Driving Tumblr's popularity: Self expression matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/self-expression-matters.html

<comment><USER2> There is a quote I like, "Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people."

Tumblr wins because it turns ideas into things and makes them easier to talk about. Not only this, but it also makes it really easy for your writing to get traction with others, assuming it's reasonably interesting. It's like training wheels for future intellectuals, a perfect match for intellectually curious kids in their late teens and early twenties. (In fact, it almost invents a new category of online interaction that I'd call 'intellectual sociability'.)

This was my analysis of Tumblr a year ago, and I think it still holds perfectly today: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961523>

</comment><comment><USER3> I love Tumblr, been using it for nearly 4 years! While I agree that self expression matters, at least for me, there has to be more than that. MySpace also allowed users to change up and remix their profile page with custom CSS/JavaScript code but they still lost users to Facebook's clean design. MySpace became a digital ghetto, made evident by the glitter graffiti-like images posted user's comments. What I like about Tumblr is not only that it allows me to customize my tumblog but that it helps me with a set of great looking templates!

<comment><USER4> What myspace did was a horrible implementation of customization and community features. It was an eyesore. They might have cleaned up some of their act now, but its too little too late.

Tumblr is more like blog+facebook+twitter, made ridiculously easy; minus the clutter and noise.

<comment><USER5> MySpace is arguably worse now than it ever was. The default profile looks much better, but that's about it. There are still obnoxious ads everywhere. They've tried to copy, poorly, a bunch of facebook features like the news feed, but it's crammed full of commercial spam. The profile management tools are clunky and annoying. Even their logo is now horrible.

But the issue wasn't that MySpace was an 'eyesore' or that Facebook was 'clean', except to the extent that MySpace was full of distracting ads. Facebook is full of stupid crap, too. Facebook made the better choice to focus on innovating community features, which was its strength, where MySpace failed to innovate along its own strengths. Maybe was poorly designed or poorly managed, or maybe they simply panicked and tried to be facebook but clearly not as effectively. I don't know. But now it's a mess.

Facebook was and is a better tool for interacting with your social network than MySpace, and continues to innovate in that space. MySpace was, at one time, better than facebook at self-expression, media sharing, and making connections with semi-random strangers. Now, I'm not sure it's really good at anything particularly interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I run a site with fairly high traction with teenagers specifically teenages from california and tumblr is very popular with that demographic. From the outside looking in, they seem as excited about it as I was about friendster circa 2003, like this blogging thing was just invented. My take on the success of tumbler, for this demo at least is that it successfully implements standard blog tools that were once too nerdy for the masses (rss subscriptions, auto posting to twitter / fb, making it easy to post any type of media, making it easy to theme their blogs). In fact most of them use it like a twitter on steroids, posting pics and videos and viewing them without having to click on a like to a seperate service.</comment>


New, portable, open source password manager for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://www.ylvapasswordmanager.com/ <comment><USER2> Why this over keepass?

Also, a quick skim of the source code shows that the program keeps the decrypted file on-disk[1]. That seems like a huge vulnerability if you don't have FDE enabled.

[1] [https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd...](https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd7fa4bd58954b457dd6/Ylva/MainWindow.cs#L175)

[https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd...](https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd7fa4bd58954b457dd6/Ylva/EncryptionAES.cs#L154)

<comment><USER3> I think you need FDE no matter what. e.g. Hibernation will dump your passwords to disk, even if they're only kept in in unmanaged, VirtualProtect'ed memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I unfortunately agree with the sentiment of others from this only being supported on windows. I built a CLI password manager[1] sort of as a learning exercise, but to this day I use it daily and have over 250 accounts managed in it. I temporarily back up the encrypted file to S3 in case my computer blows up, but for some reason I have a small sense of satisfaction that my passwords don't live in a 3rd party like LastPass, even though I'm aware of the auditing and scrutiny they go through consistently to maintain credibility for what they do.

[1] [https://github.com/whatl3y/hide](https://github.com/whatl3y/hide)

<comment><USER5> LastPass has been breached 3 times, and they've had RCEs in their Chrome Extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another one I've used for years is password safe:

[https://pwsafe.org/](https://pwsafe.org/)

Free and open source.

<comment><USER7> Same. And I'm surprised by how rarely it gets mentioned in these kind of HN discussions. I would have thought given it's origins (originally designed by Bruce Schneier and open-sourced in 2002 [0]), it would have a bigger following.

[0] [https://www.pwsafe.org/history.shtml](https://www.pwsafe.org/history.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Portable… for Windows? It's a .Net application using Windows Forms. That's open sourced, and thus portable in theory. In practice, it's Windows only.

Turns out they use a different meaning of "portable":

 _"Open source version of Ylva is available as a single binary file which is portable by default. You can run it from a USB stick."_

<comment><USER9> In the world of Windows applications, portable means that the program can be run without any installation or storing anything locally. So you could run it off a usb or other portable storage. This is a common usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> But this can't go everywhere my password are needed, why would I use this?

Not to be harsh, but LastPass (and others) works across Mac, PC, IOS & Android in multiple ways. A password manager to a degree needs to make my life easier, this means being portable and compatible.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have been using Keepassx[1] with Syncthing[2] for synchronizing the password database. It has been a great experience due to following reasons beyond the crypto advantages:

\- Open source

\- Peer to peer without having to share file contents with central server like Dropbox etc.

\- Full featured Android and Linux (KeepassXC) clients with nice UIs (on Android I have the option of using fingerprint auth to open my database)

\- Autofill integration on Android (I haven't tried on Linux)

[1]: [https://www.keepassx.org/](https://www.keepassx.org/) [2]: [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

<comment> m-p-3 I use KeeWeb[1] on MacOS, iOS and Windows, and KeePass2Android[2] on my Android device which has decent autofill. They all also supports cloud storage natively, so I don't have to worry about keeping them in sync.

I do use Syncthing for other stuff though.

[1]: [https://keeweb.info/](https://keeweb.info/) [2]: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2android.keepass2android)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using Bitwarden for a little more than a month and it is by far the best password manager I used. And being open source is a very nice bonus. I'm going for tue paid option to support the company behind it.

<comment><USER13> Does it have the following? They're what have kept me stuck on KeePass:

\- Browser integration (a single key combo unlocking & filling in passwords)

\- OTP support

\- SSH agent and key storage

\- Entry-level (rather than file-level) synchronization

\- Google Drive synchronization

\- Automatic history maintenance

\- Storing arbitrary additional data

\- Icons (makes identifying entries so much faster)

<comment><USER14> It does have a decent browser integration, OTP support, history support (last 5 passwords) support for arbitrary additional data and icons.

Having not read the source code, or investigated the details, my understanding is the sync is entry based over file based. On multiple occasions I lost data to Keepass's insane lack of sync functionality, I've never once done the same with Bitwarden. Google drive sync is kind of moot as the sync happens on a server (which you can run yourself).

<comment><USER13> > my understanding is the sync is entry based over file based

> Google drive sync is kind of moot as the sync happens on a server

Confused, so are you saying there is a server that does entry-based syncing? KeePass it's the KeePass client that resolves conflicts at the entry level with whatever is on Google Drive (which it connects to via plugins).

<comment><USER14> Apologies, I spoke too quickly. I'm unable to edit my original post to fix it.

The sync is client side according to [0]. I can't find specifics in any documentation on whether it works at an entry or file level, however I wonder is that actually important? Just because you sync at a file granularity doesn't mean you can't resolve entries individually.

My experience with Keepass was that my changes would get stuck in a conflict file that Dropbox would generate if you happened to use Keepass in 2 places at once, as they don't support syncing and force you to manually go through [1] on every device.

[0][https://help.bitwarden.com/article/how-is-data-securely- tran...](https://help.bitwarden.com/article/how-is-data-securely-transmitted- and-stored/)

[1][https://gist.github.com/cmcginty/07869f3c6c27ecb0fef84ca7900...](https://gist.github.com/cmcginty/07869f3c6c27ecb0fef84ca7900e7bb7)

<comment><USER13> I was using "syncing" and "resolving" synonymously. What I was distinguishing between was keeping the most recent file (which is what happens if you use typical cloud syncing for the whole database file) vs. the most recent entry in a given file (which is what you get when KeePass itself gets a chance to actually examine both versions and figure out conflicts internally).

I can't figure out how the KeePass (or the plugin you use, or whatever it is) was handling your Dropbox syncing; it sounds like it was doing a dumb file- level merge, when in fact it's capable of doing much better than that. I use the Google Sync Plugin which has never failed me, even when I'd modified databases on two clients independently before syncing. It uses the ImportUtil.Synchronize() function which I think is what handles the dirty details. See the Technical Details section here: [https://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html](https://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html)

<comment><USER14> > What I was distinguishing between was keeping the most recent file vs. the > most recent entry in a given file

Sure! (sorry, have finally had my morning coffee). I believe that Bitwarden handles it correctly via "live sync" [0]. - albeit it's been a transparent process to me. I've generated logins on my mobile, and logged into them within 30s via the browser extensions on my desktop PC.

> I can't figure out how the KeePass (or the plugin you use, or whatever it > is) was handling your Dropbox syncing;it sounds like it was doing a dumb > file-level merge

It was, and it was excruciating. However, this is one of the issues I have with Keepass - it may be possible to do better, but the default behaviour is abhorrent.

From the link you gave, it explicitly calls out the issue in "advanced" synchronisation schemes under "Local <-> Master" [1]. If you don't correctly follow the setup steps you can end up with [2] which can (and does) result in data loss. The (as far as I can tell) official (as far as I can tell) forums seem to be happy to pass the buck [3] and say "Oh that's not our problem, that's the sync services problem".

> I use the Google Sync Plugin which has never failed me

I don't doubt that for a minute, but for someone migrating from LastPass/OnePass to Keepass, searching for "How to sync keepass across machines" will _never_ point you to the google sync plugin.

[0] [https://blog.bitwarden.com/live-sync-bitwarden-apps- fb7a5456...](https://blog.bitwarden.com/live-sync-bitwarden-apps-fb7a54569fea) [1] [https://keepass.info/help/kb/trigger_examples.html#dbsync](https://keepass.info/help/kb/trigger_examples.html#dbsync) [2] [https://sourceforge.net/p/keepass/discussion/329221/thread/2...](https://sourceforge.net/p/keepass/discussion/329221/thread/22255c46/) [3] [https://sourceforge.net/p/keepass/discussion/329221/thread/9...](https://sourceforge.net/p/keepass/discussion/329221/thread/9deb1dc3/)

<comment><USER13> > I believe that Bitwarden handles it correctly via "live sync"

That looks cool!

Re: your other comments though: you're not doing a fair comparison. Try letting Dropbox trash your %AppData%\Bitwarden folder and then let me know how well LiveSync handles syncing! That's what you're doing to KeePass.

> However, this is one of the issues I have with Keepass - it may be possible > to do better, but the default behaviour is abhorrent.

This _isn 't_ the "default behavior" though. The default behavior is in fact to synchronize everything correctly... if you only give it a chance to do that. But if you insist on letting your Dropbox desktop sync pull the rug out from underneath KeePass and replace the whole database randomly, it's literally impossible for KeePass to know what the old entries were to be able to merge them -- it doesn't have them anymore. It needs an old copy of the database around so it can compare the two, and those instructions tell you to make a second copy so it can do its job. That seems pretty fair to me -- what more can you expect? You didn't even give it a chance to do its job, and instead let someone else just trash the place while it's gone, then blame it for not actively fighting your attempts to do that?

This is why KeePass has plugins like KeeAnywhere [1]. You're supposed to use those instead of syncing your database like a normal file. [2] So KeePass actually gets a chance to do its job... if you only let it!

[1] [https://keepass.info/plugins.html#keeanywhere](https://keepass.info/plugins.html#keeanywhere)

[2] Well, KeePassX[C] folks will beg to differ and just tell you to keep doing what you were already doing and it'll work Just Fine (TM), and that what you were seeing happening in front of your eyes was supposed to be vanishingly unlikely. It's basically gaslighting as far as I can tell, but somehow they can pretend it doesn't affect them, so I dunno...

<comment><USER14> Understood re; Dropbox and appdata however that doesn't change the fact that if you search for how to sync Keepass across machines that's what you're told to do! The fact that they don't consider syncing a core part of the password manager and are happy to tell people to take awful workarounds (and not mention that it can be resolved with a plug-in anywhere on the main site) tells me that I don't want to use that project.

Pity we didn't have this discussion 18 months ago, I might not have left keepass

<comment><USER13> > The fact that they don't consider syncing a core part of the password > manager

> and not mention that it can be resolved with a plug-in anywhere on the main > site

Again, you're accusing them of something that's false! They very much do see this as core functionality and explicitly tell you how to synchronize right there in the synchronization section [1]:

 _If one of the files to be synchronized is stored in an online storage (like e.g. Amazon 's S3, DigitalBucket, ...), you need an online storage provider plugin (e.g. KeeAnywhere, KeeCloud or KeePassSync)._

> and are happy to tell people to take awful workarounds

The only bit I'll give you is that the workaround isn't user-friendly, and that they should probably leave a note mentioning the much-more-user-friendly plugins in the Trigger Examples [2]. But aside from that, if you actually follow their workaround, it should work just fine -- as I understood your problem was that you _didn 't_ follow their workaround, then you blamed them for the resulting file conflicts...

[1] [https://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html](https://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html)

[2] [https://keepass.info/help/kb/trigger_examples.html#dbsync](https://keepass.info/help/kb/trigger_examples.html#dbsync)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll shamelessly plug my own open source password manager, not because it's mine but because I believe it is better. And it is more portable, just put it in your pocket! It's at [https://finalkey.net/](https://finalkey.net/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmm, I guess this year everyone writes their own password manager.

(Can we have a year of fast PIM outliners? The competition is pretty sparse there.)

</comment><comment><USER17> The first thing I do whenever someone writes their own password manager is to read the Encrypt function. This one is AES-CBC with its own hand rolled integrity scheme. Not very strong by modern standards

<comment><USER18> Doesn't look very hand rolled to me. It's standard HMAC. The only unusual thing is the timing-unsafe comparison[1], which probably needs fixing. It _looks_ like an attempt was made at a constant-time comparison (|= ^ pattern sure looks like it), but the early return breaks it again. I'm not sure if much can be gained from a timing attack in this particular instance though, since the key fully depends on user input in the first place.

(By the way, even Microsoft's own documentation doesn't use constant-time comparisons for HMAC[2]!)

[1] [https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd...](https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd7fa4bd58954b457dd6/Ylva/EncryptionDataIntegrity.cs#L38-L44)

[2] See the example on [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.security....](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.security.cryptography.hmacsha256?view=netframework-4.8)

<comment><USER17> I'm not a C# expert by any means. Is the IntegrityHash of the plaintext, and not the ciphertext? [https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd...](https://github.com/nrosvall/ylva/blob/2a4afcfb3727151fa09fdd7fa4bd58954b457dd6/Ylva/EncryptionAES.cs#L78)

That would be a really serious flaw. If not, hand rolled AES-CBC-SHA256.... why not just use an AEAD implementation? This is exactly why I look at these. There's a lot of nuance to that one decision, and so it usually gives quite a bit of signal about the project as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As soon as I saw "verkkokauppa" in the list I assumed it was a Finnish developer.

It looks like a nice project, but I'd echo the other compaints - having a tree, or folders, would make it much more useable.

I tend to have a structure which looks like this (simplified):

        Git/
           github.com
           gitlab.com
        Servers/
           ssh.example.com/
              root.txt
           ssh.example.org/
              webmail.txt
        Websites/
           lwn.net

Having all the items in a flat list soon becomes very crowded. Checking my own password store I have over 300 entries.

</comment><comment><USER20> All password managers and form fillers I've tried are quite terrible at correctly finding and filling fields/text boxes. They all seem to rely on finding patterns for things to fill from code. Which doesn't work. As there is no clear pattern accross billions of non-standard web-forms.

Does anybody know of pw managers that work using image recognition (OCR-like) on the GUI to find fillable fields? AKA: using the same form-API that humans do?

<comment><USER21> I would guess that it wouldn't be worth the hassle of the inevitable inaccurate identifications. The most ergonomic password entry tool I've used is rofi-pass [1]. It's so effortless that I don't think anything smarter could improve on it in practice. It works in a predictable and way in any application (eg SSH pw in a terminal) without any complex integrations being needed and once you get used to using the hotkey it's basically as quick as form autofilling.

[1] [https://github.com/carnager/rofi-pass](https://github.com/carnager/rofi- pass)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I tried this briefly under Wine in Linux. On the surface it doesn't look like it has 2 features I really like about Keepass:

\- Folders. I like using folders and subfolders to keep related sets of passwords together.

\- Support for attachments. Keepass lets me keep track of keyfiles, notes, and certificates in addition to passwords. Ylva has a notes field but I really like Keepass's ability to attach files.

The QR integration is interesting I guess, I don't have any apps that allow QR code for password input but if I did it would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is nice and all, but what am I going to do with a Windows only password manager? I use several different OSs and a phone. It's pretty much a must that my password manager works on all of them.

</comment><comment><USER24> What does this achieve over the feature set of keepassx?

</comment><comment><USER25> I use Passbolt at work for a geo-deslocated team and it works very good.

</comment><comment><USER26> The title is a bit of an oxymoron.

"...portable...for Windows"

<comment><USER27> In the context of Windows applications, "portable" is also used to mean "runs without installation/further dependencies, you can just run it from a folder somewhere".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> No, please not another password manager... I have not looked into it much, but hell, it looks like it even ships its own crypto.

</comment><comment><USER29> Not a single word about how security features are implemented. Not very convincing for HN audience.

<comment><USER30> Please don't take on yourself to speak for everyone even if the point itself is valid. That's been bad manners since the BBS days if not earlier.</comment></comment>


Mountain Moon Volcano – An experimental web comic - <AUTHOR> http://yesthisislouis.com/mmv/comics/

<comment><USER2> Opera Android: I see the comics and two left and right arrows for a fraction of a second and then I get a gray page with a link to a getwebgl site. What for?

</comment><comment><USER3> Cute, and only two bugs so far:

\- opening it in a browser that's not compatible does a hard redirect to another site, so when i simply copied the link from the adress bar to another browser i was confused why it didn't work, for a while

\- in the "page" with the censored cloud i was able to zoom outside the skysphere

Edit: Also there's no RSS feed, so the chance of me seeing any updates to this ever is pretty much null.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can neither swipe right or left or click anything on the homepage... using an iPhone 6. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> Same on my ipad. I suspect this experiment fails to work on non-desktop browsers.

<comment><USER6> yea it's meant to be controlled with a mouse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It made my Firefox crash.

<comment><USER8> webgl apparently doesn't play with my Ubuntu Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like it - keep going.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very cool project, I hope it continues.

</comment><comment><USER11> cool!</comment>


The Quietest Room in the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.tcbmag.com/industriestrends/technology/104458p1.aspx

<comment><USER2> [http://www.tcbmag.com/print.aspx?print_page=/industriestrend...](http://www.tcbmag.com/print.aspx?print_page=/industriestrends/technology/104458printp1.aspx)</comment>


Ask HN: How to Find a Job Abroad - <AUTHOR>

I've been thinking about trying to find a developer job in the UK (I'm a U.S. citizen). Anyone have experience with making such a move? Any major hurdles with visas, etc?<p>Any insight is much appreciated. <comment><USER2> Getting a UK work visa is ridiculously hard these days. The economic downturn created a anti-immigration sentiment and the government changed their visa programs such that only 25000(if memory serves me right) a year can enter the UK for work.

Your workable options are:

1)Find a job at a corporate who still has unused quota

2)Find a job in a US company and than get transferred to a UK branch. This isn't constrained by the quota

3)Marry an EU citizen

I hate to be bearer of bad news but this is the current situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think many companies won't sponsor a visa from far away, however you could try going for a master's degree at a university in a city you'd like to live in and looking for internships while you're there. Though I never ended up studying in Europe, one site I looked at lot was <http://www.mastersportal.eu>

Finally, the UK has a points-based Tier 1 and Tier 2 visa program for High Value Migrants (Tier 1) and Skilled Workers (Tier 2): <http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/workingintheuk/tier1/> <http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/workingintheuk/tier2/> (Note that as of April 2011, there have been significant changes to these visa programs, so make sure you have up-to-date information.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Step 1: Save enough money to spend a few months there; Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!

Bottom line, it's easier to get a work visa anywhere when someone already wants to hire you there. It's easier to find a job when you're physically able to attend interviews and networking events. It's also better to spend extensive time determining whether this is something you really want to do before putting forth all the effort for a work visa. You can't actually WORK on a tourist visa, but you can certainly broaden your UK-based horizons in the 6 months they'll give you.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Getting a visa is a major hurdle indeed. Do not attempt this without professional help, the slightest formal error can cause your application to be rejected and require resubmission (which means paying the submission fee again).

If you're serious about this, I'd recommend getting your ass over here on some of the 6 month visa waiver programme (no work permitted) making contacts and attending interviews. Stick to large multinationals, small companies/startups will be hesitant to sponsor you due to high cost and long waiting periods.

</comment><comment><USER6> My 2 cents would be to track down an immigration attorney in the UK. Get in writing what if takes to find a development job there. Find a startup who needs a developer, apply, and include the note about how to hire you.

</comment><comment><USER7> Find a company that will let you telecommute</comment>


Python Fire – Generates CLIs from any Python object - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/python-fire <comment><USER2> Author of Fire here. Was super happy to pass the 10000 star mark on GitHub today thanks to this HN post :) -- that boosted my spirits on an otherwise long and rainy (and now delayed) bus ride.

Hope you find Fire useful!

What's next for Python Fire? We're working on improving the help screens and usage outputs so it feels less like a developer tool and more like a professional grade CLI. So stay tuned as it gets better!

<comment><USER3> Great library. Excited to see that in 0.1.2 you removed nearly every dependency except `six` (esp ipython).

This caused me to have to remove `fire` from a project repo's requirements.txt so that ipython wouldn't be included in production builds. Then in the testing script that used it, there was a comment saying "you're going to need ipython for this"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have tried this before, and all I can say is that you should probably just use click over anything else.

[http://click.pocoo.org/5/](http://click.pocoo.org/5/)

<comment><USER5> Allow me to fan the flames. I find for simple scripts, docopt[0] is more than enough. It looks like the click's docs has a discussion of the differences.

[0] [http://docopt.org/](http://docopt.org/)

<comment><USER4> I don't know man. Have used docopt, but click just feels right to me.

I never have to think about the "CLI" when using click, everything "just works"...

[http://click.pocoo.org/5/why/#why-not-docopt- etc](http://click.pocoo.org/5/why/#why-not-docopt-etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am the author of commandeer[1], which does similar things and has been around since 2013. Try that, too, if you're interested!

Seeing another library that makes it easier to access things from the command line is awesome, and finding that there are even more I didn't know about in the comments is even better.

[1] [https://commandeer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://commandeer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was looking for something similar to click / fire that uses type annotations to validate/cast the inputs today. Came across this [https://github.com/Lucretiel/autocommand](https://github.com/Lucretiel/autocommand)

I think it would be really nice to have a library that takes the type annotated functions and lets you expose them as a CLI, GUI, REST API and a web form. Practically just combining click, flask, rest framework and Gooey. Would be a great tool for data scientists.

Take something like

        def recognize(image: Image) -> List[Prediction]
          preds = model(image)
          return preds

and generate web page that lets you drop an image in and get a list of predictions

<comment><USER8> nit: isn't recognize(x) just model(x)?

:)

<comment><USER9> recognize adds type hints [0], which is what the desired library would use to verify input / select suitable UI elements etc.

[0]: [https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about a mix with gooey?

[https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey](https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey)

That'll be neat.

<comment><USER11> Hey, that's my lib! ^_^

<comment><USER12> cool. two questions: is gooey cross-platform? and can I build an app starting with gooey rather "port" an existing cli app? what I mean is can I pick and widgets and stuff from the gooey widget library by hand rather than make it parse my Args thing object.

<comment><USER11> Yep! It'll run on most flavors of Windows, Linux, and OSX.

On the latter part, nah, not really. Gooey builds all of its widgets internally. There has been some interest in Gooey exposing the little pre- baked components it uses as a util library, but I haven't explored the option super deeply

<comment><USER12> so just to be clear: i have to build a cli first and then gooey can works its magic. no way to skip the cli?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> we use this in production (flags for kube execs of python scripts)

it is bounds better than argparse and click. would highly recommend.

important to note here, that a lot of this is thanks to the python team's continued extension of the inspect module.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow this is interesting. I never knew a tool like this existed. Seeing all the alternatives in the comments here is great too. It's like getting a solution to a problem I never knew I had! Super excited to use this on my next project!

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice! This is an approach I hope will be used much more, to generate CLIs and other interfaces.

Luigi [1] does something similar, in that it auto-creates an API that lets you call any task in your task dependency graph, and provide parameters as arguments to flags. One of the things that made working with Luigi such a breeze (although we experienced other problems for our use cases).

[1] [https://github.com/spotify/luigi](https://github.com/spotify/luigi)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using a similar library in Nim called cligen[0]. Like Fire, it infers the CLI long form/short form switches from the arguments of the function it is linking to. Follow the repo link for examples.

[0]: [https://github.com/c-blake/cligen](https://github.com/c-blake/cligen)

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone know of something like this for .NET objects?

I've never thought of something like this, but this would be very useful for many platforms.

</comment><comment><USER18> seems great for my reinforcement learning models. instead of parsing my hyperparameters through the tensorflow cli API and editing the training file a line at a time to take in an additional hyperparameter, I can just directly set them through the cli with fire.

<comment><USER19> but then how will you keep track of which parameters worked well? I've been essentially storing my kwargs in json and not felt a need to control anything directly from the CLI.

<comment><USER18> Good question, for me I programatically generate a folder with the hyperparameter key - values in the name and store the checkpoints under it. As you can imagine, it can get out of control quickly if not managed well, but it works for 1-3 person projects. For anything more large scale or organized, I would recommend looking into Comet ML which lets you query and filter your experiments by hyperparameter ranges instead of manually looking at folder names.

<comment><USER19> I did that until I hit the Linux directory name length limit, lol. Now I hash the hyperparameters dict to get the directory name, and store a json file within. Totally ad hoc and I'm sure a better solution exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wanted to do such thing since forever. Kudos (and I'm frustrated :)

</comment><comment><USER21> this isn't new but I am glad its reported as I had completely forgotten about it. Will give it a try on next CLI project for sure.

</comment><comment><USER22> I always wondered how far human laziness can go? This is an absolutely terrible library. Every command line is a HUMAN INTERFACE for interactions with your program, should not exposed random methods for command line usage...

Also, developing a Python library and not keeping the most basic standard (PEP8)? You should not be allowed near Python. I really have no better words for this, just fucking lazy. I hate lazy developers, because you are the reason most software is shit.</comment>


Behind the scenes at Earth's most beautiful rocket launch site - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1551911 <comment><USER2> Remove the third party banner ads you are distributing through malware/adware on NodeJS.</comment>


GCC calls for Iran nuclear plant inspection - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/04/201341415034914835.html

<comment><USER2> "Gulf Co-operation Council raises concerns of possible radiation leaks after earthquake near Bushehr nuclear plant."

in case like me, you wondered what a compiler had to do with Iranian nuclear policy.

<comment><USER3> Exactly the same thoughts went through my head reading the title.</comment></comment>


8,000 years ago, 17 women reproduced for every one man - <AUTHOR> https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success <comment><USER2> From _The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature_ :

>In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry. The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many "houses of virgins" throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor's concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. "Principal persons" were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa's women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.

>As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.

>In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to "marry" the more favored of his subjects. The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren. In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth- century visitor, "it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty." The connection between sex and power is a long one.

<comment><USER3> One suspects the celibacy assumption says more about we who assume rather than the ancient societies of whom we assume. This is a kind of inter-millennial sexism. If a single king could have relations with hundreds of women, why can't a (presumably professional) woman have relations with hundreds of men? In such a top-heavy situation, she would have found plenty of willing customers! Sure, we are prejudiced against prostitution, but lots of ancient societies weren't.

<comment><USER4> A single woman is unlikely to have produce a statistically significant number of children. This is not about the act of sex but about actual reproduction.

<comment><USER3> Haha it's late my brain stopped working for a moment there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, > hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and > power, leaving nothing for others.

The other hypothesis that I read was that men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work (e.g. hunting, war), leading to higher death rates amongst males. There's this article that gets submitted on HN once in a while which elaborates on this but I can't find the link right now :( (edit: here it is [http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm](http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm))

<comment><USER6> _I read was that men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work (e.g. hunting, war), leading to higher death rates amongst males._

You speak as if in the past tense, but 95% of workplace deaths are men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, the evolution of human goes.

At least if we look on this from perspective of evolutionary theory of sex[1], which states that males are subject of natural selection and it is the main reason behind inventing sex differences in evolution. Unsuccessful males are cheaper to population than unsuccessful females, so there are less unsuccessful females and more unsuccessful males. From ETS perspective this reasearch an evidence of evolution, if there are no differences in reproductive ability between males and females, than evolution is stalled. But we see such a difference, than it is possible that evolution is goes. And probablity of it is bound to likelyhood of ETS to be true.

I wander, what the selection factor is?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodakyan%27s_evolutionary_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodakyan%27s_evolutionary_theory_of_sex)

<comment><USER8> The rules in societies like these would have been akin to the rules in islam/sharia. A woman is only allowed one partner, only men are allowed multiple partners (men may never even as much as see some of their women/concubines, and you'd be surprised how common that is), and getting caught (or even suspected in most cases) with another results in extra-painful execution.

These societal rules are self-propagating because men can't break them since they're denied access to women by physical obstacles (walk around in a middle eastern muslim village and you'll understand why, although it's sort of visible in many movies).

Women can't break this since if any woman or group of women tries to they get gang raped in the street.

In case you're wondering families will not divide inheritance but will choose (or even adopt) a favorite son who'll continue the business. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest get kicked into the street (happens, though).

There is a ton of "illegal" sex in these societies though because there are masses of women who are technically the property (that's what it boils down to, may be called married, but even in muslim societies where it technically is marriage they don't bother saying a woman is married, they just say she's "this guy's") of a man, but haven't so much as seen the guy for years, so if almost any man can get close to them it probably isn't too hard to convince them to have intercourse.

Walking around in these villages, one thing becomes very obvious : this is not the way to go about creating a peaceful society.

<comment><USER7> ETS speaks nothing about societies or their rules. ETS was invented by studying animals and plants and it stick to genotype and phenotype distributions while explaining role of sex in evolution.

And I do not like the idea to speculate about societies and how to build them properly starting from some evolutionary reaserch. It is different levels of abstraction. It is complex to do it right, while stretching your mind over several levels. It needs a broad knowledge, high intelligence and a lot of time spent in thinking and discussing matters with others highly intelligent and broadly educated.

Look, between evolution theory and sociology there are physiology, neuroscience and psychology. There are a lot of progress lately in psysiology and neuroscience, but psychology almost 150 years struggling to become an empirical science. There are some progress, but it is not convincing. Also I'm not sure that psysiology and neuroscience progress is sufficient to talk about brigde between theory of evolution and sociology. There are tremendous amounts of work for scientists ahead, which must be done before we can start to reason about society from evolutionary perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, they are making the assumption that one woman "mated" with one man only.

If you drop that assumption, and take "sperm competition" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_competition)) into account, other scenario's than "wealth-and-power" are possible.

Such as: groups of hunter gatherers had frequent orgies, but due to "sperm competition", a few of the man fathered all children.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _it would be one of the first instances that scientists have found of > culture affecting human evolution_

In that case, scientists must have been very much not looking indeed. Someone give me a coherent explanation, please, of how cultural patterns could possibly ever avoid affecting the composition of the next generation.

<comment><USER11> They probably meant chronologically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps the economic leverage of agriculture was lucrative enough to increase dominance by the owner's male lineage. I.E. providing food to starving women from your dad's crop could get you laid more than the hunter gatherer next door.

<comment><USER13> I recall reading an economic study on polygamous societies in the Middle East that concluded the same thing about why women would be ok with it. Financial security.

Edit: I find it annoying that I'm getting downvoted for just saying I once read an article that studied similar phenomena. To be clear, I think polygamy is a horrible thing, especially in countries where women have far from equal rights. That doesn't mean that the circumstances that make it systemic shouldn't be studied.

Edit 2: I realize that I didn't particularly contribute anything enlightening to the conversation with this comment either. In that case, downvote away. :)

<comment><USER14> Polygamy shows up routinely in peasant societies when there is a severe shortage of men, for example after a war, or when economic hardship causes many young men to leave looking for work, or when severe poverty makes a large proportion of young men unable to afford a family.

The young women left behind have few good choices for husbands, and so are forced to choose (or have the choice made for them by their parents) between becoming spinsters (i.e. not marrying and living alone or with their parents into adulthood), or becoming an older man's second wife (or third, etc.). This causes all kinds of resentment between the multiple wives and often leads to abusive relationships, but is still arguably a better outcome for some of the young women than being stuck unmarried in a context where supporting yourself as a single person is extremely challenging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A plausible theory as to why this can happen.

Apparently, millions of people (10% in a large region and 0.5% globally) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, one of the worlds greatest conquerors - and also one of the most prolific breeders[1].

"Lots of men have lots of sons, by chance. But what normally doesn't happen is the sons have a high probability of having lots of sons themselves. You have to have a reinforcing effect[1]". You need to have a prolific breeder spread out over a large geographic area whose sons are also more likely to have many kids.

Maybe 8,000 years ago something similar happened.

[1][https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy- ha...](https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-has- competition-1.16767)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it fair to say that in these societies, most women got to pass on their genes, whereas most men except for select few didn't? Thus men were the ones to be selected from on a genetic level?

</comment><comment><USER17> I would posit this was a "winner take all" outcome compounded by economics _and_ biology. High infant mortality, as well as the high risk of death from even a simple infection or injury, would be enough to reduce the number of males in a population, to concentrate means into the hands of a few. Then, the progeny of these hardened or simply lucky few would be better insulated from disease or injury than other males, perpetuating the cycle.

<comment><USER18> Why do you think infant mortality would affect men but not women?

<comment><USER17> It's a well known fact in human biology. Just a couple links on the reasons why:

"Researchers uncover several reasons why boys are 'weaker sex'"

[https://www.upi.com/Researchers-uncover-several-reasons- why-...](https://www.upi.com/Researchers-uncover-several-reasons-why-boys-are- weaker-sex/69121384750835/)

"Why is infant mortality higher in boys than in girls? A new hypothesis based on preconception environment and evidence from a large sample of twins."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23151996/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23151996/)

<comment><USER18> >It's long been known slightly more boys are born because fewer survive...

Ok, but this accounts for a few percentage ponts difference, not 17 to 1.

<comment><USER17> Right; economics probably exaggerates what is already a biological reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Horses have breeding statistics like that, with a herd stallion. Did humans go from herd mode to something else 8,000 years ago?

<comment><USER20> One thing to note is that the last ice age finished about 12k years ago, and human reoccupation of very large tracts of asia, north america and europe could not have been over night. Large areas (for example the UK north of London) were under ice sheets, but much larger areas would have been tundra and frozen dessert [1]

Additionally there would have been huge inundation of the coastal areas that were previously human occupied.

The creation of new opportunities and the chaos of the disruption of old settled communities may simply have meant that there was a multi-generational selection for successful adventurous cowards!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/File:Last_glacial_vegetation_map.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Curious but in some arab countries this still applies, so they kept this ancient fact. Also this research conclude many male deepdown fantasies.

</comment><comment> alok-g >> By analyzing diversity in these parts, scientists are able to deduce the numbers of female and male ancestors a population has.

Can anyone explain more on this? Specifically how is the time axis worked out from a study of present-day volunteers?

<comment><USER22> I'm not an expert, but the idea is that mutation rates indicate age. If a bunch of people have a particular pattern, but they're all a little bit different to the same degree of difference, you can figure out how old that pattern is.

Presumably the changing bits must be in junk DNA otherwise mutation rates would be affected by selection pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like those "one man", "17 women" scenarios were some kind of utopia for men with harems

Makes you wonder about the other 16 guys, though

<comment><USER24> It doesn't mean that it was one man and seventeen women reproducing at the time, it means that male parentage at that time was a much stronger factor in whether descendants from the line survived to the modern day than female parentage.

<comment><USER25> That would still make one wonder about the other 16 guys and why the survival rate of their seed was so diminished vs the 'alpha male' in the group.

The unequal structure of society that naturally comes about from capitalism, an unevenness that has become even more prominent in modern mixed-economies where heavy state intervention in the economy is combined with market ideology, seems to have been far more extreme and socially destructive back in the stone age when we were all 'living off the land' and not exploiting resources to support a consumer centric culture...

So much of the "naturalist fallacy" and "appeal to nature" is based on a misunderstanding or idealized view of nature.

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Naturalistic_fallacy](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Naturalistic_fallacy)

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Appeal_to_nature](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Appeal_to_nature)

<comment><USER18> The Stone Age, even the Bronze Age wasn't a capitalist society. Wealth and power were derived from military might and traditional roles, not ownership through capital investment by private enterprise.

<comment><USER25> If that's what you got from my comment then you must have misread it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


THE INTERNET: Is still a very new thing for a large number of people - <AUTHOR> http://lessthunk.com/2015/04/30/the-internet-is-still-a-very-new-thing-for-a-large-number-of-people/

<comment><USER2> Growth rate is still totally amazing</comment>


Pros/Cons of a UX/Design v. Technical Co=Founder - <AUTHOR>

With the rise of designer-focused funds (e.g. http://thedesignerfund.com/), is this a sign that having a UX/design cofounder might be more important than having a technical cofounder? <comment><USER2> Find one that complements your skillset.

If you're perfectly capable with the technical field but useless anywhere else, a business co-founder or a design co-founder can complement your skillset and let you concentrate on what you can do best.</comment>


Amazon Elastic File System on Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://banzaicloud.com/blog/aws_provision_efs/ <comment><USER2> EFS is terrible, the latency and throughput issues makes it useless for anything involving scientific computing/data processing. I could not disagree more, using it conjunction with GPU's makes zero sense. S3 and GCP/GS on the other hand are far better. Tensorflow "natively" support S3 and GS, i.e. if you path begins with "s3://" or "gs://" it will transparently pull from S3/GS, When used with conjunction with tf.dataset it allows you to have stateless training/processing. Tensorflow also support s3/gs for storing trained models.

Recommending EFS is a great way of signaling your ignorance about I/O.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like others have mentioned, EFS has it's own surprises. To get decent performance, you will see a lot of recommendations to store at least 1TiB on EFS to get decent performance (so if your working set is 100MiB, store, you need 999GiB of garbage), meaning you will spend $300/mo for capacity you don't need.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on why storing more data would fix your issues? I assume its because it moves you to a different tier but the claim seems strange for those unfamiliar with EFS.

<comment><USER3> You are right - the amount of throughput you get is based on how much data you store. Whats unintuitive about EFS is you get an "allotment" of throughput. Lets say you have 100MiB of data, you would get 100 MiB of throughput (example numbers). So you read that 100MiB of data, really quickly, and then the next time you read it, EFS is as slow as molasses.

So lets say you are using EFS for application deploys. Your application might only be 50MiB, but if you are doing multiple deploys a day, you might find that your deploy time shoots through the rough after 20 deploys. You find out that you have used up your "EFS" credits and the only way to get more is to store more data on EFS. I believe the first tier is at 100GiB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should try Qumulo: [https://qumulo.com/evaluate/download/](https://qumulo.com/evaluate/download/)

Fast, scalable and comes with tons of file enterprise features... And you don't have to get performance by putting storing more data (aka fill in your cluster with garbage data that you pay for!)

</comment><comment><USER6> I recently heard that some people are using Ceph on AWS, as the performance can be better than _EBS_ , let alone EFS.

</comment><comment><USER7> Efs is such a tire fire that I would not recommend this in production. Usually when you get to the point where efs sounds like a good idea, you've probably gone wrong somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER8> "But wait, I rather use S3. No, S3 could neither be an alternative to an NFS nor a replacement for EFS. S3 is not a file system. This smells like a cloud lockin' to me - not really, Pipeline/Kubernetes can use minio to unlock you. Another post …"

But minio is basically S3, so this doesn't make sense at all</comment>


Firefox OS puts a good $50 smartphone within reach - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/firefox-os-puts-a-good-50-smartphone-within-reach-7000015212/ <comment> ux-app I have a feeling Firefox OS is going to be big. from what I've seen of YouTube demos the OS is quite responsive on modest hardware (gs2 and nexus s).

I've had no luck this week trying to build the OS for a gs2. I'm hopeful that I'll have more success compiling for a nexus s.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I think so too. There was a big gap left open when WebOS was mercilessly killed off by HP, and I really wanted to see WebOS succeed.

Firefox OS is great so far, it has its quirks but its still very early days. There is no question in my mind that it will be a serious contender. There are so many devs out there who just want to code for one platform (web) and cant be bothered to go native (ask anyone using phonegap or sencha)...so a giant influx of good apps is not far off. And best of all, its built to open standards with no walled garden.

<comment><USER3> Actually not one went native after trying out phonegap. It would be interesting if you could elaborate more about the reasons for "giant influx of good apps". Not coding for one platform cannot be a reasonf for that, even the opposite. Cross-platform apps are usually aliens on all supported platforms. Open standards and no walled garden do not imply the quality in any way. For infrascturcure things, sure. For apps… I cannot come up with one example where open source (desktop) app is better than commercial alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whether the driving force is Firefox OS, Android, Windows, hardware components or a combination of everything, I am hopeful about the idea of a good $50 smartphone.

I had a conversation with someone about a year ago that made an impact on me. In terms of penetrating down the income ladder to those with the lowest income in the least developed places, mobile phones may have gone farther than anything else. Basic technology like electricity, cars/buses/trains, plumbing, sewage, roads.. These things penetrate down to the lowest 20-30 percentiles or so. Very few things make it farther down.

Mobile phones, made it farther down the income ladder in ten years than some technologies have regardless in thousands of ears. Around 95, mobile phones were for wall street yuppies. By 2005 subsistence farmers in failed states have access to them.

Smartphones tablets are similar enough to follow the same path path. Mobile phones shave had a big effect on the worlds poorest. Think of what access to the internet could do.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, I think I'm interrested in getting one of these devices [1]. I'm wondering though if there are currently the only (preview) devices supporting Firefox OS? And if there are officially supported by Mozilla and will continue to officialy receive software updates in the near future? (I don't want to buy a device useless in 4 months).

[1] <http://www.geeksphone.com/>

<comment><USER6> Mozilla has a list of supported devices ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Firefox_OS_build_prerequisites)), with the geeksphone devices being in Tier 1 support, and a couple of Android phones in Tier 2/3.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the link it's very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm more interested in what this will do for mobile app development than the actual phone itself. Having a phone that anyone with a text editor can write software for is going to be huge.

I briefly played with a FirefoxOS Phone at Linuxfest Northwest and it was more responsive than my old Motorola X2. I ran a few of the pre-installed apps and took a picture with the camera and it worked as expected.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am really looking forward to the impact that Firefox OS is going to have in the mobile market. There is definitely still space for a highly-featured low- priced smartphone and the HTML only is a plus for those not willing to put the time in learning how to program for Android or iOS, giving it a small edge apps-wise.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, and I'm hopeful. Though I'm not so sure about what he's saying about Android phones from China. I've bought some cheap Chinese 'smartphones' before and they were unusably bad. Perhaps there are better, Android based, models around nowadays.

<comment><USER10> What did you buy? And from where?

Just looked at dx.com and they have a lot.. but not too many with android 4

<comment><USER9> I bought a few iPhone clones, dual sim, basic java app support. This was before Android really took off, hence why I'm curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We'll see how "good" it is. I'm very skeptical about a Javascript-heavy OS being as good as an Android one on the same hardware. If all things are equal, it shouldn't be. However, I suppose Firefox OS will be more "feature-free" in the beginning, and those HTML5 apps will be a lot simpler than the typical native app, and these two things might compensate for the slower speed of Javascript. We'll see.

<comment><USER12> Well, Dalvik is not a speed deamon. I don't have any benchmarks on actual phone hardware available, but I can guess that javascript code will not run much slower on phone hardware than on desktop comparable desktop browsers, while Dalvik is a waaay slover than regular Java code on desktop.

<comment><USER13> If going by the stats that Xamarin gave[1] for Dalvik versus Mono on Android 4.0, Dalvik is also much slower than Mono. Though obviously Xamarin is not the most independent source in the findings, but I would believe it to outperform Dalvik in my own uses of both it and Dalvik for Android apps (I bought a license for it 6 months ago).

There's also some results by Koush Dutta[1] (Cyanogenmod contributer and Clockwork Recovery developer) from 2009 showing similar findings, though obviously that's way old and before Dalvik had JIT added in Android 2.2. We had a discussion sometime ago about that article on hn as well[3]

[1] <http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/>

[2] <http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/01/dalvik-vs-mono.html>

[3] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421862>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It'll be interesting to see how these "alternative" OSes perform in developing countries -- namely, those in Africa. I'm just glad to see the GPL being able to help harbor an emerging product without shooting themselves in the foot. They're providing third party compatibility, while still trying to tackle a completely different market. It's quite wonderful to see.

<comment><USER15> its MPL. not that GPL crap

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> where does it say that the phone will retail for $50? The author implies it and refers to the phone as though he was actually able to obtain one for about $50..

</comment><comment><USER17> I tried one of these phones last week. It was awful. No innovation, slow/juddery animations, bad UX. Granted it's a developer preview, but based on the preview I wouldn't develop for it.

<comment><USER18> How does it compare to the $100 retail iPhones and Android phones you've used?

<comment><USER19> Even if you buy a cheap plane ticket from Ryanair, you're allowed to complain if only one of the two engines work.

<comment><USER20> He may have been asking a genuine question. Given the current thread is about how much you can do for very little money, comparing how a $100 Firefox OS device to a $100 Android one is perfectly valid (though not entirely fair as one of the two is still not officially production ready).

<comment><USER19> I don't see how it could be anything but snark, as there are no unsubsidized $100 iPhones.

<comment><USER20> Fair enough, I somehow completely missed the significance of iPhone in the sentence and took it as smartphones in general (of which all the cheap ones are either Android or not-quite-as-smart-phones running something older).

But the cheap Firefox OS device to cheap Android device is still a valid comparison that I for one would be interested to see played out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Both phones are out of stock in the online shop.</comment>


Wired suggests bird-man is likely a hoax  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/human-bird-wings-hoax/ <comment><USER2> For reference: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3734497></comment>


Modern art was CIA 'weapon' (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html <comment><USER2> "Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete."

In other words, the US acted like a good government and helped the arts flourish, because it had a competition. It sounds like a joke, but in Us if you want to fund anything, you have to describe it as a weapon.

Write that open source software is a weapon against Chinese industry and you'll get CIA funding. Heh, after all Tor got funds from the Navy...

<comment><USER3> > ... if you want to fund anything, you have to describe it as a weapon.

In 1955, the NY Times led with "United States has Secret Sonic Weapon-Jazz"

      http://thereisjazzbeforetrane.blogspot.com/2009/08/us-has-sonic-secret-weapon-jazz-nytimes.html

Why did they fund jazz like they funded abstract expressionism? Jazz was the ultimate display of democracy and integration, improvisation and the exchange of ideas.

<comment><USER4> NPR had a program about this not long ago. According to them, many of the most famous jazz musicians of the time, like Dizzy Gillespie, was sent abroad backed by CIA and the State Department.

Several of the most high profile musicians subsequently dropped out of that program after touring Europe for a while.

Supposedly the good reception they got in cosmopolitan centres like Paris put their treatment by the US public and their handlers in the government in a grim light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, that's solved. Now let's speculate on the current cultural weapons, that the Russians can't keep up with, but that the Americans use to keep cultural dominance:

\- The entire entertainment industry.

\- The LGBT-movement / Pussy Riot.

\- Social networks, the internet, email providers and search engines.

\- Quantum computing and advanced NLP.

Clearly they wanted to keep "the (perpetual) fight against terrorism" on this list, but Russia did not listen.

<comment><USER6> Video games specifically. They are next-gen propaganda tools because you can subtly or not so subtly railroad a player into your frame by making them roleplay it for reward. It can adapt to less or more pliant players, it can collect analytics which help create faster iterations of improvement.

As an intentional cultural weapon (in the manner OP describes) I don't think it's actually ascendant yet, but it will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another possibility - CIA just sponsors random stuff to promote confusion in enemy ranks. Then claims it was for Cold War purposes.

Adam Curtis spoke about Russian government vocally backing various organizations, some hostile and some friendly to it. That way people are never sure who to trust, because even opposition is funded by gov. One difference is that Russians broadcast who they sponsor, given their target is the public.

Makes me wonder if CIA let slip it was using art as weapon to Russians, then watch them panic.

<comment><USER8> I'd kick it back a step, maybe as a spy novel plot, its no secret that "forever" the left promotes that all cultural advancement only comes from the left, nothing culturally worth anything comes from the right. I'm not trying to promote it, I'm trying to observe it. This has been a constant for an extremely long time. Meanwhile the Russians were a little authoritarian and locked down their art... why? Well one "spy novel grade of plot" is the Americans will fall for the bait and then they can keep an eye on the americans given that the artists tended left wing anyway.

Of course the rabbit hole never ends and a even more "spy novel plot" is the americans knew the russians knew so seeing as modern art is pretty much a waste of time WRT geopolitical struggles, we likely fed the artists a side dish of disinformation knowing that some of the disinfo will get back to the russians.

<comment><USER9> >the left promotes that all cultural advancement only comes from the left, nothing culturally worth anything comes from the right.

The right promotes that idea too; or rather, that all (gov't sponsored) cultural advancement only comes from the left.

<comment><USER10> I guess the orthodox right-wing view is that "progress" shouldn't apply to culture at all, and that it actually ruins culture: a person thinking of progress will never build the Sagrada Familia, only the Barbican Estate. (Similar examples can be found for music, literature, the visual arts, etc.)

<comment><USER11> We're saying Gaudi's work represents tradition?

<comment><USER10> Well, it's a Catholic basilica in a mostly Gothic style that's being built for 100 years. It incorporates some ideas that were new for its time, but so did the Notre Dame (flying buttresses).

I guess traditionalists are not against all new ideas, they're more against thinking that old = bad.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure we can agree that anyone who builds a politics on anything as reductive as [old|new] = [bad|good] is not helping much.

<comment><USER10> Just look at any left-wing art manifesto, there's plenty of those. Here's a famous one from 1917 Russia:

[https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1...](https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1917/slap- in-face-public-taste.htm)

<comment><USER11> Yeah I'm sure it's occurred across the spectrum and throughout history.

<comment><USER10> Agreed :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also see this review of Saunders' _The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters_ (2000).

[https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joff...](https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joffet.html)

<comment><USER13> I own a copy, it's a fascinating read. The British author Ian McEwan mentions that Saunders' book influenced his novel "Sweet Tooth" [0], which itself is a fine read.

[0]: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099578786](http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099578786)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The average American is likely to be completely clueless as to the cultural influence of the CIA and other government agencies on their daily lives. And this is just commentary on the things the agency has publicly admitted to.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, they're effectively our Ministry of Culture in the Orwellian sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.

-Marshall McLuhan

</comment><comment><USER17> Just to be pedantic, "Modern Art" is not synonymous with Abstract Expressionism. Modern Art began with Goya in the early 19th century. It refers to any of the schools of art that departed from the long traditions of commissioned portraiture and religious art.

<comment><USER18> I've wondered: does that mean that anything that comes after is under the umbrella of "Modern Art"? It seems like it should.

<comment><USER19> Pretty much. I'd date artistic Modernism from Manet, but that's personal taste. It's also open to debate when Modernism gave way to Post-Modernism - Neo-Dada in the 50s, Minimalism or Conceptualism in the 60s?

We're currently on "Contemporary Art", which is going to be a hard label to shake...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The deed is done, the Communists are beaten... so can we go back to art that looks like things (and requires skill to create) now?

<comment><USER21> No. Some jokes keep getting better if repeated.

Canning shit and presenting that as art piece is hilarious. Someone paying $37 for that canned shit in 1961 is even more hilarious. But somebody paying £182,500 for that his is again even more hilarious. And just consider the "inspiration" people get from that?

I shit you not.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit)

<comment><USER20> Art as a joke at the expense of art-buyers? I never thought of that angle, but it does make sense.

<comment><USER21> On many levels too. Imagine you have just gotten some utter crap into a gallery. You are silently laughing at your own joke. And telling everybody that "each person finds different aspect of it.. so I don't want to ruin that with my analysis". Or some other snobbish shit.

Then some dude comes to you "I like it. Would 500k$ be enough?".

What do you respond? "Aww man, it's just a joke. That's too much." vs. "Sold!"?

And the joke lives on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a weird bunch of decades. This neurotic competition against each's own paranoia feels a bit absurd and sour. And I just finished watching a few NASA movies again (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, ...) .. similar reasons.

<comment><USER23> You're falling for the trap of perspective. The current decade is just as weird. We just don't know it yet.

<comment><USER22> Heh, who said I thought it was an improvement. Now I'm wondering, is it a constant all through history ?

And I believe the hidden emotions of nations have been diluted into other channels when wars (a large scale PTSD) and then scare crow competition were the primary ones, nowadays it might be running in subtler ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They also funded socialist literary magazines.

[http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for- sociali...](http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-socialists- funded-by-the-cia-ranked)

</comment><comment><USER25> What's funny is that many on the right were convinced that abstract art was a communist ruse intended to upend American culture and thus weaken the US.

The article does make you ask questions, though:

>If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Was it just a matter of proving to the Soviets that America could be even more cultured due to freedom of expression? Or was it the Trotskyites looking to show that Stalin's brand of communism was inferior to Trotsky's? It does make you wonder...

<comment><USER26> Well, communist or not, it achieved these objectives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I guess even Michelangelo had the Medicis, but I wonder if something like this will influence the auction prices for various modern art.

Does a painting like this [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_57.92.jpg](http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_57.92.jpg) lose or gain new value in the context of being an unwitting participant in a sophisticated exercise of distraction?

Does the artist's original intention behind his or her art take a second place to the newly revealed absurdist quality?

</comment><comment><USER28> I read about this a long time ago in the form of a conspiracy theory, I always see people(even well educated ones) dismiss those and label it as false right away, but seeing that many conspiracy theories have proven to be true I think is time to recognize that this kind of thinking is a fallacy of the form X, X is a conspiracy theory => X is false. So I think conspiracy theories should be taken as what they are: hypotheses.

</comment><comment><USER29> i am not sure about the target audience of this sponsorship. Was it supposed to persuade people in the west or in the east?

Modern art and Jazz were not very outspoken on political issues, it was very easy to sponsor them as the artists were not likely to bite the hand that feeds them (unlike Rock musicians who were much more unruly).

Maybe it was propaganda aimed at an western audience? You still have to claim to be open minded and liberal and tell it to your own people; (see how we tolerate modern art? The commies are less liberal, never mind that we are not very liberal to minorities, blacks or those who we label to be communist sympathizers)

i think in the east Rock music (later) was doing more damage to the communist regimes (in real terms) than Jazz. Modern art and jazz had a more limited appeal, while Rock music (later) had a much wider audience.

(modern art was brait is funny that the person that helped the CIA here (post Stalin) was Khrushchev - in December 1962 he lashed out on modern art at a modern art exhibition in Moscow, following that they started a official campaign against modern art.)

<comment><USER29> Here is some more information on this event that ended the cultural thaw in the USSR.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art#1962_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art#1962_.E2.80.93_mid-1970s)

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

Khrushchev lashed out on the artist Ernst Neizvestny, interstingly he seems to have regretted that move once ousted, as Neizvestny was later approached by Khrushchev's family to design the tomb/monument for the former general secretary. go figure.

Maybe this modern art thing was designed to take some influence on the direction of cultural discourse during the thaw (relative liberalization) of the soviet union after the death of Stalin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ironically, the same kind of art was super popular in revolutionary Russia, e.g. Malevich's "Black Square".

</comment><comment><USER30> Not sure about modern art, but Travolta shooting heroin in Pulp Fiction killed thousands of Slavic youngsters..

</comment><comment><USER31> It was also apolitical. That's one way to not have to deal with any new Diego Riveras popping up.

</comment><comment><USER32> What are government intelligence agencies backing or opposing today?

<comment><USER33> Based on some of the culture control ideas in this article, online piracy doesn't seem far fetched. Pirates Bay could totally be a CIA backed site in the end. Also bitcoin maybe? Wikileaks? Reddit? Hacker News? The Simpsons? Clear Channel? Adbusters? 4chan/8chan?

Those are my guesses, I bet I got at least one right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is my favorite cold war story

</comment><comment><USER35> Art as CIA weapon - sure. Cultural marxism as leftist weapon - still paying dividends.

</comment><comment><USER36> Well, then. Good to know America's intelligence agencies are doing the important stuff. Yes, promoting dribbling on paper.

<comment><USER37> Hey, it beats carpet bombing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> As a neutral I see that Russia won the cold war by spending only on useful things...

</comment><comment><USER27> This statement from the article strikes me as a bit of a stretch:

 _Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA._

Perhaps not duped. But, how many other types of art were stifled by having a secret fund devoted to creating, promoting and praising one type of art.

Which raises the question of why the CIA chose abstract expressionism as the vehicle of choice for its propaganda. Perhaps because it is hard to be subversive with a work of art that every observer will interpret differently. Or perhaps because unlike other art that has some common ground for discourse between two observers, abstract art is like watching clouds pass by. "I see a baby!" one watcher will say. "I see a puppy!" another watcher will say. And that's where the conversation ends. It's the ultimate expression of individualism, but also the ultimate killer of dialogue.

<comment><USER39> It's hard to make a point about political violence with a maroon rectangle.

<comment><USER40> Yes and no. The maroon rectangle doesn't directly say anything. But Russian Expressionism wasn't free to paint that maroon rectangle, so the maroon rectangle could be a powerful statement of freedom.

In Park City, Utah, there is (or at least was) a gallery that sold Russian Expressionist paintings. It had a painting in it that was controversial in Russian art in the 1960s. It showed workers in a cloth factory, and it was controversial because one of the workers had a wistful or dreamy expression on her face. That expression nearly cost the painter his license as an artist. That's how heavy-handed the USSR was toward art - you needed a license to be an artist, and the government cared about the expressions on peoples' faces in your paintings.

Another thing I saw in that gallery: There was a difference in the landscapes done after 1990. They still are impressionist landscapes, but they have little dots of bright color where there were flowers. Pre-1990, the landscapes looked the same, but the overall impression was more drab. The freedom that came in 1991 showed up even in the landscapes, because the artists felt different.

<comment><USER27> Coming from Soviet Union yes it's very destructive that Socialist Realism was the officially state-sponsored art movement.

But how is that different from what the CIA is doing here. If they really wanted to be a patron of the arts and freedom of expression then why this focus on a single art movement.

<comment><USER41> Because the people in charge of the program at the CIA were fans of abstract expressionism.

To put it another way, they were using tax dollars in a very weird way to subsidize the kind of art they liked.

<comment><USER27> It seems highly unlikely that this decision was made based on personal artistic preferences of the CIA employees in charge of this program.

Like when the question came up "Hey which art movement are we going to prop up with millions of dollars?" some head honcho said "I like abstract expressionism.. make it so".

To put it another way, do you believe any decision at the CIA involving millions of dollars is not made without hordes of analysts poring over every available action and every possible outcome.

<comment><USER41> They were thinking that abstract expressionism best represented the cultural values that made the West superior to the communist world - the pure freedom of thought and imagination required to produce abstract expressionism, and a culture that could reward (or choose to not reward) its creators, without some government censor getting involved to decide what is and is not valuable and good. So it was an aesthetic love, but also a cultural love.

I totally grok where they're coming from. If you don't _love_ something, you're not going to hold it up as a model of what makes your culture superior. I love abstract expressionism and find megachurches creepy and weird, so I would hold up abstract expressionism as a fine example of what makes America great. Someone who loves megachurches and hates abstract expressionism would do the opposite. (By way of measure, my favorite painting ever is Jackson Pollack's "Mural", which I got to admire up close a lot when I was at the University of Iowa)

So yes, those CIA directors who made that decision really, truly loved abstract expressionism. They also found it the perfect antidote to the soul- deadening rigidity of Socialist Realism. They felt socialist realism was the result of a dying culture.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The good, the bad, and the beautiful code - <AUTHOR> http://eranmedan.com/post/31388713349/the-good-the-bad-and-the-beautiful-code

<comment><AUTHOR> please be gentle, it's my first blog post post on HN and please excuse my English, not a native language</comment>


The brilliant hack that brought Foursquare back from the dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/10/foursquare-hack

<comment><USER2> Here's the discussion on this article from a week ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875229)</comment>


The Antikythera Mechanism: Animation and Analysis [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/antikythera/

<comment><USER2> There is an interesting Google talk video here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNg-tXPPWc> from Tom Malzbender, who was a senior researcher from HP labs and developed a method called Polynomial Texture Mapping. This method helped him to see more details in the surface of objects and more specifically in Antikythera Mechanism.</comment>


Five arrested over 'Anonymous' web attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12299137 <comment><USER2> Excellent. How dumb do you have to be to try and DDoS the homepage of a major credit card company from your personal computer using a downloaded tool? Script kiddies or not, the law is the law. I'm glad to see them get popped for this. I can't stand all that Anonymous crap -- they've redefined what it means to be lame. This should hopefully set an example for anyone else that decides to do some vigilante work of their own. LOIC, give me a break.

"We are Anonymous. We are legion. We are no one. And everyone."

<comment><USER3> The anonymous DDOS attacks were obviously stupid and pointless. I think what you are missing is that these people are primarily teenagers who really don't know how to engage in social change in a productive way. In fact, I'm an adult, and I don't know how to engage in social change in a productive way. I'm smart enough to know that participating in a DDOS attack is counterproductive, but I'm also smart enough to know that sending Amazon and Paypal an email telling them I disagree with their decision making is also pointless. Do you have any productive suggestions for human individuals wishing to exert pressure on the decision making processes of large corporations? Also, do you believe the attitude "the law is the law" is correct for individuals living in countries with highly repressive governments? I have a lot of empathy for these misguided youngsters, and I hope someone figures out more ethical and effective ways for people who want to contest corporate ethics to do so.

<comment><USER2> You're defending the wrong kind of people. I understand the empathy for misguided youth, but these kids (and adults) knew that what they were doing was illegal. They were proud to engage in these acts because it was "cool" for them and their little /b/ buddies. They aren't the repressed political activists you're making them out to be. Besides, look at where they're from. They're not citizens of some third world nation with an oppressive regime in power. The laws they broke aren't unjust by any stretch of the imagination. They simply hopped onto a bandwagon with a bunch of other script kiddies and got popped for it. Don't light a candle for them.

Besides, citation needed on the claim that they were just confused and wanted to enact social change but just didn't know how. That's not typical of your average Anonymous devotee.

Yes, let the trolls and fake accounts people are creating solely for this thread have their way with this comment. I can spare it.

And people, stop complaining about my "the law is the law" remark as though it must be some unwaivering principle of mine even in the face of unjust laws (of which none are present in this situation).

<comment><USER4> > Yes, let the trolls and fake accounts people are creating solely for this > thread have their way with this comment. I can spare it.

You're losing it. You need a non-trivial amount of upvotes to downvote a comment. You're not being downvoted by fake accounts.

You also haven't provided any productive suggestions for human individuals wishing to exert pressure on the decision making processes of large corporations. Should we take this as a statement that you don't believe those exist, or that you don't believe those should exist?

<comment><USER2> You're right about the down votes. That's my bad. I know of no productive means by most people's definition of productive. I always say the same thing, and that's to write your senators or the equivilant in your government. What more can be done? Certainly not attacking and defacing private property based on what you read on the Web. People who defend these acts or play the devil's advocate are only fueling the attitude that is getting these people in trouble.

<comment><USER5> > What more can be done?

That's the whole crux of this. If all of your legal recourses for changing the law don't work, sometimes, you have to move to illegal ones. morality != legality. This obviously requires a lot of thought, a preparation to deal with the consequences, and a serious commitment. But sometimes, it's worth it.

<comment><USER2> The issue at hand is people damaging private organizations that chose to not do business with another private organization. Not fixing messed up or unjust laws. Not fighting a faceless government. Simply attacking a business they don't like for not doing business with an organization they do like. That's what's being defended here by the people arguing against my points.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't matter if they're private organizations or governments. It's about the power relationship. I won't get into 'corporate america blah blah blah,' but I'm sure that you can see that in this role, MasterCard plays the same role the government does. There's a certain level of responsibility that comes into play when you're a gigantic credit card company that's different then when you're a mom-and-pop grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Only five? I always assumed that there were _hordes_ of folks taking part in the Anonymous shenanigans. Do they only arrest five people because that's all they could reliably identify, or because to go after more would expend disproportionate effort, and they just needed to make an example?

> This investigation by the Central e-Crime Unit was carried out in > conjunction with law enforcement agencies in Europe and the US.

Seems that if we're going to this level of coordination, we should have ended nabbing more of these guys.

<comment><USER7> This is a scare tactic. They know that "Anonymous" is really a bunch of basement dwelling geeks between the ages of 14 and 24 and are actually too scared to do anything once their companions start getting arrested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Akin to accusing a handful of participants for massive political demonstrations.</comment>


Passive funds took power away from investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.matter-funds.com/how-passive-funds-took-power-away/ <comment><USER2> So, this is the second front page post by the same user this morning. One takes a direct shot at vanguard ("tax dialysis"), and the next an indirect shot ("they don't use your votes right - but we do! Invest with us!"). The user only has four posts in their entire history, and three are on the same topic and posted in the last 24 hours.

This ... looks off to me.

<comment><USER3> It's quite obvious what happened there, but it's not necessary bad.

<comment><USER4> Please explain...

<comment><USER5> A user has a bone to pick/an incentive to make this point, which normally leads to bad submissions. However, in this case it is a legitimate issue to be discussed.

<comment><USER2> I actually assumed the account was compromised. The account managed to not really post anything in the preceding five years, and then went on an astroturfing spree in a single twenty four hour period.

You're probably right, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a topic that's warming up in the investment space. There is a company, SAY, that is trying to get more shareholder participation.

Ultimately, the regulations need to change to allow fund holders to vote their stock. And this certainly can be enabled by technology.

In this scenario you wouldn't necessarily vote all 500 stocks of the S&P500 but you would set your preferences (always support board gender diversity, say on pay, etc... ) And the service would auto vote along your preferences.

</comment><comment><USER7> Passive (index) funds have grown because they work.

Read "A Random Walk Down Wallstreet" or "The Bogleheads Guide to Investing", you'll see it clearly laid out. For the Cliff's Notes version, turn to YouTube and watch Warren Buffet, Jack Bogle, etc.

Index Funds enrich their investors. Actively managed funds enrich their providers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty meaningless to present the numbers for passive funds without including the numbers for active inestors.

<comment><USER9> Hi I wrote this.

The numbers for active funds differ depending on the kind of fund we're talking about. For the big mutual fund complexes it's actually pretty similar to passive funds (see here [https://www.fundvotes.com/](https://www.fundvotes.com/)). To give a bit of context someone like Fidelity International [where I used to work] is at ~70% ([https://www.fidelity.co.uk/voting- record/](https://www.fidelity.co.uk/voting-record/)), which is about as low as i've seen.

The point isn't that passive funds are uniquely bad, because they aren't, but it matters more because of how big they have become.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The point is a good one that few people realize. If your holdings are in index funds, you're forfeiting your right to vote. It's almost criminal.

I don't know if a separate fund is the answer, though. Will my 401k offer Matter S&P shares? I sincerely doubt it.

To me this is a policy proposal that I'm surprised an Elizabeth Warren hasn't proposed. It's centrist in that it seems to really in inequality through corporate governance.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is not a problem specific to passive funds. Many companies are structured this way and professional investors are OK with it. Look at BABA for example. I will say this: the whole point of equity is to give you control and dividends. If you don't get both, you're effectively investing in an elaborate ponzi scheme.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good luck and a fine sentiment but the free rider incentives will favor cheaper funds with no corporate governance ambitions. The market for investors who care enough about corporate governance to subsidize others isn't big enough for critical mass in a scale business.

</comment><comment><USER13> I get that shareholders have powers to vote etc. but... are those vote usually used?

I have both ETFs and individual stocks, and in neither cases I use my shareholder power to vote or anything.

<comment><USER14> And generally, unless you understand the business deeply and are actively aware of the trade-offs of your vote, you shouldn't be voting.

We can all yell "pay parity" and "tie CEO compensation to worker compensation", but there are trade-offs. It means high performers who earn their pay are more likely to go elsewhere, where they'll be properly compensated. And who takes their place? Most likely, someone less qualified who is on the other side of the bell curve.

I'm not saying CEOs are justified in their pay or the rank and file don't deserve better pay, but there's no free lunch. Business is complicated and the current policies were put in place with CAREFUL considerations of the trade- offs. If you don't understand them at a deep level, don't get involved.

<comment><USER15> > We can all yell "pay parity" and "tie CEO compensation to worker > compensation", but there are trade-offs. It means high performers who earn > their pay are more likely to go elsewhere, where they'll be properly > compensated.

Other than more than they're currently making, what does "properly compensated" mean? Should we not use our votes to help decide that?

> Most likely, someone less qualified who is on the other side of the bell > curve.

Damn. Sucks for the board who chose a winner the first time and couldn't find another winner.

> Business is complicated and the current policies were put in place with > CAREFUL considerations of the trade-offs. If you don't understand them at a > deep level, don't get involved.

You're suggesting we all throw our hands up in the air and "let it be?" This is such a strange argument.

<comment><USER14> Re: proper compensation - this is a good question, and I don't have the answer to it. Headhunters might.

Re: the rest - these are straw man arguments. I never made those claims.

My only point was that the OP shouldn't feel bad about not voting. If he's uneducated and unqualified to understand on a business' operations, which we all are because we have LIVES outside of stalking a corporation, he should leave the well paid people to make those decisions.

Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD. 99% of shareholders and employees within a company see a very very tiny sliver of what's really going on.

If you dont like a company for a particular reason, simply dont put your money into it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ReThink – Effectively stop Cyberbullying - <AUTHOR> http://www.rethinkwords.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a great idea, but concerning that "patented" is the third most-important feature they want to tell you about the software :(</comment>


Capitalism will eat democracy – unless we speak up – Yanis Varoufakis - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB4s5b9NL3I <comment><USER2> Private ownership of means of production, i.e. capital, and free markets are essential for democracy.

If you have to depend on the village commissar's approval of your politics for your daily bread, you cannot be free.</comment>


We built a headless Firebase CMS to make it easier to add content in Firebase - <AUTHOR> https://flamelink.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Flamelink is a headless CMS built to make adding content to Firebase Apps much easier. It helps save Developers time and reverts, and Flamelink's easy-to-use interface makes managing content a dream for Content Managers. Try our beta version out for free at Flamelink.io</comment>