timsally

There are no words for this; an incredible story. My thoughts and prayers are with Bertrand and others with NGLY1 deficiency.

It seems that while Professor and Christina Might were making a herculean effort to discover and fight NGLY1 deficiency, Professor Might was granted tenure (!) at the University of Utah and is considered a rising star (http://admin.utah.edu/academic_affairs_posts/rising-stars-at...). I doubt anyone makes excuses for late homework in his class.

> The team comprises CEO, CFO, COO, and VP-BizDev…no engineers, at least in the leadership.

Huh? The CEO has a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering from Princeton and was a Principle Propulsion Engineer at SpaceX, Senior Systems Engineer at Blue Origin, and the VP of Propulsion at Virgin Galactic. Put another way, he's been a key engineer at all the major private space companies...

Shameless plug to follow...

Much of the technology here was invented by Brendan and others at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which is where I work. We have been very lucky to have Brendan join us for a few summers while he was completing his PhD at Georgia Tech and he gave a great showing at RECON. Brilliant guy. If you're interested in reverse engineering his most recent papers are essential reading: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/b/brendan.

In addition to some of the automated RE work, we've also got multi-million dollar research efforts hacking the Linux kernel and reverse engineering/analyzing embedded systems. Lot's of fun stuff. You get to work on really exciting problems and you'll have the funding and the skilled coworkers you need to execute successfully.

If you find this type of stuff exciting, you should drop me a line at sally@ll.mit.edu. We're always hiring^. We've got great benefits too, like a pension, unlimited sick leave, 13 holidays, 20 vacation days, and free classes at MIT.

^One caveat is that because of how we are funded, we are only able to employ US citizens.

Go Dan!!!!!!!

My point is that you and I have no idea whether a mission to capture al-Awlaki is "what they do or not". To know whether such a mission is possible or realistic requires knowledge that few people in the world actually have. Whether to deploy SOF or not is a command decision made on a case by case basis. We can't know sitting behind our computer terminals whether it was a realistic option or not. I assume it wasn't, otherwise why wouldn't they have tried to capture him? I imagine he would have been a very valuable source of intel.

There are a lot of people out there who seem to feel pretty strongly about sending our armed forces in harms way in this type of situation. I can't help but wonder if any of those people stand to lose anything if such an operation were to go poorly. It just boggles my mind that we would risk American lives and millions of dollars of training and equipment when we have other legal options that are less risky.

The argument that we should send special operations forces every time to go grab people is a common one, but it falls short in several respects.

The first is that most people do not realize how long and difficult the modern training pipeline is for SOF. Operators are extremely valuable and hard to come by and you do not want to risk them unnecessarily when you have other legal means of accomplishing the mission. For example, it takes 12 months to even qualify as a Navy SEAL, and then another 12-18 months of platoon training before a deployment. Only a tiny fraction of those who start the SEAL pipeline actually make it through due to the difficulty of the training. It is for this reason that the Navy offers $40,000 to anyone who can make it through the training (http://navyseals.com/files/ChallengeSEAL.pdf) and reenlistment bonuses for operators can approach $100,000. And never-mind the cost of the equipment used during the operation. How much do you think the stealth helicopter that got destroyed during the Osama Bin Laden raid cost?

The second is that there is some serious armchair quarterbacking going on. I think its crazy to assert what our armed forces should and shouldn't do without a full understanding of what you are asking of them. The complexities of planning a SOF operation that goes deep into a place like Yemen are quite involved. For more on this, I suggest the book The Black Banners by Ali Soufan. It possible (and even likely) that a capture operation for Anwar al-Awlaki was either impossible, or possible but likely to end in the death of al-Awlaki anyway.

Anwar al-Awlaki could have had a trial anytime he wanted. He simply had to go to the American Embassy and turn himself in. As things stood when he was killed, it was impossible to bring him back for a trial without an unacceptably high risks to the people in the armed forces who would have had to capture him. If you wanted some insight on the complexities of operating within Yemen, I suggest The Black Banners by Ali Soufan. The subject of the book is the events leading up to 9/11 and Soufan was one of the FBI's top agents and strong critic enhanced interrogation. He invested the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and he covers the difficulty of working in country quite well.

> But I think there's something fundamentally different about someone saying or doing something in ignorance -- especially if they appear contrite once they realize how it's made others feel -- and someone doing it purposefully, like the creep in the restaurant in Heidi's story.

Sure, agreed, and this is explicitly recognized by the US legal system (i.e. involuntary manslaughter vs. voluntary manslaughter/murder). That said, good intentions don't lessen impact on victims. Intention sometimes plays a role is determining what punishment is appropriate for the person who did the offensive/criminal act, but that's little consolation to those who are routinely targets of said acts. You're dead, whether the person that killed you meant to kill you or not. Something important to keep in mind in the context of harassment and conduct in the workplace.

> There is absolutely nothing a human can do in space that a machine can't do better, except die.

I can think of two things.

The first is a bit morbid, but consider what happens if some country ever decides to weaponize space. Being able to have people up there who can use the weapons available to them and exercise their independent judgement even in the face of an earth-to-space communication failure is important. It's the same doctrine that's behind ballistic missile submarines equipped with nuclear warheads.

The second is less morbid-- the colonization of other planets. This is necessary to protect the human species from an extinction event. Maybe even one that resulted from the aforementioned submarines. Naturally in order to colonize other planets we need to study the effects of space on humans. In order to do that we need to send them into space.

All of that said, I also believe most of our current missions can be done much more cost effectively by changing them to unmanned missions. But you can't take your eye of the long game, which just like the rest of history, is manned and involves militarization and colonization.

You know a great way to get a good workout in a short period of time is? Running. You should run for 25 minutes 3 to 4 times a week. There are three types of workouts you should do within this time. Long Slow Distance (LSD), Continuous High Intensity (CHI), and Interval (INT). For LSD, you run the entire time for a long distance slow enough such that you can talk comfortably the entire time. For CHI, you run 15 minutes at 90-95% of your maximum speed and then recover. For INT, you run for 2.5 minutes at maximum speed followed by 5 minutes of recovery, repeating until done. Congratulations, you're now more physically fit than most of the population in less time than the typical nerd spends caffeinating each week.

Source: http://www.sealswcc.com/pdf/naval-special-warfare-physical-t...

> Everyone has already forgotten Pfc. Manning rotting away for 35 years.

Please represent the facts accurately. Manning is eligible for release in 7-8 years. I'm willing to make a long bet (http://longbets.org) for $300.00 that Manning does not serve 35 years, or "rot away for 35 years" as you put it. Are you up for it?

> First of all, fuck you. It is because of people like you that believe we should be permanently at war that we are permanently at war.

Did you reply to the right comment? I don't believe in permanent war. Do you think I believe that? If so, why? Please be as specific as you can.

In the US "what we pay them to do" is vernacular for "it's their assigned job" or "it's what we asked them to do". I admit it's a bit of a weird phrase but its not actually referring to money. To your point: if the claim is that we're asking our military or our intelligence agencies to do things that aren't effective, then let's have that debate. Nuclear force reduction and end illegal surveillance? Sure. Nuclear disarmament and shutting down our SIGINT mission? Not so much.

I care deeply about what happens in the world and I also think countries having intelligence agencies is ok. This may seem contradictory to you but I don't think it is. I recognize that there are people who do not believe spying is ok, a sentiment most famously summed up by "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Based on how that doctrine worked out, I simply can't support it. I'm willing to have that debate though.

This article states the NSA developed an exploit for a product made by a Chinese networking and telecommunications firm. Honest question for HN readers inside the US: does anyone seriously have a problem with this? In my mind it falls squarely within the NSA's mission, i.e. this is we pay them to do! Question for HN readers outside the US: can you credibly claim your intelligence agencies aren't trying to do the same thing?

For those thinking about whether such things could be used inside the United States. Of course they can. So can all the equipment and weapons the military buys. And it's happened before! The gun in the Fort Hood shootings was bought and paid for by US tax dollars and it was used to kill a civilian. So this raises the question, is the military to be trusted with weaponry it needs for its defense mission even though they could be used in the US? Similarly, is the NSA to be trusted with exploits it needs for its SIGINT mission? Interesting question. An infantryman could go rogue at any time and use his service weapon against US citizens and someone at the NSA could use an exploit for personal gain, but on the whole I believe the system accounts for these possibilities in a reasonable and controlled way.

If this information is true, it seems a little crazy to me to be propagating it since there isn't really a domestic/whistleblower angle. At least, no more of a domestic angle than the military developing a new missile. Some of Snowden's disclosures are responsible for starting a productive civil liberties debate in the United States, there's no denying that. But these disclosures are ones of a different color in my opinion.

> So now what Schneier says has me puzzled about whether or not there is any level of secure room between what he calls a "regular room" and a room that a United States citizen can only enter with a very high level of security clearance.

There are. Schneier has it wrong unfortunately (or at least, was misinformed). You can enter a room approved for classified information without a clearance, you just must be escorted by someone who does have one. I've been in such a room myself without a clearance. I imagine what you were told about a special hearing room for one of the congressional intelligence oversight committees was true then and is still true now.

There is an unfortunate amount of misinformation flying around and it really detracts from what might otherwise be a productive discussion. I hope Schneier takes a but more time to double check his assertions in his next post.

You're completely off the rails here. You've devolved back into discussing the probability of dying from a terrorist attack instead of a whole system analysis. Some questions to answer your questions. Do you think the government knows things about the economy they don't release to the public but use to inform their monetary policy? Do you think the same might be true for terrorist attacks and their security posture? Does the fact that you don't know something mean that it is inherently unknowable?

> Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is, because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the first place, and no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them would be.

That's complete bunk! What's so special about terrorist attacks that make them so hard to model, as compared to other things governments routinely model like inflation, technology transfer from NASA programs, etc? An absolutely ludicrous assertion.

Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it.

My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.

Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.

That's exactly my point. It would have been better to spend large amounts of money preventing 9/11 from happening so we wouldn't have spent the 5 trillion we did on our reaction to it (never mind the cost it had to our national psyche). If someone hits a skyscraper in NYC or the Pentagon with what is effectively a cruise missile, the US military is going to be on the ground to get the bad guys within the month and we'll stay until we find them. That's just a law of nature; its what the people demand from their government, not just in America but in general. Given that, it makes a lot of sense to spend money on preventing terrorism. The direct and indirect costs of a successful terrorist attack are huge.

It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606.

What specifically is your moral objection?

Check out Ali Soufan's book (http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Banners-Against-al-Qaeda/dp/...). I'll loan you my copy if you're in the Boston area. He has had quite an interesting career. According to the book and the New Yorker, it turns out that Soufan probably would have stopped 9/11 had the proper information been shared with him. Again according to his book, he was also a major voice against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and had the chops to back it up. The book states that he was one of the most effective interrogators of captured Al Qaeda suspects and his method essentially boiled down to serving them tea and debating the Quran with them in Arabic.

For a general idea of what the book goes into, you can see Soufan's profile in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/10/060710fa_fact_wr.... In the (Pulitzer Prize-winning) reporter's own words: "Soufan became America’s best chance to stop the attacks of September 11th.".

The overreaction to terrorism isn't a direct cost and its not part of the numbers I cited. Direct costs are insurance losses, medical care for victims, relief to widowers/widows, lost wages, etc. Those costs make up the numbers in my previous comment, which alone justify spending money on preventing terrorism. Indirect costs would be what your talking about and include things like unnecessary wars, wasteful spending on defense, currency/stock market devaluation, etc. Indirect costs are in the trillions but are harder to prove and reason about, which is why I omitted them.

I think Sam's getting at something important but it would be best to first start with estimating the costs as accurately as possible. As it stands Sam's estimates to the cost of terrorism are off by several orders of magnitude, so you can understand why I pointed that out.

Terrorists attacks cost more than lives. The direct costs of 9/11 were between $40 to $100 billion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The direct costs of another terrorist attack targeting something like nuclear power could cost $700 billion or more (http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/25/news/economy/nuclear_acciden...). None of these estimates take into account indirect costs, which are potentially even larger. Preventing terrorist attacks is about saving lives, but it's also about stopping events that could wipe out a quarter of our revenue for the year. Massive economic damage can cause a lot of pain and suffering.

When analyzing risk, it's important to estimate costs as accurately as you can. Unfortunately Sam missed the boat on this one.

Language changes: https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/405148448107659264.

I took a bit of time to read some of your more recent comments and I'm going to level with you-- I cringed pretty hard. Labeling people of 25 years as "old"? Yikes. I'm not sure if you mean to come off this way or not, but some friendly advice: your attitudes surely will limit the people who are willing to work with you to accomplish your goals. Might be worth some reflection.

Great material, but it's been directly taken from the source material (http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algor...) with no added content. I imagine Vijay (the author of the source material) put a lot of work into assembling this information. Vijay's CS Theory answer should replaced as the URL for this HN submission.

EDIT: Removed part of my comment, per the blog author's response below.

All the other companies I listed have had either successful exits, large fundraising rounds, or a successful IPO. David's company is much newer and doesn't meet that bar yet.

Add Tom Leighton (Akamai), Frans Kaashoek (Mazu Networks), Dawson Engler (Coverity), and maybe David Brumley (ForAllSecure) to that list. Profitable startups are not uncommon among professors in top departments.