Fairphone 2: world's first modular phone goes on sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34982724 <comment><USER2> I've been browsing their (extremely heavy, intensive) website trying to figure out "what are the modules" ... and all I can see is that there is a removable battery and that I could replace/repair parts like camera and speaker and so on.

But it looks to me that all of the actual functions of the phone are integrated into one big SoC.

That misses the entire point of a modular computing device - phone or otherwise.

I want a wireless comms module (which contains not just the wifi/bt/cellular antennas, but the chipset itself) that I can remove or _hard_ disable with a switch.

I want an inputs module that contains _not just_ the mic and speaker, but their enabling circuitry so I can remove it or _hard_ disable it with a switch.

I want a GPS module ... a USB ports module ... a camera module.

That's what a modular smartphone is all about. There's nothing modular about a big monster (closed, telco-owned, user-hostile) SoC that contains all of the actual functions.

<comment><USER3> I disagree (Disclaimer: I'm one of the early backers). The current trend in mobile phones is towards more closed systems. Components are glued together, and often it's not often possible for a user to even change a battery. That's what I would call a big monster.

The Fairphone is the first phone to get a 10/10 repairability score from ifixit. Though there could be more components, it's definitely a step in the right direction. The whole point is to a able to use that phone for 4-5 years. If one part breaks (touchscreen, battery), you can replace that part yourself. If a better camera becomes available, I can choose to update just the camera instead of buying a new phone. Cheaper for me as a user and better for the environment.

<comment><USER4> All my iPhones have lasted 4-5 years. Granted I had to get the screen replaced on one of them after my bird dropped it off the counter.

Wtf are you people doing with your phones? I downright abuse mine (think longboarding falls at 50kph with phone flying out of pocket) and it survives all.

<comment><USER5> You have a bird that carries your phone?

<comment><USER6> It's UK slang for girl.

<comment><USER4> I also have an actual bird who once pushed my phone off the counter because he's a dick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's about time. There's almost no difference between the Sony Z1c and Z1c except the Z1c is made of metal instead of plastic and is actually a better phone. Why are we replacing our every two years when phones from 2012 should still be able to do most of what we need to? Why are some of our newer phones built worse?!

The only thing I'm afraid of is this company won't survive because, after initial purchases, there'll be no reason to buy new phones. They'd need to grow horizontally, pulling in more customers from other brands.

They'd also have to push upgrades for cameras, screens, etc to keep existing users buying new parts. Even with an amazing device like this conceptually, capitalism and consumerism will find ways to rear their ugly heads to make this business with a superior product fight for survival while those companies with less durable/upgradeable hardware will tend to make more money because they can always push the latest device to the market.

<comment><USER8> > There's almost no difference between the Sony Z1c and Z1c

I wouldn't expect there to be. :)

<comment><USER7> Oops Z3C vs Z1C :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Specs look good, and the value proposition is interesting, as many articles state, it's about time a manufacturer did something different.

My wishlist for this kind of phones:

\- OS support and updates beyond the standard 1 or 2 years (TBD, but I think they're aiming for a 3 year lifecycle)

\- upgradable RAM, check :)

\- upgradable internal memory, check :)

\- replaceable battery, check :)

\- glass fixable separately, nope (they do say it's much more sturdy than standard phones though)

\- alternative OSs, check :)

things that don't influence my buying decision that much

\- fairly traded materials (their original value proposition, which DID appeal a lot to the early backers :) )

Their success depends on appeal beyond their initial core backers, and whether someone comes up with cool or killer app modules :) (they mention some like solar cells, etc.)

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately this ships with an already outdated version of android and fairphone has explicitly said they will not guarantee support for Marshmallow. They have solid reasons for this, but that is a pretty big down side as a potential customer.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say: If the android OS cannot be kept updated, claiming that this phone has what it takes to last you more than 2 years is ridiculous. Even if you somehow get to keep security updates coming, there will be features in the new OS that are worth upgrading for even if the hardware is still perfectly fine, and apps will begin requiring an OS version you don't have.

<comment><USER11> newer version of android stop being relevant after 4.4

down vote all you want, but there's no security or functionality after that. only silly animations and insane bright color schemes.

<comment><USER12> Android 6 fixes the permission system. That's pretty fundamental.

[http://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting...](http://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting.html)

<comment><USER11> that's in my list of useless features.

if you don't use your phone like clueless people used their computers (i.e. install 20 browser tool bars and such) you have zero need for it.

also, that was included since 2.3 but never exposed (some custom firmwares did)

<comment><USER13> I disagree. There are perfectly reasonable reasons for Facebook's messenger app to request access to my photos (so I can send them). If I don't use that feature though, there's no reason they should be able to secretly upload all my photos - which they could if they got the permission at install.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The cost breakdown is astonishing. Close to 40 EUR or 10% of the average net sales price goes away for IP roalties.

[http://fairphone.com/costbreakdown/](http://fairphone.com/costbreakdown/)

I would love to see which IP holders receive what portion for their IP.

<comment><USER15> Most likely the usual suspects: MPEG LA (for hardware video decoding), Microsoft (FAT patents), Google Play license, reference designs for the hardware, WiFi/BT/GSM licenses and patents, ARM and others for the CPU design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I can use PC ecosystem as an analog, in grand scheme of things this will offer no price reduction to end consumer.

Me and my son just upgraded his PC. It was a 4 yr old PC. We wanted new graphics card and we had to replace entire PC except power supply (barely!) and the case.

Even more fun, we wanted to build a PC from the leftover parts for friend of my son who is less fortunate. OK not top of the shelf, but he can play some games. We ended up spending $150 for new power supply, overpriced memory (DDR2), thermal grease, new fan (plastic leg broke off the original) and set of screws (where are they when you need them?).

In the end, upgrade = new PC, setting up the old one was still super expensive ($150).

Another factor is: these phones get a beating in daily use. While it may still make sense (technically) to keep some components during upgrade, they will be in bad bad shape.

It may make sense in context of repairs. Just like a car: I will fix it buying parts as needed, but after N years and M miles I will replace it.

<comment><USER17> I also recently upgraded the GPU in my ~4 year old PC, it cost me only the price of the new GPU and it's one of the only upgrades I've needed to make in that time.

It sounds like you're kind of an outlier in the build your own PC market -- it's pretty impressive you managed to find a motherboard supporting only the old DDR2 ram and having to replace the CPU fan. You also seem to have had to replace the motherboard to support your (likely PCI-E) GPU. Even before I built my first computer PCI-E was long supported by even cheap pre-built PCs.

There's a sweet spot around $600 for a PC, if you buy in this range you'll save money because you won't need to upgrade the majority of components in many years. I often recommend logicalincrements.com as it has PC prices per- component in tiers.

$150 is insanely cheap for a gaming PC and I don't think $150 has ever been "super expensive" by PC standards.

<comment><USER18> "There's a sweet spot around $600 for a PC, if you buy in this range you'll save money because you won't need to upgrade the majority of components in many years. I often recommend logicalincrements.com as it has PC prices per- component in tiers."

Exactly. It's the same mantra I've always used when doing computer builds. Incidentally, the last gaming rig [1] I built was about $600 with more power than necessary. :)

[1] [http://elitegamingcomputers.com/gaming- computers/#2](http://elitegamingcomputers.com/gaming-computers/#2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the 'fair trade' aspects are important and should be universal. I'd also like to see equal concern for 'fair trade' for consumers, who shouldn't have to accept being spied upon.

I've spent months trying to find a reasonably simple way to have a smartphone where I have end-user control over my data and communications, and it seems impossible (without building my own phone or OS).

I know many people don't care; that's fine for them, but I should have the option.

</comment><comment><USER20> URL: [https://www.fairphone.com/phone/](https://www.fairphone.com/phone/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm eagerly awaiting the market's return to phones that you can actually fit in your human-sized hands. Bigger is not always better.

I recently bought a phone that's so large it takes both hands to operate it. If I'm grasping it reasonably tightly, my thumb can't navigate to over 30% of the screen. If I stretch uncomfortably to try to reach those areas, the phone is likely to slip out of my fingertips entirely. I do not have small hands.

I'm not sure what the market standard definition of "phablet" is, but for me, a 136mm x 68mm device has served me fine for years, and this new device (which I'm returning after almost accidentally throwing it across the train for the n'th time in as many days) is 148mm x 76mm. Apparently that extra ten millimeters is a big deal. (Interesting to look at Apple's product page for their sizes. They measured this too, evidentially -- the 6 and 6s went up to exactly 138x67 and aren't budging; they use the Plus series to probe over that line.)

The fairphone2 is 143x73 -- it's not as big as some other flagships on the market right now, so huge kudos for winning the miniaturization battles so far -- but I bet they're falling prey to competing on screen size, and frustratingly, though I'm interested in everything else about this phone, I'm honestly not sure _I 'll be able to hold it in my hand_.

<comment><USER2> "I'm eagerly awaiting the market's return to phones that you can actually fit in your human-sized hands. Bigger is not always better."

I never bought a smartphone because I never wanted to carry around huge devices ... for the last few years I have used a motorola F3 ("moto fone")[1]. I _loved_ this phone.

It finally broke, however, so I was forced to buy a modern phone, and I found the Neptune "pine"[2] which is a phone-watch, but you can detach it from the watch band and it essentially becomes a very, very tiny _full featured_ android phone.

I have been using it for about two months and it is great - it's basically a very tiny hotspot device that I use for mobile wifi and bluetooth, etc., and it works great as a phone ... and texting/typing isn't ideal, but it works.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone)

[2] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neptune/neptune-pine- sm...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neptune/neptune-pine-smartwatch- reinvented)

<comment><USER18> Looks more lightweight than the last secure phone design I had. The need for dedicated chips for CPU hardening, baseband firewall, and power isolation made it quite bulky. Looking for a commercial model, I settled on this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator)

Didn't build it for obvious reasons. It was the shit back in the day, though, with probably some people willing to buy if they get trusted chips. Not sure enough on return to want to risk it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the goal is reliability, modularity may not be the right way to get there. Why not just build something tough enough that it doesn't break? There are militarized rugged smartphones.[2] You will break before they do.[3] If you bend the frame on your modular repairable smartphone, you can't fix it anyway.

If the goal is upgradability, you don't just need modularity. You need a whole ecosystem building components to some standard. The Fairphone doesn't have that. Google, in 2014, was talking about an upgradable modular phone held together by magnets. It didn't work very well; if dropped, it fell apart.[4]

IFixit likes it if you can unscrew and replace every part. This does help maintainability. But do you want to go there? Here's the extreme case of that - a Model 15 Teletype. Every small part, of about 2000 of them, is replaceable. Here's repairing a damaged Model 15 from a dumpster, something I did last year.[1] Just because you can doesn't mean it's an effective use of time.

Phones should Just Work. Make them indestructible, not field-modifiable.

[1] [http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.0.html](http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.0.html) [2] [http://www.catphones.com](http://www.catphones.com) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku- xItv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku-xItv8) [4] [http://www.techtimes.com/articles/77985/20150819/googles- pro...](http://www.techtimes.com/articles/77985/20150819/googles-project-ara- phone-falls-apart-when-dropped-release-pushed.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> Actual phone cost 12K. Repairing cost 13K (INR)

I would like to share a terrible experience which I had with Micromax. I got a brand new phone Micromax Canvas A350 (2GB ram, Octa core processor) as a gift.

After a week of use I accidentally dropped the phone and broke the screen. I took it to Micromax service center and they asked me for 6K to change the screen. Since the warranty does not cover these type of damages.

A local repairing shop fixed the screen for 2K but now the warranty is violated. After a month of use power button failed and GSM signal receiving is too weak. I opened to phone to see that the antina wire was broken. (which connected GSM module to the mother board)

I took the phone to Micromax customer care they gave me a list of things to replace: Whole case + GSM module. Total cost : 7K + 6K = 13K.

Only things broken was a power button and a simple wire which will not even cost 10 INR. The cost of a new phone is only 12K

<comment><USER24> 10K Indian Rupee (INR) ~ USD $150.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm fairly sure the bootloader fuse will still be blown on this as it's a retail Qualcomm board - no bootloader upgrades for you.

<comment><USER26> > the bootloader fuse will still be blown on this

What does that mean?

<comment><USER27> Practically nothing in this case. In the case of a phone like the S6, Samsung detects if the fuse is blown, indicating modification by the user, and will disable certain features, fingerprint reader, Samsung Pay, etc..

<comment><USER25> Maybe I've got it wrong in my head, I thought it disallowed modification of the stage 1 loader (in the case of the Nexus 4 and 5, it's LK)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like the idea. The execution, on the other hand, not so much (especially compared to Ara project, from the pictures seen so far).

From the animation on FairPhone site, I counted 17 screws and 6 standoff. How many people, who would not even try to repair their phone will find this easy enough to start repairing their phone?

For comparison sake, there are 10 screws on a Nexus 5 (according iFixit teardown). Sure, the Nexus 5 (or other smartphone) will be a little harder to repair. But the difference is far from huge, and won't make someone take a FairPhone over another "good enough" smartphone, repairability-wise.

The upgrade ability? Sure, it might be nice. But, as the PC market as demonstrated (which has a lot less contraints, too), you can only go so far, until you need to replace the whole thing. Since it's not a well-established project, it's not even a sure-bet you'll still find parts at an affordable price in a few years time. And at that price point, it's not a given that FairPhone + upgrades in a few years costs less than one similar phone now, and a similar to the upgraded in a few years.

That leaves social impact and openness principles. That might appeal to part of the geeky crowd (the ones that buys Librem), and social-aware persons, if they are not turned off by the price. Let's see if it's enough to sustain a smartphone line. In the current saturated market, I have some doubts.

<comment><USER29> >From the animation on FairPhone site, I counted 17 screws and 6 standoff. How many people, who would not even try to repair their phone will find this easy enough to start repairing their phone?

So we developed into society where 17 screws is such a major problem to deal with it... Also people who wouldn't not even try to repair their phone will not try even if there is no screw.

In my opinion such phone should appeal to what you call geeky crowd and from there it should initiate some social change (probably via media such as Internet) where changing 17 screws will not be difficult task but highly rewarding in terms of being human and hardware/cost wise. After that it should spread to people and with it the hardware becomes industrial standard (parts at least) so the price of changing goes down both in cost and finding them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If we really want to get serious about keeping our phones for more than a few years, we need to solve the problem of software bloat. I would love to see an open ecosystem with some sort of distributed benchmark so apps are strongly incentivized to be implemented efficiently. Which of the 1,000 egg timer apps should you pick? The one that doesn't run out your battery before the egg is cooked! But how on earth do you even know which one that is in the current ecosystem?

<comment><USER31> On iOS, I find that it's mostly the OS that becomes unusable. However, that's an interesting idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks like about the same price as a Nexus 5X in Australia, excluding shipping.

Wouldn't it be more environmentally friendly to keep my current phone or to buy a second hand one?

<comment><USER32> The order page states "Designed for use and service in Europe only". Hang on to the Nexus 5 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's a first good step.

What I want is freedom of PC hardware of the 1990s in a smaller form factor. A smartphone consists of a system-on-chip (SoC) computer, memory chip, modem, display, cameras, antennas, sensors, card slots, battery - all could be modular. And be of a convinient form factor so that several companies offer such parts.

Android took the omnipresence role of Windows 95 on smartphones and tablets (though Android device driver are hard to find).

Back in 2006 I had a modular notebook built by an OEM sold under different brands. (picture: [http://p-fst1.pixstatic.com/51b62f6dfb04d67b66000b29._w.540_...](http://p-fst1.pixstatic.com/51b62f6dfb04d67b66000b29._w.540_s.fit_.JPEG) ) What a great hardware platform.

In 2016 the notebook market is in a bad shape - business notebooks: lower build quality (no Thinkpad robustness), higher prices and no modular notebook platform. And on PC the trusted computing (UEFI, GPT, Palladium) accelerated by Microsoft is hostile to non-Windows 8+ operating systems. Hopefully, the EFF can do something there.

<comment><USER34> Have you considered the pi-top ([http://www.pi-top.com](http://www.pi- top.com))? It sounds like it has many of the features you are looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This phone is too expensive for me right now but this is utterly excellent: [http://shop.fairphone.com/catalog/category/view/id/10](http://shop.fairphone.com/catalog/category/view/id/10)

<comment><USER35> Assuming those are all the parts one needs to construct a full phone, you save around 50% of the list of the assembled unit by building it yourself.

<comment><USER36> That list are the parts of the FP-1, which is an entirely different phone than the recently unveiled second generation. And a much cheaper one, even when it was new, so there is definitely no hidden self-assemble bargain. But things certainly do look good for repair!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Apple is absolute nightmare, but most other makers have pretty serviceable products.

Checkout youtube videos for Samsung or Lenovo phones. In amateur conditions it takes about 10 minutes to replace "build-in" battery. Or 30 minutes to replace broken glass or motherboard.

<comment><USER38> That's a bogus argument. Any flagship phone from Samsung or Lenovo will make the same tradeoffs that Apple does between thinness/weight and user- servicability.

In any case, you suggest Samsung/Lenovo phones take 10 minutes for a battery replacement. The iPhone 6 takes just four minutes:

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

<comment><USER18> "The iPhone 6 takes just four minutes"

Jesus, it's gotten that bad...?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am looking forward for the similar idea for cars to be realised.

<comment><USER40> good news, it's already like this. you can buy parts and replace them yourself :O

<comment><USER39> you don't get it...</comment></comment></comment>


Tibetans' Surprising Inheritance - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/tibetans_inherited_denisovan_genetic_adaptation_for_elevation_dna_for_living.html <comment><USER2> Summary: Tibetans apparently get their high-altitude tolerance from Denisovans, through interbreeding with H. Sapiens prior to the disappearance of the Denisovans about 40,000 years ago.

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

<comment><USER3> More accurately humans acquired the high-altitude tolerance gene variant from Denisovans and it was selected for in the ancestors of modern Tibetans. This varient is present in other human populations in East and South East Asia, but only at low frequency.

What I think is more interesting is that the Denisovans gene flow came in from males - human girls are easy would be the bumper sticker.

<comment><USER4> If a man and woman are both at high altitude, and the man is chasing the girl, and the man has the gene for h-a tolerance and she doesn't - he can catch her ...

<comment><USER3> Nice. Actually the Denisovans gene transfer most likely occurred somewhere in South East Asia. It is not thought that the varient actually evolved for improved high altitude adaption in Denisovans, but was just a varient that later provided some selective advantage at altitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The discovery of denisovans is really interesting. Now I'm starting to imagine ancient societies were like the classic Planet of the Apes movies, where sub species of different humanoids lived together and societies developed political hierarchies/roles based on those sub species, i.e. Orangutans functioned as politicians/state-mens, Gorillas worked in the military, and Chimpanzee were scientist (I think that's how the movies went -- I haven't watched them in awhile).

I wonder which sub species for human were responsible for blonde hair and green/blue eyes -- or maybe it's a sub species yet to be discovered. I bet in order to make that call you'd need a near perfect genome -- which is probably vary hard to come by.

(My Thoughts)

<comment><USER3> Blue eyes are the result of a single mutation in an individual that lived around 5000 years ago. All people with blue eyes are descended from this one person.

<comment><USER6> And all individuals with 'green' eyes and many people with brown eyes with recessive blue.

<comment><USER3> Actual green in a bit more genetically complex, but yes there are lot of people with brown eyes that carry the blue eye variant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A curated list of AWS resources to prepare for all AWS Certifications - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/leonardofed/bbf6459ad154ad5215d354f3825435dc <comment><USER2> Let's say I want to get into devops, and combine that with, gee, I don't my continued interest in infosec.

Does anyone take these certs seriously? I was listening to SE Daily and the host in an ad mentioned the SysOps certs. I even search Reddit, and the obviously more programming-oriented end of tech has always been adverse to cert culture than the grunt ClickOps (TM, but who I am kidding I stole it from a blog I forget mark) end I am familiar with.

I have debated studying for these certs. I do want try and study for them to get a feel, but I somehow doubt I can really get a job with them.

Is this like for consulting gigs where partner firms with consultants need minimum X certified people to meet a threshold for their Gold/Platinum/Whatever-flavor partner status?

<comment><USER3> I have also been thinking of getting these certifications, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to get out of them in the long term, business-wise.

I want to study for them and get to know the AWS ecosystem better, actually learn something new for once. I do hope that there's some kind of ROI for getting them. I work freelance as a developer and I know some clients really do like certifications. Then again, AWS - as far as I know - isn't all that popular in Belgium.

<comment><USER4> The base-level certs are like $99 and, if you're more than passingly familiar with AWS, you should be able to blast through them. There are a couple questions about sillier services like SWF but it's mostly EC2, IAM, S3, and DynamoDB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be better if it didn't seem to focus on selling subscriptions to CloudAcademy.

</comment><comment><USER6> And by "all" certification exams, they mean "one" exam</comment>


Slave, Scholar, Stoic - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/05/slave-scholar-stoic.html <comment><USER2> I first picked up the stoics in my early twenties many years ago when I started going to war, and I can't recommend them enough. What you get out of stoic philosophy will definitely depend on the translation you pick up. Every time you read a new translation, you'll get something new out of it. I would recommend researching the various translations, or even just buying a variety of translations on Amazon because they're so cheap. You can get all of the typical stoic works (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca) for the cost of shipping on Amazon. That is incidentally amazing to me. There's a joke about the world in there somewhere. Anyway, I suggest starting with the translation which you find most digestible. Some of them can be extremely difficult, especially if you've never had to read archaic translations.

<comment><USER3> I did as thorough a comparison of translations of _Meditations_ as I could as a non-Greek-speaker a couple years ago, and settled on Maxwell Staniforth's for being highly readable while also holding much closer to the original than most. The only hardcover available (at that time) was from Folio Society, so a little pricey even used, but I'm pretty sure there's at least one paperback in print.

There was, notably, one popular recent translation that tried to give it more of a "quickly-jotted notes" feel to capture the flavor of the original, or so it claimed, implying greater fidelity to the original. In doing so it took far too many liberties with the text—which, to my Greekless eye aided by some online tools, didn't read that way _at all_ , and was typically much wordier than this translation and generally closer to _basically any translation but this one_. Be wary of anything like that.

Just throwing that out there in case anyone finds it useful.

<comment><USER4> I've read this one[1] a while ago, and remember being annoyed at the usage of some words, like 'nature'. Is it different in other translations?

Then there's also the irony of the most powerful man in the world writing a book where he recommends the reader to be content with their station and to preserve the status quo.

1 - [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Thoughts_of_the_Emperor_M...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Thoughts_of_the_Emperor_Marcus_Aurelius_Antoninus)

<comment><USER2> Yes, George Long is only one translator for these works, though he is definitely the most popular. Most of the available translations are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, so you can expect them all to have some degree of difficulty. Also, if this is your first exposure to stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius is probably not the best introduction. Epictetus would be better, or Seneca. There's also a short ( _short_ ) book by James Stockdale called Courage Under Fire about his time as a POW in Vietnam, and how stoic philosophy helped him survive. It doesn't explore the mechanics very well, but if you ever needed the benefits explained, that book will do it.

If you can stomach some slightly more archaic and difficult translations, Harvard's Loeb Classical Library translations are readable, and Aurelius is translated there by Haines, Epictetus in his Discourses (including the Encheiridion) by Oldfather, Seneca's Letters by Gummere. The Loeb editions are nice because they're side-by-side with the original Greek, so it comes in handy if you want to take your study to the next level. A quick note about Seneca's Letters: Most of the common editions only include _some_ of his letters. You'll have to actively search for an edition which includes all 124 of them. The Dover Thrift Edition of Seneca's Letters from a Stoic include all of them and is also translated by Gummere, but does not include the original Greek and is cheaper than the Loeb edition. The Loeb books are really attractive in my library, though. If you're anything of a collector, you'll probably get hooked buying them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like - A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine, provides a good overview of stoicism.

<comment><USER6> I was very disappointed in this book after hearing so many positive recommendations. It seemed like a lazy repackaging of famous stoic writings, dumbed down to appeal to a mass pop-science type audience, plus some projection the author's personal opinions and ideas onto other writers, in a way that felt kind of forced and sloppy.

Just go to the primary sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a cool side-by-side comparison of the English translations of the Enchiridion: [https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:twh,twr,gl,pem,s...](https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:twh,twr,gl,pem,sw/section:meta)

Pick your favourite!

<comment><USER8> Thanks! And for those for which Ancient Greek is "within their power" here's the first sentence

τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν.

from Perseus ([http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0235%3Atext%3Denc)).

Actually you don't have to know anything at all, you can just click on each word and it will show you the meaning. You can then judge yourself which translation you like best. Note, for example that the word _control_ is not used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's really worth reading: [http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html)

<comment><USER10> It's interesting that Trump became the leader of free world by embodying the opposite of many of these precepts (he'd probably call someone adhering to them a loser or weakling). Epictetus would not be surprised, nor care.

<comment><USER11> I have been thinking to write a book about leadership and use the opposite of what my managers are doing, and I am pretty certain that many on this board could do the same. But then, do I really care? Would that change anything? There are plenty of books andstories providing good leadership examples.

There are also plenty of studies supporting the observation than cheaters have an easier time making financial gains, no matter how good or bad they actually are at their job, as long as they can pretend and manipulate the opinion of a group of enablers.

I refuse to be a cheater or an enabler. That I do care, and that is something I can do, and have done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Enchiridion of Epictetus is the best book I have read on Stoic Philosophy.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps the most incisive work of philosophy ever written. Short, funny and out of copyright. What's not to like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Audiobooks from Audible on the subject is also worth a listen. I listen to epictetus/seneca/aurelius at least once a year.

</comment><comment><USER15> In the same vein, I would warmly recommend Marcus Aurelius notes to anybody wondering what all that and this was/is about.

<comment><USER16> Seconded.

There's an online version I like (which is also available in markdown and json format) [1]. I can't comment on the translation quality as I'm no expert on the source matter.

[1] = [http://directingmind.com/meditations](http://directingmind.com/meditations)</comment></comment>


'Didn't we already kill this game?' [FIFA origin story] - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/rejection-tragedy-and-billions-of-dollars-the-story-of-fifa/0120299 <comment><USER2> In retrospect it seems extremely hard to imagine how it could _not_ have been a success, but the provincialism of American management had to be kept away in order for it to be a success for EA.

In an alternate history the license might have gone to one of the European developers like _Sensible Soccer_.

See also [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/21/fifa- vide...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/21/fifa-video-game- changed-football)

<comment><USER3> You would be surprised how common that is.

For example, Steam is world leader mostly because 90% of the world can not use any of their cards or method of payments to pay any of the other stores.

<comment><USER2> Steam has other advantages:

\- first mover

\- absolutely terrible UX of the other stores with game-integrated features (Origin; original GFWL). Steam's not _great_ , but it's acceptable for most people most of the time.

\- non-punitive DRM: can move install freely without worrying about loss of media

\- very generous frequent discounts

The last two help against the real competitor, piracy.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention the classic for any platform: excellent first party games to get it into people's homes in the first place.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When an experiment with existing technology does a "good enough" job - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@taitems/how-i-replicated-an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9 <comment><USER2> _Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location and direction._

That's the same argument that police departments use "Well we'll only use it to capture child abductors and stolen cars and stuff".

But the truth is that there just aren't that many real child abductors out there (especially with known license plates -- and when they are known, it tends to be a child-custody dispute rather than a stranger-abduction), and meanwhile a huge database of every driver's whereabouts is being amassed with no good controls over who owns the data or what it's used for.

I'm surprised companies aren't offering the service for free in return for the database. There must be huge marketing possibilities... John Doe drives past this oil change place twice a day, let's send him a coupon, or better... John Doe's car goes to Jane Smith's house twice a week and parks there for two hours, let's send his wife an ad for a private investigator.

<comment><USER3> Oh dear. That's so creepy someone might actually do it!

I'm getting into home automation at the moment, so a use case that I think I deleted from the article was just letting you know that your mum or someone had pulled up in the driveway. License plates vs. a known list of visitors. Or as is happening here in some of our suburbs, "Alert: A group of 4 men have arrived in a stolen V8 Commodore"

<comment><USER4> > That's so creepy someone might actually do it!

It's only creepy if it's done on a targeted, individual basis, which it won't be.

As it is - in many countries you legally have no expectation of privacy in a public place, so I have no problem with en-masse ANPR. If the police eventually develops a very dense sensor network that can track every car's movement across every intersection then there would be too much information recorded for me to personally worry about it - and I still believe it would help with crime in general. The usual reactionary bullet-points based around the usual bogey-men of terrorists and child-abduction are weak and I think distract from more meaningful and impactful, but sedate arguments: e.g. it would reduce the need for inherently-dangerous hot pursuits to follow a vehicle as the cameras would do that anyway. Uninsured vehicles could be identified immediately before they get stopped for a broken taillight or involved in a collision. And cynically: APR systems could be used to compute a car's average-speed between points to determine if the car broke the speed limit).

I don't feel mass ANPR is comparable to other bulk-surveillance schemes like Internet snooping, because I believe that we do have an expectation of privacy regarding what goes through our home connections, and acting on Internet surveillance is inherently subjective - whereas ANPR can indicate if a car is known to be stolen or uninsured, that's not something that's open to interpretation.

<comment><USER2> _it would reduce the need for inherently-dangerous hot pursuits to follow a vehicle as the cameras would do that anyway._

It wouldn't really reduce the need for the infamous hot-pursuits because often in these hot pursuits, the car is stolen so the driver is not who the car is licensed to.

<comment><USER4> Hot pursuits are not primarily about identifying the driver either - it's about following the car so they know where it is so they can apprehend the driver. With a pursuit there's a panic, a high probability of the car being damaged or destroyed, and possible injury or death for the driver, the police involved, and of course, any pedestrians caught up in the way.

With a large enough ANPR network, there is no need to chase the car - so the driver won't necessarily panic or act irrationally to evade the police - leading to a higher probability of recovering the vehicle in good condition, and a successful non-dramatic apprehension of the suspects as it makes it easier to catch them by surprise, for example.

<comment><USER2> Right, it's not about identifying the driver, it's about apprehending the driver.

I hope I never live in a society where the driver of a stolen car can expect to be apprehended no matter where he stops because he'll be tracked by a camera network so ubiquitous that he can't escape it.

Because such a ubiquitous network means that all of my travels are being tracked and recorded too - which will likely include facial recognition, so there really will be no escaping Big Brother... and I don't trust any government with so much power and information over citizens to be benign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way.

The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc.

You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc.

Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time.

Good luck!

<comment><USER6> You're very right.

At a quick glance, this thing is going to need power, probably from the car battery. You don't want it to catch fire and kill the occupants, so there's going to be R&D in power supplies, material etc, along with regulation and testing.

<comment><USER3> Emergency services vehicles run so much equipment they have isolated power from engine power.

<comment><USER7> I have noticed here in California the the police always leave their patrol cars running when parked. I was entering a restaurant a saw a patrol car running. I saw the officer inside and asked him why they leave the cars running. I asked him if was to be ready to take off fast.

He laughed and said that there is so much electronics inside that the battery would run down during lunch.

I didn't think to ask why they didn't turn off the electronics. I also didn't ask what they do at the end of the day.

<comment><USER8> Boot up times for the computer(s). That takes a while, though I imagine it is getting faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular > letters.

A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives.

[http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/](http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/)

> Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, > Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was > just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the > license plate number. His computer indicated that the SUV was stolen, and > Edwards drew his gun and told the two men to get down on the ground. It > wasn't until later that he realized he'd typed the wrong license plate > number into his computer. He was off by one digit. By the time he realized > his mistake, one of the men had already been shot in the chest at close > range.

<comment><USER6> This sort of thing doesn't really happen in Aus. I could see someone getting arrested and spending a night in jail unnecessarily or maaaaaaybe tased (and to be clear, whether we consider this a fair price to pay is a different question), but police rarely shoot people here.

<comment><USER10> Yes it does.

Just the other day the trigger happy cops shot a couple of people at a swingers party.

<comment><USER6> This is what I get for not following the news. I also remember a case years ago on Bondi beach where a guy having a psychotic break and brandishing a knife was killed. If I remember correctly this was used a justification for introducing tasers.

I should have said rarely.

<comment><USER11> A knife in the hands of a psycho is much more dangerous than you might think. If he's at close enough range a shooting reaction is correct.

<comment><USER12> You don't need to shoot to kill. You only need to disable a attacker, not kill him. "German Police shoot a knife wielding man in the leg in self defense"

[https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cfe_1440199540&comments=1](https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cfe_1440199540&comments=1)

<comment><USER13> Anybody that shot a handgun at the range will tell you that hitting a small moving target like a leg is not a guaranteed shot even by an experienced shooter (add stress, low visibility etc and this becomes even trickier).

If you come at cops with a knife I think it's "reasonable" they shoot you. What is not reasonable in the case of US cops is that they seem to shoot even non dangerous people and get away with it.

<comment><USER14> And yet UK police don't tend to shoot people with knives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author here, hi HN/Reddit.

I had hoped I'd made it clear enough, but by no means am I recommending something I cobbled together in an hour on the couch be rolled out as a competitor to BlueNet. I mean shit, I'm web scraping their database and using compressed footage from cheap dashcams. The algorithm is also untrained.

I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution.

For a full disclaimer, many many years ago I did work on various Victoria Police IT projects in a previous company. While our projects were delivered on time and on budget, we did hear some horror stories about what the multinational consulting firms were charging.

<comment><USER15> I worked in government once and could not believe the cost required to get what I saw as small projects done.

In the end I understood, when I came to understand, as other in this thread have pointed out, that there's support, rollout, training, documentation, project management, planning and it goes on and on. The technical solution can be just a small company of providing a sustainable solution to an organization.

Having said that, you should be packing this up and selling it.

<comment><USER3> I've worked with state government and fortune 50(0)s, so I get where you're coming from. Costs that are just part of doing business seem like enormous waste to outsiders. That being said, I've heard some horrible war stories. NDAs but.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel like there's a killing to be made in "bidding for government contracts as a service". Plus you'd be doing A Good Thing (at least in theory)

Obviously complicated requirements exist but I think there's a way of embracing this with some skilled workers

I think that the digital service is trying this a bit

<comment><USER6> In much (all?) of Australia all government tenders have to be publicly advertised so this is something you could definitely look in to if you were interested. In particular, Victoria's listing is at : [https://www.tenders.vic.gov.au/tenders/index.do](https://www.tenders.vic.gov.au/tenders/index.do)

<comment><USER17> I read an interesting article earlier today about IT spending in Australia: [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal- governments-$1...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal- governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562)

> It found public servants were too afraid to make major changes to IT > procurement and were not talking with other departments to avoid > duplication.

> "A fear of external scrutiny of decisions — such as through Senate estimates > and audits — leads to a low-risk appetite and a culture where it is 'not OK > to fail'," the report said.

> "This means that old and familiar ICT solutions are preferred to newer and > more innovative, but perceivably riskier, solutions."

Nobody in the APS gets fired for hiring IBM, and nobody in IBM gets fired for screwing up major government projects. [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off- and...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could- have-prevented-census-outage/7963916)

<comment><USER6> While I agree, Aus has also had some success with IT projects.

Many federal projects are now under a single sign on portal that works very well. Our taxes take less than an hour to fill out as most details are pre- filled.

And speaking for NSW, the RTA/RMS/Whatever-they're-called-these-days (our equivalent to the DMV for US readers) is almost fully functional without an in-person visit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Don't ask me why, but one afternoon I had the desire to prototype a vehicle- mounted license plate scanner that would automatically notify you if a vehicle had been stolen or was unregistered._

Don't ask me why, but something tells me there was a bit more to the actual Victoria Police project than just the image-scanning component. But the title makes for good clickbait, at least.

</comment><comment><USER19> Particularly relevant now that the Australian Federal Government has come out and said that "the cost of Government IT has jumped to nearly $10 billion.": [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal- governments-$1...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal- governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562). And you wonder why?

</comment><comment><USER20> $86M does sound high, but glad to see the author at least acknowledge that some of this would likely have been spent on improving existing software/databases etc to support the new system. Also probably worth noting is the cost of the labour required to develop the new system, and upgrade the old, and design and fit out the interior of the vehicles, and to make sure it's all done in compliance with privacy laws, and so on.

Not that I'm saying $86M is justified - rather that I can start to see how things might add up.

</comment><comment><USER21> > I would expect part of that budget includes the replacement of several > legacy databases and software applications to support the high frequency, > low latency querying of license plates several times per second, per > vehicle.

Well, if we're just checking to see if a car is registered stolen, that's hopefully a very small database. A simple hash table should be sufficient for a yes/no decision. But God only knows what goes on inside the DMV, and getting that data out into a rapidly queryable state could be tricky.

<comment><USER22> I would have thought the number of known-stolen plates would be small enough you could push the entire list out to the device.

Google reckons there's only 4.5 million registered vehicles in Victoria (.au) - with 6 character [A-Z0-9] = 36bit/5byte plates that's only gonna need ~22 meg to store them all and you've got a few bits for "flags" \- even if 10% of them are listed as stolen at any time, you'd only need a couple of meg for the "stolen car list" \- even without handwaving away the overhead for the data structure, this seems a reasonable solution. If you want the make/model/colour info you could then just query the remote db when you get a hit for a plate with the "stolen" flag set (or perhaps the "vehicle of interest" flag).

Of course nobody's gonna build it that way, because then you lose the data set of plate locations you can own without needing to ask for consent. This will, of course, store GPS location and timestamp of every plate is acquires, and if they're being particularly audacious, the actual imagery captured as well. That's how you make this a $80mil project... :-/

(Of course private industry already has this - tow trucks carry alpr rigs and sell the data to repo agencies in the US, I'm told...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The local populace has a $170 million/year problem of stolen cars. Government spends $86 million (one time cost? estimated cost over X years? it's unclear) to help solve this problem. Doesn't seem like that bad of an economic tradeoff on the face of it, really.

I can understand that the $86 million seems like a lot until you realize the kinds of capabilities that an automotive camera system like has to comply with and all of the integration needed with other software/systems/services and the fact that this cost is likely a total cost over many years as it sounds much more sensational. Just the initial report from Deloitte cost the government $115,000.

In their first trial in 2014-2015, which lasted 15 months, with only 6 cars outfitted, ended up identifying and impounding 240 stolen cars and increased revenue from additional tickets by hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. That's pretty impressive! Now they're rolling out to not just 6 cars but to 220 total, which in theory should improve policing efforts.

References: [http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to- consid...](http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to-consider- implementing-86-million-live-video-anpr-system-for-patrol-cars/) [http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria- polices-...](http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-polices- hightech-bluenet-cars-are-nabbing-thousands-of-motorists-by-scanning- numberplates/news-story/b17e68dabe72879c26528e70176689c4)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yup. I did something similar with a RasPi camera and OpenCV. On my house it store and record every license plate that drives by and/or stops. It certainly leads to some ethical questions (not that you couldn't record this data going all "Rear Window" on the neighborhood but it's quite easy to understand all the coming and goings of your neighbors.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder about the cost of licensing patents for a project like this one.

</comment><comment><USER26> Amazing and super sad that a government contract could ever be submitted for such an embarrassingly high amount. I hope more people buying gov software contracts read this.

</comment><comment><USER27> When reaching 90% completion, like an MVP, those remaining 10% will take much longer. I also get angry when tax money is seemingly being wasted. What should you do though ? Offer to do it for free ? I'm a developer and I like building stuff, I do not like selling stuff. Thankfully there are people that actually like selling, so I suggest finding such a partner and be prepared to spend five years completing the last 10% and hopefully make some money.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is fantastic!

I honestly believe it is examples like this that clearly show how quickly the world is changing, and how massive organizations are a thing of the past.

You don't need thousands of employees and $86M, you need a couple of smart people and a weekend.

Uber and Air BnB have to some degree done this already, I have no doubt the exact same thing will happen in health, education, transportation and many, many other aspects of our lives.

</comment><comment><USER29> You can't say it's expensive without knowing the requirements - this is not only misleading, but it says something negative about the overall level of discourse we have.

"Why did this system cost 86 million dollars" would be much more informative. It could be that the whole thing is a waste, but that would require an actual analysis.

</comment><comment><USER15> You could now integrate auto gun aiming on the felon and give them 20 seconds to comply.

</comment><comment><USER30> How did you get to the number 220 of vehicles?

<comment><USER3> It was sourced from an article. I originally built the tool to see if it could be done (given I knew the DB existed), and then did some Googling and found BlueNet. I wasn't actually trying to do it better/cheaper, it just so happened it had been done before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that > automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current > location and direction.

Seriously? You jumped the shark from interesting tech, to think of the children it's ok to go all Orwell here.

First App I'd make. Cheating spouse app. Is your partner or Ex hiding from you. Pay here for tracking info. Part of which goes to the people collating data.

<comment><USER22> Nah - go B2B not B2C. Collect all the data and sell it to insurance companies. Let the health insurance companies increase people's rates for regularly using McDonalds drivethroughs. Let the auto insurance companies bump up your rates because you are seen near racetracks or vehicle modifiers. Charge income protections and disability insures to search for claimants to see what they're doing when they think they;re not under scrutiny "Mr Smith, you claim to be unfit to return to work, but you're paying golf twice a week!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The author is just calling some api, I don't know how much technical knowledge people here at hacker news has, but this person is talking BS. No open source software are used here.

To the author: please spend some time and try to analyze the problem first. I don't think you even get the problem right, or know what open source is. A free api IS NOT an example of OPEN SOURCE.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if trolling, but:

I'm using an open source license plate recognition system (OPENALPR), taking the produced registration number, and THEN querying the (yes, closed source) records database via web scraping. All tools used to achieve this, bar where the records are kept, are open source (openalpr, cheerio, node-horseman etc).</comment></comment>


Group Currency - <AUTHOR> http://groupcurrency.org/ <comment><USER2> Basic income as proposed at the societal scale is essentially a wealth redistribution scheme, which implies that there is some concrete actual value removed from somebody and given to somebody else. Using a cryptocurrency to provide basic income would manifest simply as the creation of currency, with no actual value being created to correspond to the new currency, so it's just going to be inflationary. I don't see any proposals on the linked page on how to overcome that, links welcome if there are, nor does anything leap to mind to solve this problem in a sensible way.

(This has nothing to do with whether basic income is a good idea or not; the point is that this does not appear to actually _be_ basic income except at an extremely superficial level. Nor is my calling it a "wealth redistribution" scheme intended to be a criticism. I'll admit to being extremely skeptical about basic income, but that is what it is, just like EITC. Whether redistribution is a _good idea_ is a separate discussion I'm not trying to have here.)

<comment><USER3> What this scheme does is create equitable inflation. That is, I concur, not identical to BI. However, inflation does come with redistributive effects.

In most macroeconomic models, the question of "who makes the money" is abstracted into "the banks make it and lend it to everyone." That means that money has to start in the investment sphere - the expected impact on individuals is to experience cheaper debt and higher wages and prices - a sort of "regression to the mean" in their financial status.

But in a situation like the post-GFC markets, investment tends to slosh around in financial instruments without reaching Main Street in any meaningful way - the money isn't turned into capex or wages. This is the kind of thing that is smoothed out when the inflation is reformulated as a benefit. Individuals still experience the regression to the mean, but it happens instantaneously, on a predictable schedule.

<comment><USER4> Could we create a system where inflation would hit harder on the one that had the most money? That way, rich people would be enticed to move their money, and invest in risky plays. Some of them would grow very rich, others would lose a lot of money, but, on the end, they would end up reducing their income...

<comment><USER5> The tool for that is _demurrage_ , [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29), which adds devaluation of the currency over time. This complements Basic Income very well, with UBI for money creation and demurrage for money destruction.

For physical currency is has some obvious practical problems, which has prevent adoption, but for virtual currencies it is easy to implement.

<comment><USER4> Well sorry, I did not explain myself properly: my idea was that, if every coin could be associated with a specific person, rich people's coins might devalue quicker than poor people's coins. It's a weird idea and giving it a little more thought, I don't see how could a state enforce such a system effectively, though.

<comment><USER6> variable Sales tax/VAT pegged to credit card and linked to SSN/NI

Cash purchases would be problematic. Maybe drawing out cash incurs the variable tax too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you prevent members from only enjoying the upside?

Example: say we're a group of musicians, starting a MusicianCoin group. I happen to be a fairly shameless participant, so I enjoy the basic income while I'm still bootstrapping my career, but one day I hit it big, and now my concerts are all sold out for the next year (and of course, tickets are sold in exchange for MusicianCoins).

Do I give back to the group? If I want to do that, that's easy: I just sit on my newly earned pile of MusicianCoins, and wait for the steady rate of minting to dissipate the value away to other members of the group. But what if I just exit my position immediately? By trading my MusicianCoins for dollars (thereby putting downward pressure on the value of MusicianCoin), I'm avoiding giving back any of the value I created, I think?

I think this is what makes it fundamentally different than a tax-based basic income: you can't (legally) opt out of taxes.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure it's that simple. Think of it in terms of shares in a company. When Apple does well does any executive sell their shares? Maybe, maybe not.

Nothing is preventing this musician from selling their MusicianCoins. If there are enough coins and enough musicians it won't do much to the price if the market knows how to value the coin properly. The musician might simply end up losing out on a profit by this action. Depending on the situation, maybe they might end up annoying the group and getting kicked out, who knows. It shouldn't be an issue though, just as it's not an issue with company shares.

<comment><USER7> But there's a difference: Apple shareholders don't see their shares redistributed at a steady pace - Apple shares don't have a built-in basic income.

The reason why I think even a single exit might do a lot to the price of MusicianCoins, is that financial success (not only in the music industry) seems to follow some sort of power law: a very small number of members amass a large part of the wealth [1].

Do people behave like this in real life (ie abandon their group when they strike success)? Well certainly not most people - men like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates haven't taken up citizenship in some tax haven to opt out of US taxes - but IIRC one of the Facebook founders did.

There are at least two reasons why it may be a bigger problem for MusicianCoin than it is for the USA: 1) the group size is bound to be smaller, so a single such event would cause a bigger shock, and 2) it's a much easier decision to sell your crypto-coins than it is to move country.

Of course this is all arm-chair economics on my part, and I actually hope you're right that in practice it's not such an issue - I love the idea and would love to see it work well.

[1]: see these sort of numbers, where the top 1% pay 23% of taxes: [https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8406445/tax-state-local- distri...](https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8406445/tax-state-local-distribution) \- and I reckon what would have been really interesting is if they had broken it down to how much of that 23% is carried by the top 0.1%

<comment><USER9> [http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/dividend- history](http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/dividend-history)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what you mean? If I hold more shares, I get more dividends. That's not redistributive, unlike what groupcurrency proposes.

Edit: ah wait, I think I know what you mean. When I wrote they have "no built- in basic income", I meant "no built-in Basic Income" \- as per the context of this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So... I always thought one of the first things that would be implemented over cryptocurrency protocols would be a form of "closed-group socialism" where people's income is held in trust by a fund, which then allocates it (either through one-way transfers, or by issuing credit) according to people's current "scores" in the blockchain ledger, whatever those entail.

This system seems to want to do that... but without the part where people's actual money is being redistributed. I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like the endgame of this current iteration would be a sharing economy where any outside work or production that gets input into the system is distributed amongst the shareholders of credits.

Whether that can sustain a "basic income" remains an issue not directly addressable by the scope of "Group Currency"

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure I don't understand most of the implications, but seems like it could be a cool mechanism for a lot of things. You could start a company and distribute a percentage of future revenue to owners of the currency based on # of tokens (or whatever) and you have something that ties reward to time spent working on project in a direct way. Not sure you need a cyrpto currency for this or things like this, but is a cool idea.

<comment><USER13> This is basically what stock options are. The mechanism of allocation is usually a bit different, but the basic concept is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > A town, city, state or country can provide its community with a basic income > that is backed by the value created by that community.

It's not clear to me why the value created by people living inside those types of communities should be aggregated into a single monetary device. In a town, there are various groups of people working together to produce different products in different kinds of economic activity. Some make profit and thus can distribute the produced value, some don't make profit and can't distribute anything.

Those groups are usually called companies, corporations and so on. They already have a system of exchangeable tokens representing both ownership and decision rights regarding the activity of the group and the redistribution of its produced value. Those tokens are called shares or stocks. It's a nice system that does not work too bad, though I'd agree that a bit of decentralization would be welcome.

But fusing those tokens from different companies into a monetary tool that would represent the activities of a larger group controlled by political structures such as a "town, city, state or country", seems to be a gross loss of granularity that would probably result in dramatic economic inefficiencies.

</comment><comment><USER15> How is supply controlled? Through the group funds? What is to keep rational actors in larger, competing group funds from sabotaging them?

Also, how do you address the problem of goods and services with income-elastic price points? A UBI scheme will cause prices to disproportionately inflate in lower-income markets, i.e. housing will be just as inaccessible as it was before because the income increase.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The members of a group currency all mint cryptographic tokens (coins, > shares, what-have-you) at an equal rate.

So what you're saying is that I can get value that someone else has paid for with their hardware and electricity bills, without having to do anything except be on a list? Sign me up!

</comment><comment><USER16> People really do not understand blockchain.

Since each member gets regular basic income and are verified with KYC (to prevent fake identities) this is just how money is handled among friends. Alice owes Bob a dollar and Bob owes Carol a dollar and Carol owes Alice so it all eventually settles. Just the friends in this 'group' keep a record of it.

Why do they need mining then? They don't. They just need a ledger of all the loans.

If a ledger can serve as a currency system then why do we even need mining? Because users could fake multiple identities, to receive the basic income. Mining is required to solve this 'money generation' problem.

In bitcoin, not everyone gets basic income but only the ones who do some work to maintain the ledger.

What group currency is, is called hawala.

<comment><USER15> People tout the public ledger as a benefit of the block chain, but it's utterly useless as soon as someone converts to another currency and then back again (a.k.a. Tumbling).

You mention bitcoin, and tumbling is exactly how money launderers and tax evaders use bitcoin's "public ledger" today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would the IRS position on digital currencies as barter all but eliminate this use within the United States? Would the KYC requirement for protection against Sybil attacks facilitate governmental interference? Neat article, but I found the lack of discussion about the topic of taxation to be shockingly absent.

</comment><comment><USER18> I couldn't locate the line where it provides people with food.</comment>


Jitsi Meet – Improving Scale and Media Quality with Cascading SFUs (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://webrtchacks.com/sfu-cascading/ <comment><USER2> We did our daily standup call with it yesterday (mostly audio). 12 people, on a $3 Scaleway Debian instance (2GB RAM). Worked perfectly.

Obviously as we stopped using Zoom we have to manually upload all our personal data to Facebook now.

<comment><USER3> We tried to but with most of our team on Firefox it simply doesn't work unfortunately. Zoom has been the only thing reliable for us.

It's a bit ironic that somewhere, someone is switching from Firefox to Chrome because of data concerns with Zoom.

<comment><USER4> That's odd. My experience with Firefox on Windows is that I can't get audio to work with Zoom. Jitsi, on the other hand, works perfectly though there is a small yellow box that warns me that I should use a "fully supported browser"

<comment><USER5> Anyone know what the reason for the yellow box is?

<comment><USER3> Because Firefox in Jitsi is seriously not working unless you have small groups and resources to spare. But they are working on it:

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi- meet/issues/4758](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758)

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi- meet/issues/5439](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5439)

<comment><USER5> Does it need more bandwidth or more server resources (or both?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a fantastic open source solution. Can be self hosted.

It is to note that traffic does go through the server, hence need decent bandwidth. the server afaik does have the keys to decrypt traffic

<comment><USER7> The Jistsi team says the server needs roughly 5.5Mbps per Chrome user. Firefox uses a lot more bandwidth, system resources, and degrades the room capacity.

Just something to keep in mind, and after some testing I saw the same results.

My AWS bill was projected to be over $1k/month, so I put it on Linode where it'll cost between $100-200/month. Just about any decent VPS provider would be good options compared to AWS due to bandwidth.

<comment><USER8> Is there cheaper bandwidth available than Hetzner's 1.19euro +vat per TB? (Linode seems to be at 10$ / TB).

<comment><USER9> Or Hetzners dedicated hosts that have zero cost for bandwidth and unlimited traffic as well, haven't been able to find anything cheaper than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been playing with a custom install of Jitsi Meet for the last few days. It was very easy to setup.

I'm kind of fearing trying to deploy it in my company. This has nothing to do with Jitsi Meet and everything to do with the shitshow that is WebRTC in browsers.

I can't find any desktop browsers that use the available GPU for hardware accelerated video encoding. Chromium (Google and Edge) says it's "only available on Chrome OS and Android". Firefox has a flag with no scare- provisos, but I've been unable to tell if it's had any effect.

By default, every browser on my system was setup to prefer the Intel UHD GPU. I've got an NVidia GeForce RTX 2080 in this laptop. Why not use that?

One of the reasons is that all the browsers have a software-rendering blacklist for certain combos of OS/hardware/drivers. There are rare cases where errant WebGL code can cause a full system crash on (checks notes) Android. So if you're one of the unlucky many who have these combos, but also an operating system smart enough to put graphics drivers into userland, you're taking the fast-train to turning your laptop into a blow-dryer. So they tend to take the Intel GPU over the NVidia GPU because apparently Intel's hardware+drivers isn't as buggy.

You can override it in the hidden settings, which means nobody overrides it.

All of this is to say, you could have a very powerful computer and still have very poor WebRTC performance.

<comment><USER11> Does this explain why I get poor Jitsi experience on my laptop and better using the Android app on my phone??

I suspect you are hitting on the exact issue I'm having. I have a Thinkpad with just the Intel 5500 GPU, nothing superb. So, how do I figure out if at least that is being used or not?

<comment><USER10> Windows Task Manager will show you GPU utilization on the Performance tab. Start Task Manager, then start your browser and see if there is an uptick. Then start a meeting to see if there is another one. There probably won't be. Then, disable the software rendering override in your browser: (Firefox: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers#How_to_force- enable_blocked_graphics_features)) (Chrome: [https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable- webg...](https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable-webgl-in-my- browser)) and test again. Probably need to restart the browser after the change in settings.

<comment><USER11> Why would you assume I'm on Windows?

I'm on GNU/Linux here.

But anyway, yes, I see specifically an uptick in the CPU dramatically with meetings, distinct from other browsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something that isn't mentioned in the docs is room (and server) capacity, or at least rough estimates.

The Jitsi team gave some specific numbers on room capacity in the forums. Each room should reliably handle 20-35 Chrome users (Firefox uses roughly double the resources), and has a cap at 75. Apparently if you're only using audio, then rooms of 70+ people will work fine.

They're working on upping this number to 500 for configurations that have multiple bridges, as well as improving the UI to account for larger meetings.

<comment><USER8> Where does the difference between Chrome and Firefox come from? Is Firefox using a different video format?

<comment><USER12> See here for details: [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi- meet/issues/4758](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Jitsi-meet is very easy to install and to setup. "apt install jitsi-meet" and you have almost all done. The documentation is very good. It works great and it is super userfriendly. You have no excuses.

<comment><USER14> > You have no excuses.

Billions of users who aren't using linux distros with aptitude have an excuse. This isn't remotely close to the "just works" that you need to get wide adoption.

<comment><USER15> Yet it is probably the easiest and most "just works" solution to self host conferencing.

Of course if you don't selfhost anything it's not option for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Alternatives to Jitsi are Janus (mentioned in this thread) but also OpenVidu (formerly Kurento) and Mediasoup which provide building blocks to roll your own. All of these also have demos that you can use out of the box for our own conferences.

<comment><USER17> Just a nitpick: Kurento still exists on its own, and provides a generalist framework of components to build a service that can handle media.

OpenVidu is one such service, it builds _upon_ Kurento, and itself can be used to make videoconference rooms very easily. Otherwise, Kurento is just a media server that handles media but doesn't have the concept of "rooms", "publishers", "consumers", escalability, reliability, etc. so you would have to develop all those things on your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there any good tutorials for how to setup Jitsi to work for 30-50 people? The discussion forums are hard to navigate.

<comment><USER19> consider using mumble

<comment><USER20> mumble / murmur is great, I host it for family and friends to use. That said, it's only voice and text. No video or screen sharing yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was told that Matrix/Riot is a good alternative to Jitsi (can share a meeting URL and offers E2EE). Does anyone have a data point here?

<comment><USER22> Riot isn't an alternative to Jitsi so much as a complement to it. Matrix is for text chat, and Riot uses Jitsi for calls; while you can embed a Jitsi client into Riot rooms, and it auto-shares the URL, AFAIK group calls are not E2EE even if the room is.

One-on-one calls through Riot _are_ encrypted, but only if made in a one-on- one direct chat.

<comment><USER21> The riot features page makes it seem very "built-in" ([https://about.riot.im/features#voice- video](https://about.riot.im/features#voice-video)).

<comment> Half-Shot riot.im hosts its own Jitsi instance which is built into the UI, so hitting the call button in a room will spawn an embedded Jitsi call in the room.

Recently we added the option for people to use their own self hosted Jitsi instances, if they prefer.

(1:1 calls at the moment are normal WebRTC, directly over Matrix)

<comment><USER23> I might be breaking the rules, but can you point me towards any information about how to integrate my existing self-hosted jitsi server into my self- hosted matrix install? Finding this seems elusive.

<comment><USER15> I tried and i don't think its easily possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would love to use this instead of zoom. Any news about firefox support?

<comment> m-p-3 I use it for quick meetings on Firefox and so far it works with the limited set of features I need, despite the warning.

<comment><USER24> Last week I could not manage to use it for a three-way conversation (after 1h of trying everything, and re-initializing the stuff several times). Sometimes the sound of one participant was missing, sometimes the video of one. When we got it to work for a subset of two people, the CPU of everybody was at 100%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have been considering developing a simple video conferencing solution using this approach with WebRTC. Basically, I was planning on doing something like this example [0] of server-side peers or just a set of forced TURN servers, whichever approach being deployed on servers at the edge.

I figured using anycast IPs, and having server to server communication across regions before then sending back down to the client would be ideal. Each offer and answer signaling would be done via distributed pubsub (e.g. embedded nats) and general persistence also distributed (e.g. something simple like dqlite). Has anyone had success with distributing WebRTC channels like this? Are there any concerns with redistributing, say, raw h.264 and opus as is without special concern for buffering or transcoding? How do slower consumers handle a fast set of UDP packets?

Also, I doubt there's a way, but anyone familiar with an end to end encrypted approach with WebRTC and DTLS when a server is in the middle? I figure not since offer/answer is for a single peer instead of broadcast and I see no approach in the browser to doubly encrypt media streams.

0 - [https://github.com/pion/webrtc/tree/master/examples/broadcas...](https://github.com/pion/webrtc/tree/master/examples/broadcast)

<comment><USER26> Using your first solution (a custom pion SFU relay), and selectively routing the streams between "edge" servers would be similar to Octo, as shown here.

Using TURN servers instead would not have the benefit of SFU (i.e. clients will have to upload to each peer) - i.e. its still a full mesh network.

Using TURN servers with SFU would work similar to your pion solution, however it would also use more bandwidth, as it would be forwarding the same streams multiple times for each peer routed through that TURN server (instead of once per stream with SFU)

As for e2e encryption over webrtc via an SFU - yes, this is possible, but its currently very messy (wasm video encoding and encryption streamed over an SFU- bound datachannel with full mesh distribution of the encryption key). There are plans to implement "Insertable Streams" which you will be able to transform (e.g. encrypt) which will allow this to work without the hacks.

<comment><USER27> >As for e2e encryption over webrtc via an SFU - yes, this is possible, but its currently very messy (wasm video encoding and encryption streamed over an SFU- bound datachannel with full mesh distribution of the encryption key). There are plans to implement "Insertable Streams" which you will be able to transform (e.g. encrypt) which will allow this to work without the hacks.

So currently Jitsi meet the one on the web site is NOT e2e encrypted?

<comment><USER26> Yeah, not e2e encrypted when it goes through videobridge (as per this article).

I haven't checked, but its possible for 1-to-1 or small meetings they may go full mesh, which would be e2e encrypted - a few platforms do this.

edit: just checked and jitsi is "full mesh" for 2 participants - if you have 3 or more (video) participants, it switches over to SFU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been excited to try it with our company for a few months, but is it as "user friendly" as Zoom for non-technical users?

<comment><USER29> Yes. Installed it yesterday, ran a 12 person meeting with no instructions to the users other than "go to this URL". No issues.

<comment><USER30> I would even say it's more friendly than Zoom. I only tried the hosted version for both, but the experience with Jitsi was orders of magnitude simpler and faster than Zoom.

For creating a room, you need an account on Zoom and it's generally complicated to get to from the homepage. With Jitsi, right on meet.jit.si, you simply pick your url name and you're in.

For joining, Zoom kept trying to push me to download the app, and had to press two tiny buttons to get it to open in the browser. But by default you have no audio or video, so I had to spend 10m teaching my parents how to enable theirs. With Jitsi, it opens right in the browser, and video/audio work with no issue once they accept browser permissions.

At every step, zoom tried getting me to sign up or download their app, whereas Jitsi works fully in the browser with no account. Creating the room is a single click and I get to pick the url too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like Jitsi because it doesn't require any signups and it's simple to create a channel/room. But the quality of video and audio seems a bit lacking. Does anyone have suggestions on how to improve Jitsi Meet's video and audio quality when working with the official smartphone apps and platform (not self-hosted)? Sometimes (on a broadband connection), for some participants, the video from a broadcaster freezes once in a while, and worse, the audio is many a times not clear even when the video seems fine. This is with just three or four people in the call with one person turning on the video and audio (like a presenter), and the rest of them with no video and with their mics muted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are any of the participants using Firefox by chance? There are known issues being worked out ¹, some in collaboration with Firefox itself ², to improve performance and compatibility.

For now, it seems the best audio/video quality can be achieved by all participants using a Chromium-based browser such as Chrome and Edge.

\---

¹ 100% support for Firefox (and other non-Chrome browsers) - [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi- meet/issues/4758](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758)

² Bugzilla keyword jitsi-meet - [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=substring&status_whiteboard=jitsi- meet)

<comment><USER31> Thanks. I know about the Firefox issue, but all participants are on mobile — mostly Android and some iOS — using the official Jitsi Meet app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What about the cost in terms of per person per hour?

<comment><USER33> It's free and opensource.

<comment><USER34> Server time still costs money, I'd be curious to see how much at scale.

<comment><USER35> If you have commodore 64 you are OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wanted to evaluate it but was very put off when trying to connect to my google calendar they asked for full access to my Youtube profile. I get there is some youtube integration they have but binding those things together without any mention of why was enough for me to click cancel. Sucks because I really want to ditch Zoom.

</comment><comment><USER37> Jitsi has really been kicking it at my school lately; I wrote a chat bot for out Nextcloud that creates meetings and now up to 150 people can easily join into one conversation!

</comment><comment><USER38> Can someone expand the SFU acronym? I chased the link to sfu-tagged blogs at TFA and an expansion is nowhere to be found.

EDIT: Thanks!

<comment><USER39> Looks like it's a WebRTC acronym: [https://webrtcglossary.com/sfu/](https://webrtcglossary.com/sfu/)

SFU stands for Selective Forwarding Unit.

At times, the term is used to describe a type of video routing device, while at other times it will be used to indicate the support of routing technology and not a specific device.

An SFU is capable of receiving multiple media streams and then decide which of these media streams should be sent to which participants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> We started to use it at our startup. If anyone needs to set it up, we can do so in the cloud for them.

</comment><comment><USER41> I tried installing this on two different Ubuntu machines using their Ubuntu repo and it did not work. Worked fine on both Android and Ios. This is about what I expect from a java application - the java ecosystem is co convoluted and fragile that the only real options are Android, Ios, and Docker. I wish someone would write something like this in Go or Rust.

<comment><USER42> Docker4thewin :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know how the audio quality and latency of Jitsi Meet compare with Zoom?

<comment><USER44> I've used it several times to chat with family members all over the globe, and I use Zoom at work. Jitsi's great - I don't perceive a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Too bad, like most other solutions, Jitsi, by default, shares screen at 5 FPS.

<comment><USER46> Is that possible to change, perhaps if self-hosting? Video quality of screen sharing and frame rate are absolutely atrocious, to the point that you have to wait ten seconds until text becomes readable.

<comment><USER45> Apparently, yes: [https://community.jitsi.org/t/screen-sharing- fps/25132](https://community.jitsi.org/t/screen-sharing-fps/25132)</comment></comment></comment>


Linkerd Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.buoyant.io/2017/01/23/linkerd-joins-the-cloud-native-computing-foundation/ <comment><USER2> The killer application of linkerd is kubernetes, where a lot of people are using linkerd to get around using Kubernetes "Services". I think the Ingress controllers talk directly to Linkerd.

I have requested for L4 support in Linkerd that will finally make it possible for Linkerd to actually become an ingress + Service abstraction.

<comment><USER3> Op, mind telling us why people are using linkerd to get around using Kubernetes "Services" ?

<comment><USER2> there's quite a bit here - [https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a- modern-bank-bac...](https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank- backend/)

and

[https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/10/14/a-service-mesh-for- kubern...](https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/10/14/a-service-mesh-for-kubernetes- part-ii-pods-are-great-until-theyre-not/)

But you should ping linkerd on twitter. They are really responsive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure about this one yet - some benefits, but not really massive traction. I don't _clearly_ see the benefits (although latency-sensitive internal loadbalancing seems quite neat), but it's yet-another proxy in the neverending proxying of proxies within K8S already.

<comment><USER3> " it's yet-another proxy in the neverending proxying of proxies within K8S already." \- <3

<comment><USER5> I think it'd be nice to see the functionality of linkerd merged into k8s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use ebay/Fabio in a similar pattern as Linkerd and it's been amazing. I can understand that it's very useful to also have the latency stats and circuit breaker features like netflix/Hystrix.

There are also more and more private networking / tunnel / sdn tools popping up, I wonder which of the techniques will win out. There are advantages to not doing too much in each tool.

It's useful to separate traffic to instances/services by need-to-know e.g. admins vs users, and that would require two instances of Linkerd to truly separate the traffic. In this case I use VLANs/SDNs with service discovery instead.

Always interested to hear how others are solving this routing problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Howdy, Linkerd person here. Always nice to have a surprise Hacker News frontpage post! Please let me know if you have any questions. We also have a very active Slack at slack.linkerd.io. Hop on in and say hello.

</comment><comment><USER8> We're using Linkerd and Helium along with DCOS/Mesos at ForeSee - We're super happy with the technology and we look forward seeing Linkerd supporting more protocols.

</comment><comment><USER9> We are using Linkerd at NextVR and we are where happy it's L5 routing and other features. Soon are looking forward to integrate Zipkin with GCE tracer.</comment>


A Conservative Pundit Turns 14 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/fashion/08conserve.html?em=&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Once you know rebirth, it's not interesting any more.</comment>


Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488 <comment><USER2> While Taleb himself is kind of an asshole an endearing thing about him (to me at least) is that he pisses off bigger assholes and doesn't pull his punches when calling them out on their quackery. See e.g. the whole IQ debacle. Regardless of what you may think about him, his problematic views and his personality, call him abrasive, inflammatory, full of himself, whatever, but he's not ignorant, he's not a charlatan, he's not pretending to be someone that he's not.

In a way NNT reflects the original _hacker ethos_ in all of its pristine and glorious ugliness.

<comment><USER3> "Quackery" [https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim- taleb-o...](https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/)

<comment><USER2> A few things:

-It's basically a HBD blog. HBD proponents love to pretend they're doing "science" by posting huge walls of texts that masquerade as papers but would be thrown out of any respectable peer-reviewed popgen journal. ( _popgen_ , not psychology.). Here's an example of titles on this blog: "The Catholic Church and Western Genetics", "Racial Ancestry and IQ", "Population Differences in IQ-Related Genes", "Expert Surveys on Race and IQ". Note that at no point in any of those posts, any _actual geneticist_ is mentioned, only "intelligence researchers". Many of these, like Lynn, Rushton and Kanazawa were found to be guilty of conducting absolute trash science or outright fraud ([https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and...](https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and-templers-2012-paper-b334ed8db5ae), [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3332228/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3332228/), [http://risk-resilience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/jour...](http://risk-resilience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/journal-articles/files/psychopathic_personality_and_racial-ethnic_differences_reconsidered_-_a_reply_to_lynn_2003.pdf)). Many of these researchers also get funding from very shady sources like the Pioneer Fund. This alone should send all kinds of warnings about the motivated agenda of the people putting forward arguments here.

-It does nothing to address any of the points raised by Taleb, such as nonlinearity and convexity. This sentence right here shows how mathematically illiterate the author is: >I'll say more about this below, but here note in passing that Taleb never explains why a non-linear trend would invalidate IQ in the first place. The author also doesn't seem to understand that covariance between a fat-tailed distribution and a gaussian one _isn 't well-defined in the first place_ and as such measuring samples' covariance makes no sense. You don't need "a study" to prove it, it's just math.

-It basically parrots the same points over and over again, distorting the word "predict" to the point of meaninglessness: IQ predicts this, IQ predicts that. Well of course when we live in a society where many of your life outcomes are somehow tied to your ability to sit down and take a pen and paper test, IQ is going to correlate well with these! "An artifact number that drives a bunch of correlates" is not what normal people (read, people outside the Pioneer Fund buddies) mean by intelligence! In fact, nobody really agrees what is meant by intelligence, which is why AI isn't a thing and likely won't be within our lifetimes.

-You're basically a one-reply account, who posted just so that challenges to your debunked notion of IQ wouldn't get the last word. Again, let me doubt good faith is involved here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When evaluating Taleb's work you have to force yourself into a mindset of ignoring the messenger and focusing on the message. Load the content into your right-brain analytical mind and then firewall it off from your other reactions. Don't let his personality induce bias into your analysis and judgement of his work.

Maybe you'll ultimately find value in it, or maybe not. But you won't know for sure if you're spending most of your CPU cycles on hating the messenger.

It's annoying to have to do, but a useful skill to work out and keep fit from time to time, not just for dealing with Taleb but plenty of other irksome sources in life.

<comment><USER5> Have to do this with Wolfram too. There's a good mind and a good man behind all the puffery.

<comment><USER6> Is there? What is it, exactly? Could you show us? All I see is an Etonian, a work-stealer and plagiarist, a slapper of his own name onto things built by groups of people. His lone interesting contribution, the idea of cellular automata for quantum theories, failed Bell's requirements and had to be rescued by others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the link. Just 'flipped' through the first few pages and my blood pressure is already way up.. the guy just can't help himself antagonize his readers. It's going to be a tough read..

<comment><USER8> Reading Antifragile always felt like he's got some interesting insights, some of which feel quite quackery ... and the constant pot shots are unnecessary to the point of distraction.

We get it, you don't like academics and The Establishment. But do you have to mention it every other paragraph like a teenage boy?

Guess nobody gave him the Kill Your Darlings writing advice.

<comment><USER9> I just bought Antifragile and can't believe this guy gets away with the constant petty swipes. There are enough interesting ideas to keep you going but there is so much petty noise in these books. If he has an editor they are doing a terrible job.

<comment><USER10> Yes, his prose is terrible. Initially I thought he never took any english composition class. But then I realized that perhaps he thinks he is too smart for such things. That is, he writes the way he think, the way he speaks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He is so unnecessarily pedantic it comes out as great insecurity. He is so difficult to read. I would love it if a great copy editor just rewrote his work because the ideas are important. You could probably cut it half and make it accessible to more people. A shame.

<comment><USER12> It's not supposed to be accessible to everyone. I think he says as much in one of the books. He's not interested in being liked or broadly read, so much as saying what he wants to say.</comment></comment>


Low pay forces cybersecurity pros to turn to hacking - <AUTHOR> https://digit.fyi/grey-hat-hackers/ <comment><USER2> Its nice to have a transferable skill set.</comment>


The Momentum Paradox, Revisited - <AUTHOR> https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2017/july/the_momentum_paradox_revisited/ <comment><USER2> The article says that diamond (the material used for simulation) is a nondispersive medium.

Diamond is an optically dispersive material, with a dispersion constant of about 0.044 [1]. Does the article use dispersion to mean something different from optical dispersion? Or maybe they meant to say nondissipative (no energy loss during photon propagation)?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond)</comment>