What computer science can teach economics (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2009/game-theory <comment> vezzy-fnord The article is mostly about game theory, which has been a staple of economics for quite a while.

That said, I would be very wary of jumping to such endeavors simply because a particular branch of mathematics appears to supply a useful vernacular for a particular economic problem. More often than not, it leads to a situation where instead of offering new perspectives on problems, you simply repeat the same Walrasian equilibrium analysis or whatever orthodoxy, but in a more pompous language.

In fact, by far the most mind-bending and mentally invigorating economists have been those who have almost no mathematical analysis whatsoever. These include, for instance, GLS Shackle and Ludwig M. Lachmann. Their entirely verbal analyses has expanded understanding of real-world economic phenomena far more than papers on game theory, I'd argue.

Mathematical economics like the Solow-Swan growth model, Cobb-Douglas production functions, Walrasian auctioneer markets and Paretian static equilibrium models have sowed great confusion and unrealistic assumptions as much as they may have enlightened. A lot of misunderstandings on economic policy originate from taking comparative statics models too literally.

That said, there might be some use of theoretical CS. I've had the impression that process algebras like Hoare's CSP for modeling concurrency can be used for some microfoundations and thought experiments. I don't think any economist has done this yet.

<comment><USER2>
       The article is mostly about game theory,
       which has been a staple of economics for
       quite a while.

I suggest to read the article more carefully. It's about applying the study of computational complexity to game theory. When you approach conventional game theory from this angle, things become interesting: e.g. where conventional game theory says a Nash equilibrium exists, the complexity angle suggests that the market won't find the equilibrium, because the laptop can't (for example the problem might be NP complete), and the laptop is much faster than the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> H. Simon was among the founders of artificial intelligence and a very important microeconomicist, and I have often thought that these disciplines are not fundamentally different. What problem does backpropagation solve? Credit assignment. What problem does the market solve? Credit assignment. How do they do it? Localization of computation.

<comment><USER4> I think it's more general than that. Both backpropagation and the market introduce a _feedback loop_. That's the source of the behaviour. You can see similar phenomena in other closed-loop systems. That's why I think control theory is one of the best things humans invented ;).

<comment><USER3> Positive feedback loop, specifically. Tesauro noted power-law times in BP learning and you can go off and look at highly skew distributions in BP weight assignments on your own. Simon had a little program of research on skew distributions in economics (you cannot throw a stone but you hit one: money, firm size, investments, trades, income, GDP, yadda yadda), and how they are best explained by positive feedback loops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Finally, he says, it may be that where the Nash equilibrium is hard to calculate, some approximation of it — where the players' strategies are almost the best responses to their opponents' strategies — might not be. In those cases, the approximate equilibrium could turn out to describe the behavior of real-world systems.

I often think about how death and pain affect economic decisions. Someone who is poor and must be paid next week or start to go hungry, for example, makes much different economic decisions than someone who still needs to work to eat but has a cushion -- they can go several months without pay without risking starvation hunger. Even though they are in similar danger over time periods that are not too different, the second groups act as if it is no danger at all.

So there is a time horizon dependency at the moment of decision. I wonder how the complexity of the likelihood calculation affects the falloff rate of the death or pain variable? I wonder if we are constantly making these rough approximations and have some intuitive sense of when the numbers get too fuzzy to be meaningful and at that point get ignored?

Does somebody know of any resources that may have dealt with the economics of desperation?

<comment><USER6> You're right, there have been several economics studies showing that poverty causes stress which makes it more difficult to make decisions that are "rational" in a classical economics sense, such as sacrificing in the short- term for a long-term pay off. Searching "behavioural economics poverty" turns up a lot of good articles, here's an overview:

[http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21635477...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21635477-behavioural-economics-meets-development-policy-poor- behaviour)

<comment><USER5> That is interesting but seems to put too much onus on the poor individual.

>poverty makes people feel powerless and blunts their aspirations

What if it is more than a feeling? What if they are not irrational but seeing quite rationally what transactions await them?

Let's assume that two sides of a potential transaction are rational, and further assume that each side will maximize the value they have after the transaction. The poor person comes to the table with a value of 100 units but that they cannot eat and cannot be transferred directly for edible widgets -- lets call them time units. They must trade for 25 edible widgets or starve. You can buy each edible widget for one liquid currency unit. They sit across from a person that can pay them in liquid currency units for their time units knowing they can make 120 liquid units using those time units. That person knows they're poor and at risk of starvation if they do not trade their time unit for liquid units quickly. Being cold, rational actors they start the negotiation low. 1 liquid unit for all 100 time units. The poor person will starve anyway and thus refuses. Negotiation continues until they hit the magic number of 25 liquid units and an agreement is struck. The poor trades 100 time units to the person that can make 120 liquid units with it for 25 liquid units...they lose, but don't lose it all through death. The employer makes a profit of 95 liquid units.

Let's run through the same scenario with someone who's not desperate. The employer needs that employee knowing they can make 120 units with those time units in their possession. With no other players in sight, they might negotiate all the way up to 119 liquid units for those time units knowing they will profit. The employer's profit is 1 liquid unit and the employee gets 94 more than the poor person who was facing a complete wipe out if they refused the offer.

Competition changes things obviously and this is a simplistic model but the fundamental point is that one is negotiating against loss and is willing to take any loss above total loss while the other is negotiating to increase value. The second can afford to have aspersions and has every reason to feel like they have a good measure of power -- while the other is truly powerless and they live at the whim of others and have no rational right to have aspirations because they have no way to improve their negotiating position nor any expectation for that to change since every transaction they enter into is to reduce loss rather than increase their possessed value.

<comment><USER7> Yes, a non-poor person has a better BATNA, therefore they can demand more from the other party. But I think the studies show that the poverty has an effect even beyond that.

<comment><USER5> I guess my problem with studies that show the other effects of poverty is that they seem to paint the poor as just hapless, irrational, creatures; subhuman and deserving of their plight since they can't reason their way out of it.

And, who knows, they may be, but I'm going to have to see a lot more proof than what I've seen so far which tend to be of the vein 'well, look at their circumstances. You wouldn't make that decision that led them there. I wouldn't make that decision that led them there. Obviously they are not rational like you or me'.

It is very strange that everyone in the economic model of the world is assumed to be rational but the poor.

<comment><USER7> While your concern is valid - patronizing and disrespecting the poor is rampant - I don't think that's a _consequence_ of observing this effect; there's usually a prior belief. After all, the evidence is actually against the "subhuman" hypothesis - it shows that the reduced quality of the decisions is specifically a result of the environment, not an innate deficiency of some individuals.

Also, the assumption that everyone is rational is no longer unquestionable, ever since behavioral economics started gaining prominence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to transmit cross-disciplinary information. The recent popularity of machine learning in the field might be a rare exception.

Economists only cite other economists. One of my colleagues put it this way: if you write a paper that is interesting to economists, and an economist finds it and does some follow-up work, that paper will get all the citations from economists.

<comment><USER9> > Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to > transmit cross-disciplinary information.

I disagree. Economists pull in work from many other fields: statistics, math, computer science, political science, sociology. Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn't have a PhD in economics.

> The recent popularity of machine learning in the field might be a rare > exception.

Not really. Economists were applying neural networks in the 1990's, just as one example. The problem is that these ideas often fizzle out because they weren't designed for economic data and it turns out that they don't provide much value.

> Economists only cite other economists.

That's the real issue. The field of economics is very closed. It's even worse than you describe. Not only do you have to cite papers written by economists, you have to cite the right economists, or the referees will stop reading and write a negative report. Getting new approaches into economics is easy if you have connnections within the editorial process that rejects more than 90% of submissions.

<comment><USER8> > Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn't have a PhD > in economics.

I don't know about that--it was really a chore to christen the field of behavioral economics, previously considered to be "psychology".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Economists have been investigating these concerns for decades. There is work dating from the late 1960s on the computability of general equilibria under uncertainty, and concerns about computability have played a role in the influential literature on bounded rationality. A small sub-field of the discipline, usually called "computable economics", began to appear in the mid-1990s, when K. Vela Velupillai [0] began to publish papers on the topic.

Velupillai is a central figure in computable economics, and you will find references to much of the work that's been done in the area if you search for his name or browse Google Scholar for his papers [1] (and the papers that cite his).

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Velupillai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Velupillai)

1\. [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=KV+Velupillai](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=KV+Velupillai)

</comment><comment><USER11> i love how CS people always assume everyone in every other field is just slacking off waiting on the programmers to assist them with their elite knowledge about things no one else has considered

<comment><USER12> Actually economists are easily the worst offenders of any field - they even gave a name to it, "economic imperialism"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a third option when shooting a penalty kick: aim straight for the goalie. No matter which side the goalie goes for, the shooter always wins.</comment>


Harbingers of failure - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/07/harbingers-of-failure.html

<comment><USER2> This research points to a serious flaw with startup methodologies like Lean that validate the product with a self-selected group of customers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll reveal myself as one, having bought in the 80's an Atari ST, but my Amiga companions would also fall into this category. Heck for much of its early history Mac users could be called harbingers of failure, until the advent of the iPod (I bet against it) when Apple's fortunes flipped.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you using Rust for in production? - <AUTHOR> Also interested in knowing if the project is green field or rewrite. If rewriten, what language were you replacing? <comment><USER2> We are using it to write Express (node.js) middleware via Neon ([https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon](https://github.com/neon- bindings/neon)). This has a few key benefits:

* Progressively introduce Rust instead of replacing entire applications (Rust really shines in this area)

* Leverage node's strong HTTP and routing story while waiting for this to stabilize in Rust

* Leverage existing tooling for APM, config management, etc.

For example, one middleware verifies the request body with a signature from a header. Another one parses the body from a `Buffer` to JSON, transforms, and serializes as protobuf.</comment>


U.S.:North Korea agrees to suspend nuclear activities - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-02-29/us-north-korea-suspends-nuclear/53298188/1

<comment><USER2> Aren't they "officially" renouncing nuclear weapons every 2 or 3 years? The international community or the US then shell out a few billion dollars and they are good to go for a short while after that

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this even remotely relevant to "Hacker News" ??</comment>


What Does Sound Look Like? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px3oVGXr4mo

<comment><USER2> Air currents are not 'what sound looks like'.</comment>


Doing the math: Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1_of_search.html

<comment><USER2> I confess <http://DuckDuckGo.com> seemed to be an admirable but quixotic effort; now I get it. <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/> \- remember us when you are rich and famous won't you? ;-)

<comment><USER3> Ask has something like 2.5% share of the search market, and they're worth about £4bn.

<comment><USER4> Ask is owned by IAC, which has many more incredibly profitable properties like Match.com, Zwinky, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason in a nutshell: here's Google's revenue formula:

GDP of $NATION

x percentage of commerce transacted online

x percentage of revenue reinvested in customer acquisition

I think they end up with measurable percentages of the world GDP if something doesn't kill search as a usage paradigm.

<comment><USER6> patio11,

I think I've been down this road with you before (I think years ago, amazing how long I've been on this site): I don't think the majority of Google's revenue come from online transactions. Most come from services where each individual customer is worth more.

The keywords with the highest clickrates are often things like 'plumber,' 'removals,' 'mortgage broker 'or 'divorce lawyer,' yellow pages type of material.

An online shop (for example) might make an average sale of $50 with a $20 margin & a 2% conversion rate (fairly generous numbers). They can spend $0.40 on clicks and break even. An migration agent will probably get 20% conversion rate (to phone calls) & 1/3 of those will become jobs (7%). A client is worth about $1k. If they are willing to spend 10-20% on acquisition, that means they can (and do) spend $10 if necessary.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if Google sees this as: GDP of a nation * x percentage of revenue reinvested in customer acquisition * x percentage of customer acquisition done on Google.

<comment><USER5> I can't remember this specific discussion, but you're absolutely right in all particulars. Egads. Now I'm even more scared of the borg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What the math doesn't cover is the cost associated with owning 1% of the search market. I would imagine the costs associated with owning 1% and 50% of the search market are pretty close (think all the costs of crawling, storing, and indexing). You may not be able to survive in the space with a 1% share, even if it is worth $1B.

</comment><comment><USER8> You should probably mark this article with a tag - [2007] as it is currently about 3 1/2 years old.

<comment><USER9> I wrote this article over 3 years ago, while working at Microsoft. Ironically, I now work at Google. I haven't analyzed the numbers again since then, but I suspect the trends and reasoning are still the same.

I was surprised and delighted to see thousands of hits coming from HackerNews...more than 3 years later. Several search startup CEOs told me they showed this blog post to their VCs while raising money. Pretty cool.

Search is much harder than it looks. The "table stakes" investment required to operate a real search engine have escalated significantly since I wrote this. The competition is tougher, and winning just 1% market share is very, very difficult.

The new markets for search are hyper-local search, mobile search, social filtered search, and search automated action like Siri. Market share might be easier to win in these markets.

Don

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong. But if you plug in numbers from their latest quarterly report (ref: [http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://investor.google.com...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://investor.google.com/pdf/2010Q2_google_earnings_slides.pdf)) and ComScore's search rankings for 1st Quarter 2010 (ref [http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/c...](http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/comScore_Releases_January_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings) [http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/c...](http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/comScore_Releases_February_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings) [http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/c...](http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comScore_Releases_March_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings) )

You get still get a Google US Search revenue of $0.12 per query and profit of $0.07.

The US is getting 15 Billion queries a month which makes that market worth $1.6B a month, and one percent of that is $160M a month x 12 months, which would make 1% of the search market worth $1.9 Billion in revenue give or take several hundred $ Million.

Makes me feel pretty good about trying to build a financial news search engine out of Newsley: <http://newsley.com/k/Company/google/77/>

</comment><comment><USER11> But this presume all of Google's revenue are from search ads, this might have been more accurate in 2007 when the article was written but now with youtube, android and gmail this is not that correct.

Also, note google market cap has remained static or dropped during this period. The stock market loves growth and Google was one of the wonder kids on the block, Apple is new one and Google is becoming an laggard in terms of growth and the stock price and market cap growth reflects that.

<comment><USER12> Google is seeing 200,000 new Android activations _every day_ (or, the entire population of Canada every five months or so). This November, Google is releasing a new Operating System. How can you possibly say that Google is becoming "laggard in terms of growth"?

AND given that if Apple grows, Google grows (more iPhones = more Google revenue through iPhone search ads), it seems clear to me that Google is not slowing down at all but is in fact geared to continue growing immensely.

<comment><USER7> How much revenue is Google getting from these 200k Android activations? How much will it get from GoogleOS?

The growth being referred to is revenue growth. Sun showed very well that giving away everything is not the path to happy shareholders.

I believe Google is capable of continued revenue growth, but now they are going to have to fight for it like everybody else. I actually think their one engineer for every non-engineer hire is going to hurt them in those efforts, though.

<comment><USER12> > Sun showed very well that giving away everything is not the path to happy > shareholders.

Well, Google has shown that giving away everything _does_ lead to happy shareholders. Google only sells one thing: ads. (Okay, they sell a bit of hardware here and there to large enterprises, but they don't make a ton of money from that from what I understand).

I don't know how much revenue Google gets from Android activations nor do I know how much they will get from Chrome OS. I assume that they get a bit from each sale, but I'd bet that amount is very small compared to the ad clicks once the user starts searching on the device.

<comment><USER11> Well, they have also tried to make revenue in other ways but haven't done well with Google checkout and Google Apps for Enterprise, if they are so happy with ads they wouldn't be doing Google Apps which is basically not their main forte (enterprise customers, actual support, non-free web apps) Dependence on ads for money is like the Google's Achilles heel right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


After Kleiner Trial, Expect Less Shooting from the Hip in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/technology/after-kleiner-trial-expect-less-shooting-from-the-hip-in-silicon-valley.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Hearing the testimony from Pao, it sounded to me like she lied on many occasions (no proof to backup her claims), slept with co-workers to get ahead at the company (she admit she slept with a married man), and it just seems suspicious that her husband is involved with case after case of discrimination in the work place.

All of the censorship over at Reddit isn't helping either.

The justice system worked. There may be cases of discrimination in the workplace, but this isn't one of them.

I'm unclear why the VC company that employed her is somehow at fault here and why the Nytimes spun this into a lesson we need to learn about a "boys club". Shouldn't we be learning a lesson about ethics and frivolous lawsuits? It only hurts the chances of women that are facing true discrimination in the work place.

I feel like the person that wrote the article is butt hurt because they didn't agree with the decision.

</comment><comment><USER3> Venture capital is fundamentally a formal structure wrapped around a few people deciding where to put a big pile of money they control. They tend to be small, top heavy, organizations where the people at the top have a lot of autonomy. That isn't going to change.

If, on the other hand, this makes those firms think a little harder about how they might be making sexist decisions, I can't see it as a bad thing. There's no doubt that women are underrepresented in VC, and I can't help but suspect that that is one reason they are underrepresented in Tech.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hiring of women in VC will _not_ increase.

Just the opposite.

The jury deliberated for 20 hours after a month long trial. They found nothing to back the claim. And KPCB got dragged through the mud.

There is no gender quota in law. Thus, if it's my fund, I'm not hiring _any_ member of a 'protected class.'

It's not worth the risk -- if you get a really, really unreasonable person like Pao, you're spending million$ and your 43 years of good reputation for, what -- THREE YEARS of doubts in the mind of KPCB limited partners? She filed the lawsuit in 2012. Three years of bad publicity, three years of KPCB clients being wary about investing.

"If I invest a portion of the college endowment fund/pension fund/etc. I am managing into a KPCB round -- and they lose their discrimination lawsuit -- will that hurt my career -- because I invested assets into a predatory firm, and knew about it since 2012?"

There's no WAY I'm risking hiring a person in a 'protected class' \-- if they perform poorly and fail to take personal responsibility and 'play the race/gender/sexual harassment/etc. card' and sue -- my firm is being marginalized for three years ?! NOT WORTH IT.

Guess what the only category of person is not a protected class? CAUCASIAN MALES.

Here are 'protected class' types:

\- ethnic minority (black, hispanic, asian, etc.) - PROTECTED CLASS ("didn't promote me because they're white and I'm not")

\- female of any race: PROTECTED CLASS ("didn't promote me/sexually harassed me/discriminated against me because I'm a girl")

It's in a VC firm's best interest then to HIRE ONLY CAUCASIAN MALES after this farce that put a cloud over KPCB for three years.

There is no enforceable quota, no law, that requires any protected class be hired into a VC fund.

If I'm running a VC fund, I'm hiring caucasian males.

It's not worth the risk KPCB took -- they are the leading VC firm in hiring a broad spectrum of folks, including women, and look what happened to them. BURNED.

I'm also having HR hire resources to check whether the hiree has:

\- money problems

\- a history of suing others

\- a spouse with money problems

\- a spouse with a history of suing people

It's my firm and I'm not going out of my way if the 'protected class' can burn me for three years in the media while waiting for a B.S. trial. Three years of bad press; a month-long trial; then it only took TWO DAYS to find out it was a completely frivolous case.

Wow.

If EP _really_ wanted to get more women hired in VC, this was not the way.

Just the opposite.

<comment><USER5> YoungButEager betrays a significant but unfortunately common misunderstanding of the term "protected class" and its meaning in law.

A protected class does not refer to any particular group of people, but rather the significant categories that anti-discrimination laws apply to.

For instance, religion is a protected class, but not any particular religion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, prohibits discrimination based on religion because it is a protected class, or classification, that the law applies to. So it protects everyone against religious discrimination. It does not just protect Muslims but not Mormons.

If it protected only particular groups of people it would be unconstitutional, because the constitution mandates equal protection under the law.

Some of the confusion may stem from other uses of the word "class", such as middle class, upper class and working class. These refer to specific groups of people. But in the Civil Rights Act the usage of the term "class" is completely different.

YoungButEager mentions hiring quotas, but these are already illegal, and have only been applied in the past as a remedy where significant and ongoing discrimination has been proven, and a quota may be applied for a limited time by a federal judge. An example is in the state of Alabama, where the state had not hired a single non-white trooper in its history, and in the 1980s a consent decree forced them to hire one non-white trooper for every new white recruit, but this was only for a limited period of time. Otherwise, hiring quotas are mostly a myth.

YoungButEager says he will only hire white males. "It's my firm and I'm not going out of my way if the 'protected class' can burn me for three years in the media while waiting for a B.S. trial."

YoungButEager's partners should look at his misinformed attitudes and philosophy critically, because going forward, they present a significant risk and an ongoing liability for their enterprise.</comment></comment>


Mt. Gox emergency maintenance despite "market cool down" halt - <AUTHOR> https://mtgox.com/trade <comment><USER2> They implied they might take some servers down to add more to their cluster.

<comment><AUTHOR> How can someone "imply" an emergency maintenance? That would make it a planned maintenance. The servers were supposed to be operational so that people could change/place orders before trading resumes.

<comment><USER3> It's like "emergency surgery." Your doctor can say, "We're scheduling you for emergency surgery in two days or that aneurism could burst and kill you. In the mean time don't so anything stressful."

So the emergency maintenance is maintenance that, if put off, could result in the complete collapse of the system so better to do it right away and have an annoying but hopefully brief impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great how they have nothing on their home page to indicate this.

<comment><USER5> That's because the emergency maintenance is now over. This is one reason why I am opposed to posting short outages to HN; they tend to be over before the story falls off the front page.

<comment><USER4> During the emergency maintenance the homepage had no status info. The price at the top of the homepage was the last price before trading stopped.</comment></comment></comment>


Reflections on the Shock of Brexit - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437145/brexit-elite-shock-disappointment <comment><USER2> "Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%." \-- Thomas Jefferson

"Alexander Hamilton believed in America but not in Americans when he said in a June 1788 speech defending the ratification of the U.S. Constitution: 'That a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity.'"

<comment><USER3> Yes, the US government's founders explicitly hated democracy, and were slavers.

Only after president Andrew Jackson transformed the language in a PR stunt (maybe like calling yourself "anarchist" nowadays), did people imagine the US as a "democracy." (Which of course it isn't, just look at the guys who made the US government.)

<comment><USER2> I don't believe they hated democracy. I do think they had a dim view of people doing the right thing and mob rule. Hamilton wrote the above quote when he saw somebody being lynched in Albany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The FTSE 250 closed 11.4 % down on Friday, its worst drop ever. I think it's a extremely premature to be saying everything is fine. No-one will know for several years whether it was a good decision or not.

<comment><USER5> Or maybe the article is trying to calm nerves by saying that the markets were already prepared for this, and so the stock hit is done and over.

Hard to predict, but I like that the article is trying to calm people, rather than freaking people out.

<comment><USER6> I heard Greenspan is predicting that this will be a catalyst for widespread turmoil, which sort suggests that it won't be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok a small worry:

1\. HSBC bank regularly has board meetings debating to move to Hong Kong. This will probably tip the balance.

2\. Most banks want to cut staff. For example in 2013 BARCLAYS did 50bn a year on 130k headcount but google did same 50bn on 40k people. Most banks think they can lose 1-2/3rds of their staff, and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity

Now, _if_ my pessimism is right, suddenly London finance sector has 10s of thousands looking for work. The frothy housing market will tank with the dock lands hit hard but generally the unsustainable prices heading south. The knock on effects to the commuter belt will be equally hard. I can imagine being close to negative equity myself.

It's hyper local, but it's a real fear.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a lot of soul-searching (and poll-searching) going on in the UK right now. And it's worth capturing some of the main points (some reflected in this article some not)

the vote is best seen as a protest vote driven by three _emotional_ issues

1\. Fear of immigration 2\. Fear of economic dislocation 3\. Frustration at being out of political decision making

Comments: All of the above are common threads in right wing and centre right politics across the western world. From Trump to Greece there is a strong right wing, older, lower educated rump of around 15% who are the economic losers in the past couple of decades amazing debt field growth that has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty (a Good Thing)

But these three themes (the New Right) are not intellectually driven. They are weirdly fact free zones.

For example, the strongest Leave votes in the UK come from area with minimal immigration. Just as no Mexican ever stole a Pennsylvania Coal Miners job, Immigrants in the UK are not taking jobs from workers in Hull - because there are no bloody jobs in Hull.

2\. Economic dislocation _is_ a problem - London is a black hole pulling jobs, finance, young people, from everywhere else in the country to itself. House prices reflect this - houses can be bought for a few tens of thousands just a few hours drive from central Londons million pound pads.

Nothing about this makes sense - our economic future is a concern whatever we do with Europe, and it's just more dislocated in the UK.

The problem is fixing it. Our economy is mostly services now - finance being a ridiculous 10-15 % of GDP. And we are not competing when selling real goods with Germany or others.

Fixing that is a huge industrial policy issue and I don't see people taking it on.

As for the last - well An amazing BBC clip (TBC) shows a voter who voted to leave, seeming genuinely shocked at the result saying "but I thought my vote did not matter".

Turns out people feel disconnected from a political process that actually _is_ working. When it is used. The problem is politicians and electoral rules clouding the direct levers.

So rant slowly ending - we have had a massive protest vote "against the establishment" \- which is driven by fears that turn out not to be based on facts, that will result in election of a person who is just as establishment (Boris Johnson was in the same posh school / university class as Cameron. It's not a diversity win here)

My feeling is democracy has stopped being served by five yearly elections - that the real issues are much more local, and we need to find ways of forcing "evidence based politics" and more direct local action.

Sadly that can be the same sound bite as "take back our sovereignty"

<comment><USER8> One thing that is odd, is that as far as I can tell during the run-up to the referendum, no-one made the intellectual case for free movement of people to live and work throughout Europe. The 'Remain' camp made occasional and frankly incoherent statements about immigration while staying relentlessly on-message, sticking to the economy as the supposed winning hand. While of course the 'Leave' side played thoroughly on fear of immigration.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's economically efficient to have a borderless workforce, and there are also intellectual arguments about fairness. (I voted 'Remain', but that could be seen as self-interest for my own demographic). What isn't clear is why a lower-skilled worker already in a high-income country, who doesn't have any interest in moving abroad, _wouldn 't_ consider it in their own interest to pull the ladder up and restrict immigration.</comment></comment>


Humble Book Bundle: Computer Graphics by CRC Press - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/computer-graphics-crc-press-books <comment><USER2> Anyone own some of these books and can comment on how good they are?

I've read/skimmed real time rendering, physically based rendering, Game Engine Architecture, Graphics Codex and the book of shaders and am wondering how these books compare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of all the bundle books, I only own a physical copy of "3D math primer for graphics and game development".

Having no prior experience on computer graphics before, I love the book: it is well-written, concise and explains greatly lots of computer graphics stuff.

There are more math-heavy chapters so it's not a light reading, but little by little one can learn a lot from it.

I highly recommend it as a base to learn the mathematical concepts and the terms used in the computer graphics context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be really nice if publishers created "Humble Bundles"of PRINTED books. Sure, I love my Kindle, but reading development-related texts as ebooks or PDFs is painful.

<comment><USER4> That would get expensive fast when you consider the material and shipping costs. They can't have a $1 lower tier.

<comment><USER3> A $30-$50 lower tier would be more than acceptable.</comment></comment></comment>


Virtualizing APIs with Go and Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.specto.io/?p=77 <comment><USER2> I don't think "virtualization" is quite the right word. "Middleware" is better. "Protocol rewriting" might be more honest. Though in my day we just called this a "hack".

It's certainly nothing new, whether you do it with a CGI script a fancy rewrite module on your reverse proxy or a network "appliance" endpoint like a BIG-IP. It's definitely something every good ops or devops person should be able to pull off to fix those unfixable problems that crop up from vendor intransigence or developer pushback.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this just CGI, straight out of the 90s, but with a needless cycle through JSON?

<comment><USER4> There's a _huge_ difference: CGI is the ultimate backend in the HTTP stack, while this allows you to run scripts as middleware (ie modifying the response headers/body based on previous processing)

<comment><USER5> Not necessarily true. CGI could shell out to other CGI code if it wanted to. Turtles all the way down.

<comment><USER4> What if the backend is not CGI ? What if I want to use a script to gzip the output of a backend that doesn't compress anything ? Of course you can just call that backend through HTTP, but then you add another _huge_ dependency on your little script that should just be as simple as "gzip -c -"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> readlines() just to pick the first seems weird if you expect a single line. I'd read the whole thing in one go with read(). Then I start wondering if it wouldn't make more sense to keep the stream open and just iterate over new messages line by line and avoid the overhead of loading an executable, importing libraries etc. on every request

</comment><comment><USER7> It is similar, but one advantage is that you can run your existing CGI scripts (C/C++/perl/ ...) without a remote web server. That interests me as it would allow re-use of some existing scripts and it would also allow me to wrap some legacy interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER8> `data = sys.stdin.readlines()` in their Python script. Is it common to not check return values of functions in Python land? I might be too disciplined coming from a C background, but what if getting the data fails?

<comment><USER9> Then the function throws an exception and the program terminates, since there isn't anything useful it can do about the situation. What would you suggest it to do if it can't read from stdin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Direct link to Hoverfly source code: [https://github.com/SpectoLabs/hoverfly](https://github.com/SpectoLabs/hoverfly)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is there image and whitespace that takes up >50% of the width of the page? It makes it so obnoxious to read.

</comment><comment><USER12> So...AOP for web calls.</comment>


Cyberscare: Ex-NSA chief calls transparency groups, hackers next terrorists - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/08/06/cyberscare_ex_nsa_chief_calls_transparency_groups_hackers_next_terrorists/singleton/ <comment><USER3> People need to start accepting that government != country; such people as such being called as "terrorists" or "communists" or other words that were bandied about as the bogeyman of the time are perceived as threats to the government by those most poised to profit from that government. A government that no longer represents the people, but corporations and those that benefit by it, will threaten those that question its legitimacy as that is only obvious. The word "terrorist" is only the latest in a long string.

tl;dr government != country.

<comment><USER4> > A government that no longer represents the people, but corporations and > those that benefit by it, will threaten those that question its legitimacy > as that is only obvious.

A government elected with a reasonable majority arguably represents the people who elected them.

Not represents as in "represents their interests", implying that they act on their behalf in their best interest. No, represents as in "they are the image of what those who elected them want". This is the government of people who invented playdates for their children, political corectness and consumer- driven everything. It's in line with their wishes. Government officials don't just spring out from the ground.

Unless we see a mass boycott of the next election that forces both parties to radically change their approach -- a boycott so massive that the legitimacy of the expressed vote is in question -- the elected government will really be one made in the image of its electors and, arguably, government != country will eval to false.

<comment><USER5> I did vote for a candidate in 2008 who opposed the Bush administration's massive build-up of surveillance infrastructure: Obama. By 2012, it was clear he wasn't following through, but the other candidate on offer would almost certainly have been, on balance, a whole lot worse --- and a bad choice is still a choice.

When, in office, has Obama been representing what I want, in this regard, and when do you think I had an opportunity to change that through the ballot box?

<comment><USER6> "I did vote for a candidate in 2008 who opposed the Bush administration's massive build-up of surveillance infrastructure: Obama"

Did you have any reason to think that was true, other than what Obama was saying at the time?

"the other candidate"

Which other candidate? Here are some of the people who were running in the 2008 election:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_third_party_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_third_party_and_independent_presidential_candidates,_2008)

You had a lot of choices then. You also had a lot of choices in 2012:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_third_party_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_third_party_and_independent_presidential_candidates,_2012)

<comment><USER7> _Did you have any reason to think that was true, other than what Obama was saying at the time?_

You mean, like, his voting record in Congress?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years."_

This is the scariest aspect of the data collection. People like this have the data to identify homosexuals. Hell, I suspect that a lot of the rationale for the data collection was tracking Muslims.

The potential this information has to facilitate genocide is astronomical and homophobes are in positions of power.

<comment><USER9> Can we all please just take a deep breath and stop with the hyperbole.

The US government is not planning to commit genocide against gay people or whatever ridiculous premise you're insinuating.

<comment><USER10> First they came for the terrorists, then they came after the drug dealers...

You're right though, it is a ridiculous premise. There's no profit to be made from genocide.

<comment><USER11> > There's no profit to be made from genocide.

You should take a look at companies contracted by 3rd Reich government to run german concentration camps. They made A LOT of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So expressing support for Snowden is suggested to be a sign I might be a threat to a country. Way to accelerate the self-censorship (and the subsequent censorship of thought) that this whole surveillance disaster creates.

<comment><USER13> I don't know exactly who Hayden was talking about, but various people on the Internet have done a lot more than "express support". Calls for "revolution" and "rioting in the streets" seem to pop up in comments on these stories on a pretty regular basis on various sites. But there have also been suggestions of more specific action, including shooting FISA court judges and others and one guy on Reddit speculating about blowing up parts of the power grid.

Now I'm sure most of that is pointless Internet talk. But it certainly goes way beyond expressions of support or discussion of changing policy or laws through democratic means.

<comment><USER14> All over it has been established that per-se democracy does not exist anymore. Meaning that wealthy and powerful have more democracy allotted to them than to the rest. Actually what is seems is that government is putting screws real tight on the lid because if whole FIAT dollar thing fails - there will be no more democracy and only Militarized police and thorough monitoring of the people will stop an extraordinary event such as Civil war or revolution from happening.

<comment><USER15> Reminds me of "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Original Guardian article here: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/06/nsa- direct...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/06/nsa-director- cyber-terrorism-snowden?CMP=twt_gu)

Interesting quote further down where he begs the question, Betteridge's-law- of-headlines-style:

Hayden: "But certainly Mr Snowden has created quite a stir among those folks who are very committed to transparency and global transparency and the global web, kind of ungoverned and free. And I don't know that there's a logic between trying to [punish] America or American institutions for his arrest, but I hold out the possibility. I can sit here and imagine circumstances and scenarios, but they're nothing more than imaginative."

<comment><USER17> Yeah, the Salon article is thinly veiled editorial. It extrapolates quite a bit from what Hayden actually said which was pretty reasonable. He is not saying hackers=terrorists, but rather some hackers may turn to terrorism-style attacks and he is probably correct.

<comment><USER16> Yup. Though Hayden is engaged in politicking. Salon is engaged in politicking while reporting on Hayden's politicking.

When I'm feeling extra rational, I really dislike this, even when I agree with views like Salon's. It's bad if we fight dumb politicking with more dumb politicking from the other direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We live in a world doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. This sounds like an old transcript saying that if you disagree with the government / military you must instantly be a communist. Feels like we are only a step away from public service announcements on how to spot if your child is a terrorist because they spend a lot of time on their computer.

<comment><USER19> > We live in a world doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But now, we have storage and much faster circulation of information. Which means we can track these "mistakes", dig them up easily whenever they're about to be repeated and discuss them again (better yet, "fork" the old discussion and adapt it to the current issue).

Maybe somebody should build the perfect tool to do just this. (I feel it doesn't exist yet, but the need is now clearly here.)

EDIT: I tried to hint at that (in this case regarding surveillance only) here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Which side of the argument you're stood on.

It's completely ridiculous in many ways, but it's often been the case that people who are passionate activists willing to stand up against perceived injustices are viewed as a menace. It just means that they now think hackers are a serious threat.

<comment><USER21> I'm more worried about who they will label as hackers. Probably everyone on Hacker News, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Michael Hayden is being provocative -- attempting to provoke debate. This is an excellent, laudable act, and should be warmly welcomed.

So, here is my response:-

There is an element of truth to what Michael Hayden is saying, although his analysis of the situation is enormously telling, and reveals a lot about the culture that prevails in the corridors of power.

It is true that the internet is creating communities and groups that do not fit into the old hierarchies of power and control. New communications technologies forge new arenas of discourse; they bring together new communities and interest groups, largely unconstrained by geography, culture, religion or (increasingly) language. These groups are beginning to find common cause, recognize their political power, and flex their (political) muscles.

It is natural and proper that those who benefit from the status-quo should feel nervous. This technological watershed (and the movement of movements that it has triggered) does indeed pose an existential threat to many organisations that predicate their existence on the primacy and sovereignty of the Nation State.

To labor the point: Notions of sovereignty and the plenipotentiary power of the state are weakened and undermined when individuals discover that their shared humanity cuts across international boundaries, and that the "tribe" to which they pledge allegiance is neither best defined nor best constrained in terms of militarily defensible contiguous geographical regions.

So, political and economic elites that are strongly aligned with the interests and primacy of the nation state really do face an existential threat, albeit a distributed, generally non-violent, tides-of-history type threat, rather than one that is focused around a particular "enemy" posing a specific and identifiable physical threat.

As I mentioned previously, Hayden's response to this threat is telling, and reveals much about his (and the Agency's) predispositions and cognitive biases.

Firstly, he thinks immediately of a physical threat - of hostile groups seeking revenge. He sees the world in terms of "friends" and "enemies", in terms of coherent and organised groups that can be treated as atomic units, and imbued with anthropomorphic characteristics: "anger", "revenge" and so on.

Secondly, he seeks to (at the same time) elevate and exaggerate the threat posed by this (notional) group, to make it relevant to the political mainstream, by speculating about attacks on civilian infrastructure - <USER2> what he would have needed to do during the inevitable internecine budgetary battles that he would have fought during his tenure with the NSA. As a former department head, this is necessarily his area of expertise, and the home turf on which he feels most comfortable.

This second aspect is particularly dangerous in that he seeks to incite and provoke the very threat that he spends so much effort warning us about. He ruthlessly exploits our tribalistic, pack-animal ancestry, conjuring up hostile groups where none exist; engineering conflict in a callous game of divide-and-conquer.

So, we have two threads in his speculation:-

The latter thread being part of a persistent and habitual strategy of scaremongering and conflict creation -- the better to secure a bigger slice of the budgetary pie for "the boys", is rather more transparent (and consequentially less interesting) than the former - the expectation that his foes will always form coherent and organised groups, capable of "making demands", and of acting in a manner amenable to anthropomorphic analysis. This contrasts rather well with one competing view -- that sees the world as a collection of ad-hoc networks of ideas and social mechanisms, some forming, others dissolving -- clearly structured, but not at all hierarchical.

<comment><USER5> Dismissive sneers at the opposition aren't an attempt to provoke or engage debate. They're an attempt to sideline it, and effectively shut it down.

<comment><USER22> Then I have been doing the wrong thing too....

<comment><USER23> I think you are entirely correct and that you have delineated the deep structure of the scenario we find ourselves in.

Are you familiar with the work of Ken Wilber who, standing on the shoulders of giants, popularised the ideas of Developmental Psychology that support your claim?

Hayden uses language in a specific way that indicates the centre of gravity of his consciousness is located in a very Conventional / Conformist / Concrete- operational place. He speaks in terms of heroic status, power, glory, rage, revenge; take what you need, power over others, force. The downside to all of this is anxiety, depression, phobias, bullying, terrorism etc etc.

This stage of development sees anything that isn't at the same stage as a threat, and tends to respond to everything with escalating violence / force / arrest.

It is the nature of this stage of psychological development to create threats where none exist, because it defines itself in terms of what occurs when those threats are push against.

Ultimately, what we most pressingly need is to work out how to move the world through this developmental stage before we manage to work ourselves in to some really atrocious place.

Each new development in technology represents a new development in consciousness, it brings with it new ways to connect and create together as a nation of people ever so less fixed to any one geographical area. I've seen Earth from space, didn't see any boarders. As well as all new and terrifying ways to annihilate ourselves.

Perceived through the framework of Developmental Psychology, as it was progressed by the above authors, and with an eye to the greater historical context this is all occurring in, it's all very predictable.

The "competing view", as you put it, that sees the world as a "collection of ad-hoc networks of ideas and social mechanisms, some forming, others dissolving -- clearly structured, but not at all hierarchical" is located at a stage of psychological development that is a full four stages above the one Hayden is speaking from.

To further support this refer to the works of Ken Wilber, particularly Integral Psychology it's end notes and references. Also, Jane Loevinger, Susan Cook-Greuter, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Abraham Maslow.

Edit: grammar

<comment><USER22> I am afraid that I am almost entirely ignorant of psychological literature, and I shall seek to remedy my deficiency in the directions that you have mentioned, with my grateful thanks for your suggestions.

<comment><USER24> Excellent starting point: [http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Ecology-Spirituality- Evolution-Edi...](http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Ecology-Spirituality-Evolution- Edition/dp/1570627444)

<comment><USER22> Gawd. Looks utterly ghastly....

<comment><USER24> You can give it a shot at [0]. I think it's well thought out written theory of how psychology develops. The core of their theory divides evolution of "holons" (simultaneous parts&wholes) on 2 axies: internal vs outer processes and individual vs society

Problems arise when a node stretches too far in a particular direction, or fuses to tightly with its current "holon" level and refuses to synthesize its axis to evolve.

I encourage you to read the first chapter or two before making a value judgement on the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Greywolf Borealis in the Salon comments section put it better than I ever could:

 _> Hackers may be the terrorists of the future, but the real terrorist of today is the NSA. They are employing the same tools used by hackers to spy on United States citizens without probable cause or warrant. That is pretty scary._

</comment><comment><USER26> McCarthy again.

Here's the thing about McCarthy, Communists were fucking everywhere. I don't mean ideological communists, I mean Soviet secret agents. They were in every level of government. They helped funnel the most secret of information to the USSR.

And that's not all, the Soviets were erecting a police state to control hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe. They had a tremendous military force with millions of soldiers. They were cranking out more tanks than had ever been in any war in history. And bombers. And they had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to US cities in short order.

But none of that justified Senator McCarthy's abuses of power and violations of the rights of American citizens.

Here we are now faced with the threat of terrorism. Or to be more broad about it, the threat of jihadist radical Islamist fundamentalists (both in al qaeda and elsewhere). We know that these forces pose a serious threat to the US, just as the Soviets did. But is this danger on the same scale as the Cold War? Not even close. Does it justify abrogation of our cherished liberty and privacy? Never.

<comment><USER21> I frankly don't believe for an instance "terrorists" pose any substantial threat to the US. Even 911 is chump change on the scale of how much terror our own government had brought down on foreigners, and the idea that they used 3000 dead to justify a seize of power is just disgusting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Look, I'm not comfortable with the NSA program but...

This is the second Salon article in 2 days that is way over sensationalized. I get that this is interesting to people on HN, but I think we could wait for better articles to upvote.

<comment><USER21> The interesting parts are quoted anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I feel there is a fundamental mismatch of what constitutes a matter of national security.

All (?) nation states have a right to prevent their own destruction, but I think the triggers that set off the immune system reaction are important - I, and I think a lot of HN, would say there is a minimum level of expected harm before a matter is consider national security level - lets say for arguments sake a loss of 2% GDP or 1,000 dead. And the motivation of the persons is irrelevant - so the banking crisis of 2008 would be considered a national security matter by me, but two maniacs hacking a soldier to death on the streets of the UK would not (a crime yes, murder, yes, possibly politically motivated yes - but not a matter that threatens our nationstate)

However Hayden seems to be the reverse - there is no minimum level of harm (one life is too many, one defaced website is too much) but the political motivations of the people is important - so his views in the banking crisis and murders on the street seem reversed.

Maybe it is a useful viewpoint

</comment><comment><USER29> >"twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in >five or six years"

Has he SEEN Snowden's former girlfriend? This trope should be retired based on that point alone.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sometimes I wish that "Little brother" was a completely made up story. But lately many parts of it read like a script for what's happening at the moment. What is published by news lately makes me wonder what would happen the next time some big event in the US happens... the first "conspiracy theory" will be - NSA/FBI/... organised it (wouldn't be hard, people were given "support" before so that they can be arrested - just skip the arrest part) to prove more monitoring and control is needed. And could anyone really disagree at that point?

Some of that was already seen after the news about closing the embassies. There were many comments saying it's only a show, put on to "prove" that there really is a danger of something happening.

</comment><comment><USER31> As long as we are going to try to be provocative: Hayden is responsible for most of the technical and policy changes at NSA (and presumably the same at CIA) which "caused" both Snowden and Manning, or at least turned then from minor discontents to 1) motivated leakers 2) with the means to leak massive amounts.

I personally support Snowden, but think Manning was indiscriminate and motivated mainly by personal issues, using public interest as a fig leaf.

Were I to hang Manning for treason, there would be a gallows to the left for Hayden. Arguably being much more senior and invested in the system, and presumed to be trustworthy and competent, his crimes were worse, even if less direct.

</comment><comment><USER32> witches -> communists -> terrorists -> hackers...

<comment><USER33> You forgot file sharers, drugs and pedophiles. All of which have been since been said to fund the terrorism.

Which in the case of drugs, IIRC, is true. Didn't the CIA use cocaine trafficking to fund some black type ops?

<comment><USER34> Didn't the CIA use cocaine trafficking to fund some black type ops?

Yes, and if the number of bankers recently convicted of widely exposed and very large money laundering operations (Wachovia, HSBC, etc) is any indication, they continue to do so. See also:

# Air America

# The Iran Contra affair.

# Mena Arkansas (CIA investigated itself and found no wrongdoing)

# BCCI (CIA money laundering)

# The Politics of Heroin - McCoy (book with lots of source citations)

# Crop spraying in Central America[1], (the policy efforts have directly[2] and indirectly[3] increases cocaine production, yet they continue.)

# Etc. etc. ad nauseam

[1] With bullet-resistant crop-dusters! (look for "Air Tractor") [http://www.economist.com/node/17647585](http://www.economist.com/node/17647585)

[2] Search for "Roundup Ready Cocaine"

[3] By killing subsistence farmers' food crops, incentivizing the cultivation of higher profit crops like coca.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Michael Hayden was NSA director from 1999 to 2005. Michael Hayden literally was being paid a big salary to stop 9/11 from happening. How'd that go for him? Not so good.

Look at ALL THE TOOLS we now know the NSA Director really had at his disposal to prevent a foreign terrorist from hitting the US on 9/11\. Micheal Hayden name's should down in along side infamous names like the Admiral who commanded the Pacific Fleet the day of Pearl Harbor.

Michael Hayden is the textbook definition of "the man who can't find his ass with two hands and an assmap." Hayden's picture should appear next to it in Famous Quotation books.

</comment><comment><USER36> What will they do about the person or persons who disclosed the provenance of the information leading to the closing of multiple designated sites in countries in MENA?

Should we not protect the sources and methods involved in obtaining communications (not chatter, but actual intelligence) of such high valued targets as the head of the group we are most interested in, and a local organization with similar goals and growing scale?

I assume that whoever this person was is on the run, or at least not speaking from an official podium or floor of an illustrious deliberative body, right?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a great argument against people who "got nothing to hide".

If the government suddenly decides you are a terrorist you will understand privacy is a good thing.

<comment><USER38> There was a very good article on that subject in Chronicle two years ago. ([http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even- if/127...](http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/))

IIRC Bruce Schneier has made an excellent point too: "nothing to hide" becomes destructive the moment those in power get to decide what is the current definition of "illegal" or "dangerous". Just find all occurrences and shows of support of the $new_threat in the available personal histories and persecute at will.

In other words, it's _never_ the right approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For a glimpse at one possible future of U.S. democracy, I highly recommend this longform nonfiction article about Turkey [1]. It goes into detail about "...the resistance of what is commonly referred to as derin devlet, the 'deep state.'" Later on: "The deep state, historians say, has functioned as a kind of shadow government, disseminating propaganda to whip up public fear or destabilizing civilian governments not to its liking."

The indifference with which our intelligence apparatus treats foreigners could easily be (or already has?) turned on U.S. citizens if a similar "deep state" narrative develops in the U.S. All it would take are a couple loosely linked plots successfully pulled off by American citizens to construct a narrative (i.e. rationale) for turning the full forces of the intelligence apparatus onto all U.S. citizens.

[1][http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_filkins?currentPage=all)

</comment><comment><USER40> The thing is, Hayden has a point. Geesh, never thought I'd be saying that!

Terrorism is an act of _politics_ , not warfare. It's the use of stealth to deliberately attack civilian targets _in order to affect political change_. (My working definition only). The goal of terrorism isn't dead people, and you don't weigh a terrorist campaign by how many bodies it creates. Terrorism is all about striking fear into the heart of the population in order to get them to _vote_ or behave differently. That's why the tactic of terrorism is so effective against modern democracies. With the help of mass media, a few crazy people can inflict fear on millions.

So sure, in response to the United States' government implementing draconian surveillance technology, some 20-somethings that live in their parent's basement and have no life (notice how quickly the stereotypes come?) will strike out stealthily in order to inflict fear on the population, to be noticed.

But what he's missing is what military leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan have learned: you don't put out fires by dumping gasoline on them. In other words, the asshole that approved of this idiotic idea to store everything possible and then search later is the last person in the world you want defending it. He's gone off the reservation and somebody should shut him up before he makes things worse.

If the establishment starts circling the wagons on this issue, and it looks like that's what is happening, it's going to drive a wedge between the people and the government. This is not a good thing for them to be doing, terrorist threat or not.

All these political and agency leaders are betting that the next time there's a terrorist attack -- and there will be -- that anybody who supported killing this program will be rounded up and laughed at. I'm not so sure about that. I wouldn't bet on it.

<comment><USER21> Terrorism has not been used in any well-defined way for years and is a demagoguery technique. The government has been throwing fuel on the "let's exploit our ability to terrify our citizens" since 9/11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The next major "terrorist" movement will come from transparency groups, but not for the reasons you think. Actually, most of you would probably be against such groups.

Instead of focusing on government transparency, they will seek total transparency. They will track everything, everywhere. They will collect information about you and me. They will install cameras and trackers everywhere (in a decentralised fashion). They will link your online profiles together. They will make your address and phone number public.

The next major "terrorist" movement will force societal transparency. They won't be personally motivated. They will do it for the well-being of society as a whole. Privacy is evil, and we should get rid of it before it's too late. Information should flow freely, and it will.

I predict that transparency will be forced upon us all, not just the government. But most of you can't see it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Lesson? Don't pose a threat or appear to threaten the _' legitimacy'_ of the mafia, er, state.

</comment><comment><USER43> I hate this type of pointless rhetoric. Politics of fear.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can't help but wonder if he's maybe exaggerating the security of .mil.

</comment><comment><USER45> >"They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States," Hayden said

Is he trying to get .mil sites targeted? Does he understand psychology at all?

<comment><USER46> Does he understand security at all? "Hardest target"?

This is not a smart man.

</comment></comment><comment> Link- In other words: "In the name of the People, we demand more power."

</comment><comment><USER47> _People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people_.

As true today as ever... And unfortunately for us, at the moment, the balance is way to far in favor of "the people are scared of their government". People like Snowden and Manning risk moving the balance the other way, so of course high-ranking government official types will spazz out over this stuff. Transparency is anathema to corruption and abuse of power.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is the next move. Criminalizing the opposition not because of their actions, but simply because they are the opposition. And it's not a response to Snowden, it has been decades in the making by slowly making everything that could potentially pose a threat a criminal offense.

It's only a matter of time before the question will be asked: _" Are you now or have you ever been a hacker?"_

</comment><comment><USER16> Completely off topic to otherwise excellent discussion, but funny how "nihilists" were the first thing he flagged up.

I can't think of nihilists without thinking of The Big Lebowski. [http://assets.sbnation.com/imported_assets/81096/nihilists.j...](http://assets.sbnation.com/imported_assets/81096/nihilists.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER49> I find this quote highly offensive:

"Who for them are the World Trade Centers?"

Thousands of people died and many others thought they barely cheated death. It's insulting to compare that with the dangers of these "hackers."

Is there a Godwin's law of the NSA now that involves the WTC?

</comment><comment><USER50> Respect my authorty!

</comment><comment><USER51> and if you're a hacker outside US soil you should start watching out for the drones...

<comment><USER33> How high is your confidence in the word "outside"?

<comment><USER22> What happens when they photocopy the confidence-of-not-being-american tables with a Xerox copier?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> So Hayden is playing bad cop, while Alexander plays god cop?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135833)

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a very clever recruiting strategy. ;-)

<comment><USER53> For what? Witchunters?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> ...aaaand to Guantanamo you go.

</comment><comment><USER55> Must be fundraising time. _Yawns_.

</comment><comment><USER56> yesterday Muslims, today hackers, tomorrow 82 year old nuns will be called terrorists!

<comment><USER57> I assume you're talking about this: [https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7](https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> How long do I have to use this site before I get downvote?

<comment><USER59> It comes at 500 karma. You'll have to wait a while. And if you mean the article, then you'll never get downvote. There is no downvoting articles. Only flagging.

<comment><USER60> Oh I thought it was removed completly. I understood that but this 500 points- rule souds like an invitation to karma whoring...

I'll return to my silent existence now.

<comment><USER61> Karma-whoring will be counterproductive if the community doesn't solicit/reward such behaviour. And this attitude of the community has more or less thwarted karma-whoring till now. We'll see how this works out in future.

<comment><USER60> Really? How do you realise it is carma whoring on such a high niveau portal? I see many comments stating the obvious getting their upvotes, not contributing anything useful to a topic. It is still carma whoring, just on a high niveau. This is what such a system creates and it forces you to scroll more to find the really useful comment. I know it works, I did it too ;)

Removing the system completly while integrating a clever report-system would have been more useful here imho.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HP Rejects Xerox Offer but Remains Open to a Deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-offer-but-remains-open-to-a-deal-11574027722?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> All that pair needs is a huge debt load going forward. Looks like a spiral down the drain to me.</comment>


Ask HN: What deal makes sense for a late co-founder? - <AUTHOR> I'm about to join a startup that has existed for a couple of months on paper, but hasn't actually done anything yet. It's the infamous example of an "ideas guy" looking for a programmer (me) to build it, but he's already been working hard on collecting information we need, networking, talking to potential stakeholders and trying (unsuccessfully, so far) to get money for this idea.
I think the idea is great and would be fun and educational to work on. The only downside is that he doesn't have money to hire me.
We're not sure how to arrange ownership of the startup, particularly in light of the work he has put into it. The first heal he proposed was: I get a normal salary, and in 3 years I can buy 20% of the company for €2000. As long as he can afford to pay that salary, that's a totally fine, no-risk-for-me deal. But there's no money, and I think maybe it'd help a lot if I built a prototype first. I can afford to go without income for a while, but since I'm unpaid, that requires a different deal. Some of his proposals:
* If I work 1 month unpaid, I get 20% of the company.
* If I work 3 months unpaid, I get 40% of the company.
Both seem fairly reasonable to me considering he's already put several months into this.
Something I'm considering is: the prototype is mine until we get funding, and then he buys it from me. This would have the advantage that if it fails, I keep my own code. (But is that worth anything? Once it's finished, I can probably build a better one in less time.) And I'd get money for my work instead of shares that may or may not be worth anything.
Downside is that we don't know when we will have funding. But that's really the fundamental problem here: will we have some funding in 3 months? And how will we eat if we don't? What risks are reasonable to take here? <comment><USER2> Stay employed - both of you.

Build it and prove it whilst employed.

50/50 equity. Make sure you have a vesting schedule.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have the time to build this while employed. And doesn't 50/50 ignore the time he already put into it?

In any case, I've made up my mind about putting at least a month into this. Even if it fails, I'll probably be doing a lot more fun stuff in that month than I've done in my past couple of paid projects.

Note that the company already exists and he currently owns 100% of it. How would that work with vesting schedules? He's probably thinking along completely different lines (he has experience in traditional business, but not tech startups).

<comment><USER3> 50/50 also ignores the time you put into learning technical skills...and the time the ideas guy put into becoming an ideas guy. To put it another way, if your joining the company more than doubles the value of the company, then 50% of the equity is a bargain for the ideas guy...and you're 'leaving money on the table'.

To put it another way, if the structure of your mutual relationship is hard negotiating, then it's fair for either of you to renegotiate based on each piece of work.

Or to put it another another way, if the ideas guy resents being generous and their concept of equitablility is that 3 years + a few months is worth 80% of the company and 3 years + 2k is only worth 20% then that's a tell. And it may not be a view of the world that is likely to get significantly better.

Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Linux Kernel Fastboot [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/event/4/contributions/281/attachments/216/435/LPC_2019_kernel_fastboot_on_the_way.pdf <comment><USER2> How nostalgic! Mind you, I say that in a good way!

This brings me back to the heydays of Sun Microsystems where they controlled both the hardware (SPARC) and the operating system (Solaris). Sun didn't hesitate to use this to their advantage. With Clear Linux, I see Intel doing some very similar things. Yes, this was just a story about boot time, but it led me to take a look at Clear Linux and it looks like it could be a star. I'm interested in how much more performance their distribtuion is able to squeeze out. I'm also wondering how they're dividing their focus here and what high notes they're trying to achieve.

At a strategic level, I'm assuming that they're wanting to distinguish themselves from ARM? Are they looking to create a well-tuned reference for other Linux distributions on Intel to adopt? At a tactical level, I see they're focusing on performance, availability (which boot time would be a function of)... but are they tweaking for other things such as reliability? Fault tolerance?

Until now, Clear Linux wasn't even on my radar. Today, it is. Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share?

<comment><USER3> > Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that > they'd like to share?

Not much of one, but for a while I was playing with multiple distros trying to find the best possible power management for my laptop. (XPS 13 9380.)

Clear did better than the Ubuntu installation that came with it -- but a dead octopus would have done better than _that_. It was sitting at 6W for non-CPU- intensive work, and was also noticeably snapppier. Windows on the same hardware sits at 8W when idling; same as Ubuntu.

More recently I've tried Arch, though. Which somehow got that same workload down to 3.3W, albeit with a lot of adjustments... that didn't seem to affect performance, but did affect power use, clearly.

It's just too bad that all of this optimization goes out the window if I fire up a browser, but I've had a fun time finding ways to avoid that.

Apart from that, obviously Clear's software repository is far more limited than Arch's, and it also seems harder to contribute to. I don't think that problem will be going away soon.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to hear more about the tweaks you've done to Arch. I've gone little beyond a few power management things myself (On a Thinkpad X1C Gen 6). I get decent battery life, but I know it could be better. And giving up Arch would be a tough sell to myself.

<comment><USER5> The thing with arch is it's mostly not more tweaks that give you better battery, it's not having all the crap that Ubuntu preloads running that makes that happen.

<comment><USER4> Folks think I'm crazy for using Arch as my main dev machine. I'm not an Ubuntu hater at all (it runs my main server in the basement at home)... but it'd be awfully hard to go back to using it as my main machine.

<comment><USER6> Really? Arch is... boring. Once you've set it up, nothing happens without your permission and you can just keep developing away. Sure you have updates imposed on you, but you can delay them a bit if you dont have time right now, and its not like upgrades are indefinitely avoidable on any other OS.

Using Arch often gives me advance warning that my apps will break on users machines due to changes in libraries. I see the changes first and can add compatibility for the new library version such that it's fixed before affecting my users.

I love it as a daily driver.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, for me, it's "just right". Most detractors claim it's "bleeding edge". What? just because it's got something newer than Postgres 9.1 available?? (this was my argument against Debian/Ubuntu for a long time)

Totally agree that it's a great daily driver. It has EVERYTHING!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the bit on slide 16 where initializing 8GB of RAM takes 100MS, so they boot with only 2GB and then hotplug in more memory later.

<comment><USER8> Just last weekend I was talking to one of FreeBSD's VM gurus about doing exactly this in FreeBSD too. You have to be careful about it though -- some data structures are autosized at boot, and if you're not careful you can end up with systems "running out of memory" because they have _too much_ memory.

<comment><USER9> > some data structures are autosized at boot

It's probably a good idea to audit all the things that are autosized at boot by ram size; some of them are probably much too large on a system with 128 GB or so, given some of the sizing was written when 128 MB was big. I know I've run into the size of IP fragment buffers being way too big, but not sure what else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those of you who are interested in such things might also like to watch my BSDCan 2018 talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMywejyXB9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMywejyXB9k)

<comment><USER10> Sorry for off-topic: I checked your HN profile and tarsnap looks like what I've been searching for a long time. Looks much more straight forward than nextcloud and open source too. Wish you success with your company.

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "mem=4096m" in cmdline to only init 2 GB

What is going on that makes this 2:1?

<comment><USER12> 2gb user + 2gb kernel?

<comment><USER13> 2 gb user + 1 gb swap + 1 gb rootfs unpacked in ram perhaps. They discuss a decompression operation and the only portion of the sequence that would occur in normally is unpacking a rootfs in RAM.

<comment><USER14> The kernel itself is compressed, and among the first things that happen after the bootloader hands off to the kernel is that the stub at the beginning of the kernel decompresses the rest of the kernel.

And in this case they don't appear to be using any initrd for the root filesystem, just hurrying to bring up access to the full filesystem over eMMC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > SATA driver init takes 100 to 200 ms even without a real disk

That's pretty interesting. Wonder what it is doing?

<comment><USER16> SATA controller firmware has a hard-coded "drive predelay" that waits before enumerating attached devices, a relic from the days long before SSDs. Even when an option to set a custom amount is available in the BIOS, it is in addition to and not instead of, as there's no bus master to tell it all attached disks have init and the controller may speak to them.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be done synchronously up front at all, except when the BIOS hands off control of the system to the SATA controller it expects that afterward it has a definitive list of available boot devices and their properties, for selection/display in the boot menu and BIOS configuration.

Theoretically with UEFI and it's NVRAM-resident settings, a boot device could be expressed as a namespace and path, and the firmware need not enumerate devices until it has determined that there's a need to search for alternative/fallback boot devices, but the stack hasn't been updated with that in mind.

<comment><USER14> The delay in question is in initializing the Linux driver, not in the system firmware scanning for bootable devices before running Linux. The Linux driver may be taking a while for similar reasons as the firmware delay you describe.

The hard drive predelay is also not as obsolete as you may think; I've encountered high-capacity SATA SSDs that take a surprisingly long time to come up after being hotplugged, to the point that Linux doesn't always succeed in bringing up the link on the first try.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I missed that in the discussion. Thanks.

I'm willing to bet if the stack enforced tighter tolerances for modern non- rotating disks, manufacturers wouldn't be able to slip such shoddy firmwares into production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd really like to get my raspberry pi booting in a couple seconds. I have a few ideas for things I'd like to try but the boot time is too long. Don't need X11 but I would like to use raspbian.

<comment><USER18> If you do not need the graphical stack, there is room for optimization both in kernel and user space. On a similar board (4 ARM cores) with Ubuntu I managed to start user space applications in <2 seconds (from power on) and the complete boot (including Xorg/MATE) in <10 seconds. If you are interested, on Medium I have some write-up (same username, last post).

<comment><USER19> A link to said write-up: [https://medium.com/@fmntf/adapting-ubuntu-for-the- automotive...](https://medium.com/@fmntf/adapting-ubuntu-for-the-automotive- quick-boot-and-power-loss-resilience-74d25915250c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Discussion on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d34rvg/how_intels_cl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d34rvg/how_intels_clear_linux_team_cut_the_kernel_boot/)

<comment><USER21> > Just remove the sleep(2700).

Such high quality discussion too!

<comment> why-oh-why > SATA driver init takes 100 to 200 ms even without a real disk

While it's a joke, they're not particularly far from the truth, as noted in a different comment here. They do indeed wait for some parts to respond.

<comment><USER22> Would it be possible on multithreaded architectures to have a thread listening for the response, then setting a flag in /proc or somewhere else to indicate that the part is now active? That way, init code that does not depend on that device can continue to run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've seriously got to look into running arch with a clear linux kernel. I knew they did some pretty serious optimization work, but this is definitely impressive.

<comment><USER16> Most of the bloat isn't from the kernel. That's the last thing you really optimize after getting rid of all the background services, startup tasks, etc.

<comment><USER23> Clear kernel performed better in every single test run by phoronix, except one (because it has retpoline and others did not). [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=arch- ant...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=arch-antergos- clear&num=4)

<comment><USER16> I think you misunderstood. I was saying in a typical stack, time from POST to desktop is significantly overshadowed by userland bloat, not that Clear kernel is not worth the optimization.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, but a stock arch system is significantly less slowed than a typical stack. Getting to bootloader is still significantly longer than actual OS boot, though. I'm not usually a supporter of the "all software has to be open source" thing, but between spying issues and horrible code, it seems like coreboot is a serious benefit. Wish I could get it on my machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Systemd is ~1.5MB - the loading time for emmc is 100ms

Surely not _all_ of systemd is faulted in immediately, is this really an issue?

<comment><USER26> If you want just the important parts faulted in, you need to get the important parts into their own pages, preferably in order. I don't know whether profile- guided linking is a thing.

<comment><USER27> PGO detects hot/cold functions and places them together¹ ², but I imagine whatever it needs on startup is probably not especially hot. …Though it might all be cold, which would have the same effect, actually.

―

¹ At least on GCC but I would be very surprised if clang doesn't also do this.

² You can also do this manually with __attribute__((hot)) and __attribute__((cold))

<comment><USER28> PGO may not be the right tool for this. Mozilla used custom instrumentation and linker scripts to achieve symbol ordering optimized for startup.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100223202038/http://blog.mozil...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100223202038/http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/02/19/teaching- ld-to-optimize-binaries-for-startup/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome! I'm seriously thinking about running Gentoo with Linux Clear kernel!

<comment><USER30> "running Gentoo" \- Sure, waste your life compiling code for next to nothing performance benefits that will never add up to the extra time it took to compile the code..

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Site seems Not Found, is there any backup?

</comment><comment><USER32> I have hard time understanding why do they have to have a supervisor there to begin with

</comment><comment><USER33> P10

> Rootfs Mouting -> Rootfs Mounting ?

</comment><comment><USER34> Do I understand correctly that the motivation for this is that the rear-view camera on the Chery Exeed LX runs Linux? Is it a good idea to ship a car with safety components running Linux?

<comment><USER35> As opposed to running what?

Linux (as in, the kernel) is extremely stable and well tested.

If the components in question utilise any significant features of the kernel, I strongly doubt some homegrown kernel-esque project will achieve more stability and reliability than Linux.

Sure, if it can be done with a (minimal) amount of embedded code then it quite possibly should be, but if a whole kernel is actually needed then Linux is a fine choice.

<comment><USER36> QNX is still fairly popular in cars. Sometimes also QNX for the more critical things and Linux for the rest.</comment></comment></comment>


RobinHood Bug Allows Users to Margin Call at 1000x Leverage (Some $1M in Debt) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/drlmxq/time_to_one_up_ctn/ <comment><AUTHOR> video of someone losing $50K+ in real time: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-tNkuYV4_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-tNkuYV4_Q)

$900K+ Loss [https://i.imgur.com/3sMhGi7.png](https://i.imgur.com/3sMhGi7.png)

Summary: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/ahbea5/a_us...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/ahbea5/a_user_in_rwallstreetbets_managed_to_lose_5798957/)</comment>


Ask HN: Why would I do `gh repo clone` instead of simple `Git clone`? - <AUTHOR> No I am curious. What purpose this CLI client serves? Ok helps to do some GH specific things (PR, Merging PR etc.) from command line, but other than that what is a real use-case to give up good old git client? <comment><USER2> For cloning, yes, git makes more sense. These changes are for people who want to automate the Github end of it. Personally, I don't see an immediate need yet, as I like using the UI (easier for my brain to remember).</comment>


Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/mozilla-developing-web-push-notification-system-for-firefox.ars <comment><USER2> Here's the original blog post they reference [EDIT: and now link to], with technical details and code samples:

<http://jbalogh.me/2012/01/30/push-notifications/>

And, the wiki page:

<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Notifications/Push/API>

Firefox has a presence on most operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS), so the goal would be that a website could send you a notification whenever and Mozilla would figure out the best place to alert you of it.

(Disclaimer: Mozilla employee, but not working on notifications)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is word-for-word what Notifo was built to accomplish. Maybe with the weight of Mozilla behind the effort (and a large pre-existing install base) they will have more success.

<comment><USER4> I have the same problem with this feature I had with Notifo: It sounds awesome, until I try to think where I'd use it. I can't find many uses where it would beat email, even though I use it for some things like HN comment replies, notifications for actions on my web apps and various personal events.

I think the area where notifications are important, but slightly less important than email, yet not so unimportant that you don't want to have a user install another app, is pretty small... Too bad, I very much like the idea of Notifo. When will it stop working? Do you plan on open sourcing any part of it?

<comment><USER5> Interesting that you see it as competing with email -- I first thought of it as a "new mail" notification for gmail/facebook/hN/etc.

<comment><USER4> But it _does_ compete with email, I get instant push notifications on my email client on all my devices. The killer feature of Notifo et al is that you can customize the alerts that will be generated, but that's a small part of what the notification does (i.e. notify you).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting idea - I'd be happy to have a standard method of passing notifications that were simpler than an email from any site to any user.

But I do not like the idea of tying it to web browsers, or to one aggregator. If I want all of my notifications to go to Google and be turned into emails, or to Facebook and appear in my inbox there, or to a server I run myself, where I can get them with a desktop app, then I should be able to.

<comment><USER7> I don't see anything that ties people to a single aggregator, and it's not common for Mozilla to design for that. From the spec[1] it seems they're designing a system where client has to accept any URL to notify and any server can work as long as they accept POST request with certain parameters.

[1]: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Notifications/Push/API>

<comment><USER6> Looking at the higher level document* the Post Office seems to require the Mozilla ID. It's possible that that just means "A unique ID for that server", but I'd like that to be explicit.

* [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Notifications/Push#Post_Of...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Notifications/Push#Post_Office)

<comment><USER8> Like all wikis, that document was way out of date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't like the fact that it requires Mozilla to have a proxy server. It's a single point of failure - it has scalability and political implications.

<comment><USER10> There has to be a server somewhere and we know users won't pay for it, so what's left?

<comment><USER9> It's crazy how much browsers are becoming operating systems. I'm neither for nor against it in general; I simply think it is an interesting thing to watch happen. However in this case, I think it makes more sense for the user to download a desktop application in order to get push notifications directly from the server when not browsing the website.

<comment><USER10> I guess they don't want the app to hold open connections to every site (some people have solved the C1M problem but some haven't) and they probably want a server to buffer messages when the app is not running. You'd run into these same issues whether the notifications are received by Firefox or a different desktop app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man. I've wanted to build something like this since I was at Yahoo. Glad to see someone's finally doing this.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope they develop a stop-people-from-switching-to-Chrome system. Other than incrementing their version number faster.

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome. This is what we've been building over at Boxcar, albeit outside of the browser.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm betting this is more about boot2gecko than Firefox. Maybe not a lot more, but it's certainly necessary for boot2gecko to have any feasibility.

Does anyone know why they're pushing this instead of plain old Server Sent Events (something w3c is already working on for servers to push to browsers)?

<comment><USER8> I think notifications will be useful in all our browsers, not just B2G. I'm targeting Firefox Mobile for the initial release since mobile is where notifications fit in the best.

I don't see notifications supplanting Server Sent Events. SSE gives developers a lot more control over the stream since it's connected directly to your server, and you don't have to bother the users with permission dialogs. You'd use push notifications if the user doesn't have your site open, but otherwise SSE gives you more power.

(I'm working on push notifications.)

<comment><USER14> Cool. :) Thanks for the reply. I had assumed that an "app" made for Firefox or Chrome would be able to register a handle for a Server Sent Event so that apps could be notified or have their state changed via an Action even if the tab isn't open. Somehow I missed that this was that functionality via a new API.

As for B2G, I think I just got excited about it because notifications was the bit I was interested in seeing work out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What about notifications that don't require Firefox to be opened? Or notifications that don't require an internet connection? or notifications that don't require your computer to be on? What about notifications that don't even require me to be awake? Send me push notifications through ether, straight into my brain.

<comment><USER16> apple's working on the eyephone.</comment></comment>