How Dropbox Knows When You're Sharing Copyrighted Stuff Without Actually Looking - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/how-dropbox-knows-when-youre-sharing-copyrighted-stuff-without-actually-looking-at-your-stuff <comment><USER2> The moral of the story is that you should pad all your files with some nonce.

EDIT: Sorry, the _moral_ is probably avoid copyright violations. The advice above is more like the practical workaround. It's nonetheless useful as a way to avoid overreach from rights holders in cases of false positives or suppression of fair use.

<comment><USER3> Yep.

        echo a >> file.mp3

should suffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How Turtl has no idea when you're sharing copyrighted stuff: [http://turtlapp.tumblr.com/post/81222024691/how-turtl-has- no...](http://turtlapp.tumblr.com/post/81222024691/how-turtl-has-no-idea-when- youre-sharing-copyrighted)

</comment><comment><USER5> No new info here. Dropbox de-duplicates using hashes, so they would use them against a blacklist. The main problem with Dropbox still remains: They can read your files if they want to and you have only their word that they don't.

For now I'm going with Bittorrent sync [1], at least until an equivalent service with an open source comes along. (Would be nice if they open sourced theirs, though.)

[1] [http://www.bittorrent.com/sync](http://www.bittorrent.com/sync)

<comment><USER6> Also, SpiderOak.

<comment><USER7> I use SpiderOak, but they can still read your files, they hold your keys.

Something like tarsnap is the only paranoid-proof choice. It's not even distributed as a binary file.

[https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/)

<comment><USER8> They cannot read your files, only your password can be used to decrypt them, which is not even saved on their server.

[https://spideroak.com/zero-knowledge/](https://spideroak.com/zero-knowledge/)

[https://spideroak.com/engineering_matters](https://spideroak.com/engineering_matters)

<comment><USER9> If you enter your password into a system that they control at any time, they have potential access to your files and can be ordered by the government to change their code so that it does collect your password in order to enable decryption of your files.

<comment><USER10> _and can be ordered by the government to change their code so that it does collect your password in order to enable decryption of your files._

And they can be ordered to do so secretly with no notice, neither to company management nor to you nor to any judicial body that could review the decision.

That's the lesson of Lavabit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How do they compute a hash of a file without actually looking at the file? Magic?

<comment><USER12> 'looking' here means having a person look at the file or possibly having a system run analysis* of the file. Neither happens.

Since you seem to be talking about having their systems touch any bytes of the file, I have a more important question: How would you expect to have a file synced with dropbox and shared via dropbox without dropbox touching the bytes? Magic?

* you know what I mean by analysis, think gmail

<comment><USER13> Simple. Truecrypt (or whatever other encrypted filesystem you prefer) volume on Dropbox. Files in partition.

Dropbox has no idea what is on the volume.

(In an ideal world, you'd have a filesystem set up that was a separate encrypted file for each file in the virtual filesystem, with an additional encrypted file that contained the virtual directory info. But this is simpler.)

<comment><USER12> Well sure if you use another program to encrypt the file then Dropbox can only see the encrypted bytes, but that's not what mbrutsch was objecting to. A particular truecrypt volume could still have a takedown related to it.

<comment><USER13> Not automatically via the method used here (hash blacklist)

<comment><USER12> When I say 'particular' I mean someone notices the truecrypt volume being shared either semi-publicly or multiple times and files a DMCA for the volume itself. Then you have to alter it or make a new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's also a method dropbox can use to save storage space. Inevitably, two or more users will put the same file in their DB. By computing and comparing hashes they can simply just store one copy of the file and point all users to that single instance of the file (they may do an exact match check too once the hashes collide since hashes can have unintended collisions as well).

I have no idea how much efficiency this buys them, but the same mechanism can be used against a blacklist of known copyright or illegal materials. In this case, having a hash that matches something in the copyrighted materials list AND sharing it triggers this action.

Just as easily, putting some child porn in your DB could also have them check against illegal material hashes and trigger an automated notice to some law enforcement agency or something similar.

This can even be used for National Security without violating the classified contents of the documents. Say another Snowden-type grabs a bunch of classified documents. The agency could give DB a list of hashes with instructions to "call us" if a user uploads a bunch of leaked documents to their DB. They could even do this blind, just send DB a hash of every classified document or piece of data they ever produce and catch leakers before anybody in the agency even knew something was leaked internally.

<comment><USER15> Say a company, with its 1000 1TB/user accounts, has ~600GB/user in real life usage, since there's going to be a lot of cross over they could save upwards of .5PB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The trouble with using hashes is that they have no context. Suppose I own the copyright on some file and issue a DMCA takedown against somebody else sharing it with the world. In that context the takedown is totally legitimate. But now the hash is on the list, so what happens next time when the file is being shared in some totally different context? What happens when the copyright holder wants to share the file? What happens when some other third party wants to share the file with a small number of people in a way which is unambiguously fair use?

You end up over-blocking, unless you include some option to bypass the block, in which case why even bother? It's not like you could inform the copyright holder when someone shares the file without invading users' privacy and opening up the system to abuse against political speech.

The whole thing is a mess because the fundamental problem is that the cost of most infringement on the internet is less than the cost of evaluating whether that use is infringing, so you end up with a high error rate no matter what you do. It breaks the founding assumption that copyright is not in tension with the First Amendment and makes you choose which you want to sacrifice for the other.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a good time to note that ClearSkies [1], the open source BTSync alternative, is having a fundraiser: [https://www.bountysource.com/teams/clearskies/fundraiser](https://www.bountysource.com/teams/clearskies/fundraiser)

1: [https://github.com/jewel/clearskies](https://github.com/jewel/clearskies)

</comment><comment><USER18> What a bunch of doublespeak bullshit. "We're not _looking_ at your stuff, we're only computing a hash of your stuff and comparing it to a blacklist!" Right up there with "we're not recording your phone calls, we're only recording your phone call _metadata_."

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish more posts had great summaries like that at the start.

</comment><comment><USER20> doh</comment>


The New York bar that takes Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/investing/bitcoin-bar-new-york-city/ <comment><USER2> >Along with his businesses, Shrem is the co-chairman of Bitcoin Foundation, a group that stands for promoting and standardizing the new currency

>"When we opened a few months ago, I said that we needed to be the first New York bar to accept Bitcoins," said Charlie Shrem

So it's more like "Long-time Bitcoin promoter finally able to accept Bitcoins".

<comment><USER3> Charlie Shrem has been accepting bitcoins for a long time. He founded the BitInstant company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "How much is a pint of beer?"

"Right now or by the time I finish pouring the drink?"

<comment><USER5> Witty, but I'm pretty sure two adults at a bar can agree on a price without a great deal of difficulty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While they "take" bitcoins, they do not do any business whatsoever IN bitcoins. Nothing is denominated in bitcoins, the bar never receives any bitcoins, etc. Bar prices its stuff in $, bar gets paid $. The End.

It's almost as if the bar doesn't want to reprint its menu twice a day to account for the bitcoin pricing bubble.

<comment><USER5> Heaven forbid bitcoin be used for anything. If you buy them just to sit on them, you're a dirty speculator contributing to the bubble. But if you use them to purchase something, well, there's something wrong with the way you did that as well. I'm not sure what it would take to impress some people.

<comment><USER6> My point is that this bar, run by a person who has drunk the Bitcoin Koolaid, is still unwilling to take any of the risk associated with doing business in bitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As long as you don't keep too much of a BTC balance, the risk seems minimal. I guess the trick is that with a currency that's increasing in value, it's very tempting to keep a large BTC balance.

<comment><USER8> The applicability of this to the wisdom of using Bitcoins to pay for drinks (or anything else) is left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER9> Something I've come to realize is that there are now only two kinds of people: those that have successfully managed that simple exercise, and those that think Bitcoins are the magical future.

The 'in-between' has long since faded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> :/ the article kind of left me wanting more.

How many customers have paid using bitcoin in the first week?

How much of this a novelty attraction versus an actual payment alternative?

Is there a payment dispute system for BitPay?

How did BitPay an the bar owners get put in touch? Is there some interesting business development story here?

<comment><USER11> It's still not BC as currency, though: the prices are in USD, and then get converted for you. That's probably a good thing from the short term user's viewpoint, as BC is as volatile as a very smelly thing right now. There are all sorts of traps for a long-term user, though.

<comment><USER12> I'm not very well-versed in economics, but would setting prices to a relatively non-changing BTC value not actually be a good thing to stabilize its value, if enough people were to do that?

<comment><USER13> What is the incentive to do so? BTC is expected to rise in value over time since it's a deflationary currency. So any sane businessperson should expect to be constantly decreasing the BTC price over time. It's a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but the same effect happens (in the opposite direction) with a normal inflationary currency. Every few months or years, prices change to reflect their new value. When prices are doubling or halving once a week, that starts to get problematic (see interbellum Germany, 2000s Zimbabwe).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It was my understanding that bitcoin transactions took about half an hour to clear? So how can they then say "The transaction happens instantaneously, EVR promises." Or, is this one of those things that has been fixed recently?

<comment><USER16> It's about trust. The transaction hits the network immediately. Then a miner puts it in a block as soon as right away, or as slow as... several days (if you put a transaction fee, you'll move to the frontish of the line). Once its in one block, every subsequent block is a vote for its authenticity.

So, if I accept a bitcoin right away, I open myself up to a fairly trivial double-spend attack. If I wait for one confirmation, it's harder, but still sorta maybe doable. If I wait for several (1-2hours), it's near impossible.

Compare with taking cash which may be phony, or a CC which is easily charge- backable, and the business's risk is ... close enough to the same.

<comment><USER17> Not really. The transaction arriving over the Bitcoin network, which takes around 10 seconds, is the first pass of authenticity testing - it won't work unless the account has the money and the sender has the rights to that account and the nodes forwarding the transaction haven't seen any other spends of that coin since the last block. At that point, doing a double-spend reliably is already hard enough that anyone who can do it probably has much better things to do with the ability than try to skim $20 worth of drinks at a bar.

One confirmation, that is, being included in one block, takes anywhere from a few seconds to 15 minutes, probably averaging 5-7 minutes. With that, it's already virtually impossible to double-spend without having enough mining power to take 51% of the current mining network. That's a bit more hashing power than the entire current mining network combined. That'll earn you hundreds of thousands of dollars a day just doing honest mining, and potential double-spend activity well into the tens of millions or more. Again, why bother with that to rip off a $20 bar tab? Or even a $2,000 bar tab?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The news for me is that the founder of BitInstant (and co-chairman of Bitcoin Foundation) also owns a bar in midtown Manhattan.

</comment><comment><USER19> I went out on a Monday night to EVR, met Charlie through a mutual friend. I had no idea that he was involved with Bitcoin at the time, nor that he was planning on accepting it at EVR. Really down to earth guy, plus the free drinks didn't hurt my opinion of him. :)

</comment><comment><USER20> _> Servers bring over a tablet with a BitPay app that lets merchants accept Bitcoins as a form of payment. The app converts the dollar value of the bill into Bitcoins and gives customers a bar code...Customers would use their smart phones to scan the bar code that will deduct the amount from their Bitcoin accounts. BitPay will credit that $15 to the bar._

This is kind of counter the spirit of direct P2P of bitcoin. I'd expect the transaction to happen directly between the customer wallet and the wallet of the bar. Why is the intermediary / conversion needed at the time of the transaction?

<comment><USER5> It's not much different than any other currency in this regard. You can trade USD cash for goods directly in person, which is easy and works fine, but you can also choose to use any of various financial services built on top of USD, like credit cards.

Bitcoin is still superior to USD cash in many ways, however, because the "direct P2P" transactions are virtually immune to fraud (e.g. counterfeiting) and can be done online. Of course, the financial services for bitcoin are relatively new, which means there aren't any particularly experienced and trustworthy options. It takes time and a long transaction history because the average person will trust a financial service provider—remember that credit card companies used extensive advertising campaigns in their efforts to get people to think of them as normal everyday USD transactions.

<comment><USER20> Right, but there is a slight difference. Credit cards work as virtual money and enable credit as an extra service attached to them. Direct bitcoin transactions are more similar to debit cards (rather than cash) in a sense that they enable virtual money and you pay from what you have (except that you don't need any service to back that up, unlike the debit cards which require banks to enable them). I.e. ideally in the bar example, one wouldn't need to use any financial services, but would still be able to pay with virtual money a la just using a card, of course for that the circulation of bitcoins needs to be more active, so bar could actually use them, instead of opting for instantaneous conversion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the implications on taxes? Is this legal?

<comment><USER22> As long as you pay tax its fine, anyway for the bar they are accepting USD. Bitpay accepts the transaction and pays USD to the bar, Bitpay worries about the BTC they collected.

(The bar never sees any BTC from a customer)</comment></comment>


Hackers Made an App That Kills to Prove a Point - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/medtronic-insulin-pump-hack-app/ <comment><USER2> It's an insulin pump and the company isn't addressing huge security flaws so security researchers made an Android app. Saved you a clickbait click.</comment>


The ultimate guide to bike-sharing and the future of "China to Global" exports - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@spenceryang/the-ultimate-guide-to-bike-sharing-and-the-future-of-china-to-global-exports-63ba741089ea <comment><USER2> After just returning from China, I can vouch for the fact that they are not exaggerating when they say the cities are literally being buried in bikes. There are hundreds, if not thousands of bikes on almost every major intersection and street corner. Some cities have 3-4 bike sharing companies dumping bikes everywhere they can. It's very convenient for the users, but only if you have some way to pay, which is very difficult for visitors without a Chinese phone number or a source of WeChat funds.

<comment><USER3> Just walk around where there are a ton of bikes and you will find one unlocked

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Being able to leave your bike anywhere makes bike sharing so much more compelling.

How does maintenance work with this model. Paris has had bike sharing for a long time. The advantage of having the bikes in one location is if one bike had an issue you could use another. Also maintenance crews had to only visit a limited number of locations.

In 2-3 years time will the bikes deteriorate such that they will not be nice to ride?

<comment><USER5> Maintenance is not an issue if bike-sharing becomes a non-viable business.

One of the scam bike-sharing business models are to make money on deposits, raise money from investors, and bounce.

So the Chinese government is looking at forcing these companies to place deposits into reserve accounts, instead of letting them declare as revenue to attract investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "There are nine million bicycles in Beijing"

Song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHQG6-DojVw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHQG6-DojVw)</comment>


Web Content Management is dead but death is just the beginning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/03/web-content-management-is-dead-but.html

<comment><USER2> There is a growing attitude in the Internet community that content is worth very little, static content is worth nothing, and old content is the abyss looking back at you. I see it reflected in the new obsession with fleeting bits of nothing.

Personally, I find myself coming back to websites that cultivate their own content, offering both insight and substance. Perhaps the ideas I find there are old by the standards of Twitter or Facebook, but I suspect they are the better for the chance to mature.

<comment><USER3> I still find it astounding that people think real time information is that important. There really aren't that many amazing things happening in the world at any one time. My rule is if it's not worth sticking in my memory system/org-mode it's not worth reading. I can count on one hand the amount of material I've put into supermemo from blogs this year.

99% of blogs are highly targeted linkbait with little actual content. My key sources for information are pubmed and citeseer, then google/delicious search.

I wish someone would invent a search engine that scanned for ad-less content, that was old but edited many times by a human, and linked to by other ad-less, old, often updated content. That's important to me, but usually takes 10 pages of google to find these gems due to all the SEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nonsense. This might hold true for the individual-oriented website, in which case this could be thought of as the next evolution of blogging. When considering a content-rich corporate website, this article just sounds hyperbolic (in the future, we'll all have flying cars!).

"Version control is obsolete" makes no sense in that world. Version control gives the content-creator a way of reflecting on what has existed in order to improve old content and avoid repetition (as well as backtrack the occasional mistake).

It's all just content (management, editing, and aggregating) - no need to look for new buzzwords to fill the space with.

</comment><comment><USER5> As long as there are small businesses, there will be inexpensive websites. And your idea of a CRM-driven site, while attractive, is idealistic and quite unrealistic for most small businesses. Most <strikeout>small</strikeout> businesses are lucky to have their customers in a database at all, let alone one that has clean, normalized data for you to interface with.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have studied how small business driving their business and we can see that there is one device and one database that rules it all. It's cell phone and the addressbook.

If we can link together link generation, addressbook with the phone and collaboration/team work system we already provide huge value for small business.

At least we think we are...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You will probably always need to manage your content somehow. Not only that, but you'll also need a framework or a development platform to base your software and ideas upon.

The CMS's (WCM's) role in your life might be diminishing relatively, since your focus is on more than your own website, but it's still a fundamental building block in your web presence

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - fundamental building block because we always deal with content. But the role of WCM is changing and I think that new wave of software is coming that will change a game just a little bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think we're heading for a sea change in the way people interact with the internet. The signs of it are all steadily creeping into view, but we haven't quite gone over the edge yet. WCM vs CRM isn't really it though, that's just another sign.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Most commonly it was used for building and hosting external websites."

Actually, for many organizations the intranet is much larger, more dynamic and often more important than the external website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - as was thinking of that part also. To be honest it proves WCM death even better. Today internal collaboration systems are killing intranet websites very effectively. Look at things like Yammer or similar (Salesforce Chatter?).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it's just a beginning. We will release soon our version of that concept.</comment>


Mathiness: not just a problem of macro-economics (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://magic-maths-money.blogspot.com/2015/06/mathiness-not-just-problem-of-macro.html <comment><USER2> People have been complaining for 20 years+ that economics chose the wrong tool. It needs psychology, not math. (Or, more accurately: more and less, respectively – you'll still need math).

The old joke about physicists starts "Consider a spherical chicken". It's funny because it gets at the reductionism at the core of physics, and it's even funny for physicists because they actually have been pretty successful with that model.

It just doesn't work that way in economics. Even worse, the reductionism in economics is unethical, because when it registered (somewhere) that humans are not "objective, utility-maximising spheres" they more or less started advocating that they /should/ be. That got us to "corporations are people" and 24-step daily checklists to "make better use of your time". It also made fast- food the superior choice (time is money!), so at least the "spherical" part is coming along.

After this short rant, which was obviously about microeconomics and therefore off-topic, something different for macro: While he's right that the "growth" debate has had more or less the same trajectory as the Grand Unifying Theory in physics, I wouldn't discount the improvements we've made in other areas. Inflation, for example, is pretty well under control. People don't appreciate that too much, but I remember how my Grandmother talked about inflation. It was basically /the/ catastrophe of her life (Germany in the 20ies – WW2 was just a result of it).

So we seem to be doing something right – maybe economics, maybe politics, but certainly better.

I also disagree with the very last paragraph of the article where he seems to advocate dropping the scientific method for a model closer to that of the social sciences. An improved discourse would obviously be great, but he seems to be equating math with the scientific method. We can try to get at the complexities of economics with new tools and still verify the results. Ultimately, math should be able to make a comeback when it develops the tools to describe systems of this complexity. It's a lot like the brain: it is obviously possible to describe the brain using physics & math (because it's a physical system). BUT we're not there yet, and until we are, we get better results with the collection of heuristics called "psychology"

<comment><USER3> _It just doesn 't work that way in economics. Even worse, the reductionism in economics is unethical, because when it registered (somewhere) that humans are not "objective, utility-maximising spheres" they more or less started advocating that they /should/ be. That got us to "corporations are people" and 24-step daily checklists to "make better use of your time". It also made fast- food the superior choice (time is money!), so at least the "spherical" part is coming along._

Some citations are clearly needed here. In particular about the _normative_ claims you believe economics makes - as far as I know the field is very strictly positive [1]. Economists will say that fast food is better _because people are choosing to consume it_ , and most of those same economists will discuss the topic over a lunch of artisinal kale salad locally grown by vegan hipsters.

[1] There are cases where economists are clearly motivated by normative concerns to draw a particular positive conclusion - e.g. that the law of demand doesn't work for low skill labor. But that's a different critique. [http://cafehayek.com/2016/12/41844.html](http://cafehayek.com/2016/12/41844.html)

<comment><USER2> I guess the scientific term is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus). The classic experiment is probably the Ultimatum game. And that's so old, you're tempted to say: see – they did notice the flaws in their theories!

Yes, economists will readily admit to these flaws and encourage you to keep it in mind when evaluating their predictions and prescriptions. Unfortunately, people aren't just marginally different from the models. Just yesterday I violated transitivity of preferences when choosing lunch.

I did an evaluation of GDO growth forecasts for my bachelor thesis. None of the institutions (Central banks etc.) managed to outperform a well-adjusted random number generator.

<comment><USER4> I don't think economist always are that frank about the limits of their models. E.g. Milton Friedman I think seemed to think that the world worked mostly has homo economicus. He had some rather ridiculous examples. E.g. he was touring a factory in Hong Kong and claimed workers had picked noisy and hazardous work environments over more pleasant ones, because it paid better. That strikes me as a guy with the head in the cloud lost his his theories.

Jobs don't exist in endless varieties like that. If I'd rather have a better health insurance but lower paid job, I can't easily change to an almost identical job, with just those differences.

I also remember him arguing why it was rational for Ford or GM to install a cheap fix for dangerous fuel tanks. His straw man argument was that an infinitely safe car would cost infinitely amounts of money. With such arguments you can argue in favor of no minimum standards for anything. Never mind that he failed to see the blindingly obvious problem. It simply didn't make any economic sense because any car company making such a cynical calculation would severely damage their reputation and thus their sales. It only works for companies who manage to cover up.

And Milton Friedman is one of our most celebrated economists. Sure he create some great theories, but he seemed also to not heed to typical advice of not taking models too literal. He basically advocated policies based on rather fundamentalists interpretations of economic models. If he could do that, then surely lots of other economists would fail in the same manner.

<comment><USER5> > He had some rather ridiculous examples. E.g. he was touring a factory in > Hong Kong and claimed workers had picked noisy and hazardous work > environments over more pleasant ones, because it paid better.

How is this a ridiculous example? Did he just invent it or was that indeed the actual reason why they were working there versus a more pleasant place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see some focus on this, as I believe so many of the ills of the present days has been caused by this mathiness. I don't think math or mathematical models are bad per say, but they have clearly been used in the wrong way in too many instances. Ones has placed far too much faith in simplified models of the real world.

We don't like the messy world of human interactions and so we have tried to turn it all into math, while overstating the utility or applicability of the models.

It is a bit like trying to create a mathematical models for determining the quality of a persons character rather than simply relying on people's subjective characterizations. We forget that humans have brains which are very good at processing massive amounts of messy data. Instead of relying on human brains why have outsourced the task to mathematical models which can't easily deal with messy data, and thus simplify the world to the point where quite essential characteristics are lost.

Also as a software developer I think we could gain a lot by employing more agent based simulations to the economics field. I think too much of the dynamics of a system over time is lost by relying so exclusively on mathematical equations.

Too much of economic science also seems to have turned into a political ideology for many on the right. The fact that a mathematical model predicts inefficiencies from taxation in a free market, seems to make some people believe it is inherently bad with taxation and it must be limited at all cost.

Such models should always be compared with real world data, where there has never been found a clear evidence that higher taxes really retards economic growth the way a simple model predicts. Naturally because an economy is extremely complicated with many interdependent variables.

Higher taxes might cause worse allocation of resources but it might also allow for better schools and thus better skills among workers increasing efficiency more than is lost through distortions of taxations. Not claiming it is like that, but giving food for thought about the idea that it is hard to look at these models in isolation.

Mathematical models were used in the late 70s to argue in favor of high CEO salaries. We know today that there is no empirical evidence that it worked. Western economies are not growing faster and companies are not better run. There is no provable difference between highly paid CEOs and lower paid CEOs.

This shows the danger of such mathematical models. They become self fulfilling prophecies. Once people start using them, they keep using them because of inertia and the tendency to conform and stick to traditions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Glad this issue is getting attention. It's one of the things that got me to reconsider applying for an economics PhD.</comment>


The Essential Startup Reader: 10 Lessons In Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/01/02/startup-company-lessons/

<comment><USER2> This is solid.</comment>


Vintage Computer Festival West This Weekend - <AUTHOR> http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/ <comment><USER2> And in two months Berlin: [http://vcfb.de/2019/index.html.en](http://vcfb.de/2019/index.html.en)</comment>


Advise HN: If auto-detecting language, provide a way to change it - <AUTHOR> A frustrating UI pattern when traveling around the world. It's great if websites auto-detect your location and set the language on your first visit. But a shocking number do not allow you to change it afterwards, or the implementation is buggy/isn't saved across sessions.<p>VPNs help solve this problem, but it's an easy to fix UI flaw. <comment><USER2> I've built a lot of websites/apps over my career, almost all of them in multiple languages and regions, and to me the best practice pattern is this (if you can do it, sometimes for various legal/company reasons you can't).

Default your app's language to the first match between the languages you offer and the user/browser's preferred language list. Fallback to English or the country locale, depending on the app's goals/requirements. If the user still changes the language , save it in a cookie/session whatever so on repeat visits the corrected option is selected.

This only solves the language problem though, not regional issues such as an online store in Germany vs Spain which have different deals and products. This is why you should keep a clean separation between locales and regions/countries.

Anyway thats my 2 cents from the trenches.

</comment><comment><USER3> Websites should just respect the HTTP Accept-Language header sent in requests. There's no need to try detecting the language by location, just trust the browser.

</comment><comment><USER4> It sucks that websites "detect" language by location. When I was in Mexico I always had to use Chrome's auto translate to English because I was sick of searching for the language chooser.

</comment><comment><USER5> My biggest issue with automatic language detection is that many websites use location to detect language, instead of the http accept headers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Even then, most website language selectors suck.

It would be nice if language selection happened via the browser UI rather than the site itself.

Fortunately the future is at least bright on the automated translation front.

<comment><USER7> Every browser I've used for a long time has supported Accept-Language with a preference list I can change. Are there any that don't?

<comment><USER6> I did read about _Accept-Language_ prior to posting and its current situation struck me as suboptimal:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Language)

In regards to browser support, you are correct—however, changing preferences can be cumbersome.

Interestingly, there appears to be several browser add-ons that provide _Accept-Language_ quick-switch capability in the browser UI, and that's more in line with what I had in mind with my original comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Official StackOverflow FAQ on Gender Pronouns and Code of Conduct Changes - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/334900/3834 <comment><USER2> Sometimes I have a hard time believing that this gender stuff is really happening. That there are really people who want to divorce the words "man" and "woman" from a person's sex, and instead make them about personal identity. That they have enough political power to force changes like this with no discussion and no dissent allowed.

It is not in any way bigoted or transphobic to believe that a person being a man or a woman, and therefore the pronouns used to refer to that person, are determined by that person's sex at birth. This was the accepted belief of the vast majority of the human race up until about 20 minutes ago, when it suddenly became a bannable offense.

StackOverflow going all-in in support of social engineering on behalf of political activists is baffling to me. Where does this end? Is the goal really to force all of society to change to placate a small group of activists? A reasonable compromise would have just been to allow "they" to refer to someone in a neutral way, but I understand that this is actually _not allowed_ if the person being referred to has stated they would like "he" or "she". This is what makes me think it's more about social engineering than actually protecting anyone from harm.

<comment><USER3> The presumption of malicious intent is what's off putting. Plus its a fool's errand, you cannot retrain a few billion people by public shaming. I'm a liberal, and this is stupid.

<comment><USER4> One of the central ideas that lead SE is "Assume good intent". There's no presumption of malicious intent.

<comment><USER5> ... didn't they just fire someone like two weeks ago based on a presumption of malicious intent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Moderating it and encouraging the community to run around policing each other seems like it is a bit too much.

No matter how gently you moderate a person many take it harshly and I suspect the response will be to push back at the moderator, moderation, and ultimately the rule.... and it ends up being more counterproductive than anything else.

Very very generally I would compare the response to say police detaining someone as far as a someone's response goes. It is hard to do so no matter how lightly it is presented and not get a strong response.

Another issue is that moderators can't know if two people know the correct pronoun unless clearly stated in that conversation, so they are going to be guessing the vast majority of the time...

<comment><USER4> The FAQ clearly states that if you don't know then you're free to use they/them, and only are required to use their preferred pronouns if you're asked to do so by the person or if you very clearly knew before (say that you wrote 10 answers to someone over a week, if you defaulted back to they/them on each, then it could be seen as intentional).

<comment><USER6> I read that, i'm not entirely sure how that relates to my post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like the rule changes boil down to three points:

* Use gender neutral pronouns in most prose

* When directly addressing a user, use their pronouns, as configured on the user profile

* Specifying your own identity is optional, intentionally ignoring the identity specified by others is not

On the one hand, SE can be esoteric enough as it is, more rules will make for less ease of use. I absolutely think that there should be some level of natural resistance to all new (and existing) barriers to entry.

On the other hand, this new rule isn't particularly difficult to understand (imo) and aligns fairly well with current best practices. I feel that it's particularly disingenuous to foist this issue as _the_ straw that will break the camel's back, given how thoroughly declawed this rule is. Most infractions won't even constitute an official warning (though I am certain there are people who will test this rule to the limits, which will certainly be interesting to watch unfold).

</comment><comment><USER8> > Q9: Do I have to use pronouns I'm unfamiliar or uncomfortable with (e.g., > neopronouns like xe, zir, ne... )?

>

> Yes, if those are stated by the individual.

Yikes.

I'm 100% in support of all gender identities, sexual orientations, races, etc., and I'll fight for everyone's rights and well-being, but this is insanity.

It's one thing restrict offensive language but it's a whole different beast to mandate specific language.

Nope. Nope. Nope. I'm not doing it.

Sorry not sorry.

<comment><USER9> Not doing what? Being 100% supportive as stated and addressing people respectfully? Seems strange to express displeasure with a corporate policy about a website by being disrespectful to unrelated individuals.

<comment><USER8> > Seems strange to express displeasure with a corporate policy about a website > by being disrespectful to unrelated individuals.

What are you even going on about? Whom have I disrespected?

Allow me to repeat myself: It's one thing restrict offensive language but it's a whole different beast to mandate specific language.

If, e.g., you tell me to not refer to a certain group of folks using a particular racially offensive term, that's fine and pretty reasonable, but if you tell me that I _must_ refer to a certain group of folks using a term that you or they chose simply because you or they said so, as far as I'm concerned, we're slowly walking ourselves into a dictatorship. For the first option, I can simply not do anything and avoid being a "bad" person, but for the second option, I'm implicitly a "bad" person if I don't explicitly do as told (in this case, aka, ordered).

There's no way I could ever accept that. Nope. No way.

<comment><USER10> How do you feel about using someone's name?

<comment><USER11> I think the argument boils down to fundamentally restructuring the syntax of our language to the point where pronouns are now individual identity-level constructs. I won't take a position, but I will say that this restructuring is expensive and confuses the hell out of me.

<comment><USER12> You might want to be getting your site back up: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21252544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21252544).

<comment><USER11> LOL thanks, nice blip of traffic there pushing my little VM to its limits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really have problems following through this complex discussion. But if pronouns are such an issue, this proves that too many discussions on StackExchange are about people and not about technical issues.

They should focus again on technical issues and also find ways to reward questions and answers about really specific issues. It could be observation bias but it seems that questions/answers on very generic topics get most upvotes, although these things can usually also be found on other websites easily and with more detail.

<comment><USER14> > this proves that too many discussions on StackExchange are about people and > not about technical issues ... They should focus again on technical issues

StackExchange is a network of Q+A sites covering a diverse range of topics, many of which are non-technical by design.

I think you might be confusing StackOverflow, the original and most popular technically-focused programming Q+A site, with the broader collection of Q+A sites this policy is addressing.

Unless you're suggesting that all non-technical StackExchange sites should be shut down, which is a bit more drastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree with this. I use any pronouns or name someone wants to be called. I'm not a jerk.

I don't understand the backlash, do you go around and call people other name that they want to be called because "you don't feel like it"?

<comment><USER16> The problem isn't that people should be referred to in the way they want. The problem is trying to mandate it from above.

Ideally, it would be perfectly "allowed" to insult someone by referring to them in a way they explicitly asked not to be referred to. And it would then also be perfectly allowed to call that person out for being a jerk. That's how a naturally formed community would handle such trolling -- but here, the idea is that the "right behaviour" has to be enforced by rules from above, and that's really not a good idea if you're dealing with anything other than a group of pre-schoolers.

<comment><USER4> Relevant: [https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

You're still perfectly "allowed" to maliciously misgender people, it'll just get you warned or banned.

<comment><USER16> Well, I'm pretty sure "being a dick" was a bannable offense before, so the change of rules is then basically unnecessary.

<comment><USER4> Obviously some people didn't understand that this policy would be included in "don't be a dick", otherwise we wouldn't be seeing all this pushback.

<comment><USER16> The pushback is totally justified. Because this is about "you have to say what we command you to", instead of "you should just not be a dick".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unless they include the pronoun by their name... good luck.

There could be a macro that expands into the pronoun or whoever you're responding to.

<comment><USER18> +1. This is actually a really good idea and solves the issue with people potentially abusing pronouns on their profile page in bad faith.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, I wonder if the most likely result of this is that SO just becomes more of a "place I look stuff up", and less of a "place I post things"?

Also, I wonder what happens the first time somebody says their preferred pronoun is "God", or something 127 characters long? or Little Bobby Tables? or...?

<comment><USER4> > Also, I wonder what happens the first time somebody says their preferred > pronoun is "God", or something 127 characters long? or Little Bobby Tables? > or...?

As they said on the answers... bad faith actions like having a 127 character pronoun means that it must be reported: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official- faq...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official-faq-on- gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes/334908#comment1098246_334908)

<comment><USER20> Seems logically contradictory to have an individual decide their identity but have an external body determine whether that's in bad faith or not.

<comment><USER21> It isn't. If one accepts the premise that gender is separate from biological sex, one accepts chosen gender-based pronouns as acceptable descriptors of a person's gender identity, but the premise of gender-based pronouns is that they describe gender. As the set of human genders is not infinite, the set of valid pronouns to describe human gender is also not infinite.

"I identify as an attack helicopter" is _obviously_ stated in bad faith, as "attack helecopter" is not a valid human gender. "God" or a base64 hash are also obviously not valid genders. The only people who would do so to begin with are trolls who want to mock trans identity.

<comment><USER22> Though where is the line drawn about what is a valid gender/pronoun? For instance, are all the pronouns listed on [https://askanonbinary.tumblr.com/pronouns](https://askanonbinary.tumblr.com/pronouns) acceptable or not?

<comment><USER21> 99% of this issue is about the validity of calling someone either "he" or "she" when their gender identity is not the same as their biological sex. The use of such "nounself" gender identifiers[0,1] is uncommon and controversial even with the LGBT community[2].

Personally, if I know someone is sincere and wants me to use such a pronoun, I probably would, even though I'd find it odd.

So let's draw the line here: _at the very least_ if someone wants to be called "he" or "she" that should be respected regardless of their biological sex, and agree that it gets "complicated" from there.

[0][https://nonbinary.miraheze.org/wiki/Nounself_pronouns](https://nonbinary.miraheze.org/wiki/Nounself_pronouns)

[1][https://anagnori.tumblr.com/post/75752291700/a-non-binary- pe...](https://anagnori.tumblr.com/post/75752291700/a-non-binary-persons- guide-to-invented-pronouns)

[2][https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/2oj7jt/thou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/2oj7jt/thoughts_on_nounself_pronouns/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The people that don't understand why this is awful concent to speech regulations. I can't see how this differs from homophobia enforced by law. Both limit a person's freedom. It is totally different to mispronounce and to make racist remarks. The former can be solved by asking the other person the latter won't be solved because the other person is an asshole. One is a mishap directed towards a single person and the latter towards a group of people.

</comment><comment><USER24> And this is the beginning of the end of SE. They should never have gotten anywhere near involved in such a controversial topic. Especially, given their site is _international_ and I'm assuming a huge amount of their customer base is coming from conserved, third-world countries, who are simply not ready to change to make a first-world minority feel better of factually correct wording.

Save yourself the burden: $ echo "127.0.0.1 stackoverflow.com www.stackoverflow.com stackexchange.com www.stackexchange.com" >> /etc/hosts

<comment><USER25> I found SO useful, but it is copy-left

[https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing](https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing)

So even GPL works need relicensing if they include anything from SO??

<comment><USER25> Ah, GPL is an exception; including something from SO makes your work:

Either GPL, or one of two licenses they consider equivalent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Somehow I feel StackOverflow is preparing itself to be bought. Part of contract is for SO to deal with these hard problems before the it is made public.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can StackOverflow provide a technical solution?

When I write my question, answer, or comment, allow me to add markup such as <pronoun @CaesarM />.

And then StackOverflow will display the pronoun in the correct way.

\---

Or StackOverflow could take it one step farther. If I write a question, answer or comment with a pronoun, a dialog pops up asking me which username the pronoun refers to. The software does the rest.

</comment><comment><USER28> If I were 15 nowadays, I'd be getting so many people banned, lol.

I can't comprehend how SE can be so ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER29> Are there any reasonable SO alternatives?</comment>


As a user, I ____ - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/oktopushup/status/1030457418206068736 <comment><USER2> Yes. Now I need to refine my backlog. A lot of great ideas I didn't thought about yet.

A lot of users don't care and are used to these tactics. Is there a chance that this will change in the future? I hope so.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also: [https://2018.bloomca.me/en](https://2018.bloomca.me/en)</comment>


Wyze Massive Data Leak - <AUTHOR> https://ipvm.com/reports/wyze-leak <comment><USER2> Discussion on this issue in Wyze community forum and on Reddit:

[https://forums.wyzecam.com/t/what-is-up-with-the-data- breach...](https://forums.wyzecam.com/t/what-is-up-with-the-data-breach/78975)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/wyzecam/comments/efzsub/massive_wyz...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wyzecam/comments/efzsub/massive_wyze_data_leak_wyze_has_exposed_millions/)</comment>


Ask HN: Starting Over - <AUTHOR> Some time ago I spent a few years at a young, fast growing company.  The technology was exciting, the developers where the best I've seen, and technical leadership was great.  And myself, I expended considerable effort becoming an expert on the code and domain. All was not roses though, there was the usual lack of product direction and product management, and I eventually moved on.  Since then I've found myself hopping from job to job, always disappointed, always comparing the new to the old, and always disappointed. The developers aren't motivate, or the culture is a bit toxic, there's often no appetite to adopt new technology, etc...<p>Lately it's occurred to me that I may never experience that type of work environment again, and this makes me sad.  Has anyone else experienced this? How did you cope? <comment><USER2> This is one of the biggest problems for careers in general, which is a lack of clear pathways for advancement.

It is particularly bad in software fields because the field came into existence in a time when unions and similar kinds of thing have been in decline, and also due to the nature of the work.

Two answers to this are: (i) choose better jobs (ii) try to solve these problems yourself in your local environment as best you can. Putting these together you get (iii) move into management, (iv) start your own firm, etc.

To solve this problem on a general level there has to be some elevation of the standards of software management and that is a good calling to be a manager today. I've seen people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s make stupid mistakes in management of and communication with people that I made when I was 22 and was fortunate to be corrected by the department head of my graduate school so that I learned not to do it again!

[http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/memorials/fitche...](http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/memorials/fitchen.pdf)

There is definitely a conflict that arises out of how when you work for firm X you get a huge amount of specialization insofar as (i) the specific code base you use, (ii) the domain, the people, the procedures, all that, (iii) the tools, be it ColdFusion or Haskell or Gnu automake or Visual Studio or whatever

</comment><comment><USER3> I, too, worry that I may have worked at the best place in my career as I was getting started. I'm a mechanical engineer, and got to work at my dream job as a semester-long internship right before I graduated. The product and culture were both amazing, and I loved the work and the empowerment I felt--even as an intern. Despite getting great reviews from my manager and the team I worked with, the timing did not lead to a full-time offer. Business wasn't great and the company was down-sizing, and my group was being hit especially hard. It was also a small team to begin with, so there wasn't really any place for me to fit in.

I've since taken my first full time job, and I've missed my old role a lot. It's not that I don't have a good job--I certainly do. My coworkers who have worked here for most of their careers love it, and don't see themselves leaving. But I've seen how things can be better--I've seen great jobs. I've interviewed at a several places, but I'm not taking any role at a job opportunity unless I think it will be great. One day I plan on starting a company and making it an amazing place to work.

However, in addition to telling you to keep looking because great jobs are out there, I think you need to look at how you can make your current role better. Try to see what can improve the culture, nudge things in the right direction. It might not be big and it might take some time, but you can certainly make progress. And when you leave, your office will be better for it.

</comment><comment><USER4> You need to find _your_ passion and a job that fits it decently.

My dad was career military and my ex husband was career military. When I was a military wife and full time mom, I was doing things that mattered. Military spouses are part of the system. Spouse support groups are integral to the military mission. "Loose lips sink ships" and all that.

I got divorced and I got a corporate job. A lot of folks working there were incredibly jazzed to br there. That job was the biggest thing that ever happened to them and their identity ad an employee of BigCo loomed large in their eyes.

Not so for me. Lives and national security did nothang in the balance. It was just a paycheck to me.

I now do freelance work so I can keep myself healthy and free. I am more jazzed about figuring out how to do this well and make more money at it than I ever was about my corporate job. Figuring this out makes a real difference in my life.

You need to find your _Mission_ in life and pursue that. If uour job serves your misdion, great! If your job is just a paycheck but it frees you to pursue your mission in your free time, almost as good.

This is not going to come from stumbling across the right company. It is about what makes you feel most alive -- and that varies from person to person.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that you understand the problem is with you. You are looking at that experience through a lens that distorts the reality of the situation. You left that job for a reason!

If you are constantly searching for that perfect combination, you are not going to find it. You are chasing the dragon. And even if you find it, it will eventually change and become unpalatable to you.

The answer is within you. You can change the environment you are in. Expend considerable energy doing so. In the end, you might find you were right back in that happy place you were looking for.

</comment><comment><USER6> > How did you cope?

You must keep searching.

That exciting, fast-growing company on the cutting-edge IS out there. It will be different of course, but you'll recognize the elements.

You'll find it by refreshing contact old colleagues, talk to them live. Go to meet-ups and VC conferences, meet people. Share your scorecard. Ask who they know that's doing cool, interesting work.

Then really probe for fit-- culture/team dynamics, technology. The more conversations like these, the better your odds.</comment>


Mark Cuban, Facebook, and OpenSocial - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/facebook_google_opensocial_mark_cuban.html

<comment><USER2> Tim is really getting it right here-- and the analogy drawn here between the withdrawal of the Google SOAP API's in favor of the AJAX widgets is spot on.

Google/OpenSocial and Facebook/F8 severely limit the scope of the kinds of social applications that can be built. A widget living inside a controlled ecosystem is not an app!

That universal social aggregator we've all been dreaming about (and that friendfeed, readr, plaxo pulse, etc. have been trying for) is never going to happen when the data usage is so restricted.

Let me authorize my app (via oauth or similar) and get real data feeds (RSS/Atom/JSON) for me to mash up and leverage as I see fit! Why can't I get an RSS feed of my Facebook friends' news feed (and not just status updates)? And give me the firehose, let a thousand filtering algorithms bloom! Once someone creates a compelling social network host that lets me freely extract and aggregate all my friends' activity streams on demand, that'll be the real social web platform we've all been waiting for, and not just a widget host.

I think this is a real crossroads for Google and Facebook-- they've both been nominated as the next "Evil Empire", and how rigidly they control their developer and user ecosystems will determine if we'll learn to love or fear these companies in the next few years. Both have recently taken steps in the wrong direction.

NB: Someone should make a try at establishing a "social news feed" standard. An atom extension with an indication of event source, type, priority, etc...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Mr. OReilly has an interesting point about how all these different social networks that he is a member of portray an image of who he is... and my belief is that instead of having one ultimate platform such as Facebook with our social graph we might have to see it spread out between different networks ... each network will focus on something specific in our lives, and will hold information about us with regards to that particular niche, topic, group or activities that we have ... for instance I don't think facebook could ever replace Flickr or Ebay, and the two could have many info on me that represent me, my activities, reputation and social graph

</comment><comment><USER4> "When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don't. I'm not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere...."

" the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet" is not quite the same thing as "the real me" is it?

The rest of OReilly's article seems to base itself on where the "real me" resides. On facebook vs something else.

All very bizarre.

<comment><USER3> "The rest of OReilly's article seems to base itself on where the "real me" resides. On facebook vs something else."

I am not sure if it says where else it resides, I think every part of the real me (in this article Mr. OReilly's real me) resides in different parts, and in order to get _complete real me_ you then have to combine all these graphs (networks)

if phography is my hobby, then I will probably be very active on Flickr and my social graph there is just one angel of what the real me is ... it is the real me in the world of photography, or its the real me when I am playing the role of a photographer, which couldnt necessarily be copied easily with more general sites, like Facebook or Myspace

<comment><USER4> Good Point.

My point (poorly expressed no doubt) was that searching for the "real me" in _any_ combination of websites sounds bizarre (to me).

     There are large chunks of my life and personality my "real me")  that fall outside my activities on the web. Even with your photography example, hopefully there are aspects of your photography experience/intent/whatever that are *not* captured on flickr.

I guess i was just responding to the notion of the "realness" of a person being captured/capturable on the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also, I think perhaps a more descriptive title is warranted here...

waxy's title: Tim O'Reilly on Open Social and Facebook (he nicely articulates why both fall short, while reframing the problem with a solid prediction)</comment>


RIAA and MPAA call for government mandated spyware on computers to fight piracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/04/15/riaa-and-mpaa-call-for-government-mandated-spyware-on-computers-to-fight-piracy/

<comment><USER2> Link to original: [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/15/big-contents- dystopi.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/15/big-contents-dystopi.html)

Edit: link to _original_ original: [http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/entertainment- industrys...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/entertainment-industrys- dystopia-future)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why am I reminded of the passage from Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ where one of the characters says (approximately) "Any ubiquitous computing network where every local node has to run government code inevitably devolves into absolute tyranny."

<comment><USER4> Because that's about what this is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These people are really beginning to annoy me. They are under the impression that a few poxy songs are the most valuable things on earth. They had a fwe good years in the sunshine but now it is autumn in the land of sing a song for sixpence.

Your product has lost its value. Adapt or die.

I know it's a shock to wake up on morning without a steady income from the songs you sang a 10 years ago but tough, try doing something productive today.

And yes, I do know what it is like. I've had my lifestyle made illegal, TWICE.

> Network administrators and providers should be encouraged to implement those > solutions that are available and reasonable to address infringement on their > networks.

Fuck you, PAY ME</comment>


This One Leadership Quality Will Make or Break You - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2011/12/19/this-one-leadership-quality-will-make-or-break-you/

<comment><USER2> What a load of hogwash. Short version: Leadership is pursuit because it leads to attainment, and therefore leaders should study "pursuitology" in school (I'm not making this up).</comment>


Alone in the Dark - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2019/08/alone-in-the-dark/ <comment><USER2> Little Big Adventure is painted down in the article, but it is also a masterpiece. It plays uniquely, in a way that's hard to express.

I happened to find a copy in a discount bin almost a decade after it was released. Despite the dated graphics, the charm of the game feels absolutely tangible throughout the game. I completed the game and did so again after another 5 years through dosbox. I bought the sequel (LBA2) because of this, of which I have mixed feelings.

The controls of Alone and LBA always felt natural to me, so I cannot share this sentiment of confusion. The sudden camera jumps in Alone in the Dark can be confusing, but then again I actually played "Resident Evil" _before_ Alone (it was only then that I became interested in the genre).

I have to say that there are several french games that really stood out to me due to the artistic and general playstyle in general.

"Heart of Darkness", from Chahi of Another world fame stays true to his style. The "Gobliins" series from Coktel vision are similar to lucasart's games, but have a completely different humor/feel to them. Coktel Vision did several positively weird games (Inca 2, for example).

I played most of these games decades after they were made just for curiosity, simply going by the "I liked this game, let's see what the author/s also did". Sometimes you do really hop into masterpieces that stand the test of time.

If you have youtube channels that dig into this sort of stuff, I'd love to hear about it. I follow some retro channels, but I didn't see those really mentioned anywhere aside from the usual "Another World" and "Price of Persia".

<comment><USER3> Little Big Adventure was released by a french game company (in an "enhanced" version) in 2015 and is now available on Steam and elsewhere: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventu...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventure__Enhanced_Edition/)

<comment><USER2> Looking at the screenshots and description, I was immediately thrown off by the "enhanced gameplay" and the fact that interactive items in the level seem to be highlighted with the magnifier icon.

Being a fan of this game, I'd say that unless you can turn those off, play the original.

The fixed throw distance plays a crucial role in several of the puzzles. What's the point of interacting with the environment if you can go directly at the spot and pickup everything? There are, again, sections where only speaking with the villagers hints you at the right locations. This is _very_ important for the gameplay mechanics.

<comment><USER3> They can't help but mess things up can they. Although I've found some enhanced games like Resident Evil have managed to do it properly. But you have to have someone who really appreciate the original doing the update. Someone opinionated on the matter like yourself.

<comment><USER2> There have been countless bad games where players have to resort to a "probe everything" approach in order to find items which are needed to progress in the game.

But "good games" generally strike a balance between all the gameplay mechanics and that's precisely how they came to be known to be good.

You wouldn't change the way mario jumps in order to reach higher places and call it "enhanced gameplay".

Similarly you wouldn't show every hidden question box with a blaring icon so that you'll always know where all the secret boxes are.

These two elements are defining features of the game. You don't change that.

I think the current approach is to make games so approachable to "casual gaming" that anything deep loses meaning. Many old games that I consider beyond "good" wouldn't fly today. But adapting these games to a more modern hand-in-hand approach will simply destroy them.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, games are turning into a Disney themepark tours of cool cinematic experiences.

This is why indie game people are doing so well, they are limited in scope and are forced to make actual games.

I still think the gaming scene is in a good place though. Always tons of good stuff around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to love this game and all but forgot about it til I saw this pop up here. When I was about 12yo or so I emailed Infogrames asking about the game's development as I was interested in games programming back then, one of the developers emailed back and forth with me a few times, pretty cool.

Back then the cool library I found for developing games was Allegro for the DJGPP C/C++ development env for DOS. My brother and I started creating video games. It was so much fun trying to figure everything out and research things online. I seem to remember Yahoo kind of had curated directories of sites related to games programming.

My brother ended up working in the games industry for years, whereas somehow I ended up doing more web and data programming stuff. It pays better but sometimes I get excited about what it may have been like going the route of games dev. Ah, life.

<comment><USER5> > one of the developers

Wasn't the game developed by a single dev (Frédéric Reynald)?

<comment><USER6> yes it was Frederick Raynal who made it. I don't think he was alone, a team called Adeline Software (a wink at Delphine Software) worked on it for the first episode at least.

<comment><USER7> It's all laid out in the article. Adeline was the Delphine studio Raynal joined when leaving Infogrames, after Alone in the Dark was published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Raynal's lifestyle was becoming so unbalanced that his family was beginning > to worry about him. One day, he ran out of his room in a panic, telling them > that all of the color had bled out of his vision. His mother bustled him off > to an ophthalmologist, who told him he appeared to have disrupted the > photoreceptors in his eyes by staring so long at a monitor screen. > Thankfully, the condition persisted only a few hours. But then there came a > day when he suddenly couldn't understand anything that was said to him; he > had apparently become so attuned to the language of computer code that he > could no longer communicate with humans. That worrisome condition lasted > several weeks.

This sounds hard to believe. A lot more people use computers nowadays, for equally long periods of time if not more, and neither of these symptoms seem to be a thing. So... what's going on here? Embellishments to the legend?

<comment><USER9> Burnout perhaps ?

I think depression can cause color perception loss (not complete, but colors fade out).

Also when getting used to a second or third language (i.e. french _ english) one can temporarily get overwhelmed and have difficulty to switch to either of them. I never came accross literature on this, but personaly experienced periods of a day or more where I felt I just couldn't speak anything. Asking friends moving to foreign countries some of they hit the same issue.

At that time at least in France "specialist" would tell the most random diagnostics with a straight face and it was pretty normal to go get a second opinion for anything more than a cold. Nowadays they know patients have at least googled symptoms and try to ecplain more of their thinking behind diagnostics IMO.

<comment><USER10> > At that time at least in France "specialist" would tell the most random > diagnostics with a straight face and it was pretty normal to go get a second > opinion for anything more than a cold.

Huh, what part of France are you from ? There was and there still is nothing wrong with the quality of care or doctors training in the country, compared to other places (quite the contrary, in fact)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's also a great "Classic Game Postmortem" video from 2012 by Frederick Raynal, too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4)

</comment><comment><USER12> If I remember correctly, after I upgraded my PC, Alone in the Dark was the only game where I had to turn the Turbo button off to be playable... otherwise it would be so fast that the first monster would come at you from the window within seconds. And of course, walking was running like Usain Bolt.

<comment><USER13> As a kid, I never understood how the CPU could be too fast for the software. I'm not sure I do now either though. I get timing issues on ROM emulators for the old games using quirks due to NTSC/PAL issues. I know there were other programs that did not work with the Turbo button engaged that were not games where timing might be much more crucial.

<comment><USER14> You have to explicitly write your code to prevent this from happening. You typically have an engine that is executing all of your logic (rendering, game logic, AI, etc.) in cycles. By default, it will execute these cycles as quickly as possible. So for anything with real-time components, faster CPU = enemies move faster.

I forget which game first introduced a fix for this, but the solution is to have the engine run on time-based ticks -- you wait to execute the next cycle until the requisite time has passed.

<comment><USER15> Another alternative is to say, "How much time has passed since the last frame?" and update the game state based on that.

When your computer can't hold a constant framerate, the game doesn't slow down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree on all major points but one: I genuinely enjoyed Shadow of the Comet. Then again, I've also played CoC in campaigns based on that adventure. Never ran it yet as a Keeper, though. Alone in the Dark, Lovecraftian as it might be, definitely represents several turning points in my life. The turn to an appreciation of slow horror, of appreciating the safety of real isolation. And while he's mostly demonized, I have to thank the boss at Infogrames who insisted that Alone in the Dark run on a 286. I didn't have a 386 or a 486 when it came out. AitD was my first brush with 3d, and while it did send me back to 2d for a long while just out of mortal terror, I've come around realized that like all art forms, there's a time and place for both in the world.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, unexpected reference to Popcorn. I had no idea it was connected to anything else, let alone Alone in the Dark. I remember trying to puzzle out a lot of Popcorn's menus and documentation since it was all in French. It was like Arkanoid, with power-ups designated by a letter, but all for French words — "V" for an extra life is one I remember. I made myself a little cheat sheet to keep by the computer. This was on an XT/CGA era DOS computer.

(Also the Alone in the Dark backstory is fascinating as well, but the Popcorn reference caught me off guard.)

</comment><comment><USER18> This hits home, being born and growing as a kid in Lyon, having played AITD on the family's 386 in 1993/4 or so, and later practiced rowing for years on the Saône river right in front of Atari's ship-shaped buildings, even giving some rowing lesson's to Atari/Infogrames team during a company event (and to Bruno Bonnel himself, who has been later into robotics and today in... politics).

</comment><comment><USER19> Filfre is a great resource, an exhaustively researched one man work of love and a veritable rabbithole for who grew up on games in the eighties. Check out at the very least the articles about The Hitchhiker's Guide, about Elite and, one of my favs, about the curious creation story of Neuromancer (the game), which surreally enough involved LSD guru Timothy Leary.

<comment><USER20> I made a list of Filfre pages I liked after reading through the entire archives: [https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital- antiqua...](https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-antiquarian)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Alone in the Dark was very similar to an H.P. Lovecraft story and if that was what you were looking for that is what you would find. Relentless Twinsen's Adventure was an intense fever dream of a fantasy that kept the player going on pure suspense and wonder. It had the dramatic finesse of Loom or a good sci-fi novel. When I purchased it I had only assumed it to be mindless entertainment. It turned out to be a statement on the human condition that was too valuable to let everyone know about. I diligently played it after school for many days giving the game my full attention. When I was finished I felt like I grew up a little and society at large did not let me down concerning the harsh truths revealed in this game. This is why I'll never forget Relentless- the general malaise and apathy of the time in history it was released deeply contrasted against the wake-up call contained within the lessons of its gameplay. Both games we're ahead of their time and technically very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not mentioned: It was apparently possible to complete the game in a "pacifist run". Every fight could be avoided with exceptional attention to the fiddly details that the article rightly criticizes.

I managed to get as far as the kitchen without shooting any zombies (put the bowl of food on the table, duh), but couldn't figure out anything beyond that.

</comment><comment><USER23> A friend and myself pitched a game idea for similar to this at DSI Vancouver (soon to be EAC) around 1990. It didn't hit fertile ground where I guess sports games were the go to idea. 3D, Lovecraftian, same camera ideas. I'm glad this one was made.

</comment><comment><USER24> Amazing article. As a teenager, I'd always looked back at emulations of this game with a wonder of how the graphics and visuals came to be.

Surely it set the stage for a decade of fixed-set-pre-rendered games such as final fantasy and resident evil. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER25> Everyone in my neighborhood had the demo version of this game. It's awesome, but we could never leave the first room (and it wasn't for sale in my country).

I might as well play it today to overcome this childhood frustration :)

<comment><USER26> Where would that be?

<comment><USER25> Brazil

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I loved this game when I was young. I finally had access to three floppy disks and tried in my 286, only to be frustrated that my CGA monochrome monitor was not supported...

I would play at my friend's house... good times

<comment> ryan-allen I couldn't figure out how to play it, I just kept dying constantly but I was intrigued none the less.

I plan to one day give it another go as an adult :) Fortunately it's available on GOG! [0]

[0] [https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark](https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I fondly remember this. It scared the bejesus out of the 8 yo me.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there a way to play the game today, with a CRT screen emulator? I imagine the graphics will hold up a lot more faithfully to memory.

<comment><USER30> >with a CRT screen emulator

Game is VGA only. VGA did line doubling. There are no black bars every other line people mostly associate with using CRT TV.

<comment><USER29> I played the game on a CRT monitor back in the day, would like to emulate that look. You're correct, there were no visible black bars on VGA PC monitors.

The screen was fuzzy so it actually looked a lot better than it does in an LCD monitor due to a natural "aliasing" effect from bleed/blur/glow.

I know video game emulatores like MAME have good ones but didn't know there was a filter for DOSBox, will try that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I actually remember when it came out. Played it briefly with my sons (8-10). We couldn't get past the opening scenes, died so many time in the first hour of playing, for no apparent reason with no apparent solution, that we gave up and never played it again.

So I don't have any fond memories of it whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like how most of my favourite games of all time started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I played the Acorn 3000 port of this in the mid-nineties as a eleven or twelve year old. The early part where zombies are coming through the trapdoor and window were really scary for me at the time, but what a game. Only finished it when I revisited it years later.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's a Let's Play series for those who want to get nostalgic: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2aaXr8I3bCRKN)

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice; thanks for the throwback, I played the dickens out of that game.

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh man, I played Popcorn on our 386sx with grayscale screen. Haven't thought of that game in almost 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER36> Then they immediate ruined the franchise with the second.</comment>


If it costs $1.7B to develop a drug, can we expect to lower drug prices? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Considering-that-on-average-it-takes-10-years-and-costs-about-1-7-billion-to-develop-a-new-drug-and-move-it-through-clinical-trials-only-a-fraction-of-potential-medicines-actually-receive-FDA-approval-how-much-can/answer/Richard-Murphey?__nsrc__=4&__snid3__=4571942478&share=1 <comment><USER2> I guess the real question is how to reduce the price of developing new drugs.</comment>


Homemade spacecraft reaches 100,000 ft, films the whole way - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/homemade-spacecraft-reaches-100000-ft-films-the-whole-way-2010102/

<comment><USER2> If you plan on duplication read this:

<http://www.eoss.org/pubs/faqloon.htm>

and please pay special attention to the 'notice for airmen'.

I'd hate to be on board a plane colliding with this, and even if the chances are small the outcome could be bad enough that I think that a toll free phone call is not too much to ask.

Great experiment otherwise!

</comment><comment><USER3> At an altitude of 100,000 ft (30.48 km), the balloon reached the stratosphere portion of our atmosphere. The space shuttle and other spaceships reach the thermosphere, which is the layer between 95km and 600km. The space station orbits at an altitude of 350km. The edge of space, called the Karman line, is 100km above the Earth, meaning that the ballon technically did not enter "space". Regardless, this experiment and it's footage are fantastic.

More info at Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth>

<comment><USER4> In addition to altitude, another important distinction is velocity. You need to be moving at around 7.5 km/sec (17,000mph) to stay in LEO. Ballons aren't going to help much there. And any orbital spacecraft is going to need some serious shielding if you want it to come back in one piece. Some of the pictures of this Soyuz landing give an idea of the engineering needed: <http://cryptome.org/info/soyuz-tma18/soyuz-tma18.htm>

The pictures and video are pretty, but calling it a spacecraft is exaggeration. You can't see the curvature of the earth at that altitude. It only appears that way because of the wide angle lens.

I hate to rain on this parade, because high altitude balloons are really cool. They're just not spacecraft and I can't stand exaggerated titles.

<comment><USER2> Nobody is trying to do science here, that's one _very_ cool dad and as far as his son is concerned it might as well be space.

Petty bickering over definitions doesn't matter much, after all no balloon could take you to the 100Km mark simply because they'd explode long before you got there (as did this one), but 30Km is three times as high as your typical passenger jet will fly and that's good enough for most people.

The article about the Karman line literally reads:

"Some people (including the FAI in some of their publications) also use the expression "edge of space" to refer to a region below the conventional 100 km boundary to space, which is often meant to include substantially lower regions as well. Thus, certain balloon or airplane flights might be described as "reaching the edge of space". In such statements, "reaching the edge of space" merely refers to going higher than average aeronautical vehicles commonly would.[5][6]"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line>

<comment><USER5> There's a distinction (which admittedly might only be in my head) that a balloon _requires atmosphere_ to work, which means it can't get into _space_, since buoyancy in the surrounding air runs out by the time you get to "space" where there _is_ no "surrounding air".

'course that's no more a technical definition of "space" than "100km" or "the Karman line"...

Still, that's a cool project!

<comment><USER2> Well, that depends on what you mean by 'work', if with work you mean go up for ever then the answer is a clear 'no'.

However the 'envelope' for just about any balloon that is not built with extreme altitude in mind lies within rather than on top of the atmosphere.

A balloon will go up until the pull of gravity is balanced by the lift, and in most balloons that point will not be reached until the balloon bursts from a lack of counter-pressure by the atmosphere.

<comment><USER6> Why should they burst? Certainly a little rubber balloon will - but the difference between a good helium balloon and vacuum isn't much - a thin foil layer would contain it without bursting.

<comment><USER7> The bursting is a fairly good automatic cut-down. If it doesn't burst, it will ceiling at some point, and then zoom around until something happens.

You might get some more height with a stronger balloon (or a larger balloon with less gas) but you want the flight to be over in a reasonable time if you ever want to get the payload back.

So then you have to use nichrome wire or something as a cutdown, just something else to worry about. 100k-ft is pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amusingly, helium is a fossil gas. (It's extracted from the top of natural gas reservoirs.) Once we run out, there won't be any more, and the only way to make more is through nuclear transmutation, or extraterrestrial mining. No matter how you look at it, filling balloons with helium and giving them to children is going to be too expensive in the near-ish future.

Also, attaching an iPhone to a weather balloon seems like an expensive and roundabout method to destroy a phone, if the parachute fails, or if it hits water hard enough to break the seal on the instrumentation capsule.

<comment><USER9> The iPhone never left the ground; they used it to receive the GPS signal from the balloon.

<comment><USER2> If you listen to the audio track of the video there clearly is the tell-tale chirp of a cell phone connecting in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They make it look so easy. I bet many parents would be willing to buy such a kit. Does anyone sell this yet?

<comment><USER11> Someone mentioned that you need to notify the FAA and such before doing something like this. I think the regulation surrounding this would make it hard for most parents to do even with a simple kit.

On the other hand, I used to love playing with Estes Rockets(<http://www.estesrockets.com/>) as a kid (Which I still am since I still love those things ;p) . Those don't go far enough to be an issue.

<comment><USER12> IIRC launching a weather balloon is regulated differently than launching a rocket that will enter/cross regulated air space. Still, you're going to get into a huge load of shit if you get caught without getting prior approval.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't people worry about where these things land? That's pretty fast to be landing on someones head!

<comment><USER2> Or on a highway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If they actually strapped an iPhone into the capsule, then it would have been interesting to capture accelerometer data too.

<comment><USER15> FWIW - sounds like they did use an iPhone:

"We used the instatracker app. You can use buddyway as well but we found it unreliable and too complex. A friend lent us her old 3G with a cracked screen."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Coolest Dad ever!

</comment><comment><USER17> Somewhat related, one wish of mine is to be lifted by a balloon to the degree that I can still walk and run, but I can also jump 20 feet if needed.</comment>


The double-arm barn door tracker - <AUTHOR> http://education.jlab.org/tracker/ <comment><USER2> This has nothing to do with tracking barn doors, and everything to do with time-lapse photography for astronomy and telescopes.</comment>


ABA Problem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem <comment><USER2> It's unfortunate how many CS graduates I talk to who haven't heard about this pretty simple concept. It's the kind of thing you get once you hear it and it's important to be aware of. Fortunately, many CS graduate do learn this as well.</comment>


Http://searchyc.com/ down? - <AUTHOR>

Ironically, I was checking into HN to find "Down for me" and I wanted to use SearchYC, but it appears to be down for me!  And has been for a while.
So I turned to Google, found http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/searchyc.com and it's not just me.
Any news? <comment><USER2> Oops, just restarted the server. Incidentally, the server will be down at some point in the coming few days because I'm moving.</comment>