The Fake Factory That Pumped Out Real Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-fake-biofuel-factory/ <comment><USER3> It's a typical case of creating a wrong metric and then steering by it.

I really don't like these 'credits' systems, the same goes for CO2 credits and all the other systems out there like this. They're a magnet for fraud and rarely if ever serve to actually remedy the issue they're aimed at.

It's just a way to move money around, not to solve problems.

The interesting bit here is that is actually quite hard to figure out why what they did was illegal, at first glance you'd say that the agency that created the opportunity is _just_ as culpable as those that took advantage of it, it doesn't take genius to figure out that this would lead to trouble.

[http://econlife.com/2012/04/government-guidelines-and- uninte...](http://econlife.com/2012/04/government-guidelines-and-unintended- consequences/)

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's why most economists I've read seem to agree that carbon tax is better than co2 credit cap-and-trade systems - simpler and harder to game, flawed only because it includes the word "tax" which is unpalatable to the public.

<comment><USER5> A tax is actually vastly more complicated and easier to game.

Remember, the goal is to cap emissions, not to raise money. When you start with a cap and work backwards towards the clearing price, you are guaranteed to be meet that cap. But when you start by setting a price, there is zero guarantee that you're going to meet your emissions target.

Also, the point of cap and trade is that it lets societies meet their emissions target in the least expensive way possible. Whereas a tax imposes the same fees on everyone, regardless of how much it would cost them to lower their emissions. This makes zero sense.

<comment><USER6> Cap and Trade and a Carbon Tax are equivalent in outcome. Cap and trade would impose fees on everyone regardless of how much it costs them to lower emissions also. The problem with Cap and Trade is that it targets the large scale emitters rather than the item desired to be limited.

Imagine that you had five major producers putting out 30% of airborne carbon, and 50,000 minor producers putting out 70%. The cost of administering a cap and trade system to the minor producers would be incredibly expensive - <USER2> legislation would instead focus on gouging the five major producers. Also imagine that the 50,000 minor producers could very easily cut their production of carbon in half.

The price should be set to the amount of damage the externality causes. Current estimates of the social cost of carbon is ~$220 per ton. [http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...](http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2481.html)

Cap and trade punishes large players - taxes are fair _because_ they impose the same fees on everyone.

Cap and Trade being the least expensive way possible is also a terrible loss for good tax reform. If we implement a responsible carbon tax, the offset income can be used to reduce associated corporation taxes, sales taxes, or even income taxes.

An optimal tax system taxes things and behaviors we don't want, and subsidises things and behaviors we do want. Let's get rid of an income tax, and replace it with a environmental tax. More money in your pocket, and cleaner air.

<comment><USER7> As California's attempts to tax mileage of hybrid and electric vehicles proves, if you create an additional source of revenue for the government, tax levels will bear no relation to the harm they're designed to compensate for. It becomes just another way for the government to raise taxes without admitting to doing so.

<comment><USER8> The gas tax was set to charge for road wear, not carbon externialities

<comment><USER3> And VAT in Europe was only created to rebuild after the war.

Tax repeals are very rare, once they're worked into the budget they are there to stay and usually will expand to pay for other things besides the reason they were originally created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Other hilarious and frightening "business ideas" with US government issued carbon credits:

Dumping giant piles of iron sulfate into the ocean in Northern Canada: [http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/haida-readying- for-s...](http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/haida-readying-for-second- round-of-iron-dumping-in-ocean-1.115880)

Driving a train full of biodiesel across the border and back again numerous times while never unloading it: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/biofuel- credits-behind-mystery...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/biofuel-credits- behind-mystery-cross-border-train-shipments-1.1252080)

<comment><USER10> I tried to find a follow up to the iron sulfate story but couldn't find one, would be interesting to hear what happened.

<comment><USER11> Evidence seems like it worked. Much as people didn't want it to.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida- gwaii-o...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida-gwaii-ocean- fertalizing-chile-1.3550783)

<comment><USER9> The theory behind it is sound, the issue is with sustainability. Changing the ecosystem that much when you have no idea how sustainable the growth is or how it will affect the ecosystem as a whole is risky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Methanol is not a catalyst in biodiesel production, it's a reactant. See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production#Transeste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_production#Transesterification)

This example shows ethanol but it works the same way with methanol.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nevermind the scam. How is the system supposed to work?

A company produces biodiesel and can sell, separately, the biodisel and the RIN. A fuel company can buy the RIN instead of biodiesel, and, in theory, that would mean that another fuel company bought the biodiesel, and is using more biodiesel and less petroleum. Correct?

What if, instead, the biodiesel is used in a previously non existent or previously carbon neutral industry? That does not seem to reduce pollution at all. How does the system prevent it? Does the system prevent it?

<comment><USER14> The biodiesel was meant to be equivalent to regular diesel, so it could be sold at the same price, but more expensive to produce. So a "previously non existent or previously carbon neutral industry" wouldn't have any reason to switch to biodiesel, unless it was already good for them to switch to regular diesel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > He kept a miniature, stainless-steel working model of it in his office. "I > could put vegetable oil through it and get a cup of the most beautiful > biodiesel you ever saw," Harvey Greenwood, Green Diesel's former director > for engineering, says of the model.

The most interesting part of this whole story, imho. Doesn't anyone else want their own desktop vegetable-oil to perfect diesel machine?

<comment><USER16> I really want to make something like this. I wonder if that would need a little agitator, or some temperature control, or valves, or what?

And then once you have the piping, you can get some automatic control, and some management software. . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting that there's no easily found mug shot of him considering he's in Fed Prison.

In India, about 25 years ago, the govt instituted export credits. Basically, in order to import anything, you needed to have export credits. So, export credits became a fungible currency. And people started exporting all kinds of crap under the guise of something legit, just to obtain export credits. People were exporting bricks, calling them shoes, and then selling the export credits. Of course, government officials were involved end-to-end in the scam (via relatives and friends, as is usually done there). Sad to see similar things are happening in the US now.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd much appreciate a description of the core thing here, without the narrative.

<comment><USER19> EPA allows biodiesel refiners to make up their own serial numbers. They sell the numbers in excel spreadsheets to oil companies. No one ever verifies that the numbers match real barrels of biodiesel. Criminals moved in

<comment><USER20> THANK YOU. >3000 words to 36. These long form articles are not for everyone, a TL;DR summary is always welcome.

<comment><USER21> That's not really a summary of the article, which is about a particular company.

And the article itself _already has_ a nice condensed explanation of the fraud: [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-fake-biofuel- factory/...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-fake-biofuel- factory/img/feat_biofraud30_1200x720.png)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We got rejected, we think we are early - <AUTHOR>

We applied with http://intigrent.com and were rejected from the summer batch 2015..we think we are too early for yc but would love to get any insights from HN community. <comment><USER2> Good idea, but I think kids (I am thinking specifically in kids with ADHD) could be a better market for this: A more dynamic, visual, and challenging learning environment.

In this context, I have missed "learn by doing" missions. For example, given a queue diagram, "implement" a "pop" operation by clicking and dragging the elements in the diagram. Check [1] for an approximation of this idea.

I just cannot see the "game context" concept. Calling lessons "missions" is not enough, but maybe I am missing something here.

You really need to polish the user interface.

Anyway, great work a lots of potential. Congrats.

[1] [http://visualgo.net/](http://visualgo.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of feedback are you looking for? I didn't see anything about your company or product, so it's difficult to offer advice.

<comment><USER4> Learn by watching short videos, solving practice problems and working on real world projects. All in the context of a game!

<comment><USER3> Oh, sorry, so intigrent.com is your site? Based on your post, I thought it's some accelerator you were applying to and didn't check the link. My misunderstanding!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What do mean by "we think we are too early"? What is your pitch and what do you think you need to do next?</comment>


WebKit Clock - <AUTHOR> http://onotakehiko.com/webkitclock/ This site is driven with HTML5 canvas, CSS3, JavaScript, Web Fonts, SVG and NO image files. It's optimized to WebKit rendering engine and you can see it with Safari and Google Chrome. <comment><USER2> Very slick, though the dot for St. John's is in entirely the wrong spot. Last I checked, it was still up here in Canada!

(Also, I very much dig that the back button actually goes back through the cities you clicked on, and not immediately off the page.)

<comment><USER3> He's off by a "'s". St. John is one of the US Virgin Islands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm intrigued. How is the globe done? I can't dig deep enough to find the source of the globe.

<comment><USER5> It's drawn using a canvas element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did something similar a while back. I used canvas and coastline coordinates ([http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg_coastline/index.jsp?llat=-90.0&...](http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg_coastline/index.jsp?llat=-90.0&ulat=90&llon=-180.0&rlon=180.0)) to draw the globe. However I could never quite figure out how to draw the world perfectly. I used canvas.fill and I would always end up with some parts of the world showing, that actually should have been hidden. I can post the source code if you like - all it needs to be done is probably a viewport.

</comment><comment><USER7> Waiting for Web Standards Clock.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is very cool, but Salt Lake City is in the United States, not Canada.

</comment><comment><USER9> Oopsa daisies. UTC in Sydney is currently +11 (daylight savings).

<comment><USER10> It says "summer time is not supported" right at the top.

<comment><USER9> Then what's the point for it being a clock? :)

<comment><USER11> It's more of a HTML5 demo than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Uses about 50% of my 2-year-old Macbook Pro's CPU on Google Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER13> very nice!</comment>


Python SMS API:  Zeep Mobile  - <AUTHOR> http://zeepmobile.com/ <comment><USER2> The "catch" being: "Zeep Mobile supports this service by attaching 40-character teaser advertisements to each message sent to your users' mobile phones. Your users have the option to respond with the appropriate trigger word to receive more information about the advertisement."

I'm not sure what this has over <http://www.textmarks.com/> \-- which seems more flexible and has been recommended here (mind you, I haven't used TM so maybe they send out ads too -- but there seems to be nearly 1000 apps running of TM already).

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if these guys read HN, but in case they do I have advice: read the tmobile playbook right now or be prepared to enter a world of hurt.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting. I wish I had something like this 5 years ago. I think Internet phones will eventually destroy SMS.

</comment><comment><USER5> this is great news. congrats! hopefully if this works out you expand as a service and allow organizations to acquire their own shortcodes/numbers. if you can abstract the nonsense and provide a robust api i think you have a win.</comment>


IPalyzer lets you analyze any IP for location, RDNS, blacklists, and more - <AUTHOR> https://www.ipalyzer.com/

<comment><USER2> Very cool!</comment>


Reverse Engineering a NAND Flash Device Management Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://joshuawise.com/projects/ndfslave <comment><USER2> I realize that this whole process was more than just data recovery (it's a very valuable learning experience too), but if it was _just_ about data recovery, couldn't he buy another SD card and re-solder the IC from the broken board to the new one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, yes, good point :-) I didn't write about that, but I did take some pictures of failed attempts at that.

That's one of the first things I did, actually. After dumping the contents of the flash off, I went on Amazon and hit 'reorder' on the same SD card that I'd bought before. Unfortunately, it was not the same: in the picture [1], the left is the one I'd purchased this time, and the right is the one I'd destroyed. The deals that low-cost SD card makers get on NAND flash vary greatly from day to day, so they just manufacture based on whatever controller and flash combination they can get cheapest on any given day: even the same SKU is unlikely to stay the same internally very long.

I did also try soldering to the BGA pads on the damaged one [2] [3], but no joy: I imagine that there were some traces that went backwards on the board before going towards the controller (for instance, to meet the TSOP leads), and on inserting the SD card into my laptop, I still had no signs of life.

[1] [http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd- fux-11.xscale.jp...](http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd- fux-11.xscale.jpg)

[2] [http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd- fux-13.xscale.jp...](http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd- fux-13.xscale.jpg)

[3] [http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd- fux-15.xscale.jp...](http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd- fux-15.xscale.jpg)

<comment><USER3> 5 minutes of googling == 6 months of reverse engineering :)

recovery tools for SM2683EN flash controller: [http://www.usbdev.ru/files/smi/](http://www.usbdev.ru/files/smi/)

xor formulas and block structure for Transcend card: [http://flash- extractor.com/library/SM/EN2683/EN2683b%20BA__e...](http://flash- extractor.com/library/SM/EN2683/EN2683b%20BA__ec_de_d5_7a__2x2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha, very good! Yes, I had seen the second link -- and, in fact, posted on the Soft-Center forums at the time. It gave me some of the basic information, but sadly, without the "key" to what some of that means, it's not terribly useful to me :-( for instance, I'm still not sure what "xor 0186" means, and how that translates to the whitening scheme I saw.

The "Update size" and "Update enable" did give me the idea to do what I called 'sector updates'. Do you have any more information on how those work?

I didn't have that 'usbdev.ru' site at the time. That page seems specific to the USB versions, not the SD card (SM2683) parts; unfortunately, I speak very little Russian. Do you have any particular parts I should ook at?

Thanks so much for any help you might be able to provide! I'd like to fill in the blanks in my knowledge of these things; in particular, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I knew how the sector updates worked...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are lucky that the SD card you had used a discrete package for the flash - to reduce costs, quite a few of them just encapsulate a bare die, which is nowhere near as robust; even assuming the die didn't crack, trying to wirebond one of those without special machinery is nearly impossible. MicroSD almost exclusively is constructed this way.

There's also a very interesting article about reverse-engineering the microcontroller used inside: [http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting! I wonder where on the flash the firmware for the SD card is stored -- or perhaps it's stored in the controller EEPROM? If I could dump it out, that would be very valuable indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My EE knowledge is a few years out of date, but I was surprised to learn that excessive correlation between pages causes problems. The XOR key used for decorrelation is apparently not too hard to reverse engineer, so I wonder if this could be turned into an attack against solid state storage devices. Would storing a particular data stream which becomes very correlated once the XOR is applied lead to data corruption? Wear leveling and filesystems might make this difficult to pull off, but it still scares me a bit.

<comment><USER6> Due to close physical proximity, there will always be some degree of capacitive coupling between the cells. This coupling will cause a cell's potential to increase slightly when its neighbors are programmed. Having all of your neighbors programmed to the highest potential state is the worst case, as your delta V from coupling is greatest. If it is shifted enough, there would be a bit error at that cell.

Data randomization seeks to mitigate this issue by normalizing the distribution of states across the page. Having a single XOR key wouldn't do a very good job for the reasons you noted. When I worked on flash, we used elements of the address to seed a PRNG for data randomizing. So the XOR key varies across the entire device.

There are other systems in place in flash to further mitigate these issues. All programming is adaptive, using feedback between programming pulses to hit the target. The pages within a block are intelligently ordered so that a programmed cell cannot possibly have all of its neighbors programmed from lowest to highest potential.

But yes, in general, if you had the right data stream, you would be able to slightly degrade the BER, possibly past what the ECC can repair. There are a lot of systems in place though, as NAND is inherently lossy to begin with. These issues are compounded by MLC designs which have tighter margins per cell.

SSDs have yet another layer of system mitigation. I know of at least one manufacturer that disables NAND level randomizing in favor of encrypting every bit of data that is programmed. Some drives have enough redundancy that they can lose an entire flash die without losing data -- as if losing a disk in a raid setup.

You probably shouldn't be storing anything important long term on a device that programs NAND raw. i.e. flash drives and sd cards. They aren't designed nor spec'd for high reliability.

<comment><USER7> This whole XOR scheme seems destined to fail! Why not just use a 64b/66b (or similar) encoding scheme?

<comment><USER6> The XOR scheme is perfectly good enough. If it were a real issue affecting customers it would be replaced (but it isn't).

The XOR scheme is extremely cheap (compact) and does not need to operate serially on the data stream (good for performance). The only applications that use the NAND provided randomizer are the cheapest of controllers. In fact, even the SD controller in the linked article used their own XOR scheme. A system designer can always turn off the builtin randomizer, and replace it with whatever method they choose -- they all do for various reasons. At the controller level it can be implemented in, typically, higher performance and more compact logic processes. It does not need to be duplicated for multichannel devices, as it would if it were in the NAND.

<comment><USER4> _The XOR scheme is perfectly good enough_

...until someone finds a way to exploit it, as has happened with CD's "weak sector" copy protection schemes. It's only a matter of when it will happen, not if.

<comment><USER6> Corrupting the storage of a test pattern isn't particularly useful. MAYBE, you could cause premature tagging of bad blocks wearing out a flash drive/card faster. If the system you are using is allowing these kinds of writes to your storage device you have more pressing issues.

Only the most primitive SD/flash drive controllers actually use this scheme anyway -- encryption is much better at randomizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice article.

I wrote a lot of the flash object store for the Apple Newton, back in 1992. I've often wondered how many of the things we came up with were later patented by other companies.

</comment><comment><USER9> Impressive work and a fantastic writeup to boot. Kinda makes me want to accidentally break something (okay not really).

</comment><comment><USER10> ECC explanation is also good.</comment>


Increased Network Bandwidth for EC2 Instances - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-floodgates-are-open-increased-network-bandwidth-for-ec2-instances/ <comment><USER2> It's sometimes very frustrating the poor UX AWS forces on its customers. If you read the post, they have made the high-speed network available, but you can use it only if you use the AWS cli.

> Enhanced networking cannot be managed from the Amazon EC2 console. [1]

AWS (and other cloud providers) charge a huge premium compared to smaller dedicated and VPS providers and yet the customers need to suffer things like this and that too when the product has been available for around 11 years.

The complexity of AWS billings system is astounding. Setting the billing alarms is somewhat easy now (using the budgets features), but still needs some careful reading about the options available.

It seems like the ease of use is near to the bottom for AWS product managers.

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/enhanced...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/enhanced- networking-ena.html)

<comment><USER3> To play devil's advocate it is a platform for building scalable systems, not everything is going to be point & click & their users are fine with it. Their business model is providing infrastructure, not UX. Even amazon.com the marketplace does not have great UX, and if you view source their code is messy, it just goes to show it doesn't matter.

Other cloud providers may have a 1-click UX to deploy a load balancer, but they lack features Amazon has, like logs... once your app needs to scale you don't care about 1-click UX, you care more about how easy it is to debug & scale your platform...

<comment><USER2> Good UX can also make complex applications simpler to manage. Also, not all applications are complex and have a huge scale. There are many IT admins who need to manage a lot of small applications that support small departments.

Also, I think AWS can have both. Great CLI and APIs to deploy complex infrastructure, and great visual UX to operate, monitor and manage it. I think we as customers should demand it. If we won't let them know of our pain, how will they know? I hope they are listening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how that changes feasibility of running cacheless workloads against S3. So far this been a challenge in terms of performance as you can hit throughput cap fairly quickly.

<comment><USER5> I'd assumed it referred to aggregate bandwidth, and indeed that seems to be the case after testing. Throughput to a single key still remains around 600mbit/sec within a region, and meanwhile the real problem with S3 isn't throughput so much as latency, and no amount of bandwidth will help that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They seem to be encouraging everyone to move to NEWER instances for better networking and so on... So what happens to those old ones?

<comment><USER7> I bet some customers at least for some apps never move? And I presume at some point they just power them off and recycle them. With some forced maintenance over time they can consolidate to a small corner of the DC and install new systems around them? Just guesses..

<comment><USER8> I had EC2s running since 2007, eventually some of the underlying hardware fails and you're forced to terminate and move to a new instance.

<comment><USER9> When did it terminate out of curiosity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there disks that can write up to 25gbps? What applications would need that much speed?</comment>


The End of the Computer Age - <AUTHOR> https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel <comment><USER2> Transcript: [https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston- lect...](https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end- computer-age-thiel#transcript)

</comment><comment><USER3> "...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts."

This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton of inefficiencies to fix.

I often lament that the built environment of the average American city looks stuck in the 80s, and this quote made me think of that.

<comment><USER4> I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

<comment><USER5> > And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all > that matters.

I don't think it's the _spending_ that the US is allergic to, it's the _collecting_ the money to spend.

<comment><USER6> Ever been to Connecticut? I-84 is still constantly in rough condition, even as property and income taxes climb.

<comment><USER7> As a Korean who visited LA this summer, I was shocked to see how unmaintained the roads were, especially the highways. (There were cracks and debris all over the place)

<comment><USER8> I remember thinking the same back in 2005, which was the first time I'd driven in the US. Cracks and potholes all over the place. At the time I'd assumed it was because California was basically bankrupt (maybe it still is), but slightly shocking that it's still the case.

I suddenly felt like I understood why American cars have such soft suspension. The roads were notably worse than in the UK, and by a wide margin: no way I'd want to drive a car with a sportier setup there.

What's depressing is that since 2010 there's been a progressive degradation in the state of _our_ roads. In Cambridgeshire the roads are now in a terrible state: cracks, fissures, potholes, road markings barely visible.

You can blame public spending cuts for this, and no doubt there's truth in that statement, but there are plenty of road infrastructure projects happening. For example: the (admittedly decades overdue) A14 upgrade, recently completed Ely southern bypass, various smart motorway projects (M1 and M4 spring immediately to mind, as well as recently completed work on M3).

This is all well and good, but I would far rather see some of this money diverted to the basics of a safe road network: i.e., ensuring the roads we already have are in good condition. I would particularly like to see funds being used for smart motorways, for which serious safety concerns have emerged, diverted in this way.

<comment><USER9> 'Smart motorway' is an umbrella term for various traffic control schemes used on motorways since the 90s. The version deemed unsuitable is dynamic hard shoulder running (called 'managed motorway' at inception), first used on the M42 from 2006 on.

All new projects in England since 2013 have used All Lane Running (an alternative to widening, where the HS is permanently converted into a traffic lane). This format is not being killed off.

The A14 Huntingdon Bypass was supposed to open as a smart motorway (A14(M)) but the legislation hasn't passed soon enough, so it will open as an all- purpose road with motorway-style restrictions and smart tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This talk mostly reiterates his basic talking points so it feels a lot like rambling. And the title is not justified by the argument.

There is, however, a case to be made that the computer tech age has reached an end. Tech companies turning to investing in banking and real estate is not a good sign.

<comment><USER11> Tech companies are still doing tech. It's more that the "tech" label is being applied to other companies incorrectly.

<comment><USER10> apple is investing in payments, credit cards and real estate. so does facebook (and google)

<comment><USER12> But they haven't stopped doing technology. If anything, they are bringing technology to banking.

I am not saying I am feeling great about those particular companies entering the finance industry, but it's not like it's a signal that technology is becoming unimportant. If anything it's just the continued expansion of technology.

<comment><USER10> time will tell. i think it 's worrying that they are entering these zero-sum markets

btw this technology already exists in bitcoin and other coins

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thiel's talk starts around 10m40s, after the throat-clearing intro.

This is not his most articulate talk, fwiw. Thiel's smart and sometimes very clear, but not here. This feels off the cuff, where he's falling back on pot shots and sound bites.

<comment><USER14> Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on _The Portal_ (Eric Weinstein's podcast) a few months back:

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter- thiel/id146999...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter- thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908)

I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and Weinstein.

<comment><USER15> _We 're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago._

Kind of. There's no new "must have" consumer electronics product. 3D TV was a flop, robot vacuums were a dud, VR goggles make 5% to 15% of the population nauseous, and everybody has a smartphone. The "lose money on every sale and make it up on volume" model (Uber, etc.) is coming apart. Self-driving cars don't work yet. Moore's Law has hit a wall. Wafer fab cost is so high that the next node may be unaffordable.

There's lots of stuff to do, though. Solar panels and batteries work pretty well, and there's a few trillion dollars of those to be deployed. But it's not a Make Money Fast business. Electric cars and charging stations work, and those need to be deployed. The battery manufacturers need to get their automation act together and start pumping those things out at high speed at very low cost.

There's also lots of room for progress in bioengineering. Editing DNA is just beginning.

<comment><USER16> It's weird that everything is compared to one of the most successful products ever created. Something that went from an incredibly niche product to nearly every adult, and a lot children owning, in a very short timeline.

Every Apple product launch has commentary of "This isn't as successful as the iPhone", like yeah, no shit, the iPhone isn't going to be replicated every 10 years. We aren't always on the cusp of being able to combine components generated from advances in multiple industries to propel one industry to market dominance.

I like to imagine a future where we are able to continue the advances of Moore's law by getting more efficient with our software and the ever increasing abilities multi core processing. I have no idea if that's how it's going to continue, but in the absence of continued progress in one area, progress will probably be demanded in another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This mostly just reads like stream of consciousness gibberish to me. Is there an actual coherent argument in here somewhere?

<comment><USER18> This is the top 1% celebrating themselves. If they had any coherent arguments, we would have been convinced long since. As it is, they're just laughing their asses off while taking candy from a baby (i.e. getting even more rich and powerful).

<comment><USER19> Is it me or has his thinking got more sloppy?

A couple examples, his indictment of the Obamas is that they sent their kids to Harvard but his indictment of America is that we don't focus on the things we do well... such as universities?

The assault on science now without any prescriptive solutions. Is he arguing for more populous interpretation of science? Has he had any first hand experience and investigation into the mechanisms of double blind peer review? (In my experience, still prone to gaming but often rigorous and the best method we've got).

Re: The indictment of the SV elite. I don't move in the same circles as he does but it's obvious that he's still smarting from the SV elite's rejection of him.

His hypocrisy from being owner of Palantir and yet seeming indictment of AI software for governments? Another layer of hypocrisy of espousing libertarian values when he's come to embody the system as much as anyone (in the administration, numerous govt military contracts with Palantir). And yet he's even more shifty than that, embracing NZ citizenship for possible tax evasion avenues.

His indictment of Twitter yet entrepreneurs have made material progress in traditional sectors (his old buddy Elon making headway with Tesla).

Our indictment of him should be that he's turned his back on values he's formerly espoused, content to rankle in a 'get off my front lawn style' on his large pile of capital while often committing the same hypocrisies of which he feigns disgust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities, you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of those words to make any real sense.

Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves. And in the limit case, maybe it can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian Economics type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something."

AI is literally communist. Thanks Peter.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying.

a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials.

b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship).

It's pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER22> Well, but China _doesn 't_ use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem.

And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.

<comment><USER21> Sure. Thiel is proposing a model. All models are wrong, some are useful, and so on. His models happen to be interesting to people who like to think in more contrarian ways. That doesn't make them right, and we can debate their merit, of course. But it hardly makes them impossible to understand.

That China hasn't solved the economic calculation problem yet is plain to see, and I don't think that's quite what Thiel is saying. He's talking about the principles and the mindset behind the support for AI, as well as its ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce asymptotically.

No one said Harvard's signalling was arbitrary. It's a very clear signal. Thiel's point is that that signal has nothing to do with "higher education".

<comment><USER22> "well as its ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce asymptotically."

My assertion is that it can't though. That's because the complexity of even a fairly small entity makes the number of the particles in the universe look infinitesimal.

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

"In 2016, Adam Yedidia and Scott Aaronson obtained the first (explicit) upper bound on the minimum n for which Σ(n) is unprovable in ZFC. To do so they constructed a 7910-state[2] Turing machine whose behavior cannot be proven based on the usual axioms of set theory (Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), under reasonable consistency hypotheses (stationary Ramsey property).[3][4] This was later reduced to 1919 states, with the dependency on the stationary Ramsey property eliminated."

To me, granted I have only a vague idea of the meaning of the above, that's saying that "solving the economic calculation problem" (society having more than 1919 moving parts) is not just beyond physical limits of the amount of matter in the universe that could be used for computation. It's not just beyond the physical laws that we think we know, like a FTL spaceship would be. It's beyond the most fundamental math we have. To me, that's like a _third order_ of infinite impossibility.

And as far as Harvard goes, how can the interaction between students and faculty have nothing to do with higher education? What else is higher education? In _every_ school, people learn from each other, and they interact more than with people at other schools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing how much the output of Serious People pontificating about AI is coming to resemble that of the AIs themselves.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it will be revealed that he had an AI write this talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Other than old arguments about innovation deficiencies (wanting flying cars but getting 140 characters), there was little/nothing about "The End of the Computer Age."

The talk was more about _scaling_ (Finance, Tech, Cargo, and People) with some insights regarding which the US has a chance to compete effectively against China (only Finance and Tech) and some (related?) advice to the left and the right in the US:

Left: Move beyond identity politics.

Right: Rethink the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

Thought provoking commentary, but mistitled as "The End of the Computer Age".

</comment><comment><USER25> That introduction is a guillotinable offense.

<comment><USER18> And this time the Scarlet Pimpernel wouldn't lift a finger to save them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now.

His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, if not planetary, scale. And we get a very small, and shrinking, number of big players. One Google. One Amazon. One Facebook. One Alibaba. One Tencent. Three big US telcos. Three big US banks.

<comment><USER26> Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only game in town. But Thiel himself is a supporter of monopolies and wrote a whole book on the virtues of them in "Zero To One".

One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early 20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs, scientists and technologists in such a small window of time.

If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we had hundreds of Elon Musks.

<comment><USER19> I don't agree with your summary of the greats, you're lumping in scientists with entrepreneurs.

If you want revolutionary entrepreneurs in our era, this list is a fairly good summary: [http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/](http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/) 2017 Fortune 500 "Companies Founded by Immigrants or the Children of Immigrants, by Company, Founder" . Jobs, Brin, Yang, Huang, Bezos and more

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am not 100% sure but I think this fits here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc) (Newsroom opening scene). I am not American but I believe this can apply so much in a lot of places.

</comment><comment><USER28> I thought this was going to be about Stadia.

</comment><comment><USER29> Centuries old subways? I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard layout. Innovate people!

<comment><USER30> Hold tight because soon there will be Brain Computer connections with enough bandwidth to allow us type, read, write at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wait.. I thought I read a "how to recognize snake oil in AI/ML" posting just yesterday...

</comment><comment><USER32> Wait - he helped elect a cryptofascist that plunders the public coffers for personal gain, and then he's got the chutzpah to complain about the state of public infrastructure?

At the _Manhattan Institute_? The place that loudly complains that tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation?

<comment><USER18> > ...tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation

Right, and the super rich cannot wait to relieve us tax payers from our plight and pay all those bills for us. Otherwise, what would be the point in never paying any taxes?</comment></comment>


Advocates say paper ballots are safest - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-10/advocates-say-paper-ballots-are-safest <comment><USER4> There is absolutely no need to have electronic voting machines. Votes happen months before one needs to take office. Counting of paper ballots is an easy and solved problem. No need to try to optimize speed of counting for elections. It's not a big enough issue. Paper ballots are also decentralized and thus, much harder to manipulate.

The downside risk of electronic voting is very high. It invariably leads to centralization, meaning allows risk of amplified manipulation in presence of hacks.

"Why can we have electronic banking, but not electronic voting, vowelless?"

For one, elections cannot be insured like your bank transactions can. Loosing money can be devastating, but the Republican system with democratic voting is much more important than the banking system.

<comment><USER5> Totally agreed, but there's a variation on electronic voting I've heard proposed that I think would be very, very helpful. Long story short, the machine doesn't _record_ the vote, it just _produces the ballot_.

You enter all your choices on the machine, then the machine spits out a piece of paper, and the paper itself is your voting record. You verify that it is correct before it goes into the ballot box.

Nothing's perfect, but this doesn't seem to have any weaknesses that existing paper ballots don't, and it gets rid of a few. It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle", and real errors like overvoting. Software shenanigans are almost pointless, because the piece of paper is the vote record, and the voter checks it.*

Machines can also be more usable for people with input/output difficulties (poor eyesight, motor control, whatever).

\---

*I say "almost" because we all know that plenty of people won't check it. Vision problems are also a concern here, but not any more so than with plain paper.

<comment><USER6> "Congratulations, you have invented the most expansive pencil"

In France we don't actually write anything. When we enter the room we're given one paper per candidate with the name and logo printed clearly. Once in the voting booth we put one or none in the enveloppe. That's it. Problem solved.

<comment><USER7> How do you verify your vote is counted correctly and not made up? Having the voting ledger would be cool - you could verify with the "transaction id" and how it's recorded.

<comment><USER8> Through process verification.

I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand elections are monitored by the Electoral Commission who employ people to watch every step of the process. In addition every political party is entitled to send scrutineers to polling places and the count. The boxes are shown to the scrutineers who verify it to be empty, then sealed. The boxes are never taken out of sight. Every step of the process is under multiple eyes.

This seems to work well. It's possible to double vote by visiting multiple stations but in practice this is rare. It does happen but the electoral commission do analysis on the votes to ensure it didn't affect the outcome. Those responsible are prosecuted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can Americans explain why voter ID is seen to be disenfranchising or sometimes inarticulately simplified as "racist"?

Voter ID is mandatory in so many parts of the world. What are the rest of us missing?

Edit: Not that it matters, but I live in India, so "poor people can't get ID" confuses me even further.

<comment><USER10> Surprised nobody's mentioned this yet: The most common form of ID in the US is a driver's license. To get one you need to meet a bunch of requirements and then take a driving test at a local branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). If you are ever looking for a great example of government inefficiency it's the DMV offices [1]. All of them run horribly, most have massive wait times for simple procedures, and the employees have a reputation for not giving a shit. Not to say all of them run like this, but in California it's so bad that the government officials have their own secret DMV office to avoid waits [2].

If you were a poor person who really only has the value of their physical labor to feed your family you might not want to waste spend hours and hours of your incredibly (relatively) valuable time for something you can make do without. Since these poor people are often minorities voter ID laws disproportionately affect them.

The question of racism being a factor for supporters of voter ID is kinda muddied. Voter ID laws seem to make a ton of sense on the surface, but a little bit of knowledge about the American election system makes it clear that voter fraud is really not a big problem. There's no doubt that racists would support voter ID laws as they do suppress the election turnout of the poor, but I haven't seen any evidence that racial factors contribute to the majority of people's support for voter ID laws. Like every topic in US politics, it has become hyper-polarized to the point where both sides talk past each other to try to demonize their opponents.

[1]: [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-DMV-so-slow](https://www.quora.com/Why-is- DMV-so-slow)

[2]: [https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol- aler...](https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol- alert/article216408570.html)

<comment><USER11> > The most common form of ID in the US is a driver's license.

It's the most common, but not the only one. You can just show up and ask for a plain ID, and avoid all that. And I kinda have to wonder how people get their I-9 filled out without any form of ID. You generally need an ID just to work in this country.

<comment><USER12> There are states where you have to show a utility bill to get one of these.

<comment><USER13> You just need to show proof of residence, of which a utility bill is one example.

<comment><USER14> Which means you have to be in a stable living situation.

<comment><USER15> What kind of ID homeless people can get then? Can they vote? Register to vote?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> After the Bush vs. Gore election problems in 2000, I recall a paper here on HN of a study of different voting mechanisms. I think it was an MIT study - <USER2> anybody knows the paper, please post.

Anyway the conclusion was that all systems have some non-zero error rate, but the most reliable was paper ballots with optical readers. Ability to audit was important too.

So this paper was discussed here and I thought it might make some impact on the voting systems in the US. After all, I thought, here we had a credible study, the merits were being discussed, and so on.

Of course what happened was that my state (PA) adopted all electronic systems, with poor audit trail, etc. I don't think any legislature anywhere made a good faith effort to weigh the possible options in a rational way. I think the vendors came in, gave a presentation, and the everybody went with their gut feel.

<comment><USER17> well if anything it shows that you cannot trust paper ballots or that in a close contest no one will. electronic voting will work provided you can take a record of your vote, say a bar code, and scan it and verify your vote was recorded properly. so give them a paper copy with their votes printed out and a code they can scan either at home, their phone, any government facility, that says - yeah it counted.

when it comes to bulk counting the electronic version is used or a printout of every single bar code value is mass scanned back in.

how else can you have a paper ballot that cannot be altered?

<comment><USER18> > _how else can you have a paper ballot that cannot be altered?_

With simple, boring techniques requiring the presence of multiple scrutineers appointed by different candidates. The process relies on mutual suspicion to detect problems at every step.

In an Australian election, all ballot boxes are numbered. The seals are also numbered. When a ballot box is assembled, the seal numbers and box number are logged, signed by the senior Electoral Officer present and countersigned by at least two scrutineers appointed by different candidates.

Ballots are not numbered, but are counted as they are dispensed. Each is initialled by the official who hands it to the voter. This process is observable by scrutineers.

When time comes to count, the box numbers are cross-checked with the logs, again under scrutineers. When the ballots are hand-counted, it happens with scrutineers watching. When the tallies are made, it happens with scrutineers present.

When any of the scrutineers disagrees with some aspect of the process, they can appeal to the electoral commission. If they're dissatisfied, the matter can be taken to the Court of Disputed Returns.

So far as I am aware, only once, in over a _century_ of Australian elections, have ballot boxes been lost. That election was voided and rerun from scratch.

Paper works. You just need to see how other people are already using it successfully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not only should we not use electronic voting machines, we should not use electronic vote _counting_ machines.

Paper ballots counted by electronic means should be just as suspect, as whoever hacks the counting machine could set vote totals to be just shy of the limit required to initiate a manual recount.

All votes should be counted by hand.

<comment><USER16> Hand counting is another source of error or corruption though.

I like the idea of optical scanning with random audits. That is you'll scan them, then keep them locked up together with subtotals for each box. You can audit that the subtotals add up, and then randomly pick boxes to hand count. You can then verify that the votes in the box match the subtotals for that box.

<comment><USER20> > Hand counting is another source of error or corruption though.

Hand counting, in public, at the voting site, puts the count in view of all interested parties. Any errors or corruption are the results of the collected views of those present. Electronic counting, in any form, adds to that the views of whomever builds, delivers, and collects the electronic count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The 3 important aspects of a legitimate vote are:

1) Secret

2) Unique: one vote per citizen and all votes are worth the same.

3) Universal: no citizens should be prevented from voting.

-

The US doesn't consistently follow these:

\- A citizen from state A is worth more than a citizen from state B because of the electoral college.

\- A citizen can register to vote in multiple states.

\- DNC superdelegates are worth more votes in primaries.

\- Right to take time off to vote.

\- Geographic location of polling places.

... and a large list of irregularities.

<comment><USER22> You should really research the electoral college instead of just assuming it's unfair. There is a reason for it. You may disagree, but it's not just an obvious flaw or oversight. It was intentional.

Edit: to the downvoters, your downvotes won't magically and retroactively count as votes in the 2016 election. Why not participate in the discussion instead of the incivility? Or, you know, hypocritically participate in the HN equivalent of the Electoral College, those with downvoting ability.

<comment><USER23> I'd be interested to hear what you say what the original reason is, as I've heard several. Not one of them is at all useful in the modern day.

1) To appease slave-owning states, by allowing slaves to be counted toward the allocation of representatives and electoral votes. No longer relevant after Civil War.

2) To prevent demagogues from gaining popular support. Assumes that electors will meet and decide on a candidate when the electoral college votes, rather than being bound ahead of time. Clearly, did not do this job in 2016.

3) To keep small states from being overwhelmed by large states. Assumes that loyalty and identity are primarily to a state (e.g Virginian) rather than to the country (American). Furthermore, causes undo emphasis on swing states, which are primarily based on how much urban/rural area falls within the state borders.

I have not heard any reasons to dissuade me from the belief that the electoral college is a vestigial organization that no longer serves any purpose.

Edit: Also, your entire comment is a form of personal attack that does not give any argument. At most, you imply that an argument for the existence of the electoral college exists, but give no support for its existence. If you are going to say that a reason exists, at least give a one sentence description, or a link to what you believe that reason to be. As it is, you are disingenuously setting yourself up to say, in effect, "Well, none of those reasons are the one that I was thinking of. I'm keeping the real reason for myself, but feel free to continue guessing while I act like I have the superior position."

<comment><USER22> It's 3) To keep small states from being overwhelmed by large states. Assumes that loyalty and identity are primarily to a state (e.g Virginian) rather than to the country (American). Furthermore, causes undo emphasis on swing states, which are primarily based on how much urban/rural area falls within the state borders.

It's similar to the idea that each that each state gets the same number of senators. There's a balance between state governance and federal governance, such that you can live in a state more attuned to your preferences. Regardless of your political ideals, this plays out in your favor (I guarantee it, unless you're oddly attracted to the simultaneously bland and chaotic politics of the federal).

As for the claim of undue emphasis on swing states, I'd say then it's working as expected by even allowing swing states to have a chance against California. So I guess we come to our fundamental disagreement: should the majority always be able to railroad all dissenters? The Founding Fathers thought about the same question and figured, no, the majority is not always to be trusted.

To give just a bit more context still, I'm vehemently opposed to Trump for a number of reasons, but by no means see the Democratic party as putting up many good candidates. I just can't stand by their platform on many things. But my point is that while I would have liked, say, Rubio as president, the majority of Republicans selected Trump. The majority did something I really disliked.

The Electoral College is there to have some kind of counterbalance to oppressive majority. Whether it's truly effective is a matter for another, more detailed debate. All I asked in my original comment is that people not dismiss it as ill-thought-out, unfair or archaic without giving it some thought.

Edit in response to your edit: obviously I'm not disingenuously writing some alternative argument. I wrote this before your edit.

<comment><USER24> Do you think the framers of the Constitution intended the House to have one representative for every 750,000 people?

You didn't simply ask people to give it some thought. You implied the person you were addressing hadn't. Then you reacted to the resulting downvotes by calling them uncivil and hypocritical and snarking about the 2016 election. You went on to imply that your opponent wants "to railroad all dissenters", which is hardly a charitable interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Paper ballots might work best in the west, but in some developing countries ballot stuffing remains a big problem. In these countries I feel VVPAT is a better solution.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter- verified_paper_audit_t...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter- verified_paper_audit_trail)

</comment><comment><USER26> Please, no one mention blockchain.

<comment><USER27> haha that was actually my first thought.

The whole cryptocurrency stuff seems pretty shady but there are select applications where blockchain is ideally suited & this seems like one of them.

i.e. All those independent election monitors can set up their own node etc

<comment><USER28> Stop thinking like an engineer.

The most important feature of elections is that everyone in society can take part of the process, understand the process, and (locally) verify that the elections are fair.

Technology just introduces black boxes that citizens are somehow expected to trust, because something something cryptography something blockchain.

No, that's not good enough.

<comment><USER27> >Technology just introduces black boxes that citizens are somehow expected to trust

oh please. People trust the lock sign on HTTPS all day without understanding it. (or mastercard or the bridge they drive over or well anything).

Avoiding superior technological solutions just because the man on the street doesn't understand them is a bad approach. If society did that we'd still be in the 1800s.

<comment><USER29> > oh please. People trust the lock sign on HTTPS all day without understanding > it

Yes, and the internet is an absolute cesspool when it comes to security. Do we really want to hold up the _internet_ as a shining success that we should be applying to probably the most important institution we have?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Paper ballots are safest, but not perfectly safe. The voting system is routinely hacked in a lot of countries, e.g. in the US:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering)

Russia:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_instances_of_ballot_bo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_instances_of_ballot_box_stuffing)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting)

Ultimately if the people in power do not respect the democratic process, they can and will hack the voting and vote count process.

In addition to that modern democracies suffer from selection bias. The persons you can vote for are often a hand or self selected group of people which will not threaten the existing oligarchy.

The only voting system I know that would be free of all these problems is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition) . Because the greek understood already 2500 years ago:

"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes, and the only way to break the paper ballot method is fake ballots introduced physically into election sites. However, I predict this is much harder stunt to get away with the rise of social media. If anything, going with paper ballots reduces the attack vectors and the speed at which it's executed on a legitimate process.

<comment><USER32> Plus, if you want to intrude physically into election sites, which can and has happened in the U.S., at least you have to have a lot of people involved in order to do it on a large scale (increasing the chances of getting caught). Electronic voting machines could potentially be compromised in many places by a relatively small group of people, some of whom might not even be in the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> We should only change vote tech to make it more secure not more efficient.

<comment><USER34> Congratulations! We've managed to develop a completely secure voting device, with a formally verified codebase. The machines cost USD$150,000.

Due to the cost, we will be able to deploy two machines at a single voting site in your county.

Please ensure you arrive with enough time, as lines are expected.

<comment><USER35> That's nice. You have fun with that. We'll keep our $300k and our paper ballots. No lines are expected as we've tried this before and know more or less how many will show up.

<comment><USER5> The parent's `sarcasm` tags were apparently swallowed in HTML sanitization. :) It was _meant_ to sound like a horrible idea.

<comment><USER34> Apparently the modest nature of my proposal wasnt clear enough. I forget to really punch sarcasm in text.

My point: cost is always a consideration. And in voting, has a direct correlation to such issues as deployment and voter ability to... well, vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-squared CMV: I think we should be able to vote electronically with the same convenience that we do online shopping not to make it easier to count the votes but rather to increase turnout numbers. 50-60% - is that better for representative democracy or 90%? The counterpoint of decentralization - <USER3> is a single point where final counts happen. So who is to say that final single point isn't manipulatable?

<comment><USER36> Echoing the other comment about Sweden: The last Australian election had 91% turnout, which was the lowest since 1926. It is possible to have high turnout without computers.

You could, for instance, not have elections on a weekday as a start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Change My Mind: Washington State's vote by mail is the best system in the world.

Ballots and guides are mailed out 2 to 4 weeks before voting day. All voters need to do is fill out their ballot at their leisure and put it in a mailbox or ballot drop box before the end of election day.

I see no compelling reason to prefer any other system in existence.

<comment><USER28> It allows vote coercion, I can threaten you to vote a certain way and watch you drop off the ballot, and there's no way for you to change your vote later.

Having monitored physical polling stations where people vote in secret removes this opportunity, because I can only see _that_ you voted, but not what you voted for.

<comment><USER37> That's a theoretical problem. And one that doesn't scale. You wouldn't be able to realistically intimidate 10,000 people and watch each one drop their ballot into a box.

In practice I don't think there are even fringe accusations of it being a problem.

> Having monitored physical polling stations where people vote in secret > removes this opportunity

It reduces, but does not remove, the opportunity. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_intimidation_case)

<comment><USER38> It isn't a theoretical threat.

Before 1932, the vote in Brazil was not secret. It resulted in widespread voter coercion and bribery, a system we used to call "halter voting". The "colonel" (powerful landowner or authority figure) would use the threat of violence to force those in his electoral "corral" to vote as he pleased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why not have both as an audit system? Electronic voting for instant tabulation. It prints out a voter verifiable ballot receipt that goes into a ballot box. If the electronic count and the paper count don't match, some error or fraudulent activity has occurred.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why is any technology of any kind required? Surely all that is needed is for the voters to make indelible marks on pieces of paper and for another person to tally those marks.

</comment><comment><USER41> Pencils are safer than pens. I really like the British voting process, not just because I grew up with it but because we can point to what about it makes so much sense.

</comment><comment><USER42> xkcd agrees: [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)</comment>


Ask HN: What's this new black bar at the top of the page? - <AUTHOR>

Making fun of the new Google design? <comment><USER2> Someone died. It's a mark of respect. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712469>

Several people have assumed it was Google-related. Perhaps if the bar was labelled people wouldn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712469>

There's also a search function at the bottom ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> 6th Ask HN about the black bar :)</comment>


Ask HN: What's your opinion about service meshes? - <AUTHOR> I remember there was a lot of hate for SOA/ESB in the 2000's.
Now with microservices, we're seeing service meshes (Istio, Conduit, ...).
What's different this time? <comment><USER2> Some differences from my perspective:

\- SOA/ESB in the 2000s was driven more by business, less by available tech. As an example of what I mean here, SOA folks would usually talk about decomposing business process. E.g. Amazon sells something, there's a "shopping cart" service, a "payment" service, and a "delivery" service. (I'm simplifying, but you get the point) Modern microservies are way more granular than that, and it could be that you have 5 tech-oriented services that compose to a single sub-step of a business process. The original SOA idea had the concept right, but was (IMHO) still too coarse to make the idea work.

\- Several enabling techs that came since then (containerization being an example key one) didn't exist then, which made doing the same thing 5x more painful. So the tech just grew up.

\- On the data side, SOA/ESB was driven by XML and XML Schema. As someone who practiced a lot of that, it was really painful to use a document markup language to do structured data exchange. XML was popular because in the age of proprietary formats it was the first open, text-based, non-license encumbered format. So don't get me wrong, there wasn't anything better _at the time_ , but that didn't make XML actually good for the job. Note this is __not a comment that JSON is better __. In 2018 we 're in a world where open data standards are the default. So it's not XML vs. JSON. It's XML vs. the entire rest of the world you have so many options.

\- Performance improved, how many years of Moore's law, storage & memory in between? This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Since 2000 we gained so much in computing power, that we can afford to slather on another 10 layers of abstraction to make microservices easier on ourselves.

\- Software support improved. Go back to 2001 and scaffold a java app that worked with WSDL and SOAP. Then go check out 2018's serverless framework and scaffold a node.js serverless function. Back in 2001 you may have been manually downloading JARs and putting them in a lib folder, then checking that into cvs. In 2018 it's yarn install whatever, saving dependency structure (but not binaries) in git. This amounts to hours of extra work the developer is no longer doing. Greg Lemond, the famous cyclist, was inadvertently talking about software when he said: "It never gets easier, you just go faster".

\- Infrastructure improved. As with the previous point, there are hours of work you're not doing, that lets you focus on your microservice. For example, almost no one who writes a microservice admins the server it runs on. Why would you take such care to admin a single box? Just execute it and spin up another. The average developers of 2001 would be mind-blown.

...But some things stay the same....namely there's nothing free in this world, and everything's a tradeoff.

\- Service decomposition to the right level is still really tricky and people regularly screw it up.

\- Being able to write your system in 10 different languages is nice for flexibility of hiring, speed, and team independence. But then of course you have to maintain 10 different languages worth of software.

\- We've traded debugging of simple stack traces in monoliths for ultra- complex network inspection setups where we debug the failure to pass a parameter to a remote function through a nightmare of complexity -- through the tech stacks of both services, through the networking layer, through the containerization layer, through the orchestration layer, etc. etc. Monoliths were not without their charms.</comment>


Critical deficiencies in upcoming Java module system (Jigsaw) - <AUTHOR> https://developer.jboss.org/blogs/scott.stark/2017/04/14/critical-deficiencies-in-jigsawjsr-376-java-platform-module-system-ec-member-concerns <comment><USER2> Sun/Oracle should have just swallowed their pride and standardized on OSGI as the Java module system years ago. Instead we've had years of back and forth, backbiting, arguments, and lack of progress... all the while people were actually getting work done by just using OSGI. At this point, the "standard Java module system" seems to be a solution looking for a problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the point of the new module system? The current package system works fine. This sounds like it's going to break a bunch of stuff, particularly shading and dynamic class loading which I'm currently using.

Java should look at the C++ ecosystem. There's so much code already written that few sane people will use something that's not 99% compatible.

If you want to complete with Golang just make a subset of java that's AOT compatible</comment>


An open letter to Sam Sethi - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulcarr.com/an-open-letter-to-sam-sethi-on-the-occasion-of-him-completely-losing-his-mind/

<comment><USER2> Can we all please move on. There's nothing to see here.

<comment><USER3> You're wrong. It gets even more entertaining here:

<http://robinwauters.posterous.com/the-sam-sethi-nutcase>

<comment><USER4> entertaining is one word for it. I think its ridiculous, and really offensive. Sam is a human being - and people are tearing him apart all over the internet - who cares if he deserves it, is _disgusting_.

I don't believe writing public letters about how he has mental health issues helps the issue. think of the consequences _if_ he did

less scene more startups.

 _gets off soapbox_

<comment><USER3> Yeah, they shouldn't be saying he's schizophrenic (or even mentally ill). I bet few of them know what that even means or what damage it can cause.

But, if they want to say he's a douchebag and, importantly, they have proof, well.. that's fair game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> this nonsense shouldn't be covered here

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's how this read to me: "I've put a huge amount of effort into trying to mediate this dispute and get to the point where people could apologise and get on with their lives. I almost got there but let a couple of retarded drunken ranting emails made me lose my temper so badly I now feel the need to throw away any chance of achieving anything positive in the situation by publishing a retarded sober ranting blog post. Also, I am high as a kite."

</comment><comment><USER6> "The court in no way found that TechCrunch's statements about you were false, but simply that no-one from the company turned up to defend them."

While a default judgment is not the same as a victory, they seem reasonably similar. I'm as upset as anyone that it's so easy to win a libel suit in Britain, but this story has a "winner" in the popular sense (which is what I imagine is important to this Sethi fellow).

<comment><USER7> It is only a winner if a U.S. court would ultimately conclude that the UK courts had proper jurisdiction over the defendants. No proper jurisdiction = no enforceable judgment (at least outside the UK).

<comment><USER6> A recent story that agrees with you: [http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/08/03/arrington-loses- lib...](http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/08/03/arrington-loses-libe.html)

While it would be more mediagenic if Arrington had to fork over some cash, I think jurisdiction is separate from the issue of who the court of popular opinion sees are the winner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perez hilton == Paul Carr</comment>


Vim Recipes - <AUTHOR> http://vim.runpaint.org/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty nice! My wish for these types of things - can you just put out a big list key combos to browse through? I know the basic concepts of vim but I just want to see how the commands can be strung together. Something like:

\- ggVG: highlight the whole file

\- jj: escape (this is in my .vimrc, not standard)

\- xp: swap letters

\- vab: highlight an s-exp (inluding the parens)

\- gt: go to the next tab to the right

\- gT: go to the next tab to the left

\- :tabnew: open a new tab (you can also add a file after that)

\- daw: delete a word

\- das: deletes the sentence under the cursor

\- dap: deletes the paragraph under the cursor

\- vas: selects the sentence under the cursor

\- ci(: deletes the inner content of a parens, puts you in insert mode

\- q[key][whatever]q: records a macro

\- @[key]: plays back the macro

\- ZZ: save and close the current window

<comment><USER3> Before I made a brief foray in the land emacs, I used tabs in VIM rather than leveraging the buffer system (I came from a Windows world, so I was used to tabs in other editors). Then emacs opened my eyes to magic of buffers, and when I returned to VIM (for various reasons), I found buffers to be better than tabs, especially once I first learned the commands, and then updated my .vimrc with a few useful shortcuts, particularly for split views.

<comment><USER4> Please tell me the difference. All I see is that it's more difficult to switch when using buffers instead of tabs (have to press :, have to add ! if it's not saved).

<comment><USER5> There are multiple plugins to cosmetically improve interaction with buffers, my favourite is minibufexplorer. Using tabs like you might in other editors is fine for a beginner, but once you begin to learn and use more advanced vim features you'll very quickly realize they don't scale.

Also, you should _always_ make sure 'set hidden' is in your '~/.vimrc'. It's a crime that it's not default in my opinion. Takes care of the dumb _"have to add ! if it's not saved)."_ thing.

<comment><USER6> Two words: FuzzyFinder.

Bind it to a key and switching between buffers (or on-disk files that are not even loaded) becomes as simple as typing a few letters of the filename.

No more scanning of abbreviated tab-labels, no more trial and error cycling through buffers. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just ran across the following, today:

Vim offers strong file encryption with Blowfish

<http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=4870>

Haven't looked into it much, yet. On a Windows machine, today, where I did notice that it seems to bork tab-based autocompletion when specifying a filename while saving (^I doesn't trigger autocompletion).

EDIT: Credit due to:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/ey0ma/vim_offers_strong...](http://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/ey0ma/vim_offers_strong_file_encryption_with_blowfish/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Blowfish encryption (and persistent undo) came in 7.3:

[https://groups.google.com/group/vim_announce/browse_thread/t...](https://groups.google.com/group/vim_announce/browse_thread/thread/66c02efd1523554b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case anyone else was wondering, the PDF appears to have been generated from HTML using "Prince" <http://www.princexml.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried journeying into Vim, but failed, sticking to Netbeans for mainly python-development.

Highlights that made me uneasy:

\- Often I'd find myself with an accidentally closed gvim, having to open up working projects all over again.

\- Overview of source changes with more control: Changes in n files pops up n vimdiff windows.</comment>


Short, Readable Deep Learning Implementation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JeremyNixon/oracle/blob/master/convolutional_neural_network.py <comment><USER2> Where is max poooling layer?</comment>


The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/ <comment><USER2> "But the attempt didn't work, because the Linux team was careful enough to notice that that this code was in the CVS repository without having gone through the normal approval process. Score one for Linux."

Actually, they were just lucky enough that someone wasn't able to break into the main BitKeeper repository. It is highly unlikely that any private organization could withstand a state sponsored intrusion from the likes of the US, Russia, or China. And that's assuming they needed to. They probably already have found bugs that would let them in without going to such lengths. Also take into consideration that just "Linux" by itself is useless, there will be a lot of other 3rd party applications installed on the system with a lot less strict security over their source code.

The particular bug in question doesn't actually provide an exploit, it just sets the current UID to 0. An attacker would still need some other method of executing their own code under that ID which would require the ability to create new processes (e.g. the command line), or a method of altering the code of the current process through some other bug. The fact that an accompanying alteration wasn't found that allowed for that is a good hint that there's a lot more problems.

<comment><USER3> Are there any calls that check the UID before performing a privileged operation? It seems to me like this would be exploitable, since modifying a kernel data structure like this is surely not intended.

<comment><USER4> > Are there any calls that check the UID before performing a privileged > operation?

All of them. that's what the UID is for.

<comment><USER3> That's what I thought–this basically gives you root access. So it's just a privilege escalation, plain and simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I enjoy the idea that we can feel safe from attackers because we caught an attacker once, that time back in 2003.

<comment><USER6> Definitely not safe:

[https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/1...](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/Syzbot-and-the-Tale-of-Thousand-Kernel-Bugs-Dmitry- Vyukov-Google.pdf)

Far as backdoors, the most common way professionals do it is disguise them as normal bugs/vulnerabilities. They werent saboteurs: just slipped like everyone does. ;)

<comment><USER7> Your comment reminds me of the Underhanded C Contest. Some of the submissions are absolutely _dirty_ , and it goes to show how feasible it is to slip in these kinds if bugs.

[http://underhanded-c.org/](http://underhanded-c.org/)

<comment><USER6> That's a nice example of sneaky subversions. Many examples. I do want to emphasize even more that subversions with low consequences will look like most common, vanilla stuff you will see. Most of them won't make UCC since they look too accidental. Article included a common source of problems and subverison opportunities: replacing == with = or other way around. Few would bat an eye when that could just be a finger slip of a hurried programmer.

The other part of things is you don't want to just introduce the defect. It's better to meaningfully improve something so the contributors' image stays good despite problems. So, you want to improve it for performance, readability, or something like that. Then, make sure most of your contributions _don 't_ introduce problems. A high-quantity, mostly-positive contributor is a much better saboteur since the bad stuff is both (a) tiny portion of contributions and (b) stuff others screw up on. Therefore, it looks like random defects not worth blocking that contributor.

The fact that things like Linux kernel have hundreds of vulnerabilities a year isn't helping. The baseline is way worse than any saboteur would be contributing. Such insecure-by-default projects make their job much easier. Hell, they can look pretty skilled only adding a few vulnerabilities to a project with that many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.phrack.org/issues/64/15.html](http://www.phrack.org/issues/64/15.html)

<comment><USER9> If memory serves me right the CVS bug was originally discovered and exploited by a member of an infamous file sharing site. After descriptions(?) of that bug were leaked in underground circles, an east European hacker wrote up his own exploit for it. This second exploit was eventually traded for hatorihanzo.c, a kernel exploit, which was also a 0-day at the time.

The recipient of the hatorihanzo.c then tried to backdoor the kernel after first owning the CVS server and subsequently getting root on it.

The hatorihanzo exploit was left on the kernel.org server, but encrypted with an (at the time) popular ELF encrypting tool. Ironically the author of that same tool was on the forensic team and managed to crack the password, which turned out to be a really lame throwaway password.

And that's the story of how two fine 0-days were killed in the blink of an eye.

(The other funny kernel.org story is when a Google security researcher found his own name in the master boot record of a misbehaving server.)

<comment><USER10> >(The other funny kernel.org story is when a Google security researcher found his own name in the master boot record of a misbehaving server.)

Do you have a link to this story? I tried googling but couldn't find it

<comment><USER9> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I love, loved, and will always love C, it has too many security dangers like these. I know it's not intrinsically its fault, and that you can mitigate lots of issues using better tooling, but many of the issues with C are due either to poor design choices (just look at the state of string.h) or things nobody could foresee decades ago. While being close to metal is of paramount importance for tasks such as writing kernels, we shouldn't be forced to pick between safety and simplicity; I think that C needs a treatment like C++11 has been to C++. Lots of people will stubbornly stick with C89, but a boy can hope, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER12> Published 2013.

</comment><comment><USER13> The check should be written:

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (0 = current->uid)) retval = -EINVAL;

This would cause a compile error on the naughty code.

<comment><USER14> "Yoda conditions" are controversial. (Personally, I hate them.)

Some people find conditions with the constant on the left, like `(0 == foo)`, jarring and difficult to read. Other people apparently aren't bothered by them. In my experience, neither group of people will be convinced by the other side's arguments.

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

<comment><USER15> _Personally, I hate them_

I'm nearly ambivalent on them: I'm no programmer. On the one hand it looks like relying on behaviour that is correct now but may not be so in the future. On the other it is a little extra safety. It looks horrid. Its a nice mini hack.

Nahh: Too specific to one small potential source of error. Rely on this sort of nonsense and before you know it you'll be invoking magic. Use a decent IDE that looks out for it if you need reminding about this class of bug.

<comment><USER12> > On the one hand it looks like relying on behaviour that is correct now but > may not be so in the future.

> Use a decent IDE that looks out for it if you need reminding about this > class of bug.

And when your next environment/plugin/employer's setup changes or doesn't offer this warning? Or the day that getting your critical system back up ASAP leaves you no choice but to SSH in from your phone and edit your source in Nano?

Learning and practicing defensive programming as a professional programmer is like defensive driving for a taxi driver, or survival skills for a long- distance hiker. It's a part of what someone who considers themselves a serious professional should maintain.

Relying on a 'decent IDE' to manage your code quality for you is an excellent way to blunt your skills. I'm not saying we should all throw IDEs away or turn off their warnings, but to rely on them is an awful substitute for maintaining good practice. Granted, crossing every t and dotting every i is much, much harder in C than most other languages, but every compiler warning you have to hunt down and fix is another little slice of your day shaved off and gone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Delay Using a Database - <AUTHOR> http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/database/delay_using_a_database.html

<comment><USER2> This is the first time I've ever heard anyone say, "I wrote an app that didn't use a database and it worked out for the best in this instance." I would counter with suggesting that, for any app that you expect is going to either (a) grow quickly, or (b) be unsupported by you in the future likely should have a database, otherwise you will have trouble.

<comment><USER3> What I'm taking away from the article is the ol' KISS prinicple.

I don't see why building on an RDBMS necessitates added cost, though. I can think of at least two production-quality products that are free, and depending on the application, using the structure provided by database tables and SQL queries can actually be simpler than using a mishmash of hashtables and XML files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't want to make my own system for storing and retrieving records (juggling flat files?). I don't write my own server (no matter how little the project), and I don't make up my own database system.

The SQLite docs are clear, and there are a billion tutorials for interacting with SQLite in every programming language. It's easy to use, and it leverages the work of others so I can focus on the things I want to do.

This article is ridiculous. The lazy hack and the next lazy hack coughed along until they did it right.

</comment><comment><USER5> Simply the most down-to-earth and pragmatic article of the last few months here.</comment>


Computational Complexity for Dummies - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.fortnow.com/2009/05/foundations-of-complexity.html

<comment><USER2> The green color hurts my eyes !!</comment>


Rhubarb: The role of Edinburgh in its cultivation and development [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/jrcpe_47_1_lee.pdf <comment><USER2> I've lived in the midwest all of my life, and grew up eating Rhubarb Pie that my grandmother made. The Rhubarb she used was from her garden, and is likely the decedent of my original German homestead family from several generation back.

Recently I've come to learn that Rhubarb is not native. Which was surprising to me because I see it everywhere. It came over from our European immigrants and has been hanging out ever since.

Last spring I was hiking in a forest in ND, and came across a beautiful patch of rhubarb. This got me thinking -- where did this patch of Rhubarb come from? If all local Rhubarb eventually can be traced back to the mother plant brought over from Europe as immigrants made their way west, could we use genetic markers to trace individual patches back to specific homesteads, and ultimately to specific counties of origin in Europe? This kind of thing fascinates me.

According to the linked article, the plant originally came from China. So in theory, only part of the story would be told by linking a patch back to Europe. You could continue to trace back all the way to China.

<comment><USER3> The group is Himalayan if I'm not wrong. Is a mountain plant.

For me it was always a frustrating species, very reluctant to grow and prone to death sentence by slug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Gregory was notoriously argumentative and after a quarrel with a fellow academic, Professor Hamilton, he smote him to the ground with his stick. Summoned to court he was found guilty of assault and fined £100 (a considerable amount in those days). He had the last word, however. On paying his fine, he said that 'He would willingly pay double to be allowed to repeat the assault'."

</comment><comment><USER5> If the Russians had a virtual monopoly until the late 1700s, it's interesting that the plant spread so fast. My grandparents told stories about their parents enjoying rhubarb, and they were certainly not wealthy.

So rhubarb went from something you'd send to the Pope to curry favor, to a very common plant in the gardens of the poor, in less than a century.

<comment><USER6> It's very easy to grow, and quite prolific once established. I have two plants, and with no effort on my part I can harvest 10lbs or more from each every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sadly, no mention of rhubarb pie, which I'd never had before moving to the southern U.S.:

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

The wikipedia page also mentions what seems like a important tidbit: the stalks remain toxic if frostbitten.

<comment><USER8> In Michigan, Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie is pretty common and available at any larger grocery store year round. Plain rhubarb pie (which is superior in my opinion) is much less common but still available upon request from most bakeries. Similarly, my family has "Rhubarb Crunch", basically an Apple Crisp using rhubarb instead of apples, at every major family gathering in the summer.

<comment><USER7> Oops, I didn't mean to imply it's unique to the south, just that I'd never had it growing up in Miami. The delicacy there (which has no equal) is key-lime pie. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the family stories I have heard, my great-grandmother raised rhubarb, so my grandmother had it because my grandfather was used to it. I was encouraged to take a stalk whenever I wanted growing up, which, at times, was twice daily.

As for location, I grew up in Illinois, my grandmother was from Arkansas, and my grandfather and his mother, while being from Illinois, traced their family roots back to Pennsylvania Dutch.

I still prefer the raw stalk to anything else.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love the etymology whereby 'barb' in 'rhubarb' means 'barbarian'—because from the Greeks' point of view, only barbarians would eat it.

[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rhubarb](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rhubarb)

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember rhubarb and Icelandic poppies ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_nudicaule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_nudicaule)) were among the few introduced perennials that prospered in Anchorage, Alaska.

</comment><comment><USER11> Its funny because Ive never seen anything at the Botanics in Edinburgh about this aspect of its history, and i spend a lot of time there

Also no mention of roobarb and custard -

[http://www.roobarbandcustard.tv/](http://www.roobarbandcustard.tv/)

</comment><comment><USER10> There's something particularly satisfying about this submission combining rhubarb and Edinburgh, either of which would make for a fine offbeat HN post in its own right. Maybe value grows quadratically with the number of such inputs.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my favourite photographs is this one:

[http://imgur.com/a/Fty3m](http://imgur.com/a/Fty3m)

I was told it's from Gloucestershire in the 1930s, but I have no way of knowing if that's true.

I can't get my head round their shoes.</comment></comment>