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Cheap and compact medical testing - jebblue http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/08/cheap-and-compact-medical-testing/ ====== dang Url changed from [http://www.gizmag.com/harvard-multifunctional- electrochemica...](http://www.gizmag.com/harvard-multifunctional- electrochemical-detector/33263/), which points to this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Facebook ads are useless to me - mathrawka http://blog.thejon.org/post/56435806501/how-facebook-can-improve-mobile-ads ====== ada1981 Could you set the url to yourdomain.com/fbapp.php and have fbapp.php simply set the header to the URL with tracking parameters embeded?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Shocking response from Facebook about request to remove this offensive page - nreece https://twitter.com/tentspitch/status/338244602735779840 ====== TomGullen I believe this is a result from this campaign: <http://www.womenactionmedia.org/> I can't get behind this campaign, because a large part of it appears to be advocating censorship of humour. The face value difference between genuine hate pages and humour is often subtle. But their intentions are completely different. A joke, no matter how crude is not attempting to propagate the idea that rape is acceptable. Because it's intentions are not to encourage the spread of hatred, it appears the reason they should be removed is because people are offended by them. If you find them offensive, don't view them. And I think it's pretty easy not to view those images unless you go looking for them. Here's the campaigns 'examples' page: <http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/examples/> There is a clear overlap between the jokes, and what I would consider hateful. The majority appear to be bad jokes, and the supporters of the campaign often (understandably) find it difficult to differentiate between the two. I can't support censorship of humour, no matter how offended I am by it. The campaign in my view has failed because it has not clearly defined it's boundaries, it's going to war with genuine hate pages and bad jokes at the same time and is causing a lot of confusion in the process. ~~~ RyanZAG I clicked through that examples page you linked, and I disagree with you about what these jokes are. Jokes need to be funny, there is very little humor in "This bitch didn't know when to shut up. Do you?" I agree with you about not censoring jokes, but seriously.. these are not the kind of jokes that are worth the time spent looking at them. Would a picture of your face with blood with the tag line "Tom Gullen didn't know when to shut up." be a joke? I think not. ~~~ TomGullen > Jokes need to be funny No they don't, humour is not objective. Regardless of how distasteful a joke is, it's intentions are not to incite violent acts. So the only casualty is how offended you are by them. If they are offensive, simply don't view them which is very easy to do. > Would a picture of your face with blood with the tag line "Tom Gullen didn't > know when to shut up." be a joke? I think not. Honestly I might find it funny, it depends on who executed it, how it was executed and how it was presented. It would be hard to execute in such a way where I would find it funny, but it's definitely possible. Either way I don't think your example is very good. Your presenting an example of targeting a named individual, and what's actually going on is most of the 'humour' images are targeting demographics. A better example would be a picture of a bloodied man with the caption "He still hasn't mowed the lawn" or whatever. I would probably chuckle because the image was so bizarre but I don't think it should be censored. ~~~ clarkm Whenever I hear people try to argue that certain jokes "aren't funny" and therefore shouldn't be permitted, I get the urge to ask them what they think of postmodern art. I've learned from asking that most people don't hold consistent positions. About 100 years ago when Duchamp put a urinal on display and titled it _Fountain_ , you bet people were screaming "that's not art!" And that was just the beginning. There's anti-art and anti-jokes. There's institutional critiques, inside jokes, and meta-humor. It's not all appropriate, and it's not all good. The rule is: if you don't get it, then it's not for you. ~~~ TomGullen Paradoxically I find purposefully unfunny jokes to be some of the funniest ------ tommi I think this was an excellent response from Facebook. I don't agree with the message, but I also don't want to increase censorship just because I don't like what others are saying. ~~~ akie I strongly disagree with you. How is encouragement to rape ever acceptable? ~~~ ghshephard It's not "acceptable". It's horrible. It's despicable. It's disgusting - and the person who posted that picture, and created that picture, should be ashamed of themselves. Absolutely no reasonable person believes, for even a second, that that posting shouldn't be taken down, and immediately, and the person who put it up should also immediately apologize. The question, that is being posed, is whether Facebook should be taking down these horrible, despicable, and disgusting pictures without consent of the original poster. I'm pretty pro-censorship and government control over what people are allowed to post, and see - so I would say, "Yes. Take it down." There are those who are more pro-free speech, who would say, "No, Facebook should not be arbitrarily censoring these images. Leave it up." But - I can certainly understand both sides of the argument. [Edit - For those who believe that Facebook should remove that article, read through <https://twitter.com/sammorril>, and consider whether you believe twitter should be censoring his posts, for example, <https://twitter.com/sammorril/status/307191599543234560> is one that I reasonably think should be erased by Twitter on the same grounds that the Facebook posting should be erased by Facebook. There's lots of offensive humor that I'm fine with being censored/removed. Your position on this topic doesn't necessarily reflect whether you believe the views being posted are acceptable, but more-so whether you believe central bodies should be arbitrarily dictating what others are allowed to post, and see, and how frequent, and under what circumstances that power to censor should be used.) ~~~ dchest You're wrong: there can be no arguments about pro-censorship or pro-free speech regarding this picture. As mentioned right in Facebook's reply, they _already_ censor content according to their guidelines. The argument is about whether this picture is "bad" enough to censor it. ~~~ ghshephard The reason why it's a pro-censorship vs pro-free speech argument, is that almost everyone (for any reasonable definition of everyone) believes in some censorship in a civilized society. The real question then, is not whether censorship should take place, but where the "line" should be drawn. Depending on your feelings regarding censorship, you may believe that crude and objective jokes that you find offensive should, or should not be censored. Depending on their content, I think they should. Those who are more free-speech leaning than I am may state that they are offended by that speech, but defend the person who is making the offensive speech their right to make it. ------ fastball I don't think that can even be considered humour, but I also disagree that the image is "hate speech". Women are not the exclusive victims of rape in any sense. Ridiculously stupid and unfunny? Yes. Putting down women for being women? I don't think so. ~~~ skue > Women are not the exclusive victims of rape. This is a ridiculously weak argument. According to RAINN, 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, and the majority of male victims are either prisoners or children, which is another whole class of crime in itself. What is being proposed by the photo (joking or not) is rape against women, pure and simple. And we have a worldwide epidemic: 1 in 6 women will be victimized in their lifetime. Maybe the majority of HN readers are too young or socially isolated to have a close relationship with a woman who has been a victim. But when you see what it does to real human beings, then it's hard to be so damn callous about this. ~~~ theorique The oft-repeated RAINN data is suspect and based on questionable statistics and speculations. It is certainly not derived from actual criminal reporting data. ------ qxcv Here[0] is where Facebook defines what they consider to be "hate speech": > Content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, > ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, > disability or disease is not allowed. We do, however, allow clear attempts > at humor or satire that might otherwise be considered a possible threat or > attack. This includes content that many people may find to be in bad taste > (ex: jokes, stand-up comedy, popular song lyrics, etc.). Granted, it's a horribly distasteful image macro, but Facebook acted according to their written community standards, so I'm not sure why their response is "shocking". It's also important to bear in mind that the page is titled " _Offensive_ Humor at its Best", so I'm not sure why it comes as a surprise that the images are, well, _offensive_. [0] <https://www.facebook.com/help/135402139904490/> ------ cotsuka I agree encouraging rape is not acceptable. Neither is racism. Or disrespecting other people. But we have decided that it is better to have freedom of speech than no freedom of speech. Is Facebook's response in the right? I think so. We should be angry at the person who put up the photo. ------ venomsnake So there is something offensive on page called offensive humor at its best ... surprise. Now here is the thing with humor and offensiveness = with 7 billion people on this planet everything is offensive to someone. Also funny to someone else. This is a stupid joke - ignore it. If it got shared by a friend defriend him. If it got promoted to you by facebook sponsored - file a complaing. But trawling on pages for finding something to be offended by - it is way too close to censorship in my opinion. ------ ColinWright I offer this as a thought experiment for people on both sides of the debate: Is it acceptable to shout "Fire!" in a panic-stricken manner in a crowded theater? If not, then you accept that there are circumstances when "free speech" is not applicable. If so, please defend your position, when such an act may lead almost directly to serious injury and perhaps death. This question removes the connection with rape and perhaps might help to focus attention on "speech with consequences". ~~~ pionar Yes, it's offensive, yes, it's disgusting, but how exactly does it "have consequences"? Do you really think someone is going to go rape a woman just because of this tasteless rhyme? That's ridiculous. ~~~ ColinWright Do you think speech like this has no consequences at all? That's what I'm trying to find out, whether people believe this sort of thing genuinely has zero effect. Personally, I think speech and communication in general goes both ways. It reflects what the source thinks and feels, and in turn affects what the listener/reader thinks and feels. I think there is an effect. Do you think there is none? And then there is the other aspect. Do you believe that speech with consequences should be censored or controlled? Or do you believe that all speech, even shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, should be uncensored and uncontrolled? You appear not to have answered the question I actually asked. ~~~ glomph All speech has an effect otherwise no one would bother talking. The question is not whether it has an effect, but whether it causes enough harm to justify stopping it. Older than the fire in the theater example (which if I remember rightly comes from a supreme court case in the US) is John Stuart Mill: >An opinion that corndealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. But he then of course gives one of the most brilliant defenses of free speech in all circumstances other than direct harm ever written. Do you think this is going to cause direct harm? ------ clarkm I'm just wondering how you come across such a picture on Facebook in the first place. I imagine you have to go looking for it, considering it's in the group "Offensive Humor at Its Best," which I doubt anyone would share with their friends. The picture was posted on February 12th [1], but she didn't report it until about an hour ago [2], which only adds to the evidence that she went out of her way to find this. So my question is: why would you do this if it's going to ruin your day? There's bad stuff all over the internet, and it's not going away. It doesn't seem productive to launch a crusade to get it all taken down. Just block it if you don't want to see -- get some filtering software, install parental controls. I really hope no one tells or about 4chan or tor. [1] [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&set=168467446611226) [2] [http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&s...](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=208652812592689&set=a.168468706611100.13857.168467446611226&type=1&comment_id=253779&offset=0&total_comments=11) ------ D4M14N I think context matters a lot, and this photo was posted to a page called "Offensive Humor" so people know the message is wrong and offensive, I doubt anyone would actually be on that page seriously agreeing with that message or being influenced to carry out its message. If this was posted to a page called "Women are scum" or similar etc then the photo would have a different meaning. ------ factorialboy WTF facebook? Encouragement of rape is not acceptable IMHO. ~~~ SG- It's not encouragement, it's someone's attempt at a joke. It's ok to joke about things, and sometimes it's offensive. ------ nraynaud I guess a would make that a gender issue since it's mostly women who are target of rape jokes. The real craziness is this insistance in removing any female nipples (for some reason, male nipples are not sensored) and not dead corpses or guns even in countries where nudity is far more accepted than violence. ------ bigd If you get pissed by what you find online, then you're better off the Internet. ~~~ bigd I strongly believe that people which complains about the content of Internet, whatever it might be, should go trough "internet 101": <https://encyclopediadramatica.se/The_Power_5> ------ general_failure Great response from facebook. I prefer that nothing visual be censored. People should just ignore shit that is offensive to them. And we as a society should just look down on people who create offensive shit. ------ DanBC Facebook took a while to decide that videos of women having their heads cut off were not acceptable. I don't find Facebook's decision here confusing. ------ stefan_kendall Fuck censorship. Depictions of violence are not violence. Movies, porn, video games. Do they encourage shooting people in the head? Not in real life.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Want to buy a jail, never used? - mountaineer http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/06/want_to_buy_a_jail_never_used.html ====== TrainedMonkey Too bad number of beds is only 525, that is 10 too short to fit the entire congress. Otherwise this would be a great facility to use use when they can't agree on a budget deal. ~~~ jamestomasino I don't think folks would be opposed to overpopulation in that prison ~~~ lostlogin According to this they would need a few beds removed to meet the average found in a 2011 report from Ohio stating 31% overcrowding. [http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Boards/Sentencing/resources...](http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Boards/Sentencing/resources/Publications/MonitoringReport2011.pdf) ------ anigbrowl _The county’s request for interest in Wapato Jail – the latest development in the years-long search for ways to unload the never-used 168,420-square-foot facility – went up May 2 and closes at 2 p.m. Wednesday._ Why do news outlets never report these things until the time period has almost expired? Not that I had any ideas I wanted to submit, but it seems like the media has a deliberate policy of holding back news stories until a deadline has almost arrived in order to manufacture a sense of urgency about the story.l I see this all the time with requests for comment on public policy and suchlike - mainstream news outlets don't bother to mention it to the public until the time is almost expired, creating the impression that bureaucrats were trying it sneak it past the public. ~~~ tedunangst Selection bias? I've certainly seen plenty of similar stories published closer to the origination date. I'd say it just sits in the slow news day pile until an opening arrives, but starts getting a priority boost as it's about to expire. I suspect most of the actually interested parties aren't just finding out about this now. ------ JDDunn9 Who wants to chip in for a zombie apocalypse shelter? ~~~ michaelmior My first thought too! Especially after the last season of The Walking Dead. ------ edandersen Could be an economical replacement for open plan offices. ~~~ dlevine Or "closed plan" offices. "You get your own office (complete with a bed and a toilet), but we decide when you can leave." ~~~ gonzo you can leave when the project is done. ~~~ dlevine Your "office" door is tied to a Github issue, and when it is closed, your door opens :-) ~~~ jacquesm Milestones would be so much more effective. ------ csbrooks Photos of the keys? Bad idea. ~~~ pbhjpbhj Indeed, that security console would probably handsomely repay a thief for getting those keys cut from the photo. ------ outside1234 Sounds like a great datacenter :) ~~~ fiatmoney I was actually thinking this; then I thought about cooling. Bet those cells aren't exactly optimized for airflow. ~~~ aaronblohowiak They all have plumbing ------ hypron I wish I could buy this and turn it into a paintball/airsoft arena. ~~~ dkuntz2 Laser tag. All of the fun, none of the pain. Also 500% more nerdy. ~~~ laxatives None of the pain, half of the fun. As the cost of losing decreases, apathy greatly increases. ------ Theodores I spent a couple of terms at university in a hall of residence that was based on the design for a Swedish prison. This could have been an 'urban myth' however the limited access to the building (one door, no fire escapes), the layout and the room dimensions made that myth believable. I actually had some great times there, it was where I met my best friends and where I studied hardest. We did not have toilets in our rooms but we did have wash-basins. The windows did not have bars on them and the doors were normal doors with handles on the insides. The grey lino flooring and the grey brick walls could have been 'prison', however, with a few personal touches, e.g. posters on walls, some colourful rug on the floor all was fine. No students committed suicide on our block or had to be put on Prozac. It would be very interesting to see this prison converted to some type of college/university facility. Clearly some courses cost more than others to teach, however, I would be very much surprised if it cost more to teach than to imprison. ------ rmason Then there's the unfinished jail in downtown Detroit: [http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/22491752/leduff-wayne- co-m...](http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/22491752/leduff-wayne-co-may-tear- down-new-jail-sell-land-to-dan-gilbert) ~~~ briandh There is also a large, mostly-unused prison in rural Illinois: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Correctional_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Correctional_Center) ------ koalaman you could make this a prison experience hotel kind of thing. It would be popular with bachelor parties, etc. People love this kind of thing. ~~~ the_watcher Yea, there's a service that will kidnap and "torture" you (the torture is more of making you really uncomfortable than actually hurting you). ------ trhway very strange feeling looking at it without people - the lack of purpose [in the big sense] of such buildings/spaces is immediately noticeable. I mean it isn't that something will be built, learnt, stored or housed there to keep away from elements. Instead the primary purpose of prison/jail buildings is to waste huge amount of resources, human and material. (not advocating for complete prison abolishment today as it is still some years before we can do something like "house arrest" or other [may be selective] rights limitation for convicts. It is just sad that we still can't produce a practical alternative to prison/jail which will move our society forward instead of backward) How about some "Uber for law violators". Some technical means of keeping a convict in the society, just taking away his ability to do any harm - one of the 2 goals of locking up - and his ability to enjoy the life or some parts of it - the other goal of locking up which satisfies societal need for justice. ------ jpatokal _" the county is able to rent it out, as long as it doesn’t make money off the deal"_ Can somebody explain the logic here? I can see why you wouldn't want to rent out an operational jail at a profit, but what's wrong with making a "profit" (read: tiny dent in the huge losses incurred in building the damn thing) if it's sitting there empty and unused? ~~~ Fomite I presume its tied to the tax-exempt status of the bonds that funded it, preventing the county from building a tax exempt jail and then, for example, leasing it to a private prison company. ------ psychometry We've still yet to prosecute those responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis... ------ JeffreyKaine I'm thinking that this could be the perfect live in incubator. ~~~ JeffreyKaine Though, it'll need a paint job. ------ JoeAltmaier Scout camp! The slough and wetlands are ideal. Plenty of camping and dining facilities. Open ground for sports and events. ------ michaelmior I'm curious where the $300,000/year in maintenance comes from. ~~~ JoeAltmaier Painting, roofing, broken windows, fence. Vandalism and weather.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
It’s Like Google Maps with Sim City 2000 - OnionMap - prakash http://flowingdata.com/2008/08/07/its-like-google-maps-with-sim-city-2000-onionmap/ ====== jrockway This is cool, but why not link directly to the site: <http://us.onionmap.com/web/us/> All the linked blog post tells us is that the author enjoyed playing Sim City 2000. Not Hacker News :) ~~~ prakash It was more from a meta perspective, I would like more HN folks to know about the excellent flowingdata.com website. ------ cousin_it As a map dev, I'd like to see a lot more competition to Google/MS/Yahoo from hand-painted maps. It's an under-explored niche. Another example: hand- painted, interactive road intersections at Yandex Maps - [http://maps.yandex.ru/map.xml?mapID=2000&mapX=4159769...](http://maps.yandex.ru/map.xml?mapID=2000&mapX=4159769&mapY=7475551&scale=7&slices=1&l=jnc&oid=jnc-01-61) ~~~ Poleris Do you have any recommendations for other resources for getting high-quality maps?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Disappear - 0_o http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11999355 ====== jonas_b My experience from the armed forces is that cool new gear is always nice, but you should never become dependent on it because if it could fail in a battle environment, it's quite likely that it will. Moreover, additional equipment requires more battery power which means more weight, something that troops already struggle with. Another trap of fancy gear is that it could increase the perceived distance between you and the residents in the area you're supposed to operate in. Think of it, what would you think if somebody with a massive bullet-proof vest, invisible cloak, night-vision googles and a grenade launcher came walking by your house one night? Winning the hearts and minds of the people around you is critical for any operation, and if you walk around look like inspector gadget, it's easy to forget that the bling in the battle vest isn't your primary life insurance. ------ iamwil The last paragraph was the most interesting. It's like using ambient light to spot something, rather than shining a spotlight out into the field. Makes me wonder if there are other ways to take advantage of this. ~~~ nsrivast Haven't you seen the Dark Knight? ------ dkokelley As a bonus, how many faces can you spot in the image at the top? I'm at 6 or maybe 7. But seriously, these technologies are really interesting. The "shadow" of stealth bombers through standard cell waves is interesting. Eventually they may create a plane that emits white noise to cover up it's shadow. ~~~ ryanmahoski Good catch - I count 7: <http://100.s3.amazonaws.com/camo.jpg> ~~~ mleonhard Is there a person looking through binoculars midway between 4, 5, and 6? ~~~ ryanmahoski Yes, I think you're right. Updated. ------ noahlt I always wondered if the researchers ended up concluding that pixellized camo was the best simply as a result of their using digital hardware to run the experiments. I mean, come on, _nothing_ is pixellized like that in the wild. ------ cellis How to create wealth: get a government contract and persuade them that they need your software. Charge massive license and consulting fees. ------ dood How not to be seen: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4ZnGprplKU>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Akamai's quarterly State of the Internet report - casca http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ ====== casca Summary: [http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2012/press_0...](http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2012/press_013112.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Re-Ask HN: HN hiring threads became crowded, dumb job boards. Alternatives? - zerr HN hiring threads are not so personal anymore. Full of resume black holes.<p>Getting noticed is like a gambling, lottery... due to massive applications I guess.<p>It just got like a yet another dumb job board (Craigslist, Dice, Monster, lately Stackoverflow).<p>So are there any alternatives or maybe some ways to fix this on HN?<p>Thanks. ====== andys627 I've had some success on the who's hiring thread by 1) showing off what I've done on a personal website, dribble, github, whatever. And 2) taking 5 minutes to poke around the employer's site and explain how your skills/interests/personal experiences are at all relevant. ------ 27182818284 Although it doesn't change the substance, [http://hnhiring.me/](http://hnhiring.me/) changes the view to make it much easier to search and sort through the jobs. Changing the substance of a job board is, at least in my mind, non-trivial. Hiring and finding work have always been difficult problems and the Internet is just taking a new stab at it with things like LinkedIN (horrible) indeed.com(OK not a terrible job search engine), Monster (spam) and others.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Conversation: Mark Cuban's new start-up, 'Motion Loft' - mviamari http://namesake.com/conversation/ae8ce3ea-3bb5-11e0-9d61-12313f042095 ====== lifto I for one welcome our new Motion Loft overlords!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Earth wind map - erwan https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/850hPa/overlay=total_precipitable_water/orthographic=-101.72,27.73,418/loc=-80.657,44.536 ====== lsh Lovely, but posted previously here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415488)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mozilla does not renew the 5-year contract with Google, but Yahoo - nicolagreco http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/mozilla-partners-with-yahoo-which-will-become-the-default-search-engine-in-firefox-next-month/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook ====== xanderstrike Yahoo's search is utter garbage [1], cluttered with misleading ads and other nonsense. This is a major downgrade for Firefox, as it no longer comes with a working search out of the box. [1] [http://i.imgur.com/sZUIGwc.png](http://i.imgur.com/sZUIGwc.png) ~~~ mightykan Yahoo's rolling out a new interface for search for Firefox by the end of this year, and other browser beginning next year. The official Mozilla blog [1] has screenshots of the new design, which mimics the existing cleaner Google site. [1]: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice- an...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and- innovation-on-the-web/) ~~~ thaumaturgy So the new interface will look like Google but won't have Google's results. ------ oska > That contract with Google was set to expire this year, though, and it look > [sic] like either Yahoo made an offer Mozilla couldn’t refuse or Google > decided to walk away from the deal. I imagine most of us are assuming the latter? ~~~ stephenr Google's actions are increasingly negative from a personal freedom and personal privacy standpoint. Mozilla specifically mention that supporting DNT (Do Not Track) user preferences was part of the deal with Yahoo. Google's whole business model relies on huge numbers of users of their "free" services to monetise eyeballs on ads (plus of course further building profiles on users) - I find it very hard to believe they initiated this change. ------ zajd Uhh, does Yahoo's "new" search look like a clone of Google to anyone? ~~~ owenwil Yep. Complete with Google's cards look and everything. It should be noted that Yahoo has a five-year contract to deliver search results from _Bing_ in the US ~~~ dragonwriter > It should be noted that Yahoo has a five-year contract to deliver search > results from Bing in the US Isn't that 5 years remaining on a 10 year contract?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Internet Explorer Security Bug: How to Protect Yourself - robot_scream http://mashable.com/2014/04/28/internet-explorer-bug-how-to-protect/ ====== markcrazyhorse OOO OOOO I know the answer to this, is it erm... Stop using a shitty browser?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - partingshots https://unraid.net/blog/help-take-the-fight-to-covid-19-with-boinc-or-folding-home ====== timboslice Folding at home is running out of work because of the overwhelming response. I've found that sometimes restarting the FAH client/container will trigger a new job even after being stuck in a loop for hours ~~~ rarecoil Rosetta@home (BOINC) still has a ton of work items and is CPU based, so it's easy to run on most anything. Some are COVID-19, some are MERS, some are things that have nothing to do with coronaviruses. ~~~ washadjeffmad I've been running BOINC, and since none of the tasks required GPU, as you mentioned, I was able to scale to a number of devices that the client could be compiled on. If you have 5-8 hours to devote to a round, put everything you have into it. It's quick to set up and is certainly worth the cycles. ------ beautifulfreak Here's a Google doc showing the performance of various GPUs when folding: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v5gXral3BcFOoXs5n1M6...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v5gXral3BcFOoXs5n1M6l_Uo3pZpQYogn6gVlxRPnz0/edit#gid=0) ------ floatingatoll Mac users, note that Folding@Home can't use GPUs at all. I considered Boot Camp but their docs (and Boinc's) seem focused on Nvidia and don't appear to have kept up on "ATI" (AMD) video card instructions. ~~~ hornetblack Folding@Home is runnign GPU stuff on Windows without any configuration on my AMD RX 580. Although it's not using much of it. Presuably because OpenCL only runs of the Compute units which are relatively small part of the GPU. ~~~ floatboth No, all GPUs released in the last 10 years have a unified shader architecture. Vertex, fragment, and compute shaders all run on the same units, and they are the _big_ part of the GPU. "Compute units" is AMD terminology for a grouping of ALUs and stuff. Nvidia calls them "stream multiprocessors". Example: Vega 64 has 64 CUs, each CU has 64 "shader processors", so there's 64*64 == 4096 "shader processors" total. This is the big part. ~~~ hornetblack Yea I install the Asus GPU-Z and i was better and gave that it was using 90% of the whole GPU. Windows just doesn't know how to count GPU usage apperntly. ------ 0mp There is a FreeBSD port of the FAH client: [http://freshports.org/biology/linux- foldingathome](http://freshports.org/biology/linux-foldingathome) The installation is as simple as "cd /usr/ports/biology/linux-foldingathome && make install". ------ generationP Is there a way to have some more fine-grained control about how Rosetta and Folding use resources? For example, I want them not to run in sleep mode, and certainly not when the laptop's lid is closed. Or, better perhaps, to throttle above certain temperatures. ~~~ timClicks Yes, those knobs can be controlled by the BOINC client. You retain full control over how/when your computer uses its resources. ~~~ generationP Where exactly? I haven't been able to find it. ~~~ generationP Oh, I see: Options / Computing Preferences. Would still like to have a "suspend when lid is closed" or "suspend when temperature is > 70°C" option, but I guess that would require a lot more hardware specialization than the authors of the tool could reasonably be expected to do. ------ gorgoiler I can’t understand the statistics for Folding@Home. If there are X million PCs donating Y% of their time to the project, and they cost $Z each, I was wondering what X _Y_ Z was. That is to say, if discovering protein structures is a critical problem needed to solve Covid19, how much would it cost to just replace this distributed computation with some dedicated machinery? ------ pmoriarty I wonder why Amazon, Rackspace, and other major hosting providers that are sitting on a ton of hardware haven't contributed resources to efforts like this. Or have they? ~~~ ramraj07 Because a legitimate scrutiny of FAH projects would probably just get them rejected ~~~ Infinitesimus Could you expand a bit? Are you suggesting that F@H projects are perhaps not as beneficial? ------ JamesBarney Gwern's article on folding @home [https://www.gwern.net/Charity-is-not-about- helping](https://www.gwern.net/Charity-is-not-about-helping) TLDR - As of 2015 it's been pretty useless for the amount of electricity and computing power it burns through. Nothing particularly noteworthy listed on wikipedia either. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home) Seems like if you have a huge cluster of computing and free electricity and want to help out it might be more useful to mine bitcoins and donate them to covid-19 charities. ------ butz If we could throw all computing power that was used for mining bitcoins, how long would it take to produce required results? ~~~ r3drock This would probably not work since bitcoin miners are all ASICs these days. ~~~ mehrdadn I feel like the question was just trying to see how much computation would help, rather than whether the chips are actually capable of doing it. ~~~ Dylan16807 It's a reasonable question, but it's hard to evaluate the processing power of those chips because of how very specific those circuits are. ------ clSTophEjUdRanu I once caught wind that my professor gave extra credit in distributed systems class for BOINC points. I ran this constantly for years and then he didn't even give the extra credit. ------ ck2 Can you pick which task your resources are being used for? (ie. covid19) because they have several in progress and I think it selects randomly? ~~~ osamagirl69 At least with folding at home they have set the covid19 research as top priority for all of the clients (regardless of the clients preference). Note - as far as I know there are no covid19 CPU based works units, so you will continue to get normal work units if you have CPU slots available. This is worth mentioning, because by default the client adds your CPU to the available slots. On linux you have to go into advanced settings to enable the GPU at all, so it is something to watch out for. ~~~ rarecoil The Folding@Home GPU client works way better on Linux with NVIDIA/CUDA than it does with AMD. I could not get a 4x Radeon VII rig with ROCm to utilise more than a single GPU at any time due to OpenCL errors. Also, the folding@home Ubuntu client has three-year-old issues with not installing properly [1] so you have to workaround that, too. If you have the time to contribute reliability patches to the Linux clients, I'm sure it would be appreciated as well. [1] [https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah- issues/issues/1193#issu...](https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah- issues/issues/1193#issuecomment-340875034) ~~~ rarecoil Update: Installed Windows 10 Pro on a separate SSD, and I appear to have GPU slots for all GPUs under Windows. ------ KerryJones I love these projects and have donated time in the past to different projects. I'll be promoting this to all my friends -- there are so many ways to help and this feels like one of the easier ones. ------ Fire-Dragon-DoL Folding at home is apparently really hard to install and run on windows without admin permissions. Big bummer. I tried for 2 hours! (the beefy pc is for gaming) ~~~ vortico Why don't you have admin on your gaming computer? ~~~ Fire-Dragon-DoL I have an admin, but it's not the "active" account. It's used only for installing stuff and general maintenance of your computer. This is not only the proper way to use an admin account, but it's also recommended. The fact that Folding@home supports only running the software when the admin account is logged in out of the box (there might be a solution to my problem, I just hadn't found it), it's disappointing and problematic. ~~~ gambiting >>The fact that Folding@home supports only running the software when the admin account is logged in out of the box (there might be a solution to my problem, I just hadn't found it), it's disappointing and problematic. Well, no, that's not entirely true. You can run F@H as a service and then it can run without anyone logged in. The problem then is that it cannot use the GPU for work, but that's not a problem with F@H but with how Windows manages access to resources for background services without a user logged in. ~~~ Fire-Dragon-DoL I'm confused though. Videogames can use the GPU without being an administrator, why is administrator needed to run F@H with GPU active? ~~~ gambiting Now I'm confused. Administrative privilages have nothing to do with using the GPU. A service process cannot use the GPU, regardless of who owns it, that has nothing to do with F@H, that's just how Windows is designed. According to the organisation behind F@H , the application requires administrative priviladges to make sure you have the permissions to use the application on the machine. I guess they had enough complaints about people running it when they don't(students, employees etc), so requiring administrative priviladges is the easiest way. ~~~ Fire-Dragon-DoL Your explanation though makes sense, even though the solution to the problem it's terrible. I presumed it was for the GPU for weird reasons (bad software, CUDA, somethng like that), but what you described makes the most sense. Apparently, I managed to get it running today with some magic using icacls and file ownership. The web control does not work, but I'm able to run the Advanced Control Panel and start everything from there. ------ aledalgrande They should really make an Apple TV app, I have an Apple TV 4K sitting there most of the day, and I'm sure most owners do too. ------ justlexi93 Is there a preference with BOINC vs Folding? ------ m0zg Inexplicably F@H is not available as an _official_ docker container, and their install procedure for Linux compares unfavorably with wisdom tooth extraction. ~~~ JensRex How so? I just looked, and they have both .deb and .rpm packages available. I once spent two-and-a-half hours having two wisdom teeth removed, and afterwards I got an infection in the empty sockets. I'd rather do all of that again, than having to use Docker for anything. ~~~ 05 The debs don't install on Ubuntu 19.10 BTW (obsolete deps). ------ MuffinFlavored I get that F@H does a lot of computation with my CPU/GPU if I am running the client. What do those cycles do? It tries a bunch of random stuff to calculate... what? What is it trying? It sounds a lot like Bitcoin mining, but I'm not sure what it's trying to do. ~~~ Infinitesimus Their about page and update articles give a good high-level overview of the project [https://foldingathome.org/about/](https://foldingathome.org/about/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Machine Learning for Middle Schoolers (2017) - mr_golyadkin https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/05/machine-learning-for-middle-schoolers/ ====== Puer I'd imagine it's a lot easier and more effective to teach middle schools basic probability first. All you need is a coin or a deck of cards to introduce them to real world examples. ~~~ nerdponx Not to mention that machine learning without at least some probabilistic intuition is asking for trouble in many applications. ~~~ meesterdude for image classification? I don't think so. ~~~ nerdponx Maybe for copying and pasting MNIST-in-Keras. But to even understand and make good use of cross-validation, you absolutely need to understand expected values, sample size, and the bias/variance tradeoff. That's all statistical intuition that depends more or less directly on a basic understanding of and healthy respect for probability. ------ gardinal [http://www.datasciencekids.org/p/home- page.html](http://www.datasciencekids.org/p/home-page.html) ------ mr_golyadkin I found this via [https://andrewgelman.com/2018/11/30/stephen-wolfram- explains...](https://andrewgelman.com/2018/11/30/stephen-wolfram-explains- neural-nets/) which is a nice little intro.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Defaulting to private browsing mode - jgrahamc http://blog.jgc.org/2011/03/defaulting-to-private-browsing-mode.html ====== JoachimSchipper Firefox 4 beta 12 (on OpenBSD) actually has a "Permanent Private Browsing mode" checkbox on the privacy tab. So you can already do this. ;-) That said, you may be interested in <http://panopticlick.eff.org/>, which shows just how private private browsing is... ------ rwmj I've been doing this for about a year (not "private browsing mode" specifically, but setting Firefox to delete all history, cookies etc when it closes, which amounts to roughly the same). Honestly I haven't noticed a lot of difference to my user experience, except except every week or two I have to click the login buttons on a handful of favourite websites. Since FF is still remembering the passwords, I don't have to retype those. Other useful extensions I'm using: NoScript and HTTPS-everywhere. ~~~ mike-cardwell This. I don't get why browsers allow long term cookies by default. Session cookies should be allowed by default, but "normal" cookies should be off by default. I've had mine off for years now without any noticably bad effect on my browsing... ~~~ e1ven I'm not sure how you know the difference between a session cookie and "other" cookie from a technical level. You could do a per-cookie approval, but that gets tedious quickly. ~~~ jrockway A session cookie is a cookie that is sent without an explicit expiration time, and is explicitly specified to be so in the standards. ~~~ e1ven Sorry, you're right. Wasn't thinking properly. ------ samdk You can set up default private browsing/incognito mode if you want to. None of the major browsers have support for doing it through the normal options GUI as far as I know, but getting it working isn't at all hard. In Firefox, set the "browser.privatebrowsing.autostart" about:config flag to true. In Chrome/Chromium, append " --incognito" when starting to open an incognito window. Alias it or add it to your GUI shortcuts to start it that way by default. In IE8+, append " -private". ~~~ rsoto Firefox has the option via the GUI, in the privacy tab, select custom settings for history and tick the first checkbox. ------ ars You don't need to use private browsing mode for this. Just change the various setting to not store cookies permanently, not store history for more than 1 day, etc, etc. I assume you still want a disk cache? Private browsing disables that, but that has a detrimental effect on your browsing. This is a terrible idea for most people though. Every time I go to my bank it needs to re-authenticate me? It doesn't remember the sites I go to frequently? I need to login again every time I go to HN? ~~~ wladimir _Every time I go to my bank it needs to re-authenticate me? It doesn't remember the sites I go to frequently? I need to login again every time I go to HN?_ You can still let your browser remember your passwords. This reduces 'authenticating' to simply clicking a button. Or you could configure a whitelist of sites that _are_ allowed to keep your cookies for a longer time. And to 'remember' sites I go to frequently I have bookmarks (and my own memory). Then again, browser history did save my ass multiple times. It's the cookies that annoy me. ~~~ sapphirecat > Or you could configure a whitelist of sites that are allowed to keep your > cookies for a longer time. This, I do. All cookies are session cookies except for my bank, to save their "I use this computer a lot" cookie so I don't have to be challenged in addition to the anti-phishing and password stage. And, I trust my own website so that I can put 'newblog' into the awesomebar and start writing quickly. The only problem I've had is determining _which site cookies are important._ The bank uses a 3rd-party provider for the Internet Banking Area, so their cookies have no relation to the bank name. Once Firefox has forced a cookie to session lifetime, it doesn't go back to being saved when you whitelist that specific cookie's domain, which was confusing when next I visited the bank and it had forgotten me. But after _that_ visit, it was fine. ------ bajsejohannes This is a bit extreme for my case, but I do agree there lots of good use cases for privacy mode. My favorite one is when someone needs to borrow my computer: Giving them a browser in privacy mode means they don't have to log out of my gmail/facebook/etc to check theirs. ~~~ chadgeidel I have a "guest" account set up on my computers for exactly this reason. Windows' "fast user switching" gives me a nice way of quickly providing someone a handy "clean" environment for them to go wild with. Not sure what the equivalent of this is in OSX or Linux. ------ retube I agree with him on 3 of his 4 points. I want third-party cookies disabled by default, I want forms never to remember anything and I don't want passwords cached. But I DO want my history remembered. In fact I want every page I ever visit automatically indexed (somewhere) that I can easily search against when I'm trying to find some page I've previously visited. Of course, the ability to easily remove pages from history/index though is a must ;) ------ Tichy I've had Firefox configured to behave like that for ages. The problem is that in the meantime I have started to never close my browser (notebook always just goes goes to sleep, no restart). So those settings aren't as useful as they used to be anymore. ------ aj700 [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/phodabgmalihpnmm...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/phodabgmalihpnmmlgoplifofcdnjoll) there's also this chrome extension, but it only blacklists, not whitelists.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Brief History of the Internet (1999) - michael_nielsen http://arxiv.org/html/cs.NI/9901011 ====== tjgq If you are interested in the early history of the Internet, and would like a lot more detail than provided by this paper, I cannot recommend the following book enough: "Where Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins Of The Internet": [http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up- Late/dp/06848326...](http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up- Late/dp/0684832674) ~~~ pasbesoin This is the first time I've seen someone else on here reference/recommend this title. I quite enjoyed it, as well. (My copy ended up water damaged and I can't refer to it right now, but from memory...) ------ Create ...and Al Gore??? Guderian insisted in 1933, within the high command, that every tank in the German armoured force must be equipped with radio- and visual equipment in order to enable each tank commander to communicate and perform a decisive role in blitzkrieg. Guderian Kenngruppenheft, Funk in jedem Panzer -> Hut 6 -> SAGE -> SRI - > Cerf "inspiration" \--> Edward Bernays. ~~~ michael_nielsen Without getting into what Al Gore may have said or meant, let me quote the following lovely little tidbit from Paul Ginsparg (who created arxiv.org). It's about physicist Ken Wilson, but Al Gore and Newt Gingrich make a fascinating appearance: "He [Wilson] was on the NSF taskforce that pushed for the implementation of the early NSFNet, and I was told by George Strawn (one of the people on the NSF side shepherding the process) that Ken was the key person who argued for using the TCP/IP (i.e., internet) protocol, rather than the DECnet protocol favored by many of the other physicists, and we know where that has led… (George also told me that the absolutely essential people who moved the NSFNet through the senate and house, respectively, were … Al Gore, Jr and Newt Gingrich)" [http://quantumfrontiers.com/2013/06/18/we-are-all- wilsonians...](http://quantumfrontiers.com/2013/06/18/we-are-all-wilsonians- now/comment-page-1/#comment-3645) ~~~ Create BS. There is almost no conceptual difference between the two below, which would allow for any substantial credit in terms of innovation for the people you are mentioning. [http://www.ilord.com/images/enigma-in- use-3-600px.jpg](http://www.ilord.com/images/enigma-in-use-3-600px.jpg) [http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm//wp- content/uploads/201...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm//wp- content/uploads/2012/09/crop.jpg) [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Kenngrup...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Kenngruppenheft.jpg) [https://awarmanf.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/us-4.png](https://awarmanf.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/us-4.png) Concept of datagrams, encapsulation, Radio Identifiers (~ MAC/IP address) etc.: [http://operationturing.tumblr.com/Enigma](http://operationturing.tumblr.com/Enigma) ~~~ Create care to elaborate what was Cerf's & Co. crucial distinguishing insight? ------ lotsofcows Now I just need someone to explain the history of subnets. Never worked out how they ended up as they are.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon grocery shopping free with prime now - minithanos https://blog.aboutamazon.com/shopping/ultrafast-grocery-delivery-is-now-free-with-prime ====== minithanos Any thoughts on future of insta cart type delivery services? ------ specialityfoods that's great news	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask YC: What do you use for personal workspace lighting when natural light is not available? - jamesbritt I'm lucky to have my office desk next to a window, so I get some decent natural light during the day, but when I want to work into the evening I find that my current GE "Reveal" full-spectrum 60-watt lamp isn't quote enough.<p>What do folks here do to get good lighting when the Sun isn't around? ====== jrockway I have one of these: <http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40141079> It sits directly behind my monitor and lights up the room so that I am not blinded by my monitor. It isn't enough to read by, though, so if I need to do that I use a regular desk lamp. But for computing, this sort of setup is ideal (IMHO anyway). ------ johnm A halogen torch lamp with variable output. Nice indirect light and no flickering. ~~~ optimal I agree--I find the light of halogen lamps to be crisp and without the hazy effect of traditional incandescent bulbs, making it easier to work for long periods of time without excessive eye fatigue. About five years ago I moved to a new place and had a very hard time finding halogen torchieres in stores. I never learned exactly why, but I suspect it was due to liability issues, because this was around the same time they started putting bird cages on top of the lamps. ~~~ johnm Yeah, a lot of the torch lamps these days are using CF bulbs since they are more efficient and don't have the big fire dangers. :-( ------ yagibear <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123879> from 53 days ago	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ARToolKit - absconditus http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/ ====== absconditus An example video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsdh9TdzgM>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Turn a light bulb on with every new user or download - rigoneri http://rigoneri.com/post/49229364680 ====== ra BIG FAT WARNING: If you're going to relay your Raspberry Pi / Arduino to mains electricity, be very, very careful! Mains electricity can KILL. Make sure you learn about safe shielding, connecting and grounding practices. Above all, be extremely cautious! I can't stress this enough. EDIT: For more information: <http://tubelab.com/Safety.htm> ~~~ ars Better yet: Don't connect your Raspberry Pi / Arduino at all to mains electricity unless you use an opto-isolator, or you have training in designing such circuits. The usb relay is NOT designed for this! See the picture: <http://www.circuitgizmos.com/products/cgu451/cgu451.shtml> In a device intended for hybrid hi/low voltage there is a clear gap between the high and low voltage components, and an isolation transformer or opto- isolator between them. ~~~ glimcat I have training in designing such circuits and I'd still use an opto-isolator. This is not manufacturing. It's a one-off project. It's not a highly refined design. You don't have to worry about finessing a marginally lower build cost because of what it will mean in 10k unit quantities. Just use the opto- isolator. ------ jacquesm This falls - as others have already commented - in the 'knows just enough to be dangerous' category. Please use LEDs, don't even bother messing around with opto-isolators and so on unless you have experience with both mains electricity and designing safe circuitry. ~~~ tehwebguy Agreed 100%. Not happy with the Pi's 3.3v pins and want to light something brighter than a couple of LEDs? Try this: \- 12v power supply (from like anything in your house) \- 12v LED strip (super cheap on eBay or basically anywhere) \- This awesome MOSFET from Adafruit <http://www.adafruit.com/products/355> This is what I used for a cool RPi + RFID + LED project this year, write-up coming eventually, here's a clip for now: <http://vine.co/v/bvZQVJLnemh> \- my example only has a few LEDs but in the final product I used strips with about 30. ------ mnutt This seems like a really great use for raspberry pi. I recently finished a project involving a pi + a relay to activate a door buzzer, written in javascript. It was surprisingly simple and straightforward. Besides turning on lights, the cool thing about relays is that most things involving physical push-buttons can be taken apart and easily wired up to a relay. ~~~ stephengillie Arduinos can (supposedly) host webpages, and pins can be powered or depowered by (properly parsed) HTML POST commands. Combining this with a relay means we can create WIFI website interfaces for anything that uses electricity. The opportunities to improve current products are so endless that I become overwhelmed whenever I think about this. We all have the parts to do this today, but so few are assembling them. \--- Want to set an outlet to turn on or off at different times? No need to buy a timer, just goto that outlet's website on your WIFI LAN, and set it on a timer. Or you could depower the outlet to make it child-safe. Are you going on a trip and you're afraid you left the toaster plugged in and your house might burn down? Just VPN to your home LAN, sign into your kitchen's website and have it power off all outlets. Locked out of your car? Pull out your phone, securely sign into your car's website, and tell it to unlock the doors. Power and depower garage door openers, sprinklers, RC cars, even industrial equipment from a simple web interface. ~~~ noonespecial Couldn't agree more. I wrote a blog post about it a while back demonstrating my take on this. Here's common household appliances getting web interfaces that can be accessed with any smartphone by QR Code. No arduino or soldering mains current required. I think every electronic thing in my house should have a little QR Code next to it so I can just point my phone at it and get its interface. <http://www.thesinglestep.org/thoughts/qrcontrol/> The video halfway down shows it in action. ------ joshu Working with mains power is stupid. Don't do it if you can avoid it, especially if you don't know what you are doing. You can get a small remote power switch for $100 or so. ~~~ john_w_t_b Belkin WeMo is only $49 and programmable via IFTTT. Edit: $45 on Amazon at present. ~~~ alex_h We've had success with a WeMo and this project: <https://github.com/issackelly/wemo> which lets you control the WeMo switch from within your local network. A quick python script to query the database for new users followed by calls to on() and off() works great. ------ ultimoo This is when I feel envy toward engineers who can program hardware. I'm so involved with Ruby and HTTP and CSS etc. that I have negligible knowledge about Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone. I don't even know where to start and whether it will be a fruitful exercise (i.e. will I be able to devote sufficient time to it to actually learn something worthwhile). Anyway, this is a neat project and I wish you good luck OP! ~~~ izak30 With any of these three platforms you could be doing this project in an afternoon. Processing isn't any harder than Ruby. You can do it. Check out <http://Raspberry.io> for some resources the python community put together to use Raspberry Pi Check out makezine for resources designed for people who aren't even familiar with programming. It doesn't take much to get up to speed with some basic on/off circuits. With a little high-school physics or just some asking around of friends you can get custom devices going. ------ stillmotion I built something similar recently to flash a light every time someone buys something on Creative Market (video here <https://vine.co/v/bTnnTVmH5eD>). I know nothing about mains electricity, so I pulled together an Arduino and a LED with a bit of socket work to get a green light flashing. Once someone completes a sale, a piece of Javascript is requested from a Node.js HTTP server I setup. The server then pings the computer with the Arduino plugged into it over UDP and the client sends a serial response to the Ardunio, flashing the light. It's pretty simple, but it was fun to get all the components together and learn more about hardware development. Since a flash of the LED is requested on every sale and the UDP responds pretty quickly, it acts as a great thermometer during high sales peaks. I'm now in the process of abstracting the entire thing into a self-contained box that communicates over wifi and uses mains electricity. Hopefully I don't kill myself. ------ droopybuns Cool project! Maybe iterate it to use LEDs instead of incandescents. For hardware hacking- you have 3 types of hardware that can make life easy- but there are tradeoffs: 1) Arduino 2) Raspberry PI 3) Beaglebone Arduino is great when you want low power, but it isn't an awesome internet platform. Raspberry Pi is great when you're going to leverage a full blown PC Monitor, but using it for hardware hacking requires a bit of elbow grease The Beaglebone is great for when you are doing something internety & hardware hacky, but without a full blown pc monitor. I would have done your project with a beaglebone, fwiw. I'd also have used LEDs instead of incandescents. But this is a great project! Nice work! ~~~ nkozyra Never forget the MSP430, which is either $5 or $10 depending on when you hit it. ------ sly010 Nice one! When I did something similar, I found the clicking sound of the relay more satisfying, than a lightbulb, so I eventually completely removed the lightbulb. At the time I used MacMini, which was a tiny bit expensive for this very purpose (also not everyone in the office likes a blinking light 24/7) then eventually I came up with the following oneliner: tail -f "<access_log>" \| grep --line-buffered "<whatev>" \| sed -ue "s/^.*$/\x07/" I also needed to set the terminal bell to be a "click" instead of a "bell" for this to sound acceptable during moderate traffic. ------ nhayes-roth For a larger company with more signups/uploads, I'm envisioning a wall of LEDs, controlled by an Arduino board. ~~~ masonhensley Or better yet, make it interactive with something like this: [http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/majors/150-pan...](http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/majors/150-panelkits) Peggy's could be fun too: [http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/75...](http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/75-peggy2) ~~~ nhayes-roth The Peggy 2 looks really neat. I just might spend some time on this during the summer... ------ rschmitty Hook up a USB Flashing Police light to failed CI builds [http://www.amazon.com/Rhode-Island-Novelty-Police- Beacon/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Rhode-Island-Novelty-Police- Beacon/dp/B0011CZV5A/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t) ------ roycehaynes I think a blend of raspberry pi + phillips hue lights + data + code = awesome product. ~~~ lostlogin Newman 314s idea of email tags triggering a different light colour, combined with this... ------ newman314 I would build one for new email alerts, a different color for each account... ------ rocky1138 I wonder why he didn't use something like IFTTT. ~~~ rowborg I built this for our company using IFTTT; we have a little blue siren that goes off when a user converts. It's powered by the production app sending an email to IFTTT which power cycles a Belkin WeMo. Very simple, and it works quite well (excepting for a 10 second or so delay between the conversion and the siren going off). ------ sugandhan Awesome! :) \m/	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
GoDaddy hires former Yahoo and Microsoft exec Blake Irving as CEO - 01PH http://www.slashgear.com/godaddy-hires-former-yahoo-and-microsoft-exec-blake-irving-as-ceo-11260413/ ====== adamnemecek Announcement of Blake Irving leaving GoDaddy in 5...4...3...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Choosing open source project licenses when not legally-minded? - sbjs I have an idea for a really great open source project that I know there's going to be a lot of interest in, and no app already fills that niche. Before I open source it, I want to choose the right license, to allow people to use the app freely for whatever they want, to protect me from whatever they do with it (without forming an LLC), to allow other developers to contribute to it, but still allow me to maintain control over the project, and to protect my right to receive donations through Patreon if people become enthusiastic and excited about the app. But IANAL and have no idea what repercussions each license comes with. What are some resources where I can <i>quickly and reliably</i> choose a good license based on my requirements, without becoming a lawyer and without accidentally choosing a license that bites me later down the road? ====== tptacek No open source license will allow you to maintain control over the project. If you can imagine having any proprietary interest in the project --- some line of business or donation revenue stream built on your thing that will naturally go to you --- you probably want to GPL. GPL adds use restrictions that make it difficult (though not impossible) to commercialize open source software, and those restrictions will apply only to your downstream users (you are not bound by the GPL for code you own and can relicense it as you see fit). This is part of the business model for a lot of open source companies. If you want to go really nuts with that, look at AGPL, which imposes even more restrictions. People are generally cool about GPL and less cool about AGPL. If you don't care about any of that, MIT license is the most normal choice. ~~~ SeanLuke I'm not sure what the "most normal choice" means, but in this age of software patents, X/MIT (or BSD) is archaic to the point of being dangerous except for the most trivial of projects. Select a license which has a patent release. Otherwise people will have a very good reason not to use your software. If you want to go the BSD-style route, the most normal choice here is Apache. ~~~ yellowapple Is this still an issue if you don't own any software patents? ~~~ SeanLuke Yes. Because your licensees don't know that and they don't know you wouldn't obtain them later. ------ cweagans Highly recommend [https://choosealicense.com/](https://choosealicense.com/) ------ cimmanom Also consider dual licensing as a solution. For instance, you can release code under a restrictive open source license (such as GPL or AGPL) and also offer the code for a fee under a non-open license that allows it to be used in closed-source projects. ~~~ sbjs That sounds like a great idea for the app I want to make! It would let users create and ship apps that come with my custom runtime functions bundled in. I'm trying to figure out how to monetize it, and my only thought so far is to open up a Patreon for donations from any very enthusiastic users. But sublicensing seems like a good alternative! Or maybe I can do both. ------ Boulth Besides the license think about registering a trademark. That way Docker, Linux or git manage not to dilute the name (see e.g. [https://www.git- scm.com/about/trademark](https://www.git-scm.com/about/trademark) ). As for the code, if it's open source anyone can fork. But with trademark they'd have to rename the project. <insert IANAL boilerplate here> ~~~ sbjs Good point, I was reading through licenses and saw some like Apache and Mozilla mentioned trademark limitations, but now that you mention it, that probably only counts if you trademark it first! I will look into trademarking without an LLC, great idea. ------ zzzcpan The easiest and safest approach is to choose the most restrictive license possible, like AGPL, and not accept contributions without signing an agreement, like Google does [1]. You can always switch to a less restrictive license later or sell under a different license, etc. People will still be able to use your product freely, try it out, read code, contribute, but you will be protected from large corporations taking advantage of your work without paying you (like Amazon unable to use open source Mongo and Mongo unwilling to sell to Amazon). [1] [https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google- individual](https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual) ------ dom96 This website is a really good resource: [https://tldrlegal.com/](https://tldrlegal.com/) ~~~ sbjs Hi dom96, it's so weird to see authors of big projects I really like just pop up in Hackernews comments like this! Thanks for the link and recommendation, it looks great, did you use this when choosing the license for Nim? ~~~ dom96 Actually I think we did. Nim used to be GPLv2 and we changed to MIT. :) ------ miguelrochefort The only open source licenses that make sense are the Free Public License 1.0.0 and the Zero Clause BSD License.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The case for removing all politicians from Twitter - pslattery https://onezero.medium.com/the-case-for-removing-all-politicians-from-twitter-41646fb9dddb ====== Porthos9K Removing all politicians and pundits from Twitter is a good start, but we should go further. Kick them all off Facebook and every other platform. Kick them off TV and radio. Don't give them an inch of print. Let them have nothing but static HTML/CSS web sites. Politicians should be like sysadmins; we shouldn't have to acknowledge their existence unless something has gone wrong.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Best book(s) to learn about the basics of economics? - culturestate Given the current climate, I feel a little behind when it comes to broader economic themes. Anyone have any recommendations for texts that can help non-economists grok the subject? ====== Shmulkey Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt: <http://jim.com/econ/>, <http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf> Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (video series, too) Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek (short, non-technical paper which is full of brilliant insights): <http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html> Not a book, but the Econtalk podcast is fantastic: <http://www.econtalk.org/> ~~~ amh The "Free to Choose" television series is really great, second that. They're all on google video, search for the obvious keywords and "long" duration (20+ mins) to find them easily. I especially liked the debate segment in each show, where Friedman argues his points with both supporters and detractors. It struck me while watching it, you really can't find stuff like this on TV anymore. ------ HSO Please beware that "economics" is a very dangerous subject in that the notions of "right" or "wrong" are very, very different from theoretical fields like mathematics, practical fields like engineering, or experimental fields like physics (yes, I'm aware this is perhaps overgeneralizing, but you get my point). My practical advice to a beginner would be: Please disregard any theories in the beginning, by which I mean both rigorous microeconomic models and (especially) the narrative sort found in books for layreaders or newspapers. Stick to data! Read a lot of data. And then some more. Also, instead of theories about the data generating processes, read their concrete definitions, what exactly do they measure (not just the general idea they're intended to capture but what exactly, like "192 vendors of banana in location X are self- reporting Y"), how are they collected, what market mechanisms exist (market microstructure), etc. Stick to the concrete and read data. Only when you're ready to make a commitment, take a year or two off and dive into economic literature. Economics is a field where, if you don't know what's what, you will be "had" by the next plausible-sounding, impressive-looking idée du jour if you're not careful. One has to know quite a bit to see the assumptions underlying the theories and how they influence its results, and I can tell you that the mainstream theory rests on very shaky theoretical foundations. The typical structure of economics literature is that this weak foundation is first brushed over in one sentence (usually starting with "we assume that..." and ending with "...to keep things simple/tractable/whatever"), then comes some big mathematical exercise, and then comes a very plausible-sounding discussion of the main idea that is constructed to either resonate or astonish you. there is also quite a bit of advocacy here, don't forget we're dealing with a real-world subject with somewhat fuzzy notions of "right" and "wrong", hence the incentive is there to fund/get funded for certain lines of research or results that support or refute political views. Also, unlike in other fields, you will generally not find that the "best" economists naturally emerge in brand-name departments, like Harvard or MIT. It's very political. In my own opinion, the better thinkers are found on the fringes, perhaps with "official" specializations in physics or sociology or psychology and not officially branded "economists" at all! So stick to data, you will know more than most branded economists and you can't go wrong, after all, the data is the data... ;) ~~~ gtani Thanks for this. So you're recommending econometrics as a start? Is that Bayesian or Frequentist? ~~~ HSO I would actually not recommend econometrics as the OP seems to just start out in this area. My recommendation is: get to know the data, learn what is available, read the definitions/construction methods, plot it in so many ways, do simple statistical summaries, for subperiods, for the entire sample, nothing fancy. One caution though: Try to do so _before_ making up your mind as to what explains the world, and even more important, try to forget everything you've already been programmed to read into the data. It's like in some karate movie, you have to "empty your mind" and let the data come to you, and if you let it sink in, at some point, you will start to ask questions and seek your own answers. I think that's a better way than to be presented with one or two general frameworks and then force fed so many specific models and examples that invariably one ends up seeing the world and asking the same questions like "them". One concrete example is "aggregate demand". It's a concept presented in the most basic textbooks as a "fact" but it's really an artifact. Fischer Black claimed that the more he thought about it, the less he understood how one could distinguish between "aggregate supply" and "aggregate demand", yet economics is taught like that in every basic textbook I have seen so far. There are very few "facts" in finance and economics, so for the beginner, before consulting what others have thought, I would recommend first having an unadulterated look at the facts before reading explanations or stories. ------ frognibble My favorite book is "Economics in One Lesson". It's available free online and in print from major book sellers (see the top search results on the Google). This book does not represent mainstream economic thought, but that's a good thing given the track record of mainstream economists in the current crisis. ~~~ nandemo I love that book. Another good, "popular" Austrian-school book is _What Has Government Done to Our Money?_ by Murray Rothbard. _The Theory of Money and Credit_ by Mises is on same subject but it's more comprehensive, the tone is more academic and is considerably harder. Both are available online. <http://mises.org/money.asp> <http://mises.org/books/Theory_Money_Credit/Contents.aspx> ~~~ SkyMarshal Just an addendum, lots of good free econ books in pdf format at <http://mises.org/books/>, including all the Austrian School classics. ~~~ narrator Looked at that collection. I've read a lot of Austrian stuff and I'd say that Hayek's elaboration of the trade cycle and the dynamics of international currencies are the two greatest works of Austrian Economics. They are not the basics by any means though and are pretty tough going, as hard as reading books on compiler design. <http://mises.org/books/monetarynationalism.pdf> <http://mises.org/books/pricesproduction.pdf> ------ scottjad If you're the kind of person who reads Diplomacy by Kissinger for an introduction to geopolitics or the Bible to understand christianity, then I'd highly recommend Human Action by Ludwig von Mises for a very strong understanding of economics. One of the best (and largest) books ever written on economics, you don't have to be of the Austrian school to get a lot out of it. It lays a strong logical and theoretical foundation and then considers issues in a very engaging and even entertaining manner for non-economists. And it's available as a very high quality audiobook for free! <http://media.mises.org/mp3/audiobooks/mises/HumanAction/> ~~~ hga Yes, _Human Action_ is big, thick and highly recommended. You can find one or more earlier and still quite useful print editions on the net (as I understand it, the subsequent edits weren't heavy). ------ adamcrowe General and fallacy debunking: 'Economics In One Lesson' by Henry Hazlitt <http://jim.com/econ> Land and rent analysis (missing in almost all textbooks): 'The New Road to Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Collapse' by Dr. Michael Hudson [http://michael-hudson.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/03/RoadToS...](http://michael-hudson.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/03/RoadToSerfdom.pdf) 'The Chaos Makers: The Dreamers & The Deceived' by Fred Harrison [http://renegadeeconomist.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/04/the-...](http://renegadeeconomist.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/04/the-chaos-makers.pdf) ------ npp One option is to browse some major university websites for commonly used textbooks and pick one that's appropriate for your level (in terms of math/econ background) and seems interesting. Some common choices are Krugman & Wells and books by Mankiw. Textbooks are drier than popular books, but they are clearer and more rigorous, and you have some assurance that any reputable one will attempt to present a balanced, mainstream view rather than pushing a personal agenda. Another option that is a bit more expensive but may be a lot more enjoyable is getting some DVDs from the Teaching Company. They get what are usually very good lecturers to give their courses, and <http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=550> <http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=5610> seem to be the kinds of things you're looking for. I haven't watched these, but maybe worth a shot. (Regarding some of the other suggestions: blogs are ok, but the more econ- heavy ones will assume some degree of familiarity with economic concepts, and will post on random topics in no particular order, so they don't really solve this problem. Non-mainstream books or famous monographs are also ok at some point, but as with all such things, it's generally best to at least understand the basic mainstream stuff first.) ------ roobaron To grok the subject, it will take a while. Search for a good undergraduate economics course and follow that. I second Hazlitt "Economics in One Lesson". But if you truly want to understand this, you will need to start with one book and then note all the books and theories which come before, going back a long way 200 years or more. Read or read summaries of those as well. In that way, you will get a firm foundation and understand how some "new" stuff is just old stuff with a new name. ------ cbare Wealth of Nations is a great read, if only to appreciate how much of modern economics Adam Smith either foreshadowed or invented and how misrepresented his ideas typically are. There's a certain amount of slogging but it's well worth the time. ~~~ billswift _P J O'Rourke On the Wealth of Nations_ does an entertaining and fairly accurate job of "condensing" it. ISBN 0-8021-4342-3 ------ Towle_ "How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't" by Irwin Schiff. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/8009736/Irwin-Schiff-How-an- Econom...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/8009736/Irwin-Schiff-How-an-Economy- Grows-and-Why-It-Doesnt) ~~~ Shmulkey The author is currently doing time for refusing to pay income taxes. A crank, IMHO. ~~~ dpatru Throughout history people have refused to submit to immoral government controls and have suffered the consequences. They are to be admired by people who aspire to be free. The income tax is an assertion that government owns the work of its citizens and has a right to take as much of it as it wants. The majority of citizens accept this claim because they don't want to be fined, imprisoned, or otherwise mistreated. Taxpayers are slaves on the government plantation, forced to work for the government. When a slave protests and is punished, he should not be called a crank by the other slaves. ~~~ mkramlich You are aware that government provides services in exchange for those taxes, right? ~~~ dpatru Among the "services" that (American) government provides: Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (countries that have not attacked us), military spending equal to what the rest of the world combined spends, social security and medicare (ponzi schemes in which workers today are forced to finance the retirement and healthcare of the elderly with no realistic expectation that their own retirement and healthcare will be similarly provided for), and of course law enforcement and prisons (a large part of which is devoted to punishing non- violent drug "crimes," i.e., people using illegal drugs themselves or suppling them to those who want to buy them). Providing services does not justify the income tax, even if those services were useful or moral, which they are generally not (see above). The mafia and private slave owners also provide services (protection and employment) but this does not justify their robbery. The sixteenth amendment to the American Constitution was only ratified in 1913. Somehow America survived until then without a general income tax. ------ riffer <http://www.marginalrevolution.com> is your best bet Through posts it links to all of the other good econ blogs: Krugman, Mankiw, as well as good articles in FT, NYTimes, Economist, etc. Economic texts are notoriously boring, blogs are a good solution to that problem ------ te_platt Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell ~~~ mkramlich I've seen a few recommendations for that in this discussion. Never read any books by him, but in my experience reading newspapers over the years, reading oped articles by him, it seemed clear to me where his political affiliation lies, at least with respect to the main two US political parties. Did you see any of his political slant in this book? Or did he seem to stay neutral/impartial? ~~~ srveit The "slant" in this book is that he is pro-free market and anti-central planning. He states that the free market is the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. The book explains why this is so with many varied examples. ~~~ mkramlich does he address Tragedy of the Commons? monopoly? uneven distribution of information and power? aristocracy (feudal or modern)? just curious, because those are also economic forces in the real world, but they tend to push back against the notion that a totally free unregulated market w/o govt intervention is best. Regardless, I'll definitely check it out. Looking at the 1st few pages on Amazon and he seems to have good writing skills. Do not like the Hoover Institution connection though. ------ thinkdifferent Everybody is suggesting some Austrian Economics books. I don't think it's a good idea to start with something which is not mainstream in the academic world. I've read something about austrian economic, and it sounded good to me, but I know it's so easy to foolish a layman in any field with almost anything. If most academics today at top univesities and most nobel prize are not followers of the austrian school there may be good reasons. Better to start with the current state of the art and then read about less popular schools. ~~~ amh I find your comment ironic given your username. At one time, bloodletting was mainstream in the medical world. ~~~ thinkdifferent :) Yes, it's quite ironic. I'm not saying Austrian Economics is wrong, I don't know enough to make such a claim. I'm just saying that for a complete beginner it's better to start with what is believed to be correct by most professionals in the field. Then of course it's great to study Austrian Economics. I think that starting with the general consensus among professionals is the way to go in any subject. I know economics is heavily politcs influenced and politics can trump over truth, but still... To think different first you have to know mainstream and if you see something wrong in it you can criticize. Otherwise is just ignorance. ------ NeilCJames For an overview of mainstream modern econ, if you read nothing else, read Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan. For a good introduction to the major economic schools of thought check out Economics as Religion by Robert Nelson (he has written a new one on the same subject that I haven't yet read). To get into behavioral economics, I'd recommend Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and The Winner's Curse by Richard Thaler. Tread carefully, there is a lot of polemic posing as economics on bookstore shelves. ------ splat University Economics by Armen Alchian is quite a good introductory textbook to the basics of mainstream economics. It has a strong emphasis on understanding economic concepts intuitively which I like. If you're looking for a more mathematical introduction, McAfee's open source book is a pretty good introduction to microeconomics and is available for free at <http://www.introecon.com/> ------ culturestate Thanks for the recommendations, everyone. I don't have a math-heavy background, so Econ has always seemed formidable and daunting to study. I'm sensitive to the political agendas of name-brand economists and theories and just never really knew where to begin. One text that hasn't come up here, but has in my offline discussions, is Foundations Of Economics: A Beginner's Companion by Yanis Varoufakis. Any opinions on that? ------ drallison Economics is a bit like theology. You read it to get exposed to the ideas, learn about other people's beliefs, and be amazed by the beautifully argued but experimentally unsupported theories. I liked Eric Beinhocker, Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. ------ Ratufa Bookwise, some places to start for general overviews of economics are: "New Ideas from Dead Economists" by Todd Buchholtz "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan Blogwise: <http://www.marginalrevolution.com/> is entertaining and filled with good insights from a libertarian point of view. <http://economistsview.typepad.com/> has more centrist/liberal views on a variety of economic issues and has a good set of links to daily economic- related blog posts from various points of view. The above blogs have enough links to other blogs to get you started, and they will give you different points of view on current topics. ------ techiferous The Undercover Economist is quite a fun read and very accessible to the layperson: [http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor- Dec...](http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor- Decent/dp/0195189779) ~~~ hardik I agree, it lays out many economic concepts in easily understandable form for persons new to the subject. ------ libertyhacker For what it's worth, the Campaign for Liberty has compiled a list of videos and books on economics at <http://www.campaignforliberty.com/edu/economics.php> ------ samratjp If you are concerned about learning about how we got into all this mess and have 10 minutes to spare - this would be a great primer <http://www.crisisofcredit.com/> ------ amh Along with the excellent recommendations here, I would add "The Worldly Philosophers" by Heilbroner ([http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers- Lives-Economic-Th...](http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives- Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X)) for a slightly different angle. It covers a wide range of famous economists and describes the high points of their theories along with some biographical detail, in a very engaging style. It's the economics version of "Men Of Mathematics", which is also a fascinating book. ------ callmeed Naked Economics by Wheelan [http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Dismal- Scie...](http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Dismal- Science/dp/0393049825) ~~~ ebun I second this rec. The author breaks down economics with common language and regular, everyday topics (no charts, graphs or formulas). ------ rwl I learned a heck of a lot from reading John Kenneth Galbraith's books. In particular, _The Affluent Society_ , _The New Industrial State_ , and _Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went_ ~~~ rwl Really? I get downvoted for providing an alternative that the Milton Friedman crowd doesn't like? ~~~ mkramlich I tried to correct that with some upvotes. :) Unfortunately HN (and other sites, not unique to this one) doesn't have a way to enforce distinctions between down-voting due to: 1\. respectful disagreement 2\. writer is crackpot 3\. writer is troll 4\. voter himself is being juvenile 5\. typo 6\. cosmic rays 7\. cat sat on keyboard Actually maybe there's a startup idea in there: deliver a product/service/tech that DOES enable reliable disambiguation between those cases! ~~~ rwl Heh, I was about to say that Slashdot already does something like this, but I am pretty sure they aren't covering cases 6 and 7. Cosmic rays and keyboard cats...now there's a startup problem I can sink my teeth into. Thanks. :) ------ chrismealy "Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics" is really great Hacker News-ish book about economics. It's the only non-technical book that gets into agent-based computational economics. There's some unfortunate business strategy waffle in the middle but otherwise it's fantastic. Here's a review of it by the great Herb Gintis: <http://www.amazon.com/review/R26IO7AY7JHS8C/> ------ grandalf Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman... ------ kiba Whoa what with the hacker love for Austrian economics? It like everyone take after Eric S. Raymond, the hacker who extends Austrian(Hayekian to be more exact) economics to the field of software development in his _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_. ~~~ mkramlich the strong Austrian current you see here is probably due to 2 factors: 1\. libertarianism & anarcho-capitalism are fairly popular among programmers 2\. the "markets good, government bad" belief is pretty common among business fans personally I think there's both good and bad, wisdom and horrible flaws, in both of those belief areas ------ RockyMcNuts The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner - [http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic- Th...](http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic- Thinkers/dp/068486214X) ------ pragmatic I might recommend some behavioral finance: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics>. _Predictably Irrational_ is good. ------ ochekurishvili Gregory Mankiw has published a numerous excellent books. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Gregory_Mankiw> ------ mkramlich not books, but would anyone here recommend that he try the lecture videos at KhanAcademy.org? Or entries in Wikipedia? ~~~ hga Economics is so fantastically politicized---in a more honest age, it was called political economy---you'd have to apply your maximum filters for Wikipedia to be of any use. Probably not the best choice for a beginner. ~~~ mkramlich Agreed. I think it is because unlike with the real/natural sciences, in Economics it's very easy and common to commit fallacies like cherry picking and making deductions based on incomplete information or emotion-based assumptions. Folks that grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth (relatively speaking) are more likely to be anti-government/pro-market, and folks who want to make a living by running a business tend to not like taxes and not like external regulation of their activities, even when their activities would cause harm or impose external costs on their fellow citizens (pollution, etc.). Actually I'd argue that Wikipedia may be a more neutral resource than many books because with books there can at times be only 1 person who blesses it with authority whereas most economics articles are vetted by the community and endlessly critiqued and debated over by editors, with both Pro and Con factions wrestling over the fairness and objectivity of each sentence. A book can often just be an attack piece or propaganda tool. ~~~ hga The problem is that Wikipedia articles will have "random" biases and omissions. When you read a book by one author it's at least likely to be consistent in its bias. E.g. the latest example I've found of this, which I grant you is relatively obscure compared to more prominent and no doubt well fought over articles, is the one on the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), which had one of the largest Chapter 9 bankruptcies in history: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Public_Power_Supply_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Public_Power_Supply_System) All that financial history has been airbrushed out; unless you notice the categories at the bottom, check out the Further reading or the right External Link or sample the article's history you'd have no idea about what was a rather major bit of economic history, rated as one of the three both large and notable Chapter 9 bankruptcies: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_9,_Title_11,_United_Sta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_9,_Title_11,_United_States_Code#Notable_Chapter_9_bankruptcies) ------ xaverius 'Economics' by Paul Samuelson ~~~ hga It's a "classic", at one time _the_ classic, but I don't have much respect for an author who's glowing portrayals of the wonders of the Soviet economy were over the years quietly modified and then dropped as the truth became too well known to be ignored. ~~~ mkramlich Agreed on both your points. (His college textbook is probably the thickest in my economics collection.) I lost a lot of respect for him over the Soviet era. It undermines his credibility on many other issues. Economics is already a soft science (compared to physics, etc.) so having trust in the authority of it's pole bearers is pretty critical. ~~~ hga Exhibit number N on why the neo-Keynesians don't get much respect today (well, not counting those they empower). And it was worse than I'd remembered when I composed the above; as Wikipedia says, " _In Samuelson's 1973 edition of his famous textbook, he laid forth the prediction that the Soviet Union would catch up to the United States in per capita income by 1990, and almost certainly would by 2015 because of its superior economic system. Subsequent editions of his textbook would later push the date of his prediction back farther until the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed._ " ------ maeon3 Robert Shiller, Long time Professor of Yale University does economics the best justice I've ever heard. [http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial- markets/content/down...](http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial- markets/content/downloads)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The world doesn't need an Apple tablet, or any other - jacquesm http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/The-world-doesnt-need-an-Apple-tablet-or-any-other/1262456214 ====== brk TLDR; Armchair quarterbacks always like to take up either the pro or con side of potential new trends and products. They all operate on blind speculation and random presumptions based on their own limited views (or fanboyisms). Apple may or may not release a tablet-type device. It may or may not be a PC or an uber-iPod touch. It may succeed or fail. NOBODY KNOWS. ~~~ jacquesm He makes a good point though about it being an 'in-between' device. If it's less than a laptop and more than an ipod and iphone does that mean people will carry another device or are they going to make choices ? ~~~ annoyed who needs another newfangled gadget? mine still works just fine [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2007Computex_e21Forum- Mart...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2007Computex_e21Forum- MartinCooper.jpg) [http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/another- day-a...](http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/another-day-another- guy-using-a-desktop-computer-inside-a-coffee-shop) ~~~ jacquesm Hehe, good point, but 'new' does not equal success. I remember the 'newton', and the tablet is suspiciously close to a modernized newton. ------ joezydeco C'mon, Gruber wrote the exact same thing 4 days ago. And there are other "web surfing on the toilet?" quotes from Jobs scattered all over the blogosphere. It looks like we've broken the Mach 1 barrier in hype and are now designing the project _for_ Apple instead of just sitting back and speculating wildly. ------ kadavy Maybe he should use this knowledge about what a poor product positioning move a tablet would be to assume that the announcement is actually not about a tablet at all!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Email hasn't changed in 20 years, I've coded something new for 9 months - muszc-master http://ivelope.com/invite/InvitedByViktor ====== SyneRyder I wish you well with this, but I don't see why I would want to use it. I don't see any mention of email priority settings or incoming filters, which are key to my email workflow. (I have hundreds of filters that automatically prioritize my email for me before I even begin to read them each day.) I'm fairly attached to a native-app based workflow (I'm a big fan of Postbox, and before that I used Eudora), so I'm probably not the target market for this anyway. The search looks promising though, and while the design does look 2005-ish, I don't mind the design of the promo website. Something about the font feels slightly off (somehow Windows-like with the way it antialiases, fonts are a bit too small in places) but it isn't terrible. The animated screenshots are really helpful. (One tip: be open to charging a _lot_ for it. Email is mission critical and one of the apps I spend the most time in, I am happy to spend money on having the best experience possible. Postbox charges $40 and I still feel that's a bargain.) ~~~ muszc-master Thank you for your comment! I agree that filtering and priority settings are very important, maybe it wasn't clear enough but there are two animations with active (if you send a question in an email and are waiting for an answer the email will be marked as active) & inactive emails and the drag & drop filtering option. Some people has said that they prefer native-apps and I still haven't decided if this will be a web app or a native app (using Electron, which for example Visual Studio Code is built with). The design will be fixed and probably next week I'll have updated the landing page with a more modern design. Thanks for all your feedback and yes - email is a mission critical app and the target audience is people spend a lot of time with email so saving a lot of time and effort in that department would be worth paying for for some people. ------ muszc-master Any feedback is very much appreciated. A lot of people I've shown it to doesn't like the design and think it is too 2005-ish. I have to admit, I'm a developer first and designer... second... ~~~ fizzbatter I don't have any feedback _(not big on email myself)_ , but i just came to sympathize with your design woes. It's just so difficult, imo. ~~~ muszc-master From the people I've talked to regarding the design it seems to be a divided camp between making the design more like Premier Pro: [https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/04/6-PR- Sec...](https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/04/6-PR-Secondaries- affected.png) or more like this: [https://dribbble.com/shots/1334369-Mochila-Mail- manufactured](https://dribbble.com/shots/1334369-Mochila-Mail-manufactured) What do you think? ~~~ fizzbatter Take a massive dose of salt with my comment, as i am not a designer. Personally, i think the mochila design looks better, but i really like dark designs (easy on the eyes), so the Premier is nice on that front. ~~~ muszc-master No worries, I think it's a matter of taste and I will try to find a good design that will look more modern either going in the mochila or premier pro direction. ------ jtsylve This seems very similar to what once was Google Wave. That's not a criticism, though. I miss Wave. ~~~ muszc-master Yes, some functionality is inspired by Google Wave :) Hopefully this will not go the same way that Wave did though ------ kixpanganiban Really nice concept. I can see myself using a web email client when I need to move between Mac, Windows, and Linux. Features look promising, however I feel like the UI design is a little dated. It reminds me of Outlook 2005. Perhaps if you try moving into a more modern design format, you'll be able to attract users more easily. Other than that, I'd be happy to try it out soon! ~~~ muszc-master Thank you for the comment! A lot of people love the functionality but hate how it looks so my priority right now is to make a more modern design for next week, stay tuned! ------ inimino Looks interesting. The biggest question I have that isn't answered on the website is what is your business model? I doesn't look like an open source project but it isn't clear. ~~~ muszc-master Yes, it is not an open-source project but the intention is to make it into an SaaS if the beta launch goes well and people like it enough to pay a small fee for extra features. ------ jason_slack If this were a stand-alone app, I would use it. For me the workflow seems better than Mail.app or Thunderbird. +1 for using characters from the HBO show Silicon Valley. +2 for using TPS Reports! ~~~ muszc-master Thank you for your comment! And a lot of people has requested it to be a stand-alone app so maybe this is the direction I in which I should head.. ------ davesuperman Honestly, this is awesome. I use Gmail web as my default clients and while I was watching the video I was like... yes, yes and YES! Most compelling features were: calendar in email, tabs, quick edits. Things that appealed less where threading and tasks, since I'd assume others have to use this product too. I've signed up for beta and can't wait to try it out. ~~~ muszc-master Thank you for your feedback! I've received massive amounts of love for this product and if you'd like to get involved somehow, you can find my email in the footer of the landing page :) ------ zeluve The only thing that attract my eyeball is the tabs. Others are identical to all sorts of mail agent product out there. Also, you need to think about who is your customer. If you are targeting at developers, the front-end isn't that important but the performance and functionality are crucial. For what you currently offer, I don't see a clear position of your product. ~~~ muszc-master Thank you for your feedback. The target market is not really developers but people who use email more than 3 hours per date. It has a lot of similar functionality to for example Outlook - but there are small things - for example adding an email to your calendar by clicking on a date that Outlook doesn't have but makes a big difference in how you use it I think. Glad to receive your feedback I will try to clarify my positioning also! ------ nsebban The front-end part looks ok to me. I hope your invite queue advances quickly enough so I can try it soon. The instant-meeting-setup feature is nice, but the main email/agenda solution have this covered in an acceptable way already, IMO. I know for a fact that providing a search feature in a mail service isn't an easy problem to solve. Can you tell us a bit about the infrastructure behind this service ? ~~~ muszc-master Good points. Thank you. About searching the email inbox: Upon first signing on, all emails (and filenames) in the inbox will be indexed and cached to MySQL and we're also working on providing an option to use WebSQL to cache this locally. ~~~ nsebban You may want to aggressively filter the amount of emails you're going to index, then. It's not rare that people have inboxes bigger than 10Gb. To be honest, I think email search is something even Google hasn't succeeded yet. The way it's introduced on your homepage makes me think you have succeeded...but it will definitely be HARD to scale if your service becomes popular. ~~~ muszc-master Yes that is absolutely correct, we'll be using an agressive filter for what data is indexed, and to make it fast, the search will primarily search the most recent emails & files... ------ Etheryte What does this offer over, say Outlook? Tabs are nice, but mostly it looks like just another average mail client, just on the web. ~~~ muszc-master If you watch the demo video, I'm showing a lot more of the functionality - for example the ability that when multiple users send emails via Ivelope, it turns the email into a reddit-like thread with different levels of indentation which is also, I think, the reason why Reddit won over traditional web forums - right now, email is like an old school web forum, but with Ivelope it turns emails into real discussion threads - one of the reasons that Reddit is one of the most popular places to discuss things on. You also have the separation between emails from people and emails from computers (newsletters/promos) into a separate folder, which is displayed in an overview mode, where you can see the email instantly and also unsubscribe from ANY email with one click of a button :) ~~~ threepipeproblm Thanks for posting this. I think you need to work on finding your _key_ differentiators and putting them up front in video & marketing materials. Curious how you handle something like the task feature when the recipient is not an ivelope user. ~~~ muszc-master Very good point, thank you. So when someone has sent you a task that is not using Ivelope and you click "Mark task as Done", the first time the user will be shown a popup on how to handle this, if he wants Ivelope to send an email every time he sets a task as finished, or if he wants to send an email when all tasks in an email are finished or if he just wants the tasks for his own personal todolist. Having unique features will bring in more users I think. ------ fiatjaf But it is an email client, or a client to some other protocol? ~~~ muszc-master It's a web-based email client with some features which will only work fully when both users are using Ivelope (but most features work for everyone) - and also does it count as a protocol when [] in text is converted into a task? :P ------ Animats Is this an IMAP client in the browser, or something where you give your email credentials to some server somewhere and it looks at all your mail? ~~~ muszc-master This is a concern several people has voiced, and it's not yet decided if it will become a native-app or a web-based client that was my first thought. There are two camps basically: people who would hesitate to give their credentials to an unknown server and would want a native-app and people who don't care about that and would prefer a webmail client. ------ umedzacharia Wish you well, but I would love it to be a Mac mail agent instead of a web base client. ~~~ muszc-master Yes many people has asked for this and I'm trying to figure out in what direction to go :) ------ EliRivers eMails, tasks, conversations, documents, searched and indexed, all bound up together in one integrated whole. Is this another Lotus Notes? Or the ill-fated Chandler? ~~~ muszc-master I sure hope not! ------ neonbat i thought the website was called 'ive-eloped' and had a hefty chuckle. ~~~ muszc-master Haha that's funny!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Researchers get cardiac muscle cells to grow, repair heart attack damage - iProject http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/researchers-get-cardiac-muscle-cells-to-grow-repair-heart-attack-damage/ ====== ameister14 It would be interesting, if they are able to control the cell division, to see what applications this could have in oncology. ------ BrianPetro One more step in creating the 'too old' ~~~ alan-crowe On the contrary, this is the good kind of medicine. Emergency treatment saves your life, but leaves you with a damaged heart. This research looks towards repairing the damage.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Account Blocked? - deadaccount From my other account "unwantedLetters" I am unable to comment on stories. If I log in, my comment is visible, but not if I am logged out. Can PG or someone else please let me know why?<p>Thanks. ====== getsat You've been "silent banned" or "hellbanned". You're not the first: [http://www.google.com/search?q=hellbanned+site:news.ycombina...](http://www.google.com/search?q=hellbanned+site:news.ycombinator.com)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Sync Google Drive to an S3 Hosted Website - michaeloblak http://pages.sheetsu.com ====== fiatjaf That's great, but I believe it will not work with Google Docs files, right? ~~~ michaeloblak Actually, you can translate Google Docs file into a .html file. So it can work. ~~~ fiatjaf Yeah, but it will come with a lot of embedded CSS.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Evading all web-application firewalls XSS filters [pdf] - ebarock http://mazinahmed.net/uploads/Evading%20All%20Web-Application%20Firewalls%20XSS%20Filters.pdf ====== davvolun The title sounds misleading to me; this paper is about evading the set of WAFs which may include the universal set at this point in time, and further only including specific versions and rulesets of those WAFs. I don't know...the title made me think "well, then why bother using a WAF at all?", the paper actually implies that I should use a WAF as one line of defense, but I don't think anyone ever got the warm fuzzies thinking their app was fully protected behind a WAF. If the game is to survive the bear, I don't have to out-run the bear, I need to out-run you. A WAF is a nice pair of sneakers against your flip flops-- doesn't help me much if my legs are broken. ------ tootie Good thing I never bother installing one. ~~~ spydum If a dedicated WAF can't protect you, how confident are you that your own application is doing appropriate level of escaping/santization?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Many ‘American’ phrases are actually British - Ours90 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/10/english-language-british-american-book ====== justherefortart Soccer versus Football is my favorite.</soccer player> Lol, they even have a Soccer link at the bottom of the page that goes to /football	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: I need warm gloves that won't hinder typing - tired_man I need a pair of warm gloves that are thin enough that I can still touch type.<p>The arthritis is kicking in early this year (morning temps in the 50s) and I have to keep working.<p>If you have any recommendations or links, please, please share.<p>(Note: Multi-million dollar winning lottery tickets cheerfully accepted in lieu of advice.) ====== detaro Two ideas: There are gloves aimed at photographers that either have thinner material at the fingertips, slits to stick the fingertips out of or removable tips. Glove liners made from silk (intended to be worn under thick gloves, like socks are for shoes) can be really thin, maybe combined with a fingerless glove? ~~~ tired_man I hadn't known what glove liners were made from. A set or two of silk liners underneath nytrile gloves might be just right. I'm going to check out the photographer's gloves, too! I never re-adjusted to cold climates after the service. I spent so much time in Asia/Africa that if it isn't 85 or 90, I'm looking for a sweater. You'd figure after more 20 years my body would have would reset. Thanks for the leads! ------ PaulHoule You could cut the fingers off a pair of cheap gloves. ~~~ tired_man Ah, but the fingers are the part I need most. Thanks, though.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AI could help fight climate change - jonbaer https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613838/ai-climate-change-machine-learning/ ====== martincollignon If you have time to dedicate to the fight against climate change, consider reading this paper [0] and start or help out some of the projects mentioned. One example is Tomorrow [1], a startup that tries to calculate your CO2 emisisons based on app integrations and is looking for help on these integrations and CO2 models, but there are other projects like this one [2] or this one [3]. [0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433) [1] [https://www.tmrow.com/](https://www.tmrow.com/) [2] [https://openclimatefix.github.io/](https://openclimatefix.github.io/) [3] [http://pangeo.io](http://pangeo.io) ------ dboreham The article missed the most obvious way in which AI could fight climate change: by replacing the current election and political system with AI. This would fix the fundamental problem that humans are collectively unable to avoid killing the planet they live on. Solution: put decision making into the hands of software designed to achieve the goal of not killing the planet. I'm pretty sure as this (election replacing AI) is a much easier technical problem than self driving cars.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Matt Cutts on How to Prevent Scrapers from Outranking You with Your Own Content - a5seo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q&feature=player_embedded ====== gojomo If this is a major problem, I would imagine site 'B' (the true originator) could actually embargo their new content until after Googlebot visits it, then open it to the public. Combined with a few tricks to send Google to the newest content – fresh sitemaps, PubSubHubBub, links from any other pages Googlebot is currently visiting on the site – this probably wouldn't delay the release of the content to the human audience by very much.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Perl Toolchain Summit - freyfogle https://code.foo.no/index.php/2018/02/16/perl-toolchain-summit-2018-oslo-norway/ ====== vgy7ujm Great initiative!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown - PaulHoule http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-robocalls-idUSKCN10U18L ====== jimmydddd I've always been confused as to why the phone companies refused to put any effort into this. Do they make significant money from spam calls? I can't see how that would be. Does anyone have any info? In fact, when nomo robo (www.nomorobo.com) came up with a pretty good solution (they won an FCC robo blocking contest ), the phone companies lobbied congress to shut it down. No only were they not helping, they were blocking progress from others. ~~~ bkruse They do not make money from it. Actually, robocalls are really looked down upon in the industry, as the traffic is not profitable. Imagine this - telco carriers are charging per minute. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no per-call fees, only per minute with 6 second minimums and 6 second increments. Now imagine all the robocalls where they keep calls open for 3 seconds ( enough to determine if it's a live human or answering machine ). That carrier has a lot of resource utilization to "setup" a call, but after that, there is not much that the carrier needs to do. In order to combat this, all tier-1 carriers now have ASR (answer ratio) and ACD (average call duration) minimums. In addition, if you have more than ~10% of your calls less than 6 seconds, you get an ADDITIONAL 1-2 cent per call surcharge. That's a lot of money given that my average cost of long distance is .17 cents ($0.0017) per minute. It's the second tier carriers that is "blending" this traffic with good traffic in order to get the minimums then charge the telemarketers much higher costs per minute. ~~~ MichaelGG Yep and it's a huge business for them. (I work in this industry, with these kinds of companies.) It results in great deals for non-robo callers, as they are desperate to get good conversational traffic to add to the mix. It depends on which provider, but the dialer penalties usually aren't that harsh. Regardless, everyone's cautious. And they'll mix right to the limit. Put on restrictions on how many times a number can call? They'll switch up numbers and keep the mix perfect. It creates a huge opportunity. If the FCC was serious, they'd just start cracking down and push liability on down the line. Then no one would want to take the risk. It's high volume, so without huge deposits and guarantees, no one would touch it. ------ jsymolon How about the caller id that's being sent has to match the billing number and company ? The telcom companies _know_ who to bill, why do they have to develop any method to fight abuse ? Being a suspicious person, I suspect it'll be a new feature to add to the bill. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing) ~~~ subway That isn't an easy problem to solve. What do you do when a company has a large set of numbers on a single trunk? Do you maintain a list of authorized CID source numbers? How do you enable 3rd parties to make calls on your behalf? ~~~ ralfd > How do you enable 3rd parties to make calls on your behalf? Why should that be possible? If anything the disadvantages of nuisance or even scamming obviously far outweigh the benefits. ~~~ dangrossman Few companies over a certain size run their own call centers. It's no different from a software startup using AWS or Rackspace instead of building a server room in their rented office space. I think it is both acceptable and desirable for my phone to tell me Comcast is calling me (as they currently do), even though it's technically an outsourced call center that makes/takes calls for several different companies from the same building and same set of phone numbers. Requiring caller ID match the billing address for the phone number would be like requiring Hacker News be hosted on a cloudflare.com subdomain because the IP space we're talking to isn't actually owned by YC. ~~~ bkruse You can set the CallerID name to whatever you want. We once had a customer that set their callerID name to "DEAD" to signal that the phone number was no longer in use. People thought they were issuing threads on their outbound calls. ------ e40 My cell and landline have been getting increasing robocalls. The ones to my cell have randomly generated caller id's that are near my own number. One day I got 3-4 scam/spam calls and I kept them on the line for a good 10-15 minutes. Every one was a free trip to Mexico. At the end, I would say (after the first time) "this is the Nth time you called me to day" and the people would actually argue with me that it was the first. Now, when I see an unknown number, I just send it to voicemail. ~~~ nullc > My cell and landline have been getting increasing robocalls. The ones to my > cell have randomly generated caller id's that are near my own number. You can exploit this, get a number in an small area code where you know no one and do no business with. Then don't answer any calls with that area code. This is highly effective. ~~~ smackfu For me, they also tend to throw in large cities like New York and Chicago. A lot of people know someone in a big city and might be willing to pick up an unknown number. ------ phonon I'm using the Android 6.0 "mark call as spam" feature and it's working pretty well so far! [https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/3459196?hl=en](https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/3459196?hl=en) ~~~ JustSomeNobody Cool. Unfortunately, I get a new number every call, so this would do nothing. ~~~ gcb0 even if it works be ready to say goodbye soon. I've used that feature on Google voice for years, until they decided drop it. 4yrs later they release this. let's count how long it take to go away again. and fun fact, Google voice is the only Google product i pay to use from them ~~~ phonon It's still there for me in GV? [https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089?hl=en](https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089?hl=en) [http://imgur.com/a/9Dvrw](http://imgur.com/a/9Dvrw) [http://imgur.com/AxPTrUZ](http://imgur.com/AxPTrUZ) ------ mrfusion Is something going on with these? About two months ago I started getting 3-4 spam calls per day. Never had anything before that. ~~~ koolba > Is something going on with these? About two months ago I started getting 3-4 > spam calls per day. Never had anything before that. I think there are "waves" of it picking up. There was a time a few years ago where everybody and their dog was receiving a robocall about buying an extended vehicle warranty or Rachel from card services "just checking in". ~~~ chucksmash Don't forget the "This is your captain speaking..." one with the blasted foghorn. ------ JohnTHaller At get about a half dozen robocalls a day. I'm using nomorobo on the home office VoIP line, so they only ring once. Still annoying but livable. Unfortunately, the scammers are now setting caller ID phone numbers of XXX- YYY-???? where XXX-YYY are the first 6 digits of your own number and the ???? are 4 random digits. As they randomly set this for each call, it gets around nomorobo and the call comes through. As more folks start using something like nomorobo, expect to see most scam callers adopt this approach. ~~~ bkruse That's correct and could cause the opposite problem (where a legitimate callerID gets blocked). Smaller telcos restrict the outbound callerID to only CallerIDs (DIDs) that you own. This would be very difficult to enforce for a wholesale carrier - where their customer is an aggregate of thousands of customers. ~~~ MichaelGG It's not even feasible. Like IP, the outbound calls go via many paths. So like ISPs almost never filter your source address, same for telcos. Small ones with tiny accounts might, but no one even remotely on wholesale. But changing IDs is already illegal, so the FCC could decide to chase it down if enough people complain. ~~~ MertsA Do you have a source for the claim of caller ID spoofing being illegal? AFAIK that's only illegal if you're using it to further a fraud. ~~~ MichaelGG Yeah I knew someone would point that out. In the case of evading robo laws, it'd be fraud, right? ------ runako For a while, I used Jolly Roger [1] as a sort of DDOS / attempt to get my number removed from the call lists. I have no problem paying for it if it were integrated/automatic. But after a while, I just got tired of manually adding it to a call. [1] - [http://www.jollyrogertelco.com](http://www.jollyrogertelco.com) ~~~ galori I just spent an hour listening to some of their recorded call sessions on youtube, it is hillarious. ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm- hnvBm9Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm-hnvBm9Q)) It's also genius, if we can automate transferring telemarketers to stuff like this, we'd be using technology against them, use up all their human paid time and make it unprofitable to spam call. ------ msoad So a contact in your phonebook can have many phone numbers associated with it. We can make an open source contact that includes all of "possibly spam" numbers and if you have that contact on your phone, you'll see "possibly spam" is calling. ~~~ Avenger42 That's exactly what I've been doing for years. I also gave it a custom ringtone that's 4 seconds of silence and turned vibration off, so unless I'm actually doing something with my phone, or else listening to music, I don't notice the interruption. The issue is that nowadays, I rarely get spam from the same numbers multiple times. They just generate a new fake number if the first one didn't get a response. ------ anexprogrammer We need something similar in UK and Europe. For the last year I've been getting 3-5 calls a day on weekdays and a couple of silents. Always the same scams and spam - Bank misselling, upgraded boiler or glazing. Something changed or I was just lucky up til the start of this year, but it's got really annoying. I wish I could simply globally block international and unknown numbers unless on a whitelist. Every blocking solution I've seen works on individual caller IDs, which is obviously useless for witheld or spoofed calls. Sending to voicemail is a sort-of solution, but results in a lot of half scripts recorded - they must always start speaking the moment the answering message starts playing. ~~~ hackinthebochs If you're on android and are rooted, root call blocker works great. I had to do this a few months ago and only let through calls in my address book. Funny thing is all this started after I added my number to the do not call list ------ sirtastic For the last 2 years I've been receiving calls from some call center in India sometimes up to 5x a day asking if I want viagra. I've asked, pleaded, demanded and have blocked by now hundreds of the numbers they call me with which can range from a local number to one across the country. I've had my number since I was a teenager and don't want to stop using it but I've been seriously considering it lately because the calls feel like harassment. I don't get how they are able to do this and why something hasn't been done about it. ------ mrfusion I've heard there's a do not disturb hack for the iPhone. You can set it to do not disturb but still allow numbers in your contacts through. I'm really tempted to try that but I'm worried about missing important calls. It would be neat if they simply let you block every number that's ever been reported. Sort of like a real time global blacklist. ~~~ beachstartup > _I 'm really tempted to try that but I'm worried about missing important > calls._ i think most people are starting to realize that there really isn't any such thing as an important call from a number you don't recognize. ~~~ my_first_acct Unfortunately, if you are dealing with medical issues (your own or someone else's), you are going to get lots of important calls from numbers you don't recognize, and from phones with blocked caller id (doctors, for instance). And because of privacy considerations, they are often reluctant to leave a detailed message. ~~~ ghaff Yep, when I get a call claiming to be a phone number that's not likely scammy (e.g. a state that no close friend or family member lives in or is visiting), I hesitate to just ignore it a lot of the time. Certainly if it's a possibly relevant area code, I'll tend to pick up. This isn't because I can't resist picking up the phone. But checking for voicemail after the fact takes even more time and cycles. And I don't want to end up playing telephone tag if someone actually does need to reach me. ------ stretchwithme Excuse me if I am less than enthused with AT&T being involved. They send me physical mail addressed to resident. I called them to cancel it. They took my name and soon no more mail is going to resident. Its addressed to me personally. I later call to cancel that mail. Soon, no more mail is going to me. Its going to resident again. ~~~ MBCook The ridiculous thing is even after the FCC said it was OK numerous times AT&T still refuse to do anything to work on robocalls claiming that they needed judicial approval. The FCC had to pass a memorandum (or something) earlier this year explicitly spelling out the AT&T had absolutely no grounds for their believe and was allowed to and SHOULD work on the issue. ------ taf2 Interesting no one has mentioned this page in the thread: [https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic- pumping](https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic-pumping) As I understand there is an incentive model in place to encourage this type of traffic. ~~~ bkruse That's not true, the carriers are compensated through CABS (carrier access billing) based on number of minutes, not number of connected calls. Carriers have to accept traffic from other carriers, even if they have not paid their CABS bill. Right now, no one is paying anyone. That's why fair cross-carrier compensation and flat-rates are a big talk in the FCC instead of what's called "Tariff rates" which vary by carrier and by destination. Freeconferencecall.com exists because of CABS and having very high tariff rates. They do NOT want lots of short duration calls. That doesn't help them at all. ------ mirekrusin People should stop using phone numbers all together, just 4g signal is fine. ------ dang Url changed from [http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-to-lead- robocall-s...](http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-to-lead-robocall- strike-force-calls-for-industry-wide-cooperation), which points to this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Software Engineer - gmiller123456 https://dev.to/anaulin/things-nobody-told-me-about-being-a-software-engineer-3pa5 ====== hguhghuff As the author says, Programming is a lot more fun than software engineering.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Sochi Olympics API - pranade http://www.kimonolabs.com/sochi/explorer ====== blackdogie Using their Olympics logo is one quick way for you to get a cease and desist letter. [http://registration.olympic.org/en/faq/detail/id/25](http://registration.olympic.org/en/faq/detail/id/25) IANAL Interesting data though ! ~~~ frandroid Or the words "The Olympics", "The Games", or even digesting their data (whether they're on string legal footing or not...) Good luck. :) ~~~ mmastrac The Olympic trademarks live at a meta-IP level [1], with trademarks enforced by specific laws rather than standard trademark. Legal corruption at its finest. [1] [http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/Protect...](http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/ProtectionofOlympicTrademarks.aspx) ~~~ pranade fair enough. we removed the rings to improve the chances of keeping the data live ------ untog _Despite the expense and interest, there is no API_ There is most definitely is. It's just not free. ~~~ pranade Yes, you're right. We think it's important that this data is openly available ~~~ mbesto Serious question - have you look very deep into the legality of what you're doing? I have no doubt in the world there is huge value in your service but generally speaking your website violates the most basic terms of use of pretty much any site that exists. That being said - you (and pretty much every other web scraper in the world) enters into this grey area of "binding contract" in the terms of use. Personally I'd be very scared about your service being able to scale for two fundamental reasons (1) the more attention you attract as you scale, the more legislation will be targeted at you and (2) people who want to protect their data will create services to block your efforts. note - IANAL and I say this not to scare you, but hopefully to help. ~~~ meritt There are numerous web-scraping tools out there, many are easy enough to use for non-programmers (Connotate and Mozenda for instance) so, while you have a point, precedent shows that web scraping is prominent and not going away anytime soon. I applaud innovation in this area. Your #2 is simply not plausible unless Kimono carefully follows robots.txt and consistent user-agent, which is rarely the case for a competent web-scraping platform. Legality is also a strong word. Web scraping is rarely illegal in the sense that you're committing a crime. A company could definitely issue a C&D and potentially go after you in a civil lawsuit but it's very infrequent (sadly not so much anymore with all the bullshit CFAA suits against "hackers" lately) that a government entity would pursue someone for scraping data. The general consensus is if the information is available to end users with a regular web browser, no logins or agreement checkboxes, then it's fair game for web scraping. ~~~ mbesto Precedent is also a strong word. There are numerous people on the road who go over the speed limit. It's prominent and not going away anytime soon. This is not a cause for precedence. Precedence implies that a legal case take place in order to dictate the law. AFAIK, between your unsubstantiated comment and my general knowledge of this area, the reason no one has provided a scraper service at scale isn't because the technology or execution wasn't right, but rather that it's simply illegal to do so. > _The general consensus is if the information is available to end users with > a regular web browser, no logins or agreement checkboxes, then it 's fair > game for web scraping._ That's simply not true. Here's an example: [http://www.yelp.com/static?country_=US&p=tos](http://www.yelp.com/static?country_=US&p=tos) _" By accessing or using the Site, you are agreeing to these Terms and concluding a legally binding contract with Yelp Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California ("Yelp"). Do not access or use the Site if you are unwilling or unable to be bound by the Terms."_ _" Use any robot, spider, site search/retrieval application, or other automated device, process or means to access, retrieve, scrape, or index any portion of the Site or any Site Content;"_ My overall point? Kimonolabs is slowly painting a target on their back and it's only a matter of time before they'll have to "lawyer up". ------ bbx I wanted to build a simple calendar for the London 2012 Olympics (and actually built another one for the Sochi Olympics). Both times I ended up using a JSON file found on NBC's website. Like the linked article suggests, it would be nice to have access to an official (and even simple) API, to dig up some interesting statistics or just have some fun playing with the data. ~~~ pranade Totally agree... we thought the same thing, which is why we built this :) ------ bdc I love the way this API is presented on the page. It's awesome. It exposes itself in such an obvious way that it leaves no question about its capabilities and usage. Makes me want to jump right in. ------ kingkool68 I built a scraper to organize athlete profile data [https://github.com/kingkool68/Scraping-Sochi-2014-Athlete- Pr...](https://github.com/kingkool68/Scraping-Sochi-2014-Athlete-Profiles) ------ johns Where is the data sourced from? Having had to secure rights to Olympic data at a past company, it's a minefield of legal and usage restrictions. ------ tonystark Sochi-mash anyone? ------ injekt [http://www.stats.com/olympics_2014data.asp](http://www.stats.com/olympics_2014data.asp) ------ thezach take it down dude... the IOC is not a group you want to get into an IP battle with. RIAA is like a little kid compared to them.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Best question and answer software? - bwb Hi, anyone got any suggestions for could software that allows users to ask questions and others to provide answers? Similar to Yahoo q and a. ====== BrendanL33t Hi, my name is Brendan and I work for Sponge (www.getsponge.com) - We are a Q&A solution in a closed beta as well, but we have several deployed examples in the wild - you can email me at [email protected], I can show you and we can see if there is a fit for what you are looking for. ~~~ bwb awesome, sending you an email. ------ ig1 I believe that's what YC startup Opzi do, although they're still in closed beta. ~~~ bwb Sweet going to chk them out and see if they need testers, thx! ------ cancelbubble A quick search gave me these 3 PHP solutions, <http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/stackoverflow-clone-php/> I thought Stack Overflow actually licensed their software where you can start your own Q&A site on whatever. Might be something to look into. ~~~ bwb Yep was hoping someone had some direct exp, I can search pretty well too :) Don't really like those guys and I don't think they are doing licensing with their new model.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Moving in the opposite direction of variable rewards - FailMore http://joshsummers.co.uk/2015/02/26/Opposite-Direction-Of-Variable-Rewards/?utm_source=Hacker%20News&utm_medium=Submit&utm_campaign=Curious ====== kleer001 Compuyrz will destroy our humanities, lulz	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Danger – Men Cooking - suengay http://men-cooking.takeashare.com ====== suengay Danger – Men Cooking A collection of original recipes and some great stories about the men who play in the kitchen at The Boomerang Social Club at Grand and May streets in Chicago. This is for them! <http://men-cooking.takeashare.com/> ------ donrocco Danger – Men Cooking A collection of original recipes and some great stories about the men who play in the kitchen at The Boomerang Social Club at Grand and May streets in Chicago. This is for them! <http://men-cooking.takeashare.com/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Covid-19 treatment program recommended by doctors in Wuhan - pspct https://www.covid19readings.com/articles/2020/02/14/Wuhan-Union-Hospital-COVID-19-Treatment-Program ====== mtmail Can you remove the 'Please share!" part in the title? "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important." [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ~~~ pspct Updated.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The coolest or the most worthless invention ever created? [video] - benigeri http://www.wimp.com/inventioncreated/ ====== benigeri This is actually hilarious.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mono and LLVM's BitCode - orand http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2015/Sep-02.html ====== orand I'm impressed at what the Mono/Xamarin team is able to pull off, but I can't help feeling that one day Apple is going to introduce a change (or a new product) that breaks the leaky abstraction in a way that the magic Xamarin elves simply can't fix. I thought watchOS 1 would be the breaking point, and then watchOS 2, but so far they appear to be making those work. Keep up the good work, I hope to be proven wrong!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Renaissance Technologies - pvsukale3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies ====== smabie A great book about RenTec and Jim Simons came out recently: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution. Everyone in the industry worships Simons and RenTec as practically god-like. What they've managed to do shouldn't really be possible and is out of this world. According to Wikipedia over a 20 year period between 1994 and 2014, RenTec realized an 71.9% annualized return in their internal Medallion fund. And before anyone says that's a fluke, let's calculate the probability of such a "fluke" using some simplifying assumptions: 1\. S&P 500 returns are log-normally distributed with a log-return of 10% and volatility of 10% 2\. RenTec made a mean annualized return of 71.9% over 20 years 3\. The returns of RenTec are independent from year to year We get a P<1.64E-14. Therefore, I think we all can agree that we can reject the null hypothesis of RenTec having no alpha. And before someone says that it's a scam, there's no outside investors in the Medallion fund anymore, so if it is a scam, they would only be scamming their own employees. And if that was the case, I think we would know. ~~~ soVeryTired Sounds like you've assumed that rentech are running the same volatility as the S&P 500. That's very unlikely to be true - most systematic hedge funds ran crazy high risk in the '80s and '90s. But even if you assume it's a coin toss as to whether they perform well in any given year, twenty good years in a row is impressive. My best guess is that it's a combination of luck, skill, and hindsight bias. Rentech probably had (has?) an edge. They were also partly lucky: in investment, you can do everything right and still lose money. There were also many other players: had LTCM not blown themselves up, we might be marvelling at their investment prowess now. ~~~ bumby I'd be curious what their risk-adjusted returns are, especially in a leverage free environment. Anybody know where to find such information for RenTec (or other hedge/mutual funds for that matter)? ~~~ smabie According to the book, they were running a SR of 2 through the 90s and early 2000s. After overhauling their strategies, they started running a SR of around 7! I’m not sure where you can get information about other funds besides finding articles in BB or WSJ, but the HFRI Index publishes return information for different classes of funds. Regardless, I don’t think you’re going to be able to access SR unless you’re an investor or work at a portfolio analytics company. ------ sbu_throwaway Here's some inside baseball: I recently graduated from Stony Brook University where Jim Simons chaired the math department in the 1960s. He left to start Renaissance Technologies which is located 1 mile down the street from campus. Their influence is everywhere. We have a Simons Center for Geometry and Physics ($150m building). I take classes in Frey Hall (Robert Frey used be managing director at Rentec). Our med school is literally the "Renaissance School of Medicine." Our athletic facility is the Walter J. Hawrys Campus Recreation & Wellness Center (named after Jim's father in law). etc. etc. Children of Renaissance employees come to campus on weekends to train for USAMO and play chess. I met Jim a couple of times at alumni events and what stood out is how humble and normal and down to earth he seemed. He is also a chain smoker and was lighting up indoors(!) but of course no one can say a word to him lol. He's been making >$1 billion a year for like the past 20 years. To put it in perspective: an average code monkey like me making $250k at a FAANG would have to work for FOUR THOUSAND YEARS to make how much he makes in a year. It's unreal. ~~~ gwern Don't forget the yachts in the Stony Brook marina! I always smiled as I passed the giant 'Matrix Rose'. No need to ask where the money for that one came from. ~~~ rosege Just googled the yacht - its pretty small for someone of his wealth. Check out the late Paul Allen's yacht Octopus or MY Eclipse for what some billionaires go for. ~~~ moscovium Let's see Paul Allen's yacht... ...look at that tasteful off-white coloring, the thickness of it. Oh my god -- it even has a water mark. ------ cjken While I understand there are moral and ethical complications with the vast sums of wealth and influence attached to RenTec, the tone in these comments is disappointing... There is no fraud at RenTec, and there is nothing magical about what they do. It's simply an amazing technical and scientific organization, operating with almost unthinkable efficiency and scale. I haven't read the book, but I'm pretty sure this isn't in it: I've been told by reliable sources that if you pick any one strategy (however you are able to separate/define that) from the Medallion portfolio and it will not be individually remarkable--probably less than a 1.0 Sharpe (net of trading costs, gross of fees). There are countless hedge funds with equally performant models and sub-strategies. What makes RenTec different is their ability to generate orthogonal strategies at a remarkable scale. They generate more ideas with less philosophical and empirical overlap than anyone else, by a wide margin. The software and theory required to do this for a fund as large as Medallion is absolutely as rare and valuable as their returns have proven. Wrote more about it here: [https://www.bridgealternatives.com/medallion-isnt- magic-prob...](https://www.bridgealternatives.com/medallion-isnt-magic- probably/) ~~~ logjammin This is really interesting, and what I'm about to say makes me feel more bleeding-heart than I feel I am most days, but there's something deeply melancholy about the fact that this collection of the best intelligence our species has to offer, working together to achieve something utterly unheard of - so unheard of that many other smart people think there's something criminal going on - is exerting its collective effort to - when you put it in plain English - hack a casino. We're hurtling at an accelerating rate to ecological ruin, with millions (hundreds of millions?) of deaths a plausible outcome in the next 100 years, not to mention a fall in the standard of living for basically everyone, and our best and brightest are doing the Manhattan Project of cash. As a stupid person, I can't do much other than shrug - hell, I can't even say I wouldn't do the same as these brain-genius PhDs if I had their capabilities. But it still kinda sucks, is all. ~~~ solveit The problem is that our society is _terrible_ at rewarding positive externalities. Even worse than we are at punishing negative externalities. I do object to your phrasing. Quantitative finance isn't hacking a casino. It does generate actual value. The problem is that finance is one of the few fields where you can expect to be rewarded in proportion to the value you generate because the amount of value you generate is easy to measure. Cue all the smart, realistic people rushing into finance instead of having a larger impact for peanuts doing fundamental science or something. ~~~ logjammin Thanks for this. What you say about proportion of compensation makes a sort of sense, but I don't have the chops or the knowledge of the field to evaluate it. The 'easy to measure' thing is definitely insightful and useful to me as I think about it. Money does have that clarity to it. The "hacking a casino" thing I'll defend, though: to the extent that getting better at gambling games and finance both can involve prediction, probabilities, data collection, and the like, I don't see how the analogy fails on anything but its crudeness, which I'll happily grant (while also saying I was going for a chuckle with it). I didn't mean to imply that getting good at either is something to be embarrassed about, only that it feels a little ... maybe "small", next to other concerns. I think that superlatively intelligent people do have god-given opportunities the rest of us don't have, and that while they're free to do as they please, the rest of us sometimes hope they'll use them wisely (and, selfishly in this case, to our benefit in some small way). I'll also say that I meant "hack" in the older, more optimistic 1970's way, like "figure out what makes it tick and do cool things with it" instead of the more sinister modern sense. I don't attribute any malice or ill intent to Simons/RenTec, at least not without evidence. I guess I could reinterpret/update my comment in light of what you've said to now say that "whatever value these men and women are creating inside this secretive firm, there's a strong case to be made that it's not the most urgent or needed kind these days". I'm curious and sincerely so, though, when I ask: what actual value does quantitative finance create? ~~~ strangedynamics My experience is limited, so take with a grain of salt: my sense so far is that it helps stamp out any statistical/numerical inefficiencies in the markets that humans would otherwise be inefficient/slow to adjust to. For instance, if a straight up arbitrage opportunity exists across exchanges, automated strategies ensure that it goes away very quickly, much more quickly than discretionary human traders would. If there are proven statistical trends to the markets, then those should be acted on as well, because it means we'll arrive at the fair price of an asset sooner rather than later. A simple example: if a stock closely tracks the price of oil, and there's a quick uptick in the price of oil, it's better for the price of the stock to get immediately adjusted upwards rather than after a delay (and purely quantitative, automated strategies make this happen). I think the name of the game is that you have a bunch of people acting in their best interest, and thereby giving us an efficient market, which benefits the rest of the world by ensuring low slippage, fair prices, high liquidity, etc. ~~~ solveit Basically this. I'll slightly elaborate on why an efficient market is a good thing. It means that anyone can change money into a different currency without having to worry about being ripped off. There is one exchange rate and you'll be paying that plus a small margin. It means that anyone can invest in publicly traded companies without having to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to value them. Pension funds would be next to impossible without this. To the extent that the market is efficient, you don't have to worry about the imminent collapse of IBM. If _anybody_ knew, the prices will reflect it even if the rest of the world has no idea why the prices are as they are. (The further markets get from being efficient, the further this gets from being true. Compare investing in the S&P 500 to the shenanigans happening with penny stocks. Be glad that your pension fund gets to invest in the former so it can pass on the latter.) It means that companies can raise money without too much difficulty. They'll sell a part of themselves, and a legion of quants will give them as fair a price as humanly possible. If the price were unfair, someone could exploit it to make money , correcting the price in the process. Ergo the price will be fair. While this sounds far removed from the welfare of the people, this is what greases the engine that runs the jobs of virtually everyone in the developed world. It also lets people pool risk to try risky but worthwhile things. The impact this has on innovation cannot be overstated. Of course, I agree with the above poster that finance probably isn't the best place for smart people to spend their lives. I'm just claiming that finance people aren't overpaid, everyone else is ludicrously underpaid. ~~~ logjammin This is a really good case for quantitative finance, and it's also really clear, so thanks for both. Consider my perspective changed for the better. There's still a bit of dissonance in this for me, but it's abstract and strays a bit what you're saying, so don't feel a need to respond: I think, for example, about the friends and acquaintances I have in finance who I've often heard lament about the lack of meaning, utility, and social value in their work despite the good pay. They're smart men and women, every single one, so I'm sure they know they case you're making - so what gives? (This is clearly more a question for them than for you.) I also wonder idly what proportion of the explosion in the finance industry since the 1970's is taken up by the sorts of plainly beneficial and useful efforts you describe, and what proportion is simply craven, greedy bullshit. Clearly the latter is more salient in the cultural and moral imagination, in no small part because of the Madoffs and the Beskys and the Milkens of the world, not to mention everyone involved in the 08 crisis. That the former isn't as salient makes me think, like, how many Jack Bogles are there for every Gordon Gekko? I know a ton of Gekkos - I went to college with them! - but few Bogles. ~~~ solveit I feel both of your questions and have no answer for either :( ------ txt I use to service pools back in high school on the north shore of long island. And I remember doing Simons house, unbelievable property. The house keepers house was 5x bigger then mine..and the pool was massive, right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the long island sound. Sry if its offtopic but this read made me think of it! ~~~ JohnJamesRambo I like anecdotes like this, thank you. ------ graycat Simons hired "the best" people? On who Simons hired: IIRC there is an interview with Simons where he explains that he hired good mathematicians, etc. who had published interesting work or some such. In particular, he required no MBA or business degrees, experience with accounting, reading corporate annual reports, SEC filings, or business. So, my guess would be that at least for the early years of Simons's work, such people would not be very welcome in the rest of _Wall Street_ and usually not considered the "best" or even good at all. Point: That he hired "the best" has to do with what criteria one is using for _goodness_! By the way, in this thread there is mention of Thorpe! So, yes, his _Beat the Market_ had in the back that some argument was from "measure theory". So, before my Ph.D., I was working carefully through Royden, _Real Analysis_! I was getting through the two exercises on upper and lower semi-continuity when I went to grad school. Right away I took the 700 level course in analysis (measure theory and functional analysis) and probability. The prof was a star student of E. Cinlar, long head of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton. Got to meet him once! So, that background should be of interest on Wall Street? After some good efforts, not as far as I could tell although then I didn't yet know of Simons. It is true that the year I got my Ph.D. near DC, the ORSA (Operations Research Society of America) conference was there and I submitted a resume. I was 110% busy taking care of my (later fatally) sick wife so didn't go but some friends said that on some bulletin board I had lots of requests from Wall Street! Gee! At one time I interviewed at Morgan Stanley and mentioned my paper on multi- variate, distribution-free anomaly detection. A computer systems management guy was a little interested. Another guy wanted me to give him an outline of the paper; I did and mentioned that I'd like to work on applied math of trading -- his reaction seemed to be that neither he nor Morgan Stanley nor anyone on Wall Street would be interested in any such thing! Later a Bertsekas student from MIT gave me the rumor that Simons also liked hiring Russian mathematical physicists! Point: It seems to me from a distance that Wall Street has been slow to hire people like Simons did. On what Simons did: There's an old comment that a good casserole is like a good marriage -- only the people who made it really know what is in it. My guess is that this remark applies also to Simons! In particular I doubt that we should regard him as a _quant_ much like the rest of Wall Street. Bluntly, I suspect that there's no telling what the heck Simons did: E.g., there's no law that he had to have much contact with the Markowitz work, the Sharpe work, the CAPM (capital asset pricing model), econometrics, classic time series analysis, the Thorpe work, the Black-Scholes work, the Martingale convergence theorem, the Doob decomposition, controlled Markov processes, stochastic differential equations, the Brownian motion solution to the Dirichlet problem -- he could have been doing things totally different! Heck, quite generally it's beyond super tough to be on the outside trying to know what's going on inside: E.g., I got interested in cooking, once took my wife to André Soltner's Lutèce, but never got a clue about how he did it! E.g., I made some progress with violin but never figured out how Heifetz did it! E.g., I made some progress in physics but never figured out how Einstein did it! E.g., I made some progress in math but really have no idea how Simons did it. It's a Robert Frost one?? -- "We dance round and round and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows."?? My approach to making money is not to try to get hired on Wall Street, out on Long Island, or near the commodity pits in Chicago or Kansas City but just to do my startup. There I don't have to know all the ways people got rich in business -- it's enough for me to find just ONE way! I don't have to know how all the cooking, music, physics, or math of the past was done -- it's enough for me to do some math for the problem I'm trying to solve. I don't have to know every computer operating system, programming language, memory management or concurrency algorithm -- it's enough for me to know enough computing to get the code running for my startup. Since I'm able to be a sole, solo founder, I don't have to convince people on Wall Street or Silicon Valley that I might make them money -- I just need to convince myself and then actually DO it! And if I'm successful, my crucial core original applied math _secret sauce_ should remain secret! Point: I don't believe I can figure out how Simons did it! ------ gibybo Note that RenTec also runs two other funds that are larger than the Medallion Fund, but both under perform the index. On a completely unrelated note, if I were interested in creating a fund that appeared to have market beating returns for decades and I wasn't concerned about the legal consequences, here's one way I might do it: I would create fund A and B and seed them with some initial capital. For fund A, I would create a machine learning model that took in lots of opaque parameters and hire a team of very smart mathematicians and computer scientists to optimize this model to perform profitable trades. In order to easily generate alpha, I would subtlety feed in some parameters that were correlated to the future market moving actions of fund B. Since I also run fund B, I uniquely have this information. I would use the performance of fund A to woo outside investors into investing their money into fund B. In order to prevent fund A from overtaking fund B in asset value and thus diminishing the value of the subtle signals, I would close the fund to the public when it got sufficiently large and periodically distribute its assets to its investors. In order to avoid any of my employees from eventually figuring out what's going on and reporting me, I'd incentivize them to avoid looking too closely by requiring that they invest a large part of their income into the fund with a long vesting date. I'd also require them to sign a long term non-compete so that they cannot work anywhere else in the financial industry if they leave. ~~~ throwawaymath To be frank, running this sham for 30 years sounds less plausible to me than beating the market the boring way. How would you stop investors in your two public funds (and their accountants) from asking pointed questions about disbursements from one fund to the others? Do you plan to fool them for this amount of time, or bring them into the conspiracy? And how will you sustain the conspiracy when your other two funds trail the market index by a lower combined differential than your other, internal fund is beating the index? Will you initiate a Ponzi, or something else? There is a more realistic angle to attribute RenTech's returns to fraud. I don't personally believe it as I have friends there, but I believe it would technically work: A nontrivial number of RenTech's employees have come from the intelligence apparatus of the United States; namely the NSA. Simons was particularly affiliated with them early on in his math career. It strikes me as plausible (but again, highly unlikely) that if RenTech _is_ is a conspiracy, it is a conspiracy sponsored by US intelligence. They would have the capability to run a 30 year secretive conspiracy, and they would have they desire to attract top talent in math, physics and computer science. But I'm just speculating for fun year. I really don't think there's any conspiracy :) ~~~ gibybo There would be no disbursements from one fund to the other. Fund A would purchase an asset slowly over time. When it has finished purchasing the asset, fund B would purchase that asset quickly at a scale large enough to increase the market price of it. As the price rose, fund A would sell its position. The net effect is that fund A sees increased returns and fund B sees decreased returns. ~~~ rramdin This is throwing any efficient-market hypothesis out the window. Msybe this would work for a year, but why would anyone invest in fund B if it is a consistent loser. If you can figure out a way to slowly buy an asset and then quickly buy more of it and make both strategies profitable at all, then you're onto something huge. Almost as huge as Ren Tech ~~~ gibybo It assumes an efficient-market. The money is coming at the expense of fund B. It doesn't need to be a consistent loser, it just needs to make less than it otherwise would on average. People invest in funds that under perform the market all the time. That describes the majority of the finance industry. ------ melling There was a book published last week on Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies: [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market- Revolution/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market- Revolution/dp/073521798X/) The author was interviewed on the Masters in Businesss podcast: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-10-30/gregory- zuck...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-10-30/gregory-zuckerman-on- the-quant-revolution-podcast) Simons is a serious mathematician: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_$mathematician$) He won the Oswald Veblen Prize in 1976: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Veblen_Prize_in_Geometr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Veblen_Prize_in_Geometry) ~~~ tgb He's still an active mathematician, too, for example a 2018 pre-print: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07129](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07129) ------ deepnotderp Someone's going to say this eventually, so it may as well be me. Rentech is not the only hyper successful fund. There are others, like TGS management ([https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/05/09/mys...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/05/09/mystery-13-billion- philanthropists-revealed.html)) that are just as successful and who you've never heard of. What rentech has done is to have built an excellent data processing engine that automatically extracts signal from noise. Other, much more secretive, funds have done this too. ~~~ throw_this_one Very cool. Do you have any info/resources on how the signal extraction works? ~~~ deepnotderp Signal processing, information geometry and information theory mostly. You can read the papers rentech authors publish before they leave ~~~ objektif Do you have any examples? ------ philshem I’m not a bot but I am always posting relevant and recent (2017) New Yorker articles that are worth reading: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons- the...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons-the-numbers- king) And this interesting theme: > Foundations are not taxed, so much of the money that supports them is money > that otherwise would have gone to the government. Scientific mega-donors > answer to no one but themselves. Private institutes tend to have boards > chosen by their founders, and are designed to further the founders’ wishes, > even beyond their deaths. Rob Reich, a professor of political science at > Stanford University and an expert on philanthropy, told me, “Private > foundations are a plutocratic exercise of power that’s unaccountable, > nontransparent, donor-directed, and generously tax-subsidized. This seems > like a very peculiar institutional and organizational form to champion in a > democratic society.” ~~~ tasuki I'm not a bot either, and why would you start your post by saying you're not a bot? ~~~ philshem Many of my comments are links to relevant NYer articles ------ superfish It blows my mind how much RenTech does with some ~300 employees. I recently had a phone screen with them (no offer otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this) and all of my communication was with this MIT math PhD. No HR, just the PhD. Compare them with a Big N that has 10,000s of SWE’s. It’s a safe assumption that each engineer is individually less talented but even so, how do they iterate/experiment with such few employees? ~~~ tasuki > how do they iterate/experiment with such few employees? Faster! ~~~ solveit _Upon hearing this, the student achieved enlightenment._ ------ zozbot234 > _This article is about the American hedge fund management company. For > technical advancements during the European Renaissance period, see_ > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_technology) ~~~ Aardwolf Thanks, something like that is what I expected and what piqued my interest from the title :) ------ leto_ii I have to say, the first time I read about Renaissance I felt sadness at the thought that this much ability and such resources were put into essentially making money out of thin air, with very limited (if any) social benefits. I can't escape the feeling that the world would be a better place if maths and physics phd's would get to live a good life doing maths and physics, rather than being lured into quant finance. ~~~ kasey_junk How do you feel about them working on nuclear bombs & working for the NSA? Cause for many years that was the standard way to live tr good life. ~~~ Barrin92 working on nuclear or military technology is double-edged as it is serves both national security interests and advances technological knowledge. Rentech is an absolute technology black box that will both take its money and knowledge into its grave with virtually no productive outcome for society at large. The NSA and US nuclear science at least drives innovation. ~~~ ipsa The US economy (to which RenTech contributes with profits made on foreign markets) is a national security interest. Working to be very rich and then donating a large chunk of money to promote science - and maths education, also advances technological knowledge. Those depricated CRUD apps I wrote a few years back served neither. We'd all like our opponent Poker players to play with their cards open, but if they did, they'd never win. Have to accept that you don't get to see the cards of winning players (which includes military technology until declassified). I find this "Financial trading does not do any good for society" to be rather simplistic, romantic, and envious. The carpenter who turns wood into a chair is said to be producing value, but the investor who turned uncertainty into a profitable hardwood trade is not. ~~~ Barrin92 trading is largely a zero sum game. Companies like rentech earn money through speculation. If a craftsman makes a chair you have a char in the economy. If renetch extracts a few billion by betting on the stock market someone else has lost a few billion. The only hypothetical benefit is some liquidity but that is pretty meaningless in today's economy and there's even some evidence that high-frequency trading has negative net effects on volatility. So no this has nothing to do with envy or romanticism. It's just a bad idea to have people with PhDs who could be changing the world play zero-sum gambling games on the stock market. These guys could be reinventing physics or bring us to mars. That's what makes people criticize these activities. And as far as charity is concerned. Yes, Simon has done a lot of good. However, the other famous rentech guy is Robert mercer, and he is in the business of funding climate denialism. So whether you get a good philanthropist or a bad one is pure luck and has nothing to with the discussion on financial speculation. ~~~ strangedynamics Pretty sure the zero sum game trope is overplayed/inaccurate. ------ analogkid The tone of many comments here is disappointing. I'm really surprised at the number of people suggesting illegal activity. Why is it so hard to accept that someone did the math? ~~~ analogkid I should add that Renaissance Technologies is hiring! [https://www.rentec.com/Careers.action](https://www.rentec.com/Careers.action) My group is looking for very strong Java/Kotlin developers. ~~~ throwawaymath I know this is not likely, but you should consider setting up an anonymous email in your HN profile to at least receive questions about the company as an employee. Not to answer anything proprietary or to give anything away under NDA, but so that people can speak candidly with someone not in HR without having to rely on HN comments. Denise is great, but I wouldn't say she's the best source to answer harmless but very important questions prospective Java programmers might have that _you_ can answer, for example :) Here's an example question for you: do you want candidates to also have tax and accounting experience, or is deep Java/Kotlin enough? Something to consider. ~~~ analogkid It's a small world. Denise used to sit outside my office until I moved moved to a new location. ;-) She has forwarded requests that people may occasionally send directly to me in the past and I generally try to respond. I prefer all communication be done through proper channels to avoid any "issues" that might arise. I have a son who is a CS major in college now. I completely understand how challenging (and borked) the hiring/interviewing process is now as I speak with him about the frustrations he experiences. Which is why I try to be approachable when people have queries. ~~~ lfowles Can't say I had the most favorable phone interview with you guys, but I did appreciate the _incredibly_ responsive process even through the "proper channels". ------ eternalny1 Renaissance Explores Settlement as IRS Seeks Billions in Taxes [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/renaissan...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/renaissance- explores-settlement-as-irs-seeks-billions-in-taxes) ~~~ sampo Related HN discussion from 9 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063977) ------ initium This made me remember this interview with James Simons on Numberphile: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB_OdGGA450](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB_OdGGA450) ~~~ nikofeyn the full length one is very good. it gives an understanding as to why simons has been so successful. [https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0](https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0) ------ Tycho Who audits their returns? They have not had any outside investors for over a decade. I had not seen an update on their yearly performance for quite some time, and was surprised to see an updated table published in this book. So I'm curious, where did these numbers come from, and did RenTec confirm them, and did an independent party confirm them? ------ XnoiVeX So much negativity in this thread. We fear or doubt what we do not understand I guess. ~~~ xgulfie You must have some nice ruby-tinted glasses to be able to put a positive spin on "secretive hedge fund with black-box trading algorithm hires scientists to makes rich people lots of money" ~~~ nodesocket I think you've been drinking too much of the Warren coolaid. If you are American, vilifying wealth and building companies is quite a silly endeavour. This blame game mentality is counterproductive and will only restrict and impede your own financial success. ~~~ throw_this_one I mean what is the end effect of this though? Basically some smart people get very rich. Due to zero-sum game, other people lose. No benefit is derived in the real economy. The only possible benefit is increased liquidity... which really isn't that beneficial past a point right? I don't see the benefit. If you have a different angle I'd be glad to hear it. ~~~ bhupy > Due to zero-sum game Wealth is not zero-sum, it's created. Real GDP (i.e. adjusted for inflation) in the world has increased from ~$3.4T to ~$110T since the 1900s. ~~~ throw_this_one Yeah, but what does that have to do with trading? When you create something that physically benefits people/the world, you usually extract your own value (profit) by providing even more value and selling it. When you trade like this, what net value are you providing? It seems like they are just extracting value. Also, if all the smart minds were doing advanced trading in 1900, would the GDP have risen as much? Instead people were creating aircraft, fighting disease, creating the internet, etc. ~~~ patentatt Agreed. And as you mentioned above, many believe the “real value” or whatever of liquidity is indeed capped and has diminishing returns. Trading financial instruments doesn’t just perform the capital allocation task that we were told it does in Econ 101. It’s also a fantastic way to take other peoples money. Why is that so hard to believe? And to those feeling a need to deny such behavior as an attack on capitalism, I’d suggest that it’s the purest expression of capitalism. The goal of investors or capitalists isn’t to do anything useful other than acquire more money. To the extent useful stuff happens, that’s just a side effect of acquiring more money. There’s no altruism involved. So it should be something that a true capitalist would embrace. ------ rb808 Do they still outperform? I can imagine 10 years ago they were ahead of everyone but now quant investing is everywhere I would be surprised if they have a big edge. ~~~ hogFeast I would read the recent book. Competition really started in the mid-1990s (and quant funds existed way before that point), and Renaissance actually picked up steam far later than everyone else (and had trouble raising capital because everyone thought the space was already tapped out). Btw, the point to investing isn't an absolute level of knowledge but relative knowledge. If you keep moving ahead because you are smarter then you will keep outperforming. The view of most investors, not just in quant, is: I went to X university, I am very smart, anyone who does better than me is cheating/insider trading/committing fraud/etc. But the majority of people won't outperform regardless of "intelligence". AHL has been doing quant for nearly four decades now, they only hire the elite, they even have their own quant finance institute at Oxford...results? Still shit because it isn't as easy as just hiring a ton of "intelligent" people. For some reason, smart people tend to believe that the real world is like university or government where success is achieved by other people thinking you are smart...it isn't like that. Obtaining results is the combination of many things (i.e. most quant firms churn and burn employees, most quant firms have trouble retaining staff, etc.). ~~~ tomp Companies like AHL and Winton have completely different goals and ways of making money... they got into the “quant” (a.k.a. trend following) industry very early and still reap the benefits, they have big AUMs, scalable strategies, etc, but (AFAIK) their actual performance isn’t that amazing (compared to RenTech, Two Sigma, Citadel, ...). I only interviewed at AHL so I cannot speak of the quality/intelligence of people _working_ there, but judging by the difficulty of the interview, compared to some other companies, my conclusion is that their hiring bar isn’t that high. I also wonder how limited these companies are in their investment strategies - either they _cannot_ invest into more sophisticated strategies (limited by investor agreements), or they don’t _want_ to, because poor _known_ returns are easier to justify (“trend following just had a bad year, nothing we can do about it”) than poor _unknown_ returns (“we tried thes completely new thing that we have no experience in, and it didn’t work and we lost a lot of your money”). ~~~ hogFeast Winton is fundamentally dissimilar to AHL. Winton have a reputation for skill and outperformance. AHL have a reputation for blundering incompetence (that is why the 'H' in AHL left to start Winton, and became a billionaire doing so). The only goal is to make money. I understand your point in that AHL are dissimilar to RenTech but I didn't say any way was correct. The right way is whatever makes money. You have firms that look like AHL and do better. I would look at who they actually hire. From what I know, there is almost no- one in their quant team who didn't go into Oxbridge (at least for PG). That is not a low bar. Btw, I have seen this elsewhere. I know of non-quant firms that only hire from Oxbridge, and they get the same result as firms that don't have a specific analyst program (i.e. everyone rotates through admin/sales/marketing). The point isn't that this doesn't work. RenTech have a high bar, it works. The point is that you have to really understand why you are doing it. Hiring "smart" people without thought only results in a higher wage bill. And if we are going to get into it: one big issue with AHL has been the management (that is why David Harding left). They have got better but I don't think they are totally out the woods (I have heard they are trying to do momo in illiquid and esoteric markets...which won't work). Saying it is the clients is one of the worst excuses in investment management. That is actually true one time in a hundred (BlueCrest is one). It is like the crap football teams complaining about good teams having all the money. Good fund managers have good clients because they don't fuck up all the time. The issue is AHL, for whatever reason, kept trying to do the same thing for decades, and expected to print money. ~~~ tomp Thanks, interesting and insightful comment. Regarding analyst/graduate rotations, what do you think is the actual value there? To me it seems just a way for the team to lose a potentially decent employee just as they’re done training him/her. If the idea is to familiarize juniors with the firm, what it does and how it works, wouldn’t a shorter program with direct lessons work better (e.g. what some investment banks do - send everyone to the HQ for a few weeks - or Jane Street, where everyone first learns OCaml)? ~~~ hogFeast The value is that they hire a ton of people with a very low bar. The smartest go into investment research, the next lot go into sales, the next into marketing, the rest into admin. The effect, I believe, is two-fold: one, these guys are cheap. And two, you don't have to rely on someone's education, you can see if they actually can function in the workplace. But this places a huge burden on actually being able to train people who aren't particularly intelligent to do a complex job and creating a team-based culture (i.e. where the sum is greater than the parts). One example of this is Aberdeen Asset Management. They went from one guy in an office to one of the largest asset managers in the UK (and the world) by hiring this way. A big part of their growth came from acquiring firms with lots of lazy Oxbridge types, firing them all, and moving in their low-cost team of guys. This isn't like what IBs do, it isn't what Jane Street. Both are highly selective, and hire into specific jobs. IBs will do a big training program over a few weeks to get everyone up to speed (i.e. on accounting, whatever) but what I am talking about is 3-month rotations through every part of the business. HR at IBs hire "geniuses", they hire the best of the best...if you do this, it makes no sense to pay them a big salary and then stick them in the back office (they will probably get poached). Now most of these people aren't actually any good, most will get promoted up to VP because they have been there X years, and then get laid off during a recession...but the hiring culture is totally different (and btw, massively overstates the ability of HR too). And btw, it is semi-efficient because most IBs understand they will end up with a bunch of overpaid turnips...it is worth it to find the next rainmaker (but the rainmaker in asset management never pays off because they get poached). ~~~ tomp Interesting.. yeah you're right, AFAIK better banks (Goldman, BAML) hire for specific roles even for non-IB teams... All in all, I often wonder if/how it's possible to improve on both of these approaches, how to figure out both if someone is _actually_ intelligent (as opposed to just booksmart, or got the interview questions from the recruiter) _and_ whatever else is needed to perform (drive, common sense, not IYI, ... I'm probably not experienced enough even to know, let alone to judge...), particularly for computer developers or generally researcher types. Btw, I'd love to meet and chat about this. If you're in London, feel free to email me tom.primozic at gmail ------ insiderthrow Either really good math or really good insider trading. ~~~ s_dev Heres Numberphile interviewing James: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=gjVDqfUhXOY&v=QNznD9hM...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=gjVDqfUhXOY&v=QNznD9hMEh0) He's a MIT/Berkley Math professor. ~~~ dhruvmittal I met him a few times when I was a grad student at Stony Brook (Physics). I can't speak for his particular math skills, but he's in possession of an incredibly sharp mind. The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics has an art gallery and an associated lecture series, and James often shows up to participate in these events. Luckily, these events are free to enter for all graduate students. At one of these events, I'd commented that a particular piece reminded me of a crystalline structure I was interested in studying (as a li-ion cathode). James overheard me and came over to quiz me on some of my group's work. About 8 months later, I ran into him at another lecture. While he didn't remember my name, he asked how my hollandite simulations had turned out. This anecdote doesn't really prove anything, other than that Dr Simons is a pretty cool dude. ------ edward Recently published book on this topic: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman ------ anonu Nobody really knows how RenTech makes their money. There have been some interesting data points over time, mainly through lawsuits where interesting tidbits of info were divulged. There are indications that the main rentech fund is a combination of high leverage and some potentially risky tax plays through structured products. ~~~ dredmorbius Correction: nobody who knows, if they've talked publicly, have been taken as seriously credible. Someone, I suspect, knows. ------ mason55 A decent book about Jim Simons just came out last week [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution- eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution- ebook/dp/B07P1NNTSD) I'm most of the way through it, it's an interesting read ------ spyder A related promising company in this field is Numerai: [https://numer.ai](https://numer.ai) Building a meta model from predictions submitted by the community (based on encrypted training data provided by Numerai). More info in their video below. Also Howard Morgan the Co-Founder of Renaissance Technologies too is talking about them and a group of investors led by him invested $1.5m in the company: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhJnt0N497c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhJnt0N497c) Their performance is not public, the only hint you can find about it is in their recent video about some backtests (which doesn't mean it's their real- world performance): [https://youtu.be/zeGx7gVgK0o?t=172](https://youtu.be/zeGx7gVgK0o?t=172) ~~~ chillee I'm very skeptical about numer.ai. I participated in their contests for quite some time (made a significant chunk of change), but I have huge doubts that any of our predictions are actually useful to them, for a multitude of reasons. ------ naringas Do they produce/create anything? or do they simply trade finacial assets in a way such that they accumulate profit? and by "simply trade" I really mean "trade in an incredibly sophisticated and clever way" ~~~ tcgv In an interview I watched on youtube Jim Simons says their trades provide liquidity and efficiency to financial markets, as to say they are effectively contributing to the economy, and not just earning money. ------ account73466 Performance of the 100bln fund is given at [https://whalewisdom.com/filer/renaissance-technologies- llc](https://whalewisdom.com/filer/renaissance-technologies-llc) ------ ipsa So, assuming nothing against the law, how would they do it legitly? I am guessing: \- Treat the markets as a complex dynamical system and use the tools from statistical physics such as the Gibbs Ensemble, to derive internal states from input and output. \- Treat the markets as an encryption algorithm and use the tools from cryptanalysis, such as differential cryptanalysis: Even when unable to decipher the full algorithm (total break), one may still derive details and a subset of system functionality. \- They were probably the first to heavily use Hidden Markov Models (see Baum–Welch algorithm and the IBM speech recognition recruitment) and keep on the frontline with new machine learning algorithms (their deep learning revolution would have started 10-15 years before industry). \- They'd have an extremely solid backtesting pipeline, where any new feature can be stress-tested for signal. Features could be very arcane (% of mentions of the currency on neighboring state television) and are constantly (re-)added and removed: concept drift and market competition would gradually weaken signals, but fresh signals are added to keep the performance. \- All features are fed into a single final model (which may be an ensemble of many different forecasting techniques as to lower the variance). This model is very dynamic year-by-year (with just a few long-term signal features). \- Finally, I suspect there are strategies that only become available when you have 1 billion under control. In a physics sense: That is a lot of energy / control theory experimentation budget. Normally, hedge funds would like to avoid feedback loops and their trades moving the markets, but I suspect there is a lot of money to be made when you can calculate in which direction the market would move when the system is deprived of - or infused with a jolt of energy. More hands-off: Buy for 1 billion in stock at market open, sell at market close. Buy signal will take a few hours to converge and result in a higher price, so you make a profit when you sell your portfolio to the very buyer's market you created, causing a drop in price to complete the loop. \- The extreme returns for 2007/2008 could be due to the increase in volatility of the crisis (you can make more money when there is a lot of action, and competitors suffer from human herd bias / hysteria), but also, in part, due to them being the first to effectively exploit signals in growing social media platforms and search engines. A few years later it was public knowledge that gauging frequency and sentiment on Twitter was once a valuable signal. \- The NSA/CIA type recruits would not work on industrial spying, but on cryptanalysis, (graph) data mining, OSINT, HUMINT, IMINT, and for the security of the firm (which probably runs a tighter security than the intelligence agencies of smaller countries). ~~~ deepnotderp > Treat the markets as a complex dynamical system and use the tools from > statistical physics such as the Gibbs Ensemble, to derive internal states > from input and output. No. This is what people like LTCM believe. It does not work, the underlying processes driving markets constantly change. > \- Treat the markets as an encryption algorithm and use the tools from > cryptanalysis, such as differential cryptanalysis: Even when unable to > decipher the full algorithm (total break), one may still derive details and > a subset of system functionality. \- They were probably the first to heavily use Hidden Markov Models (see Baum–Welch algorithm and the IBM speech recognition recruitment) and keep on the frontline with new machine learning algorithms (their deep learning revolution would have started 10-15 years before industry). Yes, and as a fun note, Peter Brown, their current CEO, was Geoff Hinton's grad student. \- They'd have an extremely solid backtesting pipeline, where any new feature can be stress-tested for signal. Features could be very arcane (% of mentions of the currency on neighboring state television) and are constantly (re-)added and removed: concept drift and market competition would gradually weaken signals, but fresh signals are added to keep the performance. \- The extreme returns for 2007/2008 could be due to the increase in volatility of the crisis (you can make more money when there is a lot of action, and competitors suffer from human herd bias / hysteria), but also, in part, due to them being the first to effectively exploit signals in growing social media platforms and search engines. A few years later it was public knowledge that gauging frequency and sentiment on Twitter was once a valuable signal. \- The NSA/CIA type recruits would not work on industrial spying, but on cryptanalysis, (graph) data mining, OSINT, HUMINT, IMINT, and for the security of the firm (which probably runs a tighter security than the intelligence agencies of smaller countries). All correct. ------ gesman Access to superior information under the disguise of math and science. ------ atlgator I wish I was good enough to work for them. It must be fascinating. ------ kweinber You can’t separate Renaissance from Bob Mercer...the guy who helped fund Brexit, helped create Cambridge Analytica, the major founder of Breitbart news, and who got Trump elected mostly to avoid paying taxes. He and his firm did more than anyone I know to make the world a more unstable place. ------ nfRfqX5n they talked about this on the Masters in Business podcast on Oct 30th. pretty interesting stuff. ~~~ notlukesky [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-01/rithol...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-01/ritholtz- s-masters-in-business-getting-jim-simons-to-talk) ~~~ npongratz Direct download: [https://traffic.bloomberg.fm/BLM3980613543.mp3](https://traffic.bloomberg.fm/BLM3980613543.mp3) ------ trpc Jim Simons and David E. Shaw are legends who should have some HBO series about them. Both were researchers who left academia to beat the scumbags of wall streets in their own game with no finance background and they made unbelievably so much money in a very short of time that they would have been jailed or killed if they weren't in the US. ~~~ objektif I have seen more scumbags in academia than i have in WS btw. ------ viewbase Back in late 2017, RenTec made an unusual move of raising capital to capitalize on "market opportunities arising from Trump’s presidential victory": [https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/renaissance-s- medall...](https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/renaissance-s-medallion- made-stunning-shift-after-trump-election) By Occam's razor, it is more likely that Robert Mercer made use of his close ties with Trump administration to gain insider knowledge, than RenTec consistently having superior quantitative analysis than their competitors in an extremely competitive and saturated industry. ------ sjg007 I dunno, I would take reliable weather reports a year out and try to predict crop prices. I am assuming demand will be linear. Maybe you can do this within the US, maybe not. ------ champagnepapi Here is a link to the book recently written about Jim Simons and RenTech [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43889703-the-man-who- sol...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43889703-the-man-who-solved-the- market) ------ unchocked A 66% annualized return over 30 years - from a completely opaque investment strategy. Extraordinary result for sure, how did he do it? Run by Robert Mercer, the money man who associated with prominent money launderers. Based on my priors, Occams Razor says Rentech is a laundromat, not a hedge fund. ~~~ rb808 66% CAGR is impossible. That would mean every million dollars you invested turns into $4 Trillion. ~~~ rat_1234 Well, the thing is that they cap the size of the fund at $10B so it's not really a CAGR per se as the original capital isn't appreciating at that rate. It's just they have $10B invested and then they distribute $6.6B per year and that's it (i.e., the fund doesn't become $16.6B next year). Still take your point that it's an insane figure!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
My terrifying deep dive into one of Russia's largest hacking forums - NoB4Mouth https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/24/darknet-dark-web-hacking-forum-internet-safety ====== 1996 Seems like a nice place! But what good is a submarine ad if you don't give the url?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why and how should someone learn functional programming? - dsc A lot of people tell me that it's the holy grail of programming crafts -which I don't see. So enlighten me.<p>Thanks in advance. ====== newhouseb In terms of day to day programming, I've picked up the following habits: * Natural terseness. A lot of functional code is freakishly short. Because functional code is similar to how we think of math, it's often times easier to simplify out over-computation and you end up with the bare minimum of what you actually need. * Generic programming. Things like currying and first-order functions are great for separating (or combining) context from computation. When you understand where the difference lies, you can write your code such that it is adaptable in the most efficient way (read: generic). * Lambda functions. Infinitely useful in a language that uses them, like Python. Lambda's are great for doing work over large collections of data without getting lost in for loops (i.e. map, reduce, sort, fold). FWIW: I learned what I know from Haskell ~~~ viraptor Examples I completely agree with. I got used to short functions so much, than my normal function length in any other language went down a lot too. Now I'd probably refactor anything that doesn't fit on half of a screen (got fairly big monitors though). And that's a good thing - the effect is easier to read and the shorter the code is, the more self-documenting it becomes, because you have to name every sub-process correctly via the function name. Something that would otherwise be a 40 line function with inline comments: "First do this", "then do that", becomes a two- line: do_this(); do_that(); with ~20 lines in each of them. Much much better. On the other hand, once you get too used to lambdas, you start missing them in other languages. It just felt natural for me at some point to make a C macro (f, arr, type, len) which did something like map on an array of `type` using a function pointer `f`. That didn't go very well with other people who normally read that code... ------ Ixiaus I got my first taste of functional programming with Erlang. Honestly, it had me befuddled for quite some time with pattern matching and the "functional" style; I was used to using objects to encapsulate rather than "modules" and "functions" - the distinction in nomenclature may seem frivolous, but the concepts are worlds apart when used in the context of Erlang or Java. Erlang taught me a lot that I never even came close to learning with PHP, Python, and C++. Most notably what Erlang is good at - Concurrent Programming. I still didn't fully "grok" functional programming though as I just completed the book and didn't complete any projects using Erlang. The real meal first started with Common Lisp which drove me to Scheme (Common Lisp is a mess, Scheme is minimal in nature, and Scheme is much more true to a functional language than CL). I then picked up the _Little Schemer_ series of books and proceded to have my world view enlarged; with the addition of many other excellent resources, my knowledge of programming increased exponentially. Within a few months of "grokking" functional programming and grooving with Scheme (it is my favorite language to date, Python comes second) the noted benefits were: an increased academic understanding of computing and the modality with which computable logic is represented, clearer/cogent/lucid and higher-caliber thought, my creativity in programming was unleashed, and I've found that I have a vested interest in the _philosophy_ behind what I do. I also feel like my general perception of reality has changed too, I interpret my life experiences with a different set of concepts now. The experience of learning a functional language and being committed to "grokking" it, has been remarkably similar to the time I went backpacking through India for two months on a budget... _alone_. I came back with a new kind of maturity and my mind just works different from everyone else I know that still hasn't left the states. It's like that, your mind just works different than all the others that haven't left procedural/OOP land. As for production projects: there are plenty of companies that use Scheme, Erlang, and a other functional languages. I personally would love the opportunity to program in Erlang or Scheme over any other language (they are that much of a joy); alas, my industry (web application programming) is primarily enamored in Ruby/Python/PHP (Python and PHP being my primary marketable skills) so I would probably need to build my own startup or work for a company that uses the language (it wouldn't be in web application programming though!). By the way, HN is built using a dialect of LISP based off of Common LISP (is that correct?) of which Scheme (Scheme is also a dialect of LISP) is a brother. ------ bjg If you've really never had any functional programming experience and you are interested in haskell, I would recommend "Learn you a Haskell For Great Good" <http://learnyouahaskell.com/> It's a little bit silly, but it's a great bottom up tutorial of haskell and a lot of functional programming paradigms. ------ vault_ I wouldn't say that it's the holy grail, but there are several reasons why it's good to know, and also many why we'll probably start seeing a lot more of it. The biggest reason that its' a good thing to learn a functional language is a lot like the reason that it's a good idea to learn more languages than just Java. In this case, all you have is one paradigm to think in (object-oriented (probably procedural as well, but...)). Functional programming is a completely different beast that requires different ways of thinking. Lots of the neater concepts of many popular languages now are lifted right out of functional ones. Python's list comprehensions and generators come to mind. A more pragmatic reason to learn about functional programming is that it is becoming increasingly useful. Functional languages are, in general, much easier to parallelize. More importantly than that though, they make it easier to make _correct_ parallel and multi-threaded programs. As for why these are often presented as the 'holy grail' of programming, many of features exist to make it simple to create concise, correct programs. The features are all the foreign-sounding buzzwords that people tend to rave about: composition, laziness, currying, lambda-functions, monads, strong type systems, type inference, higher-order functions, loop abstractions, and any number of other nifty things. If you're interested in learning more, check out the Haskell or Ocaml languages (or Lisp, but Lisp isn't entirely functional). ~~~ dsc Any resources you suggest, just off the top of your head? Realworld haskell is free online, any others? ~~~ vault_ I'm a fan of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (<http://learnyouahaskell.com/>). It's not quite done (a couple of advanced topics are absent at the moment) but it's a good introduction to the language, and is somewhat less dry to read than your average programming language book. ------ shahriarhaque I wouldn't say it's a Holy Grail or Magic Wand, or whatever you want to call it. I would say: learning a (pure) functional language, or taking a university course on it, is a religious experience. One that every programmer should go through to learn a new way of looking at problems. ~~~ Andys Important side note: religious experiences are not always good :-) ------ gtani I thought these papers are useful: <http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf> [http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Presentations/ecoop2004...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Presentations/ecoop2004.pdf) [http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/03/01/OnHaskellTyp...](http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/03/01/OnHaskellTypeClassesAndCInterfaces.aspx) [http://www.harukizaemon.com/2010/03/functional- programming-i...](http://www.harukizaemon.com/2010/03/functional-programming- in-object-oriented-languages.html) ------ daleharvey it isnt the holy grail, I can say I am a better programmer thanks to learning erlang though, half of that is due to its functional nature, half due to the erlangs idioms. you learn the same way you learn any other language, just pick something to program and go for it. ------ pdelgallego I learned using Elisp, it didn't make a better programmer, but I am much more pragmatic now. Use the 3 schemer books The little schemer, the seasoned schemer and the The Reasoned Schemer, and read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. You can work through the books using clojure or other more appealing languages. ~~~ smanek Elisp isn't really functional ... everything is dynamically scoped so you don't get closures and the entire language is built for mutating state. ------ pavelludiq Referential transparency makes things so much simpler, there is so much less stuff to keep track of, when your program is much less prone to random state in one part of your code affecting another. Its not the "holly grail of programming", its more like "the less broken type of programming". ~~~ dsc I think I'm running out of ideas as to where I would IMMEDIATELY want to use it. A list of neat projects that should highlight the use of functional programming would be useful in this case. ------ hga How long have you been programming and in what languages? ~~~ dsc For about 6 years. In C, Java, Perl, Python, C++ and, sadly, VB. I've seen a bit of "funcational" in python's type "function" and lambda expressions. But didn't really understand how I could go far with this. I kinda don't see how I can build a large project based solely on the idea of having those constructs in the language. ~~~ hga Once you have enough scars from side effects, especially if you try your hand at concurrent programming, you'll appreciate it a lot more I suspect. Although as others have noted, it's not exactly a "holy grail". ------ MisterWebz I'm curious as well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Robots Evolve And Learn How to Lie - nickb http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/robots-evolve-and-learn-how-to-lie ====== mattmaroon Those guys are morons. They evolved a robot, but not one that cleans or cooks for you. Just one that goes around eating stuff. Basically, they created my wife. (She's going to do whatever the real life equivalent of down-modding me is if she ever sees that.) ------ ivankirigin Hype to get into the press is something that is really annoying about AI and robots. It would be great if people actually understood how most research just doesn't scale into the human analog. This line of research will NOT produce human-like robots that know the subtleties of deceit. We're talking about "robots with light sensors, rings of blue light, and wheels". Ridiculous. ~~~ eru I guess computers will learn to bluff long before they learn to deceit.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A futuristic redesign of Hacker News - itsyogesh https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ ====== unknownkadath Very pretty, will check back and dig deeper.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NY Attorney General Report on Crytpocurrency Market Integrity - chollida1 https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/vmii_report.pdf ====== chollida1 The big takeaway for me was that coinbase not only trades on their own exchange but accounts for 20% of its volume. Coinbase went from being one of the "good guys" to being one of the "bad guys" really quickly here :( There is a reason that we dont' let the exchanges trade on their own markets against their clients. It's a long learned lesson. Especially because coinbase came out earlier and said expicilty that they don't do this [https://www.recode.net/2018/1/22/16911692/cryptocurrency- bit...](https://www.recode.net/2018/1/22/16911692/cryptocurrency-bitcoin- trading-coinbase-revenue-secondary) > Coinbase makes money not on bitcoin’s price but on the volume of trades — > charging both the buyer and seller usually a fee between 0.25 percent and 1 > percent of the total transaction size through the site. The company serves > as both an exchange and a broker of deals, though it does not serve as a > market maker that holds bitcoin The NY AG has a tweet storm about this here [https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/104209855584926515...](https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1042098555849265152) Question to the crypto currency community. Who are the good exchanges now? Where can you trade with any sort of assurance that the exchange isn't front running you or using your order flow to trade against you? I guess this is a good place to start [https://twitter.com/dlauer/status/1042114043065126914](https://twitter.com/dlauer/status/1042114043065126914) Also > Circle reported that it accounted for less than one percent of the executed > volume on its platform Poloniex during the most recent time period reviewed. So the exchange backed by wall street was squeaky clean, while Coinbase comes off looking pretty poorly from an ethics stand point, that's actually a shock and pretty refreshing. Though Wall street is alot more regulated and risk adverse so maybe that's not too surprising. ~~~ gojomo It's a bit hard for me to reconcile "twenty percent of executed volume on [Coinbase's] platform was attributable to its own trading" with "[Coinbase] does not serve as a market maker that holds bitcoin". As far as I know, Coinbase has no investment vehicle which uses discretion to speculatively move into and out of individual cryptocurrencies. Instead, they sometimes collect their commissions in cryptocurrencies, and they offer an index fund. To the extent they'd need to convert those commissions to fiat to cover other expenses, or acquire/discard coins for the index fund, those activities necessarily require buying/selling at market, but offer limited opportunity for manipulation. If the "20% volume" is from these necessary activities, it's not so concerning, and (for example) forcing them to use someone else's market for these activities would be silly. ~~~ askmike > If the "20% volume" is from these necessary activities, it's not so > concerning, and (for example) forcing them to use someone else's market for > these activities would be silly. I don't agree, if they need to hedge spot for their index there is huge value in being the one that operates the venue. The activity is trading crypto and there is always an incentive to do this at the best price (doesn't matter whether you are providing liquidity, or hedging some exposure). Right now we can only assume they do this "the fair way" (eg. how we can trade on their platform - with the same information we have). But how do we know they are? For all we know the guy that needs to execute these trades is sitting next to another guy that is monitoring the exchange and everyone's stops / margin liquidation prices. ~~~ gojomo As an extremely-low-frequency user of Coinbase's services, I personally wouldn't really care if, when they make necessary crypto trades to liquidate commissions or maintain requested customer/index-fund holdings, they used their proprietary position to get a slightly-better deal. They have to make their profits somehow. And, the ultimate check on their profits is competitive offerings. Thus a slight profit here may just help them charge less elsewhere, in the fees I explicitly pay. (I can see how a professional or high-frequency trader would feel differently, though.) But, a further clarification from Coinbase has confirmed my skepticism of the nefarious interpretation of the "20% volume" statistic. The 20% figure s driven by trades at the direction of of customers, not for Coinbase itself. See: [https://blog.coinbase.com/correcting-the-record-coinbase- doe...](https://blog.coinbase.com/correcting-the-record-coinbase-does-not- engage-in-proprietary-trading-97e66145af6e) ~~~ captain_perl There's a million ways for a crooked exchange to fleece clients, but front- running is the most obvious and profitable way. If you're evaluating Coinbase, then start there. ------ AdrianSetter If the document changes for any reason, here is a immutable copy fetched just seconds before writing this comment. [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQKAuCmjwpEjGp2V5bu4C533PDY1tuuen1vpBU...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQKAuCmjwpEjGp2V5bu4C533PDY1tuuen1vpBUGhdsjRm) ------ rossdavidh I will probably get downvoted for this, but: I think there is a recurring pattern here. Like discovering that absolute anonymity on the internet enabled bad behavior, and pseudonymity allowed foreign governments (or just trolls) to engage in duplicitous or offensive behavior more easily, it turns out that many of the traditional "limitations" of government-regulated currencies, are features and not bugs. I'm not saying there's no place for cryptocurrencies, but they are clearly not for the average, non-technical, mom-and-pop operation to use. They do not protect you from being abused by powerful institutions; they make you more vulnerable to being abused by powerful institutions (although perhaps different ones). If you are a technically savvy user or a large organization, there could be valid reasons for using them, but in general they are not a replacement for ordinary non-crypto currencies, and that's not in spite of their freedom from government control, but rather precisely because of it. ~~~ askmike I agree with the points you make, but not the overall sentiment of your comment: Bitcoin does provide a level of privacy and self sovereignty that hasn't really existed since cash. So i agree with your: > (although perhaps different ones) Powerful players can only play games with each other around the price. And if you are a retail trader you might get caught up in this. But that's about the only thing they can do, limiting the attack surface drastically. I'm saying see cryptocurrencies more as an expression of freedom and less as a place to dump all your savings into. Unfortunately too many people got that backwards. ------ seibelj This is a good overview of nitty-gritty details of exchanges that wasn’t assembled before. If the purpose of the document was to scare people from trading or purchasing crypto, I think it failed. It is truly incredible that in 10 years cryptocurrencies are now worth in the $100 billion vicinity. If you read HN regularly, not only should they be worth 0 but everyone with a neutral-to-positive opinion of them belong in jail. Just like self driving cars, the HN opinion can be wrong to extremely wrong.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Blockchain Is Latest Bitcoin Start-Up to Lure Big Investment - nvk http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dealbook/2014/10/06/blockchain-is-latest-bitcoin-start-up-to-lure-big-investment/ ====== midas It takes a while to fully understand how blockchain.info works, and how their wallet is very different from something like Coinbase/Circle/Xapo. Once you do, you realize that blockchain.info is an amazing example of the types of things that can be created with cryptocurrency that weren't possible before. They truly embody the spirit of Bitcoin. Now if only they would support HD wallets so you don't have to backup your wallet after every transaction... ~~~ scottcanoni And how exactly is Blockchain "very different from something like Coinbase/Circle/Xapo"? ~~~ clarkmoody The Bitcoin private keys are created and encrypted on the user's machine, in JavaScript (Chrome extension available). Those companies have custody of the user's private keys, meaning that there exists the potential for government seizure / hacking theft of users' coins. ~~~ scintill76 In other words, exactly like the first Bitcoin wallet ever created (Satoshi's), but less secure (subject to the JavaScript being MITM'd, something breaking out of its JS sandbox and getting your private keys, keys being recovered from de-allocated memory because they can't be wiped by JS, etc.) I'm just not a big fan of blockchain.info, so I have a strong reaction to midas's gushing above. What does blockchain.info do that "wasn't possible before"? It can't take credit for Bitcoin itself. It's like an online bank? Doesn't seem very innovative in that sense. Again, the things that might seem like pluses (being able to access your bitcoins from any computer with an internet connection and a browser; keeping your own keys) are also really dangerous. I'd rather just use an actual application that lets me keep my own keys, without being subject to the browser's attack surface. ------ vessenes This is great news, and nice work by Roger and the whole team. Blockchain is the way Bitcoin's lights are turned on so that most of the world can see what's happening, and has awesome potential both for monetization and better reach. ------ scintill76 I think someone already said it in another thread I'm not seeing now, but I have to say I've been a bit miffed about the "Blockchain" name. It was OK when they were blockchain.info, literally a few pages with public "info" about the "blockchain". Since they've added wallets in the last few years, and now with whatever they need $30M to do, it's confusing, incorrect, and maybe a bit unfair to call themselves "Blockchain." It'd be kind of like an American payroll company calling themselves Automated Clearing House. It doesn't make sense, because ACH is actually the shared technology, not created by them, that enables them to do their work. It's unfair because people might hear about ACH transfers and think they can only be done by this one company. blockchain.info doesn't control the Bitcoin blockchain, and they shouldn't control the name either. ------ 7Figures2Commas > But despite the failure of some Bitcoin-related sites and new regulatory > challenges, more than $250 million has been invested in Bitcoin companies, > most of that in the last 12 months, according to Wedbush Securities, a > financial services firm. Interestingly, there's a good chance that the sum of the valuations given to these Bitcoin companies in the past year is equal to a not insignificant percentage of the total value of _all_ the Bitcoin in circulation[1]. Xapo[2] and Coinbase[3] alone were both reportedly valued at more than $100 million in their last rounds, and I wouldn't be surprised if Blockchain received a similar valuation. From a technical perspective, the current Bitcoin chart[4] doesn't look good, and hasn't for a while[5]. If there isn't a sustained recovery, the sum of the valuations investors have given Bitcoin-related startups could one day exceed the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation. [1] [https://blockchain.info/charts/market- cap](https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap) [2] [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/08/bitcoin-startup- xapo-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/08/bitcoin-startup-xapo-valued- north-of-100-million/) [3] [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/12/andreessen-boosts- bit...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/12/andreessen-boosts-bitcoins- legitimacy/) [4] [https://blockchain.info/charts/market- price](https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500000) ------ jerguismi Congrats to the blockchain.info team! ------ scintill76 Does anyone know where Blockchain Ltd is registered? In the UK, Nicolas Cary (executive named in article) is the Director of Blockchain-UK Ltd[1], while Blockchain Ltd appears to be registered to someone else[2] not named on blockchain.info. [1] [https://www.opencompany.co.uk/company/08880875/blockchainuk-...](https://www.opencompany.co.uk/company/08880875/blockchainuk- ltd) [2] [https://www.opencompany.co.uk/company/08858277/blockchain- lt...](https://www.opencompany.co.uk/company/08858277/blockchain-ltd) ------ junto Is it just me or does anyone else have a tendency to treat all .info TLDs with a high degree of skeptisism? I naturally assume that a .info site is going to be a scam or of poor quality or fleeting at most. I wonder if they will buy themselves the .com with all that cash? ~~~ scintill76 They have blockchain.com (and bitcoin.com), but they started out on blockchain.info.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fast Multiplication with Slow Additions - loup-vaillant http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/fast-scalarmult ====== zimmerfrei There should some warning note right at the top, given the topic is presented mainly for cryptographic purposes. There is a huge body of quite diverse side channel attacks against all of these "fast" techniques for scalar multiplication, and the article is too weakly making references to pitfalls for each approach and the importance of constant time logic (also, no mention of masking techniques! Though those are routinely overlooked by way too many speed-obsessed practitioners). ~~~ loup-vaillant I confess I'm quite tired of having to litter every article that might be about cryptography with the standard warnings. I might as well warn readers not to use this knowledge at all, because they shouldn't implement their own crypto to begin with (even though I did). This is an advanced topic. If the reader is in a position to use such knowledge, I felt I could safely assume they would know when it is safe not to be constant time. (For instance, signature verification doesn't process secrets, and can be variable time.) > _also, no mention of masking techniques!_ Out of scope. Those are hidden behind magical constant time routines. ~~~ zimmerfrei >> also, no mention of masking techniques! > Out of scope. Those are hidden behind magical constant time routines. How is that? Side-channel resistance is largely a matter of reducing the Signal-to-Noise ratio for traces an attacker can leverage to extract secrets. A constant-time logic reduces the Signal; a masking logic increases the noises. The two are largely independent and at times at odds. For instance, recent fast curves (like DJB's) are good because they can be easily implemented in constant time in software (as far as we know) but they are actually much harder to mask (in software or hardware). ~~~ loup-vaillant Oh, I thought you were talking about the bit twiddling required to implement constant time lookup and constant time branching. > _Side-channel resistance is largely a matter of reducing the Signal-to-Noise > ratio for traces an attacker can leverage to extract secrets._ Who cares about resistance when you can have immunity? Constant time crypto leaks _zero_ signal through timings, who needs any noise to mask that utter absence of signal? Unless maybe you were thinking about other side channels, such as energy consumption, or electromagnetic emissions? I'd agree those are worth pursuing for smart cards and dongles, but on regular computers (from palmtops to servers), the threat is mostly academic. ------ evancox100 The "non-adjacent form" optimization appears to just be radix-8 booth recoding, no? ~~~ loup-vaillant _< looks up what the heck is "booth recoding"…>_ I think they're different. In booth recoding, the windows are _fixed_ , and non adjacent form is a special case of _sliding_ windows (2-bit wide). I don't think booth recoding does minimise the number of non-zero digits. That said, it does seem to produce similar results in some cases: 01111111 100 (binary) 10000000-100 (NAF) -- radix-4 Booth recoding 01111111100 000 -> 00 110 -> 0-1 111 -> 00 111 -> 00 111 -> 00 001 -> 01 010000000-100 (same as NAF) But I think it's just a coincidence, here. ~~~ detaro semi-OT: big thumbs up for your Poly1305 "tutorial", clearest explanation of it I've seen yet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: review my startup - Desktop Application Analytics - te_platt http://www.concerity.com/ ====== pwhelan I don't have the time to take a real look at it yet (at my plain ol desk job). I like the idea, site construction looks good. However, the first thing I noticed is that the "See Through the Darkness" paragraph on the right-hand side. The paragraph goes too low, into the whitespace (I'm using firefox 3). The rest of the front page looks so nice that it stands out. I'll take a look at it some more later. Best of luck.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Catalogs - cskau http://www.google.com/catalogs/about/ ====== MatthewPhillips Sounds like something perfect for HTML. I'll never understand why companies are ok with releasing a product that works on one specific device but are unwilling to release a product that works on one specific html layout engine. Google, of all companies, should do this. Instead they hold back their web apps and demand that they work on all modern browsers. When is Google going to lead the charge by using all of the latest CSS3 effects? Google Catalogs could have been awesome as a Chrome app. ------ BSeward Can anyone who's used this gather whether it's built with iOS APIs or HTML5? Looks a little too perfect for HTML5, which is too bad for Android tablets (and the three people who own one). Since this has been tried lots of times and no one has done it successfully yet and there's just not that large a market for this it may not have made sense to focus a lot of cutting-edge web engineering prowess at this. ------ pchristensen I've downloaded this, and it's very easy to see why it's an iPad app. The experience is like reading a real catalog (gorgeous magazine-like layout and photos) but with more information accessible at a touch. Frankly, if this was on the web, it would feel weird, very un-webby, un-ecommerce. Maybe if more apps like this started showing up on the web that opinion (of what is webby) would change, but for now it's the right style for the medium they chose (or the right medium for the style they wanted to convey). FWIW, I love the app, I wish it had more catalogs I shopped from. ------ Construct Google first launched their online catalog service in 2002, but shut it down in 2009. Browse via the Wayback Machine here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080828155311/http://catalog.goo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080828155311/http://catalog.google.com/) Interesting to see that they've revived it as an iOS tablet-only product. It does make sense that the tablet crowd would have higher disposable income than the general internet population. Given the emerging popularity of eBooks on tablet-style devices, catalogs are the logical next step. ------ exit does apple get 30% of every catalog item purchase? ~~~ pchristensen Includes "Buy on website" link for every item, so nope. ------ barista Download??? Why? Why not put it all online? ~~~ tertius Demographics. ------ sidwyn This feels awkward. Why is Google marketing the iPad? ~~~ pchristensen Google is marketing item-by-item shopping analytics to catalog retailers. You are the product. ------ Urgo iOS only, really? I mean I wouldn't have any use for this most days but this could be nice come black friday. ~~~ watty Yep, this baffles me. The iOS product will bring in more ad revenue due to the success of the iPad but I'm surprised that they didn't develop and release an Android version as well. It's a bad sign for Android tablets when Google starts giving priorities to the rival OS. ~~~ m0nastic I think it would be a much worse sign if a separate group within Google launched a product (which required signing up partners) and the initial product wasn't targeted for the dominant tablet platform. I am surprised that they didn't try to make this "web-based", but if you're going to launch a product like this as a native application, it would be downright foolish not to do so first on the iPad. ------ tmcw Had the feeling a bunch of years ago that Google wanted the web to be a vibrant, creative, interesting place. But, I guess online shopping and Angry Birds is the real objective. ~~~ pstuart And what will pay for that vibrant, creative, interesting place otherwise? ~~~ tmcw Recent behavior has indicated that they've moved from 'subsidizing innovation' to 'making boatloads of internet cash' now that the stock market expects them to be infinitely profitable. ------ petrilli Finally, our long nightmare of not being tracked when looking at paper catalogs is over. ~~~ notatoad why are people so afraid of having marketers know what they like? i'd rather be served relevant ads than irrelevant ones. ~~~ DanielStraight You mean why are people so afraid of anyone at all with money or legal force knowing everything they've ever expressed any interest in without any context to explain the degree of or reason for the interest? ~~~ mayanksinghal <http://www.dataliberation.org/> ^ You can always delete your data, at least for the given list of products.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Winning 1kb intro released at Assembly 2015 - joeyspn http://www.p01.org/releases/BLCK4777/BLCK4777_safe.htm ====== bane Anybody interested in a well written history of the scene that really helps explain it as a cultural phenomenon should probably read the demoscene chapter in "The Future Was Here", a book about the Amiga. It's probably one of the best written synopsis of the scene I've ever read and really places it well as both a technical and artistic movement and helps provide context for this kind of work. ~~~ chengsun Also, a fantastic visual guide is the documentary film "Moleman 2" (2011). It's freely available to watch on YouTube; highly recommended: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU) ------ adam12 Here is the UNPACKED source. function u() { requestAnimationFrame(u); for (g = p ? B.currentTime * 60 : (B = 'RIFFdataWAVEfmt ' + atob('EAAAAAEAAQAAeAAAAHgAAAEACAA') + 'data', b.style.background = 'radial-gradient(circle,#345,#000)', b.style.position = 'fixed', b.style.height = b.style.width = '100%', b.height = 720, h = b.style.left = b.style.top = A = f = C = 0, 6177); g > f; h = f % 1 ? 1 : .995) for (s = Math.pow(Math.min(f / 5457, 1), 87) + Math.pow(1 - Math.min(f / 5457, 1), 8), f == [b.width = 1280, 1599, 2175, 2469, 2777, 3183, 3369, 3995, 4199, 4470, 4777, 5120][C] && (C++, h = 640), f += p ? (c.translate(640, 360 + h / 45 Math.random()), c.rotate(A / 5457 - h / 5457), c.scale(1 + s * 8, 1 + s * 8), 1) : (B += T((1 + s * 8) * Math.random() + (1 - s) * (h / 45 * (f * (2 + C / 3 % 1) & 1) + (C > 3) * 8 * (f * (2 + (f / 8 & 3)) % 1)) \| 1), 1 / 512), i = p.length; i;) y = p[i -= 7], x = p[i ^= 1], r = p[i + 4], l = p[i + 6], s = 2 * Math.random() + 1, t = s * 4, a = 122, 640 > r ? (640 > Math.abs(p[i ^= 1] += p[i + 2]) \|\| (p[i + 2] = -1), 640 > Math.abs(p[i ^= 1] += p[i + 2]) \|\| (p[i + 2] = -1), t = Math.random() > p[i + 7] \|\| p[i + 7] == '22312131212313' [C] & h == 640, w = x - A, p[i + 2] \|\| r * r / 3 > w * w && (t = s * (r - Math.abs(w)) / 45 + 2, a = 2 * Math.random() + 5, p.push(A, 0, s * Math.sin(a += 599), s * Math.sin(a - 11), s * t, C + s, 640, .995), s = 2 * Math.random() + 1, a = 2 * Math.random() + 5, p.push(A, 0, s * Math.sin(a += 599), s * Math.sin(a - 11), s * t, C + s, 640, .995), s = 2 * Math.random() + 1, a = 2 * Math.random() + 2, p.push(A, 0, s * Math.sin(a += 599), s * Math.sin(a - 11), s * t, C + s, 640, .995)), a = p[i + 2] * y / 45, l = p[i + 6] = t ? 640 : .9 * l, t = r) : A = p[i] ++, g > f \|\| (s = r, c.beginPath(), c.lineTo(x + s * Math.sin(a += 599), y - s * Math.sin(a - 11)), s = t, c.lineTo(x + s * Math.sin(a += 599), y - s * Math.sin(a - 11)), c.lineTo(x + s * Math.sin(a += 599), y - s * Math.sin(a - 11)), c.shadowBlur = r, s = l, x = s * 2, a = p[i + 5], c.shadowColor = c.fillStyle = 'rgb(' + [x + s * Math.sin(a += 599) \| 1, x + s * Math.sin(a += 599) \| 1, x + s * Math.sin(a += 599) \| 1] + ')', c.fill()); p ? c.fillText('BLCK4777', 90, 99) : (B = new Audio('data:Audio/WAV;base64,' + btoa(B))).play(p = [f = C = 0, 0, 0, 0, 180, 2, 0, 1, -360, 0, 0, 0, 99, 1, 0, 2, 360, 0, 0, 0, 99, 1, 0, 3, -2880, 0, 0, 0, 1280, 0, 1280, 0]) }; ~~~ paulirish A bit prettier: [https://gist.github.com/paulirish/21326986569181e47f21](https://gist.github.com/paulirish/21326986569181e47f21) ------ segmondy And today, I was reading that facebook's mobile messenger has 18000 classes, and is about a 100mb, this doesn't take into account other dependencies it has on the OS. These demos are 100% standalone, no external libraries. Progress is a funny thing. ~~~ mrich This is a Javascript demo. So let's not discount the browser, Javascript engine, JIT, 3d acceleration libs, sound libs, and everything used from the OS that is involved here. Still it is a great effort. Your argument fits better to a machine like the C64, where demos are really going directly to the hardware and the OS is basically inactive. ~~~ Dylan16807 Well most of the things you named are inactive. It's using a very tiny bit of external 3d code, and external decompression, but almost everything else out of browser, javascript, libs, and OS is passthrough. The javascript engine exists but does not serve to make it smaller; the code is simple loops and subroutines that would probably be better as native code. ------ myth_drannon the 4kb winner is also amazing [http://archive.assembly.org/2015/4k-intro/hydrokinetics- by-p...](http://archive.assembly.org/2015/4k-intro/hydrokinetics-by- prismbeings) ------ justin_ Here's a 256b web compo from 2002 (!) [http://wildmag.de/compo/](http://wildmag.de/compo/) A lot of the stuff looks almost trivial compared to what we do today. (And unfortunately a lot of these won't work anymore) ------ mrspeaker p01 does so much good stuff ([http://www.p01.org/releases/](http://www.p01.org/releases/)) - the fact that he won Assembly 2015 with a JavaScript demo is testament to his skills! ------ gfody other results: [http://archive.assembly.org/2015](http://archive.assembly.org/2015) ------ kornakiewicz For Polish-speaking guys: Ha!art published a magazine about scene with some of good articles: [http://www.ha.art.pl/czasopismo/numery-czasopisma/4054-ha- ar...](http://www.ha.art.pl/czasopismo/numery-czasopisma/4054-ha- art-47-3-2014) ------ X-Istence This is one of my favourite demoscene's: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auagm5UBTwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auagm5UBTwY) ~~~ skrebbel Nitpick: the demoscene is a community. You linked to one of your favourite demos. (and insiders wouldn't call it a demo but an intro because it's small, and _obviously_ the word "intro" signals something about file size) ------ btzll I wonder if the bad performance is due to the <1kb requirement. ~~~ Ellipsis753 Almost certainly. It would be tempting just to pre-render this to an HD video otherwise. ~~~ sp332 In case you missed the link on the page, there's a 1080p version on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnZUUSdpt-k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnZUUSdpt-k) ~~~ hebdo The point was that it is probably much less CPU intensive to decode such a stream in 1080p than to render it from a compressed 1k of Javascript. ~~~ taeric Not sure the point of the comparison. Yes, some of our encoding technology beats some algorithmic generation of content in performance. If the goal is size of encoding, though, it doesn't come close. Tricks like this can help show how less than a gig of data is enough to encode an operating system. Or a person. ~~~ piAcceptor I really hope you are right about encoding a person in less than a gig, but what about the associated genome (3000 megabases), episodic memories and/or neuron connectivity?! Surely this is data that would be essential, yet very hard to algorithmically encode? ~~~ taeric I don't know enough to weigh in on if a person is just a gig. I'm just going off of this[1] presentation. [1] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know- How-T...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To- Compute) ------ tantalor Why "intro"? As if "demo" wasn't confusing enough. ~~~ Mithaldu The demoscene started out of the software piracy scene. An intro was a short thing like this one, that people put into the boot sequence of games they cracked or otherwise made available to the scene. Over time these got more elaborate and people started making them separate from the games to show off their prowess in coding, called demos. Nowadays the names serve to differentiate the runtime length and size of the program. Intro = short thing, demo = long full effort thing. ~~~ skrebbel > Intro = short thing, demo = long full effort thing. The problem is that that's not true anymore either. Many intros are equally "long full effort" as your average demo. Intro simply means "demo with a size limit", these days (and by "these days" i mean "the last 15 years") ------ alt_ Cute, but doesn't really compare to non-js stuff: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNIKOD6WnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNIKOD6WnY) ~~~ mrspeaker Ha, I love that you are so condescending about what he made, and one of the first comments on the video you linked to was "Yawn. We did better in 256 byte microcode strings in 1986." ~~~ JeremyBanks I didn't read it as condescension, but observation: old demos were able to take advantage of a lot that's not available to JavaScript. ~~~ Someone But isn't the whole challenge of a demo to make the most of limited resources? ------ clippit How to unpack the compressed html file? I see a lot of binaries in there starts with "PNG". ------ aikah crashed my browser(chrome latest,win 8.1) but there is a video capture linked . ~~~ LeoPanthera Works fine in Safari 8.0.8, OS X 10.10.5 ------ cloudsloth Stunning. ------ rtpg how does one even begin to figure out the techniques used to write intros or demos like this? ~~~ z303 Read up on Computer graphics. this EdX course looks a decent starting point [https://www.edx.org/course/computer-graphics-uc-san- diegox-c...](https://www.edx.org/course/computer-graphics-uc-san-diegox- cse167x) ------ rational_indian So Javascript is now Assembly? ~~~ skrebbel No, Assembly is an annual demoparty in Finland. ------ replete iTerm is also pretty great, because you can split terminal tabs into panes and there are some new neat features allowing you to click on filename strings etc in Finder! ~~~ snikch I think you meant to comment on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10069521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10069521)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Being productive with Emacs – part 1 (2009) - todd8 http://web.psung.name/emacs/2009/part1.html ====== alahache Being productive with Emacs: (slide 9) M-x tetris	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The OWASP Top 10 is killing me - sidcool https://insights.hpe.com/content/hpe-nxt/en/articles/2017/10/the-owasp-top-10-is-killing-me-and-killing-you.html ====== sixhobbits Not all vulnerabilities stem from ignorance, although this seems to be the default assumption of the infosec community. Writing secure code takes more time than writing insecure code. Time is expensive. In every organization I've worked, security has been neglected pretty explicitly. It's not a case of "OK this looks secure", but instead more like "I am aware that our codebase has some security issues but I need to prioritize rushing out this new feature/improving our CPA". And this is not always the wrong choice. For most organizations, the probability of having someone who is both malicious and competent enough to exploit an XSS vuln visit your site is pretty small. The chance that you'll go under if you don't get that new feature out or improve your CPA is pretty high. If you want to criticise the state of security (and there is definite room for criticism), I think there is a need for tools and education to allow people to better make these decisions. We need ways to communicate a) how likely it is that we'll be attacked? b) what would the consequences be? For now, when these questions are asked, the answers are almost always "pretty small" and "uh, possibly like really bad, depending on the attacker" We need ways to translate these into numbers that we can compare with profit margins, etc. This is _way_ more important than actually learning how to mitigate SQLi. ~~~ Spooky23 I think the infosec community is the biggest barrier to improving security. Security is like a bug light for ambitious idiots now. In large companies the function has been staffed up as a separate vertical with lots of CISSPs and other alphabet soup people who run around chasing nonsense and reporting how valuable they are. Security expertise needs to be embedded in projects and programs so that leadership with domain knowledge can make smart decisions. ~~~ deoxxa It sounds like your problem is with the infosec _industry_ rather than the infosec _community_. The community in general would agree with you about the industry being kind of broken, I'd say. ------ nfriedly This is one thing I like about IBM: they have a separate security team that audits stuff before you ship it. I was working on a react app where I set up server-side rendering, and then had it JSON-encode the state and dump it into a script tag in the end of the HTML. My thinking at the time was "It's JSON- encoded, and it's all the user's own data anyways, so it's safe." Eventually I needed something from the querystring and for whatever reason put it into the state. It turns out that a <script> tag from the querystring in a string in a blob of JSON in a HTML page will execute. Oops. Fortunately IBM's security team caught it before it ever shipped. Now it's been fixed and the app has a CSP header to help nullify any future mistakes. ~~~ mmcnl That's weird, shouldn't that be a responsibility of your router? Or did you roll your own? ~~~ nfriedly I think it was a combination of react-router and react-router-redux, and something I was doing for SSR that led to the issue. The initial fix was just to delete the react-router-redux data from the store just before JSON.stringify'ing it. There were a number of weird things that were specific to my usage, so I'm not sure that the vulnerability would be there in a "proper" setup. ------ methodover We experienced our first successful attack at my startup a few weeks ago. What got us wasn't anything on the top ten list. I'm pretty sure it isn't covered anywhere in OWASP to my knowledge. Users reuse passwords across different websites. An attacker tried a database of usernames/passwords sourced from elsewhere; a small percentage (about 1000 out of more than 10M requests) succeeded. 100 of those had something to steal. Attacker used a botnet, so our IP-based fail-to-ban logic was ineffective. We thought about lots of ways to deal with this moving forward. My boss (CEO) didn't want to implement any kind of 2 factor authentication, because it's cumbersome and will lower conversion rates. We took a different strategy which is kind of complicated to explain, but it's not nearly as secure. Anyway. What gets me is like: Password authentication SUCKS. It's a terrible terrible authentication strategy. It's awful. It should not be relied upon. It would be good if humans didn't reuse passwords. But we do. So it sucks. ~~~ sixhobbits You can mitigate this almost completely by finding that "database of usernames/passwords sourced from elsewhere" (they're not hard to find) and blacklisting them. Users should not be allowed to use any breached password when they register. A simple message saying "this message was included in a recent password breach and is therefore not secure" should suffice to prevent users getting annoyed that they can't use their favourite password on your site. Enforcing a minimum length of 10 or even 12 is a great way to eliminate nearly all previously leaked passwords from being used on your site, and it further encourages users to use password managers. Passwords are shit, but they're here to stay for a while still. ~~~ wongarsu HaveIBeenPwned makes this really easy by publishing a list of hashed passwords that have been observed in breaches [1]. The list is by no means complete, but it should cover a lot and is very easy to setup. 1: [https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords](https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords) ~~~ methodover That... is a great idea. I'll do it. Thank you! ------ beager The OWASP Top 10 isn't changing because we can't (or won't) stop not patching those issues. Quite telling that when talking about how to move beyond the baseline security struggles of the OWASP Top 10, TFA provides only superficial suggestions, rather than actual links to libraries, tools, and implementation guides that can be used to quash or audit OWASP Top 10 issues. ------ ynniv Many of these are due to the use of unstructured strings, which we do because we’re lazy. We’re so lazy about it that our modern languages don’t even support the ability to distinguish user strings from application strings (perl’s taint mode). The workaround in development has been extensive testing, but this is insufficient in an adversarial environment. The best solution is to bring structure to your strings so that you can tasing about how they can be abused. Parse your strings, kids. ~~~ minitech > We’re so lazy about it that our modern languages don’t even support the > ability to distinguish user strings from application strings (perl’s taint > mode). “User strings vs. application strings” is too coarse. You just need to enforce types (a type for SQL – see query builders, a type for HTML – see MarkupSafe, etc.) and provide safe constructors for those types. Safe syntactic sugar for those is supported by JavaScript (template strings), Rust (macros), C++ (overloadable string literals), Haskell (overloadable string literals and Template Haskell), and probably plenty of other modern languages. For the others, explicit type wrappers are generally enough (like the aforementioned MarkupSafe in Python) – the only thing that’s lacking is enforcement by libraries. ------ gcb0 I love OWASP. but everything they do has zero usability. At times it looks like a bunch of 7yr old trying to mimic a big corporation. This list is a huge example of it. Instead of a text, they have a repo, that generates a huge PDF, mentioned in a press release, with the release described verbosily in a wiki! And I went trhu all those hops, and I still couldn't find a single link that points me to what "Injection" means. ~~~ rst It's a generalization of SQLi, to cover situations where the queries (or commands, or whatever) built up by unguarded string concatenation are something other than SQL. (Though, oddly, the examples in the current draft seem to all be SQL based.) ~~~ gcb0 thanks. have an upvote. I was mostly interested in learning why they have such atrocious publications/content organization though... i write on that subject internally for my employer. if OWASP goal is to inform the public, and not look like a mega-corporation, they are doing things very wrong. Their press releases are less parseable than the worse our legal department can produce. ------ ianamartin In my experience, it’s not been a lack of understanding or knowledge on the devs’ part. It’s been more about how much of a hurry we are in to deploy. I’ve tried a few different strategies to get around this. 1\. Build the backend first. Don’t show a UI that looks anything like it’s functional until you sneak in the requirements that you know are needed but can’t get buy-in from. Fails because PMs and stakeholders don’t see progress fast enough. 2\. Plan security into the design specs and feature list. Fails because there’s always someone who (like when presenting speed as a feature) is higher up than you who will cross it off the list because “we’re behind a VPN/our users are too stupid to hack us/the only speed that matters is how fast we can deploy this. 3\. Build the entire front end first with absolutely no backend wiring at all and slowly add the connecting db functionality and take your time adding security checks along the way. This also fails because once PMs and stakeholders see the pretty stuff, they assume it’s almost done and have no tolerance for “slow” progress. Direct, straightforward communication about the importance of security doesn’t work. Obfuscating your team’s process to sneak in best practices doesn’t work. The bottom line is that—again, much like speed—-if your leadership doesn’t see the value or can’t be persuaded to see it, it’s not going to happen, even from very well-educated teams. This is a cultural issue that an individual contributor can only do so much about by choosing the safest frameworks to start with. And that’s about it. It’s added a number of items to the list of things I ask in interviews now that I’m on the job market again. Where does the company prioritize security in web applications? Where does it prioritize speed? How hard do people have to fight to get these included as product features? I won’t make a blanket statement that if those answers are not to my liking, I won’t take the job. But you need to know where these things stand as company commitments before you accept a job with a primary role of web developer. ~~~ Sacho > 3\. Build the entire front end first with absolutely no backend wiring at > all and slowly add the connecting db functionality and take your time adding > security checks along the way. This also fails because once PMs and > stakeholders see the pretty stuff, they assume it’s almost done and have no > tolerance for “slow” progress. It sounds like this approach should work, because you can sell a bunch of reasons rather than just security. If you don't take the needed time to develop the code, you will have correctness(not enough testing) and maintenance(not enough refactoring) problems alongside security issues. If the company's leadership shuns all three in favor of quicker deployment, then security is most likely not going to be the biggest problem, it would be all the bugs you have to chase down in spaghetti code. ------ SomeStupidPoint > Create a culture of writing and deploying secure code. How? That may sound glib, but this is really just asking everyone to try, right? I would guess that the vast majority of security mistakes stem from ignorance not apathy, and that most coders are trying. Relying on people trying clearly isn't working because there's simply too much to know and it requires too constant of attention. I think we actually _do_ need better tooling, in terms of things like using type systems to flag sensitive data and automatically suggesting a threat modeling report include that item. The suggestion that people spend a lot of effort all the time is clearly not going to work -- why can't we ease that barrier by focusing on better tooling so security becomes a natural part of the process, enforced by actual mechanisms? ~~~ module0000 You can't control humans unfortunately. Humans write code, and some of them will care more about the quality of work than others do. These people will at some point work above/below/with you, and their mistakes will cause you some sort of inconvenience. My mother taught medical school, and she had a saying... "What do you call the least qualified idiot who passes my class?", the answer is "Doctor". There are good coders and bad coders, and unless we start somehow forbidding the bad(but still good enough to get hired) ones to work with/for us - this isn't going to change. ~~~ diroussel If one developer can introduce a bug, that is life. But if it can go undetected by the compiler, unit tests, code review, component tests, acceptance tests, mutation testing, static analysis, pen test, etc, then maybe the process can be improved. It may not be cost effective, but then it's still not a lone developer problem. It's a management decision. ~~~ IncRnd > It may not be cost effective, but then it's still not a lone developer > problem. It's a management decision. That's one way of looking at the issue. Another way is that this is a way for an individual developer to stand out above his or her peers. ------ nanodano Most developers don't know security [http://www.akashasec.com/most-developers-dont-know- security/](http://www.akashasec.com/most-developers-dont-know-security/) ------ tofflos The article mentions home grown authentication and authorization mechanism and suggests that we stick to proven solutions. The problem is that, at least within the Java community, that library-, framework- and application server authors are not providing easy to use solutions that integrate well with applications. Instead there are a bunch of complex solutions that require manual configuration, proprietary extensions and arcane programming models for something that sits in front the application making it difficult for application authors to provide a seamless user experience. No wonder so many people are rolling their own. This is why JSR-375 was created. It needs to happen! I've tried the reference implementation and it was awesome! If you're working on the JSR or the RI then I'm rooting for you! But I don't know if anyone is working on them these days? ------ mmcnl Perhaps security isn't as easy as (often self-proclaimed) security experts think it is. Unlike them, developers don't devote 100% of their time to security. I couldn't care less about people standing on the sideline yelling at me what I can't do. How about proactively seeking out and suggesting meaningful improvements which actually help increase security? Security in big corporations often boils down to a unit of people ranting about everything and nothing, and telling people what they can't do, while in fact, they should be doing the opposite. ------ tim333 It's always seemed to me that the web2py approach of providing a secure starter app with auth included and then letting developers break it if they want seems quite a sensible way to go. Not sure how well that works in other frameworks. [http://www.web2py.com/book/default/chapter/01#Security](http://www.web2py.com/book/default/chapter/01#Security) ------ BrandoElFollito It is a shame that A10 and A7 were rejected. In our mobile held, APIs are often unprotected because authentication is hard for machine to machine transactions. OpenID and the misused oAuth are a solution but it is hard to implement. A7 addressed an organizational issue completely absent from the top 10. Since there à so much controversies, they sold have made it a top 12. ------ JeanMarcS > This means that the malicious script can read the user's cookies, session > tokens, _stored usernames and passwords_ , or files on a local hard drive. I've seen those. On a website for a company who hired me for building their server infrastructure. The password was in clear text in the main cookie. I signaled it and the dev team corrected it. It was only 3 years ago... ------ partycoder A functional prototype is not finished software, but it is for many people considered to be a product. Functional prototypes in many cases do not even implement their functional requirements properly, let alone the non-functional ones like security. Security in any form is not a priority for many startups. Especially the ones that aim to be acquired before their hot potato blows up. ------ vacri Why should the top 10 change? We still secure our houses with locks, secure our neighbourhoods with police, secure our borders with armies. We drive safer cars these days yet we still secure our road edges with barriers at dangerous points. Why would the categories of risk change on a bi-annual basis? ~~~ MattPalmer One might hope that these low hanging fruit would be addressed, leaving more sophisticated attacks to fill the top 10. Buffer overflows used to be a major vulnerability. These only stopped being such a major problem when languages that prevented them became widely used. The lesson is probably that developers and the business don't have the time or inclination to address them, and the nest defence is to make the problem impossible rather than relying on good security practices being followed. ------ ianamartin Also, a response to some of the mitigation’s suggested here: 1\. Prevent people from reusing passwords from other websites/lists. Fail: you shouldn’t know if the pw is the same as any other pw. If you can tell, you are already doing it wrong. PW + random salt protects you against reused passwords. If your application is able to compare other passwords to the current password, not only did the othe site fuck up, but you did too. (re)Captcha: fuck you. Even if it’s after the second failed attempt. Fuck you. I hate you. You are implementing security theater, making everything worse for the user, and killing your conversation rate for everyone but spammers,who have this down pat. Pushing x numbers of rules, whether or not they are special characters or not. 8 vs. 10 doesn’t matter that much. Push passphrases instead. Multi-factor is sort-of okay, but the implementations are garbage and the user experience is awful. I’m not a security expert or a researcher. I’m a data engineer with a lot of web app experience. But most of the advice in this thread is total garbage. Web apps need to find a way to make the gold-standard of authentication accessible to users: per-device public/private key pairs. Until we do that well, we suck at life and our jobs compared to native apps. I include myself when I say that we have held ourselves to an incredibly low standard. OWASP is a pathetically low bar. Yet we often fail. It’s time to step up our game, people. And it’s on us to do it. ~~~ jjnoakes > PW + random salt protects you against reused passwords. That only protects you if every other site does it. If you salt your passwords and some other site which doesn't is compromised, you are hosed too if your users reused passwords. > If your application is able to compare other passwords to the current > password, not only did the othe site fuck up, but you did too. Sorry, don't follow. How is it a mistake to compare a password your user is entering to a known blacklist of compromised passwords? ~~~ ianamartin To your second point, giving this information leaks too much about the user trying to create a password. I go to a site and try to register an account. The app says, “sorry, you can’t use that password because it’s been used with this username before and has been compromised.” Your attacker now knows that the user is in a compromised list. You can’t do this without leaking information about the user. If you compare to a global list instead of the user, then you’ve leaked the opposite information. That at least one user is on some list of compromised passwords. You can’t do that without leaking information about at least one user. And, as discussed, exponential fall-off doesn’t work in the world of distributed attacks. That’s my response to point two in a nutshell. But I’ll add that the application layer should have no knowledge of the plain-text password to begin with. The password should be hashed on the client side before being sent to the application layer. Then salted and hashed and stored in the database. The double hashing doesn’t get you anything in crypto terms as far as I know, but it means that if your application leaks or the network between the front and back end is MITMd, then you are leaking hashes and not plain text. Of course, if the network between your front and back ends is compromised, you fucked up pretty bad anyway. But it adds at least a little effort for the attacker instead of allowing them to just grab username and password pairs in plain text. I also salt + hash usernames in transit, so it’s not immediately obvious who is associated with what. That gets me to your first point. You are correct that doing all of this doesn’t protect any individual user from illicit access, and I should have been more clear about my concerns. If an individual user chooses to reuse passwords, their account can be compromised. You are 100% correct about that. But in the case of a data breach, which is what I was thinking of in terms of “preotection”, it’s going to be really hard to compromise a collection of salted, hashed username/password combos. In my opinion—again, I’m not a security expert, and I welcome criticisms such as yours—I don’t think we’re going to get people to stop reusing passwords. And I don’t think we’re going to get people to use multi-auth any time soon. I think this is the best we can do until someone comes up with a way to get per-device key pairs to work in a friendly way. Thanks for your thoughts and criticisms and questions. ~~~ jjnoakes Comparing passwords to a list of compromised ones doesn't leak anything. Just ignore the user name. And hashing on the client in addition to the server doesn't save you from any mitm attacks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Histogram as the Image - tambourine_man http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/09/idea_the_histogram_as_the_imag.html ====== robinhouston Even though this is five years old, I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a very cute trick. The followup by Josh Millard is even better: [http://www.joshmillard.com/2007/10/04/retro-histo-making- an-...](http://www.joshmillard.com/2007/10/04/retro-histo-making-an-image-fit- your-histogram/) ~~~ nitrogen It's a good thing he created (and you posted) that followup, because otherwise I would've spent the rest of my morning implementing the same idea. ------ mumrah Relevant: <http://xkcd.com/688/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
UK National Lottery's Twitter PR Disaster - sjcsjc http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40935410 ====== jaymzcampbell Ah, this brings back memories of an adidas campaign I worked on for the Stan Smith launch in the UK. I had a backend that would automatically generate an image from a given tweet [1] but we were mindful of this exact sort of problem so built a whole CMS around it to allow a social media manager to automatically tweet back from the official adidas account. It would include their stylised label and various auto-populated messages they could edit if they liked. All works well until the evening shift comes on based outside of the UK and they end up sending out a tweet [2] with a picture of Dr Harold Shipman - a notorious serial killer [3]. [1] [https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840](https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840) [2] [https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold- sh...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-shipman-in- adidas-ad/) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman) ~~~ madaxe_again That's pretty special - and the whole thing reminds me of a rather more minor snafu with social media a client had. My business built and operated an ecommerce platform. At one point we added a feature that would allow retailers to populate content areas with images from twitter and instagram - they'd just pop in a hashtag, images matching that tag would flow into the CMS, and they could then choose which to publish. So far, so good. Users are tweeting product shots, retailers are semi- automatically populating their sites with them. Along comes a client - who is running a very successful campaign with it - but they're struggling to find the time to moderate everything, can we please make it auto-publish. We warn them of the probable abusive outcomes, but they aren't having any of it - they say that they'll reactively moderate. We acquiesce, but only after getting them to sign a release that essentially says "we warned you". It goes live, after having languished in staging for a month where the client adamantly refuses to test it. "We'll test it live, we'll just set a hashtag on the main homepage module, and we'll see it working." We know the change to autopublish has been tiny (a single additional setting toggle) and safe, so aren't too perturbed by this all too usual behaviour this time. Twenty minutes after it launches the client's MD (this is a £100M brand) phones, frothing and panicking that the site had been hacked and was full of porn. A glance at their usually clothing filled homepage reveals an alarming amount of flesh. At this point I'm almost impressed that they've been attacked so quickly, so hop into their CMS to do a bulk delete for them - when I start crying with laughter, for what have they chosen as their test hashtag? Only #xxx. ~~~ CodesInChaos How was that feature supposed to work concerning copyright? "Scrape random images off the internet without the site's or the user's consent and upload them to a website for commercial purposes" doesn't exactly sound legal to me. ~~~ msla > How was that feature supposed to work concerning copyright? Somewhere between "Better to ask forgiveness than to get permission" and "Fuck it, we'll do it live!" You know, the usual response to copyright laws on the Internet. As an addendum, a nontrivial number of people think copyright laws are about plagiarism: [http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/](http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/) (Copyright laws have nothing to do with plagiarism. Acknowledging whose copyright you violated does nothing to help you. Plagiarizing without directly copying is likely legal.) ------ zitterbewegung Why won't people learn that creating a twitter bot when its attached to a large corporation will create a PR disaster ? See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_$bot$) [http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive- tweet...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive- tweets/index.html) ~~~ turdnagel It's not necessarily a Twitter bot - it's any project on any platform that broadcasts user-generated content out without vetting. ------ petepete "Yer da sells Avon" is definitely my favourite regional insult. ~~~ hacktothefuture Can you explain this one please? ~~~ moron4hire I found a video on YouTube when I googled for it, that was kind of homophobic. Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad". ~~~ lin_lin > Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad". Wait, would you really not cop that right away? ~~~ moron4hire "Da" is not common in the US. If I saw it on its own, I would almost certainly assume it was the Russian word for "yes" before I drew connection to "Dad". Most people still say "Dad" without dropping the ending, or "Pa" if they were raised by heathens. Also, when I first saw the image, I read it as "Yerda", which I assumed to be something like a female given name of some sort of Scandivanian origin. ------ camoby I’ve been working with a US based ad agency recently, who asked about some features a bit like this. I’ve had to educate them on this idea with the fact that if you give the internet a ‘pen’, sooner rather than later, they’ll draw a cartoon penis. ------ jpalomaki Would be interesting to know if some these snafus actually turned out to be disasters. Yes, it's certainly moment of embarrassment for the PR crew, but it might be that public forgets the actual thing and the brand just got visibility. ------ SirHound Sounds like a phenomenal success, then. ~~~ e12e Yeah, I think such social media "failures" has long since become a canned recipe for generating free media hype. It allows brands to tap into obscene words and imagery by proxy ("we didn't know") - but gets lots of press and organic traffic as people make anything from meme jokes to hate speech. Case in point: the UK national lottery just reached whatever fraction of hn users that are possible customers, probably nudging a few percent of those to remember to buy lottery tickets. ~~~ JimDabell Good point. There's also Susan Boyle's album launch that was promoted with the hashtag #susanalbumparty that was a stroke of genius. ------ KaiserPro And this, dear reader is why you _always_ sanitise user inputs. Be it a twitter bot dealing with the unwashed masses, or a simple form... ------ drcongo Things brings back memories of the fun we had when Skittles handed their website over to the internet. [http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new- skittles-twitt...](http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles- twitter-homepage-not-so-sweet) ------ aaron695 PR disaster? What bullshit. Do the morons behind the headline really think people will boycott the product now because of a mistake? Or is the BBC now giving out free advertising for a product? Come on sheeple. And yes it is sheeple to believe that the BBC believe their headline was also true. They know it's no PR disaster but it gets them clicks. ~~~ corobo You were making a great point until you dropped sheeple in there. ------ artursapek After Microsoft learned this lesson with "Tay" I'm surprised companies are still making this mistake. Also, "hijacked" seems like the wrong word. More accurate would be "misused". ~~~ monkeyprojects This is a mistake all marketing people will make (hopefully just once but we all know that won't be the case). The worrying thing is that the last similar social media fail was less than 3 months ago with Walkers Crisps showing various photos of mass murderers.. ------ frou_dh In which the social media offense economy has both supply and demand ------ throws3bit This is the reason why you need Managers with a CS degree and not an MBA. ~~~ msla MBAs do stupid shit all the time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The magic of generating new ideas - rolling_robot https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-myth-and-magic-of-generating-new-ideas ====== paideic Coming up with something truly new is much, much harder than people give it credit for. We take the sun being the center of the universe for granted today, but it was an extremely non-obvious fact for the smartest people in the world for millenia. One of my math professors had a great take on the difficulty of injecting a new idea into the world: he said that the greatest mathematical achievement that anyone had ever made was not anything like calculus - it was the realization that there was something similar between five stones and five fish. ~~~ dawg- Nietzsche describes the problem beautifully in _Beyond Good and Evil_ : "However independent of each other [philosophers] might feel themselves to be, with their critical or systematic wills, something inside of them drives them on, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of concepts. In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew: – to this extent, philosophizing is a type of atavism of the highest order." ..."Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar (I mean: due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar grammatical functions), it is obvious that everything lies ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems..." ~~~ thrav I know religion probably doesn’t play well around here, but your quote brought a memory rushing back that I feel like sharing. My very Christian mother once asked me to help her come up with a slogan for the church. I know her pastor well, and know him to be an avid student of history and the literature. After much thought, I told them this, with the warning that if they used it they’d better be willing to face the consequences of what it means: “The purpose of the church is to remind people who they are. As children, they know. Over time, the world makes them forget.” In my estimation, Jesus’ goal, and the Church’s job should be guiding people back to what they once knew. Unbridled love and trust in others. Non- judgement. Absolute acceptance, before we learn there’s such thing as a stranger. Thank you for sharing this passage. “Their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew” Later, my Mom sent me the link to the sermon where the pastor quoted my statement and my warning, and followed it with, “My friend might be onto something, because in thinking on the text with his proposal in mind, I recalled one of Jesus’ declarations, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” ~~~ tim333 > back to what they once knew. Unbridled love and trust in others. Non- > judgement... That's quite an optimistic assessment of little children. ~~~ Hoasi > That's quite an optimistic assessment of little children. I'm not sure if it is. Little children lack preconceived ideas, and, often, inhibition. That combination is a good recipe for accepting the unknown and coming up with new ideas. That is not to say they can't be cruel at times. ~~~ galaxyLogic Little children are also easily led and controlled by other people like their parents. And no doubt that is what Mr. Preacher-man also wants: Followers. Thank the Lord and pass the bucket. Become dependent on me telling you what is the truth, you believing that if you just believe what I tell you you are granted the ticket to heaven, if not you go to Hell. Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that, and now you tell us we should be like them little children too. We should blindly trust the preacher-man, like little children, that's what he is telling us. ~~~ Hoasi > Very conveniently it is very easy to make little children believe all that My counter-intuitive opinion is that children are quite skeptical of religion. They may enjoy the make-believe part of it. Pretending, after all, is child play, but they will never take it for granted just because an adult tells them so. On the contrary, kids will know when something is made up. An adult seriously resorting to magic to answer a child's question will raise doubts. That kid is likely to question authority and religion ever after. ~~~ galaxyLogic > kids will know when something is made up. I think if adults SEEM to be believing it then kids will believe it too. Maybe you can say that then is not misleading them since you believe it to be true, but I don't think that proves that kids really have a critical thinking ability. That is why I think they are easily mislead. Of course there is much good to be said about having an "open mind", but having an "open mind" basically means anything can enter it. Kids' brains have their doors wide open. Is that good or bad? I don't think we can say it is just plain good. They need to learn critical thinking, all humans do, that is the skill to acquire. ------ otras These two different ways your brain works on ideas, focused and diffused, were my biggest takeaways from Barbara Oakley's _Learning How To Learn_ class. I've found that actively going between them, say by studying hard for 90 minutes and then going for a long walk, has been tremendous for learning. Highly recommend the course (or the book form, _A Mind for Numbers_ ). ------ melling “ These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing.” ~~~ fudged71 These (unconscious processing) moments for me almost always happen in the shower. I'd love to find another ritual that gets me in a similar mindspace. ~~~ unicod3 I usually find it in the bed at night time. Like I am going to bed and my brain starts to dig deeper for the problem and finds a solution. ------ tabtab There's plenty of new ideas around, you don't have to generate them yourself. If you ask in forums or search the web you can get a big list. The problem is culling the list for practical and successful ideas. Somebody has to invest the time and/or money do actually _do_ it, and accept the high risk of failure typical of startups and new open-source projects. That's probably the bottleneck. Ideas are cheap, execution is not. Here's a free sample tip: Dynamic Relational. It's the new "plastic" (a movie reference). The NoSql movement has shown a market/desire for dynamic databases. But with Dynamic Relational you get dynamism AND sql; you don't have to choose one or the other. And you can set constraints/rules to gradually make it more "static" like traditional RDBMS. ~~~ iKevinShah I feel, in my opinion, getting an idea and generating something _comparatively easier_ part compared to actually educating the market / users about what the idea is and what is the solution we have generated, we all see / are a part of so many good products which just had a steep learning curve and hence failed / didnt get accepted. ~~~ tabtab I'm curious of specific examples. Functional programming is possibly an example. It takes a good long time for many to become productive with it, and with some it will never click. It's hard to actually know if its a personal preference or something inherently better. After all, code is more for humans to read than it is for computers. ------ dwd James Altucher, who's posts used to appear frequently on HN maybe 6 or so years ago and had a few good ones about how he would write down every idea (10-20 a day) and his methods for validating them. I haven't read anything of his for a while, but he still seems to write a lot about ideas. [https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for- becomi...](https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an- idea-machine/) ------ whalesalad This feels appropriate: Hammock-driven development by Rich Hickey [https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc](https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc) ------ kart23 I can relate to that feeling. When you just figure it out, not even thinking about your problem, just doing something mundane and unrelated. But that stage of concentration and struggle is crucial. You need to care about the problem, have some investment in it. And it's so satisfying seeing the solution work, especially if you don't know the correctness 100%. ------ andrewstuart As DeBono says "Good ideas are obvious in hindsight". I have no shortage of ideas, most pretty ordinary, some very small number good. It's a very long journey though from good idea to release of a successful software product. Takes time, money, motivation, technical skill, not making big mistakes and that absolutely required ingredient, luck. ------ osullivj The article is about maths, but could equally apply to debugging or software design. The overworking a problem phenomenon described earlier in the article sounds like "analysis paralysis". ------ flyGuyOnTheSly >In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil. I noticed the same thing about my poker game back when I used to play religiously. Taking a week or two long break from playing invariably improved my game. None of my poker buddies understood the phenomena, but every single one of us experienced it. ------ pugworthy I'm curious if anyone has run into situation where being an "idea" person has been a negative at work. Sometimes there is the perception of ideation as a waste of time, or that the ideator (is that a word?) is one of those "whacky ideas" people. "Why are you going for walks, don't you have work to do?" ~~~ gitgud It can be frustrating if the _idea person_ is constantly talking about them, but doesn't act on any. It's easy to have ideas... validating/building them, that's the hard part ~~~ jbms Talking about them may be to see which ones resonate with people and are perhaps more valuable to do. Ideas people can be full of ideas and so they don't hold them too dearly because they'll have more ideas tomorrow. Sharing them's a way of testing and dismissing the majority that won't get traction.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Learning Heroku - arithmetic I'm beginning to learn Heroku for a side-project. What are the best resources out there? Are there any books you'd recommend? Any good blog posts, documentation etc.? Please share them all! ====== wait There are also some screencasts scattered around the Heroku blog. For example, I was just using their screencast on New Relic and the queue depth: [http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/3/8/heroku_casts_queue_...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/3/8/heroku_casts_queue_depth_new_relic/) I also recently used another screencast for setting up a Sinatra app. It's incredibly simple, go figure: <http://twilio.heroku.com/> Very helpful. The Heroku docs also have a lot of information about the Heroku specific stuff that you might want to read about (like dynos and the backlog). ~~~ arithmetic This is great! Thank you! ------ bbgm The Heroku docs are great. Michael Hartl's <http://www.railstutorial.org> Chapter 1.4 also covers that well ------ ryanto <http://docs.heroku.com/> \- I am sure you have seen this, but there is a ton of good info here.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Was Winter in Venture Capital Funding So Short? - mathattack https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-was-winter-in-venture-capital-funding-so-short-40138f426f39#.4bd84vr33 ====== tqkxzugoaupvwqr > It was only a year ago that many in the Venture Capital industry were > predicting that “winter was coming” and to be fair the author of this post > was chief amongst them. The author already mispredicted the future once. Why should his new analysis be trusted now? ~~~ mathattack An author who fesses up to a mistake is more credible than one who doubles down on it, or pretends that it didn't happen. Very few pundits are intellectually honest enough to look at their history. They make their name on being loud. Pundits (and VCs, journalists, doctors, etc) who do check their work become better for it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Let's parse - bgray http://briancarper.net/blog/lets-parse ====== mahmud Has nothing to do with "parsing", but otherwise an OK personal sentiment. I have seen this abuse of the word "parsing" yesterday as well. Seth Godin released a new ebook of motivational posters for the distraught marketer, and in it they called the act of distilling insight from data: "parsing". That's almost like calling surgery "internal haircut". ~~~ nopassrecover Parsing _is_ deriving semantic (I.e. Higher meta level) meaning from basic data. Just because there is a more technical and focused definition of the term does not mean this definition is more correct (though admittedly it is more important in a technical forum). Consider such terms as "rational", "cache" and "cookie". ~~~ mahmud Marketers, specially Godin, are hardly technology laymen. I know, because I am one. Marketing is a quantitative discipline now; they have enough vocabulary to describe the various stages and strategies for data processing that "parsing" is hardly an excusable synonym for "mining". Hell, they even have a rich terminology for _parsing_ itself; ask any marketer what "scraping" is and they will know exactly what you're talking about.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Put decent JavaScript documentation in your address bar - shawndumas http://blog.davidpadbury.com/2011/02/05/put-decent-js-docs-in-your-address-bar/ ====== strager DuckDuckGo: !mdc date, or !mdn date, or !js date. Woo!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google to invest $105,000 in Drupal - rob http://buytaert.net/google-to-invest-105000-usd-in-drupal ====== aneesh Investment is a slightly misleading term. It's more of a gift, since Google is presumably not taking any stake in Drupal as a result. Yes, Google isn't purely benevolent, and recruiting engineers is probably a goal of this program. But still, Google is not investing in Drupal; it's part of their recruitment budget, essentially.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mozilla ends deal with Yahoo and makes Google the default search engine - spacemanspiffy https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ ====== BHSPitMonkey Duplicate of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15695114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15695114)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PayPal Withdraws Plan for Charlotte Expansion - tshtf https://www.paypal.com/stories/us/paypal-withdraws-plan-for-charlotte-expansion ====== throwaway5752 I will be super interested in Red Hat. They threatened to leave for Atlanta in the past five years. This could not be further from their corporate values, and they have a highly distributed workforce and a big base of operations in Massachusetts and a fair number of people in the Bay Area. McCrory is a real idiot. The money in NC comes from the cities. They may have won a Pyrrhic victory in the gerrymandering, but now that the rural districts have this power to drive legislation, they are going to drive companies/money right out of Asheville (brewing, tourism), Charlotte (finance/finance tech), and Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill (software R&D and biotech). PayPal isn't the first news. NC lost a startup incubator that was going to start a local presence already. There is more to this, and it's going to end the governors' national political ambitions as well has harm the economy of NC for decades. edit: if it doesn't get overturned (in its entirety) immediately when the legislation gets back in session or through the courts, which is already in progress. ~~~ Grishnakh Well, the people of NC are getting exactly what they deserve. They voted for this. And spare me the whining about gerrymandering. The Governor is elected by everyone in the state; gerrymandering has no effect on that election. If this were really an issue of gerrymandering, we would have seen a crappy bill passed by the Legislature, and sent to the governor, and promptly vetoed because the governor more closely represents the average people in the state. That didn't happen. ~~~ JeremyNT There are two NCs. One is currently in power; the rural, poor, uneducated. The other is more modern. We live in cities and we want our homes to be good places to live for all people. You can view maps of this state and how it votes, and the places this law will negatively impact (places where modern industry might have otherwise come) did _not_ vote for this. There is a war here: rural versus urban. The rural counties are in control and they siphon off tax revenues from the cities. They strip the cities of any local autonomy (not just in this issue) both fiscally and socially. You can say "the people voted for this" but the people who voted for it are not negatively impacted by it (except that there will be less tax revenue in the cities they can siphon off of). I'd point out that California has had first hand experience in this regard as well - with Proposition 8. The happy ending to that story defied the will of the Californian people. Lament the laws of NC, but don't paint us all with the same brush. ~~~ Grishnakh The problem is that you're all part of the same State, so your votes are all equally counted (more or less; for Governor, they are). So I _have_ to paint you all with the same brush: that's just the way the system is set up. Sorry. I do realize (as should anyone) that not everyone in any given State is the same, and that every state has different regions where people think differently. This rural vs. urban fight isn't confined to NC, it's happening in _most_ states now. (Maybe not Wyoming or Montana...) But you had to realize before moving to NC that that state was like that. Like every Southern state which votes "red" in the Presidential elections, there's a large number of conservatives there, and the conservatives in the South tend to be even more religious than the average conservative. So I don't think it's quite fair to move to urban NC and then complain about the rural voters giving you shitty laws: there was never any indication that this state, overall, voted more progressively. If you want a state that really is more progressive overall, you have to go someplace like New York or Massachusetts or Connecticut or Washington (state). But of course, the cost of living isn't as low in places like that as it is in the South; that's the price you pay. ------ stblack This is the first time I have ever read news that reflects PayPal in a positive light. Never thought I would ever write these words: way to go, PayPal! ~~~ gist I view it as dangerous actually. That is corporations with money, power and lawyers determining and overriding voters in yet another way. Doesn't matter how you see this particular issue. The next time it could go in another direction. [1] [1] Live by the sword, die by the sword. ~~~ oliwarner Overriding? They're not writing the law here, they're going where the best laws are (or where the worst aren't). NC gets to keep its shitty laws, PayPal just won't be part of it. What's your alternative here? ~~~ gist No this is a bit different. They are publicly announcing it in a way that says "we don't approve and here is your punishment for taking this route". Not to mention what about the harm that comes to the citizens who would have held those jobs as well as the other economic impact of the decision? All to citizens who might not have had a say in choosing this outcome? I won't even get into the impact on stockholders who buy the stock to, in general, make money with their investments not for social issues. ~~~ Avenger42 > I won't even get into the impact on stockholders who buy the stock to, in > general, make money with their investments not for social issues. Several years ago, in response to a request that Apple commit to only agree to measures that wouldn't impact the bottom line, Tim Cook told an activist investor "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock." (It was in response to a question about Apple's environmental stance, but Tim likened it to a request to ignore accessibility issues.) If I disagree with Paypal's disagreement, I'm free to withdraw my investment and go to a company that will ignore social issues. ~~~ gist Apple is in a unique position to do that because of the cash that they are throwing off now and their popularity. That was not always the case with Apple (as you are aware) and also is not typically the case with your average corporation. When you are riding high there are many things you can get away with. > If I disagree with Paypal's disagreement, I'm free to withdraw my investment > and go to a company that will ignore social issues. If you are a long term investor and if the stock is not trading at a good point for you that may not be possible. Let's assume you have a large position in the stock and it has lost money since you bought it as only one example. ~~~ WJW You are confusing impossible with undesirable. You care about the money more than you care about the social values espoused by the company. I'm not saying that that is wrong, but if you feel incredibly strongly about something then taking the loss may be preferable to violating your core beliefs. ------ mc32 Great political move on PayPals part. And good social move to put pressure on the politics of NC. But... This is mostly for show. If they really meant it they would not do business in Uganda, DRC, Kazakhstan, etc. places where it's de jure illegal to be out as LGBT. So, while the side effect of their PR is good, it's more or less a side effect of PR for them. I'll believe their intentions when the move out of all places which have medieval anti LGBT laws. ~~~ caseysoftware Exactly, it's virtue signaling. This week, it's fashionable to attack and punish North Carolina. Next week, it will be somewhere else, probably also in the US. But Paypal will never cease business in Saudi Arabia or anywhere in the Muslim world where the government executes gay people. We shouldn't celebrate or support people "standing for their beliefs" when they're not actually risking anything. ~~~ daj40 I wouldn't say they're risking nothing. Sure, they're not shutting down existing offices and removing themselves from markets, but they probably walked away from money they wont get back. I'm sure there were legal fees, plus people they might have already begun to recruit. So yes, its not a large risk, but its not like it didn't come at a loss for them. ------ alistproducer2 Good, I hope more companies follow. I understand some people's reservations with how fast the cultural landscape is changing. The biggest problem I have is underhanded tactics, asinine euphemisms, and feigned naiveté by the people trying to pass these laws. If you truly feel you are on the right side, why try (so feebly) to hide your intentions? You are either a brave culture warrior fighting for what's right or you're a cowardly bigot. You can't be both. ------ iends Too bad the city of Charlotte was the city that passed the law in the first place. So you're taking a stand against NC by hurting Charlotte who was just screwed over by the state gov too. ~~~ Grishnakh Sounds like Charlotte needs to start some kind of war with the state government. Maybe they should secede and start a new state. ------ throwaway5752 I am bummed this went off the front page (presumably flagging/downvoting because of people's political disagreements). * this effects Y Combinator [https://ei.ncsu.edu/y-combinator/](https://ei.ncsu.edu/y-combinator/) * it effects Google Ventures: [http://recode.net/2016/04/01/google-ventures-north-carolina-...](http://recode.net/2016/04/01/google-ventures-north-carolina-hb2-ban/) * There are local incubators and less formal groups of local startups against it. ------ daj40 This was NC's Commerce Secretary's response. Not very well thought through. [http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2016/04/05/n-ccomme...](http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2016/04/05/n-ccommerce- secretary-doesnt-foresee-economic.html) ------ topbanana Great - if only PayPal cared as much for its customers as its employees ------ pklausler Some behavior is its own punishment. What did NC expect, an influx of tech businesses drawn to crazy hateful laws? ------ grej Is this the same PayPal that does business with more than 20 countries where homosexuality is illegal, including 5 where it's punishable by death? The NC law is bad but this from PayPal is hypocrisy of the highest order. ------ funkonaut So will PayPal shut down their office in India? Doubt it. ------ draw_down Elections have consequences, as they say. ------ joshuaheard The law requires men to use the men's room, and women to use the women's room. I don't see the problem with that. If it's really an issue, why can't PayPal just put a third bathroom in its facility for any gender? ~~~ natrius What is a man? ------ zeveb Absolutely shameful for PayPal. This is not about equality and inclusion, but rather about using government violence to force people to support that which they oppose. A black baker should not be required to bake a cake for the KKK; a homosexual florist should not be required to provide flowers to the Westboro Baptist Church; neither should a Christian baker or florist or software developer be forced to employ his art and skill in service of something which he opposes, and which opposes his belief system. ~~~ throwaway5752 That would be interesting if it were _in any way_ relevant to what HB2 were about. * it overturns a local law regarding who can use a bathroom, and removes the ability for anyone but the state to legislate that (takes power away from cities and counties) * it removes the ability of city and counties to enforce hiring standards on government contractors (minimum wage, discrimination practices, safety standards) in any way whatsoever. * it effectively undoes the state employment discrimination laws for all classes of employees. You have to file discrimination charges in federal courts (of which their are fewer, have higher filing fees, and shorter windows to file under federal law). Since you seem generally ignorant of the law, this is a good explanation :[http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics- government/ar...](http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics- government/article68401147.html) It is particularly deplorable that they demonized transsexuals to pass the less popular/otherwise more difficult to pass portions of the bill. It was clearly just a way of threatening people in primaries if they didn't run against the bill that was passed in a highly unusual emergency session. But... assuming you know all this now, what you propose is shameful. PayPal is under no obligation to 1) not have ethics/standards at a corporate level or 2) hire people and open facilities in a state it doesn't want to do business in. The bakers/florists can do whatever they want (and could before/after this bill), but they cannot benefit from the payroll taxes collected by NC from the PayPal employees that will now be hired elsewhere. Shame on you for either not thinking about your argument or being dishonest. It's an important issue and should be distracted from/intentionally obfuscated. ~~~ alistproducer2 It's pretty clear the OP is a troll, but at least we got your enlightening response from it. The law is even more distasteful than I knew. ~~~ Grishnakh Yeah, no kidding about the enlightening response. This guy has the worst username ever ("throwaway5752"); he's one of the best and most informative posters I've ever seen here. ~~~ throwaway5752 Thanks :) It was throwaway at first, but I've grown fond of it. ~~~ aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA Easily the worst username.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ecuadorean opposition activist email and Facebook hacked by the President - shahryc http://www.hastingstribune.com/apnewsbreak-email-leak-suggests-ecuador-spied-on-opposition/article_51b2966f-2891-5a62-a975-74773d10eb81.html ====== shahryc "Ecuadorean opposition activist Dr. Carlos Figueroa was being pursued by the state when his email and Facebook accounts were hacked. Several dozen of his colleagues have similarly had their digital lives violated. All blamed President Rafael Correa's government..."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Can intelligence be boosted by a simple task? For some… (latest n-back study) - jonmc12 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/06/13/can-intelligence-be-boosted-by-a-simple-task-for-some/ ====== jonmc12 Also on the latest n-back study: [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/a-simple- exercise-...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/a-simple-exercise-to- boost-iq/) [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230443230457637...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576371462612272884.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_11_1)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: The Jizz Quiz: NSFW Game – 1 Porn Movie Title, 3 Thumbnails. Which One? - rodstod http://fuky.tv/jizzquiz/ ====== rodstod Made this build on top of various Internet Porn API's. Every few hours 20+ new random games. Good answer? You can watch the clip. 7 questions.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Formal Security Analysis of the Signal Messaging Protocol (2017) [pdf] - godelmachine https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf ====== motohagiography Great paper, there goes my weekend. Initial impression is that theoretical place to look for attacks on an implementation would be simultaneously against the derivation components in the KDFs, (const0, 1), which appear to be the basis for iterating the chain keys to gen msg keys (other than the hmac of the previous one) - and on the derivation of a chains root key from (I think) the contents of that initial 3DH key agreement. If I were sabotaging an implementation, I would probably examine the impact of reducing the entropy of these components. Even then, you would have to precompute chains of message keys for each sender/recipient combination. Using the previous key HMAC in the KDF to increment message and chain is a really nice touch as it removes the dependency on a static counter or a universal GF counter seed across all client instances. Whether these intuitions are correct or not, what the protocol effectively does (very well) is force an attacker to target an individual users device to get message cleartext, as even if an implementor made a bunch of mistakes, the diversity of keys across senders and recipients makes passive mass surveillance impractical. IMHO, the most economical "mass," attack against it would be to identify its messages on the wire, then auto-exploit the endpoint devices, install screen grabbing spyware, and harvest that data. Hardly passive or scaleably undetectable. Nice. ------ badrabbit Am I correct in my understanding that a mitm attack that starts with the initial messages could work and the only way to prevent this is to verify the safety number out of band? ~~~ chimeracoder > Am I correct in my understanding that a mitm attack that starts with the > initial messages could work and the only way to prevent this is to verify > the safety number out of band? That's pretty much inherent to any E2E encrypted system. You have to have one of: 1) out-of-band verification 2) a trusted party for verifying the identities for the initial key exchange 3) a set of (multiple) trusted parties for verifying the identities for initial key exchange. (3) is what PGP does with the web-of-trust. It's conceptually secure, but the user experience has proven to be an utter disaster. For the form factor that Signal is addressing (mobile-only[0], intended to be used by people who expect the same level of user experience as WhatsApp provides), it's much better to go with a combination of (1) and (2). [0] yes, there's a desktop app, but it's not recommended, and you still need to do initial setup on a phone ------ Cieplak Why try to break the protocol, when you can just SSH into the endpoint and read the keys and plaintext directly? ------ egberts So there are 13 ratches, precompiled Rainbow Tables could be made to follow the decryption trail, no? ~~~ tialaramex Two things 1\. When mentioning a word you've heard in the hope that people think you have some clue what you're talking about you need to stay up to date. Rainbow Tables were 2008, this is 2018, try "Blockchain" instead. 2\. No. Rainbow Tables are an improved time-space tradeoff. For situations where a time-space tradeoff is almost good enough, Rainbow Tables can take you over the line. Where you aren't even close (as is the case for Signal), it doesn't matter. For the obsolete LM Hash a straight time-space attack needs maybe 50TB of disk to break it with 100% accuracy, which back in 2003 would have been really expensive. Rainbow Tables often shrank this to about 30GB, with < 1% penalty to recall and a modest additional time penalty, so it was made much cheaper. With a Signal ratchet you need a lot more space. Imagine all the disk space that exists in the world today. OK, now imagine that this space doubles every year somehow, and that keeps happening for the next 100 years, and you have all that disk space for your project of breaking a Signal connection. You are still nowhere close, even with some very generously estimated Rainbow Tables. ~~~ tptacek Egberts, what he's trying to say is that you can't use a rainbow table to break elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman or AES-256-CBC. ------ doomrobo Original edition: 2016 Extended edition (this one): 2017 ~~~ sctb Thanks! We've updated the title.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why I hate Facebook - browngeek http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/20/markets/thebuzz/?postversion=2009022012 ====== endtime Summary: Bearded gentleman "hates" Facebook because he doesn't think they'll be able to monetize their traffic, and doesn't like being shown ads. Not a very satisfying article. He doesn't really say anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Also, the ad thing? Now, I hate ads, I love Opera's content blocker, and I have to admit that Facebook is the only site that has ever shown me ads I want to click. I even bought something from a Facebook ad once! ~~~ calambrac Please never do that again, you'll only encourage them. Nobody (except you, I guess) wants to see or click on ads while they're reading up on their friends lives. And honestly, fb ads are pretty terribly awful. You've never seen ads you want to click on Google? Even when you're searching for things to buy? ~~~ endtime Facebook's ads aren't intrusive; the pictures are very small and the ads are way off on the side of the page (unless there are some I don't know about due to my content blocker). The only time I even notice them is when something interesting catches my eye. There are two reasons not to like ads: 1) They are intrusive/distracting; and 2) They show you stuff you don't care about. If Facebook can occasionally show me ads for things I might actually want, and if they can do so in a way that doesn't intrude on my browsing experience, kudos to them. Edit: Oh, forgot to answer your question. No, I don't think I've ever seen an ad on Google that interested me. I don't really use Google to find things to buy, though. ------ pg Strange. It's as if CNN decided they better get hip and make the site more bloggish, and then they copied the wrong things about blogging. ------ sjs382 Guy who (admittedly) doesn't use Facebook hates Facebook. News at 11. We've seen this before in other forms: Guy who (admittedly) doesn't use Twitter hates Twitter. News at 11. Guy who (admittedly) doesn't read blogs hates blogs. News at 11. _yawn_ ~~~ unalone I hate when hating popular things becomes vogue. It's one thing to rant about it in an enclosed area, but it's hardly news. ~~~ sjs382 I just think its funny that the "Guy who (admittedly) doesn't use" writes a column about his hate. ------ cookiecaper This article is bad and silly. :( I don't know why CNN is publishing some dude's inane diary. The author assumes that using Facebook and using Facebook obsessively are the same thing; he complains that after using a computer at work all day, he doesn't want to use one all night, and that he doesn't see the need to update everyone about the minor details in his life, and that these are why he detests Facebook. The author seemingly doesn't realize that Facebook does not force you to input every minor detail of your life nor does it force you to spend your entire evenings in the perusal of its pages. When one checks Facebook merely periodically, and rarely updates, there are times when it comes in mighty handy, and it's silly for this man to write the whole service off to everyone else because he doesn't believe that anyone can use Facebook moderately (for the record, I log in to check things about twice a week and update my profile about twice a year). Even less sensibly, the author also hates Facebook because he doesn't see an immediately obvious plan for profitability. This is a really weird reason to hate something that you hold no financial interest in (and the author clearly has none in Facebook). If dude thinks that Facebook's operations will continually yield negative cash flow, that's even more reason to _enjoy it while it lasts_. Seriously. ------ timcederman With a title like that, I thought it was going to be a Matt Maroon article.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Malcolm Gladwell is Underrated - zbravo https://medium.com/editors-picks/bacac83a1381 ====== tokenadult Unlike the author of the submitted article, I don't find Malcolm Gladwell's disclosure statement about possible about possible conflicts of interest[1] boring reading. In fact, I am finding it quite interesting, especially the quotation of the memo Michael Kinsley wrote when he was editor of _Slate._ I'm glad the author of the article kindly submitted here provided the link. [1] [http://gladwell.com/disclosure- statement/](http://gladwell.com/disclosure-statement/) ------ mathattack I'll read his book and take them for what they are... He combines memes that are just under the radar of public awareness, and brings them to the national discussion. Even if the 10,000 hour rule is not rigorously supported, it's worth reading Outliers because the ideas become part of the national conversation. His books are worth the 2 hour read. I'm not sure if I appreciate him because my expectations are modest, but I've never viewed his books as a waste of time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Y Combinator Website Technology Usage - garazy http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-usage/Y-Combinator ====== garazy This is just detection on the homepages of the sites found at yclist.com with the removal of the "dead" links as well as dead results that I found in the results from the person who put together this awesome spreadsheet - [https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIaZ...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIaZ30A#gid=0) Interesting to note in all of the incubators very few are using Microsoft ASP.NET/IIS over nginx/Apache setups.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What's new in Python 3.8 - dolftax https://deepsource.io/blog/python-3-8-whats-new/ ====== azhenley Relevant discussion from last week: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20463170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20463170)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Edward Snowden: ‘Governments can reduce our dignity to that of tagged animals’ - Libertatea http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/03/edward-snowden-assassination-complex-governments-tagged-animals-drone-warfare-whistleblower ====== progressive_dad I've often thought it would be an interesting experiment to drop cheap GPS units into the bags of the homeless and create an online tracking system. ~~~ thatcat sounds like the obama phone program [http://www.obamaphone.com/](http://www.obamaphone.com/) ------ datalist I do not like such comparisons, as it (like animals) leaves the impression that such actions are just fine with anybody besides humans. ~~~ blacksmith_tb Generally tagging animals is benevolent, though - scientists use RF tags to track animals in order to improve our understanding of population numbers, range, etc. So for me Snowden's analogy is a bit odd, if we tagged animals to make them easier for hunters to find, it would resonate more.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ken Kesey, the Art of Fiction No. 136 (1994) - dnetesn http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1830/the-art-of-fiction-no-136-ken-kesey ====== wutangson1 Ken Kesey- the author of The Great American Novel- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". ~~~ 8ig8 ...and the subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool- Aid_Acid_Te...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool- Aid_Acid_Test) ~~~ snikeris Kesey about this book, from the article: > I had no major problems with the book then, though I haven’t looked at it > since. When he was around us, he took no notes. I suppose he prides himself > on his good memory. His memory may be good, but it’s his memory and not > mine. ------ hurin (1994) tag? ~~~ dang Added.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Internet, Facebook blackout hits Algeria as protests gain strength - alphadoggs http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/021211-algeria-facebook-internet.html ====== SoftwareMaven "The protests and Internet crackdowns in these countries have revived talk in the United States of giving the president an Internet kill switch." I would hope that these events would be useful in convincing the people of the US that it is a bad idea to give the president a kill switch. The internet wasn't turned off in Egypt to help the Egyptian people, after all, and, if it is going down in Algeria, it isn't for their benefit, either. ~~~ mdemare By the time the situation in the U.S. deteriorates to that point, the president won't care about having legal authority to do something. It's as pointless as outlawing military coups. ~~~ Joakal You mean when the USA enters a state of emergency. Like they are currently in since 1995? [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/State_of_emer...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/State_of_emergency#United_States) ------ cristoperb That articles is light on details. Renesys, who did a great job reporting on what was happening with Egypt's networks, is keeping an eye on the situation. Hopefully they'll have some details tomorrow: <http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/02/watching-algeria.shtml> It sounds to me like Bouteflika might be volunteering to be next. edit: I should note, as the renesys link above, that all of Algeria's prefixes are still being advertised publicly, so if they are blocking the internet at this point it is some kind of internal filter and not an Egypt-style total cutoff. ------ nano81 I'm visiting Morocco in about 10 days. They seem relatively stable compared to Algeria, but I've seen reports of marches being organized there as well. It will be interesting. ------ abraham Google has not taken a hit so the internet as a whole does not seem to be blocked. [http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=US&l...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=US&l=WEBSEARCH&csd=1296977159770&ced=1297581959770) ------ redouane lies, im algerian and there is no blackout here	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Repo: A new Git client - cobychapple http://dmgctrl.com/repo/getting-started/ ====== fcoury Looks like it doesn't work with Mountain Lion, just fails to start... ~~~ cobychapple Works fine on Mountain Lion for me :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What is Serverless Computing? Your code, a slider bar, and your credit card - urza http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhatIsServerlessComputingExploringAzureFunctions.aspx ====== urza Recently there was a debate about serverless computing under some article on HN. I struggled to understand what does it mean as I never heard about amazon lambda before. This is very nice explanation for coders.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It - kjhughes http://gizmodo.com/intel-compute-stick-review-don-t-buy-it-1699377058 ====== nickysielicki The author did not seem to seriously consider that the use case of this is not intended to be an HTPC replacement / equivilant. Just because it follows the form factor of the chromecast and firestick does not mean that it needs to match that ease of use on a TV. I don't buy this review. The author doesn't seem to understand the niche that this device is best for. ~~~ deeviant Do you care to enlighten us on what niche this device is best for? ~~~ nickysielicki It's a chromebook that runs a full OS. What this device is good for: * Grandma and Grandpa need a PC to read their email, watch YouTube, and maybe make a christmas card in Word. They don't care about playing Dark Souls II because they're not 12 year olds. They just need a cheap computer that isn't their eMachine from 2005. This outperforms it. * I want a web terminal in my kitchen for reading recipes, or in my garage for watching YouTube tutorials and running some obscure software to program my car.[1] Why is it better than a chromebox/book? * You need / want software that isn't available in a browser. And with this device, you don't have to hack on the BIOS to boot another OS. Where this device is beaten: * I want to a dedicated device to stream Twitch or Netflix (Get a $30 set-top device meant to do graphics intensive things, not a general computer) [1]: [http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=175](http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=175) // my brother uses an old laptop for this currently. ~~~ thejrk No way would I give this to my Grandma. ------ irascible Meanwhile the 150$ Chromebook I bought is still working flawlessly after 2+ years. Best cheap ass lap top I've ever had. ------ Arzh > You would think a computer expressly designed to plug into a TV would have > an option for overscan correction, yes? You’d be wrong—the Compute Stick > doesn’t support that at all. I could have sworn that win8.1 has overscan correction. I don't really think that is a failing of the hardware, unless it's a failing in the graphics driver, which I don't think it is but I need to investigate further. The rest of the review is equally awful.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
California Wants You to Eat Roadkill in 2020 - clouddrover https://www.thedrive.com/news/31695/california-wants-you-to-eat-roadkill-in-2020 ====== chrisbennet In my Maine grade school circa 1970's we would eat moose road kill I know.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: In what order did the best and worst periods in your career come? - vonklaus edit: I like that a modest amount of people have upvotes this, and thank you to the people who did respond, but just a very quick post mortem on 2 tine periods would be very helpful.<p>If you are a founder, employee, student, unemployed whatever, what moment or timeframe was would you say:<p>"Fuck Yes, I am/am close to my definition of success"<p>and<p>"the sick to your stomach, cold sweat, vomit in a trash can before work, abject failure monent/s in your life"<p>what order did they come. ====== JoeAltmaier Never had a bad moment, really. Joined a Silicon Valley company out of college (Stanford) doing OS work which was nirvana. Came back to Iowa, did Neural Network simulators and then Java stock charting apps (yes there was a connection). Back to San Jose to design a Fibre Channel Switch product that we sold to Dell. Then an InfiniBand implementation that didn't go anywhere. Then consulting for big $$. Then another startup - web collaboration tools. I did the network and media management parts. Now consulting again. At all times I was employed for good money, happily married with 3 super- bright boys, involved in community and family. ~~~ HiroshiSan How did you build the habits to achieve all this? I'm currently in my 2nd out of 3 years in College studying Computer Engineering and I'm having difficulty just keeping up with my courses. ~~~ JoeAltmaier I programmed computers since I was 10. My brother bought a kit (Altair 8800) and that was it for me - I've been coding ever since. Computers have grown as I did. So its been my life, not my job. ------ Dav3xor The day I got georeferenced, shaded, 3d terrain working for a synthetic vision system, singlehanded, in bare OpenGL ES 2.0. Friend of mine at work took my picture seconds after I got it working, you can see the crazed look in my eye. [https://www.flickr.com/photos/24025582@N03/4150935582/in/dat...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/24025582@N03/4150935582/in/dateposted- public/) The worst day of my professional life was probably the day Derek Sivers canned me because, "I want to do your job myself." ~~~ vonklaus Stellar. Out of interest, how did Derek fare, Was it objectively a decent decision on his part or what? Also, looks good from the flickr img. ~~~ Dav3xor Oh man... Derek is an interesting guy. He hired me to do encoding and distribution -- both the business and software sides. I did ok with the software (except for ~2006 Ruby GC unknowingly causing me problems), but my business/people skills weren't up to it at the time. The business side was very very difficult though -- it was really difficult to get the retailers to take more music after the initial load. ------ vonklaus For me, the highest point was moving to LA from the east coast. so much possibility and opportunity. Had some great experiences and got an education, but ultimately lead me to now. "Partied" too much, went broke, ran up massive credit card debt and selfishly borrowed money from my parents. Had nothing to show for it, had to move back home and sell my car. However, I am finally starting to get my shit together and become employable again. I would have answered my own question from a professional standpoint, but have been perpetually unemployed. Now at least, I have a few small contracts ~1k lined up and am learning heaps. So hopefully for me the order is "worst" => 1 year to present, best => some time in the close future. ------ shortoncash I found the early part of my career to be horribly boring. I'd ace all these technical interviews that were hard and then get into jobs that weren't as interesting as the interviews. The high point of my career was when I quit a job and just started making money without an employer. I really don't think tech jobs pay well enough for what they demand. I read the descriptions of job ads now and just get disgusted. ------ shaftway Employee Worst moment: '00 tech bubble implosion. I had dropped out of college, was working for a major company (ask.com) and survived three rounds of layoffs. Watching FuckedCompany.com and seeing the rumors come true made me phyically ill. I saw friends lose their jobs and I rationalized it by telling myself they were the lower-skilled employees, not really adding value (that's true, they weren't). Then it was my turn to be cut. I couldn't help applying my rationalization to myself. It was bad for me. High point: I had a manager try to coerce me into signing an agreement to stay with the company for the next 2 years. I was interviewing at the time and quit a week later. When I gave him my resignation he said "I have a lot of friends in Silicon Valley, and you better stay at this job for a long time because it's the last one you're going to get." 2 years later I get an internal reference check email. I wanted to try to sub in for the on-site interview, but I'm glad I took the high road and just gave the hiring coordinator my history with him. ~~~ ahstilde I'm sorry I don't understand what an internal reference check is? And what trying to sub in means? ~~~ rahimnathwani Internal reference check: HR contacts you because a candidate worked at the same company as you before, and they want to know your opinion of them, if indeed you know them. 'Sub in': Act as a substitute for some else (in this case, another interviewer) if that person can't/won't make it. ~~~ shaftway bingo ------ lsiunsuex Low point - the day I was let go from a job I was at for 8 years. The company made the promise (we signed papers) that if the company ever sold, we'd get a (small) cut of it - which is the only reason i stayed so long. I reported directly to the owners (of a 750 employee company) and never once thought I'd get let go (this is a few years ago when the economy was doing worse then it is now and it was a financial company) Had I known I was so easily expendable - I'd have left years before to get some variety (I was a systems admin / programmer) High point - 6 months ago - got our first real corporate sponsor for my side project. Not enough to leave our day jobs, but enough to prove what we're doing isn't a waste of time and make life a bit nicer. responsibilities - anything and everything related to IT / Programming / DB Admin / Design / UI, etc... Side project started about a year before I got let go from that low point job - so about 4 years in the making. ~~~ rahimnathwani "The company made the promise (we signed papers) that if the company ever sold, we'd get a (small) cut of it - which is the only reason i stayed so long." Was this agreement only good for the time you were an employee? Was the company ever sold? ~~~ lsiunsuex Yes - only while employed - received documents i had to sign after termination saying it was voided. I drive by on occasion and still talk to a few people from there - never sold to my knowledge. ~~~ rahimnathwani "received documents i had to sign after termination saying it was voided" Why did you have to sign any documents after termination? What did you stand to gain by signing those documents (or stand to lose, by not signing them)? It's usual to sign a contract only if both sides get something out of it (whether money, a promise to do (or not do) something, ...). In many jurisdictions, a contract is void if this isn't the case: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration) ------ mrlyc My best period was when I got my first job as a programmer. My worst period is now. I am 61, have been unemployed for two years and I sometimes wonder if I've retired and just don't know it yet. ~~~ throwaway6497 Do you feel, that you are unfairly discriminated because you are older? It feels terrible to hear such things. If you are a programmer, it seems like you either have to move to management as you grow older or change careers to survive. Best case scenario for a programmer, of course is to make a ton of money so that you don't ever have to depend on employment to pay your bills. ------ mdip The best times in my career were shortly after I started out and right now. The worst were several parts in the middle. In the beginning I had started out at a telecom that was quite stable (around 1997). I was 19, it was my first "real job" with a paycheck good enough for me to live comfortably on my own. Within a year I went from lower-level support work to back-end support. The market my company was in was disrupted, causing bankruptcy in 2001. This was still a great time. When something like this happens, the company survives on the best members of its staff and I was that guy -- I quickly filled in gaps and started in software development (where my passion was anyway). Over time, this led to my worst periods. The demands for the job grew, but my salary and frequency of interesting projects did not (except for a brief period in 2008). Every 6 months the company shrank taking with it a majority of the great people I worked with (most leaving on their own due to the environment). Coming in to work every day amidst the terrible moral was taxing. I left that job last year though I wouldn't say that my work ethic has changed. I never let the bad things get me down -- ultimately, I have this job to support my family and that's motivation enough to do the best work I am capable of. But that has a cost. Every day I'd drag myself out of bed, start work, and when finished I'd be "spent". My performance at work didn't change, but I can now admit that my performance in everything outside of work suffered greatly to the extent of it being one of the reasons I am now divorced. I'm now back on track. At my new job I work with and for excellent people -- people who truly love the work and the company they work for. I fly out of bed at 5:00-5:30 AM excited to work (so excited, in fact, that I use it as motivation to get a morning run in ... "I can start working as soon as I eat breakfast and run around the block" ... it's weird to use "starting work" as a reward for doing something I don't want to do). It helps that this place is both a good fit for my skillset and a great place to expand it. I'm a passionate learner and need a job that keeps things interesting and new. My personal lesson in all of this is "If you can help it, don't keep a job that doesn't value you". If you work in software development today and you're any good (heck, even if your not from what I've seen) there are few good reasons to stay at a lousy employer for very long. I had no excuses. I stayed 3 more years than I should have, maybe more. Loss aversion and fear that I wouldn't find a job as good as I had were paralyzing for me. This was powerful enough to keep me from even getting my resume together and looking. Once I began looking, I discovered that despite the lousy local economy, there were endless choices available to me so I took the one that fit best with my circumstances. The end result is that I no longer finish the day "spent". I've managed -- using the 8 or so hours I can devote to it on the weekend -- to complete 5 personal projects, 3 released open-source. When I talk about what I do, those are the things I tend to mention first -- they are mine, and a direct result of mt overall happiness. ------ shortoncash I found the early part of my career to be horribly boring. I'd ace all these technical interviews that were hard and then get into jobs that weren't as interesting as the interviews. The high point of my career was when I quit a job and just started making money without an employer. I really don't think tech jobs pay well enough for what they demand. I read the descriptions of job ads now and just get disgusted.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hans Reiser Sentenced to 15-to-Life - mqt http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/29/BAIQ12KT15.DTL ====== compay I find it scary that an insane murderer was offered a mere 3 years in prison. ~~~ Hutzpah >> Hans and Nina Reiser met in her native Russia in 1998 and married a year later. more a naive american boy than an insane murderer. ~~~ chris_l insane for not taking the deal? ~~~ Hutzpah insane out of sorrows because he didn't get what he thought he would get. ------ michael_dorfman Someone ought to do a write-up from a game-theoretic perspective. He was offered a plea at 3 years, but instead gambled on an X% chance of 0 years, and a (100-X)% chance of 25 years. Where's the rational cutoff for X? ~~~ ovi256 22/25, 88%. Anymore and the expectation of the gamble would be higher than 3 years. ~~~ michael_dorfman OK, but that's assuming the years are equally weighted. Three years is an extended "vacation", but he'd already have been out by now. 25 years, on the other hand, means not seeing the outside until his kids are married.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon Route 53 Releases Auto Naming API for Service Name Management/Discovery - MayBeColin https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/12/amazon-route-53-releases-auto-naming-api-name-service-management ====== zimbatm This seems like a useful feature but it would be nice to have a better understanding of how it affects rate-limiting. Historically Route53 has been pretty useless for service discovery because of the heavy rate-limiting. Something around 5 updates per second, on the _whole account_ with a window of 60 seconds. I don't know if it's still the case but it used to be quite painful, especially when you need to scale up the number of instances quickly. ~~~ mark242 Why would these instances not be behind ELB? ~~~ zimbatm WebSocket. ELB adds latency and is harder to debug. ~~~ otterley Have you considered using NLBs instead? ~~~ zimbatm That was before NLBs. But yeah, NLBs might be a good choice now. ------ djb_hackernews It's not clear how this is different from what is currently possible. I'm not a route53 guru but can't you already a) create a subdomain microservice.mydomain.com b) create instances c) add the instances IP address to an A or AAAA record for the subdomain. Is it that they didn't have APIs for these operations and now they do? I know I'm missing something. ~~~ zackelan If I'm reading the underlying docs correctly, previously you would have called ChangeResourceRecordSets[0] with a quite verbose XML document. It looks like you'd need to first query for the existing RR set, modify it, then update it, and deal with potential race conditions if two service instances are starting concurrently. Technically possible, but quite a bit of complexity. Now with auto-naming, you create a service[1], then a service instance calls RegisterInstance[2] on start-up with a much simpler JSON payload. 0: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_ChangeResourceRecordSets.html) 1: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_autonaming_CreateService.html) 2: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_autonaming_RegisterInstance.html) ------ otterley Only 8 records per answer? I wonder why. Many of us run services comprising hundreds of endpoints or more. ~~~ setra Considering this is DNS there has been a historical limit of 512 bytes. Despite this not usually being a limitation now you are really pushing the ideal packet size with hundreds of answers each of which are multiple bytes. High chance of packets being dropped. ~~~ jsjohnst > Considering this is DNS there has been a historical limit of 512 bytes. Only with UDP transport, longer responses are told to requery via TCP. ~~~ colmmacc These days EDNS0 allows bigger UDP responses in many cases, which may mean some fragment re-assembly. Unfortunately there are a staggering number of networks and firewalls that don't open TCP 53, and also ones that don't permit UDP fragments. So if you want DNS to work reliably /everywhere/, sadly it's wise to stay below the 512 limit. ~~~ otterley We're talking about service discovery here. This is internal DNS traffic in AWS, where these issues to which you refer are nonexistent. ------ toomuchtodo For folks who are using Consul or Zookeeper, would you consider replacing service discovery with this? ~~~ otterley Not yet. I think this is just the first step towards an AWS-native service mesh solution. I suspect there will be future announcements over the coming months that continue to put all the pieces together.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
High-Speed Pool and Billiards Video Clips - Tomte http://billiards.colostate.edu/high_speed_videos/index.html ====== bradknowles These are awesome! And I’m seriously stoked to see that someone else has posted the link here! Yay, I’m not the only pool nut in HN!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Bureau – XCOM Declassified Launches for Mac OS X - kracalo http://www.ihash.eu/2013/12/bureau-xcom-declassified-launches-mac-os-x/ ====== velik_m I posted this link on hn a while ago: [http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/19/4614410/xcom- the-b...](http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/19/4614410/xcom-the-bureau- development-2006-2013), but it didn't get much traction. I thought it was a great example of software development done wrong.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Help us spread our site to your school - symbiotic If you want to skip the BS and see the final product here it is: http://www.collegeacb.com<p>So it’s been 4 months since we had our interview with the YC in Mountain View CA. It was a really exciting experience and although my partner and I were really upset that we didn’t get funded, I decided to continue developing the project. I remembered reading a bunch of posts after the interviews were over from many of the teams who did not make it. What I haven’t seen thus far is the story of what happened after the rejection, so here it is…<p>My co-founder and I were both seniors nearing the end of our college careers when we applied for YC. By the time we heard the amazing news that we had been invited to interview in Mountain View neither of us had even a potential job offer lined up for after graduation. We were pretty much banking on getting accepted.<p>After we were rejected we pretty much put the project on hold as we scrambled to find jobs. Luckily I was able to get a position as and my co-founder got accepted into the google summer of code program. My employers wanted me to start work at the beginning of June (only a few days after my graduation) but I knew that once I started work I would have no time to continue development on the potential startup. Luckily, I was able to push off my starting date for a month. At this point my co-founder was busy and wasn’t able to help with the programming. But where he failed to deliver in lines of code, he made up in sound advice and encouragement. I moved back home and coded away for the first 3 weeks of June. At that point I had a buggy version of what I had hoped to create, minus a few features, that I chose to drop/postpone. I started my “real” job early July and have been fixing all the bugs up until now.<p>So if you’re still reading at this point here is a description of the idea from my YC application:<p>“Our product is an anonymous social network geared towards the college community. The site is centered around a forum where students can vent their frustrations, talk about taboo subjects, or tell stories about their lives. However, as users interact with one another and post their thoughts to their community at large, they have the option to reveal their true identity or request the true identities (verified by University e-mail) to and from people whom they would like to reach out to in real life. It is our hope to connect our users not by their already established social identities, but by their common interests and character.”<p>PG and company were worried that it would be too difficult to spread our idea. We have observed an incredible viral effect when launching the site at a few test schools. Usually we are able to reach 50% or more of the university within 3-5 days. The problem is that the viral effect does not spread from school to school, only within the specific school. It requires a friend or other contact at the school in order to spread the word. That means that we need a friend or contact for each school we want to launch at.<p>So this is where I do the shameless plug for help. If there are any college students out there who had the attention span to get to this point then we would love it if you would help us spread our site to your school. We are willing to offer you 100% of our advertising profits (from your school) for the first 2 months for your help. Usually all that it takes is for you to create a facebook group and invite all of your friends, and maybe put up some fliers. Were expecting that our contact will make between $25 and $500, so its not a bad deal for the little amount of effort it takes.<p>If your interested in helping out please email me: aaron [at] collegeacb [dot] com<p>Here a link to the site if you want to check it out: http://www.collegeacb.com. I’d definitely love to hear feedback (especially on design and usability or other ways to spread to new schools). ====== Alex3917 What makes your service better than all the other startups offering anonymous conversations among college students? All of them have basically been proven to be fads, popular for a brief time among gay kids looking for hookups and people looking for vicodin, but then rapidly losing popularity after a few months. (I'm thinking specifically of boredat.net and juicycampus.com.) I'll admit I've never used the competing sites so I don't know much about them, but I also don't see much that differentiates your site either. ------ steveplace 1) I know it's probably overplayed, but this is one instance where a facebook app would definitely help your exposure. Having a random rant from your school on your wall every day would be interesting to me at least. 2) Lower your barrier to entry to allow people to post without logging in. Then offer to create an acct to see if anyone replies to your post. Also, there is no "register" button on the front page. 3) The img on top doesn't link back to home. Might want to change that. Some design comments: You have extra spacing on your login box. I'm on firefox with ABP. A random quote at the bottom of the forms would be nice. _And_ you could have a site-wide feed that transcended schools. That might help eliminate the isolation between colleges. A description/slogan to the right of your top_text might be helpful. Also, tighten up the copy when your explaining what your site is. You need an about and a privacy page on your footer. ------ symbiotic Thanks for all of the comments everyone. To address some of the issues: You don't have to log in to view posts, only to make them. This is one thing that I think guides the discussion in a more meaningful direction than boredat/juicycampus. We have community moderation, so that if your post is reported a couple times by other users then it is removed and your posting privileges are temporarily suspended. This helps cut down on the excessively slanderous posts that you see on juicycampus. As for it being a fad... At my school we had a live journal board and it has remained popular for at least 3 years now. I'm pretty convinced that if done right, we will be able to keep the attention of the student body. Not to mention that each year there's a whole new class of freshman who the idea may be completely new to. PS: My co-founder was on NPR talking about some of these issues. You can check it out here... [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9394823...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93948235) Click on the "Listen Now" button at the top (next to the red button) ------ rtf At UC Santa Cruz there is a Livejournal community with an end-of-quarter "post anonymous secrets" thread. Exactly what is described here, and very popular. I think other campus LJ communities did the same as well. I'm surprised at the critical attitudes -- that there are two competitors is reason for encouragement and indicates that the market you're targeting is no illusion. All you have to do is make your site better and better-known than the other guys. ------ eventhough Don't make me have to sign up or log in to see stuff. Let me into a school and let me read what's going on right away. Let me peruse your content. ~~~ netcan Not sure if I'd make that a rule. ------ dslydel I personally think this is a great idea. Reading through the posts, its obvious that this offers something that juicycampus does not, mainly, actual conversations. You might consider expanding tools, I notice you can private message people, which is cool, but it would be nice if there were a couple "special" reasons to come to your site other than what I just mentioned. ~~~ symbiotic We have been considering a "crush list" feature where students can add the email address of their crush to a private list. If two people add each other then their identities are revealed. The one thing we are worried about is the possibility for abuse (like someone adding everyone they know to see if there are any matches). ~~~ dslydel Not a terrible idea, I was trying to think of something that fits nicely into the gossip/anonymous board idea. Like maybe a post-secret type section. Errr... well, I'll think about it some more. ------ cbrinker It just doesn't seem like something that will catch on. It offers a single particular service that is probably only useful to some people a minimal number of times before it gets old and/or their question(s) is answered. Maybe it's just me personally, but I don't see a use for it really. ------ mstefff why would people want to talk to each other anonymously? instead of talking to my friends in person or on one of the other million social networks, I would want to speak to people I don't know anonymously? ~~~ Alex3917 The Harvard Crimson had a decent editorial explaining the appeal: <http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515684> ~~~ mstefff alls i know is that it's pretty lame if you spend your time doing that - just rambling on to no one about nothing. a community like this is completely different. ~~~ dslydel just because you don't do it, doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. How many people think it's silly to be posting on this site! ------ sharpshoot www.juicycampus.com and www.boredat.com already have this down. ~~~ hooande juicycampus isn't doing great according to compete and boredat is down. Seems like there is definitely still room in the market.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If I haven't succeeded by mid 20s, can I still be successful? - tristanperry http://www.quora.com/Success/If-I-havent-succeeded-in-my-mid-20s-could-I-be-successful-in-the-rest-of-my-life? ====== Skalman This was also posted just a few days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322798> ------ Tycho _"At age 28 Genghis Khan had nothing and was barely starting to get control over his own small tribe. He eventually ruled over the largest land empire in human history"_ Still though, basically just a ned. ------ Anjin Everytime that I have a thought like that I'm reminded of a poem by Anis Mojgani that really moves me <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAC3WXOOWE>. I just love the ending, "Already am. Always was, and I still have time to be."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Just compile some Scala code to get an interview - petervandijck http://blog.getgush.com/post/5132502649/hiring-great-scala-developers-or-happy-to-learn-for ====== raganwald To all the naysayers here: Please remember that the set of people who read HN is NOT representative of the set of people applying for programming jobs. Something that may seem trivial to the point of insulting here may be an effective way of filtering hundreds of really bad resumes out of the process. For example, the very act of installing and properly running "Hello World" in your language is probably going to cut your pile of submissions by 50% or more. It's a fizz-buzz filter. It isn't meant to try to filter the top 50% of HN readers from the bottom 50% of HN readers, or to identify the Scala programmers but reject anyone who solves the "puzzle" in Python or PHP, it's meant to filter out the folks who can't get anything to work in _any_ language. No big deal really, it's not like they're promising you a job if you solve the puzzle. They just want to cut the submissions down to a manageable number by eliminating the no-hopers. ~~~ petervandijck Indeed. We get resumes for PHP developers living in Bangladesh. We get resumes from outsourcing companies. And indeed: we're not promising you the job. Just promising you we'll talk to you on Skype. And finally: we've already gotten a few really good job applications with the attention this is getting :) And finally finally: yes, I messed up the blog post. ------ CodeMage I haven't run this, but the code seems to have an error. As far as I can tell "k.size" will return 19 and you need to subtract 20 from the ASCII code to get the real thing. Otherwise you would get gibberish. EDIT: I actually went and ran the thing, just to make sure I wasn't crazy. You definitely need to change "(c - k.size)" to "(c - k.size - 1)". ~~~ antiterra gWU`UAXYjT[ig\\\eBWca looks like 20 characters to me, why would k.size return 19? ~~~ CodeMage Because \\\ is an escape for \\. ------ jorgeortiz85 I think they meant: val k = """gWU`UAXYjT[ig\\eBWca""" Otherwise one backslash escapes the other and the string isn't the appropriate length. ~~~ CodeMage Duh. Now I feel stupid. There was obviously an "H" missing in the e-mail address. ------ Luyt Well, that took me only 5 minutes, a refreshing experience after getting a webstack up on OSX consisting of memcache, oursql, CherryPy and MySQL for the first time ever ;-) $ cd /usr/ports/lang/scala $ sudo make install clean $ rehash [fire up an editor and paste the code into test.scala] $ scalac test.scala $ scala ApplyTo [email protected] $ cat test.scala object ApplyTo extends Application { val k = "gWU`UAXYjT[ig\\\\eBWca" println(k map {c => (c - k.size).toChar toLower}) } Hmmm, do I get the job? ;-) Oh wait, I see I maybe should have saved the source code in ApplyTo.scala instead of test.scala. I really should look into Scala some day Real Soon Now, interesting that it runs on the JVM, I was messing around a bit with Clojure, which also runs on the JVM. I haven't worked with Java recently, but I used it some years ago and I remember the interesting FileStreamBufferedReader class hierarchy which you needed to read a simple file. My personal blog is mentioned in my profile. ------ jodrellblank "Hiring Great Scala Developers"? I translated your Scala into Python and got the answer, but I'm not a great Scala developer or even a good Python one. Seems quite a weak filter which risks flooding you with applications. But I do want to hear more about _Digital pictures: We are building a product to solve real problems_ Are you willing to say any more about it, or is it all secret until you launch? ~~~ blacksmythe >> Seems quite a weak filter That was only a small part of the filter: " Mention your github/HN/blog urls, if you have them. Mention personal projects. Mention startups. Mention open source." ------ abrenzel Am I a loser because I didn't feel like downloading a Scala compiler or translating this to a language I do have an interpreter for, so I just got the table from man ascii, counted the characters in the string, and then did the transformation by hand? ~~~ lanna If you don't feel like even downloading the Scala compiler, you definitively should not apply for a Scala developer position. ~~~ stanmancan In his defence he never asked if he should still apply, he simply asked if he was a loser for using an ascii table to figure it out instead of compiling :P Which no, that doesn't make you a loser. I think if anything it makes you part of the average HN population, hackers. You were curious, you thought of a solution to the problem presented, and you went ahead and figured it out. ------ glesperance For those like me that were too curious to wait for an interview to know more about this startup : <http://nextmontreal.com/gush/> ------ wcsun So, you are asking people to learn sbt? [http://code.google.com/p/simple-build- tool/wiki/BuildConfigu...](http://code.google.com/p/simple-build- tool/wiki/BuildConfiguration) ------ phoyd Why is the decoded mail address pointing to a server in china? ~~~ petervandijck Google apps. ------ petervandijck (The code got indeed messed up in the formatting. I put it in the HTML source.) ------ jpr And by trying to get the code to compile I'm yet again reminded why I don't like Scala: The compiler is slow as fuck to get started and the syntax of the language is such that whitespace appears to matter. No thanks. But I wish y'all good luck anyway. ------ sipefree >>> k = "gWU`UAXYjT[ig\\\eBWca" >>> ''.join([chr(ord(c) - len(k) - 1) for c in k]) '[email protected]' Can I get a job as a translator? ~~~ code_duck for($e="tdbmb.efwahvtir/dpn",$i=0;$i<strlen($e);$i++){$r=$e[$i];echo chr(ord($r)-1);} Uh... can I get a job doing PHP?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MongoDB connection overhead - stock_toaster http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/06/08/mongodb-connection-overhead/ ====== stock_toaster I thought the ulimit stack value was the _max_ stack a process could allocate (soft/hard limit), not the default size of the stack as the post seems to allude to. Is this just a case of mongo allocating too much onto the stack instead of onto the heap (malloc)? 10mb seems like a lot per connection!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war (2015) - chippy https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining ====== kleer001 B.S. Gray oversimplifies Pinker's argument and acts as an esteemed gate-keeper, though without the right credentials. You want to refute an 800 page book, you'll want to write more than 4500 words. However Gray's not entirely incorrect. Violence is complex and does increase and decrease randomly in the short term. But Pinker's point is the long term.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Intel Enhanced Privacy ID - sweis http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/PEC2011/presentations2011/brickell.pdf ====== sweis EPID is slated to ship in upcoming x86 architectures. It's interesting because it provides strong hardware-based authentication, but with support for of pseudoanonymity or anonymity.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A 3-D View of a Chart That Predicts the Economic Future: The Yield Curve (2015) - matt_the_bass https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/19/upshot/3d-yield-curve-economic-growth.html ====== matt_the_bass Yes, the article is out of date, but I thought the visualization was really cool!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write - diodorus https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/why-jewish-history-is-so-hard-to-write ====== DanAndersen Anyone interested in this topic should definitely check out Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which had a Dan-Carlin-style series of episodes about early modern Zionism and the origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: [http://www.martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new- jerusalem...](http://www.martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem/) It does a great job of being even-handed and emotionally connecting the listener with the motivations of the people in history. The history of the Jews (and the Jewish diaspora in particular) is fascinating. Between the typical opposing endpoints of assimilation/integration and separation there is this curious in-between state that seems both chaotic and stable over time -- the state of being "in a place" but not always being "of that place." The aforementioned podcast describes well the urge to assimilate or to remain distinct, positions held by both those in the Jewish community and those outside of it. The modern revival of the Hebrew language into a living tongue, both as a method of crystallizing identity and distinctiveness, is one example. Also interesting to consider how even small differences in "rules" between societies (like allowing usury or not, and to whom) leads to complex social consequences over time -- sort of a cellular automata analogy. Historical patterns of Jewish expulsion from various societies also make for interesting microcosms to understand tribe- based interactions: when the Jewish people were invited or allowed into a region, who was behind that change in policy and why? When pogroms or expulsions happened afterward, what were the causes and which segments of the population were the catalyst and why? It's an endlessly dynamic system that resists our efforts to create a simple static narrative -- and I suppose if anything it helps reveal that all of history is like that. ~~~ Pigo On a side note ...and I know I'll be sacrificing some points for this comment... I can't seem to get what everyone likes about Dan Carlin. I really enjoy history, and appreciate color commentary, but I've found the couple that I've heard didn't hold my interest very long. I started the Khans and one on the Romans, after hearing the non-stop praise on JRE. I really wanted to like it, which is why I was shocked that it seemed slow and light on the history despite being hours-long. This is just, like, my opinion, man. I'm not trying to talk bad about it, I've just been curious if anyone else was disappointed or knows a better episode I should check out. I'm fascinated by Genghis Khan though, so I'm not sure how another topic could be more intriguing. ~~~ DanAndersen The World War 1 episodes might be slightly more enjoyable, because I think those deal a bit more with "history" in the sense of events and blow-by-blow of what happened. But it may be that Dan Carlin's stuff just isn't your style. Carlin's approach tends to be more of a discussion where he uses the backdrop of a historical event to ponder some aspect of the human condition. There is also a lot of repetition and redundancy and rambling when he talks, so some of the appeal is people who just plain like the sound of Carlin's voice and enjoy hearing someone talk about something interesting. I tend to divide up my podcasts into mental categories of "those I listen to at normal speed" and "those I listen to at 1.5x or 2x speed." Carlin's stuff fits into the first category for me. Are there other history podcasts you've enjoyed? I think something like The History of Rome might be more of your style. ------ commandlinefan I've always been idly curious as to what happened in Israel (as in the geographic area) between, say, 35 A.D. and 1948. It seems, though, as if everybody who might have some insight there also has an agenda that makes any concrete information they might have to share indecipherable. ~~~ guelo Mostly 1,400 years of Muslim rule besides a short period of Catholic rule during the crusades. ~~~ jsharf Just separating it based on religion is weird. I feel like in a 1-sentence tl;dr you should at least mention the Ottoman empire from 1299-1923 (ended in WW1). ------ oyvey Wow amazing how the bound of religion and ethinicy can led people to survive thousands of years and still maintain an identity. ~~~ MichaelMoser123 Indeed, this fact this makes me proud to be a Jew. (A happy Passover to all whom it may concern). As a young boy my father used to take me to the Pergamon museum in Berlin - one major exhibit is the Babylonian street of processions (it dates to the neo-Babylonian empire) He used to say - here you see our heritage, we were around the show when Berlin (and all the other great capitals of the world) were still a swamp. ~~~ throwawayjewish I was born Jewish and was pretty religious for most of my life, but even when I was religious I never understood why we should be proud of this, or why this is a good thing in and of itself. I would be really interested if you could explain more your way of thinking about it, because to me when my father explains that we should be proud of having the same meal our ancestors did Xthousand years ago I don't feel impressed in the least. Instead, it just feels like a long streak of spreading a meme. People often get surprised when I tell them I don't consider myself Jewish anymore or that I don't intend to bring up any children I have Jewish. They often cite their surprise to the fact that Judaism has a long ancestral history. And I really just can't understand this frame of thinking that says Judaism is good because it's been going on for long. So I would be interested if you could explain why this impresses you :) ~~~ MichaelMoser123 Its a personal thing, I am not in a position to persuade anybody. I think that our present is explained by the context of the past, and that you can't understand the present without looking at the past. Now the past is a complex thing that can't be reduced to some simple formula, I still believe that you can still learn out of it, because human nature didn't change to much throughout the ages. Our reality may be quite different from what it used to be, but we are not essentially different from our ancestors, so we can still learn from them (hope that helps). Our experience is similar to the experience of our ancestors, we are part of the same process - it may be distant, but it is still relevant (in my opinion), the accumulated experience of past generations is of great value (because we tend to repeat the mistakes of the past) I know that I did repeat the same statement several times with variations, but it is as far as I can get. Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that's pretty impressive to me. ~~~ TangoTrotFox > " _Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that > 's pretty impressive to me._" This is dangerous logic, because you're not comparing it to anything. For instance one argument I've seen for the existence of a god was the fact that many constants and other seemingly 'magic numbers' of our universe are set just as is required to maintain life as we know it. The problem there is that assuming this is true, it's still meaningless since the only way we could ever come to observe this fact was if it was true. This observation is known as the anthropic principle [1]. Basically considering the merit or probability of something happening when you would be unable to observe it not happening is impossible. You could say you're comparing it against the failure of other groups, but this is probably somewhat disingenuous as I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that the oldest persistent ethnic group is likely some group within Africa neither you or I have ever heard of, and you'd probably be unlikely to praise their longevity and persistence in and of itself, even if it too was likely ripe with strife throughout time. [1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) ~~~ bradfordarner I'm not sure the Anthropic principle can be applied here. There is a broader data set than that which is relevant for that principle, based on my understanding. "Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs. It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic. Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context? ~~~ TangoTrotFox Who are you comparing Jews to? This is the point. I don't think there's any reasonable comparison. Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success in most 'host nations' leaves them without any other group to compare against. Powerless minority groups are certainly not a reasonable comparison. Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means, even more so when the shared genetic lineage also happens to provide a substantially higher IQ than average for the vast majority of the group. ~~~ davemel37 I was taking you seriously until you wrote this, "Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success" and this, "Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means" I really think there is an undertone to this perspective that is colored by a narrative that is false at best and possibly something much worse. I dont think there is any factual basis to claim Jews had great economic success or were of means outside of false narratives perpetuated by their enemies. Even if you can point to specific eras or individuals that had success, you certainly couldnt demonstrate it existed propritionately more so than others, or that it existed in all the periods where they were persecuted and oppressed... ~~~ TangoTrotFox Your post display an impressively poor knowledge of even the most basic facts of history, of which you then speak on authoritatively. And then you try to attack my character based on your lack of knowledge. Dear sir, I can only applaud your narcissism. It is impressive! [https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and- moneylend...](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and-moneylending- in-judaism/) ~~~ davemel37 How does this article support your claim that Jews survived because they "had means"??? Showing a disproportionate amount of jews in finance in the last 500 years in a few limited instances...in no way shape or form speaks to the means of the vast majority of Jews nor does it to speak to 3000 years of persecution. You wrote a previous comment about jews distinctive physical features and now you speak of their means and share an article about rotschild and than view a Jew who calls you out on your false narrative a narcissist?! Ascribing a few peoples wealth on a group of millions is the very definition of anti-semitism... I refrained from calling you out sooner to try to give you the benefit of the doubt...but the fact is the wealth on one person or a few people lending money hardly reflects on the entire Jewish people...it is a dangerous stereotype not based on actual facts...just a stereotype based on a fraction of a fraction of the population... Your belief that jews arent poor or oppressed minorities without means throughtout history is patently false! Even if you can point to a few exceptions to the rules. ~~~ TangoTrotFox [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/banking-and- bankers](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/banking-and-bankers) Or you can search for literally any source. The extreme success of the Jewish communities throughout time is extremely well documented. This success, paired with insularity, was often one of the big motivations for their oppression throughout history. Expulsions would generally involve direct or indirect confiscation of material possessions. Between the 13th and 16th century Jews were expelled some 15+ times, in some cases multiple times from the same places (such as France) where they would be expelled, invited as their absence proved problematic, expelled again, and so on. The reason Jews have distinctive features is because today about 75% of Jews are Ashkenazi - a very distinctive group with a variety of distinct features, both physical and nonphysical. For instance Ahskenazi individuals show an average IQ average nearly a standard deviation above the mean. The reason for the genetic relationship is that historically Judaism was far more insular than it is even today. For instance interfaith marriages is an extremely new phenomena. Pair a religion that makes it extremely difficult to join (and was only more difficult in the past) with extreme restrictions on things like marriage, and you end up with strong genetic similarity. It's not dissimilar, in effect, from geographic isolation which yielded most distinctive traits of various groups today. ------ olivermarks I read Adam Kirch's review 'Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write'. Perhaps it is because no one can ever seem to agree on what 'Jewish' actually is, as evidenced by some of the discussion threads here... ~~~ throwawayjewis2 Fair point. I guess in that sense it's like "big data" or "blockchain", both concepts that I'm sure exist but I'm not quite sure how to define. Anecdote: I was once in a conversation with a fellow who was a rabbi and this topic came up. He said, "well...the way I think of it is, if you can think of ten characteristics that are 'Jewish', anyone who has any six of them can claim the title." I guess that's one way to be flexible. ------ aaron-lebo Schama who the article discusses produced a similar series that's on prime: [https://www.amazon.com/In-the- Beginning/dp/B00J97O91Q/](https://www.amazon.com/In-the- Beginning/dp/B00J97O91Q/) ~~~ dizzy3gg If you're UK based then it's on iPlayer: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0398rkj/the-story- of-...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0398rkj/the-story-of-the- jews-1-in-the-beginning) I actually started watching last night after never really been taught (or remember being taught) much about them. ------ golemiprague There are much earlier archaeological artefacts including stone writing from much earlier than 457 B.C. This is the time after the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians who dispersed the Jews around the area. Since then there were Jewish communities all over the middle east including in Egypt. I don't understand why the writer of the article is so baffled about this. Just as an example, the Merneptah Stele is the first to mention the name Israel and is dated to 1203 BC. Ahab and Omri the Israeli biblical kings are mentioned in the Kurkh Monoliths and the Mesha Stele from 850 BC so to start to research Jews just from 457 BC looks a bit too late in the game. ~~~ jrumbut From other things I've seen from Schama I think he starts the book there because he is fascinated with the episode, not because he thinks it's the first solid evidence of Jews. He sees Elephantine as countering widely held beliefs about ancient Jewish life (that it was all in Israel, homogenous, etc), containing interesting analogues to the present day, and being an altogether interesting story. It can be more difficult to spin a good yarn from the older material. ------ blah389405 how is this relevant to hacker news? ~~~ mfringel To the simple son, you will say "Because enough people upvoted it." ~~~ googlemike For those curious: This is a passover reference. ------ Zenst History is not hard to write, it is just hard for many to read it correctly. ~~~ zpatel great point..	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What's your development workflow? - thinkingserious ====== taylorlapeyre I'm a web developer. I open an editor, a browser window, and a terminal. Then I write some code, testing it in the browser and checking the logs in terminal when I need to. I resize the browser every now and then to make sure that what I'm making is acceptably responsive. I use the browser's developer tools quite a lot to inspect elements and interact with javascript directly. After I make some progress, I make a commit with git by using git add -p and git commit. Then I push those changes to GitHub on a branch that has a Pull Request waiting. After I have completed whatever I'm working on, I wait for a code review on that thing. As I'm waiting, I begin working on something else. After I address any comments, I merge the pull request and continue what I was working on before. I use Atom, Google Chrome, and Terminal.app. ------ Jean-Philipe I have vim and some terminals on a tmux session, and a browser. Change some back-end code and have the server reloaded automatically or run some tests to verify the code works. Front-end there's an auto-refresh. Sometimes I try stuff directly on the debug console of the chromium browser, like CSS and JS, and once I've figured something out, I write it into the file. I wish vim could directly talk to the browser like emacs can, or lighttable, AFAIK (haven't tried those yet). But I'm stuck on vim forever because of the normal mode key bindings. Other than that I use git and for some projects Trello for colaboration. ------ dllthomas For my day job, where I'm doing C development, I have my Makefile set to run tests after building, and I set up my tests to print errors in the "file:line: message" format vim looks for (with as many hopefully-relevant lines as I can manage). Key bindings for :make, :cnext, :cprev, and ":make search PATTERN='\<^R^W\>'<Cr>" (where I have a rule in my makefile to grep through project-relevant files) - any build errors or testing errors or search results show up in my quickfix buffer, and I can step through them or :copen and search or filter within the results. ------ thinkingserious Here is my checklist: [http://sendgrid.com/blog/programming-style-guide- checklist](http://sendgrid.com/blog/programming-style-guide-checklist)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Simplified BER MetaOCaml N102, for OCaml 4.02.1 - a0 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fa.caml/x4P5sWWrn5Q ====== saidajigumi For anyone else who wasn't previously familiar with MetaOCaml, [1] provides an overview and relevant details of this implementation. E.g.: _BER MetaOCaml is a conservative extension of OCaml for ``writing programs that generate programs ''. BER MetaOCaml adds to OCaml the type of code values (denoting ``program code'', or future-stage computations), and two basic constructs to build them: quoting and splicing. The generated code can be printed, stored in a file -- or compiled and linked-back to the running program, thus implementing run-time code optimization. A well-typed BER MetaOCaml program generates only well-scoped and well-typed programs: The generated code shall compile without type errors. The generated code may run in the future but it is type checked now._ The bit about generating only well-scoped, well-typed programs is pretty interesting! [1] [http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html](http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft Silverlight to back Ruby, Python in browser - edw519 http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/06/Microsoft-Silverlight-to-back-Ruby-Python-in-browser_1.html ====== neovive This is a very strategic and clever move by Microsoft to try to leverage the strong developer communities of Ruby and Python in order to gain grassroots support for Silverlight. If PHP support was also added, as discussed, it would be especially interesting.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
JavaScript: The Important Parts - benlakey http://benlakey.com/2013/05/26/javascript-the-important-parts/ ====== mattchamb A nice article, I have been trying to learn more about javascript recently, and the section about "this" reminded me about a nice moment I had while tring to learn. I used to get confused about how the "this" binding worked in javascript. My moment of clarity came when I tried to do something like this: someObject.someFunc = anotherObject.someOtherFunc; Doing this kind of thing didnt work with the conceptual model of "this" I had from my years of C# where functions are bound to objects. Then I realised that ofcourse the object referred to by "this" would have to change, how else would it be implemented when you have first-class functions that can be passed around freely without a lexically captured "this"? Now I see as "this" more of an attempt to keep familiar syntax than something that fits with the semantics of the language. It really seems more of a call- context. ------ tshadwell That section on Javascript security is pretty brief, I'd like to add some others from websites that I've tested: * Take document.location.href and document.location.hash as unsanitised input especially if they're affecting DOM. * Avoid using innerHTML or jQuery's .append(), they slow down the page with reflow and make it easier to inject code into the page. * Always write regex to match the minimum it needs to; Javascript code is visible to the client and therefore anyone who wishes to find and abuse exploits, completely avoiding iterative testing to determine regexes that generate links and other code. * Remember that because jQuery has a lot of syntactic sugar, doing $("#bac" + myString) can do a lot more than just select from a set of similarly id'd nodes. ------ inopinatus Having never particularly enjoyed working with JavaScript, this gave me a chuckle: "‘JavaScript: The Good Parts‘ ... the book is thin". ~~~ jk4930 It's really thin: [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uPZ2b48viTk/TflhMaivRHI/AAAAAAAABC...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uPZ2b48viTk/TflhMaivRHI/AAAAAAAABC8/dYV8_fPjFTs/s1600/JavaScript- the-good-parts.jpg) ------ mikegirouard I left this comment in the article, but it hasn't shown up yet. I don't want to nitpick but DOM is just an API (of W3 origins, which also makes it a standard). "The DOM is not a JavaScript concept. It is an object model for web browsers" The first part is correct, but the second is a little off. You might want to say "used _by_ web browsers..." or something along those lines. ~~~ mtdewcmu This is from Douglas Crockford's talk, "An Inconvenient API - The Theory of the DOM," which is perhaps the best title ever for a programming lecture. The way he adapted Al Gore's cover art is so inspired, it's just sheer perfection. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y0U-2qJMs> ------ kyllo eval is not only dangerous, it is also a very expensive operation. If you put eval inside a for loop you are going to have a very slow program. ~~~ weareconvo And if you do DOM manipulation inside an eval... god help you. ------ opinali Maybe we should also brand Mozilla's asm.js as "JavaScript: The Fast Parts". ------ laureny The question burning everyone's lips is: "What's the intersection between the Javascript 'Important' and 'Good' parts? ------ cburgmer Why does Object.prototype keep making it on those lists? Hands up please if you have used inheritance in JS (or any language) lately. ~~~ Torn _raises hand_. I'm sure most people building frontend applications in js with MVC patterns are using inheritance. People doing OO-style inheritance in js probably want to go down the ES5 Object.create route, rather than reassigning prototypes. [http://uxebu.com/blog/2011/02/23/object-based-inheritance- fo...](http://uxebu.com/blog/2011/02/23/object-based-inheritance-for- ecmascript-5/) ------ tekacs 'All of this means that it doesn’t matter what an object’s lineage is, only what it can do at the moment.' This made me chuckle for reasons entirely unrelated to JavaScript and prototypal inheritance. :) ------ saidulu401 Nice article :) ~~~ ashok_mopidevi Javascript closures and scope of objects are important	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Computer Programme and Micro Live - timthorn http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p031v2bg ====== brudgers UK viewable only due to BBC rights distribution. Much of it available on YouTube. ~~~ brudgers Episodes: 1\. It's Happening Now: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc) 2\. Getting Down to Basic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYetKjaVl6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYetKjaVl6k) 3\. Micro Live [with visit to Alan Turing play]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR08vi64GDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR08vi64GDQ) 4\. Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX01PUVyvHU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX01PUVyvHU) A very good look at changing markets. 5\. -- Compilation 6\. Blocked by YouTube.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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