My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord <comment><USER3> "I felt relieved: gone was the posturing so obvious in the previous candidates. They worked in advertising, at startups—Twitter employees who talked about how much money they made and the exotic locales where they took their vacations. Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth. He seemed trustworthy."

As an aside, that's a sad little bit of commentary on the tech scene these days.

<comment><USER4> What an absurd statement by the author.

These people were interviewing for an apartment in a notoriously tough housing market - they were probably just "posturing" (mentioning their good jobs and money) because they thought it would help them get the apartment.

He sounds like an outlier of a landlord who prefers a sketchy semi-employed roommate to one with a guaranteed salary.

<comment><USER5> He's not really a landlord if he's looking for a roommate. I mean, technically he is, obviously, but it's not a traditional landlord - tenant relationship when you're living in the apartment together.

And I'm not sure in what world talking up how much money you make or the vacations you take would endear you to a potential roommate - it'll just make you sound pompous.

<comment><USER6> In a world where roommates don't always pay their rent on time and in turn screw you because now you have to cover since they're not on the lease. Vetting a roommates's ability to pay rent is not unreasonable.

<comment><USER5> If you're in SF and the person says they are a techie, they can pay rent. You don't need to go into boastful details about it.

(in any case, you should really be signing a sublease agreement)

<comment><USER7> Yeah I've totally _never_ run into someone who "owns a startup" and was "actually broke."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, I went to college with Ross. He was a year ahead of me.

I didn't know him personally, but several of my friends did. I had a few friends in college (some of whom I still talk to) who were good friends with him. When he got arrested, I looked up his Facebook page, and I found we have 5 mutual friends listed (and I know a couple of others who knew him but didn't have him on FB). Also, when he was arrested, my then-officemate looked him up, and it turns out he met Ross at a party once and had a conversation with him (though they didn't know each other beyond that). Small world.

That stunned me, but what stunned me more was when I found out Richard Bates did most of the technical work. I knew Richard. We were in a few of the same clubs, we had a class or two, we hung out in the same friend groups, and we were almost friends for a while. Richard was a... peculiar person. He had no people skills whatsoever, and he managed to be both shy and condescending at the same time. He treated people horribly. I ended up having a falling out with him in my senior year after he cut me out of his life for trying to patch things up between him and one of my best friends, who he suddenly cut out of his life with no explanation whatsoever (that is, Richard cut my friend out of his life). IMO, he wasn't a good person. Certain... nicknames for him based on his name began floating around as people got fed up with how he treated them. I'm still absolutely gobsmacked that this guy I personally knew and disliked built the Silk Road of all things. It's still hard for me to believe (and, yes, I know for a fact that this is the same Richard Bates because his email address was published in the trial, and I recognize it as his).

UTD was a special place.

(For the record, I changed my name last year, and I seriously doubt Richard knows my new name. I have to wonder if he'll read this and think "who the hell is this person?", because there's nothing about my username here, which is based off my new name IRL, that he'll recognize.)

<comment><USER9> I knew them vaguely as well, sharing some friends. (I'd wager we've probably met in real life at UTD a few times.)

Was Richard the guy who went as a flasher at a Halloween party? Because every time I read about him testifying in court, I'm imagining him doing so in that costume, which was ... graphic.

<comment><USER10> I never knew UTD had such goings-on, probably because I was just an evening student who attended business classes there :) (FYI: I have been a developer most of my life - just wanted to broaden my horizons re. business.)

I think I also know a Richard Bates from UTD, as a co-worker (but I am not real sure that it is the same person so I won't be too specific as to company and etc.). I found this Richard Bates to be a hard worker who was detail oriented and focused on doing the right thing.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, there was a fair amount of stuff happening at UTD when I was there - <USER2> was easy to miss if you didn't live on campus, or if you only attended in the evenings. Sorry you missed out on the fun!

Although, to be fair, some of that 'fun" was actually pretty regrettable in hindsight. But them's part of learnin'.

I didn't know Richard well, but nothing I learned about him made him seem like he would be a bad employee, except I guess the possible personality clash, which can be true of anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a bit of an aside, but this line really stung:

>> _Ross was a techie, but he didn 't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth._

One of the main reasons I got into software development in the 90's was the fact that software engineers were (largely) eloquent, optimistic, and down-to- earth.

It's sad that a vocal minority has sullied the image of an entire industry.

<comment><USER12> Virtually every niche of society considers others of their kind as eloquent, optimistic, and down-to-earth. This is a common perception in a group of people with shared passions. From artists, techies, to politicians and even Nazi Germany.

<comment><USER13> Wow, Godwin's law struck hard and fast. Was that reference _really_ necessary?

<comment><USER14> Can't a person make a point that just happens to involve Nazis without someone invoking "Godwin's Law"?

It's like just because someone slapped a label on a thing we're not allowed to do the thing anymore. We need an "Anti-Godwin's Law" that states no mention of Nazis or Hitler can be made on the internet without someone inevitably invoking Godwin's Law.

<comment><USER15> Zike's Law: Whenever Nazi's are mentioned on the internet, someone inevitably mentions Godwin's Law.

<comment><USER16> Is there a law for mentioning Zike's law? (kinda serious)

<comment><USER17> I believe that's Kurotetsuka's law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Sure, we wanted Ross to go free. We wanted him to be innocent, to be a hero: the poster boy for privacy in the Information Age."

That may be partially true, but Ross polluted much of the goodwill the Internet community had for him when he decided to "order a hitman." I doubt he was ever _that_ serious about hiring one. If you read the chats he had, he sounds completely out of his league, and probably never would have been capable of it if the FBI did not sort-of-entrap him with a murder-for-hire plot. Unfortunately, he really screwed himself by going down that road.

The best argument in defense of silk road and Ross, from a moral/philosophical standpoint, is that it represents a victimless crime. Indeed, by moving transactions into the online world, it may have actually facilitated a drop in real crime. Ross must have known that if the FBI ever caught up to him, he could defend himself with this moral reasoning, and at least stand a chance of acquittal in a jury trial. It's a shame that he had to completely ruin that chance by also trying to hire a hitman. He should have kept things simple and never strayed out of the territory of libertarian economic experiment.

<comment><USER19> Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.

Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.

He hasn't lost my goodwill yet.

<comment><USER20> > Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. > There was never any harm done to anybody.

I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.

(edited for grammatical clarity)

<comment><USER21> He hired CIs posing as hitmen a few times. His diary/movie script/fictional book on his laptop they found claimed he tried to kill an employee who had potential to snitch, and a scammer in Canada that ripped off many users.

He also agreed to a higher price for the "hit" in Canada, as it was claimed by the CI the target lived with 3 other people and if they were to collect all his assets as ordered then everybody would have to die. Ross was totally cool with that and paid.

I also don't think this is why his fanbase on SR dumped him, they seemed more pissed that his security practices were so terribad awful it put everybody else in jeopardy. It's almost as if he read his own forum's security base and then did the opposite of what everybody said not to do like "Never order fake ID to where you live" and "Don't sit in a cafe ordering drugs off this site" (don't sit in a cafe/library and run the site either).

The money he paid to kill non existent people was way more than what they caused him to lose through scamming, he could have paid back the losses out of pocket with his huge stash of bitcoins instead of seeking vengeance. He acted exactly like a boss of a gangster dial a dope operation that orders the hit of one of their drivers they think is ripping them off.

<comment><USER22> Got a link for the claims in those first two paragraphs for us? Because if that _is_ true, it changes a whole bunch of things, including the argument about entrapment I made in a sibling thread.

It's a rather different thing if they entrap him with a tough moral dilemma than entrapping him with simply ordering a hit on people when it's not the only alternative to a whole bunch of other people having their lives destroyed, including targeting 3 people that just happen to live there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The main thing I would like to know is why did he hire the lawyer he did? His defense basically sold him up the river, as can be seen from the scathing comments from the judge. Is it still a fair trial if your lawyer is incompetent?

<comment><USER24> It's possible to get a re-trial on the grounds of incompetent defence, but the bar is really high. And since Ulbricht is still using the same lawyer for his appeals, it doesn't look like he's trying that route.

His defense did seem pretty poor, but given the amount of evidence against him, its not really clear what a "good defense" would've looked like.

<comment><USER25> From the Ars op-ed, it sounded like his best chance would have been to file a legal declaration of interest in the Iceland server and proceed to challenge its discovery- a course of action that the judge hinted at but that his attorney refused.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross- ulbric...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross-ulbricht-got- a-fair-trial-but-not-a-fair-investigation/)

<comment><USER24> It's not particularly clear they could have had it thrown out in anycase. And even if they did, there was more than enough information just on the laptop to tie him conclusively to Silk Road. So his lawyer threw a Hail Mary and decided to try and deny Ross owned the server at all. It didn't work, but going the other route wouldn't have either.

I suspect a lot of the people who were pressing for Ross to challenge the seizure of the server are doing so because they're interested in the legal questions involved, rather than maximizing the chances of an innocence verdict.

But in anycase, you generally can't get a re-trial based on incompetent counsel based just on strategic decisions, even if those decisions were poor ones. You need to show your lawyer was really asleep at the switch on a basic level, like giving the client factually wrong information, or going off to Cancun for a couple weeks instead of preparing a defence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > How could someone intelligent enough to graduate with a master's from Penn > State be dumb enough to use his own personal email to advertise an illegal > bazaar on a message board as basic as Shroomery.org?

Does anyone honestly believe this is how he was caught? Or is it just parallel construction[1]? I wouldn't be surprised if Tor is completely compromised by the United States Government, and this fact is just being hidden.

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)

<comment><USER27> Does it matter? The fact of the matter he did make that post, and several others, with his personal email clearly visible on Archive.org. Even if they caught on to him some other way, not much work is required to follow those traces right to him.

<comment><USER26> So what? My personal email is probably in a lot of random places on the internet. If I commit the crime of public urination and the authorities are able to catch me because they have video cameras in my bathroom, is it a good thing that they can then google around for my email and say "Hey look, we found this guy because his email was registered on this public urination forum! That's how we caught him!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On the last line of the FBI seizure form [1], does it say "Filastine currency"? What do you think they meant by that? AFAIK the Palestinian territories use Israeli currency, so that's probably not it...

[1]: [http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content- images/contentima...](http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content- images/contentimage/19835/1426102571747985.png)

<comment><USER29> First hit on google [http://filastine.com/log/l00t/](http://filastine.com/log/l00t/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Back in my days of credit card fraud and identity theft no one knew what I was doing. I simply refused to talk about what I did to earn money with friends. It was kind of fun to make it like a game.

It was a little sketchy but I never seemed like a sketchy guy so maybe they suspected porn or something like that. It's not hard to have an online life that's different from the real world, that you hide from everyone.

</comment><comment><USER31> How come he says "he did not own a cellphone" but in a fbi report it clearly says "Samsung smartphone"?

</comment><comment><USER32> Definitely checking this out later. I've been in a VICE documentary binge lately and this will add to my collection!</comment>


Jet fuel from thin air: Aviation's hope or hype? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49725741 <comment><USER2> I am involved in this project. The aim is to built a demonstration plant to show the feasibility of the process and to develop a blueprint for larger plants that can produce sustainable jet fuel economically. Producing sustainable fuels is always more expensive than fossil fuels. However, upcoming legislation and taxation (at least in the EU) will change this equation.

Someone mentioned an efficiency of around 50% in a post here and resulting pricing, that's a fairly good estimate of the overall process and what is discussed as achievable cost for renewable synthetic fuels in general. The process is in this demonstration plant is Fischer-Tropsch. Using CO2 from an industrial point source is more efficient; however, it has potential legislative issues when it comes to certification of sustainable fuels, emission certificate trading... it's a fairly complicated topic. In addition, worldwide potential for lowest renewable energy costs does not correlate necessarily with existing CO2 point sources. That's why direct air capture makes a lot of sense.

Whether CCS is a better solution depends on renewable electricity pricing vs. the CCS costs, public acceptance and feasibility at the location of a plant. These vary strongly depending on where you are in the world. In many parts of Europe there is strong opposition to it as it may prolong the exploitation of fossil sources.

<comment><USER3> Finally, an expert! I'm not, although I've been involved in energy for a while now.

I believe the Germans made synfuels towards the end of WWII using Fischer Tropsch when they were running low on conventional fuels. What tech is new about this project, besides the energy source?

<comment><USER4> They made synfuels from coal, which contains a lot of, uh, coal. So no need to capture it from the air. They didn't worry about CO2 pollution back then.

<comment><USER5> For fuel synthesis, you have two principle processes: carbon sourcing, and actually sythesizing the fuel.

Once you've got the coal sourced, most of the rest of the WWII process is directly applicable to modern carbon-capture methods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The jet fuel part of this is a distraction from the important (and hard) part - turning electricity into usable liquid fuel.

Electrolysis is easy enough, and there's plenty of places with enough water.

Then you have hydrogen. Hydrogen is not nice to work with, store or use, so you want to turn it into something else a bit nicer.

The problem is, almost all practically usable liquid or gaseous fuels contain carbon. Where do you get that from?

The obvious answer is the atmosphere. That's also the premise of carbon sequestration. The problem is that CO2 isn't actually particularly abundant. It's currently hovering around 400 parts per million - that's about 0.04% of air. To make a kg of hydrocarbon you need to process an awful lot of air to get enough CO2. That all takes energy. A lot of energy. Suddenly your round trip efficiency is practically zero. If these guys have cracked that problem, it would be fantastic. I hope they have, but I suspect they haven't.

<comment><USER7> I came here to say essentially this. To your point about how low (in percentage terms) the concentration of CO2 is, direct carbon capture from the atmosphere still seems a fool's errand to me. The only way I see carbon capture being at all viable for this purpose in the short term is to scrub the waste gasses from industrial processes where carbon-containing compounds are extremely concentrated.

<comment><USER8> Cement (of certain types) relies on direct carbon capture from the atmosphere to complete curing (although conventional cement only carbonizes through a finite depth during its expected lifetime), so it's definitely possible. It just takes a lot of energy.

About 2 MWh (thermal, or ~7GJ) per tonne of CO2 captured (not counting storing that CO2) to regenerate the chemical CO2 capturing agent. Here's a review: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619307772)

(As an aside, a gallon of gasoline emits about 10kg of CO2, so to capture that CO2 from a gallon of gasoline would require about 20kWh worth of electricity.... Typically, a gallon of gasoline gives you about as much range as 10 kWh in an electric car, so you can go 2 times as far in an electric car just using the energy it'd take to capture the CO2 from a gasoline car. And that doesn't count the electricity required to refine/crack the gasoline from crude.)

And also, on board the International Space Station, CO2 is captured from the atmosphere regeneratively. Capturing CO2 in this way takes less energy at the higher concentrations on board ISS, but is still possible.

As an aside: Much of the ISS's CO2 is converted into a hydrocarbon (methane) using hydrogen (from water and solar electricity) and, amusingly, vented to space as a waste product. The point is to recover the oxygen (again, in the form of water) from the CO2.

<comment><USER9> In case someone else is wondering about the math on the aside about how a gallon of gas (3.8kg) can emit 10kg of CO2: [https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentIncludes/co2_inc.htm](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentIncludes/co2_inc.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The US Navy is already experimenting with producing synthetic jet fuel on aircraft carriers using power from the nuclear reactor. Their concern is with reducing the logistics chain rather than environmentalism. But if the research results are made public they could be applied to commercial aviation.

<comment><USER11> It would be _really_ interesting to see that getting applied to a fleet oiler design. A nuclear powered tanker that constantly refills itself for the DDs and CGs to use...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let me get out my back of the envelope for some quick and inaccurate calculations ;-)

There are 10.3 kWh of energy in a litre of Jet A1 fuel.

Let's assume (generously I think) that the process is about 50% efficient, so it takes ~20 kWh of electricity to make a litre of Jet fuel.

Assuming (amortized) solar power is the same cost as grid power ~$0.1/kWh then to make your litre of fuel costs 20 *0.2 = ~$2/litre

According to my research Jet A1 costs about ~$0.50/litre.

So this is a way off at the moment, however if there was tax on fossil fuels for aviation then this could be competitive.

<comment><USER13> Depending on how capital intensive the plant is, this might still be cost competitive with intermittent low, zero or negatively priced green electricity.

<comment><USER14> Also ... renewables are always going through cycles of high and low availability. Prices vary across these cycles. If you make your fuel only at the time during the day when there is the highest delta between supply and demand, then you pay the minimum electricity cost, and the utilities are glad to have you there to balance the load.

<comment><USER15> Note that this economic strategy is already in place in other industries where electricity price is a large component of the final cost of goods sold. Aluminum smelting is a huge example of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The question should not be whether this is too costly as compared to jet fuel, but at what carbon price is it cheaper than jet fuel? Once the cost of carbon is at the long term limit, which is equal to the cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere, then these technologies could be much more cost effective. (But if they aren't, there would be no reason to ban flying, as the carbon price would pay for the extraction of carbon that flying produces.)

By not account for how much jet fuel costs with increasing carbon pricing, and by framing the alternative to allowing climate change as banning flying, it seems like the author has completely missed the story..

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess a more low-tech approach would be to fuel jets with ethanol. Googling a bit now, the U.S. uses about 18 billion gallons/year of jet fuel[1], and produces 17 billion gallons/year of fuel ethanol [2]. The price per gallon is about $1.5 versus $1.94 [3,4]; because jet fuel has 46% higher energy density that means that the cost per Joule would increase by a factor of 1.9.

Obviously this is only a back-of-the-envelope thing, but it seems that even if we switched to renewable fuels using the technology that are available today, ticket prices should about double. Historically, that corresponds to going back to circa-1980 prices[6], which I guess is bad, but not exactly apocalyptic.

[1] [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31512](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31512) [2] [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32152](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32152) [3] [https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/ethanol- pric...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/ethanol-price) [4] [https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=jet- fuel](https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=jet-fuel) [5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density) [6] [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how- air...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-airline- ticket-prices-fell-50-in-30-years-and-why-nobody-noticed/273506/)

<comment><USER18> The problem with ethanol is it absorbs water, which at greater altitudes (lower temperature and pressure) freezes and blocks fuel lines. For that reason aviation fuels have limits on ethanol content.

<comment><USER7> Could we redesign the fuel system to (safely) remove the water somehow? Or prevent the fuel from absorbing moisture in the first place?

<comment><USER19> It would have to be hermetically sealed from creation to combustion at 37,000 feet. I'm sure it's theoretically possible but so difficult as to be untenable.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you could chill it to precipitate the ice just before loading it on the plane?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, here's how to kill a few birds with one rock. Make jet fuel using nuclear energy. But nuclear energy is horribly expensive, right? No, _civilian_ nuclear energy is horribly expensive. The US Navy churns out nuclear reactors at a steady pace, and operate them perfectly safely. They've never had any incident. If the Congress mandates the US Navy to become net zero carbon emitter, they can do it. And they also gain additional logistical simplification. They say that every gallon of fuel sent to the front line in Iraq costs the DoD $100. Yes, in the oil-soaked Iraq. If you shorten the supply line, maybe this price goes down to a more reasonable level. Can you imagine that, instead of getting a war for the exorbitant price of $10 trillion, you can get one for a paltry $1 trillion? We could get 10 wars for the price of one.

<comment><USER21> > They've never had any incident.

I'm not being conspiratorial here, but if there was an incident, which would make the navy look vulnerable and weak to both the population and potential enemies, would we ever know about it?

<comment><USER22> A big chunk of incidents would be known to adversaries just by their nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "It sure does sound amazing. It sounds like a solution to all of our problems - except that it's not," said Jorien de Lege from Friends of the Earth.

"If you think about it, this demonstration plant can produce a thousand litres a day based on renewable energy. That's about five minutes of flying in a Boeing 747.

"It'd be a mistake to think that we can keep flying the way that we do because we can fly on air. That's never going to happen. It's always going to be a niche."

Wow, the Naysayers really know how to build a constructive argument.

</comment><comment><USER24> This always strikes me as missing the point. The end result is fuel to burn. It doesn't matter where it comes from, only what the net carbon budget is. Continuing to burn petroleum in jet engines is _fine_ , as long as it's appropriately offset. There's absolutely no technical reason to need to bend over to implement this kind of setup. Spend those dollars on renewables and sequestering solutions instead, clean up the last 10% of fossil fuel extraction at the end of the process.

<comment><USER25> Lots of people working on different ideas to help reduce CO2 is probably what we need though. We don't know what will be the 'winner' yet, but the more things we try the more likely we are to find the best solution(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds very similar to Prometheus Fuels. The AMA thread on here from the founder was amazing.

<comment><USER27> To save anyone else curious the hardship of searching...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > "It'd be a mistake to think that we can keep flying the way that we do > because we can fly on air. That's never going to happen. It's always going > to be a niche".

Why did BBC include such a strong statement in the article, given that it's just someone's gratuitous personal opinion?

I know that it's good journalistic practice to include sceptical opinions, but couldn't they find someone who is sceptical while at the same time being able to back their opinion with some sort of evidence or arguments?

Edit: it's also possible that this person's contribution was a longer text, and that it was cut short due to the article length limits. Maybe the original text included better arguments? It would be unfortunate if that was the case.

</comment><comment><USER29> Whatever happened to Prometheus? I haven't heard anything since their launch [0]. The website doesn't have any updates [1]. Complete radio silence.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240)

[1] [https://www.prometheusfuels.com/](https://www.prometheusfuels.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I envision a future (not too far away) where we can literally turn anything into anything else reasonably efficiently.

CO2 in the atmosphere with hydrogen and oxygen from water, waste into each of its base component atoms, whatever into whatever else.

Something like global recycling of everything, if that makes any sense.

</comment><comment><USER31> On Saturday, Elon Musk said that SpaceX will use direct air capture to make fuel from air on Earth: [https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3852](https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3852)

In partnership with Climeworks, one of the leading DAC companies, I just launched a campaign on Kickstarter using carbon materials to make a bracelet made of captured atmospheric carbon dioxide. Check out the video! [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/go-negative/negative- br...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/go-negative/negative-bracelet- captured-carbon-dioxide)

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like some kind of Fischer–Tropsch process. Starting with CO2 sounds like it would require an obscene amount of electricity though.

<comment><USER33> > Starting with CO2 sounds like it would require an obscene amount of > electricity though.

It could still be worth it, depending on how/when it was made and how it interacted with the grid. There's an increasing problem right now of too much solar supply during the day and not enough power storage; projects like this could be used to soak up excess power and it would still come out carbon- neutral.

<comment><USER34> Germany is paying other countries to absorb spikes. Anything that creates value instead looks like a win to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In the synthetic fuel world, how much renewable energy capacity would we need globally? We need to replace all current electricity generation with renewables, then we need to add more to power electric cars, and then some more to produce synfuel. That sounds like a lot of capacity.

</comment><comment><USER35> "This demonstration plant can produce a thousand litres a day based on renewable energy. That's about five minutes of flying in a Boeing 747"

</comment><comment><USER36> Why not just process biomass?

<comment><USER5> There isn't enough.

Even for aviation alone, which is about 6% of US fossil fuel consumption, using a process Boeing had lauded as a "breakthrough" a few years ago, essentially using a salt-water pickleweed (halophytes), you'd need the entire states of Kansas and Oklahoma, plus considerable chunks of Nebraska and surrounding states, to meet present US demand.

We use _a lot_ of fossil fuels. Mind-boggling amounts. And those accumulated slowly over immensely long periods of time, though that's due to inefficiencies both in what ancient biomass was kerogenised in the first place, and the losses in keroginisation (essentially: petroleum formation). Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003), lays this out for coal, oil, and gas.

For petroleum, we're presently burning about 5 _million_ years of accumulated fossil biomass every year. Or, alternatively, we burn through a full ancient year's biomass accumulation every 6.3 seconds.

All biomass, roughly, equates all human and livestock feed, plus some construction materials waste-streams (mostly wood and forestry products). When you say "use biomass", you're really saying "go through the leftovers of humans and livestock". And quite simply, there's not all that much there. Maybe 5-10% of current total energy use _if_ you could _efficiently_ capture the entire wastestream (and keep in mind that it is _very_ widely distributed.

In practice, you could probably power waste water treatment plants off of captured biomass, with some surplus left over. But not much more than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> _" It sure does sound amazing. It sounds like a solution to all of our problems - except that it's not," said Jorien de Lege from Friends of the Earth._

 _" If you think about it, this demonstration plant can produce a thousand litres a day based on renewable energy. That's about five minutes of flying in a Boeing 747._

This is the same people that have faith in that technology in renewables can improve to one day surpass nuclear.</comment>


An analysis of the Adobe password dump - <AUTHOR> http://pv.tl/blog/2013/11/03/adobe-password-analysis/ <comment><USER3> What a flawed, sensationalist headline. So, he looked at all people that used aliases for Gmail accounts (added a +something or . to their address) to register multiple times.

By comparing the hashes for these Gmail users, he then determined that 51% used the same password for duplicate Adobe accounts. He asserts they were "highly technically savvy users" and thus 51% is the lower bound for the population of all Adobe users, thus 51% of the users used the same password somewhere else. Therefore "64 million" user's accounts are compromised on other sites, because they must be using the same password else where.

OK. Here is the problem. You, a savvy user, have multiple accounts, on _the same site_ , why would you use different passwords for your alias accounts? Same password on same site != Same password on all sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who knows? All I am doing is working from the data available.

I've tried to be clear about the methodology. My guess is that most users just reuse a small number of passwords. Anecdotal evidence supports this.

If you have a suggestion for how to derive a better _estimate_ from available data I'd be very interested to hear it.

<comment><USER4> You're looking under the flashlight.

A better analysis could be done if it were compared with another password leak from another site.

But even if there's no better analysis, the best analysis may still be severely broken.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

I think it's debatable actually - while intersecting the list with another does give you less bias, it also reduces the sample size immensely (as happened in the 2011 analysis I linked to), so there are trade offs in both directions.

I'm not claiming that I know exactly how many accounts reuse passwords - I am suggesting that, based on my estimate, it is more than half.

The evidence (that I've linked to) supports this. There are other studies which show upto 60% of password reuse: [http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/07/what- do-sony-and-yahoo-have-...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/07/what-do-sony-and- yahoo-have-in-common.html)

If you can produce a better estimate please go ahead.

<comment><USER4> I don't doubt there is much password reuse. Like the original complaint, I don't think the data point has value because reusing passwords on same site implies nothing on different sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do email providers ever look at these dumps to see how well they're doing compared to the competition?

A very quick sum of the top 100 providers gives me:

24476611 Google accounts

41177410 Microsoft / MSN / Live / Hotmail / Outlook accounts

24319157 Yahoo accounts accounts

Which surprises me. Maybe I missed something, or I'm double counting. I'm a bit tired and I've probably messed it up.

<comment><USER6> I wonder how far back these accounts actually go. "Adobe accounts" have been a thing for at least 4 years -- the first time I needed one was in 2009. I'm sure they probably extend back further than that.

If this is a database that's been growing over a long enough period, the distribution might be very different compared to a system that's only been around for, say, a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it illegal to possess the dump file? I ask this purely from a self- protection standpoint as, over the years, I'm pretty sure I've signed up for more than one account, and would want to check to see what data is registered in my name.

<comment><USER8> I don't think there is anything copyrighted in that file. And you don't crack/circumvent any protection to download that file. IANAL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In addition, the password length of an Adobe account is restricted to 12 characters:

[http://www.jirasekonsecurity.com/2012/12/adobe-limiting- maxi...](http://www.jirasekonsecurity.com/2012/12/adobe-limiting-maximum- password-length.html)

<comment><USER10> That hasn't been my experience. I changed mine today to a 40+ character password just fine.

That said, I was still a victim of the hack. Good thing I had a unique password that I didn't share with any accounts.

<comment><USER9> I changed mine to a 20 character pw, but couldn't login with it. I worked, when I entered only the first 12 characters.

You could try logging in with the first 12 characters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Evidently the passwords weren't hashed with a unique salt or this analysis wouldn't have been possible.

Edit later: Ugh, now that I read up on this some more I realize they weren't even hashed, but encrypted instead.

</comment><comment><USER12> I did a similar analysis a few years back. [http://rafekettler.com/2011/06/16/analyzing-the-lulzsec- pass...](http://rafekettler.com/2011/06/16/analyzing-the-lulzsec-password- leak/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there anyone out there that takes these reports and the reported files and sends an email out to all the people informing them that their password is potentially compromised?

I haven't yet received an email from Adobe, but I would imagine that my email address is likely among the accounts that were leaked in this file.

</comment><comment><USER14> you'll need to still download and gzip -d the file... but this will help you search

[https://gist.github.com/taf2/7285640](https://gist.github.com/taf2/7285640)

<comment><USER15> or just use grep...

<comment><USER14> I tried grep first - at 10-12mg / sec disk io it was taking too long... This scans the file in about 10 - 30 sec depending on whether your email is near the top or bottom... Obviously if the emails where sorted we could do better...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ironically, if Adobe is truncating their passwords to 12 characters that would be a major positive for me in the case of this leak as they'd only have half of my password. At least one of my accounts account from back when I memorized all of my 20+ character passwords was compromised. I'm sure I still have a few accounts with the same pass that need to be reset just to be safe, but it's at least there's _something_ to chuckle about...

<comment><USER17> but what if adobe only checks the first 12 characters entered? if so, then your "whole" password needed to log in was in fact leaked.

<comment><USER16> When logging in to Adobe, but that's a password reset away. They won't be able to get into any sites which allow more than 12 characters which, while it probably doesn't help me much in practice, may at least serve to frustrate a couple people who try to mess with my accounts. It's still a major net negative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So someone decided to host the only copy I can find of users.tar.gz on sourceforge, who has of course taken it down. There's a torrent, but it seems to be stuck at 75%. Anyone else got something I could use to warn customers in the list to change their password?

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone's done it already - [http://adobe.cynic.al/](http://adobe.cynic.al/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have just seen this dump, 153 million email addresses just waiting to be spammed.

<comment><USER14> I see three of my email addresses in the list 2 are no longer valid - <USER2> imagine because of the number of invalid email a addresses in the list any spammer attempting to use the list would pretty quickly be shut down . But surely someone smarter about email delivery could comment</comment></comment>


Tesla is making a Covid vaccine - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1278578543044300805 <comment><USER2> Elon's track record of "helping" hasn't been great so far. Let me guess: they'll get all the details wrong, produce the wrong thing at scale, and then elon will blame... hmm, I dunno, silicon valley or something.

<comment> blinding-streak It's interesting he feels the need to make a vaccine, since he thought "probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April"

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?s=20](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?s=20)

</comment></comment><comment> blinding-streak Elon just can't help himself with stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spoiler alert: you need to wait in line for the vaccine and pay extra if you want the vaccine liquid to be delivered in any color but black.</comment>


The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves - <AUTHOR> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/15/morale/ <comment><USER2> The shift in meaning of the word _morale_ is important. "Pour encourager les autres" is subtly different. Officers (and sergeant's) canes are sometimes called 'starters' and were used to 'encourage' harder work. I think calling them 'swagger sticks' came into use when hitting troops and sailors became less acceptable.

'give that man the end of the rope to encourage him to pull harder' comes to mind: it does not mean 'let him be the one pulling on the back end' -a concept found in many a book by CS Forester, Patrick OBrien or maybe even Herman Melville (who witnessed flogging)

<comment><USER3> Capt. Vladimir Littauer was an influence on George Morris, and hence on US olympic equestrian teams. Littauer was trained in the imperial russian cavalry, where the staff sergeants instructing the young officers would often whip them for correction, excusing themselves by saying "sorry Sir, of course that was meant for the horse." He notes dryly that when he was earning his biscuit in exile by teaching rich New Yorkers to ride, he'd had to slightly modify his pedagogical methods...

(the soviet equivalent is from a movie in which the scout camp director reminds the scouts: "Remember, young people, this camp belongs to you! You are the owners, therefore, you must have Di. Sci. Pline.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although "pour encourager les autres" is similar to "the floggings will continue", I do not think that it is the same sentiment, or in the same lineage.

The sarcasm lands on the word "encourage" \- so that it does not mean "encourage to have better morale", instead it means "encourage to work harder out of fear of punishment".

The phrase means "to make an example of someone, as a warning to strike fear into the rest, and ensure compliance". (1) It is a crack of the overseer's whip.

On the other hand, "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves" expresses a self-defeating cycle of interventions that perpetuates the situation.

1 ) [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/pour%20encourager...](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/pour%20encourager%20les%20autres)

<comment><USER5> I'm not convinced. Merriam Webster seems consistent with the article's interpretation saying that it is meant ironic. The examples given by you and others in this thread of "encourage" meaning to force doesn't rule out the double meaning and irony. The modern saying is merely more transparent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In modern parlance:

Scrum meetings will continue until velocity improves.

<comment><USER7> I know PMs that have meetings amongst themselves calling them "scrum" meetings. I suppose it's no worse than a department of programmers that named itself something that is also a field of math without being aware of it.

<comment><USER8> Ah, you mean "Scrum of Scrums" where the people with at best half a clue lose that half.

I distinctly dislike my job (and am looking elsewhere, interview monday).

<comment><USER9> Scrum - as pretty much everything - is bad when it's done bad and can be good when it's done good. I've seen both: 30 minutes of SoS where you'd wish for a pure caffeine infusion just to keep your eyelids up and daily SoS meetings with representatives from about 15 teams which were quickly adjourned most of the days when no cross cutting concerns needed coordination. It all hinges on the person responsible for the meeting.

<comment><USER8> Shrugs, I don't have the authority to fix the problems yet I'm responsible for the fallout - hence I'm leaving as soon as possible.

If you have a broken process the developers with options will leave, what is left is the developers who are either stuck for family reasons or simply unemployable elsewhere - a few years later you wonder why a simple change takes a week and a half and breaks things that should be totally unrelated and blame the process, so you do workflow re-org number #27 to see if you can fix it.

It's hard to explain to a more senior manager that they are in fact the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The wikipedia article on John Byng (the ultimate source of the quote) is fascinating, particularly this section:

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

"Naval historian N. A. M. Rodger believes it may have influenced the behaviour of later naval officers by helping inculcate:

"a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy. More and more in the course of the century, and for long afterwards, British officers encountered opponents who expected to be attacked, and more than half expected to be beaten, so that [the latter] went into action with an invisible disadvantage which no amount of personal courage or numerical strength could entirely make up for.""

So it seems that Morale did actually improve!

<comment><USER11> Perhaps, but I'm not convinced that was the real cause of British naval dominance during the latter part of the age of sail. Their real advantages were that the officer corps was at least partly a meritocracy, and the government provided enough funding for realistic training. By contrast the other European navies were so badly managed that they often basically beat themselves through sheer incompetence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Modern take on it:

Scrum meetings will continue until morale improves

Edit: Accidentally submitted twice

<comment><USER13> Fuck scrum.

Edit: No really, fuck scrum.

<comment><USER14> Spoken like someone who has never witnessed the abomination that is SAfE... God I miss the time when Scrum was the worst part of my job

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting read but I think this 'Quote Investigator' went off at a tangent with "pour encourager les autres" (a famous quote in its own right, but not quite the same sentiment). It seems more like the 1961 navy cartoonist who coined "all liberty is canceled until morale improves" deserves credit for the creative act, unless some earlier source is found.

</comment><comment><USER16> Byng's fate seems to mirror a bit a history of Thucydides, an Athenian general who lost Amphipolis to Spartans and was sentenced for exile because of that. The sentence pushed Thucydides to create one of the greatest historical works of ancient era.

It's funny that ancient Athenians were less barbaric than imperial Britons.

</comment><comment><USER17> First example that popped into my head was Mutiny on the Bounty. Anthony Hopkins as Bligh.

<comment><USER18> Captain Bligh was actually notable for an unorthodox management style. He was doing his best to be an enlightened and humane captain of the ship and, for a long time on the way to Tahiti, managed to entirely avoid floggings. He gradually reverted to a more traditional naval flogging policy as five months in Tahiti led to dereliction of duty, but his main morale problems were more around Tahiti being a tropical paradise, while life on board a ship is miserable. Taking away the rum because someone stole his private coconuts probably hurt more than the beatings.

(However, he is easily conflated with Edward Edwards, who was sent to hunt down the mutineers and bring them to England to be tried and hung. Cruelty was in the job description.)

<comment><USER17> Your comment reads as if you were there. :)

The film is just a film, probably not a true reflection of what happened. Memorable for the performances nonetheless, speaking only for myself.

<comment><USER18> The incident was investigated in detail, with several journals, testimony in court of ten mutineers (of whom only three were hung), as well as the captain's own logs, and more. Much of it is fascinating reading. Bligh's own post-mutiny voyage was nothing short of heroic and he was hailed upon his return.

The interesting human study, I think, is the image of Bligh as the earnest, "enlightened captain," but a failure at that: paternalistic, overbearing, out of touch, naïve about the motives and feelings of those serving under him, prone to causing jealousy and resentment, dangerously mixing business and friendship with things like a personal loan to his first mate... and just not self-aware, oblivious to his own anger management issues and the impact of verbal abuse on his officers.

You could take real management lessons from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like 1961 is the oldest example identified. The earlier quotes have a fundamentally different character.

As "encouragement" goes, it is sometimes cited that the Soviet NKVD had a quota to shoot down the ten percent of their own infantry who were furthest from the front line of any battle. As might be expected, it is hard to verify, but it would have discouraged reluctance to advance.

What is well established is that being taken prisoner was considered desertion, and soldiers released after the war, or liberated by advances, were routinely executed or sent to the GULag.

</comment><comment><USER20> A couple posters have brought up the "meetings will continue" version. US Senator Max Cleland used this is 2000, but I wonder if it can be antedated? [https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg85968/html/C...](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg85968/html/CHRG-106shrg85968.htm)</comment>


Apptimize (YC S13) launches wysiwyg a/b testing tool for native apps - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/apptimize-seed-funding-visual-editor/

<comment><USER2> Are they planning on releasing this for iOS? Looks to me like it's explicitly disallowed by the App Store guildelines.

<comment><USER3> A/B's completely fine on iOS - just see the way that Facebook runs their tests: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/09/airlock- facebook/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/09/airlock-facebook/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That being said, MG Seigler is a Google partner? Wow.</comment>


Anatomy of a Program in Memory - <AUTHOR> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/anatomy-of-a-program-in-memory <comment><USER2> Submit more articles like this one and less Web 2.0 gossip please.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to the comments on that article, the people _still_ don't understand the basics of virtual memory.

"Great article! / Quite shocked to know that windows takes double the kernel memory compared to Linux."

"I'm wondering, though, why does the kernel space consume 1gb? That seems like a lot.."

<comment> a-priori As narag says, it's only recently that this has become an issue. When physical memory size was orders of magnitude smaller than than the address space, it didn't matter that the kernel carved out 1GB of address space for itself. User applications still had the other 3GB, which was far more than any system had physical memory.

It's only during this limbo period when 4GB of RAM is relatively cheap, yet there are still 32-bit systems kicking around, that it becomes an issue. On a 64-bit system with a 16 exabyte address space, 1GB is a drop in the bucket. Once again, it won't matter.

(I suspect Linux allocates more than this for itself in 64-bit systems, but I don't know the details. At any rate, out of 16EB, even 100GB would hardly be noticed.)

<comment><USER3> From the way I read those comments, I gathered that the comments implied that Windows "consumed" two gigs of ram, where as Linux took 1 gig. I thought there was a dissonance between how people understood "virtual memory," which is essentially a mapping function, to "memory," which people assume to be the physical ram.

<comment> a-priori It's easy to make that mistake at first, but it is a very important distinction. Most of the time, for most processes, most of that space is unallocated. However, since it's basically impossible to change the size of the kernel area without relinking the process binaries, and since that area is shared between all processes, the size of that area has to remain fixed.

It is interesting that Linux and NT differ. Perhaps this is due to the fact that NT needs more kernel memory to house, e.g. the windowing system, whereas Linux systems put X in userspace? I'm speculating here.

Something I never considered: that design difference probably makes Wine's job easier, because between the 2GB and 3GB marks is a region of memory the Windows process assumes is inaccessible, yet in Linux is in userspace. They could (and probably do) load the Wine libraries here without interfering with the Windows process. It also means that it would be very difficult to implement Wine's complement, a way of running Linux binaries on Windows.

<comment><USER4> Linux used to be 2GiB/2GiB too, just like NT. It changed because people with big processes were unhappy; for a while there was an unofficial kernel patch for the 3GiB/1GiB split. Maybe NT didn't change because not as many people were running supercomputers on NT, or because changing NT is harder.

You don't have to relink your userland binaries to do this because they don't contain virtual addresses of kernel data structures, only their own data structures. Expanding the space available for _mmap_ won't force those data structures to move.

You can pretty much load Wine libraries wherever you want; it's pretty rare for a program to break if memory it assumed was unmapped gets used for a library, and programs that break that way will have a lot of trouble when Windows versions change too. Generally programs are only linked with knowledge of where they themselves will be loaded in virtual memory. (Linux ELF shared libraries don't even know that.) All the other addresses are given to the program at startup. It is unusual for Linux binaries to believe that they will be loaded above 2GiB; the usual start address is 0x08048000.

Here's the memory map of a process running under Wine: <http://gist.github.com/53853> \--- note that there's a lot of Wine and X11 stuff loaded below 2GiB (0x80000000).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Totally worth the price of admission. Every linux dev, especially c/c++ programmers, should be required to read this post. Once a year.

</comment><comment><USER6> That blog is a gold mine. Subscribed.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to understand what's being described in this article, but unfortunately I lack the necessary educational background. Does anyone have any links to other resources that will allow me to better understand what is being discussed in this post?

<comment><USER8> Virtual memory is part of the fields of computer architecture and operating systems; popular textbooks are _Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach_ and _Modern Operating Systems_.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=pqYl3SWkA64C> <http://books.google.com/books?id=tqtZGQAACAAJ>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > This helps prevent pointer bugs, though not as effectively as avoiding C in > the first place.

I hate to sound like the average Reddit poster and write something like "quoted for truth", but... quoted for truth.

<comment><USER10> I found this the strangest and most out-of-place statement in the whole article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> if you're interested in the security aspects of this stuff, there are a number of presentations by openbsd developers on the openbsd site (<http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/>):

<http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/nycbsdcon08-pie/>

<http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/ven05-deraadt/index.html></comment>


A 6k-year-old fruit fly gave the world modern cheeses and yogurts - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/a-6-000-year-old-fruit-fly-gave-the-world-modern-cheeses-and-yogurts-128165 <comment><USER2> A traditional Bulgarian way to make yogurt is to put ants in the milk.

[http://www.ayurvedic-recipes.com/prigotvjane-na-kiselo- mljak...](http://www.ayurvedic-recipes.com/prigotvjane-na-kiselo-mljako) One of the last paragraphs.

This means the required bacteria were present in the environment and this process has been repeated intentionally several times.

The article affirmation that it happened once because of a fly and then the new bacterial strain survived seems a bit naive, considering bacteria mix their genes all the time.

<comment><USER3> >A traditional Bulgarian way to make yogurt is to put ants in the milk.

I wonder of the formic acid in ants has anything to do with helping the curdling process. Ants have fairly acidic bodies, they taste like lemon when you eat them....yes I have eaten ants.

<comment><USER4> Carpenter ants taste far far _far_ worse than lemon. They taste like burning. As there are over 1,000 species of carpenter ants, I can't tell you specifically which species, but they are the black and brown ones that are common in Maine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a nice, even a probable, idea. I suppose it's good enough to try to hook readers in to the actual science. The paper itself has no talk of fruit flies and no support for this claim.

<comment><USER6> Come on, look at the graphical abstract to the paper. And notice the references to "insect-associated species K. lactis var. drosophilarum"

<comment><USER5> You're absolutely right. My ctrl-f search for "fly" returned nothing, with javascript off I have no graphics on that page, and reading the introduction and skimming the rest didn't mention them but that's no real excuse. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The milk-producing animals cow, sheep, and goat were all domesticated between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago [20 ], and paleoproteomic analysis of dental calculus has shown that humans were consuming milk, most likely as cheese or other fermented products, by 5,500 years ago [21 ]. "

I wonder if 500 years is a reasonable rounding error for this time span or just making the headline more reader "friendly".

[https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...](https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(19\)31384-3)

<comment><USER8> That 5500 is a terminus ante quem[1], the time before which - not the time at which - humans must have started consuming milk products. I don't know whether the 6000 year number is based on anything, but changing it to 5500 wouldn't make the title any more correct. You'd have to explicitly mention that it was a bound, which is probably a bit much for a headline.

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

<comment><USER9> Unless the fruit fly was already 500 years old at the time

<comment><USER10> But don't we already know it was 6k years old?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now I am wondering why K. lactis is preferred over K. marxianus, given that the latter was the source of the former's ability to metabolize lactose. The paper mentions a dairy strain of K. marxianus, but does not elaborate.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading things like this in a paper about microbes, I wonder: why is the English speaking world so trashy?

 _...a little bit of illicit sex made all of this possible._

<comment><USER13> It's not an "English speaking" thing, nor "trashy".

Moreover, that is not a paper; it's a blog article written with, and I quote the website's colophon, "Academic rigour, journalistic flair".

Or "calm down ur tits m8 get laid or smt" as an actually trashy english speaker would say.

<comment><USER12> Reading this as journalism I still wonder, why is the English speaking world so trashy?</comment></comment></comment>


Raygun.io - cloud error logging - <AUTHOR> http://raygun.io/

<comment><USER3> Sorry for asking this cheeky question, but are Dell, Microsoft, Dropbox & Aol really clients of Raygun.io or just clients of Mindscape?

Always wonder how people manage to grab these big clients so early on.

Seems like a cool product!

<comment><USER4> They are Mindscape customers - we wanted to make sure we showed that Raygun.io isn't some new random startup but is a product from a successful, profitable company. It's going to be around for a long time :-)

We did make sure we said they're Mindscape customers by the logos for that reason, we'll replace them with Raygun.io customers soon - we already have some larger customers trialling but haven't got them listed as that felt dodgy since they aren't technically paying customers yet ;-)

I hope that helps - I like cheeky questions too btw! :-)

<comment><USER3> Cool stuff. Just one suggestion, maybe add a place where people can sign up for a newsletter to receive updates. I quickly forget name of products, and as mentioned by others, the error tracking market is growing. I don't see myself using this yet, but I'd be interested in giving it a spin once JavaScript is supported (I assume Node.js won't be a problem?).

<comment><USER4> Great idea :-)

Flick me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll make sure you get our news! :-)

Oh, and no, Node.js won't be a problem :-)

<comment><USER3> You've got mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There seems to have been an explosion in error monitoring apps recently, competition in this market is great.

If you are checking out other services, our product Bugsnag (<https://bugsnag.com>) looks pretty similar to raygun, with more platforms supported, chat/sms notification and automatic issues/ticket creation.

<comment><USER6> We've been using bugsnag for a couple of months and it's really good. Their support is great, they're iterating fast and I never saw their backend stop getting the errors (as opposed to airbrake or exceptional).

<comment><USER7> I think this is why everyone mass-exodus'd from Airbrake/Exceptional - <USER2> if you stop being able to track errors, the service becomes entirely useless. You only had ONE job Exceptional! ONE job!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using the product since Alpha, needless to say I love it. The guys are Mindscape have been awesome over the years with their other products, that I jumped onto Raygun knowing I would get exceptional support.

Their .NET support is awesome, and because their providers are opensource I was able to write a NancyFX specific provider: [http://www.philliphaydon.com/2013/01/introducing-raygun- and-...](http://www.philliphaydon.com/2013/01/introducing-raygun-and-nancy- raygun/)

It's definitely a competitive market to be in, and their take on it is only just begun, but based on their support over the years, and support with Raygun, I have no doubt the product will be even more amazing than it is now.

Also, WinRT support is GREAT! Picked up a few error in my Windows Store App!

</comment><comment><USER9> See also <http://amon.cx/> free open source for one server one application or $24.95 for no limits - host on your own servers

"Amon is language and framework agnostic and it doesn't care if you have a PHP, Ruby on Rails, Node.js or Django app. The only requirement is that the language you are using supports http requests and json."

<comment><USER5> "If you want to log exceptions and data from your web applications you have to install a client for your language. (Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks very similar to <http://getsentry.com>. What would you say makes your product better?

<comment><USER4> We're pretty early on, so we certainly aren't in a position to out feature-set sentry, but from what I've seen so far you're just starting to look at intelligent notification emails (sending on first sight, threshold changes, patterns etc) and you've begun work on the .NET provider while .NET was our starting platform (however we don't yet have Ruby for example which, correct me if I am wrong, was for Python initially?).

Not an exhaustive list, but a couple of points where I think we're doing pretty well in comparison for a new product :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks beautiful! I would hope there was planning for Python support though, Django sends the most annoying Internal Server Error emails. I've got hundreds in my inbox right now. Is there any reason Python isn't on the roadmap yet?

<comment><USER12> The go-to solution for Python/Django is Sentry.

* SaaS at <https://getsentry.com/welcome/>

* Host-it-yourself at <https://github.com/getsentry/sentry>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> John-Daniel Trask, co-founder of Mindscape (makers of Raygun) here. If anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer them here :-)

<comment><USER13> Beautiful product, and congrats on the launch. How is this different from Airbrake, or exceptional.io?

<comment><USER4> Thank you - our designer will be pleased to hear that :-)

We think we differ in many ways, but here's some of the current highlights:

\- Airbrake & Exceptional are fairly focused on Ruby (although there are providers for other languages and platforms, often built by individuals outside those products). We wanted to make supporting other platforms a key focus and will have the app alter the display based on where the data comes from (for example, you'd have very different expectations of an iOS crash report than a rails crash report). I hope that makes sense :-) At present we have support for .NET, WinRT, PHP and have Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C and more under development at the moment.

\- We know that email notifications can be a pain. We've started life with what (we hope) is a much better approach. Email on first exception of a given type being seen, then again as thresholds change, or if recurrence is concerning. You don't get an email for every single error.

\- Exceptions are a first step. We have fairly lofty goals but if we can nail a great experience for exceptions we know we'll be on the right track for other other information to help developers / operations folks.

That's just a simple run down and isn't exhaustive by any means -- we're just launching and your feedback is very much appreciated by me and the rest of the team :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Stem cells shown safe, beneficial for chronic stroke patients - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/06/stem-cells-shown-safe-beneficial-for-chronic-stroke-patients.html <comment><USER2> Autologous mesenchymal stem cells are turning out to be one of the most underappreciated advancements in medicine today, and scandalously the FDA is slowing progress in the field by seeking to prevent doctors from harvesting and reintroducing one's own stem cells back into the body.

MSC's can be harvested from one's own adipose tissue with a little bit of liposuction.

The process of separating the stem cells from fat is called stromal vascular fraction.

It's an astoundingly easy process to do [1]. The equipment is inexpensive, and so far the procedure has been shown to be safe.

MSC's have been shown to improve COPD, and reduce the allergic response that triggers asthma. Skin damage healed, cartilage and joint injuries repaired, and even MS put in to remission,

MSC's administered via IV flock to areas of inflammation and damage and begin to repair it. The cells know what to do. Local administration is even better, as in this study or in cases of back pain and joint injuries.

Autologous treatments should not be considered biological drugs and subject to monopolization by biotech companies through decade long clinical trials and FDA approval.

These are our own cells from our own bodies. Doctors should be free to practice and innovate in this sphere, and in this case innovation is mostly just dosage, frequency and delivery method because the cells know what to do.

I believe that in the next decade or two, autologous stem cell treatments will be basic preventative care for everyone, a treatment each year will repair damage before it becomes pathology.

[1] [https://www.miltenyibiotec.com/~/media/Files/Navigation/Rese...](https://www.miltenyibiotec.com/~/media/Files/Navigation/Research/Stem%20Cell/SP_MSC_lipoaspirate_protocol.ashx)

<comment><USER3> I've been working with MSCs for more than 15 years, mostly in stroke, and I agree completely. It's worth noting that this trial used donor cells, and that might be part of the reason they don't remain after a couple of months. There is evidence that autologous cells persist longer, likely because they aren't swept up by immune rejection.

What we and others have found is that age of the donor inversely correlates to their therapeutic potential. For that reason, I founded Forever Labs, Inc. [http://www.foreverlabs.co/](http://www.foreverlabs.co/)

We bank young MSCs so that they can be preserved for therapy later in life. I banked my own two months ago.

We prefer bone marrow MSCs as the BM also contains blood progenitor and stem cells, whereas adipose tissue does not.

*We are fast expanding and raising; email in bio. ;)

<comment><USER4> If you banked your cells today at the age of 30, how much therapy can be hypothetically produced from that in the future?

Is it a store that depletes as you use it? Or can banked stem cells be replicated to create more reserves?

<comment><USER3> Different therapies will likely require different numbers of cells, and most clinical trials using MSCs involve preliminary expansion of the cells. We store multiple aliquots of your cells so that only a portion may be thawed at a time.

We don't expand the cells at this time, but will likely offer expansion services in the future.

Yes, by expanding you could create a very large reserve of cells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The study seems focused on just motor skill improvements. Was there work done to see if it helped with aphasia? Could this help aphasia?

<comment><USER6> It makes no sense to me that this is marked dead. Seems like a totally reasonable question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The primary difference between this and most of the stem cell therapies delivering mesechymal stem cells - which are more or less the standard type of cell to use for the moment, the most studied and most characterized, no-one got fired for using mesenchymal stem cells, etc - such as those widely available via medical tourism is the delivery to the brain. That isn't something clinics do, for all the obvious reasons.

So I'm inclined to think that this is one of a number of different studies in recent years to demonstrate that the delivery methodology makes just as much of a difference as the type of cell lineage and any tinkering done to that cell lineage.

</comment><comment><USER8> They've been doing this kind of thing over in China for some time now[1]. Science with a capital 'S' doesn't happen until the U.S does it though, and until that point and time all procedures are considered risky and dangerous. Even if you're going to die before any of it gets approved, you better not do any of this stuff.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fu2ub/as_requested_i_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fu2ub/as_requested_i_am_working_in_a_stem_cell/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Many people are aware that soon after President Obama took office, he authorized federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, which President Bush had resisted. The Obama administration made a big deal out of it at the time:

[https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/removing- barrier...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/removing-barriers- responsible-scientific-research-involving-human-stem-cells)

What got swept under the rug was that at the same time, President Obama specifically rescinded a previous executive order that directed the HHS to "conduct and support" research using adult stem cells:

[https://www.cellmedicine.com/obama-executive- order/](https://www.cellmedicine.com/obama-executive-order/)

I don't think the Obama administration ever spelled out why, at the same time it was promoting ESCR, it decided to also deprioritize adult stem cell research, but I think this latest news -- along with all of the other advances of the past eight years -- has shown that moral issues aside, adult stem cell research is paying high dividends.

<comment><USER10> > I don't think the Obama administration ever spelled out why, at the same > time it was promoting ESCR, it decided to also deprioritize adult stem cell > research

It was all part of the same EO, which was accompanied on the same day by a Presidential Memorandum on scientific integrity in government decisionmaking on science and technology, and the rationale for the set of policy changes was explicitly to move toward allowing decisions on what avenues of science to pursue (not the goals, but the routes to the goals) to be guided by science rather than politics.

It wasn't deprioritizing adult stem cell research, it was letting the relative priority of adult stem research be set, and adjusted, over time based on science, rather than being set by political directive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I read they don't turn into new neurons but rather release chemicals that stimulate growth and repair. Am I understanding correctly?

<comment><USER12> yeah, they say that the stem cells actually disappear after about a month but improvement continues well afterward. and they say its because of growth factors released by these cells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it possible that the procedure itself, the act of drilling and poking needles into the brain, stimulated the improvement? The stem cells didn't linger and they're precursors to skeletal muscular cells so maybe they actually had no effect on the outcome? Is it possible/ethical to do studies where they drill and poke into the brain without injecting stem cells?

<comment><USER14> The article mentions they're now getting ready for a larger double blind trial. This one was I think a test for safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder why only 7 out of the 18 patients showed improvement? What could that mean?

<comment><USER15> You should compare that 7/18 with what happened to other 18 in the same condition. 1 year after stroke, it is quite safe to say that 0/18 would have any improvement in 1 month (the patients were testes also 1 month after).

<comment><USER16> Doc here. Not negative on this story, but it is completely false to say 0/18 would have improvement with standard care. Patients frequently improve from strokes; some quite rapidly. Maybe you had a typo?

The next step is intervention versus placebo. Strokes are very common. It should be easy to find patients to enroll.

Hopefully this will turn out to work and be worth the cost.

<comment><USER15> 1 year after the stroke, the difference in a month is very limited in my experience. I am not a doc, but I've crunched some numbers related to this topic, what was your experience?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I found to be worrying is that the researchers seems to be unclear about how MSC is causing the improvements.

Also the improvements continues after the stem cells have disappeared. This seems to suggest the effect doesn't come from the MSC, but rather the chemicals the cell produces. Does that mean if we can synthesis the chemicals, we don't need the cell?

</comment><comment><USER18> I hope the next trial works too, this is amazing. I wonder if this technique would work for other brain disorders like Alzheimer's?

</comment><comment><USER19> Where's the link to the study?

</comment><comment><USER20> Well, it looks like we can advance science without pretending killing human beings is ok, after all.

<comment><USER21> This comment and others you've posted break the HN guidelines. Please (re-)read them, and post civilly and substantively (or not at all) from now on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

<comment><USER20> Please specify which ones and exactly how.

<comment><USER21> HN's rules don't work that way, partly because formalizing them would merely turn them into a long list with an infinite number of loopholes to be exploited, and partly because we'd die of boredom if we tried.

Users here are simply expected to live by the spirit of the law—civility and substantiveness—when commenting here. Snarky one-liners that characterize a (vague) opposing view as "killing human beings" fail the "civil and substantive" test. Plus there's outright rudeness in comments such as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663455) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651181), which has no place here.

<comment><USER20> I always substantiate any of my one-liners. In this particular case see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836930) . Few things are more deserving of "snarky" treatment.

The other two (chronologically disordered) examples are a product of my indignation with an obstinate person who wasted people's time and, brazenly ignoring their arguments as well as my own, continued arguing FUD.

Bottom point: I am not malicious and I contribute. So I'd appreciate if the trigger was not pulled on me even though it's probably the only way to get one's comments removed from here :-/</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


From 1957: "The latest prodigy of the chess world is a fourteen-year-old ... Robert Fischer" - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1957/09/07/1957_09_07_025_TNY_CARDS_000257152?printable=true

<comment><USER2> _some of the wits among his teen-age friends now address him as Master Master Fischer_

No, I think that's wrong. That degree of sparkling wit could only have originated in the brain of a New Yorker columnist.</comment>