Coinpunk - Run your own Bitcoin wallet service - <AUTHOR> http://coinpunk.org

<comment><USER3> This is the last thing we need in the Bitcoin world... online wallet services run by people not even smart enough to roll their own.

Kudos to you and spending time on this project, it looks pretty slick, but it's a horrible thing for Bitcoin in general.

If the only thing it manages to accomplish is accelerate the rejection of online wallet services then I suppose it's a good thing.

<comment><USER4> A lot of folks "smart enough to roll their own" have gotten hacked. A common, peer-reviewed implementation could be a long-term win.

<comment><USER5> Unless this provides the entire distro it seems like people are still going to get hacked through vulnerabilities in other software.

<comment><USER6> I agree. But I wouldn't use this argument to discount the product - <USER2> really should be implemented. It seems like the solution would be to provide a specialized "Coinpunk Ubuntu distribution" that you can install on the cheapest Amazon instance or any other cloud server.

I think this a pretty the ideal way to have a bitcoin wallet. You can probably trust Amazon better than you can trust your own machine at home (Companies with much larger assets than you'll ever have are able to trust Amazon), and you can also count on something like S3 or gmail for backups.

The ability to log in from anywhere without having to install a client is really important for usability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Help me buy cheap beer and fixed gear bikes

I think the name you were looking for is "Coin Hipster"

<comment><USER8> "Coinster?" "Coin Hipster" just seems too tautological as two words. Coinster wold be no less so, but just seems less that way because it's "one word."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this storing the private keys on the server ?

<comment><USER10> Probably, and you can't really get around that.

Client side encryption in JavaScript isn't at all secure either, no matter how much Blockchain.info would like you to think otherwise.

<comment><USER11> can you elaborate why is client side encryption isn't secure at all?

<comment><USER10> Alright. I'm going to use <https://blockchain.info/wallet/> as an example.

The website presents to the user a page that asks for their identifier or username, if they can provide either of those, the server returns an AES encrypted file containing all of the private keys for the bitcoin wallet. Using JavaScript, these are decrypted with the users password when and if they can supply it. At face value, this means that the server will never be able to see the wallet, or spend from it. There's quite a few very nasty attack vectors against this service though.

• Any browser plugins have full access to everything in the wallet, at any time. Most people run AdBlock, or Ghostery, or SSL Everywhere, a compromise of any plugin (or a malicious author) can steal coins at their will.

• The server can modify the client code at any time, which means that it could be changed to send back the private keys once they have been decrypted, or to simply send back the password when entered.

• The website offers a "verifier plugin" for their users to use, which supposedly verifies the contents of blockchain.info for malicious activity. If you look at the source of the plugin on github, it pretty much prevents XSS and nothing else. There's absolutely nothing stopping somebody at blockchain.info from modifying the code.

• Any person in the world can download the encrypted wallet, and preform an offline attack on it in their own time. Due to the way wallets are stored the public key is exposed, meaning a malicious entity can check the balance of the wallet before launching the full power of their GPUs against it. This particular attack was noted by the community, and blockchain.info started sending email notifications out to their users; many users noticed quickly how many people were downloading wallets to attack. It's not like the bitcoin community suffer a deficit of graphics cards.

• The encryption of the wallet files is hilarious; AES and 20 rounds of PBKDF2. I doubt that there's any off-the-shelf implementations that can handle it, but I wager oclHashCat could probably be easily modified to attack them. If it can manage 3 million attempts against 1Password keychains, it would be magnitudes faster against this.

The author is well aware of all of this, and still keeps the misleading statements about the security of the service on the introduction page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for posting this. I think this highlights really well how complicated Bitcoin security issues are.

I will come right out and admit that there is an intrinsic risk to leaving your Bitcoin wallet on a 24/7 server that an attacker can potentially break into. I think that running your own (vs a centralized hosted wallet service) potentially mitigates some of this risk, but of course, if there was a security issue with Coinpunk, an attacker could theoretically write a script to spider for servers. I do believe that it does help to reduce the "single point of failure" problem though.

I do think that the added convenience of 24/7 bitcoin transactions is worth the risk. I think that there is a threshold of acceptable risk that people will take for convenience. After all, even if you're running Bitcoin-qt on a desktop, what's to stop a trojan horse from infecting that machine and stealing its wallet file?

There are a few things I want to implement eventually to improve the security of Coinpunk. One thing I want to do is allow accounts to remove and backup their private address keys. This would in effect turn the account into a "savings account" that is locked from changes. You could move a large portion of your funds to that account, and then keep the rest available for quick transactions.

Another thing I want to do is enable the wallet encryption feature. It's not a huge security gain because the attacker probably has access to that password, but I don't think it hurts. This could perhaps be combined with a chroot jail that doesn't have access to the config file after loading, requiring the user to figure out how to pry the password out of memory on a running program (which isn't impossible, but it's definitely more work).

I wanted to get the basic system running, and then explore these security improvements in a systematic way with help from the community. So these features will eventually go in, I just want to go slow and make sure we get things right.

<comment><USER10> Please keep in mind that I have nothing against developing Bitcoin services, and absolutely nothing against your project.

My main gripe is with services like Blockchain.info and Strongcoin.com who make claims that are provably false. Both have large banners on their main pages claiming that their services are the safest most secure store for currency. We—both they and I—know it to be a lie.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I didn't take any offense to your comments, I found them to be very reasonable and I think it's important that we have an honest discussion about these issues. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can somebody please describe the most basic use case for this server?

<comment><USER13> Accessing bitcoins from your smartphone, I guess? Assuming you don't want to host your wallet with someone else.

<comment><USER12> There is the android wallet app already. I wonder why would one want to keep his wallet on a server?

<comment><USER14> Because its easier.

I only have about $20 in bitcoin. I would much rather use a server, because the thought of losing $20 in case of security breach doesn't really keep me up at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sweet, exactly what I was looking for.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how many people from hn will be at the Bitcoin 2013 conference this weekend. The Thursday meetup thing was pretty cool, standing in the conference reg line right now.

</comment><comment><USER17> I find Bitcoin cool. I love open source and I love web services. That having been said, I will very happily use an offline client for my Bitcoin needs. Not one that connects to the Internet and not one that primarily or even secondarily works via it.

(Yes, I'm more paranoid than most, I do keep them on an "offline" jump drive and sign transactions offline. But at the very least, I'd use Bitcoin-Qt, or Armory with encryption. I'll give this a closer look but it gives me the heebie-jeebies, maybe I'm wrong for feeling that.)

It certainly looks nice and usable, though!

<comment><USER18> How do you send/receive transactions to/from the blockchain, then?

<comment><USER17> Note that I sign transaction offline. To put it simply your address is a private key, from which a public key (the public address) is derived. You can have one client, synced to the Blockchain, displaying your balanced, able to make transactions.

Then you take that transaction to an offline computer or source and sign it, take it back to the online computer and transmit it to the network. /roughly, see the other link for better information

<comment><USER19> Are you signing it manually? Or just doing some go-arounds with Bitcoin-qt? I'm really interested in this, but never found any python scripts or how-to's.

How do you allocate change address' etc as well?

<comment><USER20> Look into the Armory client and some guides on how to do offline signing with it. It is also a deterministic wallet so your backups and offline computer will never run out of change addresses.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


100K Toshiba laptop batteries recalled for overheating reasons - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/3050377/hardware/major-toshiba-laptop-battery-recall-issued-after-faulty-units-overheat-and-literally-melt.html <comment><USER2> I remember well when Toshiba did a poor job of putting the desktop version of Pentium 4 processors into laptops and there were a myriad of heat issues. Frankly, I've stayed clear since.

<comment><USER3> I had such a laptop. It had two huge fans on the bottom, weighed upwards of 10 pounds (much of that heatsink), and roared like a jet when the CPU was worked.

It still saw about six years of faithful service.

<comment><USER4> P25-s607, and mine is still working, it's got to be 13 years old? I still use it for downloads.

I actually thought it was a well built/designed computer. It was marketed as a laptop, but the minute I got it home, and set it up, I knew it was my new desktop. It's got to be the biggest, heaviest laptop they ever made? The only thing that failed was a hard drive, and it was an easy repair. Meaning they designed it to be worked on by us.

That laptop has seen a lot of my life. Two failed relationships. Two great pit/bulldog mixes, and a bullmastiff.

One of my dogs used to lick the screen every once in awhile.

The screens on the fan openings needed cleaning with a vaccume.

I remember buying it at circuit city for $2700

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just had the (dis)pleasure of working on a Toshiba laptop. And now i get to tell the customer to check their battery. I'll no longer recommend that brand!

<comment><USER6> There are very few brands I can recommend anymore.

For me? Filter by "does this laptop have the service manual available officially from the manufacturers site?". That instantly gets me down to Dell and Lenovo (AFAICT).

Everyone else? Unless they need to run Windows I tell them to get a Macbook, with the AppleCare warranty if they're in a country without consumer protection.

<comment><USER7> For laptops I stick to Lenovo T-series and Panasonic Toughbooks, I've found both to be very amenable to end user hardware modification. I don't run Windows, so unless the manufacturer does something crazy with IME or UEFI - I'm not worried about spyware.

<comment><USER8> Does the BIOS have a whitelist of approved parts such as WiFi modules on the think side? I have a consumer grade lenovo and I'd not recommend it to anyone.

<comment><USER9> I second that. Once I had a ThinkPad where under Linux WiFi performed terribly and I could not replace WiFi card to one known to work reliably due to that BIOS whitelist. So I used USB WiFi dongle. So much or user-serviceable hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone familiar with battery internals explain what are some of the likely causes that make such mass-produced consumer product go dangerous? Are they intrinsic to the working principle of the cells?

<comment><USER11> There is a tension between making batteries that are safe and batteries powerful enough to support consumer's ever increasing expectations for more powerful machines. Battery makers have to weight making a battery more devoted to batter materials (more electrical storage) versus more casing (to control the contents). It just boils down to chemistry: we're trying to jam a huge amount of energy into a small place, yet release it in a controlled manor. Li- ion batteries have a membrane that separates the two side of the battery. If it has a defect any any manor, it turns into an uncontrolled release.

A 30 watt battery can power a 30 watt light bulb for a full hour. It doesn't seem like a lot of light and heat, but that is because it is released over the course of an hour. Now, think about all of that energy being released in ten seconds. We're talking basically about a 5,000 watt heater trapped into a little space not designed to dissipate it. It's going to catch on fire.

What's amazing to me about batteries isn't that they occasionally catch on fire, but how infrequently they do. Modern Li-ion batteries have an amazing amount of energy density.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Make Google Fonts Render 1-3 Seconds Faster in Slow Networks - <AUTHOR> https://googlefonts.3perf.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> So, a few weeks ago, I discovered a way to make a text that uses Google Fonts render faster. In slow connections, that might give a boost of 1-3 seconds. Some backstory:

* When you use custom fonts (like Google Fonts), most modern browsers won't render the text with that font immediately. Instead, the text will stay invisible until the font is downloaded – or until 3 seconds pass. You might've experienced this yourself (if you had an Android phone and used a slow connection once). This is done to prevent a FOIT, but this hurts user experience.

* A typical solution for this is to add a CSS rule like `font-display: swap` which tells the browser to avoid waiting for the custom font. However, Google Fonts don't support this rule, and the only remaining solution becomes to a) self-host fonts (annoying) b) use JS libraries like Web Font Loader (hurts the initial font load time; pretty complicated for one task)

* Recently, I found a solution for this. Turns out, you can fetch a Google Fonts stylesheet asynchronously, patch it to include font-display, and insert it into the page. So I composed a project that does it! To avoid hurting the performance, the project generates an inline script and a few `<link rel="preload/preconnect">` tags. The script also does some extra work to avoid unnecessary FOUTs. The total size of the code snippet is 550 bytes minified and gzipped.

Here's the primary source code of the script: [https://github.com/iamakulov/googlefonts-font-display- helper...](https://github.com/iamakulov/googlefonts-font-display- helper/blob/master/src/script.js)

Would love your feedback on the tool :)

</comment><comment><USER2> or you know, just disable custom fonts</comment>


Graduating from an average university, should I do a MSc or work in a startup? - <AUTHOR>

My first question to the Hacker News community, I hope I am not doing anything wrong. :)
So, the situation is like this: I am 22 years old, I study Computer Science at Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London and I am graduating this July. When I first got admitted to university I was planning to become an academic. Now, all I want is to finish with my exams and...go out there.
Now, there are three main problems with that:
1. I am most probably going to graduate with a high 2:1 (an average mark between 65% and 70%) from an "average" institution so I suppose that this may be a weak point in my applications for jobs.
2. I don't have any major work/project to show to places where I apply. As with my skillset, they are limited to what I was asked to do/study at university. I can obviously work on this issue after I graduate but since then my applications aren't going to be as "rich" as I'd like them to be.
3. I don't know if that's the "right" thing to do. I am disappointed with higher education in the UK and this is making me feel that doing a Masters will not really help me (apart from giving me another qualification in papers, that is -yes, I am one of those that believe higher education is overrated-). Also, because of that, I feel tired even when I am just thinking about MSc studies.
Which brings me to my question: Do you reckon that it's better I do a Masters (even at a "yet another average university") or should I really give it a go, build something and apply for every position I find interesting? Is "actual work experience" going to be be more helpful than a MSc from a university like, say, UCL or Imperial? What do most people ask for when they look to hire someone? What's better for us as individuals? <comment><USER2> My experience has been that my M.S. hasn't particularly helped me to get jobs, but I think that's more because I did my research in a particularly specialized field (vehicular networking) than because the degree is worthless. I worked full-time while going to school, and I think that has done more for my career than the degree did. I know how things work in far more detail than I did after college, but it feels more like another iteration of breadth-first as opposed to a solid spike of knowledge. About the only thing that my M.S. did for me was killing a latent desire for an academic career. Several conversations with professors who told me, point blank, that they got Ph. D's because they never wanted to get "jobs" gave me sufficient motivation to avoid that track.

That said, I enjoyed grad school far more than the time I've spent working, and if I could do it over again I would. The only thing I'd change would be to pick a more widely relevant area for my thesis, which seems to be the only thing anyone really cares about with an M.S..

That said, you mention that you already feel like higher education is overrated, and that you don't think you're likely to go to a great grad program. I think this is an open-and-shut case against grad school at this time. I'd head out and make your mark on the world in some other way. You can always revisit grad school if you change your mind, but you won't be able to get your early-to-mid 20's back if you spend them on something you seem to be hesitant about right out of the gate.</comment>


Visualizing JavaScript Code as 3D Cities - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/visualizing-javascript-code-as-3d-cities-5785867f7d85#.66rur3ebu <comment><USER2> This, for C++ - and visualizing data-access behavior as train traffic, pushing one another out if not frequently requested into the districts station..</comment>


Ask HN: How has IndexedDB been holding up for you in production? - <AUTHOR> I haven't found any recent conversations about IndexedDB here on Hacker News so I'd like to bring up the subject again. I'm looking at using it for my next project but I'm looking to get a feel for how stable and reliable it is first.<p>For those who don't know, IndexedDB is basically a way to be able to store and manipulate lots of data (even gigabytes) on a client's computer through a web browser API, effectively allowing a website to have a client-side database. <comment><USER2> I've used it. There isn't much to discuss honestly. It's a bit faster in my experience than local storage is, and it can handle more than just string types natively (like ArrayBuffers).

It also has a concept of versioning that's really clean.

However, all your data is dead if you ever clear your cache or migrate machines. You should really consider that as a huge downside. Databases have an important use case and you don't have to just use a SQL solution either.

Something like CouchDB would work fine if you only want some Storage. PouchDB + CouchDB is a good combo That would give you some nice abstractions here without having to put all the onerous on the end user to have some continuity in their data

Also see [https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant- and-o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/instant-and- offline/web-storage/indexeddb-best-practices)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your input. I recall reading somewhere before about a chrome update that (accidentally?) wiped out data stored through indexeddb. Have you heard or experienced anything like this? That case is more concerning to me than when a user clears their own data, because any copies of the data across many machines would all be wiped out around the same time.

<comment><USER2> I've experienced updates in every browser go awry in this way one way or another.

It's really built to be a source of ephemeral storage not the sole provider for an application, that's just the reality of it. There's no continuity guarantees.

<comment><USER3> I see... that's not good

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the reason you think you would need to use it on your next project?

By the way are there any similar projects that already use it at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> To avoid having a centralized database altogether and just have clients store their own data on their own machines.

The reasons why I'm interested in that are:

1) security and privacy (much harder to steal data that's not centralized in one place, and I'll be able to sleep better at night knowing I don't have sensitive data on my hands)

2) code maintainability. I'm not impressed with what happens behind the scenes with relational databases out there and I think it stems from tackling the problem at the wrong layer of abstraction. basically relational databases nowadays aren't really just databases, they're also ways for many, many users, even millions sometimes, to reach consensus about what the current state of the data is. and to throttle alllll those data changes from all those users through one current state (the database) is just wrong imo. really, every user should have their own state of the data, and whenever one user makes a change to their data, that change can be communicated across the network. i.e. a p2p database. this i think decouples storing and manipulating data from communicating data changes.</comment></comment>


Dividing Droplets Could Explain Life's Origin - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170119-active-droplets-cell-division/ <comment><USER2> This article reminded me of one I read a long time ago in Discover:

First Cell - [http://discovermagazine.com/1995/nov/firstcell584](http://discovermagazine.com/1995/nov/firstcell584)

It turns out that this article is about David Deamer who is quoted in the Quanta article.</comment>


Ask HN: ML – if training data are private documents - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I am working on building an application using ML on confidential finance documents. Data I require in huge number are private information which I can never have legally without the permission of the owner.

Has anyone used ML on such private documents, if yes what approaches did you take to collect such data?</comment>


The Irony of Writing Online About Digital Preservation - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/the-irony-of-writing-about-digital-preservation/416184/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> In one day we will wake up with a horrible hangover and all the events of recent past would be wiped out from our collective memory.</comment>


Momenta – capture your moments as pictures with sound - <AUTHOR> http://www.momenta.io/

<comment><USER2> Neat, but i would think the novelty would wear off after some time. Also Google+/facebook could eat their lunch super fast. I'm a big fan of Microsoft Blink ([https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/research/toys/blink.asp...](https://research.microsoft.com/en- us/research/toys/blink.aspx)) - the idea being you can pick the photo you want, or keep a vine-esque video of the moment.</comment>


Sleuthing Software Can Reassemble Deleted Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01novel.html?ref=business

<comment><USER2> Keep this in mind before you take that photo in the first place!

<comment><USER3> and wouldn't it be nice if they briefed their colleagues, so that law enforcement officers the world over will stop "asking" photographers to delete pictures they've just taken.</comment></comment>


Angel investors boos Scottish start-ups - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/44ab515a-95d7-11e1-a163-00144feab49a.html#axzz1u8WntZZ6

<comment><USER2> I got defeated by the paywall. What's the jist of the article?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you want "boost" - kind of turns the meaning of the article on its head. The title is all I can see, however, because of the paywall.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's "Boost", not "Boos"</comment>


Hacker angels - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/hacker-angels.html <comment><USER2> It's fascinating and inspiring and exciting to watch this "hackers all the way down" ecosystem grow. What'll it be like in five years? In ten?

<comment><USER3> "sorry, we can't invest unless you use OTBS"

<comment><USER2> You should become a Segway gang and wear black hoodies that say "Hacker Angels" in green Terminus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know many many extremely intelligent, driven, and practical people that want to start a startup (or have started one), but lack the mentorship to put them into the right mindset. Great mentors are really difficult to find, and it's fantastic that you're offerring your advice to people that would otherwise have a hard time getting it. (Of course some funding is nice too, though I'd argue it's less important).

<comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion, the internet is the great equalizer. You can ask someone a question over email, or on a forum like this, or over Twitter and you can often get thought-out responses.

Not that it could ever replace an investor relationship, but there's no reason that people can't solicit advice from people who have already achieved success. Of course, you may not always get a response, but you'd be surprised by how approachable many people are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is where I hope to be next year. Now back to coding...</comment>


Roblox hits 100M monthly active users, bigger than Minecraft - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/04/roblox-hits-100-million-monthly-active-users/ <comment><USER2> Both of my kids played a lot of Roblox until we banned it. They easily became obsessed and were violent when removed, even with a tightly controlled schedule. They would try to connect to offer WiFi networks to get access and would steal our phones to get access. We ended up having to detox them like it was a drug.

Beyond that we found that the openly mod-able nature of the game allowed some remarkably disgusting 3D models and game modes. Just Google it. It was not hard to find a room with 50 kids holding adult store items and doing extremely inappropriate things.

The system is also rife with predators. One game let them share pictures somehow. Some guy was asking my daughters to send them pictures of their feet. Try to censor that request in chat, I guess.

This if course sets aside the caste system that is built on their in-game currency. Scammers can convince your kids to trade their favorite items away in a "trust trade".

Roblox is not appropriate in my experience.

<comment><USER3> My own son had this period where he was obsessed with playing on the XBox. When I tried to limit his time, he became agressive. So I said "Wow, if XBox has this influence on you, maybe you should stop completely. What do you think?". His smart reaction was to show that he could play a limited time, and be good afterwards. Now I don't have any problems with him.

The thing with kids is that you will not be there all the time, especially when they get older. So banning something they like, doesn't seem like a good solution to me. They will have to handle such impulses themselves. So if you can let them handle their own impulses, that is way better.

For example I will never tell my kids that they cannot smoke, because that will be out of my control anyway. But when we walk to a hospital, there are always patients outside smoking (who obviously look sick). Then I tell them "look at those smokers, how sick they are. And it really smells bad too" etc. When I ask them about smoking, they have very negative associations with it.

So if your kids are doing inappropriate things to play, maybe talk to them as if they are adults, and make a reasonable deal. And show them how their decisions will impact them.

Raising kids is not about enforcing rules, it's preparing them for the real world where they need to make their own decisions.

<comment><USER4> I was only allowed 2 hours of Sega Genesis play, which was just enough to get to the final boss in Sonic and die. Never beat it.

In hindsight this prepared me for the 2 constants in the real world: Never having enough time, and constant disappointment.

<comment><USER5> Rookie mistake. You have to leave the Sega on come back the next day when you have your allotted time. God forbid someone vacuums and uses your plug.

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of when my brother and I beat Legend of Zelda and left the end segment on the tv for a few days to bask in the glory

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft are the new social networks right? Well when I was 15 and we used to play Counter Strike and Quake 3 the "social network" was hanging out on servers with maps just chatting and walking around the map aimlessly or just hanging out on IRC. So I can totally relate to how kids nowadays are going back to this sorta hangout. Text only can be boring (kinda like IRC for many people who couldn't tolerate it) but hanging out in servers, spinning around and doing stuff actively (albeit not productively for society) is actually much more fun. Now couple this with discord and all the in-game voice chat stuff + emotes and the ability to build anything. Yeah I can totally see why young kids wanna hang out in video games all day!

<comment><USER8> I miss the old first-person shooters and the concept of self-contained servers (instead of a global user profile system). Games last for a couple hours, and everyone starts at zero and gets weapons & perks as the game continues (so newbies aren't stuck with bad guns while level 100+ players dominate the server). In 30 minutes of playtime or so you'll have earned enough points (by killing enemies, etc) to be able to afford any weapon you want, compared to now where getting to the top takes months of grinding. There was also no global profile system, so no need to worry about your rank, K/D ratio, etc.

As a result the games were pretty relaxed, there wasn't any rage and the chat conversations were respectful and actually substantial (akin to an IRC network). The game was Crysis & Crysis Wars (and unfortunately the developer ruined all that going forwards with the sequel).

<comment><USER9> How is that different from new shooters? In Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty etc you also start from 0 in each match. Leveling up gives you cosmetics only.

<comment><USER10> CoD is the odd one out, as levelling gets you weapons. But I don't think that's the issue, you unlock them all in a few dozen hours, a weekend for the average teenager.

The issue is modern matchmaking doesn't have the same community-building effect as joining the same few servers every day, getting to know the people you're playing with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a Roblox programmer (Builder's Club) scripting a game, the draw of addressing this huge user base by way of simply coding Lua scripts to release a product that invites In App Purchase is downright tempting!

Then you discover the apparently wide spread client side hacking (speed, teleport, aim bots... you name it) and content theft (models, geometry, Localscripts) and pervasive scam attempts so frequently reported. But that's the internet, and the cost of doing business, right?

After some success (proof of concept stage) building an unreleased game, I started to notice pitfalls and inconsistencies in the developer docs, including lack of documentation for methods and properties specifically out as recommended or best practice approaches.

Chunks of the docs would suddenly disappear for days or weeks with no notice and no explanation and may or may not reappear after some time. Didn't see any change logs that I could find.

And then one day this summer I could not access the developer docs site at all, from any of my devices on different ISP connections. After proding around, I realized this was only occurring on Safari (Mac and iOS). Too many redirects (for Tracking)! Apparently Safari had gained additional privacy checking after an update.

Got me thinking, if it's the case that Apple effectively doesn't trust the techniques used by Roblox to add tracking to their developer documentation site, is this effort something I want to continue pursuing?

Which segues to the question:

Given the active user base and gross cash flow of Roblox, how do you now frame the new ARKit, RealityKit, Composer, and SwiftUI announcements from WWDC?

<comment><USER12> > Given the active user base and gross cash flow of Roblox, how do you now > frame the new ARKit, RealityKit, Composer, and SwiftUI announcements from > WWDC?

I'm not sure what the question is, the two are hardly related. I guess you can use both to create games, but the thing is, you wouldn't have the network to go with it. I mean you could create a video but unless you upload it to youtube it might as well not exist. Or you could create a mobile game but unless it's in the app store (or featured / in the top x) it might as well not exist.

Roblox at least gives your content a chance of being discovered.

<comment><USER13> I don't think your odds of being discovered on Roblox are _that_ much higher than on the App Store. Roblox is full of a lot of content (most junky) that you'd have to swim through to get to the front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to play Roblox when I was a teenager. The game has a scripting engine that players can use to program their own levels/events in Lua. The code editing/debugging was pretty tough to use when I was playing it, but it's one of the reasons I got into programming. I learned about programming, viruses, and hacking through Roblox. People write all kinds of amazing scripts on Roblox that you can download and put into your own levels.

<comment><USER15> Ah yes, the viruses; I remember those.

People would write scripts that would copy themselves into every object in the game, sometimes renaming those objects to a constant string just to be annoying. People who would edit their games in "build mode" (I can't actually remember what it was called) rather than directly in Roblox Studio would import an infected model from the store, get their place infected, and then any models they shared on the store would _also_ be infected.

I wrote an "anti-virus" script that would search an entire place for known viruses, delete them, and reset the names of any renamed objects back to their default. Eventually Roblox themselves started clearing the source code of any virus scripts they knew about, which I discovered when several of my "virus definitions" files got blanked out.

Those were the days. I wonder if viruses on Roblox are still a thing, or if Roblox managed to put a stop to them for good. (Less people editing their places in build mode would probably make viruses _way_ less effective.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have to doubt that TechCrunch understands gaming when they post about a game without including a single screenshot.

</comment><comment><USER17> Roblox has grown big on other peoples IP. My kids are only interested in it so they can play a Minions game or a Spiderman game.

I guess that's how YouTube got big too.

<comment><USER18> Its better than apps with in app purchases and ads.

<comment><USER19> I had to remove Roblox from our devices because all of the levels my daughter would load were either not age appropriate or would put IAP purchase buttons under the controls so you couldn't avoid hitting them accidentally. It was incredibly scummy. My kids are young so maybe they just don't know how/where to find decent levels but it felt gross and wasn't something we wanted to encourage. IAPs were absolutely everywhere in the levels I saw her playing before we made the call.

<comment> ryan-allen I'm considering banning Roblox for similar reasons. I would let my kid use some pocket money to buy Robux, but then I found out his friends would log into his account and spend any spare Robux he had lying around.

I've tried to get in to it myself to better understand it as a mechanism, and I'm at a loss as how it's so popular.

My guess is that on the surface it looks innocent enough to naive parents but in reality it's quite a bit 'elsagate' in nature.

I am happy that, right now, he prefers to spend time in Minecraft with his headset, it's a much more positive game (making houses and exploring without predatory in app purchases).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My 8 year-old boy is a big Minecrafter. He went through a phase where he switched to Roblox. I checked it out and he asked me what I thought, I said "this is hot garbage—not nearly as good of a game as Minecraft is", but I let him keep playing it for a few weeks. Finally he switched back to Minecraft and got disgusted with the game quality of Roblox and dumped it.

I was relieved because if he hadn't, I was getting ready to ban it. I had set up the account with parental controls to turn off chat because I knew adults played the game, but I ultimately decided it was inappropriate for kids after digging a little deeper and seeing what a toxic waste dump it is.

</comment><comment><USER21> My 8 year old son switched to Roblox from Minecraft a while back, he loves it, he spends a lot of time in RobloxStudio making his own mini games. All seems quite cool, just make sure you turn on all the parental/privacy controls, there is a high amount of interaction with random other players.

<comment><USER22> I have to say that the parental controls are really strict, in particular the chat auto-moderation, to the point that any word or sentence that could be remotely considered inappropriate is censored. I suppose this is a good thing considering that most players are young kids.

<comment><USER23> Ah, interesting. That explains the Roblox memes I see from time to time with very odd grammar. "Go commit neck rope", "I will un-alive you", and "Do you are have stupid?"

<comment><USER24> When I read about companies implementing chat auto-moderation, I'm not sure whether to be disappointed at the utter pointlessness (coupled with invasiveness) of such exercise, or to applaud them for promoting kid creativity.

<comment><USER25> The companies probably understand that it doesn't really work, but they need to be able to show something. Parents won't accept "it's impossible" as an answer.

<comment><USER26> Which in turn makes me wonder, how home parents tend to forget being kids?

<comment><USER25> I have wondered about the same thing before. I think it's mostly an emotional reaction. Society in general seems to be really accommodating to parents when they have emotional reactions about their children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I recall my child years ago playing this game (maybe age 8?) and explaining how they communicated with words like 'socks' for 6, 'ate' for 8 etc. because numbers were banned to avoid kids giving out sensitive info like their age, address etc.

<comment><USER28> Block-Chat™!

[http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history- of-t...](http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns- speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/)

" _By hook, or by crook, [people] will always find a way to connect with each other._ "

— Randy Farmer

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So many negative comments here but nearly a decade ago now I was hugely interested in Roblox - on their platform I found an amazing creative outlet and made some lifelong friends. Their game engine is powerful while also being simple for a 12 year old to pick up and learn - I taught myself the fundamentals of programming on their platform and I doubt I would have gone down the same career path without it.

<comment><USER30> Frankly, Roblox is not the same as it was 12 or 10 years ago, when I played. A few weeks ago I reinstalled it and perused the catalog of games. Most or all of the top games have microtransactions in them, you can really feel the influence of money in the games development. My money on when it started going downhill was when Disney bought out Roblox, whenever that was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My 8-year-old daughter has paid a lot more attention to Roblox than Minecraft lately. Being able to connect with friends there is definitely a factor, but I think she's also drawn in by the seemingly endless supply of new content. One game or genre getting boring or frustrating? There are dozens of not-bad others waiting right there, clamoring for attention. And honestly, that makes me a bit uncomfortable: it feels like it's actively encouraging a short attention span and shallow engagement.

The thing that I miss most about her Minecraft phase is that as far as I can tell, at least on a tablet (where she usually plays) Roblox is all about consuming other people's content rather than creatively building your own. That makes me sad. I'm sure she'll shift gears again eventually (in fact, she and her friends have been occasionally picking Minecraft back up lately), so maybe I shouldn't be so antsy waiting for that time to come.

<comment><USER22> > at least on a tablet (where she usually plays) Roblox is all about consuming > other people's content rather than creatively building your own

That's correct, if your daughter could access a desktop, then she could use Roblox Studio as noted here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20621457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20621457)

However I have to say that, even then, the creative component in Roblox is not as central to the experience as it is in Minecraft.

But then again, my daughter often plays on those Minecraft online servers that offer mini-games (e.g. Hypixel) and those don't have a lot of creativity involved either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm reading all the threads here and wonder: is there a similar type of game that is safe for kids to use? I'd love to have the collaborating with other kids to build things, but I'm deeply concerned about the predatory aspects other parents are describing here. Is there an open source version of Roblox or Minecraft that you can run on your own server and only invite known people (neighbors, friends, etc.) to play on it?

<comment><USER33> while its not open source you can definitely run minecraft on your own server with a whitelist. I dont know about roblox.

You might also be interested in minetest?

<comment> em-bee there are plenty of minetest servers if you don't want to run your own, check out a few and see how they are. several advertise a family friendly atmosphere. go inside play a while and monitor the chat to see how the moderators act. i found a great server right away, where my son and i are now happily building away without trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone remember Blockland ([http://blockland.us/](http://blockland.us/))? It was arguably the precursor to Roblox and in some ways the building portion of Minecraft... the creator Badspot just never embraced it and it fizzled out around 2007.

Arguably he could be a billionaire these days if he had kept at it. He had the right idea... but did not execute.

<comment><USER35> I played it back in the day. It performed better and looked better than early Roblox. My first exposure to programming was actually thanks to Blockland as it inspired me to download the Torque game engine and mess around with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's a minigame-oriented Second Life for kids. With all the time I split between that and Minecraft growing up, Roblox's popularity doesn't surprise me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well my anecdotal experience is that my kids saw videos on YouTube about other kids playing it and then they wanted to play it. I have no desire to play any of the games the popular games seem centered around nearly impossible "parkour" maps. But they love it and switch between it and Minecraft. I wonder how much of their playing base is just young kids.

<comment><USER38> Roblox is overwhelmingly populated with kids. Much more so than Minecraft from what I've seen. The one big advantage it has over Minecraft is that it's easier to play together with friends from school. The kids all exchange their Roblox handles and put them on their seemingly enormous friends lists.

<comment><USER39> Seems like this type of brain-dead simple feature -- frictionless joining of gameplay servers from a friends list -- would be something Mojang should consider adding to up their engagement.

Minecraft is interesting because, according to Google Trends, it had finally been slowly dying out in terms of search volume for years.. ([https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=minecraf...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=minecraft))... until a few weeks ago! It has suddenly been spiking almost up to almost where it was in its peak of popularity in mid 2013. PewDiePie started playing it a bunch recently in his videos, so maybe that is the reason.. or maybe there is some other reason that it's been trending that Pewdiepie just picked up on. As not a regular Minecraft player I can only wonder.

<comment><USER40> Minecraft as a game has never progressed from where it started. There is nothing new in it (new items, new structures etc don't count, they provide the same experience, just colored differently) while a game like Terreria is done so well with fantastically structured gameplay and progression. After you've gotten to a certain level in Minecraft, the game becomes pointless.

<comment><USER41> > Minecraft as a game has never progressed from where it started. ... Terreria > is done so well with fantastically structured gameplay and progression.

I would say minecraft has progressed much more than Terraria. Minecraft started as a building only game. It then added survival elements and redstone which add two entirely new ways to play.

I didn't play Terraria in its early days, but it seems like the content added is in the form of new items, bosses and areas rather than entirely new concepts.

<comment><USER42> Don't forget about the equip enchanting system, potion brewing, fishing, The End, treasure hunting maps, village raids, and most recently the villager trading system overhaul. The game is so completely different now than it was ten years ago, it's crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Honestly wish I'd known about this when I was younger. In my opinion this could be a gateway for younger coders to start working on larger projects.

</comment><comment><USER44> The gaming world seems so foreign to me now and I used to play games several hours a day growing up. I can't understand the appeal of this game or Minecraft even if I try to imagine myself as a child again.

<comment><USER45> > I can't understand the appeal of this game or Minecraft

You can do things from smashing zombies' skulls with a sword to building a replica of your own house to building an ATARI emulator in Minecraft. How is that not exciting?

<comment><USER44> Possibly because there is no goal and your friends aren't there in person. It's too open ended and over the internet.

Not feeling like I'm really with friends just from talking to them online might be my problem because really anything can be fun when you are with people you enjoy spending time with.

<comment><USER46> I'm an oldie, but I accidentally got caught up in Minecraft in the year or so it came out and have fond memories of infecting a friend who came over with his laptop so we'd play at my place, drunk as hell.

Entire days and nights disappeared one Christmas, 'til we decided it was dangerous to keep on... . Suffice to say, if you wnated, you could play in the same room, or across the internet. Or both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm having a hard time understanding what roblox is, even when looking for a gameplay video.

For an older analogy, would it be fair to compare it to something like TinyMUCK with graphics?

<comment><USER48> Same here. I generally am fairly well versed in games and tech, even the more obscure stuff, but I'm surprised about how little I've seen about this game over the years. I've heard the name here and there but never really looked into it.

So far, it looks close to VR chat? I'd also like if someone could explain:

1\. What the appeal is (I'm guessing mostly community?)

2\. How do they monetize (purchasable cosmetic content?)

3\. Where most of the demographic is (country, age, gender)

<comment><USER49> So it's a browser based gaming 'portal', that includes chat, profiles, cosmetic items etc and which allows users to create their own basic games. The appeal is that the games are fairly simple, often social and don't require a ton of investment (i.e. casual). They make money on in game currency which can upgrade both cosmetic and non-cosmetic items in both a users profile and in- games. Demographic is probably pre-teen, both genders.

<comment><USER48> Ah, did not realize it was a browser game. I can see how that really increases the demographics, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wow, they finally made it. I knew the CEO years ago, when he was doing physics engines.

</comment><comment><USER51> Roblox is like the internet in its flexibility and its lawlessness. My 3 sons have ipads and play together but in a restricted time setting. My oldest (10) started playing with lua scripting and all 3 like to create on roblox studio. There will always be weirdos on that but it's part of life and you must parent and educate them that people are sometimes evil morons but its something they all love to do together and in some sense its making them more prepared for the online world.

</comment><comment><USER52> Too bad they never implemented Linux support, and can't fix their network code to work in Wine either.

Minecraft despite being controlled by MS now, still has a working Linux client.

<comment><USER53> Not only does Minecraft work on Linux for me... on the same machine with some weird old intel integrated graphics drivers, opengl flat out doesn't work/isn't supported on Win10!!

Nothing a jump drive and a .deb file can't fix! Thanks MS for having a heart.

<comment><USER52> For MS it's a major exception though (and only because they bought it already with Linux support). Their general gaming attitude is still quite anti-Linux.

<comment><USER54> It's more because it was written in java, and would be more work to not support linux than to support it. (Granted, it wouldn't be java if they hadn't bought it that way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> My kids (7f/9m) work quite well together in it. My 7 year old daughter took to it much more than Minecraft, mainly with her brothers direction.

</comment><comment><USER56> I remember people arguing which one of them two games in the title invented the meme "oof". It turns out now Roblox is winning.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is amazing! Speaking as someone who played from ~2011-2013, seeing this type of growth in something I loved brings me nothing but good feelings. It also speaks a bit to a type of business model centered around tech that doesn't try to have completely explosive growth.

</comment><comment><USER58> Denying your child access to an internet connected computer in 2019 would put your child in a very disadvantaged position in life. It has become necessary to be fluent in computer operating system GUIs and the ways of the internet. For school, work and now for socializing. There was never a centralized decision to make things this way. Nobody was ever asked if they were ok with this. It just happened.

Imagine that neuralink tech starts to become normal. Inevitably, some parents will opt to have their child linked. Many children will be linked regardless because it is medically necessary. The linked children perform five times better than the linkless. They socialize by electronic telepathy, even though they only have threads in their motor cortex in the early days. Being linked also enables them to engage in wildly addictive and inappropriate behavior that had never been widely anticipated before. You become a parent in the midst of this. Do you imagine that you would opt out? Do you imagine the parents of yesterday thought they would opt out of allowing their children to do what children do now?

</comment><comment><USER59> So roblox is what second life wanted to be? Any insight into why it worked out so much better than SL?

<comment><USER60> It's targeted at kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Last time I wanted to give it a try they wanted to install on the small system drive. :-(

</comment><comment><USER62> "In other news, Microsoft announcing its acquisition of Roblox today..."

</comment><comment><USER63> Unfortunately neither Minecraft: Bedrock Edition or Roblox really works in Linux.

<comment><USER64> I don't know how it compares but Minetest is always a thing

<comment><USER22> Thank you for mentioning Minetest, I didn't know it existed!

<comment><USER63> I tried it, but unfortunately it is no where close to Minecraft. Crafting items is a pain from what I can tell, unless I'm just not recognizing some shortcuts.

<comment> em-bee i only play minetest so i can't compare. for complex items you have to craft the ingredients first, so it can end up in a chain from raw materials until you got your actual item done. it can be a bit tedious, but on the other hand if you need an item many times, bulk crafting works well, it is just as easy to create a single item as it is to create hundreds of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> doesn't run on linux. non starter for my kids

<comment> em-bee yup, i'll stick with minetest</comment></comment>


Should I join a class action I approve of but am not involved in? - <AUTHOR> http://www.halvorsonsettlement.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> A little background - Talentbin scraped the web then produced (millions?) of "candidate profiles" from candidates that they had never contacted or got agreement from. Turns out the court thinks this makes them not a recruitment agency but a consumer reporting company, and they then violated this and that and should cough up.

Now I think that's good riddance to bad business practices and would applaud from the sidelines. But as it seems my email is in the pile, I am being asked to either remove myself, or sign up.

I feel the damage I have suffered is small if anything so I am unsure - join a class action or not?

Thoughts?</comment>


Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s  - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2081930,00.html?xid=tweetbut

<comment><USER2> There is already a 44 comment thread on this _on the front page._

<comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746481>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you've ever read Henry Ford's autobiography - a man who once took apart an entire car to the last bolt and reassembled it by himself - he says much the same.</comment>


Rails & Nodejs Developer: 13" MBP or Air? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
My 6 year old MBP is on its last legs & I am need to buy a new portable device, I am trying to decide between a MBP or MBA.
The pro has a faster processor, retina display and can hold 16GB of RAM but the Air has a 12 hour batter life and is much lighter. The screen & HD sizes are both the same.
I spend most of my time developing Rails, NodeJs and Angular apps at the moment, I do a little graphic work via Sketch, nothing too exotic.
Just wondering if anyone has tried both machines, what was your experience, what did you go for in the end? <comment><USER2> the company i work at gives us all this exact choice, and these days most of us go for the Air. personally, i prefer the portability and the extra battery life. for me the retina display is a bit of a gimmick, and to be honest i think almost everybody's whose had a retina MBP here has experienced catastrophic hardware failure at one point or another. apple always take pretty good care of you when this happens, but it's better if it doesn't happen at all. who knows though, maybe they're issues that have been sorted out now.

but yeah, i find my air is more than adequate for all the stuff i do on it (basically the same as what you're asking about).

</comment><comment><USER3> I do similar work so I guess I can chime in with my experience here.

I went from a 2011 13" MBA to an early-2013 15" rMBP and found the difference to be massive. The main benefits being the incredible display and a pretty decent cpu/gpu/ram upgrade. After using the retina for a couple of weeks I opened my MBA (which was gathering dust on a shelf) and couldn't believe how bad the screen looked in comparison.

However I do miss the battery life and boy does this thing get HOT. It's summer here in Brisbane and yesterday (it was around 35c) my CPU got to 106c.. my lap did not enjoy.

But yeah I definitely recommend the retina. Be sure to max out the RAM too.

Edit:

I recently added a 27" haswell iMac to my collection which was another massive improvement. I've been doing maintenance on an old node.js app that has a pretty crazy build process and compared the runtime on each of the machines - The MBA took just over 3 minutes, the rMBP about 1.5 minutes and the iMac did it in under 20 seconds! I still spend most of my time on the MBP though :)

<comment><USER4> It's not a good idea to use a laptop in your lap for extended periods of time... expecially if it's running at 106C... especially if you're a male.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rails? MBP or better, for me. Running unit tests on the Air kicks my fan on and takes many seconds just to start up the harness. You need to think of available RAM also, if you're using a fat IDE like Eclipse or RubyMine.

A way around this is to simply SSH into a bigger box to work on. Then it's GREAT. If you use Fuse w/ SSHFS, it's powerful enough for a fat IDE... but I still use TextMate or Vim over SSH and run my tests on command line remotely on the Air. It saves days of productivity.

<comment><USER6> Which year Air do you have? When I fire up a Rails test suite on mine (hundreds of tests, many with JS through poltergeist) it doesn't stutter or enable its fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> After a lot of back and forth I went with the late-2013 15" rMBP and I don't regret it for a minute. I know, it's expensive but if you can afford and as someone else said here, after you spend some time with the retina display it's hard to get back to a non-retina display, I can tell you that for sure, especially when you work on the high-resolution ratio...you can fit a lot more content at that resolution and is quite useful when you design.

</comment><comment><USER8> Air.

I bought the Pro for web development and I think it was a bit overkill. I don't really use the Pro-ness of it ever. I think the Air is a better deal.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't quite agree with the much lighter tag with the new retina macbook pro. May be this argument held well for the old MBP. The new Retina MBP is 1.60 kgs compared to Air which is 1.35 kgs. I personally moved from Air to MBP just because of the extra power and I did not notice much on the difference in weight.

</comment><comment><USER10> I do a lot more Nodejs stuff than Rails, but I've gone from a MBP to an Air, mostly for the battery life. It's done quite well for everything, including Adobe suite.

One thing though is you can forget trying to run dual monitors on an Air if you're into that.</comment>


Is paying a realtor worth it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/cxahw4/how_complicated_is_it_to_sell_your_home_without/ <comment><AUTHOR> Founder of Realoky here. Interesting market research we are doing on Reddit. Apparently even many realtors don't think realtors are worth it and most people can easily do it on their own. We are developing a platform to finally help people do that With zero commissions and zero fees.

<comment><USER2> So you post an article that backs up your company's market plan. The article is from reddit.com (did you start that thread)? You then follow up with a comment to advertise your company! Great marketing concept!</comment></comment>


Google Mandates 'Powered by Android' Branding on New Devices - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/03/29/powered-by-android

<comment><USER2> This is not only good for Android (and thus Google), but it's also good for consumers. Most consumers don't know that Android is a platform and that they can switch between manufacturers without much trouble.

It's not great for the manufacturers themselves, but it's time consumers in general know that they're not locked down.</comment>


Warfighting: What VCs tell you to read - <AUTHOR> http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/service_pubs/mcdp1.pdf

<comment><USER2> Lots of great insight on building teams, getting everyone to have a shared understanding/training/framework. Commanders intent and mission goals are useful thoughts on delegating / focusing a team, etc. Thoughts on using tempo, strategy and "maneuver" warfare are incredibly relevant to resource- constrained startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Teambuilding and strategy are highly practiced arts in the military. In my opinion, it's why officers who leave the military make good business strategists and leaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The observation that junior officers are closer to the situation and better equipped to make immediate tactical decisions than senior officers who are at the rear can, almost word-for-word, be used to describe how to manage programmers.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoy USMC's Warfighting, you've got to go read Clauswitz's "On War" - it established modern military science. It's the most clear thinking, straightforward work on a difficult topic I've read. Seriously, read the first 20 pages of On War and you'll think more clearly for the rest of your life. I'm not exaggerating, it's that good. Everyone in their life should skim Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and read the first 20 pages of On War:

<http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/TOC.htm>

<comment><USER5> I have to say that, while Clauswitz is certainly down-to-earth, pragmatic, and has much merit, the book is not for the faint of heart of. I don't think straightforward is a word I'd use with his work that was compiled posthumously from his incomplete manuscripts.

<comment><USER6> Clausewitz might be practical compared to Sun Tzu, but his assertion that the enemy's center of gravity (strongest point) is the point which all energies should be directed sounds stupid. He is also too intent on single deciding battles.

Sun Tzu's use of deceit, spying and diplomacy - avoiding the battle altogether - is a more flexible approach. But it's impossible to believe that you could predict the outcomes of major scale events in such a precision that he teaches.

You should also read about John Boyd, a master hacker in his own right:

Little-known pilot shaped U.S. strategy in Iraq: <http://www.post- gazette.com/nation/20030321boydnatp5.asp>

From fighter Tactics to the Art of War: <http://www.sci.fi/~fta/JohnBoyd.htm></comment></comment></comment>


Focus and Drive, episode 3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTM8mnJIx7M

<comment><USER2> It sounds hard to leave your own startup. Even the successful ones. Says the guy with a 6+ year tenure. :)</comment>


With Cyanogen dead, Google's control over Android is tighter than ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenbot.com/article/3153485/android/with-cyanogen-dead-googles-control-over-android-is-tighter-than-ever.html <comment><USER3> The article is wrong on so many counts:

1\. Closed source apps are not the threat (Nowhere does it say that the dialer, home screen, messaging app, or camera are a part of the OS. All are replaceable, and all replacements integrate just as well as the original, it's not an iPhone).

2\. Google controlled Android through legal means - If you want to make your Android phone in a factory, or if you want to use any google app, you need to obey their rules. So if yo want Play store, you have to play along.

3\. Cyanogen saw Google as a threat, but Google didn't see Cyanogen as a threat. Cyanogen didn't die because of Google's behavior. They died because of terrible execution.

Remember the spat over split-windows. Google didn't ban the appstore (despite being able to), they demanded that the environment not be _too_ modified.

Cyanogenmod backed down and Google let it go.

The only thing is that they were forbidden to _package_ it, but opengapps is still around.

4\. Google isn't closing-source because of Cyanogenmod or other custom Roms. It's bigger threat is Samsung or Amazon.

<comment><USER4> > Closed source apps are not the threat

Yes, they are. See [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html)

> All are replaceable

You can _not_ replace the Dialer at all. Replacements can not integrate at all. The others have similar problems.

> Google controlled Android through legal means

According to the EU, they didn't – they abused their market power to extort companies to force them to bundle their products.

> Google didn't see Cyanogen as a threat.

Yet Google cracked down even more on OEMs that shipped non-Google Android in markets where Google Android exists in the meantime. They definitely saw a threat.

> Google didn't ban the appstore (despite being able to), they demanded that > the environment not be _too_ modified.

See the EU argument again: Google does _not_ have the right to restrict their services in that way, due to having too much market power. They can not discriminate against the environments their products will be used in.

<comment><USER3> > Closed source apps are not the threat > Yes, they are. See > > [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html)

Well, they should. But I wouldn't call a closed-source messaging app (which you can replace with qksms) proof that AOSP is over.

>According to the EU, they didn't – they abused their market power to extort companies to force them to bundle their products.

I meant legal to contrast "force" (closing the source), not that it's not illegal. They could really open-source everything and still mandate people to use Hangouts.

>Yet Google cracked down even more on OEMs that shipped non-Google Android in markets where Google Android exists in the meantime. They definitely saw a threat.

Did they fight CM?

What did they do to make CM's life difficult?

>See the EU argument again: Google does not have the right to restrict their services in that way, due to having too much market power. They can not discriminate against the environments their products will be used in.

But they can refuse to license the Google Play store to entities outside of OEMs, as long as the terms aren't discriminatory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google controls Android due to the PlayStore

Just an anecdote. I'm currently living in China and me and the other expats were always kinda amused that local Chinese are willing to spend the equivalent of 2 months of their salary on an iPhone. Apple's grip on the market is absolute here

At first, like some high brow NYT journalist, I thought it must be a cultural thing. People looking for a status thing, a vanity thing in a image conscious society. Or a the very least they're willing to fork over tons of cash to get a good quality device bc they don't trust their own phone makers. But the local phones are actually hardware-wise okay. And they have decent warranty support (not Apple level.. but still)

But after watching a friend struggle with an Android phone, I realized that the problem is the apps. There is no GooglePlay store, just crappy 3rd party stores like the Xiaomi Store. These stores have basically no standards when it comes to app quality and Chinese apps are horrible bloated virus-like monstrosities that slowly cripple your phone till it barely works and the battery dies after half a day. All the permissions managers and security features in the world don't stop the system from being a complete disaster here.

If anyone wants to free Android - they need to make a good play-store alternative that only allows high quality apps. They you can make your Android fork and whatever else you want

<comment><USER6> My Android phone was practically dead in China.* My iPhone worked completely fine. And like everyone use an iPhone 7 and an AppleWatch 2 in tier 1 cities. And the rest of China seem to use non-Google Android phones with a different AppStore.

* not even connecting to WiFi worked, as it tries to connect to a Google domain to check, which is blocked. (iPhone connects to apple.com to check, though that domain works fine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cyanogenmod (and every other custom ROM) is, and always was, an extreme minority of Android users. I don't really see how this changes anything.

<comment><USER8> > I don't really see how this changes anything. This affects much more than > the small minority that you think: PS : its hard to differentiate between > ROMs here since the Android XDA community tend to be quite competitive and > sharing a lot of code \- Dynamic Tiles was first introduced by CyanogenMod. > \- CM introduced ambient lighting based day/night modes \- CM's Theme Engine > is still one of the best out there. While they derived their themeing engine > from Sony. Google added app based status tinting into android after this \- > CM/PA had even introduced a camera tile which still remains a wonderous > thing \- The long press on home button for google now, seems like a concept > heavily derived from PA's Pie Menu. \- Runtime permissions came in > Marshmallow, But CM's privacy guard came much earlier.

There are several other minor features also which made the cut from AOKP roms to AOSP.

And once you spend enough time on websites like [Google-My Activity][1] .You would realise why many would want to avoid the google ecosystem owing to their privacy concerns. Most of the alternative android app markets like F-Droid survived majorly because of custom ROMS. While their numbers were not huge, they were the few who preferred keeping control of their devices and the information that they shared. Almost 80% of the custom ROMs are forked off CM. With CM being dead,this would affect others too.

You can also thank CM for ensuring that devices have a much longer lifespan than what the OEMs deem.

[1]:[https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity](https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity)

<comment><USER9> Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top of App Ops that Google had already been developing.

Also, IMHO, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the Google Now shortcut was inspired by PA's Pie controls. One is just a shortcut to an enhanced search feature, and the other is... not unlike iOS's Assistive Touch feature on steroids. The only commonality is that they occur near/around the home button.

 _EDIT_ : And in fact, my Galaxy Note II had a "long-press menu button to trigger search" since the dedicated search button was removed -- nothing particularly unique about that paradigm.

While Cyanogen Inc. may well have been Google's biggest "threat" when it came to control of Android, it wasn't even that big a threat to begin with. They were always beholden to Google's source dumps, as was any other ROM distribution. I'd argue little has changed in terms of how much control Google has over Android's destiny, and Cyanogen Inc.'s (impending) death doesn't really move the compass in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER8> > Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top of > App Ops that Google had already been developing.

ApOps was removed by google[1] .

I agree with the little has changed bit. But I think we should give them credit for innovating quite a bit on the platform.And with Google's version of the OS, there were little outside options.which will reduce more drastically atleast till all Custom ROMs start forking of LineageOS.

[1]: Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top of App Ops that Google had already been developing.

<comment><USER9> It wasn't _removed_ ; it was simply hidden because it was a work-in-progress piece of infrastructure wasn't ready for end-user consumption[1]. The same underlying code was still used by Privacy Guard[2], so it still wasn't CyanogenMod's innovation. App Ops would eventually make a user-facing comeback in 6.0 Marshmallow, with a very similar UI, just with the additional runtime popups for on-demand permissions.

I agree that CyanogenMod did bring innovations to the table -- I'm in no way trying to diminish that. Just clarifying attribution where due.

Speaking more generally, there is no doubt that custom ROMs answered needs/demands that Google just couldn't satisfy in the same timelines. Custom ROMs deserve tons of credit for prototyping and "market testing" concepts/features for Google. The good news is that -- by and large -- most of the low-hanging fruits have already been incorporated back into mainline Android. Nowadays, I've personally found fewer and fewer reasons to use custom ROMs (outside of the ever-important need to extend device lifetime anyway -- probably the biggest thing remaining that Google likely won't ever attempt to satisfy).

[1] [http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/11/googler-app-ops- was-...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/11/googler-app-ops-was-never- meant-for-end-users-used-for-internal-testing-and-debugging-only/)

[2] [https://www.xda-developers.com/protecting-your-privacy- app-o...](https://www.xda-developers.com/protecting-your-privacy-app-ops- privacy-guard-and-xprivacy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bit of an alarmist article title when plenty of fairly popular alternatives exist, like AOKP, AOSB, Slim, and PA. Was CM doing something extra to/with their ROMs and code that these are not?

<comment><USER3> AOKP - dead.

PA - <USER2>

AOSB - Exceeded bandwidth and archive doesn't seem to have archived it properly. According to Google cache, they're working on L, so seems dead.

Slim - was dead for a few years. Seems to have revived.

The question is what will LineageOS look like?

<comment><USER11> AOKP is definitely not dead. Take a look at the recent gerrit activity: [https://gerrit.aokp.co](https://gerrit.aokp.co)

<comment><USER11> Sorry, do url without https, so gerrit.aokp.co

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's a great narrative, but the project lives on ala the nature of open source. [http://lineageos.org/](http://lineageos.org/)

<comment><USER3> We'll see in a few months how viable is it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Makes me think on how much is Google using open source just as a gimmick or a marketing term and win over engineers when in reality they know that is next to impossible to achieve something with the code they publish and the dependencies on their services. Even if a contender uses their code, they have all the resources to squash them by marketing their product way better.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a really bad title. Cyanogen is founder of the Cyanogenmod project and he is not dead.

<comment><USER15> [https://mobile.twitter.com/CyanogenMod/status/81308624950634...](https://mobile.twitter.com/CyanogenMod/status/813086249506349056)

<comment><USER16> I think you missed the point. CyanogenMod was named after its founder, Steve Kondik, who's online alias is cyanogen. Steve is still alive and breathing [https://twitter.com/cyanogen](https://twitter.com/cyanogen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not any tighter than it was before Cyanogen's death.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-is-us/](http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-is-us/)

Hopefully it gets done right this time.

</comment><comment><USER19> > bringing customization and features far beyond those available in the stock > OS.

I looked into custom ROMs (i.e., Android forks) and that wasn't my experience. They took AOSP (Android Open Source Project), made some mostly cosmetic changes, and distributed it. CopperheadOS might be an exception.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd die to see the day we could install custom ROMs on an Apple device

<comment><USER21> Most Apple users (including me) don't want to install custom ROMs. Actually, I'm quite sure most Android users don't want either (and most of them don't even know what's a ROM).

<comment><USER22> But wanting to and being able to are two different things. I don't want to change my cars tires, but I absolutely want to be able to.

<comment><USER23> Some would say, "welcome to democracy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> stealing Android doesn't seem like a particularly great idea in the first place. maybe look for something much better than Android.

but, i guess it was really about Android's market share.

</comment><comment><USER25> What about Oxygen?

<comment><USER26> We need it to breathe.

(but seriously, what about it?)

<comment><USER27> People usually get confused about OPO's business model. They think OPO is a 'XDA community device' which makes cheap flagships for the people so they would do anything to fulfill their wishes. So some think OxygenOS is a custom ROM supporting tons of devices.</comment></comment></comment>


It's time to finally kill CAPTCHA - <AUTHOR> http://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/it-s-time-to-finally-kill-captcha-2 CAPTCHA tests, used almost everywhere across the web, are frustrating for all internet users. However, for me, and millions of other blind or vision impaired people, CAPTCHA tests prevent us from engaging with the web and government services, because they can't be read by screen reading software - which is why it's time to kill CAPTCHA. <comment><USER2> I would rather suggest a physical CAPTCHA device for the visually impaired featuring a revolving braille writing sheet of paper. Or maybe just a huge red button they would press to confirm that there is a real person sitting behind the computer.</comment>


How Puritans became capitalists - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/01/how_puritans_became_capitalists/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Ideas+section <comment><USER2> I'm surprised they completely failed to mention [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Sp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism) which is probably the classical text on the matter (and they appear to reinvent quite a lot of the same theories)</comment>


M.C. Escher: More Mathematics Than Meets the Eye - <AUTHOR> http://im-possible.info/english/articles/escher_printgallery/

<comment><USER2> Obligatory reference to Gödel, Escher and Bach.

(For the record, I do understand this article explores a different mathematical aspect of Escher than Hofstadter)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen Lenstra's talk about Escher's print gallery some years ago in Rome and then again after a few months in Pisa.

One of the most captivating talks I've ever seen. He's a great speaker. I wish I had him as a professor.

EDIT: forgot to add, in the Mathematica blog there is another explanation of the mathematics between the "Droste effect" and the code to obtain it: [http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/04/24/droste-effect-with- mathem...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/04/24/droste-effect-with-mathematica/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm just speechless about that computed re-creation assembling the four frames. Brilliant.

The interpretation of the blank spot is also quite nice and very Escher-esque, with the content literally jumping out of the frame. Probably Escher left the center patch blank because his construction method would have him exceed some technical/physical limitation, so instead of drawing an approximation he preferred a void.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's an OS X screensaver based on this work which animates the effect, in a similar way to "dive" animations into fractal images. Fascinating but also nauseating after a while.

<http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/lotsablankers/lotsaescher>

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone who grew up mesmerized as a little kid by a large framed work by Escher in our house, this is an awesome read. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks! Awesome read! Makes me love Escher's work even more.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have a larger version of the last picture?

<comment><USER9> Here's a slightly larger version (thanks to <http://tineye.com>): [http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/droste/escher4.jp...](http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/droste/escher4.jpg)</comment></comment>


It's time to break up the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/opinion/schneier-nsa-too-big/index.html <comment><USER2> _This is where the NSA overreaches: collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately._

Put aside the question of data on U.S. citizens: I don't understand how in an era of burner phones and widespread encryption any intelligence agency can do without some bulk foreign surveillance. Say HUMINT gets its hands on a foreign bad guy's contact list. Odds are the most relevant information you'd be able to extract is in the past, especially if the target knows you captured his list.

Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately" and use the data to build social graphs for current and future (currently unknown) targets of interest?

EDIT: I don't mean to cast Schneier's argument uncharitably. He may very well make a distinction between "acceptable" and "overreaching" bulk surveillance, but if so he doesn't seem to outline it in this piece.

<comment><USER3> > Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records > of Yemen "indiscriminately

Yes. You can not commit act of violence indiscriminately just-in-case.

The US army could place a bomb under every house in Yemen, just in case that they would need to bomb it later. Would that be an overreach? If they don't activate them, how can it be harmful?

<comment><USER4> Where in the world did we start talking about bombing in the comment above? He is talking about passive communications collection.

<comment><USER3> Passive communications collection is extremely dangerous. If data get leaked, people are going to die left and right. If the data is somehow incorrect or corrupted, innocent people will die.

Surveillance is violence. It is that simple.

<comment><USER5> First you mention ways in which surveillance could result in violence, then you equate violence and surveillance.

Doesn't your own argument indicate that they are separate concepts? It doesn't seem simple at all.

<comment><USER3> That is a very semantic way to look at it. If a bomb explode, people die. Thus I (incorrectly?) equate violence and bombs even if they are technically two separated concepts. Any weapon, be that information or bombs or what have you can technically be disconnected with the violence they create, but its a very dishonest thing to say when the army uses it in a war zone.

<comment><USER6> You didn't equate bombs with violence, if you had you would have a chance of winning your argument. You equated intel to violence.

Edit: Just to be clear so you can't try to weasel out of what you said, troops need to be fed so food is violence. Is that clear to you?

<comment><USER3> Im commenting to "win an argument". If you want to believe that information that direct drones where to send missiles are equal harmless to food, then have a nice day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We have a Cold War sized security apparatus. This is what led our leaders to think wars on the far side of the planet could be done at "only" a few tens of billions, and why the cost ballooned to multiple trillions. Because it could. Because we have the machinery in place.

Now we realize that machinery has put us in a panopticon. To keep us from creating any fundamental change in government or society. That will cost us more than trillions of dollars.

<comment><USER8> Actually most it was winding down after the cold war; it was Terror which really brought it back. (the IC was shrinking fast; the mainstream military had been cut in half but the rest had a long lead time to reduce beyond that.)

(EDIT: I meant "it re-inflated back to peak size; it's not like it's remained at that size since the Cold War" \-- which is almost worse, since it means it was a semi-conscious choice vs. just inertia.)

<comment><USER7> At no point was it "cut in half."

Here's a graph: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2012/11/M...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2012/11/Military- spending-sequester.jpg)

It's barely below the peak spending, including Star Wars and all that, of the height of the Cold War.

Cutting it in half would be a good start, along with Homeland Security.

More was spent on the recent wars than the whole Cold War. That's your grandchildrens' debt slavery right there. People should be very very angry about that.

<comment><USER8> The number of personnel in the Army was cut approximately in half (ok, more like 35%) after CW and Gulf War 1; the spending (and headcount) lagged new enlistment to a combination of inflation and Congressional protection (and the process of separating people being slow). BRAC, etc. was quite real. Capabilities were approximately cut in half under Clinton, too

[http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004598.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004598.html) is a decent graph of headcount. Reductions in force lag 4-8 years, though.

We did have a massive ramp-up post-9/11 -- not arguing that. I'm arguing that in the 1990s the military was on a downward trajectory, which was good, and it was cut substantially and in-line with previous cuts.

Personnel count is a more inflation-insensitive way to measure defense spending, IMO. Part of that is due to increased contractor use, but that really didn't kick off until ~2001. The US military in the 1990s was objectively declining in size, capabilities, and mission, as it _usually_ did after a war, until they developed the "perpetual war on a tactic" innovation.

The _IC_ was the area which was cut a lot, though. CIA under Clinton was basically dumping ground for incompetent liberal artists starting their careers, with political motivations -- sort of like a third-string law school -- which was fine since there was ~no mission. The Cold War era people were essentially either of retirement age, or shifted to the commercial world. NSA wasn't growing much, either. NRO, I believe, was in sustainment mode. The problem is they ramped up the IC post-9/11 and did it with _those people_ , and then bringing in trigger-puller types, including lots of "crusaders" (super-religious, relatively uninformed, un-nuanced understanding of any of the issues) people. It's kind of amazing we didn't end up actually invading Iran or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Second, all surveillance of Americans should be moved to the FBI."_

This sounds like a great idea in theory, but in the current age of global communications I'm concerned that it's impossible to separate surveillance into "American" and "foreign". This gray area is what the NSA currently uses to circumvent the US Constitution, and I don't see how any other agency would handle it differently.

<comment><USER10> " _This sounds like a great idea in theory, but in the current age of global communications I 'm concerned that it's impossible to separate surveillance into "American" and "foreign"."_

I've got an even better idea: _No surveillance at all!_

What do Americans gain from the all-encompassing, algorithmic surveillance? -Why _precisely nothing_ , of course. On the contrary, they suffer massive losses in privacy.

So why is it done, then? -Not for the people's benefit, that's for sure.

<comment><USER11> "No surveillance at all" wouldn't just exclude "all-encompassing, algorithmic surveillance". It would also exclude warranted tapping of phones in connection with a murder investigation, and similar. I would be hugely leery of asserting that we gain precisely nothing from that.

<comment><USER10> You know what I was referring to.

<comment><USER11> No, I don't. I have a few guesses, but no clear picture of which you mean, since none of them is particularly close to what you said.

<comment><USER10> I was referring to NSA & Google monitoring everything anyone in the world does online. It's pointless to "refute" what I said with a "but what about criminal investigations?!" .. Well yeah, what abou them?

You don't need to monitor _everyone everywhere_ to solve crimes. You know that, so you shouldn't be confused about what I was referring to.

<comment><USER11> _" You know that, so you shouldn't be confused about what I was referring to."_

I'm a fan of the principle of charity, but it only extends so far if we're to actually engage in meaningful discussion. If I always take what you wrote and assume you mean something I agree with, I might not actually be engaging with the ideas you are trying to convey. This wasn't a case of ambiguity, but (apparently) of hyperbole that I failed to recognize as such. Even recognizing it, I'm still not entirely sure how far you intend it backed off.

<comment><USER10> Nevermind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the photo they picked to go with the article subtly undermines it. I wonder if that was deliberate.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, that's awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's good to see a piece like this on cnn.com, but I doubt that anything will come of it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Right after the military industrial complex and its pseudo "jobs program".

<comment><USER16> its

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> No need to break them up. They just need their virtually unlimited budget cut to the neighborhood of 1995 levels. A gas expands to fill its container. A political organization expands to fill its budget.

</comment><comment><USER18> "It's time to bell the cat," the mice agree.

</comment><comment><USER19> First, I am really surprised to see this on CNN....</comment>