Collection Of Puzzles For Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/All/?p=348

<comment><USER3> Obligatory Project Euler plug whenever anyone posts a collection of puzzles for programmers. <http://projecteuler.net>

These sorts of puzzles are great for when learning a new language. Take a bunch of problems you've already solved in one language, and see how the solution works in another. If the solutions are too similar, it may be a sign that you aren't quite grokking yet how to think in the new language. Or that the new language is very similar to the old one. In which case, perhaps it would be more worth your time to learn a more different language. As Perlis said, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

<comment><USER4> > "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not > worth knowing"

Makes a good quote, but I don't buy it from a practical perspective. Library support is my primary motivation in choosing which scripting language to use for work projects. I don't think much differently at all in Ruby than in Python, but knowing both is extremely helpful.

<comment><USER3> I mostly agree with you in that there are perfectly valid reasons for learning similar languages. The quote is too strong, too absolute. But I still have a weakness for the quote because learning languages that alter your thinking is so much more useful than learning ones that don't.

As to ruby/python, I only have a superficial knowledge of Python, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that ruby blocks let you do thinks you can't in python. Rspec is one of the examples that gets talked about a lot. But if I were asked to sum all the numbers divisible by both 3 and 5 between 1 and 100 in Ruby, I'd do it like this

      (1..100).select{|a| a % 3 == 0}.select{|a| a % 5 == 0}.inject(&:+)

In my mind, that is a completely different way of solving the problem than by running a loop. My understanding is that you can't really do something like that conveniently in Python. Though, like I said, I really don't know python, so please do correct me if I have that wrong.

<comment><USER5>
      sum([x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0])

_edit: actually sum the list. Of course, it's even shorter if you realize you can write it as:_

      sum([x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 15 == 0])

<comment><USER6> You're better off making that a generator:

sum((x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0))

Notice the parenthesis instead of square brackets. Your version actually creates a list in memory. A generator generates the items one by one and doesn't need to store them all at the same time.

<comment><USER7> You can just write it as

      sum(x for x in xrange(1,101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0)

and skip the inner set of parenthesis; the parenthesis on a generator expression are not needed if it is the only argument to a function.

<comment><USER8> Can't you all think for a bit? All of These solutions are O (n) in both time and space... there is solution that will take O (1) time and space - and I think that you learned it in math class at (latest) high school (hint: arithmetic progression)

<comment><USER7> Seriously? The discussion is about language features, not optimal algorithms.

One could imagine the question was actually "sum BusyBeaver(n) for n divisible by 3 and 5 between 1 and 100", i.e. no closed form. In Python:

      sum(BusyBeaver(x) for x in xrange(1,101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0)

(And yes, if one was being really pedantic, one could replace the condition with x % 15 == 0.)

<comment><USER8> The thing is that people start using those libraries w/o thinking before - <USER2> theirs' solutions end up doing much more work than is needed

<comment><USER9> This could be said of most anything high level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recommend the 250 points and 500 points problems of topcoder(<http://www.topcoder.com/>). Some of the classical puzzles are so straightforward, while more effort is needed to find the tricks of the problems on topcoder.

</comment><comment><USER11> I seem to recall there being a subreddit filled with these kind of puzzles, but I can't find it right now. Anybody know the one I'm talking about?

edit: this was the one I was thinking about <http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer>

</comment><comment><USER12> I have never understood the desire or need for these. Why not tackle whatever problems are in the way of what you are trying to make? I guess some people like them for their own sake, but I haven't ever felt that way.

<comment><USER13> Some of these, at least, are excellent ways of learning how to think about a solution to a problem. Take the Friday the 13th puzzle for instance -- you can do a lot of floundering around with a puzzle like that in some languages until you realise that it's exactly equivalent to looking for all of the Sunday the 1st dates, and it's been a long time since I worked in any language that didn't have an easy way to do that. Sure, some puzzles are just puzzles for the sake of cleverness (the typical "think outside the box" things), but others are about decomposing or restating a problem to make it much simpler that a frontal assault on the original problem as stated. If you're the sort that can immediately intuit the decomposed problem all of the time, cool -- most people need to train their minds to work that way.

<comment><USER14> Start writing a game. You will learn a lot more from the problems you have to solve for your game than from a dozen project euler websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ACM ICPC previous problems are also interesting.

<http://icpc.baylor.edu/info/Problem+Resources>

</comment><comment><USER16> (plug) For a little while I tried to make some "practical" puzzles for new programmers [0], but with school and work I've found excuses to not work on it. I also began rewriting the site in Ruby on Rails so I could leave Wordpress, but, for the same reasons, I haven't worked on it in quite some time.

[0]: <http://programthis.net>

</comment><comment><USER17> The website <http://programmingpraxis.com> has a ton of interesting puzzles.

</comment><comment><USER18> For _beginner_ programmers, though some of these make good questions for an interview. We used Roman number converter question few times and it's an unboring exercise.</comment>


DNA from teeth leads to discovery of new group of ancient Siberians - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190605133524.htm <comment><USER2> One of the interesting bits here is that these are the only people outside of North America to share DNA with first peoples of North America.</comment>


Flash used to penetrate IE's ASLR and DEP protections. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/03/microsoft_windows_protection_bypass/

<comment><USER2> ... and people still don't want to hear that Adobe's Flash client sucks.</comment>


Average stock ownership: 22 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/top-stocks/blog.aspx?post=e9460aab-d393-48a1-9112-8d8e4ddee50e

<comment><USER2> Warning, that page has a flash ad that autoplays with _very_ annoying audio, turn down your speakers before you click the link or you'll wake up the whole house.

In fact, don't bother clicking here is the whole text of the 'article':

"What, you bought a stock one whole hour ago? And you still own it? That stock is practically a dinosaur in Wall Street's new reality.

The average time a stock is held is 22 seconds. But that's an improvement from a year ago, when it was 20 seconds, according to analyst Michael Hudson, an economics professor at the University of Missouri.

It's all because of computerized split-second trading. "The financial sector is short term," Hudson said in an interview. "They talk as if they're long term."

Wired has an excellent overview of how computerized trading has taken over Wall Street. It's so bad now, in fact, that computers now read news articles at lightning speed, searching for key words that will help them buy stocks. "The machines aren't there just to crunch numbers anymore; they're now making the decisions," Wired reports. Computerized high-frequency trading makes up about 70% of all trades, experts say.

How can the individual investor compete with that?

<comment><USER3> I understand when people copy the content of some blog post the author submitted to HN while a server is too overloaded to read it at the source.

I don't understand you copying the full text of an MSN news article because you don't like the advertising. Please respect copyright a little bit. If you don't respect copyright, at least respect Paul and don't create reasons for lawyers to send him DMCA infringement notices.

<comment><USER2> So it's ok to copy blog posts because a server is overloaded but not ok to copy a 5 line article from MSN _half_ of those five lines were copied by MSN from wired, two more were from an interview elsewhere ([http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&#... warning, also auto plays some ad, sorry) and whose sole original contribution seems to be to deliver some auto-play ad?
That's inconsistent.
The wired article is here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_ai_flashtrading/
I really wonder which one of the two remaining lines you think the DMCA infringement notices will be about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Keep in mind that this could easily be a statistical quirk. Firms that make very frequent transactions will tend to make a lot of them; as a result, they deal in insane volume and will make up the majority of the sample size. The statement in the headline is simply saying "Stocks that get traded often make up the bulk of stocks that are traded," which most people would say "Duh" to.

To see how this plays out, imagine a hypothetical financial world that looks like this:

Firm A has $100M under management and makes a transaction every 10 seconds (total: 3 million trades). They make a return of 10%, $10M. Each trade is for 10,000 shares (average 0.03 cents/trade profit).

Firm B has $1B under management and makes a transaction every 3 months (total: 4 trades). They make a return of 10% ($100M). Each trade is for 10 million shares ($2.50/share profit).

The remaining 100 firms have a total of $100M under management and make one transaction per firm per year. They make a return of 10% ($100,000 each). Each trade is for 1000 shares.

(Ignore how everyone makes a profit in this supposedly closed financial system...we can just chalk it up to the Fed injecting money into the economy.)

If you average the holding time of each stock _by transaction_ , you have (3 million trades at 10 seconds + 4 trades at 7.5 million seconds + 1,000 trades at 30 million seconds) / 3,010,004 trades = 1019 seconds. That's an average holding time of just under 20 minutes.

If you average the holding time of each stock _by volume_ , you have (30B shares at 10 seconds + 40M shares at 7.5M seconds + 100,000 shares at 30M seconds) / 30,040,100,000 shares = 9,976 seconds, or an average holding time of about 3 hours.

If you average the holding time _by firm_ , you have 1 firm at 10 seconds, 1 firm at 7.5M seconds, and 100 firms at 30M seconds, for an average holding time of just under 1 year.

If you average the holding time _by firm, weighted by capitalization_ , you have ($100M * 10 seconds + $1B * 7.5M seconds + $100M * 30M seconds) / $1.2B = 8.75M = about 4 months.

Note how different the results are depending upon how you perform the average. The article sounds like it's averaging by transaction (i.e. taking the total number of trades and dividing it by the time period they're traded in), which is method 1. I'd argue that a better metric is method 4, averaging by firm weighted by capitalization, which indicates how roughly how long firms with lots of money at their disposal are choosing to hold stocks. In a world like the hypothetical one above, where you have a few high-frequency trading firms, a few giant fundamental-investing firms, and a bunch of retail investors, the results for that are wildly different.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is entirely devoid of content. It is completely worthless.

Newsflash for everyone thinking about being involved with the markets: the reason they work is because there are participants with different motiviations and ideas on how to make money. Period. By definition, the "plankton" of the markets are the market makers (both designated and implied, read passive HFT). These guys provide immediacy. They do that with the express intent of continuously trying to manage their inventory of any particular stock to 0 (with constraints of their pricing model). This directly implies they have a very high turnover and a holding period that is minimized as much as possible.

Why do they do this? Market makers provide a valuable service: immediacy. They supply to other traders an OPTION to trade with them by displaying liquidity on the standing limit order book. Therefore, they must deal with adverse selection (trading with counterparties who are more informed than they are). A market maker is there, ready to trade, and when someone lifts their offer or hits their bid they want to turn around and lay that position off as quickly as possible, ideally via another limit order being matched with a market order. This is the way they earn their living: by making the spread.

</comment><comment><USER6> Compare this to Mr. Buffett, who has been quoted as saying:

"I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years."

Quite a contrast.

<comment><USER7> Yes, his strategy is about the opposite. It relies on doing very good stock picking and then holding the stocks for a long time.

I wonder if buy and hold is as good of a strategy now as it was back when he started. He had the luck to start at a time from which there was a decades- long growth in the stock market.

<comment><USER6> It is.

Size is Buffett's anchor now. If you give him a small amount of money, say $50Million, I think he'd do wonders with it.

I model my investing style after what he was doing about 10 years into his career and its worked out well for me with very little stress. The only reason I sell is if I find something that looks like a better value, but even if I'm right to move elsewhere the taxes make me question my decision every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _How can the individual investor compete with that?_

A: Don't try. Holding stocks a long amount of time insulates you from the market-timing nonsense where the day traders are fighting tooth and nail for fractions of a percentage point of profit.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it seems with high speed algorithmic trading your larger competitors are always going to have faster machines, better connections and likely many many programmers just as smart or smarter than you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How did they get this data on stock trades? I would love to take a look at that it. And instead of an average, I'd like to see a histogram. I bet there are a lot of very quick trades and a lot of people/companies that hold onto stocks for months or years.

<comment><USER4> You can get raw data from the NYSE TAQ database, as well as various resellers:

<http://www.nyxdata.com/Data-Products/Daily-TAQ>

However, doing things like producing a histogram or tracking the individual numbers for a given fund require that you be able to identify individual traders, which is generally not possible. Funds will route their orders through brokers specifically to anonymize them, often slicing a given order up into many sub-orders so that it can be spread across multiple brokers. The golden rule of the financial industry is to never ever let your competition know what you're doing; if it gets out that, say, Goldman Sachs is buying a whole lot of Google stock, you can bet that the price of Google will rise and it'll cost Goldman a whole lot more.

When I was still tangentially involved in financial software, there was a lot of interest in algorithms that could heuristically identify possible actors based on patterns in the data, much like how Google identifies webspam or PayPal identifies fraud. I'm not sure how far this got, though, and obviously if some company succeeded in it, they wouldn't tell anyone. Actually, I kinda wonder if this is the sort of stuff Palantir is doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Charge a $5 tax per trade on stocks held less than 24hours. That would slow the volatility of the stock market quite a bit. We should probably have a speculation tax on commodities too, to quieten the wild swings in prices we sometimes see.</comment>


Tell HN: HNSearch is broken - <AUTHOR>

Currently I'm just getting the spinning wheel.<p>http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+HNSearch+Broken <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+H...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+HNSearch+Broken)

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=HNSearch+br...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=HNSearch+broken)

EDIT:

It's working now. Interestingly, it returns _no results_ for the search terms HNSearch and Broken. Google search returns lots of them.</comment>


Flappy Bird creator, Dong Nguyen, taking down game; "I can't take this anymore" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432227971173068800 <comment><USER2> I feel for the guy. He made something a while ago, put on the market without much fanfare and then out of the blue his game suddenly shot to the top and raked in 50 million downloads. If you're not expecting it and you don't have the right people around you, all this publicity (a lot of which is quite negative, despite the game's popularity) can be pretty hard to take for some people. Remember Susan Boyle's breakdown post her win on Britain's Got Talent?

Having said that, I've spent a couple of hours playing it since the first posts on HN showed up (yesterday) and got myself a top score of 50. I feel the appeal is in its simplicity.

I hope the creator takes some time out and gets the support he needs.

<comment><USER3> This is actually quite common behavior. You see this a lot in any sort of craft where you get sudden and unexpected success, they end up resenting their creation or feel some disconnect between the effort they put in and the result.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but $50k/day compensates completely for any potential resentment. Especially coming from the real world, where stalkers and people showing up at your door and getting hold of your phone number because of a service or product you provided that drew a few nutjobs rarely comes with _any_ compensation.

He should make all the money he can, laugh off the haters (whatever haters there are - I have only heard people talking either about how much they like the game, how frustrating the game is, or how nuts it is that it is making so much money for what it is). He could ride it out for a few weeks (or months, if he's lucky) and retire. Especially in his part of the world.

This artsy-fartsy turtle-head-back-in-shell thing is pretty crazy.

<comment><USER5> Who the $#%^ wants to "retire" when they're not even 30 years old? What does that even mean? Never create anything again, just potter around and waste the rest of your life away until you die, because of a meaningless stroke of luck when you were younger?

What I suspect you're not getting is that $50K/day is NOT 350x more rewarding- feeling than $1K a week. He can't just sit around and bask in some wonderful "I win" feeling, laughing off the haters.

There's an important point where you start making the money you need, then another where you start making the money you want (to reduce your future risk, to take reasonable good care of your parents as they age, etc.).

But the number going up beyond that doesn't give you anything good; it just makes you more of a target, separates you from everyone you interact with, gives you a heavier responsibility, makes it _harder_ for you to just live the modest, comfortable life you were hoping for.

Money is not a goal in itself; or rather, only for the profoundly short- sighted. It's an enabler. If it's making him a target, and alienating him... why should he want that?

\-- Edited: somehow I had the idea he was a teenager; corrected that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a side note, Dong has doubled his Twitter followers in one hour from 7000 to what now is nearly 16000. Whatever was his real intentions, he is receiving media attention which will most likely last even after he pulls out the game.

You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income. As an indie developer he should know the fact that Flappy Bird won't last long - for example, Rovio is making over half of its income from other physical brand items. I'm not saying you will see Flappy Bird soda next year, but the games Dong releases later will most likely gain more attention thanks to Flappy Bird and Twitter is a way to make sure that the fans will notice it.

<comment><USER7> _You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income._

Are you speculating that, or are you suggesting that others should speculate that?

<comment><USER8> It's an expression, bro. Calm down.

<comment><USER9> It really bothers me just how heatedly pernickety some users are.

 _WoodenChair_ , your request for calm is greatly appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My teenager students will be devastated by this. They really liked the game. We also had a good class discussion about adverts, the amount of money you can get from adverts, and the cost of living in Hanoi.

The main thing is that they worked out that there is a _human being_ who lives somewhere and who has a name sitting down at a computer and hacking away at this game so they can play it.

<comment><USER11> Cost of living in Hanoi is so high because of strict building codes. They have these towers, you see, and they constantly have to move them a floor at a time across the city, and the larger floors have to sit below the smaller floors, with a severely constrained workforce. It's a logistics nightmare.

<comment><USER12> They should hire someone to devise a strategy so they can move the floors more optimally.

<comment><USER13> If someone were able to do that, they could leverage it into a very high-up position somewhere. Three-post towers of hanoi is an easy problem. Four-post is still unsolved.

<comment><USER13> Have we turned against fun facts?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reve%27s_puzzle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reve%27s_puzzle)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This very recent tweet from Dong seems to explain his motivation: [https://twitter.com/dongatory/statuses/432096186313355264](https://twitter.com/dongatory/statuses/432096186313355264)

other guy: "No problem, but you hate the success of Flappy Bird?"

Dong: "Not because of them but because how people use my game. They are overusing it."

<comment><USER15> And in about a month or two Flappy Bird fever will wear off and folks will move onto something else.

Don't turn down millions of dollars because people are doing what people do! Someone remind him of all the folks who have downloaded his game and stopped playing nearly immediately...,

<comment><USER16> This might come as a shocker to many people on HN, but many people do not like money.

<comment><USER15> It's not noble to waste opportunity like that. If he doesn't like money, he should take the money then give it away. A lot of poor people would kill to have that money to feed themselves and their families, or send their kid to school - if he feels so inclined he should take it and give it to them. If not, he's wasting a huge opportunity to either be very rich or very charitable out of some poorly thought-through righteousness.

<comment><USER17> So you advocate doing things you find morally objectionable while telling yourself that it is the right thing to do because you can give the money away afterwards? That sounds insane to me.

<comment><USER15> I think it's morally objectionable to waste a rare opportunity when one could just as easily channel that opportunity towards the benefits of others.

<comment><USER18> This really does not compute for me, so it's bad to stop ruining people's lives if in ruining their lives you could help other people's lives? What if the people addicted and raging over Flappy Bird are the same ones that you think should be helped?

<comment><USER19> You're conflating two acts: he has produced a game, and being addicted _to games_ ruins some people's lives. But if he withdraws his game, their lives don't suddenly get un-ruined. They just switch to some other game.

Basically, you're suggesting that an equilibrium of (1 person-hour stolen by addiction : 1 person-hour of ad impressions given to charity) should be replaced with (1 person-hour stolen by addiction [just to some other game] : 0 person-hours of ad impressions given to charity). Note that there is no "0 person-hours stolen by addiction" option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He's averaging $50K per day from in-app ads according to an interview with The Verge:

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5383708/flappy-bird- revenue...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5383708/flappy-bird- revenue-50-k-per-day-dong-nguyen-interview)

<comment><USER21> AND he's in Vietnam. Huge sum of money.

<comment><USER22> >AND he's in Vietnam. Huge sum of money.

It's a huge sum of money anywhere. But in Vietnam, you can hole yourself up in a nice hotel in the center of the city, eat out everyday and live lavishly for less than $2k a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I understand that he is probably wanting to get away from all the press coverage but I'm pretty sure this is not the right way to go about it. This might actually have the opposite effect. I had no intention of downloading it but knowing it is about to be removed, I'm going to download it.

<comment><USER24> He's really a PR genius. When he restores Flappy Bird to the app store next week, after a week of the media writing about how it was taken down abruptly, It'll blow up even more.

<comment><USER25> When - if - he removes it from the app store, Clumsy Bird [insert clone here] will take over his sales momentum, and Flappy Bird will never be heard from again.

<comment><USER26> indeed , clumsy birds is coming close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This kind of helped me relate to why he's taking it down: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD- nzHy2DdU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD-nzHy2DdU)

I know it's a joke, but on the other hand, it's only funny because a lot of people identify with the sentiment.

<comment><USER28> So uhhh, now that he's out of the game can I make yet another SFCave clone and start making $50k/day then?

<comment><USER29> Good ole' sfcave. I've been playing that game since the palm pilot days. I remember upgrading my to a newer palm pilot and finding out that the game wasn't actually running full speed on my old greyscale palm. The android version is still fun.

<comment><USER28> Hah, yeah, I'm not sure if the game was timed properly or if it just ran as fast as your device could draw it.

Fucking loved that game. Android port is pretty good, but just not the same for some reason. Not as fast perhaps. Flappy Bird made me glad to see someone could do something nice with its formula still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If this is a marketing trick, that's some next level shit. But I'm not suggesting that it is.

<comment><USER31> Well at least there'd be a next level to _something_ then.

<comment><USER32> Wow. Did you just... You DID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> PURE CONJECTURE:

I'm an app developer and have been approached about doing deals to make it to the top where they would take a share of the revenue (and/or) charge an upfront fee.

So he could be taking it down because he doesn't want to keep paying 10-50% of his profits to some other company, when he realizes he can probably get another app to the top with his existing fame and userbase.

Would make a lot more sense than his claimed reasons.

<comment><USER33> It also would help explain the app's jump out of nowhere 6 months after release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If this is because of harassment then I feel really bad for him. The game may be super simple and silly but it shouldn't be ridiculed by those who are jealous of its luck and success.

My personal score is 102 and I appreciate the game for what it is.

<comment><USER35> There was a Polygon article on HN recently about how the audience has no idea what it wants. It used Flappy Bird as the example, mentioning how it was an overnight success, but repeatedly slammed it:

"Not only is the visual language of Flappy Bird almost entirely re- appropriated from early NES games, but it seems to be engineered and designed by someone still learning how to create games. There are frequent slowdowns and animation glitches in the Android version but, more importantly, Flappy Bird has absolutely no sense of what indie game developers call "feel."

The hitboxes are ridiculously large, which is the source of much of the game's difficulty. The flapping mechanic, while serviceable, is entirely ordinary. It looks and feels like a game design student's first project in their intro to programming class."

In other words: "Well, this product is a turd, but it look how many idiots are buying it!" If that was your pet project, how would you feel? Imagine if every news article covering your game did so by giving you backhand compliments. It would crush you very, very quickly.

<comment><USER19> That's bad journalism, of course. If people are buying something in droves, and classical analysis suggests that that should be impossible, then there's something wrong with the analysis. A proper article would start with what we know -- "people love this game" \-- and then try to figure out _why._

You see the same backwards approach to journalism everywhere there's a scale in how much work things take to produce. Critics appreciate things with a complex process behind them. People, meanwhile, value mostly nostalgia and super-stimuli.

The wine most popular in blind taste-tests of people who haven't developed a "palate" for wine, is basically equivalent to grape juice with some vodka dumped into it. This isn't a bad thing! But critics hate it, because there's nothing to talk about there. It's grapey, and it's alcoholic, and that's all people really want. Until, that is, they're immersed into the whole culture of oaky this and tannins that, and start thinking about what went into the wine instead of just whether they want to drink a lot of it.

And because of this, critics generally don't serve the people. People want to find the _best-tasting_ grapey alcohol. Critics, meanwhile, just want to talk about how long something aged in a barrel, and don't even have _words_ to differentiate grapey alcohols.

<comment><USER4> That isn't how Polygon works. They and their writers absolutely despise their readers and gamers, in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The owner is pretty vague about it on twitter, but I'm pretty sure they're taking it down due to how it effects their quality of life:

[https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432095426854912000](https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432095426854912000)

<comment><USER37> Sounds like he made a mistake and is paying for it now. If he really wanted a simple life, he should not have published a game under his own name.

<comment><USER38> It's a big pain in the ass to register an App Store account as a company vs as an individual. Especially if it's something as small and casual as this.

<comment><USER37> It may be a pain, but the game is generating a lot of attention and money. The prudent choice would be to release the app under a company's name. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER38> It became popular after the fact. He wasn't expecting to become this popular by a long shot. By the time he was starting to get popular, it was too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There are lessons to be learned from this phenomenon in all fields (marketing, game dev, PR, etc...)

One thing I can empathize, and suspect is the root of this, is that as a young developer I'm sure he's scared out of his mind of legal repercussions. It's not easy scraping pennies one day, and then the next day checking your bank account and seeing money in there that you feel you didnt work for. It doesnt feel legal.

At the very least, I'm sure that weighs heavy on his mind.

<comment><USER40> See, it is not like that. Even if he was selling the game he would have to wait for at least a month for Apple to pay. And since this is advertising, it can take a lot longer. Also, he can have problems getting the money into Vietnam or wherever he is. He may get a large US cheque, which will be a huge pain to cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> You fail so many times that it shows so much ads, I don't know how ad payment work, but it must be profitable. Does not make sense to shut down because of some haters.

<comment><USER6> Polygon reported the game to make $50'000/day from those ads. The developer seems to have a mental breakdown and should probably go offline for a day or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's hard to imagine a reason to even think about taking it down and seeing its poor command of the language it looks like we'll never know. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because he's a lone developer, too much to handle for one guy.

</comment><comment><USER43> Accidental product success, followed by accidental PR success. Half of HN would kill for this kind of luck, and this poor guy doesn't want it... Which makes it even more interesting!

</comment><comment><USER44> I dont think its a PR tactic or anything. They guy just doesnt care for money or popularity it seems, for whatever reason. Just let him be and move on internet...

</comment><comment><USER45> Maybe it's a PR tactic to get everyone who doesn't have it yet to download it?

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe he's more brilliant than we've given him credit for. Possible scenario is that he's received take downs for prior art, name infringement or whatever. Instead of fighting it and waiting for Apple and Google to do it he says he's taking it down, driving popularity while doubling or tripling his ad impressions for a couple days

</comment><comment><USER46> If he really couldn't take it anymore, and really wanted out of the game, he would have taken it down without any fanfare and gone off the grid completely.

By announcing it, though, he's drawing an incredible amount of attention to the game which leads me to believe this was the intended effect. Heck, it made me download it as I've never played it before.

Genius move.

</comment><comment><USER47> that's probably the thing. Just think about what it is like to suddenly find yourself as a public known non-government guy in a socialist, underdeveloped country obviously owning a million bucks. D'oh. I bet he's been stalked a lot last days.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a great opportunity for someone to make a (good) clone of this game and clean up!

<comment><USER48> But this game's concept has been around since forever already, also on other app store titles, so... idk.

<comment><USER23> Good point. I guess, on a very ground level view, all game concepts have more or less been around for years. It would be an interesting study of why this one went so big when so many others didn't.

Also, I was thinking of more of a blatant rip off. I'd imagine those rip offs that are already out there are going to see a spike in downloads in the next couple days when people go to find this game and it isn't there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Taking down the game tomorrow isn't going to stop the flow of ad income from already-installed copies.. plus, generates a rush of people downloading "before it's gone". Genius.

</comment><comment><USER50> Twitter is such a shit platform to convey ideas and motivations.

<comment><USER51> You know, that idea you just expressed fits nicely into 140 characters.

<comment><USER50> I should claim that that was my point, and that I was trying to be satirical.

However, the truth is that for discussing motivations and explaining things, such as Flappy Bird's demise, it really is not the ideal way to convey a message. Nuance and detail are gone on Twitter... and to your point, I was initially downvoted for my comment, presumably because I didn't give sufficient contribution to the converstaion.

<comment><USER51> I totally agree with you. I just couldn't resist the irony.

Twitter seems best for short-form humor and food-truck locating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This guy lives in Vietnam? I would be seriously worried about my own safety if I were him. Coming out and doing that interview was a bad idea. Believe me, you don't want to be known as a rich person in a country like Vietnam.

People will jump in front of your moped just to extort some money from you. Everyone, including the police are crooked. In fact, I would be more worried about the police arresting the guy under some false pretense to extort some pocket money.

</comment><comment><USER52> Dry your tears with the money, dude! Rake it in while you can!

<comment><USER53> Money doesn't always dry tears, especially if he is going through a semi mental breakdown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder if he thinks all the "negative" reviews are serious feedback. He is from a different culture and humor almost never translates well.

</comment><comment><USER55> I hope he reverts on this decision and keeps the game up. I am not a fan of it, but I can appreciate his success.

</comment><comment><USER56> Everybody as an internal thermometer on how comfortable they are with success.

If you're too low ("I know I can do better than this!"), you work until you reach your temperature.

If you're too high, you self sabotage yourself until you are back to your level.

Case in point, removing your multi million dollar game from circulation.

</comment><comment><USER57> Some context would be nice. I have no idea who this guy is (or Flappy Bird) and why we should care.

<comment><USER58> Flappy Bird is a silly game in which you tap on the screen of your touch device to nagivate a (duck?) through a series of narrow paths delineated by tubes sprouting from the sky and ground. In the tradition of older 8 bit video games it's extremely unforgiving one mistake and you have to start over. It's apparently been a big hit. In regard to who the guy is, he is the developer of that silly game which he did for fun part time, it's blown up and he is tired of people harassing him. As to why people should care? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER59> I don't get it.

Why did he get harassed?

Because he made money?

<comment><USER60> He got harassed because the game looks like it didn't take much work, and it's more popular than people think it deserves to be.

<comment><USER61> Damn this is my dream, make a simple app with little effort, make millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I was explaining to my kids he other day this great silly game and they already knew what it was. The first thing they said was people play that all the time at school. The top reviews are "tounge in cheek" to the addictiveness of the game.

</comment><comment><USER63> Well, this is great news for anyone who's trying to clone the game.

<comment><USER64> There are already clones: [https://play.google.com/store/search?q=flappy](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=flappy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> [http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-flappy- bird](http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-flappy-bird) sign the petition to save Flappy Bird

</comment><comment><USER66> Where is this $50K per day coming from? If he has given this information to public, what was he expecting? Especially living in a country where people makes $150 per month.

</comment><comment><USER67> If he hates the game so much, why did he release version 1.2 on the 7th Feb (two days ago!) with a new title screen, new UI, "new birds" and new backgrounds?

<comment><USER68> He released 1.2 at least 7 days ago, given app review times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> what are the chances that his twitter account was hacked?

</comment><comment><USER70> Now even more people are going to rush to the App store and download the game today before the app is taken down.. assuming that would really happen.

</comment><comment><USER71> There are at least 30 million users on Flappy Bird (users that have played at least once and have a gamecenter account.

</comment><comment><USER72> The thing is - if he didn't care about the money, couldn't he just release an update without the ads?

</comment><comment><USER73> I don't think money is his problem. He got an Apple product to code his app. That costs him something.

</comment><comment><USER74> This never works out the way the vanishers expect it to. The media won't let it.

</comment><comment><USER75> It looks like a joke. I couldn't find any meaningful explanation for it.

<comment><USER76> [https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432095426854912000](https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432095426854912000) [https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432096186313355264](https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432096186313355264)

That should explain it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> How about someone acq-hired him? :)

</comment><comment><USER78> Any chance this is a PR stunt?

</comment><comment><USER79> Clones in 3...2...1...

</comment><comment><USER80> Because Internet.</comment>


Ask HN: How should a 7th grade girl learn to program iPod/iPhone apps? - <AUTHOR>

Back in my day, I learned how to program with HyperCard on the Mac. It allowed making GUIs right away, had plenty of books, and was a self-contained environment (not the mess that is HTML/CSS/JS).
Now, a family friend's 12 year old daughter is curious about making iPod/iPhone apps and I'm wondering what is the right language/platform/environment for this era. Suggestions?
Some people recommended Greenfoot and Invent with Python, but I'm looking for something that can produce results on a device she's already using. (Because I remember trying to learn programming in an alien environment and I found it really discouraging when I was a kid. In my day, that was trying to learn console text-mode programming when I was a Mac GUI user. Present-day Me thinks it makes sense to learn the basics in text-mode on a PC first, but Kid Me is not convinced.) <comment><USER2> The language for iPhone is Objective C. This is a pretty popular tutorial package for it: [http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios- apprentice](http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-apprentice)

I'm only a fledgeling programmer myself, so my comment should be taken with a grain of salt, but I suspect ObjC might be a bit much to start with for a 12 year old. I tried and failed to take up programming a few times before I finally tried python and it stuck. Then again, that's just me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I think ObjC is too much for a 12 year old with no programming experience. (Frankly, IMO, anything with manual memory management is probably too much.) So I'm curious if HN'ers suggest other ways to get something going without writing it in ObjC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend you get her going on something like Corona SDK which is an iPhone gaming framework based off of Lua.

[http://www.coronalabs.com/products/corona- sdk/](http://www.coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/)</comment>


The European Lisp Symposium will be streamed on twitch - <AUTHOR> More details here: https://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/2020/index.html <comment><USER2> I'll finally be able to afford to attend this year!

Since it is free, and you do not have to log in to view the event, there might also be non-Lispers interested in a few of the subjects listed in the itinerary. Obviously it is Lisp-specific, but some of the subjects are a little more universal.</comment>


2015: 274 days, 294 mass shootings, hundreds dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/01/2015-274-days-294-mass-shootings-hundreds-dead/ <comment><USER2> Not the most obvious HN subject matter, but I thought the data-driven approach of this article offered worthwhile perspective on an issue that impacts the quality of life for the many HN readers based in the US.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: On average, every 22hr or so, someone somewhere in the US "goes postal" and manages to kill at least four other people.

<comment><USER4> As the article points out, the Mass Shooting Tracker tracks mass shootings (at least four people _shot_ ), not mass murders.</comment></comment>


Beta: Free tool to migrate analytics and ad data to various databases - <AUTHOR> http://cognetik.com/data-streams?utm_source=HN&utm_medium=comm&utm_campaign=datastreams <comment><AUTHOR> Supported cloud data sources: Adobe Analytics, Doubleclick, Adwords, Facebook, Bing, Kochava, Youtube. Soon Twitter & Salesforce.

Supported Databases: Amazon Redshift, MySQL, Google BigQuery. Soon Microsoft SQL. BI tools like Tableau also supported.

Our product acts as a pipeline that sends clickstream & ad data to user's selected databases. Would love to get your feedback!</comment>


Questions to ask during developer interviews - <AUTHOR> https://coderwall.com/p/2gvpeg

<comment><USER2> These questions are good for the most part, but I'm not so sure about the bug tracker comments. For one, on this topic the author contradicts himself:

 _Believe it or not, the best companies of all don't even have a bug tracker._

...

 _I've never seen a company that doesn't use a bug tracker, but if I ever found one, I'd be more impressed than revolted._

The only way this isn't a contradiction is if the author has never encountered some hypothetical "best company."

Furthermore, as the number of clients increases, the number of bugs coming in will also increase. And clients will file tickets for things you didn't even consider a bug -- user error, for example. When a company has a lot of tickets being filed, there's a good chance the developers can't respond to each bug right away, and that's where the tracker comes in.</comment>


I am looking for ideas for a tower defense game - <AUTHOR> I've been learning Unity for a while, it's now time I build something of my own. I want to make a Tower Defense game, which is one of my favorite types.
Any ideas for style, theme, ambientation and characters? <comment><USER2> I bet if you ask on the Unity forums you might get more specific help.

Also: [https://www.neogaf.com/threads/general-tower-defense- strateg...](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/general-tower-defense- strategies.580565/)</comment>


Peter R's Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497289.0 <comment><USER2> Well,

Regardless of how exactly it happened, I think the big thing is that anything that operates as "just an exchange" has the potential to operate as a fractional reserve bank instead (IE, just operate with enough money to cover day-to-day transactions and not-have/use-for-something the remaining funds people think you have in your vault).

So basically, trusting any unregulated entity that claims to have stuff in its vaults is an inherently dangerous thing since such entities inherently tend to fail all at once when they fail (because they can mask either a series of small failures or a failure large enough to bankrupt the company but still not large enough to clean out the customers - yet).

<comment><USER3> It also shows what happens in an environment without insurance. If Mt.Gox was insured, this catastrophe would have been avoided for the customer by either the insurance company paying out or by Mt.Gox never getting hacked due to the security controls that the insurance company would have demanded.

This, of course, raises the questions of "who insures the Bitcoin insurance company" and "how do the insurance companies protect their Bitcoin now that they are a target?"

<comment><USER4> Mt. Gox tried to secure insurance of customer deposits. Japanese insurance companies asked them about the specifics of their business and then said, to paraphrase, "Oh HELL no." One of the issues was that they were awaiting guidance from the Financial Services Authority, because insurance companies hate uncontrolled regulatory risk. The other issues were the sort of thing which will get your Errors and Omissions insurance application circular filed regardless of whether you're running an exchange or running a web development shop.

E&O insurance is surprisingly simple to understand. You fill out a 5ish page application, which asks you about the character of your business, your tech infrastructure, and your procedures/policies/etc regarding particular risks. The underwriter reads your application then asks some drilldown questions. The two I got were "Confirm Mr. McKenzie has 5+ years of professional experience in system administration" and "Confirm that the use of Appointment Reminder in a hospital is for the hospital's business administration or the convenience of patients, rather than for treatment/diagnosis/etc of a medical condition." (Translation: If it breaks, does anyone die? If so, we will probably not write this policy.)

<comment><USER5> I'm curious if this is due to Mt. Gox not trying hard enough. Recently a Bitcoin startup was able to obtain insurance from Lloyd's: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/backed-by-lloyds- of-...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/backed-by-lloyds-of-london- new-uk-startup-offers-insured-bitcoin-vault/).

If this theory is true, presumably Karpeles would not have done this after the 2011 hack, because that would be insurance fraud (falsely obtaining insurance on the theft of coins that have already been stolen). It's possible that it would have been more difficult at that point because of Bitcoin being less mature.

<comment><USER6> But isn't Lloyd's famous for insuring what most other companies won't insure?

<comment><USER7> Yes. But from what I understand, this is because Lloyd's is a marketplace and not a traditional insurance company. They put wealthy entities in contact with people with peculiar insurance needs and let them work it out.

<comment><USER8> That's the classic move: outsource the risk to other people's money, and pocket some fees. Lloyd's seems a little like a bookie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The risk that something like this is what happened is why Bitcoin companies (and other companies that deal with money) should have mandatory vacation policies for employees. With a mandatory vacation policy, it's much harder to a single person to commit fraud, since keeping up a fraudulent scheme requires daily attention to create fake books and records.

[https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory- vacation](https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory-vacation)

<comment><USER10> That's an interesting idea.

A mandatory vacation sure would have put a stop to "Brian Molony"'s systemic theft from CIBC much earlier. iyww Biran Molony was the real life person behing the movie "Owning Mahowny".

<comment><USER11> It's not just an interesting idea - it's very much the norm in much of the banking industry in my neck of the woods. It's generally considered one of the best ways of picking up internal fraud.

One example that springs to mind from Australia was a branch staffer who had managed to rack up A$5 million dollars in fake mortgages. Went on holiday, the stand-in noticed dozens of mortgages to the same PO Box, did some digging...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr: Mt Gox had a lot of coins stolen in 2011 and has been running a fractional reserve ever since. Mark tried to delay the inevitable insolvency by creating a bot to manipulate the price, and eventually tried to cover it all up by blaming "transaction malleability" attacks.

One of many plausible explanations. It's going to be really interesting seeing how this actually plays out.

<comment><USER13> Im sorry but what is there to "play out"? The show is over. There is a bankrupcy filed protection that will decide what to give to whom but thats about it. We will never find out the truth. Even after extensive investigation, if any, you dealing with anonymous wallets over period of years that been sicking coins out of gox. Definite answer who did it, who knew it, even how they did it, will never come.

<comment><USER14> There's likely still a whole criminal investigation to come. Plenty of people to interview, records to review, pieces to put together. I think it's pretty likely that more information will come out.

<comment><USER15> I was watching Freakonomics the other day (well, part of it, anyway), and they were talking about how the Japanese police will only really investigate crimes when they have a clear chance of getting a conviction. Take that as you will, but it seems to be that even if there's an investigation, that doesn't mean that anything will necessarily come out of it.

<comment><USER16> That and the Japanese police also will try to get a conviction even if it means convicting someone with little evidence. Combined with their seeming incompetence at investigating cyber crime this does not bode well for the MtGox investigation. The Japanese police have a 99% conviction rate with prosecutors being fired for threatening to kill suspects if they don't confess. The Japanese system of "Justice" strives for convictions, not justice.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20810572](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20810572)

Summary: Police arrest 4 separate suspects and get confessions from 2 for having a virus on their computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I like about this story is how consistent it is with decades of stories from financial fraud. E.g., the downfall of Nick Leeson and Barings Bank:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson)

Poor internal controls, greed, arrogance, and snowballing losses that lead to greater and greater risks. And then disaster, at least in the cases we hear about.

</comment><comment><USER18> Of all the speculative explanations so far, this one would make the best plot for a movie script.

<comment><USER10> He's certainly a great writer. The thing that was lacking were the sources.

<comment><USER19> If you've been in the bitcoin world since at least before the first MtGox "crash" at $40 then it would be obvious which events he's talking about.

Granted it's being being turned into a narrative but the history is spot on. I wouldn't have bothered putting in sources if I were him either, it's time consuming and those who know the history of the events wouldn't need it.

<comment><USER20> Tone down the superior attitude. Sources benefit everyone.

<comment><USER19> It's not about being superior he's posting on bitcointalk the audience would be very familiar about the sequence of events. It's posted in "speculation" I.e. It's a hypothesis based on what everyone in the bitcoin world observed and he created a plausible yet possibly completely fictional technical hypothesis for what happened behind the scenes. There's no "sources" to back it up.

It's like when HN goes offline. It's an observable fact. Writing what you "think" happened to explain this fact is the speculation part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This shouldn't be surprising. The same sort of things would happen back in the good old days when we were on the gold standard.

Usually the catalyst in those days was some sort of financial stress at moment of weakness for the bank. In the 19th century, Typically this was in the fall before the receipts from the harvest came in. Small banks would have minimal reserves, and failures could easily cascade.

I'm surprised with all of the rhetoric about fiat money that nobody figured this out sooner.

<comment><USER22> > I'm surprised with all of the rhetoric about fiat money that nobody figured > this out sooner.

My experience has been that goldbugs usually just don't want to be told about or think about this, so I'd expect things to be the same among Bitcoin supporters. And presumably a number of the clever boys will quietly reason that even if, later on, Bitcoin goes the way of all money, the people who were in on the ground floor will still have made their killing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Assuming that MtGox (let's say MtGox, not Mark) did indeed introduce transaction malleability as a feature, that should be very easy to prove with source control commit logs. But if the malleability vulnerability was already there to begin with, it would be very hard to prove indeed that MtGox was taking advantage of it.

Edit: I should also add that Mark in particular has not proven himself smart enough in my eyes to pull something like this off. In terms of technical skill, yes, but this requires a very human approach to deception which I, based on the conversations I've seen him have, do not think he possesses.

<comment><USER24> MtGox didn't use source code control.

<comment><USER25> rheide was talking about the Bitcoin source control.

<comment><USER23> No actually, I meant the MtGox source code that deals with transactions. The malleability issue was known long before MtGox announced the exploit. It's possible that MtGox initially handled transactions correctly, but later introduced the malleability issue so they can blame their problems on that. Like I said before, I don't believe that's the case though.

<comment><USER26> Mark was the CEO, the lead developer, the lead business guy, the lead operations guy, and nearly everything else you can think of. He likely had unlimited power to doctor anything he liked, and probably in a way that would not make it easy for other employees to notice. Even if they did use source control, he could probably mask those commits.

Honestly I'm not even sure how many other technical employees they had. I would assume only a few.

<comment><USER27> Would also explain why he never grew the team out more -- would make it more difficult to control the situtation.

<comment><USER28> Wow, this is something that's been bothering me for some time. Why didn't Mark grow the team? He evidently didn't have _any_ employees, just a handful of contractors.

This would explain why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm predicting the imminent collapse of Mt. Gox collapse stories, following an indeterminate period of irrational exuberance.

</comment><comment><USER30> Someone please work on the screenplay, and please have David Fincher direct.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting to note that the transaction malleability issue was a known problem to MtGox at the very latest by November 2013. [1]

I know this first hand because I was on #mtgox at the time speaking to support staff trying to get some of my own coin out, which I eventually did get. I personally think that at this point they themselves were "wtf is going on?" about the issue and couldn't really explain what went wrong.

Between that time and now they surely must have understood the problem well enough to either use it as a "feature" or try and fix it, which they didn't.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324918.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324918.0)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is as plausible as anything else I've heard so far.

</comment><comment><USER32> What is "GoxBTC" vs "Real BTC" ?

<comment><USER33> GoxBTC is BTC that you had in your account at Mt Gox, essentially, an entry in their database.

RealBTC is what you got when you finally got it out of them, to spend elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm thinking about opening up an exchange for crypto-currencies with a guarantee that deposited coins are put directly into a cold wallet. The only drawback I can see is that (so far) I don't see an easy (and secure) way to make withdrawals instantaneous.

Perhaps my background in hardware systems leads me to solutions that use physics to solve certain security problems, but to me, sending bitcoins to an unconnected computer over a unidirectional link seems trivial.

<comment><USER35> You can't put money directly into a cold wallet, if I understand correctly. If you can manipulate it directly then it's hot by definition.

<comment><USER36> Yes, you can, as long as you have an address (Public key). A wallet is just a private key.

The transaction history, and thus the ballance of an address is held in the blockchain, in the ether.

To spend the coins, you must have at hand:

* the current blockchain

* the private key

* a connection to the network.

<comment><USER37> Is that true even if you only spend some of coins and not all the coins? I seem to remember there being something very tricky about this if you are using a paper wallet.

<comment><USER38> You can add coins to a paper wallet many times.

What is considered risky is spending only a fraction of the paper wallet, for the following reasons:

\- you just used the private key for creating a transaction, so the chances of it being compromised increases

\- the client you used might have sent the change to another address while you're thinking the remaining coins are still in the paper wallet

But if it's done well, yes, it's possible to spend a fraction of a paper wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The question for me after all this is simple:

Is it that 'Everything is a Ponzi scheme until it isn't' or is it that 'Nothing is a Ponzi scheme until it is'?

<comment><USER26> I think in the real world, there is a large mix of both. Hard to know the true percentages of either category, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> When bitcoin started it was touted as anonymous, reliable and secure against fraud and theft by central authorities (especially government.)

I had some doubts (and other interests) so didn't bother getting into bitcoins.

Now we find out that bitcoin definitely isn't secure, and fraud by central authorities is just as possible as with _any_ complex system of representing monetary value. I really think it's a universal Law - let there be any kind of central body involved in a system where there are profits to be made by dishonesty, and there WILL be dishonesty.

MtGox turns out to be no different to the FED and any other fiat money authority. No different to the bullion markets, and their empty gold vaults (gold stolen, due to fractional reserve fraud.)

I think I'll stick to keeping gold and silver pieces in an old sock. The only true value store is in-your-hand allodial, and never, ever abstracted to ones and zeros (or paper.)

<comment><USER41> > Now we find out that bitcoin definitely isn't secure

If anything is secure, then bitcoin is. That doesn't mean that it protects people from their own incompetence when it comes to security, there's no getting around that at this stage.

> and fraud by central authorities is just as possible as with any complex > system of representing monetary value.

Only when you actually trust a centralised authority with the private keys in question, which people should not be doing in the case of businesses like mtgox which were obviously utterly incompetent right from the start. Plaintext passwords in http get queries embedded in plaintext emails? Come on, that would've twigged my "this is a really dumb idea" sense even before I started software development.

> MtGox turns out to be no different to the FED and any other fiat money > authority.

Exactly, which is irrelevant to the security of bitcoin itself. It's like saying a currency itself has a security vulnerability because a security guard at a bank was incompetent, it doesn't work like that.

> I think I'll stick to keeping gold and silver pieces in an old sock.

Gold and silver are just as vulnerable to centralised betrayal when held by a third party, and bitcoin is just as invulnerable to centralised betrayal when you hold it yourself. Your analogy compares two entirely different situations in order to make one look better than the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Mark decided that he would do what he thought was right: he would slowly earn back the lost bitcoin with MtGox trading fee profits and eventually make his customers whole again. He still had over 500,000 BTC left—he moved 424242.42424242 BTC between bitcoin addresses and convinced the community that MtGox was solvent._

So, bitcoin is actually a hybrid fiat+cryptocurrency? Since there is little transparency, a significant fraction of the BTC market capital might actually exist as fiat!

Version 2 of a cryptocurrency protocol needs to protect against incompetently implemented exchanges as well.

EDIT: Apparently, there is a BTC scheme for proving solvency. Making this mandatory for exchanges would go a long way to improving things.

<comment><USER42> Its what economists have been trying to tell the BTC community for years. Some people get it, some people don't. Think about the money supply.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply)

There is not only the MB money supply (total number of paper dollars that exist), there is also the M1 money supply (MB + number of Traveler's Checks, and other highly liquid bank inventions), and M2 (which includes deposits).

The true size of the monetary base can artificially grow and shrink in ways completely uncontrollable by the central-authority. This is true with both the USD and Bitcoins.

The ultimate reminder is... the US implementation of fractional reserve banking _forces_ banks to do no worse than 10%. In unregulated markets, the "banks" (ie: MT. Gox) will tend to lie and cheat, and will have ratios at far far worse rates.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but the BTC infrastructure itself provides a cryptographically strong method of proving reserves. If a large nation decided to implement its own hybrid fiat/cryptocurrency, it would basically be an unstoppable juggernaut, assuming no one ever broke the crypto protocols in a widely exploitable way. (And even then, the fiat currency might survive.)

<comment><USER42> Agree'd. Although, to reach this conclusion, you have to first shed the commonly idiotic notions of anti-government anti-social stupidity, and recognize the utility of a public-private partnership.

Anyway, I think from a "infrastructure" point of view, BTC is not good enough yet. I'm finding proof-of-stake systems (peercoin / NXTcoin) far more technically useful than BTC... in particular, the fact that they're "greener" and don't waste electricity like the current mining rigs do.

The ideal system probably would be a decentralized proof-of-stake cryptocoin with regulated exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> P2P crypto-exchanges can't come soon enough. Now the hacker's focus will be on Bitstamp and Coinbase. Hopefully they'll do everything they can to protect themselves, but it's probably just a matter of time before they get broken, too.

</comment><comment><USER44> I did notice that the owner of a large mining pool was receiving error notifications from Mt. Gox. This mining pool has tampered with mined blocks to include religious messages, so they'd definitely be in a position to do transaction malleability attacks to provide Gox with plausible deniability.

/r/bitcoin thread with sources: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zifxf/why_is_the_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zifxf/why_is_the_admin_of_the_secondlargest_mining_pool/)

<comment><USER12> I recall hearing Mt. Gox had some sort of deal with Eligius where they'd include Mt. Gox's transactions for free. I don't know what Eligius got in return, if anything.

The religious messages thing is a strawman. Miners are allowed to include whatever they want in the coinbase. It's common among pools, and hardly considered "tampering". [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38007.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38007.0)

Edit: more info: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zifxf/why_is_the_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zifxf/why_is_the_admin_of_the_secondlargest_mining_pool/cfu7y1a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Great story. It certainly is a plausible one that changes the culpability of the owners. (From theft to slippery slope, both still bad)

</comment><comment><USER46> i'm just (still) glad i didn't buy into the latest fad because of common sense.

all stories aside i believe that bitcoin is unsafe - and that this has been /blatantly/ obvious since i first encountered it as a suggested method to launder money and fund criminal activity.

don't buy unregulated 'currencies' with a strong history and incentive for money laundering and facilitating the black market. its violates the spirit of the law of pretty much every nation on earth.

whilst i genuinely believe that cryptocurrency is possibly the way forward - certainly a global currency which is independent of such whimsical things as nation states, politics and commodoties - i also think that it took a spectacular lack of common sense or 'street smarts' to actually spend money on bitcoins.

nice story... but i am indifferent to its truth - it doesn't negate the obvious risk of investing in bitcoin. but then many will say 'the greater the risk the greater the reward' and they are precisely correct.

NB: i barely trust the bank - i have a bank account 'under duress' as most of you probably have - that i would like to see my earnings from employment. how did that happen? why should banks have any involvement in my remuneration for work. /i would very much rather cash in hand that you can't fuck up for me because you are _gambling_ it on the stock market under the pretense of running a business/. its not like we have self inflicted financial crises as a result or anything at all... :/

<comment><USER47> some people, which probably use tin hats, thinks that bitcoin was made by the government because it makes the flow of money more traceable, since all the operations are public. The government will never use bitcoin or bitcoin-based currencies because then they couldn't cover their own traces.

<comment><USER48> Serious organized crime operations would also never use Bitcoin for the same reason. Physical cash still offers superior anonymity and obfuscation to BTC. Also, when you're laundering hundreds of billions of dollars, you can use real banks and the legitimate world financial system, not some fishy online currency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I very much need a ;TLDR. Not through laziness but through hatred of the patronising prosaic style which stopped me reading.

<comment><USER50> Actually, I'm pretty sure it was laziness.</comment></comment>


Chilling discovery: ice house discovered under London street - m-i-l https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/28/chilling-discovery-archaeologists-uncover-lost-ice-house-under-london-street <comment><AUTHOR> Ice rooms make for fascinating and resilient architecture. Hopefully they'll open it up to the public for viewing.

While exporting ice from Norway to England seems to be quite the undertaking, in the 19th century businessman Frederick Tudor managed an ice empire that shipped ice from Massachusetts (from Thoreau's Walden Pond) to what was then Calcutta (now Kolkata), India.[0].

[0]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the- stu...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-stubborn- american-who-brought-ice-to-the-world/272828/)</comment>


Dropbox won't remove kernel access from upcoming Project Infinite feature - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/27/dropbox-wont-remove-kernel-access-from-upcoming-project-infinite-feature/ <comment><USER2> Why do I get the feeling the phrase "technologically impossible" is going to come back to bite him in the ass.</comment>


Sales Hiring Guide For B2B Startup Founders - <AUTHOR> http://blog.close.io/sales-hiring-101-for-startups <comment><USER2> Great post! I browsed your site some more, and found a video of a presentation you gave. Asking for the close is killer. In retrospect too many of my first couple of calls ended with... "So uh yeah, I'll email you I guess."

Me and my cofounder have been doing test-runs of sales just to test if there was interest in our market. We made a note to take time out of developing to call 20 vendors a day. Some things we found:

1) Doing cold alone is nerve-racking, doing sales with a friend is actually pretty fun. It's almost nostalgic of crank-calling people as a kid. You can joke about the interesting run-ins you have with vendors. My cofounder and I grab snacks and just spend an afternoon calling.

2) We rate each call with "likelihood ratings (1-10 rating of how the call went). These are just qualitative ratings about the disposition of the caller on the other line. Every 50 or so we take note of what language improves the mood, and what turns people off. This way we're consistently improving our pitch.

3) Early on we let the initial tone of the calls dictate their end result. Too many calls ended more abruptly than they should have.(because we perceived that the other end was too disinterested to sway.) But we quickly noted was that many of the vendors had the same objections. It was an easy fix, just come up with a list of simple, logical retorts. There's many calls that we talked out of a ditch. -It's like when you solve yourself out of a cluster- fuck in 2048 :)

4) I'm not a very extroverted person, I don't have a marketing background. But I've actually come to like the calls. The first call of the day is always the hardest. The initial dip into a chilly pool is unpleasant, but you get over it much quicker than you would think. I talked to many interesting people just through cold calls. At first I scoured my network trying to find someone to delegate this task to, now it's part of the daily work schedule.

5) Ask for the close, just let them say "No". Don't dance around it. In the bigger picture who cares that one person said "No".

TL,DR Technical Cofounders can operate telephones; thus they can make sales calls. Make a structure, log objections, find patterns. (It's fun.)

</comment><comment><USER3> My impression is companies struggle when it comes time to assign quotas to salespeople. The places I've seen do it right have support from someone (CFO?) who has had experience in a disciplined environment, and wants to increase predictability of revenue. I've seen small (100 employee) places get it right and large (1500 employee) places not. The key is the support structure for the sales force.

<comment><AUTHOR> Spot on!

Creating the right commission/compensation structure is super tough and crucial to create a scalable sales force.

In my experience that's not the first challenge startup founders have when they start their sales team.

First, figure out what sales channels/models are predictable and repeatable for your product/market.

Once you've validated a lot of assumptions reg sales model you can move on and worry about sales execution & scalability etc.

And at that point you better bring in someone who's done it before and knows how to create commission structures that will work for your company

<comment><USER4> what do you mean when you say "sales model" \- is it the same as revenue structure ?

I'm trying to understand startup B2B sales as well and I'm trying to understand "sales terminology 101 for tech founders"

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for asking this question & sorry for the sales lingo :)

when I say sales model what I mean is the most successful/feasible way to sell your product.

is it via inside sales (people sending emails, making calls and giving online demos) or field sales ( people going door to door or flying to large enterprise customers for meetings etc) or a combination of both.

are you getting your leads via marketing (inbound) or do you have to do cold outreach (outbound) or a combination of both.

what tools and process do you use to sell what is the average time it takes you to close a deal what's the average deal size a sales person can close etc etc

all these factors and a bunch more would make up your sales model.

probably a good idea to write a post dedicated to this subject but I hope this clarifies it a bit :)

<comment><USER5> sometimes called the "Playbook"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't upvote this plan enough. Well done, Steli.

We're transitioning into stage 2 right now which has been an exciting ride, this is basically exactly the playbook we're running.

Our biggest challenge has been finding the right combination of hunger, fearlessness, & cunning people to bring on as the core of our sales team (if you're out there, shoot me an email, we'd _love_ to meet you)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great introductory post.

I'll admit that this is the first time a post like this has convinced me to sign up for something -- I'm going to do an "office hour" with them. I'm just starting some small b2b sales for my startup... I have 5 years technical sales experience, but this can't hurt!

If anyone's ever spoken with them or used their service before, I'd love to hear about it!

</comment><comment><USER8> I suspect that Lemkin would disagree with the order here, FYI. Lemkin clearly states on sasstr.com and quora that he thinks you essentially hire 2 sales reps, then a great VP of sales.

He also states that on their blog. [http://blog.close.io/how-to-hire-your- first-vp-sales-and-not...](http://blog.close.io/how-to-hire-your-first-vp- sales-and-not-screw-it-up)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right.

I'm a big fan of Lemkin but might disagree here although I'm not sure if it's semantics or if we truly disagree.

I think after you have just 2 reps it's usually too early to hire an experienced VP of Sales although I guess it's fine if you hire someone and give them that title.

Someone who is currently a director of sales or sales manager might be better for phase 2 although you should start looking for a VP as early as 2 reps since it's going to take a very long time to find the right fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have only a feeble knowledge of American football, still I'll employ the metaphor to put forward a thesis:

Good B2B sales people are like wide receivers, they can run like the Hades, provided there is a ball and it gets thrown to them.

If the receiver has to run into the outfield & then come back to say we need to inflate this ball some more - worse, starts looking around for a pump - that's close to being finished.

The founder bears the responsibility of ensuring there is a properly inflated ball, and only then start to pass it. This is a great responsibility, coming on top of the taxing burden of creating a new product out of thin air & putting the show together.

It's good that the founder performs the initial sales function, but this is also where early adopters can mislead the product fit for (eventually) the real paying customers. At the least, do all the 'pivoting' before the wide receivers come into the game.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is surprising how much of your network you can tap into for hiring, when you simply go through all your Facebook or LinkedIn connections.

</comment><comment><USER11> I stopped reading when I saw the photo.

You don't think anyone but white guys can be salespeople? I'm just curious why you'd choose such an image, especially given the fire Y Combinator is under for systematically excluding and under funding women and minorities.

<comment><USER12> You realize that's just a screen grab of The Wolf of Wall Street, right?

<comment><USER11> I do. that's why I think it's lazy.</comment></comment></comment>


Ideal first round funding terms - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdixon.org/?p=271 <comment><USER2> _not worry about money but not save any_

So what does that mean? No retirement savings? No 401k? No 529 Savings for kids' colleges?

If I weren't saving for that stuff, I'd be worried.</comment>


The Death of the Rude Press - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/155627/death-rude-press-deadspin-splinter-blogs <comment><USER2> >It's often hard for me to imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American institution

Yes. Especially including Gawker network writers, like the author himself. What he sees as "rudeness in the name of speaking truth to power", millions of others see as low-rate tabloid-esque journalists injecting biased, poorly- formed, condescending and contemptuous opinions into articles with the direct intent of maliciously stirring outrage in an unwarranted and sensationalistic manner.

The death of the Gawker / "rude" press was a long time coming.

<comment><USER3> Gawker was trash, but I wouldn't lump all of the "rude press" in with them. There's value in low-budget "answer to no one" journalism, specifically in that the wealthy who often control the bigger outlets and their friends can be taken to task.

<comment><USER2> I'm using "Gawker network" and "rude press" mostly synonymously here. There may be outlets who act differently.

In general, though, I'm very skeptical of the idea that journalistic rudeness, snark, condescension, and contempt is a good way to address issues, even if the issues may be real and deserving of exposure.

<comment><USER3> I actually think we agree. When I think of positive "rude press", I think of local papers that, amidst some goofy headlines, do real local reporting that informs the readership. The "good" rude press imo isn't rude just to be rude, but is rude in the sense that those who are privileged aren't shown deference. The Village Voice is a good example.

The trash rude press are the tabloids and muckrakers who I think most would agree we'd be better off without.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an assumption underneath the Gawkersphere snark (that this piece is a part of) that the correctness of one particular far left political worldview is unassailably true. This assumption undermines the entire article, because it leaves no room for dissent.

Fortunately, most non partisans recognize the complexity of the world reaches far beyond the limits of what one political viewpoint is able to encapsulate.

<comment><USER5> Gawker is not "far left".

<comment><USER6> Effectively nobody in the US is "far left".

<comment><USER7> [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things- to...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to-know- about-polarization-in-america/)

In particular, look at two aspects of the animation for "Political Polarization of the American Public, 1994-2014": First, notice that the line for Median Democrat moves only to the left. Second, put your pointer or your finger over where the line for Median Democrat is in 1994 and compare that to where it ends up in 2014. Then do the same for Median Republican.

edit: Here's the version of it that goes to 1994-2017 -- you can clearly see what happens from 2015 to 2017 as well:

[https://www.people-press.org/interactives/political- polariza...](https://www.people-press.org/interactives/political- polarization-1994-2017/)

<comment><USER8> Becoming more "consistently liberal" is hardly the same as being far-left. Hell, even moving more to the left isn't necessarily, depending on where one starts from, and the early 90s are not exactly known to be a left-wing era in the US: the liberal President of the time won on a campaign on a promise of cutting down welfare - "Two years and you're off"; you can move quite a bit from that without becoming a socialist.

<comment><USER7> > Becoming more "consistently liberal" is hardly the same as being far-left.

Becoming more "consistently liberal" and less "mixed" is essentially the definition of moving to the left.

> Hell, even moving more to the left isn't necessarily, depending on where one > starts from, and the early 90s are not exactly known to be a left-wing era > in the US

As opposed to what preceded that, i.e. Bush/Reagan?

Arguing that Democrats aren't far to the left of where they were 25 years ago because at that time they were much closer to the center than where they are now is just conceding the point by rephrasing it.

<comment><USER8> Eh, sorry, I guess we're using different definitions here. I'm not saying "Democrats aren't far to the left of where they were 25 years ago" (nor is twic saying that, I suspect).

"Far-left", at least everywhere I've seen the term used, is not relative to a previous position the same population held, but relative to the overall political spectrum. It's essentially "in the subset farthest to the left one can possibly be".

Who exactly fits into the far-left is arguable, but generally abolition of large-scale private property tends to be a requisite.

<comment><USER7> If nobody is far-left unless they're Karl Marx and nobody is far-right unless they're Adolf Hitler then in practice nobody is going to be either of those things unless they're ignorant or mentally ill, because they've both been attempted with results so stark that no sane person could want to repeat them.

The extremes also expose the flaws of that spectrum to begin with, because your average anarcho-capitalist would no sooner want to live under Hitler than Stalin. But we've somehow managed to categorize as "far right" both the proposition that no one, including the government, should ever use force to coerce anyone to do anything, and simultaneously the proposition that the government should use lethal force to stamp out homosexuality and racial impurity and wrongthink. And on the other side, that far-left at the same time means both granting equal access to power and resources to everyone and granting total economic authority to an all-powerful central government. And that the government should use lethal force to stamp out wrongthink. In that sense far- _anything_ is just a useless general-purpose pejorative, so if it's going to mean anything then it isn't very useful for it to mean that.

So I tend to think a more useful meaning is something like the category exemplified by AOC as compared to the category exemplified by Bill Clinton.

<comment><USER9> Very well put. But in your last paragraph, "useful" probably means "useful _for discussing the US_. That probably wouldn't classify as "far left" for most of Europe.

And that's fine, because if we're discussing US politics, then Europe's definition of far left is rather irrelevant.

<comment><USER7> Yes, of course. If you put Bill Clinton in Europe he's a member of a right- wing political party. If you put him in the US he's a Democrat who can carry Pennsylvania and Ohio. If you put him in Saudi Arabia he's a cartoonish left- wing extremist.

It doesn't mean anything to talk about positions or shifts over time without some kind of a baseline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is just trying to spin a particular narrative out of an existing and larger trend where information (and media in particular) is becoming less and less valuable to individuals.

The world is saturated with hot takes, and I don't need your particular ad- laden website to enjoy them, even if you have serious but rude journalists. Ask every other journalist in every part of the world how the industry is doing and you'll understand this isn't specific to the "rude press".

</comment><comment><USER11> > It is an attitude. The defining quality of rude media is skepticism about > power, and a refusal to respect the niceties that power depends on to > disguise itself and maintain its dominance. It's often hard for me to > imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the > competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American > institution.

It's weird to me that people are so unskeptical about assertions that things are somehow completely dysfunctional in one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world.

Our institutions are not only the product of a vigorous democratic process, but we can compare the results to the institutions of other vigorous democracies. If we look to our friendly neighbor to the north, we can see that in broad strokes, and even a lot of detailed strokes, they've organized their society very similarly to ours. We can look across the pond to the U.K. or Australia and see the same thing. To me, what warrants skepticism isn't our institutions, it's those impugning the "competence and motives" of those leading them.

<comment><USER12> > It's weird to me that people are so unskeptical about assertions that things > are somehow completely dysfunctional in one of the freest and most > prosperous countries in the world.

As someone who hails from Asia like you and has seen proper dysfunctional systems, I agree completely.

But don't events of the past 3-4 years give you any pause? I've recently developed a habit of reading foxnews front page, and there's a clear trend of painting Mexicans and brown people in general as troublemakers. You and I will agree that the system isn't really corrupt, but I think you and I will also agree insofar as it's all ruled by money, news will be given out in the manner in which it gets them the most money: and unfortunately that is going to be by producing more outrage and by appealing to our laziness and our worst instincts. Doesn't that give you any worry?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not just rudeness, it's the belief that a media publications sees itself as immune to societal norms and values. Gawker truly believed that it could print whatever it wanted to, and be immune to responsibility, because it believed it was shielded by free press laws. It was nothing more than an awful tabloid. Good riddance.

<comment><USER14> Calling Gawker "rude" is at the same level as calling Baghdadi an "Austere Religious Scholar"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Insanely obvious counterexample: Barstool Sports is growing faster than ever in the _exact_ category that deadspin failed to maintain their traction in.

<comment><USER16> Barstool is referenced more than once in the piece, but not directly by name. Deadspin did not fail, it was murdered.

And I know you aren't saying it directly, but this really shouldn't be about The Left and The Right. The problem is about punching up versus punching down.

<comment><USER2> Those are largely one and the same in the current culture, though. "Progressive rude journalists" like Gawker's use "punching up" and "we're rude only to those who deserve it" as an excuse and shield for shitty epistemology, and as a justification for refusing civil engagement with those they disagree with. It's who _they_ deem to be "up", and their judgment is dictated by their personal and political biases.

"Punching up" in general is a concept unique to modern progressive philosophy, as well. I don't believe that's a concept for the right. I understand the thought behind it, but I think it's a very dangerous and slippery slope.

The fuzzy "up" concept for the modern left is kind of the equivalent of the fuzzy "degenerate" concept for the modern right. They're just labels you use to tar people you disagree with or dislike, and then you use the label as shorthand to merit any kind of judgmental or malicious behavior towards that group.

Also, even when one _does_ agree with their "upness" assessment, it doesn't necessarily have any relation to the nature or deservedness of the criticism. I agree billionaires are powerful, but you can still write hit pieces against billionaires which misrepresent their words and positions, or imply hidden intentions behind their words or actions with no credible evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We're left with the legacy of pop-SJW as a result of the blossoming of "rude media" in the 00s and early teens. Jezebel's entire schtick was to say the most inflammatory stuff they could think of and dress it up in pop-crit theory clothing. The intellectual legacy of Denton's family of muck-raking websites isn't truth-to-power journalism, it's twitter pile-ons over prom dresses.

</comment><comment><USER18> > It was rude, by and large, to people who deserved it

Almost everyone can justify to themselves and people like them why someone else deserves to be treated rudely. It's a lot harder to avoid being rude, even to people you disagree with. It's also better for society to disagree in other ways.

<comment><USER19> There is market for rudeness. But you still have to have worthwhile context.

<comment><USER18> There is a market for a lot of things that are not good for us as individuals or society at large. I would suggest people not feed that market. But, that's just my 2 cents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It mentions a number of "Rude" news sources, but fails to mention Fox News, which I think also qualifies. Rupert Murdoch started with Australian and British papers, and I think that's an important detail. Adversarial press was more of a British thing than an American one, or at least developed there earlier.

</comment><comment><USER21> Bootlickers and the civility police didn't kill the 'Rude Press'. Overpopulation killed the Rude Press.

A lot of 'normal' media sources rushed left to be the anti-Fox. It's become so crowded that the field has started to thin.

</comment><comment><USER19> Gawker were told to shut up and dribble, not be less rude. Heaven forbid the owners want to make a profit instead of bland social justice content.

If gawker were profitable enough, no one would have ever interfered with the editorial process.

</comment><comment><USER22> "It was rude, by and large, to people who deserved it: amoral and venal team owners, predatory sports media personalities, bandwagon Warriors fans. "

Being rude to people that deserve it is the same sort of justification used for punching Nazis. It's easy (and a good idea)when they are wearing a Swastika, but it's actually not so easy to discern most of the time. And when you are a media outlet, you peddle in most of the time scenarios resulting in nonstop clickbait.

Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Bootlickers and the civility police won. [...] And even worse things have > survived. [...] It is the anti-P.C. media, where the audience's vicarious > thrill comes not from watching scrappy underdogs heckle their supposed > betters, but from watching guys sitting comfortably atop social hierarchies > belittle and dominate their lessers. [...] a position of maximum privilege > is male, and young, and probably has some money to throw around

The rude media has died because the rude media is boring. You can only blame déclassé white men for the worlds problems so many times before everyone tunes out. What was new in the 1960s is not new, interesting or even right 50 years later.

OP should probably read some of that anti-pc media, like Mencius Moldbug or RMS. A few people who have something interesting to say and have been crucified for it by OP and OP's friends. To quote Moldbug (2013) [0]:

> The logic of the witch hunter is simple. [...] The first requirement is to > invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to > harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch > hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to > gang up and destroy witch hunters. [...] Obviously, if the witches had any > power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on > broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They're > getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake! Priorities! No, they'd > turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a > country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found > dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the > size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's > a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and > lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of > hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

[0] [https://www.unqualified- reservations.org/2013/09/technology-...](https://www.unqualified- reservations.org/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare/)</comment>


DOOM E1M1 music comparison on various sound cards – Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXFYWJ7dbz0 <comment><AUTHOR> Part 2

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TsL0HyVq4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TsL0HyVq4g)</comment>