I commented more extensively in the root of the post, but you can't even begin to imagine.
Think about every script you've ever written for "some thing at home" and how you only cared that it worked for the very narrow, specific, circumstances you were looking for. Maybe you left out error handling and just let it crash when you failed to put in the right parameter. Who cares? It's just a script for your one, lonely, workstation/server.
That's about the quality we're talking about. The companies that make these switches sell them to, maybe, five customers[0]. Software upgrades? Sure, if you replace that $30,000 card with the new version. Having trouble with the software? A support contract can be purchased for a similarly high fee[1]. A company producing this equipment doesn't put a lot of money into QA. In security, there was a general fear about these programs. It was so concerning that the management interfaces to the equipment was on "as close to air-gapped as you can be without being air-gapped" networks with the kinds of logging, auditing and the likes that you'd expect for a network holding government classified information[2].
[0] So few customers, in fact, that you can call them up with a serial number and find out who the purchaser is. I know this first hand due to someone propping the door to the switch site open resulting in, I think, 5 of what I was told were $30,000 a-piece cards being stolen. I was told they were effectively worthless to the thief, though, because nobody would buy them second hand in that manner and the moment they were offered for sale, if someone realized what they were, the thief would be caught.
[1] To be fair, I know of one specific circumstance where the company only offered paid support but that was mainly because I didn't work on that team; I'd speculate that all of them functioned this way.
[2] Well, maybe what you'd expect in an ideal world, anyway.
> Think about every script you've ever written for "some thing at home" and how you only cared that it worked for the very narrow, specific, circumstances you were looking for. Maybe you left out error handling and just let it crash when you failed to put in the right parameter. Who cares? It's just a script for your one, lonely, workstation/server.
I find seeing this mentioned oddly comforting. I write my worst software for myself. Zero validation, very little error handling, unchecked assumptions all over the code.
At least I'm not the only one out there with a barely-stable home lab setup because of shoddy programming.
This is the difference between tinkering, experimentation and engineering. All of these have their proper place. There is no shame in having a shoddy piece of code as long as it is within a lab environment. Trouble usually starts when this kind of code changes hands and finds serious users.
I joke that I have an ever growing private repository of code I'm too embarrassed to publish publicly. Only partly joking; it's actually several repositories. But as others have said, people who are programmers more than just professionally do this all the time. There's very few things that involve using a computer that I run into day-to-day that I don't think, "I could do this faster with a dirty script[0]"
I used to do interviews and would often encounter candidates who had no public repositories, anywhere, GitHub or otherwise. I learned quickly to be very disarming before even asking and settled on something along the lines of "Look, I know when you write things for yourself, you're doing it with very limited time and for an audience who is more interested in it doing 'The Thing' without regard for anything resembling best practices, or even typical practices. I fully expect lousy code and that's perfectly fine, but I really need as many recent samples as you can possibly give me before this evening to be prepared.[1]"
What wasn't probably realized by the candidates was that if I'd made that phone call they were getting the technical interview regardless of the code quality and I was barely going to glance at their code until the interview. And the best thing they could do for me was to give me code that was on the bad side of things[2]. The first question I'd ask is "OK, imagine you have all of the time you'd ever need to make this perfect. The goal is to get there in stages and maximize the improvements as early as possible. What would you change and in what priority." There's no way in their development career that they're not going to encounter something as awful as they've written in production and be asked to fix it, and they're going to have to start with "make it work again" and in a limited number of stages "get it to the best state; hopefully to an ideal state" but the goal is to get to as stable of a state as possible before you're pulled somewhere else.
[0] Or better, stop doing it at all by putting that dirty script in a cron job that won't have any logging, I'll probably be really happy with for the first few weeks, then forget it was there and not realize a few months later when it stops working.
[1] It was kind of a dick move and I always felt a little guilty, but I know that my instinct would be to spend an evening cherry picking the best examples which I'd then go without sleep to clean up as best I could before morning. And it wasn't a situation where I wanted to judge them at their worst "Well, if their worst code looks this good, they must be good."; if I got a code sample that was too good, I figured it was the rare script that was cared about but that the developer didn't want to unleash on the world and feel like they had to support. When this happened, it was always from a candidate who gave me one maybe two things while claiming to be a code addict and I always asked those candidates to rectify their love for software with only having a couple of very small, albeit well-written code samples. I recommended one guy who admitted he had a lot of other code but was too embarrassed by it and then logged into his BitBucket repo.
[2] Which I found worked best when I simply just asked candidates for their worst code and told them, generally, that I'd like to get a feel for how they handle eliminating technical debt. If the code was too good, I'd have to find something that I felt they should be able to quickly understand well enough to offer ideas for improvements; that rarely worked out well -- it's always easier on the candidate when it's code they've written because they're, at lease possibly, likely to be familiar with it.
To [0], would there be any value to stealing the cards not to sell them but to reverse engineer them to find vectors for attacks? "Effectively unsupported, never updated, and responsible for a massive amount of telecommunications" sounds like a great time for an attacker. Also seems like it would have value for industrial espionage.
I can't say that I'm completely sure, but I'm going to guess the answer is "Probably Not". The big telecoms tend to be very conservative about where they spend their money -- understandable with a product this expensive despite the grief one tends to have in working with the product. The market is also moving toward more generic equipment and less specialized hardware for a lot of things and I'd imagine these cards will fall into that category at some point, as well.
What keeps most of from 'shipping' our home-grade, hacked-together code to anyone else is the fear of having to support it, though. "OK, grandma, now shell into the RPi and tell me what crontab -l says..." - you would think that aside from any sort of professional ethics (or even pride) that companies in these situations wouldn't dare ship something that 'mostly worked' (unless they had superhero lawyers...)
"The network management software interpreted the empty field as a 'wildcard,' meaning that the software understood the blank field as an instruction to block all calls, instead of as a null entry. This caused the switch to block calls from every number in Level 3’s non-native telephone number database."
Probably a filtering interface with several fields, in which you fill the ones you want to filter on. If you don't fill a field, it's not used as a criteria for filtering (so empty fields are a "don't care" for that field's criteria).
I know what you mean but i am not sure how much he knew about the things manning leaked. Considering what he did before i want to believe that he had a good reason why he did it. Maybe he really thought people were in danger
People really were put in danger. The Taliban targeted Afgan nationals revealed in the documents to be associating with the US. From a Taliban spokesperson: "We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the U.S. If they are U.S. spies, then we know how to punish them." [1]
I like freedom of information, but what Manning did was simply irresponsible. There was no filter on the documents released. Release all the reports of us torturing and murdering, sure. But don't go around telling the Taliban exactly which families risked their lives to help the counterinsurgency.
Fucking hell, will you stop linking that 8-year-old article? The only information contained in it is one goat enthusiast no one ever heard of, quoted as saying "yes if we learn of a betrayal against goat enthusiasm we will be upset about it." That proves absolutely nothing. If any brave Afghan national USA collaborator had died as a result, we would have heard about him enough to be sick of it. Unlike, for instance, the thousands of Afghan nationals murdered directly by USA military, whom the war media never mentions.
This comment crosses into ideological flamewar and personal attacks, which are destructive on HN regardless of how correct your underlying views may be. Please don't do those things here.
It isn't a question of criticism but of grandiose rhetoric—e.g. equating people who disagree with you with child-haters, and whatnot.
One can argue that atrocities demand intense responses and I agree with that. But I also know that on internet forums this has long degraded into garden-variety flamebait, that the discussions it produces are tedious, predictable, and worthless, and that the end state they lead to is heat death. It's for those reasons we moderate discussion this way, not because we're secret atrocity sympathizers.
Edit: I think it can be helpful to understand how this is really a question of the medium you're posting to. Heated rhetoric that might make sense in a different medium doesn't work the same way in an online forum. No awareness is raised. All it does is provoke opposite flames, and then people try to destroy each other verbally and wreck the container in the process.
If your concern is to make points about reality in the hope that someone else will shift their view a bit, the only way to do that here is neutrally, because if you can't be neutral, the state machine simply advances to state Flamewar. If your concern is to vent rage about evil, that may well be justified, but it doesn't make sense here because the destruction it causes outweighs the limited relief it brings and the zero other good it does. This isn't personal or specific to your views. It's a way of tending to the container for everybody.
Troll somewhere else. If you read even the first line of my comment you’d know I’m talking about protecting Afghan nationals. If you continued reading, you’d see that I agree with leaks exposing the evils committed.
According to him he did it as a matter of conscience given the broad and indiscriminate nature of what Manning was releasing, potentially putting the lives of US servicemen and those that work with them at risk.
His stated reason was that Manning was putting lives in danger due to not filtering the documents released whatsoever. This included revealing the identities of Afghan nationals which had been friendly with the counterinsurgency. These nationals were then targeted by Taliban. See my sibling comment for more.
If you're talking about IMAGE it was known where it was NASA just didn't know that it was still transmitting. IIRC the discoverer actually used the orbital elements to determine what satellite he was seeing. They still had an active and accurate TLE for it they'd just stopped checking because NASA thought it was dead in space after the eclipse a couple years ago failed to reset the broken power supply. [0]
"the thing about the dods tracking capabilities" is true. They know what's up there, down to lost tool bags.
The instances you're thinking of are either "lost" as in "presumed dead" (like IMAGE) or non-Earth orbit probes (like ISEE-3). IMAGE was never untracked, and ISEE-3 was never supposed to be tracked (but its location was still known.)
My point was that the NRO had the resources to build two Hubble level telescopes that no one knew they had until they handed them over, an agency with little oversight, large amounts of cash and very few leaks.
If they are handing over that kind of technology I wouldn’t rule out them having some amazing tracking stuff we know nothing about and won’t for a decade or two if ever.
Hubble's tech isn't particularly impressive any more. NRO having 2 spare is more a sign of just how much money is sloshing around over there than anything else I think.
I always feel that patents or at least the way patents work is really bad for humanity as a whole and hindering our progress. On the other hand there has to be some way for inventors to benefit, are there any good alternatives?
Have you ever worked in a field where patents are an important part of the market structure? Telecom, pharma, etc.?
I spent my engineering career in telecom, and patents are a key part of the model. Those industries don't have the equivalent of a Google or an Apple that can bankroll expensive R&D on the back of massive consumer revenue. They're no unicorns or network effects where you can take a 20% cut on every app that gets sold to your captive user base. Instead, companies pay teams of very expensive PhDs to develop things like error correction systems for modems. They patent those things, use the patents to either extract licensing revenue or, more importantly, keep out free riders who didn't contribute to developing the technology. Then it's all obsolete in five years and they do it all over again.
Markets are good, and patents, as imperfect as they are, provide an infrastructure for integrating expensive R&D efforts (which don't result in tangible property), into markets, in a way that avoids free-riding. And it also results in market structures that are sane. I can just go buy a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom can recoup its investment by just selling me a chip, and count on patents to keep out free-riders. Their business model doesn't require them to make a whole consumer end-product like a phone, or tie their hardware to advertising, to be viable.
In the absence of patents, you get trade secrets and vertical integration. Apple doesn't care about patents because it doesn't sell you chip designs or even a chip, it sells you an iPhone. Google doesn't care about patents because it doesn't sell VP9 or Blink--those are just a means for furthering its advertising business.
Take a step back and think about the business models you want to see more of. Do we need more Apples and Samsungs, which want to sell you a complete end-user product tied to their ecosystem? Or do we want more ARMs, which are happy to just sell you a chip or even an IP core? Wouldn't it be nice to bring back Netscape? Where you could just exchange money for a web browser, instead of going to google.com and it bugging you to download Google's web browser for "free?"
> Those industries don't have the equivalent of a Google or an Apple that can bankroll expensive R&D on the back of massive consumer revenue
What are you talking about? The biggest players in the telecom market report some of the largest profit in the country, both in real terms and as a percentage of revenue. They're just so entrenched that they view any R&D as a cost center if they can't use it to keep others or of the market.
If you look at a pure telecom company like Verizon, they're at $13.6 billion in profits (for 2017) on $125 billion in revenue. Apple is at $50 billion in profits on $229 billion in revenue (for 2017). So Apple's margin is almost double.
Also, "consumer revenue" is the key word. The biggest R&D players in telecom don't sell to consumers. Intel and Qualcomm sell chips (and ARM just sells you IP). They don't make the chip in house and sell you a complete phone. At the same time, a company like Verizon or Comcast that sells to consumers isn't vertically integrated and doesn't do its own R&D. They buy all their equipment from other companies that do the R&D. You don't have vertically-integrated company that uses consumer revenue to bankroll the R&D. You have specialization and market transactions mediated by, among other things, patents.
Contrast web technology, where there’s no patents and no markets. Nobody sells browser engines. There is no specialization. It’s all driven by Apple, Microsoft, and Google, who invest in the R&D to further their consumer-facing platforms.
Verizon is a holding company. It's structured as a holding company with numerous subsidiaries because it's got physical property all over the country, and is subject to literally thousands of different regulatory regimes: federal, 50 states, thousands of city and county utility boards. But its profit figures are reported on a consolidated basis. (And if you have hard evidence to the contrary, man do you have a valuable lawsuit on your hands.)
It's setup in slightly different ways for different niches in the market, but on the mobile side it's a holdover from original FCC regulations on how ownership of spectrum worked. The FCC wanted to encourage competition, so they heavily emphasized partnerships with little mom and pops for each local region of spectrum. After the FCC removed those regulation requirements, those partnerships were still useful as sort of bellows of profit so that the C level can manage their growth curve.
This is all not really private information, is how pretty much all of the telecoms are structured, and isn't illegal.
Not the other 30% or 49% or what have you that's not owned by the national company. But the nature of how the national company handles so many services for the partnerships means that 'negotiations' can change how the money flows around year after year in a way thats controlled by the national company (I say national company because they really are more than just holding companies, they handle large pieces of the business as well).
The profit that accrues to those partnerships either never gets back to Verizon (in which case how is it relevant?) or simply "bellows" (as you put it) the cash flow to Verizon. In the latter case, it'll still show up in long-term measurements. But at the end of the day, Verizon's 5-year profit margin is 13% while AT&T's is 11%. That's about the same as Starbucks. Google and Apple are at 20%+, and Facebook is at 28%.
I suspect what the poster is talking about is telecom equipment manufacturers, not service providers. Yes service providers reap obscene profits. Equipment manufacturers are typically much more challenged by competition and commoditization.
It used to be that the service providers did massive amounts of R&D. Hell, Bell labs was one of the most impressive R&D laboratories of all time. The service providers just decided that it was better to buy themselves protective laws, and to squeeze out any R&D than to try to actually compete.
This isn't a sign of how important patents are, but a sign of how the extreme rent seeking behaviors of the telecoms greatly manipulated many aspects of the market that they're in.
AT&T (of which Bell Labs as a subsidiary) was a vertically-integrated nationwide monopoly that bankrolled its R&D using its massive consumer revenue. Most people would consider the current market structure, where service providers are separate from equipment manufacturers, to be an improvement.
You're still only pointing to two different basic models: companies that recover R&D expenses through vertical integration and direct-to-consumer sales (old AT&T, Apple, Google), and companies that recover R&D expenses in markets mediated by patent protection (Intel's wireless business, Qualcomm, Broadcom). Is your point that the former is preferable?
Also, you're comparing apples and oranges. AT&T today sells a different, much more valuable product than AT&T in 1970. Back then, a household might have one phone line and demand growth was basically nothing. Today, households have multiple cell lines, they're willing to pay much more for them, and demand keeps exploding. Likewise, Google is more profitable than AOL was at it's peak--it sells a different, much more valuable product.
> patents, as imperfect as they are, provide an infrastructure for integrating expensive R&D efforts (which don't result in tangible property), into markets, in a way that avoids free-riding
Preventing free-riding is just one means to the constitutional end of promoting the useful arts; it's one that imposes tremendous transaction costs on society. Another means to that end is for the law to say to innovators, what you've done here is nice, but your bringing it forward simply doesn't provide enough net societal benefit to warrant legally prohibiting your competitors from copying your work — so if you want to keep whatever competitive advantage your innovativeness gives you, then you'd better keep innovating, because your competitors might be gaining on you. (Pace Satchel Paige [0] and Thomas Jefferson [1].)
When a patent is issued, most of the time it's a single, junior civil servant who literally makes legally-binding industrial policy for the entire nation. At a minimum, patent applicants seeking such a private industrial policy should have to do, and document, a thorough prior art search, in the same way that Ph.D. candidates must do and document a literature search for their dissertations. The existing patent examination process is like requiring a Ph.D. candidate's adviser to do the literature search, and requiring the degree to be conferred if the adviser doesn't turn up anything — and of course in the patent world there's always the factor that "the antlike persistency of solicitors has overcome, and I suppose will continue to overcome, the patience of examiners, and there is apparently always but one outcome." [2] A false-positive issuance of a patent has somewhat-greater ramifications for society than a false-positive issuance of a doctorate.
[1] In a famous 1966 opinion, the Supreme Court, citing Thomas Jefferson, said: "The patent monopoly was not designed to secure to the inventor his natural right in his discoveries. Rather, it was a reward, an inducement, to bring forth new knowledge. The grant of an exclusive right to an invention was the creation of society—at odds with the inherent free nature of disclosed ideas—and was not to be freely given. Only inventions and discoveries which furthered human knowledge, and were new and useful, justified the special inducement of a limited private monopoly. Jefferson did not believe in granting patents for small details, obvious improvements, or frivolous devices. His writings evidence his insistence upon a high level of patentability." Graham v. John Deere & Co., 383 U.S. 1, 9 (1966), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=910565259149730...
> what you've done here is nice, but your bringing it forward simply doesn't provide enough net societal benefit to warrant legally prohibiting your competitors from copying your work
The interesting thing to me about this is that it is fundamentally not a legal judgment, but an economic one. I think patent examiners should be required to have some background in economics along with whatever legal training they get (and, of course, their subject matter expertise). Similarly for judges deciding patent cases.
Anyway, as I've posted here on HN occasionally, I think the problem of figuring out at patent application time whether the invention is obvious or not is too hard, particularly for a junior civil servant. Instead I propose that the first step in an infringement proceeding should be for the patentee to supply objective evidence, along the lines of the Graham factors, of nonobviousness. The burden of proof should be on the patentee, and the court should evaluate this evidence on its own, without deferring to the examiner. What do you think of this idea?
> The interesting thing to me about this is that it is fundamentally not a legal judgment, but an economic one.
It's a mix of both. Unfortunately, too many patent lawyers seem to subscribe to the natural-rights theory of protecting inventions: If you invented something, why then just naturally you should be able to prevent others from making, using, or selling it without your consent — as though conceiving and writing up the idea was the most important part of bringing the benefit of the idea to the public. Too often, the other facts involved in effective innovation seem to take a back seat.
(In the 1980s and 1990s, at meetings of the ABA Section of IP Law, I don't know how many times I'd hear Don Banner [0], a former chair of the section and former commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, hold forth on the importance of protecting "the little man from Little Rock," i.e., individual inventors.)
> The burden of proof should be on the patentee, and the court should evaluate this evidence on its own, without deferring to the examiner. What do you think of this idea
I think that would be the sounder public policy — keeping in mind of course that the patent examiner is a neutral expert.
Excellent! I think you're the first person here who has agreed with me :-) It seems like a subtle tweak, perhaps, to many people, but I think it would make a huge difference. Rayiner thinks it's unnecessary after Alice, but I'm not convinced; subject matter is a different aspect of the problem. (Also, though I welcome the effects that Alice is having, I'm not sure I think it's correct. The problem is that word "abstract". As software engineers, we know that abstraction is a hierarchy, and the abstract/concrete distinction is not absolute but is relative to the level within that hierarchy that one is speaking at. Any idea, in short, can be argued to be abstract.)
> keeping in mind of course that the patent examiner is a neutral expert
A neutral expert, but also one whose incentive structure encourages them to close cases. They don't get bonuses for fighting off obstinate applicants with bad patents.
Require mandatory licensing of all patents on 'fair and reasonable' terms (as decided by some sort of market). Require that inventors get a share of the licensing fees (non-transferable until valued by the market).
The point of patents is to entice innovators to PUBLISH their inventions.
A patent should be about some process that is so complex that nobody else has figured how to do it before (i.e. some secret trick). When it's published, humanity is better off by publishing it now (even if it's locked up for a little while) so people can investigate related solutions (some of which might not infringe).
But the patent office is allowing patents on obvious things, so the public gets no value in their publication. (Actually negative value, since people have to waste time reading them and companies are afraid to develop products).
How exactly would that work when I work for a corporation who is paying me to invent? If I am successful in my invention, then I just take my invention and run. This would stifle research investment.
Well, you get good healthcare and pension in most european countries. You can live a lot cheaper than in the big cities in the us and there is no gangs and not as many drug addicts
Compare housing costs in London, Paris etc vs SV - yes health care Is nice but that is used as an excuse by employers who also benefit from the European health systems.
In the Midwest chicken is often $2 a pound. Vegetables vary a lot, but $3 a pound is about right for perishable stuff other than greens (which are more expensive). Carrots and onions and the like are way less than $3 a pound.
A little OT: The price for food in Germany are to my knowledge one of the lowest in the world compared to the average income.
This trend of food getting cheaper all the time has led to a real „industrialised“ agricultural sector in Germany. This effect is good for the consumer because an egg costs like 15 euro cents, but it is horrible for the environment and especially for the animals. You just can‘t produce so much cheap food without tremendous sacrifices.
Food prices here in Germany indeed are very low. In my experience this has another bad side effect. Many people expect food to be that cheap and don't even consider buying 'good' food for higher prices (even if they can afford it).
E.g. I buy ecological eggs (not the 'supermarket-ecological' ones) and they cost about 45 cents a piece. That's at least 3 times the usual price.
