Jid – Drill down JSON data incrementally - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/simeji/jid <comment><USER2> Ok, I've just hacked a version of this that uses jq[0] underneath, so you can do all the sorts of fancy queries jid originally doesn't support: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq](https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq)

[0]: [https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/)

<comment><USER3> In less that 24 hours since the post, you've managed to shoehorn jq in (looks like about 6 hours of work from commits). Nice work! Really shows the power of OSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The JSON crowd is re-inventing LISP. Originally, JSON was a subset of what you could pass to "eval()". Yesterday, state machine programming in JSON. Today, an inspector.

<comment><USER5> Except JSON has a huge advantage Lisp doesn't: it's close to, or in some cases identical to, the data-structure syntax of several popular programming languages. Lisp's particular s-expression syntax is not close to or identical to any programming language other than Lisp.

In other words: once you decide you don't want to program in Lisp, Lisp's way of representing data stops being a useful syntax for representing your data. Undervaluing this realization (and worse, reacting smugly when interacting with people who don't share your undervaluing of this) is a big part of the gulf between Lispers and the rest of the world.

<comment><USER6> > not close to or identical to any programming language other than Lisp.

It's close to the Lisps, Scheme, Racket, Clojure, and many others.

You are correct that the popularity of Ruby, Python, and JavaScript has eclipsed the popularity of these languages, and so the popularity of JSON has eclipsed that of s-expressions.

<comment><USER5> Scheme, Racket and Clojure are all Lisp-family languages if not arguably Lisps in and of themselves.

<comment><USER6> By that token, JavaScript and PHP are C-family languages

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C- family_programming_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C- family_programming_languages)

I don't see where checkbox ticking will get us.

<comment><USER5> They are C-family languages.

It should be unsurprising that languages which have adopted Lisp's syntax/programming model to a larger degree will also naturally find Lisp's syntax/programming model to work for them, while languages that haven't... won't.

<comment><USER6> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I personally like digging in a ruby console, e.g.:

        require 'json'
        require 'open-uri'

        data = JSON.load(open("https://api.github.com/users/Dorian"))

        data.keys
        data.first
        data["public_repos"]

etc.

<comment><USER2> You personally like to suffer.

I used to do that in Python, but it is a pain. jq is great for these things, and jid seems to be also.

<comment><USER7> How would you do a `data.keys.sort` with jq? Here I don't have to learn a new programming language or hack around with UNIX pipes ;)

<comment><USER8> jq has sort and sort_by(exp). Its | is a jq operator, not a unix pipe.

It's true it's a new lang, and although simple, I often have to look things up.

It might be nice to have a jq REPL, so needn't quote, and easier to keep state around.

<comment><USER9> I find jq syntax tricky, and it's difficult to work out what I need to get to specific elements. I guess I'm more used to things like XPath. Seconding the request for a REPL

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be nice to have this in Chromium/Firefox developer tools.

</comment><comment><USER11> I built a similar thing recently with python. Not complete, but a bunch of stuff does work. It's modeled on interacting on-device with a JunOS or Cisco config. Probably the most interesting feature is text completion.

[https://github.com/mypalmike/ijsoned](https://github.com/mypalmike/ijsoned)

</comment><comment><USER12> Shameless, but related plug [0] - an interactive JSON log viewer.

[0] [https://github.com/pkamenarsky/sherlock](https://github.com/pkamenarsky/sherlock)

</comment><comment><USER13> How can I use wildcards in queries?

For example consider this.

        echo '{"users":[{"name":"s1","id":1},{"name":"s2","id":2}]}'|jid

I can query users[0].id or users[1].id. How can I get all the ids? I tried users[*].id which didn't work.

In Clojure I use specter [1] for this which is able to handle wildcards using ALL.

[1] [https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter](https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter)

<comment><USER14> jq uses empty square brackets as a way of accessing all of an arrays elements. Not sure if this tool uses the same syntax?

E.g. users[].id

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When should/shouldn't I use this over jq? Is the main difference that this is interactive while jq is not? How similar/different is the syntax?

</comment><comment><USER16> If only Jid & jq could get married <3 :)

<comment><USER17> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099819)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Does it use jq internally?

<comment><USER2> The answer is NO for jid, but jiq uses jq internally: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq](https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> J-drilla</comment>


Google China was accused of propagating "porn" by China Central TV - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.cctv.com%2Fchina%2F20090618%2F107062.shtml&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&history_state0=&swap=1

<comment><AUTHOR> For someone who don't know the background:

Google has one of the best porn filter mechanism and the SafeSearch option cannot be turn off in mainland China. Since Kaifu Lee become the head of Google China, Google pulls tons of money to maintain government guanxi.

Today, China Central Television (CCTV) made a special coverage to accuse that Google China have assisted porn propagation by made links to foreign porn sites.

<comment><USER2> It's totally political. Google provided search results when everyone else is shuting down during 4th June.

And one core member of isc.org.cn is Baidu.com, Google's largest rival. Baidu bribed China's CCTV with a lot of money this year, especially during the Spring Festival TV Programs.

One thing about free macket is very sad in capitalist China, there's no fucking business model, everything depends on politics model, even underground politics model.

Update: Something is going on here

This is the Search suggest for 'Son' in Chinese [http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?hl=zh- CN...](http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?hl=zh- CN&jsonp=window.google.ac.hr&q=%E5%84%BF%E5%AD%90)

This is the search suggest for 'lol' in Chinese [http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?hl=zh- CN...](http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?hl=zh- CN&jsonp=window.google.ac.hr&q=%E5%91%B5%E5%91%B5)

looks like a malicious Google Suggest hack and someone purposly reported it to the national TV

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I said it long time ago in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=251020>

"Freedom, democracy and smut can go hand in hand."

All governments just use porn as an excuse to "parenting" their own citizens. But if citizens can't judge issues by themselves, why do we need democracy and rule of laws? If citizens can't judge issues themselves, how can government officials be better in the same department? The difference is who has the power. And some people really take the power in their hands to serious.

We as human being tends to be corrupted with power at our own little hands. The only way to get the balance is to allow different groups owns mutual destruction power against each other, therefore we will all be civilized and enjoy the peace among ourselves.

</comment><comment><USER2> There's a ancient saying in Chinese: 欲加之罪何患无辞

It means an interest group is growing very fast in China, eventually it will kidnap all personal and national politisc, economics, culture with its monopolization.</comment>


World Population Growth - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/ <comment><USER2> This is a deep and excellent compilation of global population demographics. I'd add a few additional observations:

1\. Population doesn't always follow a logistic curve. See Ireland, particularly before and after 1850. [http://www.mapspictures.com/ireland/history/ireland_populati...](http://www.mapspictures.com/ireland/history/ireland_population.php)

2\. The land area per capita plot is a very interesting direction to take the discussion. The more so if you consider solar flux and things derived from solar flux, such as food. For humans, and non-humans. Recent trends become all the more fascinating. [https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/_bi5uhywbdyukhfy- eayjw](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/_bi5uhywbdyukhfy-eayjw)

3\. There's looking not only at _population_ but total _biomass_. Paul Chefurka has plotted out how human and nonhuman vertabrate biomass compare over time. Another fascinating insight: [http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...](http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg)

[https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152825071748824](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152825071748824)</comment>


Why Bitcoin may never hit the mainstream – decimal points - <AUTHOR> http://clickbrain.com/miami/bitcoin-may-never-hit-mainstream-usability-2/

<comment><USER2> I agree completely and this has been the main drag I have with bitcoin, people struggle with whole numbers let alone decimals! This will frustrate people to the point of no return. A universal currency system has to be built with the lowest common denominator in mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't agree more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We say "calories" when we mean kCals– if Bitcoin does become completely mainstream, I see no reason why casual users wouldn't just say "bitcoins" instead of "milliBits".

<comment><AUTHOR> I do hope you are right and that the extreme fractional math won't be an issue, but have my concerns still, because the valuation is so critical to the meaning of the names. It won't be like a dime that always means the same thing, because the average value of a dollar doesn't impact thinking through daily purchases.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Seeing posts from 100 days ago within the top 125, anyone seen this? - <AUTHOR>

I was browsing HN today, and I wasnt logged in(dont know if this is the cause) and when I got to the 5th page, I started seeing posts from many days ago.  I took a screen shot of the offending posts: http://i.imgur.com/yZymU.png<p>Has anyone else seen this before? <comment><USER2> The discussion about rubymotion is currently #118 (I'm logged) and "PHP the right way" is #114. But what do you find surprising in this? The main page of HN features the most popular threads and I guess some of these threads have been referenced somewhere else and upvoted by people who did not see it before? At least I'm sure that <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212568> has been referenced recently in another popular (meaning front-page) submission : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412721>

<comment><AUTHOR> I was just surprised that all of the posts #110-120 are from between 7 and 111 days ago. I have usually not seen that old of posts breaking the top 125 like that(I thought the algorithm was supposed to target new posts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A couple weeks ago I saw a post on the first or second page that had been from some weeks prior.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I just think it is weird the algortihm is picking up an article from over 100 days ago, and showing up in the top 125 posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah seems to happen all the time once you get a few pages deep.</comment>


They're made out of meat - <AUTHOR> http://terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A short film based on same story: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ)</comment>


First New U.S. Nuclear Reactor in Two Decades to Begin Fueling in Tennessee - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/first-new-us-nuclear-reactor-in-two-decades-to-begin-fueling-in-tennessee <comment> ju-st back of napkin calculation:

1180 MWh; 4.5 billion dollar capex; 2.4ct/kWh opex[1]; 50$/MWh income

yearly power production = 1180MWh * 24 * 365 = 10'336'800 MWh

yearly revenue = power production * 50$/MWh = 516'840'000 USD

yearly costs = power production * 1000 * 0,024$ = 248'083'200 USD

capex / (revenue - costs) = 18 years

Doesn't look like a very interesting investment choice!?

1: [http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/economic- aspects/economics...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/economic- aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power/)

<comment><USER2> I think it's an even worse investment than that.

I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper.

The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade.

Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation).

Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA).

If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.

<comment><USER3> > I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. > Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell > their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax > payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Only if you're counting the decommissioning costs for nuclear but not for anything else. By the time a mine is exhausted it's generally a Superfund site, whether they're mining coal or neodymium. And what do you do with fifty million decommissioned solar panels?

> Also, uranium costs are not fixed.

The amount uranium price fluctuations contribute to operating costs is negligible.

<comment><USER2> Yes, PV solar is not so good with waste either. Yes, the costs of removing broken solar panels should go into the costs for a project too. But that has nothing to do with judging weather Nuclear plants are a terrible investment.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned. Which is why I think the estimates for decommissioning are wrong. But perhaps there are cheaper ways to do it in the future... I don't know.

Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh. But that could still impact the bottom line if costs were 3x as much. But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

<comment><USER4> _Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned._

Much, if not a lot of this has to do with the simple fact that after you mothball the plany, it's easiest and cheapest to wait a while for various radioactive isotopes to decay to less hazardous stuff. As long as you mothball it properly, and maintain that, there's no hurry.

<comment><USER5> If the money is set aside ahead of time and invested well then sure. If your dependent on the company that operated the plant to still be around then there just going to keep putting it off until the company fails. At which point the taxpayer is stuck with the costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The last line of the article surprises me:

 _However, we 're hoping that by the time Gen IV reactors are ready for construction (sometime in the 2030s), fusion power will have completely taken over electric power generation._

Based on the current trends, it seems like renewable energy will be set to take over energy production before fusion power.

<comment> norea-armozel I doubt renewables can compete with a fusion reactor for high load power uses. So, I can see fusion being used in part with water desalination plants or anything to do with heavy industry.

<comment><USER7> > I doubt renewables can compete with a fusion reactor for high load power > uses. So

Right now, the can compete favorably with fusion for most uses, what with fusion not actually being even remotely viable. GP seems to be offering the opinion that they will improve to compete more favorably with the best (even before considering environmental concerns) large-scale generation methods before fusion is viable, which may be overly pessimistic in terms of fusion progress, but then again, given how consistently fusion has failed predictions of imminent viability, isn't at all implausible.

<comment><USER8> Actually there are potentially some large breakthroughs in fusion power depending on how the new Wendelstein 7-X does when it is turned on later this year. Stellarators are pretty cool and if they prove viable could lead to a big shift in the field away from tokamaks which have stalled in efficacy improvements.

Here is an article about it: [http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/10/feature- bizarre-r...](http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/10/feature-bizarre- reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion)

And here is a great video showing the design in amazing detail: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "[During failure,] only a small amount of water transfer (about ten garden hoses worth) is necessary [...] to keep the reactor stable."

How much is "ten garden hoses worth"? Are we talking running ten garden hoses at full capacity for a few seconds? A couple hours? I very much dislike comparisons like these in reporting, especially when discussing safety.

<comment><USER10> They didn't say how long the hose is. Maybe it's a mile? To the moon and back?

<comment> shawn-furyan I would think the author means flow rate, not static volume. That would be a hopelessly unintuitive, and as you demonstrate, incomplete analogy if it were meant to represent the static volume needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how this new plant will affect the power costs to consumers and especially wholesale power costs.

The Chattanooga area just turned up their municipal fiber network to 10 Gbps and a lot of tech companies are moving there. With inexpensive power and good connectivity, it might be a prime location for data centers.

</comment><comment><USER12> So, where do Small Module Reactors (SMR) fit onto the authors timeline of reactor development? Do SMRs show any promise, or are they just an iteration of the same ideas, but at a smaller scale.

</comment><comment><USER13> design from the 60s, built in the 70s and ceased production in the 90s

put into operation in late 2010s

what could possibly go wrong

<comment><USER4> Given how much experience we have with this class of reactors, and the inherent safety of PWRs (e.g. TMI, vs. BWRs like a Fukushima), and that the organization running it has long, continuous experience in running these, not much, I'd expect. They only unique danger comes from it being mothballed for so long, and the possibility that resulted in undetected degradation (anything more that corrosion?).

<comment><USER14> Agreed.

If PBR is to be taken as the flagship of reactor safety (physics prevents a problem from ever occurring), the safety features in Gen II PWR come pretty damn close. You'd need a long cascade of extremely unlikely events in order for it to dangerously fail, for example, the reactor vessel being bent so that the rods are unable to be affected by gravity. Having first breached the concrete and steel whatever caused the catastrophe would also need to bend _uranium._

<comment><USER15> I don't have anything new to say about TMI/PBR/PBM, etc., however this sentence stands out:

"You'd need a long cascade of extremely unlikely events in order for it to dangerously fail"

Have we learned nothing at all ? Even when given extremely relevant and instructive examples _within the last 10 years_ ?

From Fukushima to Lehman Brothers, we continue to be shown that these unlikely events are highly correlated - even if they are extremely unlikely individually.

 _The Tsunami comes with the Earthquake_

<comment><USER14> > Fukushima

With Fukushima they _knew_ what the problems were and _chose_ to make an half- assed attempt at safety - for example: the 2008 Tsunami study was ignored. I guess what could be surmised is that nuclear power is only completely safe in the absence of human nature. Which makes you correct in a round-about way.

However, it is unsafe in comparison to what? Nine times out of ten not being able to breath anywhere on the planet, forever, seems like the more dangerous prospect; versus making a specific piece of land uninhabitable for a few thousand years. Nuclear waste is far easier to see, which makes us more aware of it and hence our monkey brains believe it is more dangerous ("smoke just dissolves into the air!").

I can't think of any power solution that doesn't have severe drawbacks; however, nuclear is at the very least not the top contender in that list.

<comment><USER16> > However, it is unsafe in comparison to what? Nine times out of ten not being > able to breath anywhere on the planet, forever, seems like the more > dangerous prospect;

The arsenic and other emissions from a coal plant are roughly measurable to a nuclear MELTDOWN every 10 years.

<comment><USER14> ... and because of the current anti-nuclear sentiment, when South Africa faced a power crisis they decided to build the biggest coal power plant in the southern hemisphere[1]. I honestly can in no small way whatsoever see that as a win for the environment.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medupi_Power_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medupi_Power_Station)

 _Thanks for that factoid._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad we have solved the nuclear waste problem.

<comment><USER18> It's a political problem, not science problem. We could have already completed the Yucca Mountain project, if not for the anti-science anti-nuclear fear mongers and NIMBYs.

<comment><USER17> You delusional people are fascinating. If anything you are anti-science, considering that it's bat shit insane to do something that has absolutely no chance of being sustainable and every chance in the world of being a disaster. What's so darn scientific about piling up nuclear waste with a half-life longer than humans have even been able to spell out names? This has nothing to do with NIMBY, but if you think it is, why not simply store it where you live.

That project is not complete at all and there are significant problems with it altogether, not even to mention that it's not a solution, it's a warehousing of a problem. It's as if you cut off your house from the sewage system and started stockpiling your waste in the garage. Sure, that would work, but for how long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Exciting, but too little too late? As I understand it, there's a good chance we've already doomed ourselves to the necessity of using geoengineering to fix our climate.</comment>


Ask HN: Everyone-Must-Follow Blogs? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any blogs that absolutely anyone (with a brain) could and should follow? Yea, there are the usual webcomics, but otherwise there are few feeds I keep on Google Reader for more than a week or two. <comment><USER2> I posted some links in this recent thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134392></comment>


Demonstrations to protest NSA spying planned for July 4th - <AUTHOR> http://restorethefourth.net <comment><USER2> If Brazilians can create a 1 million strong protest over a 0.1$ bus fare increase, I'd hope Americans from the "land of the free, home of the _brave_ " would be able to do the same over the revealing of a massive spying apparatus that's used against Americans and completely infringing on the 4th amendment.

But even more importantly it's infringing on their human rights that should guarantee that they don't have to live in fear in a surveillance state and they have the right to anonymous speech or being able to have confidential conversations with people, without having to think that everything they say is being recorded by the government, and if if they even say the "wrong words" they may end up on certain "lists" that are monitored more heavily.

<comment><USER3> Is the protest over the bus fare increase? I was always told it was merely the latest in a long string of events drawing in protesters.

Likewise, didn't the group that incited protests over the bus fare increase later support ending the protests, since the protests are said to have been co-opted by militants and fascists?

Likewise likewise, neither anonymous speech or confidential conversations have gone away (that is, where they were possible before). But you may have to choose to enforce that by technical means (a capability we _didn 't_ used to have, by the way, just ask people who lived in the age of letters and phone calls).

Likewise^3, the prioritization of who would be monitored by warrant is certainly a legitimate function of the security apparatus, unless you're trying to claim that picking random conversations to get a warrant for is somehow more effective in breaking up terror cells or criminal conspiracies.

I would argue that taking action against people _merely_ for what they believe in is screwed up, but I not only wouldn't blame people for keeping a closer eye on those who advocate large changes to government, I'd be offended as a taxpayer if they weren't doing exactly that.

<comment><USER4> > Is the protest over the bus fare increase? I was always told it was merely > the latest in a long string of events drawing in protesters.

Brazilian here, and you are right. The big protests started in one capital and not all capitals raised their fares, at least not recently. One week before that, in my city, we had thousands of protesters, who wanted something to be done about the violence (873 people were murdered by gunshot in the first quarter alone, out of a population of 2.5 million, giving over 60 per hundred thousand people).

After the demonstrations in São Paulo, it spread like wildfire. Since not all cities have the same problems (at least, not in the same priority), the protesters had different agendas. But they were (and stil are) all over the country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Okay, so let's not become the next Occupy movement with this, can we figure out what it is we're protesting _for_ in the first place? And "FREEDOM" or "PRIVACY!" aren't things you can protest for and expect to get. Maybe something like, "We want to require the government to announce ALL FISA court rulings" or "We want to require the government to declassify details about the PRISM program" or something along those lines.

We no longer live in an age where rhetoric tears down walls and opens doors. Somewhere along the line, people in power recognized they can just ignore pretty words and they'll usually go away.

<comment><USER6> I think it's fairly clear: [http://www.restorethefourth.net/press/](http://www.restorethefourth.net/press/)

1\. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;

2\. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;

3\. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

<comment><USER7> (1) Is never going to happen. Even _civil cases_ in the US can be conducted under seal, and those very rarely pertain to national security. This is exactly what the parent commenter was referring to when he said that people should figure out exactly what their demand is; the demand in item (1) here is totally unrealistic.

(2) and (3) seem very straightforward, realistic, and productive.

<comment><USER8> (1) should be broken among its parts. The state secrets privilege is hard to get rid of, but it is realistic to call for the repeal of the "library records provision":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_records_provision#Secti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_records_provision#Section_215:_Access_to_records_and_other_items_under_FISA)

Notably, Google itself has launched a campaign against the gag order related to NSLs, which we should all (hopefully) support!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Glad to see HNers are excited about this. Shameless plug - if you live in or around Gainesville, FL, I encourage you to attend the one I'm organizing for my town: [http://gatorsrestorethefourth.com](http://gatorsrestorethefourth.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is just an opinion because my personal experience with protesting is null, but isn't the strategy of protesting in hundreds of communities ineffective?

It's easy to ignore or contain 50-1000+ protesters [1][2] at some 600 locations (see Occupy Wall Street), whereas a centralized protest (maybe in DC?) of 70,000+[3] will hear their voices ringing across the world.

It's easy to feel like your working together and making a difference with someone across the globe, but really to be heard you need to work together,as a team, in close proximity. Change isn't easy.

[1] Wrong: [http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2011/ows_gallery_121...](http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2011/ows_gallery_1212/ows_gallery_05.jpg)

[2] Meh, street performers pull bigger crowds: [http://media.syracuse.com/news/photo/10265946-large.jpg](http://media.syracuse.com/news/photo/10265946-large.jpg)

[2] Here we go: [http://wakingamericaup.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/i-have-a-...](http://wakingamericaup.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/i-have- a-dream-2.jpg)

<comment><USER10> You're probably correct, however starting off, if you start with say 10 people protesting on a local public street you may get 10 new people to notice you.

After a time you can double, triple, quadruple, etc. your numbers. Then go to DC with 70-100,000 and get attention.

<comment><USER9> After giving this more thought, I agree. Large demonstrations don't happen over night, and it's necessary to start somewhere and gain traction, with the ultimate goal of snowballing into a large centralized demonstration.

Maybe what's needed is an agenda that clearly works towards such a demonstration, one that's broken up into attainable goals/milestones. If demonstrators don't feel that they're continually making progress, they lose interest -- or maybe its hope that they lose. And at some point, you need strong leadership to reign in all the pieces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're interested in getting involved, there's discussion Restore on the 4th's subreddit at [http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/](http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/) and daily IRC meetings at 5 p.m.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just a quick note, remember to turn off your cell phones at these events. Protestors are tracked by their cell phone records by the police and govt.

</comment><comment><USER13> I know setting the date of most of these events to the 4th of July is very symbolic, but is that really the best choice? That is the one day that Americans already gather in large numbers to celebrate. In DC alone the entire national mall area and surrounding are gridlocked with people who come to see the fireworks. How would you be able to tell who is there protesting and who is there to celebrate? It seems like your protest message would easily be lost in the noise of the Fourth.

Why not set it for the day before? 100,000+ people on the steps of the Capitol or in front of the White House on the evening of the 3rd would get much more coverage than doing anything on the 4th.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you want to spark mass protest, here's how you do it: cut all government programs. Once people realize how much government is artificially inflating their livelihood and how little corporations have really left for them, they will get angry and start rioting. It no longer will fit the left/right paradigm. If a Walmart employee can no longer feed their family because they have no access to government programs and Walmart pays their employees an awful wage, do you think they are just gonna take that? No. They'll demand actual change.

</comment><comment><USER15> The only way public demonstrations are going to have an effect is for them to be _massive_ and _concentrated_. That does not mean widespread protests are a bad idea _per se_ , but that if none of the protests actually have mass, they are going to be ignored by both officials and your fellow citizens as a temporary annoyance for which they will hold little sympathy.

Development of public support _against_ greater security at the cost of freedom is the only way to make meaningful change. Yes, marches/demonstrations can be part of this. But small demonstrations do not alone capture the public's interest. One must capture the public mind--and that means informing the public and winning their support of having _less_ "security" where weaking or violating the protections of their basic rights are concerned.

Right now, as various polls have showed, far too many Americans desire the feeling and theater of security. They are content to be invaded at airport security because _eventually_ they can still fly. They are content to have their communications slurped up because they can still send that email and make that phone call.

It's not until they're staring at a public fountain from which they are not able to drink because it has a stupid printed sign above it that says "Whites Only" that the public will accept that things have gone horribly wrong.

I think demonstrations would be excellent to see, but not if they're anything like the Occupy movement, which the wider public opposed against their own self interest. It is very difficult to get the public's attention when they do not _feel_ the effects. The public is rather shitty at evaluating and appreciating things in the abstract. Demonstrations that are massive and concentrated would have a much more significant impact. Think of the Civil Rights March on Washington. That level of mass and concentration. Doubling it would be even better.

And yet, even that basic right to protest has been severely weakened by the fact that one must get a _permit_ to protest in many of the locations that would be tactically good choices. This is madness. The 4th is not the only Amendment that the People have allowed to be weakened over the last two centuries.

Americans have become very lazy where protecting their rights are concerned, because the vast majority of Americans do not participate in protecting those rights when they are violated against minority factions.

<comment><USER16> > The only way public demonstrations are going to have an effect is for them > to be massive and concentrated. That does not mean widespread protests are a > bad idea per se, but that if none of the protests actually have mass, they > are going to be ignored by both officials and your fellow citizens as a > temporary annoyance for which they will hold little sympathy.

This statement sounds a little defeatist and gives an excuse for not participating in demonstrations (since the required _massive_ scale is likely not reached, one might be better of not going).

Actually demonstrations, even if they do not effect immediate change, will still have a number of positive outcomes. First, they will likely be reported on in the news (at least that would be the case in Germany), raising awareness. Second, demonstrators will meet like minded individuals with whom they can network and form strategies. Third, demonstrators will realize that they are not isolated and feel more empowered as a result. Last, it will at least remind the public and politicians that some people do care about this.

Is any of this enough to affect change? Likely not. But it is a first step and if we can't even go demonstrate against this then we might as well stop caring. The possibility that demonstrations will not have the immediate effect we desire should not stop us.

<comment><USER15> Apologies. I did not intend to sound defeatist at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I can't help but think this is the worst idea ever. You have a highly-strung government, watching everyone for signs of domestic terrorism, and then protest, which the government has considered an act of aggression since at least the Dubya administration.

The only remedy we have in this country is lawsuits. Not class-actions, either; individual lawsuits for $500k each, for egregiously prejudicing your individual rights guaranteed by the constitution. ten thousand or so of those, with the president's name in all caps (head of the Unitary Executive) listed as the defendant.

or, you know, you could try to make a well-regulated militia of 3D-printed pea shooters, so you can overthrow the largest and most heavily-armed military in the history of the world. that'll definitely work.

Myself, I appreciate the disclosure I'm being given that Scott McNealy was right all those years ago when he said we have zero privacy anyway. The government has the right to do whatever they want with their property. if you use/are their property (isn't that ARPAnet thing US military property?), expect them to enforce their interest in that property.

TL;DR for the downvoters (+6 to -2 in less than 20 minutes? hilarious): PROTEST BAD. LAWSUITS GOOD.

<comment><AUTHOR> >You have a highly-strung government, watching everyone for signs of domestic terrorism, and then protest, which the government has considered an act of aggression since at least the Dubya administration.

That's a terrible justification for not protesting. Free societies require courage.

<comment><USER17> Not wanting to be in harmony with the 800lb gorilla is a terrible justification for not being in harmony with the 800lb gorilla.

As for being courageous in a free society: Let me know when you find one. we can both move there and be courageous together. In the interim, I'm going to play by the rules of the game, as I'm stuck in the system.

Perhaps you guys don't understand this: they have _really_ big guns. waaaay bigger than anything we have. and they have the authority to use them when they're threatened by acts of mass protest. the Executive's powers used at Kent State ages ago have only gotten stronger. Don't be like those poor bastards. or the Seattle WTO protesters. or the DNC/RNC protesters.

Seriously, they _want_ you to sue them. Just do it.

<comment><USER18> I guess we'll give you a call from the protests then. Look for us being mocked on the TV, if we're not intentionally ignored by corporate media.

<comment><USER17> please do. I'll be home all day on the 4th.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why is this US only?

<comment><USER15> There is no reason it has to be.

However, invoking the 4th of July as part of the American public consciousness is not guaranteed to resonate with the wider world population.</comment></comment>


Design the ideal programming language for startups - <AUTHOR>

Syntax Clause, that jolly old elf who has thousands of magically outsourced programmers in the far north, grants you a Christmas wish: the ideal programming language for startups. <p>What sort of language would you ask for? <comment><USER2> How about a

\- modern functional language with

\- development and debugging tools as good as state of the art for imperative languages and

\- a large and well maintained set of libraries that

\- run on all major platforms and

\- have a liberal distribution license (BSD/GNU/Apache/etc)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is no One True Universal Startup (tm). There are startups that work with embedded micro controllers, and there are startups that create networking software, startups that work on the Windows Desktop and startups that work as server ware that is accessed via http.

Each one of those domains is going to have different requirements, and each one of those would be better served by one language as opposed to another.

It would be like asking people, "which human language is best for communicating". Well, if I had to describe many different kinds and varieties of snow, I'd probably choose an Eskimo dialect. If I had to describe many different levels of respect, honor and shame, I'd say Japanese. If I was to communicate in the business realm, I'd have to say English. And, if I had to talk about hunting tapirs in a rain forest, I'd probably use a dialect native to tribes in the Amazon.

With all due respect to PG, the idea of One True Language (tm) is a myth as far as I'm concerned. Langauges are tools. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Familiarize yourself with enough different tools so you can make intelligent decisions, and then use the most powerful language/tool for the job at hand.

</comment><comment><USER4> Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the answer depends entirely on what that start-up would be doing and in what context it would be operating(skills of programmers available, integration to other code etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally posed this question with an additional condition -- you get $100M to invest in 10 startups that use this new language.

The point was to see if there was anything startups might have in common, in their language needs. Maybe the answer to that is "nothing", but I wonder.</comment></comment>


The Wu-Tang Clan and The World's Most Exclusive Album - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-wu-tang-clan-and-the-worlds-most-exclusive/

<comment><USER2> I'm a big hip hop head and I applaud Wu-Tang and especially RZA for being one of the most innovative minds in rap. His book The Tao of Wu was excellent, I highly recommend it.

Aside from all the commentary on his intent with this, I have a simple question: do we think they can actually keep this album from being leaked? I know they're talking about making users use special headphones etc, but when push comes to shove, can't someone figure out a way to cheat this? Super tiny microphones that could record from inside the ear or something? Fake ear, if I'm coming up with crazy possibilities?

Like anything that claims extreme security, it begs someone to go to extremes to break it. Will they succeed? I kind of think someone will.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author builds arguments based on a couple of premises with which I disagree:

1\. Live music and recorded music are just two representations of the same underlying piece of art.

I would argue that each rendition of a song is its own piece of artwork. A recording is tweaked until it represents the artist's (or producer's) vision of what the piece should sound like. A live show is spontaneous and unique by definition.

2\. The measure of art is defined by the intrinsic quality of the piece.

I think that art is more than the piece itself and includes the context in which it was created and the way it is presented.

In the case of this album, I think that the business model, the current piracy context and even the gilded box contribute to a very interesting piece of artwork. Whether or not the album 'sounds good' is only one piece of the genius of this work.

To say that the Wu-Tang Clan is missing the issue with respect to music's exclusivity is totally beside the point. This is something entirely new, with a powerful statement in a very interesting context. For all we know, the entire album could be a bunch of farm animals and gun shots[1][2] and this would still be a great piece of artwork.

1: [http://www.metafilter.com/73403/Something-Awful-Forum- Hilari...](http://www.metafilter.com/73403/Something-Awful-Forum-Hilariously- Hijacks-CBC-Anthem-Contest)

2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbZMnF1VNlE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbZMnF1VNlE)

</comment><comment><USER4> Disclaimer: personal opinion and generalizations to follow. Because art.

Under the umbrella of art, there are artists, and a subcategory of entertainers/performance artists. Music, because of the visceral reactions it elicits, tends to be best experienced in a live setting. The animation and general atmosphere of the crowd brings a lot to the emotional table that is lost elsewhere, including home listening rooms.

All this said, i get the idea they are aiming for, but it strikes me as the wrong presentation of the medium. Just as framed oils on canvas have a desired display in galleries that has been refined over centuries, music has a pinnacle presentation, and it does not include headphones.

<comment><USER5> > Music, because of the visceral reactions it elicits, tends to be best > experienced in a live setting. The animation and general atmosphere of the > crowd brings a lot to the emotional table that is lost elsewhere, including > home listening rooms.

Definitely a generalization, as you caveated. With few exceptions, my appreciation for musical depth is substantially _lessened_ in a live setting.

One such exception is a venue with theater seating and an observant audience. The crowd sits and absorbs. I'm not taking chamber orchestra here, either. I mean Will Oldham or Bill Callahan or X-refined-"indie" band. Another is certain kinds of music played live in small bars where everyone is rip roaringly drunk and ecstatic but _not_ focused on the performers, but engaged with the elevated social tenor, which includes dancing, senseless mixing, mingling and disregard for decorum. Random bluegrass works well for this.

But largely (read: basically always), I _need_ to consume music in either solitude or in extremely intimate, restricted, established, and empathetic company. Otherwise I can't concentrate on my emotional responses or develop complex relationships with the work!

I don't mean that this is Appolonian for me. The contrary is true: it's Dionysian, but that's the kind of thing I can't get when surrounded, socially navigating, self-conscious and worried about the perception of others. Too much, not enough, as they say. My focus is a fragile thing, easily dismantled. (I envy the robust among you!)

Anyways, I'm just digressing here, not disagreeing, esp. as you allowed for the fact that you are generalizing a bit. My experience differs vis-à-vis musical appreciation. Certain friends of mine have expressed similar feelings.

But is it surprising that relationships to art will be as varied as people and art objects themselves?

My guess is that there is at least a baker's dozen worth of people out there who prefer listening to music through barriers we can't understand, and still as many whose appreciation for music and voice and song comes from not hearing it at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This kind of idea is something that can only be pulled off after gaining a threshold level of fame and media attention.

It's not like this would work for anyone other than Wu-Tang.

Critics and Journalists are desperate to proclaim that this is the birth of a new business model for music, but it doesn't take a lot of intuition to understand that things work differently for a popular, talented group that already has millions of fans, as opposed to some random nobody in search of a music career. There's an obvious aspect of demand that plays against the supply startegy here.

Not to mention that the second, third and fourth people who attempt similar stunts will simply be accused of biting Wu's ideas, or perhaps they'll just be met by plain disinterest. Imagine Fred Durst conceives of a solo album with guest artists Korn and Linkin Park playing on select tracks, and then says:

      "Hey guys, this amazing work of art will never
       see the light of day, unless one hundred billion
       dollars."

Okay, Fred Durst, that's great, please promise to never show anyone anything you do ever again, and take Korn and Linkin Park with you. We'll all be eternally grateful. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess the model worked okay for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_Supermarkets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_Supermarkets) (right down to the "make music more like other art types" motivation), but it certainly doesn't scale.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is super cool. I mean, I think the shows would be fun to go to. Although I wouldn't bother with the headphones if I were them, maybe have it on good speakers first, then available for second listening / skipping around on headphones.

</comment><comment><USER9> Previous posts: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=wu- tang#!/story/forever/prefix/0/w...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=wu- tang#!/story/forever/prefix/0/wu-tang%20one%20copy).

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, as soon as someone listens to it for the first time and lets everyone know that they're long past their heyday (just listen to Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers instead), this will all be a moot point.

That's my prediction, at least.

<comment><USER11> I chafe at that a bit. Wu Tang was always one of the most creative forces in hip-hop. If you look at what they have done as a group and individually over the last two decades, there is some very impressive output. I don't like the idea that they are past their prime just because their hip-hop golden era work was so influential, or because hip-hop is seen as disposable youth culture that old men have no place in. A lot of it is just nostalgia if you ask me. Personally I think they've earned the right to be treated as artists even as they age and have their work be given honest consideration. I mean we're not talking about friggin' Pitbull here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >great musicians such as Beethoven, Mozart and Bach [were] held in the same high esteem as figures like Picasso, Michelangelo and Van Gogh

The irony being that the Wu-Tang Clan probably earned more money than all those artists combined.

<comment><USER13> While Van Gogh and Bach certainly lived fairly modest if not, in the former's case, threadbare lives, the others, who unlike Bach and Van Gogh were also quite highly regarded in their lives, were pretty well off (though Mozart squandered much of it).

Picasso, for instance, was estimated at a 50 million net worth when he died ([http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/8/new...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/8/newsid_2523000/2523469.stm))

The others, being at least a couple hundred years older, make it a lot trickier to figure out conversions, though they all seemed to have, for most of their career, lived fairly successful and comfortable, though certainly hard working, lives. Michaelangelo, for instance, was well known for getting wealthy contracts from popes, merchants, and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In b4 pirates leak it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dollar, dollar bill y'all. Also, Wu-Tang Financial.

<comment><USER16> well played</comment></comment>


Donna Strickland becomes the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/1047074159703052291 <comment><AUTHOR> It is sad that she didn't have a Wikipedia page, or it was deleted and revived, until the announcement. Seeing her prior awards it does not make much sense why she did not have a page.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&action=history)</comment>


Ask HN: Are companies averse to hiring remote developers from the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> I was laid off from my job recently but immediately started applying to new jobs. I'm expanding the job search to include remote positions at companies that might be located outside of California. Unfortunately I haven't heard back from any of them. I wonder if it has to do with the current job market being so competitive, or if my resume is weak, or if those companies think my salary expectation would be too high and they won't be able to match it, so they're not going to bother considering me as a candidate. I know when my previous company was hiring, we stopped reviewing most resumes from local Bay Area developers because it knew it couldn't match their salary expectations.<p>On a side note: I have about 5 years of experience as a backend developer. I'd be happy to share my resume/LinkedIn over email if anyone is aware of any opportunities! <comment><USER2> I'm going to echo your assumption that most remote employers will just not bother reviewing CVs from bay area devs.

I guess looking at it from a different angle, as a bay area dev are you going to accept a long term position that comes with an 80k compensation package?

If in your cover letter you were to indicate that you would entertain a long term commitment at a rate typical with that of the remote company's on premise employees. Perhaps you would get more interest. Just a thought.

Best of luck on your job search. For good measure you might post your core skills here. You never know who is going to read this...

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, as an unemployed dev currently making 0k, yes, I would take it. Thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER2> As would I in your shoes! The rub is as a potential employer, I would be questioning if you will still be here in 6 months or will you spend your time as an employee looking for something "more appropriate"

I want to be clear that this is not any kind of know on you. You might be the perfect long term person for the job. You just need some kind of hook to convince potential employers that you are not a drive by.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that totally makes sense, I understand why potential employers would have concerns. For what its worth, I was at one company for 4 years and about 1 year at my previous company prior to getting let go. I hope the tenure at my first company demonstrates that I'm not just a job hopper and do prefer to stick around and grow.

<comment><USER3> You might not be a job hopper by Bay Area standards.

I've been at the same place since 2005.

Not many places want to train you and reveal trade secrets, only to see you disappear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You don't need to tell remote employers where you're located until after they get a chance to interview you, you could say you live in California without being super specific as to where in California you live. Since the job is remote they only need to know roughly where you live. After they hire you they may find out but then they have decided you're great for their team.

</comment><comment><USER5> We have several engineering positions open at onXmaps. We're a mapping app for the outdoors with a good offline experience. Our first app was for hunters, and now we have an offroad app too. Check us out [https://www.onxmaps.com/careers](https://www.onxmaps.com/careers)

We hire remote, but don't target expensive areas in our recruiting. However, we won't turn down a good candidate based on location (as long as you're in the US). If your resume looks good, a short call with our recruiter will get us on the same page regarding comp. We are competitive, but not with FAANG.

<comment><USER6> I like the work you are doing - I had been meaning to write a mapping app for rockhounders for years, to let us know whether we are on public land or not, but I saw your product and decided not to do it because although we aren't your target market nor does your product do exactly what is needed - it is close enough to do the trick, and I'd rather see where you go with it than try to re-invent something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know several employers who hire remote, and it isn't a Bay Area thing -- they won't employ anyone in the state of the CA, for the same reasons they won't employ international employees -- they see CA legislation as too onerous to be bothered with dealing with when they can hire devs out of states with more lax employment laws.

<comment><USER8> Given that CA is an at-will employment state, "states with more lax employment laws" really sounds like a euphemism for "states which allow non-competes"—in CA non-competes are unenforceable. Do you happen to have any more specifics? I'd be really interested to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just curious, why live in one of the most expensive places on earth and seek work for an employer in a different locale? Are you tied to the Bay Area for personal reasons?

<comment><AUTHOR> The primary reason I want to remain in the Bay Area is because my family and friends are here. I grew up in the Bay Area and can't imagine packing my bags and leaving them behind. That being said, I'm unemployed and not in a position to be picky. If the opportunity is great, I'll be open to relocating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm looking for a backend/Node developer for a 3-6 month contract. Let me know if you want to chat.

</comment><comment><USER11> On your resume pot you time zone, not your location

</comment><comment><USER12> If you need any mock interviews I am willing to help for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd appreciate that! What's the best way to contact you?

<comment><USER12> email@example.com, please use this one as the other one already expired.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for HN not providing us a way to share an email address privately, I know I know we? keep things simple just down vote.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much, just sent you on an email.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NBA player Jason Collins says he is gay - <AUTHOR> http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/ <comment><USER2> If Jason Collins is reading this:

Good for you Jason. It takes serious guts to admit to that in the athletics field. You have helped pave the path and change closed-mindedness and therefore should be proud. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent Article. Good for you Jason!</comment>


Potential Tax Risk of Mutual Fund Investing: "Embedded Gains" - <AUTHOR> https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/potential-tax-risk-of-mutual-fund-investing-%27embedded-gains%27/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original comments of Joshua Kennon:

[https://disqus.com/home/discussion/joshuakennon/mail_bag_buy...](https://disqus.com/home/discussion/joshuakennon/mail_bag_buying_stock_when_valuations_are_high/newest/#comment-2320370039)</comment>


Encrypting Your Dropbox Seamlessly and Automatically  - <AUTHOR> http://pragmattica.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/encrypting-your-dropbox-seamlessly-and-automatically/ <comment><USER2> The key to dropbox's awesomeness is delta compression, which this is totally going to destroy. Aside from placing a greater load on their servers in terms of storage and bandwidth, it will degrade your experience. Caveat emptor.

<comment><USER3> _The key to dropbox's awesomeness is delta compression, which this is totally going to destroy_

Not necessarily. It looks like encfs is vulnerable to a cleaning lady attack, in which case dropbox (acting as cleaning lady) will be able to recognize and take advantage of unmodified blocks.

That said, this approach won't be able to recognize blocks which are duplicated (rather than merely unmodified) either within a file or between two different files (actually, I'm not sure if dropbox can recognize data duplicated between different files, even without encryption; but tarsnap can), and sensible generally want their encrypted filesystems to be secure -- so this really isn't a very good solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the use case discussed in the article seems to be exactly the one for tarsnap (<http://www.tarsnap.com/>), that is encrypted remote backups. the only upside is this this awkward setup is free (or ~ 1 dollar a month cheaper), though at the cost of being much more adhoc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Honest question: if you trust dropbox.com enough to let them run a daemon on your box, does this really buy you anything?

<comment><USER6> Depends on what the daemon is doing. JungleDisk and Arq backup products for instance are daemons on my box, but LittleSnitch tells me they're only writing to S3 which is a public API, and I can verify what's in my S3 account. Not so much with Dropbox -- can't tell what's going through that SSL connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not affiliated with them, but if you want zero-knowledge, encrypted dropbox-esque storage (and a few other benefits) you might try spideroak instead.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have a TrueCrypt volume that i keep on my dropbox and it has worked fine for me for over a year. It was very easy to set up in Ubuntu.

<comment><USER9> But everytime you write to it every byte in the volume will change and dropbox will have to resync the whole file.

<comment><USER10> Is that true? If I use TrueCrypt to encrypt my entire 200GB hard drive, does it have to update every block on the disk when I write to a single file?

<comment><USER9> Ideally it should otherwise you are vulnerable to a range of differential attacks. In practice it's a compromise between performance and security.

It might very well touch a large number of blocks to stop an attacker working out where on a disk a particular file is. There are a bunch of rsync freindly crypto implementations that minimize this effect

<comment><USER11> How exactly would an attacker have enough access to your encrypted data to do a diff attack? If he has physical access to the machine you're going to be compromised regardless of the details of the encryption scheme.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Pseudo IPv4 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-the-last-reasons-to-not-enable-ipv6 <comment> X-Istence Except that in the past I've had major issues with Cloudflare's IPv6 service, recently one of the issues was that Centurylink customers (at least in the Denver area) were unable to visit any Cloudflare hosted IPv6 sites.

[https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/470243728473325568](https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/470243728473325568)

Was my Tweet to Stackoverflow regarding the issue.

Here is the paste of the symptoms seen: [http://paste.ofcode.org/XQGqerxCNXwYsHDQMZ3aja](http://paste.ofcode.org/XQGqerxCNXwYsHDQMZ3aja)

This meant that until I reported the issue to Cloudflare/StackExchange that people using IPv6 were UNABLE to access those resources needed to load the site (the server would hang indefinitely, so happy eyeballs did not work!). In the case of StackExchange on Centurylink that meant that CSS and other resources did not load, for my site ([http://defcne.net/](http://defcne.net/)) that meant my site didn't load at all!

I absolutely love Cloudflare, but to me it is inexcusable that there is no monitoring to verify that these issues don't exist. It took me filing a report for them to fix the issue.

Ultimately it came down to this:

"We had recently been experiencing IPv6 routing issues with one of our upstream providers for some of our data centers which may have contributed to the issues you had been seeing. We've since disabled transit for that provider to temporarily work around the issue."

Yet this meant that my site/StackOverflow and countless other sites using Cloudflare were offline (if the customer has IPv6 enabled) for almost a week (first report from customer using CenturyLink, me trying to figure out what is going on, to CloudFlare fixing the issue).

<comment><USER2> Huh, I'm on CenturyLink ipv6 at home and was having weird issues with a number of sites from early last week onwards, and then early this week it magically cleared up. Guess that was likely it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> >IPv6 can be adopted without a performance penalty

Sadly, in my case, this is untrue. If I enable v6 on my Comcast home connection, I see routes with consistently higher latency--around 50ms more for paths within the U.S. such that even a 200 mile destination (HSV => ATL) is ~70ms away.

<comment><USER4> Wait wait wait...Comcast is using bad and/or incompetent infrastructure? Stop the fucking presses!

(I'm sorry sir/madam for your inconvenience)

<comment><USER5> Comcast is deploying IPv6. Verizon isn't even trying IPv6 with FiOS.

<comment><USER6> They have actually started working with business class customers this year. I'm still, rather impatiently at this point, waiting for it to trickle down to residential customers.

They have a landing page[0] that hints at the possibility, but I've never seen anything or heard anyone actually say that IPv6 is coming to residential customers.

[0] [http://www.verizon.com/Support/Residential/Internet/HighSpee...](http://www.verizon.com/Support/Residential/Internet/HighSpeed/General+Support/Top+Questions/QuestionsOne/ATLAS8742.htm)

<comment><USER7> They haven't bothered to update that page in a few years, sadly. It says "Dual Stack IPv4/IPv6 will be launched in various areas within Verizon's FiOS network, starting Later in 2012. Check back for more information."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, how easy will it be to deliberately search for an IPv6 address to collide with a desired pseudo_ipv4 address? (Based on my very limited crypto knowledge, I might worry that there could be some novel denial-of-service or impersonation attacks in that direction if this is MD5 with a known format and salt.)

<comment><USER3> 300MM is well inside brute force range for even a single CPU (as noted in the article, md5 is cheap!). One issue is figuring out which IPv4 address you wish to impersonate; sites don't give that information out so readily in 4chan's case, the IPv4 address only ends up in user-facing information as poster IDs, which are themselves hashes of the IPv4 address and (I assume) some thread- specific salt. For these poster IDs, I've never checked if a cookie is involved, but that could also be the case, and would make this attack a bit harder; that said, it is quite feasible to obtain the target's IPv6 address through other means.

I think what might be kind on Cloudflare's side is to add a secret domain- specific salt to this md5 hash, but I'm by no means a crypto person.

(edit) eastdakota and billpg below both pointed out that to carry out an impersonation would require connecting to Cloudflare with the correct IPv6 address. This is probably the biggest hurdle, so feel free to ignore what I wrote above.

<comment><USER9> Anyone with an IPv4 address can use one of several 6to4 gateways to get a whole /48\. This gives them access to 2^80 addresses they can originate traffic from.

<comment><USER10> As mentioned in the article, they only hash the first 64 bits of the address. That means you only get 64-48 = 16 bits to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This technique was demonstrated at the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference in 2010:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkV9ZgRZvv4#t=7m52s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkV9ZgRZvv4#t=7m52s)

<comment><USER12> Ahhh -- thanks for the link. I was just trying to dig up an old NANOG thread which discussed Gmail's use of the same technique.

I noticed class E address space in my gmail activity log years ago, and a wink from a googler implied this is what they were doing. Nice to have confirmation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cloudflare is really really good at writing technically interesting PR releases.

</comment><comment><USER14> @pg, news.ycombinator.com does not have a AAAA record. Is there any chance for it to support IPv6?

<comment><USER15> I raised an issue on GitHub about this a few days ago: [https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/100](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/100)

<comment><USER16> that is unfortunate considering they are using cloudflare... I wonder what the hacker news software does with IPv4 addresses that couldn't work behind the service described in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe I'm not the only one wondering why I should bother to enable IPv6?

<comment><USER15> If you have that mentality, we'll never get off IPv4. If that happens, ISPs won't have a choice but to implement Carrier Grade NAT. That's bad for a lot of reasons, but mostly because many homes share the same address. Implementing IPv6 means every device in the world has a unique, globally routable address with all ports open (no NAT).

That's pretty cool. However, we can only do this if we get over the chicken- and-egg problem, which is why it's important you enable IPv6 and encourage others to do so.

<comment><USER18> If I want to pirate content, your Carrier Grade NAT looks quite attractive as a legal shield!

<comment><USER15> I'm not entirely sure if CGN will provide some legal protection for pirates but it might make it _harder_ to pirate content as you cannot open ports on CGN meaning BitTorrent will have less seeds which slows downloads. Afaik, IPv6 will make piracy extremely easy as UPnP won't be a requirement. Want to share a file with some friends? You can quickly spin up a web server, send them the URL and it'll just work.

<comment><USER19> You still need UPnP or something, otherwise your IPv6 default firewall policy (allow out deny in) is going to block inbound connections.

Yes, it's easier to hole punch, but a webserver won't do that.

And if you're manually configuring a firewall, I'm not sure "allow port 80 <someIPv6>" is any easier than "forward port 80 to <someipv4>.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER20> I think you are missing a lot. For instance, I have IPv6 set up at home, at work and at some homes of friends and family. I have firewall rules setup such that traffic from subnets I know is generally allowed instead of allowing access to a single port for the general internet. I also have DNS set up with names like computername.sitename.mydomain.tld

That allows me and the people I know to connect to each other's machines in a way that wouldn't be possible with IPv4 and NAT. I can be at my brothers and type \\\\[fqdn] in explorer and it will just work. To me, that is the way the internet was meant to function from the beginning.

<comment><USER19> If you're able to configure firewall rules, you're well outside of any normal users able to make up a significant amount of P2P traffic. And to most users, port forwarding and configuring a firewall rule are nearly identical.

Truth is that for most users, NAT today is almost always synonymous with a firewall that has deny in, allow out policy.

10+ years ago, a lot of folks often connected their machines to the Internet in the way you specified. You could go around scanning people's systems, viewing their fileshares and so on. NAT "fixed" a lot of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Note that with around 19k people connecting from ipv6 there is a 50% chance that two will have the same pseudo IP, so you can't use these for unique IDs alone. At 50k you hit 99% chance of collision.

[edit] I originally did this with a 24-bit rather than 28-bit space, so my numbers were way to low.

<comment><USER22> Whereas with IPv4 there is a 100% chance that two users are coming from the same IP via NAT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Given that protecting the source IP is not a goal (keyspace is far too small for that), why use something like MD5 when something like CityHash or MurmurHash3 would do?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a fast MD5 implementation available through ngx_lua so using it is easy. Using one of the hashes you propose would have meant creating an API to access one of them and adding them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How are they using class E?

I looked into enabling that for virtual networks in my app ( www.zerotier.com ) and quickly discovered that Microsoft Windows has _hard coded_ these IPs as unusable. On a Windows box the IP stack will absolutely refuse to talk to the 240 block. I spent a few weeks looking for a workaround and could not find one, but I did talk to someone who used to work in MS and he confirmed to me that it was a hard-coded prohibition.

<comment><USER25> The IPs aren't being used for actually traffic routing. They're just included in the HTTP header so the web application can have something to use in any session, abuse, anti-spam, etc functions. You are correct that routing across Class E is practically impossible due to hard rules in place in Microsoft Windows and elsewhere.

<comment><USER24> In my research Windows is the only culprit in the OS space. There might be router firmwares too but I'm not sure.

The entire Windows networking stack from top to bottom is a tangled mess of pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know of an affordable pingdom like service which supports IPv6?

Not having a convenient way to monitor the IPv6 side of things is my last reason for not enabling IPv6.

<comment><USER27> Pingdom uses AWS. There's a million of services and platforms (e.g.: Heroku) that don't work on IPv6 because AWS doesn't support it in EC2 (and services built upon EC2 like RDB and whatnot).

I'm not sure how we can talk AWS into supporting IPv6 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 464XLAT: Breaking Free of IPv4: [http://youtu.be/Xl- hIyZSAmA](http://youtu.be/Xl-hIyZSAmA)

</comment><comment><USER29> I haven't seen a blogpost about it yet, but seems like Cloudflare is under heavy attack recently that causes performance degradation: [https://twitter.com/CloudFlareSys](https://twitter.com/CloudFlareSys) Any idea when it'll be all mitigated and performance back to normal?

<comment><USER30> Congestion happens all the time on Cloudflare, they re-route it and there's not much to be worried about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If I use an IPv6 gateway, does that mean what I think it does: all my traffic is going through their network?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the nature of CloudFlare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I saw the second snippet in the post and thought, is the time you lose in that string.format significant? The real question follows: what do you use to benchmark this kind of code with consideration for luajit and also for your server architecture?

</comment><comment><USER32> geo targeting seems to be another area of fail for ipv6. Had to disable it for netflix in UK when I was using a tunnel as it thought I was in the US so would not stream. Now I have native it might be better not sure.

<comment><USER33> That's your tunnel/ing software not supporting IPv6, I think. I experienced the same issue with Netflix in Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Totally unrelated, but why the heck does the cloudflare blog have some sort of facebook iframe ad popup? When it fails (blocked by AB+) it covers up part of the article.

<comment><USER35> Seems to be a bug in HTTP Switchboard extension.

<comment><USER36> Not a bug. It's just the web page which styled the Facebook frame to be way larger than it needs to be -- given it's just to receive a Facebook button.

Edit: This will happens with anything which blocks Facebook frame, but not Facebook script.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Now you can download memes from 4chan marginally faster!!

(I'm really glad they did this, because at 4chan's patented "SOON™" dev pace, it'll take us another decade to add native IPv6 support.)

<comment><USER25> Next up, Hacker News. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> We changed the title ("Eliminating the last reasons to not enable IPv6") to a more neutral and informative subtitle.

<comment><USER39> The new title is not more informative; "Pseudo IPv4" is a new term that is meaningless before reading the article. The original title was more informative, especially in context with the URL domain.

<comment><USER38> Sorry, I didn't see this reply until now. I still think it was more informative. You left out the "Introducing", which makes it clear that the post is introducing a new product or technology, with a name related to IPv4 (and therefore, likely, to IPv6). That seems to me to say a lot more than the article title does. But I see how one might disagree.

The real problem with the original article title is that it is linkbait (grand claim about a controversial topic) and misleading (there is far from universal agreement about this), and so violates both of HN's guidelines about titles. Therefore it needed changing, and when doing so we try where possible to take language from the article itself rather than inventing something of our own. A subtitle is often a good choice, because it's often what the article would have called itself if it weren't trying to be sensational, and that seems to me to be the case here.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much do tech speakers cost? - <AUTHOR> How much does a tech speaker for a remote company event cost?
Sure it super depends on the person, but what was your previous experience?
Thank you all so much for you help! <comment><USER2> Most do it for free for one or more of the following reasons:

* To get that iconic/cliche Steve Jobs style posed photo on stage, with your hands arranged in some sort of Tai Chi move - [https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/104673638-GettyImages-...](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/104673638-GettyImages-51938008.jpg?v=1581001989&w=1400&h=950)

* To get the LinkedIn/Twitter/Social media humble bragging points

* To get yourself known to recruiters or other tech platforms for career opportunities

* To get the free swag

* To network with other techie folks

* Free hotel / travel expenses (paid by your company or the host)

<comment><USER3> Also - the talk in some way functions as marketing for the company they work for, either as

marketing to buy some product the company has

marketing to want to come work for the company that is doing this cool stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They can cost several thousand dollars a pair.

<comment><USER5> It's absurdly expensive to be an audophile, I couldn't get into it.

The used market is very lacking in my area unfortunately.

<comment><USER6> I was about to say the opposite (thankfully used equipment is abundant & cheap where I'm at).

There's also the DIY route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We have a LogiTech setup at my work and work really well. We have problems on connecting sometimes but I don't know if to blame the macbooks or the speaker itself.

<comment><USER8> Underrated comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You'd better get in touch with the person you want and ask directly.

I would speak for free, if needed :P

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is hilarious :D

Love both discussions but I actually wanted to now about people speaking on stages about tech topics. Or in the current situation speaking on virtual conferences via video chat.

</comment><comment><USER10> A few thousand bucks buys you a professional conference speaker. Most of that is expenses.

I had a friend who did conferences for verticals that would attract 500-2000 people. People who write books, former generals/admirals/nasa people, B-list celebrities, people associated with past news events, tech celebrities, etc all do keynotes.

A remote event should be much cheaper as these people have no work. I'd offer $500 and go as high as $2000.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can we fix the title of this thread, please? It's pretty ambiguous.

<comment><USER12> It's clear enough from the text.

<comment><USER13> You overestimate people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A local tech meetup I go to has managed to get some very well-known and accomplished speakers. They don't pay speakers fees, so having a large personal network is really useful. The local tech community is large, and a few senior tech leaders are involved with the meetups.

The meetup is also involved in running a conference. And some companies are willing to pay travel expenses for their employees to come out and speak. It's good for marketing and recruiting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Two completely disconnected yet valid, and even useful, interpretations of the question. This is good fun!

</comment><comment><USER16> Some will pay 10k to speak if it is a famous conference</comment>


Google Glass isn't dead; Intel-powered hardware reportedly due in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-glass-isnt-dead-intel-powered-update-reportedly-due-in-2015/

<comment><USER2> I think the issue with Glass is that when it started out, it appeased to our inner sci-fi geekiness of wearable technology that can do it all all without lifting a single finger. However, two years onward and nothing but a prototype running an unsupported and outdated chip, I can see the criticism being levelled at Google Glass.

Will switching to Intel hardware and adding in a few missing pieces of functionality be enough to save Glass? Who knows. For something like Glass to succeed, you need to have the support of developers who will write the apps and drive adoption, but it seems Google are fighting a losing battle at present to get developers to stay or new developers to enter the fray. There is just no incentive at the moment for people to care about Glass. I think Google needs to make its intentions clear, there is too much uncertainty and I think that is what is holding Glass back, perhaps even killing it. At present the perspective of many is Glass is just another Google experiment that can get cancelled at any time.</comment>


Show HN: Instantly run DNS, HTTP and Traceroute tests across the globe - <AUTHOR> https://pulse.turbobytes.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Agent and control server written in Go : [https://github.com/turbobytes/pulse](https://github.com/turbobytes/pulse)</comment>


Most valuable developer Linux notebooks in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://cri.dev/posts/2020-06-20-Most-valuable-developer-linux-notebooks-in-2020/ <comment><USER2> I have been using linux laptops for so long I cringe anytime I have to use osx or M$ ... linux has just fine tuned everything so much over the years it just more productive than other OS

... the default terminal on Ubuntu is sooo much nicer than anything I have found for osx

As a server side developer I do most of my code execution on remote servers so the laptop becomes less of a bottle neck ... no need to drop 2 grand on a laptop to run linux ... instead spend that dosh on a trip to Paris

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense. Depends (as always) on the use case</comment></comment>


UC Berkeley research fellow Michael Cohen dies at 25 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailycal.org/2017/10/04/uc-berkeley-research-fellow-michael-cohen-rising-star-in-computer-science-dies-at-25/ <comment><USER2> If anyone's interested, I found video of Michael Cohen as a guest lecturer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3umLs_SnhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3umLs_SnhQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> How does one publish 30 papers in 3 years? That is an insane rate!

Just navigating the political ramifications, dealing with revisions, etc, on three or four a year is a serious pain in the ass, let alone ten.

<comment><USER4> What is considered a paper in CS is different than in many other fields. That is not to say the content is not worthy of publication, just that they tend to be shorter and often are more focused on a single issue. There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process. Looking at his top 10 by citation count on google scholar shows most in proceedings and under 10 pages. Arguably it is more intellectual work, but the process is less arduous so the rate isn't that insane.

<comment><USER3> > There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an > easier review process.

The big CS conferences are around 20% acceptance rate, Science and Nature are around 7%. So while easier than Science, that is still quite an accomplishment!

<comment><USER5> Getting a paper into high-impact conferences are definitely still an incredible accomplishment, but comparing these acceptance rates is a bit misleading. Those CS conferences have a very narrow scope, while Science and Nature literally cover any topic pertaining to science and nature... including CS :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a friend and colleague of Michael's at MIT. This article is very nice and gives a good summary of what made Michael so special. In a lot of ways, Michael was the animating "spirit" of the MIT theory group. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and incredibly deep understanding of basically every area of computer science, and many areas beyond; in the short year that I knew him, we had conversations about everything from convex optimization to computer architecture to rent control laws to Medieval philosophy.

Michael was a truly remarkable researcher. Ludwig's comments about him being the type that you "only see a couple of times in a generation" are accurate. I also recommend watching the start of Yin-Tat Lee's recent talk [1] at the Simons Institute. Yin-Tat is a prolific researcher himself, so his comments carry a lot of weight.

For those wondering about Michael's publication count: computer science (and especially theoretical computer science) is a "high publication" field, in part because of the nature of publishing in conferences and in part because the field is young and there are many good open problems. Still, Michael's publication record is abnormally strong and reflects his collaborative nature. Regarding the comments about co-authorship, Michael could easily have been a co-author on a dozen more papers if he had cared, since he often contributed the main ideas to projects that he never formally joined. This was definitely my experience collaborating with him. I expect that Michael will be more prolific in the next year than many living researchers, from the point of view of publishing.

His papers (incomplete list here [2]) are very well written, by the way. I recommend checking them out.

The most incredible thing about Michael was the way he learned. If you talked about something that he didn't understand, he'd quiz you about it until he did. And he did this with everyone, from brand new grad students like me to famous professors.

At the same time, Michael was incredibly generous. He liked to talk, and you could interrupt him at any time and he'd explain everything to you with astounding patience. Michael wasn't in science for glory; he just really loved learning and teaching. He's already profoundly missed and our entire community is shocked by his untimely passing. My deepest condolences go to Michael's family.

We hope to have a memorial website up soon, especially since Michael was too humble to have much of an online presence.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pIheZseT1U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pIheZseT1U)

[2] [https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=t3kDJHQAAAAJ...](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=t3kDJHQAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate)

</comment><comment><USER7> Life is so precious. To think any one of us reading this could be gone tomorrow.

<comment><USER8> I'm morbidly curious what the odds are that someone reading this _will_ be gone tomorrow. I'll bet it's non-trivial.

<comment><USER9> I think you are right: the chances aren't extreme, but are non-trivial. This looks to be a chart that has the mortality data necessary to answer your question (although presumably it also includes "non-natural" causes like suicide and homicide): [https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html). The first two columns show age, and the probability that a holder of an American Social Security card who is of that age will die within the next year. For all but the oldest ages, I think it should be accurate to simply divide this by 365 to calculate the chance that an individual of that age will die within 24 hours.

From the chart --- and oversimplifying HN demographics by assuming they match those of chart and consist only of 30-year-old American males --- the probability of death within the year is 0.0015; making each individual's daily chance of death 0.000004, which is about 1 out 250,000. Unless I'm misremembering, to calculate the chance that at least one person out of a group of size N dies, it's easiest to exponentiate the probability of survival (1 - .000004 == 0.999996) ^ N, and then subtract this from 1 to find the chance of at least one death.

If we guess that we readers are one-thousand 30-year-old males, I think that means there is about a half a percent chance that one of us will die before tomorrow ((1 - (0.999996 ^ 1000)) == 0.004). If we instead assume ten-thousand 30-year-old males, then we get about a 4% chance that someone won't be around after tomorrow. If we generously assume a hundred-thousand such readers, then there is about a 30% chance that one of us won't make it another full day. I don't know what the actual readership numbers are for this post (or maybe the grandparent was self-referencing their own comment rather than the main post?) but it seems likely that it's somewhere within that range.

If we use a more realistic age distribution for HN, the probability would go up (older readers increase the probability more than younger readers decrease it). On the other hand, if we assume that HN readers on average have better health care and less risk of violence than randomly chosen Social Security card holders, then the probability would go down. But suicide risk would probably go the other way, so I don't know what the total correction factor would be. Still, I'd guess this estimate would remain in the ballpark. Corrections to my methodology or calculations appreciated.

<comment><USER10> Nice analysis. One shortcoming is you group all deaths together; expected and unexpected deaths. A considerable chunk of 30 year old's may be expected to die, mostly from cancer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does one die of natural causes at 25?

<comment><USER12> Natural causes just means ruling out of external causes and accidental death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd only made the acquaintance of Michael through a mutual friend. In but a few hours, I became convinced this person is one in a billion. What a pity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Live as if you were going to die tomorrow, learn as if you were going to live forever – Gandhi

</comment><comment><USER15> How does someone dies of "natural causes" at 25? This sounds more like an unknown health condition.

<comment><USER16> dying from a disease is still a natural cause. Unnatural would be getting killed, suicide, accidents etc.

<comment><USER17> The term "natural causes" is a misnomer for "non-human-agent causes".

<comment><USER18> It fits the "natural versus artificial" dichotomy. i.e. anything is natural if it comes about without human agency.

<comment><USER19> If I die from a lightning strike while hiking, I'm pretty sure that's not counting as "natural causes" either.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Code University - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/edu/

<comment><USER2> A fantastic long term recruiting move. It's like Apple getting their systems into schools, or Microsoft giving away it's development environments to colleges to base their course work around (and Sun/Java). Google is presenting course work that is tailored to their needs for graduates coming out of school. It'll be a natural progression of smart talented students leaving school and walking into Google, who has always had a long history of hiring people with advanced degree's.

</comment><comment><USER3> I looked into the algorithms section and, unfortunately, even the great schools (Northwestern included) are _still_ teaching intro courses using sequential models. I think we need to address parallel algorithms (parallel quicksort, parallel prefix, etc.) from the very beginning if we want to institute parallel thinking. Tacking it on as an afterthought two semesters later isn't the same. And yes, I'm very aware that this sounds like "Teaching of Sequential Algorithms Considered Harmful." ;)</comment>