Gunmen Set Fire to Microsoft's Greek Headquarters - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/06/27/microsoft-greek-headquarters-fire/

<comment><USER2> My guess would be that Microsoft's Greek office didn't want to pay protection money to some or other criminal racket -- or something else along similar lines also involving criminals. This kind of violent activity tends to become more prevalent and audacious when grown men and women can no longer provide food and shelter for their families.

Greece is truly in the midst of a _Great Depression_. According to official statistics published by the Greek government, the country's rate of unemployment is now nearly 22% -- that is, one out of every five people looking for a job can't find one; and more disturbingly, the unemployment rate for young people is 53% -- one out of every two can't find employment.[1]

[1] <http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06/D9V87S5G0.htm>

<comment><USER3> The thing I've always had in the back of my mind regarding Greece's current woes, is that, despite being the cradle of democracy, the parthenon, the diaspora etc... they're just a short boat trip away from Northern Africa. And beyond that, just subsistence Africa, the Sahara etc. They may have the trappings of a "Euro" country at the moment... but things could quite concievably get way worse for them and a lot closer to their neighbours than it's easy to imagine.

<comment><USER4> And the US is right next door to Mexico and South and North Korea are, well, you get the point. Geographical proximity is not an accurate economic indicator. Also, Africa is not some homogenous blob of poverty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm truly baffled by what they were protesting, here. I'm no MS fan, but I haven't heard of any particular ire pointed at them for anything, much less the troubles Greece is going through now. Was this just a wanton act of petulance?

<comment><USER6> I think it'll be hard to guess unless more evidence surfaces. With a machine gun, gas canisters, etc., it sounds pretty organized, not a random splinter group of angry students or anything. The "mass" left movements (KKE, Antarsya, various squat-based anarchist groups, etc.) tend not to carry out military- style armed actions like that, and are more into the mass marches with Molotovs and rocks. There could be a smaller group that chose MS as a convenient target (probably it was less well protected than banks or government building are). But even those, when they do something "big", tend to try to make a PR stunt out of it, e.g. unfurl a big banner on the front of the building and spraypaint slogans. This looks more clinical in a way, which makes it look more like a pointed threat than a protest.

With the current high unemployment and general anger, there are a _lot_ of questionable groups in weird webs of entanglement in Athens, so could be other things as well. There are some violent right-wing groups who might be coming from nationalist rather than leftist reasons (out with the foreigners/etc.), or it could be something apolitical like organized crime. The latter is getting bigger as groups of desperate people are looking for any way to make a living; in particular, many people suspect that some football-hooligan "ultra" groups have morphed into criminal syndicates. They're also sometimes associated with the Golden Dawn neo-Nazi group, though it's never quite clear how much of that is politics versus money versus general not-very-precisely- directed anger.

(As a side note, Athens vs. everywhere else in Greece are almost completely different places these days. Even as half-Greek I would be careful where I went in Athens right now, but the rest of Greece is much different.)

<comment><USER7> Could be a false flag operation designed to discredit one side or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to other news reports, this is just the latest in a string of attacks on American companies in Greece. McDonalds, Citibank, and Starbucks were hit in Athens. If this continues, you might see multinationals scale down operations or even close up shop in Greece, adding to the unemployment ranks - just what the Greek economy does not need.

<comment><USER2> Sources?

<comment><USER8> > Sources

A Reuters wire story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who read the headline as "...Microsoft Geek Headquarters?"

<comment><USER10> Title got me to, its always funny when it happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Didn't pay protection perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER12> Someone turned off the firewall!

</comment><comment><USER13> They were trying to end of life IE6 in Greece.

</comment><comment><USER14> Too brazen to be Mac users.

</comment><comment><USER15> Now that's what I call a flame-war.</comment>


Show HN: an Amsterdam Metro map in git commits - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sjmulder/ams-metro/network

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I could do the London tube but it's cyclic. Even for Amsterdam, route 50 was a bit of a kludge as you'll see in the tree.

Here's an image with tag/branch names for the lines: <http://i.imgur.com/vXhLYry.png></comment>


FreeBSD January-March 2017 Status Report - <AUTHOR> https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2017-01-2017-03.html <comment><AUTHOR> I think these are great to read and hope more open source projects follows suit:

1\. It allows people to understand where the project is heading (including pace)

2\. It acts as sub-project discovery and usually uncovers areas that otherwise likely had been overseen

3\. It serves as recruitment; links to each subproject and its members - letting users quickly get engaged should they want to.</comment>


Mibbit: IRC for the Rest of Us - <AUTHOR> http://news.gotgame.com/mibbit-irc-for-the-rest-of-us/ <comment><USER2> _other applications like instant messaging clients swelled in popularity, most people forgot about their old friend IRC._

It's interesting how other people see the world. I forgot that there was something _other than_ IRC. Everyone I know is on IRC, and IRC is about 85% of my communication. (E-mail is the rest.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not bad. Is it crazy to think there ever might be an web-based IRC client with support for DCC? Even is OS X the best IRC choice is probably Colloquy that looks good but has no DCC support. Otherwise you have to go with XChat which is really ugly and not updated anymore, but mostly functional.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Yeah I'm toying with implementing DCC, it'll probably get into Mibbit one day soon :) Probably have a parallel HTTP based file sharing concept as well for when you want to share something with the whole channel.

<comment><USER3> Cool. Sounds like a good idea. Also, it seems that since this client is web- based it gets past the IRC port blockage that our internal firewall is doing :) So thanks for that too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tried to connect to Freenode but the client has been D-Lined!

<comment><USER4> Yeah one of the freenode servers seems to have. The easy solution is to try again - you get a different server each time. Hopefuly the admin will notice their mistake, or we will be able to get hold of them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Software Still Lives (Drawings on Software Development) - <AUTHOR> http://amydyer.art/wp/index.php/2019/12/11/software-still-lives/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I'm a software engineer and an artist. I'm back in school, and for a final assignment this semester made three massive drawings on the topic of software development. I hope you enjoy them! I'm interested to hear how a technical audience responds to them, and if they express anything to you.</comment>


New Dell computer comes with a eDellRoot trusted root certificate - <AUTHOR> http://joenord.blogspot.com/2015/11/new-dell-computer-comes-with-edellroot.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614837).

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion at Reddit

[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3twmfv/dell_shi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3twmfv/dell_ships_laptops_with_rogue_root_ca_exactly)

<comment><USER4> And prior HN discussion about that reddit discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614837)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> confirmed on my laptop too.

nice reddit [https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3twmfv/dell_ship...](https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3twmfv/dell_ships_laptops_with_rogue_root_ca_exactly/)

including examples of people using it to mitm https connections.</comment>


Morgan Stanley: Google should give out free smart speakers to beat Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/06/28/morgan-stanley-google-should-give-out-free-smart-speakers-to-beat-ama.html?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> Why not have one device that acts as a TV hub(roku), Wifi router, and speaker. Sell it for like $9. So you take the time to actually use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> If they do it, they may get the NSA to fund the whole thing.</comment></comment>


Analysis of the Nahid-1/Safir launch failure satellite image - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cbassa/satellite_analysis/blob/master/nahid1_launch_failure_analysis.ipynb <comment><USER2> Very interesting analysis!

For more context: [https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump- twe...](https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets- sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran)

<comment><USER3> Combining the height of 382km from the notebook with the supposed resolution of 20 cm from that link gives an angular resolution of 0.00003 degrees [1]. That is about 2.5 * the angular resolution of the Hubble telescope. However, as that article notes, this image was taken through atmosphere.

I don't know much about telescopes, but some googling seemed to reveal earth based telescopes with similar resolutions. Hence, it seems within the range of possibility.

[1] [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=20cm+%2F+382+km+radian...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=20cm+%2F+382+km+radians)

<comment><USER4> The interesting thing you can derive is what the lower bound is on the diameter of the imaging system via the diffraction limit. I get about 1 meter (but have fat fingers and sleep deprivation). Which is big, but not crazy big.

Edit. 224 is supposed to be a variation of this guy [1], which has a 2.4 metre mirror (which should be more like 7cm on the ground).

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen)

<comment><USER3> Does that 7cm figure include the effects of atmospheric dispersion?

<comment><USER4> That is the minimum possible resolution* (hence the lower bound on the diameter). Atmospheric stuff will make it worse and be variable from day to day (and depends on the length of the exposure, which would be a bigger problem looking at stars than the earth). I think that is around 2 microradians for astronomical telescopes.

*there are tricks to get super-resolution, but ignore that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More discussion on the author's Twitter feed.

[https://twitter.com/cgbassa](https://twitter.com/cgbassa)

</comment><comment><USER6> Any Farsi literate readers here? What's the writing on the concrete circle at the bottom say?

Edit: Argh, it's in the article... _" The product of national empowerment"_. Interested though, if that's accurate or has alternate interpretations. Seems intended to be read by spy satellites...

<comment><USER7> > Seems intended to be read by spy satellites...

That seems like a stretch. If it was meant for spy satellites wouldn't it be in English and have a message that's a little less generic?

<comment><USER6> I'll bite. What other reason for such huge letters facing upwards? Based on the trucks, they are 1-2 meters high.

<comment><USER8> Launches are often filmed from aircraft for promotional purposes. So yes, they are probably intended to be read from above, just nothing so drastic as spy sats.

<comment><USER9> Just like the X in the SpaceX landing pads [https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+landing+pad&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+landing+pad&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER10> They also had the drone ship names around the landing circle in the earlier days. Seems pretty much to be the same point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wikipedia article on USA-224: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224)

<comment><USER12> "USA-224 - the first of these two - was completed by Lockheed US$ 2 billion under the initial budget estimate, and two years ahead of schedule"

That's impressive.

<comment><USER13> Depends if the initial budget and schedule were accurate, or massively padded.

Under promise, over deliver.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but have you ever heard of a procurement project where this happened? At least to me it seems that you always hear delays and cost overruns of the type of F35, Zumwalt, Osprey. The usual explanation is that this is the natural outcome of a cost-plus modus operandi. How can a multi-billion project end up 2 billion below budget and 2 years ahead of schedule. We are talking about the same manufacturer that brought us the F-35 after all...

<comment><USER14> My experience with highway construction is that a lot depends on the highway inspectors (who are employed by the highway department, not by the firm doing the construction). If they're lazy the highway will seem fine on day one, but will be quite rough within a year. If they're diligent it will remain smooth for a long time.

So, it seems possible that the military bureaucracy doesn't do a very good job of supervising the work done by armaments manufacturers, while the spy- satellite bureaucracy does an admirable job. I'm surprised!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well done! It would be interesting to look at the angle and length of the shadow of one of those towers to estimate the time of day the picture has been taken and verify the hypothesis that the picture has been taken around 09:44UTC

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a good associated reddit comment analyzing the resolution of the satellite.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cxmfjd/president_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cxmfjd/president_trump_tweets_sensitive_surveillance/eymf0w0/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cxmfjd/president_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cxmfjd/president_trump_tweets_sensitive_surveillance/eymxym2/)

tldr; potentially 15-20cm resolution taken on this angle. And if it's the KH-11 (or later advanced kennen/kh-12), it is the first image since 1984 ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Janeskh1...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Janeskh11leakedphoto.jpg))

<comment><USER17> It sounds like, from the description of the previous image and non-classified information about KH-11 such as that released when two surplus satellites were released to NASA for possible conversion to telescopes, this pretty much just matches up with what we already knew about its capabilities. If amateur satellite-watchers hadn't already figured out this was a Keyhole satellite and tracked its orbit closely this might have given that away and helped Iran stage their launches to avoid its watchful eyes, but as it is I don't think any great secrets are being revealed here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> OK. I have what is possibly a dumb question, but why is it even _possible_ to connect to the open internet, much less send a tweet, from what I assume is supposed to be a SCIF or some similarly secure room?

Surely the answer can't be that no one ever considered a sitting President would expose classified intelligence just to shitpost on Iran?

<comment><USER19> > but why is it even possible to connect to the open internet, much less send > a tweet, from what I assume is supposed to be a SCIF or some similarly > secure room?

Just curious, how do you know this was tweeted from a SCIF?

<comment><USER18> I don't actually _know_ , I just assume any classified briefing like this has to take place in a SCIF or someplace at least shielded from RF leakage. I may be naive, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure this is true. As the president is the original authority for classified information, he can probably ask for classified briefings in non classified areas or terminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> More, including technical history of Iran's satellite program:

[https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your- military/2019/08/31/...](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your- military/2019/08/31/mysterious-iran-rocket-blast-draws-trump-tweet-tehran- response/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Lucky for them the satellite (Nahid-1) was not loaded at the time of the incident (which likely happened during fueling), and is in a lab ready for another launch.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm actually all for it. I don't think it would be a big deal if unarmed Iranian drones are flying above US airspace zone or above the orbit high enough to consider it being outside of what atmosphere is considered. I mean US drones fly above Afgqnistan skies all the time and they are even armed, so I don't see a problem so long as its done on some common agreed rules.

<comment><USER23> For everyone down voting this framework already exists as the Treaty on Open Skies. It was finalized in 1989, but started as a mutual agreement between NATO and the USSR.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it appears that Iran is the country not wanting in on this one. Go figure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the deal here? Is this a case of US high tech sabotage (like the famous stuxnet) and Trump making a joke about it on Twitter?

<comment><USER3> The fact that this reveals something about the optical surveillance capabilities of the US. And notably, the fact that a sitting president is sharing this (sensitive) information on twitter for apparently non-strategic goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The shadow Trump and his cellphone are casting on the image is the best part. Guess nobody had the balls to tell him pictures aren't allowed in a briefing of this nature?

<comment><USER26> The top left portion of the image is redacted. Which suggests it was cleared for publishing.

Lots of people saying this was not a good move by the USA to publish this image. But why? Yes, it's a fascinating image. But these high resolution capabilities are pretty well known and expected...

<comment><USER3> I think it is mostly people jumping on the bandwagon of 'trump bad'. That is, the news here is not the secret info revealed, but that trump revealed secret info.

<comment><USER18> Why do you think it isn't a problem that Trump revealed secret info?

<comment><USER3> I do think that Trump is a problem. His treatment of classified material is a good indicator of that. It's just that, in this case, the classified material is not very revealing.

I do think people are exaggerating how bad this leak is to make it worse that Trump leaked it.

And really, we should not be blowing Trump mistakes up. Because when he really does do something horrible, we need the other side with us. If we keep blowing things out of proportion, the other side will just be pushed into immediately dismissing us every time.

<comment><USER18> >It's just that, in this case, the classified material is not very revealing.

It reveals that we were monitoring the launch, either by violating Iranian airspace with a drone, or with a satellite whose optical capabilities appear to be worthy of discussion.

It also reveals the likely position and identity of that satellite, which reveals likely other candidates for American spy satellites.

>I do think people are exaggerating how bad this leak is to make it worse that Trump leaked it.

The fact that he _tweeted slides from a classified intelligence briefing_ is _already very bad._ The fact that his justification amounts to "I had the right to, so I did" is very bad. It shouldn't even matter whether the material leaked is "revealing." Do you think Trump actually cares?

FFS, people wanted Hillary Clinton sent to the electric chair for treason for _far less._

>If we keep blowing things out of proportion, the other side will just be pushed into immediately dismissing us every time.

The other side is composed of people like yourself willing to dismiss any degree of outrage or anger at Trump as simply "jumping on the bandwagon of 'trump bad'." They already immediately dismiss us every time.

But... and I say this irrespective politics... Trump _is bad._

That's not liberal or Democratic sour grapes, or panic from the deep state or leftist media establishment desperate to stop Trump from disrupting the status quo, that's not jumping on a bandwagon because he's politically incorrect and the country is full of SJWs clutching their pearls at the sight of a man who tells it like it is. It's literal, documented, established, objective truth at this point. Donald Trump is not a good person. He's not a good Republican. He's not a good Conservative. He's not a good President.

Even if you support his populist agenda, wear a MAGA hat with pride, and would bring your own hammer to build the damned wall yourself if you could, it should be obvious at this point that continuing to support Trump is a fool's errand. Anyone still drinking the Trump Kool-Aid has clearly gotten to the poison and it's eaten their brains away.

<comment><USER27> The position and identity of all satellites is already public knowledge. It's impossible to hide for long in orbit. It's the satellite _capabilities_ that are classified.

<comment><USER18> >It's the satellite capabilities that are classified.

Welp... now the world knows the satellite's capabilities and that said satellite was probably USA-244[0].

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224)

<comment><USER17> All the amateur satellite watchers have known that this is USA-224 and that it's a Keyhole imaging satellite pretty much since it launched, along with its exact orbit and a good idea of its imaging capabilities. That's how everyone managed to figure out how this was taken so quickly. Officially this is all highly classified, but in reality it's been public knowledge for quite a while.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Humanizer: a must have tool in every .Net developer's toolbox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MehdiK/Humanizer

<comment><USER2> I build some of these stuff myself, although not as complete as this one!

Nice find!</comment>


Some C++ example code to demonstrate how to perform code similarity searches - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/functionsimsearch <comment><USER2> what's SimHash? How does it work?

<comment><USER2> I think I have found it. [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring04/cos598B...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring04/cos598B/bib/CharikarEstim.pdf)</comment></comment>


Human trials for potential anti-ageing drug could begin within six months - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/unsw-harvard-scientists-unveil-giant-leap-anti-ageing <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting thought if, obviously a huge if, this or something similar turns out to work as advertised.

Would the drug be left unpatented as a gift to humanity, highly unlikely, or exploited for every penny like viagra?</comment>


You can't defend public libraries and oppose file-sharing - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/ <comment><USER2> _Yes, it is different. It differs in efficiency._

Not an irrelevant difference. A public library is funded and maintained by the same community that uses it. The manual processes required to consume the material are a natural check in the process and the result is a mild shift in equilibrium. Communities benefit and libraries are legitimate customers, so publishers are at least still getting paid.

File sharing's equilibrium is nowhere near as balanced as the library. And equilibrium matters. It's the difference between a healthy and stable ecosystem and a rodent plague ([https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk](https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk)).

<comment><USER3> Do you think that peer to peer filesharing communities are not also funded and maintained by the community that uses it? I contend that this is exactly the case.

There must also be an original legitimate customer of the work being shared, so the publisher is still getting paid.

The difference does only lie in efficiency. In a world of ever-increasing efficiency, why do we shackle libraries to 20th Century levels of service?

<comment><USER4> Libraries legitimately own _every copy_ they distribute. If they lend 10 copies of a book, 10 copies were paid for. They don't pay for one then Xerox 9 more.

File sharing exists explicitly to deny publishers payment for anything they distribute. 10,000 copies results in no compensation beyond the original.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article assumes that if you defend public libraries, you must defend them for the same reason the author defends them, and that particular reason happens to fit well with file sharing.

But there are other reasons to defend public libraries than simply the fact that they disseminate knowledge and this is worth carving out an exception in copyright. I think most people would defend public libraries on the basis of the doctrine of first sale: after an author sells a copy of a work, they can't control how you use it. As long as you're not making unauthorized _copies_ of it, you can lend it out or do whatever else you like with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is reading a book different of watching a movie? When I'm done, I can return the book/delete the movie.

The only difference is outlined in the article: the movie can be watched simultaneously by different people who got it, whilst I'm the only one with the book in my hands.

<comment><USER6> Confused: you can 'return' the movie AND keep a copy, which you distribute widely thus ruining any chance of the creator profiting by their work.

Can't do that with the physical book. Not for free anyway.

<comment><USER7> You can scan the book and distribute digital copies of it for free. The only investment is time required to scan the books.

<comment><USER8> You can also steal a book from the library under your jacket, and then you don't have to return it. It doesn't mean it's legal or right.

<comment><USER7> I was just countering his point on copying physical books: "Can't do that with the physical book. Not for free anyway."

Stealing a book doesn't amount to copying the book and returning it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author states:

"You would frequently hear that authors are paid royalties when their books are borrowed from a library. This claim is not true. "

I'm not sure what he's trying to say. In the UK, public libraries are part of the PLR scheme in which 1,000 annually-rotated libraries provide their lending details which are then scaled-up in a linear fashion and the royalties calculated on that basis.

It does mean that low-volume authors might not receive royalties one year if their loans were not sampled, but the concept is that they'd receive out-of- proportion royalties the next year when the sample set rotated.

The only reason a sample was used instead of direct measurement was due to the volume of data; automation could nowadays calculate per-author royalties on an all-branches basis.

Source: I summer-jobbed in a library back in the mid-90s and compiled the PLR statistics for the branch.

[https://www.plr.uk.com/libraryInformation/sampleLibLists.htm](https://www.plr.uk.com/libraryInformation/sampleLibLists.htm)

<comment><USER10> He claims that these are not copyright royalties, but rather a cultural grant.

<comment><USER9> Aha that helps, thank you. He's also wrong there, unfortunately.

[https://www.plrinternational.com/faqs/faqs.htm#legal](https://www.plrinternational.com/faqs/faqs.htm#legal)

<comment><USER11> "There are no working PLR systems yet in the United States, South America, Africa or Asia." So the existence of this system in some places doesn't itself invalidate the argument in places without that system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This isn't really a fair comparison. File-sharing has marginal costs close to zero, so wide distribution becomes essentially free. Public libraries must hold an inventory that can only be increased by paying for another copy of the book, movie, etc.

If public libraries had their own printing presses and loaned out copies they printed from some master edition this would be a fairer analogy, but in this case libraries would effectively be stealing from the publishers and authors, as file sharing sites are currently.

<comment><USER13> Well to be fair the costs are irrelevant, you can claim the big issue is that Libraries actually getting their copies for free and in many countries actually charge (even if minute) fees for people to be able to borrow books making them more akin to Netflix than to TorrentFreak.

But the setup cost is really not the issue especially considering that you can setup a new digital library at little to no costs these days and as a very large portion of the books (I would say probably 99%>) that you would be able to get a hold on in a public library got digital copies than setting up the same exact collection isn't that hard.

Another argument to be made is actually the "value" of the information shared in libraries vs file sharing sites, while you can argue that even the poorest made film or the buggiest game has some educational value you would be hard pressed to claim that file sharing sites help propagate knowledge on a level that is even in the same order of magnitude as public libraries used too.

Yes some people might download a book, even a school book or some documentary (which today they are pretty worthless sadly) but majority of downloads are TV shows, Movies, Porn and Games which sorry claiming that they are akin to a public library is just blasphemous.

<comment><USER14> Movies, TV shows, games and music is all part of our common culture. The question is then if children who partakes in culture do better than those who are deprived, and what impact it has on their life.

One thing I am sure of is that there is no single artist in the world that isn't also a consumer of art. You don't become a great musician if you don't have access and listen to other peoples music, and you don't become a great movie director without watching other peoples movies. Same should be true for games, painting, and writing. If we removed all non-educational book from public libraries we should see a direct decrease in the number of writers that exist.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but that's not the original argument for the support of libraries. If you want to claim that people benefit from downloading the latest game of thrones episode or the latest call of duty in the same way their great grand parents and great great grand parents did when libraries when public libraries were being established during the mid 19th century you'll find it to be quite an uphill battle.

Also since none of your examples actually stated a clear violation of copyright law on what ground do you even attempt to make an argument? Spielberg went to the movies last time I've checked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of course you can, but it requires accepting that copyright is an imperfect practical compromise between opposing goals, and not some platonic ideal.

</comment><comment><USER16> Efficiency isn't everything, by the way.

Effectiveness is another important metric. Can filesharing give me access to all those millions of books that have never been digitized?

No? So I guess libraries can do something that filesharing can't.

I won't go so far to claim that filesharing could never give me a perfect replica of Bembo's "De Aetna". But it doesn't today.

See? I can defend libraries on another criterion than efficiency.

<comment><USER17> But that criterion can also be used to defend file sharing.

Many people are worried that copyrights last so long that some old movies that are good but not longer profitable are not being preserved anywhere except by pirates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any useful comparison of libraries to file sharing ends at believing both are just places where Stuff Is and you can go and get it for free. It's to our collective benefit that libraries are much more than that.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree, making information as widely available and accessible as possible can only be a net positive for a society in the long run. It would be interesting if business models shifted more towards crowdfunding.

</comment><comment><USER20> What an absurd title and statement. Of course you can defend public libraries and oppose file sharing! It costs almost nothing to share digital files, while libraries have very real physical location costs and costs to maintain physical books (and maybe even to purchase digital books?). Not to mention the local community benefits a physical library offers.

<comment><USER21> You didn't read the article. His point is that the purpose of a library is knowledge-sharing (and to your point, the expense of a library is for the greater good of knowledge-sharing). Since the purpose of file-sharing is knowledge-sharing, then they are similar in nature.

<comment><USER22> A "real-world" library's goal of knowledge-sharing is balanced with the need of the content-provider to make some money to support distribution and authoring of books. The public pays taxes to fund libraries so that people who can't afford to buy (or choose to not buy) particular books can still access them. There's a natural brake on distribution in that each copy can be checked out to at most one library patron at a time.

The most direct analogy carried over to the electronic space is e-book lending systems with built-in DRM. These systems usually keep the N-number-of-copies- available-for-loan restriction in place. Unlimited file-sharing does not at all resemble the balance between the-good-of-public-knowledge vs the-right- and-need-for-publishers-and-authors-to-make-money that a physical library model provides.

<comment><USER21> I would argue that the "need for publishers and authors to make money" is where the issue lies, not in the means of knowledge transfer (libraries vs. file sharing).

Just like how governments subsidize libraries, so too should they subsidize file sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> People who value money over educating the public will support copyright, while people who value public education and free access to culture and media do not. It's really that simple. No argument's going to convince one side to hop on to the other. Unfortunately (for this matter), it's not 1850 anymore and the amount of people in power that value public education and culture (in the US at least) is virtually asymptotical to zero, thus the current laws we see demonizing copying.

Ironically, a lot of the people behind those laws, especially big tech companies, benefit greatly from a technically educated and skilled public that would not exist, or at least be much smaller, without piracy. Is it wrong for me to pirate a few thousand dollars worth of software, educate myself, and be able to contribute many million dollars worth of work to society? Copyright supporters certainly think so, but I'd argue that the benefits to the public far outweigh what the copyright owners wrongfully claim as "losses" but is really nothing more than wishful imagination of profits they would not have made anyway.

Of course, arguments for public benefits these days are unfashionable. The zeitgeist is to fight for the copyright holders to the end, despite the fact that most of the copyright holders are not actually the creators, not actually the people who would or would not benefit from copyright law. The fact that, for example, most artists on Spotify make about the same amount whether they're on the service or not is a whole other discussion and reason to end or modify copyright itself, but it certainly kills the argument that there would be no creative works if artists didn't get paid. That's actually the case currently and it's quite ironic to see the handful of extremely rich artists pretend to fight for the guy who made two dollars all last year while his record label and music service raked in millions. Copyright law mostly benefits scumbags who've never created anything worth perusing in their lives.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is a false equivalence. They both "share" a piece of content. The difference is that a) the library is bereft of an item while checked out and b) the library, or some benefactor, paid for the item. This means that the content creator got paid for their content

When a person shares a file, they are not bereft anything besides some bandwidth for the transfer. They can consume the media as another copies or streams from them. The same is not true for a library or by extension private media. Only one person can consume.

If they wanted a true equivalence, you can do it. Putting aside the fact that the DMCA says that private parties cannot backup DRMed material, I can do what ever I want with my material (right of first sale). I can read a book. I can throw it at the dog. I can burn it. I can lend it to a friend. The same is true if I converted the physical medium into a lockable digital resource.

In this scenario, I have file copied into a server. The server is my only means of accessing the content. The server is instructed to create a global lock on the media when consumed. So within my house, only one party can consume the material at a time. If I made this server public, I would be effectively allowing anyone to "borrow" my content. Once the content was watched, the consumer would lose access to the content and the global lock would be freed.

If I wanted to listen to Abba's Dancing Queen while some other person did, I would be blocked. "Sorry, that content is locked".

Now I, as a content owner, am bereft of my material. The only way to get access to it is to forcibly take the global lock from the person, thus ending their streaming.

So we can take this simple server concept and apply a Popcorn Time veneer across it. People make their LEGALLY purchased content available. The nodes in this distributed system file lock. It's searchable. It's free. It's perfectly legal (except for the DRM bit, but that's another issue).

</comment><comment><USER25> Many comments here compare the cost of a physical library to near-zero cost of the internet, but that's not a fair comparison itself.

The cost of a physical library is physical, not informational. The article describes a situation where information sharing was challenged by the industry that has a physical monopoly on media (books). They were not granted informational monopoly, they only have monopoly on physical manufacturing.

Thus the absence of physical cost (or difference in efficiency) of sharing information does not change the concept of a library.

<comment><USER2> It's a one-dimensional argument that relies heavily on rhetoric. It's hard to draw any practical conclusions from such an argument. The point is mostly just to persuade you that file-sharing is good and anyone who opposes file-sharing is dumb.

<comment><USER25> The only practical conclusion I can draw about file-sharing is that it does not look like it will stop. Information sharing is only going to increase-- that's what the internet was designed for. Publishers will probably need to focus on physical means of revenue that the internet can not inherently provide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Falkvinge's argument boils down to this:

 _So we can observe that public libraries and file-sharing differ in scale and efficiency – and only in scale and efficiency..._

 _That has to be a first in the public debate: Are those people actually standing up and demanding that public services, such as public libraries, be made less efficient, to have less output for the tax money spent on it?_

I have to assume he's playing naïve here to make his point, because otherwise this argument is pretty silly.

First, "differs only in scale" is a ridiculous way to try and erase the distinctions between any two things. A snowflake and an avalanche also differ only in scale; that doesn't mean that if you like a white Christmas you'd love being buried alive on K2. Scale is the difference between a refreshing drink and drowning.

Second, no public service operates under a mandate of "maximum efficiency at any cost"; they operate under legal and regulatory frameworks designed to balance various different public interests. Highways have speed limits and traffic laws and restrictions on driving while intoxicated, along with uniformed officers to enforce these. They all reduce the theoretical efficiency of the highway as a conveyor of traffic, but they're there because there are other interests the highway needs to serve as well, like getting as few of the people who use it as possible killed. Different jurisdictions have different sets of laws that balance these interests in different ways, but they all try to balance them somehow.

Libraries are the same way. Knowledge-sharing is an important public interest that they serve, but the public has other interests as well. It has an interest in authors continuing to want to write books, for instance, and publishers continuing to want to publish them. So libraries strike a balance; they pay for their books, they lend them for a limited time, and so forth. These restrictions allow for wide public access without unduly cramping the market demand for books.

E-books make the old balance libraries set more complicated, since it's harder to _lend_ them. Without some kind of DRM, you're not really lending them at all, you're _giving free copies away,_ which is something very different than what libraries do with physical books. DRM can address that, but it makes using the library's resources more difficult and annoying. So the old balance needs to be recalibrated to find a way to meet all the interests the old one did. But replacing the world's libraries with the Pirate Bay would be blowing up that balance completely, not recalibrating it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious to what extent this comparison holds true for the content these two systems share. My (under informed) understanding is that piracy mostly traffics in movies, TV shows, video games, anime, adult content _ahem_ , etc. While libraries loan some of those things, they mostly loan books.

If PirateBay was mostly promoting the sharing of fiction and nonfiction, I might be inclined to buy this argument for an educated populace. But I don't think that HBO's Game of Thrones or The Seventh Son really provide the same level of education as many (if not most) books a library would lend.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Books are also widely copied and shared... as audio files or eBook files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A related sentiment: [http://freepubliclibrary.org](http://freepubliclibrary.org)</comment>


Twitter / twisst: Sorry ISS watchers, no space ... - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/twisst/status/241154273793146881 <comment><USER2> Wow that's sad. Twisst is a perfect example of how to use Twitter for one-to- many messaging.

I hope an alternative or new way pops up soon.</comment>


Automated to Death? - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrum+%28IEEE+Spectrum%29

<comment><USER2> I work on avionics. It's a great job, except you have no idea when or how things can go drastically wrong. We had a bug in our weather data parser that didn't surface in 2 years of constant testing. The weather receiver is only supposed to give data for the continental United States, but we occasionally would get a Temporary Flight Restriction for Iraq, which worked fine.

One day, we got a report from a customer that his panels rebooted twice, in the clouds. All signs were pointing to the weather receiver. I feverishly looked through the code and eventually found the problem.

We were getting a TFR for an air show.. in Guam. I knew that we handled the eastern hemisphere properly, the Iraqi TFR's worked fine.. The data looked something like "....151.235E10.1235N...".. We eventually determined that the floating point value parser was treating the E as scientific notation and blowing up. It worked fine on my PC (glibc), but not on the device (newlib).

<comment><USER3> So what happened? In "2 years of constant testing", you ... didn't test it on the device? Didn't try codes outside the area it was supposed to work in? Is there a weather data standard and you didn't meet it, or is there one but it's not always followed, or is there none and you have to do as well as you can?

<comment><USER2> A little bit of all those things -- it worked just fine, on the device, for 2 years, including the occasional eastern hemisphere TFR. It only happened with a TFR that was close to the international date line which made the ascii -> float conversion run off the end of the string. I admit I didn't test that eventuality -- but I was using a C library function that's been in constant use for over 30 years.

There's no real weather data standard, XM Weather is a collection of formats (nexrad radar comes over as a bitmap, weather reports are METAR encoded).

The Temporary Flight Restrictions are in XML, well, not really XML, it's a really nasty format designed by Jeppesen were you basically have to write your own XML parser because they made it impossible to parse with a standard XML parser.

It just goes to show that even when you test the hell out of something, you can still get blind sided by something you never thought of, but once it happens, it seems really obvious.

Remember the problem the F-22 had going across the international date line -- that code was a lot less tested than mine in that regard -- but they just didn't think about it.

[http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot- down-b...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-by-the- international-date-line-03087/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We're going to see more and more of these articles popping up as cars become more automated.

To me it doesn't matter what the rate of failure is on automated systems, as long as the rate is below human failure rate. In that case, we win. It also doesn't matter whether humans can recover given a failure, again given that the failure rate is already below the average human failure rate.

The problem is that humans are really hung up on the illusion of control. We know that in a car that drives it self that we're not in control and the prospect of that machine killing us without our intervention scares us. What we're not so sharp on is that by taking control we are [hypothetically] increasing the chances of our injury or death, and in a field of all manual or all auto cars, manual control doesn't even favor skilled drivers since the real danger for above average skilled/careful drivers is the /other/ drivers on the road.

<comment><USER5> It's the Dunning-Kruger effect: Sure, if this machine's failure rate is below the human average, it'll be safer for average humans. But I'm better off in control, because I'm a far better than average driver--aren't you, and almost everyone you know?

<comment><USER6> I don't think this is more than just superficially true for driving.

As another commentor pointed out, there are (at least) two causes of "better," one being more skilled/practiced and the other being more careful.

Presented with such a dichotomy, I doubt the average person would grossly over-estimate his own skill, though he might over-estimate his own carefulness. Anyone find any studies on this?

I've also, in casual conversations, used the proxy of "loving" driving. Very few people love to drive, unconditionally. For those that don't, eliminating any mechanical aspect of operating the vehicle is potentially appealling, since the whole experience is a degree of necessary evil.

Another proxy I used is transmission preference in "stop and go" traffic, though this is just a specific case of the mechanical part of driving a car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Fifty-two minutes after leaving St. George's, Bermuda, on its way to Boston, the Royal Majesty's GPS antenna cable became detached from the GPS antenna. This placed the GPS in dead-reckoning mode, which does not take into consideration wind or sea changes. The degraded GPS continued to feed the ship's autopilot. No one noticed the change in GPS status, even though the GPS position was supposed to be checked hourly against the Loran-C radio navigation system, which is accurate by roughly one-half to 1 nautical mile at sea, and a quarter-mile as a ship approaches shore.

Is there some reason why the GPS device couldn't raise an alarm when it dropped into dead reckoning mode?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a fascinating article. We are in constant dialog with our customers about how much the systems we provide should do automatically. They always want it to be entirely automatic, and we keep telling them that they need to keep their staff engaged, alert, and prepared for emergencies.

This is a fantastic article to help them understand, and I'll be researching the incidents mentioned. I already knew two of them, the others will be invaluable.

Thank you - I wish I could up-vote you many times.

</comment><comment><USER9> I disagree from the article. There is no paradox in automation, just a simple sensationalism desire from the authors.

Everyday, there are thousands of accidents in the world(mainly cars) just because human errors,like distractions, and if no automation existed there will be dozens of airplane accidents everyday, given the enormous number of flights.

It's not human intervention what is needed, it's just something as simple as a proper error reporting system. If an accelerometer fails and nothing happens, just report :ACCELEROMETER FAILED and problem solved. That a GPS failed, just report: GPS FAILED, and problem solved. Just change the redundant accelerometer, GPS when in land-port.

This is what human beings do, when one eye-ear-inertial information has nothing to do with the other, we got dizziness sick.

If someone designed the system badly, is not fault of automation, it's fault of the engineers. Debugging and testing is important.

<comment><USER8> They're not saying that automation doesn't reduce accidents. They are saying that the accidents that occur now are sometimes caused by the human operators becoming deskilled because of the automation.

When you say:

        " ... it's just something as simple
          as a proper error reporting system."

you make it clear that you don't work in automated real-time systems. I do, and it's more complex than you seem to think.

I know of a case similar to the grounding of the Royal Majesty. In that case, again, the GPS antenna became disconnected. There was a proper error reporting procedure that was defined and documented, and yet still no one fixed the antenna, and still everyone trusted the AIS/GPS system even though it was reporting as broken. In the same way that Windows users are "trained" to click "OK" on every pop-up dialog, so they were "trained" by their day-in, day-out experience to trust the system even though they'd been told it was broken.

You also say:

        Debugging and testing is important.

I don't think there would be many who would disagree with you, but are you suggesting that the systems described had had no debugging or testing? Of course not. They had been debugged and tested. Exhaustively. And knowing something of the field, most likely rather more than you imagine.

Bugs remain, and when they surface, humans need to be able to take over swiftly and accurately. Increasing automation makes it less likely that they do so. Even if you've had extensive and intensive training, if you don't use it for six months then you are unlikely to remember it all in an emergency.

That's the message of the article, and I endorse it, because I personally have seen it happening.

<comment><USER9> Hello I never said it was simple, I say it has to be simple. But the human being is way complex and error reporting are so simple. Simple doesn't mean "easy". IMHO engineers try to do complex systems they don't understand, instead of simpler ones.

I have worked in automated real-time systems, and I was not bad at it. And yes, I have seen real industries working with duct tape fixes, hanging cables when there was parts movement,that was a calling for disaster, but I will never take responsibility of it with my handstroke because if I let them go I will go to jail if it happens. I know what is stopping a production chain for doing something the "right way" and having the owners eyes on you while they are losing thousands of euros every not working minute.

That is the proper and original meaning of Murphy Law, if you let something to happen, it will.

Even when proper training, people do stupid things just because they can when you let them. I had in my family an airplane pilot from the early days when 50% of their colleagues had died from crashes. A friend of him died trying a "macho" demonstration to her girlfriend with his little plane. If you try to do stupid things with a commercial airline, it won't let you unless you deactivate the automation(and give explanation of why you did so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Checking the accuracy of the GPS system and autopilot perhaps seemed like a waste of time to the watch officers, like checking a watch against the Coordinated Universal Time clock every hour.

If the watchstanders didn't check it at least when they came on duty, and they obviously didn't, they are criminally incompetent.</comment>


A Question - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/a-question <comment><USER2> Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally nothing in this post is in any way amazing to anyone who actually remembers life ten years ago. We had smartphones. We had social media. We had web forums. Just because you've dumped money into some of them doesn't make them special or even interesting from a technology standpoint.

I, too, support SpaceX (as well as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, etc) but pretending that reddit is even anywhere near that list as far as being "unimaginably fantastic" is either depressingly credulous or else clumsy false optimism.

Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without _needing_ a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full- featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform.

More generally, in cars, computers, and most other sectors in technology, things are getting less and less accessible to casual interest or even moderately-dedicated hobbyists. Sometimes it's in the name of efficiency, sometimes it's in the name of corporate control, but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. It was just easier to learn the internals, then, when programs were programs, instead of HTTP APIs, and circuits were circuits, instead of closely-held intellectual properties. When was the last time anyone bought an appliance of any sort that had the wiring diagram pasted to the inside of the case?

Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun.

<comment><USER3> > I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, > chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc.

As an early-adopter with sufficient income to afford whatever gadget you're talking about, I'm sure you found a lot of utility communicating with the <1% of our population that shared your position and enthusiasm. The other 99% of us had land-lines. Only some of us had the internet.

> Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on > general-purpose computing

I have no idea what you're talking about. Our society is now saturated with computers. We carry computers in our pockets that we casually call 'smart'. These devices are wirelessly connected in a global network that we casually call 'the internet'. Computing is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore.

> Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun . > . . everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form.

Yes, the retina display existed in some form: in low-contrast PDA displays. Yes, 4G and 100mps broadband existed in some form: as in, dial-up screeching. Yes, Reddit existed in some form, as in your local BBS.

Sometimes difference of degree are so great that they become differences of kind, precisely because they make further technological innovations possible. Any startup that hinges upon "network-effects" knows this. Anyone who's used an Oculus Rift has experienced it.

There's nothing new under the sun? Only if you're living in the past.

<comment><USER4> _There 's nothing new under the sun?_

I don't think anyone is suggesting that nothing is new. Just that nothing is _mind-blowingly_ new. As you say, the last ten years have seen a lot of improvements in existing concepts - connections are faster, displays are better, etc. etc.

But that's not the kind of mind blowing change Sam suggests that it is. If you had told me ten years ago that tech would look like it does today I would say "yep, sounds about right".

<comment><USER3> I think the Oculus Rift is certainly mind-blowing. Also the fact that I can work remotely effectively.

Thinking on this further, the difference between 10 years and 20 years is immense: 2004 vs 1994. Maybe we just need another 10 years to see how far we've really come since 2004. We are only just beginning to experience what happens when you connect the global population wirelessly.

<comment><USER5> I was working remotely effectively starting in '98-'99\. DSL + VPN + Thinkpad + cell phone + etc...

<comment><USER6> Heck, back in 2004, I was using a Nokia 3650 to SSH to one of our servers and make configuration changes to our backup software. While riding in a car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sam is probably too young to remember what the world was like before the internet. From my perspective (just turned 45), the technological change in everyday life between 1994 and 2004 is _much_ more significant than the incremental improvements in the past 10 years.

\- In 1994 I didn't even have dialup internet; in 2004 I had a reliable 1 mbps connection.

\- In 1994 I knew few people with mobile phones; in 2004 I had one with a color screen (Motorola v600) that could search Google and take pictures.

Facebook and Twitter did not exist, but the basic entertainment and communication functions they provide are not radically different from those of online forums, chatrooms, email, older social networks.

The main difference that Sam overlooks is that in 2004 all this was not available to hundreds of millions (billions?) of people in the world, just like the internet was not (or barely) available to me in 1994.

<comment><USER8> A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law, cheaper storage and cheaper bandwidth, i.e. incremental, sometimes useful improvements via the web, but no nanotech robots that detect cancer, Mars base, nuclear fusion, etc.

Innovation seems to have stalled in the world of atoms, cars (and transport generally), houses, healthcare etc all not noticeably improving, except incrementally (deliberately ignoring Tesla, which will hopefully have a widespread impact on the entire car industry in the coming years).

Some areas have gotten worse overall, such as finance, which seems to be disconnected from creating value for the wider economy and seems to be getting more unstable and risky as time progresses.

EDIT: I don't mean to sound overly negative, some of the YC RFSs sound quite ambitious, I hope they succeed in attracting more of those types of companies funded and off the ground [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

<comment><USER9> _A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore 's Law_

If you believe Robin Hanson, maybe even all software innovation ever.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware- grow...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow-like- algorithms.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the question isn't whether or not we innovate enough, the question should be whether Sam believes that YC is funding start-ups that will one day become the new Tesla or SpaceX.

From the previous batches I don't recall a single one that ever stood a chance of that, though there are plenty of new middlemen and some neat innovations. Most of the really interesting ones died off very quickly.

SpaceX and Tesla required massive investments, the long view, a very unique founder and good timing all in one package. If they had been YC funded companies rather than companies funded by a founder that could personally dump a fortune in them when nobody else cared they would have sank long ago.

So I don't think that YC will fund a Tesla or a SpaceX, the model is not particularly suitable for such long haul and extremely risky ventures.

But they'll clean up on making a bunch more companies like Dropbox, AirBnb and so on over the next decade.

<comment><USER11> Their fusion companies have an outside chance at it.

The frustrating thing about this piece is that there's certainly a case to be made that VCs are funding some innovative companies with wild potential to change the world.

This piece doesn't come close to making that case. Instead it's just kind of whiny.

<comment><USER10> I should put some time in this and go over the roster of YC companies over the last years to pick out the ones that I thought were _really_ moving the needle. I suspect that the kind of secondary investors that would put money into a YC backed and vetted company are the kind that are looking to exit in the near future, not the kind that intend to see their capital locked in for decades and that this is one of the reasons why media companies, IT companies and middle men tend to have a much better chance of success.

Their models are much closer to what the investors are already used to and how they in turn made their money. Space ships to Mars and electric vehicles do not at all seem to be a good match for the YC model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > What were you doing 10 years ago?

Pretty much the same, but on platforms with a different name.

Also, the fact that people are using some toy now -- even if they love it -- does not mean it's anything more than a toy. After all -- toys are fun; if they weren't, they wouldn't have been made. You play with them for a while, tell people how great they are, and then you move on to newer toys and forget about them very quickly.

In fact, the very reason many don't remember what they used ten years ago shows how forgettable these toys are. I can certainly remember what life was before mobile phones, or before the internet. But before Facebook and Snapchat? It's kind of hard to remember the name of all those companies that were sold for a lot of money and then disappeared. We had MySpace, ICQ, VocalTec, RealMedia -- pretty much the same as today.

<comment><USER13> Speaking of platforms, user behavior hasn't changed at all and front ends aren't different other than style and name, but back ends have changed a lot.

I'm almost at 10 yrs on my linode cloud account. My servers at work have gone from hardware to mostly virtual images. I used to store data on spinning rust, now I put my trust in the NAS guys. NoSQL went from 0 to hyperspeed hype back down to a normal-ish technology. JVM went from nothing but java to I deploy scala apps on it and think about deploying clojure apps. GIT has gone from doesn't exist to every piece of code I write is in git. Puppet is the same age and trajectory. About 9 years ago I started my first ruby on rails project. If you told me a decade ago that I'd be paying for an account to store my version control repos I'd say you're kidding, but here I am a github subscriber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work in a 'top' neuroscience lab in which we study the nature of neural computations theoretically and experimentally, the kind of thing that you may consider Super Duper Really Serious attempts To Innovate.

The things being dismissed in this thread as 'toys' and 'old stuff made prettier' make our work easier.

Scientists communicate on twitter and via blogs; the open-access movement is picking up steam this way. It's much easier to decide to move across the world to work with a particular experimentalist if your mom knows how to use Skype and you can talk to your grandma from the hospital on her iPad.

Innovation happens in the world, not in a bubble. Making things easier to use and more appealing to the mainstream is real, extremely valuable progress.

Not to mention that all of the mathematics we use was developed by mathematicians purely as new, purposeless shiny toys. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> The best rejoinder to this might be the Founder's Fund manifesto, which originally started with, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

That specific phrase has since disappeared. But it illustrates that we can enjoy—even invest in—certain innovations like social media, while bemoaning the lack of innovation in other spaces (eg transportation in this example).

Here's the modified version of the manifesto:

[http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future/](http://www.foundersfund.com/the- future/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I recently went on a trip to Paris (~250BC). Finding commercial flights (1969) and good hotels took minutes and I didn't need to talk to anyone (hipmunk(2010)/tripadvisor(2001)). I checked out the area around the hotel (1950) on Google street view (2007). My family kept up to date on where I was via find my friends (2011) on my iPhone (2007). My phone showed me where I was through Google Maps (2005) and directed my with a built in compass (2009?). I used city mapper (2011) to figure out how to get around efficiently on the Paris metro (1900). The trip was noticably different from my last one. Last time to take decent pictures I carried a consumer affordable DSLR (2007), this time I carried my iPhone 5. In 2007 I tried to take panoramas and had to very carefully take individual shots and stitch them together laboriously in software afterwards that took hours to run. This time I took one on my phone and shared it with my family 30 seconds later. I took hand held time lapse videos. I live translated signs with WordLens (2010) after failing to learn much French with DuoLingo (2011). I could go on and on like this about all the changes. Many in the last 10 years or less.

Yes I could have done basically everything I did this time last time. Maps and compasses aren't new. There were tour guides available, and smart phones, and language classes. But the experience was qualitatively different.

If I was feeling early adopter instead of like relaxing maybe I could've done some things that weren't possible last time, like driven in an electric car that is among the best performance cars in the world, tested self stopping or self parking or self driving cars, toured with a consumer VR rig, taken a video with a self-piloting quadracopter, or gotten my genome sequenced, or watched a streaming video from the space station, or....

That's what I could come up with in a few minutes while writing this comment and searching on wikipedia. If you can't get excited about all the innovations happening right now oh boy are you doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's a very good point but weak examples. USENET was not just comparable but better than Reddit.

I like more succinct version of that observation by Marc Andreessen

 _Tech only serves rich nerds w / $$$ products. Same things show up later at huge volumes & low prices for everyone. But those are unrelated._

[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/528723742940073986](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/528723742940073986)

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems odd to use Tesla and SpaceX as the counter example to "building toys for rich people".

Tesla and SpaceX are exactly that...toys for rich people. But who cares? Look at the Wright brothers building the first controllable, fixed-wing, powered aircraft...that was a toy for rich people. Tesla and SpaceX technologies to become accessible to the masses likely need to start out as toys for rich people. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if I had listened to what the people wanted I would have given them faster horses.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sam left out the two innovations that have made the most difference to my life in the past 10 years:

1) the Google Library project, which scanned tens of millions of books and made them free online. 2) ebook readers (first the Kindle, and now AMOLED or super high res smartphones)

I now have access to so much human knowledge, and can take this vast library anywhere.

Much of the other great innovation in the last ten years were in expansions or second versions of existing ideas:

1) Stackoverflow is so much better than experts exchange and random forums. 2) Wikipedia is infinitely better than about.com 3) Between Crashplan, Dropbox, and OSX time machine, backups are in much better shape now. I never worry about losing my files. 4) Smart phones were not life changing, but they did save the annoyance of printing directions and then carrying a moleskin, crossword puzzle, paperback book, etc, everywhere I go. 5) Yelp and Amazon reviews are so much more extensive now, making accessing high quality products so much easier. 6) Goole maps now support transit directions. Finding the right city bus or set of stops to take when traveling is much easier.

Some things have gotten worse. I think newsgroups+AIM+IRC+blogs&RSS were better than Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. Obviously, many will disagree.

Right now, the biggest area we need innovation in is in food and energy. In most other spaces, we are reduced to solving the most minor of "first world problems". Major kudos to Sam and to YC for actually investing in energy startups in the recent rounds.

</comment><comment><USER19> > massive wealth inequality is likely to be the biggest social problem of our > time

The problem is that it's a cycle.

High wealth inequality -> large percentage of population with low SES -> structural forces perpetuating inequality -> ...

Already you see the Republican party copying the tactics that tehran used to turn persia into an islamic republic with great success, due to the systemic issues above, so it's hard to see how this is going to end well.

<comment><USER20> I find this fascinating and want to read more, but you haven't given me a lot to go on. Any references? What is SES?

<comment><USER19> SES is socioeconomic status, i.e. a combination of wealth and education.

In terms of reading more about what's going on in the US in general, the best sources of information are probably just the (often yearly) reports put out by the major governmental agencies: the CDC, the Department of Education, the DoJ, the EPA, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook- over 10 years old.

Twitter- 8 years old.

Reddit - 9 years old.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think people are saying that smartphones or Uber or even Reddit aren't terrific innovations. They are.

They're complaining about stuff like this: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/and-the-winner-of- techcrunc...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/and-the-winner-of-techcrunch- disrupt-sf-2014-is-alfred/)

One of the biggest competitions in the tech scene, and it's won by a personal butler service. Not even a robot butler; just a way to order a person to do your bidding for below the rate that you would ordinarily have to pay.

Not to mention all the money wasted on new advertising platforms, and startups that say they'll "change the world" through some trivial, stupid iPhone app. There's too much bluster and people don't get called out on it enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> The last ten years have not been that notable. The biggest change has been the speed and power of mobile devices - the advent of 3G (then LTE) has opened up a lot of opportunities. But that has nothing to do with Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or any of the other startups Sam mentions - it was technology developed by boring old large companies.

Ten years ago I had a Nokia Symbian phone that (if I recall) could only connect over GPRS. Could still check e-mail fine, though. I was using MSN Messenger to communicate with friends instead of Twitter. I uploaded my photos to Photobucket instead of Dropbox. I ripped CDs to MP3s instead of paying for Spotify.

Yes, there has been innovation. But it's nowhere near as remarkable as Sam makes it - it's simply easier to do things than it used to be.

</comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps the most unintended consequence of these innovations will have the most profound impact: keeping our youth from turning themselves into criminals.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any crimes.

"Arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 15.5 percent in 2013 when compared with the 2012 number"

[http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in- the-u.s/2013/c...](http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in- the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/persons-arrested/persons-arrested)

<comment><USER23> > Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's > because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any > crimes.

I have never heard that theory at all from any crime reporting, statistics, or books. Do you have any information on that?

<comment><USER24> Agreed, I'm fascinated by this theory but I can't find a single reference to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Useful things are wonderful, even if they're obvious and not new or even innovative. The problem is _considering_ things like Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter innovative when they're absolutely not. They're fundamentally simple communication channels that almost anyone could create, thanks largely to Internet pioneers and open source developers. Their users and public image make them valuable.

I'm very happy we have these things, and I'm happy they're well-designed and secure. But they're not really innovative.

</comment><comment><USER26> "I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation… "

This reminds me a bit when the Nightly News runs a story about something and then adds "but critics say it's not enough and doesn't go far enough".

Who are the "critics" exactly? Critics are easy to find.

Critics are visible and get attention. But never do I see any quantification of how many people actually "complain on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit about the lack of innovation". Or even care.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't want to get into the argument about whether there has been digital innovation in the last ten years, but I'd like to note an observation about the 'world of atoms' vs. 'world of bits' statement.

One of silicon valley's strengths has been its tolerance for failure. Typically, if you found a startup and it goes under, you pick yourself back up and just get a job at a different startup or a big corp. However, I'm not so sure that this strength exists in the world of atoms to the same extent as in the world of bits. Perhaps it's because non-digital skills are less fungible, or perhaps it's because the valley is so crowded by the digital crowd that there in no room for a critical mass of atom-wranglers, but I suspect that the typical failure path for non-digital startups involves leaving the valley, or at least leaving the startup ecosystem.

Perhaps Sam could speak more to this difference between the worlds of bits and atoms in the future. I know that YC is looking to do more innovative work in the world of atoms, and I laud this. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has noticed how much more successful the valley has been at bits than atoms since the 90s. I know that VCs would like to do more innovation with the atoms. But silicon valley seems to lack something when it comes to atoms that they have with bits. It's not the VCs; they are present and ready. Maybe it's something else.

</comment><comment><USER28> People who say we don't have innovation don't literally mean we have nothing new, they mean that the rate, scale or impact of innovation is much less than in preceding decades. This sentiment has been expressed outside of the tech world also: Larry Summers maintains that we are in a period of long term economic stagnation.

I don't know if the claims, as they relate to tech, are true; maybe someone should actually present some convincing evidence for it instead of vaguely pointing to Snapchat.

<comment><USER29> Part of the problem is we know what is significant today, when we look back. 1904 to 1914? Heavier-than-air flight, cheap automobiles, rural electrification. 1914-1924? Radio, airlines, diesel railroad engines, moving pictures. 1924-1934? Television, talkies, commercial radio. 1934-1944? Nuclear power, commercial TV, colour films, antibiotics. 1944-1954? Jet aircraft, nuclear weapons, commercial nuclear power. 1954-1964? Space travel, colour TV, bipolar junction transistors, vaccination programmes. 1964-1974? Lunar landing, commercial supersonic flight, microchips. 1974-1984? Microcomputers, modern medical imaging, minimally invasive surgery. 1984-1994? Internet, e-mail. 1994-2004? Commercial Internet. 2004-2014? Who knows? Ask me again in ten years.

In 2004, in the wake of the .com crash, the future of the commercial Internet was not clear. Furthermore, the argument for slowing down of innovation is not entirely implausible. The big, foundational innovations like bipolar junction transistors, microchips, microcomputers and the Internet do seem to trail off in recent decades. For all the medical advances we have achieved nothing can touch anti-biotics and vaccines in terms of impact. They aren't even close to the same category.

The transistor is an interesting case for people who claim there is nothing new under the sun: transistor ideas had been around since the '20's, but it wasn't 'til the late '40's that they were "invented" and it was the early '50's that Shockley's innovation made it possible for them to go mainstream. Shockley didn't "invent" "the transistor", but he did invent something that was such a great improvement on existing technology that when we use the word "transistor" we are generally referring to his invention, even though that is not the most general use of the word.

It is perfectly likely that there was at least one world-changing invention in 2004-2014, but it'll be another decade before we can say with any certainty what it is.

<comment><USER28> I have a hard time believing any of the pre-1974 inventions were not known to be important almost immediately. BJTs are perhaps the only exception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I still have my sense of wonder when I look at that the hardware, for example the magic supercomputer from the future that is my old Samsung S3 mini. People should really drop their smartphones less.

Culturally we've lost quite a bit of empowerment that the personal computer brought. The loss of privacy and the distinct awareness of an entity in the background collecting all data is always on my mind.

</comment><comment><USER31> The WeLL, BIX, and BBSes predated the web, and my sub-$200 computer was doing a fine job of it. Newsgroups were a thing.

I love all the tech advances, but just because the old tech wasn't as widely disbursed doesn't mean people weren't doing things that happen today.

I remember a old Byte magazine on conferencing and it had a lot of stuff that is basically todays messaging networks.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sam's question is interesting, but I think that as much as the world has changed in 10 years, it's also important to remember how much it hasn't.

I was doing a lot of the stuff I do now 10 years ago. Hell, I had a Rhapsody streaming music account and it hooked up to my TiVo, an XBMP-laden Xbox and a Denon system in 2003. And I was AIMing with friends on my cell phone in 2003 too.

But let's roll back the "I'm so l33t and the world isn't that great today" rhetoric for a second and look at why I think the real innovation argument has happened.

Where were you FIVE years ago. What were you doing then?

And in that case, with the exception of Instagram and Uber (and to a lesser- degree, Slack), almost everything I use, every service I pay for and every entity that is part of my daily life was around 5 years ago and was, more often than not, something that I used then too.

That isn't to say that the future isn't great and that there aren't improvements (and massive ones) to those services. But Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Android, iOS, Spotify, Tumblr, WordPress, Drupal, Skype, Evernote, Hulu, Netflix and the other countless services that exist now, existed then. They weren't all as awesome then as they are now, of course, but the stuff was there.

I don't write this to belittle Sam's point, but to mention that the way we judge what we use and how we use it is changing so fast that I think a decade can be too broad to look at to consider "innovation."

So if I'm comparing what we use today and what will exist in 5 years, or will be a "threshold" moment in ten years, we look at what's available and if I'm honest, I'm not sure what has happened in the last few years that is of YouTube level of game changing.

YouTube, Netflix streaming, Uber, Tinder (I suppose, I'm married so I haven't used it but my friends who use it have had their social lives changed by it), Facebook -- these are truly paradigm-altering services (and yes, Facebook wasn't the first or even an early social network but it is paradigm altering in the sense that its' the first service that literally everyone joined, thus making it feel necessary). If I look at something like Snapchat (just to pick on them because I'm not a fan), I don't see anything paradigm shifting about it. That doesn't mean it doesn't become a permanent thing in the future, but it's not like Dropbox or YouTube.

And as an analyst, that's what I want to see more of and what I'm not really seeing over the last few years (with the exception of VR stuff).

</comment><comment><USER33> I think in a post-Snowden world, innovation in information sharing and access technologies is met with a lot more skepticism and cynicism.

I was actually surprised how cynical the coverage of Amazon's Echo was. I expected to see at least some geeking out about the specs or the engineering that went into it. But the conversation was dominated by half-serious-jokes and comments about increasing Amazon's ability to sell you stuff, and giving the NSA and much higher fidelity recording of our daily conversations.

I believe we have now passed the point where the first questions we ask about new products and technologies aren't about how cool and innovative they are, but cynical questions about what the corporations selling them are really up to.

</comment><comment><USER34> Maybe it can't be helped. YC, for example, needs to make money to keep existing. To make money, it needs to invest in companies that are likely to make profit. But the best way for companies to make profit isn't to innovate, is it? It's to find an audience and some business model and all that c*p I know nothing about, but that I feel yields companies and products that "lack [...] innovation," as some complained.

Maybe, if we weren't so money driven and more of us could afford to build things for the sake of innovation and progress only, the results would be different.

But I do concur, that there is at least one exciting and relevant problem that remains unsolved in the world of bits. A problem you're well aware of. :)

</comment><comment><USER35> What was _I_ doing 10 years ago? That's beside the point. I'm in the top 1% global wealth-wise, as are most people who are able to use the services mentioned. What were people in the other 99% doing 10 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER36> What's happening now?

We all carry cel phones that are also personal computers, MP3 players, and gaming machines. They're made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google (which started as a search engine, like Lycos. Kurzweil and Berners-Lee work there now.) Apple's and Google's run 'nix. Apple's and Microsoft's are pretty hi-fi miniatures of their respective flagship OSes - in fact, in Microsoft's case, things flipped upside down and the phone UI design started driving the desktop.

TL;DR: Pocket PCs. Unix, Linux, "Windows"

</comment><comment><USER37> Roughly speaking, most advancements come in two stages

        — initial technology breakthrough

        — building massive companies for mainstream markets

These stages can be 10 years apart from each other.

Companies like Dropbox and Uber are commercializing advancements of the last decade. It's easy to criticize them as "lacking any serious innovation".

At the same time, scientists make serious advancements on materials like graphene. But few people at HN notice this progress because massive commercialization has not started yet.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting, I literally just wrote an article ([https://medium.com/@marknadal/rise-of-the-immutable- operatin...](https://medium.com/@marknadal/rise-of-the-immutable-operating- system-f7945b1da993)) on this exact issue the day before.

My conclusion? The exact opposite of Sam's. For the most part I feel like software has gotten worse while hardware has significantly improved. The one exception I will make is Dropbox, that has changed my life.

</comment><comment><USER39> Uh, I think they mean meaningful innovation, not mobile apps.

When we look back at the last 100 years of innovations, something tells me Dropbox photo sharing won't make the list.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think you asked the right question but gave the wrong examples for the HN crowd. Consumer tech doesn't always seem that impressive unless you start thinking about scale.

Instead, I think you should be pointing out GitHub, AWS, CloudFlare, Elasticsearch, Stripe, Mailgun, etc.

No one is going to convince me they want to go back to the days of racking expensive (commodity) servers in a colo and hosting Exim alongside a payments gateway.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think much of the last decade has been about streamlining information accessibility. Whoever owns information dominates the market.

It's like in one of those third world countries where a dictator coming to power would manifest his control over information channels (tv, print, online, etc) as a first thing. But here corporations are in control in a pretty way.

</comment><comment><USER42> Honestly, all these mobile apps are quite unnecessary, and sometimes downright annoying or harmful (to productivity, and peace of mind). 10 years ago I used MSN Messenger, and that was all good. I don't need to be permanently connected to other people, especially when I'm supposed to be doing something else.

</comment><comment><USER43> More examples of how much the world has changed, and how fast, from an essay I wrote a few years ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/i91og/todays_real_li...](https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/i91og/todays_real_life_is_yesterdays_science_fiction/)

It's already outdated!

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd like to remind Hacker News that the question is rhetorical.

</comment><comment><USER45> The same message delivered by Louis CK 10x more effectively [http://youtu.be/KpUNA2nutbk](http://youtu.be/KpUNA2nutbk)

</comment><comment><USER46> Whats wrong with building toys for rich people? Rich people need to play too.

</comment><comment><USER47> Sorry, Sam, SV doesn't see much in the way of serious, powerful, valuable, important _innovation_. Or, with some high irony, the real builder of SV, the US DoD and aerospace, is the real, all-time, unchallenged, unique world-class example of _innovation_ and in comparison the present SV is a bad joke.

Sam, the rest of innovation is not all about atoms, SnapChat, PInterest, AirBnb, Uber, iPhone, Android, or Tesla.

For Tesla, I predict that in a few years Tesla will have gone the way of just another fad, this one only for rich people. Why? The battery technology sucks. Thus, for the car, the range is too short and the charging time too long, especially when charging at home. And the battery durability sucks.

One of the main problems with SV innovation is one of the first steps in innovation -- objective, expert, peer review of the crucial, core technology. Such reviews are standard and easy to get from the Ph.D. committees of the world's best research universities, the best journals of original research, and the NSF, NIH, and DARPA but not from SV, YC, etc. To SV and YC, _technology_ is just routine software, often in, say, C++ or Python. Might regard the application of the _technology_ as new as a business but not the technology itself.

Net, for _innovation_ and _technology_ , SV and YC don't get even half way to first base.

Hint, hint, hint: _Information technology_ is about, right, _information_ , and basically that's not about C++, Python, Tesla, or atoms and instead: And the candidates are, low gluten diets, Yoga meditation, low carb diets, following 10 top psychics, feedback from getting out of the building, a liberal arts education with a lot of attention to the great books, video games, funding the advantages had only by college dropouts, funding teams that arrive to work on skateboards, and powerful, valuable, high quality, original research in pure/applied mathematics. And the winner is (drum roll, please). Oops, sorry, my iWatch just went dead and I lost the answer. Sorry 'bout that.

Let me know when SV is ready to read a math paper. I have one with a small typo and will place a bet with you here on HN, $1, that in the next 30 days no one at a SV VC firm or YC will be able to find the typo.

Then we can move on to noticing some leading examples of L^2, that L^2 is complete, and how to use that as part of the crucial, core foundation to building a company worth, say, ballpark, $740 billion. Hint: Divide that in half and think a little.

From all my time in pure/applied math in research universities, working on challenging US DoD problems, and in one CS lab, I was around nearly all quite bright people. Then I got to know about the SV _information technology_ world and its version of _innovation_ and did a big upchuck and, then, a big laugh.

SV _innovation_? Smoking funny stuff in an echo chamber. Just where does SV get that really strong funny stuff it smokes?

But, but, but, SV IT VC is making money for its LPs, right? Likely not very much. Or see

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital- returns.htm](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.htm)

But, Sam, surely you don't believe that there's any significant interest in innovation in SV IT, right? I mean, about _innovation_ in SV, you were just being facetious, just joking, right? Sam, please tell me you were just joking. If you weren't just going for laughs, then SV IT is worse off than I feared.

</comment><comment><USER48> > What were you doing 10 years ago?

Wasting my time on Web forums.

</comment><comment><USER49> Having a good laugh at how Sam Altman doesn't know what Snapchat is... Would love to see someone use it to send a message "about how Silicon Valley only builds toys for rich people."</comment>


Show HN: GroupSnapp – Event based photo sharing - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zilverline.photospective <comment><USER2> Excellent idea. I have a couple of suggestions in case you would like to get in touch and have a discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much, I would love to hear your suggestions.</comment></comment>


Framer X: React, meet design - <AUTHOR> https://framer.com/announcement?ref=P4vqoN <comment><USER2> I noticed those last few months that the update cycle of Framer was slower, all while they recruited strong developers. I supposed something big was brewing and I wasn't wrong. Can't wait to see Framer take on the current product designers quintessentials problems with the tools available to them.</comment>


Darpa Seeks Android Apps for Warfighters - <AUTHOR> http://www.dodsbir.net/solicitation/sbir102/darpa102.htm

<comment><USER2> "SB102-002 TITLE: Handheld Apps for Warfighters"

Just a few days ago while playing battlefield:bc2* i was thinking how easy could it be to build a military tactical support application running on commercial smartphones. Issues related to network/gps availability in a war scenario could render it completely useless but, how hard could it be to built something that provides GPS tracking with position sharing a la latitude + objectives highlighting/enemy pinpointing or the ability to store and retrieve basic objectives description (info on map)? Collect various data (collected directly from the usual device sensors or from some external peripheral connected to it) from this devices and present it in some tactical "management" overall view should be quite straightforward too.

Maybe it's too easy to build and the cost to implement it per soldier is too low too... this makes me think of that 50$ application that was used to intercept UAV video feeds... scary scenarios ahead.

* Every player has obviously a map view, can view other players in his squad and pinpoint enemy locations.</comment>


Steemit Bridges Blockchain and Social Media, but How Does It Work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/steemit-blockchain-social-media-how-works/ <comment><USER2> I saw a couple of post by people complaining that they couldn't get their Steem tokens out of the Steem system and into Bitcoin - has this been resolved?</comment>


Markdownfmt: Like gofmt, but for Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shurcooL/markdownfmt <comment><AUTHOR> (the author is a friend of mine), posting this here because I always forget that this project exists but I think it's super useful :) thought others might not have seen it yet</comment>


Square Appointment Scheduling Software - <AUTHOR> https://squareup.com/appointments <comment><USER2> This makes so much sense. Most of the places I see a Square reader are up and coming businesses, small mom and pop shops, and places that aren't corporate.</comment>


China unveils terrifying Dongfeng-41 nuke at 70th anniversary parade - <AUTHOR> https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10039105/china-set-to-unveil-dongfeng-41-nuke-that-can-strike-us-in-30-minutes-at-70th-anniverary-parade/ <comment><USER2> Some huge overcompensation going on over in China right now.</comment>


Ask HN: For what reasons did Oracle start degrading MySQL - <AUTHOR>

Can you please explain in more detail, how come Oracle started degrading MySQL even though it made public commitments to advance it for the next 5 years, while he was interested in acquiring Sun? Thank you in advance! <comment><USER2> I'm just speculating, but I suspect Oracle Database is a pretty huge cash cow - it's one of those enterprise products you can't get a quote for without a phone call.

You're not going to have every small website owner make a big purchase like that, so something like MySQL is pretty much unavoidable for them. If it can become competitive with Oracle itself for enterprise users, though, I guess the numbers could be big enough it's worth breaking some promises to protect the cash cow.

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