My Chumby hacking story: Do you believe in the Users? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnhh.net/posts/crankshaft-chumby-do-you-believe-in-the-users.html <comment><USER2> I was involved in multiple attempts at "net-boot linux and let the local user be root", what works best is exactly what is mentioned in the article: just wipe the thing each time.

But there are different approaches to this: on one extreme you can boot minimalistic linux from PXE which does moral equivalent of "curl ... >/dev/sda" on the other end you can run from ramdisk. The ramdisk approach works very well, but is neccesarily limited by size of RAM.

For our anime conventions we have our own "linux distro", that consists of debian unstable with quite involved rewritten initramfs which obtains the root image from somewhere (file on USB storage, which can be optionally mounted directly, or downloads the image using HTTP) and pivot_root's into that. Being able to boot Linux on ThinkPad without any persistent storage to speak of and being able to use it completely offline (the whole infrastructure for this to happen is only on our internal LAN, not on any kind of WLAN) is somewhat magical.

<comment><USER3> These days you could solve the problem with virtualisation: boot a small ramdisk that loads KVM with GPU passthrough, and give it a block device that's an LVM snapshot or something similar that you can reset every boot. Pre-KVM, you could have used Xen with a paravirt kernel.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just made a live Ubuntu image that fits in 300MB RAM with libvirt.

I have a 5-year-old i5 computer with 8GB of RAM that I use as a Hackintosh with dedicated passthrough GPU, USB root hub, and an SSD. Having dedicated GPU and USB root hub are for performance obviously, but having a dedicated SSD means I could just pull the SSD out and plug it into a genuine Apple computer and it will work just fine. I have only two SSDs and didn't want to waste one of them to be the host OS, so I decided I would just pull another to-RAM trick to boot the host OS from a slow USB drive and put the host OS in RAM. The "abstraction layer" costed me 1GB. Just got done today, and I'm quite pleased with it. Now I have a "shell" distro that abstracts away my underlying hardware and gives me macOS regardless of what hardware I run it on.

KVM/qemu are dreams come true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> MIT computer lab (Athena) workstations mostly all had a well-known local root password for years. The thinking seemed to be "make it not a mark of honor to get root and trust the users to be reasonable".

<comment><USER5> This was only for non-departmental workstations. For computer labs run by single academic departments, the root passwords were not generally public.

The command

      tellme root

would print out the root password for the public workstations.

The command

      tellme off

would spew insults at you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great read and gives me a lot of faith in the Crankshaft program (same author).

<comment><USER7> I would love to add something like Crankshaft to my car, but I needs so much retrofitting :( I would also lose my current FM radio, Bluetooth, etc that the car has. I hope there could be a better solution, too bad I bought the car right before Android auto came out...

<comment><AUTHOR> We are releasing a patch that prevents the head unit from taking over the audio from the phone. It will allow you to keep the Bluetooth (or whatever normal audio path) you have :) That also means the Pi needs to do less too, which means it will not jank.

<comment><USER7> Oh, very nice! So I can have the two together, you mean, side by side?

<comment><AUTHOR> It means that you can use the Pi as just a display (instead of as a display and an amp at the same time).

Normally, when you plug the phone into the Pi, the phone won't play audio anymore. Instead, it asks the Pi to play the audio for it. Normally, that's a good assumption because it's connected to a dedicated head unit that has an amp. Now with this DIY RPi thing, we broke that assumption: the Pi has a bad DAC and doesn't have audio input (and the performance is janky now at times for unknown reasons).

I was just tipped by Emil, another developer who got really deep into hacking this. He told me that there are ways for the Pi to say "I'm not interested in helping you project the audio, you just keep playing whatever you normally play." So now your phone only projects the UI/maps to the Pi, but still routes audio/Hands-free directly to your stereo through BT. A benefit of that is you can use your handsfree, buttons/controls built into your steering wheels fine if your car has native Bluetooth.

That workaround has some problems with Chinese phones we realized, but works OK for a couple of Nexus/Pixel we tested.

<comment><USER7> Oh, that's amazing! I'm going to look into getting the kit and setting this up, thank you for all your work. My phone _is_ a Xiaomi, so I don't know if it's going to have problems, but being able to navigate on a front-mounted display would be fantastic.

I guess I can just test it with my TV first, thanks again!

EDIT: Can you write some installation instructions somewhere prominently? I know I probably just need to burn the image to an SD card, but many others won't. I recommend [https://etcher.io/](https://etcher.io/), if you want to mention some piece of software, as that works quite well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, thanks! The installation instructions is in the works. I might need to remove the "no manual needed" part :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a great story. Thanks for writing it up, I loved reading it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you enjoyed it. One thing I tried to do is not just document what I did, but also my intentions when I did it. That's one thing I learned from the Dolphin project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow! So much fun to read... you rock! Thanks for writing this up! So many exclamation points, I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I am thoroughly entertained and encouraged by the positivity that I received from everyone.</comment></comment>


Getting Past the Dominance of the Nation State - <AUTHOR> http://continuations.com/post/161938064520/getting-past-the-dominance-of-the-nation-state <comment><USER3> An Australian citizen is an Ecuadorian embassy in England, in order to protect himself from multiple governments that are trying to jail him who coincidentally have been hurt by information he's published as a journalist. Allegedly, a politician who was quite powerful and stood to become even more powerful asked why he couldn't just be assassinated (I think there was never a reliable source for this last bit).

Nation states are the only thing that can protect us from the powerful.

Eliminating nation states would be like having one lawyer arguing both sides of a criminal case. We need nation states to advocate for their citizens and we need nation states working against each other and competing to ensure the best outcome for everyone.

Support your nation state that supports you. In a world without nation states, when the government turns against you, you'll have nowhere left to go.

> The Nation State is too large a unit for good experiments. Take education as > an example. Having a national policy makes little sense at a time when > technology is fundamentally changing how learning can occur.

So just run those experiments at a smaller scale than the federal government. Nice to see everyone finally catching onto the idea of States' Rights.

> Information technology allows new approaches to regulation through > transparency. In many instances what the federal level role should be is > provide requirements for transparency of and interoperability between > local/regional policies. This means we could have a significantly smaller > Federal Government in terms of the number of direct employees, size of > agencies and body of regulations.

Again, this has nothing to do with the existence of nation states.

<comment><USER4> Your example is kinda ironic, given that this _Australian_ citizen is in an _Ecuadorian_ embassy in _England_ , and the politician who wanted to drone him is an _American_ , and the reason he's still alive isn't actually any guns or tanks protecting him, it's the PR outcry that would happen if an assassination took place. His own nation state isn't doing a very good job of protecting him, considering he is taking shelter in _another_ nation-state's property, and that the resources that would attack him are owned by yet another nation- state, and for a significant portion of the world's population, this latter nation-state has conducted quasi-military operations against them with no interference by their own governments. He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him.

I see your point, and I get that there's a common-defense argument for the existence of nations. But realistically, if anyone _not_ an American finds themself opposed to the U.S's interests, their national government isn't going to be of much help to them. Realistically, the invisible hand that prevents the U.S. from bullying the whole rest of the world (even moreso than they do) is that the U.S. as a nation has fairly little interest in being the boss of 7 million people, and oftentimes struggles with being the boss of 300 million people, and the popular outcry over wars abroad tends to stop them within 8 years or so after they get started. It has nothing to do with other nations being an effective check on U.S. power.

<comment><USER3> > It has nothing to do with other nation's being an effective check on U.S. > power.

The example proves you wrong. Without another gov't protecting him, Assange would absolutely be in a US jail right now, or dead. I didn't say that the Ecuadorian military kept him safe. It is the nation states playing against each other that has kept him safe. Whether that play is social or economic or militaristic is just a minor footnote.

> He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if > he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him.

Not an acceptable alternative. Gov't would find him. Very unlikely he would make it out of the airport. You have to have the power of the nation state to play against the other nation state. Ecuador provides that in this case. It doesn't always work (US rolls over nations in middle east all the time), but it does work most of the time most of the people (for some definition of "most of the people" which would be people who live in nations that play the nation state game).

<comment><USER4> He wouldn't, though, because with no nations, the U.S. wouldn't exist as a nation, nor would it have jails, nor would there be an "it" to have them. You can't take one side of the thought experiment, eliminate it, and then assume that the other side will run amok without it, because the whole point of the thought experiment was to imagine what would happen if we eliminate the _concept_ of nation-states.

The bigger question is "Is there some person or organization who would cause harm to Assange that he would not be able to protect himself against?" I don't know the answer to that. Go back to the Middle Ages and the answer would be that Assange would pledge his loyalty to one particular lord, who he agreed not to spill the beans on, and he would get protection from them in return. With city-states (popular in antiquity, and perhaps rising again), he would reside in a city, and (assuming he wasn't exiled), that city would provide for his defense and refuse to extradite him, and all the other cities can go to hell.

The complexity today is that we have this whole other level of trans-national organizations: multinational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, Internet communities, hacker collectives, etc. Many of the "attacks" on these organizations can't be stopped by a national border; for example, Assange can continue releasing damaging information against the U.S. from within the Ecuadorian embassy, and he has done nothing to physically violate U.S. territory, and yet this doesn't matter because our lives are half lived in cyberspace anyway. The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories, and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with physical force.

<comment><USER3> You make a good point, but his argument then quickly boils down to anarchist style stuff which isn't worth a debate in my opinion. If you removed all these power structures somehow, they would just be replaced by other (probably identical) power structures.

> The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence > occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories, > and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically > succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now > have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with > physical force.

This is an interesting idea, so suppose the nation state is eliminated. Wouldn't there just be a new equivalent of the nation state that arises that is based not around physical borders but around digital borders in some way? People are always going to disagree about fundamental ideas, and they're going to band together to protect their ability to live according to those ideas. Which brings us back to the article's point #1: "Nation states, true to their name, tend to emphasize the interests of a particular nation above others.". We'll just end up with that again but instead of the US sanctioning Russia, we're going to have 4chan, reddit, and instagram launching DDoS attacks against each others' users.

<comment><USER4> Well, you're certainly not going to eliminate the concept of power. I've heard that floated by some utopianists ("we'll have world government and then everybody will get along with everybody else") and I think it's ridiculous.

I don't think that's what the article is suggesting, though. Rather, it's suggesting that we re-draw the boundaries of how we organize that power, with one level globally and another locally (probably at the city or territory level).

I'd assume (based on similar writings) that this would work with a federated world government with very limited and specifically-enumerated powers. Basically, we accept certain principles as foundational (rule of law, property rights, non-violence, consent of the governed), and then transfer the monopoly on physical force to a world government whose only task is ensuring that individuals don't violate that. The world government would have very limited powers: aside from preserving peace, it'd basically just define the rules around trade disputes and redress of grievances, and delegate the arbitration of these disputes to a mutually-acceptable arbiter. Possibly it might also serve as a market-maker for externalities (eg. selling carbon credits) and coordinator for shared efforts (eg. fighting infectious disease, or interstellar space travel). It would also ensure freedom to move between municipalities as long as you accept the laws of the local municipality, i.e. borders cannot keep people in or out, but they do define the extent of how you must behave within the municipality.

All other powers would go toward local municipalities. This includes a great deal of things currently reserved for a nation-state: drug laws, the place of religion, official languages, national holidays, traffic management, growth policies, possibly even things like free speech. So if San Franciscans want to smoke out, Emirates want to mandate the wearing of the hijab, Texans want complete freedom to carry a gun, Virginians want a holiday honoring Robert E. Lee, they all get that - within their own city. They just don't get to force _other_ people to take on their customs. If Californians are upset by how everybody in Texas is packing heat, or Texans are upset by how Muslims wear a head scarf, or Muslims are upset by how San Franciscans smoke out all the time - _too bad_ , they can define how people should behave in their own city, but they don't get to define how everybody else behaves. And the role of the world government is to ensure that, and put down any attempt at imposing your views on others by force.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm confused, but that sounds precisely like the current condition of countries today, except on a scale smaller than America and more similar to small European or Asian nations. Having a global government would either do nothing to them in the best case scenario, or more likely, end up crushing them for the needs of the many and/or ultra rich.

Taking your example of Virginians wanting a holiday for Robert E Lee, small countries and big countries could easily do this. You say limit it to a city so that those who don't want it aren't affected. But even passing it at the city level leaves people who don't want it. I see no difference between 60% of a country the size of Malta supporting something and 60% of a city the size of Anchorage.

<comment><USER6> Well it kind of is, but with power being pushed even further down to the local level, where you could actually know your leaders, you largely remove the ability of nations to wage wars, especially on any sort of global level, and people are better able to self organize. In the states we see a problem right now with coast-inland and some other smaller cultures where you have some people who are able to take power dictating wildly different views for other people who absolutely disagree with them. It's hard to manage a multi-cultural country. We see it right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Arguably, we're already sailing past dominant nation states into uncharted waters in many respects. Just look at "free trade" treaties of the last couple decades. They're less about removing barriers such as tariff's, etc. and more about ensconcing the rights of corporations over states.

e.g. Your constituents don't like pollution in their river and, playing to your constituents, you pass a law to ban dumping of chemical X, which was previously thought to be harmless but now appears to be not so harmless. Oops! Your government is being sued by foreign corporations impacted by this law, because a treaty you signed gives them that right.

Bottom line, if we're going to continue eroding the power of nation states (and nation states really are doing it to themselves), we'd better be damned sure something representing and protecting the interests of people is there to replace it. Lots of science fiction dystopias feature corporate cleptocracy's as dominant forces, and that's for a very good reason!

<comment><USER8> > They're less about removing barriers such as tariff's, etc. and more about > ensconcing the rights of corporations over states.

This fud that has been spread by the illiterate folk of the internet has caused so much damage. ISDS is for enforcing agreements between _states_ if they feel businesses from their countries are being unfairly discriminated against. Nation states are still perfectly able to leave the free trade agreements if the terms are not satisfactory because they are _sovereign_. ISDS is the mechanism by which free trade agreements actually ensure there is free trade. Don't join free trade agreements if you want to place tariffs on foreign businesses or enforce regulations selectively against foreign business.

>e.g. Your constituents don't like pollution in their river and, playing to your constituents, you pass a law to ban dumping of chemical X, which was previously thought to be harmless but now appears to be not so harmless. Oops! Your government is being sued by foreign corporations impacted by this law, because a treaty you signed gives them that right.

I love your example because it shows how little you even know about what you are spreading fear of. You clearly feel strongly about this but you were incapable of spending 5 minutes reading wikipedia to inform yourself about what you are writing about?

>governments retain their regulatory ability, if the agreements in question specify that regulations protecting health, the environment, labour rights and human rights are allowed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor- state_dispute_settlem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor- state_dispute_settlement#Regulatory_capacity)

e.g. don't sign an agreement if you don't want to follow the provisions of the agreement. Otherwise don't expect other people to follow the stipulation of the agreement either.

Why do you insist on commenting about something you are clearly ignorant about? I am willing to bet $1000 that you have not read a single word of these trade agreements you feel so confident to give lectures on.

Bottom line, people that are ignorant and have no idea what they are talking about should not act as if they do.

<comment><USER9> re: ISDS, one concrete example of is the case of Australian tobacco plain packaging regulation versus the tobacco company Philip Morris [1] [2].

In 2011 Australia passed legislation that "requires health warnings to cover at least 75 per cent of the front of most tobacco packaging, 90 per cent of the back of cigarette packaging and 75 per cent of the back of most other tobacco product packaging" [3].

Philip Morris restructured and moved the headquarters of their Australia and Asia operations to Hong Kong. By doing this they could take advantage of an earlier 1993 trade agreement between Hong Kong and Australia, and launched an ISDS claim against the Australian government, claiming that the packaging regulation meant that their branding and trademarks had been confiscated.

Say what you want about "free trade" agreements between states, it is pretty obvious that if these agreements can be potentially exploited as above then one of the outcomes of such agreements is the erosion of the rights of states and their citizens, and in increase in power and freedom to global capital.

[1] [https://www.ag.gov.au/tobaccoplainpackaging](https://www.ag.gov.au/tobaccoplainpackaging)

[2] [http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political- news/austra...](http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political- news/australia-versus-philip-morris-how-we-took-on-big-tobacco-and- won-20160517-gowwva.html)

[3] [http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/conten...](http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/content/tobacco- plain)

<comment><USER10> And Phillip Morris lost the case. You left out that particular part in your example. I wonder why that is? Is it because in this case, as in most such 'examples' of the horrors of ISDS, it turns out that the system did not prevent a nation from acting against a foreign corporate interest?

<comment><USER11> > And Phillip Morris lost the case. You left out that particular part in your > example.

It's not about who lost or won, the problem is that there was a hearing at all. Why would there be a need for dispute settlement between companies and states ? There can be no dispute, the state dictates the law and the companies either comply or leave the country.

ISDS is like giving kids the possibility of suing their parents over their bedtime. It implies the kids have some kind of say in the matter when they really don't.

<comment><USER8> > There can be no dispute, the state dictates the law and the companies either > comply or leave the country.

Why even have free trade agreements if you can create laws that will destroy foreign business? ISDS is not so states can be subject to companies, it for states to follow agreements they sign. If the state values muh sovereignty so much they can simply reneg on the agreement and lose the benefit of free trade.

<comment><USER9> > Why even have free trade agreements if you can create laws that will destroy > foreign business?

if the business in question is only profitable because it pushes negative externalities onto other parties due to lack of regulation (e.g. tobacco companies, anyone on the supply/demand side of unregulated polluting industries) then it sounds like destroying such business models through regulation is a feature, not a bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm,

Getting past the dominance of your legal rights under laws you can influence...

Getting past your having a representative government where you're more than one six-billionth of the vote...

Getting past your sense of belonging to any kind of a shared culture...

...to that glorious future where you receive the beneficence and wisdom of multinational corporations directing each facet of your lives, untrammelled by that old fashioned notion that you and your compatriots might have concerns about how they operate, and may require them to conform to your expectations, rather than your society conform to theirs...

Sorry, but I think I'll hang on to the idea of having a national parliament full of politicians that we can all bemoan, but that sometimes actually defends our interest.

<comment><USER13> My thoughts exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the nation state is to go away in favor of one global government then you sure as hell are not going to get those nice things like decenralization. You are by the nature of what you are doing getting more centralization. And thats bad, very bad. Just to give you an example, look at modern events. Edward Snowden can leak information of the USA government and he can get away with that because there is Russia which acts now "as the protector of free speach". In a global government there would be no way to run. States needs to compete against each other. A monopoly never benefits the customer!

<comment><USER15> A citizen isn't a customer of a nation.

<comment><USER16> That attitude is a sad artifact of a particular period of time. In future there will be fewer walls and other terrible methods of custom-enforcement.

<comment><USER15> You do not seem to understand. Customer has an implicit meaning of having your services sold by a company. Citizens do not have services sold to them. They're bound by a social contract, and have agreed to go ahead, together. The services they benefiot from are the consequences of their choices. The nation and the state are an extension of this social contract. I do not care for borders and walls, and would gladly see them disappear. But not if it's at the cost of becoming a "customer".

<comment><USER16> Customers can opt out of the "contract". If citizens can't, some of them will have very bad experiences. That's true even if most citizens are able to affect the terms of the contract in meaningful ways. Some citizens simply do not have that privilege, and occasionally their happiness is contingent on the possibility of escape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think you'll have a hard time convincing Chinese, Russians and Indians to de-emphasize nation-states, let alone telling them not to put their nation first.

If you travel a bit, outside of western Europe which experienced WWII, most places --even dirt poor ones, have very nationalistic tendencies.

I don't see the idea catching on in most of the world, unfortunately. And then remember the conspiracy theories behind "the new world order" and "thousand points of light" and how people derided that.

That said, long term, we will have to arrive at some solution which ensures that not one nation (or any other organization of people) have the capacity to inflict destruction on others --the way Guangdong cannot decimate Guangxi or Colorado cannot invade Utah.

<comment><USER18> Given that the majority of those people are trapped behind the boundaries of those states by poverty and visa rules, I can understand why they are nationalistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Getting rid of the nation states is the same as only having a single nation state.

Something similar occurred during the Roman Empire. There wasn't any practical way to get out of the empire, and no practical check on the power of the government of the empire.

If the policies of the empire happened to affect you negatively, there really wasn't anything you could do about it. You couldn't pick up an leave. You couldn't affect the government policy. You and your family for generations would just be stuck.

<comment><USER20> I think there is an alternate interpretation (or at least just a reinforcement of my own beliefs) that the nation state should just occupy that local / regional level. We consolidated nations and built empires because of the logistical and militaristic needs of organization in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Since WW2, though, we have:

* Solved the logistical problem with the adoption of wide area communications networks, enabling instant communication and more importantly negotiations between independent regions and areas anywhere in the world.

* Solved the military problem with the development of world-wrecking nuclear weapons, whose presence equalizes all involved nations such that it does not matter if you have a giant population and production machine to build every other weapon of war - the danger of just a few dozen advanced nuclear weapons in arsenal deters any reasonable nation from attempting invasion because that many bombs could render the Earth uninhabitable.

Additionally, computers ease the burden of managing international relations between potentially thousands of participating bodies by instituting protcol standards between them and the Internet gives us an environment to broadcast transparently the terms of interaction between nations, and those can be updated in real time in ways a generation ago couldn't consider possible.

Now there is no good motivation to maintain giant nation states. Letting large countries break up into smaller, more focused soverignties handling their own affairs maximizes liberty for the people. And the international economy can be very effective as a tool of global governance - if you and _most_ nations agree on something, and think it is important enough, you can embargo the dissenters to put economic pressure on them to reform. Likewise, for any noble cause, you can accept the burden of economic isolation to prove your point and then campaign to change the minds of citizens in other countries.

If governance were localized like this, you would not run into the apathetic superstate of the modern age where citizens demands are very often ignored. When a legislature only rules a few million people, individual voices are louder, and deposing the corrupt is much more straightforward - even if it requires violence. The larger and more expansive the sovereignty the more detached from any one locality it becomes until it is just detached from everyone operating as this global influence without oversight.

<comment><USER21> When mini-states start popping up, it's usually accompanied by conflict, not freedom.

Imagine scenarios where parts of the United States or Mexico broke up. The result is certain warfare and likely military dictatorships.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This has been tried before, Holy Roman Empire, Soviet Union. None of those were solving these most pressing problems. We cannot expect a "global government" to solve these problems either.

Nation states are much better.

<comment><USER23> Some people may argue that previous experiments at bigger states failed for a lack of communication, a problem that can be solved much better with internet, machine learning, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I confess difficulty in taking any article seriously when it implies that "the blockchain" is some sort of revolution in distributed consensus.

It's actually a very inefficient tool for this, and better methods have existed for years.

</comment><comment><USER25> How in the world is individual taxation a "global problem"? The only interpretation I can make of that is that we should have to pay for a world government, with which I emphatically disagree.

<comment><USER26> Most of the taxable income (unlike most of taxable people and organizations) is international, mobile and very flexible, so effective taxation already relies heavily on international agreements and cooperation.

If you'd leave Bill Gates taxation to whatever municipality he lives in, the expected result would be that the richest person in the world would pay practically no taxes; you need to tax (and thus cooperatively track) worldwide revenue of people and corporations. Tax spending can and should be handled as locally as possible, but tax collection would be best done globally, cooperatively eliminating loopholes (like forcing tax shelter jurisdictions to change their ways) and establishing common rules to avoid a "bidding war to the bottom", like the current EU initiative to harmonize corporate income tax.

<comment><USER25> A "bidding war" is an extremely _good_ thing. I _want_ governments to compete to offer me the lowest possible tax rates. What you're describing is a monopoly, which would be very bad for the "customers" (everyone except governments).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks to technology our nation states will probably grow bigger. But having no nation states is quite unlikely. The reason why there are states in one form or another since forever is that they give people some feeling of unity, not some feeling of exclusion of others. So without nation states people don't suddenly feel all happy, but they don't have any unity that pulls them together.

<comment><USER20> This implies that thousands of years of human history where people were not members of giant continent spanning countries people had to unity.

That is absurd. People can feel a sense of community on many scales, but the extremes are from ones own family to feeling like a citizen of Earth and a part of a global human culture.

Nation states are one optional step on that ladder, and it has many more than just three levels in it. Hell, just consider the difference in scale of nation states - from a country like New Zealand that has half the population of the New York Metro Area, to India or China with more than a billion people each. Completely arbitrary, and the size and cultural divides between different countries are massive. You can't even come close to placing all nation states at one tier of social inclusion and absolutely cannot ascribe individual happiness to membership in one.

<comment><USER23> I don't want to argue that nation states are best theoretical models to bring people togehter, but I want to argue that the real states, as sh*tty as they may be, are the result of hard work of many people and one of the features they offer is a higher level of unity than anything that came before them. Just dropping these results of hard work will not end up in more success. I want to argue that you can't win a marathon by stopping to run before the finish line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is Globalisation no longer the 'inevitable' it was once touted as? National leaders have for some time now been promising things which are simply not in their gift economically whilst becoming more and more protectionist and frankly bigoted in what they say. I get that they are merely echoing the concerns of their constituents and that democracies being organised on national lines that there has effectively been this incredible disenfranchisement as a result of globalisation. I think it was Joe Stiglitz who about a decade ago advised us to turn up at AGMs rather than polling booths if we wanted to continue to have a say in our futures. More likely we will have super-nation states like China and Europe before we 'get past' nation-states entirely. And although the anti-globalists appear to be winning currently, the market will in the end I believe choose not to have borders and woe betide those luddites who oppose it. Trumpistas, Brexiteers et al.

<comment><USER20> Yea, globalization is still inevitable because its economic prospects crush isolationism. Countries that don't participate will (and do) fall behind. If legislatures try to resist it, they will find consequences to their economic bottom line that can cripple an economy for decades.

The current crop of nationalism in the west is coming from the dying breath of a generation on the way out. People they don't want to fade away or have someone else take their place, that want to fight for what is effectively just them getting younger again and wanting to be back in the 1950s and 1960s with all that entails.

The only hope can be that rather than try to resist globalization the world economy can collectively steer it towards positive outcomes for humanity rather than selfish outcomes for the soon to be trillionaires steering the ship. And that the economic tides of the modern era don't embitter new generations into the same blind nostalgia for their own pasts when the world moves on - back to that steering issue - we need to avoid having hundreds of millions more people fall off the train in the future to avoid this environment happening again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This has been dreamed about since forever I think.

The shoddy implementation in the past has been empire. Anyone can become a citizen of Rome. There was even a "Roman" empire which persisted for centuries that didn't even include the city of Rome. Rather it was an idea, a uniting of cultures under a common law and currency.

But the trouble with centralization is when it breaks down ("when", not "if") people go right back to their natural state of bands and tribes and feudal warlords. And it's hard to have nice things in that state. Witness Somalia or the Middle Ages. So I think some intermediate organizational complexity is good as a buffer and insurance against collapse back to low level tribalism.

If the idea of eventual world governance is some type of EU/UN council of bureaucrats making detailed rules and policies I'm afraid that won't work out well. The word "ineffective" comes to mind. Plus, the cogs and citizens in nation states have an extreme vested interest in keeping things as they are. So there will, for the foreseeable future, be a very large group not interested in reporting to an international committee who have enough power to make sure it doesn't happen.

However the problems of nation states, particularly right now, are very real. Pollution. International crime. Tax Evasion. Sophisticated weaponry. Etc. Etc.

These things have to self organize in my opinion. Kind of like how they say you should look for trails in the grass where people have walked to see where to put the sidewalks.

I've always thought the eventual outcome would be something along the lines of a very lose international order dealing with broad rules of pollution, international trade etc. and then more detailed city/county level governments who take care of most of the day to day governance. I've thought AI might be best suited to run the international order. Remove the politics at that level. Keep it math.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think its time to get past the episode of surplus cash in multi-national cooperations pockets, corroding local laws.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like what he's describing, but as he said, this could never be done in a quick manner. We will probably not see it in our lifetimes.

Regions need other regions to help them when things are going badly (and if we are to experiment, we need to acknowledge that bad things will happen to regions that they themselves cannot solve). Nation states are composed of many regions so they can force or incentivize regions to share the load.

If we truly want equal opportunity, we need to make sure that regions are not completely stopped from innovating but also don't have to take all of the consequences when something goes wrong. Sure, they shouldn't come off scot- free, but it's very low for a region's children, elderly and sick to pay the full price for something they had little chances to stop anyway.

</comment><comment><USER31> How can one talk about governance units and not mention safety/army? If there is going to be another form of governance it has to protect its "citizens". Protect from whom and how ? Who will be terrorists, who will be good guys? As an example nowadays we have ISIS, a loose international ideology spread through the internet across borders, from people with little hope of forming a sovereign. Kingdoms, City states, Empires, feudal lords, nation states, their existence depended on exchanging safety for taxes/servitude. I believe that's the main force (fear) that unites people under a blanket term/belief. Not "common problems" which have always existed anyways.

<comment><USER20> ISIS in a perfect world would be combated by UN peacekeepers and allies of Syria and Iraq in the territories they control.

The international supporters are just domestic terrorists, to be dealt with by police.

Really nothing changes from present day, except that Russia and the US aren't doing their own thing in the region with their own militaries, which is largely what caused most of the unrest and extremism in the region - <USER2> interventions for the past century in that area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> so many people seem to conclude that absent nation-states we must move to a global government. did you even read the article or the book that was linked therein?

The modern democratic nation state was widely ridiculed in Europe, by existing kingdoms and fiefdoms.

I feel like what I am watching on most of this thread is whatever future comes next being widely ridiculed by defenders of the current state of affairs. History repeats itself.

</comment><comment><USER33> we've come up with a system that's created great prosperity and wealth for all our citizens, but it's important to look back at what they had going on in the 1200's -- those were the good old days.

(I don't mean to be so dismissive, but a lot of people still don't have access to the internet and the technology and services, and they way they get that infrastructure built is through nation states.)

<comment><USER3> He wasn't saying to go back to 1200s, his point was that, ,=since then, those states fused into countries which was good, therefore we should keep fusing into (presumable) the inevitable one-world government.

<comment><USER34> One world government = single point of failure. It may work more harmoniously if you have leaders that care about the people they serve, but if misguided leaders get into power and cause problems your choices of living in a society beyond the control of this leadership is greatly reduced.

<comment><USER20> Playing devils advocate a bit here, but does it actually matter to an individual? In most parts of the world it does not matter if your country is composed of millions or hundreds of millions of people, you can't just leave if the government turns against your interests.

For most people, they are stuck with the government they have no matter what, regardless of if it is a good or bad one.

For all of them, a world government changes nothing. They are already at the whims of leaders that can work harmoniously or for selfish ends that can better or worsen their lives with no recourse on their individual parts.

The exception, and I think this is what the OP misses, is that Europe is demonstrating that you can take a different route, with sovereign states that agree to open borders that allow people to instead go wherever they feel best served by the state. The EU is new, but if it doesn't fall apart I guarantee in a century it will evolve into different countries appealing to the specialized interests of certain peoples who then migrate there. I would feel that is much more healthy than trying to erect universal laws upon every human on Earth.

<comment><USER34> > "does it actually matter to an individual?"

Yes, and it's not just about population size, there are more important concerns, such as the safety and economic mobility of the individual.

Let me put it like this, would you rather live in your current nation state with the leadership you have, or under a world government run by a ruler like Duerte that openly promotes killing people (my apologies if you're currently living in a country like this).

> "For most people, they are stuck with the government they have no matter > what"

Not really. People do move country when things get bad in their own one (for political and economic reasons), even when they don't have much money to do so. People even risk their lives to make such journeys.

> "They are already at the whims of leaders that can work harmoniously or for > selfish ends that can better or worsen their lives with no recourse on their > individual parts."

Not all countries are equally badly run. Some national governments look after their citizens better than others. I can list some examples if you like.

> "Europe is demonstrating that you can take a different route"

Europe isn't taking a different route. The EU is becoming increasingly centralised. The Eurozone is a step towards consolidating economic power in Brussels, there are talks of an EU Army, etc...

> "I would feel that is much more healthy than trying to erect universal laws > upon every human on Earth."

In my opinion, the best compromise is universal rights rather than universal laws. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was organised by the UN is one example of this:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To suggest that humanity needs a global state seems to beg the question of all of politics: how do you get people to get along and transition peacefully to new states?

The threat of Napoleon got the Holy Roman Empire to globulate into its modern nation-states. But I don't see how Saudi Arabia is ever going to relinquish power, let alone share a government with the Israelis.

</comment><comment><USER36> All of humanity is never going to agree on the same values. The best we can hope for is that people with the same values can find places to live together and share those values.

</comment><comment><USER37> The problem is not the "nation state" but nationalism.

<comment><USER16> In most cases, the former encourages and sustains the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think that cyberpunk literature might have a clue here as to how this might happen.

1) Decouple states from strictly adjacent geography. There's no reason that "France" has to all be where it is in Europe. We already have precedent for that with Embassies, Diplomatic vehicles and other foreign soil recognitions. Imagine a France franchise the size of your average McDonalds, in the middle of what we now call Thailand. Maybe it's in a mall next to a Venezuelan franchise. You can pass between entirely different governing systems as easily as walking between stores. There's other precedents, colonial territories and other overseas holdings, but those have different semantics I think than overseas diplomatic mission franchises.

2) Since states no longer are tied to specific contiguous geographic areas, why do historic nations only get to play in the franchise game? How about independent state franchises? What if Google opened some brick and mortar micro nations in city centers all over the world? Or Green Peace? Or any group of like-minded individuals able to "buy-in" to whatever threshold is required to achieve some kind of global state franchise recognition? What if stepping into any Walmart was effectively the same as walking into the Nation of Walmart? Why does a nation even need territory? What about on-line nation states?

There's some precedent here as well, with a couple non-territory owning states like the Knights of St. John having many functions and obligations of a state, without having any territory.

3) This effectively makes the (dys)topia of nation-companies come true. But it also enables very free movement between nations. Don't like how Walmart taxes the little guy? Move over to Sony, or France, or the Reconstituted U.S.S.R. in Australia.

The other path is of course a kind of global citizenship, where citizenship to individual nation states either doesn't exist or is purely optional. Or another model where citizenship can happen at different scales such as county citizenship that gives you specific rights within a tiny territory or continental citizenship that spans across nation states. Another path might be buying certain pieces and parts of different citizenships: I want American- style free speech and libel laws, but U.K. style health care and Korean style justice system...so I become fractional citizen of those three states for those things and pay taxes (dues) into those systems apportioned to some asking price.

Ultimately the real question here that will determine the mechanics of this evolution will be "what's the goal?". If it's free movement between territories, a system like the E.U. or the U.S. seems to work pretty well for that. If it's looking for a specific kind of representation (better health care in this place vs. that, different legal standards for property ownership, etc.) then some other system. Nation State membership today works because it's at some equilibrium that provides some measure of rights and obligations that more or less works for the population.

That equilibrium in many cases has changed significantly over time, with new rights being recognized, and new obligations also being asked of the citizenry, sometimes states that aren't working are dissolved and sometimes new ones take their place. But the general direction is that states with an internal ability to peacefully move along with that equilibrium seem to be doing well, and ones that provide too rigid of a framework finds themselves in trouble. The unfairness of course comes with the minority of people in each nation who are at the ends of the various internal socio-political spectrums in each state who can't get a representation-responsibility mix that works for them, and their particular state can't offer.

<comment><USER18> Snow Crash!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is docker a 'distribution' under restrictive OSS? - awinter-py Are there license consequences to serving docker images? I've heard that dynamic vs static linking can have different implications under the LGPL. Does docker add extra complexity? <comment><AUTHOR> Are there license consequences to serving ISO images or tarballs? Yes. Docker images are not a separate and special thing, IMHO.</comment>


Trump's TikTok deal has hit a serious roadblock - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/2/21418496/tiktok-for-you-page-algorithm-deal-us-china-trump-microsoft <comment><USER2> Had to laugh at the line "a growing stalemate over the algorithm behind TikTok's For You page, arguably the most important piece of software the company has".

Anyone here with experience writing recommendation algorithms care to disagree with my claim a replacement algorithm that's 90% as good could be written in a week?

Real value of TikTok is in the video-editing software and network effects.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your development setup like? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER3> OSX - Iterm2 - TMUX - <USER2>

Full mouse support enabled for Iterm2/Tmux/Emacs so I can click and drag windows/frames, etc.

Clipboard access is seamless with respect to the fact that Emacs has different Cut/Paste commands than OSX - but when I do cut/yank in Emacs the results are available for me to Command+v inside OSX.

For me there is almost nothing missing from using anything in GUI mode for my development purposes. I live in the console and have found very little reason to switch.

Using RubyMine for Rails is awesome and I used to be a die-hard fanboy... but I made the jump to the console 2 years ago and haven't missed _anything_. I have found no productivity gains over living in RubyMine/Intellij vs. Emacs/Iterm2/Tmux.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ubuntu (with lots of VirtualBox VMs) + sublime text. Most VMs have node.js, Puppet and Apache.

I try to avoid customising my dev env too much as it has caused my problems in the past when moving employers or platforms but that is a personal preference (I know lots of other devs that go for customisation in a big way).

</comment><comment><USER5> Ubuntu with Fish Shell and Jet Brains IDEs (mainly RubyMine, PyCharm and WebStorm)

<comment><USER6> I stumbled across Fish Shell recently, it seems quite interesting. Why do you use that rather than, say, bash?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ubuntu for desktop, OS X for laptop, bash and vim for mostly Java development

</comment><comment><USER6> linux + bash + emacs for most things, Eclipse for Java projects.

Gitg and Bazaar Explorer are useful GUIs for their respective VCSs. (Not that I strictly need them, but I like seeing a graphic representation of the project history.)

</comment><comment> andrew-lucker linux + bash + ssh + nano. not necessarily in that order. puts me on any server environment with a swiss army spaceship in hand.

</comment><comment><USER8> arch linux, bash, vim. IntelliJ IDEA for Java stuff, QtCreator sometimes for C++ stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> osx, zsh, sublime text

</comment><comment><USER10> osx, bash, vim, tmux</comment>


Elon Musk, Tech's Cash-Poor Billionaire - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-techs-cash-poor-billionaire-11588967043 <comment><USER2> It's really concerning that theres essentially a giant liability, Elon's personal debt, that doesnt show up on the balance sheet. As the article discusses, a margin call would be devastating, and hopefully any irresponsible decisions in his personal lifestyle choices don't spill over to put Tesla or SpaceX at risk. Especially considering how powerful a force they've been in driving consumer changes in vehicles and in developing the commercial space market.

<comment><USER3> Very unlikely, but if necessary Tesla would go through a Chapter 11 reorg, not a 7 liquidation. The brand, charging network, and manufacturing capacity has too much value to throw away.

When Tesla was on the brink of insolvency years ago, he had a handshake deal with Larry Page (they jetpooled together) for Google to acquire Tesla and for Musk to continue to run day to day operations. Wasn't necessary, but there are options.

Elon will be fine.

<comment><USER4> If Tesla goes through Chapter 11, there's no way in hell Musk will be running it afterwards.

He gets away with all his shenanigans because he's a rain maker.

If his incredible run of success dries up, the narrative is going to shift hard.

<comment><USER5> > If his incredible run of success dries up, the narrative is going to shift > hard.

I remember how Apple kicked out Jobs.

Any chance Tesla will suddenly find a competing company in EV market which it can buy with certain conditions?..

<comment><USER6> I know it's fashionable of late to lionize Jobs, but was it really him or was it just the "second-generation effect"?

Look at Microsoft under Ballmer, or Google after Page/Brin. All seem(ed) to be hollow shells of what once was.

<comment><USER7> Google has been anything but a hollow shell from a shareholder's perspective. They've gone from strength to strength.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tren-hard [http://archive.md/0ncZV](http://archive.md/0ncZV)

<comment><USER8> Link gets a DNS Resolution Error for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Yet he has to borrow, sometimes a lot, to pay for his lifestyle and business > investments without liquidating shares that help him maintain control of the > companies he runs.

Not sure. He could sell secondary shares without losing control, just like zuck

<comment><USER10> As the article points out, Tesla went public before the "founder gets preferred shares that have all the voting power" thing became popular. Zuckerberg sells the non-voting shares, but Musk doesn't have any.

<comment><USER11> > As the article points out, Tesla went public before the "founder gets > preferred shares that have all the voting power" thing became popular.

This is simply not true. Google popularized it in 2004 with their IPO. It's how page/brin today control over 50% of the alphabet votes. Zuckerburg copied page/brin. The reason why musk couldn't get the same privileges is because tesla wasn't a growth powerhouse that google/facebook/etc were. He wasn't in position to make such demands from investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The propaganda machine around Musk (Iron Man, etc) is so strong that I doubt it will allow him to fail. There is too much money to be made in mythology.

<comment><USER13> It looks to me like the real propaganda machine is the one whose only output is a non-stop barrage of articles like these, unlike you know, rockets that reach the ISS, and cars that have collectively safely driven billions of miles.

Musk doesn't need to justify himself, these journalists might.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pay walled.

<comment><USER15> Hit the web button at the top and then the first link

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Elon uses four personal jets guzzling who knows now much gas. He practically flies 24x7. When it comes to climate, he is a hypocrite.

<comment><USER17> Elon has done more for climate activism and the green movement in the last decade than basically anybody. Besides perhaps Miss Thunberg.

His "guzzling" jets as you call them are a minor convenience in order to facilitate quicker, more efficient transport to enable the evolution and development of Tesla and SpaceX.

Do you expect him to drive everywhere? Not only would that be worse for the environment, but it would mean more of Elon's precious time wasted and thus also our time wasted because a brilliant man is stuck in traffic.

<comment><USER16> I expect him to video conference, not fly 150,000 miles/take 250 flights a year—nor fly his jet from one LA airport to another LA airport to shorten his chauffeured ride home. I expect him to buy carbon offset credits. I expect him to _not_ publicly trash public transportation. I expect him to _not_ donate to climate change denying politicians, and I expect him to _not_ sell emissions credits to polluting automakers, delaying their transition to ZEVs, and sneakily undoing _all_ of the environments benefits from buying a Tesla car. I expect the Tesla paint shop from repeatedly violating California emissions regulations. I expect Musk to not spread coronavirus disinformation over Twitter. I expect him to not expose his workers to undue risk by violating Alemeda County's restrictions on non-essential businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Remember that Elon agreed to have his tweets reviewed by Tesla's in-house counsel in lieu of formal SEC action after he lied about taking the company private.

He recently tweeted that the stock price was too high. Something legal would never allow him to say, especially if he is on the verge of exercising options.

My bet is the SEC isn't going to tolerate this behavior anymore, and he won't be at the helm of any of his companies by the end of the year. He will be just plain poor.

<comment><USER19> He agreed to have _material_ tweets reviewed by Tesla's in house counsel before publishing. With a specific definition of material and examples of content that would be material. This tweet IMHO doesn't fall under that definition of material. Even if you think it did, you're blindly assuming that this tweet wasn't reviewed (which it might well have been, if it was reviewed it was _certainly_ legal instead of probably legal).

The SEC doesn't have a choice to tolerate or not tolerate this behavior. They basically lost the last time they sued (it ended in a settlement where the only concession to them was rephrasing an existing agreement after a judge said some strong words), and they would probably lose again if they sued this time.

<comment><USER20> > _Even if you think it did, you 're blindly assuming that this tweet wasn't > reviewed_

Musk said it wasn't reviewed:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-stock-falls-after-ceo- twe...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-stock-falls-after-ceo-tweets-stock- is-too-high-11588348672)

His tweets in general are not reviewed. He does not respect the SEC:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIzGdoPu9vs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIzGdoPu9vs)

<comment><USER19> > Musk said it wasn't reviewed:

Huh, I hadn't seen that. You're right (upvoted you).

> His tweets in general are not reviewed. He does not respect the SEC:

I'm perfectly aware, I'm the sort of weirdo who reads the court filings in these lawsuits. I was hoping that he would have been ... cautious ... enough to get this tweet reviewed against the general policy since it is pushing the boundary of the agreement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SDS – Store Arbitrary Data in URL Shortener URLs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ColdSauce/ShortDataStorage <comment><USER2> How is this better than a real database?</comment>


Show HN: Lofi v1.5.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvx/lofi/releases/tag/1.5.0 <comment><AUTHOR> I've submitted this before on HN, but hasn't gotten much traction. Just wanted to share my most recent milestone of 1.5.0 on this project -- including Linux support.

I started this project a year and a half ago and so far, the user base has been growing!</comment>


Bursting the Analytics Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://thepojoman.blogspot.co.il/2012/11/bursting-analytics-bubble.html

<comment><USER2> I'd have to disagree a bit with the basic assertion of this article. While focusing on higher quality output of content is clearly useful, it can't be said that it is necessarily more useful than analytics. First, how do you quantify the quality of content? Is it by personal preference or by the number of site users engaging with that content? I'd probably use engagement (the stuff that leads to revenue) as the metric of choice for ascertaining the qualitative value of content, and , of course, that would be most accurately measured by the site's analytic data. Analytics help objectify what content people like and removes the aspect of personal preference.

Additionally, we need to understand why our traffic does certain things and, more importantly, why they do not do certain things. Analytics can help identify deficiencies in our site's user interface that cause friction for users to do the things we need. Without the proper data to show how users are interacting on a site, UI designers may be shooting in the dark if the goals are conversion rates and not just slick designs.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's true and unfortunately this has been my experience at a couple of previous employers as well. Given the difficulties of actually collecting good data and properly analyzing it, it's no wonder that the same analytical tools, used to great success in some companies, can be rendered useless or even harmful.

I'll add that a third reason for the obsession over analytics is that stat reports tend to take the focus off of the decision makers themselves. Managers who aren't confident in (or wishing to escape responsibility from) their decisions can simply blame the numbers and graphs and say they had no other alternative.

In some dysfunctional organizations, "judgement" and "decision" are bad words that imply bias and liability, whereas "report" and "conclusion" are pure gold.

Don't be too discouraged, though. There are plenty of employers who avoid using analytics inappropriately and know that great products and customer service are even better than stat reports in the long run.</comment>


SpaceX Starlink Satellites Spotted over Netherlands [video] - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ytUygPqjXEc <comment><USER2> Original source: [https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/05/wowowow- spectacular...](https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/05/wowowow-spectacular- view-of-spacex.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Miniwebapp request: Can someone make a webpage where I can enter my coordinates (or City) and the page calculates when I can see the satellites "train". Bonus points for indicating the general direction (east, up, west). Extra bonus points for a graphical approximated image, where it shows a few train position at different times.

<comment><USER4> this one is _just_ as you described: [http://me.cmdr2.org/starlink/](http://me.cmdr2.org/starlink/)

or the "iss detector" app. on android you can even watch a 30s ad to get the "famous objects extention".

You than need to fiddle with the settings > enable famous objects > select satelites or somethang > choose starlink

<comment><AUTHOR> >[http://me.cmdr2.org/starlink/](http://me.cmdr2.org/starlink/)

Wow thanks man. I just saw them today at 3:00 am , the sky was the clearest it ever been. I saw them and I thought they were far away city lights but they disappeared after few minutes :-)

<comment><USER4> They are still a train, right? Most of them bunched up, moving fast.

I also caught them this night and they looked amazing (but moved in to the shadow quite quickly).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Best Gorilla Marketing Trade Show Stunt Ever - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/trade/

<comment><USER2> I almost want to flag this: the article did not feature "gorillas", it featured fake buddhist monks.

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke confusion of "guerilla" and "gorilla". Does such a person envision the Taliban sending large, hairy, non-human primates into action in Afghanistan?

</comment><comment><USER3> That would be 'Guerilla'.</comment>


Redshift Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heapanalytics.com/redshift-pitfalls-avoid/ <comment><USER2> Hi, author here. This post covers some of the surprising things we ran into getting started with Redshift. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> Very interesting.

I have to ask - with 80 clusters, do you set up a cluster per customer? Or do you put multiple customers on the same cluster?

Can you talk a bit more about how you've set up your workload queues in the Redshift WLM? I can spot at least three different workloads in your post:

1) loads into Redshift 2) transformations once data is in Redshift 3) customer ad-hoc queries

And then what node type do you use for your 80 clusters? I'm asking because the smaller dense-compute clusters offer more I/O, which helps a lot when you're loading data into the cluster.

<comment><USER2> We offer our customers the option of managing their own cluster or having us manage it for them. About 80% of our customers choose the first option. In this case, cluster sizing and queue configuration is up to them.

When we manage the cluster, we set up a new cluster for each customer. The node type we choose depends on the customer - for larger customers we'll typically use the DS type nodes (with hard disk storage). The slower I/O isn't a huge deal for us, since getting the data from our database to S3 is usually the bottleneck in the process, rather than copying from S3 into Redshift.</comment></comment></comment>


Should I try to keep my startup alive or look for a job? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working in my own startup for a year and a half in my home country, but for many reasons I'll be moving to Toronto in less than a month (August 13th) with a permanent resident visa. I don't have family, friends or connections there and I'm wondering if I should try to keep my startup alive and look for funding or should I look for a job as a web developer (I'm a full stack web developer with a emphasis on AngularJS). What do you guys think? What would you do in my position? <comment><USER2> It would depend on whether your company has employees and could run alone (ie. with a remote CEO), or if you're alone in your company. It sounds like it's the later.

If that's the case, assuming that there won't be any commercial activity when you're not here to make it happen, then it'll be best to close it down, given that there are in general running taxes and charges, whether your company makes a profit or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a partner but I don't have employees. Thanks for your suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How come you have not told us more about the startup, type, traction, what it does, the vision, the posibilities, the dream?

Perhaps this is one of those time in life where you already deep down has made the choice and now you are looking for external verification?

Or could it be a case of "when in doubt, there is no doubt" or perhaps it is time to think if it is a "hell yes" or a no?

</comment><comment><USER4> You have a partner but you don't have employees? Maybe you can think about starting a new company at a new place......

</comment><comment><USER5> Does it make money?</comment>


Foxconn to shutter China factories - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/10/foxconn_restructuring/ <comment><USER2> Unbelievably bizarre that high profile news of suicides at a rate smaller then the demographic norm in China results in the loss of 800,000 jobs.

<comment><USER3> That's what we call a powerful meme :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This news is almost certainly false.

<comment><USER5> A sign of great reporting:

      This news comes by way of the Chinese-language news site
      ON.CC — a Google translation is available here — and
      couldn't immediately be independently verified.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that is actually a sign of good reporting. Most news sites would not tell you that they had not verified this message, they would just publish it as truth. It also may indicate that they tried to verify it.

Of course, they could have decided to hold onto the story, until it was verified, but in the online world, news travels fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I honestly don't blame them. They either have the choice to increase costs by 30% because of media pressure or decrease costs and media attention by moving to a cheaper country where people aren't as prone to jumping off of roofs.

<comment><USER8> Not asking this to be sarcastic: what cheaper country? I can't immediately come up with any industrialized nations capable of supporting large-scale electronics manufacturing that would have _lower_ wages than China.

<comment><USER7> According to the article, they're considering Taiwan, Vietnam, and India.

Taiwan has a ton of electronics manufacturing, and Vietnam and India both have industrialized coastal towns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I doubt the story. BTW, I was flying back from a work day in San Jose last Friday, and the fellow sitting next to me on the airplane mentioned both that his company makes iPad parts and that they have had problems with suicides in their China factories. Probably the same company?

</comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't make sense. Announce a 30% raise in wages, then a week later announce that everyone is fired?

<comment><USER11> Makes a ton on sense.

Announce the wage increase because you are forced to. Then realize that you are no longer competitive and are loosing business. Now your only choice is to lay people off.

<comment><USER6> What doesn't make sense is the incredibly huge task of moving all that work to somewhere else, as well as leaving an area that you have setup to handle such a huge amount of work.

If this is true, it is just in the planning stages for years down the track, or they have been planning this for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> hmm, I see that they have suspended their death benefit to discourage suicide. maybe death benefits shouldn't cover suicide at all

<comment><USER13> That would probably wind up with some pretty horrific situations. It's not always clear if a death was a suicide. Combine ambiguity with LARGE sums of money...</comment></comment>


Occupying Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/10/wall-street-york-police-bridge

<comment><USER2> For those of you who haven't heard about this, CNN has a bit more facts in it's coverage: [http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/06/politics/occupy-wall- stree...](http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/06/politics/occupy-wall- street/index.html?hpt=ibu_c2)

The full impact of the greek default hasn't hit yet and it is not unreasonable to expect that Italy or Spain may default next. People have already started leaderless protests. Meanwhile - it's pretty easy to make money on the way down assuming you have it to begin with.

It is not hard to predict some pretty big changes in the next few years.

<comment><USER3> Italy and Spain are in a completely different situation if compared to Greece. Expecting that they will default _is_ unreasonable.

<comment><USER4> Italy and Spain are dangerously over-leveraged in a low growth environment and thus vulnerable to a speculative attack that pushes interest rates up long enough for them to go into default. It is not clear yet whether the European establishment will toe the line on not letting a sovereign default on its obligations, but if they fail to do so, then such an attack becomes much more likely.

<comment><USER5> Italy. Yes. Spain. No.

Spain has a smaller debt 65% of GDP compared to most western countries, including the USA (92%) and Germany (83%). They do have huge economic problems. Right now the biggest danger is that outside trouble brings down their banks.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, Italy is running a primary surplus, its families are among the less indebted in the Western world, and its banks have liquidity. To put it simply: if needed, it is still possible for the government to raise a lot of money, for example through a property tax - something that has already been done in the past and is being discussed now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A wonderful article, though I think what's often unsaid in regards to the occupation is their commonality; they all feel that their voices, despite what it is that they're calling out for individually, are being ignored, despite being larger in number. Little is as frustrating as silence in the face of effort.

<comment><USER7> So they're frustrated that despite the fact that they've been whining for years that the world isn't perfect (where "perfect" means "precisely the way _I_ want it to be), the world still isn't perfect?

The solution: more whining?

<comment><USER8> Do you really think that people are expecting the world to be perfect, or is that the straw man you prefer in order to ignore their demands?

And, more esoterically, would the world ever progress if everyone accepted it as it was and never pushed for perfection?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We are getting kicked out of our homes."

..and why is that? I want to see how many of these people protesting actually got kicked out of their homes and why.

"We are forced to choose between groceries and rent."

Do you have a cell phone? Do you have cable? Where do you live?

"We are denied quality medical care."

Interesting how this is somehow wall street's problems. Can I blame them for tax increases too?

"We are suffering from environmental pollution."

lol?

"We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything."

If you can't find a job..you need to ask yourself why. I lost my job a little over a year ago and then started my own company. Since then, I've had tons of recruiters and other companies emailing me because they want me to work for them. There are still plenty of jobs out there. You just need to bust your ass to get them. Most people aren't willing to put in the work.

I saw the start of this entitlement mentality with music and software piracy. Many people from this generation feel it's their "right" to be able to download these things for free. Now they are entitled to a home, a college education, and a job.

They want equality, but the problem isn't we aren't all equal. I work 12 hours a day. As a result, I have more money in the bank than someone that works part-time. Why should I be limited or penalized for this?

"So far, it's pick-your-own cause, with grievances ranging from bank bail-outs to animal testing, and yet what most of the mainstream media seems to have missed is the fact that the occupation itself is its own demand"

This is why I find the entire "occupation" to be a joke. Every left-wing asshole with a grievance against big business is out there protesting.

<comment><USER10> to whoever responded with:

 _"But anyways. Like most of us, I am also very fortunate to be in tech, and have a passion for programming. But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society."_ ,

but then deleted their comment:

you really should repost it. it captures my feelings too and i wanted to thank you for putting them into words.

again and again, i encounter people in my circles of well-employed colleagues who do not realize how lucky they are to have interests coinciding with aptitudes coinciding with particular economic demands in their productive years.

and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.

<comment><USER9> "But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society"

What a defeatist attitude. I do work harder and smarter than other people in our society. My work and success reflects this.

"and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory."

It's sickening that you would equate having a good job with mostly luck. Winning the lottery is pure luck.

I chose to get involved in the tech industry. If I would have been in any other time, I would have chosen a different industry and most likely been successful. Less than 1% of it has to do with luck. If I would have just sat here and done nothing, my career wouldn't have fallen into my lap and my skill set wouldn't have suddenly appeared.

Anybody can be successful.

<comment><USER11> I started programming because I was fascinated by computers. It wasn't until years later that I found out it was a lucrative job. It sounds like your recommendation would be for everyone to chase money regardless of their passions. You have to admit that people who are passionate about things that pay well get a better deal in that situation. There are a lot of things that are worthwhile that are not well rewarded economically. If all of the artists and idealists disappeared and we were only left with money-chasers, the world would be that much poorer.

Also, regarding success: hard work and intelligence matter a lot, but so does opportunity. Have a look at Gladwell's Outliers for an interesting analysis of this.

<comment><USER8> Plus, there's the negative effect of having our market flooded with people who go into programming "because that's where the money is".

I'm as critical as anyone when people decide to get liberal arts degrees without at least working on other skills on the side, but let's not be so naive to think that if a CS degree was the new liberal arts degree, that we wouldn't be having the same exact problem in society.

Only we (people on HN) would probably be making much less money.

<comment><USER12> I sometimes wonder what a bizarro-world hacker culture would be like. What if tech didn't pay well at all, and there was a lot of social pressure to get a "real job" and a "real degree", like Political Science or English Literature, instead of wasting your time getting a worthless CS degree?

It'd probably be less pleasant in a lot of ways, but the people still in tech would probably be an interesting group.

<comment><USER13> _I sometimes wonder what a bizarro-world hacker culture would be like. What if tech didn't pay well at all_

It would be like the early 1990s, or living in North Dakota.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They were sold security. Bow to authority, relinquish individual responsibility, receive a steady paycheck and a base standard of living. Here are your ethics: "Accept your place in life; don't fight for yourself: we'll fight for you. Turn on the TV and kick back. Be docile. We'll look after you."

Now they're still repeating their original mistake: they're asking others to fix their situation. But the game has changed while they had relinquished control: real economic damage has been caused (Tragedy of the Commons). Of course, as usual, now there is a call to arms and a protest at authority, but they still don't understand: instead of asking for handouts they should fix their situation by putting in effort, taking responsibility and standing up for themselves and each other.

<comment><USER15> _instead of asking for handouts they should fix their situation by putting in effort, taking responsibility and standing up for themselves and each other._

Isn't that exactly what they're doing?

Taking responsibility can take many different forms. No, those people are not taking an individualist entrepreneur route that most here on this particular forum are probably more comfortable with. However, the individualist approach cannot solve every problem. Sometimes, a different route is needed.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are exactly the kind of process by which people _are_ taking responsibility. Ideas are fermenting there, people are activated, becoming involved at whichever level (political or otherwise). This is not a uniform process - certainly, many people will just be there out of rage, not really becoming activated, but at the same time, many people undergo transformations, gaining knowledge, forming goals, talking about and then attempting concrete steps to get what they want.

This is hard to believe if you've never actually been in touch with a movement like this, mostly because it is impossible to see such developments from the outside. I've been personally involved in similar things when I was younger (though at a smaller, local scale), and even I can't see what's going on as an outsider. But believe me, if you think those people are all shouting for somebody else to fix everything for them, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

<comment><USER14> > Isn't that exactly what they're doing?

Okay, yes. In a way. But they're taking responsibility to try to get other people to do something for them. You're right, I do have an individualistic perspective on this. I don't think it works well. The only control they will get over the situation will be the control they're given by the government/big industry.

> But believe me, if you think those people are all shouting for somebody else > to fix everything for them, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking > about.

I'll take the bait. What are they doing other than protesting for a government response/solution to their woes?

<comment><USER15> _What are they doing other than protesting for a government response/solution to their woes?_

First of all, I think we have to make sure we understand each other what the question is here.

Most of the griefs of the protestors, as far as I understand them, can almost by definition only be solved by a government solution. (Assuming you accept their claim that they are not protesting for their individual well-being, but are instead protesting against systemic issues in society.) Bank regulation comes to mind - obviously, banks cannot be regulated by individuals. The same thing applies to macroeconomic problems such as mass unemployment.

Once you recognize that a given problem can only be resolved by government changing its behavior, there remains the question of how you proceed. Do you simply shout about it on the street, or are you trying to do more?

It is this "more" that I was talking about, which usually happens in movements like this. Of course I cannot give you concrete examples since I am not involved in the whole Occupy Wall Street thing, and outside observers can only see them after the fact, if they have been successful.

It usually starts with people genuinely interested in learning. Groups form where people teach each other and become creative. People spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix the problems, and trying to reach out to those who are already in a position to implement their plans. Some may go on trying to run for office themselves. And so on.

This is often unsuccessful for obvious reasons - changing the behavior of government is extremely difficult. But it's not unsuccessful for a lack of trying. More often, the greatest problem is the fact that the people involved are simply inexperienced in dealing with those type of power structures, and therefore fail to acquire enough social influence to really effect a change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The question I can't find an answer to is, what do they actually want? I feel like "change" isn't specific enough. They need a single, obtainable goal, and focus on getting the media to say that goal with every report.

<comment><USER17> From what I've heard from them, I think "better safeguards against regulatory capture" would cover a lot of it, though I have yet to hear that term specifically.

<comment><USER18> The best five words for Occupy Wall Street that I've heard.

I'd bet a vast majority of people there would get behind this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> watch some of them squirm through their cognitive dissonance. If you are protesting wall street then how the hell do you support Obama when his presidential campaign was bankrolled by Goldman Sachs? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFVR9Nv43J4&feature=share](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFVR9Nv43J4&feature=share)

<comment><USER20> They are in fact also protesting against the merger of big business and politics. They are thus demanding an end to big money like the example you gave into politics.

I do not think this is necessarily a democrat's protest. This is a people's protest, the 99%.

<comment><USER19> This reminds me of a quote:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years." ― Alexis de Tocqueville

<comment><USER21> The quotation you mention was not said by de Tocqueville:

[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#Misattrib...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#Misattributed)

[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler#Unsourc...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler#Unsourced)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This whole 99% vs 1% BS is just getting ridiculous.

Maybe they should be happy they're not the 99% of the world who die of starvation and preventable diseases instead of whining that it's so unfair.

The protestors ARE in the 1%. It's depressing to see their open greed and belief they are entitled to more.

Maybe if they applied all that energy toward creating wealth instead of protesting, they would be in a better situation. Or better yet, try and help the 99% of the world that's worse off than them.

<comment><USER6> I'm reminded of people who argue against high-paid athletes going on strike for being greedy, despite the institution owners pulling in far larger portions of the wealth. "They're paid millions to throw a ball around! They should be happy with a fraction of the wealth they generate!"

Which is, of course, the underlying point. Who is really "creating" the wealth? That's a matter of perspective. I'm sure the self-described "99 percenters" feel they're the ones who "created" much of the wealth the "1%" has.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that's the point at all personally.

Protesting that other people have more money than you is just the same as a 2 year old throwing a tantrum.

<comment><USER23> the "too big to fail" situation is dangerous. the banks are _correctly_ making big bets because they know it's impossible to default since the government HAS to bail them out to prevent contagion.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that's true. Many banks have fallen. Big ones as well.

Also, the proper way is to vote out the government if they do something like that, and to make it clear you don't think it was a good idea.

Protesting on streets is a barbaric way to do things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd offer some of them a job...but then again I don't think they want one.

Nor are they willing to take any sort of personal responsibility for the "mess" they are in. You didn't necessarily get screwed, you probably screwed yourself. And if you are complaining about tuition costs go protest at the universities, not Wall Street. How dumb can some people be?

Certain financial institutions may certainly be at fault to a degree, but so is Washington and Congress and YOU. Take responsibility and do something positive for the country. This is a joke.

<comment><USER25> You really believe that a vote has any power?

<comment><USER24> Absolutely! But people need to vote at every single level from city council to the Presidency, not just once every 4 years for whoever your favorite news stations tells you to.

I personally don't feel bad for or listen to those who refuse to vote.

<comment><USER26> >Absolutely! But people need to vote at every single level from city council to the Presidency, not just once every 4 years for whoever your favorite news stations tells you to.

On the one hand I absolutely agree with you, but on the other hand, corporations vote with their dollars every single day.

<comment><USER24> True, but who else votes with their dollars every day? American citizens. Perhaps some should pay more attention to what they are voting for with their wallets.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GMail to be likely to blocked in China - <AUTHOR>

With the introduction of Google Buzz, it is only a matter of time before GMail will be blocked in mainland China. Providing Facebook like functionality and the watching of Youtube videos from within GMail has all but guaranteed the service will be blocked soon.<p>Sorry for the previous, slightly missleading headline but as someone living in China heavily dependent on GMail I can see it coming. <comment><USER2> the headline of your post is quite misleading. Are you stating a fact or an opinion?</comment>


Putting iPad Sales in Context - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2012/04/ipad_sales_context <comment><USER2>
      a sum of money that three years ago was a record
      quarterly profit is now just the blip between the
      (historically strong) holiday quarter and the
      (historically weak) January-March quarter.

This is definitely the best quote.

I'm wondering if Apple's mainstream-ness is going to catch up to them soon with the hipster crowd. Then again, the only other major options for consumers are Microsoft-based which are even more mainstream and corporate.

<comment><USER3> > _the only other major options for consumers are Microsoft-based_ //

Not heard of Android then?

"Apple's market share in tablet segment slipped from 64 percent to 57 percent in Q4, 2011, According to the research reports from iSuppli, Amazon's Kindle with an impressive 14 percent growth in the market snagged a large share of iPad sales in Q4, 2011." ([http://www.91mobiles.com/blog/10192/Apple+iPad+tablet+market...](http://www.91mobiles.com/blog/10192/Apple+iPad+tablet+market+share+slumped+to+57+percent.html))

"In Forrester's analysis, Samsung has a 5 percent share; Motorola 4 percent and Acer a 3 percent share. HP's TouchPad, now discontinued, had a 6 percent share, but that was during that series of crazy fire sales when everyone suddenly rushed to buy one." ([http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/forrester-no- android-tablet...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/forrester-no-android- tablet-has-more-than-5-share-vs-ipad-how-does-amazons-kindle-fire-compare/))

TechCrunch here estimates Kindle Fire to have sold 40% as many units as iPad for the "holiday quarter".

<comment><USER2> You're right. I wasn't thinking in terms of mobile (doh). Good catch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think another important point is that the iPad didn't replace an existing tablet in the users home.

It was an entirely new genre of device. No doubt when people bought macs they probably had some kind of computer before it. Most iphone users were just replacing their previous phone, just as the first ipod users were unhappy with their 15 song capacity generic mp3 player.

To gain such adoption for a tablet device that people didn't previously knew they needed - is huge!

They first convinced the market they needed a tablet and second that the iPad was the right product to meet that need. Incredible!

</comment><comment><USER5> So why should anyone believe analyst estimates again? Don't they base their estimates on shady equations?

<comment><USER6> Not all analysis are the same, so, depending on which analyst whose business politics you buy into, its Caveat Emptor.</comment></comment>


How Many Site Hits? Depends Who's Counting - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22click.html?ei=5088&en=ae40f44cfcf1df51&ex=1350705600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all <comment><AUTHOR> "This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by ratings companies based on panel samplings."

I think they mean it _does_ correlate, but not _perfectly_. Otherwise that statement is self-contradictory.</comment>