How We Hire - <AUTHOR> http://www.getadministrate.com/blog/how-we-hire-at-administrate/

<comment><USER2> Under the important things they've learned, "A startup is a war. ... lots of life changes shouldn't be made together", and then a biblical quote saying that a newly married man should not be set to war.

Doesn't strike me as truly the bias-free process they were earlier promoting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, was wondering in retrospect if that would be a bit bizarre without the context of the talk.

Essentially, we were saying that this idea of making sure we're not hiring people who are undergoing lots of change in other areas of life isn't a new idea, and has been recognised by ancient cultures long ago (hence the quote from the Old Testament). If you can find any similar quotes from a long way back, let me know and we'll add them!

<comment><USER3> This seems unwise to publicise. There are a few common life changes for which you cannot legally discriminate against a candidate in hiring (in the US.)

I'm not even sure why you would allow hiring manages to ask the questions necessary to discriminate against these candidates.

More fundamentally, there seems to be a conflict between candidates who assure that they are committed to the position and hiring managers who assume they cannot be.

"We were willing to hire you and put the success of our company in your hands, but we don't really trust you when you say you'll work hard, because you'll probably just go sneaking off to go spend time with your family."

I think candidates would prefer a company that trusts the judgement of its employees.

<comment><USER4> As this is the UK this is very unwise stating that you discriminate against those with young kids or those planning to start a family is insane.

If that came to court you would lose automatically.

It strikes me they need to hire some one with a basic knowledge of employment law.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we're definitely sending almost exactly the opposite message that we intended, on a slide that had a lot of verbal context put around it. I just updated it to make it more clear and remove the quote. No point to it that can't be conveyed in a clearer way. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Additional things that struck me (in addition to my other comment on censoring university name):

They give transparent pay ranges up-front. The salary game KILLS me (I can play it, but I don't like it). I had a HR person demand my current salary "so the company could protect itself", but didn't like when I asked their number "so I could protect myself". (I have a NDA that covers my current salary, but the HR person told me I should tell him anyway and "they won't know".)

They respond to every CV. THANK YOU. This should be automated for all companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> "We don't claim to be experts on HR.." then they list some prerequisites to hire and say "Don't have these prerequisites? Don't hire. Period."

...couldn't read past that. I really despise the "our way is the only right way" opinions.

<comment><USER7> You're misreading the slide. That's the criteria they use internally.

"Hey Bob, you need a new team member right? If you don't check these boxes then you don't really need one."

It's not directed towards outside people. It's just their internal process.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if you're reading the slides correctly.

Company Organization Chart, Company Handbook, Company Values.

This isn't something "Bob" comes up with.

<comment><USER7> You're not really getting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So they've hired 150 people over the last 10 years, and currently have 13 people.. Turnover much?

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, sorry if that wasn't clear. Our team (through working at various other organisations) has hired more than 150 people over the last 10 years.

<comment><USER8> Haha that was my guess, but then I looked at your website and I didn't see anything about recruiting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        4. Verbal offer and acceptance.
        5. Email offer letter and acceptance.
        6. Official offer and acceptance.
        7. Send contract over in advance to review.

This seems like the wrong order, as I would call that the opposite of "in advance". Job seekers should see a contract before accepting any job.

<comment><USER4> This is common in the UK you have an offer letter outlining the basics and accept on that basis

You have to have a contract within a month or 6 weeks(I cant remember off the top of my head) of starting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Culture fit is really important."

We could discuss hours about culture fit but this might reveal an uncontroled bias on your (remarkable) bias free hiring process because it is highly subjective. How do you ensure a recruiter assesses culture fit correctly (i.e not by the way someone dresses for example or just by ensuring that the candidate looks sufficiently like him).

<comment><USER11> They specifically mention defining company values and having predefined interview questions to test for every value.

<comment><USER10> Looks like I skipped that part, thanks. I would love to have a snippnet of the questions though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty interesting, I haven't really seen a place that filters out the Degree Pedigree and name from the CV. I'm curious if they actually have any in depth data on this, because the hiring manager working the job sounds great in theory for them to know a lot about the job, but it can also really create an environment where everyone thinks the same way.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have any data on the blinded vs. non-blinded looking at CVs, other than the anecdotal (and deeply embarrassing) realization that in the past there may have been instances where we were favoring "normal" names or becoming overly impressed with specific universities. These types of subtle biases exist, no matter how much we wish they didn't, so we thought we'd try to remove them as much as possible.

We like the hiring manager to know how to do the jobs they're managing/responsible for, but the expectation is that the person working the job should be and needs to be better. So for the first few weeks they work how the manager did things, then we specifically ask them to step out and start experimenting. It seems to work pretty well. Someone told me 37Signals has a similar policy in place, not sure what it is exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We strongly value reliability, so we're testing this with every email..."

What if the candidate is in an all-day meeting at the job he's currently working and doesn't have time to open his personal email?

This process seems to involve a lot less of the weird psychological-tests- designed-by-non-psychologists, but it's still there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think reliability is different than promptness. If someone says they'll get back to us on a certain day, we take note of that, and if it doesn't happen without a reason given, that's a concern. We wouldn't want to treat a customer that way, for example. We're totally fine with people letting us know (and this in fact just happened with a candidate recently) that their train is delayed due to mechanical failure, and they'll be late. That's a huge plus for us vs. just arriving late without forewarning.

<comment><USER14> Wait, that's basic social competence!

Sorry, but I don't think any interviewer in the history of job interviews would give a guy a job if he showed up late without warning - how is your "testing for reliability" any different?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to see they're using jobscore.com, but as far as I can tell doesn't have a presence on careers.stackoverflow.com. While I've yet to apply for a new job, I've so far found the good ads on so to be far superior (in terms of how informative they are, in letting me classify them as a probably good/bad fit right off) to pretty much any other job ads I've come across.

Ultimately I suppose the main thing is to get good talent to apply (and to a lesser extent, not waste everyone's time with those that clearly are a bad fit) -- so posting something like this on HN is probably a good strategy vs placing an ad pretty much anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for posting this; I submitted an "Ask HN" entry a few days ago to ask other start-ups how they go about hiring technical people ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978111)) - it didn't get much traction but this might be a good opportunity to find out a bit more :)

</comment><comment><USER17> >The CEO must be personally involved in the first 150 hires.

Is this a typo? Should it have read 'first 15 hires' because 'first 150' is absolute nonsense.

<comment><USER18> In fairness, it really depends on the CEO's level of involvement in those hires. If the CEO is taking time out of the day to interview each of the first 150, that might be inefficient (or it might not be, depending upon the length of time during which those 150 were hired). On the other hand, if the CEO merely has to give a thumbs up or final approval to anyone who's made it through the gauntlet, that seems like a more modest timesuck.

<comment><USER17> Modest yes but also completely unnecessary. If the CEO hasn't spent one-on-one time with the applicant then they shouldn't be the one holding the final decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > 3\. Interview

> 1\. Review blinded CVs (remove name and university whenever possible)

Interesting that they remove the name of the university, considering the seemingly widespread habit of name-dropping Ivy League universities when people want to show themselves in a good light/give indirect credentials, or is talking about someone who they want to show in a good light.

Though I've seen this behaviour on "The Internet", and The Internet is more American than Scottish.

<comment><USER20> Trust me, the British obsession with prestigious higher education establishments matches or perhaps even exceeds the American obsession.

<comment><USER4> Does it? on here I have seen a lot of comments that you have to go to the right University in the USA. And getting a good law job seems to require an extra degree from a small number of law schools

And I suspect that France is worse give the lock the tiny number of universities like ENA have on the Civilservice</comment></comment></comment>


Using Micro-Optimizations (Improving TCL Core Performance) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJrsl3fHQ74 <comment><USER2> This is Richard Hipp's presentation (of SQLite fame) at EuroTCL 2016. They "more than doubled the performance of SQLite using microoptimizations of the underlying C code". The same methods can be applied to Tcl.</comment>


Exploiting Tinder to get paid features for free - <AUTHOR> https://softwareontheroad.com/reversing-tinder-api-with-nodejs/ <comment><USER2> Excellent write up</comment>


New ways to get more done in Outlook.com - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.office.com/2015/05/21/new-ways-to-get-more-done-in-outlook-com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really glad that Microsoft is still trying to innovate, but I think that this time something went wrong with the marketing copy:

"The more you use Outlook.com, the better Clutter gets. You can help train Clutter by dragging messages in or out of the Clutter folder and you can turn it on or off depending on your preferences."

<comment><USER2> Their innovation made my friend curse heavily when he was forced to use Outlook.com for his e-mail.</comment></comment>


Analyzing the Wikileaks Afghanistan data with R - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/07/an-analysis-of-the-wikileaks-data-with-r.html

<comment><USER2> Here is the original article by Drew Conway:

<http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=2226></comment>


Think women in tech is just a pipeline problem? - <AUTHOR> http://medium.com/@racheltho/if-you-think-women-in-tech-is-just-a-pipeline-problem-you-haven-t-been-paying-attention-cb7a2073b996/

<comment><USER2> This really seals the point for me:

 _" Female voices are perceived as less logical and less persuasive than male voices. Women are perceived negatively for being too assertive. If tech culture is going to change, everyone needs to change, especially men and most especially leaders."_

This makes it sound like it's bigger than an employment problem, bigger than a tech problem. This quote makes it sound like the problem is how humans perceive males and females in general. How do we change that? Is it culturally rooted in gender roles?

Is it a problem in Western societies only? What's the ratio of males to females in Indian tech and Chinese tech and Kenyan tech? Do they have the same attrition rates?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm tactically resubmitting this, as the previous post [1] set off the flame- war detector (# comments > # upvotes). But I think this is an excellently written and thoughtful article, and deserves more visibility than it previously received. Please weigh commenting carefully with your contribution to setting up the flame-war detector.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959217)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the 3rd time at least that this thing is submitted. The second time in 24 hours. Maybe it's time to let it go.</comment>


A Deep Hybrid Model for Weather Forecasting [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/weather_hybrid_representation.pdf

<comment><USER2> as a grad student in atmospheric science, I am a little skeptical of the applicability and robustness of these approaches. There are people in our group who apply machine learning ideas for prediction, and I use them for data analysis, so I am not against data-based approaches. however, the partial differential equations which govern the atmosphere are known, can be approximated in a computer, and have been done so for decades. It seems silly to pretend otherwise, and the best/current weather predictions use data and physics.

This report make some pretty intense statements about the "limited success" of "analytical techniques", but in the end, they only claim to make an improvement of 1-2%. The kicker is that they make this comparison to the NOAA model, which is one of the crappiest models out there. The model the europeans use is about 5-10% more skillful, and it is generally recognized that the USA has fallen behind in this regard: [http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us- fallen-behind-in-nu...](http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us-fallen- behind-in-numerical-weather.html).</comment>


Questorming: exploring the unknown unknowns - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2012/1/2/questorming

<comment><USER2> Your not exploring unknown unknowns - your identifying the labels that you don't understand in the context of a project. Still a very useful methid to chart out what u know and what u don't know.

The only real way to learn about unknown unknowns other than smacking into them hard is to talk to someone in tbd field. It's the fastest most efficient way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'd argue that finding out the limits of what you know is a good step towards turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns...

<comment><USER2> One really doesn't have anything to do with the other but I wont belabour the point.

Relying on linguistic mapping of previously known relationships is a poor system for discovering unknown unknowns. talking to someone in that space is orders of magnitudes more efficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> When such a person is available... sure. But when it's a unique subject (e.g. a startup's business model) for which there is no expert other than yourself, mapping your own knowledge of the topic and finding leverage points to expand it is extremely useful.

The book example is just an example. There are lots of materials out there about writing books, so using Questorming to explore this is indeed a waste of time, but it provides a useful example.

<comment><USER2> The more I think about this more I dislike the idea of sitting around and thinking in a room.

To really figure out unknown unknowns for a business model, you should be talking to the people who are already in the market, customers or reading trade literature.

Sitting around in a room alone doing this is probably a just a huge waste of time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Git-meld-index: Run meld or any Git difftool to interactively stage changes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jjlee/git-meld-index <comment><USER2> Vim plugin Fugitive [1] effectively allows editing files in index.

[1] [http://vimcasts.org/episodes/fugitive-vim-working-with- the-g...](http://vimcasts.org/episodes/fugitive-vim-working-with-the-git- index/)

</comment><comment><USER3> That looks great, I'll give it a try at work!

Basically, if I understand well, it's a GUI over `git add -p`. Instead of the CLI short diff, you get a `meld` instance that computes the diff between two (virtual) directories, one with the modified files of your git, one with the current index. And like `git -p`, you select what you want to add to the index.

That seems great to have a global vision of modifications, and to be able to navigate between the differents files to remember exactly what belongs to the commit!

I had such a tool in mind since I discovered `git add -p`, thanks for working on it!

<comment><USER4> It's not just "selecting" exactly but editing (see the README). git gui etc. don't work quite this way I think:

Using the tool I'm finding I'm quite often clicking the right arrow to add a hunk to the index, then just editing the right hand side to delete a few lines or tweak what was edited somehow. This is a very "natural" way to stage just what you want.

Also once it supports git reset -p like functionality and also editing the working tree (see the README), I guess that visual editing workflow will get more powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > navigate to a change without saying 'n' to every change you want to skip

This tool sounds great, but in case you didn't know, 'git add -p' supports '/' to search for a matching hunk.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you use emacs - make sure you're using magit!

</comment><comment><USER7> SourceTree also has this functionality.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why not just use 'git gui'?

<comment><USER9> Because this isn't the same thing. Did you really create an account just to ask such a question?

<comment><USER10> You can stage individual lines and hunks (and split up big hunks) in git gui. So it's a valid question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> tig can also be used to stage changes.</comment>


Don't start a restaurant - lots of startup parallels - <AUTHOR> http://www.rimag.com/article/CA6699502.html?rssid=272

<comment><USER2> The article describes the new fast-casual restaurant style, which sounds a lot like a modern startup in its ethos:

>>Bill Kim's [fast-casual] restaurant..."We're going to serve really good, vibrant flavors. It's going to be $15. [Customers are] going to be in and out. I'm not going to serve dessert or drinks..."

In other words, make what people want, make it really damn good, and strip away everything else. We know this works for startups, but I wonder if it will work as well for (higher-end) restaurants, which generally try to sell an atmosphere and experience.

<comment><USER3> If you think about it, there's a class of restaurants that does something like this. What I'm thinking of is a local burrito place that is a little grungy, the employees quick and efficient (but not very polite), and with damn good food.

They've stripped everything that wasn't the core product, and they have a line out the door every day, all day. Even their branding has been word of mouth, I don't know if I've ever seen a real advertisement for them.

I'm sure this kind of restaurant exists in practically every city.

<comment><USER4> but sometimes even the really good authentic places do poorly because of location. I'm not sure how it would apply to internet startups. I have a friend who owns an authentic chinese restaurant in south beach florida. He says he makes most of his money selling fried rice by the 5-gallon bucket and lipton hot tea. There weren't enough residents in the area to appreciate high quality authentic chinese food (they don't normally serve kung pao chicken)

<comment><USER3> The mexican place I was talking about is certainly not "authentic", but it's near a university, and serve delicious food (but not really mexican). I don't think slavish attention to old-world detail is the path to a successful restaurant, so much as just making something good and accessible. Think of it as usability. Sure their potato burrito isn't really very mexican at all (really, not at all), but it's good, adjustable spice level, and an easy word- of-mouth sales instrument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If "fast-casual" is actually an industry trend, that makes me very sad. I like the full dining experience; it's pretty much the only reason I'd willingly go out to eat.

If there's no "experience" to the act of doing so, what's left is in most cases a commodity that can be made, or reasonably emulated, at home or wherever without all the trouble.

I think there's some startup parallels in that too.

Doing business with a vendor is often valuable when the vendor offers truly substantive core competencies and a breadth of experience spanning a problem domain, not just because the vendor has a competitively priced deliverable to sell you.</comment>


Ask HN: Building a site like Airbnb and Etsy with JAMStack? - <AUTHOR> Been reading lots of articles around JAMStack[0] (JavaScript, API's and  Markup) and I'm pretty excited about it.
I am thinking about building an Airbnb or Etsy like site with JAMStack and planning to host this on Netlify but unsure about how to go about doing the API part of JAMStack.
Is there any pointers on this or I going about this the wrong way?
[0] https://jamstack.org/ <comment><USER2> You have to bring your own, Firebase, hasura, and Prisma are good options for building out something quick. Netlify does not host backends, iirc, so you will have to do something there. The above 3 all have hosting options, the first is only hosted, the other 2 are open source. Prisma 2 was just released.

You will still need to implement much of the logic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just note that if you're making something that needs to rebuild, such as a blog, it will take time for new pages to build into static sites. You can get around this by making template files into which the API will dump data.

I would advise you check out Gatsby for JAMStack, they seem to be the best for this stack currently.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a job for firebase. That should provide the apis you need off the shelf. Or write your own api in nodejs</comment>


Judges Poised to Hand U.S. Spies the Keys to the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/courtint/ <comment><USER2> By the way, Ladar, Phil Zimmermann and others are working on a new secure end- to-end Email protocol: [http://darkmail.info/](http://darkmail.info/)

There's also some information on the Kickstarter page: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark- mai...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mail- initiative)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this happens, I hope more US companies or start-ups move their headquarters/servers abroad. Maybe then Congress will do something serious about it. This, perhaps more than anything revealed so far, would make me switch to a non-US based service as soon as possible.

<comment><USER4> The NSA can just crack into your servers abroad, if they want to; no warrants required. Admittedly they'd have to work a bit harder if it's not in a jurisdiction friendly to them, but breaking into foreign servers is basically their job.

If people running the company in question still hold US citizenship or keep money in the US, the US legal system can still reach them unless they never want to go home.

<comment><USER5> Yes if companies move off shore then the NSA doesn't even have to give a second thought to the legality of their actions(not that they're giving it much thought now). But if enough big US businesses move elsewhere and take their jobs and tax revenue with them, that will probably serve as a strong motivator for Congress critters.

<comment><USER6> I wish!

Reality is far from that I am afraid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We need to assume a threat model today where Advanced Persistent Threats can seize private keys from hosting providers and US companies. Both secret court orders and hypervizor exploits are part of this threat profile. This threat is greater from smaller companies. Large companies will be better able to resist secret court orders.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that the current track record supports "Large companies will be better able to resist secret court orders." They have more resources that they _could_ use for that, but they also have more to lose. I don't think we've seen evidence that they _are_ resisting those orders - and certainly have seen evidence that, for example, Verizon and AT&T are just handing eavesdroppers everything they want and then some.

<comment><USER7> Based on the conversations, I've had with various internet companies lawyers. They consider their private keys to be their crown jewels and they believe the US government would be not be able to keep it secret in the long run if they turned them over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The real questions:

a) Why does Wired, a tech pub who should know better, seem entirely ignorant of the existence of PFS cipher suites?

b) Why wasn't Lavabit using PFS? Then key compromise is mostly irrelevant as long as you're not incarcerated and can scream bloody murder.

<comment><USER10> Wired is pretty bad when it comes to actual journalism. I've noted this elsewhere on HN in the past (and have seen others echo my sentiments) but any time I read one of their stories covering a field where i have a lot of knowledge, they always get basic concepts as well as things like simple domain vernacular wrong. I can only assume this also applies to areas where I have little expertise. The more knowledgeable about tech I become, the more I view Wired as a tabloid/click bait farm.

<comment><USER11> Really, Kevin Poulsen is the Wired writer you are going to pick on?

He co-created Secure Drop with Aaron Swartz. If your memory doesn't go back that far, there was that cool article the other day about how a hacker reverse-engineered OKCupid. He's written stories that have put pedophiles in jail and exposed the FBI's use of malware on criminal suspects.

Someone else can defend Wired in toto these days, but, I will say it'd be hard to choose a less appropriate writer as proof for your first sentence.

And, yes, Poulsen was my _former_ boss and editor.

<comment><USER12> Interestingly, the post to which you're replying never actually refers to Kevin Poulsen, neither explicitly nor (as far as I'm concerned) implicitly.

<comment><USER13> Kevin Poulsen's name is on TFA.

<comment><USER12> I understand that. Where does the poster ever specifically mention "the fucking article" as the target of their discontent? It's directed at Wired as a whole, is it not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yay for client-side crypto. I think aside from making it hard(er) to steal CC#s and making online banking a bit safer, SSL is fairly useless and has been for a while.

I think a new crop of services that generate keys completely on the client and use servers as dumb, data-ignorant conduits between clients are going to be a lot more pervasive in the next 10 years. At least, that's what I'm betting on =].

</comment><comment><USER15> The meta goal is getting rid of these judges that don't take privacy seriously.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Levison turned over the keys as a nearly illegible computer printout in 4-point type. In early August, Hilton – who once served on the top-secret FISA court – ordered Levison again to provide them in the industry-standard electronic format, and began fining him $5,000 a day for noncompliance. After two days, Levison complied, but then immediately shuttered Lavabit altogether. Levison is appealing the contempt order."

Nice.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, that judge would not stop interrupting the lawyer. Is that typical?

<comment><USER18> It seems that judges can be jerks sometimes.

I was once a witness to a traffic accident, and had to go to court. The judge asked the defendant (whose inattention caused the accident) what happened, and his story wound up "and so the other guy was shaken up but not injured". The judge then gave a several minute harangue over his presumption in knowing what happened to the other guy.

Finally he asks the guy "how do you KNOW that he wasn't injured?". The guy replies, "I went to see him to apologize, and he TOLD ME that he wasn't injured."

Of course, the "told me" what second-hand so probably not admissible, but it sure didn't warrant the rant that the judge gave him.

<comment><USER19> Anecdotal, but every Judge I've met (outside of their working environment) was a pretty self-important asshole, and I've met a number...

Not always the case I'm sure but it has always made me rethink the idea of a Judge as an 'impartial' adjucator

<comment><USER20> wow lol. When I went to court years ago to defend a traffic ticket, I took the elevator up to the 3rd floor. At the second floor, the doors opened to reveal a group of people waiting to hop in.

The judge in the elevator with me quickly reached over me and pressed the "Door Close" button. This closed the doors, preventing the waiting people from getting on and the car continued to the next floor where he and I got off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why can't SSL be used to secure a symmetric key exchange that clients then save on their own computers or USB dongles?

Of course, privacy obsessed clients can simply run their own email client off a USB stick with their own private keys.

But anyway, if the servers simply store keys which the clients themselves unlock via their passwords, and the server stores nothing, the NSA would have to either sabotage the hardware the clients use or else do rubberhose cryptanalysis.

<comment><USER22> the only solution is if the client (open source so it cannot be compromised) did all the encryption and decryption. that way you can store your keys and the server can store your encrypted data. otherwise you trust a compromisable third party to authenticate the server as legit.

<comment><USER23> _" (open source so it cannot be compromised)"_

Open source is necessary (or nearly so) but not sufficient.

<comment><USER21> Why is it necessary?

<comment><USER24> Unless you provide sources, and, really, a viable build environment -- see RMS's discussions on this, and such counterexamples as Red Hat's rather difficult-to-reverse-engineer build environment (the real value-added of CentOS and other RHEL free forks), as well as Microsoft's long-standing source licenses to academics (build environment not included AFAIR) -- it's possible to hide either failures or backdoors in your products. True crypto is _well- tested_ crypto. That doesn't mean "verified" (can't prove a negative), but it _does_ mean very thoroughly vetted.

Even proprietary security companies have long practiced _source provided_ (different from "open source") code for their key crypto engines. PGP comes to mind in this regard (the company, not the protocol).

But fully open source means you've got _vastly_ more exposure of your crypto guts to examination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It seems to me that the number of computer programmers in the world contrasted against the number of judges and politicians who still do not get privacy, security, and technology provides the perfect mix for WWIII via not armed combat but by attacks against spying powers, no matter which country it might be.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wouldn't it be easier to just gain access to the datacenters where the data is stored, presumably unencrypted?

<comment><USER27> Imagine that the old mails aren't stored anymore on the servers in the data centers, but that you have all the encrypted traffic saved and you can unlock and read all the old mails. The same keys unlock the old mails and all the mails that are going to be made. Why wouldn't you want such keys?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I expect the militarization of space to follow the same approximate trajectory as all this internet skulduggery.

<comment><USER29> Only nation-states can easily weaponize space. I don't know if a treaty could restrain individuals from writing exploits.

<comment><USER23> _" Only nation-states can easily weaponize space."_

For now.

<comment><USER30> Interesting question to which I do not know the answer, can I, as an individual, give SpaceX a satellite to launch into a polar orbit without disclosing the function of that satellite?

<comment><USER31> I don't think so. I think even ArduSat ran into ITAR problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> we are f*d</comment>


Ask YC:  What is the average Facebook user like? - <AUTHOR>

I am particularly interested in specific examples of the form:  ~k% of Facebook users would be interested and able to do activity X.
For example, would one expect the average Facebook user to be a creative person capable of suggesting interesting ideas?
Would you expect the average Facebook user to be interested in interacting much with friends?  And if so, what sort of sophistication could one expect in such interactions? <comment><USER2> _Would you expect the average Facebook user to be interested in interacting much with friends?_

Yes, definitely. But in general, at least among the largely growing high school contingent on Facebook, I generally wouldn't expect much sophistication... the interactions I've observed are pretty similar to what you see on MySpace.

Facebook is growing in the older-than-college age group too, though, and naturally those users are going to act more like adults. Writing facebook applications is pretty easy, so one great way to test your idea would be to just put out a prototype and see what happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> It still takes a week or so to build an app, so there's a limit to how much experimentation you can do as an individual.

Perhaps we can share some experiences.</comment></comment>


Simple Chrome window resizer - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browser-resize/pnmdcoaajafdppfpioijldebfbpogopn

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this last year for fun while working on a responsive project, partly to continue learning about extensions and also to do some non jQuery JavaScript, to help wean me off using it unnescessarily in projects.

Code is on github too, [https://github.com/grahamlicence/chrome- resize](https://github.com/grahamlicence/chrome-resize) if you want a starting point to make your own.

In light of the "Window resizer" extension trickery I'd recommend making your own one because it's fun and you can make it do exactly what you need.</comment>


Microsoft makes a regular old laptop: The Surface Laptop - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/microsoft-makes-a-regular-old-laptop-the-surface-laptop/ <comment><USER2> "The Surface Laptop ships with Windows 10 S, the new cut-down Windows 10 SKU Microsoft announced today. Out of the box, the operating system can only run apps from the Windows Store, though it's possible to upgrade it to a full Windows 10 Pro install for $50."

It's a good compromise, still, I would have desired this $50 price tag to be around 20. Unfortunately, the Windows Store is still not as rich as we would love it to be to be completely independent of "traditional" applications.

</comment><comment><USER3> So I guess this is the first product shipping with Windows 10 S.

Is anyone else scared as much by Windows 10 S as I am? Given that it will be the cheapest option for OEMs I can envision it shipping on the majority of laptops. Being limited to only Windows Store apps seems like a huge attack on open computing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish Microsoft would build hardware that lays on the Pareto Frontier. For example, the Surface RT 1 was both more expensive than the iPad and less capable (no WSA apps). Make it cheaper than the iPad or add value elsewhere. You're not going to beat Apple for "coolness" no matter how hard you try.

Needless to say, I'm still going to be using my Thinkpad.</comment>


Sanitizing Bitcoin: This Company Wants To Track 'Clean' Bitcoin Accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/sanitizing-bitcoin-coin-validation/ <comment><USER2> It's a completely pointless task that will just hurt innocent people.

Bitcoin transactions are by their nature traceable through the blockchain- but ownership of them is not. In it's simplest form I might sell a coin to somebody for cash, the blockchain does not show this change of ownership and an outside observer now thinks that they are still monitoring the same persons transactions. If they were "blacklisted" then suddenly the sold coins are worthless, even though the original seller has had no adverse impact.

It has interesting extensions, where you are able to destroy other people's funds by tainting them with your stolen ones. The Bitcoin system does not, and can not support a system where the user can accept and reject funds. You can ignore inputs, but that gets very messy very quickly.

You end up in a situation where only institutionally "clean" coins are allowed, and the system collapses. How this ever came to fruition I'll never know.

</comment><comment><USER3> _weed out 'bad actors' – like the Dread Pirate Roberts – from the legitimate Bitcoin business world_

People of the world:

For the greater good please send all your Dollar bills and coins that were ever used for illegal activities to my doorsteps.

This is you last chance to win the war on drugs, terrorism, children, religion, or whoever else your demons might be!

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I missing something? Between mixers and single-use addresses - not to mention every mundane transaction that hasn't opted into into this tracking scheme - the odds of them being able to say much about a typical address seem practically nonexistent.

I can see some strong similarities to DRM. There are large organizations that would very much like for a technical impossibility to exist, leading some to step forward to sell a fundamentally flawed patchwork to them whose primary impact is inconvenience for end users.

<comment><USER5> Has anyone developed the bitcoin equivalent of the "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP) Response"[0] yet?

[0] [http://www.dmuth.org/fussp.html](http://www.dmuth.org/fussp.html)

<comment><USER6> Ironic given that Bitcoin grew out of the idea of a 'Proof-of-work' token that was proposed as a FUSSP itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the worst case, white market Bitcoin transactions will be no more tracked than cc/paypal/swift/sepa transactions. On the bright side, people will have much harder money and state will have much less power (no deficit spending whatsoever).

In reality though, the contamination of the market by Bitcoin will happen much faster than anyone could set up a framework of tracking it. Black markets will grow huge. A lot of intellectual work can avoid taxation easily. Especially, when younger generation finds itself in a situation of economic disaster that was created by their parents and grandparents. Teens will be less likely to tolerate all this banking nonsense.

<comment><USER8> Bitcoin, at least right now, is literally the antithesis of hard money. It has no backing, either political (e.g. Fed) or economic (e.g. gold-backed). Value fluctuates wildly. A week from now it could be worth $1,000 or it could be worth $1.

<comment><USER7> 1\. There's no problem with "backing". Gold is backed by gold. Bitcoin is backed by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not broken while being in the open for plenty of people to exploit it. Just like anyone interested may try to synthesise gold at a cost lower than the market price.

2\. Every early venture is also very volatile. Facebook, Twitter, Google, the web itself and the internet were volatile in the beginning. A lot of uncertainties, legal issues, security issues etc. Only when they reach half of the potential market, they start looking stable and glorious. I bet when gold was started to be used as a currency it was uncertain, competing with previous currencies and prices were fluctuating a lot.

3\. Bitcoin can't be suddenly worth 1$ tomorrow for economic reasons. Only for technical reasons (but then it is more likely to become worthless). Economically, no big holder of bitcoin is going to crash the price by cashing out publicly if there is a way to sell steadily and/or privately. Which happens already. SecondMarket's BIT gets all its coins and money purely privately, without anyone noticing much changes.

Since almost no one is holding Bitcoin-denomitated debts, no one is hurt by having Bitcoin price _rising_ unexpectedly. It only boosts interest. So if it stays around $430 for the months or grows to $1000, no one will be hugely disappointed. Even if drops now to $300, only a fraction of holders will suffer losses, while majority of others is still well in profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> since all Bitcoin transactions are public and pseudonymity given by opaque addresses is our ONLY financial privacy protection, services like this should be considered a direct and malicious attack on Bitcoin system.

<comment><USER8> The information is all there, and all public, right from the start. This is no more an attack on Bitcoin, than taking wood from beneath a "Free Wood" sign is theft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was just wondering given that 75% of US currency is tainted by drug traces we can safely assume it was used in illegal transactions.

So if we compare this to "dirty" bit-coins how do you determine if a coin is dirty. How recent does this transaction have to be for the legitimate organization to refuse it because if a bit-coin is considered dirty forever after being involved in a dirty transaction that wouldn't work.

I'm probably missing some intricacies of how the block-chain works since you can do transactions of any size not necessarily 1 bit-coin.

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

"Their plan is to compile a database of the known identities associated with Bitcoin addresses in the hope that Coin Validation will become the one-stop- identity shop for law enforcement when trying to find out who's doing something nefarious with Bitcoin, while providing a red-flag system for businesses who have customers trying to use Bitcoin that's associated with illicit use."

</comment><comment><USER11> The lack of anonymity holds Bitcoin back from being an effective digital equivalent to cash.

I was just thinking about this the other day. If you have one well-meaning blacklist on certain Bitcoins, you could have dozens. Stolen coins, drug coins, "Democrat" coins, coins spent on Sunday. Like anti-spam lists, each Bitcoin user could choose which blacklists to pay attention to when receiving coins, but won't necessarily be privy to all the lists that divvy his seemingly fungible pool of Bitcoin into coins that are more portable and coins that are not.

It's not unworkable to have one list that everybody pays attention to, though even that is contentious. It's the ones that will follow that should really cause concern.

</comment><comment><USER12> This was bound to happen, and cannot be stopped from happening, given the nature of bitcoin.

It's not the end for bitcoin anonymity. There will always be a market for "dirty" coins, and there won't be one definition of "dirty" either. The countermeasure is a multitude of such tracking tools, each operating on an opt-in basis, each with a different definition of "dirty". Then merchants and users would be able to choose what provenance has what value.

In fact, there is an opening now for someone to build an alternative system that isn't associated with regulators. One that perhaps might help us track stolen coins, like those from Pirate@40. On the other hand as a voluntaryist I happen to believe that DPR (the other pirate) deserved his coins, and I would accept his coins at face value.

If such an open-data solution existed, then I would feel inclined to support merchants and exchanges that reported their bitcoin addresses, knowing that (a) if their funds get stolen, people have the opportunity to reject the stolen coins thus reducing their value and the incentive to steal and (b) the public can perform audits on these bitcoin exchanges. On the other hand I wouldn't feel comfortable with a closed solution where the data gets walled off from the public, which selectively benefits those with access to the data.

The future of bitcoins will be full of unexpected surprises that seem obvious in hindsight. I think this is one of them. To the moon!

</comment><comment><USER13> Short form:My BTCs are for sale, the ones I found the password for. I'll be buying some more equities on the US and Canadian markets.

I must be terribly dull, but I fail to see why bitcoins have any store value at the moment. As a medium of exchange, I see their use. But taxes are payable in sovereign currency, and 20% of the worlds economy is taxed by 1 entity accepting only USD. Sovereign entities are not about to relinquish the power of inflating the money supply. And if I want to park money, I want to be able to pay my taxes with it when the time comes.

The p2p currency of exchange I get, as well as the distributed POW that has a reward priced in this currency. But what prevents a network of persons (or trustworthy entities) to clone it into one that has more legitimacy? What does BTC have over litecoins?

As a matter of fact, Litecoins are really more distributed as the proof of work uses a GPU instead of SHA256 that is now mostly computed by ASICs; GPUs are in every modern computer and the POW computation would not benefit from a significant speed up with ASICs. This is a better distribution platform if the breadth and width is what prevents a fork of the blockchain.

And if LTC became too expensive, volatile, etc, as an exchange medium, GPUC could be an alternative, ad nauseum.

Basically the point is: there seem to be a decreasing return on the network effect of a p2p unit of exchange, not the opposite(as for the fax machine, or facebook). This law of diminishing return, IMHO should bring to an end sooner or later this bubble caused by people failing to see the difference between a unit of exchange and an asset.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's so hard about it? Have a public registry of transactions that are deemed illegal or theft. Refuse to accept transactions by bouncing them back. So if you are the receiver of 1 btc from anyone on the blacklist you have to create a transaction that returns the 1 btc to the sender. If the address doesn't do that, then that address is also put on the blacklist. Since all bitcoin transactions are public, it is trivial to verify whether the receiver of the btc complies or not.

It could work almost exactly like Spamhaus which tracks email spammers (which coincidentally also happens to be pseudonymous) and smtp servers relaying spam.

As long as enough people opt in to the blacklists it would make life very hard for thieves. Whoever controls the blacklist would gain a lot of power yes, but since opting in would be voluntary you could always decide to use a different blacklist.

<comment><USER15> 1) Perfect for harassment, repeatedly send .000001 btc to someone, to force them to keep sending it back or be blacklisted

2)What happens when someone using blacklist A accepts payment that looks clean, only to find out they are now blacklisted on list B? No one could use bitcoin for something like ebay transactions, for fear that the payment they received might be blacklisted by some list.

<comment><USER14> 1\. It would be trivial to implement feature in bitcoin clients to automatically bounce transactions from blacklisted addresses.

2\. The situation is the same as if someone irl where to accidentally purchase stolen goods. Or as if you where accidentally spamlisted because you forgot to secure your smtp server. Your options would be:

a) Return the bitcoins and clear your status. b) Argue your case with the operators of blacklist B. c) Ignore your blacklisting and just don't do business with those who follow blacklist B. If they blacklist addresses for frivolous reasons, more people will ignore their list and it won't matter if you are on it or not.

A decent client could automatically keep the blacklists updated so it would hardly be any burden for normal users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> so, this company is trying to become the bitcoin sanitation authority? as I said before -- it would be a bad thing as there's never a way to know if the stain is valid 100%. and, where there's authority -- there's corruption. I hope it fails.

</comment><comment><USER17> The strength of something like this becomes evident in the optimistic future when governments (or at least accountants) decide to help opted-in users to report their taxes from Bitcoin-related transactions.

As others mentioned, it's not practical to try and enforce this on people who want to circumvent it, but there is certainly value in improving convenience of accounting for those who want it.

The Intuit-for-Bitcoin market is still practically non-existent, so expect to see more such announcements as the promise of Bitcoin's legitimacy continues favourably.

</comment><comment><USER18> If bitcoin clients ever adopt the zerocoin protocol then there wouldn't be anything to track:

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

Although they seem to think that the protocol should not allow anonymity for some transactions:

[http://zerocoin.org/q_and_a#what-about-money- laundering](http://zerocoin.org/q_and_a#what-about-money-laundering)

</comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't stop screaming in my head 'THIS COMPLETELY GOES AGAINST THE ANARCHIST-LIBERTARIAN ROOTS OF BITCOIN' while reading this.

<comment><USER20> It occurs to me that Bitcoin can either be an anarchist-libertarian weapon against capitalism, or it can have mainstream success, but probably not both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what the laundering rates will be and what the economy of "dirty coins" will look like.</comment>


Climate change: The rich are to blame - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51906530 <comment><USER3> I like that this approach doesn't measure money, but energy usage. Energy always feels to me like the real currency and form of wealth. Normally, we want to increase the amount of energy we can spend, alas we need to find better ways of doing so.

<comment><USER4> CEO Morgan would agree with you.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: predicting the future since 1999.

<comment><USER5> > Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this > generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future > seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew > and eat our fill.

CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed"

<comment><USER4> Energy is the currency of the future.

\- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"

I was going to link to its page on Paean to SMAC but it turns out that quote is from "Global Energy Theory", a tech that didn't make it into the final game (but had data set up for it). So there's no write-up about it.

Instead, I'll link to the Paean's "First Time Here?" page: [https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time- here/](https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time-here/)

<comment><USER5> The lore in that game was so fantastic. I wish there hadn't been an IP war over it. These days Hollywood is so desperate for ideas that it could have been a TV series or a film by now otherwise.

My favourite tech quote was MMI (mind-machine interface):

> The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this > monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile > unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the > sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army > of demons.

Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Report on Human Rights"

\----

The text doesn't do the delivery credit though, the acting as well was often phenomenal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This ignores the area where the rich do the most climate damage - <USER2> corporate activities.

Individuals and poor people don't cut down hectares of rainforest, kill hectares of soil with mass monoculture farming, spill billions of barrels of oil into the ocean, etc. All these things are done in pursuit of more profit (or at least more revenue). The beneficiaries of these activities are the rich - the execs, shareholders, banking partners, VCs, etc.

I would guess that the scale of damage done -- the disparity of climate harm between rich people and poor people -- is far greater than the individual rich vs poor personal energy consumption.

<comment><USER7> The beneficiaries of these activities are the people buying the products. If people wouldn't have a desire for more cheap food and other products then people wouldn't make it. Turns out though, that it's the poorest people for whom cheap food is most useful. An executive still eats the same amount of calories as anyone else.

<comment><USER6> That's the theory, but in practice it doesn't work that way. Just take oil and gas, for example. The poorest people are certainly not consuming large amounts of petroleum products. For example, consider the US Military - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_States_military)

The primary beneficiaries of this military consumption are the corporations that supply the goods and services that the military pays for (with public money), but the gains made by those corporations go into a relatively few pockets.

Another example is big agriculture corporations. In the US, for decades there have been subsidies paid to corn "farmers" (now big corps), to the extent that the businesses had to find ways to use corn beyond just food. Thus came corn syrup, ethanol ([https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_against_ethanol_bad_...](https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_against_ethanol_bad_for_environment)) and more.

Beneficiaries of this, again, are a few people. Meanwhile, land is burned out (soil quality reduced to worthless), plus all the infrastructure and energy use related to operating large scale farms.

If I had all day to spend, I could probably find a dozen other examples.

This has nothing to do with cheap food for poor people; and after all, the research shows that the cheap food is the unhealthiest.

<comment><USER7> > _The primary beneficiaries of this military consumption are the corporations > that supply the goods and services that the military pays for (with public > money), but the gains made by those corporations go into a relatively few > pockets._

Why do you consider the primary beneficiaries of an activity that consumes resources the ones who supply the resources? Surely, the beneficiaries from the activity itself are the primary beneficiaries. Or to put this into context: the primary beneficiaries of the military are the people and trade that the military protects. The primary beneficiary from the military's use of helmets aren't helmet manufacturers, but rather the soldiers using the helmets.

> _Another example is big agriculture corporations. In the US, for decades > there have been subsidies paid to corn "farmers" (now big corps), to the > extent that the businesses had to find ways to use corn beyond just food._

And cheap food benefits nobody? I would imagine that if the food they produce is so cheap that they have to find other avenues of using it that this would benefit people who have trouble affording food.

> _This has nothing to do with cheap food for poor people;_

It has everything to do with cheap food and goods. Without these economies of scale a chicken sandwich would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. If you had to gather all of the ingredients yourself then it would be incredibly expensive.

> _and after all, the research shows that the cheap food is the unhealthiest._

I wouldn't call potatoes and rice the unhealthiest foods. Nowadays we consider some foods unhealthy because they are so plentiful - _because that are cheap_. People tend to overindulge in them which makes them "unhealthy". Most of the time it's a question of how much is consumed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Possible policies:

* Carbon taxes

* Cap of total emissions

* Energy assistance program for the poor, or a rebate for everyone; whatever is more likely to succeed politically.

This way the lifestyle adjustment comes mainly from the top, somewhat from the middle and the poor don't waste fuels and electricity or use other means of heating like illegal firewood.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is hardly surprising. A lot of __poor __people are not going to fly, are more likely to use public transport and because they have less, or no, disposable income, consume less.

Sweeping generalisations of course

</comment><comment><USER10> Not very surprising. The question is; how do we mitigate further damage, address the damage that has been done and make sure that those responsible pay the bill?

<comment><USER11> Accounting of the externalities when applying taxes would certainly help.

<comment><USER12> Sadly this won't work. Unfortunately, the capitalist system is very opportunistic and "[my country] first!" initiatives would quickly out-compete countries and trade blocks that heavily tax consumption or production in that way.

Just look at Norway, my personal go-to example for that kind of taxation. The country has an absurdly high "luxury"-tax on cars (up to 100% all costs combined). The only reason they can do that, though, is the complete lack of a domestic automotive industry. The high taxation simply doesn't affect their national economy in the slightest. Countries like Sweden, the Czech Republic,or especially France and Germany couldn't do that - they have a substantial automotive industry.

What unfair competition can do could be observed in Europe in the 1970s and the 2000s. In the 1970s, pretty much the entire textile industry moved to South East Asia due to absurdly low costs compared to Europe (one could name it outright slavery). In the 2000s, the Chinese government did the same to Germany's solar industry by undercutting prices using substantial government subsidies.

Proper taxation of goods depending on environmental impact would be able to fundamentally change the economy from focus on consumerism to a more sustainable and cyclic economy. But it only takes a few market actors that don't participate to render the scheme unsustainable overall... And the recent trend towards autocratic "alpha males" in global politics (from the White House, to the Kremlin, to the Bosporus, and South America) paired with increasing nationalism worldwide doesn't make me hopeful for the near future.

<comment><USER10> These are some very good points. Thanks for putting them together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Us "Rich People" have agency to push entropy aside, using energy as a resource, in a way that people in undeveloped areas do not.

<comment><USER5> ye and that agency comes at a global cost. I'm looking at the ankle deep water in Bangladesh. Who is paying for that? Not the 'rich'.

How is that anywhere near the human principal of 'fair'?

<comment><USER14> Do you really think that Bangladesh's problem is the "ankle deep water"? Honestly, I think the left has completely lost it. Let me elaborate very briefly: forty years ago, the left would have been concerned with people in the poorest countries living in mud huts, with no food safety, no hospitals in reach, no schooling, no protection from illness and natural disasters.

Nowadays- and it's enough to read a left-wing newspaper to realise- the left is only concerned with the marginal increase in misery (supposedly) caused to the poorest by climate change. While in fact the mythical baseline we should bring the world back to is only just slightly better than the current situation, that is, still horrid by any standard.

If your problem are the floods in Bangladesh, you'll help them very little by cutting the jet trips of the rich west; what they need are tons of energy and machines to build water management systems, schools to educate a class of engineers and civil servants, factories to build job security, agriculture to build food safety and resilience. All stuff that in fact emits shittons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

/rant

<comment><USER5> Ankle deep water is just a flippant way of referencing rising sea levels. Some families that used to have low-lying farmland now just have a river, raise ducks instead of chickens.

Its a visible outcome of the use of fossil fuels. Obviously its not Bangladesh's only nor primary concern.

Also, FWIW, I find it exceptionally offensive that you've tried to turn this into some left/right hocus pocus. Global warming, climate change, developing world poverty; these are all issues where the directional political learning does _nothing_ to provide the solutions.

<comment><USER14> > I find it exceptionally offensive...

Not sure what you mean with this. What I was trying to say is that the political side that is traditionally more vocal about the need to improve the condition of the poorest (I think we can agree on this- that's what defines the left anyway) has- in my opinion- lost its way by focusing too much on the climate issue as if it were the source and the solution of all problems.

More, I think that the left has actually bent the climate issue (which is at its core a scientific issue, something that transcends any value judgement) to the point of making it coincide exactly with its fundamental ideological framework- which explains why climate change is felt as such a central problem by leftwing/ liberals and leaves rightwing/ conservatives so sceptical.

(To give you an example of what I mean with this: you'd expect campaigners for action against climate change to organise big rallies in favour of the construction of hundreds of nuclear plants- or at least for more money into research for cheap and safe nuclear energy. This doesn't happen because the issue of climate change has been shaped into a glove that fits perfectly the ideological framework of the left: less industry, less capitalism, less consumption, more redistribution).

<comment><USER5> What I mean is that we were having an interesting discussion about energy meaning agency and how that agency might also have trade-offs and then you were like:

> DAE left and right?

and its just completely unnecessary. I'm sure you enjoy using that frame to approach issues but appreciate it can have a negative impact on discussion, especially somewhere like here where we all appreciate agency and doing stuff and solving problems.

The reason environmentalists who campaign for environmental issues don't campaign for nuclear power is that many of them are also not fans of nuclear energy as they are concerned about nuclear waste. I don't feel like that particular outcome is that surprising given the history of that movement. If you're looking for consistency there maybe they should be more into battery tech to handle green power downtimes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [offtopic rant]

Coronavirus is hitting back hard on behalf of nature.

Pollution levels in worst hit areas have come down. Industries have shut down and economic activity has subsided.

Coronavirus is in a way a ironic f __k you to Humans. Its the kind of enemy that we as a civilization are worse prepared for.

Even after all the technological breakthroughs, we are still nowhere.

With our current technology we can easily tell whether there is a cat or a dog in a picture, but can't tell quickly enough whether a asymptomatic person standing right in front of you has Corona infection. Way to go! Let's make some more bright graduates to work on making people click more ads, yeah.

<comment><USER16> The greatest tragedy is we have 50 years of lost geniuses doing Quant work for Wallstreet instead of making scientific breakthroughs.

<comment><USER17> Being fair, efficient allocation of capital is important. it creates wealth, which improves human life.

There are definitely lots of bulshit jobs out there, but I wouldn't call quants among the highest tier in terms of waste of human talent. I'd probably look at adtech for that.

<comment><USER18> This would make sense if our markets were optimising for something useful other than how to extract wealth from workers & consumers whilst providing as little as possible in return.

Practically everything on this site is about moats & branding. Of waves of VC money swamping an ingrained industry with the hope of carving out a monopoly. Of google smashing existing competitive markets giving away a better product for 'free' in order to have better surveillance of phools so google can sell their spending.

None of this is "efficient allocation of capital". Unless your goal is wealth concentration and the destruction of democratic liberal society.

We need a cultural change to lauding regulation that enforces competition in our markets and politics. Otherwise we're on a rapid track to feudalism.

<comment><USER19> Fortunately, that's not all of it, it's a circle:

markets optimize production and take from workers

workers enjoy what markets provide and optimize the production and specifically production value of human work, taking from those who are producing

production optimizes what markets will sell and take from them.

And in practice it's 100000x more complex than this, mostly because such complexity is necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> consume less, be moderate, have a healthy lifestyle, avoid civilization and have an abundance of happiness! and MOST important - don't read stupid comments on HN haha

<comment><USER12> The irony in your comment stings so hard, I'm feeling like a fakir reading it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ridiculous reductive nonsense

<comment><USER22> Agreed. This article is takes something complex and reduces it to total idiocy.

<comment><USER21> It's a reimagining of original sin. And it can get lost. Evil way of thinking

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the reason this got flagged?

<comment><USER23> It hits close to home.

<comment><USER10> That could be a reason...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Climate change: we need to make everyone less well-off in real, tangible terms that will directly affect every part of their lives. Justified by framing it in class-war terms, but with proposals that will make many things that were once available to the masses luxuries for the really rich. It's like it's a simultaneous demonstration both of why many on the right believe fighting climate change is just a left-wing weapon to push their ideology _and_ why the supposed natural audience of the anti-rich populist left, poor and working- class members of society, are "voting against their own interests" and not supporting them.

<comment><USER25> The alternative is random unevenly distributed making of people less well off; such as the Australian wildfires or the gradual flooding of Miami.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Climate change aside:

This trend of measuring what resources rich people use compared to everyone else just snacks of jealousy. Who cares if energy distribution isn't "equitable"?? Just live your life and stop comparing.

Edit: Prepared to eat Karma here, but it's what I believe.

<comment><USER27> Aren't we somehow in this boat together?

<comment><USER28> Some of us are reluctant to give up the good seats in order to save the boat.

<comment><USER6> More accurately, some passengers are rich enough to afford to buy an extra seat just to carry their extra luggage, depriving a poorer person the opportunity to share the ride.

<comment><USER10> An extra seat? The whole deck.

<comment><USER10> I mean, seriously, have you had a look at wealth distribution? It's about 0.7 percent that owns about 46% of all the wealth. ([https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/nov/2017-11-13T1...](https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/nov/2017-11-13T16:11:56/embed.html))

To stay with the boat analogy; the top half of the boat is nearly empty, reserved for the exclusive use of some few rich people (and maybe their servants), while the lower decks with the machinery is teeming with masses of poor people, crowded by the hundreds into vast rooms right beside the boilers, devoid of any infrastructure or sanitation, barely able to move or breath.

The boat is sinking and the poor in the lower decks are drowning. All the while the few rich in the upper decks are trying to cut a way pieces of the boat and make them swim by themselves.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. And when something like Corona hits, and the mass of poor people get sick all at the same time, then the boat stops moving.

We are observing the early stages of a correction in the way of life, and I daresay the near/medium term future will be quite different than things have been for the previous 40 yeras.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


No Combat Without Movement: Enders Game as Maneuver Warfare Primer - <AUTHOR> http://blogtarkin.com/2013/01/28/there-is-no-combat-without-movement-enders-game-as-maneuver-warfare-primer/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand what all the fuss is about. It's a great book---in fact, for a while, it was my _favorite_ book---but humans have been fighting wars for thousands of years. The Romans ruled the ancient world, and the Mongols Asia, with their mobility.

And yet we're supposed to believe that "hey, strategic and tactical movement is pretty great" is a new idea?

Frankly, _most_ of the time, size and power win the day. Oracle is still here. Microsoft is still here. Yahoo is still here.

The reason Card writes about weakness combined with movement and agility and brilliant insight is the same reason we are all fascinated with startups--- because they're all counterintuitive (read: loses most of the time) and therefore _fun to watch_. That's it. Not because it's always a superior fighting style. Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done.

Now, I am an underweight computer programmer, so I don't know what I'm talking about. All I've done is think, and play video games. Which is precisely what Card has done.

And I say this as a fan of Card's work. But turning military fiction into the Art of War is a little much, it seems.

<comment><USER3> > _And yet we're supposed to believe that "hey, strategic and tactical > movement is pretty great" is a new idea?_

Well, no -- I don't think that point was really argued anywhere in the article. The tactics of movement are perhaps only recently being formalized, but I think most students of history would agree that all modern military strategy has historical precedent ... assuming that you generalize the tactic broadly enough.

> _Frankly, most of the time, size and power win the day._

Hmm. There are two ways I can see to parse this: one is historical -- "most of the time, size and power have won the day" -- and the other is theoretical -- "most of the time, size and power will win the day". I would readily agree with the first, but I'm circumspect about the latter.

I avoid computer games because they're a time sink that I can't afford, but I did get introduced to Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, and I still set aside a little time for it now and again. It is a game that depends _very strongly_ on relative sizes to determine victories. But, my favorite race is militarily also the weakest one. I have the most fun trying to break the game, coming up with less obvious tactics and strategy.

I think there are enough exceptions to the rule of the mightiest throughout history that it's somewhat self-defeating to assume that force size will decide a battle.

> _Oracle is still here. Microsoft is still here. Yahoo is still here._

Although there are some parallels, business is different from war. We shouldn't use businesses to make points about military strategies.

> _The reason Card writes about weakness combined with movement and agility > and brilliant insight is the same reason we are all fascinated with startups > ---because they're all counterintuitive (read: loses most of the time) and > therefore fun to watch._

Well, sure. That doesn't mean that it can't also be a good example of a subject.

> _Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done._

I would counter-argue that WWI in particular was such a messy, horrible, ugly disaster particularly _because_ of the use of non-fancy maneuvers combined with new technology. Trench and chemical warfare was direct force-on-force conflict, and because planes were relatively new inventions, they were de- emphasized despite being exactly what each side needed to win the war.

<comment><USER4> > I would counter-argue that WWI in particular was such a messy, horrible, > ugly disaster particularly because of the use of non-fancy maneuvers > combined with new technology.

Most of the military histories of that war I've read don't so much blame the tactics, but technological limitations. Radios were still too large and power- hungry to be practical anywhere but at sea, last-mile telephone cables tended to get cut by artillery as soon as battle started, and optical signalling (e.g. flags) were difficult to make out near the front, leaving commanders basically with runners and carrier pigeons as soon as battle started.

When a local engagement can be won and lost in half an hour to an hour, but the communications RTT is 2-3 hours, maneuver warfare gets impractical (as do a lot of other things, like long range artillery against anything other than fortifications).

<comment><USER5> > _When a local engagement can be won and lost in half an hour to an hour, but > the communications RTT is 2-3 hours, maneuver warfare gets impractical (as > do a lot of other things, like long range artillery against anything other > than fortifications)._

Which invalidates the entire GP's reasoning about 'size and power always winning the day'. You can't really compare warfare modes before and after portable radios; feedback loops are different.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely - although note that, at certain historical time periods, the command and control situation was closer to the current one than the WWI situation. The early 20th century was just a period when weapons ranges and (off-battlefield) transportation speeds had gone up immensely, increasing the effective size of a battlefield from practical shouting/runner range, while battlefield communication still hadn't caught up. On the other hand, there are clear examples of maneuver warfare in ancient times, involving tiny (by modern standards) amounts of space and force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I first read this book early in my first USMC enlistment in the late 90s. It was (is?) on the Commandant's Reading List, even, as recommended reading for mid-grade NCOs and junior officers because of the strong representation of maneuver warfare, the importance of individual initiative, etc. In the intervening years I've read it a good 10-15 times. If you've not read it you're missing out.

<comment><USER7> Have you read Lind or Leonard's book?

<comment><USER6> God no. I think by "best book" he means most entertaining and most accessible treatment of the concepts of the book.

<comment><USER8> Ha!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To all thinking of reading Ender's Game, do not expect some epic storytelling with the grandness of Asimov, Herbert or Tolkien, or the depth of a Greg Bear or Gibson, or intrigue of an Iain S. Banks or George R. R. Martin, or fortelling of an Arthur C. Clarke or Heinlein, etc.

The maturity, scope and content of the writing in Ender's Game's pales in comparison to many childrens books, modern or otherwise, including J.K. Rowling's.

As someone else in this thread posted, it will feel like reading a (barely) sci-fi version of Twilight, aimed at a pre-teen audience, and you may question why some opine the book's greatness. You may have a point...

</comment><comment><USER10> I've read this book a good 3 or 4 times and it never ceases to amaze me. Ender's Game is without a doubt Orson Scott Card's magnum opus and a must read for anyone remotely interested in science fiction. I always had an interest in the combat tactics employed in the book, and admired Ender's seemingly unlimited ability to innovate, but never realized it had such a concrete grounding in legitimate military tactical theory.

<comment><USER11> I used to like this book. Then I realized it's basically _Twilight_ for teenaged boys and started to think about it more critically.

Ender is an impossible creature and creates an archetype that cannot be lived up to. People make mistakes, it's what makes them learn, advance, succeed, become stronger. Ender is some kind of perverted ideal.

The way this essay describes military strategies makes it seems like those running today's theaters are absolute idiots that simply smash one group of soldiers to another just like the British did in the 1800s. This is not the case. "Attrition theory" is not what's employed in individual battles, pawn- for-pawn style exchanges. The US Army, as an example, takes extremely low numbers of casualties with staggeringly high numbers of casualties inflicted.

Most of these bold claims about Card's novel seem like fluff on closer examination. They're plot drivers for a novel and in that sense they bear a similarity to real-life examples. Nothing more.

<comment><USER12> Ender is profoundly not a role model. I think you may have missed something crucial there.

<comment><USER13> Except that in practice, he actually _is_ a role model for a large number of people in the military.

<comment><USER12> Well, yeah; "Shut up, do as you're told, and we'll succeed in exterminating those other people" is a lesson the military takes in a somewhat different light from the general public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the article confuses physical 'movement', with maneuvering, which in the context of maneuver warfare is more about adapting your strategy to both hit the enemy's critical vulnerabilities (again not just physical, we're talking media, moral, supply chains, sight, ability to discriminate between civilian an enemy, timely communication of orders, ability to concentrate force, etc), while covering your own.

Movement and physical speed is just the most basic of the possible maneuvers in this context.

The rest of it does seem pretty good/interesting though

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting article, but I've read Leonhard's book _The Art of Maneuver_ and it does a much better job of explaining all of this and especially putting it in context than _Ender's Game_ does. And includes some very additional interesting ideas such as classifying weapons by what sort of behavior they'll induce in your enemy as the enemy tries to avoid or defeat them.

</comment><comment><USER16> Something that gets explored more in the sequels is what being a soldier does to him- Ender becomes a dedicated pacifist, effectively founds a religion, and devotes the rest of his life to undoing xenocide.

And it's cool that those are actual tactics- plus the timeline makes it look like Ender's Game was actually on the cutting edge of military thought.

</comment><comment><USER7> How does the review begin with:

 _"Despite this aggregation of martial thought, the best book on maneuver warfare is in fact a 30 year old science fiction novel. Although incomplete in addressing all aspects of theory, Ender's Game is one of the best books on maneuver warfare ever written."_

And then conclude with:

 _"Not all precepts of maneuver warfare are explored in the book...Nevertheless, there are enough examples in the book to make a credible case for the book as a primer on maneuver theory."_

It is worth noting that for Lind maneuver warfare was third generation warfare and not fourth generation warfare.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really liked Ender's Game and can not wait for the movie <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/>

<comment><USER18> They'll slaughter it, for sure.

I don't have any _evidence_ of this mind you, but I've been through this cycle with favorite books enough times to have learned: don't get your hopes up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice article. I read EG in high school and I'm Marine now, but never thought about EG as a primer on it. Depending on what experience kids have, maneuver warfare can be a difficult concept to grasp. But once understood, it can be applied widely (e.g. to business). For example, in my current startup I may not have the technical background, but I've found ways to compete anyway. Another example is where Malcolm Gladwell describes Col Van Riper's exploits in his book Blink.

Anyway, I have friends who are ROTC instructors and forwarded this article to them. MCDP 1 (Warfighting) is dry, so EG is a fun (though shallow) primer to discuss. It should also make the concepts in Warfighting easier to visualize for someone without any concept of asymmetric warfare.

To respond to some of the comments, maneuver warfare isn't a new concept but it's obvious it's not well understood, particularly in business. Another useful military idea to apply to business is the OODA loop (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop>).

</comment><comment><USER20> Another sci-fi book (or series) that would be relevant in the context of tactics and strategy, is Jerry Pournelle's books/compilation on Falkenberg's Legion:

<http://www.baenebooks.com/p-322-the-prince.aspx>

<comment><USER21> Less good for strategy but more for simply being excellent military sci-fi, I'd recommend David Drake's Slammers series and Joe Haldeman's _Forever War_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was just reading about "Surfaces and Gaps." There is a concept there called "reconnaissance pull" versus "command push." Basically, that's MVP, A/B testing, and pivoting.

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently picked this book up after hearing great things about it for so long. I'm not surprised that much of the information is relevant from a strategic sense. The book is really written in a thoughtful and careful manner.

Side note: I really hope the movie coming out later this year does the book justice.

<comment><USER24> I had the exact opposite experience. After everyone gushing about it, I finally grabbed it a couple of years ago. I would've _loved_ this in my teen years, but as a 30something, it felt like a rather mediocre military sci-fi book with a huge Mary Sue protagonist and dubious moral conclusions. Well, at least it wasn't as long as Atlas Shrugged.

<comment><USER25> I couldn't agree more. Ender's game is pretty much Atlas Shrugged in space, written in a slightly less abysmal style. Same complexity in characters, same vindication of the megalomania/resentment of the introvert male teenager reader, same cult following.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> WARNING, contains spoilers.</comment>


Things I learned while breaking my car - <AUTHOR> http://tumblr.2arrs2ells.com/post/12212048934/things-i-learned-while-breaking-my-car

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the OP - would greatly appreciate feedback, as I try to write more regularly.

Also - this didn't make it into the article, but I'm pretty sure the issue has to do with a cable that got disconnected / soldered joint that broke (the stereo was working, but seems to have lost power about a week ago).</comment>