Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/bitcoin-bitfinex-tether.html <comment><USER2> Don't forget that someone has been using Tether to wash trade bitcoin on bitfinex...

[https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/are-fraudulent-tethers- being-...](https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/are-fraudulent-tethers-being-used- for-margin-lending-on-bitfinex-5de9dd80f330)

[https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/wash-trading-bitcoin-part- ii-...](https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/wash-trading-bitcoin-part-ii-who-and- why-is-someone-wash-trading-on-bitfinex-e1c7b5e0b3bb)

It was widely believed that the tethers being "sold" weren't really backed by anything and were being used to inflate BTC prices. Now they are claiming 30M were stolen? I'm betting it's going to end up being a lot higher. They are using 30M to soften the blow of the higher number. I believe this tactic has been using by Yahoo and others in announcing the number of stolen accounts as well.

<comment><USER3> Tether has a blockchain so you can see for yourself how much was stolen. Also, they blacklisted the hacker's address^.

The @bitfinexed narrative is so flaky, especially the chart "proving" that Tether issuance pumps BTC. I could post a similar chart showing that my trips to Costco pump BTC.

There are legitimate concerns around Bitfinex and Tether^^ but the FUD has gotten out of hand.

Things to keep in mind if you disagree:

1) There is increased demand for Tether mostly from exchanges other than Bitfinex. They aren't even the largest holder of Tether by a long shot. This explains increased issuance as much as any conspiracy.

2) There are no widespread complaints about being able to withdraw from Bitfinex

3) There is no premium on BTC price on Bitfinex as there would be if there were problems withdrawing in things other than BTC, a la Mt. Gox.

All this being said -- all this would go away if they would prove they had the funds backing Tether.

^[https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/932862730415017984](https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/932862730415017984)

^^Mostly, IMO, around 1) making themselves a target for FinCEN, 2) the market not pricing a proper risk premium into Tether

<comment><USER4> > Tether has a blockchain

How can they create new tether on demand if it's backed by a blockchain? Do they control all the mining?

<comment><USER5> Something like that.

<comment><USER6> Stupid, right? Why don't they just use a Postgres database?

<comment><USER7> Because then we wouldn't have a known number of issued coins as well as the full set of holders of those coins? Nor would we be able to trustlessly send them anywhere?

<comment><USER8> > Nor would we be able to trustlessly send them anywhere?

That's not the case anyway, since Tether can retroactively refuse to honor tokens that were allegedly stolen. What if the attacker had traded his 30m Tether-USD in exchange for bitcoins? Then the seller of these bitcoins would be left holding the bag, because the central party that is Tether refuses to honor these obligations.

Tether can never be trustless, because it's credit. Some party needs to redeem tether tokens for USD, and if that party refuses to do so then your money is gone.

<comment><USER9> people who hold Tether trust the Tether system that is enough to keep the peg to the dollar for now, but I have doubts the peg holds

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing I have been remarking recent conversations with other long- interested crypto-friends hasn't been about the price action, or about the drama, or about the lack of transparency on exchanges like Bitfinex -- but rather about the comparability of discussions today to those we were having in 2013. (Disclaimer: I attempt to avoid holding strong opinions in this space)

There are certainly patterns in the environment (maybe marketplace) which are repetitive and reminiscent of the early days. Confusion around price is one. Two viscerally opposed schools-of-thought is another.

One thing I think, though, that has suffered is the availability of information assessing the market structure or environment on it's merits/deficiencies without bias. This is likely hard to achieve, in general, but these days you cannot find reliable news without being sucked in to the swirl. Coindesk is pulling a CNBC-of-crypto, articles flying out every hour with opposing themes. I totally understand the model, captivating the audience, but it makes it hard to observe what's happening fundamentally (without having a grasp on the core narrative).

I continue to follow, in a casual way, but as I said continuously impressed by how the environment remains young -- trends from '13 persist to '17 and probably '18 (still young!).

<comment><USER11> Coindesk is intimately linked with blockstream, the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository, censor /r/bitcoin, and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.

<comment> dane-pgp The controversy surrounding BlockStream is fairly well known, but what is the connection between them and Coindesk? I've not been following that side of things.

<comment><USER12> As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn't been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who lost over 100 bitcoins in a sketchy mining pool, for the love of god, please be careful. I was in early on this madness, and dedicated my gaming rig for a couple of years. Basically forgot about it, until one day I went to move my coins only to find the site just a Cloudflare mirror. Learn from my mistakes and be careful.

<comment><USER14> How did you lose money in a mining pool? Hopped in a cloudmining scam?

Mining pools don't store funds, you tell them your payout address.

<comment><USER15> I seem to remember that in some pools you had to initiate a payout to your wallet through the pool website. Payouts weren't automatic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's surprising to me that the rather straightforward question of whether Tether (Bitfinex) is actually holding the dollar reserves against the issued tether tokens is so difficult to answer.

Just the fact that the company has not definitively disproved the accusations of fraud against it, which have been instesifying for weeks, is evidence that there is something to the charges.

There is a not much discussed point I'm curious if anyone here has a perspective on.

Tether has claimed that their business model is based, in part, on earning interest on the reserves they (supposedly) hold to back the issue tether tokens.

It was pointed out by Bitcoin analyist Tone Vays the other day that such a business account should not be interest earning, as it is not supposed to be put at risk (by being lent out.)

This strikes me as rather suspicious: that a significant part of the explanation for how Tether earns money doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER3> It's probably part of their agreement with the bank(s) -- if they're even traditional banks -- not to reveal the relationship except to certain parties.

And yeah, assuming all the funds do exist, I'd be amazed if they were being held in a risk-free non-interest bearing form. Which is why it's a bit crazy that Tether sticks to the peg so well -- the NPV of a Tether accounting for even non-conspiratorial risks has got to be less than $1

<comment><USER17> _> It's probably part of their agreement with the bank(s)_

The point is that Tether and Bitfinex have the power to publish their bank balances, and they could authorize their banks to confirm the deposits if they wanted to.

Why would they refuse to do this, even while under intense suspicion of actually not controlling 1:1 reserves, unless the accusations were true?

The question of interest is a distraction. Businesses usually hold cash in money market accounts or do short-term repo agreements to get a little yield with very low risk. But that yield would be at most 2% a year, so not relevant to the real question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To see adoption go as wide as current HODLERS hope BTC can go newbies need to be insulated from the type of insanity laid out in this article.

Like at bare minimum and for the survival of crypto nobody should trade on unaudited exchanges.

Or a step further despite Coinbase's scaling issues the fact that they have both insurance coverage and FDIC coverage on all accounts makes me much more likely to refer people interested in starting w Bitcoin there than anywhere else.

But this is also the kind of centralization that Crypto is designed to avoid.

[https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/166...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1662379-how- is-coinbase-insured-)

<comment><USER19> > _they have both insurance coverage and FDIC coverage on all accounts makes > me much more likely to refer people interested in starting w Bitcoin there > than anywhere else._

Very misleading statements.

The FDIC coverage does not include any bitcoin wallets. The bitcoin insurance only covers their hot wallets (something like 2% of all the bitcoin they hold). Yes, cold storage is a bitcoin security best practice, but it obviously does not eliminate the chance that a breach could occur, and if it does, none of that 98% is covered.

With that said, to Coinbase's credit, they haven't been hacked yet, which is actually quite an achievement considering the landscape.

<comment><USER20> > With that said, to Coinbase's credit, they haven't been hacked yet, which is > actually quite an achievement considering the landscape.

They have been victims of massive USD chargebacks. I think Coinbase is bleeding so much money to chargebacks that co-founder Fred Erhsam figured out company is never going to turn a profit and resigned.

<comment><USER21> I thought AHC transfers were very difficult to get chargebacks on. How much could they actually be losing on these events? Are they actually not that rare?

<comment><USER20> They are pretty easy to chargeback as long as you initiate it within 30 days of your first transfer. Give a notarized letter to your bank stating that you did not do these ACH transfers to this "Coin Base" company.

You can get ACH charged back for up to 180 days with more involved procedure.

<comment><USER22> When your bank figures out that you're probably full of shit, are they likely to terminate your account and/or report you to the police for fraud?

<comment><USER23> Terminate, yes. Report you to the police, not sure.

Chargebacks for small amounts are often paid by the bank itself because it's cheaper than actually disputing with the merchant, so banks will certainly terminate accounts of customers who abuse that.

<comment><USER24> I've heard in most cases, banks don't bother investigating / pursuing (credit card) fraud for amounts <$10K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly it sucks that these incredibly sketchy exchanges do so much volume. Poloniex and Bitfinex are sketchy as hell, but I guess their fees are low so no one cares.

It would be somewhat surprising if bitfinex doesn't go down in a spectacular ball of fire within the next 4 years.

<comment><USER26> The only practical use cases for bitcoin as a currency are money laundering, selling drugs, evading capital controls and tax evasion so the least regulated exchanges are going to draw a lot of volume.

As a store of value, you're depending on its continued use as a tool for criminals for it to appreciate in value beyond pure beanie baby-style speculation, so you depend on you still depend sketchy exchanges to drive the price.

When the futures contracts come out, there is going to be a massive price correction as bitfinex isn't going to be able to print enough tether to counteract all the shorts.

Once the price of bitcoin starts dropping, people are going to try and cash out of bitfinex en masse, causing a run on the bank and collapsing the whole house of cards. I wouldn't be surprised to see sub-1000 bitcoins by January.

<comment><USER27> > The only practical use cases for bitcoin as a currency are money laundering, > selling drugs, evading capital controls and tax evasion

Bitcoin is actually terrible for these use cases since the blockchain is public and more traceable than your credit card. If you're really trying to hide your financial transactions then a better option would be something more anonymous like cash, or one of the other cryptocoins that actually does provide anonymity.

Your inaccurate and misconceived perception of what bitcoin's use case is would be laughable if it weren't so popular and wrong. I fear you're completely misunderstanding the new world economy. You think that bitcoin is a sideshow for criminals, and seemingly failed to see that maybe a large parallel economy is being created digitally.

You see, Bitcoin was created after the 2008 crash where the banks, the organizations we've trusted with our money for a century, made some deliberate and knowingly poor decisions and they lost a lot of money for many of us.

Bitcoin was invented so that never has to happen again, so that we can have a secure storage for our money without someone else controlling that money. You might say that bitcoin was created to get away from the wall street criminals. I suggest you pick up some cryptocoin (of any kind) so you're not completely left in the dust as the centralized banks lose power and the decentralized economy reigns.

<comment><USER28> > You see, Bitcoin was created after the 2008 crash where the banks, the > organizations we've trusted with our money for a century, made some > deliberate and knowingly poor decisions and they lost a lot of money for > many of us.

I hadn't heard about that. Which banks lost their customers' money in the 2008 crash?

<comment><USER29> The banking system deliberately removed value from all holders of EUR, GBP and USD: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing)

<comment><USER30> This is false. During QE, inflation rate was below target, so _less value than normal_ was removed from EUR, GBP, USD, etc.

<comment><USER29> You can't measure value like that during a recession. Whichever way you look at it, QE removed value from those currencies.

If I were to rob you, claiming that the overall robbery rate was lower that year, so you weren't robbed by others, so your expected losses were lower does not change the fact that I robbed you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It is certain that US law enforcement will come down hard on Tether eventually. Anyone pretending to transfer dollars outside the banking system will meet the same fate as Liberty Reserve. When it happens Bitfinex will be toast, and Bittrex and Poloniex may fall too.

<comment><USER32> Why would Bittrex be hit by this?

<comment><USER31> Tether is a large fraction of their volume and likely deposits as well. If all that money vanished overnight their customers would be extremely upset. Also, without Tether they could no longer pretend to have USD support. So many people are fooled by "USDT" into thinking that they have dollars.

Could Bittrex push all the blame onto Tether and just keep operating as if nothing happened? I don't think this would work very well. At the very least this would suddenly point a ton of law enforcement scrutiny in Bittrex's direction which might end the unlicensed money transmitter party over there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its interesting to see how hostile HN is towards Cryptos. Completely ignoring the opportunities that it offers for fund raising Start Ups. At the same time HN likes to bash VCs that are uptight and how hard it is to find capital. I think this is a sign that even the tech world is not resistant to legacy thinking. Just like the legacy thinkers of other industries, like print and brick and mortar commerce were dismissing the new innovation that is happening on the internet. This time the "internet guys" that are so familiar with the legacy VC model are dismissing the new innovation in VC.

As with most legacy thinker its almost impossible to change there mind with arguments, they like to ponder on the risks and counter arguments, just to stay comfy in the status quo.

Banking, Finance, VC is one of the oldest industries with the least innovation in the last century.

The really smart VCs did already realize that and instead of shuffing their head into the sand. They started proactivaly getting involved into the field

Tim Draper of DFJ, (Tesla, SpaceX, Skype Early Investor) holds over 1B$ in the crypto space.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obKtE1in7NA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obKtE1in7NA)

<comment><USER34> HN was actually pretty pro-crypto 4-5 years ago, I think the tech world in general has started to see crypto and ICOs as a bubble within the last year or so.

<comment><USER35> Probably not wrong: I've started seeing crypto investment posts from friends who are musicians, teachers, and baristas.

[https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2014/02/10/top- anecd...](https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2014/02/10/top-anecdotal- signs-of-a-market-bubble/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is it wrong that, as a non-Bitfinex customer, I'm kind of rooting for an exit scam so that the price of BTC tanks and offers a perfect buying opportunity?

<comment><USER37> A token only redeemable for bitcoin collapses and you think that will hurt the price of bitcoin? It will hurt the price of tether certainly, the other side of the trade will boom.

Always amazed that some fail to grasp this, tether disintegrating is a solid buy for bitcoin, apart from the bad media coverage, which going by current standards has no effect on price. So that's $600m desperately trying to get into bitcoin all at once, this likely happening within a space of ~72 hours, think about it for a moment.

<comment><USER38> It's not a zero-sum game: value can and will be created and destroyed. If a crash of tether causes a distrust in the whole crypto space (which is not a given at all, granted), and people rush out of the whole space, all of it will crash.

Would a crash of tether be a source of concern for the value of Bitcoin? If bitfinexed hypothesis is correct, that is to say that Tether is printed out of thin air and used to buy Bitcoin thus artificially inflating its value, then yes, absolutely: a crash of Tether would cause massive distrust in the entire crypto space...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> NYT in 1997 about him:

 _PHILIP G. POTTER, who develops investment products for high-net-worth clients of Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Discover & Company, likes to think of himself as an ''uberconsumer.''

Last year, he spent his bonus on a 50-inch TV and a $3,500 Rolex watch. He wears custom-made $800 suits, custom-made $80 shirts -- always with white collars and white French cuffs -- and $200 shoes. He is ''totally wired,'' as he puts it: His home phone forwards messages to his pager; he answers them over a tiny $800 cellular phone."_

 _... 'I can continue to come up with new products, to add value, [in a downturn market]'' he said. ''I'm not responsible for getting money. Getting it's hard when the market goes down. But there will still be products to sell. It'll just force me to be a little more creative.''_

[http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/business/faces-of-the- new-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/business/faces-of-the-new-york- economy-big-earner-big-spender-little-burden.html)

<comment><USER40> > Last year, he spent his bonus on a 50-inch TV

That made me chuckle

<comment><USER41> Sorry to go OT, but ten years ago we needed five guys and a truck to move my friend's $2000 55" rear-projection TV. It weighed as much as a small piano and we almost dropped it off the deck. I just got a 55" 4k LED TV for $400 and it weighs as much as my dog. The mind reels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The stolen Tether are unredeemable, and thusly worth nothing.

They pose a certain risk with accepting dodgy transactions though.

<comment><USER12> We don't know for certain how much was really stolen. We just have Tether at their word. And if more was stolen than the amount frozen, it certainly is redeemable—for bitcoin on an exchange.

<comment><USER43> or do we? [http://omnichest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPtZooy...](http://omnichest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> These exchanges are running off of traditional programming, not decentralize programming correct? Isn't it possible to run them decentralized like with Ethereum or something? Maybe that's too slow? Just wondering as trust mixed with trustless seems tainted by design. I imagine getting some encrypted thing passed with a one time transaction id to transfer from a real fund that when completed, verifies transfer and notes that in the blockchain. I don't know though, haven't done programming DAP stuff yet.

<comment><USER45> Yes, it's called Etherdelta.io

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I moved the crypto funds I had on Bitfinex to other exchanges a couple of days ago because the tether situation was making me uncomfortable and distrusting of Bitfinex.

</comment><comment><USER47> With so many issues, how does one invest in Bitcoin safely?

<comment><USER48> Buy stocks of GPU manufacturers.

<comment><USER49> AMD is very cheap. Morgan Stanley recently downgraded because they believe mining crypto will fade by 50% in 2018.

<comment><USER50> Considering AMD has lost increasingly large amounts of money every year since at least 2013, I'd say AMD is pretty expensive.

<comment><USER49> Fair enough. They will pull into the black in the 4th quarter if they hit estimates.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: AlertPay? - <AUTHOR>

I just received a direct advertising opportunity but they insisted they pay me through AlertPay.  It looks legit but I was curious if any other HNers had any experience with them, should I avoid them, is it a scam, or anything? <comment><USER2> Dictating a method of payment is usually the first sign of a scam. Usually, people make it easy for you to give them money.

That said I'm not saying anything about AlertPay or the opportunity you have before you. Just making a general observation.

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily, PayPal, for instance, may not be viable in some countries.

<comment><USER2> Ergo you would provide options if you needed to take money from a person in an non-paypal country...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is C# suitable for creating a modern OS like Windows 7? - <AUTHOR> Are C# and the .Net framework suitable to create a modern OS like Windows 7?
This is a followup question from [the now deleted] thread:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100812071342/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/783238/why-windows-7-isnt-written-in-c
What kind of problems might one expect to encounter by choosing C# over the tried-and-true strategy of using C? What kind of problems in this domain might be better solved by a high-level language like C# compared to C? <comment><USER2> Microsoft had this as their aim with "Windows Longhorn", announced ten years ago this month, but failed in their task and released instead Vista.

Here's some relevant snippets from [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2011/06/window...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2011/06/windows-8-for-software-developers-the-longhorn-dream- reborn/) ...

* ... Longhorn would integrate .NET into the core Windows platform. .NET FX, as it was known in the company (with "FX" standing for "framework") would give way to WinFX, a Windows Framework based on the same technology. Among other things, this would include a brand new way for writing user interfaces, codenamed Avalon, that would be thoroughly modern, vector-based, and hardware-accelerated. Windows itself would be written to use WinFX for its user-visible programs—Explorer, calculator, and so on—and, going forward, .NET would be the way to write Windows applications. Win32 would still exist for backwards compatibility, but it would be frozen and left static.

* Longhorn would have been the end of the old ways of writing Windows programs, and the dawn of a new era of modern Windows development, one that was not hamstrung by design decisions made ten or fifteen years prior.

* As we all know now, Longhorn never shipped as such. The project grew enormous, unmanageable, and broken. Around the same time, Windows XP, on which Longhorn was based, was being ravaged by hackers. Microsoft poured its resources into making Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 tolerably secure—an effort that culminated in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1—then, for the most part, started development of its next operating system, the one eventually to ship as Windows Vista, all over again.

* One of the biggest losers in this developmental reboot was .NET. Windows Vista, though radical in some ways, abandoned the entire "WinFX" concept. Avalon did ship—it's now known as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)—but as an add-on to the operating system, not a core part.

<comment><USER3> In many ways Microsoft in the early 2000's was a bit ahead of the trends in operating systems and mobile devices.

They probably failed because they were competing against themselves and were just too big and compartmentalized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, there is no question that C# is sufficient to write an OS. However, you would need to ignore/replace the libraries that are normally used with C# applications. Instead you would write your own low-level libraries that provide only the kind of services that an OS requires. But the biggest hurdle will be the compiler. A normal C# compiler only generates bytecodes that will be run on the .NET or the Mono virtual machine engines. You will need an additional stage of compiler that either produces machine code, or something that can easily be converted to machine code such as C code or GCC's intermediate representation. It is a hurdle but not a massive one since there is a lot of support out there for writing compilers. People have recently been writing compilers for a number of languages that emit Javascript and your hurdle is no more complex.

When you write your compiler you will probably end up leaving out some C# features such as reflection, because they are too intertwined with .NET. This is common with other languages when people have tried to write a compiler that emits machine code and it does not usually cause a problem because the problem of interfacing with hardware does not demand the same features from a language as building a modern web app does.

Do your research before starting this because you will likely find a lot of projects that have already built bits and pieces that you can reuse.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, it's already been done. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_\(operating_system\))

<comment><USER6> To clarify, part of what makes this possible is that they extended C# with some attributes to specify that regions of code should run in a sort of high- integrity mode, where they can't be suspended for GC, etc. This allows them to do things like handle interrupts safely from C#. They call it 'Constrained Execution Regions'.

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms228973.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms228973.aspx)

<comment><USER7> CER is part of the hosting work done for SQL server integration (i.e., SQL server hosting the CLR), not Singularity.

For Singularity, they used an extended version of C# called Sing# (based on an earlier research project called Spec#)

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

<comment><USER6> Is it the case that Sing# doesn't leverage CERs at all, then? I thought it did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Lisp machine operating system was written in Lisp. In fact, it was Lisp all the way down to the microcode, or at least, it would present the microcode in Emacs as if it were Lisp, and you could modify it there. The Lisp machine OS was similar to other OSes of the age, more capable in many ways.

A modern OS is a huge amount of work. It's so vast, your choice of language isn't going to make or break you. Moving a mountain with a tablespoon should proceed three times faster than with a teaspoon. You're still looking at an eternity if you're the only guy.

For this reason, your best bet is to narrow in. Decide what it is you want to write an OS for. Do you want to explore novel user experiences? C# is probably fine for that. You don't need to write the whole OS there, just the "shell" and the window manager. You can do that now, and not spend any time dealing with drivers. Do you want to experiment with microkernel or exokernel architecture? You'll be breaking new ground. Is C# OK for that? What you're really asking is, what are the limitations of C# that you'll run into? The GC pause is one, another is dealing with raw bytes and making it perform. If make the CLR self-hosting, you're going to find performance problems like crazy. If you make fixing that your mission, you could be a hero like the PyPy guys, and everything gets better, or you might just be throwing away a lot of work.

I happen to think a lot of interesting problems would benefit from a high- level approach. Security is a declarative process. You want to say what you want secured and not how. Only one system I know of has ever used Prolog for this (MeeGo, IIRC?) but it was probably a perfect fit. There are lots of opportunities for this kind of thing in OSes and they're never really exploited. If your whole kernel is C and you want to add a declarative security module, well, you'll be writing C. You can surely accomplish the same tasks in C as C#, but if it's a pain in the ass you'll either wind up with a weaker or more limited version in C, or you'll spend more time writing and polishing it. But the world is ripe for a few people to take the unpopular tradeoff and see how well it works out, rather than taking their predecessor's word for it.

To sum up, they're not suitable for the whole job from start to finish. However, if you tried it, you'd make some interesting stuff, and learn a lot, maybe even make things better for other people. Take a crack at it. Worst thing that could happen is you fail. :)

<comment><USER9> > The Lisp machine operating system was written in Lisp. In fact, it was Lisp > all the way down to the microcode, or at least, it would present the > microcode in Emacs as if it were Lisp, and you could modify it there. The > Lisp machine OS was similar to other OSes of the age, more capable in many > ways.

On the other hand, IIRC early machines at least used custom hardware with direct support for many runtime features and implementation details, e.g. GC and tagged pointers.

<comment><USER8> I'm far from an expert, but I've definitely heard mention of those things.

I think what makes us non-Lispers romanticize the Lisp machine isn't that it ran Lisp per se or even a high level language. It's the Aston Martin flavor of a machine built to be one comprehensive whole by people who understood all the layers and wanted a coherent machine in toto. We still crave these things, and there's something vaguely upsetting about knowing that (for instance) one's Smalltalk image is running within a Unix environment and not natively, even though in practice it's better this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes but why would you want to?

I can't think of a single long term advantage of using a language that high level to build system software. Sure it makes a cute research project but that's about it.

As for application level stuff, a big chunk of windows 8 is c#, mainly in the metro space as is windows phone.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to put the equivalent effort into answering this question that you did into researching it: maybe, maybe not.

That you didn't mention Singularity or Cosmos tells me that you haven't cared enough about this to even do a cursory Google search on the subject.

Anyway, Google those above OSes, browse through their white papers and you'll have your answer (as given above). You might also check out JavaOS, Inferno, JNode, etc which have similar goals.

To get you started with less effort:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_\(operating_system\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_\(operating_system\))

</comment><comment><USER12> In fact a few people at MSR had that exact idea ([http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/singularity/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/singularity/)).

</comment><comment><USER13> To write an OS you need to generate native executable for the hardware that you are running on. The mainstream implementations of C# require CIL + CLR. i.e. you need a virtual machine + libraries and framework. Not exactly "bare metal" environment.

But C# is more advanced language than C, so that might be beneficial in some areas. As a minimum you would need a C# to native compiler and facilities to include assembly language code in some low level areas.

To get a better idea of what it takes to implement an OS, take a look at the Linux kernel source code. Or if that is too daunting, you could look at Minix 3 sources.

<comment><USER5> C# generates native code just like many other languages. In fact with a few minor tweaks MS has written an OS in C# called Singularity.

<comment><USER14> C# by default doesn't generate native code. C# generate CIL (Common Intermediate Language), which only gets turned into native code at runtime by the JIT (Just in time compiler).

That being said, it is also possible to generate a native image (using ngen) to transform CIL into native code for a specific machine. But that approach is the exception more than it is the norm.

<comment><USER15> I am pretty sure ngen doesn't create native code in the sense that it doesn't create a windows executable. All it does is the same as the JIT but does it up front (for the target platform). In other words it still generates something the runs inside the CLR.

<comment><USER16> It _does_ generate native code. What else do you think is what runs at runtime? .NET never has been interpreted (apart from Micro) so you either have the JIT or ngen and both result in the bytecode translated to native code prior to running. That it still calls into the CLR for things like object allocation, garbage collection, etc. doesn't change anything. You can do the same from C++ if you want.

<comment><USER15> There is a reason they call it managed code. It isn't native windows code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What makes C suitable for low level programming is not only lack of GC, but lack of global heap at all. Global heap is just a library thing. You can decide to alloc on a stack or use a particular memory region for allocation. Also you routinely copy between user and kernel spaces for security. This is totally different then global GC and global heap approach of c#. All works around this problem is basically getting away from C# so could you still call it OS written in C# when this problems were solved?

</comment><comment><USER18> You might want to wait for Rust to be ready, because this way you can build an OS that truly made for the future (very optimized for multi-core).

If you don't want to appeal to the general market, but more for a specialized market (like in enterprise or whatever), then you should probably optimize it for AMD's Mantle API, too, and take full advantage of the performance for both the CPU and GPU that you get from that. Also don't even bother with 32-bit.

</comment><comment><USER19> Elementary OS is built on Vala, a language syntactically similar to C#, but compiles to C. Not trying to detour you from C#, but it might be a better option as even Singularity is not entire C# (the lower level stuff).

[http://elementaryos.org/](http://elementaryos.org/)

<comment><USER20> Elementary OS is a Linux distribution. Linux is primarily written in C.

<comment><USER19> > _Elementary OS is a Linux distribution. Linux is primarily written in C._

Yes, the Linux kernel is, but not all of the userland, which is what makes Elementary OS, "Elementary OS." ElementaryOS outside of the kernel is primarily Vala[1].

One of the comments by the ElementaryOS developers the other month on HN about their usage of Vala and its performance:

> _aroman 51 days ago | link

Vala is, all in all, fantastic. The way I describe it to people is "it feels like C# but runs at C speed", and that's pretty much accurate. The only issues we have are binding bugs and Vala bugs, both of which are harder and harder to find these days. And when you do find one, the development community is very active and you can find the help you need.

For concurrency, I have personally written async vala code (which has some excellent support, including closures), but there is full thread support via GObject. The thread safety stuff is the same as the underlying library, and lots of work goes into GLib/GTK+ to make them thread safe where appropriate._

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194028)

<comment><USER16> This makes your point about Vala being a better option than C# because it can be lower-level a little moot if the core is still C just like in Singularity.

<comment><USER19> > _because it can be lower-level a little moot if the core is still C just > like in Singularity._

Not exactly, as it's more likely they didn't want to roll their own kernel when there's a perfectly good open source one. Microsoft and Windows didn't really have that luxury and based on the project's likely goals with its commericial leaning successor, Midori, they wouldn't want to use something under the GPL either. I'm not a hard core kernel developer, but I'd wager one could be written in Vala if one was so inclined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Microsoft carried out a research project looking into this, but an open source group is actively developing another implementation.

What they've achieved is really quite impressive. [http://cosmos.codeplex.com/](http://cosmos.codeplex.com/)

<comment><USER22> Haha, not to be confused with this: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/seliot/archive/2010/11/05/cosmos- pet...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/seliot/archive/2010/11/05/cosmos-petabytes- perfectly-processed-perfunctorily.aspx?Redirected=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No, but Rust is a contender.

<comment><USER24> Do you want to offer some reasoning for your enlightening statement?

<comment><USER25> From my cursory review of Rust, they're getting a lot of things right. One small example: in C#, you can't properly stack-allocate things like strings, because "reference types" get alloc'd on the heap, end of story. A function might decide to store a reference later, so stack alloc isn't possible. The CLR implementation doesn't do escape analysis.

In Rust, the type system encompasses things like who owns a pointer, so you can keep memory management simple, while choosing performance-oriented paths when needed.

The CLR itself is actually fine with a lot of such things (nothing stops you from stack allocating a string "by hand"), it just doesn't help you out. IL is pretty expressive and can translate C in a fairly straightforward fashion. So "C#" by itself has some drawbacks, but they could be patched over with some interop libraries or language extensions.

<comment><USER5> If by string you mean array of char then it's perfectly possible to stack allocate an array of char in C#.

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa664785(v=vs.71).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa664785\(v=vs.71\).aspx)

And seriously, it's not like everything in the linux kernel is stack allocated. The stack runs out of memory as well so it's not as if stack allocation is some magical place with out resource constraints. Since we deal with processors with caches and lots of other variable timing issues you don't even really get deterministic timing either.

<comment><USER26> > The stack runs out of memory as well

I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but I want to point out that Rust stacks are growable (at least in theory), so you won't run out of stack until you're OOM.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.ebooks.com/en-in/209784911/database-internals/alex-petrov/?_c=1 <comment><AUTHOR> The book can also be found on Amazon but this link seems to be the way to buy the DRM-free version.</comment>


Python/Javascript - Deferred Processing trick/hack - <AUTHOR> http://jiaaro.com/pythonjavascript-trick-hacky-error-handling

<comment><USER2> Check out the end of this page: <http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/10/27/>

It's a great example of "Nerd Sniping": <http://xkcd.com/356/></comment>


Uber, Lyft vs. Taxis in New Year's Eve Fare War - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Uber-Lyft-vs-taxis-in-New-Year-s-Eve-fare-war-5984146.php <comment><USER2> > Both Lyft and Uber have partnered with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and > will donate a percentage of New Year's Eve ride fees to that organization.

I can't say I'm exactly thrilled about this. There are many more effective organizations they could donate to that aren't on the side of prohibition.</comment>


Mongrel 2 Routing And The Magnetic Bikeshed - <AUTHOR> http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1277144478.html <comment><USER3> The Lua pattern-matching code he mentions is here (<http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/lstrlib.c.html#match>). You can browse the overall source (<http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/>) online, too.

The Lua standard string library includes a minimalistic regex implementation - it doesn't have full REs because the implementation would probably be larger than the rest of Lua (!).

For situations where you're better off with a real parser and not just REs, LPEG (<http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html>) is available as a library. It's a bit different from both REs and LL(k) / LALR(k) parser generators (it's a PEG variant), but works quite well in my experience - <USER2> designed with parsing in mind, it scales down quite nicely to typical RE string stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love this line: "I find the average programmer's lack of understanding of the TST data structure and its variants maddening."

The average programmer is a coal-shoveler, moving data from a hopper to furnace all day long. Most of the programmers I have met haven't had to do a binary tree since college and wouldn't know a ternary tree if it was growing in their garden.

As for parsers ... yeah, not even. I imagine they're not terribly difficult to write, but I don't know anyone who's even remotely interested in it.

<comment><USER5> If there was a book explaining not only the basics but also the purpose of and why I should care about binary trees, TSTs, bitwise operations etc., I'd buy it. Twice!

I am a self taught web app programmer and I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around these kinds of things.

<comment><USER6> Look at the textbooks used in data structure courses at various schools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So long as he's apparently requesting this sort of thing, why not use a Patricia trie instead of a TST? Typical use-cases would probably yield a lot of single-child nodes in a TST, which a Patricia trie would eliminate. There would probably be a good amount of memory savings, and the only additional code complexity would be a strcmp() (edit: which doesn't increase the _algorithmic_ complexity, since you'd be doing those comparisons anyway).

Using a TST is probably fine; it just looks like this problem cries out for a Patricia trie.</comment>


Ask: A good robotics platform for a programmer with minimal HW - <AUTHOR>

Of course, I would need to get better at circuits and things. :)
I've seen the iRobot Create, the Willow Garage create, and a couple of other similar platforms but I want to focus on the software right now. I remember seeing a hobby robot with a laptop but I can't seem to remember it this second.
I was inspired by the nnrccar posting that made the rounds earlier but I find that my hardware skills are not so great right now. Embedded stuff is fine (I do that during the day at a network hardware company, although our tool chain is super complex).
Do you have any recommendations? <comment><USER2> lego mindstorms. They're programable (python, ada, a bunch of languages) little robots. and they're cheap enough for parents to buy their children.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought about that. Can I really make a good prototype of something out of it, though? I have some coin to throw around (~$1,000) so I want something that I can make a MVP. Of course, I'm new to this, so maybe I'm wrong about that, too. :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does seating to Startup School work? - <AUTHOR>

I understand that investors/VIP will probably get the front seats, but after that how does seating work? It is on a first come first serve (i.e. star wars movie release bring your tent style) or is there some sort of pre-arranged seating? <comment><USER2> It's a large campus auditorium.

As far as I recall from prior years it was all first-come, first-served seating, though people closely involved with the presentations tend be clustered near the front, because they need stage access and arrive early.

(Maybe there was a row held for speakers, but if so it was pretty subtle. The event is not about any sort of VIP/velvet-rope tiering, and any investors-not- speaking in attendance might prefer to work the room in back rather than cluster in a reserved holding pen at front...)</comment>


Show HN: Elbi – good on the go - <AUTHOR> Our London-based non-profit startup has recently launched our first product, we'd love any feedback and comments. It's a platform for encouraging small acts of charity and philanthropy from its users, you can find out more on our website: https://www.elbi.com/about.html<p>It's early days yet, our app is currently only on iOS and its feature-set is pretty minimal but we've got big plans and lots of ideas for the future! We're just starting to iterate on those and the feedback we're getting from the charities that we've onboarded so far as well as our users. <comment><USER2> The heart animation is nice but it is overflowing, it goes out of the viewport on a mobile screen whereas the text fits in perfectly.</comment>


Minimalistic redis sentinel process to do slave promotion - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dhilipkumars/redis-sentinel-micro <comment><USER2> Please try this and provide feedback, it will be great to hear from you.</comment>


Luxury Developers Use a Loophole to Build Soaring Towers for Ultrarich in NY - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/tallest-buildings-manhattan-loophole.html <comment><USER3> What's the major complaint(s) of people who oppose large towers? Shade? Skyline (which you aren't going to be seeing anyway unless you live out in Brooklyn or Queens)? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If a billionaire wants to live up in the clouds, great, more vacant spaces in the rest of Manhattan for everyone else.

<comment><USER4> Building large buildings to fill with empty space and spending huge amounts of money catering to the ultrarich, while there are still massive housing problems in NYC, is definitely going to offend some people.

A society which enables the rich to produce extraneous waste - <USER2> making multimillion dollar luxury home spaces just to fill with nothing, so that you can skirt the law for building codes, and not even allow a person to live there - yeah that's offensive.

The rich should be able to buy things they like, yes. But of course it's offensive when the country has a housing crises and the rich are building houses that nobody is allowed to live in, just so they can get a better view?

I mean yeah that's pretty obviously offensive and a strong, real reason that people are opposing these towers - it's described in the article.

<comment><USER5> The country doesn't have a housing crisis. Certain cities do. Certain states do. And the ones with the worst housing problems have the most restrictive real estate laws.

<comment><USER4> I really don't understand this position. The country has a housing crisis _because many of the cities in this country do_. Removing the connection to the rest of America is an incorrect way of looking at it because of cause and effect: this is such a big problem in America today that it is affecting people who weren't directly in the housing-short markets themselves.

A weakness in part of America is a weakness for all of America. It works this way with the outside world too - our housing shortages are part of a _global problem_. _We are all in this together_. Framing the issues that the world cities have internally as something that _isn 't a problem_ for people living elsewhere is just denying that we live in a connected society.

One groups problems affect the other groups.

> And the ones with the worst housing problems have the most restrictive real > estate laws.

Do you have a citation for that? I don't believe it's true.

<comment><USER6> Ignore the citation. Come to Houston and see for your own eyes. We don't have zoning, and laws are pretty lax. HOAs are another story, but that's a different issue entirely.

New York has a problem - we don't. And I'm not going to solve their problem because they created the set of choices that led to it.

What makes America great is all of these cities get to make their own unique set of mistakes. Over time, we figure out as a whole what works and what doesn't. Some cities can choose to follow that path or ignore it, but either way, it's _that_ city's problem, not _everyone's_ problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "It offends me," Mr. Macklowe said, "because we created a very nice building > that fits into the skyline perfectly."

Oh, please. 432 Park is one of the biggest eyesores in the city. I wonder if that's one of their selling points: "Come live at 432 Park, the one building without any views of 432 Park".

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is weird journalism. It presents decent counter arguments to the problem, which is nice but also leaves the average skeptical reader confused about how much waste is actually occurring on these floors. Surely _some_ mechanical space is needed, and the wind-flow anti-sway idea doesn't seem crazy, but it's really hard to draw a real conclusion. The fire ladder height problem in another comment seems valid, but surely most skyscrapers just aren't ladder accessible.

But my biggest gripe (at least on mobile, maybe it's different on desktop?) is why aren't there pictures off the so-called wasteful spaces? Putting aside the argument that more space is needed for future batteries, let us see an example of what this actually looks like. That would certainly go a long way toward clarifying the wastefulness. I know what the outside of buildings look like, but those are the only pictures I see. At least get the outside of the problematic barbell building, or diagrams, or something!

</comment><comment><USER9> > _The building and nearby towers are able to push high into the sky because > of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. Floors reserved for > structural and mechanical equipment, no matter how much, do not count > against a building's maximum size under the laws, so developers explicitly > use them to make buildings far higher than would otherwise be permitted._

Like most things in today's society the reaction to this seems to be one of two: double-down on the zoning enforcement or eliminate it.

</comment><comment><USER10> The headline is simply inflammatory and irresponsible journalism. There are legitimate arguments given by sources in the article as to why the buildings are constructed this way, arguments which may or may not be sound in the final analysis on the topic, but the reader is unfairly primed to side against them.

<comment><USER11> It's also worth noting that the New York Times headquarters is the 8th tallest building in Manhattan:

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

Why is filling a building with journalists and advertising industry people morally superior to filling it with equipment?

I actually quite like the way the nyt building looks but it's definitely in the vein of excessive luxury. It didn't need to be that nice, but hey it's their money to spend! Too bad they don't grant others the same courtesy.

<comment><USER12> Because thousands of people moving in and out of a building overflows into a robust neighborhood - food being sold on the streets, restraunts and theaters hosting new experiences every day...

The neighborhoods being built up into luxury towers no one lives provides no business to the would-be shops and galleries nearby, leaving them as empty as the streets around the High Line...

"Last March, beloved leather bar Rawhide at 212 Eighth Ave. closed after rent rose from $15,000 to $27,000 a month. Close to a year later, it remains vacant.", from 2014,

[https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140204/chelsea/vacant- sto...](https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140204/chelsea/vacant-storefronts- line-eighth-ave-as-high-rents-force-out-businesses/)

There's other articles along the same lines if you google 'empty storefronts high line nyc'

<comment><USER11> Both the buildings we're talking about are in midtown. It's already at peak density of humans. Less would actually be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That building stands out so much in the sky line it's like a middle finger to the people watching it. You the type you can afford with "fuck you" money ;)

<comment><USER14> Upvoted. For some reason more recent skyscrapers (not just the ones mentioned in the article) lack the modesty of older constructions. They feel completely out of place when viewed from afar. Totally not like some of the pre-ww2 skyscrapers which are monumental or even flamboyant (think of Chrysler Building) yet work together to create a consistent and harmonious feeling.

<comment><USER13> And this one is just a boring monolithic block at least the Chrysler Building has something happening at the top architecture wise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It took me a few moments to realize the headline wasn't referring to software developers. I don't know what a luxury SW developer is!

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see why it is a loophole, it actually sounds like the law is not so bad.

If technical space was counted then the building would be 1/4 shorter? Could be.

In the grand scheme of things you can certainly debate housing that sits empty, but that doesn't seem to be the main problem in lack of stock. Your neighborhood NIMBY that doesn't want affordable construction in affordable neighbourhoods seems to have a bigger impact than just tall towers for millionaires.</comment>


Why Most Software Engineers Lose Nothing by Unionizing - <AUTHOR> https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/why-95-percent-of-software-engineers-lose-nothing-by-unionizing/ <comment><USER2> What a dismal picture the author paints of our world:

"most software engineers are low-status workers whose jobs their bosses would gladly ship overseas, and who live under the surveillance described above. They'll be fired as soon as their performance dips, or a cheaper worker comes on the market, or they piss the wrong person off. The adversarial climate exists. Again, nothing to lose."

What world is this author living in? Maybe 10 years ago, maybe, a lot of software jobs were like this. Everything I've experienced lately is that companies can't hire enough software engineers. You are _not_ going to be fired if your performance dips a little. You are too hard to replace. Interestingly, this is very similar to the situation that Paul Graham described here: [http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html)

I mean really this whole post basically says, "unions kinda suck, but your job already kinda sucks, so why not try a union?" How...inspiring? Honestly, if you really feel that down about your career a union isn't going to fix it. It's probably time to try a different field.

<comment><USER3> Classic mchurch. He's had bad experiences with some companies in the bay area. You can read his (many) rants about Google for instance.

<comment><USER4> It turns out that if you spend all of your time at work posting on mailing lists about your T7-9 vision instead of actually doing your work, your performance reviews suffer. Who would have thought?

<comment><USER5> Creating at least 45 Wikipedia sockpuppet accounts [1] probably doesn't correlate with optimal performance, either.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_Mike_Church)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a child of two union parents and married to a union worker, it is clear to me that the only contact the author has had with unions is in his dreams.

Unions constantly have to deal with internal corruption (and often don't...). The seniority system is much more arbitrary than anything approximating meritocracy. Better hope that you've saved enough if/when the union decides to strike because you are going to have to suck it up even if you don't think it's worth it. You better buy in to all the politics your union supports because your dues go to it. Enjoy watching the union protect the most incompetent worker who will go on to put lives at risk with his drinking problem. Just don't count on the union going to bat for you against the company, if they don't like you they'll hang to out to dry.

The author is out of his depth.

<comment><USER6> Disappointed but not surprised that folks are down voting instead of replying.

The unionization discussion focuses way too much around compensation instead of on union-employee relations. People just assume unions are all roses in this department (the author likens them to some street fighting Batman) when in reality they're flawed and have incentives that work against workers too. If you don't think there's nepotism and favoritism in unions then you've probably never worked in one. Unions pick and choose the workers they stand up for, it's not some romantic all for one and one for all story.

In my experience you should trust the union just about as much as hr or management. If you're not on the same side as them in whatever issue, watch your back.

<comment><USER7> The "As a child of two union parents ..." argument in relation to unionization is the equivalent of the "As a mom of two children ..." argument in relation to child psychology. I also have two parents who are members of a union but that doesn't make me an expert!

<comment><USER8> Perhaps not, but it does give you exposure to a wealth of first-hand information. I don't think the mother-of-two-children's opinion is worthless relative to a child psychologist, either; both have insights that are valuable in different ways.

<comment><USER7> No, it gives you a lot of anecdotal evidence that is impossible to decouple from the specific circumstances of the situation. E.g my experience with my union has been the completely opposite of everything stated by bhawks. So + 1 - 1 = 0, words have been exchanged but nothing learned.

<comment><USER8> "Nothing learned" only if you don't care about those "specific circumstances". The anecdotal datapoints are useful specifically because Earth's population of 7+ billion humans is remarkably efficient when it comes to running across corner cases and confounding variables.

We're talking about something that does indeed have very-situationally- dependent impacts and effects. The anecdotes require filtering, sure, but they're vital if you want aggregate data that reflect the real world instead of theoretical conditions.

If it's impossible to decouple something from the specific circumstances of the situation, then that "something" is insufficiently understood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally I think that if organized labor is to have a chance to be remotely successful in Software engineering it needs to break away from the old assumptions that don't hold any more including commoditization. They might have some luck if they established sufficient ground floors (limiting crunch time and death marches, setting rules for what they can be expected to be required for late changes - bonuses for rushes being fine, etc.) instead of uniformity.

I am not familiar with the fine details of labor but I suspect the Screen Actors Guild would be a better fit as a template. The actors are anywhere from minor extras to superstars.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree. While I am traditionally anti-union (I have seen too many rubber-room situations and ridiculousness,) SAG or the WGA are actually good models for software engineers. It recognizes minimums, but doesn't have maximums and "merit" is determined by whatever the market is willing to pay. So a superstar first time writer can make millions of their script warrants it, while journeyman script re-writes are assured getting paid scale. The teachers unions are exactly the opposite: you get more pay for seniority and the implication is that seniority necessarily means "more valuable" when that isn't necessarily the case.

Although I am economically very far right, I could get behind a WGA model for software devs. I would be happy to join such an organization. But a teachers union style union.. no way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I felt the article is underwhelming, to put it mildly. It drones on and on, seemingly repeating the same point.

Under different guises article says that if you are a low-level code monkey with no freedom or an "IT peon" doing menial tasks, unionizing can give you job security (so you can be sure that you can keep doing those boring things forever) and maybe raise your salary, too. That is probably a true statement. But this setup is _BORING_. The article claims this setup describes 95% of software engineers and I think this is nonsense. IMO at least half of the software engineers either have some project freedom and can pretty easily switch employers if they find themselves under abusive management.

And this could be at risk if unionized: no firing often means greatly reduced hiring, too. Please count me out. My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER12> Meta: This article has been flagged a few times. Could those who are flagging it explain why they feel it is inappropriate for this site?

<comment><USER13> Seriously. If folks generally understand the idea that you shouldn't use the downvote button to mean "disagree" I think this should go double for using flagging. I'm far from convinced by the article but don't see how it falls in the category of something that should be flagged - it's not trolling or offensive.

<comment><USER14> IME flagging on HN is not what you think of as flagging on other sites. Flagging is often used for off-topic or "inappropriate" and is subjective based on the flagger. I don't believe you can apply general understanding of downvotes from other sites or assume allowed reasons for flags based on other sites.

People flag for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they just get tired-head on a topic, feel a site adds nothing new to the discussion, think it doesn't belong, etc. The only real hardfast rule about flagging is that you don't talk about why.

<comment><USER8> Okay, so if someone could actually clarify what, exactly, is off-topic or inappropriate about this article, then that would be much appreciated.

<comment><USER15> I'll trade - what about this article makes you finish reading it and go 'oh yeah, that is an interesting and insightful piece of writing that other people might benefit from reading and discussing'.

<comment><USER8> Let's not trade. If you feel so strongly that Hacker News should be prevented from being able to discuss an article, then it's on you to articulate why.

To humor you, though: it's a thorough representation of an opinion that relates to my career, and the resulting discussions are important to have, regardless of whether or not I agree with the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The argument seems to be that:

* 95 ( _no, sorry 99%_ ) of Software Engineers are IT peons and

* therefore don't lose much by unionizing; however

* if you're one of the few lucky ones being recognized for what they do and making enough in compensation, don't bother

It seems to me that the biggest problem in this theory is the first assumption is wrong (at least the numbers are wildly off). Most software engineers tend to be highly compensated, work in fairly independent teams, are recognized for their contributions so don't have much to gain from unionizing.

<comment><USER17> > if you're one of the few lucky ones being recognized for what they do and > making enough in compensation, don't bother

I would disagree with that. Of course I should still "bother" to make the world around me better, I still "bother" with solidarity. Even if it's just so I can enjoy my own luck freely, and be open when I meet new people. The less corpses I have in my basement, the less corners I cut because "fuck you got mine", the more free I am. The more free I am, the quicker and better I develop. Also, unused muscles atrophy, unused mental and social "muscles" do as well, and the primary reward for being in shape is being in shape, it just feels better than being out of shape.

<comment><USER16> If a system is working for _you_ as you expect it to, you understandably have no real motivation to change it. That is the only point of that statement.

If you're concerned that your coworkers in the same company or in other companies are not being treated fairly by the system and want to help in changing it, sure, you can do that. But that's usually not the strongest force for change in these things.

In fact, the better compensated and happy workers would want to ensure the continuity of this system that treats them so well.

<comment><USER17> So in summary, I say I disagree and give my personal reasons for me personally disagreeing, and you give me permission to have them and act on them, and then reiterate what "most" people feel, as if I didn't know that, as if that wasn't the basis for me commenting in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> a highly professionalized industry in which individuals have massive bargaining power and draw gigantic salaries, where furthermore we culturally are able to open source parts of the means of production (engineers have unprecedented levels of ownership over the fate of their labor) is literally the last place I would think to unionize. color me naive, though.

<comment><USER19> You're probably right. It's janitors and other low-skill/low-pay workers who need and benefit from unionization most because I've seen the results of union-busting environments: janitors working 16 hours a day without benefits and living in their cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've actually been in this exact situation quite a few times. I finally found a safe space to work where I've been able to prove to myself that I actually am a skilled developer.

PIPs have no appeal process. Many developers are forced to work on menial bugs while simultaneously being promised more freedom "soon".

Every company is constantly hiring because every company has drastically high turnover. Burnout is a very real thing in the field, and it shouldn't be considered the norm.

</comment><comment><USER21> "If you're the typical, low-status, open-plan programmer, forced to interview for his own job every morning in "Daily Scrum", then all the bad things that unions can bring have already happened at your job"

Seems like a rather cynical take.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am neither a principle engineer at a big "N" company, nor am I a high frequency trader, but I kind of hope I am not an "IT peon" either.

<comment><USER23> I mean I don't know your situation but "I kind of hope I am not an "IT peon" either" is exactly how people who do have bargaining power end up peons to people with more power and/or information.

<comment><USER22> My sarcasm probably wasn't clear, but I am merely mocking the author's trichotomy.

<comment><USER23> ... implying that it is so fundamentally unsound that simply disagreeing with it counts as mockery.

but again whatever evidence you may have in your individual situation: the belief that "I'm getting a good deal" is exactly how a mark gets conned.

<comment><USER22> Of course it's fundamentally unsound. It's not even a reasonable abstraction for reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unionization doesn't work well in high tech because traditionally the industry has changed so fast that a union would torpedo any company that fully embraced them. I think the tech industry also has among the most relaxed, easy going environments with some of the best perks.

<comment><USER7> Wait until you hit the far side of 40.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Pessimistic = realistic here. Companies manage knowledge workers like they're fred winslow taylor and it's 1930. Managers & ed policy wonks are both trying to make programming blue collar (though for different reasons).

Nobody knows how the next recession will affect programmers. If adtech collapses will compensation follow? Why aren't more companies using offshore tech labor?

Can't comment on the union stuff but we should be wary of thinking devs are exceptional. Expensive labor isn't always valuable labor; as detroit learned in the 80s.

<comment><USER25> I was involved in a few outsourcing attempts. If you write a big check for a no-name company under a different legal system, you're going to get ripped off mercilessly ("deliverables" that don't even compile). If you open a serious branch office and interview and hire a team of your own, you might have a chance.

<comment><USER26> Don't forget, and pay properly. Even places that are cheaper than the US are highly competitive for quality workers. For many companies it's less hassle and overall TCO cheaper to hire in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One of the problems that most unions try to address is that companies will often fire employees for union organizing if they can get away with it (generally they can make up some secondary excuse, like poor performance). In some unions, firing happens by seniority; the company can only fire employees in the reverse order they joined.

In software development, we obviously don't want to have to work with under- performing coworkers, so we need some way to remove those people that isn't based on seniority. If it can't be at management's discretion either, then what's a good solution?

I think one answer may be to have a union-negotiated peer-review process -- you can be laid off or fired if your coworkers don't vouch for your work, or consider you indispensable. Depending on the process, this could work okay or it could be awful. At best, it would seem to encourage a sort of Lord-of-the- Flies atmosphere and some unpleasant office politics.

Another approach would be market-based. Maybe projects within the company are allocated some sort of virtual currency units which can be claimed by employees when they finish units of work. Employees with a surplus of currency units but not enough time to finish their tasks by themselves can put bounties on subtasks. Worker's pay should be proportional to their credit surplus; if it's not, they can have their pay reduced or they could be asked to leave. This would less political and less personal, but working out the details could be tricky and it doesn't address the problem of highly productive people that no one wants to work with because they treat people badly.

I expect there are other possible solutions.

How does the Screen Actor's Guild, and screenwriter's and athletic unions deal with this problem?

<comment><USER28> > In some unions, firing happens by seniority; the company can only fire > employees in the reverse order they joined.

No unions prohibit individual firing for cause (though they tend to require process for it); union contracts may require _layoffs_ to be conducted by seniority, and companies not covered by union contracts may use allocation of what is notionally a not-for-individual cause layoff as a PR cover for targeted firings, but it is simply not the case that union contracts (at least commonly) require _firing_ by seniority.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > And, if you work in a federally-funded research lab that pays for your > graduate education, and that allows you to publish papers, attend > conferences, and perform original research on working time, then you > probably don't need a union.

These research labs are mostly unionized. That's _why_ they have good benefits, working conditions, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Unions were great for workers at one point. But for the majority of my life, they seem to have taken worker's rights to the point that it is consistently enticing for CEOs to at least attempt to offshore huge amounts of jobs. No matter how terrible the results, they keep trying because unions kill companies in the USA.

I would like to avoid that happening to software jobs.

</comment><comment><USER31> No we lose fking everything. I just spent an evening to an electrician in his second year, excited the electrical union his giving him 8 whole days of vacation. His pay increases are on a fixed scale. And because senior members of the union are unemployed if he loses his job, those guys get hired first. And if you're unemployed and you take a non union sideproject you're moved to the back of the bus. Run far far away from unionization.

</comment><comment><USER32> Unions are usually equivalent to non poaching agreements, they set a price and most companies agrees to not pay significantly above that while most workers agrees to not work if they are paid significantly below that. It ensures that everyone is paid a mediocre salary, so if you want American engineer salaries to look like European ones start a union!

</comment><comment> jf- Software developers will be non-unionised until there are so many of us that supply outpaces demand. Then we'll form cartels to demand better pay and conditions, much like everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's unfortunate most IT/engineering people buy into anti-union propaganda blindly. The fact is that organized labor, for better or worse, equals fairer pay than anarcho-capitalist gratituity. See also: Robert Reich, Richard Wolff.

</comment><comment><USER33> There are many good reasons to unionize, but aligning the argument with Jira and daily standups may not carry much weight.

The #1 reason is that HR no longer represents the best interests of employees. They serve to protect the company, leaving employees with zero representation.</comment>


Genetic testing mix-up reignites regulation debate  - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/16/AR2010071606246_pf.html

<comment><USER4> There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as is usual with these things.

The problem with rare and expensive new technology, as genetic engineering was until quite recently, is that it acquires totemic significance. Everyone reads about it, but few people experience it directly, so it's easy to fantasize about it and imbue it with all sorts of magical powers. One of my favorite examples of this -- because it's just so ham-handed about it -- is a 1950 B movie called _Radar Secret Service_ , as spoofed on _Mystery Science Theater 3000_ :

<http://mst3k.wikia.com/wiki/Radar_Secret_Service>

 _In this film universe radar is everywhere and can do anything - <USER3> valuable mineral deposits deep underground, locate large schools of fish underwater, etc, and all from thousands of miles away! Worship radar at the church of your choice._

Of course, in 1950 radar was an amazing war-winning technology that only MIT researchers and Air Force techs had any direct experience with. Sixty years later, now that radar has come _and gone_ as a trendy police speed-measurement technology (it's all about the LIDAR now) and every local weatherperson has had a big Doppler radar display for twenty years, radar is kind of normal.

People's attitude toward genetics is such that if a woman is handed a genetic profile of a black man and told it is hers she will _actually entertain thoughts that she might be a black man_. People hear that they have the gene "for" some rare disease ("p < 0.05") and then _contemplate suicide_ because the Book of Destiny has foretold their certain doom. This attitude is no joke: It really is an intense, potentially traumatic emotional experience to read a genetic scan at this point. One is reminded of the cultures in which people think that being photographed is to have one's soul stolen. Laugh at such cultures at your peril, for in our own culture to read one's _genes_ is to read one's soul, one's essence, and one's entire future.

These beliefs will fade eventually. I actually think the 23andme incident might be helpful for public education. The biggest problem with genetic data at this point is that people take it way, way too seriously. Turning it into a laughingstock would be a positive development. Reading genes needs to feel more like reading the _Daily Racing Form_ , or shopping for fashionable prescription sunglasses, and less like touring a funeral home, scoring poorly on the SAT, or attending an exorcism.

(Of course, as someone who almost certainly does _not_ harbor the gene for Huntington's disease, this is easy for _me_ to say.)

<comment><USER5> ><http://mst3k.wikia.com/wiki/Radar_Secret_Service>

> _In this film universe radar is everywhere and can do anything - <USER3> > valuable mineral deposits deep underground, locate large schools of fish > underwater, etc, and all from thousands of miles away! Worship radar at the > church of your choice._

I don't know if radar was developed first, but since sonar accomplishes these tasks I think it's fair to give it to them. Sound/Radio, pretty close.

Agree with people taking the results too seriously, especially with some labs _not_ taking it seriously themselves by failing to handle samples carefully and contaminating evidence.

I like your example regarding souls adhering to photographs, not least because it's something I have chuckled to in my head before :\ .

Lastly, in respect to people's overreaction to results, I'm tempted to dismiss it as amazing that we made it this far, and that our genes carry any _meaningful\beneficial_ signal. This attitude is tempered by my fortunate lack of fatal news, and a chance optimistic outlook [for today at least -- the mind if fickle].</comment></comment>


Palm complains about Apple to USB governing body - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/24/palm-complains-about-apple-to-usb-governing-body-while-pre-it/

<comment><USER2> Really, Palm, is it _that_ hard to write your own sync software?

<comment><USER3> The difficulty of writing sync software is probably not their motivation here.

Palm is getting tons of free press, and they come out looking like the heroes, fighting for openness against an overly proprietary Apple.

And it's working brilliantly. Just look at this story, with its 100+ upvotes: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722294>

<comment><USER4> Are they though? Openiness would be making their own open platform and letting anyone play. They're fighting for the ability to wedge themselves into a proprietary platform.

<comment><USER5> Just mount your Pre as a USB drive and drag your MP3s on if you don't like iTunes. Most music apps support that or can be made to support it anyway, since it's very common among other MP3 players. That's about as open as you can get. iTunes is just a nice bonus.

<comment><USER6> Let me rephrase that for you: "Just use a new workflow that you're not used to --mount your Pre as a USB drive and drag your MP3s on-- _even though_ you like and are invested in iTunes."

<comment><USER5> You're looking at my comment in the wrong context. Here is what I was responding to:

"Are they though? Openiness would be making their own open platform and letting anyone play. They're fighting for the ability to wedge themselves into a proprietary platform."

That is also "a new workflow that you're not used to." I'm saying that the Pre offers _both_ options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand why so many people are supporting Palm. They are obviously breaking the law by pretending the device was created by Apple. Not only that but they also try to make Apple look bad in the mean time.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why people are supporting Compaq. They are obviously breaking the law by pretending the device was created by IBM. Not only that, but they also try and make IBM look bad at the same time.

I don't understand why people are supporting Microsoft. They are obviously breaking the law by pretending the file was created by WordPerfect. Not only that, but they also try and make WordPerfect look bad at the same time.

I don't understand why people are supporting OpenOffice. They are obviously breaking the law by pretending the file was created by Word. Not only that, but they also try and make Microsoft look bad at the same time.

<comment><USER2> That argument would only apply if Apple was somehow locking Palm out of some data. But they aren't: iTunes writes out an XML file describing its library contents. ($HOME/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml on OS X, probably similar on Windows.) With that data in hand, it's probably _easier_ to sync files over to the Pre with their own software than it is to reverse-engineer the iPod's database format and make syncing work from within iTunes.</comment></comment></comment>


Googlers Living at Google: Tiny Spaces, Probably No Sex - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/10/20/googlers-living-at-google-tiny-spaces-probably-no-sex/ <comment><USER2> >Tiny Spaces, Probably no sex.

Wrong assumption. I am sure if a Googler wanted a "slip in", a tiny space wouldn't be a hindrance.</comment>


Dear Volkswagen: you are probably doomed (but not because of diesel) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.salathe.com/dear-volkswagen-you-are-probably-doomed-but-not-because-of-diesel <comment><USER3> > Many of your top executives will go to jail.

So naiive. I would be very very surprised if anyone goes to jail over this. VW is going to take a huge hit but doomed? Puhleeze... companies have survived worse.

<comment><USER4> This is written from a US centric viewpoint by someone who sees VW as a niche brand for environmentally aware people. But we are talking about the largest car manufacturer in the world. In Europe VW is a mainstream car, people buy them because they are economical and well built. I think most people in EU see VW less as an especially "Green" brand so the reputation damage in their home markets might be less severe.

And WV reacted like Lance Armstrong caught with doping: like cycling I'm assuming all the other manufacturers are doing the same. Maybe they were less aggressive or maybe they were just were not as successful with it, therefore they were not caught, yet.

<comment><USER5> The mainstream nature of diesel in EU makes the problem worse; dirty diesel kills many people each year (about 9,000 in London alone) so VW have killed (and contributed to the deaths of) many people over the years this fraud has happened. This has cost the various health services billions of Euro.

<comment><USER6> > dirty diesel kills many people each year (about 9,000 in London alone)

Here is a paper I found related to that claim:

"Understanding the Health Impacts of Air Pollution in London"

[https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/HIAinLondon_Ki...](https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/HIAinLondon_KingsReport_14072015_final_0.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Second, you haven't just duped millions of people into buying a product they > would never have bought had they known the truth

This one made me laugh the most. All the potential buyers couldnt care less.

</comment><comment><USER8> The weird part of this is that if you accept higher NOx emission, you can cut fuel usage by ~20%. Since matter does not disappear, this also has to cut CO2 emissions by similar amount.

CO2 has global warming potential for at least hundred year scale. NOx has chemical half life of decade or two.

WHO isn't really sure how much NOx you have to emit before it's dangerous. Heating is however more culpable right now than vehicles.

I can't decide if Volkswagen is shitty thief or hero. It seems to be that the NOx fuss might be overblown and the costs in CO2 emissions could be far worse. Or not. Could someone enlighten me?

<comment><USER9> Exactly my thoughts. I wish VW had had the balls to use this to lead a discussion about lowering the cost of SCR on vehicles.

That and the complete lack of regulation of particulate emissions on the supposed alternative GDI engines really galls me as a 2014 Jetta TDI owner

<comment><USER8> Yes it seems weird. "We use this NO2 as indicator of particulate, as it's too difficult to measure directly.."

Frankly I would not be surprised if Exxon, BP and Shell would have lobbied these emission regulations. After all they get to sell 20% more diesel.

But again I might be completely wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So the solution is to hire software engineers, abandon the motor car and build autonomous vehicles.

I may be wrong but I just don't see self driving vehicles being the norm in the next 30 years. If I were VW I wouldn't abandon the traditional motorcar just yet.

<comment><USER11> By 2045 we won't have figured out a way to have autonomous cars? If we can't solve the problem by then I'd guess that we'll make the problem easier to solve by adding smart roads.

<comment><USER10> Smart roads? In the UK the councils are struggling to maintain the existing roads. there is a huge difference from what would be possible with unlimited resources and what will actually happen in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems a little over-dramatic.

Remember the GM switch story? Also had active deception for over a decade & and worse people actually died (169) as a result. That cost them just over a billion.

Even if the American regulator wants to make an example of them I doubt it'll exceed 10bn. As for jail: I doubt anyone will end up in jail let alone "many" of their executives.

<comment><USER13> That was not willful deception, along the lines of "we have the best ignition system in the world!" and people bought those cars because of specific features that were fraudulently and willfully marketed as such. How many more people will now get cancer due to the carcinogens released by a 40x increase in pollution from VW cars? It's out there to affect all of us now, thanks VW!

<comment><USER12> >That was not willful deception

No? They realised a fault in their cars were actively killing people and opted to not do anything about it. Thats closer to murder than wilful deception really. As for the deception part - they silently redesigned the part but kept the old part number so that it would fly under the radar.

Neither VW nor GM's behaviour is acceptable. Just pointing out that various car manufacturers have a history of sketchy behaviour & I'd expect the fine for this instance to be broadly in line with previous examples.

>cancer due to the carcinogens released by a 40x increase in pollution

I don't think N2O is significantly carcinogenic. The primary risk is greenhouse effect risk as far as I understand. As I understand it the other pollutants all made it below the thresholds without software sorcery, though frankly who knows at this stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If americans cared about their car emissions america would be a different country by now. People trust VW cars for their safety mainly, and this is not a safety issue. Watch for VW sales in the next months. Autonomous cars may be good for countries with good infrastructure, but they would be dangerous for many european cities. In any case, now is a good time to buy VW stocks.

<comment><USER13> That's great that you can speak for all people and why they trust VW cars. Do you still think they trust VW now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What _should_ happen, is that the claimants should tally up the damages and if it is greater than cash on hand, Volkswagen should issue shares to make up the difference. If that does not make up the difference, then the claimants should get a pro-rata portion of the company stock and all original share holders should lose their shares.

The reason for this is simple: the idea of a corporation is to shield investors from personal liability - NOT - to shield them from loss due to fraud.

What will actually happen is that the German government will meet with their trading partners around the world and pressure them into limiting the damage in order to protect German interests / pension funds.

</comment><comment><USER16> Doomed? Like all other corporations that had been caught on false advertising and frauds?

</comment><comment><USER17> Volkswagen will certainly take a hit, but it is not going to collapse - <USER2> German government will bail it any time it's necessary. An ordinary German loves and cares about the national car-making industry, and quite rightfully so.

<comment><USER13> VW stock plunged 40%, they've set aside billions but that won't be enough for the lawsuits and massive fines that will get levied. Let's do some math. VW has a $50B cap now. No one is going to buy VW cars for a while, so the bleeding will continue. With 11 million cars affected and an average price of $20-30k, even a $5k reimbursement or fine or fixes per car that's involved, that's $55B that's gone up in smoke. Do you think that I, as a VW owner, will be able to get a good car resale value, even after a fix that will likely leave my car less powerful or get worse fuel economy? Those are your only two options. The amount of willful deception and fraud that needed to take place at all levels of this company's management will make a great study for what not to do for decades to come. This company is done, the only option is for the German government to step in and bankroll a large bailout package.

<comment><USER17> You overestimate the damage. First, it only affects diesel engines.

Second, I'm not sure that 25% of the sticker price is an adequate compensation. After all what needs to be done is these cars need to be permanently reprogrammed, and as you say it means power reduction and worse fuel economy. But by how much? It has been a few years now that we (as customers) have to deal with the common industry practice of advertising unrealistic fuel consumption statistics, so I'd say to some extent more car- makers are similarly boned here.

Third, Volkswagen is a group, and owns quite a lot of brands: Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda, Volkswagen, Ducati, MAN, Scania, Neoplan and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles.

Fourth, it is common that such investigations go on for years without end. Microsoft f.eg. did not pay a single penny for the IE antitrust case.

<comment><USER13> > First, it only affects diesel engines.

According to VW, it affects 11 million cars with type EA 189 engines: "In its new statement, VW gave more details, admitting that "discrepancies" related to vehicles with Type EA 189 engines and involved some 11 million vehicles worldwide." ([http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/volkswagen-11-million-...](http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/volkswagen-11-million- vehicles-could-have-suspect-software-emissions-scandal-n431456)).

>It has been a few years now that we (as customers) have to deal with the common industry practice of advertising unrealistic fuel consumption statistics, so I'd say to some extent more car-makers are similarly boned here.

No, that would be fraud. Care to cite examples of such "common industry practice"?

> Third, Volkswagen is a group

That won't make them less open to litigation.

> Fourth, it is common that such investigations go on for years without end.

Yes, investigation and litigation will take years, but effects will be felt suddenly, such as VW cars not being able to get re-registered and driven on roads since they don't comply with emission standards, causing economic hardship and potentially larger lawsuits against VW. I think juries will be rather sympathetic to a few testimonies to that effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Frankly, it's hard to see how you can come out of this alive.

If you can't see how VW will going to come out of this alive, then I'd stay away from prognosticating. Also: clean off your glasses.

</comment><comment><USER19> and I thought hacking the diesel engine is coal, I mean, cool:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/06/rolling-coal- photos...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/06/rolling-coal-photos- video_n_5561477.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I own a TDI myself and this article seems a bit hasty in its logic. I have mixed feelings at present, but the author's feelings don't seem to be well thought out:

> As someone who just recently bought at VW diesel - my first VW ever, and > almost certainly my last - I can of course only speak for myself. But > everyone I've talked to feels pretty much exactly as I do. And if after some > more independent analysis, the numbers come back and they are even close to > what we currently read in the press (10-40x more pollutants than > advertised), I will sell the car immediately even if it is at an almost > total loss.

I agree not to reward Volkswagen's fraudulent behavior, but if everyone is made whole as a result of this saga I am not sure that I have an issue with Volkswagen moving forward. I certainly would not sell my car. The only actions that make sense through the author's lens of wanting to be environmentally conscious would be to fix the emissions or crush it. Selling it appears to just move the problem to someone else.

>There is one, and only one reason why I would consider buying a VW in the future: massively beat Tesla at their game. Abandon all fuel-powered development today and invest every single cent into long-range electric cars, and build the electric charging infrastructure throughout Europe and the US (and the rest of the world). In addition, the development of the self-driving car has to be your top priority. The car of the future has no human driver in it, and of course you know this (anyone at VW who doesn't, let go of them immediately).

The author believes that an entity engaged in a scandal for shady software cheats should engage in making software that once again has the ability to impact people other than their owners in order to make amends for their current software cheat?

I can't say as I agree. I believe the amends that they need to make are: 1) fix the emissions issues in all current and future cars, 2) make the environment whole to the fullest extent possible. I'm not sure what options are available for this, but fines and funding third party research would fit the bill if nothing else, 3) make the owners of the cars whole: If the emissions fix alters the car's attributes negatively I want to be compensated for the delta from the car I actually bought.

> The new CEO, Matthias Müller from Porsche, thinks autonomous vehicles are an > unjustifiable hype. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not: the VW board thought > that the best person to replace the guy who oversaw the cheating software > scandal (or was unaware of it) is a guy who seems to have even less > appreciation of the ongoing software revolution.

Finally at the end of the article we get to some actual meat!! That is unfortunate, and would be worth putting at the top of the article and expanding on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate your thoughts. A few comments:

\- I have thought about destroying / recycling the car. I am not sure this would be the most meaningful action. At this point, I simply want to go to the seller and return a product that is not as advertised.

\- I certainly agree that there are some intermediary steps that need to be taken with the existing pipeline. I simply wanted to express that the future has to be about batteries & software, and radically so given the current scandal.

\- Adding a TLDR to the article now.

<comment><USER20> Appreciate it, the tl;dr focuses it quite a bit! Being able to return the product would be the simplest way for the buyer to be made whole, and would be incredible of VW to offer. I'd personally wait to see what the emissions fix looks like before exercising it if they offered it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> what a bunch of american Fud.

</comment><comment><USER21> american propaganda.

<comment><USER22> @Sajaki9, did you even read the article? How is this an American propaganda?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> SW as a product is hard. No matter how good your backend or frontend if the whole package does not fit perfectly together.

The germans are the most boring "innovators".</comment>


Demo mattermost server you can create an account on - <AUTHOR> If you have heard about slack alternative mattermost but haven't tried it yet... I setup a server:
https://utc24.org/signup_user_complete/?id=cfzmajmnaiybigpemska9mk16e
HN programmers welcome. <comment><USER2> It throws a message: failed to send verification email when I tried it.</comment>