Thoughts on Ada and Language Technology in Our Times (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ada2012.org/files/Thoughts_on_Ada.pdf <comment><USER2> I received the green postcard announcing that "Ada is Green", meaning that of the four candidates for Ada, the Green design had won. That was a long time ago.

The big problem in the early days was getting a compiler. DoD had a test suite for the compiler, and only compilers that passed could use the Ada name. They also had a "floor equals ceiling" rule - no missing features, no extra features. Compilers were to be feature-compatible.

That's how aerospace does things. The interface spec defines the interface. If something is incompatible with the interface, it's defective. It's why you can take Pratt and Whitney engines off a 767 and put on GE or Rolls Royce engines. DoD took the position that a compiler was a part with a specification.

Ada was a big language back then, and some of the compiler companies underestimated the job. Ada compilers were quite expensive - one for the M68000 was $40,000. I ordered that one when I was with a big aerospace company. When it showed up as a magnetic tape, it came with an unexpected cover letter, saying that this wasn't a validated compiler, and the validated compiler would follow - someday. No go. Quality control reject. Red tag attached: "REJECTED BY INCOMING INSPECTION - DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO SPECIFICATION". Purchase order says "validated compiler". Tape returned to vendor. Vendor tries to get out of giving refund. Legal department hammers vendor until they pay up. Meanwhile, another vendor ships a validated compiler, and that is ordered and used. That's how aerospace used to do things.

The compiler price was a big problem for non-Government customers. That contributed to the lack of adoption. We had great hopes for Ada, having used Modula successfully. But it was not to be.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and those non-validated compilers, and even the validated ones, had lots of bugs. We had to get legal with a compiler vendor because of the number of bugs. This took disassembling the compiler on our end to prove our points.

"Ada is safe". Yes, if it outputs correct code. Otherwise, not so much. Lives were at stake here, and like you say, I'm not sure all the vendors were prepared for what that meant in terms of their product.

I really enjoyed working with Ada, but don't think I would want to go back to it today.

<comment><USER4> This is true to this day per IRONSIDES paper [1]. Made me consider using Ada as an executable specification language to be converted to equivalent C/C++ and compiled that way. They need to just do a functional implementation of the compiler in a language such as Ocaml with extensive testing. That's what Esterel did for SCADE generator. They said Ocaml compiler stages were easy to trace down to object code. So, that helps with the chicken and egg problem a bit. Alternatively, implement it in the VLISP, PreScheme, or VeriML that were formally verified for correctness.

[1] [http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/globecom_2012.pdf](http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/globecom_2012.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article. It was indeed too far ahead of its time. That's despite compelling benefits in the field it's designed for:

[http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe- secur...](http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/)

Interestingly, languages such as Rust are still trying to accomplish the combination of efficiency and performance Ada has been doing for decades. Meanwhile, Ada developers (esp at AdaCore) haven't stood still: Design by Contract, provable absence of certain errors in SPARK code, more programming in the large support, zero-runtime deployment options, web app support, separation kernel runtimes for highest security, and more.

So, it might be a verbose, old language. It might not support the latest 1,000 fads in IT. Yet, here is a language designed in the 80's that does what modern systems languages are attempting to do, does it well, and has great tool support. So, I'd say the case for using Ada is long-made and companies doing mission-critical software have plenty reason to try to use it. Just try a project or two to see its benefits, at the least.

<comment><USER5> I have to add that verbosity serves a purpose here. Programming in the large often means those systems are long-living and the teams programming and maintaining them are huge, heterogeneous (in skill), and changing (esp. if it's a system running for decades). The verbosity comes from making many things pretty explicit and clear.

Ada is not made for explorative hacking or intellectual workouts but for reliable implementation. And it's not that those who criticize its verbosity program in APL themselves. ;)

<comment><USER6> > Programming in the large often means those systems are long-living and the > teams programming and maintaining them are huge, heterogeneous (in skill), > and changing (esp. if it's a system running for decades). The verbosity > comes from making many things pretty explicit and clear.

I would say that this is the rule, rather than the exception, in software, and the fact that languages designed for "explorative hacking or intellectual workouts" eventually make it into production is simply a matter of inexperienced, though bright, developers prioritizing initial development cost over maintenance cost (which makes sense in startups, but those are a tiny minority of the industry). The average production codebase lifespan is about a decade, probably more.

I also agree that verbosity (up to a reasonable point) assists in maintaining codebases over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A minor point: I found the references to "Ada 1.0", "Ada 2.0", "Ada 3.0", and "Ada 4.0" distracting. I worked with Ada for a long time, and I've never heard of those terms. The successive language standards are almost universally referred to by the years they were published (1983, 1995, 2005, and 2012).

<comment><USER4> I agree and think it's slightly major. It's hard enough to get word on this language out. Having people Google for Ada 3.0 or 4.0 to get confusing results might make people say screw it. The author should revise the paper with the proper names for the sake of those people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would like to highlight that the first validated Ada language processor from 1983, the NYU Ada/Ed interpreter is still missing, along with its associated toolchain (an early SETL compiler for VAX/VMS implemented in a FORTRAN-like language known as LITTLE), more details are on my webpage:

[http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/a/retrocomputingtasman...](http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/a/retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/home/projects/spg/ada)

There are also several other interesting or unusual Ada compilers still to be found too, notably:

      Ada for the Intel iAPX-432 (arguably an instruction set architecture tailored to Ada)

      Symbolics Ada - an Ada implemented in Lisp

      Ada for the inmos Transputer - an Ada for a parallel computer architecture

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm one of those people that think LISP is the most powerful language ever designed. Best for exploratory programming. Ada is best for mission-critical stuff being among the safest. While LISP didn't mainstream, Python did by emulating the right aspects of LISP without its issues. Coverity reported it had an extremely low defect rate, too. It's also great for maintainable, fairly-reliable, productive code. Yet, most installs still depend on unsafe code in interpreter and libraries.

So, what do you people think about doing a Python implementation in a combo of Ada and SPARK? Everything is done using robust, structured programming style with Design by Contract and all checks enabled by default. A given set of checks can be disabled if SPARK or another tool proves absence of that problem. Ada's tasking or (even better) the SCOOP model can give it real concurrency. The standard library features can be as safe or fast as necessary with Ada-grade interface protections and typing. OS-specific details will be abstracted away in order to port it to a low-TCB, microkernel OS or MirageOS- style Xen guest in the future.

The result should be as usable as Python, work about as fast, be more maintainable, and have fewer implementation risks. I'd also probably implement one of the Python compilers in Ada for performance boosts. Anyone think this is a project worth pushing on academics or FOSS?

</comment><comment><USER9> On page 4, I don't exactly follow how the problematic compilation model works (specifically the bit about the implementation approach). Can anyone explain what exactly it's saying?

<comment><USER10> [http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-10-04.html...](http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-10-04.html#10.4)

"Compilers are required to enforce the language rules in the same manner for a program consisting of several compilation units (and subunits) as for a program submitted as a single compilation. Consequently, a library file containing information on the compilation units of the program library must be maintained by the compiler or compiling environment."

See also:

[http://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugn- docs/html/gnat_ugn/gnat_ugn...](http://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugn- docs/html/gnat_ugn/gnat_ugn/the_gnat_compilation_model.html#gnat-and-other- compilation-models)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How can i learn Ada as a student, when the compiler and IDE tooling is still so expensive? I want to learn it. Seems impossible without joining the army or similar 😠

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, take a look at [http://university.adacore.com/](http://university.adacore.com/) and [http://www.academia.edu/2490736/Integrating_8-bit_AVR_Micro-...](http://www.academia.edu/2490736/Integrating_8-bit_AVR_Micro- Controllers_in_Ada)

<comment><USER11> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with many things he writes. For example, safety in a language has never and will never come from particular language constructs. In the best case, we can isolate particular pieces of the program and look for counterexamples that will demonstrate that it does not work. That is why we use unit tests where applicable (where functions are at least idempotent). His concept of language safety is therefore spurious. There is simply no reason whatsoever to believe that a program in Ada would be safer than a program written in any other language. Safety is about validation and a program or a language cannot validate itself.

Furthermore, a programming language is something with a _strong personality_ attached to it. Someone created it, because he felt like doing so and then you have other people who like it and feel like using it. Ada's language design committee did not qualify for that scenario.

By the way, could you imagine someone passionate about revolutionizing the world with his new idea that will defeat Facebook or so, writing his passionate ideas in Ada?

Seriously, nobody got the slightest enthusiastic about Ada and that is why Ada barely has any users at all. The language simply does not reflect what any user group would want to do. In other words, Ada has always been a solution desperately looking for a problem.

<comment><USER3> Ada has plenty of constructs to enhance safety. Explicit type conversion. Limited use of pointers. Arrays with bounds checking. No willy nilly 'enums are ints' type stuff. Contracts. Many more are covered here:

[http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe- secur...](http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/)

Plenty of people got interested in Ada. They are people that do things like write software for trains, nuclear reactors, medical devices, and aircraft. There's not much point in trying to use Ada for a website.

With that said, I always felt that the pitch for safety was always overstated. Of course tests are needed (not aware of any mission critical system where they aren't heavily used). There were lots of papers slamming things like C++ vs Ada back in the day. Yet we were able to do safe things in both languages. Guaranteeing things in C++ was harder, but then other stuff was easier. I left Ada when I was trying to do some research in generic programming and Ada refused to let me do things that C++ would because it was 'unsafe'. Sure, unfettered use of generics would be unsafe, but so is rewriting the same code 10 times for different types. This was back when Stepanov published his STL paper. His ideas were great, they helped me, and I didn't look back. Still, if I was to work on another flight computer or weapons system I would not look askance on Ada. The tasking model in particular is very nice.

I never understood the 'committee' argument. If you don't like something about a language, say what you don't like, don't talk about how it was created. Ada is very well designed, it is consistent, and it hangs together far more than most languages out there.

No, no one is going to use Ada to 'move fast and break things' (defeat Facebook). It's a language for measured development of things that you can't afford to have break. Not spending weeks chasing pointer bugs, and going home to your family at the end of an 8 hour day is pretty darn exciting to some of us.</comment></comment>


How I Messed Up Our Repo and Ideas for Improving Git UX - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maxheiber/how-i-messed-up-our-repo-and-ideas-for-improving-git-ux-e248d9e27e79#.o70klpdqx <comment><USER2> User does a git force push and bad things happen to the repo. Naturally git and github are at fault for allowing this to happen? It seems a better solution is not to do a force push or to turn on 'protected branches' in github than to try to improve git's usability.

</comment><comment><USER3> It could easily have been avoided if everyone on the team used their own fork and committed to the master repo via merge requests. Set up protected branches on the master and then only force push to your own fork. No way to accidently ruin someone else day :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I recommend

[push]

        default = current

Usually you only want to push the current branch.</comment>


Dependent type systems as macros (POPL 2020) - <AUTHOR> http://ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/popl2020/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Major steps beyond popular paper ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167620)). Includes extensive examples (video DSL, proof assistant built using their core). Lends itself to experimenting with type system extensions and integrated DSLs -- in principle for any language with a sufficiently advanced type system.</comment>


Let's Change the World - <AUTHOR> http://s.jenius.me/39

<comment><USER2> Don't know if something like this is what you're talking about, but I thought I should pass it on so that I don't feel guilty on my day off. Give this guy a hand and maybe you'll get somewhere.

<http://www.molleindustria.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Hear, hear!</comment>


Bono owns ~1.5% of Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.learnvest.com/living-frugally/current-events/a-money-lesson-from-facebooks-50-billion-valuation-287/ <comment><USER2> No he doesn't. The investment firm called Elevation Partners (where he happens to be a partner in) does.

It's like saying that Paul Graham owns a certain percentage of Dropbox while it's YC that owns that percentage.

<comment><AUTHOR> I misunderstood that to mean that his share of Elevation Partners share was ~1.5% of Facebook.

Thanks for the correction. With hindsight I should have put a question mark in the title as I was surprised when I read it and wanted to know more.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you employ someone in exchange for equity? - <AUTHOR>

I've been approached by someone interested in joining my startup in exchange for equity. Obviously I can't afford to pay him a salary at this stage and he won't be investing any cash. What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> Do you want this individual as a co-founder?, because that is essentially the role they would be stepping in as. At minimum you would need to write a solid vesting plan of some kind, to prevent the individual from quitting in a month and taking the equity with them.

That said, I would be somewhat suspicious of the situation where someone is willing to work for only equity. Are they already independently wealthy? Are they having trouble finding paying employment?

</comment><comment><USER3> What do they bring to the table and how badly do you need them?</comment>


Why the Industrial Revolution Didn't Happen in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-the-industrial-revolution-didnt-happen-in-china/ <comment><USER2> Worth asking: why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen in the Roman Empire?

Technologically, the Empire was close in one key way. They had weapons factories turning out steel weapons. They knew steel, and could make it is small quantities. But they never advanced to the Bessemer converter, which made steel in bulk, fast and cheaply.[1] This invention was surprisingly late; it was invented around 1855 and didn't work right for another 20 years. Yet it's not complicated, just non-obvious. The Romans could have built and used a Bessemer converter.

With steel, running carts on rails would have been an obvious next step, what with all the heavy stuff needed in steelmaking. With coal and furnaces and steel, someone would have figured out steam power. Railway mania could have happened in 100AD.

There may have been something like the Bessemer process in 11th century China, but it didn't result in volume production.

The Romans never invented the concept of the corporation. They never developed common carriers or a commercial mail system. There was a huge empire, rich individuals, and guilds, but few if any inter-city operating organizations. So there was nothing in being ready and able to exploit new technology.

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

<comment><USER3> Well, there are lots of places the Industrial Revolution didn't happen, and times.

And there's the case that when it _did_ finally happen, in England in 1800, it was so utterly compelling that it spread around the world within a few years.

My view increasingly is that threading the industrialisation needle required a pretty specific set of bootstrapping steps, any one of which out-of-sequence could put the kibosh on the whole affair.

I've been looking at the genesis of the industrial revolution (and moreso, its opposite, the potential conclusion of it and general collapse of industrialised technological society) for the past five years. Joel Mokyr's been studying the concept for rather longer, and has been editing a rather attractive series through Princeton University Press on the subject, including books by himself, Gregory Clark (UC Davis, _A Farewell to Alms_ ), Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern, _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_ ), and others. Recommended.

I've been looking at the _dynamics_ of technological mechanism, and am settling on roughly nine:

1\. Fuels, energy storage, and prime movers.

2\. Materials, properties, and abundances.

3\. Power transmission and transformation.

4\. Specific process knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "technological knowlege").

5\. General systemic knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "scientific knowledge", to which I add history and geography).

6\. Information acquisition, processing, transmission, and storage.

7\. Organisational systems: governance, business organisation, financial systems, military organisation, accountancy, courts & laws, religion, ethics, and moral codes.

8\. Dendritic systems: Transport networks, communications networks, cities, nations, trade and commercial networks, information systems, knowledge-as-web (see James Burke), social networks.

9\. Sinks and unanticipated consequences. What Mokyr calls in another recent piece (WSJ) "bite-back".

Looking at this, Rome had some elements (strong social structures, fairly strong material systems), but was profoundly lacking in others -- Italy has virtually no domestic coal, and had been stripped of much of its native wood (Rome imported wood heavily, and there's a reason for the stone architecture), and the empire lacked a positional numerical system and all the computational capacity that entails.

From some of my recent reading, much of it Vaclav Smil's _Energy in History_ and Manfred Weissenbacher's _Sources of Power_ (which draws heavily on Smil, though also others), a few points become clear:

1\. As Mokyr notes, Britain was not subject to successful foreign invasion after 1066 -- in fact World War II was the first time _in nearly 900 years_ that London came under direct attack, and even then there was no actual substantial foreign invasion. Whilst mainland Europe was discovering itself in the 18th and 19th centuries, England was busily inventing commerce and industry.

2\. Coal. There are four great coal beds throughout the world, with England sitting atop the remnants of one. That continued through _parts_ of Europe, most especially France, a small portion of northern Spain and Portugal, Germany, and Silesia. The US has an absolutely massive deposit (about 1/4 the global total), actually stemming from the same Carboniferous-era forest system as the North American and European plates were joined some 300 million years ago. The fourth is in China, and smaller deposits are found in Australia and South Africa. _Industry required coal._ (Mokyr and Clark's comments notwithstanding, from other references in this thread.)

3\. Geography. England's island status not only afforded it protection from invaders, but access to trade, both from within the island and from the Continent. With most significant settlements near the coast, goods could generally move throughout the island. This was crucial, as until canals (hard to create) and railroads (required iron, or better, Bessemer steel to avoid split rails, and steam traction), overland transport was not viable (see Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ for a comparison of ship and wagon transport from Scotland to London, and realise that Smith himself travelled on horseback over several weeks when he ventured to London for university).

4\. Colonies. England could count on its possessions for raw materials, food, and as an opportunity to export its excess population. Imports included the critical goods of lumber (short in England), food, sugar (dense carbs), tea (whose heating provided purified water), pitch (for sealing ships), Irish grain (which continued to be exported through the Irish Potato Famine of the 1850s, during which the island's population fell by half), and Indian saltpeter (crucial for gunpowder). These proved to be an interlocking set of pegs that provided England with key advantages.

5\. A set of strongly self-serving economic principles. A highly illuminating insight to how "free trade" was viewed in 1870s England vs. the United States is provided by way of the highly prescient Wikipedia Edit War of 1874: the British publishers of _Chamber 's Encyclopaedia_ included an exceptionally indignant EDITORIAL STATEMENT (busted capslock key included) concerning the "extensive alterations" made by their American printing partners to certain key articles, beginning with Free Trade (either "the most important and fundamental truth in political economy" or "a dogma of modern growth, industriously taught by British manufacturers and their commercial agents". The British view was at odds not only with the American, but also the French and German, nations which followed quite deliberate government policies of industrialisation, similar to China's or Korea's of current times, as expounded by Frederick List's "National System". For more: [https://redd.it/4xe2k1](https://redd.it/4xe2k1)

England's lead didn't hold, however. By the late 19th century it was challenged by both France and Germany, which had caught up quickly (thanks in large part to their own native coal endowments), and rapidly began to fall behind the United States, which had not just coal but the lubricant of the second explosion of the Industrial Revolution: oil.

That's another story.

I Rome _had_ succeeded (or China, or Persia, or the Mayans), I suspect one consequence might be we'd be now well into discovering the intracacies of long-term remediation from industrial CO2-induced greenhouse warming of the planet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I just spent 30 minutes reading some of your past comments, as well as stuff on the subreddit on your profile. Must have been the best 30 minutes I've spent in a long time.

<comment><USER3> Thanks.

I'm always looking for insights, sources, and more than anything else, criticisms of things which are incorrect, unclear, or don't stand to inspection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why I think the EU is a dangerous idea. It has become this truism that we are stronger together. No, we are not. Europe conquered the world, because we were divided. Our strength came from our division not our unity.

Random events always happen. Every country will always experience a random bad leader. It will happen sooner or later. What is best then to have a land area unified into one or split into 10 different countries? One bad leader among 10 occasionally will not pull the whole area down. One bad leader for the whole area can pull the whole area into the dark ages.

Consider the Chinese emperor which banned all Chinese naval exploration and trade? That could never happen in contemporary Europe, because if your country got such a dumb leader your neighbors would quickly outcompete you and it would become very obvious how stupid that decision was within short time.

Being political divided is thus a good insurance against doom. Imagine someone like Hitler rising to power in a unified Europe? There would be no way to counter his madness.

That is why I think that China's rise today will eventually end up being a temporary thing. It will eventually stagnate, because China doesn't have anything to clearly challenge it. I also think this will be America's downfall in the end. We can already see an almost Chinese way of seeing the world in America. Instead of Mandate of Heaven, we got American exceptionalism, which means America is very poor at absorbing ideas from abroad. The thinking is always that America is best and has nothing to learn from the foreigners. Not all that different from the Chinese view when the British came knocking on their door.

What is great about Europe is that we got this big playground for political and society experiments. Different countries try out widely different models for society. I see this among Nordic countries as a microcosmos. Each country try out different ideas and then we copy what works from each other. Many of the policies e.g. enacted in my home country Norway has previously been tried out in Denmark or Sweden.

<comment><USER5> This is a good point, but I am fairly sure there is a balance to reach here. The EU is currently politically extremely weak, with national veto powers widespread: see how Wallonia, only a part of a small country, was able to significantly delay CETA ratification, and could probably have cancelled it; how large EU economies (Germany, France, semi-formerly the UK, and probably Italy and the Netherlands) all have veto power in practice; how some countries (Poland and Hungary come to mind) pretty much ignore some rules with little being done against it.

What would it even mean, in the current state of the EU, for "a Hitler to rise to power in it"? First, he would have to be supported by a large number of member states (in which case it would be likely that even without the existence of the EU, that sort of leader would have become widespread in Europe), and then, he would be president of the European Parliament? Of the European Commission? I doubt he would be very harmful there, except possibly to the EU as an institution.

I believe the EU can (and probably should) integrate quite a bit further before the problems you raise can realistically happen. I think member states should be given lots of freedom in non-foreign-policy, non-budgetary choices (as they currently are), which leaves a lot of room for the experimentation you describe, and less power to individually veto negotiations that are much more effective when Europe acts as a block. No-one wants to have to certify their cars or get an insurance license 27 times to service 20 million people on average each time.

As a last resort against utterly stupid decisions or policies, of course, member states are always free to leave.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I think that a great deal of America's success is because member states are NOT free to leave. Otherwise, they can abandon each other when it becomes convenient.

Edit since I can't reply. It's hard to imagine, but it wasn't always so, and rich states always have a net tax outflow to poorer states. It's the political equivalent of burning your ships; you have to make it work, for no other course is survivable. Slavery and economics forced the question, but the American Civil War was first and foremost to answer the question: can a state leave?

Note this is only about your last sentence, I agree with all the rest.

<comment><USER7> > Actually, I think that a great deal of America's success is because member > states are NOT free to leave.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads, 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'

No Article nor Amendment of the Constitution delegates authority over secession to the United States, and thus that power is retained by the several States, or to the people thereof. Thus it's pretty obvious that member states _are_ free to leave any time they choose; it's the only reading of the supreme law of the land which makes any sense.

<comment><USER8> _Thus it 's pretty obvious that member states are free to leave any time they choose_

On this subject the late, great Antonin Scalia supposedly said, more or less: "we settled that issue 150 years ago".

 _it 's the only reading of the supreme law of the land which makes any sense_

Much to the frequent lament of Scalia, the supreme law of the land is no more and no less than what a majority of the Supreme Court chooses to believe at that particular time.

<comment><USER7> > Much to the frequent lament of Scalia, the supreme law of the land is no > more and no less than what a majority of the Supreme Court chooses to > believe at that particular time.

Unfortunately that's true (and Justice Scalia was complicit in that: when he was right, he was typically really right, but when he was wrong he was rally wrong); that's why I've always respected Justice Thomas, who really does seem to attempt to consider what the Constitution actually says, requires and is silent on.

The one saving grace is that the Supreme Court is _not_ , despite what folks think, a super-legislature: it only has the power to rule in specific cases. There's nothing which prevents litigants bringing a similar case as one already decided, and the Court is free to ignore a previous, erroneous ruling. So there is some little hope that with the right justices it might ignore bad precedent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amid all the gloomy U.S. Presidential campaign rhetoric, this made me smile:

 _There 's a debate about the extent to which everything that can be invented has been invented. Have we picked all the low hanging fruit, can we continue to grow the way we did? I take a very optimistic view. I think if you want to summarize the future of technology, the short summary is, "You ain't seen nothing yet."_

</comment><comment><USER10> It did, it just took a hundred years to kick off, by all reasonable comparisons, China is in the middle of its part of the industrial revolution and there are signs that its about to slide out of it into the next phase of development.

If you consider that the "real" Industrial Revolution took about 60-80 years to run through in the West, and the West was starting pretty much from scratch, and if we pick a date of some sort, say 1976 (end of the Cultural Revolution), China has been at it for about 40 years. In 20 years (about the same length of time as the West's) it looks like huge parts of China will have been elevated to standards of living that probably exceeded those in the West when we came out of our own Industrial Revolution and will be entering into the next major developmental stage.

If anything a better and more interesting argument is how China was able to reproduce the Industrial Revolution in modern times as a model for economic growth.

<comment><USER11> China could industrialize much faster because all the needed science and industrial inventions had already been developed by the West. The real question for China is whether its present form of government can sustain development over the long term.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, China's situation is a bit different:

\- There's already a well developed, wealthy, stable of markets that will buy the output of production along with the domestic development.

\- The technology to kick off the development has largely already been developed, China just had to import it and get people to run the equipment and work on the assembly lines.

What's just as interesting is the ways in which it's the same:

\- Powered by Coal - just like Britain, America and Wallonia

\- Rapid urbanization triggered by the rise of manufacturing jobs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this theory "fits the facts" as we know them but for me it fails for me on South America. South America was much more like early Europe in that it has both a diversity of groups, geographic features that make it hard to conquer, and competition. So what was missing that left the empire of Brazil falling behind when Europe was racing ahead?

<comment><USER13> I'd say climate played a factor in Brazil and South America's economic progress. This article mentions nothing about climate, Europe during the winter months would be the perfect time to sit by a fireplace and solve hard problems. Notice how much of the countries and people living near the equator fail to have built great civilizations, humans just aren't as productive in the heat.

<comment><USER14> > Notice how much of the countries and people living near the equator fail to > have built great civilizations, humans just aren't as productive in the > heat.

I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now and they all had some of the greatest civilizations. Historically these "countries" spread beyond current political borders which more or less encompasses a continuous stretch of land and I am talking in that sense.

<comment><USER15> "I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now."

Not really, we are talking 3000 to 4000 years ago and certainly climate was colder then.

When we talk about Egypt we know there were very fertile land and cities then that are desert now. In Mesopotamia there were terrible deforestation done by humans that is recorded on documents and salinization of fertile lands that are now also desert but at the time supported millions of people.

We also know there has been at least two terrible changes in climate that lasted at least years that made the Earth cold and dark linked to volcanic eruptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a follow on, one could ask the question: what where the circumstances that led to China being unified and Europe not.

Something to do with culture? Something to do with population levels? Something to do with the crops being grown?

<comment><USER17> One "explanation" you hear a lot is geography. China's central plain is... a plain. It's easy to conquer and hold a plain. Europe has got mountains in the middle, plus various odd bodies of water getting in the way. That makes it much more difficult (given ancient/medieval modes of transport and warfare) to unify politically. Hence the conditions of perpetual competition that the article mentions.

China has mountains around the edges, and had a hell of a time conquering the little kingdoms that were in them. In most cases, the best they managed was tribute, and never really established real administrative control.

<comment><USER18> But the Romans did manage to unify much of Europe for hundreds of years. Why wasn't that feat ever replicated again?

<comment><USER19> That's an interesting question I've thought a lot about in the past (the rise of the great empires in general, to be honest).

My best guess is that they were able to do this thanks to the advancement required to face off the threads before their eventual rise. There wasn't anybody who could really compete with what they had after those wars were won. The Pax Romana held relative peace in Europe because of that strength.

I'd love someone with more knowledge on the subject to come and answer this - really fascinating subject.

<comment><USER6> A lot of Roman strength was organizational. In conquering, they spread that knowledge. It would probably have been hard to do it again with the same technique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't wait to find out what the revolution that was possible in our time but that we failed to see is. We have computers. We have spaceships. We have fish farms. We have sequenced DNA and cloned sheep. Seems sort of like you should be able to put all of that together to make... SOMETHING. Oh well, I guess 1000 years from now we are going to look sort of primitive by comparison. I would like to officially note, for the historians among us, that I am not culturally opposed to any technological innovations in the production of Computerized Spaceship Fishfarm Clones. Not sure what's stopping me from innovating here.

Yes, talking about the industrial revolution happening in Rome or China in the distance past is sort of like that in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> Me too, although I'll point out we are searching both harder and more efficiently than at any point in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMO, the author is being unfairly generous to the intentions of Europeans. He has it right when he says it's about competition, but then he goes on to credit Europeans for being more interested in progress and general welfare than the Chinese. That interest in progress and public welfare did eventually show up in the 19th century, but until then I'd say it was more about competition for money and power. The elites of the European nation states simply wanted anything that would give them a leg up on their neighbors. Anything that could either benefit their military or create a trade surplus was especially prized.

<comment><USER22> The Enlightenment has its roots in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The enormous progress of American capitalism in the 19th century sprang out of the preceding European intellectual movement.

</comment></comment><comment> fajr-rd Europe had competition between states but it also had stability. The key seems to be balance between competition, that forces states to innovate and gives freedom to inventors, and stability, that brings wealth and allows academic/engineering traditions to take hold. Persia had many scientific discoveries and technological innovations during the so called Islamic golden age but whole cities have been destroyed including there libraries during the Mongol invasions that spared Europe. Meanwhile, Paris, London, and many Germanic cities had centuries without suffering from catastrophic destruction. Also, I think that the focus should be on a technical level more than on a cultural level. "Then one day, Europeans build a vacuum pump. [...] In 1573, a Danish astronomer called Tycho Brahe observes a supernova." I would rather know more about how they came up with pumps and telescopes than read a long dissertation on how Chinese elites were too conservative or on how Aristotle has been trashed. Why did Europeans came up with pumps and telescopes and not China? I feel that the answer has more to do with demands (from demographic growth), concentration of wealth and skilled craftsmen than with political systems. Did China also had available materials, skilled workers and demand for efficient production?

</comment><comment> noir-york Superficial article that comes up with the only answer the author knows: "competition".

I'm as pro free market as the next (liberal) economist but competition had little to do with why the IR didn't happen in China.

One obvious counter example to the article: Europe had centuries of bloody competition before IR, so why did the IR take so long to come about?

And the simple answer is that what enabled the IR to happen was the Enlightenment and the core of the Enlightenment is essentially, value pluralism. Before the Enlightenment, God or his representative on Earth, the monarch, was the sole source of truth. Science, or any other sources of truth were squashed. The Enlightenment broke that link, most obviously with Locke's argument for the separation of church and state.

The lack of value pluralism also explains the lack of innovation and progress in other cultures through history.

A footnote: Machiavelli is misunderstood in the popular culture. The reason he is so important is not because he was the originator of the idea that there are different moral frameworks for princes (rulers) and the ruled, but that it a necessary, indeed a _good_ thing that there are different moral frameworks. Machiavelli wrote in the 16th century, and was one of the early value pluralists.

</comment><comment><USER3> One element of the Industrial Revolution was the military power necessary to secure resources and land to develop it. Given a wood-fuel powered industry, this meant a _lot_ of wood.

I've been meaning to run the calculations as to how much a full first rate ship's fire would equate to in wood equivalents. I'm basing this off of the _HMS Victory_ , a 104 gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy.

Armament consisted of 30 x 32#, 28 * 24#, 30 * 12#, and 2 each 12# and 68# forecastle guns.

A single round from all guns (unlikely -- a broadside would be half the armament) would then unleash 1.1 tons of iron shot.

From Vaclav Smil, iron smelting requires an 80:1 ratio of source fuelwood to output iron, with the fuelwood first being converted to charcoal, a 4:1 reduction itself.

Firing all guns of the _Victory_ expends the smelting power of 92 tons of fuelwood -- about 30 cords.

Canon could manage perhaps 2 rounds in a minute, with sustained rates of 20-40 rounds in an hour. At the upper bound, we're looking at 3,600 _tons_ of wood in shot consumption.

The _Victory_ herself required 6,000 trees in construction, was refurbished after her first major engagement at a cost greater than her initial construction, but perhaps in compensation, remains to this day as the oldest commissioned warship, having first launched in 1768.

I haven't done the calculation of gunpowder usage, though I've got a reference for 6# charge for a 24# gun. If that's proportionate to all guns, then a full round would be 1/3 ton of powder.

If anyone has a source for UK or US arms manufacture (guns, shot, powder) for the 17th - 19th centuries, I'd be quite interested. -18th centuries, I'd be interested.

</comment><comment><USER23> If I understand the historian's viewpoint, the industrial revolution happened in Europe because it wasn't too dogmatic. I wonder if research today has become too dogmatic -- most big labs are run by older professors pushing their ideas onto the next generation.

</comment><comment><USER24> In the West we had glass - glasses to see with and therefore people able to read/write into old age. This was an important advantage, we could learn from the writings of our elders and our old folk could still learn and research even if they had poor eyesight. Meanwhile, in China, they had 'china' instead of glass to make stuff with.

The China that existed before the Communists took over had this absurd foot binding practice that took 50% of the working population off the 'job market'. Meanwhile, in the West, women did most of the harder work, with their children in cottage industries that pre-dated the full on Industrial Revolution.

Selling opium to China probably didn't help with their economic development either.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have yet to read all of it, but I have liked what I have read of the following overview article:

Why did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?

[https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20t...](https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20the%20Industrial%20Revolution%20Start%20in%20Britain.pdf)

It actually discusses several diverging schools of thought.

<comment><USER3> Including Mokyr's earlier work. He's been tackling this since the 1970s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The industrial revolution did happen in Japan though... and without any of the key factors explained in the article.

<comment><USER6> They had outside pressure driving it, though. I'd probably go so far as to say that no society voluntarily chooses an industrial revolution, they have it forced upon them by a variety of pressures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The correct question to ask is why did it happen when and where it did. I believe that the common and correct answer is that the necessary confluence of ideas and social structures and incentives and wherewithal came together.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fukuyama's "The origin of political order" and "political order and political decay" I would recommend to anybody interested in this topic. They are, however, quite ... extensive.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Why the West rules for now" has an interesting take on this

</comment><comment><USER29> "The first of the unprovable premises on which science has been based is the belief that the world is real and the human mind is capable of knowing its real nature. The second and best-known postulate underlying the structure of scientific knowledge is that of cause and effect. The third basic scientific premise is that nature is unified."[1]

The above describes the Christian world view which was prevalent in Europe.

1\. Henry M. Morris, Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Baker, 1991), p. 30.

<comment><USER30> This is a distinctively white Christian thing? Surely there have been, since ancient times, people in every corner of the world who believe the world is real (whatever it amounts to to believe this as opposed to not believing it) and recognize cause and effect (again, I can't even fathom what it would amount to to be a civilization which did not acknowledge cause and effect).

ETA: Looked up Henry M. Morris. Ah; he's a young Earth creationist, and "the father of modern creation science". I see.

<comment><USER29> You seem to think that bringing race into this is somehow acceptable. It's not.

If you have something specific against the quote other than innuendo, I'm sure there are less offensive ways to make your point.

Looking at other world views prevalent at the time, the metaphysical was inextricably tied up in the physical. Christianity asserts that the world is real, and that it is worth studying.

<comment><USER31> You mean your particular sect of christianity.

Christian Gnosticism and Catharism are just two historical christian sects who denied the reality of sense-perception, and who were purged for that. Not to mention christian mysticism, specially that of Meister Eckhart, or Spinozism, or any Neoplantonist interpretation of christian tradition. Christianity isn't a single theological or even metaphysical tradition, but a multitude of ones pinned to a more or less single oral tradition embodied in the bible. Specially, christianism doesn't entail physicalism.

Furthermore, I don't see what's exceptional about "the world" being "real". Even the Eleatics and the Neoplatonists would've agreed to that, granted that "the world" be their "One", even though they asserted that sense-perception is illusory. If these words are taken in their most general sense, then this proposition becomes a platitude. You might as well say that "whatever is, is". And no one has ever seriously argued that nothing exists (Gorgias of Leontini did only in jest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "The Triumph of the West" by Roberts goes into considerable detail explaining it.

</comment><comment><USER33> It has been argued that a big part of the picture leading up to the industrial revolution is concurrent growth in life expectancy and wealth. The former and the latter both drive one another, and the effect of small increases compounds over time to generate sufficient capital and interest for technological progress.

[http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html](http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html)

"During the 17th and 18th century the English economy underwent a dramatic transformation: its capacity to feed and increasing population increased impressively. ... Perhaps for the first time in the history of any country other than a land of recent settlement, rapid population growth took place concurrently with rising living standands. ... The notion of life expectancy provides the most important tool to examine the phenomenon of mortality, taking into account the age structure of the population. Life expectancy at age x is the average number of years that a person of age x will still survive at a given date. The most commonly used indicator is e(0), life expectancy at birth (or at age 0), but sometimes other statistics like e(1), e(5), e(20), e(50), are also tabulated. Their main advantage is that they capture age- specific mortality profiles: for instance, an increase in mortality concentrated in the age-group between 20-25 (due, for instance, to a long war) would affect e(0) but not e(30) because the probability of survival, given that a person is already 30, does not change. Decisions about future capital and consumption are not taken by the agent when he is born but, rather, when he is twenty or twenty five years old. Therefore, the relevant survivial profile for considering the influence of mortality over investment choices is given by adult life expectancy. In fact, making the distinction between e(0) and adult life expectancy is expecially important for our problem because adult mortality behaves in a completely different way from infant and child mortality in the first half of the 18th century: adult mortality rates decreased very sharply from the end of the 17th century, while infant and childhood mortality rates were unusually high between 1680 and 1750. ... If life cycle inspiration was present in rural England in the 18th century, farmers who were becoming aware that old people were gradually living for longer periods must have been more concerned about their own means of subsistence in the future. This may have been an important stimulus to reduce consumption, increase savings and take into account longer horizons."

Which still leaves open the question of how and why the early parts of this avalanche got started in England but not in Taiwan or Japan or Sardinia as analogous islands, and why the actual timing as opposed to any other plausible century.

</comment><comment><USER34> One reason the Industrial Revolution happened in northern England is manor lords began seizing the land that belonged in common to the peasants and enclosing it. Newly impoverished peasants would then become cheap labor for industrial factories. This is similar to what Deng Xiaoping and his successors did in China over the past few decades.

<comment><USER3> The Enclosure acts and Poor Laws. Discussed in Smith. Possibly also Toynbe's _Lectures on the Industrial Revolution_ , though I'd need to confirm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This article ignores decades of scholarship about the roots of the industrial revolution and capitalism.

The short answer is that the Europeans (maybe for some of the reasons given in this article), were greedier than the Chinese.

It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before Columbus. [http://www.economist.com/node/5381851](http://www.economist.com/node/5381851). But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing all their natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers. Whereas the Chinese expeditions were financed by the empire, the Europeans expeditions were financed by debt, so the men needed to arrive on land and quickly acquire wealth for themselves at all costs, or else they would return to Europe broke or never return at all. And this led them to commit the horrendous acts in the New World we know so much about.

Western Europe, now full of gold and silver stolen from the New World had levels of wealth it had never experienced. This led to increased demands for certain goods (like English wool), which forced the population off of the land and into urban centers, thus creating the landless working class. This process was called The Enclosure [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure). An urban, landless working class, was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution. The extraordinary wealth ready to be invested in industry, a product of colonialism and the slave trade, was another necessary condition for the industrial revolution.

<comment><USER36> This comment reflects a worrying trend I keep seeing, which I'll summarize as: the answer to all history is that Europeans are evil. Whatever the question or the circumstance or the evidence, we have to contort them to confirm our pre- determined narrative that Europeans are evil. This, of course, is nonsense. The Chinese were equally as greedy as everyone else at the time. The idea that China didn't capitalize on its expeditions (to any location) for humanitarian reasons is patently absurd and easily disproven. It begs the obvious question - why did they finance expeditions if not for greed? Were the Chinese the pre- TV model for Star Trek - boldly exploring the seas for the benefit of all mankind? Get real. See Lim Hong[1], the 16th century Chinese pirate who ruthlessly slaughtered half of Southeast Asia.

This comment reflects a highly selective and ethnically targeted historical ignorance and misattribution.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Hong_(pirate)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Hong_\(pirate\))

<comment><USER35> I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil -- you assumed that. The fact is that colonialism and the slave trade, despite creating massive amounts of wealth for some, were horrific for its subjects. And Western Europeans were the first to scale both colonialism and the slave trade globally. This isn't debatable, it's plain fact.

Unfortunately, people like the interviewee explain away early western economic domination by referring to Western European intellect and culture, and ignoring the dark side. This has been the case since the beginning of economic history. Adam Smith didn't even bother to discuss slavery in The Wealth of Nations even though he knew how critical it was to the development of capitalism.

It's time to be honest about how we got here. If the ugly truth offends you, I don't know what to tell you.

<comment><USER36> > The short answer is that the Europeans...were greedier than the Chinese. > It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before > Columbus...But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing > all their natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers.

...

> I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil

<comment><USER35> I explained very clearly why the circumstances surrounding the expeditions pushed the Europeans to be more greedy than their Chinese counterparts. The fact is that the Europeans pillaged the New World and the Chinese didn't. I believe mainly economic considerations led this to be the case. I don't know what your explanation is.

<comment><USER11> Your phrase "the short answer" seems to imply that this is the whole explanation for why the industrial revolution happened in the West and not China. Perhaps that is not what you meant.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turning a Regular WiFi Router into a PineApple NANO Hacking Tool Clone - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/install-openwrt-or-pine-apple-on-low-cost-wifi-router-67cbd26a1a15 <comment><USER2> Very Affordable and moddable. I'm going to enjoy working on it when it arrives. Great find!</comment>


The Downside of Encrypting Everything: Virus-Filled Ads Are Harder to Track - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-downside-of-encrypting-everything-virus-filled-ads-are-harder-to-track <comment><USER2> Er...

I'm not sure I see how having ad traffic travel over HTTPS is a problem here. Malware researchers deal with HTTPS all the time. It's not some sort of insurmountable barrier -- the content is all available to a browser, after all.

<comment><USER3> The content is available after it is decrypted in a browser on a _single_ host. If the streams are inspectable by network defenses they can be inspected at much more feasible scale allowing one device to protect 10,000s of hosts from the same malware-laden ad. The alternative is to try and deliver protection to 10,000 browsers, and somehow keep them synchronized which is just so much harder and expensive. Or you could make the host operating system, apps, and the browser resistant to exploitation...

It's not that encrypting secrets is bad (and sessions are secrets). It's that encrypting everything without looking at what you gain and lose is poor engineering and it all seems to be politicized somehow (camps, factions, dogma..) with HTTPS-only being pushed as the answer to one security problem (confidentiality vs active eavesdroppers) at the expense of existing solutions to other problems, including integrity (please don't compromise my hosts), availability (I cannot use recent browsers to admin my equipment because they ban self-signed certs but trust 100+ CAs) and non-repudiation (where did the malware come from?).

... speaking as someone who studies malware analysis.

Cheers, adric

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMO, look for increasing pressure on CAs to unilaterally revoke certificates issued to known malware networks.

<comment><USER5> That won't happen, if anything SSL cert's are easier to get now than ever and with projects like letsencrypt.org it will become even easier.

Also many of the malicious adds do not come from malware networks they come from all major ad networks including Google's.

You have ads exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in Flash and browsers that not easy to detect, and with the amount of syndication in ad networks you can't effectively blacklist or revoke them.

One of the downsides to this whole "letsencrypt" movement and CA's from less "organized" countries being accepted by major browsers and clients is that you will have much more failures in security.

SSL was designed around high level of trust and that trust worthy SSL certificates will not be easy to come by, this is why they used to cost so much there was actual inspection and you would get fraud insurance for quite high amounts. Today i won't be surprised if you could get a Google.com cert from some low tier CA in the Philippines which automates the process and it will be valid on large amount of devices.

We need a better verification system for SSL and actual policing of certificates including integrating it into DNS, if i ask for Google.com i should get a "cert" entry from the DNS server just as i get the A entry for it, and i don't understand why this isn't the case yet.

<comment><USER6> Because the main thrust of HTTPS at this point is regaining some privacy from snooping governmental organizations more than it is building a trust chain.

<comment><USER5> So having a chaotic system in which SSL certificates are easy to near trivial to get and hence spoof makes it harder for organizations to spy on you?

<comment><USER7> In a manner of speaking. Even a self signed certificate prevents you from passive eavesdropping and traffic injection (a thing we _know_ the US government is doing _right now_ ) if not an an active man in the middle (something which may or may not be happening to you on the plain HTTP connections you use every day)

<comment><USER5> Passive eavesdropping yes, injection nope since it's not passive to begin with and unless you can explicitly verify it it's pretty useless. SSL works because we assume that people can't issue certificates for websites that they do not control which isn't the case.

<comment><USER8> MitM on a self-signed certificates costs more than QUANTUM-style packet races. Please, stop trying to keep the internet in plaintext.

<comment><USER5> I'm not trying to keep the internet in plain text, I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates and not having to worry about a CA in china issuing certificates for the sites i visit because they can be CBA to check.

An attack against a self signed cert may cost more then what ever but that wasn't what we were talking about initially either.

If you can MITM which they can and can get cheap valid certificates it's game over.

And while the NSA might be able to get certificates no matter the case, people have managed to buy certificates for domains they do not own multiple times now.

Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of individuals.

<comment><USER8> > I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates

That ship sailed a long time ago. While hierarchical PKI has always been a flawed concept (I find it unlikely that you actually trust all of the organizations that firefox/etc ship as trusted roots). Even if you did, as you aid, these "authorities" have signed improper certs.

Trying to patch holes in this failed system (such as revoking those improper certs) is yet another foolish attempt to enumerate badness[1]. If you want authentication, you need do your own chain-of-trust instead of assuming ~100 cert authorities will do that for you.

> Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of > individuals.

So we should keep the world in plaintext (by not allowing self signed certs)?

Quite a few people besides the NSA already[2] MITM connections. My point is that we absolutely need to raise those costs. Even with the NSA, just because they have the capability to do something doesn't mean you should give up. _Make_ the do the extra work of a MitM attck (even if probably a small amount of extra work in the case of the NSA).

Add another categorization if you want. Nobody said you have to treat self- signed certs as secure, just that they _need to be used_. Privacy from eavesdroppers and authentication are separate goals.

[1] [http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...](http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/)

[2] [https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...](https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#bernstein)

<comment><USER5> I think we are mostly in agreement, but the problem is that if the attacker can perform a MITM attack then a self signed certificate unless it's explicitly verified is worth less.

I've said that we need to add additional levels of trust to the current PKI/SSL cert system preferably adding DNS records with the hash of the certificates and enforcing DNSSec globally this isn't the best solution but it's just enough of an easy hack that it will work for a good while.

What i do not want to see is people thinking that if we just spam SSL certs and stick them on everything it will some how help us, this is the classical definition of security theater.

When cost reduction isn't sufficient to thwart any effective surveillance, and worse using self signed certs trains people to just click accept, and free SSL certificates make it easier to gain valid certificates in a fraudulent manner things will only become worse not better.

While it's true that authentication and encryption are separate domains with how TLS/SSL is implemented currently they are tied by the hip, if you can't trust the authentication part of SSL the encryption part becomes meaningless to all but the most primitive types of passive sniffing.

If you want to separate them then lets kill TLS all together since PKI for the most part have failed, we can use other pure key exchange mechanism like well implemented DH without all the certificate nonsense.

<comment><USER7> _and worse using self signed certs trains people to just click accept_

This is a thing that happens right here, right now. We treat all of the following things as equivalent big scary warnings from the browser regardless of how bad they are or what the impact on security actually is.

        * Expiration date d+1day (security impact: NIL)
        * Name doesn't match the cert
        * CA not trusted
        * Certificate is self-signed
        * Certificate was generated using old/broken crypto

Weve've got a couple decades of retraining to do because of this boneheaded, "wolf-crying" design.

<comment><USER5>
        * Expiration date d+1day (security impact: NIL) > not much impact unless the certificate age is tied to the time it might take some one to refactor a key
        * Name doesn't match the cert > Can't trust that you communicating with the correct party, worth as much as plain text to me
        * CA not trusted > Unless you can explicitly verity the end certificate and the chain = plain text to me
        * Certificate is self-signed > same as the above
        * Certificate was generated using old/broken crypto > depending on the exact issue government agencies will most likely be able to break the encryption, if it's more easy attacks like BEAST or CRIME so can resourceful non-governmental organizations and individuals.

This isn't just crying wolf we need a new and better system, one that ensures that the key exchange is secure, and one that ensures that who ever you speaking too is the actual intended precipitant and not a system which currently if one of those fails both fail, and more often than not can easily fail on both on it's own out of the gate.

<comment><USER7> It is exactly crying wolf because AFAIK, okay, cert expiration - you don't have to rekey when you go get a new one, you just get a new one. The benefit seems to be commercial, rather than technical.

Name doesn't match: I've encountered a legitimate (as opposed to an obvious misconfiguration) error along these lines precisely zero times in well over a decade.

CA untrusted: CA trust is worthless - the browser doesnt differentiate between "the person who holds the cert had control of the domain when we generated it" and "we made sure this person exists and checked their identity". (Unless you jump into the total scam that is EV certs...)

Would you kindly stop banging on about "As good as plain text?". because as has been explained to you _ad nauseum_ , in the worst case it becomes you vs one attacker who holds the key to the bogus cert, instead of you vs anyone on the local wifi network. The number of attackers is unbounded in the latter case, QED, it is strictly a better security posture.

SSL as it exists today is fine for keeping _a_ hacker out of your connection. It was not designed nor implemented for a post-Snowden world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If we block ads, there isn't a problem

<comment><USER10> If sites start moving to HTTP/2, is it true the untrustworthy code can be inserted into the same stream as the "content"?

Everything could be coming from the same domain/IP? This might make blocking ads and tracking more complicated?

My solution as HTTPS spreads is to MITM my own connections so I can see what is being sent and received over the wire. As the article says, it is a PITA. But it is necessary.</comment></comment>


The Kickstarter Game Successes: Where Are They Now? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/28/the-kickstarter-successes-where-are-they-now/

<comment><USER2> I'm really curious if the people funding these projects have a good idea what they're going to get.

I know that creative and inspired teams can do great things but ... for example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game. What I assume people expect though is a Fallout 3 level game. I'm guessing Fallout 3 cost $10-15 million to make.

I don't know what the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill? I suspect that's close to what those original games cost. Things have changed. I'd argue it would be challenging to make those same games but at today's expected quality for the same price.

Of course I hope they all do great and the games all rock and there's certainly plenty of smaller awesome games to be made. FTL for example. But, for certain games, sequels, or games that are supposed to be very inspired by older games there are expectations I think the developers will have a hard time meeting.

<comment><USER3> I backed Wasteland, and I'm expecting a game similar to Fallout 2 with modern graphics and probably little to no voice acting.

They're using unity so they making big savings right away, but are constrained with what that engine can do. And that's fine. I think most people who backed it want a game that's true to its roots rather then has the latest graphics etc.

Finally Kickstarter doesn't preclude additional funding sources. $900k might have gotten them half way there with the assumption that they can get additional sources of funding after that point. bear in mind that they will be getting sales to people other then current backers after they release.

I think the key thing though is that a small focused team, using an engine like Unity can get a lot done, and the constraints will be excepted by a community who is far more interested in a classic RPG then the latest graphics.

<comment><USER2> Engines are great but engines don't make games, people do. Mostly artist and designers. A typical AAA game is 80% non engineers.

Lots of AAA teams use existing engines like Unreal. It still takes them teams of 70 to 200 people a couple of years to make all that content.

My point is Unity may br great but it's not really the solving the harder issue in games, Asset Creation

As for expectations you might be right. Time will tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Zombies, Run! wasn't covered in RPS' roundup, probably because we're smartphone only and were quite early - but we were the biggest videogame project of 2011 with $73k from 3500 backers.

Through a pretty herculean effort, we launched on time in February. Since then we've sold almost 250,000 copies across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and grossed somewhere in the region of $1.5 million.

So yeah, I'd say it's working for some people. Did backers know what they were going to get? I don't know, Zombies, Run! is a very original idea so we couldn't just say "It's like X but with Y." But they seem pretty happy as far as we can tell.

<comment><USER5> They state they only covered games with over 100k$

<comment><USER4> /me looks again

Yes, and just for 2012. Oh well!

<comment><USER6> RPS also only covers games that run on Microsoft Windows (and the occasional board game).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More detailed progress updates for planetary annihilation are posted in their forums: <http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=61> Look especially for post by project lead Jon Mavor aka neutrino

<comment><USER8> He's also posted some good stuff at <http://www.mavorsrants.com/>. They have been pretty transparent about the dev process, they just haven't used Kickstarter updates as the primary medium for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lost interest the third time they said there were only updates for backers.

Yes, they should be providing more updates for the people who might buy it. I think the backer-only updates were listed as features since that was presumably one of the big draws of the doublefine kickstarter success.

But RPS: do some journalism and ask someone who did back it? Or email the project? For a story titled "where are they now", having half the entries be "they protected updates so dunno, lol" is annoying.

<comment><USER10> I came to make a similar comment, and am still reading my way through, but RPS seems to have a bias against updates only for backers.

In my opinion, the games that are still far from being released are doing just fine by not marketing themselves a little too early. If I'm not mistaken, games typically ramp up their marketing efforts much closer to actual release dates than during the development process.

Kickstarter enables a different method of capitalization, sure, but I think the game development process remains consistent as with other types of funding available to developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Carmageddon: Reincarnation has already been released on iOS. They just put it as a free game on day 1 on the iOS store as there isn't a simple way to only give backers a game due to Apple's rules. Mac version coming soon maybe.

What bothers me reading through this is the rather pessimistic tone vs an objective one

<comment><USER12> That's not true. The version released on iOS was a port of Carmageddon 2 and has nothing to do with reincarnation..

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh hey, they mention the one game I backed and have beta access to: Word Realms. (By the Kingdom of Loathing guys.)

It's basically a complete game at this point, just polishing and minor bug fixing left. (Well, _maybe_ the devs secretly plan to add additional features, but certainly nothing feels missing.)

<comment><USER14> At least one feature is still locked out in the betas. ;). And it's pretty cool. Zack is going to give me a heart attack with the design though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> in essence, the crowd-funding model is working just fine. Game publishing will never be the same.

<comment><USER16> Only one single game in that list actually got released and half of the rest are way overdue.

<comment><USER17> But what does it actually mean compared to other game companies? Looking at valve and blizzard, both has had a long standing style of only releasing a game once its is "done", no matter the years that has passed since the first estimated release date.

And maybe this is wrong and the future of game development will shed those tendencies. Looking historically on game development, rushing a product out of the door to meet a release date has rarely produced a good game (anyone heard of E.T?). So the question might be, what alternative do we have between rushing a product for relase date, and waiting until it is "done", which might mean fifteen years to find out that the game is rather crappy (duke nukem forever). We can also look at development processes like Debian, and compare a static release schedule with a dynamic one.

<comment><USER18> Other companies don't pre-sell games or promises before the game is launched, though.

<comment><USER19> Not sure what you mean here? Pre-orders are an absolutely critical part of publishers' revenue, which is the cause of the weird structural problems around magazine reviews (where 8/10 means "below-average game").

<comment><USER20> Stock market analysts do the same thing as game critics, and never, ever give sell ratings: [http://www.cnbc.com/id/42790061/Stock_Analysts_Too_Scared_of...](http://www.cnbc.com/id/42790061/Stock_Analysts_Too_Scared_of_Sell_Ratings_or_Too_Stupid)

I'm guessing in both cases it's because the best raters get the best access from companies.

Same problem probably exists in other industries too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lets quickly add that all up. Roughly 24 million dollars in total have been raised for crowdfunded games (just the kickstarter projects mentioned in the article).

For how long have we been doing that? Is crowdfunding games a 2012 thing?

<comment><USER15> Things changed dramatically after Tim Schaefer managed to raise 3 Mil $ for double fine adventure in Feb 2012. Since then, many games managed to raise above 1 Mil $, 9 actually per Kickstarter stats. Star Citizen, a flight sim, raised the most , 6 Mil $ just as of two weeks ago. Before that Project eternity was the record holder with 4.2 Mil $. Yeah, it's definitely a 2012 thing & if anything, it's acelerating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe someone can make a similar update list, but for kickstarter electronics (how is that OUYA going?).

</comment><comment><USER23> tldr: <http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b76494ada40f0817000160>

It seems to me that most of these problems are communication problems. You just got a backing of XXX hundreds of thousands of dollars and don't want to disappoint with some bad news, but that's a poor long term strategy. People are surprisingly forgiving if they feel like you're telling the truth and you're doing your best to make good on your promise.

<comment><USER24> That tl;dr is not a representation of the actual content. You reduced it to the last few bullet points.</comment></comment>


The U.K. NHS has failed to investigate 'unexpected deaths' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/02/never-thought-he-wouldnt-come-home-why-son-connor-sparrowhawk-die <comment><USER2> Title is misleading, this story is about NHS England which is a totally separate entity from NHS Scotland, NHS Wales and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland.

There is no such thing as a "UK NHS" or NHS UK. Each NHS entity in the UK is separately funded and operated independently of each other.</comment>


Amazon peer-to-peer selling - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.in/p2p <comment><USER2> This is neat. My biggest complaint with Amazon these days is there's just so much noise on the site. For any given search I expect like half the results not to be serious ones. Even when you filter for just prime, there are tons of edge cases like the mini version of a thing will be prime but the regular version is not, or only one color is prime, or sometimes the item is clearly more expensive than in a store so you're paying the full consumer cost of 2-day shipping even though it's prime, sometimes the item has changed slightly but still includes the old reviews which are now misleading, etc. In some ways these are nitpicks, but Amazon have set the bar so high that now I expect the magical experience that I get with Amazon-fulfilled items for everything on the site.

Anyway I feel like amazon would be even better if these low quality listings were moved off to a separate site which was explicitly 3rd-party (whether from businesses or individuals) similar to Ebay. And then the main site would have "official" stuff where amazon does more quality assurance on the listings and it's all fulfilled by them and Prime. (I also think that better curation like this is necessary for purchasing through Echo to really catch on at least for me, there are way too many gotchas in Amazon listings that I still feel like I need to actually focus and look carefully through the listing before I buy anything).

My idea is obviously very different than this Bangalore-only product but there's a glimmer of a separate 3rd-party only site here and I hope Amazon evolves in that direction.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I also think such a spinoff would do well against ebay. I tried using paypal/ebay yesterday and gave up after 3 hours of trying to get a payment to go through. It was like going back in time to the 90s

<comment><USER4> Amazon actually tried doing this with junglee.com. The challenge of course is generating traffic for a separate entity, plus it is more costly. So now it has sort of integrated Junglee with Amazon where, junglee powers the used & refurbished business.

P.S: In India, all Amazon listing are third party, since legally foreign investment is not permitted in ecommerce, so Amazon.in actually just functions as a marketplace not a retailer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In USD:

14 cent fee for anything less than $14.72

73 cent fee for anything $14.72 - $73.58

$1.47 fee for anything more than $73.58

This service reminds me a lot of craigslist but with a fee. Does India not have a similar service?

<comment><USER6> Amazon pick up the item from you, pack it and deliever it to the purchaser. Craigslist invokes meeting up with people either at your home or at a public place. Now if you were selling say 3 items a day (random number plucked out of the air) you would only need the single pick up of items.

That is value in the fees from what I see of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bangladore only.

Cool way to get into the market. Pickup cost would make it harder to work in the US.

<comment><USER6> How's Amazon's own delivery service going over there? In the UK it's pretty common to have amazon deliever via Amazon Logistics for my area (it's not nationwide yet).

As the side states it seems to be about selling in your local area so doesn't seem that much of a leap from what Amazon are currently offering. (I.e. Your sold item isn't going cross country. To the nearest depot and back out again after packing)

Note: This is just an observation on that Amazon already have a collection / delivery network in place with plans to expand. Not a comment on the quality of said service. I've had many miss deliveries (my items delivered to other addresses, other people's items delivered to me, a knock on the door then driving off. My home office is less then 30 secs from the front door but still had drivers climbing back in their vans saying no one was home during that time.) but I guess that's what you get when drivers are paid per delivery instead of per hour.

<comment><USER8> I ordered a bunch of stuff from amazon.in when I was visiting India. All the deliveries are via courier like DTDC. But I was in a smaller town. I am not sure if the Amazon delivery network is in action in the bigger cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is tangential, but I presumed a launch page like this for an Amazon product would be copy-edited by a native English speaker, even if for India, no?

("Sell as Individual" should definitely be "Sell as an individual", a very common mistake with non-native English speakers.)

<comment><USER10> Articles are frequently dropped in Indian English; as I understand it, Hindi does not have articles. It might be an error, or it might be localisation.

<comment><USER11> No, this is wrong in Indian English too.

It's true that Hindi doesn't have articles; instead one, this, and that are used (translating).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wonder how this will be profitable with Bangalore's traffic. 2km can take 1 hour in peak hour.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a reason why all of the content on the page are images? (one image per section)

<comment><USER14> Probably to make sure the Rupee symbol renders properly: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3598085/displaying-the- in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3598085/displaying-the-indian- currency-symbol-on-a-website)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Man - I'm so impressed by Amazon pushing this stuff out and constantly leveraging their existing infrastructure.

This looks to be affiliated with Junglee ([http://www.junglee.com](http://www.junglee.com)) so might mean Amazon is repositioning it as P2P.

</comment><comment><USER16> If framed properly (ie. this isn't Amazon quality, buyer beware!) this would be the single most exciting advance in commerce for myself.

99% of the friction of me selling used stuff I don't want or new stuff I produce is the shipping and money handling logistics.

I can't do Craigslist/Kijiji. I'm socially awkward and would rather throw away item X than risk the possibility of an awkward situation where someone's messing with me or trying to barter the price down, etc.

<comment> jon-wood I've had pretty good success signing up as an Amazon seller to get rid of a few things I don't need anymore. My only annoyance is them massively under quoting on shipping costs, meaning you really have to do those calculations yourself and then price it in. This bit really irritates me as they'll sell you shipping from their seller portal, and even there it's massively more expensive than the price their quoting the customer for shipping.

<comment><USER17> Part of that is the dramatically lower shipping rates you get if you do it in volume. The other reason is that people hate shipping costs, so its usually a good move to subsidise shipping with the product price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's getting difficult to keep track of all the services Amazon is offering these days. If it's products then the feature will be integrated into the search results so it should not be a problem. But it feels like they are announcing something new every other week these days.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there a similar service in US?

<comment><USER20> Not really. You definitely can get close with eBay/Craigslist + Shyp[1]

[1]:[http://www.shyp.com](http://www.shyp.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, this is way better than eBay. And the fees are so small, it's hard to believe.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does Amazon do the deliveries with Amazon employees, or is this an "Uber for packages" thing?

</comment><comment><USER23> craiglist on amazon? amazon is getting bigger and bigger and is making ebay obsolete I feel.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why is this not there in the US? Why not start in SF?

<comment><USER25> Why should it start in SF? You wouldn't happen to live there would you?

<comment><USER26> But ... but ... but ... doesn't the Earth revolve around SF?! :-P</comment></comment></comment>


Mastodon 2.8: Highlights from the Changelog - <AUTHOR> https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/04/mastodon-2.8/ <comment><AUTHOR> Keybase support got the most attention pre-release. Now you don't have to do a verification toot.

</comment><comment><USER2> i am so thankful for mastodon. vivu la fediverson!</comment>


What Unpaid Internships Say About Your Company - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/04/unpaid_interns_heres_what_they.html

<comment><USER2> I'd also add that it doesn't build good will. I did an unpaid internship in college. It was good experience, and I was doing real work (not just getting coffee), but I did resent not being paid. It sucks to be told, in essence, "we don't value you at all; we're doing you a favor. Now wear a tie to work and act like a professional, even though we're not treating you like one."

I did it because I needed to pad my resume. But it didn't make me want to come back and work for the company, or sing their praises to my classmates.

<comment><USER3> True in your case. Not true with many of my friends. I run into at least one friend daily taking up an unpaid internship. Even after I lecture them on how it is illegal, they insist they are excited about it and don't really care about the money.

<comment><USER4> The possible illegality of them is no problem for the interns, only the company. I can't see how your lecture could be convincing, especially since a lot of people think they're moral, each side is getting consideration in the legal sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is falls in line with one of the fundamental problems with college and that problem is that success is college is skewed towards those whose parents, or whomever, pay their way as opposed to those who pay there own way. Some kids are financially independent during schools so they MUST have a paying job. This means that they can't take an unpaid internship to get a resume boost. They have to stick with their bar tending or wait staff job to keep making it. Most kids like this are working 20 - 30 hours a week. This doesn't leave a whole lot of time to build up the resume in any real way. Kids who have to work don't have time to go out and join clubs and take "leadership" positions within them. Since leadership positions and work experience in the field is what employers look for these kids are at a disadvantage. Now take a kid whose parents pay for tuition, rent, books, etc. He has the time to work for free and become the president of the student union because he doesn't have to wait on the drunk college kids 8 hours a night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

<comment><USER6> I've actually always thought that employers who learned that a candidate put his or herself through college thought more highly of that person. Being able to show up daily and get through the trudge would be, to me, hugely more telling than a 'leadership position' at a club or a student union. Though, maybe that's just my lack of school spirit showing.

<comment><USER5> I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large corporations. I do think that small companies tend to value skill and hard work more, however I find, being in school right now, that it is the large corporations that are recruiting students at job fairs and not smaller companies and start ups. I think students who work, and and learn skills on their own are better off looking for jobs on their own outside of official recruiting. At least for people going into tech.

<comment><USER7> _I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large corporations._

I don't know about that. I think it's more impressive myself to see that someone worked his or her way through school than to see tons of extracurricular activities. In fact, unless they're professionally relevant, extracurricular activities don't rank very highly at all on my list of things I'd like to see on a resume.

Edit: Of course, I should add, I don't work for a major corporation, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. You're giving young people opportunity for learning and experience, both in a profession, and in working with others.

2\. You're helping establish a new generation of relevant workers by offering them meaningful experiences instead of typical summertime opportunities such as burger-flipping or lawn-mowing. Your internship is about their future, a typical summertime job is nothing more than "spending money"

3\. You're allowing yourself to fully evaluate a potential employee's abilities.

My career began with an internship (over 20 years ago), which I always value as having been a springboard for my career.

<comment><USER9> Was your internship paid or unpaid?

Where did you stay while you were interning? How were your living expenses paid for?

<comment><USER8> Unpaid, at home, and with my own money. I didn't treat the internship as a career. It was a part of my education, and I was happy to invest the time and effort. I learned an enormous amount, and it benefits me to this day.

<comment><USER9> Where'd you get the money to live on while you were doing your unpaid internship? What I'm getting at here is that part of the point of the article was that unpaid internships favor people who come from more privileged backgrounds.

<comment><USER8> Yes, for those whole three months I fended for myself with my savings.

Your interpretation seems as though something is being imposed on someone, and some social injustice is being committed. Unpaid internships have advantage for the employer, and for the intern. That there are some people who can afford to invest their time and effort more so than others is not the fault of the employer, or of the intern who has the means. Nobody in this being is treated favorably, and nobody is being denied.

Life isn't inherently equal and fair. People with 'advantage' (meaning wherewithal and means) and will use it, and should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If something is interesting enough and if I like the people short internships (two months tops) close to the place where I live (I can drive there with my bike) are something I would most certainly do. (And they are legal in Germany. No minimum wage, either.) I don't know whether I would be overly eager to work all that hard. Depends on the stuff I'm working on, I guess. Yet money – even if it's only a little – shows me clearly that you care. I think it's a important signal. I think many interns would be happy if you paid them only a little money.

<comment><USER2> "I think many interns would be happy if you paid them only a little money."

Absolutely. As a college student, I would have been happy with a low wage; I didn't need to support myself with the internship income. But after working half the day somewhere, it would have been nice to have a few bucks for a meal, and made it feel less like slave labor.

Mostly it would have been the symbolic value, though. The statement that "you're worth hiring, and we're better off for having you here."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why is the government exempt from unpaid internship laws? The White House has tonnes of unpaid interns from what I hear.

</comment><comment><USER11> Aren't unpaid internships illegal?

Updated: Yes, sometimes...i read the rest of the article.

<comment><USER12> Most are. There are six criteria an (unpaid) internship has to meet for it to not be illegal. Essentially, the company offering the internship has to be offering it solely for the benefit of the intern and can derive no real benefit from it themselves. (And a company can't offer an unpaid internship as a way to avoid paying employees for training.)

The full list (linked from the article) is here: [http://www.theeagleonline.com/news/story/new-study-raises- qu...](http://www.theeagleonline.com/news/story/new-study-raises-questions-on- legality-of-unpaid-internships/)

<comment><USER13> "and can derive no real benefit from it themselves"

I would think that would be pretty impossible to conform to no matter how you structured the intern's day/tasks. Unless you simply provided them a desk in which to study, or worked and let them observe with no interaction I would think sticking to this rule would be difficult.

<comment><USER4> I think that's the idea, to make it impossible for them to be useful _and_ legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In addition, an unpaid internship only attracts students who do not know their own value. The really good ones know they can find a place willing to pay at least some of what they are worth.

<comment><USER15> No they attract only students who DO know their worth.

$BIG_WALLst_COMPANY will only employ people who have done an internship on Wall St.

This means that all Wall st $BIG_COMPANIES can offer unpaid internships because they have a $$$ value to you. And compared to the $$ cost of going to Harvard/Yale (the only other requirement for Wall St) it doesn't really matter.

If a student thinks that the $1000/month they could be earning in a paid internship doing web design in Idaho has more value they are probably wasting their tuition anyway.

<comment><USER16> students who go to Microsoft or Google can expect to make about $5,000 a month. A friend of mine god an offer from a financial who was trying to give him $6,000 a month.

I'll also add that my cousin is a global controller for a relatively small (I guess?) hedge fund on Wall Street and he cut his teeth working a job during college. Also, he went to Ohio State.

In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they are paying you (by them or any other company).

And again, going beyond that, my friends who are working on Wall St. (CMU kids) are being paid.

Unpaid (and poorly paid) internships are for suckers.

<comment><USER4> " _In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they are paying you_ "

Indeed. I very recently checked with my friend who runs MIT's EECS undergraduate program and she said that all their internships are paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think unpaid internships can be good. We must realize that there is more value than money. If a company establishes something that they have considered how you can benefit from, then I think they should be encouraged, particularly for early phase startup companies that don't have the cash but have interesting new solutions.

<comment><USER18> There may be more value than money, but there isn't more you can eat than food.</comment></comment>


Show HN: API for Rendering and Sending Transactional Email Templates - <AUTHOR> https://www.klaviyo.com/quick-mail

<comment><USER2> Wow. Isn't this pricey for a pretty straightforward API?

<comment><AUTHOR> The pricing will probably change, but the reason we're charging at all is to ensure we can provide reliability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks cool! How do you differentiate from all the other email services - MailChimp, MailGun, SendGrid etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not trying to compete with them, we're using them. They solved the hard problems of delivering email, we're just trying to make it easier to send good looking emails through them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is this different than just using Mandrill with templates, and sending content/HTML into placeholders?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the sound of it, I'm guessing they're similar, but I haven't had a chance to use Mandrill's templates. This started as an internal API we created and just decided to open up.

Our templates use a Django-like syntax, which let's you use loops and conditions in a easy to use way. Mandrill's might be the same or better. We done a lot with Django so that feels comfortable.

We're trying to focus on the experience of creating a new transactional or triggered email, so it's easy to go from "I have an idea for an email" to "I'm actually sending it." We use this internally with a simple Python script to send formatted summary emails of product usage each night and it's easy to set up -- write the script to fetch the data, create the email template and you're done.</comment></comment>