MasterCard under DDOS, can't process SecureCode online payments - <AUTHOR> http://blog.securetrading.com/2010/12/mastercard-maestro-3-d-secure/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I just finished Accelerando a few days ago (late to the party). I'm hopped up on futurist vision.

First, let's stipulate that 4chan's Anonymous raids are mostly juvenile and often ineffective at doing anything meaningful to their targets.

At the same time: The ability of a community to completely self-organize, without central direction, and instantly execute a publicly-visible plan like this is without precedent in human history.

It stands to reason that as time goes on, larger groups of people will become involved in communities that exhibit 4chan-like cohesion. A larger pool means a higher likelihood of these groups including people with the knowledge and ability to do ever-increasing damage.

The long-term implications are interesting. Into the future, are we talking about the instant formation and dissolution of "terrorist" or "dissident" groups, bound together by transient common interest and gone again within days or hours? If you're a government or corporation, this is terrifying. You can keep tabs on other governments, and even traditional terrorist cells, which each move at the speed of the usual group dynamics, proportional to their size.

But what the hell do you do about groups you can't predict that are gone before you even figure out what's wrong? Groups that aren't bound together by national identity or other easily quantified affiliations – just ideas, ideals and transient events?

There's something meaningful here that points to how we all get along in the future, in the same vein as the "post-secrecy world" presaged by Wikileaks- style activism enabled by network technologies.

Or maybe I just need a nap.

<comment><USER3> > _The ability of a community to completely self-organize, without central > direction, and instantly execute a publicly-visible plan like this (...)_

I don't see any reason to believe it went down that way.

It's probable it was a group who already had much of the ability in-place to execute an attack like this, and who decided to target mastercard.com because it was found to be vulnerable, or because paypal and amazon were out of thier reach.

<comment><USER4> Not a real group so much as whoever wants in, is in, on a per-effort basis; a movement is spearheaded by an individual or two and each so-called member spontaneously decides whether to participate or not. "Anonymous" is hardly a group or organization, any more than the IRC channel for your favorite framework. A weak analogy is whenever Redditors decide to contribute to a certain cause or user. No one decided for the group, and there was no real vote, but nevertheless without the community most individuals would not have contributed.

Economist / Babbage: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileak...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks) (I think he gets the definition of OP wrong, but everything else seems to jive with my non-firsthand understanding.)

<comment><USER5> It's relatively accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cyber warfare has always been a staple of sci-fi fiction, but generally between nation states. I can't help but wonder if the reality is that this 'warfare' won't be so much between nation states, but between governments and the public and we're witnessing the start of this with a secretive and paranoid government(s) on one side and a distrusting and increasingly activist 'public' on the other. Corporations are stuck in the middle looking at their bottom line, but pressured from both sides.

<comment><USER7> I read an interesting editorial a few months back -- can't remember where -- that basically made the counter-intuitive point that we are not headed towards totalitarianism. Far from it. We are headed towards mob rule.

The writer used the various strikes and protests in Europe as an example. His point was that as the nation-states became less relevant, people would begin to more closely associate in virtual groups than geographic ones.

I _also_ read the recent leaks about China, which leads me to believe that the Chinese think they can keep a lid on the internet.

This could be the beginning of a long, drawn-out period of chaos and overreaction by all sides. Sure would suck to have to choose between that and totalitarianism (even if, in the end, totalitarianism wouldn't work) Perhaps this is some author's overactive imagination though. I sure hope so.

<comment><USER8> Public demonstrations in Europe these days are generally well-behaved. Probably the main motivation for taking to the streets is to ensure that the government at least acknowledges an issue rather than simply ignoring as was case in the past.

The anarchist groups active today are a little less troubling than groups like the Red Army Faction, Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army that were a feature of the 1970's and 1980's.

The real danger of mob rule might come from unscrupulous politicians making capital from social tensions. The recent series of expulsions of Romany from France and Italy were certainly a very troubling reminder of Europe's recent history.

<comment><USER9> 1989 is only a bit over 20 years ago:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C5%9Fescu>

And I do not doubt that if some European politician got it in to their heads to try something really stupid that such 'reminder' demonstrations would turn violent pretty quickly.

In France it wasn't 5 years ago that 100's of cars were burned every night and in the Netherlands squatters do battle with the riot police with some regularity.

Mob violence is never far away.

<comment><USER10> I think that the events in France don't belong to this list. France is dealing with a lot of youth criminality from ghettoized communities. The burning of cars was not backed up with any political claims. It only reflects how authorities are losing control over certain neighborhoods.

<comment><USER9> The burning of cars was - as far as I understand it - a direct consequence of multiple decades of festering trouble that was not adequately recognized or responded to by politicians. The shortest complete description of the background on this was something like 'these youths are protesting not against any specific policy but against being born in to a situation that they find it almost impossible to escape from in the country that they are nominally a citizen of'.

If you can do better than that be my guest, but I definitely see them as motivated by politics, even if not directly attacking a specific policy or having a concrete goal. It's more an act of frustration with life set off by the friction between police and these youths, specifically one incidence was the spark that set off the powder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's sort of interesting - maybe even ironic, although I don't know if that adjective is quite applicable - that when a news story comes out that says that a major website is down due to DDOS, the first thing I do - and probably what many others do - is try to go to that website to see if it's still down. That, of course, must make the situation so much worse.

<comment><USER12> compared to the traffic the servers are seeing from the bots, the single requests of curious people is pretty negligible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this is setting a very dangerous precedent. Yes, it was lame what Mastercard did to Wikileaks, but it wasn't technically illegal. What Anon is doing to Mastercard, however, is completely illegal and damaging, not only to MC but to its customers too (who are innocent bystanders in this case).

<comment><USER14> I'm going to try to articulate a position that I think that I understand but is not mine, so please bear with me.

Let's put aside what is "legal" and focus on what is "socially desirable" business behavior from the perspective of Anon. MasterCard, as a private entity, has wide leeway in how it chooses to deal with other private entities such as Wikileaks. Is this socially desirable? While I have no special insight into what Anon is thinking, I would surmise that they are not pleased that private entities are restricting free-flow of information and acting as a state's agents even when not compelled to do so by the force of law.

We've heard from many business (Amazon, PayPal, etc) that blocking WikiLeaks (and consequently inhibiting free distribution of classified US documents and secret corporate information) is, at its core, a profitable business decision. I would guess that Anon is trying to send a message that such an "anti- freedom" decision (scare quotes intentional) can instead become very expensive.

<comment><USER15> It's not a dissimilar concept to strike action, in that it may well have a negative effect on customers, but is believed to be neccesary none-the-less.

I fully support unions and strikers, however I'm not sure how I feel about this kind of action. The similarity ends with differences such as strikers have names, faces, spokespeople, they decide together if they are for or against striking, it isn't one or more people with nothing to do with the company who makes the decision.

<comment><USER16> Strike actions have symmetry and boundedness. Withholding labor obviously affects both the company and the workers and the action can only go so far since both sides need each other to survive.

This kind of action is _asymmetric_ and _unbounded_ : Anon can hurt MasterCard without cost to himself (presumably) and he can theoretically carry it out for as long as he wants. This can only lead to some kind of escalation if MasterCard (and similar entities) want to survive.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. My comparison was purely in reply to the concept of "you shouldn't hurt a company to improve things, because it hurts their customers too."

<comment><USER17> Well the you can compare it with commercial sanctions to Cuba, Irak or North Korea that the international community don't suffer too much (they're not big players) but the people of those countries do, not only their governments.

<comment><USER18> OTOH, you can't let dictators use their own population as hostages, when they buy weapons instead of feeding the populations (Saddam, which you mentioned, had lots of money from smuggling).

Also, is it better to let those populations suffer in "jail" for generations? (If I was Eastern European, I'd be pretty pissed to have been left to rot until 1989.)

If nothing else, the dictators spread their problems (support of terrorists, atom weapon programs etc).

Look at WW II for what will happen when democracies are pressed. At the start of the war, British military argued against bombing private property (German factories). Compare that to a few years later.

(I guess the place where this is closest to happen next, is Israel and the humongous Hezbollah (/Hamas?) arsenals of rockets optimized for attacks against civilians.)

Point is, those juntas are arguably a blight on humanity that needs to be solved, the longer it takes the worse it might be.

Ah well, this is both after the discussion and irrelevant to Wikileaks.

Edit: Made a bit clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm really not a fan of Internet mob justice. I don't see how this attack helps Wikileaks in any way. It's only going to make it harder to find anyone willing to do business with them.

<comment><USER20> It doesn't help WikiLeaks and it's not supposed to. What you're seeing is a group of people who looked at MasterCard's decisions, and reacted to prove them wrong.

MC thought that preventing money from going to some people who move information around was a smart business decision. Anonymous replied with, <<No, trying to prevent the free flow of information is a _bad_ business decision.>>

They do this, presumably, with the idea that next time MC will think twice before doing their part in silencing the flow of information.

This is all irrelevant to WikiLeaks. They have nothing to do with this at all, except that their particular case provides Anon with a clear example to set for MC.

<comment><USER19> You really think cyber terrorism is going to make Mastercard more likely to want to work with similar groups in the future?

<comment><USER20> Woah, don't put words in my mouth like that! I _never_ said I thought that. That said, I'm not sure I understand your question. Wikileaks and Anon aren't related. MC can't choose to deal or not deal with Anon. Their choice is about Wikileaks, who have nothing to do with any of this.

If they continue to choose to ban payments through their system to Wikileaks, I assume they'll continue losing money from DDoSs. _shrug_ I don't have any idea what'll happen, but I think you have to accept that Anon has a point, even if you don't agree with them.

MC slows the flow of information. Anon slows the flow of cash to MC. If MC doesn't respond, it seems like they'll keep losing money.

<comment><USER21> While I understand the logic of your point, I think the assumption you make is that MasterCard will add in the costs of a possible DDos attack when considering whether they made the right business decision.

And I think the answer is no, although it's arguable. There is surely a point at which MC will try to do the "right" thing instead of the profitable thing, and it's easy to see how that point is between cutting off Wikileaks (which arguably is harming US national interests) and changing business strategy to appease hackers.

<comment><USER22> I think you missed his point again. He's not speculating as to what MC will optimize. He's just stating point of fact, as we understand it today. If you do A then B will happen.

Given that its unclear to me that what Wikileaks even did is illegal (<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/world/02legal.html?_r=1>) I have little sympathy for MC. It just feels like they're a bully in this situation. It does suck for their customers though. Maybe more customers will drop MC due to their inefficiency? Who knows.

<comment><USER19> How is it being a bully to deny service to a customer who may or may not be committing a crime? There is no inalienable right to have a credit card merchant account.

<comment><USER5> That's why we call it 'being a bully' and not 'committing a crime.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If Private companies, all in concert, deny a party the ability to publish for whatever reason, is that different from government censorship?

I think not. It is of course if it is only one private company, because the individual has a choice, but if all private companies deny it, then the individual has no choice, thus it is no different than the government itself having denied it.

This that we are seeing, I believe, is the connection between corporations and government in action, the business-government complex if you like. Private companies should not have the right to discriminate based on other's beliefs or opinions.

</comment><comment><USER24> Only SecureCode is affected (the MC equivalent of Verified by Visa), not all MasterCard online payments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I updated the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Better attack: reduce the credit card usage, and try to pay more with cash. As both MasterCard and Visa (the ones against Wikileaks) take the gross of its revenue from retail and pay by credit, that could really hurt them... but without doing anything illegal. It's just business: you fuck Wikileaks, I reduce your profit, dear [put your favourite megacorp name here].

Boycott list:

        * Amazon (Amazon stops hosting WikiLeaks website [Reuters, 20101202])
        * Tableau Software (Another Falls: Tableau Software Drops Wikileaks Data Visualizations [20101202])
        * Everydns.net (WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name [guardian.co.uk, 20101203])
        * Paypal (WikiLeaks loses PayPal revenue service [cnn.com, 20101205])
        * PostFinance (Swiss bank freezes WikiLeaks founder's legal defense fund [rawstory.com, 20101206])
        * MasterCard (MasterCard pulls plug on WikiLeaks payments [cnet.com, 20101206]
        * Visa (WikiLeaks loses PayPal revenue service [ibnlive.in.com, 20101207])
        * Twitter??? (it was or it wasn't censorship?)

<comment><USER26> Boycotts are good way to go. But for giant companies like Amazon and Paypal, it is unclear that they would be able to correlate determine ___why_ __their sales are going down.

Unless the Boycott is huge.

<comment><USER27> Both Amazon and Paypal ask you why you closed your account with them.

Now, if you just reduce your usage of their services, then you're right, it'll be hard to attribute.

<comment><USER26> Is it a checkbox, or do I write in: WikiLeaks?

<comment><USER27> No Wikileaks checkbox, you have to write it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A better way to show Mastercard that you don't like what they're doing would be to cancel your Mastercard and/or stop accepting MC payments.

<comment><USER29> This only works if enough people do it AND tell MC (and possibly the media) why they're doing it, though.

<comment><USER30> Yes, and that is how it is supposed to work. Boycotts and demonstrations not working, does not justify attacks.

<comment><USER31> The problem is this isn't how it happens. First, consider that no attack is really happening. It's merely digital, it harms no one physically. So this is merely economic harm (indeed, calling it an attack only elicits sympathy for the victim). Gandhi used an attack on the economy with his salt march. He broke laws.

Boycotts and demonstration raise awareness, but unless it reaches a critical mass, they don't work. Boycotts and demonstrations that disrupt (like marches through the street or strikes) are other forms of economic attacks that cause real monetary loss.

Voting with your wallet only works so far. Usually you're in the minority. Not because you're wrong. Even elections understand this: the results are based on those who voted, not those who could vote.

Review history, and time and time again you'll see economic attacks as parts of non-violent means.

<comment><USER32> It does harm people physically when, say, their sandwich purchase doesn't work and they become overly hungry -- physical stomach pains. And maybe a diabetic somewhere will end up in the hospital.

And what about the guy who was buying safety equipment and now he has to do the first day without it?

<comment><USER31> I can apply the same "what if" logic to Rosa Parks, who caused police to be sent to arrest her rather than patrolling their location and stopping a murder. Or someone on the bus that got delayed being late for a job interview, not getting it. Or that same diabetic not being able to get to his medicine he left at home.

Edit: I should also remind you that even if you want to accept your arguments, they aren't impacting actual transactions. Merely SecureCode transactions done online. So I highly doubt a diabetic in need of medicine now is going to order online.

Edit 2: And seriously, a guy get's a bit more hungry because he has to wait a tad longer because he can't order Fat Man's Pizza online because SC is down, and that's violent? Heck, then I guess Gandhi wasn't so peaceful after all, what with his salt march causing less money for people, and therefore, less money to buy food with, and therefore, less food to eat.

<comment><USER32> It's hard to think of a plausible way that Rosa Parks hurt anyone but it's very easy to think of plausible ways that having your credit card denied could hurt you.

But I didn't know it was online only. In that case it's hard to think of plausible ways it would do physical harm.

I didn't say "violent" so don't complain about me calling stuff "violent". All I said is that economic harm can cause physical harm, it's not harmless (contrary to the person who said it is harmless. not low on harm but literally harmless).

You should not be upset with people who make corrections without expressing any opinion. Factual, literal-minded minor corrections are no threat to your side unless your side is mistaken.

<comment><USER31> > It's hard to think of a plausible way that Rosa Parks hurt anyone but it's > very easy to think of plausible ways that having your credit card denied > could hurt you.

No. I can't think of a way having my CC being denied online is going to physically hurt me. Maybe you can give an example.

Seriously though, your logic is flawed.

> I didn't say "violent" so don't complain about me calling stuff "violent".

Sorry, but what would you call an attack that causes physical harm? Peaceful?

You don't have to say the word violent, but you can still describe it.

> All I said is that economic harm can cause physical harm

And a butterflies wing could flap because of it can cause a hurricane causing the deaths of millions. Yes, everything is connected. I can create all sorts of crazy scenarios. Let's stick to reality.

Anon is doing a DDoS. Twisting that round and saying "Anon is attacking people causing physical harm" is dumb.

> Factual, literal-minded minor corrections are no threat to your side unless > your side is mistaken.

I'm fine with factual, logical minded corrections. Your comment was void of that. You should remember context.

Until you can show anon attacking people causing physical harm, your actually not saying anything.

<comment><USER32> Why so hateful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm fairly naive about the specifics of a DDOS, but it's such an obvious vector of attack that I'm surprised it's a major vulnerability.

Could anyone explain what it would take to minimise vulnerability to such attacks? I would have expected the standard load on SecureCode to be pretty high anyway, so I'm surprised that an attack brought it down. I welcome anyone to fix my reasoning :)

<comment><USER34> The program that is being used is a multi-threaded .NET app that opens a lot of connections and then allows them to timeout.

Easiest form of DoS to carry out and easiest to defend.

Prevention:

a) Upstream forwarding proxy that will block all requests from an IP that hammers the server

b) Low timeouts (5-10 seconds)

c) Intelligent upstream router than can drop the routes

d) They are hitting mastercard.com, which should be distributed on a CDN

e) Separate the public website from the application, don't even but them in the same IP address block

At Techcrunch we survived a 4chan DoS attempt. Surprised Mastercard didn't (I think the scale of this attack is larger, but still)

<comment><USER35> >At Techcrunch we survived a 4chan DoS attempt

I wouldn't mention it; just my friendly advice. _Anon_ is a fickle beast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'll be interested to see if Mastercard's stock takes a dive as a result of this. Not that I don't expect it to recover quickly of course. But it does make me wonder who first suggested 'operation payback', and what exactly their motives were...

<comment><USER36> there's been no impact on their price that I can see so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> So basically if you help wikileaks you'll be DDOSd by the (presumably) government. If you cut them off you'll be DDOSd by other parties.

The only solution is to have nothing to do with them. Not exactly an optimum solution - I'd much rather be cut off and constantly find new hosts than have people afraid to have anything at all to do with me.

These attacks are not helping wikileaks.

</comment><comment><USER38> As an organisation Wikileaks should distance themselves as far from this sort of activity as possible. If they condone it, or even merely appear to condone it, then their fate is most certainly sealed.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if the perpetrators of this attack realize an attack against e-commerce may attract the attention of federal authorities more than one against a quasi-religious group.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, it's almost as if the government and large businesses only care about each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The really sad part about this is the people who are probably getting most hurt by this are the web developers who maintain mastercard.com; probably a few fellow HNers. I'd hate to be in their shoes right now.</comment>


How to save the 200,000 apps Apple plans to purge from its App Store - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/17/how-to-save-the-200000-apps-apple-plans-to-purge-from-its-app-store/ <comment><USER2> Apple is dropping support for 32-bit apps in iOS 11. Doing this improves performance as 32-bit libraries need not be loaded alongside 64-bit ones. Furthermore, it paves the way for Apple SoCs that do not have hardware support for 32-bit instructions, maybe saving some precious silicon real estate.

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/06/ios-11-32-bit-mac-app- store-6...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/06/ios-11-32-bit-mac-app- store-64-bit/)

<comment><USER3> They could just not load (or even ship) the 32bit libraries unless they were needed. My guess is they don't want to develop and maintain 32bit versions of all their frameworks, especially newer features like drag&drop. (For the hardware part I don't know enough to say whether or not keeping a 32bit armv7 mode around is costly?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are selling a 100 copies a month this forced refactor could be used to add additional features and revenue streams to the app. I see the annoyance with a forced move but I personally vote for better performance vs legacy app support.

<comment><USER5> Why not both, with different versions of the app exposed to users of different versions of iOS? Or are there not enough people running 5 year old hardware to make it worth anyone's while?

<comment><USER6> They already do allow both. They did _not_ announce that they were dropping App Store support for older devices. Right now you can download older apps on devices running iOS 5 -- released in 2011.

<comment><USER5> Hmm. I guess that most app devs remove older versions of their apps when they upload newer ones. I've got an iPod Touch that I abandoned years ago because searches for apps come up exclusively with results that were incompatible with it. Apps would bug me to update, but then present me with a newly-incompatible version.

<comment><USER6> It's not the devs that remove older apps. Apple keeps older versions of the apps around when you submit a new one.

Now if by "older" iPod touch you mean the first gen one. I can also confirm that Apple does not allow you to go back that far.

Around January of this year, I reset my first gen iPad running 5.x and was able to download and use older versions of Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, the CW, Spotify, Plex, YouTube, Facebook (?) and Google Drive.

Also most of Apple's downloadable apps still work - Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (?).

Most games will not work.

Edit:

I just noticed you said that you abandoned your old iPod touch years ago because searches came up empty.

Apple didn't always allow you to download older versions easily.

[https://www.infoq.com/news/2013/09/previous-version-ios- apps](https://www.infoq.com/news/2013/09/previous-version-ios-apps)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article seems a little bit overwrought. I don't think that deleting a bunch of cruft from the app store will "create a cultural black hole for generations to come."

Sure, there are apps that will probably get deleted that don't deserve to. But when you play in the walled garden, these are the consequences.

<comment><USER8> > _This article seems a little bit overwrought. I don 't think that deleting a > bunch of cruft from the app store will "create a cultural black hole for > generations to come."_

Plus, if that was our actual concern, we had TONS of other stuff to help preserve first: digitize all kinds of old books, movies and music and make it available for example.

iOS apps would be at the very bottom of the cultural landscape for things that would be missed (and the nature of technology is not such that those are meant to be evergreen artifacts anyway... nobody much cares that we can't play ZX Spectrum games easily for example).

<comment><USER9> You can't really rank or prioritise what cultural artefacts are going to be missed. It's such a subjective thing.

For example, whilst I enjoyed many retro games back in the day, I can't say I am too bothered about not being able to play them. But there are many people who would care, and value these things highly.

And there are certainly old apps I do care about for other reasons: perhaps they had a novel interface or solved certain problems in an elegant manner. For example, I would love to be able to easily play around with the software designed by Kai Krauze.

With art and culture, everything is subjective. One person's high art is another person's trash.

<comment><USER8> > _You can 't really rank or prioritise what cultural artefacts are going to > be missed. It's such a subjective thing._

What people going to miss is subjective. What they should miss is objective.

Or rather, is a subjective decision they don't get to make for themselves.

In the end, everything, even morals, are subjective. But in the end, also, most societies agreed collectively in some prioritisation, despite what each individual (or even the majority) prefers. And unless something drastically changed in how we think about culture, old books and movies and films are more important than some abandoned 32-bit only iOS apps.

I guess it's a US thing to think it's all about the individual and its personal taste, but in other cultures at least, there is such a think as a canon, and while it's still fuzzy and subjective at the edges, it's not like spandex wearing superheroes or RPGs ever get as important as The Iliad or some philosophical work, just because the majority got in arrested development sometime in the 90s and prefer the former over the latter.

<comment><USER9> I cant argue with you that some works are objectively better than others. Or that works in much older media are going to be much more culturally significant than any app.

Personally I think the value of (some of) the older apps is how they are waypoints in the progression of software design, specifically for touch screen devices.

I view software as an evolving medium (the ultimate meta-medium), and as such think its worth preserving at least some of these artefacts for future study.

Perhaps this doesn't count as culture, but I think it's important.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you too, after all I'm a software developer myself (and I love my 80's Sierra DOS games).

So, it's not like I don't believe that they have some value (ZX games or early iOS apps), but that I made my stand a little more black and white to get my point across.

I don't believe most of it is culture to the sense that a book is, mostly because most of them are quite plain, derivate from numerous other apps for other platforms, and driven by basic commercial desires. And of course, a book can be a window in someones mind/thought/philosophy/etc, whereas an app is mostly a utilitarian endeavour (it's like we don't attach much cultural importance to past commercial products, e.g. old tv sets or old fridges or old typewriters -- we might like them as antiques, but that's mostly it).

That said, there are also utilitarian reasons for us wanting software to keep existing in some form (to open old documents, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What would be ideal would be the ability to charge for an update. Developers would be inclined to actually update their apps. My favorite apps have died on the vine after a few years because it's not worthwhile updating. And so I have to shift to other, inferior apps. Crazy! The alternative is in app purchases, but that really complicates things for the user.

<comment><USER11> > What would be ideal would be the ability to charge for an update.

Some developers do – they release a separate app that could have been provided as an update and just slap "2" at the end of the name – and I usually find that scummy. (Looking at you, MacPaw/Gemini.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple said that the newest version of iOS will not support any 32 bit apps. Apple did not say that:

a) you would not be allowed to submit apps that have both a 32 and 64 bit version and supported older iOS versions.

b) That they would discontinue their policy that allows users to download older compatible versions of apps (that I can confirm works back to my first gen iPad running iOS 5)

</comment><comment><USER12> ARM provides hardware support for virtualization. MacOS includes a hypervisor framework.

Could Apple support older apps (slowly) in an iOS VM that contains an older version of iOS?

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, venturbeat redirected me to a malware site. Crazy.</comment>


Fitbit automatically tracks your fitness and sleep - <AUTHOR> http://www.fitbit.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> There's just been a lot of discussion and interest in Wakemate here. I just saw this alternative that also claims to track calories and fitness so I thought I'd post it for those who are interested.</comment>


Post-Jobs Apple 'has nobody to say no' - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/post-jobs-apple-has-nobody-to-say-no-1073607

<comment><USER2> My first thought was "oh god, here we go, someone _had_ to make this argument eventually..."

But then I glanced at the screenshot, and to be fair, it... feels wrong. Something about it doesn't quite sit right. Hmm, it gives me pause for thought.

<comment><USER3> The colourful buttons, with their cheesy 2006 aqua reflection; near invisibly thin highlighting of the current section; too many colours not inline with Apple's increasingly monochrome designs; the reflective posters from the same era etc.. There's a lot of things not to like about that UI. It definitely feels like another Apple knockoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I seem to remember they have these guys named Tim Cook and Sir Jonathan Ive that have the ability to say no. I would expect the rest of the folks on this page <http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/> and pretty good at knowing what should be in a product.

This is really going to be the goto story for people on a deadline or to get some page views. It is even easier to write than the standard "I am all out of ideas" top-10 list. I swear I am going make a website generated by a program that outputs these type of stories. I always wanted to learn Prolog.

<comment><USER5> off topic, but Jonathan Ive looks really out of place on that page with all the others smiling... I wonder what they just told him?

<comment><USER6> he's also the only one wearing a t-shirt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For once you'll read a much more balanced and informative coverage of the same "news" on TechCrunch: <http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/jobs-apple-tv- margolis/>

Seriously, try it out. It goes beyond the link-bait headline ad actually gives some real information.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you've read the biography, you probably know that Steve jobs initially said no to the idea of the iPhone having an app store. He later came around. I personally like the new Apple TV UI. The previous version had pull down type menus, which can make it difficult to find stuff as your content inventory grows. The icon like app interface they've adopted now, similar to ios, is something more people are accustomed to and something they can keep adding to, "folders" could become "channels" etc.

<comment><USER9> Reminds one of another TV based interface... <http://www.tsgmoc.com/NintendoWii/Images/WiiHome.jpg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something rubs me the wrong way about this being sensationalized like this. Okay so one disgruntled insider thinks their latest design is shit and Jobs wouldn't have let it through. Fine. He's entitled to his opinion.

But the media is just chomping at the bit for any kind of Apple-is-slipping story so they can pin it on Jobs' death. But the reality is that most of the people who made Apple's recent products great are still there, and so is Steve's vision to a great extent. Also, it's not as if Jobs was infallible in his design sense. He let abominations like the hockey puck mouse out the door, and who knows what sides he fell on in all the internal design debates over the years. The mythologizing of Jobs is clouding people's judgement about Apple's performance and it's only gonna get worse.

</comment><comment><USER11> People conveniently forget that multiple flops also happened on Jobs' watch. For all the talk of his ability to say "no", maintain focus and never sacrifice UX they still produced the G4 Cube and iTunes Ping, among others.

<comment><USER12> The G4 was a commercial flop, but arguably a great product, not that I am looking for an argument about it..</comment></comment>


Do you have any spare startup ideas worth building? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-any-spare-startup-ideas-worth-building/answer/Chris-Remus?srid=kLCi&share=0c538573 <comment><USER2> I do not. If I did, I would be building them.

The closest thing I think I had to what might be an interesting idea lately was a tool that automatically detected and translated Japanese text in videos. But it's technically way beyond my abilities, and I have no idea how I would actually make money at it if I could do it well at all, and if Google can't do it already, I definitely can't. I don't even know where Grimsby is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably, although nothing sitting at the forefront of my mind right this minute. Still, if anybody is looking for a startup idea, there are a few things you can use to help kickstart your thinking.

1\. Look at pg's / yc's "RFS" (Request for Startup) posts.

[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for- startups](http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-startups)

2\. Something I experimented with for a while, but eventually quit (much to my detriment, probably) is this: try to think up 10 ideas a day, every day. Write them down. Yeah, probably most of them will be shit, but if you're doing 10 ideas a day, you'll probably hit on something good just by the law of large numbers. The question, of course, is can you distinguish the good idea from the not-so-good ones?

3\. Read the news, pay attention to what's going on around you, and keep asking "how could I apply some tech that I know something about, to help this situation"?

4\. Doodle. Draw boxes and arrows and just try to connect things. Do this in conjunction with (3) above.

5\. Here's one of my favorites: read about OLD tech. Go back in time. In tech, there's a strong and noticeable "what's old is new again" theme. Old ideas go out of vogue and come back into vogue in a slightly altered form. Look for some tech idea that was trendy 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, and ask yourself if it could be revisited now and made more useful due to Moore's law, the Internet, "big data", whatever. Or, on a related note, sometimes ideas come out that are actually good ideas, but they fail because they were simply too early. The environment wasn't right, but maybe it is now. Find something that failed and see if conditions have changed enough to make that old, failed idea into a viable idea.

OK, here's a free startup idea for you... take everything I said above, add your own ideas to the mix, and then build a tool / service for helping people come up with startup ideas. Text mine old news articles, books, manuals, alongside current news articles and research papers (look at arXiv.org and other pre-print servers) and identify a way to extract useful startup ideas from that morass.</comment>


Making $35,000 Bonsai Scissors - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD2XGwmRJi8 <comment><USER2> If anyone wants to understand how Bonsai works, I have been really enjoying Nigel's Saunders "Bonsai Zone" videos for almost a year now: [https://youtu.be/T_ifeQSazPo](https://youtu.be/T_ifeQSazPo)

He does a great showing basic maintenance and explaining what he's thinking before he does it.

It's actually quite simpler than I expected. Just letting the trees grow and pruning them regularly, so forks only extend one unit or so before branching again. And removing "meaningless" growth. And using very well drained soil to maximize how much air and water the trees get.

I have just started my first Bonsai after many months of watching Nigel. I'm enjoying it a lot! I look forward to having a few more trees so I am busier. With one tree it's mostly just watering and waiting.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you feel about the effort put into the tools used to cut Bonzai?

<comment><USER2> I think it's healthy for people to work hard to do things at the uppermost of their capability. And it's wonderful for someone with means to support someone who is doing that.

It's certainly not necessary for healthy trees. It's a group of artists supporting each other's art.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nicely done video and editing. It left me wanting to learn more about what makes these scissors so great beyond their gorgeous handcrafted nature. For example, the hardness, finish, sharpening, technique, etc.</comment>


Show HN: Decentralized networking library for (not only) games - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/inetic/club <comment><AUTHOR> When we started working on our game, we knew we wanted it to feature multiplayer. We did not know whether we'd earn money and hearing how much it normally costs to run dedicated servers we wanted to avoid that cost, so we decided to go the decentralized way and created Club library.

One of the features of a dedicated server is that you have a central authority that makes decisions about who is in the game/lobby and who is not. In Club, these decisions are done through a decentralized membership algorithm in such a way that everyone receives membership changes in the same order.

Other that membership decisions, Club also offers an algorithm for totally ordering messages. That is, if one node sends a message A and another node sends a message B independently, it holds that if some node receives A before B, then every other node that receives both messages will receive them in the same order.

It should be noted though that such ordering is slow, because it requires an acknowledgement from every other node in the network, but if performance is an issue, this algorithm can be used for leader election, and after that the leader may serve as a central authority for further and faster ordering of messages.

Other feature that a dedicated server solves trivially is message routing. Typically, users/nodes that are connected to the internet are behind some kind of router, these sometimes go out of their way prevent two nodes from establishing a direct connection between them. A dedicated server on the other hand normally isn't behind a router or is set up in such a way that any node can connect to it, thus any node that wants to communicate with any other node may do so through the server. In Club - again - there is no central server, but the library apart from maintaining who is in the network, also stores the information about who is connected to whom, so for any two nodes that are in the network, Club knows how to efficiently route messages between them.

Now there are also some other features that I did not mention, but there are also many TODO items I've got.

Such as:

* Automatic establishment of full network where everyone tries to connect to everyone to reduce number of message hops and the risk of network partition (I had this already, but commented out the code while refactoring). * Symmetric NAT traversal (similarly, I had this, was commented out during refactor ). * Better congestion control. * Node to node routing (Currently only broadcast. Extending it should be trivial) * Encryption ...

Now, the questions that motivated this post: How big of a utilization do you guys think there is for such library? Is it something that was already implemented by other libraries? I checked RakNet and few others but AFAIK they concentrate on the 'centralized server' approach, but maybe someone can correct me? I would love to continue working on it, but the lack of seeing or hearing of a similar approach used somewhere else makes me worry I'm being naive so you guys may give me a cold shower :)

The library is written in C++11, it currently only depends on Boost (Mostly Asio) and is distributed under the Apache 2 license (though I'm thinking of relaxing it further to MIT).

(I cross posted this from [r/gamedev]([https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/4pg8kf/is_there_a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/4pg8kf/is_there_a_demand_for_a_decentralized_networking/)), I'm not too much of a writer, sorry about that)</comment>


Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics - <AUTHOR> http://www.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

<comment><USER2> I was a bit disappointed with the Zed Shaw flame war. On a good technical article people started to express their feelings about Zed, avoiding to discuss the technical issues raised.

Still the subject remains shady even it is affecting seriously the hacker world.

[UPDATE] A separate thread was made to discuss the shady issues: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709583>

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with this very much. Slashdot suffers greatly from this (or it thrives on it, depends on your point of view I guess).

Apple vs Microsoft, Republicans vs Democrats, GPL vs BSD license, RIAA vs the world etc the discussions are always the same and nobody learns a thing.

It's a mindset problem, a flamewar does not do anything to advance the topic it just causes everybody to dig in just a little deeper.

<comment><USER4> Only to the participants. I actually find many of the arguments interesting, if repetitive. After you have seen the SAME arguments many times though it does get wearing.

Actually, the arguments can be useful to help get newbies try different programs/environments and you explore WHY you agree or disagree with various viewpoints. The emacs vs vi flames I read when I was first getting started caused me to keep trying to use vi, until I was finally able to understand why I found it so difficult. (I just cannot get used to its modes; I continually forget whether I am in insert, append, or command mode and have to go back and fix the goofs that causes.)

EDIT: I should have read down a little further before commenting; the idea of a wiki exploring the differing opinions is excellent from my POV.

<comment><USER4> The above was actually talking more about the "religious" wars than flaming as such. The best flaming site I have seen was Panda's Thumb back several years ago; they often had hundreds on comments with atheists, creationists, and religious-apologist atheists screaming back and forth at each other, but it was very entertaining, I've rarely read Panda's Thumb for the last few years since they've quit the flaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> >Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

is the entire guideline, too long for a title.

<comment><USER5> I know this is off-topic, but your username is slightly misleading. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's something of a joke. :D <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124391>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Classic flamewar topics" is interesting enough to define further. Is it a small list of banned arguments? Is it more a set of behaviors?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28Internet%29>

My favorite of these topics (edit: I meant "classic" on the internet as a whole, not specifically to Hacker News. How many classic flamewar arguments do we really have?) is the discussion about .999 repeating equaling one. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692338> links to a physics forum discussing it for 400 forum pages. It goes on because no one ever gets the right answer because both sides are correct and wrong at the same time and it's completely an issue of definition. The answer is to define the problem more precisely which allows you to argue that the naive perspective is ultimately correct for the hyperreal number system.

<comment><USER6> .999 wasn't really a flame topic is it? Some people learned stuff they didnt know about infinity. Others presented fairly good arguments for .999... != 1 and we spent time disproving that. ANd others introduced Hyperreal numbers whihc some hadn't heard of.

No one got angry or passionate or flamey as I saw it... the topic never made it much onto the main page and was a nice discussion.

Im not disagree with the sentiment "avoid flame topics" - I just dont think that is a good example.

A better one would be the current TC article on the main page (and all the boring meta discussion on "ban techcrunch" and flaming about pg & ma being buddies).

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, it wasn't a flame war here, I was referring to the 400 page version on PhysOrg. We could handle the topic -- by the end of the PhysOrg thread (I only read the last page) they're calling each other retards over the definition of continuous for limits.

A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Meta discussion is a very different type of flame topic. It's also been extremely important to defining the character of this board so seperating it MetaFilter style is a drastic step. How can we discourage metatalk when it is annoying but allow it when it is interesting?

<comment><USER6> Ok yes so the thread was a flamewar - but the way I saw the topic was as a conversation starter (rather than just post an Ask HN thread). I doubt many people read past the first page :)

But I take your point.

In terms of meta discussion; all that is fine. I just mean it should be considered "non gratis" to bring up flamey meta topics. Like Ban TC and so forth. It's been discussed a billion times before and always leads to flaming.

EDIT: I also love the rule that says if you've been here for less than a year dont moan about thinks going reddity - that's another pet-hate meta topic of mine :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like cute animal pictures.... it's a shame I have to post those elsewhere. :)

<comment><USER8> I complain here about inappropriate stuff a lot, and I you know you're kidding but: As far as fluff goes I'll take cute animal pictures over all the other fluff that shows up here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obviously the Apple II is far superior to the TRS-80 family for any serious computing task. Ataris are good for gaming and the Commodore 64 has a disk- drive that's too slow for any practical use. As for the MSX machines, they have no soul.

I am sorry. Could not resist.

Note: This post is best viewed at 300 bps.

<comment><USER10> The Atari wasn't just for games!

Oh, my. Now we've gone and done it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> God told me that if you interpret the bible correctly, it proves that Man's fingers were designed to use vi, not emacs. But only on Windows. Discuss.

</comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps one of the recurring topics that I think introduce flame wars on here is all of the Mac-PC articles that keep popping up. They never introduce anything new or provide anything beyond attempting to justify fanboydom.

</comment><comment><USER13> Would it be fair to say that all topics explored in Paul Graham essays,

<http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

which includes my favorite topic of education reform, are not classic flamewar topics?

<comment><USER14> It would be fair to say, "use your discretion". Any topic can be presented in an inflammatory manner.

<comment><USER13> That's an interesting response. That implies that something that is very much a core topic of HN discussion could be nothing but flame bait if the treatment of it in the submission is sufficiently inflammatory.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. I may enjoy pie, but you won't win my favor by presenting me a pie to the face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> like... Flash?

</comment><comment><USER16> Instead of restarting flamewars just link to the original flamewar?

<comment><USER17> That's an interesting idea. Imagine a wikipedia-like site that aimed to be the definitive guide to known flamewars. I'm just trying to comprehend the carnage that such a system would cause between the people who cared about the site for what it represented vs the people who just cared about their varying legs of the debate.

feuerkrieg.com is available.

<comment><USER18> It would be great if, instead of posting the same arguments over and over, people were editing and strengthening a canonical version of that argument. At least you'd get higher-level flamewars.

The difficulty would be preventing people from deliberately weakening the other side's argument.

<comment><USER17> Prejudiced users could vote their way into threads in order to support the particular details and rebuttals to which they subscribed.

Then you could use the data from the results to morph it into a dating site. Particularly twisted members could opt for the 'opposites' option. Or you could make it random. You don't know until you turn up for coffee - mwuhahahah!

People said that the internet would make the human race more open and tolerant. I have other ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While we are at it, please avoid FUD, payperpost, PR submarines and tabloid gossip.</comment>


Rebooting a 1970s satellite with modern software and hardware - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/04/rebooting-a-1970s-satellite-with-modern-software-and-hardware.html

<comment><USER2> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818597)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7199692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7199692)

<comment><USER3> Much better links than the oriley one. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is easy to miss, but the text of the O'reilly artivle is only the teaser/preamble for the podcast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone interested, here's the link for the site dedicated to ISEE-3

[http://spacecraftforall.com/](http://spacecraftforall.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> radar.oreilly );</comment>


XSS Exploit on Azure's Community support portal - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/support/community/ <comment><AUTHOR> I guess this is one way of getting your ticket looked at...

" At the moment the Azure Front Door WAF does not scan for XSS threats when the request going through FD is of content-type multipart. This was advised this is the case by the Microsoft Support team. For example, if I send the following request through Azure Front Door with OWASP DefaultRuleSet enabled on its WAF: POST:

content-type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryriZKfNGOPKHI8rWO

Form Data: 958127ef-8053-4054-811e-49d54be8a09f: <script>alert('hello');</script>

The WAF does not detect the XSS threat simply because of the content-type.

This is fundamental to have in a service dedicated to protect backend systems. I am conscious this is currently being worked, however what is the ETA?

Thanks. "</comment>


Credit Cards for Giving - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/credit-cards-for-giving <comment><USER2> If you're going to be making donations in the thousands-of-dollars range in the US, set up a donor-advised fund. You donate appreciated assets to the fund, and direct the fund to cut checks to the charities you want to support (this saves small local charities from having to deal with gifts of stock, while preserving your tax advantages of doing so, which far outweigh the credit card points). Many employers will match donations from a DAF that you control, so you keep that, too.

We have one with vanguard charitable, which was easy to set-up and fund (minimum $25k, IIRC), but there's several good alternatives.

<comment><USER3> This is great advice. Other advantages of DAFs:

\- Super easy donation process - log in, search for the nonprofit you want to give to, click a couple buttons and you're done. Even lower friction than going to the nonprofit's website and entering credit card info.

\- If you don't already itemize your tax deductions every year, you can "bunch" several years of charitable giving into one year by contributing in advance for future years. For example, if you plan to donate $5k per year, you can contribute $15k to your DAF this year, but grant $5k out of the fund each year. You can itemize the contribution in the first year, while taking the standard deduction in the 2nd and 3rd years.

\- Fewer things to track and list when you do your taxes. You only need to report your contributions _into_ the DAF (often 1 or fewer per year), so you no longer have to scour your records and record each individual charitable donation you made.

[not an accountant nor a lawyer, not tax or investing advice]

Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity all have low-cost DAF options that you can set up online in a couple minutes. Annual fees, minimum contributions, and minimum grants vary by provider so it's worth doing a little bit of research.

<comment><USER2> The point about "bunching" donations is really interesting, and a very savvy option for people whose annual donations are a little below the threshold for itemizing deductions. Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't donate through Facebook. Their processes are pretty unfriendly to the charity receiving the money. They float the money for an unspecified amount of time, which hurts charities' cash flow. They provide less donor data, so charities can't thank donors or reach out to them again in the future. And if it's a personal fundraiser, even if the money goes to charity, Facebook does charge fees.

Just give directly to the charity. If you're concerned about the fees, just cover them yourself. Industry standard is 2.9% + $0.30.

<comment><USER5> > They provide less donor data, so charities can't thank donors or reach out > to them again in the future.

wait, facebook does something to help me maintain my privacy? i hate giving some place $25 and then getting monthly mail for the next 10 years.

<comment><USER4> I was expecting this comment.

Charities send mail because it helps them raise money, and it's one place that direct mail still works, and it works well. You can call the org and have them take you off their mailing list. I would just ask that if you do, also set up a recurring donation. One time donations are nice, recurring donations are better.

But if you're more comfortable giving Facebook more data about you (donations contain a lot of information) but not giving that data to the charity, why are you donating to them in the first place?

<comment><USER5> > Charities send mail because it helps them raise money

not every activity that helps you raise money is something you should do, even if you're a charity.

if they'd confine themselves to pestering donors who'd given them >$500, or even donated more than once, it'd be one thing.

> You can call the org and have them take you off their mailing list.

been there, tried that. less effective than you'd like me to believe! (and then they've got my phone number, too.)

> But if you're more comfortable giving Facebook more data about you > (donations contain a lot of information) but not giving that data to the > charity, why are you donating to them in the first place?

i don't care if the charity knows who i am; i don't care if anyone (facebook or otherwise) knows about my donations.

i care that the charities will pester me for YEARS because i gave them less money than they'll spend printing out the wads of full color mail they'll send me.

<comment><USER6> You create second-time donors by persistently contacting first-time donors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In Ireland, I try and make donations of at least €250 (usually by direct debit / bank transfer) and complete the relevant tax form so the charity can reclaim the income tax on the donation amount (increases the donation by ~ 44.9%).

[https://www.revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs- and-e...](https://www.revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs-and- exemptions/donations-and-covenants/charitable-donations/index.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER8> ACH is a cheap way to send money too. Not much in the way of rewards if that's your thing though.

<comment><USER9> ACH is cheap, but many banks don't support sending transfers to random accounts owned by other entities. You typically have to do deposit verification because most banks' offerings are intended for personal transfers. Few companies will dig into their records to find the micro-deposit amounts for you.

<comment><USER8> As I understand it in 2021 these micro deposits or a similar control will become mandatory (date delayed from Jan 2020), but for the time being it's optional. I don't see why a bank won't allow an ACH payment from one account to another - that's what the system is made for right?

<comment><USER9> The new rule only applies to debuts (e.g., you pull money from my account, rather than I push money to yours). See [https://www.nacha.org/rules/supplementing-fraud-detection- st...](https://www.nacha.org/rules/supplementing-fraud-detection-standards- web-debits).

Most banks have some form of P2P transfer such as Zelle or Popmoney. If you want to pay a business, they push you toward a bill pay service that often mails a physical check.

My guess is that ACH cuts into fees earned from wire transfers. Additionally, giving everyone the ability to send funds to any other random account increases the bad outcomes of a login being compromised, or someone inputting the wrong account number.

<comment><USER8> I think you're right on the ACH Vs Wire Fees earned by banks - from what I've seen the banks earn many many multiples on Wires. Although I understand that real time and faster payments are being explored as an alternative to Wires which may take some of this share if the schemes get the network effect via all banks signing up to it.

<comment><USER9> Yep! The big banks are signed up for RTP. We consumers should start seeing it sometime this year.

[https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment- systems/rtp](https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp)

Edit: Some customers have had access since last year: [https://www.jpmorgan.com/country/US/en/detail/1320572715530](https://www.jpmorgan.com/country/US/en/detail/1320572715530).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facebook already has their claws in so much of my data, why not hand over my donation history as well?

<comment><USER11> At least for myself, I have no objection to having my donation history public: [https://www.jefftk.com/donations](https://www.jefftk.com/donations)

<comment><USER12> I'm down for having it public like that, but until everyone does perhaps it'd be best not to readily serialize it in a format for Facebook's immediate consumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even better would be to bypass the whole finance and banking sector altogether and have these charities adopting blockchain for this.

A stablecoin like DAI is perfect for this on the large, and later the charities themselves could issue their own tokens and estimulate local economies</comment>


Haskell in the Real World  - building real time finance systems for profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf

<comment><USER2> Here's a link to the PDF where you can actually use your mouse wheel to scroll:

<http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf>

<comment><USER3> All PDFs that are linked to on HN link directly to the PDF, as well as to scribd. The title is linked to the former, the "[scribd]" is linked to the latter.

<comment><USER2> Oops, guess I clicked on the wrong part of the link. Thanks for the explanation.</comment></comment></comment>


Good code is cheap code - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekm.ag/Archive/Good_code_is_cheap_code <comment><USER2> I've started seeing design patterns in a vastly different light once I realised that, in PHP, all of the Abstract Factory pattern can be replaced by a simple:

        $instance = new $className();

<comment><USER3> Im not quite sure what you mean. Would you like to expand a little more?

<comment><USER4> He means that instead of implementing an Abstract Factory for creation of related objects you can simply use plain old KISS new keyword.

<comment><USER5> He's saying that PHP's ability to dynamically instantiate classes by using class-names stored in string variables obviates the need for more complex factory based patterns.

Schlepping around a particular factory instance is akin to keeping track of the class one desires to instantiate, which is easily achieved in PHP through the use of a string.

A lot of the canonical design patterns are applicable only for harshly statically typed languages such as Java, for dynamic languages like PHP many of those patterns are no longer applicable or useful. It's still quite possible to be a cargo cult programmer even if you happen to be using highfalutin' GoF design patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> amortize "cheap" over the expected lifetime of the code. If man hours to write is the primary criteria then you'll have an uncommented mess of crap. I doubt the author means for this to be taken to the extreme. It makes for a good sound bite, but there is no simple rule of thumb when deciding how much effort to allocate to various parts of a project.

</comment><comment><USER5> He's right. Most of the expense in software development goes into bad code.

Consider: good code is less buggy, easier to debug when there is a problem, easier to maintain, easier to modify, easier to understand, etc. When devs work on good code it takes less effort and there are fewer problems so projects are done sooner. Good code is like a repellent for developer effort. Sometimes good code doesn't even need updating or maintenance, it just keeps working from version to version. In contrast, bad code is typically a time and effort sink. And because it's so difficult to work with, bad code typically doesn't improve in quality (merely in functionality) so it becomes more and more of an effort sink over time.

Time is money, developers spend more of their time mired in bad code, thus bad code is more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER7> Full title: Good code is cheap code, provided you substitute the following non-standard definitions for "cheap" and "good".

How about instead, you simply say what you're saying, without forcing the rest of us to do algebra on the language:

"Maintainable code is brief" pretty much summarizes that entire article. Note, however, that if you'd used that as the title we wouldn't have needed all those paragraphs of definitions.

</comment><comment><USER8> What has been helping me out is the phrase: "Code that cannot fail is infinitely easier to maintain then code that has many paths through it which might fail."

Murphy's law: "What can go wrong WILL go wrong". So go over every line of code and ask: "How might this function do something unintended?". If you find any answer to that question then you need to change how the function works until the answer is: "This function physically cannot do something unintended". If the hardware and compiler are working to specification then the ONLY path through this code is the correct way through (or a pretty exception/error that tells you what the programmer/user did wrong or what the hardware/compiler failure was).

For example: you have a function calculate() which takes a collection of Strings which represents items to process. The problem is that function foo() might run incorrectly and some String items may become invalid or incorrect. Then calculate() will make its best attempt, then calculate may throw an exception/error or worst of all, it may work. The solution here is to make it physically impossible for the items in the list to become invalid/wrong, don't use an array of String, use an array of class Student/Airplane/Book/ProcessItem which has a constructor which validates its own existence as soon as it is made, it will produce a runtime error (or better yet a compile time error) the instant the programmer/user made a mistake.

The millions of unintended paths through calculate() which may throw a cryptic runtime exception has been eliminated. Imagine how much easier it is to diagnose a "InputProcessItemException" than a cryptic off-by-one error inside calculate();</comment>


CIA paid psychologists $80m to devise and use torture techniques - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11283967/CIA-paid-psychologists-80m-to-devise-and-use-torture-techniques.html

<comment><USER2> I guess we can see the level of ethics Mitchell possesses and how well equipped he is to aid and abet the dissolution of anyone's ego-strength for the powers that be.

If I were asked - and while I'm no psychologist - you can be sure I wouldn't concede to do that.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can imagine my surprise it wasn't Zimbardo…</comment>


Denver to begin painting designated scooter parking - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/denver-to-begin-painting-designated-scooter-parking <comment><USER2> I live in Denver and these have been really great for getting around the city. As long as the city does not end up requiring a rider to park them in these spots, it seems for the best. It's definitely nice to see the city trying to support these companies.</comment>