Corporate Socialism: The Government Is Bailing Out Investors and Not You - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nntaleb/corporate-socialism-the-government-is-bailing-out-investors-managers-not-you-3b31a67bff4a <comment><USER2> I wonder if people in the US realize that when they hear the number "two trillion" they should think "$10,000 per tax payer".

<comment><USER3> That'd be misleading though. Much of that $2T is comprised of loans.

<comment><USER2> To who and at what interest rate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the Canadian side so I'm not sure how our recent legislation differs.

Up here the government is forcing businesses to close their doors 3-4 weeks if they're non-essential. We can can weather 3 weeks and continue paying leave to the few employees we have. After that we're out of money to rent, wages, & utilities without any government assistance.

Small business don't exactly sit on warchests of cash, especially if they have business loans to pay off.

I might be biased here, but I'd prefer to maintain existing employees then lay them off and try hiring when this is over, but no one can even see if we'll actually be able to reopen in 3 weeks. How long will this take? No one really knows. If this lasts 3 months and the economy is still at a halt, we're in even worse shape as now we're bled of cash and on top of that have a bunch more debt.

<comment><USER5> Also at a small Canadian business, and I think the vagueness on timeline and 'stimulus/bailout' is intentional. It seems very likely (>50%) this will stretch out at least to June, and the government appears to be trying to avoid a huge rash of layoffs.

My take is that the government is trying to get businesses to take on debt and essentially fund stimulus spending. My advice is not to count on being back in business in three weeks.

Sorry for the dour view, but I hope you can make it through; this is going to be tough for a lot of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why bailout? Why not nationalize it instead and hopefully privatize it back later down the road. Or if you don't want the nationalization headache at least trade money for equity.

<comment><USER7> > Why bailout? Why not nationalize it instead and hopefully privatize it back > later down the road.

That's not an alternative to a bailout, its a common bailout method: the government purchases equity of an ailing institution, thereby nationalizing it in whole or in part, puts it's own management in place, turns it around, and then sells the equity on the open market.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for explaining. I thought bailout meant just giving away money or some low interest credit to companies without getting equity in return.

<comment><USER8> I used to think the same. Good article here with a bit more detail!

[https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/23/how-to- think...](https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/23/how-to-think-about- corporate-bailouts-correctly/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Workers are being helped here, they are getting 600 per week + whatever the state program gives them. In Florida, that would be around 1K per week which is unprecedented. I think where the legislation falls short is help to states. There should be around 1 or 2K per capita in direct aid to state governments experiencing revenue short falls and increased demand for services with no state 'FED' to issue money for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-recession- glo...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-recession-global- economy-stimulus-state)

</comment><comment><USER11> Haven't seen many people complaining about all the homeless people on social media much in the past two weeks.

<comment><USER12> That's because people with computers are at hunkered at home and social distancing.

<comment> blaser-waffle No morning commute, no stepping over human poo, no one trying to sell you drugs in the Tenderloin, etc. when you're at home.

<comment><USER13> Or, alternatively, not in San Francisco,CA. USA, as many people aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The real question is why/when restructuring through bankruptcy became seen as something society should avoid rather then embrace?

There is a huge argument to be said for the government acting like an buyer of last resort for critical assets/activities belonging to organization under bankruptcy, rather then acting as an lender of last resort for companies trying to stay out of bankruptcy court.

Lets keep in mind that bankruptcy under almost all western legal systems allow for the continuation of viable economic activity and resale of valuable assets, i.e. in a lot of cases most salaried employees keeps their jobs even after the parent company goes bankrupt.

From an market theory and moral perspective we need an functional system of restructuring through bankruptcy for any free market based system to starve off the (according to Marx inevitable) decline back towards aristocratic mercantilism.

<comment><USER15> The general answer is that governments (i.e., bureaucrats) are not thought to be very good at stepping in and running corporations. In addition, presumably all of those bureaucrats already have things to do and don't need the headache.

<comment><USER14> Is that empirical based knowledge or theological doctrine?

The idea that an service cannot be efficiently provided by government is an idea that tend to be thrown around a lot in US politics despite evidence from Europe that on public utilities government/state/city owned/controlled utilities is cheaper/better then private companies when allowed to compete directly side by with private enterprise.

<comment><USER15> It's one thing to have the government provide a service as part of a carefully planned operation. It's another thing entirely to put a bunch of government workers suddenly in charge of a large corporation.

 _Hey Joe and Jane in GSA, GM just went bankrupt. Could you please drop your other responsibilities and run it from now on?_

<comment><USER14> So what your saying is that the common corporate practice of lifting CEO's across sectors into companies they have no experience with directly is an recipe for disaster?

The government have exactly the same options to hire experienced people as any company in existence, so if the government cant replace bad manage neither can the private sector.

Once you have a bailout you have by definition incompetent owners and an/or management team that cant do their job properly, bankruptcy forces that to become clear by forcing the incumbent owners to face losses, bailout on the other hand keeps the rot in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I'm an investor, which I am, they are indeed bailing me out too. 55% of Americans hold equity. So 55% of Americans are being bailed out. Let's get that number to 100%, so we can move on to other issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> My rough estimate is 10% of $6T US bailout goes to people Vs corporations by end of May.

Your estimates? Is it true that Banks encashed $1T at 0% the Sunday before? Why did Mortgage rates go up?

<comment><USER18> Mortgage rates went up because 10 and 30 yr bond yields have spiked. Also, during the yield collapse a few weeks ago, banks got flooded by refi requests and it exhausted banks' supply of available dollars for mortgages.

<comment><USER9> Banks have an practically infinite supply of money. They just issue it when they create loans. What they lack is the capacity to process the loans, not the funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The whole point of capitalism is that owners are rewarded and everyone else get's fucked. That's really fucking obvious. The key to living under capitalism is to become an owner (of capital) as soon as you can and stop being a worker. Anyone talking about any other strategy is talking nonsense. The proletariat will not rise up any time soon and capitalism is not going anywhere.

So everyone's best bet is to stop moaning and get with the program. We can't beat them, join them.

<comment><USER17> Fair characterization of industrial capitalism, perhaps. How about network capitalism of the type described by Yochai Benkler? [https://www.benkler.org/](https://www.benkler.org/)

<comment><USER20> I think fundamentally humans want to compete instead of cooperate and that a tiger can't change its stripes.

<comment><USER21> Honest question, given the tens of thousands of years of humans cooperating to form groups of increasingly large size and interdependence, what makes you think there is more competition than cooperation happening?

<comment><USER20> Because after tens of thousands of years we are no closer to the utopian ideal as the cavemen were. Also because you can't cooperate for a mate.

<comment><USER21> In caveman times you were _far_ more likely to be killed via violent encounter, starve to death, or die from minor accidents or infections, etc. The average life expectancy was about 20 years, and a painful death was highly likely. And while you can't cooperate for a mate, there is no shortage of mate's to go around and likely millions of suitable matches for any particular person today. So however far from utopia we might be now, we are certainly _far_ closer than caveman times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is no such thing as corporate socialism, its called oligarchy. How long must the rest of the world suffer before the Americans open a dictionary?

<comment><USER23> That's not as rhetorically powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love Taleb; he's a certified creative genius, better-than-chance-would-allow prophet and a regular guy with Good Judgment, all three at once- a rarity. I think he is wrong on this one however.

Wrongest observation in the article:

"For the very fact that we are saving airlines indicates their role as utility"

An industry can be essential to society and still not be a utility, and that's a feature, not a bug. Nationalizing an industry implies the State has the knowledge to run it. But an entire industry of experts is already dedicated to doing just that. Nationalizing it implies the State would pay those same people or their equivalent to do what it is they already do. Why would it do that ?

This is true of critical and non-critical industries. The government does not possess the knowledge to run specialized industries. That's exactly why Socialism always fails, and yes, it does always fail.

In America at least, even "utilities" are not State owned, at most they are regulated, and the constant object of regulatory capture because of it.

His other main point, that this is not a Black Swan, it's a White Swan (a disaster they should have seen coming and planned for) is stronger. However the exact scope and duration of this event is itself something of a Black Swan, no? The entire world is in lockdown for an unknown duration. Did you want that priced into every airline ticket you buy? It's not a rhetorical question, you have to decide if this is something you yourself would have wanted, back in the beforetime.

For that matter, how does a nationalized airline industry raising your taxes to pay for Black Swans sound to you? Think that's where the money would ultimately really go? How's your Social Security lockbox doing?

The reason we stem the bleeding in our industries like airlines isn't because their lobbyists incite Congressfolk to sin or even because they're utilities in all but name. Life could go on if the major airlines all failed all at once. After some time, there would be new airlines and until then charter planes for critical things and telecommute, like now.

The reason we bail them out is because the net downstream cost of not doing so is many times the net cost of doing so. People have to have jobs to go back to after this is over. There has to be an _economy_. There has to be industries with jobs to go to.

The demand for air travel will certainly be there, air travel is not a new invention waiting to catch on, is it? So the question to be answered is: is it wiser to birth a new airline industry or treat the wounds of the one you have? Here I define wiser to mean: less costly to the government and less ruinous of people's lives.

In the US at least, everyone is getting hard cash presently to see them through, #masshole not withstanding. Many industries and even banks(!) are stepping up in all sorts of creative and genuinely helpful ways. This will pass; we will survive thanks to people's willingness to endure #lockdown for the sake of others. Everything else beyond that is gravy from historical and biological perspectives.

</comment><comment><USER24> Without businesses there are no jobs. I don't understand why people are so outraged about small business and corporate stimulas during this crisis. What exactly is their counter plan?

<comment><USER25> One solution I find interesting is that the government exchange equity for the bailout and hand it over to the American workers.

<comment><USER26> My family and friends who lost their jobs or got furloughed can't pay their rent with equity.

<comment><USER25> When I suggested equity for bailout, I mean the the government would provide cash. Instead of it just being a handout to businesses , they would receive equity in exchange

<comment><USER26> Is anyone talking about bailouts without equity? I thought that was implied, since it's how they handled the automaker bailout 12 years ago.

But regardless I don't see the efficacy of bailouts for most companies. Besides a few critical businesses like the airlines and Boeing, the money would do very little to help the workers who have been laid off or furloughed. The government needs to pick up that tab directly, or else the cash isn't going to be used for it.

<comment><USER25> My understanding is that they are talking about "free" bailouts without equity. This article [1] suggests this is the case for the airlines, which would receive a "grant", and small businesses, which would receiving tax credits. It is unclear to me if this is just a mischaracterization by the MSM.

I expect that workers will see very little of the 2 trillion dollar bill. $1000 for an estimated 30 million workers (~10X current numbers) would be about 1.5% of the bailout. 3 months of unemployment for the same would be about 10% of the total.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-stimulus-bill- up...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-stimulus-bill-updates- whats-in-the-2-trillion-relief-plan.html)

<comment><USER26> The checks are going to a more like 120 million households (ballpark, haven't checked the BLS), and your unemployment ballpark is 10 million shy of the estimates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> IIRC the stimulus bill does not allow for stock buybacks. So, I am not sure how they're bailing out investors.

Wait until the unemployment numbers are out in a couple weeks. When the government shuts businesses down, people lose jobs.

Let's not forget everyone who has a 401k and was hoping to retire this year.

To add to how wrong this headline is, the government is literally sending everyone a check.

I am sure some guy on medium is more capable of sizing this up than our entire senate and house of representatives, though. You should trust him: it's corporate greed.

CSPAN is the place to go if you want to know what's really happening.

<comment><USER6> The author is Nassim Taleb. A highly respect figure on HN among many other circles. You might have also heard of one of his books "The Black Swan"

<comment><USER27> well I stand corrected on that, it looks like he does have some experience with what he's writing about

However I don't agree with the comparison of the 2008 bailouts with the current stimulus bill at all. Those definitely were corporate socialism, but I think we have progressed as a country since then.

<comment><USER28> > _Those definitely were corporate socialism, but I think we have progressed > as a country since then_

Please provide reasons with sources to back up your opinion.

<comment><USER27> This isn't wikipedia.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Too Big To Understand - <AUTHOR> http://azizonomics.com/2012/12/09/too-big-to-understand/ <comment><AUTHOR> That's a hell of a scary chart.

NB the US tax code is similarly ginormous, especially when compared to virtually every other country in the world.

Not a great way to encourage entrepreneurship.</comment>


'The Interview' makes $1M at box office - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/26/media/the-interview-box-office-results/index.html

<comment><USER2> P.T Barnum had a famous saying about this sort of thing. "Something, something, every minute."</comment>


What is Mathematical Proficiency (James Milgram, Stanford University) - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:IvVyKg73_rsJ:ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/what-is-mathematical-proficiency.pdf+/search%3Fhl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3D1I5%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26q%3D%2Bsite:stanford.edu%2BJames%2BMilgram%2BWhat%2BIs%2BMathematical%2BProficiency&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShFbDrhraQDGKceoeECMFOPokIWB6ry56D-n7dd-7JT__paiKtIX6SqpbtABSSO-o7mb_HMLB82NZfF8yA3T6qdz2ebCA9_ifuau3sw-ETjm6YE69Xt7I-HD43tSs1BhyT38UI2&sig=AHIEtbQJgAfYXaovkOjHjfRn1dP5_WSkBQ

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitted in the Google Docs form shown here because the underlying original document

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

is hosted as a .PDF with the ftp protocol specified, which HN appears to block. Submitted because of the author's interesting discussion of this problem from a state mathematics assessment test:

"Find the next term in the sequence 3, 8, 15, 24, . . . "

That's an interesting problem to try to solve before reading Milgram's analysis of the problem.</comment>


Olympic committee banning 3G-Wifi Access points at venues - <AUTHOR> http://mobilesociety.typepad.com/mobile_life/2012/07/can-you-really-forbid-3g-to-wi-fi-bridges-at-the-olympics.html

<comment><USER2> The question this post raises is can one 'legally' ban personal 3G hotspots? And the answer is, I suspect, that on your ticket which you need to be in any of the Olympic venues, it says that you agreed when you bought it to be bound by the rules the organizers might impose on you. And this is one of their rules, and so your bound by it.

That said, there are lots of access points provided and managing a dense AP infrastructure with un-sanctioned broadcasters is pretty difficult. Channel conflicts can take other paying customers right off the air and result in poorer service for everyone. That said, I notice they don't have any problem with people carrying in a multiport ethernet switch and letting other devices share their connectivity that way...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The list is here: [http://www.london2012.com/mm/Document/Documents/General/01/2...](http://www.london2012.com/mm/Document/Documents/General/01/25/44/06/Prohibitedandrestricteditemslists_Neutral.pdf):

– Personal/private wireless access points and 3G hubs (smart devices such as Android phones, iPhone and tablets are permitted inside venues, but must not be used as wireless access points to connect multiple devices)

I wonder if they have through through how they plan on enforcing this control freakery?</comment>


Browser URLs Upvoting - <AUTHOR> http://arsenije.quora.com/Browser-URLs-Upvoting

<comment><USER2> You already can, in a roundabout way.

If there's a site I want to be the first result after I've just typed just a single letter in the address bar, I type as little of the sites name as I can before it appears in autocomplete. Then I click the site, close the tab, and start again. After doing this a few times, Firefox usually gets that this is the site I want to go to after I've typed g or f or whatever, and puts it as the first result.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


Speeding up Container Builds - <AUTHOR> http://mrmagooey.github.io/articles/speeding-up-container-builds <comment><USER2> Isn't this just apt-cacher-ng? [https://www.unix-ag.uni- kl.de/~bloch/acng/](https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/)</comment>


Benchmarks Show Firefox 57 Quantum Doing Well, but Chrome Largely Winning - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-quantum-bench&num=1 <comment><USER2> Note that this is from Beta so there's a possibility it differs from the actual release.

</comment><comment><USER3> This benchmark should be run again with Firefox 57 stable release.</comment>


Retiring Obnam - <AUTHOR> https://listmaster.pepperfish.net/pipermail/obnam-announce-obnam.org/2017-August/000026.html <comment><AUTHOR> A long time ago I started using Obnam when DreamHost allowed 50GB of free backup server space via sftp. Obnam could manage "dumb" remote sftp endpoints as well as encrypt, de-dupe, and periodically purge old data.

After obnam got slower and DH dropped the back-up service I started to search for alternatives and stumbled on attic. I ran attic in parallel for a while before its development went stale and was forked to borg backup[0]. Borg backup and obnam run on for my daily backups, but soon it looks like it will be time to retire obnam.

I'll miss obnam, it was one of the first "simple" back-up utilities that had the features I wanted (de-duped, encryption, history purging, integrity checking). It's too it never evolved to something easier to scale and maintain. I like to think it has given rise to other tools like borg backup which now have a seemingly scalable community and software design.

Thanks for your contribution Lars, you set a high bar for other backup utiltiies and I certainly think the ecosystem is better because of it.

[0] [https://github.com/borgbackup/borg](https://github.com/borgbackup/borg)</comment>


Rss-puppy: A watchdog tool for monitoring RSS feeds - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/buzzfeed-openlab/rss-puppy <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. I'm using automated RSS feed monitoring currently with IFTTT and its maker channel. The maker channel is calling my own PHP script when an entry has been added to a third party feed. It's a feed announcing new software releases which I then parse, download, and automatically install on a farm of 8 servers. RSS-puppy in this case could remove the dependency to IFTTT.

<comment><USER3> Project author here: Totally. And don't get me wrong, IFTTT has a slick interface and I love not having to manage it... but also, setting up more than a few recipes becomes a major time sync

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like it would integrate really well with newsbeuter. Having to refresh my full set of feeds is always what's kept me using a cloud-provided RSS reader.

<comment><USER5> Something like this should support Pubsubhubbub and rss-cloud. After having implemented something like this[0], I based my own feedreader[1] completely on superfeedr[2], which supports those push notifications as well and crawls the feeds in very small intervalls if not. That get rids of the problem of having to refresh the feeds completely.

[0]: [https://github.com/onli/rsspusher](https://github.com/onli/rsspusher), now defunct

[1]: [https://onli.github.io/feedtragon/](https://onli.github.io/feedtragon/)

[2]: [https://superfeedr.com/](https://superfeedr.com/)</comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Noah Everett, Founder, Twitpic - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/8969807806/dont-worry-about-funding-if-you-dont-need-it

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry about funding if you don't need it. Today it's cheaper to start a business than ever.

\- Noah Everett (@noaheverett)

<http://startupquote.com/post/8969807806/></comment>


Ask HN: Which line of code you have written will be executed the most? - <AUTHOR> The other day I was trying to determine which line of code I have written will get run the most?
I think for me it would be a for loop in a cron job I run on work's servers -  not very exciting! I am sure HN has many more interesting examples.
maybe you have written code:
- deep in an OS that handles memory management?
- that is deeply distributed?
- that is in every JS lib? ~~cough cough left pad cough~~
- maybe it is an accidental infinite loop you once wrote? <comment><USER2> 20+ years ago, I wrote the Fortran code that polls the vibration of a turbine shaft every 1/100th of second. That facility is still in operation, the system I worked on is still in operation, those type of facilities run 24x7x365 and rarely have a downtime where system or turbine might be taken offline for long. I guess my code has been running every 1/100th of second for 20 years or so. I don't think I can write any code that will beat that little piece of code in frequency of use.

</comment><comment><USER3> At a fortune 100 company I consulted at, developers were rewarded for writing efficient code that was frequently reused. This was literally micro- transaction recognition and rewards a decade prior to anything resembling today's micro-transaction cloud billing.

I wrote the billing/logging system and I am certain the main "method call logger" is by far the most frequently executed code I have ever written. It was called by any method that the author wanted to be compensated for. Alas, I was not allowed to include the call to this method in the compensation pool :-(

</comment><comment><USER4> I spent a week or so pouring through valgrind and profile output optimising the very heart of the code for a Monte Carlo simulation at a major investment bank. Some of the lines of code I wrote in that week will have been executed billions of times per day since I pushed them back in 2007 or so. They are still being used.

I got a good overall speedup (over 5% in code that was already pretty well- optimised) but by far the most valuable optimisation I did was one of the most basic - hoisting variables out of for loops. This kind of thing

        for(int i=0; i<something; ++i) {
           int x=0;
           //...do something with x
        }

changes to...

        int x;
        for(int i=0; i<something; ++i) {
           x=0;
           //...do something with x
        }

There are slightly more subtle versions of that, but at the time none of the compilers we were using (gcc 3.2, solaris 8 C++ compiler or Visual C++ 7) could optimise that without you doing the hoist yourself.

</comment><comment><USER5> // TODO

</comment><comment><USER6> For me it has to be the data analysis pipeline I wrote for one of the biggest semiconductor manufacturing fabs in the world. Its is triggered for every lot they produce (a lot is usually 25 wafers). This company holds the majority market share in semi manufacturing space, so it is more than coin flip likely that the device you are using to read this contains a chip which was analyzed by my pipeline. (So if it breaks due to thermal issues... sorry).

</comment><comment><USER7> I wrote the backend for a large saas that is in the business of pushing notifications to ios, Android, and browsers.

It's not as cool as being a frequent call at the OS level, but pretty good for an ex web developer.

I think it's very likely still in use, in some part, and surely into the billions of deliveries, so who knows how many executions of some inner loops or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER8> Probably some code I wrote to see how long a for loop would take in js looping a billion times. Not too exiting either

</comment><comment><USER9> On the front end it's some code that walks the DOM in a way the standard DOM don't. It can get DOM nodes by node type. On the backend it's some code that walks the file system for systems automation.

Simple primitive stuff like that tends to get embedded in a variety of other automation.

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess mine is a type-conversion class inside an apache beam job. Usually it's running on a streaming job; but when you launch it as dataflow batch job it has 30-40 workers running it at once for several hours.

</comment><comment><USER11> Technically: it's things inside of rendering or sim loops.

Philosophically: print debugging.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some architecture-dependent things in context-switch/signal handling path.

</comment><comment><USER13> Rewrote a logging framework that logged petabytes per day.

</comment><comment><USER14> if err != nil {

<comment><USER15> I was going to post the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lots of interrupt and timer tick handlers. The early ones ran every 500 microseconds and those went out the door 25 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER17> A decorator that checks if the user is logged before running a GraphQL mutation.

@login_required

def mutate(...):

</comment><comment><USER18>
        import numpy</comment>


White House is considering antitrust investigation into 'online platform bias' - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-executive-order-investigate-google-facebook-antitrust-2018-9 <comment><USER2> Regardless of the official reasoning behind it, this kind of legislation is essential to the continued functioning of our democracies.

Every company has a culture, and that culture by definition has biases, and can't help but leak those biases in everything they do and produce. When a company controls what people see (and search results are a form of control), they affect perception, which in turn affects judgment.

We saw firsthand the insidiousness of this when a bunch of googlers succumbed to savior syndrome, discussing their desire to use the powers of the company to counter "badness" and foster "goodness". Regardless of your own personal views on the political issues discussed, they can very easily end up biased against your personal views, marking yours as "bad" against their "good", while hiding behind a (self-believed) objectivity. Even when they are 100% morally/ethically correct, the very act of unconsciously biasing the majority of people undermines democracy.

Diversity of thought is WHY democracy works. The less diverse peoples' sources of information are, the less accurate they become as collective judges of a republic. We've been seeing a trend towards homogeneous thought with the advent of mass-media, but with those you could at least choose which poison to drink. With invisible biases in search, you completely lose sight of alternative viewpoints because they are suppressed at the source. A monopoly (or oligopoly) here would be disastrous. These really are the final days where we decide who will be the architects of our minds.

<comment><USER3> I feel like I've been warned about this point in time since I was in school:

"This is where relativist, postmodernism leads."</comment></comment>


Measuring and Disrupting Anti-Adblockers Using Differential Execution Analysis [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~mshafiq/files/adblock-ndss2018.pdf <comment><USER2> This is probably not an arms race ad companies want to play. Someone who has an adblocker installed is unlikely to be respective to ads, and by installing an adblocker they currently are opting out of from the ad vendors metrics. which is better than adblock vendors trying to feign ads loading or "interest" in the ads, such as addons like [https://adnauseam.io](https://adnauseam.io)

So its debatable even they would win the ad arms race, but they would also lose credibility in their own metrics as the easiest solution will be to start fooling ad companies that their ads are loading.

<comment><USER3> > Someone who has an adblocker installed is unlikely to be respective to ads

Any statistics to believe this is true? I know for a fact it's false for myself because I do sometimes click on ads when I don't block them.

<comment><USER2> I never said it doesn't happen. You're the odd case and of course there's someone who had adblock installed for them. I just said "unlikely", because they went out of their way to install the adblocker.

<comment><USER4> I myself will go to any length to avoid advertising. Luckily its pretty easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> if it weren't for CDNs, simply blocking all 3rd party domains is the fastest, most reliable and secure way to block ads and greatly reduce bandwidth.

i highly recommend running both uMatrix and uBlock Origin. then whitelist cdns on a per-domain basis.

with the amount of tech and data available these days, google still chooses to show me an ad for chevy on an ice cream site. the fact that the ads are so obviously out of context is truly baffling - does this seriously work for the general consumer? even if i've searched for chevy before, why would i suddenly exit my ice cream experience?

if ads were contextually better, less distracting and less bandwidth/perf impactful, i may actually be convinced to view them. unfortunately none of these things are true.

<comment><USER6> > with the amount of tech and data available these days, google still chooses > to show me an ad for chevy on an ice cream site. the fact that the ads are > so obviously out of context is truly baffling - does this seriously work for > the general consumer? even if i've searched for chevy before, why would i > suddenly exit my ice cream experience?

The point of that particular ad is likely less to get you to click and more to remind you that Chevy exists and is important. So when you go buy that new or used car, Chevy goes through your mind at least once, and you subconsciously have some trust in the brand because you are reminded of its existence through various outlets on a daily basis, which is naturally comforting when done correctly.

It's not really any different from seeing a Tide laundry detergeny commercial while watching South Park. What's tide got to do with a cartoon, and are you going to run out immediately and buy some Tide during the break? No, but next time you go to the store to buy detergent you'll see Tide and while you might not buy it you'll at least be familiar with it in a relatively positive manner, which for most will make the chances of them buying it higher.

<comment><USER5> except that i researched chevy thoroughly and decided that it sucked. now i have to go and purge what google thinks it knows about me. and theoretically repeat this process for every other ad network, but this is neither possible nor practical.

<comment><USER6> Point is, you researched Chevy heavily.

Not everyone is going to buy Chevy but almost everyone is going to research Chevy. The role of Chevy ads being shown to everyone plays a role in this. So a Chevy ad still is "relevant" even on an ice cream site.

<comment><USER7> Hum... The GP is almost certainly seeing those Chevy ads because he researched it. Not the other way around.

That's how tracking ads (don't) work. You usually get ads for things you just brought (or decided not to), hoping that you didn't actually buy it yet or will buy more than once, and the medium can intermediate the transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was an article the other day on HN regarding mental burnout of ads.

This morning I decided to count the ads on a news article, there were 14 between sponsored bs and banner ads. Every single one was complete garbage.

Click here to find out how the tech and ad industry are lowering the bar at a "shocking" rate

<comment><USER9> What would be an example of a non-garbage ad that could've been there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a very cool approach for detecting anti-adblocking.

However, I don't quite get the point for disruption. That is, it seems necessary to load pages at least twice, and then do some computation. How does that help users who are concerned about privacy, throughput or CPU load?

<comment><USER11> This is a technique for automatically generating anti-anti-adblocking rules. They'll be added to the block lists, so you won't have to generate them each time, only when the anti-adblocking script changes enough to break them.

<comment><USER10> Doh. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to the paper, they seem to have modified Chromium's JavaScript engine in order to record execution paths of JavaScript code. Does anyone know exactly how they modified Chromium (or preferably the exact patch they applied to Chromium)?

</comment><comment><USER13> Cross-browser support for WebAssembly was the death knell for ad blockers.

<comment><USER11> Worst case scenario, we can sandbox the whole browser and detect ads visually.

<comment><USER14> Let me know how that works when the website "requires" DRM to function.

<comment><USER15> Probably about as well as most forms of DRM...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty immoral. Companies that create or provide content should at the very least be able to decide if they want to serve you content if you don't agree to see ads with it (or pay for it). How is it moral to effectively force someone to allow you to see the content you want to see without compensating them for it.

<comment><USER17> This is like saying that it's immoral to change the channel whenever ads come on the TV or radio, or to use the mute button on your TV. It is in no way immoral. The way HTML works is your browser sends a request for resources it wants, then renders them for you. IF you don't send the request for resources you don't want, that's not immoral. If it affects the web sites' businesses, then the onus is on them to come up with a model that works. There are other reasonable free models, such as those used by public TV and public radio.

<comment><USER16> You _are_ sending the request for the resources though, e.g. if you load facebook.com there isn't a separate request for ads, they are just loaded as part of the feed. It's very much within their right (contractually) to encumber your usage of the site to rendering the full page as it's served to you. Attempting to fool them into thinking you're rendering the content as presented while you do not actually do that (as a result, imposing on them a net revenue loss) is clearly immoral.

You don't agree to a TOS by watching TV and listening to the radio, the internet is fundamentally different from those media.

<comment><USER18> That isn't how the internet works. It's a series of requests and at any point some requests can be rejected. Whether that request was critical for site functionality depends on what request that was.

Consenting to requests from google.com does not guarantee or imply consent from adservices.google.com, so if google.com tells my browser to please fetch resources from adservices.google.com I'll tell them to go away.

Personally, I use a giant blocklist [0] of domains I do not wish to request resources from.

As a comparison, if you invite _a_ friend to your house do you expect them to show up with 50 other people? Would you be upset with your friend for assuming it would be okay to invite other people to your house without your consent? Is it morally wrong to tell your friend they may not bring other friends to your house without your approval? If you agreed to letting them bring friends over, are you okay with _any_ friends or is their neo-nazi friend not allowed?

[0] [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

 _> You don't agree to a TOS by watching TV and listening to the radio, the internet is fundamentally different from those media._

You don't agree to a TOS by visiting a website either. Agreement is usually done when registering an account and even those are limited in any legal ability to enforce it.

<comment><USER19> > If you invite a friend to your house do you expect them to show up with 50 > other people?

But if you say no, your friend has the choice of whether to come alone.

Anti-anti-adblocking systems prevent your friend from making that choice.

<comment><USER18> In theory, content would not be delivered until the ads have been fetched and reported that they've been delivered. In practice, that isn't a realistic option. Not because it isn't technically possible - but because people are impatient and expect near instant load times and this would slow things down a tiny bit.

The anti-adblocking systems are the equivalent of coming over anyway but complaining about not being able to bring 50 friends the entire time. Anti- anti-adblocking systems are telling them to shut up or don't come over.

There's something to be said about people who repeatedly invite the friend over who constantly complains about not being able to bring 50 friends. I tend to respect sites who ask me to disable my ad blocker: I just won't visit their website.

A low traffic site doesn't make enough to sustain from ads. The proper response isn't to push traffic away - it's to find a business model that works. Ad based models are increasingly _not working_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Won't be very useful. The internet is turning to subscription model very quickly.

<comment><USER21> And most subscription sites still show ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> related I guess?

[http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~mshafiq/files/adblock- imc20...](http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~mshafiq/files/adblock-imc2017.pdf)

[http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~mshafiq/files/adblock- pets2...](http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~mshafiq/files/adblock-pets2017.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> . Edit: failed at reading comprehension</comment>


Ask HN: Is ADA inherently more reliable? - <AUTHOR>

This article:
http://www.sae.org/mags/AEM/8982
...indicates that students have found coding in ADA produces more reliable software and ADA is used elsewhere in projects where "hands-off" operation is critical.
Anyone familiar with ADA care to comment on this or describe the language features that might contribute to this feeling of confidence? <comment><USER2> From what I understand(which isn't much because I haven't learned Ada beyond hello world.) It is more or less java before there was a Java, all memory access, array indexes, etc. are checked at run time. Strong type system, no implicit casts. The language was designed to be amiable to automated verification. You can see this in the way close tags are done. There is no generic end of block. There is end if, end loop, end function name. This way the compiler can narrow down exactly where the missing end block is in your code.</comment>


Tonight's "The Last Lecture" ABC interview with Randy Pausch - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/LastLecture/ Part 1-4 are at the bottom. There are also photos, articles, etc. A nice compliment to the lecture itself (http://tinyurl.com/24x7b6). <comment><AUTHOR> Part 1-4 are at the bottom. There are also photos, articles, etc. A nice compliment to the lecture itself (<http://tinyurl.com/24x7b6>).</comment>


Dutch security chief says Russia is trying to hack government websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/02/dutch-security-chief-says-russia-is-trying-to-hack-government-websites/ <comment><USER2> You forgot to mention China and Iran, but I understand click bait is important nowadays.</comment>


Show HN: I made a tool to explore the SXSW artists, with graphviz images - <AUTHOR> http://www.audiogalaxy.com/sxsw2012

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using neato to draw those images. I'm happy to answer any questions about how it works.</comment>


Ask HN: A, B, or C - Which would get you to make a recommendation on a Q&A site? - <AUTHOR>

A) When I get a discount from the business I make recommendations for (i.e., the business I recommend rewards me according to an algorithm)
B) F*ck giving a recommendation, I wouldn't recommend a business regardless of a discount
C) When I know a good suggestion I'll recommend it (regardless of a discount)
We're doing private beta testing for the options above. Send me an email at email@example.com if you wouldn't mind being a beta tester or if you have any questions.
Appreciate your help <comment><USER2> TL;DR: C

Recommendations in exchange for implied (or actual) discounts is a shady moral area. Or if I've read it backward, and discounts are being given by businesses that I've already recommended, there's not much stopping me in theory of falsely recommending businesses to game for discounts, and it'd be limited only by your ability to secure those discounts from said businesses.

<comment><AUTHOR> read it backwards, but that's my fault. i clarified it for future readers. thanks for the feedback</comment></comment>


Elon Musk's Neuralink looks to begin outfitting human brains with faster I/O - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/elon-musks-neuralink-looks-to-begin-outfitting-human-brains-with-faster-input-and-output-starting-next-year/ <comment><USER2> I think he's hit the nail on the head about symbiosis with AI. If we can start to augment our own intelligence then we can, like he said, "go along for the ride".

I feel like we've read a lot of the same Sci-Fi books... here are some of my favorites that involve augmented intelligence and the possible AI struggles in the future:

True names, the Peace War books, as well as the short story "Bookworm, Run!" by Vernor Vinge.

Old man's war by John Scalzi.

The Heechee Saga by Frederick Pohl.

The Fall Revolution series by Ken MacLeod.

The Virga series by Karl Schroeder.

Musk is playing an active role in the Sci-Non-Fi that we'll all be a part of if we live long enough...

<comment><USER2> Watching the video, near the end, I started thinking about wireheads in the Known Space books by Larry Niven... Sign me up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After just reading that recent article about working conditions at Tesla and the struggles there to produce at high enough quality levels, it is surprising that he is working on this as well.

One can't help but to take it seriously considering his other achievements, but I hope he doesn't stretch himself too thin.

\- Tesla

\- SpaceX

\- Boring Co

\- Neuralink

\- Flamethrower innovator

edit: the video linked in the ars technica article about similar tech: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=QRt8QCx3BCo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=QRt8QCx3BCo)

<comment><USER4> > Flamethrower innovator It was a small project or just sidekick. It's done

>Boring Co Seems like no struggles there. Tech is established

>Tesla They scaled it and are out of production hell

> SpaceX Things are going smooth there. They have nailed landings and > launches. No immediate fires to address

Looks like Elon have some capacity to focus on other endeavors.

<comment><USER5> The only fires that SpaceX needs to address are the actual ones, like at the launchpad explosion a couple months back.

<comment><USER6> You mean a couple years ago? There hasn't been a launchpad explosion since 2016. That was resolved a long time ago.

<comment><USER7> Crew Dragon (still uncrewed) exploded on April 20 this year during a test after its return from ISS. [https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon- explosion-nasa-memo...](https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon-explosion- nasa-memo.html) It sounds like the program was only set back for a few months though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will there be a bug-bounty program for the wireless brain interface?

</comment><comment><USER9> Elon really likes to be the real-life Iron Man...

</comment><comment><USER10> In the 90s they did something similar, wiring up some poor soul who did not have any other options with a bunch of wires to make him walk by wiring impulses from the brain to the legs eventually to abandon him with all the wires still plugged up into him when the funding was cancelled. Please don't be that guy. This is very far fetched and totally science fiction and much like most of Musk's other schemes, or maybe like Elizbeth Holmes schemes, does not really match up with reality of what's possible.

<comment><USER11> Didn't they already prove they can send images, feeling etc.. through the net from Chimp to Chimp. And more recently done this with humans? I 100% agree about not leaving these people in an unstable and uncomfortable state as that's inhumane, but I don't think we should be saying this isn't possible or reality.

<comment><USER10> Yes Chimp 2 verbally described what Chimp 1 saw in great detail so it was completely proven and could not have been a fluke as much of science these days tends to be so they can justify more funding.</comment></comment></comment>


Surviving Whole Foods – A Horror Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-maclean/surviving-whole-foods_b_3895583.html

<comment><USER2> It's shocking that a place like Whole Foods is too bourgeois for a person who eats candy bars before they get to the checkout.</comment>


Twitter Redesigned (screenshots) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1689058/new-twitter-gives-you-a-good-reason-to-tweet-from-the-web

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm very curious to try this out. I didn't use Twitter until I discovered Tweetie, since the website was just too much manual labor. The UI is such a crucial piece of the Twitter experience so I hope this will be a nice, big boost for Twitter.

Another big thing is that the ecosystem is feeding back into twitter.com now. Apps aren't just built on top of what Twitter puts out, but Twitter also pulls that information back in. This has a lot of potential that goes beyond what Facebook can do with it's walled gardens.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm really interested to see how this redesign affects people's perception of Twitter. From the screenshots, it looks like this is a stepping stone to a more comprehensive social application.

The paradigm indicated by the deeper content view - like pulling in full Flickr sets - is encouraging. I'd love for it to include the full text of linked articles, for example.

As this matures, I'll definitely consider using it in its own Fluid app - <USER2> I do with Gmail, Lighthouse, and other web applications.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most of my Twitter use is through third party clients rather than their website. I don't envision this redesign changing my usage patterns much, though I think it's definitely a good step for them. I'll give it a chance; maybe I'll find myself on twitter.com more rather than desktop/phone clients and twitpic.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really do not care about being able to view photos and video but if I could preview links and manage my lists something like Yoono does then that would be awesome

<comment><USER6> The ipad app does this and it works so well that I've started using Twitter again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this looks _gorgeous_!</comment>


Ask HN: Who is the best freelance UI designer you have worked with? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious to see some recommendations from the HN community... <comment><USER2> Are you looking for freelance UI design? Or wanting to see a good example?</comment>


Evolution of the desk - <AUTHOR> http://bestreviews.com/best-home-office-desks#evolution-of-the-desk

<comment><USER2> You could replace those shades with f.lux.</comment>


Ask YC: Feedback on new TrackThis design/features - <AUTHOR>

My recent move from student to unemployed has given me time to completely rework one of my side projects.
Old site: http://www.usetrackthis.com New site: http://zend.usetrackthis.com (new design, email/SMS/Facebook tracking)
I'd appreciate any feedback on the new design or features. Thanks.
Note that the new site isn't totally live, so if you add any packages they won't be updated (yet). <comment><USER2> Where's the tour / example "what this service looks like" page? I ask this partly because I dont have any packages to track, and also because I'd want to see what kind of stuff your service would tell me :)

Also, why do I have to register for an account for Email/SMS/RSS but not twitter? I _like_ how twitter is encouraging developers not to have sign up forms.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll work on adding some examples.

I did consider email tracking w/o an account, but haven't yet implemented it. At least creating an account is fairly low friction due to OpenID.

<comment><USER2> what do you do if you dont have an OpenID account? (like me)

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the login page: <http://zend.usetrackthis.com/session/login>

You can use your Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, MySpace or any OpenID (Wordpress, Blogger, etc). I'd imagine most people have at least one of those accounts.

<comment><USER3> But not everyone. I don't have any of them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing? - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/05/09/natural-language-processing/

<comment><USER2> Geoffrey Pullum is a reputed professor of Linguistics. Yet, the article comes off as written by an awfully ignorant person.

Forget pragmatics. There won't be a generic (cross-domain) solution for that any time soon.

What happened to Powerset? Doesn't really matter. The brains behind it haven't been killed off. For example, Ronald Kaplan, the top-brain behind Powerset, now works for Nuance Communications. I suppose he will focus on making sure your voice interactions with computers will be smoother.

"How could we have drifted into the second decade of the 21st century with absolutely no commercial NLP products?"

What the heck does _that_ mean? Our smartphones understand voice commands. We have decent TTS and speech recognition. The people behind IBM's Watson seem to be targeting medical knowledge discovery. With a quick scan on Wikipedia, I came across Distinguo, automated essay evaluation, Google Translate makes my life so much easier already, etc.

If Pullum meant that he is still not able to buy an oven that understand his voice commands, sure. But saying that we have "absolutely no commercial NLP products" is braindamaged.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't PowerSet become Bing, for the most part? I remember when Bing was originally launched, they flaunted it because it could show useful information instead of just "search results." (The feature seems to be scrapped now, but just in case you don't believe me - here is an ad that 'claimed' this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHmzzLt8WFA>).

It seems NLP is a problem that the author seems to underestimate. IIRC, real speech recognition is a Strong AI/AI Complete problem. For a machine to detect the nuances in regular speech requires that the machine be as smart as at least a small child.

I don't have a lot of knowledge in AI so take my statements with a grain of salt. (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was a great book, but it made me realize I am not really interested in the field).

If we ignore the pragmatic step, you aren't really doing NLP anymore, but just really fancy keyword matching. The query "Can your site be accessed without using Internet Explorer?" is just broken down with its syntax ("Your site", "accessed", "without", "IE", I'd imagine) and then each term is either translated into a keyword or an operator (semantics). The you end up with Google:Hackernews accessed NOT Internet Explorer (maybe) when what you really wanted was something closer too "list of supported web browsers" union "internet explorer".

Without the pragmatic step there isn't any way to translate "accessed .. IE" to "list of supported web browsers"

Maybe I'm missing something, but the whole pragmatic step seems to be the bread and butter of NLP, anything else just seems to be advanced querying. The whole pragmatic step could answer :

"Can your site be accessed without using Internet Explorer?"

"Does your site support Internet Explorer"

"Is Internet Explorer supported"

"Can yr site b acccsseed wit IE?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Simple answer - Google has no competition.

And the competition has no chance given the scale required to just match, let alone surpass "google quality".

This isn't going to change any time soon, unless they create a search market place by opening up their index.

If one were to ask Larry Page what his number one priority was, it is a good bet his answer won't be search.

Compare what Google has on offer with this <http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples>

Why such a big disparity?

<comment><USER5> Sure, after all, who could possibly compete with IBM. Or Microsoft. Or AltaVista. I mean, AltaVista - backed by DEC - spent a relative massive amount of money at the time on what seemed like an index of insurmountable scale.

Who could ever compete with Facebook? You'd have to spend billions to replicate what they do, just to get off the ground.

The reason you're wrong, is because paradigm shifts is what matters, not chasing the past. That's the opening that makes it possible to replace Google (not compete head-on with them). I don't care how well organized Google is, they're so large now, they will run into the same clumsy elephant problem that every other mega company in world history has.

The problem isn't that Google has no competition. You should not be trying to solve the problem Google solved in 1998. That is over, they're riding the benefits of a solution from 15 years ago, extrapolated forward and polished.

You never compete head on with the past, you're guaranteed to die that way. You chase the future and replace the past. Look for the inflection, and bury Google in the past accordingly.

Need a better example? Windows was feared as a practical god of wrath in technology circa 1997/98. Who could ever hire enough engineers to write the tens of millions of lines of code to compete with that? It was the omnipotent titan that could never be challenged. Want the Windows obituary? It reads as follows: it never was challenged, it was replaced by the future that looked nothing like Windows 95/XP/Vista/8/etc.

The future begins with a new - obvious in hindsight - solution to a massive problem. Typically this solution will start out simple in concept, but can scale massively. It is almost always extremely cheap to instigate (relative to the value long term). See: PageRank.

The future does not begin by going after a leviathan like Google and playing the game the way they do, and spending money like they do. It never works that way. Chasing the past is usually the most expensive thing you can ever do. Just ask Bing.

<comment><USER4> Barrier to entry makes all the difference.

You are not going to see a 20 year old Woz or a Torvalds today build an NLP system of any serious utility. They just do not have access to the kind of infrastructure required to do it. So comparisons to OS evolution, MS etc are moot.

You need data, clean data and massive amounts of it to do accurate natural language processing. Very few org's have the data required to pull it off.

And that can be seen in the limitations of Siri, WolframAlpha and IBM's Watson. The human brain takes a decade or more of processing all kinds of data, to build up a language model good enough to have a productive conversation. So even if these companies come up with the better learning algorithms, required to build up a decent language model, the bottle neck will always be access to quality data.

Google has the data, but since they are off busy defending their advertising empire, innovation in search and therefore NLP has taken a backseat.

For the paradigm shift in NLP to happen, things like Siri, Watson and WolframAlpha would need access to Google scale/quality data.

Google can spur things along by building a marketplace around search so people can access the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Actually NLP has made great progress in the last few years and there are commercial products now based on it: Watson, Siri, Google Now are good examples.

<comment><USER6> This is amusing because just today, while I was driving decided to attempt to use Siri (something I do about once a month to remind me why I don't use it). I said, "Nirvana Nevermind". "Sorry, I don't know how to do that." "Play Nirvana Nevermind". "Sorry, I don't know how to do that." "Search music Nirvana Nevermind". "Sorry, I can't search for music."

Great stuff, that NLP.

<comment><USER7> Well, your last example is evidence that there was a successful interpretation of the sentence.

Things like machine translation, text to speech, and natural language understanding will only gradually get better.

If you compare how well something like Siri does now (not very well) to similar "tools" 10 years ago (awful), it's hard to deny that some progress has been made.

<comment><USER8> I'd say it's not too far advanced beyond where IVRs were 5-10 years ago. It's a hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Processing natural language is a complex problem. Most syntactic parsing algorithms have a complexity of O(n^3). Add semantic reasoning and pragmatic understanding on top of that and you're way beyond what any computer system available today can process in reasonable time.

There are approximations using statistical algorithms and heuristics such as chunk parsing and those work quite well. In fact, this might very well be the way how human language understanding works as well, i.e. human brains most likely don't need to completely parse a sentence for understanding it but use statistical reasoning and heuristics, too.

Nevertheless, while studying grammar is a discipline almost as old as philosophy, linguistics that is the search for a true understanding of the building blocks of human language is a rather young discipline. When we still don't even have a comprehensive grammar of the English language including all its idiosyncrasies and varieties how can we expect to accurately model languages in computer programs?

<comment><USER7> Human language understanding certainly doesn't require a listener to completely parse a sentence before beginning the process of interpreting it. There is a lot of evidence from psycholinguistics that humans begin the interpretation process of a given word before the end of the word is even pronounced.

<comment><USER10> The only reason humans can do this is because our language interpreter is separate and parallel to our language parser. Unless we are making a language processing chip (transistors can be fully parallel) we want to avoid wasting work.

<comment><USER11> Why "separate and parallel to our language parser"?

<comment><USER10> Neurons are a bit like transistors, it's a lot harder for them to rewire than for them to perform their already-assigned task. As a result, it is most efficient to have blobs of neurons configure into task regions and do the same thing over and over.

If you've already got a hardwired parser and a hardwired interpreter, there's really no reason to not have them run in parallel. (We have plenty of calories to run all the neurons that we need to, so any small chance of a benefit is worth a try.)

<comment><USER7> You're pulling all of this out of your ass, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We at the startup www.forty.to are working on just this problem, question answering. We've made some progress too.

If you're interested here's a YouTube demo video <http://youtu.be/VDUw4oLU7no>

</comment><comment><USER13> There is this simple thing linguists do not get: real language is much harder than linguistics.

Real life phenomena tend to be more complex than the equations "describing them". Imagine if instead of equations you have Linguistics...</comment>


A Case Study in Attacking KeePass - <AUTHOR> http://www.harmj0y.net/blog/redteaming/a-case-study-in-attacking-keepass/ <comment><USER2> «While it's possible for a user to set the 'Enter master key on secure desktop' setting which claims to prevent keylogging, according to KeePass this option "is turned off by default for compatibility reasons".»

Yep, Step 1 in a KeePass install for me is making sure to turn this on. I hate that this is not the default.</comment>


How to Find a Vision and Why Should You - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixsso.com

<comment><USER2> OK find a vision and share it with others, but be sure to deliver.

Remember Brad McQuaid (from Everquest) ? For several years he talked about his vision about Vanguard (MMO game), he made us dream and people were worshiping him.

When the game eventually came, there was such a gap between what was promised and what was delivered that the worship turned to hatred (I'm sure there was even some death threats).</comment>


Broken Promises of Privacy Response to Failure of Anonymization Paul Ohm - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 <comment><USER2> The SSRN web site continues to be a pain (for me, at least). Here are some alternative URL's:

[http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/anonymization- fai...](http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/anonymization-fail-privacy- law-fail)

<http://epic.org/privacy/reidentification/ohm_article.pdf></comment>


The V8 team not responding to generators/yield feature request - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2355

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that this is the 2nd most starred request, and there is absolutely nothing (not even an acknowledgement) in response from the team.

I wonder, whats the problem? Are generators really that hard to implement in V8? I doubt it - there is a native module for node implementing the functionality.

Its true that the spec isn't finalized yet - but it can't really be finalized with just one experimental implementation currently available.

<comment><USER2> This is the response you are looking for:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/v8-users/mV38oWvA2Nk/txtSzVd...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/v8-users/mV38oWvA2Nk/txtSzVdDhpUJ)

[note: Andreas Rossberg is a V8 team member and represents it on TC39]</comment></comment>


Hack Club NY = total success (LEGO Mindstorms now en route to Jamaica) - <AUTHOR> http://breadpig.com/2011/01/18/hack-club-1-total-success/

<comment><USER2> Brilliant guys, and great to see it was a success. I'll be at the London one (hint hint), though more for the coffee, marshmallows, and fun times than the technical side of things.

Breadpig is now my number one example for a growing company with a true cultural purpose.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Jacob! We're hoping to branch out into all aspects of "hacking." Christina had some great ideas involving grub - we've got enough of a network here in NYC to bring in some awesome people (we had a pair of LEGO execs come in from Denmark for this one) but we're hurting across the pond.

We're very interested in opening up the model (TEDx style) and will be publishing our "here's how we haphazardly put this together" tutorial in the next couple of weeks. Please drop email@example.com a note if you're interested in hosting one of your own.

<comment><USER3> So what the heck was the solution to the puzzle? Word files = evil.

<comment><USER4> It was all in the formatting. Strip away the whitespace, and you're left with a bunch of text in one of two sizes. Treat the 10pt characters as zeroes, and the 11-point characters as ones, and decode that as ASCII.

P.S. These guys put on an absolutely awesome event.

<comment><USER3> Yeah ... I really wanted to come. But clearly I'm not l33t enough :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry! We didn't want to alienate folks, just keep out non-contributors. This was our first one, so we're very much a work-in-progress -- thanks for letting us know. We'll try to open things up more for the next one as long as we can keep out the scenesters...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should talk to PlayWorks about collaborating efforts and make this widespread quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.playworks.org/> ?

<comment><USER5> You got it!</comment></comment></comment>


How to use OData for CRUD - <AUTHOR> http://blog.odatahq.com/blog/2014/08/24/How-to-use-odata-for-crud/

<comment><USER2> I use ODataHQ for my embedded device projects, it's brain-dead simple to get a back-end API setup for my various projects. Like a database on steroids.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The best thing about OData is that doing basic and advanced CRUD is easier than you think.</comment>


Top education conferences for app developers. - <AUTHOR> http://www.topeducationalapps.com/2012/01/2012%E2%80%99s-top-education-conferences-for-app-developers/

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Great list!</comment>


A Plague of Helicopters In New York - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/a-plague-of-helicopters-is-ruining-new-york.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur <comment><USER2> > And if the impact on the environment and on quality of life aren't enough to > spur action, consider the security risks. Each day, hundreds of tourists are > recruited off the street, whisked past a light security "wanding," with no > X-ray machine or background check, and loaded onto an idling helicopter with > no barrier between passenger and pilot. These helicopters then fly within > 1,000 feet of the most densely populated urban area in the country.

Seriously, can we please stop abusing "terrorism fear" in each and every discussion? This is precisely what terrorists want.

<comment><USER3> We could also stop the "this is what terrorists want". They usually want a caliphate or an independent Northern Elbonia, not scare you into avoiding tourist attractions.

<comment><USER4> They want you to be afraid. Without fear, terrorism is a useless military strategy.

<comment><USER3> Without fear terrorism is a perfectly serviceable strategy. All terrorists need to do is create enough disruption to make it cheaper to give them what they want. IRA would often issue warnings about their attacks.

<comment><USER5> > All terrorists need to do is create enough disruption to make it cheaper to > give them what they want.

They won't get what they want because of something that happened, but rather because of the fear of it happening again. So yes, fear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I spent a couple of months in NY and NJ, right on the Hudson, just this last year, Oct-> Dec. I was blown away at the amount of helicopter traffic. If you're in NJ, there's a _beautiful_ public area running roughly from West NY down to Weehawken. Monuments to military figures, veterans in general, the dueling grounds where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton fought, all on cliffs overlooking the Hudson with exquisite views of Manhattan (better imho than from Manhattan to NJ). I used to go walking there everyday. And everyday, the entire time, helicopters were buzzing up and down the Hudson. It was surreal. I wish I could capture how surreal it was. You might come away from that article with a bit of schadenfreude, "NY and noise, shocking" or "bourgeois complain of noise, news at 11" but seriously, it is insane how constant the helicopters are. And I'm from a small Texas town with _two_ airports where it seems that everyone who breaks into the millionaire class is contractually obligated to buy a Cessna or a Piper.

<comment><USER7> Same with Governors Island. You can't use the entire eastern side to relax because the helicopters are going nonstop. It's infuriating!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The technology to make quiet helicopters has been around for a long time.[0] Unfortunately its military utility seems to have prevented it from being apllied in commercial aviation until recently. That said, the commercial sector is making progress.[1]

If NYC implemented some sort of noise reduction regime and/or retrofit program it would help. Whatever they have now probably isn't aggressive enough.

> _Each day, hundreds of tourists are recruited off the street, whisked past a > light security "wanding," with no X-ray machine or background check, and > loaded onto an idling helicopter with no barrier between passenger and > pilot._

The author must have taken that scene in _The Dictator_ to heart.[2]

Seriously though, doing some invasive TSA-style searches won't help; all bad actors need in that situation is their bodies. The best defense in this case is the instincts of the pilots.

[0] [https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-built-a-special- hel...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-built-a-special-helicopter- to-sneak-into-north-vietnam-b1bb0ea35a7b)

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2010/02/eurocopter-moves-one-step- close...](http://www.wired.com/2010/02/eurocopter-moves-one-step-closer-to- whisper-mode/)

[2] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JnszgkE3O8g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JnszgkE3O8g)

</comment><comment><USER9> Now imagine how it will be when Amazon unleashes its delivery drones over the city.

<comment><USER10> would those run on electric or combustion engines?

<comment><USER11> The engines are loud but the prop noise is the really noisy part.. In that regard it doesn't matter the power source, if you've been near Phantoms or any other 'drones' you've heard how obnoxious they can be.

<comment><USER10> it would still eliminate the pollution aspect.

also, aren't drones generally higher-pitched than regular helis? as far as I know higher frequencies are more strongly attenuated by air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really why flying cars will never be a thing. That and I don't want Doc Brown running out of fussionable materials over my house.

The future of transportation is moving it all underground in densely populated areas, We need to free up the land for humans to walk and cycle and skate. And free up the sky for the birds.

Yes, without robotic construction to build cheaply underground, that is an expensive proposition. But the alternatives have a lot of costs too, many of which are borne by those who don't reap the benefits.

<comment><USER2> > Yes, without robotic construction to build cheaply underground, that is an > expensive proposition.

That's not a perfect solution either: all the rock you dig out has to go somewhere. Dump it in the ocean and you destroy the sea life. Dump it on the country side and you'll have NIMBY squads in arms.

<comment><USER13> You just need to plan where you put the spoil. There's plenty of ruined shore than can benefit.

London used the spoil from the most recent tunnel to make a 680ha wetland / nature reserve. There's some pictures at the bottom:

[http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrails-final- sh...](http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrails-final-shipment-of- earth-arrives-at-wallasea-island)

<comment><USER14> > The RSPB will require more than 10 million tonnes of excavated material to > create the reserve and is currently seeking partners to provide the > remaining 7 million tonnes.

If Crossrail is only providing 3M tonnes from 42km of tunnels, where on earth do the RSPB think they're going to get another 7M from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have to say I'm a little bit low on sympathy. Since when has anyone moved to New York City for the quiet?

<comment><USER16> I hate this weird condescending attitude about New York City. "NYC's a loud filthy crime trap. Everyone knows it. How dare people try to improve things."

Generally speaking NYC is loud because of things people do. If we can reduce the amount of noisy shit happening in the city, then yes, it'll be quieter and a better place to live.

People in large cities are allowed to demand a decent quality-of-life.

<comment><USER7> And there are still some very quiet areas in Manhattan. Financial District is one of them at night.

<comment><USER16> And to extend your point:

NYC != Midtown Manhattan

Generally when people bitch about NYC in some kind of stereotypical way, they're complaining about Midtown. The majority of New Yorkers neither live in, work in, nor spend much time in Midtown Manhattan.

<comment><USER17> Nor they live in the Hudson waterfront,where the article locates the source of noise pollution. Since most of them live in the other boroughs, I'm pretty sure there are things with more impact to increase the quality of living...

<comment><USER16> I think if you follow the thread you'll see that I was responding to ilyanep's derisive comment about NYC as a whole being somehow unworthy of improvement.

Yes, the article refers to something that affects a relatively small number of New Yorkers.

<comment><USER17> yeah, I expanding on what you said, not arguing against it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I grew up in this neighborhood, and it really is a nuisance. There are very few quiet stretches along the Hudson river (thanks to the West Side Highway), and those that aren't directly next to the road are now constantly swarmed with helicopters.

Since the helicopter port is directly on the river, I've also seen plenty of tourists play leapfrog through the highway traffic (a death wish in midtown) and promptly run into cyclists and joggers on the shared path in front of the port.

</comment><comment><USER19> Once again another problem that could be solved by a carbon tax that forces businesses to bear their external costs.

Even the staunchest Libertarian should be in support of a carbon tax, given that one of the planks of the platform is to protect the environment from harm [0]

[https://www.lp.org/platform](https://www.lp.org/platform) (Section 2.2)

<comment><USER20> Not true. Noise pollution is part of the challenge here - which carbon tax won't help solve.

<comment><USER19> That's a fair point. A carbon tax would probably be enough to push the price above where most people would do it, but there is no reason not to institute a noise tax as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author appears to labor under the delusion that policy in New York City – and Manhattan in particular – is made with the intention of benefiting those of us who live here.

If that were actually the case then the streets and skies in general would not be managed to the end of maximizing vehicular throughput at the expense of essentially everything else.

</comment><comment><USER22> A plague of hyperbole ruined journalism decades ago but people keep putting up with it.

<comment><USER23> It is a byproduct of agenda first journalism preaching into an echo chamber of self aggrandizing pricks. Take the 'political correctness' movement for example, whether you agree or disagree with the sentiment, it is a nich marketing ploy that attracts a demographic that is highly invested and passionate about an agenda and uses it as a magnet. The people attracted by this will either have a high chance of conversion (down a marketing funnel) or will be so put off they will drive it viral through controversy.

Often, anti-factual fear mongering and scare amd shame tactics are featured prominently in these articles.

it isn't a question of putting up with it. Manufacturing this content is nearly effortless so it happens all over the place for many diverse issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone really doesn't like helicopters.

I, personally, have never even noticed them. It really seems like a huge non- issue.

</comment><comment><USER24> The solution is to mandate explicit maximum noise levels and pollution emissions and budget for random, mandatory testing with large financial penalties for noncompliance. This, in turn, will greatly increase costs to the tour operators in order to comply. If it's still a viable business for tour operators when they have to internalize the costs, then the show goes on and tourists pay for the luxury. If not, the problem solves itself.

</comment><comment><USER25> I hate to say it, but this sort of comes with living/traveling in New York (or any major industrial city). You're probably not living there for the natural spaces and silent quietude. There comes at a certain point some tradeoff between isolation and security.

<comment><USER20> There is an expectation that living in the city will be more noisy/less private but to say large motors spewing tons of gases outside our windows is part of the experience is really stretching it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A plague of helicopters is ruining Hawaii. We expect New York to be noisy.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you live or visit New York City, helicopters are the least causing noise and air pollution.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ruined! Ruined!

(FYI: the original link title described how helicopters were ruining New York)

<comment><USER29> "8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City Terrible Place to Live"

[http://www.theonion.com/article/84-million-new-yorkers- sudde...](http://www.theonion.com/article/84-million-new-yorkers-suddenly- realize-new-york-c-18003)</comment></comment>


N. Korea Took in $2B in Cyberattacks to Fund Weapons Program: U.N. Report - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-cyber-un/north-korea-took-2-billion-in-cyberattacks-to-fund-weapons-program-u-n-report-idUSKCN1UV1ZX <comment><USER2> From whatever I have read so far North Korea government is pretty much a criminal organization like the Mafia . They forge money, sell drugs, abduct people, sell weapons. Pretty much anything is fair game as long as it makes money without any regard for health or life of their own people or foreigners . In addition they have a propensity for killing each other. I think it would make a great mob movie.

<comment><USER3> Totally, no other government, especially those cyber superpower countries, would ever do such immoral things.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. I can't imagine Russia ever doing something like Hacking an adversary or abducting someone.

<comment><USER5> Russia is terrible, but No. Korea is worse for it's size. That's because Russia has large legitimate sources of income, like fossil fuels, agriculture, and manufacturing. No. Korea has much less that other countries want to buy, so it makes most of its currency from criminal activity of one type or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are they training the hackers? Are they being educated abroad, or are they hiring foreign hackers? For a country living in the dark ages, how are they managing to pull this off?

<comment><USER7> > are they hiring foreign hackers?

Probably, but they wouldn't need more than one or two.

E: Actually, I should just refer to this _awfully_ specific grugq take [https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/997114164131737600](https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/997114164131737600)

<comment><USER8> Agree with this in order of magnitude at least. Even if it's 10 and not 1 or 2, the costs are relatively low. They have drug and other money. Hire for aptitude, train the trainer. Everyone else is shackled by plausible deniability. DPRK gives zero f*cks. Best candidates, best training, whatever equipment, training, and info you want, and go...no bars held.

It's all about removing constraints.

<comment><USER9> > no bars held

Off topic, but it's "no holds barred". From wrestling: no holds (moves) barred (banned), i.e. anything goes.

<comment><USER8> It's a sort of silly inverse meme thing. So a little "whoosh", but thanks for noticing.

<comment><USER6> I love it, will steal..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The beautiful part here is that the DPRK has (effectively) no cyber infrastructure of its own to retaliate against. It's perfect asymmetric warfare.

</comment><comment><USER11> Considering the lack of blow back this has generated it seems to be a successful operation on NK's part. Who knows, maybe there will be some future consequences, but everyone globally is so focused on their nukes this seems to get lost on the side. Plus the intel agencies care more about offensive operations and hiding their capabilities, so they don't seem to be making much noise about all this to the public either (not that law enforcement is their job).

<comment><USER12> If I could prevent NK from getting Nukes, or I could prevent NK from stealing billions from banks... seems pretty reasonable that nukes are still the focus

<comment><USER13> But aren't the billions a prerequisite for nukes? At the end of the day they're still going to need money to make things happen with regards to the nukes. Unless they're able to go from raw material to facilities and missiles purely from slave labor?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> North Korea has substantial hydroelectric power, which could support a highly profitable crypto mining operation. I wonder how much hydropower they need before the opportunity cost of hacking exceeds that of mining crypto. I don't think anybody wants them to spend money on weapons, but in the eventuality that they never go to war, it would probably be desirable to prevent theft.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how the opportunity cost of hacking could ever exceed that of mining crypto.

<comment><USER14> Crypto mining would provide a more stable cashflow and has a more limited downside versus theft. I see your point, given how successful the thieves have been. But I just wonder about the value of hydro power.

<comment><USER7> Hydro power is nice and all, but monetizing that requires strictly different resources than monetizing hackers. Perhaps hydro power can be valuable, but that will not make hacking any less valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > North Korea has generated an estimated $2 billion for its weapons of mass > destruction programs using "widespread and increasingly sophisticated" > cyberattacks to steal from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges

I'm more interested in how this proves cryptocurrency markets are liquid enough. Enterprises of all sizes can get in and out of a portfolio of the largest cryptocurrencies.

</comment><comment><USER16> I will guess even more. And add some drug money lets say about ~$1.3B

Two years ago:

The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower. No More.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/world/asia/north-korea- ha...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/world/asia/north-korea-hacking- cyber-sony.html)

<comment><USER17> There's probably large-scale counterfeiting, too! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#North_Korea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#North_Korea)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have a good explanation or thoughts on why a confidential UN report was leaked to the media?

<comment><USER19> Even if you keep the circle small you have a bunch of people who will have access to the report. Include some people who can gain access if they want to, e.g. IT staff.

It takes one of them who strongly believes that this information should be public knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment> ju-st How is it possible to attribute cyberattacks to a state sponsored hacking programme?

<comment><USER20> Often, our intel has hacked their intel and watched them do it.

For example: the US is certain that North Korea was behind the Sony hack because South Korean intelligence hacked North Korean intelligence, and the NSA hacked South Korean intelligence. So the NSA found that it could access Sony servers by going through SK intel to NK intel to Sony.

Another example: one of Cozy and Fancy Bear (don't remember which) is known definitely to be Russian because Dutch intelligence hacked the CCTV cameras outside their Moscow office and was able to correlate times when they conducted spearphishing operations with times when known Russian government hackers were in the office and specific, spearphishing-related Google searches were being issued from computers in the office.

<comment><USER21> Russian hackers using Google instead of Yandex or other? Or is Google here a metaphor for 'searching the internet'?

<comment><USER20> I think it was actually Google, but I read the article a while back and it might've been Yandex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe we'll never hear about it but it seems strange we don't have counter cyber ops against their weapons programs, e.g. Israel Stuxnet and Iran's nuclear program.

<comment><USER23> There's probably some guys in office buildings in Georgia and Maryland who are chucking in their heads as they read your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Get your enemies to pay for your weapons. Neat trick, if you can pull it off. I'd be more impressed if they used the money to feed their people, though.

<comment><USER25> The moment the NK people are well fed and able to focus on things other than survival is the moment that the regime will be overthrown.

<comment><USER26> The same goes for firearms. The moment they can defend themselves is the moment they take the food and resources for themselves. Having your population near starvation and defenseless is the main method used to maintain power as an oppressive fascist regime.

<comment><USER27> Not only fascist.

Authoritarian regime is more accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How is nk connected to Internet?

<comment><USER29> Quick google found:

Since 2010: North Korean ISP Star JV via China Unicom link.

Since 2017: TransTeleCom, or TTK, is one of Russia's biggest telecommunications companies and a subsidiary of the Russian railway operator.

[https://www.38north.org/2017/10/mwilliams100117/](https://www.38north.org/2017/10/mwilliams100117/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Indeed, a 'beautiful vision for his country'.

</comment><comment><USER31> Three-letters have known this for years. I know of countless situations in which a company gets ransomware and the FBI has relayed that the attacker is known, it's classified as terrorism, but nothing will happen. They've all seen it happen to many more companies. Basically, our government hasn't stood up to the evil communist bully that is little rocket man. He has committed horrible human rights violations, has attacked our companies (which is typically an act of war), and our government has done nothing.

<comment><USER32> There is a difference between doing nothing and not telling mises from hackernews what they are doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sounds about as reliable a news as the WMDs of yore...

<comment><USER34> Could you please be a bit more specific about what you are trying to say?

<comment><USER33> That there's all kind of propaganda around any enemy du jour, and don't believe everything that you hear, even if it comes from "expert groups" and "independent journalists".

Let's see in a few years...</comment></comment></comment>