Acoustic Location and Sound Mirrors (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/ear/ear.htm <comment><USER2> The modern version of this utilizes an array or grid of microphones with synchronized clocks, and is quite effective in locating gunfire.

The most famous manufacturer is "ShotSpotter."

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

<comment><USER3> 'Acoustic camera' seems to be the marketing term used for such products. Searching for this on YouTube will yield all manner of examples. The size of the device will dictate range and frequency response, there's a neat study of elephants with one here: [https://youtu.be/Xl7LnAob2T8](https://youtu.be/Xl7LnAob2T8)

One thing that I think is interesting is that you could record a setting with one of these contraptions (eg party, train station) and go back later to do beamforming in software to zero in on specific conversations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using these to find aircraft was pretty marginal, but when applied to finding artillery or snipers sound location can be very effective and very accurate. It was used extensively in the later stages of WW1 to deliver counterfire.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's bizarre looking at the technology used, but I guess at the time mechanical technology seen here was the only way to do this at the right price (or possibly any price - I'd imagine that electronic performance simply wasn't good enough at the time in terms of noise floor and sensitivity?).

Looking at most of these though, I wonder how many operators went deaf because of a loud sound being captured by them? I've been recording music professionally for the last 25 years, and seeing things like this makes me wince!</comment>


The cost of air pollution in South Africa - <AUTHOR> http://www.theigc.org/blog/the-cost-of-air-pollution-in-south-africa/ <comment><USER3> For some extra context here, a lot of this fine particulate matter is not from burning the coal - it's from decaying exposed mine dumps. The wind in Johannesburg blows the fine sand on top of the mine damps into the communities living next to the mine dumps. The article tries to make it out as being just regular air pollution from fossil fuels, but it's many more factors than just that, and fixing the unique problem of mine dumps is probably a lot easier than general air pollution if there was political will to fix it. Which there is not.

[https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/06/radioactive-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/06/radioactive- city-how-johannesburgs-townships-are-paying-for-its-mining-past)

<comment><USER4> The mine dumps are largely a problem in the south of Johannesburg. The article shows that the problem is spread across the entire country. And the Mpumalanga Highveld has particularly shocking pollution levels, from the coal-fired power stations, from SASOL and from poor residents burning coal in winter. The map shows high levels of particulate matter in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape, which are far from mining activity.

<comment><USER3> Definitely! But the majority of the deaths are concentrated in a tiny geographic area. It's important to note that fixing that tiny area would have a larger benefit than fixing the rest combined.

Also the dust from those mine dumps can travel a very long way on the wind. 100s of km.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know a lot of people hate how the EPA stop them putting a monster V8 in their hot-rod, or a diesel in something-or-other.

Now that I've spent 6 months in West Africa, where 99% of vehicles belch black smoke 24x7, I have a new-found respect for the EPA.

Anyone that is against environmental regulations needs to live 6 months in a third world country to understand how important it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, there is a president-elect who feels global warming is a hoax! [http://www.ibtimes.com/trumps-epa-climate-change-plan- bush-o...](http://www.ibtimes.com/trumps-epa-climate-change-plan-bush- official-says-slashing-energy-regulations-may-be-2451790)

His new energy secretary is an oil tycoon from Texas: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-environment- energy-1.3...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-environment- energy-1.3850622)

And he wants to eliminate the renewable energy & other core initiatives of EPA!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> New Delhi is facing a similar airpocalypse on PM2.5 monitors recording the max 999 ug/m3 in many areas. [http://scroll.in/pulse/821837/as-delhi-dominates- the-airpoca...](http://scroll.in/pulse/821837/as-delhi-dominates-the- airpocalypse-narrative-the-rest-of-india-quietly-chokes-to-death)

[http://www.livemint.com/Science/NXS0n5Bhj2nOIwPEEYIxBK/Pollu...](http://www.livemint.com/Science/NXS0n5Bhj2nOIwPEEYIxBK/Pollutants- in-Delhi-air-4-times-above-prescribed-levels.html)

We need a way for nations & policy makers to learn from each other. Or at least from each others mistakes!

</comment><comment><USER6> Solar power in the two double digit percentage can't come fast enough - <USER2> all of Africa.

I've seen some of the coal plants near Johannesburg from close - the pollution is real and and it's crazy. Also residents are burning coal, fields and whatever they can get in winter and those fires make the area hazy and smoggy.

</comment><comment><USER7> >The GBD study estimated that South Africa had 1800 deaths in 2012 attributable to fine PM. This number was based on global satellite and modelling views on the severity of air pollution in the country.

This makes it seem like they only used satellite data and a model to guesstimate this number? Very dubious without medical records to back this up.</comment>


Project VimR – Refined Vim experience for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/qvacua/vimr <comment><USER2> Hmmm. Why not MacVim: [https://code.google.com/p/macvim/](https://code.google.com/p/macvim/) ?

<comment><USER3> This looks like it's a plugin to macvim; or at least a fork of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> for those wondering what this is it's a proof of concept vim gui based on a embeddable macvimframework (mainly based on bjorn winklers macvim)[1]

it's great to see so much work on vim/neovim lately. while not related to the macvimframework idea, the author of ultisnips lately chimed in on the issue tracker of neovim. i think the end result of the discussion was that thiago was working on json-rpc now, wanted to implement a has('neovim') feature and move the python code running in an external thread. i can't find the issue right now.

i'm getting more and more annoyed with osx though. a cold boot on my 8gb macbook air has about 3gb of resident memory. redraws are extremely slow. iterm while much faster than terminal, is still just a textview which is slow, causing a lot of annoying flicker in vim terminal. it's gotten so annoying for me that i actually have a heavily patched dwm(i used to run awesome, but that's just annoying to setup in osx) with dwb browser, pidgin(yes, sadly otr in osx won't be fixed until adium 2.0 comes out, whenever that will be). and just general cmus/newsbeuter/mutt etc.

so why not just run linux on the macbook? if linux had a half decent gui toolkit that was as easy to use as cocoa(no not gtk) we wouldn't to switch to osx or windows all the time for utility applications.

[1] [https://github.com/qvacua/macvim](https://github.com/qvacua/macvim)

<comment><USER5> Just on a few points:

\- Using all available memory for buffer cache is a good thing, as long as the OS can immediately drop it if there are more urgent uses for the memory.

\- I haven't used iTerm very much, but and because Terminal has always seemed snappier. I'm surprised you had the opposite experience.

<comment><USER6> Does he mean to include buffers? On linux, the term "resident memory" refers to memory that is explicitly not buffer cache. Or does OSX use this term differently?

One day, we may be able to use the same RAM terms across all major OSs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in Vim-like editors with Mac UI, I suggest trying Vico – [https://github.com/vicoapp/vico](https://github.com/vicoapp/vico)

It is completely native, supports TextMate bundles and is scriptable using Lisp dialect.

<comment><USER8> I feel like I need to make the obligitory comment. If you want an editor that is scriptable with Lisp and supports Textmate bundles, and Vim keybindings; Emacs[0] + Evil mode[1] (Extensible Vi layer, it's great) + Yasnippet[2] (Yet annother snippet library, has textmate bundles).

I switched from vim to this setup a while ago and have to say I've been very happy with it. I like the advantage of having a full language to use and find the environment more customisable (maybe just because I never got fully comfortable with VimScript. That being said, I still use vim for quickly editing single files as you can't beat the startup time.

[0] [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/)

[1] [https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home](https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home)

[2] [https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet](https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet)

<comment><USER9> "That being said, I still use vim for quickly editing single files as you can't beat the startup time."

Add (server-start) to your .emacs and keep a running emacs around long-term. Then you can edit single files quickly with emacsclient -t.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, good point, I actually have:

      alias e='TERM=xterm-256color emacsclient -t'
      alias ec='emacsclient -c'
      alias ed='emacs --daemon'

in my .zshrc to do just that but for some reason I use vim anyway, due to it's omnipresence on every server box I go into and I suppose muscle memory of typing vim whatever_file_i_want_to_edit .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> what's wrong with vim in a terminal? I've never understood the appeal of a GUI based vim clone

<comment><USER11> The main reason I use gvim is for better looking fonts and more colors.

<comment><USER12> Also, gvim has more potential keybindings available than vim running in a terminal.

<comment><USER13> Still not convinced. I'll take tmux and a non-gui vim any day of the week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These kinds of projects are neat, but the reason I use vim on OS X is because it's the same editor I use on my FreeBSD server, and the same editor on all my Linux boxen at work. I'm used to it, and the experience is consistent.

I appreciate the attempt to make vim a better experience on Macs, but it comes at the detriment of being the identical experience across all platforms I use.

</comment><comment><USER15> The name made me think it was about the vim plugin, vim-R for statistical programming. [https://github.com/vim-scripts/Vim-R- plugin](https://github.com/vim-scripts/Vim-R-plugin)

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would you put this under a different license than Vim itself?

<comment><USER17> And GPL3 at that...smh

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> not sure but why this appeared in front page, i dont see anything special on it.

<comment><USER19> It has"mac", "vim", "redefine" and "experience" in the title.</comment></comment>


Spacetime wave packets: New class of laser defies laws of light physics - <AUTHOR> https://newatlas.com/physics/spacetime-wave-packets-laser-light-refraction/ <comment><USER2> Here's arxiv.org version (Nature Photonics version is of course pay walled): [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13341.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13341.pdf)

Abstract for those who don't bother:

Refraction at the interface between two materials is fundamental to the interaction of light with photonic devices and to the propagation of light through the atmosphere at large. Underpinning the traditional rules for the refraction of an optical field is the tacit presumption of the separability of its spatial and temporal degrees-of-freedom. We show here that endowing a pulsed beam with precise spatio-temporal spectral correlations unveils remarkable refractory phenomena, such as group-velocity invariance with respect to the refractive index, group-delay cancellation, anomalous group- velocity increase in higherindex materials, and tunable group velocity by varying the angle of incidence. A law of refraction for 'space-time' wave packets encompassing these effects is verified experimentally in a variety of optical materials. Space-time refraction defies our expectations derived from Fermat's principle and offers new opportunities for molding the flow of light and other wave phenomena.

<comment><USER3> what are 'space-time' wave packets then?

<comment><USER4> Essentially, in this paper it's a light wave were the spatial and temporal dimensions are not easily separable. What the authors seem to do here is essentially do a time dependent spatial correlation of a light pulse, which then exhibits "unintuitive" properties. The paper reads a little bit, like several similar papers in the field, where something relatively trivial is packed into a nice sounding story. That said I have not read the details yet and there might be something more profound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > title: defies laws of light physics

> text: may sound like it does, but doesn't

Yes, of course, the clickbait. Or the "How he got more clicks with this one simple trick" aka "The readers hate him for that".

Sad to see stuff like this pop-up almost daily on HN lately.

<comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 Or an alternative take – A reader comes across something that seems interesting and submits it to HN to see what the more knowledgable (in the relevant topic) think.

As for the number of junk/low grade scientific papers that are being published at the moment, it is way higher than it should be, however a reader of the submitted article link would take it at face value as having some solid science behind it. Paywalled research papers are a bane and can hide a multitude of sins (so thanks for the Arxiv link jari_mustonen). I tried to read the paper but was soon way out of my depth so the comments here that more or less say 'this is junk for the following reasons' are extremely helpful.

<comment><USER6> Yes! This is what I'm thankful about on /r/science and HN. A few times I find an article and as a layman, do not really fully understand. I generally look to see if it has been submitted on /r/science or HN to see what people more knowledgeable than me say about the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's of course a click-bait title, while some of the classical aspects of light refraction can't be applied here it is for sure within the normal treatment of light physics (as is even stated in the article). Still, cool engineering and light hacking!

<comment><USER8> 'Spacetime wave packets' sounded to me like gravitational wave packets. Highly misleading term in this context, but probably also intended to attract attention.

<comment><USER9> I think that's just the technical term. It fits the dichotomy.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Still, it mislead me into thinking it was something else and had I known what this was really about I probably wouldn't have clicked. While it is hard to tell that this technical term was deliberately coined to be click bait, there are certainly other ways to name it which wouldn't be as misleading.

<comment><USER4> I think that really depends on what you are used to reading and is in neither intentionally or unintentionally misleading. There is quite a bit of literature about spatio-temporal correllations, spacetime correlations... outside the gravitational fields. It simply means that space and time are coupled.

<comment><USER8> I would understand spatio-temporal correlations different from spacetime correlations: the first are the spacio-temporal correlations of something which exists in space time while the latter would imply some kind of correlations of space time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >"But the new laser beams don't follow this basic law of light. And it's not just Snell's Law either – the team says they also ignore Fermat's Principle, which says that light always takes the shortest possible path.

"This new class of laser beams has unique properties that are not shared by common laser beams," says Ayman Abouraddy, principal investigator of the study. "Spacetime wave packets can be arranged to behave in the usual manner, to not change speed at all, or even to anomalously speed up in denser materials. As such, these pulses of light can arrive at _different points in space at the same time_."

PDS: Or, quite possibly _the same point in space at different times_ (think out-of-order as a possibility, since _different points in space at the same time_ would imply this to be true as well...)

[...]

>"That's because they're not messing with the oscillations of the light waves themselves – instead, they're controlling the speeds at which the peaks of the light pulses travel. This is done using a device called a spatial light modulator, which reorganizes the energy of each pulse of light to intertwine its properties in space and time."

""Space-time refraction defies our expectations derived from Fermat's principle and offers new opportunities for molding the flow of light and other wave phenomena," says Basanta Bhaduri, co-author of the study."

<comment><USER11> I wonder if some combination of different materials and different modulations could allow these pulses to arrive at the same point at the same time? If so, how much could you scale that and would it be more useful than just building a higher powered laser?

<comment><USER12> That's more or less how an ultrashort pulse laser works already.

Different wavelengths (colors) take different paths so the high energy of the pulse is spread out for processing over different parts of the optical components.

The spreading is obvious in space. Less obvious is that this also spreads it in time, because each region of space gets a narrower frequency range than if the different wavelengths weren't taking different paths, and a narrower frequency range corresponds directly to a longer timescale for the pulse (see Fourier transforms).

Then the different wavelengths are focused back together to a small spot. This obviously focuses them in space.

Their path lengths are arranged carefully so they also arrive in just the right relative phase, and this causes the longer pulses at each narrower frequency to combine into a short pulse at a broad range of frequencies.

The careful attention to relative phase is literally focusing the pulse in time as well as space, to make an ultrashort pulse.

The current record for "most focused in time" pulse is 43 attoseconds, which is 43 nano-nanoseconds, 43 micro-micro-microseconds, and 43 milli-milli-milli- milli-milli-milliseconds. It uses this technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very neat I wonder how many applications this will create. I was just yesterday wondering if there was such a thing as an underwater telescope which I obviously assumed this was not possible due to distortion but wondered if laser technology could be used to give a computer image of what is in the distance. Perhaps with this laser it would be possible to do distance imagining like a fish finder but with much higher details.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this can be used to build a 3D display?

Since they can control propagation speed, you can control the intersection point of two laser pulses.

Let's say that each pulse is not enough to excite some medium to emit a photon, but if you time both pulses to intersect at a specific point in space, the combined energy of both pulses could trigger the excitation so the medium emits a photon.

You could even use the same laser to select the position, send the slow pulse first, then the fast one exactly right so they intersect at the spatial point where you want a "dot" to appear.

<comment><USER15> You can obviously do something to the same effect without this kind of modulation, and it has been done.

It might not be impossible that something like this could make it easier, but iirc correctly, the primary problems were more related the noise created and possibly the chemical results of air turned plasma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's see if they can miniaturize this to compete with finer optics transceivers

</comment><comment><USER17> could someone give me a high school explanation of this?

</comment><comment><USER18> Clickbait aside, does this effectively mean we can produce latency-free games in the sense that all players could have the exact same amount of latency?

<comment><USER19> So long as the speed of light is an ultimate speed limit, the only way to ensure identical latency is to make everyone experience the same latency as the person with the worst latency since every 1000 miles of straight-line distance adds 5.4ms one-way latency under ideal conditions. So a signal following undersea cables will incur worse latency as it's not a perfectly straight line point-to-point. Better communication technologies can get us closer to that ideal, but everything we know points at the speed of light being an upper bound for any signal propagation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Waiting for ISPs to adopt and start charging for the faster route

</comment><comment><USER21> Äh? _Raumzeitwellenbündel?_ I can haz _Zeitkristalle_ with that?

</comment><comment><USER22> It doesn't "defy laws of light physics". Our "laws" were just incomplete. Why does science media always have to act like they correctly understand nearly everything and we are just 1 step away from figuring it all out? Is it just because of click bait or is there some hubris as well?</comment>


What does one trillion dollars look like? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

<comment><USER2> To me, it's much more constructive to visualize what a huge amount of money can buy, not the money itself. (One of the other commenters is right that it only makes sense to divide a trillion dollar debt over 300 million people. But I think numbers in the millions or even a billion should be visual because projects of this size are _local_ , and so are not split over every American.)

$1 million is roughly how much a median-wage American ($40k/yr) can save by living modestly above subsistence levels ($18k/yr) over a 45 year career. I call it "a life's work".

Now, this isn't just a hobby or side project. Most people happily and rightfully include raising their children as their proudest life's accomplishment. It's "what can one do in a human lifetime after paying for room and board".

Anyways, this helps me think harder when our local government wants to spend $5 million on a project. Is it really worth 5 life's works? Maybe, maybe not.

<comment><USER3> What could you do with a trillion bucks? You could build 20000 miles of high- speed railways. You could purchase, outright, more than 90% of Canada.

I used to think about this a lot when the cost of Bush the Lesser's war was passing a trillion dollars. It eventually ended up costing almost 2 trillion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's really hard to imagine a trillion dollars, but it's also hard to imagine 7 billion people or 300 million Americans. Usually when we're talking about trillions of dollars we're talking about something at a national or international level, i.e. shared among a large group of people. Dollars per capita is often a better metric because it's _normalized_ to something more tangible.

A trillion dollars is about 3200 dollars per American or 12000 dollars per American taxpayer. It's still a lot of money, but much easier to think about.

<comment><USER5> > ... per American taxpayer

Isn't everyone a taxpayer? Or did you only mean "federal taxpayer"? Even then anyone who has a phone is paying federal taxes on the service. And people pay tax on consumption (sales and service taxes), city, county and state taxes, fuel, and the list goes on. I suspect that the vast majority pay taxes several times a month rather than the 1 in 4 you imply!

<comment><USER6> My daughter doesn't pay taxes. She doesn't earn any money. She's 6.

<comment><USER7> Bad news: if she's a US citizen then at age 6 she already owes about $215,000. As a US citizen she _will_ pay taxes. She'll start out by paying for part of your debt (and your parent's debt.) Then, she'll pay for her own debt.

I've apologized to my daughter (now 24 years old) for the burden. It's unconscionable but it's the will of the majority so I have no choice.

<comment><USER8> The majority of American debt is held by Americans. So buck up. Maybe some other schmuck will just be paying out to your daughter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One problem with these kinds of visualizations is that they're often used to visualize things like the U.S. federal budget or, especially, the federal debt. The problem is that to tell those stories accurately, the visualization of trillions of dollars should be accompanied by a visualization of 300 million people.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Since 50% of high growth companies are funded with less than $50,000, $1 trillion would fund the start of 20M young high growth companies. Fairly certain at least one of those, 20M, would have solved the financial crisis.

In other related news, as of a couple of years ago, my town has a _beautiful_ new landscaped highway median, welcoming you as you enter the city.

Source: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/inc-staff/survey-of- inc-5...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/inc-staff/survey-of-inc-500-ceos- how-their-companies-grow.html)

<comment><USER11> >50% of high growth companies are funded with less than $50,000

What is your source for that?

<comment><USER10> Source: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/inc-staff/survey-of- inc-5...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/inc-staff/survey-of-inc-500-ceos- how-their-companies-grow.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> $6.6 billion in cash was "lost"[0] and then found[1] in Iraq which I can now visualize as 66 pallets of cold hard cash. How do you lose that?

[0][http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/06/13/exp.tsr...](http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/06/13/exp.tsr.todd.missing.iraq.cash.cnn) [1][http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/26/once-thought- lost-a...](http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/26/once-thought-lost-and-now- found-6-billion/)

[Edit] There is $1.18 Trillion in circulation in the USA, about as much as in the last image: <http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm>

<comment><USER13> Iraq is well known for its huge Sufis....

<comment><USER14> can you expand? as a person who enjoyed reading rumi, I have no clue what you are saying.

<comment><USER15> I can only parse that as being a really lame pun on losing your cash beneath the cushions of a sofa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is my visualization of the 16 Trillion Dollars bailout given by the Federal Reserve to the Banks that cannot fail:

[http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/have-you- heard-a...](http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/have-you-heard-about- the-16-trillion-dollar-bailout-the-federal-reserve-handed-to-the-too-big-to- fail-banks)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the- feds-16-trillion-bailouts-under-reported/)

US Population : About 314 million Bailout : USD 16 Trillion = 16000 billion = 16,000,000 million Hence loading factor per person: 16,000,000 / 314 = about 50000 dollars. I.e. The Federal Reserve Loaded every US citizen with an additional burden of USD 50,000

</comment><comment><USER17> As with others: values make most sense not in the abstract (how big is a stack of $1 trillion in $100 bills), but in context.

How does a budget item compare with other items on the budget? How does it compare with GDP or population? How does the cost of a school compare with a hospital?

Here's the US federal budget depicted graphically: [http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/2012...](http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/2012-budget.png)

The xkcd "money" graphic is a classic of the genre, representing values from a cup of coffee ($2) to the all human economic productivity ($2,397 trillion).

<http://xkcd.com/980/huge>

</comment><comment><USER18> Or it could look like one platinum coin.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_Dollar_Coin>

</comment><comment><USER14> Visualization Summary: Scrooge McDuck use to dive into about 1/4 of a trillion dollars.

</comment><comment><USER19> The "mother" of the dollar bill stack visualizations was done by "crunchweb" in 2003/2006 to visualize the cost of the Iraq war (then 316 Billion - now > 1 Trillion)

<http://87billion.com/>

Another good one - visualizing the cost of the 2008 financial crisis (581 Trillion)

<http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2008/03/27/632/>

<comment><USER20> Worth noting: that figure of $581tn is the total worldwide exposure in derivatives, not the actual amount lost. They give the much more reasonable figure of $1.1tn earlier, and suggest that's unlikely to be accurate, but then go on to visualise the higher amount as though that's what the crisis cost with no real evidence at all.

Given the nature of derivatives, it might well not be _possible_ to lose that much ever, even if the zombiepocalypse happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very trivial (or maybe not?) to illustrate that kind of money next to one single human being. Interesting though.

Something similar - Greek's debt illustrated on trucks of cash: [http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...](http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_greek.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> I find that this is not a good way to visualize what a trillion dollars looks like. Check out these infographics - they are a lot better.

<http://demonocracy.info/>

</comment><comment><USER23> Just to make it clear once forever, that in Hollywood movies, when they say "You have 3 hours too arrange $100MM in cash" etc. there is no way this money will feet into a suitcase.

<comment><USER24> A bitcoin private key fits nicely onto a single page of paper. Print it, hand it over to the bad guys, done.

<comment><USER25> By the time you hit print the bitcoins are only worth $66.5 million. Or was it $135.7 million?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what it would look like if the stack was filled with one dollar bills rather than 100s. I'm sure the visualization would be quite mind boggling.

<comment><USER27> bet it'd be 100x as big...

hah sorry had to.. but seriously would be crazy!

<comment><USER28> Now do it in pennies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a trillion pennies:

<http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/sixteen.asp>

And if that's not enough, one quadrillion pennies:

<http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/seventeen.asp>

and if that's still not enough, one quintillion pennies:

<http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/eighteen.asp>

<comment><USER28> Now do it in peak-of-hyperinflation Zimbabwean pennies! I'm not sure if there's enough atoms in the universe for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The writing on this page is insufferable. A more effective presentation of this information would have been a simple graphic.

</comment><comment><USER30> "A billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon we're talking about real money." (-my first civil servant boss)

<comment><USER31> Originally attributed Senator Dirksen, though he later claimed it was a misquote by a journalist.

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen>

<comment><USER30> Thanks, I figured that quote came from somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember this page from 2005 or so. Good to see again indeed.

</comment><comment><USER33> I guess I could live on that amount. :\

</comment><comment><USER34> Now, that's the SketchUp, isn't it? ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is _this_ one the front page?

<comment><USER36> Because a majority of asshat startup fanatics are also money fanatics. Let's face it, most of the reason people want to do startups, it because they have dreams of grandeur.

And I agree, it is extremely embarrassing that this money article would be vote up by HN users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wonder how much it weighs?

</comment><comment><USER38> Iraq, more or less.

<comment><USER39> Or, just for the politics of it, almost 1/6 of the increase in the national debt up to now since President Obama took office. Just saying...</comment></comment>


Spammers Giving Up?  Google Thinks So - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/google_spam

<comment><USER2> If this isn't just nicely packaged marketing for gmail, it's more likely they are focusing their resources on targets with weaker defenses.

</comment><comment><USER3> "e-mail from legitimate marketers"

Yeah, right...</comment>


Apple Has Already Won. Now It Should Crack the San Bernardino iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/apple-has-already-won-now-it-should-crack-the-san-bernadino-iphone <comment><USER2> This article is an embarrassment to the IEEE.

Look at this paragraph:

"So what's the big deal? Tim Cook, in his message to Apple's customers, said the main issue is that the order would require Apple to create a specific new software file or bundle for one specific phone."

Tim Cook never, ever said that is the main issue. Or even any issue. It's a red herring.

This is such a huge mischaracterization (or perhaps misunderstanding), it truly boggles the mind. Where does IEEE find these people? I'm now worried that IEEE is either staffed by incompetents, or is being subverted.

</comment><comment><USER2> Having read this sorry bag of words to the end now I see their definition of Apple winning is the most cynical one possible: they are talking just about the PR win Apple gets from attempting to defend what is really important, the privacy rights of customers. They don't seem to think whether Apple succeeds in that attempt or not really matters, nor do they seem to think the underlying greater customer privacy concern (that of other users beyond this case) matters to Apple.

Their conclusion is stated in this staggeringly wrong paragraph:

"As mobile device forensics experts, we believe that, since Apple can create the software with confidence that it can never ever be used on another iPhone, they should reluctantly comply."

I doubt Apple has any such confidence. Matching the tool to a new phone would just be a matter of changing some configuration data such as keys and IDs.

Then later in the article, in a display of cognitive dissonance, they do a 180 and recognize that if Apple creates a pin cracking tool, it is likely the tool will be used beyond just this case.

And look at the chasm in their logic as they step through the implications of potential abuse of the tool:

"...you cannot make a backdoor for just law enforcement; the backdoor would possibly be accessible to anyone with enough skills and knowledge. So if these requests begin to multiply to the point where they are routine, or assumed in every case involving a phone, Apple and its brethren will then need to make a stand."

See what they did?

They acknowledged that the back door could be used by anyone, but then they pretend that all these people interested in using the tool will be submitting "requests" as if that is how it will work.

Yes, in a dream scenario where things do not leak, that could be the case. But these are supposedly security researchers writing this article. They should know that we don't live in a dream world.

But the authors, who have ties to vaguely specified US Government military entities including the US Army (the branch of the military which hosts, at its Fort Meade installation, the NSA) want Apple to play along and create a tool that could very well leak. They think everything will be OK because Apple can always make a stand after the fact:

"...if these requests begin to multiply to the point where they are routine, or assumed in every case involving a phone, Apple and its brethren will then need to make a stand."

It's a little too late then, though.

If a tool such as this were to leak, which is possible, then requests, and responses to those requests, would be moot. There would be no requests from criminals and rogue actors with access in governments; those people would just use the tool.

The typical response to "what if this leaks" from people of this caliber is to say "then make sure the tool doesn't leak!" But Apple realizes the stakes are too high, and the risk too great, so it wants to a more effective path, which is to not create such a tool in the first place.</comment>


The richest 10% hold 76% of the wealth - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/pf/wealth-inequality/ <comment><USER2> >Families at the 90th percentile saw their wealth grow by 54% between 1989 and 2013.

>Those at the 50th percentile only experienced a 4% rise during the same period.

>And those at the 25th percentile actually saw their wealth drop by 6%.

Trickle-down economics my ass. Also the western middle class got hit the most by globalization [1].

[1] [https://hbr.org/2016/05/why-the-global-1-and-the-asian- middl...](https://hbr.org/2016/05/why-the-global-1-and-the-asian-middle-class- have-gained-the-most-from-globalization)</comment>


Phalcon – PHP framework delivered as a C extension - <AUTHOR> https://phalconphp.com/en/ <comment><USER2> Home: [http://phalconphp.com](http://phalconphp.com)

      PHP C-extension (Phalcon)

      • C-extensions are loaded together with PHP one time
        on the web server's daemon start process
      • Classes and functions provided by the extension are
        ready to use for any application
      • The code is compiled and isn't interpreted because is
        already compiled to a specific platform and processor

<comment><USER3> This project hasn't had any discussion on HN for a long time, so we changed the URL to the home page from [https://blog.phalconphp.com/post/phalcon-2-1-0-RC1-released](https://blog.phalconphp.com/post/phalcon-2-1-0-RC1-released).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have a ton of experience with Phalcon, but this has always stood out to me as an option for companies I've worked with who were looking for a capable framework that would give them a boost in performance and versatility.

TBH the most valuable feedback I could get on this is some pros/cons from those who have used it in a production environment.

<comment><USER5> I've found it to be just as easy to get going with as Laravel. The documentation is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> PHP came a long way the past few years.</comment>


Ask HN: To go open source or not? I can't make up my mind - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working on my Final Year Project for my university degree. Submission is in 14 days and after that I'm done with my degree. When I spoke to my lecturer about future improvements and open sourcing the project he asked me if I was mad and said that I could make big bucks if I went about improving it by myself with funding from investors.
This confuses me. I asked a few more people and they said things along the same lines as well. Don't go open source. I confronted my lecturer and asked him why not?. All he said was, look at Google. All they talk about is being open right? But look at where they make money. Have they open sourced their search engine? Have they truly open sourced Android (even if the OS isn't a true source of income for them). Android still runs in closed development cycles. We get only the final releases.
But things is after all of that, I still have this urge to go open source. But I don't know what's in it for me anymore. Apart from the experience of course. But what about making my living? What's the real appeal of Open source? I'm confused.
Help me out here please. <comment><USER4> Unless you solve a specific problem that is worth a lot of money to businesses, the intrinsic value of your software is probably much smaller than you think. Most of the value in most software businesses comes from development, design, optimisation, sales, marketing and so on. In particular, selling software to large companies is a slow, expensive process that has little if anything to do with the quality of your software. You mention AI and NLP in the comments, which makes me slightly nauseous as regards the actual commercial prospects of your software - such projects tend to be academically impressive but monstrously expensive and near-impossible to market. Obviously I'm purely speculating, but I'd suggest getting your product out of academia as quickly as you can and talk to your potential customers. It's very easy to waste years of your life and a pile of VC money on a brilliant product that nobody wants. If you haven't read Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany", stop reading this and go buy a copy now.

Open sourcing a project has many potential benefits. It looks excellent on your CV and is usually the best way of getting hired by someone you'd actually want to work for, as it proves that you can actually program. If your software becomes widely used, there are excellent opportunities for consulting, writing proprietary add-ons, books, speaking engagements and so on.

You say "i don't want some big company coming and taking my source and putting it into their product even if they do credit me". In fact, that's exactly what you want, because overnight you become the world's leading expert on a product by a big company, with everything that entails. GPL it and they can't distribute the software without also distributing the source. They can use the software internally of course, but guess who they're going to want to hire if it becomes mission-critical? That's the basic reason to open source a piece of software - it opens the possibility for other people to develop, market and become reliant upon software you wrote.

If you're willing to bet every penny you have and every minute of your life for the next ten years, then make a business of it as a proprietary product. You've got a great deal to lose, but you could end up richer than Croesus. If you open source it, all sorts of opportunities may open up for you with very little effort on your part.

<comment><AUTHOR> That bit.. But dammit I sure as hell appreciated it. You brought me one step closer to getting to open source. I just posted a description of the software I'm going to build in the comments section so if you could give further advice. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Professors of computer science arent always the best people to take business advice from.

First question to ask is do you want to make a business from your project? if so, then you really need to worry about IP rights, which are commonly given to the university if I am not mistaken.

Assuming you do want to make a business and IP issues can be worked around, then you can begin to question whether open source is best or not. Without knowing more about the project its impossible to give any suggestion either way, all I can say is being open source does not mean you cannot build a business by any means, a lot of people conflate open source = no money but that is not at all true.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as IP rights go a lot of the project will be what I do after I leave university. But I've already spoken to heads and have worked around that issue. In fact they'd be my first investors, but advised against open source. So IP is workable.

As for what the project is it's pretty hush hush right now before I decide anything but to give an idea of size it would include AI and an NLP engine built into it. It's got a lot of business potential as well. If that would help with an idea of where I should go?

And again. Question is. How do open source teams actually make money out of projects like this?

<comment><USER6> technical support packages sold to enterprise customers.

<comment><USER7> And customization services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can make a lot of money on open source (Red Hat, Wordpress.com, etc), but you have to approach it from a whole different perspective and business model.

What is definitely a lot more difficult, even impossible, is the insane level of valuation that closed/proprietary companies have (ie, facebook, twitter, etc). Which means that your valuation will have to more accurately reflect your revenues and profits.

Which may not be a bad thing. It definitely makes it harder starting out, VC's are still very wary of open source, but it keeps you more honest in the long run.

If you're looking to get big fast, and cash out early, go proprietary, and ride the wave. If you want to build a solid company, you can definitely do that with open source.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would really help if you described the idea here. If you are considering open sourcing the project itself, then I am sure you can describe what it is without being afraid that someone can run off and copy the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just posted a description in the comments above. Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Without knowing more about what you're doing I'm hesitant to give advice.

However what I would say is if you think the work is something that can be applied more or less directly to real world problems, represents a significant improvement on the current state of the art and you have potential investors, well personally I wouldn't open source it.

If that's not the case open sourcing the implementation might make sense. One advantage to you is that it might help you get a good job, if that is your goal.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you want to go Open Source, go by all means. You can still make money by selling enterprise solutions to big names out there.

Think about it this way, if this project of yours becomes a big name, then you will be a respectable figure. And then it will be easier for you to raise funding or whatever for any of your project.

But you won't need that really, open source can support the founders - <USER2> almost always does.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok. any advice on licenses? i don't want some big company coming and taking my source and putting it into their product even if they do credit me.

<comment><USER9> In theory using the GPL should prevent that. It might be difficult to enforce though if the code is something that could be used internally or otherwise effectively hidden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this an ethical or pragmatic dilemma? If it's the latter, going open source could be a great or not-so-great business decision, depending on your business model. So you should tell us more about your project.

If it's the former, you can find plenty of debates on the ethics of free software online.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm... I suggest you keep it closed and try to make some money out of it (don't look at me like that, Mr. Stallman) and if doesn't work out just make it open - and should it become sort of a success make some green with it indirectly (e.g. get nicer jobs).

What is it anyway?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't say just yet what it is just yet. Not until I've made the first release. Yes. I'm paranoid after hearing the stuff that can happen :P. I sort of put this question up looking for some therapy as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My personal opinion is to "open-source" (or, more technically correct, free) it.

If I say anymore, I'll get DNed. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> "I still have this urge to go open source" -- perhaps you try the Freemium Model ?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok it would clearly help to tell what the idea is. So what I am building currently is an engine and a commercial level software on top of it to automate the checking of stylistic consistency in a document. The application of it is pretty broad but to sum it up into a few points

1) Plagiarism detection in education. It can be used as a means to detect plagiarism of individuals outsourcing their documents (thesis) through identification of differences in style (inconsistency).

2) Forensic studies. Letters submitted to court have often been suspected of being doctored by others determined to put a suspect behind bars at any cost. Can help there by identifying inconsistencies in style.

3) Literature studies. Educational tool to help professional creative writers improve their consistency in style

This can be expanded in many other ways, such as history where the software could aid in solving mysteries of disputed authorship of texts. The possibilities grow even more if you think of it merging with other types of bio metric studies.

Right now what I am building the software under is the 1st point and it is titled Multiple Authorship Detection Automation. Hence the interest from the academic field :). Ok. Hit me now.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like a great product, but the two potential fields that you just identified are 1) Education/Academia and 2) Government.

There are people on HN that are more qualified to talk about this than I am because they have more experience with selling in those markets, but this is what I understand:

You can't sell to either without a strong salesforce. These are not the sort of environments where you get paid a lot for technology just because someone discovered it while browsing the web - sure there might be one-two professors, and one-two judges, but most will expect their departmental machinery to take care of this stuff for them. The essence of the problem is that the people who are interested in using the product are different from the people who hold the purse strings, and both of those are different from the people who actually oversee the cycle of purchasing and procurement.

So, in a certain sense, your advisor is completely correct. You could really make big bucks selling this. However, in order to get there, you would either have to learn the microstructure of sales cycles and handle that all by yourself, or you'd have to partner up with someone who understands that and knows how to operate in it. Whether you want to give that a shot is completely up to you. It could be a very valuable experience.

Remember, there are a lot of problems with going open-source as well. First of all, you think "wow, I released this piece of software, awesome, now people around the world are going to gather together, hack on it and send me patches". That rarely happens. What often happens is, you end up getting requests for free tech support and bug fixes, and the usual comment of "well, it's open source, you could help me hack it" is met with a dismissive comment. In other words, once you go open-source, there's still a lot of management that you have to do in order to steer the product in the right direction, except now you aren't getting paid for it. Open-source really is a labor of love - and I don't mean loving your beautiful, smart and gifted children - <USER3> mean loving your developmentally disabled, Down-syndrome, wheelchair-bound children.

So, my advice would be, don't go open source in the beginning, and try the "build a company out of this" a shot for six months or something. Expect that in six months it will go nowhere and you can open-source it then, and see whether once you open-source it, it gets a different kind of pickup, and maybe you can still build a different company out of it then.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey just wanted to say thanks and that i had a final chat with people around the project. Their advice was not to go open source but with a completely rational reason. If this was open to all then students whose projects are to be checked by the system, those same students could download the source or the binaries and then try and game the system to accept plagiarized documents.

Thanks again all the same and I will use your suggestion for a bunch of other ideas and projects that I will be starting work on very soon

<comment><USER8> I am sorry, but that's an absolutely ridiculous, irrational reason. Your system is, presumably, a large piece of complex technology. In order to understand how to circumvent it, a significant amount of time must be spent understanding what it does. Students that want to submit plagiarized documents are lazy, and if they would stoop so low as to plagiarize, they would never in a million years spend the time figuring out how to circumvent your system.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha fair enough. maybe im just paranoid about how the minds of people work as ive seen it. We use turitin at our university to check originality of work of students. That takes a document and matches it against a huge database of their own that they maintain. Students can't use that service (unless they pay the fee which they mostly don't although I know a few who have done so) because they would look at the areas that have been marked as unoriginal and would make a few changes to make it go undetected.

at least that's how it goes. The system I have right now so far also highlights which areas specifically does the style change and in what way and by what percentage. It's being built keeping in mind a user base that should be able to get information with just two clicks . So it shouldn't be too hard to change the style here and there to game the system.

But I do raise hands in acceptance of your viewpoint here and call a truce (yes drama much) until I actually build a product before really making a decision on everything. But I do honestly value your input a LOT. thanks again :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interview with Scott Wheeler, co-founder of YC-backed startup Directed Edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.arenabiz.ro/interviu-cu-scott-wheeler-fondatorul-unui-startup-finantat-de-y-combinator/

<comment><AUTHOR> The intro is in Romanian, but don't worry, the body is in English.

</comment><comment><USER2> First try using Google translate with language autodetect yielded: "Translation from English to English not supported."

After a few more tries I landed on Romanian to English:

[http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&...](http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&sl=ro&tl=en&u=http://www.arenabiz.ro/interviu- cu-scott-wheeler-fondatorul-unui-startup-finantat-de-y- combinator/&rurl=translate.google.com&usg=ALkJrhhse8-E6JMYyxC5Bt3EiULPWBKK0w)

</comment><comment><USER3> A weird side effect of visiting this site was that Facebook started serving me the Romanian version of Facebook and wouldn't let go until I set it back to English(US).

</comment><comment><USER4> for those who don't know Scott Wheeler = wheels on HN

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry about all the translation hassles. If I knew it would be read by so many people outside Romania, I would have made in English in the first place.

Thanks for visiting. :)</comment>


How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/how-medium-is-building-a-new-kind-of-company-with-no-managers <comment><USER2> I tend to think of this approach as "a company that hasn't had a big HR incident yet".

<comment><USER3> One lawsuit from an sexual harassment will end this free for all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As Jo Freeman once said:

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware."

Her comments were aimed at the feminist movement of the 1970s, but her essay is universal and everyone can gain from reading it:

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't quite buy it. I'll guarantee that there are figures who call the shots in the company, whether they are called "managers" or not.

<comment><USER6> Did you read beyond the headline? Pulled from the article he talks about this and pin points two ideas behind making decisions:

1\. "Make everything explicit — from vacation policies to decision makers in each area."

2\. "Distribute decision-making power and discourage consensus seeking."

<comment><USER7> Could you refine point two more?

I don't understand how you distribute decision making without consensus? In that scenario "leader" types would make the decisions for the group, right? And then it's not "distributed".

I guess I don't understand that point.

<comment><USER8> My take was that "distribute" means everybody has some sort of decision making power, and the power to make all the decisions is not concentrated in hierarchical fashion. Those who wield the power to make a particular decision are then encouraged to make the decision themselves without garnering a consensus first.

<comment><USER7> Ah, that makes sense.

I have not worked under such a power structure, so I can't speak from experience. What I would wonder is how does one know where the power lies? It can more or less become invisible.

I gather it could become somewhat tribal --where while perhaps there are no titles power does reside somewhere. So here bad things are one's fault rather than say a boss's fault. How can you even vent? At least in set hierarchies you know who to blame. you know who the bad decision makers are you know who the asses are. But in this kind of structure it all more or less hidden but decisions are devolved and distributed.

I'm not sure I like the shadowy aspect of this structure. Then again, I haven't formally experienced it --except for informal groups and there you get cliques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The key takeaway from the article is that Medium is still under 50 people. At that size, any sort of hokum management style will probably work.

Call me when you hit 200+.

<comment><USER10> Gabe Newell is on line 3.

Valve is famous for their flat organizational structure. At nearly 200 people and multi-billions in revenue, it can work.

Ofc Valve does a lot more than a simple blog site.

<comment><USER11> Valve has also been called out by former employees for not being actually structureless. They don't have an official org chart, but there's an unofficial one at work anyways.

Any sufficient large group of people will self-organize into hierarchies. A refusal to write it down doesn't prevent this from happening, it just means people are even less accountable for the position they occupy.

"We believe in flatness" usually is code for "we believe in the appearance of flatness".

<comment><USER12> Ok, so this debate seems to be framed in terms of authoritarian bureaucracy vs. anarchy.

But what about corporate governance that has formal structure and rules, but is governed in a democratic rather than authoritarian fashion?

There are more than two dimensions to this. Structure does not necessitate top-down command, and vice versa.

<comment><USER13> You're talking about "participatory management". It was a fad in the 50s that comes up again from time to time. It sounds like a good idea, but it actually ends up _increasing_ bureaucracy. There's a good article that discusses exactly what you're talking about here:

[http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.sh...](http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.shtml)

<comment><USER12> That essay is hilarious, it explains all these failures of companies doing participatory management half-assed, provides a few successful counterexamples of companies/divisions/plants that did it full-assed, and then concludes that the failures failed because they didn't take the changes far enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Supplemental reading: THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS [http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment><comment><USER15> Several comments on the thread seem to not have read the article. Specifically: while they do not have "traditional people managers", they have people they call "Lead Links" and "Domain Leads" who take on management roles.

It seems many are reading the title of the article and imagining a utopian experiment in total anarchy.

<comment><USER16> Giving managers titles that don't have the word "manager" in them doesn't mean that there aren't managers. Describing their responsibilities as being "mentor"-like rather than "managerial" doesn't mean they aren't, in fact, managing.

The headline is rather explicitly stating that Medium is building a company with "no managers," and then the article goes on to describe some rather transparently bad attempts at euphemistically calling "managers" something other than "manager." I think the commenters you're referring to can be forgiven because of that.

<comment><USER17> The article doesn't do a great job conveying how Medium is actually structured. I can only speak to how it was a year and a half ago (when I left), but the difference between a system like Holacracy and a standard hierarchical organization is that a person in Holacracy might hold roles in many circles at the same time and those roles are relatively fluid.

The whole point in a role is to define who has decision-making authority over some given thing and/or what that role is responsible for. Lead links come about when a role becomes too big for a single person and turns into a circle which has its own members. The lead link is there to represent the circle to the parent circle and to determine who is filling what roles. Other than that, the circle is largely self governing (roles, responsibilities, etc are all decided in regular governance meetings as a circle, not by the lead link).

There are definitely decision makers at the company, but they're not managing people per se, they just have authority over some area of the company. The whole people side is entirely independent and generally lives outside of Holacracy.

<comment><USER16> What you've described is a manager/supervisor->director->VP->SVP/C-Suite chain, but with different terms, (possibly) shorter tenure, and with a perhaps slightly more democratic allocation procedure.

It's a management structure, just billed as something else.

<comment><USER17> Management of work, not management of people, that's the key thing. Yes there's a hierarchy of responsibilities, but individual people live many places in that hierarchy which is what makes it different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is this new? We've been doing that since 2011.

[http://robots- everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.MeshMa...](http://robots- everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.MeshManagement)

(I know this was just put on the wiki, that's because we're revamping it. I have gmail timestamps if you like).

I'm getting sick and tired of seeing in the news stuff that I've been doing for years, even told the relevant press outlets about, and getting crickets in return!

<comment><USER6> For one, it's new for them. Secondly, just because you been doing it since 2011 doesn't mean people don't like reading about how others are doing it. Where is your blog post?

<comment><USER17> Not new actually, Medium started with Holacracy either in late 2011 or early 2012. This article is about a year and a half old...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The idea of holacracy is interesting to me, but something tells me it's more about marketing than anything else. Holacracy seems to do the exact opposite of getting rid of managers. It's actually making everyone a manager of something.

And yet, it's billed as simply being a way of getting rid of managers. If that's all there is to Holacracy, then the entire idea is pointless. Reducing the layers of management is a means not an end.

Reductionism FTW.

</comment><comment><USER19> Everyone who starts a company in their twenties thinks they are re-inventing the office environment (I know, I did it too). It turns out, your company is just small, it is in a cool industry where people are well paid, and if you step back you probably have very little diversity in your office. Everyone looks just like you. Not the most challenging human organizational structure to manage.

<comment><USER20> "It's crazy how, in our company that's entirely white dudes in their mid to late 20s, we don't really have many issues with sexual harassment, ageism, or racism. We've moved beyond those concerns!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I want to know is how do they make the difficult decisions.

When does someone get fired?

If there are not enough resources in the pot, then who gets to expand?

</comment><comment><USER10> > He started spending one-on-one meetings talking to his reports about their > lives, instead of their tasks, and productivity shot through the roof

Google famously published a study that said essentially the best managers were the ones who took active interest in their peoples lives.

For me, unless they are behavior/performance related, my 1:1's are always "their" time. Time for the employee to talk about whatever. That said, most of them feel like talking about work.

</comment><comment><USER20> Valve always gets brought up as an example of a flat structure that works (and it already has been in this thread). Here's an interview with a former Valve hardware engineer describing how the system works in practice: [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_e...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_expert_shares_uncommon_look_inside_the_company.php). She likened the experience to high school, in terms of cliques that developed (which is about what you would expect). Her entire team got fired by Gabe Newell, which I kinda feel should answer any questions you have about whether there's actually a boss - whoever can tell you that you don't have a job tomorrow is in fact your boss, even if they don't want to acknowledge it. She agrees with what a lot of people have already said, that this works in small groups, but that it doesn't scale well.

Honestly, it sounded like a pretty crappy place to work, although she freely admits that she was bitter, and that it's very much a case of a disillusioned zealot. I've enjoyed working with most of the bosses I've had, and I've always thought that it's nice to have people who give you direction and quality feedback. I've had some really terrible bosses too, but the idea that since there are some bad bosses we should throw out the whole structure of management seems like a big over-reaction.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this going to be the next open office concept?

</comment><comment><USER23> i'm not saying this kind of company cannot work, but i would like to see people doing it explicitly address the points in "the tyranny of structurelessness"

[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not seeing a lot of comments describing first-hand experience with a holacratic system, so I'll jump in.

I was a developer at Moveline (which shuttered, sadly, this past December). Around the start of 2014, the company adopted holacracy as its organizational model; while there were certainly other valid reasons to do so, but I know that it was in part motivated by the fact that another Las Vegas-based company, Zappos, was also an adherent. Over the course of the year, in addition to writing code, I also served as the elected secretary for the dev team and facilitator of the GCC (General Company Circle; top-most level of the hierarchy), attended holacracy training courses, and coached people throughout the company about the mechanics of holacracy and how to make it work for them. Suffice it to say, I was pretty immersed, so I feel like I can represent how things played out at Moveline fairly accurately.

The up-front costs associated with shifting from a traditional structure to any other structure can be pretty massive; holacracy is no exception to that rule. Bigwigs from the official holacracy company (HolacracyOne) came onsite to give talks and run the first several meetings, which cost a decent chunk of change as well as taking time out of a busy startup's day. Teams and roles needed to be defined using the terminology and mechanics of holacracy. There were impacts here and there to scheduling, to communication systems, and to getting things done in general. Eventually, however, the ramp-up phase ended and we were able to experience holacracy in full.

As you might expect, there were established figures in the company who felt strong resistance to holacracy. Some of them held significant managerial power before the transition; others wanted a flatter, less formal approach. Those tensions came up fairly frequently in meetings and other conversations, and it created an atmosphere of not being quite satisfied with how things were being run (not that these people should have stifled their opinions, mind you). This problem was compounded when we entered a major growth phase, going from under 40 employees to over 100 in the span of a few months. New hires were unfamiliar with holacracy, necessitating additional training, but just as importantly they entered an environment where low-grade dissatisfaction with holacracy was palpable. If there's a lesson here, it's that adopting holacracy requires far more buy-in than you might expect. (For what it's worth, I'm not aware that anyone ever felt unable to voice their dissatisfaction at Moveline; we had a culture of open and honest talk, but identifying an issue isn't the same as solving it.)

A natural question to ask at this point is "What about backing out of holacracy?", to which I'd reply that it's easier said than done. Since a not- insignificant amount of effort goes into the initial setup, it's easy to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. The rationalization is reinforced by HolacracyOne, who clearly stated to us that most companies won't _really_ be fully operational as holacratic organizations for at least six months. Actually, the tenets of holacracy itself reinforce the idea that you just have to keep pushing forward no matter how weird it may feel: the first setup step effectively tears down a bunch of preconceptions about corporate structure, and you won't really feel like you've gotten to the point where you can critique holacracy until you rebuild that structure.

The flexibility you get for achieving the new structure is touted as a feature, but the less marketable truth is that it's a double-edged sword. Holacracy is purposefully vague on where the authority for hiring, firing, and budgets will live. Lead Links aren't managers, but they are accountable for resource allocation that isn't defined elsewhere — and it's up to your company to figure out what limits are placed, who places the limits and how, what constitutes a "resource", and so forth. It's entirely possible for an employee to have zero roles — and it's up to your company to figure out whether that has any correlation to terminating employment, changing teams, hiring needs, and so forth. Furthermore, self-defining teams present an unfortunate opportunity for organizational thrashing; at Moveline, we saw major revisions to the structure around meta-org work (HR, facilities, finance, etc.) and our sales/support teams every few months. Those upheavals, while well-intentioned, degraded individual performance, disrupted internal communication, and fed back into the underlying dissatisfaction.

I haven't read The Tyranny of Structurelessness cited in many other comments, but from the title alone I am assuming that it's an accurate depiction.

That said, there is one thing that I feel like holacracy helped with significantly: the emphasis on well-defined decision-making. When teams stopped saying " _We_ will get this done" and started routing tasks to specific individuals (who had an obligation to perform those tasks according to the roles they held), it was clear that the reduced ambiguity had a positive impact. The use of "we" has its place in an organization, of course, but "we" is just a code word for "not sure who" when it comes to planning specific, concrete work that needs to get done. If you're not careful, things can get a bit political when it comes to defining authority (at Moveline, this often related to holacratic "domains"), but I'd still consider the technique of specific task attribution as something I'd want to bring to future workplaces.

I'm happy to answer any other questions about my views on holacracy that HNers might have.

<comment><USER25> > The up-front costs associated with shifting from a traditional structure to > any other structure can be pretty massive; holacracy is no exception to that > rule. Bigwigs from the official holacracy company (HolacracyOne) came onsite > to give talks and run the first several meetings, which cost a decent chunk > of change as well as taking time out of a busy startup's day. Teams and > roles needed to be defined using the terminology and mechanics of holacracy. > There were impacts here and there to scheduling, to communication systems, > and to getting things done in general. Eventually, however, the ramp-up > phase ended and we were able to experience holacracy in full.

My "Management Consulting Claptrap" red-flag just went up...

> A natural question to ask at this point is "What about backing out of > holacracy?", to which I'd reply that it's easier said than done. Since a > not-insignificant amount of effort goes into the initial setup, it's easy to > fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. The rationalization is reinforced by > HolacracyOne, who clearly stated to us that most companies won't really be > fully operational as holacratic organizations for at least six months. > Actually, the tenets of holacracy itself reinforce the idea that you just > have to keep pushing forward no matter how weird it may feel: the first > setup step effectively tears down a bunch of preconceptions about corporate > structure, and you won't really feel like you've gotten to the point where > you can critique holacracy until you rebuild that structure.

...And this makes it sound like a cult - the same tactics as convincing people about The One True Path(tm)</comment></comment>


New Mozart Malware Gets Commands, Hides Traffic Using DNS - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-mozart-malware-gets-commands-hides-traffic-using-dns/ <comment><AUTHOR> This came out at the same time that Firefox started enabling DoH. Luckily the malware didn't use DoH so it was able to be analyzed.

DoT of course is encrypted, but can be better monitored / filtered because it has its own port.</comment>


Show HN: Lag – Know Before You Go - <AUTHOR> https://lag.app <comment><USER2> I moved recently from the UK, where my home and office both had fiber, to live in a tiny picturesque village in the Istrian hills in Croatia.

Initially, my 4g router was getting a signal strength of -110 to -120db, corresponding to two bars and zoom video not working. Spent €90 on an outdoor aerial. Plugged it into the router. Signal now averages -85, four to five bars on the router, zero issues with video calls.

My point being: there's more than one way to skin a cat and you can often improve your mobile signal if you want to.

<comment><USER3> How are you running the outdoor cable to the router? I find the hardest part of this setup actually getting the cable from outside the house to inside the house.

<comment><USER4> It's similar to installing an outdoor power outlet: [https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-add-an- outdoor...](https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-add-an-outdoor- outlet/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this idea, but I see two potential problems:

1\. It might route too many people to where the network is fast, thus making the network not fast anymore and wasting a lot of people's time as they "go."

2\. It might also route a bunch of "digital nomads" to my local art café where they will hog the tables, like Waze did with commuter traffic to my residential street.

How do you avoid those two problems? Or at least the first one, which is a problem for your target users?

<comment><USER6> Make your internet slow at #2. Presumably you don't want an army of people all on the Internet at your art cafe anyway.

As for #1, there are physical capacity limits you are likely to first exhaust. Only so many people will fit.

<comment><USER5> Actually two of my cafés have a "no computers in the evening" rule, one also has a "no computers on the terrace" rule. Now that I think about it more, with fast mobile data I don't think network speed is going to be much of a factor for places like that.

For #1, if you have ten people all on Zoom meetings at the same time, isn't that going to kill your fast-for-a-café bandwidth?

<comment><USER7> > For #1, if you have ten people all on Zoom meetings at the same time, isn't > that going to kill your fast-for-a-café bandwidth?

Not unless they all start at the same time. If they start a little staggered from each other, there will be time to boot the first person out for _trying to do a video call in a cafe around other humans_ before the next one starts.

Working in a cafe is completely reasonable, and wouldn't disturb other people. _Taking a call_ is ridiculous.

<comment><USER8> Eh, from a noise level there's no difference with having an in-person meeting at a cafe, which happens all the time and is not bothersome (depending on the cafe).

<comment><USER7> There's a noticeable difference between an in-person meeting and a call. Most people are a lot louder in the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One more issue when going somewhere: not all places have useful 4G offerings.

In France, Germany and Italy for instance I couldn't find a monthly prepaid 4G offer with unlimited data, especially in France you frequently even need a local bank account and in Germany 4G is so bad in many places that it wouldn't make a difference how much data is in the plan. Other places like Austria offer monthly prepaid as low as EUR 20, though speed may be limited to 25-40Mbps, which should suffice for 1:1 video calls.

My solution for now is to at least have my workstation connected somewhere with a fast connection and someone who could reboot it if needed, connect to that from where I am and have that do all the heavy lifting. Doesn't solve the video conference issue though.

Having flexible and reasonably quick connectivity, or an EU wide subscription, would really lift the value of locations outside of cities - I don't understand how badly this is done compared to other infrastructure investments (e.g. roads are pretty amazing in Western Europe and not that bad in places I've been in Eastern Europe compared to the US). I hope non government actors like Starlink manage to close this gap.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sorry for being pedantic, but this app is measuring _bandwidth_ , not _lag_ (latency).

See for example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag)

</comment><comment><USER11> That's a snazzy looking app, but why iOS only, and why iOS 14 only?

<comment><USER7> In particular, why not a webpage? This doesn't need to be an app.

<comment><USER12> Probably a side project for a full time iOS dev who wanted an excuse to mess about with SwiftUI and decided to use the tool they are most familiar with

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See also: [https://www.hotelwifitest.com/](https://www.hotelwifitest.com/)

Although from personal experience, data on Hotel Wifi Test is often not reliable, at least for Dubai

<comment><USER14> Implementing this idea as a web app instead of an iOS exclusive seems like the right move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I found this service quite useful, thank you!

But please, why it should be a mobile app? Looking at the landing page animation it looks like there's nothing plain (like in "jQuery only for fancy animation") web site cannot do.

</comment><comment><USER16> I heard of a similar idea in an Acquired episode: [https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/special-acquired-x-my- first...](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/special-acquired-x-my-first- million) Wondering if this is somehow related, or you came up with the same idea independently

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually what I was listening to on Friday morning that prompted me to build this.

<comment><USER17> How long was the build time start to finish?

<comment><AUTHOR> 30 hours not including 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour bike ride, shower, eating and all of that fun stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As others have mentioned the bottleneck is typically getting a good mobile plan especially if you intend to move around a larger region across borders. The EU has sort of gotten to a point where roaming costs are no more (with the right plan). E.g. I have 20GB/m I can use anywhere in Europe for 20pounds/m (Vodafone) without incurring roaming costs but once you introduce video- conferencing or video streaming that's not gonna cut it regardless of how good the signal is.

Thus I've found in the past 11 months that I've been nomadicking around Europe that you often depend on getting some good wifi which is quite the hassle (especially in rural destinations). I have high-hopes for apps like this to create a knowledge-base for areas with good broadband.

</comment><comment><USER19> Love the app! Straightforward with no extra stuff here and there. I'd like to share some suggestions after using it for a while:

\- adding an option to partially omit or edit the address would be great since not every part of the world shows the exact address accurately

\- inform what datas are stored (i did wonder why they show the latitude and longitude, because privacy reasons)

\- add prompts for isp/carrier provider, subscription/plan type, and other granular details so people know what to pick or expect

\- minor improvements on the user interaction, like autofocusing on the input so users can instantly type, or tap an entry to view more details

Overall, looking forward to share the app to my fellow iOS 14 users!

</comment><comment><USER20> WiFi speeds fluctuate heavily, e.g. workdays vs weekdays, lunch hours vs mornings vs nights, etc.

So as good looking as this app is, the real challenge is with the accuracy of its data and keeping it from getting stale. Not sure if the OP realizes this, but it's a 24/7 grind that also requires a sizable userbase.

It's not a bad idea in its core, but this belongs in the OS itself _and_ it should also be On by default to manage to collect enough data to be useful and to keep it current. I doubt that an opt-in model, especially in a form of an installable app, would work well enough to produce any reasonable coverage.

</comment><comment><USER21> What an excellent pitch! It's right there at the top, and it says exactly what the app does.

This is a refreshingly straightforward design.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice app, do you plan to develop an Android version ?

However, I'm not sure to agree with all your points. Since two weeks I work at my grandpa's in French countryside. 2.7Mbps download and 0.5Mbps upload. I can use Zoom (no video), watch Youtube (480p), and use Slack with no problem at all.

</comment><comment><USER23> This seems like another "silicon valley" issue, solving problems for an elite few people in society who have the luxury to bum about for 6 months working in hostels (if you can truly say they are working as effectively as they did before they put a backpack on).

</comment><comment><USER24> this reminds me of wifimagic[0]. This kind of community data leveraging is absolutely awesome!

0: [https://wifimagic.com/](https://wifimagic.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Are there any details on who's providing this app, who's running the site, and what they'll do with collected data?

The ToS and privacy policy are identical, and only refer to an app called "velo" and a company called "copilot LLC", and that their method of contact is "Joe Blau."

This seems very strange to me. (unless this is a "move fast, break things, collect GDPR fines" sort of thing)

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems like a cool idea, but when you are testing download/upload where are you testing to? When I visit Google's speedtest it shows me drastically slower speeds than if I go to fast.com or speed.cloudflare.com. Speeds to AWS cloudfront, fastly, cloudflare, google will always be different especially in countries /areas without PoPs</comment>


Ask HN: When does a startup stop being a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering when do you consider a startup no longer a startup?<p>Is it a question of time? Size? Revenue? Growth? <comment><USER2> Steve Blank argues that a startup is "an organization formed around discovering a business model".

By that definition, you're no longer a startup once you've established your business model and proven the assumptions built into it.

You can make revenue and even profit and still remain a startup, if you're evolving the business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> so once you stop doing major pivots?

<comment><USER2> That sounds right. Once you shift focus from defining the business model to scaling the business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In a recent interview (D8 Conference), Jobs called Apple "the world's biggest startup". I don't think it's a question of size, revenue or growth, but rather the mentality of the company and the individuals working there.

<comment><USER4> Cute, but in the literal sense, I don't think you can call Apple, a 30+ year old company, a startup.

The word is "Start" + "up". Time probably has the most to do with it, because your not a startup after more than a couple years. If your still small after that long, you're just an underperforming company. Growth probably has a to do with it as well, because the bigger and more successful you grow, the closer you are to reaching your company's maximum potential. Tons of employees aren't typical of company's that just start.

So there's my logic!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I asked this question on twitter, and people thought once you had an HR department you lost your startup-ness

<comment><USER5> My definition is that once there is no longer beer in the fridge, it isn't a startup anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When the question changes from "How can we make money?" to "How can we do it faster?"

Startup mode is the search for a repeatable, scalable business model. It ends once you've found it.</comment>


Charles Moore's Margaret Thatchers - <AUTHOR> https://thecritic.co.uk/moore-on-thatcher/ <comment><USER2> Thatcher is an extremely fascinating woman (I say this as a centre-left leaning person).

If you're looking for a very balanced view of her rise to power, exercise of it, then fall go on youtube and search for the 3 part BBC series "Tory! Tory! Tory!". It's amazing anybody, let alone a woman, pulled through it all (she had exceptionally good luck with timing, especially in her early PM years).

<comment><USER3> And it's worth noting, that Charles Moore's biography is about as far away from balanced as you could possibly hope to find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I clicked the link, I wondered what strange Forth construct was dubbed a "Margaret Thatcher". Turns out I had the wrong Charles Moore.

<comment><USER5> Me too. Why is this on Hacker News?</comment></comment>


San Francisco's $2.2B 'Grand Central' terminal open - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/San-Francisco-s-2-2-billion-Grand-Central-13174487.php <comment><USER2> This looks super cool. I'm not an SF resident, but I'm excited to see this next time I visit. There's a park on the roof, a beautiful interior, and a solid foundation for expanding the presence of trains in SF (something that always stuck out to me compared to the East Coast). Overall, it seems like it lives up to the Grand Central comparison - at least from an outsider's perspective.

The only part that's meh is naming it Salesforce Transit Center. For what seems it will be an iconic building, the name could use a better ring to it. I'm glad Grand Central didn't up as something like 'Goldman Sachs Train Central'.</comment>


Estonia Embraces Uber and Taxify - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/montymunford/2016/02/28/estonia-embraces-uber-and-taxify-as-first-european-country-to-legalize-and-regulate-ride-sharing/ <comment><USER2> What the article doesn't mention is that it was just 3 weeks ago that the police declared Uber/Taxify illegal in Estonia, after a 9 month investigation of one Uber driver. [1] The government's idea of legalizing it was already in progress then behind the scenes, and they vowed to increase their efforts after the police's statement. This is that moving forward. Also, in a rather uncommon twist, although the police spent 9 months investigating this Uber driver and found them guilty, they decided to not apply any punishment, because the driver "wasn't aware of the law".

[1] In Estonian [http://tehnika.postimees.ee/3578037/politsei-tunnistas- uberi...](http://tehnika.postimees.ee/3578037/politsei-tunnistas-uberi- juhtide-tegevuse-eestis-ebaseaduslikuks)

</comment><comment><USER3> Estonia already has some of the lowest price taxies in the Europe.

I often visit Narva (on the North-Eastern tip of the country) and getting anywhere in the city is a flat rate of 2 euros.

<comment><USER4> Few days ago I had a chat with a taxi driver in Tallin, very nice Estonian fellow in his 50s. On average he ends up working 80/hrs per week and he gets to keep (after tax, etc.) about 1/3rd of a fare paid by a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Estonia sounds like a very interesting country.</comment>