US diplomat: If EU allows 'right to be forgotten' …it might spark TRADE WAR - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/05/right_to_be_forgotten/ <comment><USER3> Many companies will go bankrupt if X will happen. X=(tape recording, internet, ATMs, privacy laws, any kind of regulation).

I can't really hear this argument any more. Sure, any regulation will have bad side effects, but who are we? A planet full of people or a planet of companies that want to maximize profit on our back? The world will not end if we are allowed some more privacy for us.

<comment><USER4> Think about what the "Right to be forgotten" means at a technical level. It means you need to permanently delete records from your databases -- not just mark them with a deleted flag as well as delete records from your backups and reports generated that may contain personal information. In addition your organization may also be held responsible for removal of data given to third parties.

This is a big deal and it has many concerned over how it can be implemented as well as enforced.

<comment><USER5> This means that the companies will not collect and maintain too much data about me to start with. There can be a reasonable amount of data - like name, DOB, address - that can stay public in any case. Other data will have to be deleted.

<comment><USER3> Any kind of personal data must stay privat unless I decide that can be revealed/public. Name, DOB, and address are personal data. I must have the right to prevent companies giving my address away (public or other companies).

<comment><USER5> That'd be the ideal scenario I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Europe is the largest economy in the world. If there is any merit to this article, then I wish the US luck, but I think they'll get a very short shrift. The EU has too many internal problems to bother pussy footing around with the US. It's a sleeping giant and I get the feeling it's about ready to start putting it's foot down, purely to save itself.

<comment><USER7> Europe is a bunch of countries. I'm sure we can arbitrarily choose any other group of countries that will make it a bigger economy than Europe. So saying that Europe is the largest economy in the world is kind of silly. Largest to what? To other continents?

<comment><USER8> By "Europe", the parent means the E.U. The fact that is has a parliament, a supreme court, a set of laws and a unified trade policy means that it can (in some situations, such as this one) be compared with other federations of states. Such as... the USA!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> it always bothers me if US-officials threatening to take counter measures when countries strengthen civil rights.

His point is, private data is big business and the US gov needs data to grind. We, the US won't let your liberal boundaries interfere with that.

Well, in Germany one has the "Grundrecht", the fundamental right to stay in charge of ones own data.

There are of course many problems in daily life and our data privacy laws sometimes hitting those practical limitations.

Nevertheless, enclosure movement was key in the rise of the US and it remains that way. Strong arming weaker forces out of their turfs and making profits. That is the american way, not ours.

This enclosure movement of private data means "web 2.0 the capitalistic way". We take your data, profiting and you are not. Here, have some booze and blankets.

<comment><USER10> > Nevertheless, enclosure movement was key in the rise of the US and it > remains that way.

I always thought enclosure was a British thing..

<comment><USER9> enclosure movement in the sense I and e.g. Volker Grassmuck ([http://waste.informatik.hu- berlin.de/grassmuck/Texts/spinner...](http://waste.informatik.hu- berlin.de/grassmuck/Texts/spinner-wissenskomm.html)) used, means taking/claiming common land by putting a fence around it.

Thats how the wild west worked basicly. The natives haven't had the concept of property.

And we don't see our own private data as "our property" as well - which pages we use, which products we buy, which X we like, where we work, adresses and so on.

It isn't property, it is us and we should be able to decide what others do with those expressions. If companies earn money with it, we should profit from it as well. Don't you think.

Google profits from that and in exchange we can use their services. Often we do know that we are the product.

Having certain informations at certain online service deleted might just spawn new startups offering to do just that for your customers and your convenience.

Gaining the trust of customers is a good thing imho.

<comment><USER10> Well yes, enclosure/fencing was very very British thing. I was just surprised that someone referred to it as the American way.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure>

What happened in America was very ugly colonization, but arguably not the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's sad that a law like this is needed at all. It seems like a matter of common decency to remove data about someone upon request.

People that are willing to fight a trade war (whatever that is supposed to mean) over this are so far removed in their worldview from my own that it's actually quite shocking.

While we're at it I'd really appreciate if my bank data wouldn't be shipped off to the US. Pricacy terrorists at work over there.

<comment><USER12> Sure, it's common decency to be reasonable and delete data if requested. But this law seems to go a bit too far and make things a bit too difficult.

According to the linked article, the person you're requesting to remove the data is also liable for any third parties that have it - and should take reasonable steps to ensure they remove it. Can you imagine the logistics of Twitter removing every reference to all tweets by xyz in a timely fashion? How about Google removing data from their search engine and making sure any number of aggregators etc also remove it? How can a company even know what's being done with public data? The law says personal data - there's certainly people sharing personal data publicly, making this effectively impossible to enforce.

The EU are right to be thinking about how to apply their privacy directive to the internet age - the current situation isn't working. However, they need to be a bit sensible here and realise that when data has been made public with a person's permission (eg Tweeted), it's that person's responsibility, not eg Twitter's.

EDIT: That's not even considering backups etc - we expect these services to work, so it's reasonable to expect and permit them to make backups. If I want to be forgotten with a reasonable degree of confidence, I'd need them to delete information about me from all their backups too. Maybe your average Wordpress blog doesn't have a nightly backup, but if it's picked up by a tech site/Reddit/HN, you can be sure they do - so I'd want it deleted from all of their backups too.

An unenforceable law that claims that people have more protection than is technically reasonably possible is not an improvement in my opinion - <USER2> should know what's happening with their data, and shifting whose lying/misleading from companies to Government is not an improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like some comment by a junior official being blown _way_ out of proportion.

The EU and the US squabble all the time about trade - it would be pretty surprising if they didn't!

e.g. Consider the long running argument over Boeing and Airbus.

<comment><USER14> still his remark about us having a right to privacy but not a fundamental right to data protection just plain irks me.

Its typical weasel words from government officials who seem to find no method unreasonable if it lets them circumvent the intent of the Constitution. They love to forget it was a document which limited the government, not us.

<comment><USER13> It wouldn't surprise me if they set up some relatively junior diplomat to make statements like this to test the water and to allow deniability if it all goes too wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyways, a "right to be forgotten" sounds like a nice idea, doesn't it?

<comment><USER16> As a web developer for a smallish company with detailed customer records I'm happy to add this as a feature.

I'm not sure what to do about my backups but hopefully common sense will prevail on that front.

I'm also curious about industries that need to retain all financial transaction records for a certain amount of time. They are going to have to be exempt from this as well.

<comment><USER11> Not just industries.

"Dear European country X, would you kindly remove all my personal data from your databases" is probably not something they want.

Guess an opt out app for the tax database would be an all time bestseller though :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would such a privacy provision spark a trade war? Is the US going to increase import tariffs because the EU legislates stronger privacy protections? This makes zero sense to me.

<comment><USER18> They are talking the talk. They (the US) is unlikely to actually walk the walk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't like this trend of US sparking trade wars everywhere. In the end it's a lose-lose outcome, for both parties. Do they really not want companies to do business in Europe over this?

I think it's just an empty threat. And I really hope EU doesn't cave in to their demands. They've done it plenty of times already, and I don't remember hearing much about "US caving to EU demands".

</comment><comment><USER20> Side rant: first 5 paragraphs of the article are nearly the same each (yeah, I know, it's a title, a lead, and 3 paras to be precise). This, plus "TRADE WAR" in capitals in the title, made me feel like on some cheap tabloid site.

<comment><USER21> El Reg _is_ a cheap tabloid site.

<comment><USER22> Indeed, and they're distinctly aware of it, in their tongue-in-cheek way. Check out their price list! <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/22/register_tariff/>

It would be nice if they had a full-time web designer or two on staff, though. Site's a bit horrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> its fine we will stop doing business with the usa. it won't hurt us as much as it will hurt them.

</comment><comment><USER24> I firmly believe we need regulation to

a) allow us to know who has obtained / stored individually identifiable information about us (presumably the storing party is opbliged to publically record who they have identifed and when where how - a cottage industry of letting us know will grow up)

b) allow us to block such recording - that is if we blacklist ourselves (right to be forgotten) then you cannot publish our details but must notify us at a contact point (ie email) and adhere to some wipe-orders.

c) this does not apply to warrented-supervised surveillance. But applies to governments et al.

This is not quite what the EU is proposing (there seems to be no "workability" to the proposals) but it is close.

In the end, technology has transformed a basic assumption about life - that we can only be identified by people within eyeshot. Now that has gone completely, and we need to rethink what we mean and expect from privacy.

As it has been said, secrecy is what other people don't know, privacy is what they politely ignore. We need to make sure companies are polite.

</comment><comment><USER25> From the OP: _Under the draft Regulation individuals would enjoy a qualified 'right to be forgotten'. That right would enable them to force organisations to delete personal data stored about them "without delay". Organisations that have made the data public would be liable for the data published by third parties and would be required to "take all reasonable steps, including technical measures" to inform those groups to delete the information._

Talk about a blow to the First Amendment. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt and say that this law doesn't force news sites to remove old stories from the web that identify people.

According to the OP's interpretation, if someone uses Twitter to tweet something racist/sexist/utterly despicable and then deletes it after getting called out on it, that person could sue Twitter ten years later if I happened to reply and quote that Tweet? Or if I referenced it in a blog post? And Twitter would be expected to take any technical means necessary to silence me?

How is this law not the SOPA of information?

<comment><USER26> Doesn't _Organisations would be able to oppose the deletion of information if they could show they have a right to publish the data under the fundamental principle of freedom of expression or if it is in the public interest for the data to remain in existence._ take care of it?

It wouldn't be hard to argue that that tweet serves the public interest by allowing the sunlight to shine on it in public.

Obviously this is a Register article so it's light on details, but it seems to me that this is targeted at organizations and you send them a message that says, "delete everything about me" ie a collection of data, not "delete this one thing about me" ie a member of data. How that is codified into law is unclear.

<comment><USER25> So this is where you and I disagree. You are seeing this as "well, ideally, the law would be seen this way" and I'm thinking, "well, this is how lawyers will try to interpret the law to bring litigation forward"

We aren't ideologically opposed, we have different pragmatic expectations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We should not go to war between EU and US, no matter what kind of war it is, even if it's just a trade war. This mess is caused by the banks. Its history repeating itself all over again, in the 1920's there was a huge stock market boom funded by cheap credit from the banks, then the stock market crashed we got the great depression and Europe and US went to war against Hitler. Now 1990-2013 we have had cheap credit from the banks causing a housing boom, when it imploded the central planning central banks intervened creating new money saving the bankers. First the imploding house market will cause joblessness because there is less profits from housing speculation to consume for secondly the new money that the central banks give to the private banks will later cause high inflation as more money are chasing the same amount of goods. This high inflation will cause tensions high food and fuel prices, there will be joblessness but the fault is the banks. What we have had now is bank socialism, bailing out of the rich.

Same thing happening again as in the 1920s, but now it's the Middle East. Same cause, different players. Lets not repeat old mistakes.

<comment><USER28> How is a disagreement about data protection principles anything to do with the banks?</comment></comment>


Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-says-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-jump-idUSKBN1CV1JP <comment><USER2> It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter.

Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their stock goes up, the market should dive.

<comment><USER4> What an ignorant comment. Who has Trump committed genocide on? Who is a self- proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?

<comment><USER5> > Who has Trump committed genocide on?

Genocidal doesn't necessarily mean he's committed genocide; it means that he's prone to (and to some extent, fascinated by) mass acts of killing. The tweets about promising fire and fury on an entire nation of people (North Korea), telling Fox that we need to kill the terrorist families as well, etc. He gets off feeling like he's the most powerful man in the world.

He's a strongman, whose solutions often involve labeling entire categories of people as bad/evil (Muslims, Mexicans, the media). If you haven't noticed this you're either not paying attention or willfully ignorant.

<comment><USER6> Threatening a country that is threatening us isn't exactly genocidal. Killing families of terrorists is deeply immoral and murderous - but it's also in keeping with current U.S. policy (see Anwar al-Awlaki - both Trump and Obama administrations have killed Awlaki's children). Terrorists aren't a race though, so wanting to kill them and their families isn't genocide.

<comment><USER7> Don't confuse yourself. It's not the millions of people El Cheeto would kill in a nuclear strike on DPRK that are threatening the US, it is effectively one trump-like individual in charge of DPRK that is threatening the US.

<comment><USER8> Government has consequences. That's why democracy is so important. This is especially true with regards to foreign policy. If a country threatens another such that the threatened country's only viable defense is to attack the civilians of the aggressor, that would be a totally legitimate tactic of war.

Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans, since North Korean artillery is spread widely throughout the southern part of the country. That is tragic, and no small part of why we've allowed this madness to go on for so long. But at some point a people must protect their security, and do what must be done.

<comment><USER7> > That's why democracy is so important

Too bad there is not a true democracy in the US.

> Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter > attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent > North Koreans,

How about we concentrate on their leadership, instead of 'spraying and praying'?

<comment><USER8> That's not so easy. Decapitating the regime, even if we could reliably kill all the key officials, does not necessarily prevent a lengthy barrage of artillery on South Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "may become profitable for the first time next quarter after ... ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies"

Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?

<comment><USER10> They've acquired the company Gnip a few years ago, which then became the exclusive reseller of Twitter firehose data.

Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin.

There's an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.

<comment><USER11> When they bought GNIP they ended their partnership with DataSift. It was a major blow to DataSift. It was a shrewd move on Twitter's part. My company switched over to using GNIP and our DataSift sales rep told us tons of other customers switched too and that he was leaving because of it.

<comment><USER10> Yep, that's correct. The recent lawsuit against LinkedIn about crawling [1] is interesting, though. It sets the precedent that third parties cannot be blocked from crawling, which technically means anyone could do this with Twitter as well.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft- linked...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linkedin- third-party-data-access-judge-ruling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >San Francisco-based Twitter also disclosed that it had discovered an error in how it had measured its user base since 2014 and revised its estimates downward

How is this possible? They can't just do like fetch_all_users, filtered by "not banned?"

<comment><USER13> Monthly actives is generally the primary metric and it's not so easy to calculate.

<comment><USER14> Do you mean it's not easy to _define_? It shouldn't be difficult to calculate any particular metric going forward, but it's inportant to define what it means to be "active."

<comment><USER15> Calculating these metrics at scale is not trivial.

<comment><USER16> In real time, yes.

But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy.

Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.

<comment><USER17> I helped build Twitter's data platform, 2010-2016.

There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a "user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way that would be done for smaller businesses.

By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active users, and for high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some "last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.

That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark / distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.

Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward definitions would surprise you.

@baddox nailed it.

<comment><USER16> Thanks. Note that I wasn't trying to guess at what twitter does, just to provide a workflow that _should_ be viable almost anywhere, in the absence of easier options. It's good to hear that the underlying idea of " _calculating_ the metric isn't the hard part" is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Twitter, like FaceBook, should be an open, distributed platform. They are too valuable to remain under the control of a person or small group of people. They are communities and their value slides, and danger to society increases, when they are under centralized control.

<comment><USER19> Who is gonna pay to host the open distributed platform? Surely not the users

<comment><USER20> I don't have any figures, let's just 5 servers running containerized environments, with a couple of decent uplinks, it is feasible to handle bandwidth of a million users for a few thousand a month.

With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no funding or IPO's needed...

In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc. ) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Regardless of my thoughts on Twitter as a product, I'm glad they're profitable and might be around for a while.

They've released a lot of good open source software - their Scala stuff is great, and it seems like the company allows and even encourages their engineers to not only open up their code, but also gives them the time to document and help the community.

</comment><comment><USER22> > and ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies

Which companies are buying this data? Considering its estimated that a third (1/3) of twitter activity is from bots retweeting, liking, and following. Not sure how much real value there actually is in this data. Twitter may turn a profit, but there are bigger issues with their model

</comment><comment><USER23> When Hacker News top threads does all the overinflation talk for you

2.Twitter says could turn first-ever profit, shares jump (reuters.com)

3.Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years (nytimes.com)

</comment><comment><USER24> By now, couldn't they just automate everything and lay off 90% of the staff? I bet that would make it profitable. I'd like to see their cost structure.

<comment><USER25> automate what exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> More and more these social media platforms feel like scheme's. Round after round of funding without ever reaching profitablity

<comment><USER27> There's always the option to simply not invest. For those platforms still in a pre-IPO state, you probably _can 't_ invest, even if you want to. For Twitter, it's easy enough to not buy the stock, and, indeed, if you bought in Jan 2014, you probably wish you hadn't. But if you bought yesterday, you're probably happy enough right now.

<comment><USER28> > But if you bought yesterday, you're probably happy enough right now.

Get out while you can enjoy a profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I know it's the huge growth story that wallstreet seeks but it's an invaluable resource, Twitter is. It should be bought by one of the big 5 tech firms if just to keep it alive in the public interest.

<comment><USER30> It should be part of the big 5 or that was the thinking 5 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can I also say one more thing without getting downvoted? A good reason why their stock is rallying today is also because of their ban on Russian Ad dollars going forward. Something that Mark could not do at Facebook.

<comment><USER32> Mark made much more, and would never release that. He chose to very publicly implement various fake news detection tools instead.

This one here was a token gesture, a rounding error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> They would be profitable in an instant if they'd get rid of half their employees? Im not sure why they need SO many people for Twitter. I believe they have over 4000, they could easily get by with 1000

<comment><USER34> Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

<comment><USER33> But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality show presidential candidate and _might_ have their first profitable moment after 10 years of existence.

Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.

<comment><USER35> "Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that it will destroy our future profitability"

Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid- term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.

<comment><USER36> I think SoundCloud's downfall would be it's huge investment into record label deals, it's paywalling to support said deals and then the lack of adoption for it's subscription service for access to those label's music.

Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.

Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Maybe they finally fix their crappiest android app. Or open api for third- party developers, because obviously Twitter doesn't know shit about designing apps.

<comment><USER38> Curious to know what about their app you don't like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think twitter found its source for profit: inflammatory politics.

</comment><comment><USER40> Twitter is pretty popular in South Korea

</comment><comment><USER41> Twitter just posted that it has inflated its user values for the past 3 years and lied to constituents, and now there stock price has risen. Why aren't more investors fleeing from these companies? It seems endemic that social media platforms are not just lacking in transparency, but completely trying to obfuscate it for profit.

</comment><comment><USER42> I predict some headlines:

"Twitter is in funding crisis now making revenue as a remedy"

"The tables have turned, Twitter now making money, what's next?"

"Twitter demonstrated first profit, VC-s are in shock"

"Twitter in decline, first profit is below expected after 11 years"

"A profitable Twitter is considered harmful"</comment>


We Will Call It Pala: A Story for the Psychedelic Movement - <AUTHOR> http://aurynfund.org/pala <comment><USER2> Brutal honesty: You just caught me k-holed at a rave in Toronto reading this and I feel like I have just lived a lifetime. Wow. Insanely well written. Also: glad I'm not one of the pioneers, unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> protip: dance at raves and put your phone down. :)

<comment><USER4> It's hard to dance k-holed. Any movement makes you want to throw up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my experience, Entheogens and money have a reluctant relationship. A 'psychedlic healing' business immediately sounds concerning to me. I can't find any convincing credentials beyond the author taking these substances at some point in her life. The author lambasts MBAs yet admits they themselves are a marketer. Not to mention, 'psychedelic industry' just sounds wrong.

What's the difference between psychedelics and anti depressants? Psychedelics have a religious component-- no, not the dogmatic, institutionalized sort you find in the likes of the roman catholic church; rather, the kind of spiritual experiences that help you come to terms with your existence, and your demise. More akin to a shaman than a pope.

While I think the world could use 'psychedelic churches' in a manner of speaking, I struggle to reconcile that with anything possesing a profit motive. lofty ideals alone will not lead to enlightenment.

<comment><USER6> A psychedelic church would just end up being a tax-dodge for drug dealers probably.

<comment><USER7> A church as a tax-dodge for drug dealers is not a new thing.

<comment><USER8> A church as a tax-dodge is not a new thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From a purely commercial perspective, I think we're seeing the birth of a huge growth industry in psychedelics.

It certainly feels like there's a lot of demand for alternative (i.e. non SSRI/CBT) treatments for depression. At the same time, there are countless anecdotes of psilocybin/LSD having a profound success on people with these types of mental health conditions.

My prediction is that psychedelics will replicate the success of the marijuana industry, albeit in a much more restricted/regulated environment.

</comment><comment><USER10> Beautiful parody of a possible future, this was incredibly well written and designed.

As it stands it's not uncommon to pay around $200/night for Ayahuasca retreats (plus $75/night lodging), and 5-MEO DMT, $200 on the low end and $1K+ in places like Los Angeles, for a 10-20 minute experience beyond experience. I've met more than one shaman/business owner absolutely raking it in, booked solid, turning people away due to overwhelming demand.

Needless to say it's a lucrative market, not out of the realm of possibility to see big pharma getting in on the action if legalization moves beyond marijuana.

</comment><comment><USER11> > What vision do you hold in your heart for a psychedelic future?

"Psychedelic" is mind-manifesting and I see freedom of self expression, freedom of speech as a roadmap into the future, not only the narrow medical/therapeutic context. Healing is important but it excludes people that would self-assess themselves as healthy - so, most people.

While flying up to space to see Earth rotating under could be therapeutic and heal your depression, awaken a completely different borderless understanding of Earth as one whole - becoming an astronaut is not an adequate medical practice at this point, it involves a number of risks, depending where every person is to begin with.

Statistical prevalence of schizophrenia is 1.2% and it's often not diagnosed - so every 1 out of 100 people is a very high risk case that even best, most experienced professionals sometimes can't handle (check out what went on with Olivia Arevalo).

Like diving, rock climbing, base jumping, surfing - most safe psychedelic sessions will rely on other people who are more experienced and can help beginners in person. There is no app that could replace a PADI instructor 10m below water surface.

I think all business models of the future should factor high risk in and model scuba diving or rock climbing - our consciousness is very fragile and psychedelic trauma is real.

</comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful story. I've also been thinking about starting a psychedelic spa. "Light and plants" has been the central thing I've been thinking about for design.

</comment><comment><USER13> Funny that in Brasília "pala" is a slang for broken and for psychotropic experiences, in the sense that if a gadget of yours start misbehaving or stops working than you can say it "deu pau", same as "deu pala", it's also used when you're experiencing some drug effect, for example laughing uncontrollably is the famous "pala de riso" or "broken of laughing", lol

</comment><comment><USER14> The most important part of psychedelic therapy—as opposed to a psychedelic experience—is unsurprisingly the therapy.

In the studies at Johns Hopkins and other places, the protocol always includes a number of therapy sessions before the trip, and an often smaller of sessions number afterward to foster integration of the experience. In addition, there are two therapists present during the trip itself to monitor and assist the patient as needed.

That therapy plays a big role in the positive outcomes. I think these substances should be legalized for recreational use, but it's important to decide why you want to take one of them and frame the experience properly. I can imagine an iteration of the story where psychedelics are fully legal, with the result being that those competing businesses seeking cash cows don't make as much sense. In that world, psychedelic therapy is just another form of therapy, and doesn't also serve as the gatekeeper of an otherwise-unavailable controlled substance.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've recently become a certified Kambo practitioner and it may end up segwaying me into the problems posed here. I'd love to include work with entheogens (mushrooms/psilohuasca in particular), but I'm not fond of doing anything "underground". The efforts made in Oakland (and a couple of other places) are exciting; I really hope we do it right federally.

<comment><USER16> ( segueing )

<comment><USER15> Well I sure wouldn't be _walking_ in this day and age... ;)

(whoops)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This story is fiction? Man I did not get that until I googled for a few of the company and individual names and came up with nothing. What are the real analogous companies? Is this story actually illustrative of the recent history and state of this industry?

<comment><USER17> On [http://aurynfund.org](http://aurynfund.org) they say they are a fund for supporting a better variety of psychedelic medicine businesses (equitable,affordable, for all) but they list no portfolio companies or otherwise no references to any such companies. Weird.

<comment><USER18> It's still a legal grey area with the way the analogue act is written. Technically, just about any psychedelic COULD be treated as schedule 1 if it's intended for human consumption, because they all have fairly similar chemical structures and activity profiles. Best not to give prosecutors an easy list to run down if you're interested in furthering the cause.

<comment><USER17> I'm still confused about to what degree this entire story is fiction or not. Just different names or do such companies actually exist? I did google (honestly only for a minute or two) and didn't find any such clinics in actual operation in SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > It doesn't appear that there is such a thing as a flashback from LSD.

That's false. Many people report constantly seeing low-key visuals after LSD, and I myself sometimes see the familiar geometric patterns when I meditate with my eyes open. Still consider LSD a very positive and life enhancing experience for me, but this seems very ill-informed and badly researched. Despite my positive experience, I would be very catious about advising LSD to others, especially to people who haven't gone through extensive therapy first.

<comment><USER20> > Many people report constantly seeing low-key visuals after LSD

That's not the classical 'flashback' though, which is generally described as suddenly being back in the middle of it in an overwhelming way. It's more like a low-level HPPD (which is something of an oxymoron as HPPD is defined by being high-level enough to interfere in life).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For anyone who doesn't know it, the name Pala is a reference to the setting of a novel by Aldous Huxley - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_\(Huxley_novel\))

<comment><USER22> Can't recommend that book enough. Huxley nailed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I loved the story. It spoke to me.

I'm optimistic. Things work in cycles. I think I know what would happen next. First, the human touch component would move out of the commodified middle class model to high-cost gentrified models and to low/no cost homebrew models.

Second, the middle class psychedelic exposure would result in hundreds of thousands more psychedelically adept humans, inspired to create meaningful, connected change. More than a cure for disease, it would catalyze cultural adaptation.

As psychedelic chemicals commercialise and normalize, new mystical rituals would develop, secular but profound. Classical civilization will continue, integrating science and spirit, commerce and consciousness. As it was, as it will be.

Capitalism does this. It moves in cycles, growing and corrupting, growing and corrupting. But in the end, with gratitude, we appear to live in a good world that offers us a beautiful future.

<comment><USER20> How will society actually be different afterwards? Please be specific in your answer.

I've seen this sort of utopian thinking any number of times. If only everyone could just take a trip man, we would all live in love and harmony!

Except it's either just vague pipedreams and semi-mystical aspiration, or it's something more solid like communal living that in general disintegrates in the cold light of day.

<comment><USER24> My two cents - psychedelics can open your mind to a new way of processing information and thinking about your daily existence. Anecdotally, it's happened to me over the last 11+ years (not through psychedelics, but through other spiritual practices like meditation). The result is that I'm less angry, less judgmental, less likely to fly off the handle. Much better at processing information, removing clutter (bullshit), and disassociating from perceptions and feelings that used to define me.

In a very practical manner, this has made my interactions with everyone around me much..."better" doesn't feel like the right word but I'll use it here anyway. This is very simple - I'm "happier" (again, not the right word, but it'll do for now), I end up treating others better, which in turn has positive impacts on their lives and hopefully the lives of others that they engage with.

<comment><USER20> well firstly, as you said, you've done this without the aid of psychedelics, so I'm not sure it's exactly an answer to my question!

And secondly, well that's not exactly a societal change. Has it made you ready to ditch capitalism?

(edit -- I'm sure your change in mindset is a positive thing, I'm not disputing that. I'm also not disputing that psychedelics can have a profound effect on individuals. But as someone who has used a fairly wide variety of psychedelics over a number of years, I've also experienced and observed that they can induce a false sense of the deeply profound. They do also seem to leave people with this idea they could change the world, but they never really seem to know how)

<comment><USER25> If they play an important role in reducing the prevalence and severity of mental illness by an order of magnitude, I think that would be a huge boon to society, human well-being, and the advance of civilization. There have been a number of very promising studies.

It's hard to fully capture the damage that is done by debilitating depression or anxiety, for example. I think the statistics are that 20% of the entire population will experience at least one episode during their lifetime. And that number has been increasing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't think psychedelic therapy can or should be shoehorned into the "scale out and make VC/CEO rich" model

<comment><USER12> Until you realize that many millions are suffering and every day someone doesn't get treated is another opportunity for them to kill themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to live on a rez called Pala. I gave away many substituted tryptamines and phenethylamines there.

</comment><comment><USER28> I had a thought that this is even beyond the word psychedelia and extends more broadly to all modern health. But then, I think the word is just right, since psychedelia has as much to do with LSD as vitamins have to do with vitamin water. If you disagree with the analogy that's no issue, it's simply A Catchy Hook.

Psychedelic simply means expansion of the mind and is independent of any particular practice or substance.

Mindfulness seems to be another, or even, "the," new culmination word for "safe" psychedelia in the west (as contrast with the "unsafe" roll-your-own a.la burning man). We can tell it's the current culmination word because it's polarized, the one word with a significant amount of scientific research, but then at the same time oddly clinical and paradoxically overall too LuLu lemon & vitamin water. It just doesn't seem to have that same oomph as eating acid and stealing fire in the desert, but it's receiving medical approvals that pave the way for economics to benefit people at scale. Mindfulness seems to encourage passivity, but then it's practiced by navy seals. At the core, it's all wrong by placing too much focus on the mind, just like we've always done in Latin-based languages.

Whatever the word is, developing a perspective that we individually believe is worth cultivating is the root of a connection between well-being and performance.

It doesn't sound like a SASS app because it isn't. It doesn't seem like a good business idea because business is a dirty word, like mindfulness, people think there's a way to do it.

Two quotes stood out to me:

"But what we really need are psychedelic models for business - business that defines new standards for integrity, equity and ethics; business reimagined with a technicolor glow."

"What would I have done if I had known that this would happen?"

The second seems like exactly the right question. If you have an answer I'd love to chat, even just for fun.

<comment><USER28> Actually now I'm confused because I don't understand Latin. Psyche definitely gets at the mind idea, but also soul or spirit. Ick sounds like what I do before I vomit but I guess "delic" is really what we'd be concerned about, but then this seems like it's just talking about an experience of the first thing, an arrow pointing back to an amorphous blob of language. I'm not sure if it's better or worse that I brought my own preconceptions to the word at this point, or how my preconceptions are different from the thing itself. I'm seeing other interpretations talking about dissolution. It's certainly something big happening, that's for sure! In a way, I'm also confused about mindfulness. Is my mind full or is the fullness of mind different from that? Does it mean something that there's only one "L?"

Absolutely I think the next interesting discussions could either be about the word, or what to do.

Again, thanks to the author for properly choosing A New Brand, with existing baggage which perfectly typifies where discussions like this tend to go, see comments below.

<comment><USER28> WOW now I'm even more confused on how Latin is different from Greek.

I should not be listened to when it comes to the words.

<comment><USER28> Fuck your burn!

<comment><USER29> It was better next year.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vanilla JavaScript is a fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework - <AUTHOR> http://vanilla-js.com/ <comment><USER2> Every time this is posted I am suckered into exploring it and get excited all over again. The project has been abandoned because apps built on it are supported by too many browsers and OSs.

We're just not there yet. Maybe someday.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're joking right? It's hard to catch typed sarcasm...

If not - then maybe this should help explain how Vanilla JS works ;-) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm been a proud vanilla-js programmer for over 2 decades.

The only in-built thing really lacking is customizable dialogs, such as HTML modal and modeless dialogs, and starred password input control dialogs.

All of the typical JS packages are available for vanilla-js, like calendar and color pickers.

What's funny is that other developers' ears usually perk up when you mention being a vanilla-js programmer, and often want a demo to see how you can do entire apps without jquery, etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Vanilla JS is a fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications.

in response to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18012334#18017288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18012334#18017288)</comment>


The Future of Computing: Logic or Biology (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/future-of-computing.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm a mathematician. Math shares a lot in common with programming. So much that it's easy to conflate the two. This caused me a lot of misery.

The problem is that the constraints around the development of mathematics are entirely different than software. Math is abstract, and there's no tolerance for incorrectness. A single inconsistency and we throw out the entire thing. Math is also not stateful, it costs nothing to throw out a theorem.

Software is constrained in all directions: time, cost, performance, memory pressure, hardware compatibility, etc. For all that math shares with programming, practicing math shares very little with practicing programming. It was frustrating trying to design correct programs.

My misery ended when I started thinking about software as biological systems. Software isn't constrained by correctness, it's constrained by _fitness_. Software decays if it's not maintained. It needs a metabolism: it must capture free energy from the environment and use that energy to increase its fitness (eg, making money in commercial software, or being useful to its maintainers in free software). It must reproduce, "infecting" new hosts. Software grows through accreted complexity and mutation, not up-front design. Software is unfit for survival outside of its ecosystem; as the ecosystem changes, it must adapt. Software has competition, predators, prey, symbiotes, and viruses.

<comment><USER3> Another way software is similar to biology and physical systems is leaky abstraction.

Once you define something in mathematics, how you defined it does not matter. You can forget all irrelevant details. In the software irrelevant minute details make systems incompatible.

As an example, Norbert Wiener defined ordered pair as:

        (a,b) :=  {{{a}, Ø},{{b}}}

Hausdorff defined it as:

        (a,b) := {{a,1},{b,2}}, where 1 and 2 are two distinct objects different from a and b

Kuratowski's definition

        (a,b) := {{a}, {a,b}}

.. and there are many other definitions and variations, but still we have only one mathematics not many incompatible ones. Some mathematicians restrict them to subsets, but they don't create incompatible mathematics.

If you do something similar in programming languages, you get two different structures you can't use interchangeably without transformation (it incompatibility starts from little endian vs big endian and ending ends with vi vs emacs).

<comment><USER4> That is because mathematics tolerates informal proofs. Try to do formal mathematics (Coq, Agda, Isabelle/HOL, etc) and you will immediately see that it is not the case that {{a,1},{b,2}} = {{a},{a,b}}. Different definitions of "the same thing" are not "equal" but "isomorphic", and the isomorphisms are a bureaucracy that cannot be ignored -- unless you are doing regular, that is informal, mathematics and all this isomorphism business is just too tedious and 'obvious'.

The problem with programming is that it is always fully formal. It may be lacking in rigour, but it is formal nevertheless. A compiler cannot process informal code (syntactically or semantically) and there is nothing it can classify as "obvious". Hence you need to spell everything out.

Mathematics is like programming in pseudocode, that's why it's so neat.

<comment><USER5> > you will immediately see that it is not the case that {{a,1},{b,2}} = > {{a},{a,b}}.

This is true for the examples you gave i.e. Agda and Coq but this is not a theoretical restriction. As long as you can formalize equality with something like axiom of univalence, you can prove similar things (e.g. forall x, f(x) = g(x) => f=g which gives interesting applications like mergeSort = quickSort). Proving univalence constructively is pretty hard, but it's at least partially solved, e.g. cubic type theory can constructively prove univalence. Agda has a branch that has cubic type theory implemented, if you want to check it out. There is also an "official" implementation of cubic type theory by the team who wrote the original paper but it's a pretty lean programming language without even unification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is interesting in terms of producing useful though / mental discussion, yet on completing that thought I disagree with almost all of it.

\- Programs are not like cars. Programs are like cars. They are a manufactured construct created for a specific purpose, which does have relative degrees of correctness.

If I have a car with no wheels, it is not a "correct" car, it is at best a chair. No engine or drivetrain, similiar - not "correct" car. Oddly enough, no seat, possibly still "correct". Hiccuping or jumping behavior, it has a bug, or a glitch.

\- Software should be pure logic automata. In many respects I would argue this can be a "bad". Such software can be extremely limited - it does X, no more. Or, it can be very brittle. It does does X1, but if I try X2, it breaks. Software like biology is in many ways better.

I feed my software an apple, it eats it, producing work and waste. I feed my software a steak, similiar. I hand my software a baseball, it throws it. I hand it a football, it does similiar. I hand it an apple, it may eat it or throw it depending on the need.

\- Faith healing. This has been a meme since nearly the dawn of computers. "Have you tried restarting it?" Maybe kicking it. Wifi won't work? Bad spirits in your house. I worked with fluid mechanics for years, and many (non-trivial) simulations seemed about as likely to complete due to system noise as they did due to program correctness.

Further, there is a serious ivory tower attitude here towards magical thinking and superstition. Technology shamanism is a very real thing. People gravitate towards it often because it works. Its oddly scientific method. If I have my lucky rabbit foot, the program compiles. If I don't, system crash.

</comment><comment><USER7> Biological systems are logical too. The genome is the program that is hardwired into them. They also run on mathematics involved in chemical reactions. Even the simplest organism like the single-celled amoeba has more complicated and highly optimized algorithms programmed into its genome for survival than the most complex system (like the LHC) ever built by humans. An amoeba behaves the way it behaves because the laws of physics imbued in the mathematics of its chemical reactions caused it to overwrite its own gene code in such a way so as to optimize the mathematical probability of its own survival. Mathematics is merely an abstraction of our mind to understand the reality of our world. The programs that we create solve problems in our world, but are constrained by the same kind of variables that constrain biological systems, but both biological and software systems could be interpreted in terms of mathematics.

No real world biological or physical system is 'simple'. Every program starts simple, but even that is up to interpretation. A one liner program in any language is extremely complicated once you factor in the OS, the compiler and the interpreter that will actually run this program. Once the program intakes more complicated functionalities, and also multiple programmers, it becomes anything but simple. Simplicity is good to organize our thoughts and design systems, but it a whole different matter to expect that the designed system will also stay simple. Hence just like any other system in nature, software also has to evolve, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. A mathematical proof is not a panacea for the problems in software development. The purpose of software changes, its constraints change, and proofs will have to be rewritten everytime. You don't expect the underlying laws of mathematics to change, that is why once proved, a theorem stays proved. But in software it is expected that the system's underlying purpose will change with time. So proving the current state is what we can do, which is not of much consequence as time goes by.

</comment><comment><USER8> Related: [http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/math- knowledge.html](http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/math-knowledge.html)

I think the question itself sort of answered why programmers don't think programs as mathematical expressions.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an interesting article but I feel like it fails to actually illuminate what's behind the distinction between logic and biology.

"Biology is very different from logic—or even from the physical sciences. If biologists find that a particular mutation of a gene is present in 80% of people suffering from a certain disease, and missing from 80% of a control group, then that's a significant result. If physicists tried to report an experiment in which 80% of the events supported their theory, they'd be required to explain what happened in the other 20%"

This may be true but accuracy by itself is not a very "deep" distinction. If you have crude engineering, you can accept a low percentage of accuracy. If you happen to have done good bioengineering, 80% might not be good enough accuracy.

A much more illuminating quality of biological systems is A. they are much more complex and B. they are tolerant of variation everywhere, that biological systems with varying properties interoperate without major problems whereas computer components require very fine tolerances to operate together. Human organs vary from person to person yet different people remain alive. If a given computer component varies substantially, chances are the machine won't stop.

The variation of each component of a biological system relates to another property of biological systems - "self-organization"; each of the components of a biological system appears through a million-year long process of self- reproduction. So each component has a bit of something (feedback, intelligence, design, etc) which allows it to keep going even when inputs and outputs are imperfect.

And finally, there's the quality of lack of any overall idea. Genetic code involves a haphazard of grouping of "lasagna code" that merely happens to work, that X component accomplishes N tasks, M of which serve no current purpose that's OK. These M purposes functionalities may have served a purpose in the past and may serve a purpose in the future but maybe neither. The methodologies operating haphazardly by itself serves the purpose of having a variety of instances of an organism that can adapt when the environment changes.

</comment><comment><USER10> "An automobile is a piece of machinery, a program is some kind of mathematical expression" If I build a mechanical computer to output the digits of PI is that a piece of machinery, a program or a mathematical expression?

<comment><USER11> A computer is a piace of machinery capable of running programs. You're building a specialized hardware to run a program - so I guess it's still a piece of machinery even if capable of running one program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, while I wouldn't argue that program = automobile, I find the author's arguments unconvincing, especially the part about meaning. Both car and software are the tools and in case of every (well designed) tool it's easy to provide the answer to author's question: "what is it supposed to do?". For example, car is supposed to move people and goods quickly and safely. And I think proving that "meaning" wouldn't be harder that proving the meaning of any sufficently complicated software. For example MS Word :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps Prof. Lamport is giving too much credit our understanding of automobiles this time around:

"There are no homeopathic automobile repair shops, that try to repair your car by putting infinitesimal dilutions of rust in the gas tank. There are no automotive faith healers, who lay their hands on the hood and pray. People reserve such superstitions for things that they don't understand very well, such as the human body."

I don't think that is true. I routinely see automobiles that are 'blessed' on the streets of San Jose (quite likely the owners of these vehicles are developing software that this paper talks about).

<comment><USER14> True. This can be seen everywhere, from food to football. I believe it can be boiled down to two things: uncertainty, which makes some people desire reassurance from supernatural, and non-obvious failure modes, which makes _selling_ this reassurance pretty much risk-free.

<comment><USER13> Yes, most of us not do not seem to be able to resist the desire for the reassurance as you put it.

My reading of the paper is that it is more about the lack of mathematical (perhaps rational or logical may be the right word) approach to program development than proving programs or lack of proofs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is very fluffy for Lamport, nothing of real substance in this essay.

I did get a chuckle out of this: > In retrospect, thinking of programs as automobiles wasn't so bad. Automobiles are pretty simple. If their car stops working, people expect any good mechanic to be able to figure out why and fix the problem.

Ok, I guess a century of engineering has produced some pretty simple machines :) /s

<comment><USER16> If we were great at engineering, a century's worth would have ideally led to simpler machines. Simplicity = sophistication.

(Before you hate on me, please know that I mean things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Cars, I believe, are not as simple as possible. They are incredibly complex. That said, look at a Tesla. Mechanically speaking, they're impressively simple machines.)

<comment><USER17> You're in good company. Leonardo da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."</comment></comment></comment>


Satoshi's PGP Keys Are Probably Backdated and Point to a Hoax - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/satoshis-pgp-keys-are-probably-backdated-and-point-to-a-hoax <comment><USER2> If only we had some globally distributed tamper-proof database we could use to timestamp data...

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't seem credible to me that the real Satoshi would have to gin up some fake evidence that he was Satoshi. If he wanted to leave a trail of bread crumbs, presumably he could have found some real evidence to leave behind. The whole thing smells more and more like a hoax.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Maybe the dead American was Satoshi, the Aussie was more loosely involved, and is trying to pull a weekend at Bernie's.

It equally makes no sense that a man who has funds to assemble the Co1n machine with Tulip Trading would muck about with an elaborate hoax like this... It makes no sense in either direction.</comment></comment>


Checkpoint threat alert: SHODAN - <AUTHOR> http://blog.checkpoint.com/2016/01/04/check-point-threat-alert-shodan/ <comment><AUTHOR> For real, they suggest to block shodan IPs. Unbelievable.</comment>


TheKitchenSync - A Tool Belt for iOS Concurrency - <AUTHOR> http://tech.cueup.com/blog/2013/05/08/throwing-the-kitchen-sink-at-concurrency/

<comment><AUTHOR> As a small post-mortem, one interesting thing we learned while building this library: The reason Apple never included a read/write lock.

They're hard to get right (probably not a problem for Apple), and their overhead usually counterbalances any potential performance gains (possibly a problem for the unwary developer).

We've got some optimization work to do :-)

<comment><USER2> As opposed to what?

<comment><AUTHOR> As opposed to using a simple or recursive mutex while forgoing concurrent reads, in this case. There was an order of magnitude speed difference in raw lock/unlock performance.

Obviously this can still be useful in read-heavy systems where the lock has to be held for long spans, but for our synchronized collections, we switched to std::mutex, which was massively faster.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried GCD barriers for this? A custom parallel queue basically gives you a reader/writer lock, with dispatch_sync or _async acting as a reader lock, and dispatch_sync_barrier or _async_barrier acting as a writer lock. GCD has a heavy emphasis on performance so I'd be interested to know how the speed of that approach is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating. I'll have to give that a shot. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> I recently reimplemented some of the caches within RestKit using a `NSMutableDictionary` guarded by a dispatch queue instead of a `NSCache`/`NSMutableDictionary` + `NSRecursiveLock`. The general idea is that you use a concurrent dispatch queue to provide concurrent read access and then use barriers to obtain an exclusive write lock to the resource. There were significant performance benefits from the change as I was able to shift the cache updates on a miss into the background. The dispatch queue approach also outperformed `NSCache` significantly under the workloads I was testing -- it appears that some of its internal calculations on add/remove can be quite costly if you are adding/removing rapidly.

Its also very flexible, as you can do `dispatch_sync` if you need a synchronous fetch of the resource or use callback blocks to go as async as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking about this since yesterday, and it seems like a really good solution for some use cases, but isn't there quite a bit of overhead to using a dispatche queue for fine-grained operations? I mean it seems like the overhead of cross-thread communication would severely outweigh a simple synchronous lock call.

Then again, if you can do things like background non-essential operations, then the higher-level benefits can probably outweigh that.

<comment><USER3> Like I said, GCD has a heavy emphasis on performance. For example, a dispatch_sync will involve no cross-thread communication in the uncontended case, and the cost is comparable to taking a spinlock. A bit heavier, but not too much.

dispatch_async will necessarily be slower, but don't overestimate how much work is _really_ going to happen in the cases where it matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love that Objective C/Foundation provides a distinction between mutable and non-mutable collections and tends to favour the latter. (I also hate they make it impossible to test which a collection is.)

Pet peeve: "insure" is used on the page. For some bizarre reasons Americans use that word when they mean "ensure". The difference is very important - insure is when you don't want something to happen and ensure is when you do!

<comment><USER6> You can test easily! [array isKindOfClass:[NSMutableArray class]] or [array respondsToSelector:@selector(insertObject:)]

<comment><USER5> Have you actually tried it? Because the people who have (me included) found that both tests will return YES, yet when you try a mutable operation you get an exception.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1788690/objective-c- how-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1788690/objective-c-how-to-check- if-variable-is-nsarray-or-nsmutablearray)

[http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/224795-nsdictionar...](http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/224795-nsdictionary- mutability-test.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What about a subset of Hoare's CSP, as in Golang/Erlang? Objective-C already has support for immutables. How hard would it be to implement channels?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would certainly be an interesting project, although the performance implications on a mobile platform may be an issue (although that's becoming more moot with each generation).

In this case, however, our goal was to take common, familiar interfaces and idioms in Objective C, and make them safer/more powerful.

Something more like channels-like would be quite useful, but it would likely be published under a different project.</comment></comment>


Alphabet Q3 Revenue up 24% - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/alphabet-earnings-q3-2017-.html <comment><AUTHOR> Given its size, Google's growth rate is incredible. What's more, they still have a long way to optimise ads. I was recently shown a YouTube ad for cat food, but Google should know I don't have a cat because it has my entire photo stream for the last 3 years.

<comment><USER2> Does anybody in your family have a cat?

I recently visited my brother and he was talking about crowdfunding a project of his..guess what? YouTube showed me ads for crowdfunding platforms later that day, probably because I was logged into his wifi.

It sure feels a bit creepy sometimes!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I've been in a meeting with nobody using the internet and our phones just merely sitting our pockets. 3 hours later I saw ads relevant to the conversation in the meeting, for which, again, I had not googled or used internet for, on Instagram.

<comment><USER4> Do you think this may be a bit of Baader-Meinhof going on?

<comment><USER5> Probably. A couple of non technical friends and I were talking about Bitcoin one evening, they had never heard of it.

A few days later one of these friends calls me asking how is it possible that he's seeing Bitcoin ads everywhere after we talked. I also thought that's Baader-Meinhof happening, but it doesn't make ads any less creepy.

<comment><USER6> Ha, I had a couple of experiences alike also. But then if you look at the big picture, it makes sense. You're a solid target for Bitcoin ads, you're in the same location with 3 other people, likely same demographics, interests, social status etc. and they become a target too?

This is all suppositions of course, I have no idea how it works. But I've tried this experiment with my gf once:

We both opened Instagram and started talking about a product class that we never saw ads for there, say like shampoos. We even mentioned a few brands and then waited for the ads to hit us. They never did.

EDIT We use iPhones

<comment><USER5> > you're in the same location with 3 other people, likely same demographics, > interests, social status etc. and they become a target too

Nice, let's call this technique "advertisement by osmosis" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Alphabet is closing in on Apple's financial crown. At the current rate they'd likely surpass Apple in net cash in the next 12 quarters, barring a shareholder payout (which is likely).

Google, the subsidiary, is chasing down $40 billion in annualized operating income ($8.7 billion this quarter). To put that into perspective, that's equal to twice the operating income of Johnson & Johnson (a monster corporation with a $380 billion market cap). It wouldn't be far fetched for Google to reach $55-$60 billion in operating income in three years.

Alphabet now has $100 billion in cash and no meaningful traditional debt. Apple has about ~$160 billion in net cash, a sum that has mostly stopped increasing. Google should stay ahead of Apple in net tangible assets this quarter as well.

Given Alphabet's growth rate (and assuming it slows some), they should get near Apple's general $40x billion net income territory in three years.

By contrast, Microsoft also has an immense amount of cash, at $138 billion (cash or equivalents). However they're carrying $76 billion in long-term debt. Google presently has approximately 5x the net tangible assets of Microsoft.

<comment><USER8> This assumes Apple won't accelerate earnings, though. I think given the blowout earnings we've seen elsewhere in the market this is unlikely especially with Apple looking to raise average unit costs on the iPhone and iPad.

<comment><USER9> Apple is forecasted in their FY 2017 to be far worse than their 2015. While Google does over 20% growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anything besides ads that actually make them money ? I am honestly curious if they still cannot find a way how to make money with anything else besides ads

<comment><USER11> $3.4B in "other revenue" (for Google), which includes hardware sales, their cut of app sales on Google Play, enterprise products like GSuite, and Google Cloud. $302M in "other bets" (the non-Google Alphabet companies), largely from GFiber and Nest.

Google - like Apple, Berkshire, and several other companies - suffers from the curse of too much capital. I would _love_ to have a business with $3.4B in revenue - it actually puts you in the Fortune 1000 at around #675, right alongside Urban Outfitters and Citrix and slightly ahead of Diebold, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Warner Music Group. But when your other business is AdWords and makes about $90B a year, it doesn't really move the needle.

<comment><USER12> That's $3.4B _per quarter_ , or $13.6B annualized run rate, putting it closer to #200 on the Fortune list by revenue.

<comment><USER13> Compre to Apple's $6B service revenue, which is quickly on the way to be a fortune 100 company.

Both companies need diversification. I'm with Google with this one _long term_ because I think their bets are more interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing I am curious about from the finance perspective is - How does the revenue recognition (RevRec) happen in the internet ad business? If company A has committed $200 million in ads over 6 months to Google. How will Google book and recognize this as revenue?

<comment><USER15> I'd be very surprised if it were any different than what's standard, which is to recognize the revenue when the product/service is delivered.

<comment><USER14> Sure but the problem lies the exact definition of delivered. What does delivery mean here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, that's quite a bit, right?

</comment><comment><USER17> It's time for people in the valley to team up and create a real competitor to google ad. This has been lasting for too long.

<comment><USER18> Appnexus is a good competitor to google ads. It provides many of the same features that google ads offers. [http://appnexus.com](http://appnexus.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> G is for Alphabet! (poking fun at the legacy stock ticker)

</comment><comment><USER20> I read this in another article:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/amazon-alphabet-microsoft- in...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/amazon-alphabet-microsoft-intel-all- crush-earnings.html)

>In a call with CNBC, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat reiterated the company's theme of "products with AI [artificial intelligence] at their core," but the main function of that AI today seems to be optimizing ad revenue.

Are all the improvements to machine learning being made to just to show us more targeted ads?

<comment><USER13> Have you used Google Photos yet? The benefit of AI is strongly apparent there.</comment></comment>


Farewell from Weave - <AUTHOR> Weave.in was a service that partnered you with other professionals in your area to meet over coffee/etc. I received this email from them ~2PM PST July 12, 2016
====
Hello,
We started Weave to make expanding your professional network easy, productive, and enjoyable. In the last 3 years we've created hundreds of thousands of new professional connections. Connections that became co-founders, investors, mentors, co-workers, and friends. Your stories were what made working on Weave so fun and fulfilling.
While Weave became the primary source of new professional connections for many people, we were unable to make it financially viable. As of next Monday, we will be shutting Weave down.
Thank you so much for being part of our community. You made time to meet and help complete strangers. You were what made Weave great.
The Weave Team
PS: If you'd like to download a list of your matches, respond to this email and let us know. Premium Members will receive a refund for this month. <comment><USER2> I'm curious to know more about this. Perhaps when the team has some breathing space, zealoustiger or fuJiin could share more about the decision.

Also, if you don't mind sharing, it would be good to know more about what it would have cost to continue to run the service without any additional features or support.</comment>


Linux – Btrfs, ZFS, ext4: performance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dhtusa.com/media/IOPerfCMG09.pdf <comment><USER2> You ought to point out that this paper is 6 years old.</comment>


Show HN: Musilinks – Interactive musical artist relationship discovery - <AUTHOR> http://www.musilinks.com <comment><USER2> I tried searching for "Armin Van Buuren" and then clicking on the name but it just kept loading after that :(

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm that's weird... have you succeeded with any other artist or perhaps after reloading? Also if any message appears on your browsers console that could help me out :) Tested on different browsers with different people many times and it loaded correctly, kind of hard to debug

<comment><USER3> The same thing happened to me. I like the idea though. Maybe have a look at Sentry, so you can surface Javascript errors and messages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here: Hey, i have built an interactive web app where you can choose any artist OR band OR band member that you love and quickly find out who's in that band (if you choose a band) or what bands are related to an artist (if you choose a person). After that, you can drag and drop the nodes in the network to start exploring connections. You can even drop any artist into the network (through the plus sign in the search bar), making possible some really cool visualizations. You can also fix/unfix nodes, open up the artist spotify top tracks and spawn spotify related artists for a particular node (if spotify has that artist in it`s db).

If it sounds confusing, check out the quick tutorial by clicking in the (?) icon. (HN icon not working yet though)

This is my first node/javascript project ever, so let me know what you think :)</comment>


Firebird vs. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL (code quality comparison) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CPP_Coder/code-quality-comparison-of-firebird-mysql-and-postgresql-53e39fc3298d <comment><USER2> No Sergey,

Do not recommend RtlSecureZeroMemory(), but the secure C11 standard memset_s(). People will ignore bad advice, which would be a mistake, because this MySQL crypto bug looks terrible.

See [http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/memset](http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/memset)

memset_s is not optimized away.

This would be implemented on FreeBSD with explicit_bzero() or on Microsoft with SecureZeroMemory(), but there's a C11 standard for this.

You can use safeclib for this, when your libc doesn't have it. It doesn't because nobody cares yet about secure C functions. At least MSVC and Embarcadero does, and Android Bionic reportedly also.

</comment><comment><USER3> A bit off topic but anybody runs Firebird in prod ? What are its advantages and pain points ?

<comment><USER4> I run it. I used it initially because it was bundled with Delphi decades ago. It was called Interbase and it was free (well, free if you bought Delphi, which about as free as you got back then).

If you needed an SQL DB, you just shipped it with your application, and treated it like you might treat sqlite today. Your user didn't know it was there, it had a single data file which you could put the data file anywhere you wanted. The backups are portable to any arch. It used MCC rather than locks, which was novel for the time. Being able to do a full backup on a live database without blocking anything was certainly novel, and is still somewhat novel today. You see other remnants of that choice, like "alter table" being instant and as far as I know, no conversion time when upgrading between versions. It also happens to be very fully featured - supporting triggers, stored procedures and what not, so much so that it was the goto database if you were migrating from Oracle. Nothing else came close.

Times have changed. It's definitely been overtaken on some features. If it's not standard SQL syntax, it's unlikely Firebird will support it, so forget JSON indexing or geospatial indexes. On the other hand if there is a ANSI SQL syntax, Firebird almost certainly does support it. It's embedded heritage still shows through. There are almost no maintenance tools besides backup and restore, because they aren't needed in an embedded setup. Again, very like sqlite.

And that is why I still use it. If you want to ship an application and the SQL part just be an unseen implementation detail, Firebird is the one to use. If you want to use a database as a tool like a spreadsheet, with lots of fancy tools for getting data and out, and lots of SQL extensions like pivot tables to make doing one off things easier, then it isn't.

The Firebird source does (or did) support an embedded mode, ie as a library you just linked into your application, just like you do with sqlite. Unfortunately none of the distro's seem to ship it that way which is a shame, because it's handling of concurrent users is so much better than sqlite's I'd use it instead of sqlite if I could.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this detailed answer, next time I need SQLite I will look at Firebird instead.</comment></comment></comment>