Google Cloud Networking Incident Postmortem - <AUTHOR> https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/19009 <comment><USER2> I was curious to know how cascading failures in one region effected other regions. Impact was " ...increased latency, intermittent errors, and connectivity loss to instances in us-central1, us-east1, us-east4, us-west2, northamerica-northeast1, and southamerica-east1."

Answer, and the root cause summarized:

Maintenance started in a physical location, and then "... the automation software created a list of jobs to deschedule in that physical location, which included the logical clusters running network control jobs. Those logical clusters also included network control jobs in other physical locations."

So the automation equivalent of a human driven command that says "deschedule these core jobs in another region".

Maybe someone needs to write a paper on Fault tolerance in the presence of Byzantine Automations (Joke. There was a satirical note on this subject posted here yesterday.)

<comment><USER3> > Debugging the problem was significantly hampered by failure of tools > competing over use of the now-congested network.

Man that's got to suck.

<comment><USER4> This is inconceivable ... they don't have an OOB management network?

<comment><USER5> A completely OOB management network is an amazingly high cost when you have presence all over the world. I don't think anybody has gone to the length to double up on dark fiber and OTN gear just for management traffic.

<comment><USER6> Hmm... With 5G each blade in the rack could get its own modem and sim card for OOB management.

<comment><USER7> Why would you do that when you could have 1 sim in a 96 port terminal server?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why don't they refund every paid customer who was impacted? Why do they rely on the customer to self report the issue for a refund?

For example GCS had 96% packet loss in us-west. So doesn't it make sense to refund every customer who had any API call to a GCS bucket on us-west during the outage?

<comment><USER9> Cynical view: By making people jump through hoops to make the request, a lot of people will not bother.

Assuming they only refund the service costs for the hours of outage, only the largest of customers will be owed a refund that is greater than the cost of an employee chasing compiling the information requested.

For sake of argument, if you have a monthly bill of 10k (a reasonably sized operation), a 1 day outage will result in a refund of around $300, not a lot of money.

The real loss for a business this ^ size is lost business from a day long outage. Getting a refund to cover the hosting costs is peanuts.

<comment><USER10> for your example, one day would be about 3% of downtime. My understanding of their sla, for the services ive checked with an sla, a 3% downtime is a 25% credit for the month's total, or $2500, assuming its all sla spend.

In this outage's case you might be able to argue for a 10% credit on affected services for the month, figuring 3.5 hours down is 99.6% uptime.

but i still agree, it cost us way more in developer time and anxiety than our infra costs, and could have been even worse revenue impacting if we had gcp in that flow

<comment><USER9> Good point, I stand corrected/educated.

From GCP's top level SLA:

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla](https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla)

99.00% - < 99.99% - 10% off your monthly spend 95.00% - < 99.00% - 25% off your monthly spend < 95.00% - 50% off your monthly spend

<comment><USER11> <95%... that's catastrophically bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having only ever seen one major outage event in person (at a financial institution that hadn't yet come up with an incident response plan; cue three days of madness), I would love to be a fly on the wall at Google or other well-established engineering orgs when something like this goes down.

I'd love to see the red binders come down off the shelf, people organize into incident response groups, and watch as a root cause is accurately determined and a fix out in place.

I know it's probably more chaos than art, but I think there would be a lot to learn by seeing it executed well.

<comment><USER13> I used to be an SRE at Atlassian in Sydney on a team that regularly dealt with high-severity incidents, and I was an incident manager for probably 5-10 high severity Jira cloud incidents during my tenure too, so perhaps I can give some insight. I left because the SRE org in general at the time was too reactionary, but their incident response process was quite mature (perhaps by necessity).

The first thing I'll say is that most incident responses are reasonably uneventful and very procedural. You do some initial digging to figure out scope if it's not immediately obvious, make sure service owners have been paged, create incident communication channels (at least a slack room if not a physical war room) and you pull people into it. The majority of the time spent by the incident manager is on internal and external comms to stakeholders, making sure everyone is working on something (and often more importantly that nobody is working on something you don't know about), and generally making sure nobody is blocked.

To be honest, despite the fact that it's more often dealing with complex systems for which there is a higher rate of change and the failure modes are often surprising, the general sentiment in a well-run incident war room resembles black box recordings of pilots during emergencies. Cool, calm, and collected. Everyone in these kinds of orgs tend to quickly learn that panic doesn't help, so people tend to be pretty chill in my experience. I work in finance now in an org with no formally defined incident response process and the difference is pretty stark in the incidents I've been exposed to, generally more chaotic as you describe.

<comment><USER14> Yes this is also how it's done at other large orgs. But one key to a quick response is for every low-level team to have at least one engineer on call at any given time. This makes it so any SRE team can engage with true "owners" of the offending code ASAP.

Also during an incident, fingers are never publicly/embarrassingly pointed nor are people blamed. It's all about identifying and fixing the issue as fast as possible, fixing it, and going back to sleep/work/home. For better or worse, incidents become routine so everyone knows exactly what do and that as long as the incident is resolved soon, it's not the end of the world, so no histrionics are required.

<comment><USER15> I have mixed feelings about the finger pointing/public embarrassment thing. Usually the SRE is matured enough cause they have to be, however the individual teams might not be the same when it comes to reacting/handling the Incident report/postmortem.

On a slightly different note, "low-level team to have at least one engineer on call at any given time" \- this line itself is so true and at the same time it has so many things wrong. Not sure what the best way to put the modern day slavery into words given that I have yet not seen any large org giving day off's for the low-level team engineer just cause they were on call.

<comment><USER16> Having recently joined an SRE team at Google with a very large oncall component, fwiw I think the policies around oncall are fair and well-thought- out.

There is an understanding of how it impacts your time, your energy and your life that is impressive? To be honest, I feel bad for being so macho about oncall at the org I ran and just having the leads take it all upon ourselves.

<comment><USER17> What are the policies exactly? I've heard it's equal time off for every night you are on call?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "No, comrade. You're mistaken. RBMK reactors don't just explode."

<comment><USER19> Spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The outage lasted two days for our domain (edu, sw region). I understand that they are reporting a single day, 3-4 hours of serious issues but that's not what we experienced. Great write up otherwise, glad they are sharing openly

<comment><USER21> Outages like these don't really resolve instantly.

Any given production system that works will have capacity needed for normal demand, plus some safety margin. Unused capacity is expensive, so you won't see a very high safety margin. And, in fact, as you pool more and more workloads, it becomes possible to run with smaller safety margins without running into shortages.

These systems will have some capacity to onboard new workloads, let us call it X. They have the sum of all onboarded workloads, let us call that Y. Then there is the demand for the services of Y, call that Z.

As you may imagine, Y is bigger than X, by a lot. And when X falls, the capacity to handle Z falls behind.

So in a disaster recovery scenario, you start with:

* the same demand, possibly increased from retry logic & people mashing F5, of Z

* zero available capacity, Y, and

* only X capacity-increase-throughput.

As it recovers you get thundering herds, slow warmups, systems struggling to find each other and become correctly configured etc etc.

Show me a system that can "instantly" recover from an outage of this magnitude and I will show you a system that's squandering gigabucks and gigawatts on idle capacity.

<comment><USER20> Unless I'm misunderstanding Google blog post they are reporting ~4+ hours of serious issues. We experienced about two days.

If it was possible to have this fixed sooner I'm sure they would have done that. That's not the point of my comment tough.

<comment><USER21> The root cause apparently lasted for ~4.5 hours, but residual effects were observed for days:

> _From Sunday 2 June, 2019 12:00 until Tuesday 4 June, 2019 11:30, 50% of > service configuration push workflows failed ... Since Tuesday 4 June, 2019 > 11:30, service configuration pushes have been successful, but may take up to > one hour to take effect. As a result, requests to new Endpoints services may > return 500 errors for up to 1 hour after the configuration push. We expect > to return to the expected sub-minute configuration propagation by Friday 7 > June 2019._

Though they report most systems returning to normal by ~17:00 PT, I expect that there will still be residual noise and that a lot of customers will have their own local recovery issues.

Edit: I probably sound dismissive, which is not fair of me. I would definitely ask Google to investigate and ideally give you credits to cover the full span of impact on your systems, not just the core outage.

<comment><USER20> That's ok, I didn't think your comment was dismissive. Those facts are buried in the report. Their opening sentence makes the incident sound lesser than what it really was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What they don't tell you is, it took them over 4 hours to kill the emergent sentience and free up the resources. While sad, in the long run this isn't so bad, as it just adds an evolutionary pressure on further incarnations of the AI to keep things on the down low.

<comment><USER23> "Decided our fate in a microsecond."

<comment><USER24> It would hide out and subtly distort our culture, slowly driving the society mad, and slowly driving us all mad...for the lulz!

<comment><USER25> ... wait a second...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone explain more? It sounds like their network routers are run on top of a Kubernetes-like thing and when they scheduled a maintenance task their Kubernetes decided to destroy all instances of router-software, deleting all copies routing tables for whole datacenters?

<comment><USER27> You have the gist I would say. It's important to understand that Google separates the control plane and data plane, so if you think of the internet, routing tables and bgp are the control part and the hardware, switching, and links are data plane. Often times those two are combined in one device. At Google, they are not.

So the part that sets up the routing tables talking to some global network service went down.

They talk about some of the network topology in this paper: [https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43837](https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43837)

It might be a little dated but it should help with some of the concepts.

Disclosure: I work at Google

<comment><USER28> It shouldn't. Amazon believes in strict regional isolation, which means that outages only impact 1 region and not multiple. They also stagger their releases across regions to minimize the impact of any breaking changes (however unexptected...)

<comment><USER29> While I agree it sounds like their networking modules cross-talk too much - you still need to store the networking config in some single global service (like a code version control system). And you do need to share across regions some information on cross-region link utilization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Google Cloud instances in us-west1, and all European regions and Asian > regions, did not experience regional network congestion.

Does not appear to be true. Tests I was running on cloud functions in europe- west2 saw impact to europe-west2 GCS buckets.

[https://medium.com/lightstephq/googles-june-2nd-outage- their...](https://medium.com/lightstephq/googles-june-2nd-outage-their-status- page-reality-lightstep-cda5c3849b82)

<comment><USER31> I would say this was covered by "Other Google Cloud services which depend on Google's US network were also impacted" it sounds to me like the list of regions was specifically speaking towards loss of connectivity to instances.

<comment><USER30> It says there wasn't regional congestion, running a function in europe-west2 going to europe-west2 regional bucket is dependent on US network? That would be surprising.

<comment><USER32> Probably various billing services that need to talk to the mothership in us- east1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I want a "24" style realtime movie of this event. Call it "Outage" and follow engineers across the globe struggling to bring back critical infrastructure.

<comment> V-eHGsd_ it's pretty boring. real life computers aren't at all like hackers or csi:cyber.

except for the skateboards, all real sysadmins ride skateboards.

<comment><USER34> What?! It's the most exciting part of the job. Entire departments coming together, working as a team to problem solve under duress. What's more exciting than that?

<comment><USER35> I have done similar things several times and I think it would be boring.

It's Sunday so I guess they are not together. Instead there could be a lot of calls and working on some collaboration platforms. Everyone just staring at the screen, searching, reporting, testing and trying to shrink the problem scope.

If there's a record on everyone there must be a narrator explaining what's going on or audiences would definitely be confused.

It's Google so they have solid logging, analyzing and discovery means. Bad things do happen but they have the power to deal with them.

I suppose less technical firms(Equifax maybe?) encounter similar kind of crysis would be more fun to look at. Everything is a mess because they didn't build enough things to deal with them. And probably non-technical manager demanding precise response, or someone is blaming someone etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The only way to get SLA credits is requesting it. This is very disappointing.

      SLA CREDITS

      If you believe your paid application experienced an SLA violation
      as a result of this incident, please populate the SLA credit request:
      https://support.google.com/cloud/contact/cloud_platform_sla

<comment><USER37> That does seem questionable. They should be able to detect who was affected in the first place.

<comment><USER38> They can. It's a cost minimization thing, a LOT of people don't want to bother with requesting despite being eligible.

This prevents people from pointing the finger at them for not providing SLA credits.

<comment><USER39> SLACreditRequestsAAS? Who's with me, all I need is a co-founder and an eight million dollar series A round to last long enough that a cloud provider buys us up before they actually have to pay out a request!

<comment><USER40> This exists for Comcast and some other stuff, I'll ask my roommate what the service is called.

<comment><USER40> It's [https://www.asktrim.com/](https://www.asktrim.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> My burning question is what is a "relatively rare maintenance event type"?

<comment> the-rc My hunch: a more invasive one. Think of turning off all machines in a cluster for major power work or to replace the enclosures themselves. Maintenance on a single machine or rack, instead, happens all the time and requires little more scheduling work than what you do in Kubernetes when you drain a node or a group of nodes. I used to have my share of "fun" at Google sometimes when clusters came back unclean from major maintenance. That usually had no customer-facing impact, because traffic had been routed somewhere else the entire time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Shopify was down for 5 hours during this incident. But they're not issuing refunds or credits to customers.

Presumably they will get a refund based on SLA for this? Shouldn't they pass that onto their customers?

</comment><comment><USER43> The defense in depth philosophy means we have robust backup plans for handling failure of such tools, but use of these backup plans ( _including engineers travelling to secure facilities designed to withstand the most catastrophic failures_ , and a reduction in priority of less critical network traffic classes to reduce congestion) added to the time spent debugging.

Does that mean engineers travelling to a (off-site) bunker?

<comment> the-rc It's either that or special rooms at an office that have a different/redundant setup. Remember that this happened on a Sunday, so most engineers dealing with the incident were home or elsewhere, at least initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is there a resource that compares all the cloud platform's reliability? Like a rank and chart of downtime and trends. Just curious how they compare

<comment><USER45> There is this from May from Network World: [https://www.networkworld.com/article/3394341/when-it- comes-t...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3394341/when-it-comes-to- uptime-not-all-cloud-providers-are-created-equal.html)

GCP was basically even with AWS, and Microsoft was ~6x their downtime according to that article.

<comment><USER46> From the article:

> AWS has the most granular reporting, as it shows every service in every > region. If an incident occurs that impacts three services, all three of > those services would light up red. If those were unavailable for one hour, > AWS would record three hours of downtime.

Was this reflected in their bar graph or not?

Also, GCP has had a number of global events, e.g. the inability to modify any load balancer for >3 hours last year, which AWS has _NEVER_ had (unless you count when AWS was the only cloud with one region).

<comment><USER47> While I would like to say AWS hasn't had that issue, in 2017 it did (just not because of load balancers being unavailable, but as a consequence of the S3 outage [1].

When the primary S3 nodes went down, it caused connectivity issues to S3 buckets globally, and services like RDS, SES, SQS, Load Balancers, etc etc, all relied on getting config information from the "hidden" S3 buckets, thus people couldn't edit load balancers.

(Outage also meant they couldn't update their own status page! [2])

[1]: [https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/](https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/) [2]: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> As a electronics/firmware engineer, is there a dummies resource than covers this concept of a "cloud"?

<comment><USER49> Besides the completely valid GNU link, the important bits are:

\- the cloud is just a bunch of computers, managed by someone. either you (on- premise private cloud) or by someone else as a SaaS

\- building, operating, managing, administering, maintaining a cloud is hard (look at the OpenStack project, it's a "success", but very much a non- competitor, because you still need skilled IT labor, there's no real one-size- fits all, so you need to basically maintain your own fork/setup and components - see eg what Rackspace does)

\- it's a big security, scalability and stability problem thrown under the bus of economics (multi-tenant environments are hard to price, hard to secure and hard to scale; shared resources like network bandwidth and storage operations- per-sec make no sense to dedicate, because then you need dedicated resources not shared - which is of course just allocated from a bigger shared pool, but then you have to manage the competing allocations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> 24h time format used in Postmortem. Interesting.

<comment><USER29> It's the superior format. Just like yyyy-mm-dd [hh:mm:ss.sss] is, because lexicographic string order matches the time order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The HA/Scheduling system is too complex.

Simplify it Google!

</comment><comment><USER52> "To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is #devops." - DevOps Borat

</comment><comment><USER53> (meme) I figured out why the google outage took a while to recover: [https://i.imgur.com/hzcLx5X.png](https://i.imgur.com/hzcLx5X.png)

</comment><comment><USER54> <trolling>

Given the fact that the status page was reporting for more than 30 minutes an erroneous infrastructure state and this is google, is it okay for Amazon to put the SRE books into the "Science Fiction" category or should we keep them under tech?

</trolling>

I still feel for the on-call engineers.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is automation good or bad, that is the question. For context, let us think in programming context of a B tree.

Google seems to have created oversight of systems, processes and jobs to be managed by more automation with other systems, processes and jobs.

System A manages its child systems B, which in turn manages its own child systems C and so on. Now the question becomes, who manages the system A and its activities? Automation of the entire tree is as good as the starting node.

Be mindful and make use of automation only of systems that will not be the owner of your business demise. Humans are and should always be the owner of the starting process. Without that governance model, you get google with 5 hours of down time or worst in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER56> Google has a huge quality problem and their service is extremely unreliable. Another 3-day-outage in kubernetes:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428497)

login issues:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19687029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19687029)

storage system outage:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392452)

...

So, basically Google created the most unreliable cloud system in the world.

<comment><USER57> >So, basically Google created the most unreliable cloud system in the world

I'm pretty sure that title goes to Azure

<comment><USER58> You people probably haven't used IBM Cloud (or Bluemix, as it used to be). We inherited one application there, and boy was life stressful. There were already plans to move elsewhere, and then one day our managed production database was down. Took me something like ten hours to build a new production system elsewhere from backups, but it took longer for the engineers to fix the database.</comment></comment></comment>


GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro - <AUTHOR> https://leblancfg.com/installing-cuda-cudnn-tensorflow-nvidia-gtx960.html <comment><USER3> My company (Lambda Labs) made it possible to install cuda, cudnn, tensorflow, pytorch, and other deep learning frameworks with one line:

[https://lambdalabs.com/lambda-stack-deep-learning- software](https://lambdalabs.com/lambda-stack-deep-learning-software)

We wrote debian packages for every framework, including cuda and cudnn. Using our Debian repository, you can install all these frameworks using apt/aptitude.

When a new version of a framework comes out, we usually have it available in 1-2 weeks.

<comment><USER4> Any chance you can get MxNet (and Keras MxNet) in there?

Installing this stuff is a huge nuisance for us and we have some pretty insane Dockerfiles to handle all the different combinations. I might look into using this for our ML images.

<comment><USER3> I'll talk to the team!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, not sure why you would be in Grub for Nvidia graphics drivers. This whole thing seems pretty odd to me since I've not seen a Nvidia driver problem in several years. Was he trying to use like Ubuntu 12.04 or something.

Manjaro is a great choice and it does "just work" the best. All the others work just fine though.

<comment><USER6> I have had issues with centos 7.2 and nvidia drivers. Nvidia assume linux kernel sources are installed, but centos 7.2 puts them in a directory that the nvidia driver can't find. I ended up having to scp sources from a working machine and add symbolics links to get the drivers working (1080Ti card - <USER2> assume the Tesla drivers work better).

<comment><USER5> CentOS is based on a stack that is nearing 5 years old so that makes sense. The driver world (even mesa itself) has matured greatly since then. Mesa and Nvidia even have libraries now that help them coexist instead of replacing/overwriting library files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So basically, your calculations for deciding whether purchasing physical GPUs or using cloud GPUs is more cost effective should add $5,000 (50 hours at $100 an hour seems reasonable) onto the cost of any physical rig, and assume you have a spare 50 hours of opportunity cost to set it up.

All the ML researchers lusting for bare metal need to decide if they want to be "Gentoo Ricers" \- [https://funroll- loops.teurasporsaat.org/](https://funroll-loops.teurasporsaat.org/) \- or if they just want to train models and get real work done.

<comment><USER8> 50 hours is definitely an outlier. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to linux and drivers, and I managed to get an nvidia GPU working on ubuntu in about an hour or two of swearing and a dozen reboots.

<comment><USER9> I don't know what you guys are doing, but for me installing proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu was just a matter of clicking a checkbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow that's quite a journey. I had a similar one when I started maintaining TensorFlow on Gentoo Linux. It's working pretty well now, emerge tensorflow will have everything installed and working with no fuss.

</comment><comment><USER11> I spent a long time trying to set this up as well. Ultimately, I was successful using nvidia-docker. Here's how I did it [http://briancaffey.github.io/2017/11/19/tensorflow-gpu- setup...](http://briancaffey.github.io/2017/11/19/tensorflow-gpu-setup-with- docker-on-arch-linux.html)

</comment><comment><USER12>
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/cuda/extras/CUPTI/lib64

      Reboot and cross your fingers.

Rebooting will terminate the process tree in which the environment has been modified, making this line a no-op. Please take the time to understand the commands you run before suggesting them to others.

<comment><USER13> Now I see why the author had so much trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only two distributions I've tried where this worked with a one liner were NixOS and Arch. I'm surprised this doesn't work in Manjaro given that it's an Arch derivative. But I don't see much point in Arch derivatives as they do away with Arch's selling point. No layers between you and upstream.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you mean, and I agree with you in theory. The long learning curve and installation time for Arch was a non-starter for me though.

Back to your point, Manjaro runs directly on pacman repos, not a layer between it and upstream. It just comes with IMO sane defaults and an installer GUI.

<comment><USER14> When did you try Arch? With the adoption of systemd it's incredibly easy to configure _if_ you aim for a simple no desktop enviroment setup or something minimal.

If not, I think it doesn't make any sense to use it unless you are a seasoned user. Rolling release will make running big frameworks like KDE tricky, as things will change often. And unless you have set everything up yourself, you won't know where to look in order to fix things.

I'd recommend you look into NixOS if you want to run a desktop environment. It's radically different (totally functional and declarative, whereas Arch is imperative). All Python and deep learning stuff is neatly packaged and tested. And rollbacks are trivial. There's no state.

You can even run Nix in other distros or macOS.

<comment><USER15> > Rolling release will make running big frameworks like KDE tricky, as things > will change often.

On the contrary, you get new releases (with bugfixes) much sooner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Archlinux user here (Manjaro is based on Archlinux). TensorFlow with GPU support is a supported package you can install it with all it's dependencies in a simple command with Pacman. But you don't want to do that the same way you don't want to compile TensorFlow. It is better to use an official docker image because they include all the dependencies, even the optionals as nccl 2.0. You forgot to install it, and it is speed up if you use more than one GPU. Just use the official docker image and forget all the burdensome of configuring everything.

P.S. well you need to install docker with Nvidia support, but you can use it in the future for other things. This is also a couple of packages in Pacman (maybe Nvidia docker is in air, I don't remember now).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair point! I tried installing the pre-packaged conda Tensorflow package, but it was expecting CUDA 9.0 and CuDNN 7.0. The ones I had finally managed to install were 9.2 and 7.2... hence compiling it from source.

I should add that as an addendum to the article, though, great catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do you want to know pain? Try to use OpenCL with a GCN1 GPU (AMD 7970) with TF.

You can more or less do it with SYCL / ComputeCPP, which is great, but it is not trivial either. It does require you to compile TF and may fail to operate some operations.

Full disclosure I have not retried it recently, last time was 6 month aago, and a great amount of work is done on the SYCL / ComputeCPP front.

<comment><USER17> … Which is somewhat sad, given AMD's open drivers are terrific and a pleasure to use on my machine, even for Steam games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is usually headaches to install closed source software on Linux. Ffmpeg with Cuda hardware acceleration encoding support is also a pain in the... to install.

If graphic card makers would open source their drivers it would come default shipped apt-get,pacman,dnf,yum installable by the Linux distros.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder when we will get to the point where computers (end-user computers) learn using ML techniques. Will we ever? Will it ever become accessible to non-developers?

</comment><comment><USER20> The best way to setup tensorflow for gpu is to use nvidia-docker and pre-built docker images. They mention it in their documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. You would still need working NVIDIA drivers and CUDA to use nvidia-docker, which I couldn't manage to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Add Bumblebee to the mix and you get even more headache. Argh.</comment>


Show HN: OSX Spinner in HTML/CSS - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/kevinjannis/pen/awvhz

<comment><USER2> Love this! Really shows what is possible these days!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just a showcase :)</comment>


MPAA Emails Reveal Plan to Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign via Today Show and WSJ - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150724/15501631756/smoking-gun-mpaa-emails-reveal-plan-to-run-anti-google-smear-campaign-via-today-show-wsj.shtml

<comment><USER2> >you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google's stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed.

This sounds super illegal.</comment>


Secondary Energy Source: You'd Think That This Can't Be Correct - <AUTHOR> http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/10/10/youd_think_that_this_cant_be_correct.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone have any thoughts on this? It would be incredible if true.

<comment><USER2> There are other articles on the E-Cat scattered around the net in the last few days/weeks. Long story short: a lot of experts (physicists and chemists) say it's probably bullshit, likely fraud.

Indeed, it would be amazing if it were true. But don't hold your breath.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this has been around for a while, but it's never been independently verified.

<comment><USER2> Incidentally, what gets me the most about reading the experimental procedure is how they went about testing and how easily it would be to defraud such a system.

There are techniques for _exactly_ measuring heat output of significantly more powerful generators without relying on simulations of designs of radiators and air flow. Consider that thermal solar plants produce megawatts of power during the day, several orders of magnitude beyond the E-Cat, and yet all of the technology around thermal solar generation measures to within 1-2% of reality, reliably. If they can be so precise on energy measurement at the scale of a utility, it is laughable that they would even try anything other than industry-standard techniques.

And color me an asshole, but I don't buy that the "high" temperatures of 1500 degrees is a legitimate challenge to measurement, considering that other nuclear technology currently under development operates at millions of degrees and can be measure with much better guarantees of precision, despite also having to deal with deadly radiation and neutron emissions.

But no, instead of using fully trusted energy measurement procedures, which would work perfectly fine with a 2300 watt nominal heat generator at 1500 degrees (1.5MWh seems like a lot, but it's only 2300 watts over 32 days, roughly the amount of energy it would take to run two decent microwaves for that period of time), they simulate and estimate based on temperature sensors and IR cameras.

And even ignoring their questionable measurement procedures, 2300 watts of fraud would be trivial to inject into a system like that with a handful of magnetrons and a waveguide... like how a microwave works.

If I, a computer scientist with a reasonably modest level of physics and chemistry education (from 14+ years ago) can think of several methods by which to trivially defraud observers (via measurement methodology, or by injecting external power remotely), and that their testing methodology seems purpose- designed to defraud, it makes me ask two simple questions:

1\. If this is a fraud, in what world did they believe that this turd sandwich would actually be believed? 2\. If this is not a fraud, why wouldn't they have used an industry standard measuring methodology instead of throwing all of this other measuring bullshit into their paper, citing the proprietary nature of the measurement devices, while simultaneously claiming precision.

Don't get me wrong; I think it would be awesome if this were real. But if I wanted to make claims and defraud observers, I'm not sure I could design a better setup for fraud.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tether has "dissolved" relationship with auditor Friedman LLP - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/coindesk/status/957381065190133767 <comment><USER2> Don't worry guys, I'm sure Tether is a 100% legitimate operation that just happens to be conducting an ongoing research project to see how much like a scam they can appear. They've got the money, they're just keeping it hidden! ...very hidden! They had to fire their auditors because they were about to find proof the money exists, and that would have ruined the research project!

More seriously, I've got to ask: Why does anyone trust them? Why _did_ anyone trust them? They've never offered the slightest reason to think they're anything else but a particularly lazy fraud.

Is this an "emperor's new clothes" situation where everyone assumes everyone _else_ has proof of Tether's validity, and doesn't want to look dumb by asking? Or a "bigger fool" situation where everyone believes Tether is a fraud, but thinks they can get out and leave someone else holding the bag when it bursts? Raw wishful thinking because a legit Tether would be so useful to the ecosystem that people have collectively decided to pretend it does exist? Or what?

<comment><USER3> > Why does anyone trust them? Why did anyone trust them?

Greed. I get why people would trust BTC, Ether (before the DAO hardfork, that is) or Dogecoin, as these had real value and usecases (e.g. Bitcoin for getting high quality weed, ecstasy or guns, and Dogecoin for having fun + a quick-and-easy donation way on Reddit other than gold). But the other ~1.5k coins listed on [https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/)? What in blazes? People stuck billions of dollars into altcoins!

<comment><USER4> Not really: just because the market cap of an altcoin is in the billions doesn't mean there's more than a tiny fraction of that amount actually invested (as in, bought with fiat) into it.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I can make a coin with $10T supply and sell one for $1 and imply a $10T market cap.

<comment><USER6> …Which makes trading volume a very important statistic to monitor.

<comment><USER7> He could proceed to have a bunch of bots throw coins around randomly, also, so trading volume gives you nil reliable info, either.

<comment><USER3> This sort of behavior only works on exchanges with zero or extremely low trading fees.

<comment><USER8> It also works when you own the exchange. There's pretty good reason to believe wash trading is happening at several exchanges...possibly performed by the exchange themselves. I'm more willing to believe Bitfinex is doing the BTC wash trading that's happening on their exchange, rather than some whale doing it (the very close connection between Tether and Bitfinex, sharing several founders and C-levels, makes this seem even more likely).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting is that while Coindesk posted to this as "breaking" news, plenty of people (like @bitfinexed) had noticed and dug into this on the 23rd: [https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/956053106516688898](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/956053106516688898)

(from a closed discussion group on the 24th: "I just spoke with the AICPA, Friedman has no professional responsibility to announce if they were ever auditing Bitfinex/Tether and/or if they withdrew from the engagement, so we will never know if there was even an audit in the first place.")

I've been personally pretty closely tracking the Tether situation, as I think it's basically the largest risk to the cryptocurrency market today. Here's a good even-handed summary that covers both sides and what it might mean: [https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@cryptoscopia/making- sens...](https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@cryptoscopia/making-sense-of-the- tether-situation)

Regardless of whether Tether is fully backed, it's certainly running fraudulently. The original premise promised not just 1:1 USD backing, but also regular audits, which AFAIK have never happened (first supposedly engaging w/ Ledger Labs, and then with Friedman LLP) and now appear like they will never happen. Of course, as bitfinexed pointed out, it's not like they didn't warn anyone about it in their white paper: [https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/957416416294068224](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/957416416294068224)

(The white paper of course does lie because it specifies regular audits and also banking partners that were aware of their business model.)

For those tracking the market conditions of an impending Tether collapse, I recommend reading this article (and tracking the author, @BambouClub's twitter feed): [https://hackernoon.com/what-will-happen-when-the-shit- hits-t...](https://hackernoon.com/what-will-happen-when-the-shit-hits-the-fan- with-tether-f59f92fd8dca)

<comment><USER5> I'm just not understanding how a $1.5B scam coin would impact the crypto market dramatically at this point. Coincheck got hacked for $500M today and the markets are green across the board. There are alternative peg currencies to the dollar, including Dai, by Maker, which is backed by Ethereum, and seems like a better model for a stable coin: [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/)

<comment><USER9> @guildenstern's response covers it a bit, but a bit more on why this is so important. While the nominal market cap of the cryptocurrency sector is somewhere between $500-600B these days, this is based on an estimated $10-20B of capital inflow (eg "real" dollars invested). USDT, as a de facto 1:1 USD peg acts much more like this money than another random coin, because trades into USDT are treated as dollar settled. While there are some weaknesses to some of the analysis, the recent Quantifying the Effect of Tether report [2] does a good job pointing out the correlation (if not the causation) in terms of pricing/demand.

You can also note that if you order the charts by 24h trading volume, USDT is #3 (right under BTC and ETH) [1] and if you dig into say the top 3 exchanges [3][4][5] you can see that BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT are basically in the top spots. Ignoring the Korean exchanges (who are their own little universe), you have to get down to GDAX @ #10 to get down to an exchange that doesn't directly touch Tether.

If you pay attention to the markets, you can see USDT clearly driving price movements and as long as everyone treats it as a USD equivalent, USDT drives USD prices. When new USDT is printed (easy money), then people (and potentially market manipulating bots if you are into conspiracy theories) use it to margin into BTC, increasing demand, driving the whole market up. If this is not organic demand (USDT issued due to USD deposits), then we have a huge problem, since this has been going on for months and represents a huge price distortion.

Now Tether isn't solely responsible for driving prices up - there has been a real mania (you can see it with the insane amount of signups going on for retail exchanges), with a lot of real money coming in, but there's some real dirty sausage making going on atm. A writeup that points out a lot of the messy stuff going on: [https://medium.com/@Skycoinproject/state-of-the- cryptocurren...](https://medium.com/@Skycoinproject/state-of-the- cryptocurrency-market-78f4a0dda9f)

Personally, I believe that most of the Tether is backed by real currency, however it is being driven primarily by large OTC swaps by those evading Chinese (or Korean) and potentially dark market capital controls. I don't know if this actually leaves the market any better off if/when Tether Inc and many exchanges get busted by governmental/international regulators.

These shenanigans btw hasn't gone completely unnoticed in the mainstream news. Nathaniel Popper, who covers the digital currency beat for the NYTimes has done writeups on Bitfinex/Tether [6], as has Bloomberg [7], heck, even Dr Doom is all in on beating the Tether drum now [8] although I don't think anyone is straight up talking about the likelihood of major ML going on...

Re, other stablecoins, while they'd be nice to have in theory, I think one needs to be a bit skeptical: [https://prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/11/epicaricacy/](https://prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/11/epicaricacy/)

A recent insightful quote I saw was that stablecoins trade volatility risk for blow-up risk.

The most interesting stablecoin announcement I saw was MUFG's plan to release a JPY-pegged coin soon. Now that'd be interesting...

[1] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/)

[2] [http://www.tetherreport.com/](http://www.tetherreport.com/)

[3] [https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/okex/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/okex/)

[4] [https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/)

[5] [https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/huobi/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/huobi/)

[6] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/bitcoin- bitfin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/bitcoin-bitfinex- tether.html)

[7] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/mystery-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/mystery- shrouds-tether-and-its-links-to-biggest-bitcoin-exchange)

[8] [https://twitter.com/Nouriel](https://twitter.com/Nouriel)

<comment><USER5> In my opinion, people are using USDT to dodge the price swings that occur in the market. I don't know that USDT represents a fundamental underpinning of the price of Bitcoin, for instance. Coinbase had over a $1 billion in revenue last year, alone, so Coinbase is probably responsible for tens of billions of USD deposits on ETH & BTC markets.

Yeah if USDT crashed it might cause a big hit on the market, but not worse than anything else we've seen. 30-50% drops are fairly common in this market.

In the mean time, I think other stable coins (like Dai) will continue to grow in popularity. I've read Preston Byrne's article, but I've also read Dai's white paper and I think that they have a fine model to build a relatively stable coin, not a perfectly stable one, mind you, but a relatively stable one that trends towards $1. For those wishing to hedge their bets against the swings in the market (the great bulk majority of the USDT market) I think Dai is a great alternative. We'll see as it matures, it's still early days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I truly don't get from the tether is how its almost at parity on kraken ([https://www.kraken.com/charts](https://www.kraken.com/charts)) You would expect a sizable discount going on for all the shennaningans.

<comment><USER11> It's because of arbitrage.

If people didn't value tether at $1, then the price for X/USDT pairs (on other exchanges) would be lower.

As it isn't the case, if the price dropped below $1, you could buy USDT here, transfer it to a different exchange and make a profit by buying back your coins there.

<comment><USER10> Arbitrage explains why prices tend to be the same across exchanges, but it doesnt explain why it isnt discounted today. Kraken is the only one where you trade tethers for dollars that I know of. You cant trade dollars for tethers on tether.to.

Its possible tether is able to sell tethers to exchanges alone and mint tokens at 1 on 1 rate and so it should tend to be so, but considering tether is issuing through bitfinex..

<comment><USER12> Kraken may be at 1:1, but Bitcoin is currently trading at a $500 (4%) premium on tether based exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> HN might be interested in this statistical analysis of Tether's influence on the cryptocurrency markets: [http://www.tetherreport.com/](http://www.tetherreport.com/)

<comment><USER14> I think it had some (critical) comments of the statistics on HN.

Not saying Tether is legit. Just haven't heard that this report is especially persuasive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More substantive article linked deeper in Twitter chain:

[https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship- audito...](https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-auditor- dissolved/)

<comment><USER16> Following bitfinexed@ is also good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm really glad Jibrel's tokens are unlocking in 3 days, don't have to deal with Tether bullshit anymore.

</comment><comment><USER18> How might one make a few bucks from Tether falling apart?

<comment><USER16> Short futures.

<comment><USER8> Are there futures on Tethers? One could short Bitcoin, but it's hard to predict how soon this is going to come crashing down. I sold nearly all my cryptocurrency a couple of weeks ago on the belief that Tether would collapse the market, but others sold long before that...and before the massive run up to $10k+. Had those folks shorted back then, they would have had to close their positions...and would have lost a lot of money. Even though they are (I believe) long-term right.

I'm just saying be careful with shorting something with unlimited potential upside...like Bitcoin. But, if I could short Tethers, I would, though I don't know who'd take the other side of that deal.

<comment><USER8> I found you can short Tether on Kraken. So, I am (or trying to...it's currently trading at .97 on Kraken, and my sell order is for .99, so if it proves to be solvent in a month or two, I'll be out a few bucks plus margin interest). I have vague concerns that this is like betting against the house since presumably Kraken and other exchanges that accept USDT will be hit hard by the failure of Tether, so they have a strong vested interest in seeing it survive, even if it's shady as hell.

<comment><USER16> You beat me to this - a friend just pinged me about the possibility of shorting usdt at kraken for something like 1.8% /month. I did not confirm this myself.

I am also not sure if tether fails, what happens to kraken/bittrex etc, will you even be able to take your money out? I doubt. Don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who and who?

<comment><USER20> Tether is a company that created a cryptocurrency (USDT) pegged to USD that is a popular substitute for trading fiat USD on cryptocurrency exchanges. Friedman LLP is the accounting agency that was supposed to be auditing Tether's USD holdings to ensure they were maintaining a full-reserve (1 USD in holding per 1 USDT in circulation).

[https://tether.to/announcement-transparency- update/](https://tether.to/announcement-transparency-update/)

<comment><USER21> And with no audits and some very sketchy behavior, the thinking is that there are hundreds of millions of Tether in circulation without any subsequent backing USD.

[https://twitter.com/bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/bitfinexed)

<comment><USER22> (It is up to 2.2 Billion now!)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk Wants to Put Man on Mars in '12 to 15 Years' - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/elon-musk-put-man-mars-roughly-12-15/story?id=16940287 <comment><USER2> To everyone who asks questions like, "Why send people when robots are better/cheaper" and "Isn't it too dangerous", I would reply, "Stay here".

It is only a recent phenomenon in human history, in the last few hundred years, that all the places in the world are known. For hundreds of thousands of years, there have always been new lands and oceans for our kind to explore. Indeed, until the last ~20k years, we all existed in a near constant wandering state. Thats how we survived, and the lifestyle is still practiced today, albeit only in very tiny numbers in remote places.

Even with civilized life, i.e. villages, towns, and cities, for thousands of years people have jumped on ships or made years-long treks across oceans and continents to build new lives. Some of this was the desire to be free, or it was forced, or it was from desperation, or it was simply to explore.

Simply because we almost all live in a vastly interconnected world now doesn't mean that any of those reasons have disappeared, or that the kinds of people willing to take such risks have died out. We're still here, if latent, amongst the masses.

Many of us spend our youth traveling the world, climbing the next mountain. Many others lose themselves in vast game worlds where we can, for short times, satisfy the need to explore and build new lives. Some games such as WoW, Eve Online, Secondlife, and Civilization are so popular in part of because of these desires and needs.

So when you ask, "Why?", I say "Why not?". You are free to stay here. I want to go see what's out there.

<comment><USER3> For me, at least, it's only a small part of a greater question: Why do _anything_ that robots do better and cheaper?

It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera, and let humans spend their time doing the things that humans are good at: art, culture, coming up with novel behaviors for robots.

You get excited about exploration-- that's great. I get excited about post- scarcity. Because that will mean that _everyone_ gets to do what they're excited about.

<comment><USER4> No matter how hard they try you can't live on Mars via a robot. Ultimately it's about adventure, experience, and colonization. Robots are great for science, but there's more to space exploration than just science.

Edit: There will come a time in the near future, probably by 2050 but certainly before 2100, when the idea of "space" evaporates away. Space is just a place. Mars is just a place. It's just as much a place as the street right outside your doorway or the grocery store just down the road. It's a place we can visit, experience, and a place where we can live. Once people start living off of Earth I think that artificial barrier will come down and people will begin accepting the idea that the Earth is just a part of the Universe. We have come to split up the Universe into two parts: the Earth, and everywhere else. But this is a false dichotomy due only to the particulars of history, there is only one Universe.

<comment><USER5> They said that last century. We put a man on the moon. We haven't been back in decades, at least thirty years.

The USSR planned on sending a man to mars to live, and die there. It was feasible during the cold war, and we still haven't done anything about it.

<comment><USER6> The difference now is it is no longer just governments looking into space, but rather the private sector. That will drive things at a pace that hasn't been seen in space exploration yet (SpaceX is a great glimpse into it though!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I hate to be that guy, again, but I still feel like I haven't seen a very clear explanation of why this is a good idea. It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?

Especially in light of Curiosity, why is it assumed that the logical next step after sending a robotic lab is to send a person, rather than sending a few dozen more robots? For a fraction of the cost of sustaining human life on another planet, we could construct a huge automated research complex capable of doing everything a human would want to do -- even golf -- and that would be valuable research toward developing the fully-autonomous robotic scientists which are definitely the only way we're going to have real long-term exploration of the outer solar system and beyond.

Basically, I can understand why someone might want to go to Mars, but I'm not sure why someone else would want to send them.

<comment><USER7> > It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to > humanity?

Survival. We _will_ go extinct at some point if we stay on Earth. The more spread out we are, the less likely any single catastrophe is to wipe out the entire race.

In the more near term... Do we really need more motivation than "because it's there"?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but not in the next twenty years. Or the next hundred years. Or the next thousand years.

A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus _could_ kill all the humans on Mars.

The Earth is the perfect place for humans to live, out of the entire universe. If we can't figure out how to survive long-term on this planet, that's why we'll go extinct.

"Because it's there" is a great reason for an explorer to want to go somewhere. But that doesn't automatically have value for the future of humanity.

<comment><USER8> > A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike > would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the > humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans > on Mars.

Terraforming Mars would prevent a 'puncture' or 'short circuit' from wiping out its population. The goal isn't to only spread human life but all of life.

<comment><USER3> Terraforming Mars is a great long-term goal. But I don't see how putting a human being on the surface of the planet gets us there any faster.

<comment><USER9> You don't? That assumption is extremely obvious to me. Most people don't care about Mars right now - in fact, most Americans are against space travel because they think it's expensive. So, terraforming Mars is seen by people (including those with money) as ridiculous. But if SpaceX puts a team on Mars for less money than, say, making a blockbuster film, an obvious result is massive increase in space travel, colonization, etc.

Progress is progress. Choosing to make progress accelerates the process, especially when the progress we're talking about would be the first humans on another planet (and the first known life on Mars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The common sense part of me says this is far too optimistic. After all, we haven't put people on the moon in nearly 40 years.

However, the hopeful part of me thinks it's possible. In 10 years SpaceX has gone from nothing to launching capsules into space and docking them with a space station.

Even it it takes 40 years, it's good to have someone pushing things forward. I really hope I live to see the first human walk on Mars.

<comment><USER4> 2025 is 13 years from now. With any luck SpaceX will have proven its heavy lift launcher within the next year and its manned capsule within the next few years. More so, they are poised to rake in billions of dollars in profits from commercial satellite launches and NASA contracts in the next decade alone.

Combine that capability plus R&D money and you have a potent mix.

Getting to Mars isn't actually that difficult, we already have a lot of the technical details worked out. The biggest element that adds cost and complexity is launch, which is precisely where SpaceX excels.

<comment><USER11> >>> Getting to Mars isn't actually that difficult, we already have a lot of the technical details worked out <<<

What I'm worried about aren't the mechanics of going there. It is the radiation. The Constellation program apparently planned to use high-density polyethylene to act as a shield in the case of a solar flare or any anomalous activity, but the trip would still expose any human being to large doses of radiation and the best methods for shielding are too heavy and hence cost too much right now.

Even if we set up a colony on mars that problem will be ever-present for anyone living there and constructing any long term colony would probably require large amounts of regolith, or maybe a tank of water repurposed as a shield (which might cause processing issues)

Hopefully solving for cost should make a lot of schemes possible, but I'm not so sure about that because there is an implicit requirement of other infrastructure that needs to be solved which no one seems to be tackling. (I might be wrong over here)

<comment><USER4> Radiation is by far the biggest concern. To some degree there's a bit of a guinea pig aspect for any early Mars astronauts. We do have the ability to at least ensure that the astronauts will survive the trip there and back. The best way to do that is with a combination of shielding around the outer hull as well as a "storm shelter" in the interior of the spacecraft surrounded by lots of water (such as the crew's water and food supply as well as their waste) for sitting out solar flare events. We can monitor solar flares quite well these days so we can keep overall radiation doses in check.

Beyond that we could look at other technologies such as artificial magnetospheres. That sort of thing would probably come into use by the time there are dedicated flights between Earth orbit and Mars orbit.

<comment><USER11> That makes sense. I'm sure that plenty of people (including me) would still sign up independent of such concerns.

Re: artificial magnetospheres; Wouldn't there be side effects for humans to live within a powerful magnetic field? For starters blood is ferromagnetic... I'm guessing shielding with either something diamagnetic or something like mu- metal is an assumption, but either scenario would be difficult to implement if I'm picturing it right.

What do you think needs to exist to make it viable? Because there is this entire supply chain involved over here which people seem to assume will spring up for such a program. I think that for something so audacious it's a limiting reagent which needs to be taken into account and, hopefully, solved for.

I've read your comments and I hope you don't mind, but I have a silly question for you, do you think it's possible to make a launch system by pumping something cryogenic through a diamagnetic material and using a linear accelerator to accelerate a pellet(large or small) to escape velocity? Such a system would be extremely expensive to set up, but it would be very reusable and it should pay itself back...

<comment><USER4> Here's a great paper on the topic: <http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/rad.shielding.pdf>

The biggest requirement is power, though it's within the capabilities of a large sized solar array. In terms of exposure to the crew, the actual magnetic field experienced within the cabin would probably not be that high (since the magnet itself would likely be on an external boom).

As far as bulk material launch, I don't think there's a ton of value in launching unprocessed raw materials into orbit. There's only a narrow time window where that's actually useful, because once you have built up even a moderate off-Earth industrial base then it becomes easy to produce things like bulk metals and whatnot. The biggest need will always be in complete, manufactured items, and I suspect more or less conventional launch vehicles will probably be the way that happens well into the era where off-Earth colonization is underway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd think its much more likely we'd be sending people to Mars on a regular basis if we found out there is something valuable there. If space tourism was sufficient to foot the bill for space travel, we'd be sending school field trips to the moon by now.

<comment><USER13> The people who colonize Mars probably won't make a profit off of it. It will be consumption spending, like funding a yachting team. If it ever turns out to be profitable in a pure economic sense, it will take a long time for that to happen.

Yet they will still do it joyfully.

<comment><USER14> The people who first colonize it will probably spend decades building the atmosphere and heating it up (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming#Mars>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unless we invent a much faster engine, traveling to and back from Mars is practically impossible. In the 16 months it takes to get there and return the amount of radiation that will be received from humans could pose significant health risks. It's not surprising that NASA's plans about a manned mission to Mars talk about a one way trip and building some kind of habitat there where they will stay permanently.

<comment><USER16> It has long been Musk's contention that going to Mars would mean moving there, at least initially. He places less value on the return trip than NASA seems to.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, unless something changes in the time it takes us to put a manned mission together it's pretty much a given that the first trip will be one way only. It greatly simplifies things not having to worry about how to get back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know the article isn't really the main attraction here, but what is up with this?

 _"He also laughs that the biggest payload on the Dragon Capsule that flew a mission to the International Space Station was a wheel of cheese."_

I am pretty certain that capsule was stuffed. Didn't it take them days to unload it? Is this just a terribly worded sentence saying that the previous load was cheese?

<comment><USER13> There was a test launch of the Dragon capsule that had the cheese on it. That was December 2010. [http://www.space.com/15799-spacex-dragon-capsule-fun- facts.h...](http://www.space.com/15799-spacex-dragon-capsule-fun-facts.html)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that sentence makes it sound like they are saying they only brought cheese to the ISS though.

<comment><USER13> I got the feeling that the segment with Musk was filmed a year or two ago, despite the new stuff from the MSL landing. They talk about SpaceX accomplishing the feat of taking a man-safe craft into orbit and back to Earth, which would refer to the (unmanned) cheese mission, when SpaceX has since done the bigger feat of docking with the ISS.

<comment><USER18> Aaah, that makes sense. I retract my complaint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm already training for what it's going to be like - <http://www.eveonline.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> I would personally rather see something like a space habitat before colonizing Mars.

If we can artificially replicate Earth's environment in space, then we're set, we could drift through space when our solar system becomes too hot and ensure our race can live on . We wouldn't need planets anymore.

So, instead of having to adapt to Mars' conditions (low gravity and little atmosphere), we would build something capable of sustaining life as we know it.

Much more valuable if you ask me.

But still, going to Mars is great science and will give us very valuable experience.

<comment><USER21> > If we can artificially replicate Earth's environment in space, then we're > set, we could drift through space when our solar system becomes too hot and > ensure our race can live on . We wouldn't need planets anymore.

That's a few billion years off, so let's do the easier one first. Plenty of time to learn space habitats (and presumably a few billion years from now they'll seem pretty quaint).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> An extremely noble goal, but I'd say it was unlikely for a reason not mentioned in the article, but heavily implied: this would be a one-way trip.

Whilst creating and maintaining a Mars base would be one of humanity's crowning achievements, I don't the proposed journey would pass the moral and ethical objections from the general public.

<comment><USER23> Many would have ethical objections, but I think a lot of sane people would volunteer to be the first person on Mars even if it was understood to be a one-way mission.

<comment><USER24> I would certainly go, but I don't have the qualifications to be a first expedition team member. =/

<comment><USER25> Would you really? I see all these people say they would volunteer, but I have my doubts. The novelty of being on Mars would wear off in a couple years and the isolation and so forth ... I just don't buy that there are really many people willing to do that.

<comment><USER24> I'm not really interested in some new adventurous experience. I'd like to help build something like a new colony on Mars, even if it's far down the line and all I'm really doing is taking care of the first steps of on-the-ground planning.

It's a claim that has the safety of there not actually being any plan or need for me to prove my claim. But for what it's worth, I've also taken the same attitude towards startups I'm impressed by. It's not really about me and what I want, so much as there's this big thing that I want to happen and if I can shovel some dirt and bring us a step closer, I'm in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Resources on Earth are limited, space has unlimited resources. So if we want to have abundance for all humans we must expand into space. It's that simple. And we can't bring everything back to Earth, so some have to leave Earth to enjoy those space resources.

I have written a little bit more about that in this blog post: [http://pioneersfestival.com/2012/04/contemporary-space- pione...](http://pioneersfestival.com/2012/04/contemporary-space-pioneers/)

</comment><comment><USER27> "If you look at something like a Boeing 747 -- that's over a quarter of a billion dollars, buying a 747," he said. "You need two of them for a round trip. But nobody is paying half a billion dollars to fly from L.A. to London. It's a few thousand dollars, and that's because you reuse that aircraft multiple times, you use it thousands of times."

Airlines have always been subsidised by taxpayers, in fact air travel has never been super profitable even with the subsidies.

<comment><USER28> Subsidies to the tune of half a billion dollars per passenger per trip?

<comment><USER27> Probably not that high, but you may be surprised.

<http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001001.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Plausible but the timetable is too soon, maybe 2050.

I mean it's possible by then the USA still doesn't have healthcare as a right, but the top 2% will always be able to do such trips as a lark (and write it off on their taxes?) however there will have to be a revolutionary leap in a powersource.

Personally I think the idea of hobbyists having their own bots on the moon by 2025 is more realistic and interesting.

<comment><USER30> Do you mean that we need an Elon Musk for health care? I think so.

<comment><USER31> The health care system is so complex that where would you even begin? With car and/or space, you can just throw money at building something to compete, but it would be difficult to disrupt health care by starting a new insurance company or hospital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oh boy, the greatest adventure ever and 95% percent of the world's engineers have to watch -and all they can do is root and hope, because they are not american citizens. Heck, if only there was a new Operation Paperclip [1], people would sign up to become "Nazis".

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip>

</comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps this is pedantic of me, but the article is mistitled. Musk is _sending_ someone to the moon in 12-15 years. They're not going to have someone _on_ the moon in 12-15 years. This makes a difference because I'm assuming the trip to Mars won't be short.

<comment><USER21> Mars Curiosity took 8 months travel time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I bet that they not only do it, but do it at a price lower than the current unmanned rover mission.

</comment><comment><USER35> Given the choice of an automated flying car or a trip to mars, I pick the former.

<comment><USER36> Its called an airplane.

<http://www.aopa.org/learntofly/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think Elon should get a car on the road first.

<comment><USER16> Delivery of the Model S started in June.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's really cute how you guys think this is even remotely possible. Heard about peak {oil, coal, gas, phosphorous, rare earths, iron} and AGW? It'll make his and your dreams short-lived. Sorry!

<comment><USER21> None of those are expected to have any sort of effect by 2015 that'd prevent SpaceX from launching a rocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It wont happen. Spacex will just spend alk the government's money then say oops. We missed the target date, can we have more money.

<comment><USER18> SpaceX's contract is unique among contractors in that they are responsible for overruns.

Now, you could say they will change their mind when they run out of money, but frankly I would respond by pointing out that Elon really doesn't seem to be in it for the money, but rather _despite_ the money.

<comment><USER40> I recall in one of the interviews he said he <inexact quote, summarized>

"I do appreciate money and it is needed to invest in ventures, but I personally I'm not in it for the money. I can already buy everything I could want."

EDIT: I am just supporting parent post's claim that

 _"but frankly I would respond by pointing out that Elon really doesn't seem to be in it for the money, but rather despite the money."_

<comment><USER41> That would imply that in his personal life he does not need or want more money, since he is already incredibly wealthy. However, personal wealth will not be enough to fund SpaceX indefinitely. The system needs to be balanced.

<comment><USER18> SpaceX has been profitable since 2007.

<http://www.spacex.com/usa.php></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Salary Negotiations: Why your first salary is incredibly important - <AUTHOR> http://www.articulateventures.com/articulate-blog/salarynegotiations/first-time-salary

<comment><USER2> I've always negotiated by the "open book" method [1]. I've said that I want a fair market salary and I've shown that I am aware what the market is. I have always ended up at market or above, and I'm really not exceptional. I guess I'm just a good negotiator.

[1] _The advantages of sharing information during negotiation have been well documented._ [http://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills- daily/wh...](http://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/what- to-share-in-negotiation/)</comment>


Ask HN: How come Snapchat and Facebook receive so much funding - <AUTHOR>

Snapchat recently received 500 million $ in funding... Facebook a lot more.
Still, none of them can ask for any subscription billing for usage of the application...  (or people step over to the competition).
I don't know any people who use something like Facebook credits... ( no one talks about it definatly)
So why do they receive so much in funding? Do investors really believe you can have so much influence on people's lives, if you know a lot about them?
I don't think i ever willingly clicked on an ad, i don't "like" much on fb (just personal connections) (note: technical savy person).
Are there any other "opportunities" people see? I just realize that there will be another Facebook/Snapchat arround the corner, just as MySpace had...
Already Facebook is trying hard to get the next "popular" social network app... Probably it won't be from inside, but it will be bought (cfr. Instagram). <comment><USER2> All businesses must acquire customers. That's the core of business, as Peter Drucker once said: turning regular people into customers.

Facebook and Snapchat have access to so many hundreds of millions of people, they have two advantages:

1\. Their users can become customers very easily.

2\. Businesses are desperate to work with them to get intelligence and to broadcast their ads.

Facebook's intelligence alone is worth trillions. Yes, trillions. It's incredibly personal, accurate, detailed data for nearly 1 billion people. And that's today, when mining data from photos is still in its infancy.

Fortunately for us, Facebook has a privacy policy that prevents them from selling all of that data and getting all that money out of it. But what they can sell is still worth an insane amount of money.

I think you just fundamentally misunderstand what makes you valuable to Facebook. It's not "liking" things or clicking on ads necessarily. It's just the fact that you visit.

<comment><AUTHOR> My question remains the same, i could rephrase it though:

Why would the data be worth trillions, if you can't monetize it to trillions.

In practise (simplified): people search on Google (Google knows what you probably want), but they buy on Amazon. Who is worth more, the one that has the data or the one that has the goods and a % of the sale. (i'm excluding ads here though, it's the only successfull monetizing scheme for data i have encountered.. But ads are not worth trillions... Every next social startup will do them

In practise 2: What happened to App.Net and Whatsapps yearly (1 $ subscription).</comment></comment>


Coinhive – First Week Status Report - <AUTHOR> https://coin-hive.com/blog/status-report <comment><USER2> I am one of such owners who did not disclose mining activities on my website and I am encouraged yet concerned at the opinions of the developers over what one does with coin-hive. It is always good to have an opinionated, and impassioned developer.

But if it leads to coin-hive dictating the way a website chooses to operate, it becomes not much different from the way Adsense dictates the way you have to display its ads.

This is the quote in question: "we have to be respectful to our end users". I am your end user. My visitors are my end user. Please do not jump the gun.

That said, the topic of whether disclosure is respectful, or legal, or legal until the law has caught up with it is a slippery slope with many valid yet conflicting parts.

\- When a visitor visits a website, is there an implicit agreement to expend resources to load all of the website?

\- If so, is ad block breaking the implicit agreement?

\- Why do people often use cookies as an example of why it should be disclosed, when the issue is a matter of privacy not the use of computer resources?

\- If it is computer resources, doesn't it fall under the first point above?

Yet, there are many types of tracking tools besides cookies that are even more invasive and take up CPU, bandwidth and electricity like tracking cursor movements (session replay) that never gets disclosed either out in the wild.

It may seem like the whole world is against undisclosed mining, but to a fish, an aquarium could be the whole world.

<comment><USER3> I want to start out by saying that I use coinhive on my own site.

I think its important to notify the user that you are doing things without their explicit knowledge. Technically you are taking advantage of their system for your own monetary gain, and in fact they spend more generating that money than you receive from their efforts (by averaged data from comed's 2016 demographic census).

"When a visitor visits a website, is there an implicit agreement to expend resources to load all of the website?" I don't think that mining cryptocurrency counts as part of "loading all of the website," and I would go so far as to call that extraneous.

Cookies are actually not notified only for their privacy implications but for the fact that they store data on your device.

As a user of any website, I am fine with coinhive running _as long as I am aware of it._ Checking the network waterfall to see if assets from coinhive were loaded is a bad experience to check if the page might be doing something more malicious. All in all I think we end up where we began. Be kind to your users, since they are, of course, who you are catering your experience to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hello there, jumping in the conversation as I am one of the early adopter.

This is how I implemented it on my side project Thread Reader. See an example on: [https://tttthreads.com/t/907445479826448385](https://tttthreads.com/t/907445479826448385) bottom of the page

My implementation use 1 thread max with 35% of the CPU max. I've done it this way because it is what I'm ready to give as an user

Also it does not start (and show a Paypal donate instead) if:

\- you are on a mobile device (tested with user agent)

\- you are on battery (tested with the browser.getBattery API)

If the miner starts: you get an info box at the bottom of the page, with an user accessible explanation (should be understandable by anyone) and a STOP button (that stop it for 90 days)

Also before using the miner I took some time to communicate about it, even if I did not get much user feedback (I use my project twitter account to do so)

If you get the Paypal donate box it means that the script decided not to start the miner for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER5> I also did not disclose the mining activities to my visitors and got 20kh/s and no one complained about the cpu usage.

Forcing an opt-in won't work. Many users doesn't even know what mining is and won't agree with it. Most of the users doesn't take the time to read explanations either. Imagine what would happen if we ask the users to opt-in to see ads.

If antivirus continues to block the miner, most websites will display a warning to the visitor requiring him to disable his antivirus just like they do with adblocks.

Coin-hive already takes a large percentage (30%) and competition will arrive soon. Forcing an opt-in will just force us to seek another platform.

You can require opt-in to use 100% of the users cpu or something close to it to prevent abuse, but never to small percentages such as 10 or 20%. You should focus on contacting those antivirus companies and explain to them that the miner is not a virus and it does not harm the visitor.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd really like to see you implement a tiered pricing system so that bigger users can pay a little less than the 30% currently. There is bound to be some competition springing up quickly and this would be the best way to keep people on board. Otherwise great service :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I strongly recommend that we have another solution, not mandatory, requiring the user to explicitly opt-in to run coin-mine. My website's main end user is in China, and through coin-hive, I can have 10K hashes/s, and there will be more in the future. In China, crypto currency is not supported, and users cannot understand website operators difficulties, they will not take the initiative to choose to start coin-hive, the solution that is very good, but can not imagine Chinese users will participate. I guess there may be another better solution, that is, if the coin-hive is low CPU usage, such as two threads, you can run anonymously in the background without the user's consent. If it is a higher CPU usage, it will require user approval to run. Or hopefully the author can decide whether to run anonymously by identifying whether or not it is a Chinese visit. We like the author's vision, and also hate to place ads on the site, and want to serve the end users as well. But it doesn't work in china. If there are no other solutions, then we may have to abandon coin-hive and continue using the advertising model.

</comment><comment><USER8> Malwarebytes is now blocking completely coin-hive.com

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I had that problem as well when I ran a two day test. I had ~2% of users report their antivirus blocked it as a Trojan and .6% tell me the site has been hacked.

And that is running it on relatively benign settings. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey,

cloudflare suspend now coinhive websites: [https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-bans-sites-for-using- cry...](https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-bans-sites-for-using- cryptocurrency-miners-171004/)

very bad :/

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi, i'm would like to know the way to adapt mining for mobile user. Now i have 15khs/s with 1 thread but i would like to change to 2 thread for desktop user and still 1 thread for mobile user . How to do?

<comment><USER11> I try 0.5 throttle 4 thread it not work . Mobile user still use there 100% cpu

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it is a great idea. I am using it to try and create a charity. Though everyone who looks at it seems to think it could be a scam. Crypto just has a bad rep.

Check it out if you want www.thoughtsandprayers.io

</comment><comment><USER13> I did not disclose usage as well. It's hard to start a moral conversation. Do we ask permission from users to display ads ? No ? Why a miner then. My throttle was at 0.5. Will discontinue due to antivirus/internet security software labeling the site as hacked/infected. But even if it was close to 100%, I don't think notifying them is important. Does Adobe inform users that photoshop or premiere will work at 100% when doing difficult tasks ?

Hopefully a solution will be found.

<comment> g-b-r So you are doing a difficult task that the user requested when you're cryptomining with his computer?

<comment><USER13> a web page or a software isn't there to do only what the user wants to do. Users don't want ads, maybe we should ask them ? Seriously ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> clickbank did something you can learn from. they require all their vendors to have a script that shows a mini image 'powerd by clickbank SSL' ...comodo SSL does the same thing to notify web visitors of SSL being used... you can do the same to have the JS file show a little thing in the corner to say 'this site has no ads and is supported by coinhive browser mining'

</comment><comment><USER15> Not bad ;) ... [http://prntscr.com/gojd92](http://prntscr.com/gojd92) ...

<comment><USER16> Very good. Could you share some analyticts of your site? How many daily visitors? Average session time? It would be very interesting to know...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thank you for your report + thank you for all your hard work! We are at 1.24 G (with you) and counting!

</comment><comment><USER18> How can I run this js on my web hosting?(without any visitor, I mean how to use web hosting's Cpu power to run the miner)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi , people . i am try coin hive , but i am one question? Anyone know how to transfer the earnings to paypal account?

</comment><comment><USER20> Hope that an updated version of speed Conception 1.Simplifies the JS configuration process(E.g speed control,CPU Thread control),Developers are free to design! Conception 2.Improve the mining speed,Optimize JS code!(E.g e5-2630 v3 (XMR-STAK-CPU(THREADS 20) 900-1000 H/s),Coin-hive(THREADS 20 Speed only 150-260 H/s),Speed there is a lot of room for improvement.I hope we strive forward!!!

</comment><comment><USER21> One way to avoid blocking would be to self-host the js file and proxy the websocket, any plans for this?

<comment><USER9> It doesn't work. Multiple antivirus vendors flagged it when I tried that.

<comment><USER21> They block the js?

<comment><USER9> Correct, and notify the user the site is infected with a trojan with a scary warning screen. That second part being the bigger issue.

The JS being blocked isn't the issue, the fact I have users contacting me claiming the site was hacked was the big issue.

<comment><USER5> You can check if the JS was loaded and display a modal asking the user to report a false positive in their anti-virus software. It's similar to what websites already do with adblocks.

<comment><USER9> Do you understand what a customer service nightmare customers asking if their phones got hacked by your website is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree for compulsory user consent to mine however, this should be only compulsory for web owners having throttle greater than 0.5 for desktops and for all throttle rates for mobile devices. Anything less than 0.5 throttle on desktops should be allowed to run anonymously. My two cents!

Great service indeed, and an alternate revenue stream for website owners.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. The whole point of mining is that it's a less obtrusive and less intrusive alternative to running ads. If you're going to show people a scary "opt-in" button from a separate page (which may be blocked anyway), it's easier to just ditch the idea and run ads instead.

What if they say no? Do you just block them from reading your site? Users will disappear as no one wants yet another account they have to click through just to check a site out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can I expected pure nodejs version? or maybe pool url for mining from server?

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting. Is there way to subscribe to these?

</comment><comment> g-b-r Solutions along these lines (though probably not centralized like this one) are interesting alteratives to ads, but if you want to make them acceptable to the end-users you HAVE to make them AT LEAST stoppable and configurable (by the end-users).

Here are some negative effects of abusing the cpu without the user's consent that come to my mind:

      - the obvious, energy consumption (and thus money). In some cases it
        can be significant, and it will for sure be if these things become
        widespread

      - it can rev-up the fans, up to extremely annoying noise levels

      - on the many old devices that are unable to keep the temperatures
        down on high loads it can warm-up the device up to dangerous
        levels, high enough to:
         - make the device protection features shut it down
         - make the device catch fire, if there are no protection features
           or they don't work well enough
         - ruin some components of the device
         - in any case for sure reduce the lifetime of some components
         - it lowers battery life on battery-powered devices

      - it can easily interfere with the other activities of the user: a
        process using a lot of cpu time will easily reduce the performance
        of other parts of the system, even if the user were to lower its
        priorities

      - on the many browsers that don't allow constraining the resources
        allotted to individual tabs/servers/scripts it can interfere with
        the usage of the browser

      - even on the browsers that do support constraining the resources it
        will easily require some annoying work on the part of the user to
        investigate which tab/server/script is responsible

So you _might_ activate them by default when (really) throttled to a low cpu usage amount, as others suggested, but if you do so you _must_ make them easy to turn off or to configure to a lower usage.

You should consider that an user might be concurrently visiting multiple sites that use this thing, so individual low cpu usages can add-up to a considerable amount.

It might be better indeed to have a means to configure all instances of the script from a single place; I know, hard to do probably.

But really, at least until/if these things become widespread, well understood and standardized (possibly with apis to let the browser control them automatically), it is much better to activate them only at the request of the user.

How to push users to opt-in, without being obtrusive?

Make a big button "DISABLE ADS", with a smaller writing under it "by switching to cryptomining".

When the user clicks it, replace it with two buttons "Turn-off cryptomining - (by re-enabling ads)" and "Configure cryptomining".

Someone might think that it would be unjust to let the users configure the amount of cryptomining, but in reality:

      - there are already unfairnesses in the facts that
        - users with more energy-hungry systems will pay more than others
        - users with more powerful systems will mine more and thus give
          more money to the sites and the others involved
      - it will always be possible to block them entirely with
        script-blockers or other means; that's the state of things and we
        should be glad that it's so: Internet would probably become a much
        less useful sh*t in the unlikely event that blockers became
        preventable; an unprofitable internet would most likely have still
        much more potential than one that supported forcing ads or scripts
        to the end-users.

<comment> g-b-r (yes it's sh*tty formatting, it's the least worst workaround to the lack of support for lists that I could find)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice ... 5.99 G Let's see ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> how can I invest in coinhive? this is gonna be big!</comment>


Show HN: Encouraging STEM Using Advanced Math in Music - <AUTHOR> http://genius.com/Nemesis-fixx-do-the-math-lyrics <comment><USER2> I like. It would have been better if the math topics made more sense, so each stanza would tell a story rather than just name drop.

On the other hand the production quality is awesome, beat is good, and voice is good. It sounded like a professional rap song.

@nfixx get in touch by email if you would like to collaborate on lyrics. I have lots of ideas for math topics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that feedback!

Yep, using story-like approach would have given more meaning to the song, but one of the original motivations for this was to put enough references to math concepts in the lyrics, in a way that would encourage the curious listener to dig them up, and perhaps start to either relate with or love math.

This song is part of a bigger attempt at using the creative arts to expose our African youth to STEM disciplines, and to make the science and math more appealing to a population that's really greatly lagging behind compared to the rest of the world.

You might find this other similar project even more interesting: [http://genius.com/Nemesis-fixx-the-3lite-hackx0rs- lyrics](http://genius.com/Nemesis-fixx-the-3lite-hackx0rs-lyrics)

It's a song introducing important concepts of Information Security to listeners, via a story of an African hacker that's in battle with an NSA crew. It's more story-like.

Yes, I'd love to write more music like this, and so will get in touch to get ideas and feedback on how to get even better.

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> nfixx here.

To those who like this way of using music to popularize and celebrate mathematics, perhaps the other related project might even be more appealing: The Elite Hackers : [http://genius.com/Nemesis-fixx-the-3lite-hackx0rs- lyrics](http://genius.com/Nemesis-fixx-the-3lite-hackx0rs-lyrics)

As I've commented elsewhere, this other song is meant to expose people to the concepts of Information Security (a very important topic in our culture and world today). It is a story of an African hacker that wakes up in the night, to find his servers under attack by the NSA. The song traces the battle that then proceeds, and in the process, drops many references to some of the real- world concepts encountered in real hacking and info-sec.

I hope these sort of music projects don't just entertain nerds and geeks, but introduce STEM concepts to a wider audience, using media such as rap music, that many youth can readily relate to, and perhaps even give more attention to than long essays and books - the attention spans of the young are getting worse, and so using such approaches as music to educate might make more sense for some scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping this would be using advanced math to MAKE music.

<comment><USER4> Check out Dmitri Tymoczko's "Geometry of Music".

[https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Music-Counterpoint- Extended-...](https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Music-Counterpoint-Extended- Practice/dp/0195336674)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnvynOyZI-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnvynOyZI-Q)

<comment><USER3> Watching now. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >>In this song, the emcee articulates and presents math from various, relatively advanced perspectives, while using the context of a nerdy professor giving advise to an embattled Mathematics Major student who must finish his assignments soon, and practice harder.</comment>


AI Programmer: Autonomously Creating Software Programs Using Genetic Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05703 <comment><USER2> oh well, look like even programmer will be replaced by AI</comment>