No ifs...alternatives to statement branching in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/no-more-ifs-alternatives-to-statement-branching-in-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Dislike of if confuses me. People claim to find conditions wordy or confusing. I don't find conditions particularly difficult to follow, but I have a question from the other side: when you use && and || as logic gates, don't you (in your mind) translate them back into conditions anyhow? Here's his first example without if:

        function getEventTarget(evt) {
            evt = evt || window.event;
            return evt && (evt.target || evt.srcElement);
        }

Sure, it's very short in this written form. But for me to _understand_ it, I need to think, roughly: evt retains its value, if it's a truthy value; otherwise give evt the value of window.event; if evt is a true value (now), return it and the value of evt.target - if that's truthy, or, if not, add in the value of evt.srcElement; oh, and by the way, if evt was not truthy initially in the return statement, bail out early (and return no value) since && only continues on if the initial value is true.

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I don't see that as miraculously _more_ clear.

<comment><USER3> Look at it like this. I am a developer who prefers the terse code compared to the longer if() variety. I've been doing this long enough that its is easier, clearer, and faster for me to understand the "evt = evt || window.event" than it is to trace through all of those if() statements.

I used to be the opposite, I couldn't understand the short form or how it worked. Ternaries confused the hell out of me for a while. Why?

Because when I look at "evt = evt || window.event", my mind has learned about the conditionals that each of these represent. Its analogous to phrases that mean different things in different contexts. "That guy has balls", for example.

So I look at it and I know that "if( evt )" is the same as "evt ? true:false" as "if( typeof evt !== 'undefined' ). I know that in the context of that statement, evt || window.event is saying "if evt exists, use that. if not, use window.event".

So the reason its confusing to people is they haven't learned all of the different things the shorter code means.

For me, after having spent many, many hours writing javascript I find the short form easier to understand and less tiring. Not only that, in raw numbers it just saves space.

Now, the other lesson I've learned over the years is that many times it is much better to start out writing in plain old "if" statements. Get the logic right, then reduce it down. There's nothing more annoying than trying to debug someone else's poorly written code.

And for god's sake, DOCUMENT!

<comment><USER4> I agree that in some cases, guards, defaults and ternaries flow more naturally. However, I feel that there's a contradiction. You say that it is easier to understand but have learned to write them in plain old "if" first because it's better. It's easier to get it wrong if you write it shorthand. If it's better to start writing them in "if", doesn't that mean it's easier to understand? If it is easier to use guards, defaults, and ternaries, you shouldn't have to resort to plain "if" to get the logic right. And I agree, DOCUMENT!

<comment><USER5> We sometimes use if-else statements to write out some straight-up logic because we don't _understand it_ at first. So we build it from the ground up. If, after writing it all out with primitives, we realize "Oh, it's just this anded with this and ored with that" then we actually _understand_ the problem.

Put another way: if you write a boolean expression as a sequence of statements, my assumption is you don't really understand what you're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "That's very clever."

The above quote comes from the smartest developer I've ever known, talking about a piece of code I had written that I was just as proud of as this guy is of his ifless branching. It took a minute to sink in that "clever" is not a term you want people using to describe your code.

As a developer, the first time you're going to encounter any piece of code is when FireBug drops you into it with an exception. Personally, I'd prefer to look at a single line that does a single thing.

For any non-trivial implementation of the author's chained implicit conditional logic, a null reference exception will leave you looking at a single line with a half dozen candidates for what might actually be throwing.

Please please please don't make a habit of coding like this for anything but the most trivial cases.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi - I 'm the author of this post. A few comments:

1) It wasn't my intention to create a holy war. There are good arguments on both sides. I use ifs and fors in my own code and will continue to do so.

2) Over the years I have developed a distaste for the _overuse_ of statement branching - I find it distracting and I feel it works against readability.

3) I wanted to catalog a bunch of (mostly well known) alternatives to present as a coding strategy

4) I realize that not everyone likes such terseness of style and what is clear syntax to one person can be undecipherable to the next.

5) Use what ever works best for you and your team

(Notice how procedural this comment was :-) )

</comment><comment><USER8> From the title, I was expecting something interesting like "SubText", or at least some kind of talk about dispatch :) Using &&, || etc gets you terse code, but the branching that you mentally work out is exactly the same.

.. unless you use the && and || _so much_ that you end up chunking out specific patterns of usage without having to explicitly think about the branching.

.. which you _can_ do with if as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Write readable code for your source files and then compile with Google's closure compiler.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a very young coder and loved the article, especially how it brings functional features to imperative languages.

But what if I write the entire company framework without a single conditional (including loops)? Are this alternatives to be used sparingly or as much as possible? Would you frown upon when you see it?

On a side note, I would love to never see a conditional again Even before learning functional programming I felt bad at every "if" and especially every "for" loop, but now I know why.

<comment><USER11> What if you did? Would it be a better framework? Would anybody care at all?

I doubt it.

This a code style and if you like it, then maybe you use the parts you want. But "micro branching" is still branching and it makes little difference how you do it (except the nod to performance concerns towards the end).

Thinking about code style and readability is useful and good, but this is by no means a common way to code. Beware of excess cleverness. It would be far better to worry about the correctness of the code rather than optimizing for a meaningless benchmark (no ifs).

<comment><USER10> It would not be for cleverness, much less for optimization (is it even faster?)

For some reason every time I see a condition I cringe mentally. There's something in a "for" loop that makes me uncomfortable and god, using "map", "filter" and micro branching would help a lot.

I'm just thinking of what I would like to see and checking it against the opinion of others.

<comment><USER11> Maybe it's a coding style that suits you then. That's cool.

I just caution against putting it in such simple terms. I hate it when I read code by somebody who latched on to the latest trend and then ruthlessly bent their style to match the new way, whether it made sense or not.

As for performance, it would have to be tested. In some languages with first- class closures, a lot of code like the examples might seriously strain the garbage collector (if present). There might be a ton of young objects to clean up, all the time. That was my only thought on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A collection of ifless techniques for those of you lucky enough to read portuguese:

<http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/search/label/ifless>

</comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't this depend on strict lazy evaluation? I could imagine if the implementation underneath changed (possibly to take advantage of parallel execution), if any segment had side effects, it would be horrible.

<comment><USER14> I can't think of a case where lazy evaluation would be required, only that the semantics of the && and || operators not change.

It's defined as part of the language that && will not evaluate the right hand side unless the left hand side is truthy. A lot more than using this stuff as branching would break if some implementation arbitrarily decided to not follow that anymore.

<comment><USER15> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the things I love about Google's Closure Compiler is that it takes care of these optimizations for you. If you want, you can write in an explicit readable style and still get any performance benefits.

<comment><USER17> But these are not performance optimisations.

Angus is making the case that functional techniques can be more concise and readable than procedural style control flow.

<comment><USER18> Are short-circuiting boolean operators as conditional-plus-result-rolled- together really a _functional_ technique? Certainly in strongly typed functional languages like Haskell they're impossible, because his example isn't even well-typed:

      evt && (evt.target || evt.srcElement)

You can't apply a boolean operator to an event! And even if you could, the result would always be a boolean. I associate this most commonly with languages I wouldn't really call functional, like Perl and Ruby (I believe Perl popularized the technique).

Even in Lisp, where you can write like that, it's much more idiomatic to use the _if_ or _cond_ forms, which is more morally equivalent to C's ternary conditional than to short-circuiting booleans.

<comment><USER19> > evt && (evt.target || evt.srcElement)

It's certainly true that this isn't well typed (not to mention not valid Haskell, since the . is used for namespacing, not access to member variables), but there's no reason that one couldn't do something conceptually similar:

        class Boolable a where
            toBool :: a -> Bool
            (&&)   :: a -> a -> a
            (||)   :: a -> a -> a

            a && b = if (toBool a) then b else a
            a || b = if (toBool a) then a else b

        instance Boolable Int where
            toBool 0 = False
            toBool _ = True

I don't know how idiomatic this is, but it works. One can see that it really is short-circuiting:

        > :l Boolable
        [1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Boolable.hs, interpreted )
        Ok, modules loaded: Main.
        > 1 Main.|| undefined :: Int
        1
        > 1 Main.&& undefined :: Int
        *** Exception: Prelude.undefined

I don't know Haskell well enough to know why the `:: Int` on the end is needed, but I'm sure that that, too, can be worked around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Eventually you will learn to stop doing this.</comment>


Building a $36.5 million business with open source software - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-studionow/

<comment><USER2> This was submitted by the author Patrick A in late August. Why the re- submission?

<comment><USER3> It's helpful to include the previous thread.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2917158>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has using GPL-licensed code prevented anyone else from being acquired? That really struck me...

<comment><USER5> Plenty of companies, whether they know it or not. Large companies like IBM are very cautious when it comes to code ownership and contamination. In some companies, employees have an easier time going through their divorce than getting an approval by an open source committee to use GPL software.

<comment><USER6> I'd expect IBM, of all "big companies," to be one of the least concerned about an acquisition using GPL software. They do so much work with GPL software, I'm sure they have very well defined internal policies on making sure they're in compliance. IBM is number 7 by measure of changesets (<http://lwn.net/Articles/460597/>) in the 3.1 Linux kernel.

Heck, my company (approx 150k employees) isn't what I'd consider a good contributor to open source software but even we have internal policies defining how we need to comply with GPL and other open source licenses. There's lawyers internally that specifically work with open source compliance.

As long as you have your act together and can show that you're compliant with all licenses (open or closed), I can't see why it would be a major barrier to a legit buyout offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Excellent info from your experience and great resources too.</comment>


Parallel Text Datasets for Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://lionbridge.ai/datasets/25-best-parallel-text-datasets-for-machine-translation-training/ <comment><USER2> are these datasets all free? pretty good list</comment>


Google has a new favicon - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/favicon.ico

<comment><USER2> Had to browse to <https://www.google.com/favicon.ico> to actually see it on Google's homepage since I'm using Google over https. I tried hard refresh and it didn't change until I browsed to the https version of the new favicon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks pretty similar to the 2008 version: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-fish-two-fish- red...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-fish-two-fish-red-fish- blue-fish.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> hard refresh if you don't see it at first

<comment><USER5> The new favicon is a white letter "g" on blue ground. If anyone, like me, is wondering, you can initiate a "hard refresh" by holding down shift while clicking on the reload button in Chrome (or, I assume, Firefox). Doing so circumvents all caching inside your browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <https://www.google.com/images/google_favicon_128.png> (found in the source on the homepage)

<comment><USER4> different image (favicon is a g centered, this is a g on the left hand side)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like it that they went (back to/for) this version. The earlier one had absolutely no taste, IMHO.

The change hasn't happened yet on google.no.

</comment><comment><USER8> is it me or this (and it's not the only thing in recent Google design tweaks/refreshes) is quite "[formerly-known-as] Metro" ? Flatter, less colors, more minimal... (not complaining, just wondering)

</comment><comment><USER9> 48x48? Is that a retina thing? Didn't know you could do that.

</comment><comment><USER10> to me it looks like something more corporate ...</comment>


New AI Dupes Humans into Believing Synthesized Sound Effects Are Real - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/new-ai-dupes-humans-into-believing-synthesized-sound-effects-are-real <comment><USER2> > that AutoFoley is best at producing sounds where the timing doesn't need to > align perfectly with the video

This is what I thought this would be and were the value is, properly syncing sounds.

Especially around foreign dubbing, if you could speed up slow down a little to match film better that could help bringing things to market.

But there will be a big wave of [pirated?] stock material coming soon which will change the art scene.</comment>


The Latin America WikiLeaks Files - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/latin-america-wikileaks-hugo-chavez-rafael-correa-obama-venezuela-intervention/ <comment><USER2> As an American I am disturbed by my country's foreign policy as it relates to Latin America, largely over the last half of the 20th century. But propaganda cuts both ways. I have a hard time taking an article like this seriously when it simply hand-waves away the complete meltdown of the Venezuelan economy as a result of "right-wing student protests" and not the complete failed socialism and soft totalitarianism of Chavez.

\---

"In Venezuela, where a dysfunctional currency control system has generated high inflation, _violent right-wing student protests seriously destabilized the country._ The odds are extremely high that some of these protestors have received funding and/or training from USAID or NED, which saw its Venezuela budget increase 80 percent from 2012 to 2014."

<comment><USER3> > But propaganda cuts both ways

You are absolutely correct. But wouldn't the U.S. behave badly, people in Venezuela would perhaps have little reason to vote for soft totalitarians like Chavez.

(I also think Hitler rose to power partly because he was one of the few politicians who were willing to call BS on the Germany's WW1 debt.)

I am not actually sure this will 100% prevents rise of authoritarians (given what is going on in Hungary), however, there is some difference in ideology, and also success, if you compare Marshall doctrine to Washington consensus.

Nations get a free pass on behaving badly abroad because of nationalism. Then they get more that they bargained for. Actually, when I think of it, this dynamic is not just between states, it also happens in different social classes as well (for example, policy of being tough on unemployed or drug users, which ultimately makes things worse).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article completely ignores the real reasons for US opposition to Castro, Allende, Chavez, Correa, Morales, et al. They were and are autocrats with programs of economic and social destruction. Critics are beaten and thrown in jail, wide swaths of the economy nationalized, wealth destroyed. Their economic programs lead only to empty shelves in supermarkets and widespread destitution and crime. In Venezuela, the murder rate is up 400-500% from when Chavez first took over. They can only find allies in the world among other enemies of human prosperity.

I think JFK captured the guiding principles best:

      Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill,
      that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
      hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the
      survival and the success of liberty. [...] Let all our
      neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose
      aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let
      every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to
      remain the master of its own house.

Sometimes it's led to difficult and morally dubious decisions, like US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile. But we should consider the counterfactual. What if Allende had stayed in power? Chile would not be the beacon of stability and growth that it is today. Based on Allende's relationships with Castro and the Soviet Union, it would probably be a lot like Castro's Cuba, a society totally hollowed out by communism.

As an aside, the characterization of the situation in Greece is completely inaccurate too. Membership in the euroclub requires fiscal responsibility; governments can no longer rely on running the print presses to pay their debt. Greece continued to waste money it did not have, and was refusing the demands for budget discipline from the countries that were keeping it afloat.

<comment><USER5> Aside from the fact that you seem quite ignorant of history ("success of liberty", are you kidding me?), what business is it of the US? When will the US stop sticking it's nose in other's business? What would be it's reaction if the reverse were happening, if a foreign global power were constantly meddling in American affairs? Why does America always think it knows what's best for everyone else? And why is what's best always more US corporate intervention?

Like ok, we get it, the US is your country, and you can completely fuck up your own republic and turn it into a surveilled and controlled human zoo dedicated to the worship of mammon. But stop going and fucking everyone else's country.

<comment><USER4> If not America, then who? The Soviet Union would have turned a lot of Latin America into their imperial possessions, like they did in Cuba and Eastern Europe. Today, the regimes that would fill the void left by an American retreat from leadership are hostile and much less concerned with elections and human rights than the US.

On a personal note, I can only wish that the US had intervened more successfully against Castro in Cuba, the home that my family and millions of others have fled to America from.

<comment><USER6> >If not America, then who?

How about the people who actually live there? I get that sometimes the people of a country can be helpless against an oppressor and need foreign aid, but people in Chile actually voted for Allende. It's not the same as Cuba.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing new, it's just solid confirmation of what pretty much everyone suspected since long ago :/

</comment><comment><USER8> So this joke repeated through decades never gets old. Its been like 50 years since the times of nationalist dictators, its 50 years ruled by U.S backed leftists, yep.. the same who have created the skirts of misery: ghettos and fabelas.

It should be obvious by now that USA will support the left wing if it fits with its agenda. There you have WW2 and polpot to mention just a few extreme historical cases.

</comment><comment><USER9> I personally love the Jacobin, but I wish their tone and vocabulary was more populist..? I always feel like I need to find another article that says the same thing written differently to pass it on to the more conservative people in my life.

<comment> Altay- I'm subscribed to Jacobin and the writing style certainly feels as though they are preaching to the choir rather than trying to persuade anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty heavy if this is true. How reliable is this site?

<comment><USER11> That describes normal US-politic in latin-america since at least 60 years, nothing is new.

The site seems solid, see also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_%28magazine%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_%28magazine%29), and the facts described are correct (for example the initial description of what happened with Greece is spot-on).</comment></comment>


Why it's hard to share the wealth - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7107

<comment><USER4> "It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly"

We know no such thing. We know that wealth is distributed unequally (see, for example, the Gini coefficient). Whether or not an unequal distribution of wealth is unfair is a decidedly normative question - and beyond the purview of economists.

One of the many problems that I see is they assume that various attributes are _independently_ normally distributed - which many studies have shown not to be the case. An individual's performance in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated disciplines tends to be highly correlated (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor>). Simply put, a person who is a great at one thing is also more likely to be good at other things.

Furthermore, there is no reason to expect the output elasticity of intellect to be anywhere near 1. Someone who is just the tiniest bit smarter than me may see a shortcut that they I don't that saves them a tremendous quantity of resources.

Study after study has shown that 'overpaid' people (sports stars, actors, etc) get paid a wage that is almost exactly equal to the marginal revenue they bring in - that is they are paid perfectly appropriately.

<comment><USER5> Well of course "fair" is a normative question, but it is one that there are usually some common themes about.

For example the "equal opportunity" American ideal doesn't match up if the greatest predictor of your economic success is not your intellect, hard work, creativity, etc. but rather the income of the family you were rather arbitrarily born into.

For example: [http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market- movers/2009/04/2...](http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market- movers/2009/04/21/nature-nurture-trust-funds?tid=true)

"The truly amazing thing to me is that parental income isn't just crucial in getting to college, and getting through college -- its effects linger on, basically, in perpetuity. One of the most remarkable findings from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project is that a child from a family in the top income quintile who does not get a college degree is more likely to wind up in the top income quintile himself than a child from a family in the bottom income quintile who does get a college degree"

A large part of this is due to public policy and there are clear examples of many European countries where changing public policy produces less arbitrary income inequalities. As the developed world transforms into a more knowledge based economy which requires large long-term investments in yourself to really compete, income inequality will only grow between those that can make the investments and those that can't.

I'd also be careful to consider how the market pays people as necessarily being "fair" until you look at after-tax income and the institutions that help determine that price. There are many different ways to setup a distribution of resources in a society and there are many different ways to setup markets (property rights, laws, public services, regulation, taxes etc.). As such we should consider the fairness of our human created rules and institutions; the particular results they create are just indicators. Of course whatever people are paid is "appropriate" as long as it follows the system of rules we have setup.

The "appropriate" results would be very different if we changed how the system was setup.

<comment><USER6> Your quote claims the effects of the parents' income persist, but in doing so it claims correlation is causation and neglects to consider other familial effects, such as genetics and upbringing.

An alternative explanation is that wealth doesn't beget wealth, but rather those with the characteristics which lead to the acquisition of wealth also beget offspring with the same properties. This isn't necessarily unjust, as Yglesias states, but rather an artifact of the reality of genetics, upbringing and their effects on productivity. If so, to achieve the "equal opportunity" you seek, you must wipe away these differences in both genetics and upbringing, in which case, just call me Harrison Bergeron.

<comment><USER5> For some Harrison Bergeron, for others John Rawls Theory of Justice. Sort of dystopian/utopian sides of a similar coin. A strong public education system is suppose to minimize the differences in upbringing (by helping those without a strong upbringing; not by bringing down those who already have a great upbringing Harrison Bergeron style).

You wouldn't have to wipe away the differences, but for some a "just" society should view someone who had poor parents, limited opportunities and an IQ of 70 and someone who had every opportunity, great parents, and an IQ of 130 as equally important and valuable. Such people view a society where the top 2% of the world owns over half the wealth and much of the world lives in absolute poverty as a sign that maybe our institutions are a bit out of wack.

Personally I'm more a fan of smaller "nudge" (nudge.org) like concepts combined with a progressive tax code and a strong commitment to helping minimize "brute luck" (being born to poor parents) while holding people fully accountable for personal decisions or "option luck" (choosing to take a risk, or making a life decision such as being a teacher vs. an i-banker; or going out at bars instead of saving). (Sort of in a Dworkin fashion see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dworkin#Theory_of_equali...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dworkin#Theory_of_equality) / or <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_egalitarianism>).

<comment><USER7> > concepts combined with a progressive tax code

About half of US workers don't pay income tax. They pay for part of their retirement (SS for them is a modest deal, because their ROI is subsidized by folks who pay more).

Our vice president said that paying taxes is patriotic. Shouldn't they be patriotic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So most people in the top 3% have rational, planned investment and management strategies, and most people in the remaining 97% bounce around in a seemingly random fashion based on their talents and interests.

That sounds about right. It's not surprising, if that's the case, that the distance between the top few % and everyone else is increasing so much.

Most people _aren't really trying to get rich._

<comment><USER9> In fact, 3% may be about the number of people who put most of their effort into making a lot of money rather than, say, doing work they enjoy or having a life.

The bulge around the average is because you need at least an average income to have a regular life, raise kids, etc. Many people work just hard enough to have an average standard of living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In what sense are the poor poor? (Louis XIV didn't have a single TV. Poor people in the US typically have two.) Income seems to be a fairly bad way to measure poverty.

Note that income is an especially bad measure if they didn't account for non- taxable sources of stuff, as is typically the case in such studies. Since those sources provide a huge fraction of the "support" for poor people, failing to account for it makes the results highly suspect. Moreover, since it is well known that non-taxable sources are significant, failing to account for them ....

<comment><USER10> I'd imagine that the poor are poor relative to the rich. Individual's happiness with their economic position tends to be based to a significant extent on what they are earning relative to other people.

<comment><USER7> Some people feel ugly compared to others. Should we do something about that too?

<comment><USER10> The disparity between rich and poor is something that society actively decides upon, and society would be well advised to take into account the ramifications of its decision. Part of that information being that the _absolute_ value of an individual's wealth is far from the only important factor - relative values are important to. Humans judge their wealth relative to other people.

To look at it in a nice, emotive context, which society do you suppose is happier: the one where the cure for all cancers exists, but is so labour intensive that only the rich can afford it, or the society where the cure does not exist at all, and all are in the same boat? I'd caution you not to underestimate the pain of knowing that your loved one could be saved, if only you had a bit more money.

Whether someone is ugly or not is not really something that society makes an active choice about at the moment - I'm not sure it's relevant.

NB: No, I am not a commie, and I am in full favour of some income disparity as a motivator towards useful output. I just find the assertion that it doesn't matter if the rich have an ever-increasing share of the pie as long as the pie keeps growing a touch disingenuous.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER7> > To look at it in a nice, emotive context, which society do you suppose is > happier: the one where the cure for all cancers exists, but is so labour > intensive that only the rich can afford it, or the society where the cure > does not exist at all, and all are in the same boat? I'd caution you not to > underestimate the pain of knowing that your loved one could be saved, if > only you had a bit more money.

Spare me the sanctimony.

Now lets look at it in a realistic context. The society where rich people can afford something today is a society where poor people said something tomorrow.

You're arguing that folks should die "forever" in order to spare the feelings of people who died "unnecessarily" during a "while". Do you really believe that people saved later are worth so little?

> I just find the assertion that it doesn't matter if the rich have an ever- > increasing share of the pie as long as the pie keeps growing a touch > disingenuous.

Oh really? You find what I say to be "lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere"? On what basis?

It's not that the pie keeps growing. It's that the amount of pie that the poor get keeps growing.

<comment><USER10> > Now lets look at it in a realistic context. The society where rich people > can afford something today is a society where poor people said something > tomorrow.

And where there will be another thing (of some critical importance) that the poor cannot afford tomorrow that the rich can.

> You're arguing that folks should die "forever" in order to spare the > feelings of people who died "unnecessarily" during a "while". Do you really > believe that people saved later are worth so little?

No, I'm arguing that a society where progress is slightly slower (i.e the pie grows more slowly), but has lesser income disparity will probably be happier than one with massive income disparity and faster overall progress. I'm not saying it's 'right' or 'wrong', but I am saying that this is a fact. Happier societies generally have lower income disparities than those displayed in the US, and really, what else do you need to justify it?

> Oh really? You find what I say to be "lacking in frankness, candor, or > sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere"? On what basis?

Because I think when people say it that their motivation is not accuracy, it's just an excuse to justify not caring about the poorer segment of society - <USER2> way to ignore the fact that although the absolute amount of pie they get has increased, there's still a problem.

<comment><USER7> > And where there will be another thing (of some critical importance) that the > poor cannot afford tomorrow that the rich can.

Yup. And then that thing will become available to the poor. Do you really want to argue that it's good to slow down that cycle?

> No, I'm arguing that a society where progress is slightly slower (i.e the > pie grows more slowly).

Actually, you weren't. You explicitly stated "the society where the cure does not exist at all, and all are in the same boat". Even if we rewrite that to "no availability short of universal", we end up with "no progress" because you can't start with universal. You have to start with expensive and rare and grow from there.

Me - I'm glad that rich people are willing to pay to be alpha testers.

> I am saying that this is a fact.

Actually, it's largely a construct of an envy campaign. Telling people that they have it bad has consequences.

> Happier societies generally have lower income disparities than those > displayed in the US, and really, what else do you need to justify it?

Do you really think that "happy, brutish, short" needs no justification? (Not to mention that "happy" is overstated.)

>> Oh really? You find what I say to be "lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere"? On what basis?

> Because I think when people say it that their motivation is not accuracy, > it's just an excuse to justify not caring about the poorer segment of > society - a way to ignore the fact that although the absolute amount of pie > they get has increased, there's still a problem.

Look. You've accused ME of lying. How about some actual evidence.

As far as "caring" goes, you've conceded that my way results in faster delivery of essential goods to poor people. That leaves us with I'm evil and your way kills people.

<comment><USER10> > Yup. And then that thing will become available to the poor. Do you really > want to argue that it's good to slow down that cycle?

To an extent, yes - we've gone over this already. As mentioned, the very fact of this imbalance can cause a society that is overall less happy.

> Actually, you weren't. You explicitly stated "the society where the cure > does not exist at all, and all are in the same boat". Even if we rewrite > that to "no availability short of universal", we end up with "no progress" > because you can't start with universal. You have to start with expensive and > rare and grow from there.

Whew, way to quote out of context. Yes, I stated that the society where such a cure was unknown is likely to be happier. This is not the same as advocating zero advancement. There is a suffering generated by partial availability of such a cure, and a suffering generated by the total unavailability of such a thing - and my point is that in the US and UK the latter is neglected.

quoth me: "No, I am not a commie, and I am in full favour of some income disparity as a motivator towards useful output".

You've set up a straw man. I could do the same to you - I could imply that you favour a society where the richest 1% have 99% of the wealth, can afford genetic manipulations that make them vastly physically and intellectually superior to the rest of society, while the rest have little more than they do now. Really, though, in the end we're talking about a matter of degree, not absolutes.

> Me - I'm glad that rich people are willing to pay to be alpha testers.

Poor analogy, implies that there's some kind of cost/downside to the rich in this role.

> Actually, it's largely a construct of an envy campaign. Telling people that > they have it bad has consequences.

So the fact that people know they're massively less well off than another segment of society (despite working 63 jobs and getting hardly any time off) makes them unhappy? Sounds, well, kind of like what I've been saying.

> Do you really think that "happy, brutish, short" needs no justification? > (Not to mention that "happy" is overstated.)

You're right, the lives of western european nations are happy, brutish, and short, thanks to their smaller income disparity. Have you ever visited? They tend to be happier, have longer lives, and experience less suffering. Class mobility is vastly higher than in the US. It would probably be a stretch to call them brutish, although those who spend much time driving in Paris may disagree ;).

> Look. You've accused ME of lying. How about some actual evidence.

 _shrugs_ I have none. After all, I can't see inside your head. That's why I said 'I think'. It's not so much of a stretch, though - it's in the interest of the wealthy to advance justifications to support their position, whether they're reasonable or not.

<comment><USER7> > Yes, I stated that the society where such a cure was unknown is likely to be > happier. This is not the same as advocating zero advancement.

It is if you think that happy is the only relevant criteria, which you've written above.

> I could do the same to you - I could imply that you favour

Yes, you could attribute something to me that has no actual basis, again. It's unclear why you think that refraining from doing so is some sort of virtue.

> Poor analogy, implies that there's some kind of cost/downside to the rich in > this role.

There is a downside. They pay 90% of the NRE. If they're not 90% of the relevant population, they've paid much of the NRE for the rest of us. Yes, they get a benefit, early access, but denying them won't speed up our access.

Yes, they clearly think that the benefit that they receive is greater than the cost that they pay, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a cost or that they're not subsidizing the rest of us.

>> Actually, it's largely a construct of an envy campaign. Telling people that they have it bad has consequences.

> So the fact that people know they're massively less well off than another > segment of society (despite working 63 jobs and getting hardly any time off) > makes them unhappy? Sounds, well, kind of like what I've been saying.

Reread what I actually wrote. Telling them that it's bad that that someone else has it better has consequences.

> Have you ever visited? They tend to be happier, have longer lives, and > experience less suffering.

Smug much? Yes, I have. I've also lived outside the US, in US ghettos, and done "poor people" work. You're comparing different populations and the difference that you're fixated on isn't particularly relevant to that difference between the populations. If you look at comparable populations, the difference that you're fixated on disappears.

Or, in stat-speak - averages can be deceptive.

> it's in the interest of the wealthy to advance justifications to support > their position, whether they're reasonable or not.

And what's my interest?

Note that everyone has "interest", yet only interests attributed to the wealthy rate a mention. And, you're assuming that the fact that they have "interest" means that they're wrong.

<comment><USER10> > It is if you think that happy is the only relevant criteria, which you've > written above

Overly simplistic. You ignored the rest of this paragraph, which explained my position. Please have the decency to debate fairly - this is HN, not Digg.

> Yes, you could attribute something to me that has no actual basis, again. > It's unclear why you think that refraining from doing so is some sort of > virtue.

My point being that you've attributed something to me with no actual basis. If you read my posts it's quite clear that I don't favour a society with zero advancement - merely that I think the balance we have struck between advancement and relative prosperity is out of whack, yet you insist that this is my position.

> There is a downside. They pay 90% of the NRE. If they're not 90% of the > relevant population, they've paid much of the NRE for the rest of us. Yes, > they get a benefit, early access, but denying them won't speed up our > access. > Yes, they clearly think that the benefit that they receive is > greater than the cost that they pay, but that doesn't mean that there isn't > a cost or that they're not subsidizing the rest of us.

The rich benefit vastly more from society than the rest of us - they benefit for every worker they have that society has educated, for every worker that can drive to work thanks to good roads, etc etc. Looking at taxation purely in terms of direct benefits like Medicare or social security is simplistic.

> Telling them that it's bad that that someone else has it better has > consequences.

You don't think it's bad position to be in, to be in the poorest segments of society? To be unable to finance care for your chronic illness if you lose your job? Frankly, I think I'd loathe that situation.

> Smug much?

Not really. I live in the UK, where we have a pretty similar issue to the US, if slightly less pronounced. I simply admire the basic civility of the economic situation in these other countries.

> You're comparing different populations and the difference that you're > fixated on isn't particularly relevant to that difference between the > populations. If you look at comparable populations, the difference that > you're fixated on disappears.

Care to elaborate?

Please don't mistake my distaste for severe income inequality as jealousy. I live comfortably, and I can honestly say that I have little use for a great deal more cash than I have now. Honestly, though, I think we're going round in circles here. If you have something new to say I'll be more than happy to continue the debate, but I don't think we're going anywhere.

<comment><USER7> > My point being that you've attributed something to me with no actual basis.

An accurate quote is an actual basis.

> The rich benefit vastly more from society than the rest of us - they benefit > for every worker they have that society has educated, for every worker that > can drive to work thanks to good roads, etc etc.

Rubbish. The educated worker benefits more from the education than the employer, absent some actual coercion. (Read "threatened or actual force", not "Google refused to hire me.")

> You don't think it's bad position to be in, to be in the poorest segments of > society?

No.

The goodness/badness of my position does not depend on whether someone else can jet to Aruba. The goodness/badness of my position depends only on my position. Telling people otherwise is both wrong and harmful.

For example, I'd much rather be poor in much of the US than middle class in Mexico. I'd much rather be poor in the US than upper class in some of the post-colonial countries in modern Africa. I'd much rather be middle class in Mexico than upper-class/rich in the middle ages.

Do you really think that I'm not choosing better even though in each case I'm picking relative poverty?

Now, you could argue that rich and poor used to have it bad but now we've advanced so that only poor have it bad....

> To be unable to finance care for your chronic illness if you lose your job? > Frankly, I think I'd loathe that situation.

That's irrelevant to this discussion unless you'd be happy if you were rich and had some incurable illness. (Hint: the real problem is your situation, not that someone else has it better.)

> I simply admire the basic civility

I like civility too, but given a choice between progress and civility, I'll take progress every time because progress makes people's lives better.

> Care to elaborate?

Not much beyond you don't know much about the US or you don't understand what averages obscure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko._

Do I misunderstand, or does this model hinge on the assumption that money (wealth, value, etc) can't be created? Assuming that wealth building is a zero sum game seems fundamentally flawed. It might look good in models as snapshots of the current situation, but as net wealth increases I'm sure it would throw things off.

<comment><USER12> Money can't be created (except for the Feds printing it, which is explicitly factored out), but wealth can; they are not the same thing. $100K today and $100K a hundred years ago are the same amount of money, but the $100K today will get you a lot more wealth.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure you mean $100k inflation adjusted. Otherwise $100k 1oo years ago would purchase a lot more wealth, you just wouldn't have access to modern technology.

Still, the Feds do print money, and wealth is added (not necessarily related), which goes against the article's premise, regardless of how you define money.

<comment><USER7> > I'm sure you mean $100k inflation adjusted. Otherwise $100k 1oo years ago > would purchase a lot more wealth, you just wouldn't have access to modern > technology.

Huh? In what sense is modern technology not wealth?

Moreover, much of what passed for "wealth" in the past is common place today.

<comment><USER11> Correct, but to compare equivalent goods, $100k would get you much more land 100 years ago than now. The point of my comment was to say that while yes, the standard of living has gone up considerably in the past century, $1 in 1909 was 'worth' more to 1909 citizens than $1 today.

I didn't mean to imply technology isn't wealth, just that you had to factor it out for my point to be made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be honest, to compare wealth of a person to another is immaterial ethically wise. It is better to compare how people got their money and decide on that.

For example, a percentage of the poor make their living by stealing, we can conclude that the little wealth they earned is illegimitative.

However, if a rich man make his living by providing excellent services to the poor, we cannot conclude that he is exploiting the poor.

If wealth are forcefully taken away in the name of aiding the poor, it is also illegimiative because you took wealth from somebody who did not consent.

There are many unfair circumstances for which the poor are forced to deal with. However, keep in mind that the poor and rich is relative to time and places. Indeed, the poor working classses are indeed richer than kings in some respect.

The middle class for example, have access to the world's largest media library via cheap broadband connections. It is also very probable that even the poor have TVs.

Part of the reason why they are poor may be lack of education, but it may also be attributed to lack of saving plan. If the poor don't save, than it is not possible to accumlate wealth over generations. If they have money to buy a TV, than it is possible for them to save.

In short, equality in circumstances cannot be considered the basic of an ethical society. We can only hope for equality in the right of men.

So how can we improve our society?

Part of our lives are indeed shaped by memes, ideas, as well concept of what is legimitative. These forces are the limitations which determine how well we struggle against mother nature and our unlimited wants and needs. While unjust insitutions like the government and laws like copyright persists, they only have the power to exists by the masses.

If the masses simply do not believe in them, than no forces of corecision and violence that was previously entrusted to these institution can force them to do otherwise.

By no mean that beliefs shape reality itself but if we do not understand reality itself, than we cannot take the full advantage of our power or use them correctly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think I can paraphrase:

"Through careful academic research, we've decided what constitutes a smart, well-adjusted individual, but society is not rewarding us, err, I mean them, with material wealth—this unequivocally exposes inequities in the system."

</comment><comment><USER15> _They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy - <USER3> 3% of the population - does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97% fitted a different curve - one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas (see graphic)._

For the record, it's this type of thing that makes me a religious person. I know there are a lot of atheists around here and I respect that. But when I see two completely unrelated processes that seem to follow the same underlying structure it makes me think our world is working off some kind of plan.

I'm not suggesting anyone jump on a religous bandwagon and become a Christian, Jew, Muslim or whatever. I'm simply saying a higher power of some kind is worth consideration when faced with this evidence.

<comment><USER13> We have a word for that and it is called spontaneous order.

That's harmony in a seemly chaostic system. The free market can be seen as a perfect example of that. It allocate resources effortlessly using price signals and billion of indiviual decisions on what to buy, sell, and conserve.

<comment><USER15> The fact that there's a defined term for something isn't in any way relevant to that thing's cause.

Random events, by their nature, should not follow a pattern. But we find time and time again that not only do they form a pattern but that they form the same pattern as otherwise seemingly random events.

Put it this way. If you can see gas particles following the same pattern as wealth distribution among people and not at least question your views about a higher power than it's you who is being irrational (Note: I didn't say change your view I said question)

<comment><USER16> _Random events, by their nature, should not follow a pattern._

Just because you intuitively feel some concept is true, doesn't make it so. For example, the idea that heavy objects fall faster than light objects is very intuitive and was Aristotelian common sense until Galileo had the good sense to actually test the idea. Of course, it turns out that idea is not correct.

It is sometimes difficult to understand new abstractions like spontaneous order. But, I think it is worth trying.

Here are some articles to use as a starting point:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata

<comment><USER15> Again saying something exists is not a rebuttal to why it exists. Also, any intuitive feeling I have that something is random is irrelevant when discussing how something is not random.

Put it this way. Ask any atheist why we have religion in the world and they'll generally give you the same answer. Humans have a need to put order to the universe so they invent benevolent deitys to give them that sense of order.

But if we discover, as we gain more and more knowledge through science, that there in fact is an order to the universe doesn't that least SUGGEST that MAYBE there is a higher power?

<comment><USER17> As a theist I have to disagree with your final point. The presence of order in our universe is very clearly necessary in order for us to be able to question the existence of order. That the weak anthropic principle is and always will be a sufficient explanation of the presence of order does not undermine my personal sense of faith, but nothing about the presence of order supports it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting take on it. Presumably even if people are rational within the bounds of their knowledge, they may well gain knowledge at random (over hear a random conversation about X, learn it is a good product then make the rational descision to buy it) such that, overall, people could be modeled as acting randomly.

The question then: what differentiates those above the gas, and how do you get there?

<comment><USER19> ... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fallacy in the first paragraph.

"Rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor" is not supported by the stated evidence of the growing income gap _ratio_. The ratio can increase even if the poor are becoming richer, so long as the rich are becoming richer faster.

<comment><USER21> I understood that statement to be talking about class mobility. Obviously 'poor' and 'rich' are relative terms, not necessarily pegged to a specific amount of income or wealth.

<comment><USER7> > I understood that statement to be talking about class mobility.

Why? None of the data addressed class mobility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They studied 18 years of US data and then make statments like:

_It suggests that any kind of policy will be very inefficient," says Yakovenko. It would be very difficult to impose a policy to redistribute wealth "short of getting Stalin", says Yakovenko, who will talk in Kolkata next week._

As if the research wasn't abstract enough, this level of generalization and political inference makes him sounds like a crackpot.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know when they say "the rich are getting richer" does that mean between generations of wealthy families, or within the same generation?

<comment><USER24> Generally people mean "the top 1% of society at the moment in time we are discussing".

IIRC, there is actually quite a bit of circulation in that set, but I can't seem to google up the studies on that I saw (I can't come up with non-generic search terms). This mollifies some people and others consider it irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How about switching the word "wealth" with the word "power" and looking at how power guarantees access to wealth.

<comment><USER17> How do you propose we measure "power"?

<comment><USER25> Tough metric to measure, but talking about the top 3% of wealth without looking at their power and/or influence is meaningless.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to target Europe w/ large file download server? - <AUTHOR>

Decent size ecommerce site that sells large file downloads (>500MB). We've been using a .com hosted in the US for almost a decade. We have lots of Euro, Aussie, and Indian users that complain of speed. Our idea:
Server 1: hosted in USA - http://www...com Server 2: hosted in UK - http://www...co.uk
The problem here is that we don't want to "target by country". We want the .co.uk domain, for example, to be a signal to Google that "users of that region should use this server instead of the .com". Obviously geotargeting in GWT wants you to specify one country - this isn't realistic though since someone in Germany, for example, would far rather download from a server 1,000 miles away (the .in server) than one 9,000 miles away (the .com).
Suggestions? <comment><USER2> [http://aws.amazon.com/route53/](http://aws.amazon.com/route53/) is what you want. DNS queries return a different IP for the same domain depending on where the user is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the help. I looked into Route 53, UltraDNS, and a few more. The problems, for me, seem to be (a) high cost, and (b) possibly running afoul of Google/Bing. I tried getting a quote from UltraDNS, for example, and that required a phone call... I also looked at other lower cost providers (DNS Made Easy) but then that whole "What if Google penalizes you?" question made me queasy!</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Taxes for selling user-generated content - <AUTHOR>

Part of our startup's functionality is to offer the ability for users to create content and then sell it to other users through our service.  We handle the payment processing and issue cheques at the end of the month (minus our small fee).  We're doing tax research right now and wanted to know others' experiences with this type of thing.
We're in Canada, and we've got the Canadian stuff mostly figured out, but we're trying to figure out if and what taxes we need to deal with when a US customer sells to another US customer, for example (or any combination of US, Canadian or international customers).
Any advice, experiences or resources anyone might have would be fantastic! <comment><USER2> I would assume you would need to locate the Canadian version of the US 1099 tax form. I would certainly start there I think everything else would then fall into place.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I guess this would be more of an "Ask HN" than "Ask YC"... Missed that in the editing process.</comment>


DOI use on Reddit – results from recent dump - <AUTHOR> http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/09/dois-in-reddit.html <comment><USER2> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but based on the author's descriptions of DOIs, they're not completely linkrot-proof. The issue is that it's just a link. The link itself could disappear or the publisher or even the metadata itself. I don't know what steps publications take to preserve DOI's but it sound like on their own they only protect against page moves. To really combat linkrot you need to provide as much metadata as possible, mainly title and authors but other data could also help tracking stuff down. Lastly even if you figure out what the DOI points to, the pdf might be gone; that's why archiving services like the wayback machine or webcite are so important. I'm glad they're doing something about it though; I find that a lot of my bookmarks 404 after only a few months. Webmasters need to realize that a URL is just like an address and that you need to set up a forwarding address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. You're not wrong. There's nothing magical about DOIs or everyone would use them for everything and there would be no link rot. You can only update links if you know when and where things are moving, and you're still around to do it.

Scholarly publishing is an area where documents need to stick around for a long time, be able to be cited in a well-understood way, etc etc.

Crossref is an trade association of scholarly publishers, formed to solve exactly this problem. Part of the deal when a publisher joins Crossref is an obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if the publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air.

Initiatives like CLOCKSS address the archiving question [http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home](http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home) . The CLOCKSS homepage has a good overview.

And to the 'tracking stuff down' point, the DOI is resolvable (i.e. a link you can click) but it's also an ID that you can look up in a database. DOIs predate the web and may live longer than it. Having a single, 'official' ID (whatever it looks like) is better than searching by metadata.

<comment><USER2> > An obligation to keep the links up to date and a plan for what happens if > the publisher suddenly vanishes into thin air.

It's good to hear that scholars are getting together and trying to mitigate the volatility of URLs. I'll definitely need to read more on the subject to understand the pros and cons so thank you for your introduction in the article; many specialist blogs tend to only write for their specific audience. It seems like DOIs are an ample solution as long as they aren't a single point of failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crossref's been around for 15 years (and DOIs longer than that). The Crosstech blog has a lot of posts on the subject. You can start here [http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers](http://crosstech.crossref.org/category/identifiers)

Here's a short list of posts that will give some background:

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids- without...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/06/rehashing-pids-without- stabbing-myself-in-the-eyeball.html)

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi- outag...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/03/january-2015-doi-outage- followup-report.html)

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously- and...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and- persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly- literature-right.html)

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_s...](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2010/03/dois_and_linked_data_some_conc.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven - <AUTHOR> https://posthaven.com <comment><USER2> How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service?

Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.

Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture- funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product.

Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.

I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.

<comment><USER2> On the one hand, you have street cred for building an awesome product which inspires confidence that your next product will be awesome too. I don't doubt it will be awesome.

But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.

Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.

That said...

I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that right now only lasts an instant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jbail -- I don't want to dig up the past, but the truth of the matter was I didn't agree with my cofounder on the direction of Posterous, but I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in. It was one of the most painful experiences to have to walk away from my baby.

I think we're put on this earth to create things of great lasting value that are good for others around us. Many things in our lives will change, but I believe this one is a constant guiding light.

<comment><USER3> > I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in

Support him? By bailing out? Was it easy for your cofounder to replace your skillset? Would love to hear the whole story if you don't mind, it could help help others who are in similar situations. It's sad that cofounders who once created something together are not able to find a common understanding in later stages. Sad that both parties reached that point where they have to utter the threat either my way or I leave. WTF. I know this is common and probably _the_ reason why most startups fail but just leaving (or maybe the true story was different) sounds a bit strange. However, maybe it was the best decision for the organization.

<comment><USER4> > _Support him? By bailing out?_

Support him BEFORE he bailed out. Ie. he supported the VC thing, although he didn't like the direction.

As for the "skill-set", it's not as if building a web service, and such as simple one as posterous (or twitter, or tumblr) is rocket science.

Scaling it is a little harder, but still, thousands of companies and websites do it on their own. So what What ireplaceable skillset?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you?

Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be.

#1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are doing. You've got just enough customers to keep you in Ramen so you're committed to working until you're 70 and can augment your income with Social Security to honor this commitment to those few.

#2) You've spent 20 years maintaining the service, answering the same questions, fighting the same fires, dealing with the same sort of "Chrome v286 can't display tri-graphs properly without mime support from the replacement for nginx" kinds of problems.

#3) Its wildly successful and someone offers to make you a billionaire if you sell it to them?

In contrast I like the foundation idea. Foundations don't get tired, they don't get tempted, they just execute against their created principals. A foundation with an endowment that runs a service which supplies a voice for bloggers for a computed value which is not to exceed 15% of the operating cost of the service. That is a durable kind of construction, the people in it are just employees, they turn over like students in a college or wait staff at a restaurant. Its a chunk of money, controlled by a legal document, implemented by a management structure, to create a service in perpetuity.

Don't build a business and promise not to sell it, build an institution that is self contained.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.

<comment><USER6> A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals. The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided financial support.

Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A foundation provides some insurance for my investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great - until that one gets acquired or acqui-hired by Facebook|MS|Google...

I wish there were some open source resource sharing protocol a bit more high- level than HTTP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like Brad said -- this one is not to be sold. We'll charge money and keep the lights on no matter what. We want to provide this service like a basic utility like water and power, because that's what having a voice on the Internet should be.

<comment><USER8> Why should I trust that this will last longer, given the same people are involved? The fact that you charge $5 / month? What do I get for $5 / month versus, say, my own VPS running whatever blog software I choose for the same money (or less)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have run many personal servers. They all come and go. They get hacked. I lose interest. The content goes away forever, except if I'm lucky enough for it to get picked up in <http://archive.org>. Posthaven is like that, but you don't have to hope. It will get archived.

Self-hosting is great and I don't think we'll ever replace it. But for the vast majority of personal content out there, you want a caretaker. I hope you'll think of us when you do.

<comment><USER9> Self-hosting is great and it has better solutions to these problems than the alternative.

And you absolutely do have to hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why are people so cynical? I know garry, and he is one of the most honest and generous people around. I signed up .. posterous was awesome and should live on.

From personal experience, doing a startup is _so hard_ that judging the co- founders without knowing the full context is just wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> So much negativity for something that doesn't matter all that much. Does anyone believe that anything can truly be around forever? Will Posthaven be around in 5 years? Probably. 10? Looking dimmer. 20? No way.

I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it. Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really that bad?

When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like mad. And that's ok.

</comment><comment><USER12> Garry, thanks for doing this new project. We need services that are sustainable long-term. We need a solid ad-free place that people can post their thoughts and have a decent chance of having them stick around as long as the web exists.

Also suggest that you think about a pre-paid plan, for say $1000, to purchase lifetime hosting, assuming you can find a way to invest the money that pays a return that sustains the service.

Also consider partnering with some long-lived institutions, like universities, that might play a role in guaranteeing the "forever" part of the proposition.

Another possibility -- sell stock to your users. There's no reason you can't make a fortune doing this. But if you go with VC money that's going to put you on a path that isn't sustainable. If you sell stock to the public with the clear up-front understanding that this is to be a sustainable business, that might strengthen the company, not weaken it.

<comment><USER12> BTW, I received my Posterous archive and linked to it from this piece, in case anyone wants to explore.

<http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/posterousArchive>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't trust it. After having to get another VPS and build (read: piece together) my own Posterous-like system (it's not half as good) I've already paid $$$. Paying these guys 5 bucks more with no way to know the same thing will or won't happen doesn't seem sane. The system doesn't even WORK yet! How dare they.

<comment><USER14> Why would you invent your own system? They have migration tools for existing frameworks...

<comment><USER13> I cobbled a system together from existing options. I may however - build my own 'alike and open source it after all this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious how you guys arrived at $5/month. Is it based more on what you expect people are willing to pay, or based more on how much you expect this to cost to operate?

</comment><comment><USER16> Or you could set up your own domain + wordpress installation and not have to rely on any one company remaining in existence forever.

It's pretty easy to switch if necessary (admittedly assuming you have the right technical skills).

</comment><comment><USER17> It's very peculiar that the way this service is presented is the exception, while it should be the rule. Actually most businesses should try to have this in mind: provide a service that users want and are willing to pay for and try to be cheap and sustainable.

I understand there is also space for "give it for free, grow like crazy", but the fact that it is now the norm is extremely odd IMHO. Most founders now optimize for VC rounds apparently.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sustainable. "503 Service Unavailable"

<comment><AUTHOR> It's back. Sorry about that.

We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to keep it online for the long haul.

Please bear with us though through this launch period.

<comment><USER18> It's not back for me. You guys must be sweating right now

<comment><AUTHOR> That we are. Sorry for the inconvenience. To be honest, we had no word on specifically when Posterous would shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm sorry but the only thing that lives up to this kind of hype is open source and run by a community.

I'll stay with Jekyll and WordPress.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks very much for making this available, garry, I appreciate it.

(FYI I'm still getting the 503 for now but I'll keep checking in.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please visit <https://posthaven.com> for now. Brett and I are working on fixing the servers asap.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. Getting an SSL connection error there, and it's actually sunny in Portland right now so I need to get outside for a run, I'll check back after.

<comment><USER15> I am also from Portland and can confirm that today's sun is definitely significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hi Garry,

This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this will definitely be in the product and supported 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Whoever made this should submit an application to be in the next YC batch. I have a strong feeling they would get in. :)

<comment><USER23> The cofounders of Posterous. They don't need YC. They were in YC.

<comment><USER24> One of them, Garry, is a YC partner [1]

[1] <http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-garry-and-aaron>

[The irony of linking to a Posterous post is not lost on me - I wonder when that link will be dead]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This idea seems ridiculous. I really hope your main selling point is not the fact that your website will last forever.

Let's not even go into the fact that there's a high likelihood this project won't even take off considering the high amount of competition out there.

But there are tons of uncontrollable situations that you MIGHT run into, even if there's a 0.01% chance that it will happen.

\- What if someone sues you and you go bankrupt?

\- What if someone offers to buy you out for 1 billion dollars?

\- What if (God forbid) one of the original founders passes away and the rest of the founders decide it's no longer worth it to keep it going?

\- What if the founding team just realizes the project is no longer for them?

\- What if after the founding team retires, the people that they pass it onto decide THEY don't want to keep going with it?

I'm just not buying it, and I feel like a lot of people will have the same skepticism.

</comment><comment><USER26> @ScoopIt (curation) launched with a layered, freemium model that made sense, as compared to the discussions around Posterous I heard, that even non-techies asked about -- what IS the funding model for Posterous.

I like the idea of $5/month. Why not sell it??? Let go of it twitter!!!

I've been a BIG Posterous fan, have 20+ blogs on it public and private, used to run a few courses, but started pulling away when the rumors and the "BackUp" button appeared.

It's NOT too late, is it? What a great story it would make to pull it back from the brink for all those semi-tech literates who can build wonderful sites on Posterous. Does someone need to start a petition to bug twitter about this??

</comment><comment><USER27> What does it offer for $5 a month? Wordpress.com charges as well and the bill runs up to a lot of money for typical bells and whistles needed to run a blog. Google blogspot is still pretty much free all around. Tumblr is the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> We think the world still needs a Posterous-like blog engine that is simpler to use for everyone else. Posterous got quite complicated after I left, and I think the world needs the simple version again quite a lot.

<comment><USER27> The world has an option to sign-up for a free blog through Google, Tumblr and even wordpress.com (though Wordpress.com's free is not free like Google/Tumblr). So what makes you think the world will sign up for $5 service?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not here to 'kill' those services. Previously with Posterous we were very aggressive about that. I think people should use the service that is best for them. For some it will be wordpress.com, self-hosted Wordpress, Squarespace, and others.

We're making it for ourselves. It's a long-term project. If we make good software, then it doesn't matter if there are 500 users or 5 million.

<comment><USER9> > Previously with Posterous we were very aggressive about that.

LOL. I remember that. [http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/posterous-targets- ning-in-m...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/posterous-targets-ning-in- massive-switching-campaign-who-is-next/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed.

Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.

On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.

[1]<http://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown>

<comment><USER29> Why not just use docpad? <https://github.com/bevry/docpad>

<comment><USER28> Because it's taken me less time to write my own thing, that does exactly what I want, than it usually takes me to configure and customise wordpress.

Also, (and this is the main reason, really) it's just a lot of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious about the need to build this from a new code base. Posterous already exists. Why not negotiate a deal with twitter to aquire the code and start posthaven from that? Indeed, why not also aquire the posterous domain and just migrate to new servers? Put all existing blogs on lockdown, and if people want to continue as posterous customers they start paying $5 a month.

</comment><comment><USER31> This may seem like a silly question, but can I cancel at any time? It says $5 a month forever, and I don't see any terms of service.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why promise to be around forever? Glad they are working toward a sustainable business, but "made to last" is good, "made to last forever" is hyperbole. No company can guarantee that, no matter how good.

</comment><comment><USER33> A sustainable replacement already exists: statically generated website on S3. You own the domain, and there is very little chance that S3 is going away anytime soon.

It will also be cheaper than $5/month.

</comment><comment><USER34> If I read it correctly, you can pay only the months when you write a post. If you don't plan to write this month, you can avoid paying.

</comment><comment><USER35> What's the advantage of posthaven over svbtle?

</comment><comment><USER36> How can anyone make this kind of promise?

</comment><comment><USER37> yeah im gonna skip on that one... track record and all...

</comment><comment><USER38> 1\. When Garry says "forever," I think he means in comparison to the now-dead posterous; & not necessarily "forever" as in "All of God's Eternity"!

2\. At least you picked a decent name, PostHaven. I always hated the name Posterous. And the brown/yellow logo. Ugh!

3\. As a non-techie I would pay $60/year for 10-blogs, BUT NOT if it will be as bad as Posterous which worked like pure crap for email-posting (yet that was their big Come On!) From Summer 2009 for 6 months it worked fine, then something changed & it never worked well after that (only headlines would post with empty body content!!!) Wasted TONS of time & energy trying to get answers from them & only got the run-around. It was a miserable nightmare for 20-months when I finally bailed in Spring 2011 & went to WP.com, & that was after seeing a post at Computerworld that there was a bug between Gmail & Posterous!!! Yet Posterous didn't know that? Pfff! Wp.com works excellent for email-posting & w/Gmail/iPhone. Make it like WP.com & maybe will consider...

4\. Do not make the account-email address the ONLY addy that can be email- posted FROM. Give us a "special post to" addy like WP does so we can post by email from ANY of our email addys, & not just the ONE connected to account. That was another royal PITA thing about Posterous. We should not have to add ALL of our addys as add'l "users" just to be able to post-by-email from DIFFERENT addys. I cannot even express how arse-backward-miserable that set-up was!! If PostHaven sets it up that same way, no thanks!

5\. Do not have Tags in the Subject Line like Posterous did!! Did it ever occur to those guys we might send our post to Posterous & elsewhere at the same time? (such as Email Groups?) Then the other list shows the stupid Tags in the Subject Line! Bad idea!

6\. Don't make the Default "Gallery" so that we have to type "NO GALLERY" in every stinking email! Or at least let US, the user, SET the DEFAULT CHOICE.

7\. Let us choose AT LEAST 1-global FONT for the blog body & headlines, VERDANA, crystal clear, best READABLE font.

8\. Let us choose AT LEAST 2-global Font SIZES for the blog body text & headline. NO TEENY TINY STINKING FONT SIZES!

9\. Let us choose AT LEAST 3-global Font COLORS: links, headlines, body text (#000000 BLACK body TEXT >> & NO STINKING "INVISIBLE GREY" FONT ANYWHERE!!)

WP.com wants $30/YEAR for the "privilege" to change global font, font size, font colors. If it was a one-time-$30-fee, fine, but not every year (10 blogs would be $300 PER YEAR just to have a decent font!)

10\. Let us choose ALL Theme COLORS, background, menu bars, Blog's Title, etc.

11\. Themes: WP.com & Posterous both have & had CRAPPY UGLY themes. You can tell that it is mostly GUYS designing all the hideous themes, because women would know better! (design, colors, layout, FUNCTION), but unfortunately, we are not the tech geeks! If PostHaven themes will be as crappy, it won't be worth switching, unless total flexibility is INCLUDED (see #8-9-10 above).

\--Have several "Magazine" type themes, Photoblogging themes, Portfolio themes, etc., that actually WORK with EMAIL-blogging! (Most of them DON'T, including the one Posterous had! The first photo should show up on site but they never did! -- The only WP.com "magazine" theme that works w/email-posting is Triton Lite & it has a hideous white film over it & TEEEENY TINY INVISIBLE GREY FRONT, making it a total loser of a theme).

\--Or, let us dl free or paid themes from 3rd parties elsewhere to use on our blogs & you guys could forego the whole themes disasters. (WP.com has paid themes but quite pricey $75-$150, & I think you STILL have to buy the CSS Upgrade just to change fonts/sizes/colors!)

12\. Let us decide WHERE we want the DAY, DATE, & TIME of each post! (At the TOP, under the Headline, NOT out to the side wasting space, NOR at the bottom of the posts! Ugh!)

13\. WIDGETS! & SHORTCODES! (for archives, search, RSS Feeds, Twitter Stream, HTML-Text-&-Images boxes, videos, etc.) Frankly, I don't see why the wheel needs to be RE-invented... it must be a "guy thing." Just copy what WP.com has already invented, but add the flexibility that WP.com does not include & I would gladly give you $60/year for 10-blogs.

14\. Oh, & allow users to have ADS!!! Posterous was always promising they were going to allow users to have ads, but they never did (all the while they were Vigi-linking everyone's blogs!)

15\. And if being able to use our own domains is INCLUDED, that would be GREAT. WP.com wants $18/Year for that privilege (10 blogs = $180) plus annual domain fees.

16\. Will PostHaven be hosting .PDFs, .MP3s, Videos, etc. like Posterous did? That was ONE good thing!

17\. BUT I'm not willing to sign up in advance because there's no way to know if any of the other above miseries from prior Posterous & current WP.com will be the same at PostHaven or not. But will keep an eye out to see how it develops.

</comment><comment><USER39> Not real impressed that it can't handle a HN load.

<comment><AUTHOR> We fixed one setting in our HAProxy that was causing an insane bottleneck.

We'd been working on it for a while, but had no idea it would be launching today and should have been more prepared.

Sorry about that. Please give us another shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This begs the question: if the acquisition was talent acquisition why couldn't they have just sold the Posterous name and software?

<comment><USER41> <http://begthequestion.info>

<comment><USER40> Descriptivist. Sorry ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you can have a option of installing your platform on our own server like Wordpress, most of us won't hesitate to sign up</comment>


Targeting HTTP's Hidden Attack-Surface - <AUTHOR> http://blog.portswigger.net/2017/07/cracking-lens-targeting-https-hidden.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Fascinating stuff. I'm particularly surprised that BT are MITM'ing connections to mail.ru. Seems a bit sinister.

<comment><USER3> He mentions further down:

> To discern the system's true purpose, I used Masscan to ping TCP port 80 > across the entire IPv4 address space using a TTL of 10 [...] Sampling this > list revealed that the system was primarily being used to block access to > copyrighted content.

<comment><USER2> Yes but he also mentions it originally existed to block child pornography, and has been repurposed to block copyright infringement. Since mail.ru is neither of those, it has obviously been repurposed for something else as well. But what?

<comment><USER3> Sure, that's indeed possible, but I'm not sure it's "obviously" a sign of re- purposing. It could just as easily be because someone was sharing warez from a common mail account, or some content owner erroneously reported the web site (which has definitely happened in the past!); either way, bam, now it's on a blacklist forever.

<comment><USER4> If that's the case, then the burden of proof for copyright-based censorship is questionably low in this UK scheme.

I mean, mail.ru clearly has a primarily non-CP non-infringement purpose; banning it (is it actually banned?) should have been transparently disproportionate to anyone reviewing that claim.

There must be something we're missing. Not that I think the tin-foil-hat theories sound much more likely.

<comment><USER5> About 10 years ago the CP block list used by multiple nordic ISPs were leaked and people jumped on the opportunity to test the quality of those listed. The result they got where that a couple percent was CP and the remaining was either dead or non-CP.

The problem (as was discussed in Sweden during that time), is that the list can't be made transparent since according to the police that would "guide" people to location of CP, and the owners of website is not contacted since thats not the job of those operating the lists. There is also no one willing to employ and pay people to clean the list of domains once the content is gone.

In one particular case there was a Bonsai website that got listed. Those studying the leaked list called the owners of it and the owners were completely unaware that most people in the nordic countries could not access their website since it was blocked. The Swedish police speculated in a interview that the site had been hacked and that the operators (web host/designers) cleaned it without notifying the site owners.

As a administrator for web hosting, I would be amiss if I didn't add to this that hacked websites have generally a multiple of payloads at the time anyone will start notice that something is amiss. A site could be sending spam, selling fake shoes, and running a CP site all at the same time, and the operators could have notices one of the payloads then decided to reinstall (and update).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is both fantastic discussion of the ability to quickly check for vulnerabilities in ways never possible at scale before and also discussion of a little-known vulnerability that even the security experts were not aware of. The security guys at Imperva Incapsula just wrote up how they protect their system against this here ([https://www.incapsula.com/blog/http-host-header- fix.html](https://www.incapsula.com/blog/http-host-header-fix.html)) – and in their tests, the only vulnerability they found was their own tests. But they wouldn't have done it until the BlackHat presentation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Security in depth. Make things secure, even if it's behind a firewall. Start by searching your LAN, and watch out for open shares, weak or default passwords, and unpatched systems. Configure every machine like it's on the public Internet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Fantastic bit of research and write-up.

SSRF is going to be the major story for the next couple years. I've seen them all over the place and they are much harder to block since they exploit multiple protocols and the properties of URLs have many arcane rules that aren't known to most programmers.

Reading this a while back really opened my eyes to how complicated it was, even if I'd already learned (the hard way) most of it:

[http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/what-every-developer-should- kn...](http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/what-every-developer-should-know-about- urls/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I just uncovered (by accident) and reported an xss vulnerability in a service once used by the Obama administration, and Obama himself, and have reported 3 other vulnerabilities I've found to other companies, one was to Google. Didn't get any money for any of them (Google sent me a Nexus 7 tablet, which was nice). :-(

Look like I might need to start using Yahoo more! Haha.

This was a great read. To others: make sure you are allowed to pentest a server before doing it.</comment>


Why Obscurity Is A Good Thing (Failing in the Dark) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mohnish.net/2012/12/04/screwing-up-in-the-dark/

<comment><USER2> I understand the spirit of your post, none the less, failure shouldn't be looked at in an overly positive light, cause it becomes an excuse for not getting right.</comment>


Microsoft CTO on the future of software engineering [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://om.co/2019/04/08/microsoft-cto-kevin-scott-on-the-future-of-software-engineering-and-the-better-world-ahead/ <comment><USER2> > _But online ads and the technology that makes them work have played a > considerable part in the development of almost every aspect of what we've > come to enjoy as the free and open internet of today._

Online ads and free and open internet are not synonymous and I _really_ wish that people would stop trying to equate them as such. The pervasive advertising systems that are running today (e.g.: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) aren't running to make the internet free and open but to squeeze out more profit margins for their respective shareholders and _nothing more_.

Were online ads the cause of the move from dial-up to "high-speed" internet? I'd argue it was actually pictures, graphics, movies, etc. and the desire to be able to consume those at a reasonable rate that caused the move from dial- up to "high-speed" internet.

How did advertising play a role in the development of that portion of the free and open internet? (Genuinely asking, in case I'm missing something here.)

<comment><USER3> Yes this. Most people who work outside software development and several within, are convinced that they have access to free internet services only because they are willing to tolerate ads.

Ads ≠ "free" services, and "free" services ≠ ads.

["free" in scare quotes to refer to not paying money per usage or to gain access to usage, but you may be paying in other ways]

Counter examples are public libraries (no ads but "free") and cable television (not "free" yet ads).

<comment><USER4> He didn't say that in principle the only way to make money on the internet was through ads. He's saying that in practice most (not all) of the services people actually use on the internet for free (at no direct cost to themselves) are in fact paid for by advertising.

As an observation, I think that's hard to argue with.

<comment><USER5> The quote in question specifically says "free and open internet" which has a massively different connotation than merely "no direct cost."

Free and open software, and by extension the internet services wishing to provide a free and open internet, often has no direct cost to end users _and also_ does not generate income from ads, and seeks non-exploitative funding or donation models very different from advertising.

Regardless of how many ad-based services people use at no direct cost, it's highly debatable whether these services contribute in any way to the "free and open" internet... their widespread usage and superficial lack of direct financial cost certainly don't factor in at all and are not relevant details for what the quote is discussing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Transcript please? Or is the future of SWE voice operated (God forbid)?

</comment><comment><USER7> Sanjay said one of the reasons he hired Kevin is because he wanted another hard core engineer in upper management at Microsoft. MSFT has historically allowed business decisions to trump technical decisions and Keven adds balance.

/former LinkedIn employee

</comment><comment><USER8> Keep in mind, Kevin Scott has made most of his career around ads: AdMob, Google, LinkedIn and now Microsoft.

<comment><USER9> Ive worked for Kevin during his tenure at MS. Ads have not been the focus, so I'm not sure the innuendo means much.

<comment><USER8> It's just the facts. I worked with him at LinkedIn, so I know his history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ads is fine. Nothing bad with it. All TV programs show ads everyday.

It's the policy that matters. If all website enforces a policy that requires user permission to show it, then it's good to go.

<comment><USER11> Well not all TV programs. The BBC in the uk is one exception to this rule.

<comment><USER12> ...paid by taxes.</comment></comment></comment>


How does language shape the way we think? - <AUTHOR> http://scienceandreason.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-does-language-shape-way-we-think.html <comment><USER2> I can't see how it could not shape the way we think, at least a little.

The piraha tribe in the amazon only has words for "one", "two" and "many". Some researchers have found that members of this tribe have an incredibly hard time grasping the concept that adding 3 rocks to 4 rocks is any different from adding 4 rocks to 5 rocks.

[http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/0354222&...](http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/0354222&tid=134) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people></comment>


Payment Processors Still Using Weak Crypto - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/02/24/payment-processors-still-using-weak-crypto/ <comment><USER2> A payment processor that my company uses sent a notice that they are finally disabling RC4 by summer and TLS 1.0 (and maybe 1.1) next year, because PCIDSS.</comment>