Snapjoy (YC S11) unveils Flickraft, one-click migration for Flickr users - jpren
http://www.flickraft.com
======
sriramk
[disclaimer: see my profile for my involvement with Yahoo, I have no
connection with this particular incident/Flickr/etc]

This and the TC post annoy me because Snapjoy (or perhaps the tech press) is
trying to spin this into some underdog vs evil big company story when it
isn't.

For example, when Snapjoy says "We tried our best to stay within Flickr’s API
limits, but the overwhelmingly positive response has exceeded our
expectations.", what they are really saying is that they didn't implement rate
limiting correctly.

And when they say "We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost
immediately after we reached the limit.", what they're saying is that Flickr
actually did implement said limiting correctly (don't have personal knowledge,
assume that's what happened).

I also like the spin from the tech press on this somehow meaning that your
photos are locked into Flickr when Snapjoy has neither an API or any other
mechanism to get photos out - all I see is a promise of a future feature to
sync to Dropbox/S3.

I completely understand the PR game being played here but I wish it needn't be
this way. Especially since Snapjoy seems to be a very slick product from a
very talented team.

And all this ignoring the issues with the name - I'm not sure how it is ok to
use a derivative of your competitor's name to build something designed to take
users away from them.

------
cfinke
With Flickr, I get unlimited storage for $24/year. I'm probably nearing 100GB
of photos there, so in order to store those same photos with Snapjoy, it would
cost me $120/year. What's the extra value that I get for an additional
$100/year?

And does Snapjoy integrate with iPhoto? I use Flickrfriend for iPhoto now to
sync Flickr and iPhoto, but if I don't have a way to sync Snapjoy and iPhoto,
it's a non-starter.

~~~
subpixel
I don't think FlickrFriend is available or supported anymore:
<http://unpaq.com/software/flickrfriend/>

~~~
cfinke
That's sad. At least the copy I have still works.

------
ssharp
This is tacky on two levels:

1) it just attacks flickr without really giving any reason. Flickr is a
sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is
going to outlast Flickr?

2) Using the image of a sinking cruise ship weeks after a cruise ship wreck
killed at least 17 people. I'm not easily offended, and this didn't personally
offend me, but it's pretty much the first thing I thought of when I saw a
drawing of a sinking cruise ship. Why run the risk?

~~~
mvanveen
> Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe
> Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?

      s/Flickr/del\.icio\.us/g
      s/SnapJoy/pinboard/g

For the regex-impaired, swap Flickr with delicious and Snapjoy with pinboard.

When I found out that del.icio.us was falling apart, the discovery of pinboard
was a remarkable discovery! The founder posted a link to a migration tool that
allowed me painlessly keep thousands of my old bookmarks. Just by itself that
was reason enough for me to support them.

I can't speak to the long term viability of pinboard or SnapJoy, but that's
true of a lot of web services, frankly. A few years ago you would've seemed
crazy for calling Flickr a "sinking ship."

------
zalew
I fail to see how Flickr is a 'sinking ship'.

btw to all the photo app creators out there: no API - no go.

~~~
masukomi
Yeah, I have to agree on both points. I feel like I missed a memo about Flickr
going down. AFAIK Flickr isn't even leaking, never-mind sinking... Am I wrong?
Have I missed something?

And API is one of the things that makes Flickr great, Snapjoy may have a sweet
web interface but that's not enough. I'm guessing from the fact that they have
a GitHub account that they'll release an API when the code has settled down a
bit more internally, so that's probably just a short-term issue.

The pricing though... the pricing isn't even remotely comparable. You gotta
give me a damn good reason to spend that much more money on a competing tool
that basically just hosts my images and makes them easily viewable.

~~~
shashashasha
Having been around conversations with some of the old Flickr people, I have to
disagree. It's definitely sinking, and has been slowly gutted over the past
few years. This is only the most recent piece of news:
<http://nolancaudill.com/2012/01/30/the-front-line/>

All of the core Flickr people have left, and some (like Aaron Straup Cope) are
starting to build their own: <http://straup.github.com/parallel-flickr/>
[http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2011/10/14/pixelspace/#para...](http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2011/10/14/pixelspace/#parallel-
flickr)

~~~
zalew
> It's definitely sinking

opinion != fact

existing alternatives != original sinking

I'm not a fan of Yahoo either, but all I hear is that is sinking because
somebody got fired, or it's sinking because someone on a blog wrote that he
doesn't like it no more.

So what there's pararell or whatever other apps to backup or sync? I've
started making sth similar for django <http://zalew.net/2012/01/11/django-
flickr/> and what that has to do with Flickr failing?

BTW remember 'dying blog platforms' by Posterous?

~~~
there
It's like a bank run; rumor spreads that Flickr is dying, so everyone pulls
their photos and stops paying for pro accounts because they think Flickr is
dying, causing Flickr to die.

Flickr is a huge site and they're not going to suddenly stop working one day.
If they do decide to shut down, they're going to give users plenty of notice
and probably offer easy ways to export photos and metadata. Until that
happens, my photos are staying on Flickr and I'll continue to view my friends'
photos on Flickr.

------
underwater
This seems petty and a bit desperate.

The site is also broken. I can't click on the logo to find out more about
Snapjoy. Pass.

------
swalsh
It would be nice if I could also rescue some pictures from facebook too.
Double brownie points if your software can automatically remove duplicates in
the process.

~~~
brlewis
Snapjoy automatically organizes using metadata, which Facebook strips out.
That plus recompression make it difficult to detect duplicates from Facebook.

------
masnick
This is great -- I've been looking for a way to get my photos off Flickr
before my pro account expires this May. Snapjoy sucked in 2200 photos in just
a few minutes.

(The only glitch was when I clicked "Get Started Now" on the flickraft site,
it just redirected me to snapjoy.com. I had to manually go into my settings
and connect my Flickr account, which triggered the import automagically.)

------
jakequist
Snapjoy is awesome. I've been using it for a few months and have never looked
back.

~~~
subpixel
I agree - Snapjoy is fast, beautiful, and simple. They can win by doing less
than the competition. Personally, I can't take the bloat and feature-creep
that has turned Flickr into a giant hassle. Just getting your photos into
Flickr has been a hurdle from day one, with no official app for iPhoto.

That's not to say there aren't Snapjoy features I want to see: the ability to
create/share collections that span multiple dates/moments is at the top of the
list.

But as soon as I started using Snapjoy I knew it had massive potential. I
especially love the default timeline view, it puts just enough structure
around your photos for discoverability, etc.

EDIT: I would love to be able to pay annually and save, though. $15 month is a
lot of coin for a non-business app.

------
mlapida
On the surface I love this idea. Flickr has been stagnant for years and
starting to worry me. I don't mind paying for a photo sharing service but the
market sure is saturated. I'll be looking for a little more than a pretty,
overpriced UI over Amazon's S3.

Wouldn't it be great if a company came around and offered front ends for S3.
One for photo sharing, one for docs. You could switch them out like skins.
Your data is in one place and never moves. If a competitor comes along with a
better front-end, you could change to them.

That would also be nice, because then you could have one monthly fee for all
of you online storage needs. Let's be honest, they're all hosted by Amazon
anyway.

~~~
subpixel
openphoto.me is what you're describing

~~~
mlapida
giving it a whirl now. thanks!

------
aresant
Snapfish, DropBox, and several of the other large photo / filing sharing sites
are essentially a UI for Amazon's S3 cloud.

I pay for dropbox primarily to store family photos & videos.

In fact the stuff I need to back-up that fits outside that category would fit
in a free, or lower priced dropbox plan.

I would switch based on price alone since photos are fairly static, non-
changing, and the #1 concern is that they survive a hard disk crash.

I wonder when Amazon just decides to go and own this market by offering a
better photo UI, or buys somebody to do it for them.

Amazon has already shown they have no fear of running over profitable customer
segments (eg they launched Prime Video while also counting NetFlix as a huge
client).

~~~
justincormack
More interested in something like open photo that is just forkable software
and I pay for S3 <http://theopenphotoproject.org/>

~~~
aaronpk
Agreed! I really like the open photo project. I started making my own photo
backup site as well: <https://github.com/aaronpk/Flickr-Archiver> I suspect
we'll see many more attempts at building a solid photo archiving site before
Flickr completely disappears.

------
codenerdz
At least Flickr has an API if you want to pull your data out.

Snapjoy doesnt :)

------
snowmaker
I love the infographic and the one-sentence pitch. It's funny, it's totally
clear why I should use it, and I'll never forget it.

People here are saying that they're jumping the gun and Flickr isn't sinking
yet. Maybe that's true. But great marketing can become a self-fulfilling
prophecy, and that's what this looks like to me.

------
alagu
We built UnifyPhotos - <http://export.goyaka.com> a month back, which moved
photos from Flickr to Facebook. We moved more than 850k photos.

I can say that the API limiting here is an implementation issue. Instead of
querying information about each photo, if you could pass meta information
(date_upload,geo,date_taken,icon_server,original_format,
url_sq,url_o,url_m,url_b,description) while doing photosets.getPhotos, you
don't have to query for each photo.

------
tlrobinson
Does Snapjoy work well with photo organization apps like Aperture?

I've hit the 100GB limit on Dropbox, and I'd like to be able to view albums on
the web.

------
dy
I guess I'm starting to get jaded... I remember when Flickr was the liferaft
of Yahoo Photos and then even before that when Yahoo Photos was the liferaft
of Kodak Galleries.

I still don't have a photo storage solution that I'm happy with - but I'm
hoping that in 10 years or so Google will have indexed the three or four hard
drives in my storage unit and placed them into Picasa X.

------
stuntmouse
"5GB's" should be "5GBs".

~~~
antidaily
Hate those kind of copywriting error's.

~~~
nateberkopec
Trolling is a art.

------
ramanujam
UnifyPhotos <http://export.goyaka.com> lets you move your Flickr photos to
Facebook.

Interesting note mentioned there - "I love snapjoy's UI. But they don't allow
import from flickr. Also, social circle in Snapjoy is something I have to
build. Facebook fits the bill."

------
mvanveen
This is not unprecedented. We did this years ago with Zooomr. There was a tech
crunch post about it: [http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/16/why-is-flickr-afraid-
of-zoo...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/16/why-is-flickr-afraid-of-zoomr/)

Many Flickr users were not happy when they discovered that the ability to
migrate their accounts was considered "burn[ing] bandwidth and CPU cycles."

My co-founder, Kris, was quoted with the following:

> Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that
> Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it
> easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere

Props to Snapjoy for creating an awesome product and giving people freedom. I
hope that you guys get your license key back!

~~~
lurker17
Snapjoy doesn't give people freedom, it just takes over from Flickr. Flickr
gives people more freedom, by letting users download their files.

------
antidaily
Annnnnd Flickr just blocked their API key.
<https://twitter.com/#!/garrytan/status/167030905821605888>

~~~
zalew
because they hit their query per hour limits.

------
AznHisoka
I think you might be violating some trademarks with that name...

~~~
artursapek
I'm actually curious if this is a violation. Does anyone know? The font is
definitely different and the F is even capitalized on the boat graphic, though
the colors are the same and the name "flickr" is in there. It makes me think
of those cereal brands that try to make you think they're the popular brand by
dancing as closely as trademark law lets them.

~~~
arctangent
Back in the day I was the first person to create a service using the Flickr
API, so that the Flickr folks could show off their API when they launched. I
called my demo app reviewr.com [1]

My original choice of colour scheme was (deliberately) very close to what
Flickr was using at the time, and Stewart Butterfield (who ran the show back
then) asked me to change the colours a bit.

I don't recall Stewart having a problem with me dropping a vowel in the domain
name, even though at the time this was a novel domain hack on the part of
Flickr.

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20040406000559/http://reviewr.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040406000559/http://reviewr.com/faq.php)

~~~
artursapek
Just saw this. Interesting. You were working as an ally though, unlike the
situation here :P

------
zeroboy
Sorry. I'm not leaving Flickr. It's one of my favorite spots on the Internet.
I love the community aspect of the site and the countless quality (and not so
quality) Creative Commons contributions.

I have spent more hours than I'd care to admit sifting through photos,
admiring people's work, reading comments - all the while listening to trip hop
or whatever is on SOMAFM.

It's one of the best parts of website design: finding the perfect image. I'm
not going anywhere.

~~~
bigiain
"I love the community aspect of the site … "

This. 1000 times this. I _so_ often hear geeks saying "It's easy to leave
Flickr, just host your photos on S3/Dropbox/your-own-web-hosting! Done!". That
misses out on a _lot_ of what keeps people on Flickr. The
social/community/discoverability side of it.

I suspect Flickr's successor will either:

1) be a service which provides all that "social/community/discoverability"
stuff while letting users choose which of many backends actually do their
photo storage (openphoto might be a first contender here),

or 2) one of the existing social networks will steamroller over the entire
photo sharing space (Facebook seems to be gaining considerable momentum down
this path).

------
rokhayakebe
Do you guys know of companies launching a side project which ended being
bigger than their main business?

------
MattGrommes
I'm getting an error saying Snapjoy's API key isn't valid. Guess Flickr didn't
appreciate this marketing stunt.

~~~
benatkin
I got that too.


TSB's Response to Its Independent Review of IT Migration Disaster - mellosouls
https://www.tsb.co.uk/news-releases/slaughter-and-may/
======
mellosouls
Previous threads on the crisis itself:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16939583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16939583)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16910947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16910947)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572216)

------
mellosouls
Appears to distance itself from the review's findings all the way through.

The review itself:

[https://www.tsb.co.uk/news-releases/slaughter-and-
may/slaugh...](https://www.tsb.co.uk/news-releases/slaughter-and-
may/slaughter-and-may-report.pdf)


Little Girls Get Bigger Every Day - jseliger
http://thesecondpass.com/?p=1591

======
aj
And the relation to HN is?


Minecraft Environmental Lighting Experiment - rutherfj
http://blog.taptonics.com/post/44803397320/minecraft-environmental-lighting-experiment
A demonstration of an iPad app that interfaces with the Phillips Hue LED lightbulbs to provide environmental lighting synced with the Minecraft day/night cycle.
======
qdot76367
This kind of idea is something philips has been working on for years, with Hue
being the newest in a line of lighting control systems.

Years ago, they were peddling the amBX line, which was a set of lights, desk
vibrators, and fans (yes, as in like, desk fans that blow in your face) that
would create an immersive environment for games. Of course, very few games
picked it up (we worked on it a bit for Second Life, and I did some silly
things with it, super mario bros, and alcohol:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kiKE3lif8Q>). amBX ended up being mostly a
failure, despite having fuck off HUGE booths on the gdc expo floor for at
least 3 years running (Who else remembers the huge black blob? Great as a
"meet me near [large obvious thing]" place. :) ).

Philips ended up either spinning or selling off amBX. It's still around as a
set of crappy LED lights that burn out quickly (?!) and have crap for contrast
and color depth. There's open source drivers out there if you look (including
my half-done-maybe-still-works libambx).

Hue seems to be working out a bit better from what I'm hearing thus far. Might
pick one up myself soon.

~~~
alirov
I got a secondhand amBX system (just the lights) off of Craigslist a few
months ago for cheap and it's been pretty cool. The Windows drivers were a
pain to deal with but I got everything up and running in Ubuntu and it works
much better.

Interesting issue is that when the power is plugged in for the first time (or
the power is reset), the drivers in Ubuntu don't properly link to the device.
The lights just flash continuously or don't turn on at all. I have to restart
into Windows with the amBX plugged in which I guess does some sort of
initialization to them. From there, if I restart back into Ubuntu, everything
functions normally.

No issues with burn out so far. There's something pleasing about lighting up
my room at night in bright colors. And it gets even better when used as music
visualizations!

~~~
qdot76367
Hmm, ok, I was seeing the exact same rebooting issue. Didn't realize it was an
initialization issue on powerup. Just curious, what drivers/programs are you
using to control it on ubuntu?

~~~
alirov
I haven't delved into the Windows drivers but clearly they're doing something
that the Ubuntu ones aren't for this issue to exist. I just noticed it's
happening after a "cold boot" of the amBX. I'm just calling it an
initialization issue because that's what it seems to me. Just wanted to clear
that up first just in case the way I was using "initialization" wasn't clear.

I'm using a combination of boblight, ruby-usb and combustd to get it to work.
This isn't my blog but I used this as a guideline to get everything up and
running:

[http://slickeel.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/philips-ambx-
starte...](http://slickeel.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/philips-ambx-starter-kit-
with-xbmc-media-centre-in-ubuntu-linux-maverick-meerkat-10-10/)

The tricky thing was realizing I had to have it "initialize" in Windows before
this would work.

------
sp332
I don't think there's an official SDK, but the Hue is easy to control with a
JSON API. [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/in-living-color-
ars-r...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/in-living-color-ars-reviews-
the-hacker-approved-philips-hue-leds/) (under the section "Taking Control").

~~~
rutherfj
Correct - there is no official SDK, but a quick search at Github will give you
quite a few projects using a variety of languages to choose from.

------
flakeskstyle
What dads do with their kids... Love it!

------
postscapes1
LIFX gets all the love these days but there are actually quite a few other
projects along the same lines.

Visualight: <http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leifp/visualight> is another
crowdfunded project and is Open Hardware.

Spark Socket: <http://www.sparkdevices.com/> takes a slightly different
approach and you probably can guess, puts the intelligence in the socket
separate from the bulb.

Bluetooth bulb: <http://www.blueclickhome.com>

Greentech 6LoWPAN based system:
[http://www.greenwavereality.com/solutions/connected-
lighting...](http://www.greenwavereality.com/solutions/connected-lighting-
solution/)

Light by Moore's Cloud: <http://moorescloud.com/> \- A larger ambient display.

------
Symmetry
Oh man, I'm proud that these products are finally coming out. I was somewhat
involved in the later parts of the standardization process, and this is
actually the first time I've seen something I've worked on come to mass
market. Looking forward to seeing devices with Ember chips come out.

------
btipling
This will probably break any red stone repeater clocks you have set up. Any
kind of messing with time in the game will break them and you have to replace
the repeater to fix them, which isn't fun if you've built anything more
complex than a blinking light.

~~~
LordIllidan
He isn't messing with time in the game - he built a separate iPad app that
allows the user to calibrate the time manually to that of the minecraft
server.

~~~
nwh
Couldn't the iPad app also emulate a client connected to the server, and only
ask for the current time?

~~~
rutherfj
That is my next plan!

~~~
AndyKelley
Possibly useful: <https://github.com/superjoe30/node-minecraft-protocol/>

Or even <https://github.com/superjoe30/mineflayer/>

------
ndejager
This is actually pretty impressive. There's lots of practical applications for
this as well.

------
prawn
LIFX will be another option for these sorts of projects. It's a Kickstarter
project that exploded in popularity and is set to deliver in the next couple
of months.

<http://lifx.co/>

I paid about $90-100 for two globes which makes it a bit cheaper than Hue. I
think LIFX also does away with a base station and has some sort of mesh
networking between bulbs?

------
Draco6slayer
Wasn't there a Kickstarter project floating around earlier that was supposed
to have the exact same functionality as this 'Phillips Hue'? Or are they the
same?

~~~
prawn
Different to Hue. I'd just written a comment about LIFX when you posted:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5341347>

LIFX is led by an Australian guy. Their email updates have covered their
design process, prototyping in China and so on and they're getting close to
delivering the first preorders.

There's a tech blog about how it will all work here:
<http://lifxtech.blogspot.com.au/>

~~~
Draco6slayer
So the chief difference there is price and the WiFi interaction between the
bulbs? Is everything else the same between the two products, then? Or does
LIFX offer any additional advantage?

~~~
prawn
Haven't looked into Hue much or used it and obviously haven't used LIFX so
someone else might need to chime in.

Hue needing a base station seems a bit annoying to me so that is a pretty key
difference. Very keen for the LIFX bulbs to arrive so I can experiment and see
what they do. It was a very popular Kickstarter foray, so I'm hoping that a
strong community forms from those customers to build all the fun stuff you'd
hope to see like music- and game-related applications.

------
Whitespace
My eyes teared up reading this; what a great dad!

~~~
rutherfj
Building up "brownie points" before he turns into a teenager!

------
biolime
That is very cool! I hadn't yet heard about the Hue but you've got me
interested in it now. Great article!

------
andrewingram
I like the idea, would work well for multiplayer where you can't freeze time
just by hitting escape.

------
whatupdave
This is really cool. It would definitely add to the immersion of the game.

~~~
rutherfj
And really good if you like to go underground at night and mine. Then you know
when the sun rises!

------
mcmire
This game. Who'd've thought that this game could be used to do so much?

------
zenogais
Pretty awesome.

------
njharman
wtf do hue bulbs have in them for $90 a bulb.

~~~
rutherfj
They are way too expensive IMHO. If I did not have the idea to hack this
together with Minecraft, I never would have purchased them.

~~~
d23
I always wanted to do something like this with an Arduino but never got around
to it. When I saw the Hue I was pretty excited, until I saw the price tag.
$200 for 3 bulbs? I'll pass for now. I'm assuming it's only a matter of time
before they become reasonably priced.


Training a Neural Network to Fall - rajnathani
https://semiengineering.com/training-a-neural-network-to-fall
======
rajnathani
The article’s title, in the formal sense, is a bit misleading, as the neural
network's purpose is for the detection (and not simulation) of falls.

IMO an interesting part in the article which is in regards to the training
data is: "the client’s data science firm used stunts people to fall like
elderly people while wearing the sensors and streaming the collected data..".

~~~
Traubenfuchs
It's an eyecatcher. Clickbait.

Training a neural net to detect elderly people falling? Interesting for a
niche.

Training a neural net to fall? What? Did I read that right? Better check it
out! -> Interesting for many more people.

------
briga
So this is pretty speculative, but I think Google already has similar models
in production that they use for targeted advertisements.

A few months ago I was riding my bike and fell down. A few hours later while
looking at my Google Pixel I saw an advertisement for a nearby medical clinic.
The ad was a guy on the ground holding his knee after a fall. It could be a
coincidence, but I have never seen any similar ads before or after. It
occurred to me that it wouldn’t be too difficult to build a fall classifier
based on the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope data.

------
agentofoblivion
Who would have thought that choosing an LSTM on iteration 1 for embedded C
code would have been fraught with challenges.


The Third Reich’s Electric Submarine Fail - smacktoward
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/aba074f47363

======
stcredzero
_“irrational faith in technology to prevail in operationally or strategically
complex and desperate situations.”_

Technology does win wars, but it isn't magic. If Hitler had followed Karl
Doernitz' recommendations and had 300 submarines on hand before going to war,
Britain would have fallen to commerce losses to submarines. It was a series of
top level decisions to defer the development of revolutionary weapons on the
part of the Germans combined with a concerted pursuit of advanced technology
by the allies, like RADAR aboard anti submarine airplanes, that decided the
war.

If it weren't for such decisions, the V2 and Type 21 would have appeared
sooner.

~~~
cstross
Yup. Like the decision to send the engineers and technicians working on jet
engines to join the infantry in late 1940, because they'd be needed for the
war against the Soviet Union and jet engines wouldn't be required in the short
term anyway(!) -- a costly mistake which set them until the surviving skilled
technicians could be hastily recalled. Or Hitler's demand for a jet bomber
which forced Messerschmitt to hang bomb racks on the Me-262, delaying their
first operational jet fighter for 18-24 months.

And some of the stuff they _did_ pursue was absolutely barking. Like the
Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte)

TL:DR; the popular belief in the Nazi regime's inherent technological
brilliance is a little misplaced.

~~~
rdtsc
I take some deal of comfort knowing that an evil and criminal regime was also
stupid and irrational. It is kind of like that bank robber that hands in the
note to the clerk and the note is a his bank receipt with his address on the
bank.

It is good that they sent rocket scientists to die in the infantry. Good that
they spent resources building that stupid tank. Good that they didn't take too
much interest in the nuclear bomb.

~~~
stcredzero
_I take some deal of comfort knowing that an evil and criminal regime was also
stupid and irrational._

Apparently, the Nazi regime was into teutonic myth based occult woo, but I
have no idea if that's more a modern distortion than an accurate portrayal.

I wonder if society in the US is any more rational. We gave up on Thorium so
we could build bombs faster. The authorities sell us wars with the exact ease
and facility that Herman Goering spoke about. Supposedly, GM started building
cars larger in the post-war decades just so engineering managers could feel
more prestigious. (Prestige came with volume of one's subsystem, apparently.)

------
qwerta
Calling Type XXI failure is kind of (mo)ironic. Soviet submarines and to some
extend western submarines are practically build on top of it. It is like
saying jet-engines are failure :-)

~~~
mpyne
I agree, and almost pointed this out myself. But the article isn't really
calling the XXI itself a failure, but instead the whole strategy to design,
build, and rely on the Type XXI to prosecute a commerce interdiction war that
Germany couldn't actually win even with the Type XXI in service. The title
would have been better as "The Failure of the Type XXI Strategy" I think.

~~~
nkoren
Yes, this. The same can be said for the V2. Technologically, it was _wildly_
successful, and today most Russian rockets and many American rockets can be
considered its direct descendants. However there's no question that it
hastened the end of the war for the Germans.

I've often wondered what the world would look like if Germany had had the same
militaristic and expansionist policies, yet hadn't devoted so many of its
resources towards genocide and wonder weapons. It may be that Hitler's
obsession with these things actually spared the world from a far more
effective Nazi Germany, and thus an even longer and bloodier war.

~~~
simonh
It's one of the problems with the idea of using a time machine to kill Hitler.
The problem is the Nazi party and Germany might actually end up with a more
sane, capable and effective leader and end up winning the war.

~~~
spacehome
Perhaps the previous, competent, dictator was replaced by Hitler.

~~~
emiliobumachar
[http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2920](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2920)

------
kapnobatairza
Spend too much time keeping your weapons in development and you may find that
by the time they are ready your strategy for implementing them is no longer
relevant or, worse, that you have already lost the war.

A good analogy for the importance of getting to market with what works, not
what is perfect.

~~~
grecy
> _A good analogy for the importance of getting to market with what works, not
> what is perfect._

I would argue they were already "at market" with what works - older subs,
bullets, torpedoes and tanks, and while doing that, they were trying to
innovate something better. They obviously weren't aiming for perfect, because
they did get it finished - it would never have been done if the goal was
"perfect".

Had they not tried to innovate something better, we'd be criticizing them now
saying "this is a good analogy for the importance of continual improvement of
your product that's in the market"

~~~
kapnobatairza
A fair counter-point, I acknowledge that there is a fine line between
investing too much and too little in R&D (but I suppose we all knew that).

------
lnanek2
Reminds me of PG saying startups are largely about boring grunt work techies
often don't want to do, like going out and interviewing clients about what
their problems actually are, etc.. Germany made technological marvels, but
lost because they distracted from basic, boring things like logistics.

------
Htsthbjig
The article is not very good.

At the time (1943) the war was already lost for Germany(not for Japan). The US
had entered the world fresh after watching people in Europe kill themselves
for more than 2 years, and US industry was just too powerful for a country
that was already weakened by two years of war.

US at the time was the biggest saver in the world, and one of the leaders in
industry production, while not in weaponry, change to weapon manufacturing is
easy when you have industry.

You can compare it with China today, while the US products were not as good as
the Germans, they learned fast and they could simply outproduce them. For
every good quality German tank, they could manufacture 10 not as good but who
cares, American tanks, same with planes.

Another important thing is that after two years of war and more planes on the
air that today, supplies became scarce, specially for Germans, so they had to
get by with less quality components out of necessity.

Again, this is very normal in any war, at the start uniforms, and vehicles are
new, morale is high, not so after years of seeing your country, your family,
your friends destroyed.

~~~
sillysaurus3
History is littered with examples of superior forces failing to achieve
victory due to mismanagement or deception. Anyone who's tried to seriously
play competitive games will say the same thing: it's not over until it's
literally impossible to win.

You're correct that the Germans had a supply problem. But that might not have
been as decisive as Hitler's decision to sacrifice the entirety of the 6th
Army at Stalingrad for mere prestige, for example.

It was a stroke of luck that Hitler was so stupid as to not listen to his
commanders and make so many blunders. Some have called Hitler our best ally in
the war, since his mismanagement was responsible for so many strategic
mistakes.

If a different type of person had been in charge in 1943, there is a sizable
chance the war could've been won. The production problems were hard, but not
decisive to the point of making victory vanishingly unlikely.

~~~
Gustomaximus
> It was a stroke of luck that Hitler was so stupid as to not listen to his
> commanders and make so many blunders. Some have called Hitler our best ally
> in the war, since his mismanagement was responsible for so many strategic
> mistakes.

The British agreed with this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley)

"The plan was submitted in November 1944, but was never carried out because
controversy remained over whether it was actually a good idea to kill Hitler:
he was by then considered to be such a poor strategist that it was believed
whoever replaced him would probably do a better job of fighting the allies."

------
3327
History does repeat itself, all this means is that US hight tech weapons and
hardware will be useless against cheap Chinese missiles dime a dozen.

------
grecy
I disagree with the reasoning.

The article makes it clear these subs were very advanced, and after the
expected teething problems expected with any new design, they worked well. Of
course they were expensive (time and resources) because they were new and
advanced. They were vastly superior to other subs at the time. Had the war
continued for another few years, I think it's safe to say these subs would
have been extremely successful in their missions. You can't go into a project
like "design the future of submarines" under the limitation that your side
might lose the war any day.

Obviously when undertaking any task it's important to have a balance of "do
what we've always done" and "innovate to find better ways". They would be
equally criticized if they didn't try to advance anything and just kept
building old tanks and bullets. The headline would be "The Third Reich's
Failure to Innovate"

Did they aim for too much innovation with these subs? Maybe, but you can't
blame the sub for that.

~~~
mpyne
I'm not sure the analogy is so bad, to be honest.

The USN submarine force was extremely successful in the Pacific... eventually.
But they went to war with pre-war submarine designs, and used a strategy of
pumping out the same old submarine types, with only minor improvements as the
war went on. It wasn't until the end of WWII and the start of the Cold War
that the US started to integrate features from the Type XXI and really try to
push the state of the art of submarine technology.

But the point is that the _Gato_ and _Balao_ -class submarines were good
enough for what the USN was doing, the important thing was actually getting
the boats out to the theater of war. An advanced upgrade project would have
risked the ability to do that at the very time such risk was unaccepted.

That was Germany's problem as explained in the article: Even with the
assuredly-better Type XXI submarine, Germany would still need many other
things to go right to prosecute an interdiction war. It would have needed
command and control improvements to account for the submarines being submerged
more often (especially if they wanted to use the effective "wolf pack"
tactics), better maritime reconnaissance to find convoys in the first place,
etc.

Its sonar would have been useful, but the flipside to that is that Allied
sonar and ASDIC would _also_ have been useful (defeating ASDIC was one of the
reasons German U-boats operated on the surface in the first place). In short,
the Type XXI really did counter a lot of the Allied advancements in
antisubmarine warfare, but it still would not have been enough. Those
resources could have been profitably employed elsewhere, perhaps in other new
weapons development projects.

On the other hand, aviation represented an area where new development was
instrumental (and cost-effective) throughout the war. The German jet fighters
would have been very dangerous if they could have worked them into their
Luftflottes sooner.

------
nswanberg
This post cites a much better article by Marcus Jones on the boat and the
context in which the boat was developed:
[http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/dd165021-2812-40ba-847f-d...](http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/dd165021-2812-40ba-847f-d5b4c3e4ac4e/Innovation-
for-Its-Own-Sake--The-Type-XXI-U-boat.aspx)

Jones's article is better in the sense that it is more reasoned and without
single-paragraph overstatements like "But everything about the Type XXI was a
mistake." It also, unfortunately, takes more effort to parse.

Jones's article also has different take: "...this paper argues that the U-boat
Type XXI was nonetheless not nearly so unrealistic a solution as [Tooze's]
account suggests...", and also suggests that while the Type XXI was an
evolutionary solution, it's accelerated development was revolutionary.

------
masswerk
There seems to be some inaccuracy involved regarding the engine: At least
following to the (quite extensive) German Wikipedia article, the Walter
propulsion[1] never reached production state and the design was altered in
order to fit a conventional Diesel-electric engine. For this the boats became
even longer and bigger and the inner hull design was changed from an ideally
circular cross-section to the unique 8-form, which introduced some other
problems.

Anyway, it was a significant fail by the Nazi industrial system. From 118
boats produced, not a single one met the standards and all of these had to be
reworked. (Most of these were only used for training missions, none of them
saw combat action.)

[1] The Walter engine would have used in deed a hydrogen peroxide fueling
system, and was the system that was deemed unworkable. The note at the end of
the article has this right.

------
fr0sty
Aside from the broader war strategy questions, this appears to be a good
example of the second-system effect.

------
lucio
"This mentality amounted to a “disease” in German war ... Germany built
radical weapons that would fail to turn the tide against an inevitable defeat
brought about by larger economic, political and technological disadvantages."

Luckily, dictatorial "leader"-based regimes aren't compatible with the freedom
required for creative geniuses... but, have they stumbled upon some kind of
primitive nuclear weapon and strapped one on top of a V2... instead of a
"disease" this "radical weapons" thing would have been the "winning bet" ?

<joking>This seems written by Captain Hindsight</joking>

edit:syntax

------
pavel_lishin
Reminds me of the uboat in Cryptonomicon, the V-1,000,000.

~~~
matthewmcg
Speaking of Cryptonomicon, haven't many historians concluded that the ULTRA
program (Anglo-American breaking of Germany's Enigma cyphers) was also a
significant factor in the decline in U-boat effectiveness?

This is not addressed or even mentioned in the article.

------
junto
I've been through the one in Bremerhaven. You can walk through it. It costs
about €6 if memory serves me rightly:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_Wilhelm_Baue...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_Wilhelm_Bauer)

------
whitehat2k9
The author mentions "Type XII" U-boats several times...this should actually be
Type VII.


Amiato (YC W12) Launches To Bring Big Data A/B Testing With SQL To All - binkert
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/backed-with-2m-ycs-amiato-launches-to-bring-big-data-ab-testing-with-sql-to-all/
======
dude_abides
Great pitch, but the product and the news article seem to be low on details.

The "how it works" link says that they get read/write access to the data on
s3, they massage/process the data, and allow queries on it. But I'm confused
how this helps in A/B testing.

~~~
mehulashah
AB Testing involves (1) changing or deploying a new feature, (2) many times
measuring new properties linked with the feature, and then (3) analyzing the
resulting user behavior. We help in the analysis process because most tools
fall short here.

For example, supposed you add more weapons to promote more battles in an
online game to keep players engaged. Say, in addition, you start collecting
measurements about how long battles take. Suddenly, after introducing the
feature, the opposite happens: players leave.

Most off-the-shelf AB tools will only tell you whether feature A or feature B
worked (the "what"), but not the "why." It could be that battles are taking
longer, so players lose interest without finishing. Or, more battles cause
players to die/lose more, so they leave.

We let you ask questions in SQL that will resolve this and find out why. So,
you can fix the problem, rather than be left in the dark. You might introduce
a feature to shorten battles, or find a way so players don't die so often.

Sophisticated online gaming companies invest in complicated data
infrastructure and experts to let you ask those questions (Hadoop, data
warehouses, etc.). But, they end up spending days massaging the data --- e.g.
to load the new property "time spent in battle" -- before you can ask deep
questions. In this case, you may get your answer, but its too late -- you've
already lost your players.

We give you direct access to all your event data (including new properties)
immediately through SQL. You can ask the deep questions and resolve "why"
right away. You're not guessing in the dark as to what to do next.

AB testing is about optimizing the user experience, and we help with the
analysis to make better improvements.


WebGL Meincraft - llambda
http://dev.pocoo.org/~mitsuhiko/webglmc?hn
======
ritonlajoie
That seems nice but it's taking, also, all my CPU time on my windows machine.
I don't get it, yesterday there was another WebGL demo on HN and it did
exactly the same thing. Is that something which we have to live with in the
future ? Is WebGL going to be too much CPU intensive, so much that nobody is
going to be able to run that ? Or is this 'demo' asking too much of WebGL ?

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
The high CPU usage is expected because I spawn off four background workers
that peg all your CPU. It's not intended for public consumption yet, so don't
jump to conclusions.

When I have finished this it will perform better.

> Or is this 'demo' asking too much of WebGL?

The WebGL part is only half the story. It uses webworkers for the perlin noise
generation and this is currently very slow in JavaScript.

------
quandrum
This page consumed all the resources on my Late 2010 MBA pretty quickly. Not
that the real minecraft runs well, but it's far more playable than this
version.

Whether that's WebGL or the programming is something I don't know.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> This page consumed all the resources on my Late 2010 MBA pretty quickly. Not
> that the real minecraft runs well, but it's far more playable than this
> version.

Well. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all: yes, it should
keep 4 CPUs busy. I spawn of four background workers so it pretty much hogs
everything.

That said, not only the world generation is slow right now, also the VBO
generation is because I do some very conservative invalidation which causes
some VBOs to be generated multiple times.

I have a lot of stuff that I can do to make this faster and my local version
already performs better but I caused some bugs in the coordinate system
conversion and my frustum culling. I have to iron this out first before I
update the live demo.

This version (rendering wise) on my Mac does actually render faster than
Minecraft at equal rendering distances.

~~~
exDM69
If and when you write a blog post about this, I think it would me more
interesting if you'd write about how you generate your vertex buffers and
organize your draw calls, etc than describing the world generation algorithm.

Everyone, and their dog, have been writing Minecraft-style world rendering
demos for a few years now and there are also quite a few blog posts that
describe the world generation algorithm. They're always an interesting read,
but I would be more interested in how you get that stuff to the GPU and how do
you render it.

Also some insights about WebGL limitations would be welcome. Would your task
have been easier if you could memory map your vertex buffers or use instanced
draw calls? This is the kind of stuff I'd love to hear about as a graphics
programmer.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Yeah, the world generation is not that interesting in my version anyways. The
interesting stuff is how it uses web workers to move that into the background
and how the VBOs are updated (or will be once I have finished that).

------
jebblue
Both my cores were pegged but if you can get this to perform as good as
Minecraft and turn it into a game I might buy it. Especially since us Linux
users don't have as many good games to choose from.

------
ritonlajoie
I noticed something : when the viewpoint is lookint at a flying block wich is
not that big, it's lagging the same as looking at the entire world. Is is
rendering something in the background which is out of the view ? I'm not
saying it's not a nice demo, actually I like the feeling very much. This
perlin noise is pretty enjoyable. But I can't understand why it's that slow ;(

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> I noticed something : when the viewpoint is lookint at a flying block wich
> is not that big, it's lagging the same as looking at the entire world. Is is
> rendering something in the background which is out of the view?

Yes it is. I have experimental frustum culling implemented but something with
the coordinates is wrong and it starts to cull things it should not.

> But I can't understand why it's that slow ;(

Because it's work in progress and in many parts the implementation is just not
finished yet. I need to fix the frustum culling, I have to improve the front
to back rendering, have to switch to transferred objects for the web workers
where possible, speed up the critical code paths and fix the Chrome
performance bugs that come from too many VBO switches.

------
bazerka
Hello both my cpu cores pegged at 100%.

~~~
EwanG
May I suggest running this in a Virtual Machine such as VirtualBox. Then you
can control how many cores are pegged by how many you have assigned to the VM,
and leave the rest of your machine responsive for other things.

~~~
FrankBooth
That's an awfully heavyweight approach to something that can be solved just as
well using the existing CPU affinity functionality of your OS.

------
mostly_harmless
Was this done with 3D perlin noise?

Give us some technical details of the project please.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
It's perlin simplex noise and there will be a longer blog post about how it
works. It's just work in progress :-)

------
Groxx
Hooray for floating islands! (seriously, I love that these exist in
M(ine|ein)craft. It makes the world a lot more interesting)

Very CPU heavy. For those wondering, it does work, it just takes a while for
anything to appear.

------
tantalor
You should prevent propagation of up/down arrow key events in the game canvas,
which (I believe) cause the browser window to scroll up/down.

------
CatDaaaady
Pretty sweet! Can't wait for the details

------
joe24pack
completely non responsive, did not finish rendering first scene after waiting
for about 4 minutes.


How to protect yourself against the WebEx vulnerability - mikaelf
https://blog.filippo.io/webex-extension-vulnerability/
======
indexerror
"There was a secret URL in WebEx that allowed any website to run arbitrary
code. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯"

What are the chances of this being done arbitrarily, and not just something
that slipped out of code review...


Dopamine Cells Influence Our Perception of Time - JabavuAdams
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/features/foundation-news/scgb-news/dopamine-cells-influence-our-perception-of-time/
======
AnsemWise
There is another article trending right now about increased Dopamine in the
shower causing your executive functions to diminish and allows for increased
creativity.

Seems like you could extrapolate that dopamine has a direct inverse
correlation to executive functions in the brain. I'd go so far as to use New
York and Silicon Valley as good examples of increased executive function and
increased creativity, respectively.

I'd also relate this to the certain side-effects of Adderall, increased
Dopamine causing a loss of time awareness and higher creativity, but the
increase in your sympathetic nervous system causes the increased focus and
awareness. Almost a best of both worlds, besides the likely strain on the body
from overworking both systems.

~~~
oxide
>causing a loss of time awareness and higher creativity

whatever you're doing when you take adderall, you'll be doing for the next 12
hours before you realize how much time has past.

~~~
ClassyJacket
I wish there was a legal way to try Adderall. It's not even legal in Australia
by prescription, and since I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, there's
basically no chance I'll ever even get try the similar dextroamphetamine.

I'd love to see what effect it had on my focus and productivity. I've had a
few amazing days before, but they're few and far between. Being able to switch
that on with a careful controlled dose would be fascinating and useful.

~~~
oxide
Adderall is basically mixed dextroamphetamine salts, there isn't a big
difference between generic dextroamphetmine salts and Adderall despite what
the drug manufacturer likes to say.

the new hotness is lisdexamfetamine, which is just dextroamphetamine bound to
lysine, making it a prodrug as your liver needs to cleave the lysine off
first. reduces abuse potential.

I wouldn't lose hope, though. You might as well lose hope if you mean free and
clear legal access to dextroamphetamine.

but, there are illegal options if you want to get an idea of what it's like.

I'm not recommending you go buy street amphetamine, I'm not even sure what
street amphetamine is like in Australia.

you might have access to methamphetamine instead of amphetamine sulfate which
can come as paste or powder as opposed to crystalline chunks/powder like
methamphetamine tends to be, it's a regional difference.

The point is you could, theoretically and hypothetically speaking, acquire
street amphetamine + a 20 dollar milligram scale.

weigh out and try a low dose (~20mg, orally) after breakfast first thing in
the morning to experience the similar effects to those that dextroamphetamine
would give you.

Would it be legal? No. Theoretically though, people use the internet itself to
acquire these things, cutting out a lot of the risk that comes with buying
drugs the more traditional way.

That's just a theory of mine, though. Hypothetically speaking. Allegedly
bitcoin and secondary wallets are involved.

------
RangerScience
I'm confused. Is this saying that you would expect to experience "time flies"
with high or low dopamine?

Otherwise, holy shit. Confirmation bias is likely in play, but this sounds an
awful lot like my experience of daily life. Slow time, difficultly with
delayed gratification, strong desire to repeat situations/actions that
resulted in successes.

~~~
dcgoss
"When dopamine activity was high, the animal was more likely to judge an
interval as short, and vice versa."

~~~
devoply
Also explains why we are miserable. When we are having a good time, time
flies. When we are not time slows down. It's as if our brain is wired to fast-
forward the good parts and play the bad parts in slow motion so I guess we
have time to deal with them. It wired to perform, not wired to enjoy.

~~~
shostack
Put a different way, it would seem the brain might make the good times
something you want to repeat and make you avoid bad times.

------
agnivade
Umm .. there's no such thing as dopamine cells. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter
and neurons which activate on dopamine are called dopamine receptors. You can
argue that neurons are a type of cell, but thats how far you can stretch it.

------
thirstysusrando
Time flies when you're having fun.

~~~
iaw
...or taking methamphetamines?

~~~
77pt77
Isn't that the reverse?

------
rdmsr
There was an article earlier this week on HN about the effects of stimulants
on Chess Ability that was oddly consistent with this:
[https://worldchess.com/2017/01/25/special-report-new-
study-f...](https://worldchess.com/2017/01/25/special-report-new-study-finds-
performance-enhancing-drugs-for-chess/)

In particular, players would tend to lose on time more often when taking
stimulants. When framed from the perspective of this article, that effect
becomes "obvious".

------
mikewhy
There's also the thought that depression causes people to experience time
dilation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Depression)

------
datalus
Did they take this cell image from Project Discovery in Eve Online? Or are
these actual cell photographs, since Project Discovery is based on identifying
actual cells & uploading it to scientists.

------
meowface
LSD heavily interacts with many neurotransmitters, including dopamine
(particularly the D2 receptor). Is it possible its unusual time distortion is
related?

------
spraak
So this (finally?) explains the reason why (most) drugs affect perception of
time


An Epidemic of AI Misinformation - hughzhang
https://thegradient.pub/an-epidemic-of-ai-misinformation/
======
ggm
Very hard to critique an article you overwhelmingly agree with!

The key point I kept picking up was the extent to which a press willing to
laud a discovery was reticent about owning the clinb-down.

Peer review in ML journals should be tighter maybe? If you solve a limited
subset of the three body problem you can't claim to solve "the three body
problem" and if you apply a well known Rubik's cube model solution you didn't
learn it, you had it baked in.

~~~
buboard
do most of the hyped papers have peer review even? the field moves too fast
for that, press releases are issued as soon as the first draft is on arxiv.

~~~
eanzenberg
Apologies, but I see a lot of “trash” published in arxiv (also some real good
stuff) Peer review could fix some things but would also show some other things
down

~~~
madenine
I like to think of arxiv as the holding area for anything that COULD be peer
reviewed.

Advantage is we get to see stuff now, not after it gets accepted at by a
conference or journal. Disadvantage, we have to filter on our own.

Twitter and sites like arxiv sanity preserver are helpful for filtering.

------
perl4ever
When I saw this item, I thought not of misinformation produced _about_ AI, but
misinformation produced _by_ AI.

Some of the Google searches I have done recently turn up mostly automatically
written articles that plug in numbers and facts but make no sense at all,
because there is no real understanding. (Yes, this is probably not "real" AI,
but it's the sort of thing people are and will be trying to apply AI to)

It seems to me that there is no way to get to a serene, well-functioning
society that utilizes intelligent machines, because in the process of
developing software that can digest and write intelligently about topics
humans are interested in, we will inevitably come up with less intelligent
software _first_ , that produces plausible misinformation far cheaper than
humans. And economics will drive out, is already driving out, real research
and journalism. Human society would be drowned by automatically generated
misinformation by the time a machine is truly intelligent, whether that is in
a couple years or a decade or longer.

I'm increasingly thinking that the people who are worried about artificial
intelligence ending the world as we know it have slightly missed the mark -
superhuman intelligence is a singularity that we are approaching, but we are
going to be ripped apart by the tides beforehand and maybe that will prevent
the endpoint from ever happening.

------
tomxor
> I see this as a version of the tragedy of the commons, in which (for
> example) many people overfish a particular set of waters [...] if and when
> the public, governments, and investment community recognize that they have
> been sold an unrealistic picture of AI’s strengths and weaknesses that
> doesn't match reality, a new AI winter may commence.

I think this is not only inevitable, but necessary! This time around it has
been a lot more useful, due in no small part to the advance in hardware since
1970s.

Unfortunately this has caused many important people to believe far too much of
the hype and not see it's current limitations. As a result they have started
integrating it into important part of our societies - i find this alarming -
not for the reason most people find it alarming i.e "because it's too smart",
but because it's far far too dumb in combination with people assuming it's
very smart. I think a lot of this problem stems from inappropriately
anthropomorphising ML with terms like "AI" when we are no where near the stage
that we need to have the philosophical debate about where something is
sentient or "intelligent". The ML we are doing with NNs is still at the "tiny-
chunk-of-very-specifically-engineered-piece-of-brain" stage. It's important
people understand this before we start integrating what are essentially basic
statistical mechanisms into our societies.

For those in pursuit of better ML and things like real AI aka AGI, I also
think having the hype blow away will do more good in the form of clarity and
lack of noise than it will harm in lack of funding.

------
ilaksh
OpenAI hype is definitely exaggerated. Seems like there might be a connection
with Elon Musk somehow because all of his projects seem to get a massive
amount of hype also.

The radiology thing, is it really the case that there are no startups in that
area with useful AI software? Seems like he overstated that.

Part of this is a worldview difference. Many people truly believe that AGI is
just around the corner, and that even before then, the narrow AI applications
will significantly alter the world as they are deployed. And since no one can
actually predict the future, it's an area where it's easy to have different
worldviews.

Personally I think that it's true that there is a lot of poor reporting and
companies that overhype results, but it also seems like people like Gary
Marcus are really not keeping up to date with the true capabilities of DL
systems. If he was up to date, why would he be so pessimistic about
applications like radiology? There seem to already be a lot of strong results.

~~~
unishark
I think there are certainly issues with ML in radiology (i.e. lots of
publications of low power studies or overfit models validated incorrectly),
but I agree with you that Marcus was being unfair. It is principle a
straightforward problem to solve with deep learning. The reason biggest
reasons "no actual radiologists have been replaced" are probably just
political/social. Hinton cannot be blamed for those hurdles.

------
scottlegrand2
The funny thing for me is that if The Economist had just hacked the input into
GPT-2 so that it was an ongoing conversation they would have found that it's
OK at holding a conversation, better than I expected when I did so.

The conversation that I posted at:

[https://medium.com/@scottlegrand/my-interview-with-the-
world...](https://medium.com/@scottlegrand/my-interview-with-the-worlds-most-
dangerous-ai-tm-473ebdde04b2)

is performed in one shot. And I think it shows both the abilities and the
limitations of GPT-2 and similar models. I am 100% role playing with the
language model and prompting it to go in the directions it goes, but it
surprised me several times, and eventually it all fell apart because I didn't
perform any transfer learning on the model I just used the raw GPT-2 XL model
to measure whether further work would be worth the effort and I would conclude
yes it would be.

The first thing I need to do is dramatically increase the length of its input
context. It's pretty good at running with an ensuing script because I suspect
much of its training data was formatted that way. But since I ran out of
context symbols, it eventually suffers from several incidents of amnesia and
eventually effective multiple personality disorder. It also contradicts itself
several times but then no more than the typical thought leader or politician
does IMO.

What The Economist did was effectively erase the thing's memory between
questions. So they were starting fresh with each question. And I think that's
why they had to do the best of 5.

------
eanzenberg
Interesting that a few big examples of hype driven articles came from OpenAI.
This is dangerous and will lead to additional misinformation and public
backlash. Scientists should be unbiased and not market driven, but when OpenAI
has these releases I shook my head along with a couple others.

Hype lasts the next quarter but is replaced with distrust. Science is a long
game of incremental discoveries. Breakthroughs usually are an understanding of
some interesting outcome that needed more interpretation.

~~~
miketery
I think this is what happens when you have various stakeholders and some are
driven by KPIs such as reach / views. To that end those specific stakeholders
(content writers / marketing) will bias towards sensationalism. That's not to
excuse the organizational culture which allows for this behavior / outcome.
There does need to be course correction.

------
spicyramen
Let us remember that AI is at the center of the cloud wars. Google, Amazon and
Microsoft while they produce ton of research, their sales teams need to market
those R&D investment to get customers interested in their tech. We are at a
stage that AI is still a buzz word for many companies, once we evolve and
deploy more and more of AI cases, we will see less and less articles promising
things that can't be implemented

~~~
thu2111
That's probably a part of it. Note how the Google TPUs aren't for sale. If you
want them you have to use the Google Cloud. The cloud is expensive and slow
... I think everyone is shocked when they first see perf numbers coming off
Azure.

I don't know if GCE is better, but the temptation to overload the hardware is
always there: hardware rental is fundamentally a business with low barriers to
entry. Anyone can buy some machines, bring up a Kubernetes or OpenShift
cluster and start renting it out. So the big 3 are always looking for
proprietary advantage and dedicated AI chips are something other firms can't
easily do at the moment, making it a good source of lockin.

Do many people need it though? Deep learning is pretty useless for most
business apps, unless you happen to need an image classifier or something else
pre-canned. Classical ML is often sufficient, or better, human written logic.
The latter can be explained, debugged, rapidly improved and in the best case
requires no training data at all!

~~~
TrinaryWorksToo
Their tpus are for sale:
[https://coral.ai/products/](https://coral.ai/products/)

~~~
raverbashing
These are Edge TPUs, for inference, not for training

~~~
The_rationalist
I thought a single powerful gpu would be enough for any inference?

------
buboard
Ugh. I dislike the author s permanent negativity, but he s right about a lot.
I think it’s worth asking why people feel the need to lie about the future of
AI? If they are confident about its future (and I don’t know of a fundamental
reason why they would not be) then there is no reason to rush half assed
results out the door and overcompensate (like gpt2). There is plenty of
theoretical questions and answers to debate publicly instead. I don’t know if
its the fear of some impending tech recession or fear of their own
incompetence

~~~
gwern
He's also wrong about a lot. For all his insistence on accuracy, he himself is
misleading or ignorant. Like his slam of the Dartmouth project - even if you
knew nothing about it, all you have to do is click through to see the claims
of 'solving vision' are sheer projection and urban legend. And he's happy to
make up claims out of whole cloth: for example, when he says "AlphaGo works
fine on a 19x19 board, but would need to be retrained to play on a rectangular
board; the lack of transfer is telling.", for which he provides precisely zero
evidence, he ignores the fact that AG training works fine on a mixture of
board sizes and such progressive growing/curriculum training in fact seems to
accelerate training
([https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10565](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10565)) and
that rectangular convolutions are a thing that exist, and there would be
plenty of transfer if anyone tried. If no one has tried that _exact_ thing,
it's because it would be pointless and it's obvious to everyone not named
'Marcus' that it'd work fine, being rectangular doesn't mystically stop it
from working anymore than using a 13x13 rather than 19x19 board makes AG-style
training stop working. (This is not the first time Marcus has claimed that
something didn't work; I first realized that he doesn't actually keep up with
the AI literature when I pointed out to him on Twitter that plenty of
knowledge graphs were in use combined with DL, and Google Search was the
biggest example of this, and he had no idea what I was talking about.)

No matter what DL or DRL does, or how little his own preferred paradigm does,
Marcus will never ever admit anything. AlphaGo beats humans? Well, it just
copied humans. AlphaZero learns from scratch? Well, he wrote a whole paper
explaining how akshully it still copies humans because the tree search encodes
the _rules_. MuZero throws out even the tree search's knowledge of rules?
Crickets and essays about 'misinformation'.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Regarding MuZero- I confess to not have read the paper very carefully, but I
am confused by its claim that the new system achieves superhuman performance
without knowing the game rules.

Specifically, MuZero uses MCTS and MCTS needs to have at the very least a move
generator in order to produce actions that can then be evaluated for their
results. The trained MuZero model learns the transition function and
evaluation function but I don't see in the paper where it learns what actions
are legal in the domain. And I don't understand how any architecture could
model the possible moves in a game without observing examples of external play
(i.e. not self-play).

MuZero reuses the AlphaZero architecture so most likely the moves of the
pieces for Chess, Shoggi and Go are hard-coded in the architecture, as they
are in AlphaZero. There's also probably some similar hard-coding of Atari
actions, which I'm probably missing in the paper.

~~~
yazr
> but I am confused by its claim ... without knowing the game rules.

> probably some similar hard-coding of Atari actions

Nope, no hard coding.

Consider trying to MCTS on an Atari game. You have to "learn to predict" the
<next frame, action> pairs. Initially this guess is very bad, but eventually
your predictions are good enough that rolling out a tree of predictions
improves your action selection

For Go, and chess, we twist our self into NOT using the game rules in the
simulator e.g. for each move, just indicate if GAME LOSS WIN

Whether this paper worthy of a new Nature hype cycle is a separate debate

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> You have to "learn to predict" the <next frame, action> pairs.

But where do the actions come from?

For example, if I play chess, I could pick up a piece and throw it at my
opponent's head. Similarly, if I play Atari I could chuck the controller at
the monitor. These are actions I can perform that are available to me because
of my basic human anatomy and because of the laws of physics (I can grab and
throw and a thrown object flies through the air untl it hits a target or
gravity wins).

In the case of MuZero, what actions can the system perform and where do they
come from? I don't see where that is described in the paper.

>> For Go, and chess, we twist our self into NOT using the game rules in the
simulator e.g. for each move, just indicate if GAME LOSS WIN

Similarly - what determines "each move"?

EDIT: I can see in the MuZero paper that "Final outcomes { _lose,draw,win_ }
in board games are treated as rewards $u_t \in {-1,0,+1}$ occurring at the
final step of the episode" but I also can't see where these come from, what
tells the model that a loss, draw or win has occurred at the end of an
episode.

I mean, if you're telling the model what actions can be performed and what
end-states values are, then what game rules are you _not_ giving to the
system?

~~~
yazr
As someone patiently explained to me 2 yrs ago...

For the ATARI, the "real world" is the present frame, and a fixed set of 4
buttons and 4 directions. This of course is the game pre-programmed into the
ALE ROM.

You can take any action, and get the next frame. but you cant "undo" an
action, and you cant restart a game from a fixed state (see the Go-Explore
controversy). And you cant explore 4 different actions in an interesting
frame.

So now, if you learn a network which predicts the next frame, you can enter
the world of model-based learning, where we do a simulated move tree roll-out
(i.e. not calling the ATARI), try a gazillions moves, and only then select an
action and get the next sample.

In a formally defined synthetic domain such as chess or logic programming, it
is not clear whether this is helpful. We are simply trading one cpu time
(calling the environment) for other cpu time (running our own learned im-
precise model of the environment)

Of course DM has a chess function which does codes the rules of the next move.
It can return a LOSS if you try an illegal move. But this function is NOT
called for the tree roll out.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Of course DM has a chess function which does codes the rules of the next
move. It can return a LOSS if you try an illegal move. But this function is
NOT called for the tree roll out.

I see what you mean- the chess function computes the results of actions
returned by the system. But, if you do rollouts you need to have a set of
actions from which to choose and an internal representation of states
resulting from those actions. MuZero learns to predict those actions and
states- but that means it selects from sets of possible actions and states.
The paper does not explain where do these sets come from.

For ATARI I get it, there's the physical ish controls and video frames. For
the board games however, I remember very clearly from the AlphaZero paper that
there was an encoding of "knight moves" and "queen moves". I also remember
less clearly that the structure of the network's layers mirrored the layout of
a chessboard. That's what I mean by hard-coding and in the MuZero paper there
are many references to reusing the AlphaZero archietecture and no explanation
of how the same components (board states, moves) are represented in MuZero.

------
andreyk
It's kind of funny just how much complaining about AI hype and bad coverage
there is (on Twitter, and on this very subreddit), it feels like there is more
of that now than actually bad coverage. This article suggests some actions to
take at the very bottom, which amount to including some discussion of the
limitations of the work in the paper -- not a bad idea, but then again the
misleading coverage usually does not stem from claims in the papers themselves
in the first place.

Shameless but relevant plug warning, I run this effort Skynet Today with the
aim to let AI researchers/experts present various advancements/topics to a
general audience without hype and with context. Everyone on the team is
volunteering their time for free and we can always use more people to help us
tackle various subjects, so if you care about this issue feel free to take a
look here:
[https://www.skynettoday.com/contribute](https://www.skynettoday.com/contribute)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Skynet Today is very good. I wish you had more original articles because the
ones you have, I enjoy a lot (your editorials and briefs). I see you are
calling for contributions, I hope you get some good ones.

Writing good articles- there's no other way to combat bad coverage. Keep it up
please and all the best.

------
system2
It happened to VR a few years ago. The development slowed down when companies
realized the sales. Unlike VR, AI is not a physical good that users/customers
can purchase and test directly. It is just a buzzword. Companies will use it
to death at every opportunity to market themselves. This is unstoppable. We
will hear more about it, maybe until people get sick of hearing "another
crappy ai product".

~~~
buboard
AI is more of a datacenter technology. People already use it
(siri,alexa,google search) and they apparently like it already. It was easy to
see that any VR headset is bulky and agonizing, but those new services work
fine. Sure, however the "not hot dog" apps are going to be disappointing

------
8bitsrule
The buzzword back in the 70s-80s (after AI over-promised in the 1960s) was
'expert systems'.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system)

(To the extent that I have kept up with it) modern AI skips the 'knowledge
base' part of ES, in favor of pattern-recognition based on 'training'.

Today's (Indeterministic, trained, n-net) AI has clearly saved a lot of
time/effort in creating 'knowledge bases'. I suspect it appeals more to
singular fantasies about 'more human than human' intelligence. (Sorry Ray)

Question is: Is today's AI even a magnitude-better than (deterministic) ES
insofar as extensibility and verifiability? What if we had spent those decades
refining the ES approach instead?

~~~
JimmyRuska
You should use both. Download wikidata and use the manually curated
interconnected data available. You could argue it was compiled by the largest
pool of neural networks ever assembled. Wikipedia data was curated content
that was hierarchically and painstakingly interconnected by humans, the most
advanced NN we know of :).

There's now discussion about how neural networks can succumb to data poisoning
/ adversarial attacks, because there are no immutable facts. Adding a mostly
immutable fact table can help keep things grounded in reason. Most of these
engines support complex inference abilities that can lead to unexpected
connections.

ES is not really dead. It feels like many rules engines changed their names to
"AI Intelligent Agents"-type wording to describe their product. Rete algorithm
is similar rule based calculation, is still used to calculate FICO score,
which you could say fits into the problems that may be better served by the
latest Neural network models. Allegro graph lets you query using prolog and is
often used for governance and compliance tools. RDFox is one of the latest
inference engines that made major advancements in turning first order logic in
datalog into parallel computation.

I'd imagine if you can build a neural network that can successfully interact
with a ES knowledge base you could easily make a neural network as good as the
one that won in jeopardy

------
blazespin
An AI winter will not happen. We are past the point of no return. The vast
majority of research is net positive research.

The only risk is misappropriation of investment, but that has already been
smoothed over quickly.

I’d get the complaint if AI was not doing anything useful as it wasn’t in ‘74,
but it simply is.

For example, plate recognition, drones and facial recognition. These are
brutally efficient technologies. To imagine any government under investing in
these is a total misunderstanding of the value that AI brings to military,
security, and economic dominance.

It’s a race between nations and the only danger is the computers taking over
(not in a general AI way, but in a way that everything is run by algorithms no
human can understand)

~~~
not_a_moth
You sure?

Without a doubt, there's an investment bubble for AI companies in industry: a
huge amount of companies have added "AI" to their proposition, where the AI is
only marginally useful if not useful at all, for the purpose of marketing and
inflating valuation.

On research side, it's now clear the current AI paradigm will not produce the
kind of massive, society-shifting promises that were made to investors, which
is the focus of the article.

Yes deep learning is here to stay for narrow tasks, but the investment
contraction for the rest could certainly feel like a Winter.

~~~
marcosdumay
> it's now clear the current AI paradigm will not produce the kind of massive,
> society-shifting promises that were made to investors

It's correct in that it won't produce the society-shifting promises. But there
is a huge amount of money on non-society-shifting innovation.

Besides, I really doubt the media predictions are what actually was told to
investors.

------
KKKKkkkk1
The term AI winter is IMHO misrepresenting the true state of affairs. Since
day one, the field's modus operandi was one of overpromising and
underdelivering. That has not changed. We see how Alphabet plows billions of
dollars into DeepMind [1] and all they get in return is a series of game-
playing bots. If unproductive activities are defunded, this creates an
opportunity for productive ones to thrive. "Winter" is not a suitable word to
describe this.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/story/deepminds-losses-future-
artifici...](https://www.wired.com/story/deepminds-losses-future-artificial-
intelligence/)

~~~
andreyk
This is a ridiculously reductive take on DeepMind... they produce a TON of
great research, and have helped advance the state of RL considerably (speaking
as an AI researcher here, having read many of their papers). Google should be
commended for investing in largely basic AI research, even if once in a while
they make a PR splash out of it, IMO.

------
euske
The more I read articles like this (or pretty much ANY article recently), the
more I'm convinced that what we really need is: transparency.

I don't mean just AI, but transparency on everything: Transparency from
researchers, news outlets, governments, retailers, and YouTubers. It's a great
shame that a lot of IT has been used for bringing more confusion and
obfuscation to the people, whereas it could be used to provide a more
coherent/honest view of the world. We should demand more transparency on every
matter.

------
ummonk
Good article, but it overstates its case.

 _> In 1966, the MIT AI lab famously assigned Gerald Sussman the problem of
solving vision in a summer; as we all know, machine vision still hasn't been
solved over five decades later._

It certainly took five extra decades, but it would be a massive shift of
goalposts to say the problem of vision hasn't been sufficiently solved today.

 _> In November 2016, in the pages of Harvard Business Review, Andrew Ng,
another well-known figure in deep learning, wrote that “If a typical person
can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably
automate it using AI either now or in the near future.” A more realistic
appraisal is that whether or not something can be automated depends very much
on the nature of the problem, and the data that can be gathered, and the
relation between the two. For closed-end problems like board games, in which a
massive amount of data can be gathered through simulation, Ng’s claim has
proven prophetic; in open-ended problems, like conversational understanding,
which cannot be fully simulated, Ng’s claim thus far has proven incorrect.
Business leaders and policy-makers would be well-served to understand the
difference between those problems that are amenable to current techniques and
those that are not; Ng’s words obscured this. (Rebooting AI gives some
discussion.)_

It takes significantly longer than a second to actually understand spoken
conversation (rather than provide a conditioned response or match against
expected statements, both of which computers are fully capable of doing).

 _> I just wish that were the norm rather than the exception. When it’s not,
policy-makers and the general public can easily find themselves confused;
because the bias tends to be towards overreporting rather than underreporting
results, the public starts fearing a kind of AI (replacing many jobs) that
does not and will not exist in the foreseeable future._

Robotic manufacturing has already eliminated massive swaths of high paying
jobs. Likewise, software has eliminated massive swaths of data entry and
customer service jobs (with software being a particularly poor replacement for
the latter, but still being put into widespread use to cut costs). And
contrary to beliefs that new jobs will be created in IT, software is able to
massively eliminate low skilled tech jobs as well, as e.g. automated testing
did to India's IT industry.

As with existing jobs that have been automated away, companies won't need
generalized AI to eliminate many more jobs. Many jobs don't rely on
unconstrained complex deduction and thinking, and will be ripe for replacement
with deep learning algorithms. And we can be reliably assured that
corporations will engage in such replacements even when the outcomes are not
up to par.

------
minimaxir
I dunno if the GPT-2 examples are _misinformation_ , more like exaggeration
for PR, which is admittingly a separate problem in AI. (marketing hype vs.
actual falsity)

~~~
brenden2
Hype and exaggeration is just another form of falsification.

------
Veedrac
Sigh.

> The Economist [...] said that GPT-2’s answers were “unedited”, when in
> reality each answer that was published was selected from five options

> [Erik Bryjngjolffson] tweeted that the interview was “impressive” and that
> “the answers are more coherent than those of many humans.” In fact the
> apparent coherence of the interview stemmed from (a) the enormous corpus of
> human writing that the system drew from and (b) the filtering for coherence
> that was done by the human journalist.

If your success rate is ≥20%, the coherence is coming from the model, not the
selection process. This is just basic statistics.

> OpenAI created a pair of neural networks that allowed a robot to learn to
> manipulate a custom-built Rubik's cube

Jeez, I've already corrected you here... well, why not have to do it again?

> publicized it with a somewhat misleading video and blog that led many to
> think that the system had learned the cognitive aspects of cube-solving

The side not stated: OpenAI said explicitly in the blog that they used an
unlearned algorithm for this, and sent a correction to a publisher that got
this wrong.

> the cube was instrumented with Bluetooth sensors

 __During training __, but they ended up with a fully vision-based system.

> even in the best case only 20% of fully-scrambled cubes were solved

No, 60% of fully scrambled cubes were solved. 20% of _maximally difficult
scrambles_ were solved.

> one report claimed that “A neural net solves the three-body problem 100
> million times faster” [...] but the network did no solving in the classical
> sense, it did approximation

All solvers for this problem are approximators, and vice-versa. The article
you complain about states the accuracy (“error of just 10^(-5)”) in the body
of text.

> and it approximated only a highly simplified two degree-of-freedom problem

As reported: “Breen and co first simplify the problem by limiting it to those
involving three equal-mass particles in a plane, each with zero velocity to
start with.”

> MIT AI lab famously assigned Gerald Sussman the problem of solving vision in
> a summer
> [[https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6125](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6125)]

I... _sigh_

“The original document outlined a plan to do some kind of basic
foreground/background segmentation, followed by a subgoal of analysing scenes
with simple non-overlapping objects, with distinct uniform colour and texture
and homogeneous backgrounds. A further subgoal was to extend the system to
more complex objects.

So it would seem that Computer Vision was never a summer project for a single
student, nor did it aim to make a complete working vision system.”

[http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-
cvlegends.html](http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-cvlegends.html)

> Geoff Hinton [said] that the company (again The Guardian’s paraphrase), “is
> on the brink of developing algorithms with the capacity for logic, natural
> conversation and even flirtation.” Four years later, we are still a long way
> from machines that can hold natural conversations absent human intervention

‘Four years later’ to natural conversation is not a reasonable point of
criticism when the only timeline given was ‘within a decade’ for a specified
subset of the problem.

> [In 2016 Hinton said] “We should stop training radiologists now. It’s just
> completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do
> better than radiologists.” [...] but thus far no actual radiologists have
> been replaced

So Hinton actually said “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s
just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do
better than radiologists, because it's going to be able to get a lot more
experience. _It might be 10 years_ , but we've got plenty of radiologists
already.”

2019 is not 2026. “thus far no actual radiologists have been replaced” is thus
not a counterargument.

> Andrew Ng, another well-known figure in deep learning, wrote that “If a
> typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we
> can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.” [...]
> _Ng’s claim thus far has proven incorrect._

I agree. This quote captures the wrong nuance of the issue.

Well, finally finding one point by Gary Marcus that isn't misleading, I think
I'm going to call this a day.

~~~
Veedrac
I published some minor corrections/clarifications to this on Reddit. HN won't
let me edit, so here's a link:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/e453kl/d_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/e453kl/d_an_epidemic_of_ai_misinformation/f98e15s/)

------
pizzaparty2
I bet ai is going to become like coding where everyone thinks they're an
expert.


Ask HN: How Edward Snowden Do His Computing? - sanosuke

	I recently read the "How I do my Computing" by RMS. And I wonder, is there any internet article which have information about which Software Mr. Edward Snowden uses? Operating System, EMail Service, Phone, Etc. I'm getting paranoic about all this privacy talk.
======
alansmitheebk
I would imagine he uses Tails and TOR.

He used to use Lavabit for email. The founder of Lavabit chose to shut the
company down rather than comply with subpoenas from the US government. There
is probably pending litigation to this day. He's obviously not going to
disclose his current email provider as it would suffer the same fate.

I'd be curious to know his choice of OS. It's probably a Linux distro, but it
could also be a BSD.

If he uses a cellphone at all, it's probably a blackphone:
[https://blackphone.ch/phone/](https://blackphone.ch/phone/) I believe Glenn
Greenwald has talked about the Blackphone and was a beta user.

It's unlikely that Snowden would reveal any details about his computing as
they could potentially be used compromise his comsec.

Here are some resources for surveillance self-defense:
[https://ssd.eff.org/](https://ssd.eff.org/).

~~~
Tomte
The founder of Lavabit was perfectly willing to cooperate with the US
government, including giving up customers' data, until some point when he just
reverted to childish behaviour.

~~~
alansmitheebk
He was forced to consent to having monitoring hardware installed. When the
government demanded that he hand over the encryption keys as well he refused.
You can read his side of the story here:
[http://lavabit.com/](http://lavabit.com/)

I don't see anything childish about upholding his fiduciary responsibilities
to his users and standing up to the agents of a surveillance state which far
exceeds even the wildest dreams of the East German Stasi.

~~~
Tomte
You're wrong.

He was perfectly willing to hand over customer data before Snowden.

~~~
jpetersonmn
Handing over specific user data when requested is a lot different that handing
over your encryption keys though.

~~~
Tomte
He handed over specific user data for other users, refused to do that in the
Snowden case. Only then (and after long stalling) did the US government demand
the keS, in order to get the data themselves.

Had he handed over the requested data, just like all the data before, noone
would have demanded any keys.

------
BorisMelnik
For most of his work, he is probably using a PC without a video camera (webcam
/ mic) operating under a fake identity. Good chance he is just using a normal
OS / setup.

Phone, I agree he probably has to have some sort of blackphone unless he is
altering his voice.

Now, when he goes to communicate with his family / reporters I'm sure he has a
whole setup with Tor / Tails and a whole lotta encryption.

If you watched the recent documentary you will see he did a lot of command
line stuff and was a huge advocate of PGP.


One percent of Googlers get to visit a data center, but I did - zdw
https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/how-data-center-security-works/
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marssaxman
I did not realize this was so rare; my whole team toured a Google data center
just a couple of months after I began working there. Perhaps security has
grown more stringent in the last eight years. It was interesting, to be sure.
I was particularly struck by the amount of engineering that went into the
cooling system. I had never really thought about that before.

The tour left me with a powerful, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that I had made a
big mistake by going to work there. Wasn't the whole point of the PC
revolution that we were going to do away with these sorts of massive,
centrally-controlled institutions of computing, instead giving the power to
the people...? How did we end up back here?