Quantum Gravity Expert Says "Philosophical Superficiality" Has Harmed Physics - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/08/21/quantum-gravity-expert-says-philosophical-superficiality-has-harmed-physics/?-k <comment><USER2> I had the privilege of meeting Carlo Rovelli (who attended university in my hometown, many years before me) in a public event targeting people that, like me, were at the time finishing high school and had to choose what to do with their lives. We showed up already bored, waiting for the usual adults who would explain us why to study this and not that, what are the many possible career paths achievable by that, which economic sectors were growing and how, and so on. In fact, some of the speakers did mostly that. On the contrary, Rovelli started to explain how he did not know what to do after school, and that he went to university initially because his family would have forced him to work as a plumber with his uncle if he decided not to go. He then advised us to choose to do only what we feel passionate about, and to distrust whoever, truth in hand, will explain us that by studying X we will be able to enter sector Y and achieve great success in life. It can seem trivial stuff, but when you are 18 and are being told those things by a humble but successful person, it really empowers you. He is also fairly easy to "approach", he himself came to speak to us after the event, joking about the fact we should not cut our hair "just to get a job" (I haven't since then, and I am 28 and working), hence I am not surprised he answers to people's comment on the interview, or that he is active on physics.stackexchange, for example.

I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of "scientists" that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question "too much" what they are doing, preventing them to really see the "big picture" behind knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER3> There seems to be a contradiction of his bashing of super-string theorists exploring "what if" theories disconnected from reality, and his elevation of philosophers who do the same. If anything, the super-string theorists are more like philosophers in the sense that they are working mainly with thought experiments, which they then try and reconcile with reality. If you read stuff written by cognitive philosophers on the mind, they do this all the time, proposing postulates and thought experiments, and then trying to rationalize them with the assumptions about the real world, often, with no reference to actual neuroscience.

Krauss et al's statements on philosophy are simply that when you build a particle accelerator, walk into a lab, or start working out mathematical theories, you don't start with philosophy of science. That's a backwards rationalization of how science is done, constructing it's underpinnings/justification after the fact. Most scientists who conducted experiments and proposed hypotheses throughout history did not start by first making sure what they were doing aligned with the Philosophy of Science. And indeed, children conduct scientific investigations all the time blissfully unaware of the philosophical underpinnings justifying it.

I'll go one further and say that the idea that you never need to do "what if" theories, but merely explore the existing ones to their ends, can lead to local optima. It is certainly possible you will run into the limits of the conceptual underpinning of the theory in which no iterative refinement can fix it in a way that leads to superior understanding.

Philosophy is useful, in the same way that logic and mathematics are useful, to explore formal systems, especially when the real world experiments are impossible or unethical to conduct. But the limits of philosophy are also born out in the assumptions used -- e.g. arguments about free will or consciousness, debates are artificial definitions that do not measurably or provably reflect the real nature of real things.

Perhaps a better commentary here: [http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/accommoda...](http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/accommodationism- from-a-physicist/)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure you're on solid ground assuming that there is a "real nature of real things" beyond known time and space and sub-light speeds. As a passage in a recent piece I read on Schopenhauer pointed out:

            Thus, for  anything  to be empirically  real, it
            must  be spatial, temporal, and causal.  Yet  space,
            time,  and  causality   cannot   be  proven   to  be
            empirically  real themselves! If space is thought of
            as an empirical entity, the insoluble problem arises
            whether it is finite or infinite. In the first case,
            there would have to be something 'outside'  space, a
            metaspace, which  is an absurd  notion;  but  in the
            second  case  it could  never  be differentiated  of
            anything  and would therefore  have no identity.  If
            time  is finite, there  would  have  to be something
            'before' and 'after' it, which again is absurd;  but
            if  it is infinite, it would  take  an  eternity  to
            arrive at the present moment, which therefore  could
            never come about.  Finite causality would enhance an
            unimaginable  'first  cause'  of all  events  in the
            universe, while  infinite  causality  poses, mutatis
            mutandis, the same problem as infinite time.

Given that the very foundations of causal logic (cause --> event) assume our ability to differentiate in time and space, it does seem as if the most interesting aspects of physics are operating in areas where open-mindedness helps.

<comment><USER5> Wow, this Schopenhauer quote is really painful to read. Given basic contemporary abstract thinking, it reads as completely naive.

This is not unique; I often feel this way when reading philosophy.

So I kind of understand where Hawking / Tyson / et al are coming from. I do think it is a mistake to single-handedly dismiss all of philosophy, and I agree with the sentiment in this article that physicists are following an implicit philosophy that they do not understand, so there's a contradiction there. At the same time, most philosophy is honestly pretty bad.

<comment> why-el That quote is anything but naive. Its basically a rephrasing of the findings of Kurl Godel, and I am not sure anyone would call that naive.

<comment><USER5> Which findings of Kurt Godel? Care to explain? Because for example this seems like it has nothing to do with the incompleteness theorems unless one doesn't understand the incompleteness theorems at all and is just hand-waving.

<comment> why-el No one is hand-waving.

"Yet space, time, and causality cannot be proven to be empirically real themselves". This is akin to mathematical axioms that escape proof within a formal system. Of course one can debate whether the analogy applies for space and time as it does in arithmetic, but this is beside the point. My point was that Schopenhauer's quote was not even remotely close to being naive, especially considering _when_ it was said (i.e. years before Godel and others proved similar conclusions).

<comment><USER6> You can use Godel's proof to show that a physics model based on space, time and causality can not exmplain those. And that if there is one that explains those, it must be based on some other set of concepts, that it can not explain.

Yet, realism is in a completely different level. You can not reason about it using mathematical constructs. (Too bad that's the only tool we have.)

<comment><USER7> Can you really? Incompleteness doesn't necessarily say this. It makes certain statements about certain types of contradictions in certain types of systems. There is still a lot of work left to be done before you can apply it here.

You may be saying this has already been done elsewhere but without references u can't just throw this out there as a given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> OK, "Critical views of science in the news" is probably a useful avenue of "hard looking" and quality control for science. But I think it behooves us to be a little more critical in our choice of critics.

This struck me when the author, in his introduction, mentioned a previous Q&A with telepathy proponent Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake only gets a brief mention in this piece as a critic of science, and I hasten to add that I don't have any beef with the article from that point on.

For anyone who doesn't know, Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect, yet in spite of a dearth of convincing, published results, in spite of a global failure to replicate his results, he keeps badgering science to take him seriously. Having been met with apathy and mild derision, he now blames science on his failure to be taken seriously.

So yes, Sheldrake is a "science critic." So are many of the purveyors of homeopathy, of miracle cancer cures, of coffee enemas, of dowsing and of Intelligent Design. Science is empirical, and people without evidence like to call this a shortcoming of science.

So my question is: how much debunking, how much finger pointing and pantsless emperors is required before we can in good conscience exclude certain groups of people from discussions about the philosophy of science? Those discussions are important, no doubt - and this is why I think we should be wary of allowing them to be bogged down by the contributions of frauds and crackpots.

<comment><USER9> > Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is > real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of > inconclusive results you'd expect.

Do you have a reference? The dog experiment seems statistically significant ([http://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/a-dog- that-s...](http://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/a-dog-that-seems- to-know-when-his-owner-is-coming-home-videotaped-experiments-and- observations), shows ANOVA, F-value (df 2,22)=20.46; p<0.0001). ). What _exactly_ about that experiment is inconclusive?

Note that I'm not saying telepathy exists. I'm discussing an experiment for which I have no sensible explanation. Is there some data/papers/methods I'm missing?

<comment><USER8> I am the one missing papers. Why didn't Sheldrake get this published under peer review? I don't feel qualified to judge his setup or analysis, so it would be that much more interesting to read about reactions from scientists who are.

By the rules of the game, if he's not participating in this exercise he's not doing science.

<comment><USER9> The paper _was_ published under peer review. [http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_14_2_sheldr...](http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_14_2_sheldrake.pdf)

If you look at the editorial board in [http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/](http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/) there are PhDs from a lot of prestigious institutions (Princeton, Sorbone, John Hopkins, Cornell) which of course is no warranty or rigor, but it may be an indication. The submission conditions show that the papers are peer- reviewed ([http://www.scientificexploration.org/documents/instructions_...](http://www.scientificexploration.org/documents/instructions_for_authors.pdf)).

> I don't feel qualified to judge his setup or analysis

then we should suspend our judgement about the validity of the results, not discredit them by principle.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for pointing out that this paper of Sheldrake's was indeed peer reviewed. That paper also mentions that three independent scientists were invited to attempt to replicate Sheldrake's work.

In this paper by one of those scientists [http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/psychicdogreply.pdf](http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/psychicdogreply.pdf) one of the scientists (Wiseman) reports that they were in fact not able to confirm Sheldrake's findings, that Sheldrake had criticized their criteria for measurement _after_ they had led to failure, and badgered them into arbitrarily establishing other criteria for success.

Wiseman also complains that he and his colleagues were badly misrepresented in Sheldrake's paper, and that Sheldrake tried to present excuses for the failed trials.

This post hoc selection of evaluation criteria is one way in which crackpots massage experimental data to substantiate their claims. Honest scientists usually do their best to avoid it.

In conclusion, in the one instance where an attempt was made to verify Sheldrake's strongest results, he was seen to be acting in a manner suspiciously characteristic of trying to introduce a bias in the direction he preferred.

Even if he isn't intentionally dishonest, this man is almost certainly a crackpot.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reference. I was unaware of Wiseman's replication. Here is Wiseman's peer reviewed paper, [http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/petsBJP.pdf](http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/petsBJP.pdf) with most of the data at the end. Some data is missing like the time of departure, which could reveal other correlations. However, I would say, that with the information available in that paper it seems pretty random and doesn't suggest any unexplained phenomenon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is this "recent bashing by Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson"?

<comment><USER11> Stephen Hawking: _Philosophy is dead._

Lawrence Krauss: _Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers._

Neil Tyson DeGrasse: _Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I've missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn't even exist in any important way back then. So, I'm disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It's not that there can't be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them._

<comment><USER12> >Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences

I think what changed was physics became much harder to understand. Pre Einstein it was fairly easy for someone without much physics training to grasp Newtonian stuff. With the advent of general relativity and quantum mechanics it became hard to understand without years of study of physics which most philosophers do not have which led to their work being not very useful to the physicists. However philosophical insights by people who do understand the physics can be good in my opinion.

Feynman seemed good, for example. Simple stuff

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_wh...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_why_questions/)

a bit more subtle, philosophical at the beginning:

[http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_28.html](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_28.html)

Feynman and philosophy:

[https://philosophynow.org/issues/59/Richard_Feynman_Accident...](https://philosophynow.org/issues/59/Richard_Feynman_Accidental_Philosopher)

<comment><USER13> And on that point, there are philosophers who do get the physics, and who are making material contributions. However they are significantly marginalized by their predecessors and often must directly compete with those who do not understand that physics for grant money, university resources and students. They are an unheard minority, quite unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _You see: the scientists that talk philosophy down are simply superficial: > they have a philosophy (usually some ill-digested mixture of Popper and > Kuhn) and think that this is the "true" philosophy, and do not realize that > this has limitations._

So true.

<comment><USER15> Hardly. What definition of "philosophy" is in use here? It sounds like he just means "beliefs" which, of course, everyone has. If "philosophy" means ideas that do not need facts, reason, or testability then it is just nonsense. Philosophy that requires these qualities is called "science."

<comment><USER16> > If "philosophy" means ideas that do not need facts, reason, or testability > then it is just nonsense.

That's philosophy's territory, now that we have science. Philosophers don't have to, and feel no need to, reality-test their speculations. And I see I may be reflecting your views on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really liked this article. The author gave real substantive answers to almost all the questions.

I would have liked to have more detail on his critique of the "guess and check" approach to science. My own opinion is that there is a very good reason why scientific progress follows the pattern he describes, of new theories being based on either new experiments, or in depth analysis of existing theories.

The reason is that science relies on belief in objective reality, and yet we don't know what objective reality is. So in order to reason about what the universe _really_ is, the best and only starting point is our current model(s) of physics.

The moment we make an assumption about what reality is that isn't based in physical theory, we are liable to be wrong. For example, Newton was criticized for his theory of gravity, because people _knew_ that reality was composed of little machine-like objects, interacting at a microscopic scale. There was no room in this worldview for Newton's "occult" force of gravity which acted at a distance.

</comment><comment><USER18> I studied physics at the University of Maryland, one of the better (top 20) physics programs in the US. I was surprised at how often questions were answered with "that's for the philosophers to think about."

Granted, there's a lot of material to cover, I don't think that's an appropriate response–especially when delivered with contempt, as it typically was.

<comment><USER19> What are some examples of the questions that got this answer?

<comment><USER20> "So wait, if QM says you can be everywhere at once, are you?"

"If GR means all the laws are related to the reference frame, does that mean all the things in it are relative too, like religion?"

"What if Dark matter really is more than just stuff that falls down. What if there are intelligent clouds there? What are their ethics like?"

"No but really, what is the definition of life?"

"Ok, so fetal stem cells, but what if we took a blood sem cell and then back tracked that into a fetal one. Is that wrong?"

All of these can take the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' given to undergrads. The Copenhagen Interpretation states: Shut up and calculate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of a quote by Richard Feynman:

 _Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds_

<comment><USER22> Kind of a bad quote. Ornithology would be useful to birds if they could understand it.

<comment><USER23> primary example of birds benefiting from ornithology :)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/06/vladimir- putin-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/06/vladimir-putin-cranes- hang-glider)

If only some philosopher of science could lead the scientists the same way ( to the former USSR citizens - "poruchik, molchat!" :)</comment></comment></comment>


Études for Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000726 <comment><USER2> Looks nice, but I think there are already some good introductions to Erlang. I wish there were more things like this: [http://www.erlang-in- anger.com/](http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/)

<comment><USER3> > I think there are already some good introductions to Erlang.

An Études is a particulary hard composition, not an introduction. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude)

<comment><USER2> I'm looking at the ToC. It doesn't even get into OTP until the last chapter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Took me a second to figure out that this wasn't a tutorial in itself, but meant as a companion to another erlang book or class, specifically Simon St. Laurent's Introducing Erlang.

From the author:

"As I continued writing my own examples, I thought they might be useful to other people as well. I contacted Simon St. Laurent, the author of Introducing Erlang, and he liked the idea of having these companion exercises and suggested naming them études"

<comment><USER5> Étude is a musical term: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude)</comment></comment>


Venezuela offers asylum to Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/06/us-usa-security-venezuela-idUSBRE96500420130706 <comment><USER2> I'm a little shocked that even here on Hacker News, most of the top-level comments fell for the headline, rather than focusing the attention back where it belongs: _the reason why Snowden needs asylum in the first place_.

Enough of this drama. Snowden has served his purpose in revealing the extend of the NSA shenanigans, but we really shouldn't have to read about his every move.

This Reuters news release does not even mention the nature of the leaks that put Mr. Snowden in this situation. It's truly a sad state of reporting and public discourse.

Edit: taking a bit of my own advice:

We need to stop the NSA snooping all of our communications and restore due process for searches and seizures!

<comment><USER3> CNN, and many other liberal "news sources" whose primary charter is to support the Obama administration can be blamed for most of this. They were minimizing the importance of the scandal, relegating those who were upset over it to the tinfoil hat club, and focusing on smearing Snowden personally from Day 1. This just shows that they have been successful in their endeavor.

<comment><USER4> Give us a break.

The reason why ALL the news sources (liberal and otherwise) covered this is because it is newsworthy. It's human nature to want to put a face to a scandal. And to be honest it's a great face. Snowden is young, exciting, mysterious, less than perfect. Add the fact that he is jetsetting around the world, visiting exciting countries with great visuals, upsetting foreign leaders and creating lots of mini scandals just keeps his story rolling.

CNN especially is just a business. And Snowden is a money maker. No conspiracy needed to work this one out.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't change the fact that their coverage has been incredibly friendly to the Obama administration, while being very critical of Snowden. That's called bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assuming Venezuela provides Snowden with some sort of travel document to leave Russia, the next big question is, how far is the US willing to go to apprehend him? How exactly is Snowden going to get a flight plan that allows him safe passage to Venezuela.

Obama previously said 'he's not scrambling jets' to catch him, but given this week's events I don't believe him. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the US went after his flight somehow. It seems like this administration is willing to be the international villain in their attempts to catch Snowden.

And maybe the CIA wouldn't dare forcibly take Snowden out of Russia or China, but who's to say they wouldn't do so to a smaller, less powerful country?

<comment><USER6> From my outside-the-US perspective, I've got this cynical theory developing - the this "international drama" the US government is fueling is much less about Snowden, and much more about measuring just how much they can get away with in full public view - relyng on bread and circuses to keep the voting public distracted. I suspect "they" know that Snowden has almost certainly distributed all the documents in a way that means that catching and imprisoning him won't stop their release (and may well accelerate their release), and that this is all just a power play demonstratingthat "the rules" are for other people, not The US Governemnt.

<comment><USER7> It feels as though they got their answer about how the International diplomatic community may respond: it seems they crossed a line with the Latin American governments, and US influence in the region is already taking hits. First Equador renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act, then the timing of this feels coupled to the Bolivian plane overreach (in stark contrast to Obama's "29 yo kid" dismissal). Perhaps it's unlikely to last, but for the moment we seem to be seeing this bloc standing together, motivated by the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in Venezuela. It is routine here that politicians air private conversations, by telephone, or even recorded inside houses. Until a few weeks there was even a TV program, sponsored by the government, that now and then aired private conversations by opposition leaders, for political benefits of course.

I really don't know if Snowden knows that, but it would be really ironic if he accepted the proposal.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why people are trying to hold him to some kind of saintly standard.

He wanted to do what he could to expose what he believed to be wrongdoing. And now he simply wants to avoid prison if possible, like pretty much anyone else would. There's no nobility in throwing away his lifetime in an American jail -- he's already exposed the NSA's programs, and prison accomplishes nothing more.

Sure, it's easy to call him a hypocrite for applying for asylum in countries "less free" than the US. But as long as "free" countries allow themselves to be pressured by the US, what choice does he have? Would you do anything different in his shoes?

<comment><USER10> Well spoken. Venezuela may not be the freest nation on earth, but I'm glad there's a few places around that stand up to US government bullying.

I say this as an American who will pledge allegiance to the US Constitution any day of the week, but not to the US government, especially not in its current form. I'm genuinely scared at how far my government has gone in persecuting lawful, nonviolent protesters and activists. Just look at the Aaron Swartz case, the harassment of Jacob Appelbaum at the border, or police actions during the Occupy protests (less related to hacker culture but just as important).

I can no longer believe that those who stay within the law have nothing to fear from the US government. This may not be true of the Venezuelan government either, but the fact that they don't let USG boss them around means at least there are options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The most concerning part of this article are the comments which to me feel like they have been paid for.

Take this for example:

'Snidely70448 Snowden STOLE 3 NSA computers with top secret classified government documents in violation of his employment agreement with Booz Allen, theft alone is a basic crime and when the theft involves top secret government documents it's in violation of the Espionage Act. Flight to avoid prosecution is also a crime in this country. These laws weren't written yesterday just for Mr. Snowden. The U.S. is seeking Edward Snowden to answer to those charges. Plain and simple. He isn't being singled out or vilified. You claim that NSA is violating the 4th Amendment (Congress and the Patriot Act disagree with you), yet you ignore that Snowden violated basic laws of the land.'

<comment><USER12> That seems like a pretty sane comment. Is there something factual in it with which you disagree, or are you simply surprised at the existence of opinions other than your own?

<comment><USER13> I don't buy into the shill argument, I actually think it is dangerous to write off an opinion that seems to be shared with around half the US population. Instead of dismissing the argument I think supporters of his actions need to argue and reason the case clearly.

That said the problem with the comments are:

* Violation of an employment agreement are not federal crimes * Theft of classified documents is not a violation of the Espionage Act. The reason why the espionage act is from 1917 is because government lawyers love the broad language in it. They haven't needed to update it because it can be applied so broadly, but the language of the law states that there needs to be an intent to aid the enemy or to prevent the US Military from carrying out operations.

The other red flag that indicated that Snowden hasn't violated 'basic laws' is that the USA is resorting to diplomatic pressure rather than an INTERPOL notice. You can't use INTERPOL for political charges but you can use it for more classic charges like theft.

There is a good reason why the 4th amendment was written, it was a lesson learned form British colonialism where independence oriented towns and villages were surrounded and houses were searched indiscriminately to shake out sympathizers opposed to the crown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nicaragua is thinking about that as well: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/06/edward- snowden-v...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/06/edward-snowden- venezuela-asylum)

</comment><comment><USER15> Assuming he makes it down there, who is up for visiting sometime? I've never been to Venezuela -- Angel Falls is really the only tourist thing which interests me there.

<comment><USER16> I would not mind spending some time on the beaches and doing a little fishing. You buy my ticket and we can have a HN meetup.

<comment><USER17> Ditto.

<comment><USER18> Now, all we have to do is charter a bus and go on a road trip. But unfortunately christoph, you are out. Only 3&4 letter nicks may board the bus ;)

<comment><USER16> I think you missed part of my message, _rdl has to charter the bus._

<comment><USER15> My hope was Snowden would pick a neutral or slightly decent place for asylum and exile, and it would maybe turn into the new US (i.e. "free place where people go to avoid oppression"), and maybe a startup hub for security (Berlin would be a top choice for that...) A protracted court case for extradition in Hong Kong would have been awesome for that, except for the high cost of housing.

But Venezuela is really not a place I'd consider. It's not Equatorial Guinea, but isn't even Argentina.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's rich.[1]

[1]: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/10/04/AR2009100402866.html)

<comment><USER20> why? the usa offers asylum to people yet has the largest fraction of the population imprisoned in the world. _and_ guantanamo. _and_ the death penalty.

why raise the standards for other countries?

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

(don't get me wrong - venezuela has serious problems. but cherry picking examples for one country is no argument at all. people in glass houses....

also, wouldn't it make the world a worst place if we required the country offering asylum to be "better" than the country persecuting someone? that seems pointless, except for internet point-scoring)

[edited multiple times btw]

<comment><USER19> Sure, I'll agree that Guantanamo's a stain on this country.

And while we have entirely too many prisoners in this country, they aren't 'political prisoners'. People aren't thrown into prison for protesting the government. (Or not generally, you _did_ have McCarthyism and such in the past)

<comment> k-mcgrady And your response to the death penalty?

<comment><USER21> The death penalty is a state by state issue. Some have it as an option, others have abolished it as an option.

<comment><USER22> The death penalty is not simply a state-by-state issue.

Besides the existence of a federal and military death penalty, the federal court system, including the US Supreme Court, deals with Constitutional issues related to the death penalty in states constantly, and has imposed various restrictions on its usage. SCOTUS has also been on an excruciatingly slow but clear path towards total nationwide abolishment.

There is very little in the US that can be treated as purely state-by-state, and so long as the 8th and 14th amendments exist, capital punishment definitely isn't one of them.

<comment><USER21> I think you're being overly technical here.

It's like saying State Insurance isn't a simple state issue because there could be intervention by the feds. Of course, but de-facto, it's a state issue and the Feds have their own purview for things like the military and treason, etc.

But, if a state wanted to eliminate it, they could, so long as their legislature or judiciary so decided. So it is a state by state issue, by and large.

[PS] I think allowing things to be done state by state actually help in the end to get the whole nation to agree on things which as a whole it might not without states or a state 'testing the waters' as it were. Eventually I see all states eliminating capital punishment, and I think being able to refer to states that have and show that it has not resulted in higher murder rates post elimination is a good thing. Same for pot laws and same sex marriage laws. In this big republic, given that we're not a strictly civil law, I think this bit by bit helps out, in the long run.

<comment><USER22> No, you're missing the point. The nation as a whole permits the death penalty to continue, even if some political subdivisions choose not to impose it themselves.

The idea of 50 sovereign states doing their own thing is merely a convenient fiction for those who don't want the murders conducted in their name to bother their conscience.

And it falls apart completely when you remember, the federal government sentences people to death, too, not just states. America conducts state- sponsored murder. Not even the 50-state fiction shields anyone from that reality.

Edit Re PS: Speaking of being technical... You're focusing on the mechanisms. I'm very familiar with the mechanisms, and I don't care about them. I care about the result. The result is we remain one of forty countries, almost all of which we hypocritically lambast for their human rights records, to retain the death penalty. No amount of procedural justification will change that, nor will it reduce our moral responsibility.

<comment><USER19> The federal government does still utilize the death penalty, but it's very rare these days. Only three times since 1963, whereas Texas has executed 500 people since 1982.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the video you can see Maduro, Venezuela's President, making the official decision public. Of course, it's still to be seen if Snowden decides to go there, and how\when is he going to do it.

<comment><USER22> Depends on how much money Venezuela is willing to spend on it, and how much Russia is willing to cooperate.

I just plotted a path from Moscow to Venezuela that avoids non- Russian/Venezuelan airspace. It's less than 12,000km. Several modern Boeing and Airbus planes can do that non-stop.

<comment><USER23> Can you post this path ?

<comment><USER24> A great circle route from Murmansk to Caracas just touches the northern parts of Finland and Norway, and crosses Iceland. It's 9,300km long, so you should be able to modify that route to skirt those countries and stay under the 12,000km given.

[http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=MMK- CCS&MS=wls2&DU=km](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=MMK-CCS&MS=wls2&DU=km)

<comment><USER23> Finland and Norway might do a France/Portugal...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing I don't understand is why Mr. Snowden did not remain anonymous when he leaked his information? Wouldn't that have given him more options for avoiding reprisal? Or did he reveal his identity to protect himself?

<comment><USER26> He said in the original interview with Greenwald that he felt that since he was breaking the law, he owed it to Americans to explain why. The way he's done it, he's the very definition of a whistleblower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Heh, quite stylish that Maduro mentioned the US/Israel's proxy war in Syria in the same breath. Interestingly, pre-conflict Syrian relations were discussed pointedly by Assange with Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, in his _The World Tomorrow_ interview: [https://assange.rt.com/nasrallah-episode- one/](https://assange.rt.com/nasrallah-episode-one/) Dig the beard.

</comment><comment><USER28> > "Who is the guilty one? A young man ... who denounces war plans, or the U.S. > government which launches bombs and arms the terrorist Syrian opposition > against the people and legitimate President Bashar al-Assad?" he asked, to > applause and cheers from ranks of military officers at the parade.

I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity.

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn Going with Iceland kind of seems like a no-brainer. He initially went to Hong Kong, which has a much lower incident of Government corruption than even the US (forgot the link, saw this mentioned in an article). I'm guessing that Venezuela is not going to score very high on that list compared to Iceland. In addition, as others have mentioned, it becomes much more political, as there is an "enemy"/animosity vibe between us and some Latin American countries, whereas there is not with Iceland.

It would end up being kind of ironic and sad if he had to live in a country that ended up being just as corrupt and used this level of spying on its own citizens. Pretty confident that Iceland would not be pulling crap like that.

<comment><USER29> Except that Iceland isn't even close to offering him asylum.

"The proposal to grant Snowden citizenship received limited support when it was discussed Thursday — the last day before summer recess. Six members of minority parties were in favor out of Parliament's 63 members." [http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/07/05/nsa-snowden- ic...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/07/05/nsa-snowden-iceland.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm sure he's relieved to hear he's able to go to Venezuela.

</comment><comment><USER31> Here is the president's video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILfbj7m6CI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILfbj7m6CI)

</comment><comment><USER32> Assuming he were to fly commercial. What way can he get from SVO to Caracas (CCS)? Like what's a possible route whereby he isn't flying over france/italy/spain which have supposedly not allowed him to fly over their airspace? Is a jet chartered for him? Does a G4 have the range? Where does it need to stop to refuel?

</comment><comment><USER33> Venezuela has great beaches and lovely ladies, can't ask for much more.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was actually fearing that Argentina would volunteer for this. I appreciate that they got the jump on us in this case. I dont think we(Argentina) should meddle on this one.

<comment><USER35> There was no risk of that, Argentina has too much to lose.

<comment><USER34> I wouldnt be so sure. The Gov needs more help from Venezuela than from the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Who cares? Let's go back to the NSA.

</comment><comment><USER37> Make sure to use Ghostery when visiting this website. Ghostery claims to have 18! trackers found there.

<comment><USER38> How can I trust that Ghostery is legit??

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Would he even be able to leave Moscow without a passport?

<comment><USER40> Yes, Venezuela can issue a travel document like the one Snowden used from Ecuador to get to Moscow from Hong Kong.

<comment><USER41> If he was handed travel documents by Ecuador why is he stuck on a Russian airport? I assumed he did travel under his own password wich was still valid when he left Hong Kong.

<comment><USER40> I think Ecuador issued a document and was studying to offer asylum, then backed off under US pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> that's great! next step: get to venezuela.</comment>


Simple P&L plan modeller from your unit economics model - <AUTHOR> https://uecalc.com <comment><AUTHOR> Automatic P&L plan making from unit-economics in cohorts. Converting cohort unit-economics representation to month by month in P&L.</comment>


Apple asked widow for court order when she sought late husband's password - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/01/apple-asked-widow-for-court-order-when-she-sought-late-husbands-password/ <comment><USER2> Sadly, I just went through this when my father passed away and was trying to help out my mother. People are horrible to surviving spouses during a very trying time. From the burial site trying to rip her off, "Oh, I'm sorry that grave site you pre-paid for is no longer available, here is a similar one for an extra $800" to Visa suddenly cancelling all their joint credit cards and leaving her with no $$ when she called them and tried to put the cards in just her name. They immediately cancelled all the cards and told her she would have to reapply! And they had like 80k of coverage, zero balance and excellent credit. She was having to pay for all the funeral expenses up front which were around 12k.

The whole process was horrible. She was a wreck and would just say "yes" to whatever. I ended up taking 3 weeks off work, flying out to stay with her and helping her get through all the paperwork issues. Not a fun time. And my dad was an organized guy who THOUGHT he had taken care of everything up front for her. It was still a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unbelievable to me that this didn't get picked up on front page of HN.</comment>


LibGDX – cross-platform game development framework - <AUTHOR> http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/

<comment><USER2> Right now LibGDX's HTML5 exporting is a joke. It might be good if they warned people about that before they spent the time to learn everything it takes just to get stuff to work... only to figure out it's a mess.</comment>


Why Millennials Are Ditching Tinder to Hook Up on Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://mic.com/articles/124581/why-millennials-are-ditching-tinder-to-hook-up-on-reddit <comment><USER2> About this article, I say oh jeez.</comment>


My first website - <AUTHOR> http://www.esan.komudesign.com Hi, nothing really big except that this newbie has created his first website.
Notice a lost pixel? you can hit me up at email@example.com <comment><USER2> Looks good for a first website. If you are planning on offering professional services, you might want to look into more "professional" looking wordpress themes. I would also create a simple logo and include actual pictures of the management team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks pghimire, i thought it was a stupid idea to post it here but comments like yours helped. I will add the management teams photos-those over there were just place holders. Do you know how i can improve my pagerank? Thanks</comment></comment>


10 great Web site designs/redesigns of 2007 - <AUTHOR> http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9835960-2.html <comment><USER2> Picnik is a really nice looking website... Some good ones for inspiration there... Thanks jobenjo

P.S. - jobenjo, are you involved with Fluther.com?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're very proud to see Fluther.com in such excellent company.</comment>


RIAA Slams Google's Anti-Piracy Efforts, Demands Even More Unreasonable Measures - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/riaa_slams_googles_anti-piracy_efforts_demands_eve.php#.TvIj_bnnce0.hackernews <comment><USER2> It's hard to imagine a more self-entitled group of complainers than the RIAA.

I have valuable stuff in my house; it is _my job_ to protect what I own. If I feel the items are extremely valuable, I should be prepared to personally pay substantial amounts to keep them safe. So I buy insurance, door locks, whatever. And for the betterment of society, we all pay taxes so that firemen can do their jobs and give us general protection of all property.

What money has the RIAA paid to keep things safe? Their only contribution so far seems to be raising the blood pressure of everyone else. Lawsuits count as raising blood pressure.

The RIAA has the audacity to complain that Google spent "only" 60 million protecting things? Is Google a security company that advertises protection services? Even if it was, shouldn't the RIAA be footing the bill? If you want 200 million dollars worth of protection instead of 60 million, RIAA, then why don't you pay Google 200 million?</comment>


Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-global-media-dominance-propaganda-xi-jinping <comment> jim-jim-jim This is a kinda controversial stance, but I think foreign propaganda has some utility. I don't trust Chinese or Russian state media to report on internal Chinese/Russian affairs honestly, but they can provide a worthwhile counter narrative to the West on certain international issues. RT has also given platforms to dissident voices within the US (for completely cynical reasons of course).

You just have to approach it all critically.

<comment><USER2> One thing to keep in mind, as biased as it can be the media in the West is based on a journalistic tradition that lets it operate free from government interference. The media in authoritarian countries like China and Russia has no such tradition and has, from inception, existed to advance the government's positions. This does not mean the West is free from bias but no one really is.

So while Western journalistic outlets may be far from perfect, you have the opportunity with them to get less politically biased information. The best of them are actually quite good at providing factual, less biased information. The same is not true of China and Russia. One tradition offers more truthful and factual reporting than the other (which in reality offers nothing less than full on governmental propaganda... especially in the case of the Chinese media. They provide a counter narrative in the same way that the Saudis have provided a counter narrative to the Khashoggi murder).

<comment><USER3> Yes, if you had to choose between Western and other sources of journalism, you'd probably have a higher chance of getting reliable facts from Western sources. But there's no need to make that choice.

You can read a diverse selection of sources and compare their reporting to not only get a more accurate approximation of the truth, but also to notice what various sides focus on. The latter means that even if one side only publishes complete lies, the things they choose to lie about still tell you something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worth noting that the very same Guardian is running a propaganda campaign against Assange, despite them benefiting handsomely from WikiLeaks.

Just recently they published a story[1] that has yet to be verified by anyone else and seems completely made up at this point.

At the same time, they did not have problems with running ads for when MBS was visiting London.

1 - [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort- hel...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret- talks-with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy)

</comment><comment><USER5> First I want to say, great graphic on the article, with the RSS sails.

Related: A study by a leading U.S. defense think tank on intense, active warfare, on the part of China and Russia, in the political realm:

[https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering- comp...](https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering- comprehensive-coercion-competitive-strategies-against-authoritar)

 _The Chinese and Russian governments are currently waging political warfare against the United States and its allies. Although efforts to manipulate public opinion and political debate often receive less attention than armed interventions or military modernization programs, Beijing and Moscow are embarked upon campaigns to suppress dissent, discourage foreign narratives they oppose, generate support for policies they favor, keep their rivals distracted, and mitigate pushback against overt acts of aggression. To date, these efforts appear to be having success._

</comment><comment><USER6> Western propaganda is so subtle that it is sold through various channels: area studies in Universities; fellowships, stipends, travel grants, visiting professorships, etc. Produce so-called research papers, then quote each other and peddle further. Remember those professors at OxBridge working as spies.

<comment><USER7> Western? You already forgot about discussion of Chinese student groups at US universities?

If anything, Chinese propaganda is both subtle and obvious. Nothing wrong with that really. PR is part of the game for anybody. Just don't pretend they do it at lesser level or not as well than the West.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A clone of RT (Russia Today)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there space for one more web chat between IRC and Slack? - jampa-uchoa So I've created a chat for my social network startup, allowing people to create rooms and to talk inside the "communities", and I'm playing with the idea that it would be interesting to make it standalone.
I read news about people leaving IRC to Slack, Slack expressing no intentions to cater the new user base, and IRC being "left behind" because it's too "outdated" (their words, not mine).
Since I think people here are familiar with open source projects, some facing IRC -> Slack migration. I want to know what you guys think? What would make you use a new client? <comment><AUTHOR> I think that Slack and IRC occupy separate spaces. One is optimal for random strangers on the internet, meeting, talking, and departing ad hoc. The other is designed for collaborative teams with a low turnover rate.

I'm in favor of keeping OSS on IRC for now, unless something else feels that space.

</comment><comment><USER2> Link IRC to a well designed web UI and allow DCC. Done. (Mibbit was a step in the right direction, but no DCC and it got fucked over by spammers so many networks have outright banned it)

</comment><comment><USER3> Fragmentation sucks.

There are lots of chat tools, none talk to one another [1]

Best thing is to connect Slack to existing IRC networks/channels, if desired. [2]

[1] [http://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf](http://cdn.sameroom.io/chat- timeline.pdf)

[2] [https://sameroom.io/blog/connecting-a-channel-in-slack- to-a-...](https://sameroom.io/blog/connecting-a-channel-in-slack-to-a-channel- irc/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Ok , Its really great.</comment>


Haystack Is Now Sortfolio: A Trademark Issue - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2080-haystack-is-now-sortfolio

<comment><USER2> _"Over the next few weeks we traded a few emails back and forth. We didn't agree with their claim, but we didn't want to get into a protracted legal battle either. Any time you can avoid lawyers is a good time. They agreed."_

Nice to see that disputes can actually be solved without laywers.

<comment><USER3> > Nice to see that disputes can actually be solved without laywers.

Sort of - they solved the dispute without lawyers by capitulating. Usually you can avoid a legal fight by backing down and doing what the other side wants.

That said, still probably the correct course of action. They didn't have any real brand equity built up in Haystack, so moving on now means they don't run any risk of getting shut down later. More importantly, they've got a small team and no legal department, so making this not on the minds of their team is very valuable.

That said, Haystack was a very catchy name, and I don't dig on Sortfolio as much. Still a decent name and important to not run the risk and waste the brainpower of their team though. I like to think I'd have made the same decision, but I wonder if I'd have gone on an ego trip and gotten ready for war. Something for me to consider and meditate on, and seems like a pretty enlightened and safe call by the 37S team.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they capitulated as much as they just realised that prolonged battles in court don't add any value to customers. As you say, they didn't really have any brand equity in the name, and so didn't really lose that much.

<comment><USER3> > I don't think they capitulated as much as they just realised that prolonged > battles in court don't add any value to customers.

That's a very good point, you put it really well there. It's easy to get caught up in "are we the good guys?", "can we win the fight?", harder to ask - "What's best for our customers?" Insightful comment, I agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Haystack.com over the years and its various owners:

\- 1996: [http://web.archive.org/web/19961105183402/http://www.haystac...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961105183402/http://www.haystack.com/)

\- 2002 (redirect): <http://web.archive.org/web/20020802105208/www.nai.com/>

\- 2006: [http://web.archive.org/web/20060818061259/http://www.haystac...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060818061259/http://www.haystack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't realize 37signals had a service called Haystack. I assumed this post was about Facebook's Haystack photo storage system.

<comment><USER6> Also modular search for django - <http://haystacksearch.org/>

<comment><USER7> also a storage engine used internally at cnet for something called webshots: [http://martingreen.typepad.com/forward_looking_statement/200...](http://martingreen.typepad.com/forward_looking_statement/2006/06/more_on_haystac.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. I think the new name is actually a bit better, as it better represents the service's main feature which is sorting through thousands of designers.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, haystack, from the "needle in a haystack" may work well for native English speakers but expressions like that don't always translate well. Sortfolio will be much more clear to a global audience needing design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shouldn't a blog entry talking about how they have to do a bunch of promotion include a sentence about what Sortfolio is?

<comment><USER11> don't be lazy.

<comment><USER12> You could say the same to the article writer. Would it be that hard to write "Sortfolio, our website design portfolio search site, ..." so one knows if following the link is worthwhile?</comment></comment></comment>


Design Trend: Long Shadow Design - <AUTHOR> http://web3canvas.com/design-trend-long-shadow-design/

<comment><USER2> Wow, some of those icons look amazing. Unfortunately, many of them don't. I'm all for this long shadow trend, as long as it's not over done (just like flat design). I find the suitcase icons particularly unattractive.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Articles" like this make me embarrassed to call myself a designer.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I freelance in?  - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I just left my day job, and I'm now considering to be a freelancer. And my first question is: what should I freelance in?
- I know how to build and design websites (HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL, Javascript/jQuery)
- I know a lot about how to improve a website/app (UI/UX, conversion optimisation, funnels, AB testing, SEO, etc.)
- I know how to build HTML5 games, and make them run as native apps on iOS/Android
So, what should I focus on? Which one of these skills is in higher demand, and can get me more clients at a higher pay?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Have you ever had a client? If not then you should go with any of the above. Just prove to yourself you can get paid.

Regarding how to get a higher pay you've got to put yourself in the mind of a potential client. What do they value? Just clear communication? How much money will it cost them to use you and will your work for them return its value (ie - they paid you 10K but the investment made them 100K).

Feel free to ping me if you've got more questions.</comment>


Windows 10 Desktop: Physically building and photographing the logos (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop/ <comment><AUTHOR> The core concept of the post is that the default wallpaper on the windows 10 Desktop was physically built and then proto graphed.

> Our approach involved a live-action shoot using different variables and > customizations. Our core concept wanted to position the logo as a portal > into the world behind it. We customized and art directed each image to speak > to the timelessness of Windows, and its ability to take us anywhere we want > to go. We though the best way to achieve this is to build and shoot it > practically.

> So we built the actual Windows logos and brought them to life through our > use of inventive camera angles and evocative volumetric lighting. Using a 9k > Phase One Camera system, we shot multiple exposures of the Windows logo, and > combined those exposures in post to create a fantastic assemblage of > volumetric lighting. The aim was to create a huge variety of desktop images, > all of them real and practical, which in essence rendered the desktop image > timeless.

> The final result was an image what was vivid and tangible, like you could > reach into your screen and touch it. The advantage of doing this practically > is that we can literally shoot thousands of images, which meant once we had > our hero image, we kept shooting and got endless varieties out of each set- > up. We wanted to create a whole library of images that can be used > throughout multiple Windows applications.

The post also goes into detail on how they implemented all that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sourcing: I saw this (2015) article in a comment on another article today by tyingq

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675369)</comment>


Introversion Software: Coming Clean - <AUTHOR> http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=2512 <comment><USER2> I never understood why they didn't create Darwinia 2 and create more of the awesome gameplay that made them famous in the first place. The need to go on and do different things is what hurt them. I don't care to fight others, so Multiwinia didn't interest me at all. And DefCon... Cripes, they recreated a game that can't be 'won' from a movie 2 and a half decades old. Even Uplink was better than those 2.

And now they're working on 'their most ambitious project yet'... Do they ever learn?

Don't get me wrong. I'm hoping it's awesome. But in the meantime, they should produce some money off something they -know- is awesome. Darwinia+ was apparently supposed to do that, but re-releasing the same old thing on a console isn't quite the right approach. Releasing a sequel could have been.

<comment><USER3> I like Defcon a lot. Sure it can't be 'won' but that's not really the point. The point is you kill millions more humans than you're enemies. I find it a tough game to play well because there's so much going on. The wrong tactical decision can have serious repercussions.

From reading the Dev blog the other developer has been doing it actually sounds like their new ambitious game is something they'll release within their 1 year of life that's left.

I certainly hope they do because from what I can gather it's like uplink but more focused on breaking into buildings and social engineering people, which sounds awesome.</comment></comment>


The Potential Upside to a Technology Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/07/the-potential-upside-to-a-technology-bubble/

<comment><USER2> He's not really talking about a bubble but the aftermath of a burst bubble, which he really doesn't get to until the last section. And yes, there are lots of upsides to a bursting bubble. A lot of the unnecessary noise fades, advertising rates drop, valuations return to normal, and you weed out a lot of the people who are involved just for the money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to hear everyones thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good post Brandon.

imjk - Not sure Brandon chose the title. Usually the editors do that.</comment>


Compilers Are Databases [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48js0H6ooBY

<comment><USER2> I think we can go further :

\- every non-trivial software is a compiler

\- every non-trivial software is a database

Every non trivial software have to read/parse/manipulate/store a lot of data. I think it ultimately permit to simplify thinks to just admit that we are doing a specialized database/compiler. The fact that input data are coming from file, database, network, command line or the code itself and are going to files, database or network is just an implementation detail.

<comment><USER3> 'Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.' \- Greenspun;s tenth rule [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule)

<comment><USER2> The real failure of this law is that, even if you use Common Lisp (or every other language), to implement your software you will finally have an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp implemented in your software.

The solution is to design your software as a compiler from the start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I watched the first part of this, and this is apparently the inventor of Scala talking about the Scala compiler.

He was talking about how deep the transformation pipeline in scalac is, compared to javac.

I would say that something close to the opposite statement is justified: databases are interpreters, e.g. sqlite is certainly an interpreter with a storage layer.

I didn't watch enough of it to see why he thinks that compilers are databases. Where's the storage layer? I'm interested in compilers and databases, but TBH I am not that interested in Scala, so I stopped watching.

<comment><USER5> The storage isn't the important part. I think his point was more about _functional_ databases than your typical RDBMS in the sense that the experimental Scala compiler needed to model time (in terms of compiler passes and phases) in order to be able to answer "What is the value/type of this thing _at a given time_?". TBH, the talk was very little about Scala and mostly about compiler architecture.

<comment><USER4> What's an example of a "functional database"? Datomic? What's the most deployed functional database?

It's misleading to say that compilers are databases if they're not anything like databases people use and know. Probably a more accurate title would have been "Compilers are like functional databases".

Storage is obviously an important part of database architecture. If a compiler doesn't deal with storage, there's only so much resemblance that a compiler and a database can have.

<comment><USER6> I think "functional database" can be seen as a wider data pattern than just a datastore that exclusively implements that pattern. It's a design principle where a piece of data once created is never changed. That leads to event sourcing or Twitters "lambda architecture".

The compiler is a database in the sense that it has a memory across incremental invocations. So the 'storage' happens to be in memory but could be on disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those that care about language development on the JVM, the JVM Language Summit 2015 agenda (this is one of the talks) is here:

[http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/agenda.h...](http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/agenda.html)

And there is an You Tube playlist for the talks already

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX8CzqL3ArzUo2dtMurvp...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX8CzqL3ArzUo2dtMurvpUTAaujPMeuuU)

</comment><comment><USER8> Martin Odersky is a clever guy, there's no doubt about that. But, at the beginning of the talk he introduces the scala compiler as having 40 steps. And he says that translating from scala to the JVM is a translation from a complex input to a complex output. And now, Databases. So.. I just don't understand why he would even want to take on such a difficult task.

It strikes me that bringing functional programming to the JVM can / has been done simpler: Clojure being the obvious one, but F# on the CLR is another good template.

Third, Frege is a Haskell implementation for the JVM which to my mind is a much better long-term bet than Scala: it's already a tried-and-tested language, and the work involved in the translation has taken an order of magnitude less time.

It's all very well having some new great language on the JVM, but simplicity is a huge virtue if you want people to build an ecosystem around it.

<comment><USER9> > It strikes me that bringing functional programming to the JVM can / has been > done simpler: Clojure being the obvious one, but F# on the CLR is another > good template.

Scala's FP is more expressive than all of them, by a large margin. Additionally, Scala also supports an useful OO system, unlike for instance the stuff F#/OCaml/... ships.

> It's all very well having some new great language on the JVM, but simplicity > is a huge virtue if you want people to build an ecosystem around it.

You realize that Scala has probably the largest, and most meaningful ecosystem of all (non-Java) JVM languages, and is driving a lot of the changes in the Java and JVM space? (Reactive streams, value types, specialied generics, ...)

<comment><USER8> Really good points.

I expect you're right about the expressiveness, although I don't really know exactly what you mean by this. The "buffet of abstractions" available in Scala actually put me off it. For me, there are too many options available to expect to have readable, maintainable code at the end of it all, especially if you work in a team which regularly creates almost wilfully hard-to-comprehend java.

This video is 2 years old now, but I think it marked the point when I stopped investigating scala. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg&feature=youtube_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

<comment><USER9> While I agree with many points in the video, it feels kind of disheartening to me how many people just wave it around as if it could be used as an attack against the language and its community.

(A general observation, what you say here is totally fair.)

Of course the video is about Scala, but the problems mentioned are widespread throughout the industry.

What most of those people miss is the fact that Scala is sometime light years ahead of figuring out hard problems. The things considered to be an issue in Scala is often stuff that hasn't even been considered elsewhere.

The video is now 2 years old, and in terms of Scala, that's a lot of time. The strength of the language and the community is that it can adapt pretty fast, and many issues have been/are being addressed.

There are plenty of libraries out there which experiment with different approaches to collections, there is a new, faster and cleaner backend, the new compiler is shaping up nicely, the new IR will solve a lot of binary compatibility/cross compilation/Scala<->Scala.js issues, and scala.meta seems to become one of the best metaprogramming abstractions in languages.

Things are working really well in Scala, so if you have any question or concerns, feel free to voice them, and I'll give you my 2 cents about what's happening in that space! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess everything becomes a database if you work at Oracle long enough.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the part about the variance of the tree type. Couldn't he just use the unit/top type as a type parameter for untyped trees, rather than the nothing/bottom type? Not only does that seem more intuitively correct, but it would also give the right subtype relationship.

<comment><USER6> Well, some things do have the type unit or Any (top). How would you express that if that means 'not known' in your compiler?

<comment><USER11> I think I don't understand your question. My remark was about his type Tree[T] of syntax trees annotated with values of type T. For syntax trees annotated with types he uses Tree[Type], which makes sense. Then for untyped syntax trees (i.e. trees without any annotation) he uses Tree[Nothing]. Now he needs unsafe hacks to get the desired subtype relationship Tree[Type] <: Tree[Nothing]. The compiler understands that Tree is covariant, so he overrides this with an unsafe annotation to make Tree contravariant. Using Nothing rather than the top/unit type (not sure what that's called in Scala, Any?) is what doesn't make sense to me. Intuitively an un-annotated tree is a Tree annotated with values that carry no information, not a tree annotated with values of the uninhabited type. If you use that you also get the desired subtyping relationship Tree[Type] <: Tree[Top] without any need for unsafe annotations.

<comment><USER12> Yes, Tree[Top] would have been another way to model this. I wanted Tree[Nothing] to make clear that getting the type of an untyped Tree gives a Nothing, i.e. a run-time error. Getting a Top is not quite the same, but it is almost as good, since only a view things can be done with type Any in Scala.

EDIT: There's one thing I did not stress in the talk and that makes Nothing a more attractive choice than Top: We want to do copy on write on these trees. I.e. if we transform an untyped tree to a typed one using "withType", we want to be able to _reuse_ the untyped tree and just set the type (unless somebody else had already added another type). If the tree is of type Tree[Nothing], we can do that safely, even if there are still shared references to the same node as an untyped Tree. Getting the type of the shared untyped tree will give a Nothing, and nothing can be done with it. But if the type would be a Top, we would be able to apply some operations on it, so the copy on write would be unsafe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking at how often this compiler must allocate (and garbage collect), no wonder Scala compilers are slow.

</comment><comment><USER14> About to watch the video, In the past I've thought about trying to model llvm code inside datomic and doing transforms with the help of datalog queries.

<comment><USER11> People have done something like this for pointer analysis (statically determining to which memory locations a pointer can point, which is a prerequisite for many optimizations), e.g. [http://yanniss.github.io/doop- datalog2.0.pdf](http://yanniss.github.io/doop-datalog2.0.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never watch videos (what's wrong with you, post-literates? Forgot how to read and write?), so commenting on the title only.

Yes, compilers indeed have a lot in common with databases. Datalog (and therefore a relational algebra) is a very powerful tool for implementing compiler passes, for asking questions about the AST or various IRs.

EDIT: I'm talking about things like this: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/mcarbin/papers/aplas05.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/mcarbin/papers/aplas05.pdf)

<comment><USER16> It really sad Prolog/Datalog based languages never took off. Our industry has no problem embedding SQL strings and mini relational engines in our imperative programs. If you're going to encode your problems in terms of relations, why embed something something more expressive and powerful?

Good paper BTW, though I wish you hadn't prefaced the post by calling people post-literates. This paper deserves more reads.

<comment><USER15> Currently Prolog-derived languages are making a sort of a comeback - Kanren is widely used, just look at the number of ports and variations. My favourite recent example of cKanren used inside a compiler is Harlan [1] (see the region inference pass).

P.S. I'm really getting tired of the ever growing proportion of video vs. text in the otherwise valuable content. I'm genuinely interested in the topic but there is no way I can watch it. Dreaming of a service which would transcribe arbitrary videos for a tiny fee.

[1] [https://github.com/eholk/harlan](https://github.com/eholk/harlan)</comment></comment></comment>


When the News Reads You Back: Standing Up for Reader Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/when-the-news-reads-you-back-why-journalists-need-to-stand-up-for-reader-privacy-15e40bd2d120#.spwro6ich <comment><USER2> One of the primary reasons I use [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) \- I honestly had no clue how many things were tracking me on sites I frequented until I installed this plugin.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link, giving it a whirl now</comment></comment>


Show HN: dial-a-stranger - <AUTHOR>

Presenting my slightly odd spawnfest entry. Dial +1 (650) 763-8833 and you will be put on hold. As soon as there are two people on hold they will be linked together into a conference call. <comment><AUTHOR> Alternatively, send an sms to +1 (650) 763-8782 to talk to Eliza.</comment>


I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001063.html

<comment> daniel-cussen I draw the line between feedback and advice.

Advice is worthless, feedback is priceless. Advice is a user saying, "Holy sneakers, I just thought of the biggest idea for how you can make a social networking online publishing app!". Feedback is a user saying, "I keep clicking this and it doesn't work" or "does the site do x?". Big difference. Advice, even good advice, is easily come by.

Feedback is a whole nother animal. Feedback is the voice of the capitalism speaking through your users.

</comment><comment><USER2> "...but don't ignore them" is the point of the article.</comment>


Swift compiler crashes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/practicalswift/swift-compiler-crashes <comment><USER2> Maybe I could get on board with this if the compiler were open source. Why are people so enthusiastic to give hours away for free to commercial projects?

<comment><USER3> Because Swift will allow developers to build better apps on Apple's platforms. The quicker Apple polishes Swift, the quicker the entire ecosystem benefits.

Sure, open source is ideal but there are benefits to helping Apple or Microsoft, for example, improve their software.

<comment><USER4> >Because if I make the walled garden nicer, I'll live in a nicer walled garden!

That's actually what you just said. Keeping is closed source, and reporting bugs doesn't benefit the developer at all. It benefits Apple.

They may get the secondary effect of this becoming an employable skill, someday, hopefully. But currently isn't, it almost is, but isn't (Judging from the 4-5 swift posts I've seen on HN compared to dozens of js/java/ruby/etc.).

<comment><USER5> > You shouldn't report bugs you find in software you use on a daily basis. > Those bugs are best left unfixed

A curious attitude!

<comment><USER4> No you shouldn't report bugs in closed source software you use. Because it has no benefit for you, only for the company. Are you being paid to make their product better? If their product failed you, find a new tool, don't fix theirs.

Now this is an ideal. You can't live like this unless you're RMS. But it is true nonetheless.

If my car breaks I don't submit a 25 page engineering report to Ford. I replace the car, or fix the problem personally and move on. My job isn't to do somebody else's job, especially when that person is paid more then me.

<comment><USER6> Please never use my software.

> Because it has no benefit for you, only for the company.

Really?! Making a tool you use every day better has no benefit for you? Sure, I can build my own text editor if I really wanted to, but I'd rather send a bug report to BBEdit to fix a problem in an otherwise good product.

<comment><USER5> Yes, this is my attitude as well. A lot of the work I've done has required the use of proprietary tools; you might not be getting paid to improve the tool, but you are (presumably...) getting paid to produce a product, and if the tool is getting in your way somehow then you need to do something about it!

Even if you don't bother to report usability issues or suggest improvements or what have you, if you encounter a bug that's blocking progress, sitting on your hands isn't going to help anybody.

(Of course, reporting it might not do much either ;) - but that's something you need to find out on a vendor-by-vendor basis. Some are responsive.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As just another app developer, I would like to thank the contributors for volunteering their time to help us all out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Swift 1.2 was released in Xcode 6.3 beta today.

PracticalSwift tweeted this : [https://twitter.com/practicalswift/status/564919949995802624](https://twitter.com/practicalswift/status/564919949995802624)

"5043 crashes before Xcode 6.3 - 1314 crashes fixed (26 %) - 2896 crashes now marked as dupes (57 %) + 10 regressions (0 %) = 843 left (17 %)"

</comment><comment><USER9> It's very interesting project. It seems that many people are interested in Swift. I am still using Objective-C for my App Store apps to avoid those kinds of weird things.

</comment><comment><USER10> why don't people just fix the compiler instead? Oh wait...

Cool project though. I hope Apple takes notice.

<comment><USER11> Would you really want a frustrated hack from a sleep-deprived developer whose main job is _not_ building compilers?

I'd rather have a team of people paid to work on the issues full time handle the problems and build solutions, but maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER12> Just to be circumspect, Apple's main business isn't building compilers. Their business unit which does so appears to derive some of its mandate from management's aversion to copyleft licensing. The business case for the Swift compiler is not to be the best alternative in a diverse market place but to provide tooling better than objective-C for bespoke iOS and OSX development. It falls somewhere between an inhouse application and a product for the open market.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that. I am only extending the line of reasoning in the comment up an abstraction layer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there any good (not too ranty) posts on the state of the quality, usability, overall viability of the Swift compiler right now?

<comment><USER14> I've used Swift to make a basic keyboard framework[1] and I've found it to be extremely crashy and unstable, even in the latest versions. Also, certain Xcode features don't work in it (such as refactoring). Incredibly frustrating. With that said, I love the language, so it's almost worth the pain.

[1]: [https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation- keyboard](https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation-keyboard)</comment></comment>


Athena regional stability simulator: model political, economic, military actors - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AthenaModel/athena <comment><USER2> "Validation of the entire model is not feasible in the near future. The phenomena modeled are too poorly understood and too strongly interconnected. Even with the modest goal of merely "anticipating likely consequences", the best that can be hoped for is establishment of credibility." \-- from pg 16 of [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140000673.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Finally, the first step to an actually playable game of Eschaton _.

_ [http://www.outsideonline.com/1902196/eschaton-worlds-most- co...](http://www.outsideonline.com/1902196/eschaton-worlds-most-complicated- game)

</comment><comment><USER4> So tell us, ...is Brexit a Seldon crisis?

<comment><USER5> Or the solution to an incoming Seldon crisis in the EU...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was hoping there would be some examples showing how to use this in the README :(

<comment><USER7> The single open issue (a tortuously-phrased "write some docs") should make clear the amount of effort the authors have made & willingness to make this approachable to newcomers (zero).

<comment><USER8> The code is pretty readable. And there's a freaking 250-page User's Guide linked from the documentation. I really think they deserve a little more than some snarky dismissal. There aren't very many open source projects with that level of documentation.

It's not Sim City, but then again maybe they didn't set out to create something that provides insights to people who first came across their field of study five minutes earlier.

<comment><USER7> Are you referring to the 250 pages of reference docs? I didn't see a 'Getting Started' or 'Examples' or 'Guide' or 'Tutorial' section, and I stand by my assessment of their attitude to newcomers.

> _maybe they didn 't set out to create something that provides insights to > people who first came across their field of study five minutes earlier_

I wish people would stop submitting those kinds of links to HN. Also: I have an axe to grind (about terrible unapproachable documentation, academic or corporate or hobbyist).

<comment><USER9> _I wish people would stop submitting those kinds of links to HN._

Why would you want that?

Surely the point of HN is to read about things on the bleeding edge of what is possible. Sometimes that blood comes from being too ambitious and sometimes from missing docs. Either way, it seems a small price to pay.

<comment><USER10> I agree - it's brilliant to find out about real progress that hasn't been picked up in the mainstream, possibly because it's hard to consume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody use this?

I certainly hope not. Most of the research papers have been related to refactoring TCL code, rather than on any correspondence between the models and reality.

You don't need a computer model to tell you that people don't like when you bomb their neighborhoods, kill their friends, and threaten their access to food and water. You _definitely_ don't need a model to suggest that maybe if there are also some riots, people will like the outcome.

<comment><USER8> I don't quite understand the criticism... Yes, this is not (yet) a model that predicts the future. But when has "we're not there yet" ever been a good reason to stop?

Societies are comparable to the weather, in that they are dynamic systems highly susceptible to instability when simulated (-> chaos theory). That's why it took from the 60s until the mid-90s before weather prognosis consistently started to beat "it's going to be like today".

Societies are even more difficult, because the individual units of simulation are already quite chaotic: while the result of increased pressure on a fixed amount of air has been measured to whatever precision you could want, and has always followed a rather simple formula, doing the same with human behaviour is still far in the future.

But that doesn't mean such models are useless. Just think of the fight over the results of raising the minimum wage. Some people should initially lose their job. Others have more money. How are they spending that money? Does that spending create jobs? What's the effect on inflation? etc...

Having an agent-based model forces you to describe every assumption you're making, free of ambiguity. Maybe if we ask economists to build something like that, they'll at least grow an appreciation for what they don't yet know.

<comment><USER11> Certain models are inherently useless.

If you use a Taylor series to model a sine curve, you can get arbitrarily good results over an arbitrarily large range, yet the model will always fail catastrophically when the modeler wants to figure out the value that will give sin(x) = 2.

This seems like a system designed for the analyst who wants to make sin(x) = 2, and will blame the participants when reality doesn't match the model.</comment></comment></comment>


Why GitHub can't host the Linux kernel community - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kernel <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion 10 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14972872)</comment>


Forty Big Banks Test Blockchain-Based Bond Trading System - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/03/02/business/02reuters-banking-blockchain-bonds.html <comment><USER2> But how are the tokens distributed? Mining is really why bitcoin is revolutionary, not the blockchain. In fact, "blockchain" is not even mentioned in Satoshi's paper. So I don't understand all the hype around this term. Banks using their own blockchain simply means they have a data-structure that resembles blocks linked together similar to a linked list. What matters is _how_ the consensus is kept for the chain and that is done using PoW mining.

<comment><USER3> Eris Industries is built on Tendermint. Tendermint doesn't use PoW mining, but it can secure a distributed ledger.

[https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/wiki/Byzantine- Cons...](https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/wiki/Byzantine-Consensus- Algorithm)

There's a lot of great innovations in Bitcoin. One of the primary reasons why it's exciting, is that it's the first widely deployed BFT ledger. Tendermint uses a different BFT algorithm that doesn't use mining.

Raft and Paxos aren't BFT, btw. As of 2012 there still weren't good implementations of PBFT/BFT middleware. [http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~mema/publications/middleware-2012.pdf](http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~mema/publications/middleware-2012.pdf) . Tendermint is that middleware.

Here's a post on why Tendermint ledgers should be called blockchains:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847136)

A lot of people say that blockchains aren't blockchains without PoW. It's not surprising that people are saying this... there's been a ton of phony consensus algorithms that purport to not use PoW mining. Tendermint is different.

<comment><USER2> What exactly is BFT? Proof-of-stake doesn't reach consensus ([https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf)) and it's unclear what this Tendermint is using? Do you have any data to back your claims up?

<comment><USER3> A consensus algorithm is one that ensures that multiple independent actors come to agreement about anything. In a blockchain, multiple independent miners or validators need to come to agreement about which blocks have been committed.

A fault-tolerant consensus algorithm is a consensus algorithm that can tolerate failure of any nodes (e.g. miners or validators). By failure, I'm referring to fail-stop failures, where a miner or validator crashes or goes offline. The key metric for fault-tolerant consensus algorithms is the threshold for how many failures the system can tolerate. For example, Raft is a fault-tolerant consensus algorithm can tolerate up to 49.99% of node failures.

A Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm is a fault-tolerant consensus algorithm that can tolerate not just fail-stop failures, but arbitrary failures. For example, one or more nodes that get hacked by a malicious hacker might be coordinated to subvert consensus from within. Bitcoin is exciting because it can tolerate such attacks from within (e.g. any miner) to a significant degree. Tendermint is similar, except it doesn't require significant energy expenditure for its security.

Proof-of-Stake was a family of early consensus algorithms from cryptocurrency projects that don't use PoW mining. A lot of them are terrible and suffered from the "nothing at stake" problem. For a while, the Tendermint project had been using collateral bonds to ensure that there is actually "something at stake". But Tendermit is more general than that. You can have stake with collateral posted on-or-off-chain, or, you don't need to use collateral at all. It all depends on what you're trying to build.

If you want a standalone cryptocurrency blockchain, you'll want in-chain collateral with bond deposits. But different blockchains have different requirements, so posting collateral to put something at stake may not be one of them.

Personally I think we should just avoid the term "proof of stake".

See ErisIndustries using Tendermint for ErisDB: [https://github.com/eris- ltd/eris-db/blob/master/erisdb/serve...](https://github.com/eris-ltd/eris- db/blob/master/erisdb/serve.go)

Actually, we wrote the Ethereum virtual machine implementation that they're using. We're moving away from the EVM though, because the TMSP architecture allows for easier native-application development.

[http://github.com/tendermint/tmsp](http://github.com/tendermint/tmsp)

If you want proof on the security of the Tendermint consensus algorithm, it's in the Github wiki.

<comment><USER4> Is that a reference to the Illuminatus trilogy in the Eris name and Tendermint logo?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it's helpful to mentally replace "blockchain-based" with "experimental database" when reading these press releases (which is all this story is, really).

The first question I have is always "Oh? And why was your old database not working? And why do you think this one will work better?" Not a question answered by this article (and for good reason; of all the many issues currently facing bond trading, it's hard to see how a decentralised ledger solves _any_ of them).

<comment><USER6> Depends on the details.

Consider a Credit Default Swap: where you promise to pay the interest on a Bond in the case said Bond defaults. Currently, humans enforce this promise. If a bond defaults, some human notices (probably by telephone) and then they run to the bank and start writing checks.

But what if you wrote an Etherium contract to automatically enforce the agreement? And then the trust in the Etherium blockchain to enforce the contract allows you to tie real money transactions to the whole process? Look ma, no more humans!

<comment><USER5> Actual CDSs are quite a bit more complicated than that. They pay out in the case of very specifically defined credit events, and it's not uncommonly a difficult question to decide whether a credit event has occurred.

The current system requires 80% of the ISDA's Credit Derivatives Determinations Committees to vote that an event has occurred. You see to think a purely mechanical system would be better, but it's not obvious to me why this would be so. It would certainly be _different_.

> Look ma, no more humans!

Yes, but why is that good? Is the role of humans in the CDS process a problem? Why? A CDS is a contract between two parties; do you believe more automation in the process would benefit the seller, the buyer, both, or society at large? And how?

The main advantage of the blockchain would seem to be its distributed nature and it's ability to not need any central trusted authority. But in the cases of CDSs, we _have_ a central trusted authority in the form of the ISDA.

Again, we come back to the issue of needing to begin by defining the problem we're trying to solve, and then demonstrate how a blockchain could solve it. What problem with the existing system are you trying to solve?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Call to arms: while big guys are doing proprietary systems, I invite to contribute to Scorex, modular blockchain framework under CC0 license: [https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex- Lagonaki](https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki) . Maillist is [https://groups.io/g/scorex-dev](https://groups.io/g/scorex-dev), we'll start discussions there on 2 more members. Testnet is alive, plans for few experimental modules are exist.

</comment><comment><USER8> This project is a massive scam. These non-work based systems aren't blockchains. They're just (bad) message passing systems. When this blockchain hype-cycle ends, I'm hoping there's some accountability here (though there probably won't be)</comment>