Show HN: Sense2vec model trained on all 2015 Reddit comments - <AUTHOR> https://sense2vec.spacy.io <comment><USER2> Accompanying blog post is at [https://spacy.io/blog/sense2vec-with- spacy](https://spacy.io/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy)

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who's tried to quantify the Reddit hivemind by analyzing word usage ([http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit- topwords/](http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-topwords/)), I think the spaCy semantic approach is a much more robust approach to the Reddit data corpus.

However, I'm not sure if I agree with the use of phrase similarity as a indicator of Reddit hivemind behavior, which was discussed in the complementary blog post. The tool is more of an indicator of the writing styles of Reddit's primary demographics (Male, 18-30) and phrases which are coincident, instead of weighting the _importance_ of given phrases to Reddit discussion.

</comment><comment><USER4> Word vectors are really intriguing to me, and I have a few questions:

If you also trained a model on a different news aggregator's comments, would it be possible to "match up" the meaning vector spaces and see differences in what meanings each community ascribes to words?

Additionally, could you determine sentiments from the positions of the words in the meaning space? One example, looking for underlying assumptions, like associations of the words 'black person' and 'criminal'. Or idk, man + sex = player, but woman + sex = slut.

Would it be possible to go higher level and see how much a corpus agrees with "free markets are good" based on its word positions?

It seems like word2vec has the potential to bring Sapir-Whorf to a whole new level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say we want to know how usage differs in one subreddit vs another. If you just train two entirely separate models, you end up with two vector spaces. The meanings within each space are entirely relative --- the absolute positions obviously aren't significant. You can try to learn a mapping, but the transform is not necessarily linear. (Interesting empirical question there...)

What you need is a 'seam' that connects the two vector spaces. I would do it like this.

Train a single model, with the words decorated by their subreddit. So you have combat:/r/gaming and combat:/r/history as different tokens. Then you have shared tokens which aren't decorated in this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now can't you experiment with algebra operations on those vectors, like "queen minus female plus male = king"?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is supported in the underlying data, but we don't expose it in the UI at the moment. We'll probably do something a bit different to help people make those queries.

<comment><USER6> Would it be possible for you to make the trained vectors available for download and independent analysis without having to rescrape and retrain the model?

<comment><USER5> FYI there are Reddit data dumps publicly available, no need to kill Reddit scraping it:

[https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus](https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus)

<comment><USER7> Awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very cool. I have played with the word2vec download a lot and I have been sorta amazed. If you had a lot of money... like google... it would be cool to train word vectors on the whole internet.

something like this definitely makes word net obsolete. :-( [http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn](http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

<comment><USER9> word2vec embeddings tend to be improved when you add WordNet (Faruqui et al., 2015): [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hovy/papers/15HLT-retrofitting- word-...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hovy/papers/15HLT-retrofitting-word- vectors.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's impressive how good it is.

But there is still room for improvement. Searching "Haskell" leads to Clojure and C++. Yes, these are both Programming Languages, but out of all I personally wouldn't have said C++. :)

"Scheme" leads to Haskell, witch is very fitting, and Prolog, witch seems to fit as a "university language" aswell.

For "Agda" it outputs "typeclasses" at 74%. This is a much discussed topic. But for a "truly" semantic understand It should know that both "Agda" and "Haskell" are in the same category and that "typeclasses" is a property that elments in this category have or don't have.

Still, very impressive. But not the singularity jet.

<comment><USER11> I would have said C++ because the template system is a functional programming language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The first name to show up when I search 'evil man' is 'Mr Rogers'...what the hell, reddit.

(first name, not first word, had to scroll down a bit, past words like 'Nazi soldier' and 'evildoer')

<comment><USER13> I was half-expecting this but Comcast is associated with Swastika and Nazi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The band names are particularly cool. It is sorta like a recommendation engine. If you like Pink floyd, you might like Led Zepplin.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty good at picking up the Smash Bros Jargon:

[https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?dash_dance|NOUN](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?dash_dance|NOUN)

</comment><comment><USER15> NSFW doesn't work: [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?NSFW%7CNOUN](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?NSFW%7CNOUN)

<comment><USER16> try RTFM, doesn't work too!!

<comment><USER17> Try ftfy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Submitting 'NSFW' (without quotes) will display mangled urls.

<comment><USER19> Not necessarily a bug on their end, those urls are actually from a bot, AutoWikibot. Which uses the word "NSFW" in every post, so all of it's formatting is highly correlated with it: [https://www.reddit.com/user/AutoWikibot](https://www.reddit.com/user/AutoWikibot)

The last line (Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete...) has this formatting:

        ^Parent ^commenter ^can [^toggle ^NSFW](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot NSFW toggle&message=%2Btoggle-nsfw+ct3omf8) ^or[](#or) [^delete](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot Deletion&message=%2Bdelete+ct3omf8)^. ^Will ^also ^delete ^on ^comment ^score ^of ^-1 ^or ^less. ^| [^(FAQs)](/r/autowikibot/wiki/index) ^| [^Mods](/r/autowikibot/comments/1x013o/for_moderators_switches_commands_and_css/) ^| [^Call ^Me](/r/autowikibot/comments/1ux484/ask_wikibot/)

You can see how that formatting might fuck up their nice natural language processor and tokenizer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very cool!

I've been working for a while on extracting "semantic" from naked text (mostly news). One of the big limits of word2vec is that the semantic should be related with words proximity in sentences, which works in some cases, but not always.

I'll give an example for all: travel/geography. If you query something like Italy [1], the results are other European states. But if you're looking for news in Italy, or to plan a vacation to Italy, or for some Italian food... or anything related to Italy itself, you probably don't expect "Spain" to be the first result.

It would be nice to have some sort of easy way in word2vec to define domains and their relationship with words proximity in sentences, to overcome situations like this one.

[1] [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Italy%7CGPE](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Italy%7CGPE)

<comment><USER21> Don't think of Word2Vec (etc) as a search - it's a different thing.

It's more like a recommender: If I like Pizza in Napoli where should I go in Spain and what should I eat there?

Italy:Pizza -> Spain:?

Italy:Napoli -> Spain:?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tried something similar a while back, only using Sparks Word2Vec implementation, though just looking at individual organizations as used in different subreddits. It is surprising how far Word2Vec can take you in deriving word similarity.

Used POS tagging in a previous post, though not with Word2Vec since I wasn't sure if differences like duck verb vs. duck noun would improve the result because the placement of verb vs. noun would already be different. Though certainly an interesting approach, I'm wondering if going backwards might yield better results for the POS tagger as well, since verb vs noun would span disparate word clusters.

1) [http://dbunker.github.io/2016/01/05/spark-word2vec-on- reddit...](http://dbunker.github.io/2016/01/05/spark-word2vec-on-reddit/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Strange, I enter "Harry Kane" and it shows me various footballers (none of which are on the same team as him). But then I enter "Jamie Vardy" and there are no results whatsoever, even though he's been HUGE on /r/soccer in 2015.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Interesting. I wonder whether we're missing some data. I didn't do so much to verify that. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And interactive sentence parsing: [https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=A+machine+lear...](https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=A+machine+learning+how+to+do+machine+learning).

</comment><comment><USER25> Indeed accurate: [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?turd%7CNOUN](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?turd%7CNOUN)

<comment><USER26> Compare and contrast: [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?dank_meme|NOUN](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?dank_meme|NOUN)

<comment><USER25> Wow, didn't know the term "dank" before. Although Urban Dictionary says it is a term used by stoners and hippies. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh this is fun if you look up politically charged words like 'thug' or even something that should be pretty harmless like 'girls'.

<comment><USER19> I don't see anything surprising about those searches. E.g. "thug" gets "gangster" which seems pretty fitting. "girls" gets "female friends", which is semantically very close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> is it just me or does it not search when you hit enter?

<comment><AUTHOR> The server logs say everything's working, so I hope not! Are you still having trouble?

Sometimes I get tricked when I enter a query that has the same top result as the one that's currently displayed. Then it looks like the results haven't changed, but further down the list, they have.

<comment><USER29> Nothing happens for me where I press enter either, I have to click on the search icon (firefox on linux).

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on this. Thanks.

Edit: We have this fixed but we're reluctant to roll it out. Two days ago when we did an AWS deploy, they replaced healthy machines with unhealthy ones, and we had an hour of outage.

If you want to fix this on the client, I think the following quick fix works. At the bottom of the sense2vec script [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/js/sense2vec.js](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/js/sense2vec.js) , change:

        input.addEventListener('keydown', function() {
           if(event.keyCode == 13) run();
        });

to

        input.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) {
           if(event.keyCode == 13) run();
        });

<comment><USER21> Also noting that linking URLs with the pipe symbol (eg [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Autechre|PERSON](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Autechre|PERSON)) will result in the "|PERSON" being dropped from the search box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> tried "netflix and chill", didn't find anything? That to me is the phrase of the year that is more than the sum of its parts.

<comment><AUTHOR> The underlying linguistics of a "phrase" here are sort of narrow. What we did is retokenize the text so that entities and basic noun phrases are merged into a single token. "Netflix and chill" is analysed as multiple tokens, so it doesn't come up as a query result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is really cool. The next logical thing is to extend it to allow multiple meanings for the same word with the same type. For example " _lead_ is a heavy element" vs "I own a dog _lead_ ". Not sure how you'd do that without explicitly giving each unique word an ID and manually annotating the training data.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great to see another use case of spacy...I've been wanting to give it a go ever since OP pitched it as an alternative to NLTK.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looking at the blog post, I wonder why spaCy thinks Barack Obama is spelled Barrack Obama. It forces spellings to the more canonical word spelling, maybe, regardless of context? Edit: or maybe somebody slipped and inserted a stray keystroke when editing the blog post?

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting side effect: it has learned to give somewhat decent anime recommendations. At the very least it recognizes some basic genres to an extent (for example, TTGL is close to Code Geass and Kill la Kill, while Kokoro Connect is close to Clannad and Toradora).

<comment><USER10> Try "Haruhi" and "Madoka". IMHO impressive.

<comment><USER34> It does characters pretty well too. For most popular series that I tried, with the weird exception of Gintama, searching any of the main characters would pull up the rest of the main cast as highly related.

It seems to have learned the relationship between characters and shows, though it always ranks the Monogatari characters as relatively close to any character search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Searched for "Best Iron Maiden album" and it was smart enough not to pick one. Then I tried "Seinfeld" and it returned Seinfeld as the 10th result behind some other sitcoms, including IT Crowd (that was an oddball!) :)

<comment><USER35> Interesting, the result seems to be for Jerry Seinfeld. If I try Seinfeld|WORK_OF_ART, I get a bunch of sitcoms but not Seinfeld.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Weirdly, their dataset doesn't include the word "thirteen" or "13". and it's not a matter of excluding numbers, they have "twelve", "12", and "14" and "fourteen".

</comment><comment><USER36> Cool. It seems to distinguish words with and without trailing period for some reason ("MySQL" and "MySQL."), which seems a bit too specific. Perhaps a good reason to, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason isn't good --- it's just a tokenization problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Any chance you'll also have a Markov chain generator? Bonus points if you can pick your subreddit, give it a starting topic, and let 'er rip.

<comment><USER38> I think that's exactly what this does: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think the server just returns nothing when it is overloaded.

I searched "dank memes" and got "steel beems". Other searches all failed.

</comment><comment><USER40> [http://imgur.com/2S0eCnY](http://imgur.com/2S0eCnY)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is awesome! I would pay for an API.

</comment><comment><USER42> FOUND NOTHING for 'dogs f--king' where the dashes need to substituted for the obvious letters

</comment><comment><USER43> just a random hilarious oddity- i wonder why it associates ricky rubio with pokemon? [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Ricky_Rubio%7CPERSON](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Ricky_Rubio%7CPERSON)

edit: and now it doesn't?

</comment><comment><USER44> It crashes on "/r/AsianFetish" phrase with 500 error :-)

</comment><comment><USER45> Searched for something NSFW and didn't get any results :(

<comment><USER46> Looks like the parser got confused by the NSFW link tag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Doesn't work as advertised for [Obama]

<comment><AUTHOR> ?

[https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Barack_Obama%7CPERSON](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Barack_Obama%7CPERSON)

[https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Obama%7CPERSON](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Obama%7CPERSON)

<comment><USER47> I get: [https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Obama%7CORG](https://sense2vec.spacy.io/?Obama%7CORG)

First result is GOP

<comment><USER21> It is showing things which are used in English in the same way as "Obama" when the word "Obama" is used as an organization.

Clearly "Obama" isn't an organization, but it does a decent job. Consider the sentence "Obama's unsolicited advice that Congress should "go ahead and vote" has only hardened the GOP majority's resistance."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia's robots.txt - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt <comment><USER2> This seems unnecessarily complicated and antagonistic. Mostly just to publicly shame a bunch of people.

At Reddit we originally blocked a couple of crawlers but then realized how pointless that was. The entire robots file[0] is basically now just for google. All of the restrictions are enforced on the server side because there were so many bad bots it didn't matter if we listed them or not.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt](https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt)

<comment><USER3> GitHub has an interesting entry in theirs [0]. The only user that's in the Disallow section is "/ekansa".

He explained it a bit on a Twitter thread [1] where I brought it up a while back and it sounds like they didn't like the fact that he was using GitHub to host XML files for another service because of the traffic from crawlers it created.

[0] [https://github.com/robots.txt](https://github.com/robots.txt)

[1] [https://twitter.com/ekansa/status/1137052076062650368](https://twitter.com/ekansa/status/1137052076062650368)

<comment><USER4> User-agent: *

Allow: /humans.txt

Disallow: /

Nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        # Observed spamming large amounts of https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=NNNNNN
        # and ignoring 429 ratelimit responses, claims to respect robots:
        # http://mj12bot.com/
        User-agent: MJ12bot
        Disallow: /

Coincidentally, I've just read more negative things about MJ12bot last week: [http://boston.conman.org/2019/07/09.1](http://boston.conman.org/2019/07/09.1)

<comment><USER6> You can read the rest of my MJ12Bot saga: [http://boston.conman.org/2019/07/09-12](http://boston.conman.org/2019/07/09-12) My take: they are grossly incompetent at programming.

<comment><USER7> The best robots.txt for Majestic:

        iptables -A INPUT -s 220.127.116.11/32 -j DROP

<comment><USER6> If only it was that easy. Last month MJ12Bot hit my site from 136 distinct IP addresses. If we drop the last octet, it's 120 unique class-C addresses, and if we drop the last two octets, then 43 unique class-B addresses (and why not ---31 distinct class-A addresses). It's a distributed bot. Very hard to block, so I think I came out ahead by them no longer spidering my site.

Edit: Added count of class-A blocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wikipedia's rationale to exclude articles for deletion pages is interesting:

# Folks get annoyed when XfD discussions end up the number 1 google hit for their name.

<comment><USER9> There are a lot of webpages with my name on them, and the Cuil search engine put the XfD discussion about deleting my Wikipedia page (because I'm not significant enough) on the first page of Cuil's results for my name. I was thrilled :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > User-agent: TeleportPro

I remember using it to download whole (small) websites on dialup and then to read offline.

<comment><USER11> In Wikipedia's case, they'd prefer you download a dump or use an app specifically designed to read Wikipedia offline. Rendering all that PHP is (or at least at one point was) expensive.

<comment><USER12> reference for above comment:

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents)

I, somewhat fancifully, keep two flashdrives with a wikipedia data dump on them "just in case"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I haven't put up a robots.txt in years, they are utterly pointless, IMHO. Even google doesn't honor them(nor did any of the others, like Alexa, for many years now). Read you web server logs, you'll see googlebot crawling pages it should not, if it were honoring your robots.txt.

<comment><USER6> Have you checked the IPs to make sure they're actually Google? There's a strong incentive to fake being Google.

<comment><USER13> yes they IPs were owned by them, they even indexed pages they were asked not to. :x

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always thought something like robots.txt was a bit silly when it's so easy to ignore.

<comment><USER15> robots.txt is the sheet with the house rules on the wall (or part thereof), not the enforcement of those rules.

<comment><USER16> Part of my monthly maintenance on an independent Mediawiki install is to cross-reference our robots.txt (which is based on Wikipedia's) and server logs.

If a client or IP range is misbehaving in the server logs, it goes into robots.txt. If it's ignoring robots.txt, it gets added to the firewall's deny list.

I've tried to automate that process a few times but haven't ever gotten far. It's unending, though. Feels like all it seems to take is a handful of cash and a few days to start an SEO marketing buzzword company with its own crawler, all to build yet another thing for us to block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Please do not remove the space at the start of this line, it breaks the > rendering.

Does anyone know what this comment means? It is towards the end of the file.

<comment><USER18> Its because the robots.txt file is created by combining a static file ( [https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-mediawiki- config/blo...](https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-mediawiki- config/blob/master/robots.txt) ) with an on-wiki page so that different language wikipedias can manage the file themselves - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Robots.txt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Robots.txt)

In wikisyntax, starting a line with a space ensure's that its in a pre tag, so this was a way to make the onwiki page show the entire thing in a pre tag and not use normal formatting. This seems to be broken by actually starting a literal pre tag inside the first line, but I'm pretty sure this used to work as a way to display the entire thing in a pre tag.

For the curious, the code generating the robots.txt file is at [https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-mediawiki- config/blo...](https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-mediawiki- config/blob/master/w/robots.php)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you fund Firefox while preserving user privacy? - ajc-sorin I saw a lot of disappointment regarding Mozilla's recent proposal to collect user data, but I'm interested in seeing alternative ways for them fund innovation and development in their browser. <comment><AUTHOR> I asked myself this very same question. I think the answer is: you don't, not directly. People simply don't care enough about their browser to pay anything.

I think we need to take a step around this problem. Here are two suggestions.

Maybe Mozilla can sell a VPN service or some other kind of product that is external to Firefox. They then use the revenue to fund Firefox development.

Mozilla can also launch an alternative version of Firefox that they label 'privacy-optimized'. That version will have all tracking disabled by default. People who really care about privacy will use that version, and it will solve their biggest complaint of 'having to turn off yet another opt-in feature'. Meanwhile, the vast majority of users don't care about tracking, so Mozilla can enable tracking by default in the mainstream version.

</comment><comment><USER2> Run a yearly pledge drive like wikipedia</comment>


What if we paid for Facebook – instead of letting it spy on us for free? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/05/what-if-we-paid-for-facebook-instead-of-letting-it-spy-on-us-for-free/ <comment><USER2> Wasn't there already an attempt at this? app.net ?

I'm sure a sizeable chunk of Facebook's user base would not be willing to pay _any_ amount.

Take for example: an in-law, who uses Facebook to "store her photos" because paying (the equivalent of) $0.99 a month for more iCloud storage space, is not something even within the realm of possibility.

</comment><comment><USER3> What if we just got off the hook instead?</comment>


Ask HN: Tech jobs/locations for saving money - <AUTHOR>

I am a commercial software engineer with nearly 10 years' experience. Most of my experience is as an individual contributor, but I have also occasionally lead small teams. Anyone who I've worked with would say that I'm competent at what I do, and whenever I feel like changing jobs, I have no trouble finding work.
Right now, for reasons that are not relevant to this post, I am interested in spending a couple of years earning as much money as I can, within reason. I certainly don't want to try the startup lottery - my goal is more to find a high paying job somewhere where the costs of living are low. The sacrifices I am willing to make are that the work does not have to be the most interesting or cutting edge stuff, I will relocate anywhere, and I am happy to live a frugal lifestyle (I have no dependents).
I'm not sure exactly how much money I can expect to save, but my hunch is that a high 5 figure sum per year may be realistic. I probably would not be willing to go as far as spending 6 months cooped up in a military submarine, but I'm interested in hearing HN readers' ideas about what kind of work I could find to achieve my goal. <comment><USER2> Work remotely while living in S.E. Asia, maybe? If you can find stable work you'd be able to save huge amounts.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is probably the best option. For example, Buenos Aires, Argentina, you could have a very good life with 1k usd per month. Buenos Aires is a beautiful city (they call it the Paris of South America). If you got a remote work from the US and can work from here, you will be able to save a lot of money.</comment></comment>


The Blockchain Is Bigger Than Any Bubble - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-30/the-blockchain-is-bigger-than-any-bubble <comment><USER2> > Bitcoin is a poor currency and a crazy investment -- but the technology > behind it is a real breakthrough.

I feel like that should be the other way around. When all the "blockchain startups" and ICOs blow up, Bitcoin will be left standing. The true innovation behind the "blockchain" was its decentralised consensus mechanism. That mechanism is only secure as long as no single entity controls over 50% of the hash rate. Some of the largest Bitcoin miners have so much hash rate today that they could attack any (SHA-256 based) blockchain but the Bitcoin one.

"The Internet is a poor network and a crazy investment -- but TCP/IP is a real breakthrough."... Sure!

<comment><USER3> the problem many praising blockchain minus bitcoin people forget, is that blockchain strength (distributed reconciliation) is possible only because of incentive (sth you get in exchange for doing all the etahashes per second).

The moment you take incentive (bitcoin) out of the equation, whole blockchain will lose its strenght.

You can not take out greed^H^H^Hincentive out of the picture.

p.s. this is black and white written in bitcoin whitepaper.

<comment><USER4> Then how do you explain the Maersk blockchain-based insurance trial that they found very successful?

Bitcoin is not the only incentive that can be had in implementing blockchain technology.

There are a number of very promising use cases for blockchain, in education, healthcare, energy... none of which involve bitcoin at all.

<comment><USER5> All "block chain" is is a Merkle tree. You can do all sorts of productive, interesting stuff with Merkle trees.

If you want to do interesting things with a trust-less, decentralized system, you need the mining and mining rewards.

<comment><USER6> There are a few file sharing applications that do interesting things with trust-less, decentralized systems, without any sort of mining or mining rewards.

Mining allows for high value transactions in a low trust environment, but lower value transactions are very possible without that.

IMO Tit for Tat is a much more interesting form of consensus building as it can be very low resource. But it's really all about the goals not the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The block chain is good in so far as it is useful. I'm seeing a whole bunch of people deploy it where anonymous trust is not a requirement. They're just needlessly increasing the costs of the networks they create. It's a bit of hype that will surely subside. Not saying it's not useful - just not for everything under the sun!

<comment><USER8> You make it sound like having an open system for timestamped records with support for highly complex permissions validation with a deep audit trail that is resistant to fraud and posthoc record tampering has no utility beyond buying drugs....

<comment><USER9> You can buy drugs with git?

<comment><USER10> Given the complexity of git commands, I cannot rule it out.

<comment><USER11> Oh here it is, git-buy-drugs.

<comment><USER12> It would never be that straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FYI: If you are interested in building your own blockchains from scratch over at the Awesome Blockchains page (and repo) [1] I collect starter samples (e.g. in 20 lines of javascript, python, ruby, ...) and articles. Happy Blockchaining. [1] [https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome- blockchains](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains)

</comment><comment><USER14> > Blockchain technology might also be used one day to produce new kinds of > central-bank money.

I feel like they missed the whole point.

<comment><USER15> Not really. In fact, permissioned blockchains are already being researched by big banks (I know someone working on this) to solve certain problems related to the integrity of financial records. It is not hard to imagine revival of ecash [1] coupled with a distributed ledger and a threshold blind signature system for issuing the currency.

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

<comment><USER16> Yes he missed something: the context of bitcoin invention during the 2008 crisis. One of the big incentive to own something like bitcoin (or any decentralized and distributed cryptocurrency) is that it allows to emancipate yourself completely from financial institution either public (the central banks) or private (retail banks) when it comes to managing your capital, hell the "be your own bank".

This is something especially important considering we live in a world where nation-states are increasingly weak, politicians are either seen as incompetent at dealing with economic issue or just straight up overpowered by transnational entities while people are more and more nomad (not hesitating to just abandon their countries for another one when they are not satisfied instead of trying to enhance it). The problem with this trend is that currently moving your capital with you is hard (e-banking is a progress but it's still not enough for most people, especially the poorest).

Finally there is this economic warfare aspect, not all countries are like the USA where the currency is a tool for global hegemony and a fundamental pillar of the state, in fact with the EU we have strong countries which for the first time in history have willfully abandoned their monetary sovereignty (they still keep control but it's not one-sided). Best examples of this dynamic is Japan which has seen the yen bleed badly during the last decades and is the first big country to have a pro-cryptocurrency attitude.

<comment><USER15> "it allows to emancipate yourself completely from financial institution"

No, it means trusting Bitcoin exchanges in addition to your bank, because at the end of the day you still need to at least get enough money to pay your taxes. So until you live under a government that recognizes Bitcoin as money, you still need to cash out at least sometimes. Even if you somehow have no taxes to pay, you still need to do business with people who do, and they are either going to demand the government's money or they are going to take the relative value of Bitcoin to that money into account when setting prices.

You seem to underestimate the power of governments, especially when it comes to money. Governments tend to enforce laws dealing with taxes and debts, and those are the laws that give fiat currency its value.

"Japan...is the first big country to have a pro-cryptocurrency attitude"

Ironically, Japan is also the source of the clearest example of the role of debt laws in determining the value of money:

[https://qz.com/1003609/bitcoins-soaring-price-means-mt- gox-c...](https://qz.com/1003609/bitcoins-soaring-price-means-mt-gox-could- pay-its-debts-and-drw-wants-to-help/)

TLDR: MtGox is paying its creditors in Yen, despite having lost their BTC, because of the debt laws in Japan.

<comment><USER16> Right now you have to cash out but the endgame is to not have to, just like in the early 00s it was a hassle to buy something online and doing your taxes or accessing government services was science fiction while now you can almost live alone without ever going out of your home required you have an internet access because even the grocery store can be visited by internet.

But sure, the governments as today can easily cripple cryptocurrencies if they decide to and I'm not underestimating their power but as I said there is a competition between states, if my country adopts a hostile behavior toward cryptocurrencies then I'm pretty sure another country with a more lenient attitude will be happy to welcome my capital and workforce (not really a new concept, it was already like that with huguenots 400 years ago and it weakened badly the top dog that France while boosting immensely second or third ranked powers like England and Prussia).

I think the leaders in first world countries already understood that, that's why the general attitude is to say "it's none of our business" right now, especially in places like Europe or Japan which kind of missed the first wave of the "third industrial revolution" like internet is called by regulating too much or having a top-down approach to develop the sector and in result got crushed by the USA.

In short: ban cryptos at your own risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > stabilized by central banks acting as _trusted monopoly producers_

Oh the number of cryptocurrencies which have tried to stabilize their currency. There was BitsharesX which was abandoned quickly. Then there is USDT. The answer is there can never be a "trusted monopoly producers" in a decentralised world.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, while Bitshares was a pretty complete failure, BitUSD, which sits on top of it as a "stablecoin" should be regarded as a complete success. Look at the price chart relative to dollars. [1] It only has brief and small excursions away from $1 despite being thinly traded and having very low market cap, and being backed by having a nearly worthless coin, as cryptocurrencies go.

Stablecoins are a very interesting concept. They are a game-theoretically incentive compatible way to stabilize a currency WITHOUT a trusted monopoly producer. [2]

1 - [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitusd/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitusd/) 2 - [https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable- cryptocur...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable- cryptocurrency/)

<comment><USER17> The smallest measure in forex is called a pip. For USD it is $0.0001. Movement of price from $1 to say $0.98 is a movement of ~200 pips. This is considered huge volatility in forex. So it might look small excursions it is not a good result when compared to real world use.

and I am saying this as someone who invested in Bitshares and it's precursor Protoshares. I still hold ~100k of BTSX.

> They are a game-theoretically incentive compatible way to stabilize a > currency WITHOUT a trusted monopoly producer.

This is the biggest fallacy in cryptocurrency scene. People think everything can be mathematically modeled. Absolutely not. Everyone will act rationally in a given situation. Absolutely not.

If that were the case we would solved all the problems in the world using some kind of game theory function.

Edit: Oops looks like I deleted the SNB example. Here's what happened:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-snb/swiss-draw- line...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-snb/swiss-draw-line-in-the- sand-to-cap-runaway-franc-idUSTRE7851LV20110906)

SNB drew and held a line at 1.20 for EUR/CHF pair. No cryptocurrency can repeat that feat.

<comment><USER19> Think cryptocurrencies are just waiting for George Soros to make a GBP-like move.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I stopped reading when the author claimed that bitcoin not having "alternative uses, like gold" makes it less suitable as a currency

<comment><USER21> What are Bitcoin's alternative uses?

<comment><USER22> I think OP's point is that "not having alternative uses" shouldn't be a negative characteristic?

To play Devil's Advocate, is Gold's current value where it is today because it is useful in jewelry and electronics? Why does Bitcoin necessarily _need_ something to provide its value besides the value we give it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand how bitcoin is different from a fiat currency. Both only has value because we say it has value. Obviously a fiat currency generally has the backing of a central government. However a government is only viable as long as the constituents tolerate it, meaning whatever currency it issues, backed by the credit of such government, again only has value because people say it does.

<comment><USER24> Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million BTC. Fiat can be printed.

<comment><USER23> Bitcoin's hard cap can be lifted should the right consortium of people decide to.

<comment><USER25> If by "consortium of people" you mean "overwhelming consensus among bitcoin users", then sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> at 144GB it's definitely very big

</comment><comment><USER27> Bitcoins value does have an upper limit, to the extent it is cheaper/advantageous to move to a nearly identical clone, because the mainline is over-valued enough that the idea entices critical mass (of new people) to shift. This normalizes over time/culture, today we fork for technical reasons, but in the future there will be other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER28> People keep comparing Bitcoin to a currency like the Dollar which leads to a lot of problematic comparisons.

Think about it as gold and it starts to make sense in the long term (short term is anyone's guess)

<comment><USER29> People keep comparing one currency to another currency? Preposterous! If you have something that is similar to the dollar it will and should be compared to the dollar. All those problems are real.

<comment><USER28> Not really. It's long since anyone saw bitcoin as a viable currency. It's a store of value like gold that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That might very well be true - as blockchain these days can mean just about anything related to cryptography.

</comment><comment><USER31> WHICH blockchain, though?

</comment><comment><USER32> How many times can a bubble burst? once ... So far the bitcoin bubble has "burst" several times, maybe we can call it something other than a bubble?

<comment><USER33> a zit?</comment></comment>


After Capitalism? - <AUTHOR> https://nplusonemag.com/issue-24/the-intellectual-situation/after-capitalism/ <comment><USER2> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine.

Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.

<comment><USER3> The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next.

> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years

But it has been done _without_ generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century.

The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs _already_ – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.

We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse.

And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but _nobody_ has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What _do_ we do with all the excess population?

<comment><USER4> Lower birth rates? Short term economic pain of a graying population for a long term gain.

<comment><USER5> While birth rates are lowering enough that the population based on current projections will start dropping in a few decades, UN projections also clearly indicate it will start increasing again soon enough, albeit at a slower rate.

To avoid that would take substantial further reductions in birth rates beyond that which is baked in based on current trends.

EDIT: Let me adjust this a bit. UNs World Population Prospects 2015 [1] says "Continued population growth until 2050 is almost inevitable, even if the decline of fertility accelerates." and their middle and top estimates shows continued growth until 2100, though rapidly shrinking growth. The low end estimate shows a reduction in the latter half of the century. Almost all of this growth is expected to be in developing countries, however.

[1] [http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_W...](http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_WPP_2015.pdf)

<comment><USER6> So the people predicting a financial catastrophe in the next 20 years because of the demographic nightmare of the boomers leaving the workforce and not dying for 20 years, so we become a society with too few workers are wrong?

Awesome!

Seriously, which is it? Either capitalism is going to fail because there aren't enough workers, or it's going to fail because robots are taking all the jobs. Can't have both!

Because, of course, having both would be fine... no catastrophe, life continues as normal as it has in the face of every prediction of imminent disaster. We have less workers due to demographic changes, but that's cool because we need less workers. We sort out the political problem of how to stop all the money going to to <1% of the population, we're all good.

<comment><USER3> > no catastrophe, life continues as normal as it has in the face of every > prediction of imminent disaster

I wouldn't call the circumstances in Europe 1815-1945, when the last massive societal upheavals happened, "life as normal".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A point made by Engels in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is that over the past 10000 years, the economic system has been completely upended several times.

10000 years ago hunter gatherers lived in primitive communism. Then slave empires arose in the fertile crescent. After Rome was sacked, decentralized feudalism became dominant. We still see its vestiges, England and Japan are ruled by royals, officially. Capitalism began taking hold only a few hundred years ago. It may be permanent in our lifetime, but it will surely be replaced in time. I doubt production will be for the purpose of enriching heirs 10000 years from now, or even 1000 years from now (perhaps even sooner).

Marx said capitalism will run its course, until its doing more harm than good. Then it will be replaced by a different system of production.

<comment><USER8> Hunter-gatherer primitive communism is alive and well. It's called "family". At that scale it's easy to do business without money.

Capitalism as in money, trade, loans and private property date back at least to ancient Babylon. If you wish to include "modern" banking in the mix with currency exchange rates, then you go to 1157 Venice or Genoa.

What happened hundred years ago was income tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely.

Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism.

We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to be centralized much beyond that.

<comment><USER10> > Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which > both parties agree

Not really. A lot of today's capitalism is based on concepts such as copyright, patents and trade secrets, which are definitely not "natural" \- in fact, they are directly opposite of "free market".

Personally, I believe that a capitalistic system where these three are eliminated or at least severely restricted would be much preferable to what we have today.

<comment><USER11> All three are basically the right of ownership, isn't that practically exactly what capitalism is?

Could you please elaborate on how the world would look like without these three concepts?

<comment><USER10> No, it's not the right of _ownership_ it's the right of _enforcing a monopoly_. If I copy something you own, you still own it, I'm not taking anything away from you... It would be amazing! Basically what we have now, but (1) noone would go to jail for piracy, and (2) all research would be shared much sooner, and you wouldn't need to worry which spurious patents your original research is infringing.

<comment><USER12> >it's not the right of ownership it's the right of enforcing a monopoly.

Ownership is a form of monopoly as well.

Just because a resource is rivalrous doesn't mean more than one person couldn't be _permitted_ to use it, particularly when you're talking about capital goods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those struggling with this, the last three paragraphs sum up the author's thesis pretty well.

It's actually more of a critique of current leftist ideas (from a Left perspective) than anything.

quote:

Getting less work seems unlikely to come about without the fight for solidarity, the chief intellectual achievement of the workers' movement, and one that none of the accelerationists see fit to mention as an ideal worth preserving or even renovating. This is despite the fact that automation—or, more broadly, the increasing precariousness of labor through technologically assisted means—has always been dialectically connected with it. What tech enthusiasts call"disruption" is in fact almost always directed at forms of organization that preserve a modicum of workers' control over knowledge and the products of labor. Because London taxicabs are controlled by people who have built up impressive maps of one of the world's most complex cities in their brains, they ought to be replaced by self-driving cars operating on Google Maps. Because high school teachers have professional systems of accreditation and training and have unions to protect these, they must be replaced by lower-paid short-term Ivy-League graduates and cyber charters.

Automation isn't a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers' control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense of control they have over their work. The only reason such work has ever not been totally shitty is that some attempt to preserve such control was made. This — not some implausible notion of a fully automated postwork future—still remains the surest of utopian impulses, the one most likely to deliver the things we want.

Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. We recall Lenin's comment about how communism would be "Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about the Soviets, the electricity will do that work for us! But politics can't get done by machines.

</comment><comment><USER14> I say this stuff is pseudo-intellectual. Painful to read indeed.

<comment><USER15> +1 is not worth your time

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The way forward is not techno-communism. The problem is not over-competition or over-coorperation but over-centralization.

We can get the imagined benefits of techno-communism by getting better at systems integration through wider adoption of improved common technology platforms. For example, what if web assembly had a registry and semantic versioning like Node.js, and that became the standard for integrating B2B, government, and IoT? This would be a programming-language agnostic system. Systems for things like digital democracy, smart contracts, etc. could be easily deployed, integrated, and evolved.

See [http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization](http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization) and [http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

</comment><comment><USER17> The following link is another review of the same book by Paul Mason [http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf](http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf) but it focuses more on the economic idea, apparently discussed in his book, that the digital economy features a zero marginal cost of production. Now, if the purpose of the economy is to allocate scarce goods what happens when digital goods dominate the economy and have zero marginal cost (wikipedia, arxiv, github, free software, etc.)? The idea that scarcity might disappear would seem to undermine the very foundation driving economic transactions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Short review of two recently published books around this subject: [https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for- capi...](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-capitalism)

I've just started reading Matt Ridley's book and so far an enjoyable read.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is a recommended read related to the subject

Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the- math/2012/04/economist-meets-...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the- math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried, honestly I tried. I tried to read it. I wanted to see the arguments because this is an area of interest to me.

But I can't write a tl;dr - it would not sink in my brain. Part overview of the area, part, something else, I really have no idea what the author was trying to say

Please enlighten me

<comment><USER20> This. I mean,

> _Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are > once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market > capitalism's erstwhile boosters._

I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.

IMO the author needs a healthy dose of [http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequen...](http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequences%20of%20erudite%20vernacular.pdf)

<comment><USER21> > > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are > once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market > capitalism's erstwhile boosters.

> I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it > means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.

Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "After many financial crises, there is a lot of economic pessimism around again, even among free-market capitalism's biggest proponents."

<comment><USER20> I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought "pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore, was something completely different and nonsensical.

The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase, misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's like the author _hates_ convincing people.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster)

/shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Speed Camera Lottery pays drivers for slowing down (gamification) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2010/12/09/speed_camera_lottery_pays_drivers_for_slowing_down.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Also fascinating to watch [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw)</comment>


Ask HN: BTC futures are announced by CBOE and CME. What can go wrong? Discuss - <AUTHOR> What's your view on BTC futures? Big players betting big money on crash, and manipulating the (still illiquid) crypto market to realize gains? Miners/Whales playing both sides (fiat futures and crypto exchanges) to their gain?<p>Or you have a more bullish view? I'd love to hear some fresh thoughts... <comment><USER2> I'm of two minds on this.

With the futures market being a place that individuals can trade non-public information for a profit, and the history of Bitcoin being tied to criminal activity (drugs, ransom ware, etc.), I see a potential for market manipulation. The value of Bitcoin is still extremely volatile; due to the inherent anonymity and media presence surrounding the asset, the ability to trigger a price swing and make a killing in options is a reality.

On the other hand, estimated illicit transactions have decreased substantially due to the evolving ability for law enforcement to track down individuals from Bitcoin transactions (worth noting that I couldn't find solid numbers on this). If this realized reduction of anonymity thwarts most attempts at market manipulation, I'm thinking that these futures can help Bitcoin more quickly find stability in the world market.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not decided either.

One of the scenarios certainly is an implicit regulation of BTC (and with time Ethereum) trading. Currently, I'm not sure the authorities can call market manipulation happening on the crypto exchanges. But with futures being out there, traded on a regulated market, then manipulating the underlying would surely qualify as market manipulation (not an expert on US securities regulation).

But this is just one aspect. I'm wondering how soon it will take for us to see various trading strategies playing both sides of the market (crypto/fiat), and what effect will that have on the price in the short term, and the future of BTC going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My 2c: concern is that btc futures becomes like gold futures which are totally fraudulent and used to manipulate the market. But gold is a bizarro land that's cash settled vs paper or something super absurd. There's not really a functional way to short "physical bitcoin" right now that I'm aware of other than participating in the tether scheme. So even if the NY Fed, for instance, came in and blasted the bid on cme btc it's not clear it would affect the physical market. Overall I think it's bullish just for increasing exposure of investors to btc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was also decidedly bullish initially (on the exact same grounds that you're describing), but I'm increasingly aware that this can be flipped the other way too.

For example: let's say the BTC futures price is lower than the exchange price, and let's say you hold BTC; pursuing an arbitrage, you buy cheaper futures, sell BTC to make arbitrage profit; multiply this across many self-serving market agents, and you have market forces working to eliminate the arb opportunity: there's our transmission mechanism, regardless of how the futures are settled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a full-page ad placed in the Wall Street Journal (those run something like 150k) by a hedge fund manager begging the CBOE to not let Bitcoin on. This was within the last 4 weeks.

I wish I could share a picture of the article but the gist of it was "could cause a sell-off that would spread to the entire CBOE and cause a total collapse".</comment>


Show HN: Grepr – an FPS where you are the bullet, created in seven days - <AUTHOR> http://et1337.itch.io/grepr Argh - its "grepr", lowercase. I guess HN has some title casing logic specifically for Show HN posts. <comment><USER2> The first video I checked out was fun.</comment>


How Are Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's Changes Affecting Workers? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/08/11/901219097/how-are-postmaster-general-dejoys-changes-affecting-workers <comment><USER2> I guess what confuses me is that, even assuming good intentions by the new Postmaster General, why and why now?

I believe the main stated reason has been that the USPS loses money and they want to make it break even or profitable. Assuming that's the reason (and not election interference), why should such an infrastructure be breakeven or profitable? And why now, during a pandemic?

There are plenty of government services that aren't even close to breakeven. I imagine USPS actually might be one of the most self-sustaining federal departments. Why should this particular one be profitable? Why should this one be privatized, out of all of them?

The USPS has been one of the most stable, reliable, and predictable forces in my life. Their informal creed speaks volumes to me: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

I'm open to hearing arguments for why the USPS should be profitable (or privatized) and why now is a good time. I'm finding a very hard time imagining why.

<comment><USER3> Primary argument is that most of the entire rest of the world has moved to profitable, privatized mail carrying.

<comment><USER4> The USPS would be profitable if it didn't have to pre-fund its pension obligations by an 75 years - an obligation no other government regulated entity must abide by.

[https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps- myths/](https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/)

<comment><USER5> The prepayment period ended in 2016. It is not to blame for current losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My spouse's small business is seeing delays in deliveries the last few weeks it didn't even see at the height of the pandemic.

And she had something get lost a week ago, something that hadn't happened in over a year (small sample size though).

We do know that the local USPS has cut back on the hours their employees are working, which is strange considering USPS is busier than ever.

<comment><USER7> In the last two weeks, key financial docs got sent back as wrong address. Charles Schwab and our bank - we only know because they called to ask us about it. We've been at the same address for over 10 years. Never had this issue before. Anecdotal, perhaps, but odd timing nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny little tidbit: my 1940s townhouse neighborhood has no universal front desk and hands out building keys to USPS for each townhouse. The mailbox is inside, and USPS is legally obligated to access it, so I know if USPS ships a package for me it's next to my apartment door.

UPS and FedEx do not have access. You have to be there when they drop off the package, or they're tossed into this hole (like a literal hole) next to the door, or they do the "we missed you" thing and sticky a note to the outer door and you pick it up in person.

I live a ten-minute drive away from the Pentagon. It's not just remote villages in Alaska that'd be inconvenienced by USPS going away.

</comment><comment><USER9> I live in Oregon, where vote by mail is the standard. While I can drop off my ballot at a drop box (convenient for folks in town, like me) it's delivered by USPS. This feels like a not-very-subtle attack on my voting franchise.

I'm a strong advocate for vote by mail, and it never occurred to me that the USPS would not be there to handle ballot delivery and pickup.

I wonder if there are constitutional issues with this kind of change?

<comment><USER10> IIRC, Oregon requires postal ballots to be received by election day.

Also IIRC, Washington's (State) rule is received by certification, which is 21 (?) days after election day.

Changing to the Oregon rule is floated most every legislative session. We've successfully beaten it back. But one thing I learned as an election integrity activist is the Powers That Be will keep trying until they succeed.

FURTHER:

Back in the day, the Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA) rate was %1 for First Class mail. Meaning %1 of postal ballots were not received by voters. And %1 of cast postal ballots never got back to central count. In my county, that's over 10,000 ballots lost in a general election.

Anybody worried about USPS's performance should probably be doing their own measuring of UAA and other metrics.

Any way. I'm _VERY CONCERNED_ about the USPS monkeying with stuff that ain't broke. Ensuring postal balloting works as expected takes _A LOT_ of effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know why anybody has to keep entertaining the absurd notion that slowing delivery and making the service "not work" is not precisely the purpose of the changes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Spare me the puerile libertarian arguments for a privatized postal service. There is no good reason for it to be privatized and many Americans lives will be negatively affected by such a change.

1) There are already private mail carriers (FedEx, UPS, et al.). They do not have an obligation to deliver mail in a timely manner anywhere in the continental US and overseas territories. This is fine if you are a city dweller, but private mail carriers notoriously do not guarantee "last mile" delivery. This will cut off many isolated rural communities for whom the USPS is a lifeline to the outside world.

2) USPS receives no tax dollars for their services. They are completely self- sustaining. A Republican congress forced an insane burden for the USPS to pre- fund 75 years worth of pension obligations: there are future postal workers who have not been born yet that the post office must plan pensions for. No other government entity has such an obligation - this is the only reason the USPS is in a financial problem and it is a manufactured crisis. There is no "small government" argument here since your tax dollars don't fund them.

3) The USO pledge states that the USPS must offer affordable rates to customers. Privatized companies have a market incentive to keep prices low, yes, but in practice there is no way that there won't be price collusion/fixing if a handful of private carriers become market dominant. Antitrust is laughably weak in the US right now.

4) DeJoy is using the manufactured crisis from pension obligations as a canard for slashing worker benefits and overpay to the bone. He is intentionally gutting the USPS so the Republicans can point at it and whine about how socialized enterprises don't work as well as private ones. This is why all mail is so delayed right now: postal workers rely on overtime to ensure that all mail is delivered in a timely manner.

<comment><USER12> > A Republican congress forced an insane burden for the USPS to pre-fund 75 > years worth of pension obligations: there are future postal workers who have > not been born yet that the post office must plan pensions for. No other > government entity has such an obligation - this is the only reason the USPS > is in a financial problem and it is a manufactured crisis.

This is the same obligation that private company pensions need to adhere to, because that is the responsible thing to do, with the difference being that the post office has to also fund retirement medical plans since, unlike a private company, those are mandated by congress and can only be changed with congressional approval.

I don't understand why this keeping getting called out, like it is an unusual burden to be responsible. In my humble opinion I think that all government pensions should be funded, because it is not fair for us to artificially lower costs now and expect everyone's children and grandchildren in the future to somehow pay for this generation's unfunded promises.

<comment><USER13> > I don't understand why this keeping getting called out, like it is an > unusual burden to be responsible.

They are being forced to plan for the next 75 years now. in 2006 They were given 10 years to have the money needed for all pensions up to 75 years in the future. That is an unreasonable burden because no company does that. No company is planning 75 years from now on anything.

> In my humble opinion I think that all government pensions should be funded

No one is saying Pensions should stop being funded or paid out.

> because it is not fair for us to artificially lower costs now and expect > everyone's children and grandchildren in the future to somehow pay for this > generation's unfunded promises.

They are not artificially lowering costs, they were making a decent profit without this burden at the current price point. They were more then capable of meeting their obligations including pensions due now, and still making a decent profit. Nothing was being pushed off to future generations.

<comment><USER12> >They are being forced to plan for the next 75 years now.

I'm reading that ALL pensions offered by private companies in the U.S. must be funded out for 75 years. I presume this is for good reason. Why should this not apply to the USPS or other local/state/federal/church employees?

I might not follow your reply, but you seem to be under the impression that the USPS is having to do something different than every private company, but that does not appear to be the case. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post- office-p...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office- pensions--some-key-myths-and-facts/)

EDIT: with the exception of medical coverage, which is handled differently than private companies as per congress.

>in 2006 They were given 10 years to have the money needed for all pensions up to 75 years in the future.

That would seem to have been a heavy burden. I don't know all the particulars, but they seem to be past that now, right? Is this ten year catchup period still relevant to the conversation?

>Nothing was being pushed off to future generations.

Then why does the government mandate this same pension funding for all private company pensions? I assume it is because there were problems with bankrupt pensions in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I imagine Trump's installed someone in charge of the USPS to destabilize it in a hurry in order to erode confidence in the USPS to be able to handle mail-in voting.

Perhaps he'll get the public behind him enough to somehow stop mail-in voting if the next few months the mail system falls apart. Or if not and he loses the election, he'll blame it on the incompetent mail service and demand an election redo or whatever Trumpy things he normally does when he loses.

It seems to me that it's everything to do with the election, nothing to do with improving the USPS.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just like you'd think a Trump sycophant would implement. Reducing services, removing equipment and cutting back on employee hours.

Mail is piling up in Iowa (where the person being interviewed is located) and from other reports all over the country.

Well maybe not in Texas or Florida where Trump depends on vote by mail.

Of course it all started as revenge against Amazon but it's nicely transitioned to manipulating the USPS for political benefits. In other words, business as usual.

<comment><USER16> Any proof that these changes wouldn't affect Texas and Florida USPS services, or that any of these changes are for political benefit?

<comment><USER17> He tweeted. He tweeted that mail-in voting is GOOD in Florida, and somehow totally different from mail-in voting in other states. He encouraged people to do vote by mail in Florida.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The USPS loses a lot of money. Even ignoring the pension pre-funding issue, it's still cashflow negative. For a supposedly 'private' company that constantly requires bailing out by the US government. The USPS is just another industry that the internet has decimated and mostly replaced. First class mail has fallen so much that only package delivery and junk mail is keeping the USPS (kinda) alive.

One of the Postal Services problems is that senior management comes from USPS career employees whose loyalty is to the postal service employees - not the business itself or even its customers. The USPS needs new blood at the top and it needs to start acting like a for-profit business and less like a business that has been captured by its union.

<comment><USER4> > The USPS loses a lot of money. Even ignoring the pension pre-funding issue, > it's still cashflow negative.

This is untrue - without its pension pre-funding requirement it turns a modest profit each year[1].

[1] [https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps- myths/](https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/)

<comment><USER11> Even if this were not true, it seems to me that a mail system is a societal good that is significant enough that I would be happy to see it funded from taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Practically a paid advertisement by the Postal Employees Union. Okay, not practically, completely.

Having had two relatives both be Post Masters you can damn well bet the slow down of mail is totally because they are purposefully doing it and not for hours cut. You underestimate the levels they go to. Both relatives recounted days where you would have bickering constantly and having to call in RCAs because two or more permanent employees were bitching over a truck or additions to a route and no mail would go out.

This same union had incredible influence over the poor working conditions RCA drivers suffer; these are all those personal vehicles marked up with PO logos and such. All with their guaranteed day but hoping for enough days to pay their bills. All having to suffer the whims of a regular PO employees who treat most of them like dirt. All this just so they can get their permanent position. Which should be done by the RCA with most seniority but this can be sabotaged quite easily by the regulars.

Sorry, this piece is election year drivel and you can expect story after story on every subject sure to come up in ads

<comment><USER20> > Both relatives recounted days...

The plural of anecdote is not data. Do you have anything solid to back up your claim that it is the postal union slowing down the mail service as a political move?

That's a bold statement and requires some strong evidence for me to believe it.</comment></comment>


Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is - <AUTHOR> http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet <comment><USER2> If anything, I think this should be a wakeup call for those of us who have the capability to change things. I'm not talking about lobbying or raising attention to the issue, but the technical challenges of designing a network that is immune to all forms of surveillance. Let's treat this as an issue of computer science, not politics.

Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible), but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for example), and I think we need more things like this.

We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties _can 't_ intercept, at least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default, and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and turned on by default.

Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective.

I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the coming years.

As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them".

<comment><USER3> The internet, which largely runs on IP and extended by NAT, appears to have been constructed poorly in terms of privacy. There are protocols like ICE/STUN/TURN (which is what WebRTC is built on) that supposedly try to bridge the gap to enable true P2P connectivity, but I believe even ICE appears limited in that it doesn't actually solve the hairpin problem, where two peers are behind multiple levels of NAT routers. I'm still investigating this issue, so correct me if I'm wrong.

What we need are better routing systems. Take a look at CJDNS which has a novel routing protocol. I don't know what the scaling limitations there are, there doesn't appear to be documentation on empirical or theoretical performance guarantees; but it's a start, and there's a growing community behind it.

With ever-cheaper devices, it should become possible to create a new family of router hardware that connects devices in a mesh fashion, scalable to the world at large. It's not going to be easy to design, and it sure as hell won't be easy to get physical adoption for (considering that the current internet is "good enough" for most), but it's possible.

P.S. I've created a subreddit at /r/fourthtech if anybody wants to get into deep technical discussions about various topics on better internet/communication protocols.

<comment><USER4> Is this mesh stuff really the answer? Sure, it can stop collection at a central point, but doesn't it still leave open the possibility for any data to be collected from spying nodes throughout the network?

<comment><USER3> The CJDNS whitepaper has a good writeup:

[https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/rfcs/Whitepap...](https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/rfcs/Whitepaper.md)

Node to node encryption would make packet inspection rather difficult, for one.

BTW, I don't think CJDNS is necessarily going to win. See: [http://www.mail- email@example.com...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg05979.html)

But soon, somebody will to come up with a mesh protocol that is simple and scalable.

<comment><USER5> But the problem doesn't end on encypting endpoints because the NSA can infer information from the flow routes. You need something bigger, like honeypots and many other tools of confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From talking to some non-tech people about this, I have a dim view of the possibility that Snowden's revelations will change anything on a political level. People seem to either not care about the power the NSA has over them, or think Snowden is a traitor that deserves death and that's enough to invalidate anything he might have revealed. Society forgets history-- generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm.

But I still do have hope, and the community at HN exemplifies it. Even if politics and society won't change enough to prevent further spying (or, on the scale of decades, a worse NSA-fueled catastrophe), _at least_ all the smart techies of the world are growing aware, getting outraged, and getting organized over what's been revealed. In many ways, our real control over technological progress is the best we can ask for.

If you know how to program, if you're thinking about learning, if your business depends on the internet, or if you're otherwise in a position to create technology of any flavor: the responsibility is on you-- _on us_ \--to shape the internet and future technology in a way that will protect humanity's privacy and civil rights for generations to come.

<comment><USER7> _> generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm._

Are you sure it's not just that the only people currently talking about this issue are white, college-aged, middle-to-upper class American men?

And for you to whip that out, I really hope you aren't one of the born-here Americans you talk about, because you would be just as bad as the people who supposedly don't care: you would be appropriating the experiences of the underprivileged to back your own, unrelated endeavor.

<comment><USER8> The extreme demographic subset you described doesn't even include the audience at HN. Surely you realize that the issue of internet privacy is talked about by more people.

And why mustn't acabal be a "born-here American" to suggest that Americans have never lived under a totalitarian state? That's an off topic remark designed to call acabal's expertise into question as a means of discrediting them without directly addressing the points they bring up.

I think acabal brings up a valid point. It's hard to whip people into action when they're not yet having direct negative consequences, even if we can clearly see the writing on the wall. People are resistant to change.

<comment><USER7> It's not an off topic remark, because acabal _brought it up himself_. He's the one who talked about born-here Americans not knowing the beginnings of totalitarian states, and if you can't see the problem with a born-here American talking about totalitarian states without actually having experienced it, and using it to back his argument, there really is no point in furthering this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nobody outside the HN community seems to care about the Summer of Surveillance. Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. I find the lack of concern from friends and family to be more troubling than a lack of concern from the main stream media.

<comment><USER10> People are ambivalent, because they have bigger problems in their lives. Like keeping a job, paying the mortgage, wondering if their kids can ever afford college, lack of health care coverage...the list is endless.

The conversations/articles on HN mostly reflect the tech communities own echo chambers and biases more than anything else.

<comment><USER11> And tis should be a wakeup call; if the system was actually built correctly, they would not have to be worrying about their next meal or paycheck!

Take all the MIC funding and redirect it into education, infra, science and social services.

Make the world better rather than weaponizing idiocy to defend a farked up system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I agree with the general reasoning of the author, I hesitate to agree with its conclusion. Like most of us here on hacker news, I've been following the Snowden/Prism/NSA stories rather religiously and, for the most part, have been very happy with the rather overwhelming coverage here on HN.

But there have been those getting tired of the news; understandably so, the repetitive hum of media coverage these days is enough to infuriate anyone who has the capacity to remember stuff. The author of this article seems to be pretty infuriated at the the public's fascination with Snowden and wants, rather ambitiously in my opinion, the public to shift their attention to the core of the issue.

I'm not sure if the public is capable of maintaining interest in such a passive evil (I guess I probably don't think too highly of the public). I do think, however, that the public is capable of fixating on the Snowden story because it is a rather interesting story. And the longer the public stays fixated on Snowden, the weird guy living in a Russian airport, the longer the NSA's wrongdoings also stay in the public consciousness.

I say, keep the melodrama coming, if only to keep alive the story of injustice to the public. The success of Snowden's whistleblowing (i.e. in terms of tangible impact) may actually rest on it.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies"

Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of: missing the story.

If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped. Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might be a while.

But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers. We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing.

So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.

<comment><USER14> You do realize that "the dream that was the internet" was so governments could maybe still communicate after they blasted each other back to the stone age?

<comment> fsck--off From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet":

      "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started
      claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building
      a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the
      ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered
      nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize
      robustness and survivability, including the capability to
      withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."

[http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what- internet/histor...](http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what- internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> (from the article) _US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn 't have it_

That part there really illustrates the corporate fascism which has permeated the US government.

Who's to say that some analyst working for a private corporation isn't selling our stolen information to some nefarious third-party for whatever reasons?

The idea that any "oversight" would preclude the above scenario is about as believable as the insistence by "high level" government appointees claiming that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" collect data from American's communications.

</comment><comment><USER16> What concerns me the most about all of this is that it puts us on a slippery slope. If always on surveillance becomes the norm for people to just take as a fact of life, then it just gets worse from there. I have a couple friends who run a startup and have told me they have given up the fact that privacy is an illusion/out moded when discussing this with them. So if being recorded all the time is the new norm and letting those outside of your own self connect data points about you is okay... where does that lead? That's what I'm really worried about.

It spells out my worst fear of later generations of digital natives will actually live in a world best described as Orwellian or even post Orwellian... even more ridiculously pervasive. They wouldn't know any better.

Ultimately data can never tell the whole story, but yet we'll act on it as if it does.

<comment><USER17> I think one of the other real concerns is that it's not even as if the government had to be careful when embarking on this journey of increased surveillance.

The public has made it _very_ clear how little they care about their privacy on the Internet when they started adopting things like GMail, Facebook, iCloud, etc. and not just as a convenience, but to actually run and manage their personal lives.

People, businesses, everyone didn't just not resist the New World of digital surveillance, they explicitly begged and pleaded for these new capabilities to be pushed to the fore as a matter of convenience to them.

So who do we blame for this 'new norm'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder."

This advertisement paid for by your friendly, co-located, on-premise, enterprise hardware vendors.

<comment><USER19> Bingo. If I were selling on premise software, this would be in my deck. Selling fear is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book.

I do believe however that enterprises act more rationally than consumers. So while consumers seem to be falling in to the "meh, I don't have anything to hide" camp, enterprises tend to be a bit more conservative. The thought of the NSA's private contractors going through customer data and hr records could actually be enough to slow down some of these enterprise SaaS companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This story is pathetic, it will sell news but it's pretty much nonsense. Clearly, the new era of computing upon us - networked computing - and with it will bring with lots of opportunities as well as many problems to solve.

Privacy is one such problem, but it's one we can work together to solve. Humans are capable of this, and capable of more than just writing stuff to cause division like the article.

</comment><comment><USER21> snowden is not the story. it has remained obvious to me that the NSA or whatever organization (rusian, chinese, or whatever) does not need some sort of dinosaur spygame facility to access this data.

all they need is just one underpaid programmer without a soul working at facebook to compromise the whole database.

wouldn't it be much easier in a case such as this one, for verizon to just have some retard patsy create that backdoor? I would imagine this to be a get out of jail free card for those guys really pulling the strings. all you gatta do is drop all the blame on some naive techie and let him go down in flames.

IMO, the next up in this chess game, is a traitor techie willing to compromise a whole nation to pay his bills.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is.

The fate of the internet's not the story. The fate of democracy is.

The fate of democracy's not the story. The fate of our society is.

The fate of our society's not the story. The fate of humanity is.

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't cry for the internet, it's already gone.

</comment><comment><USER24> why everyone is crying about spying issue. The original purpose of internet is military. US government gave access all of access to the internet, because we all wanted to use it. That doesn't mean US govt cannot use it the way it wants to use it.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra "If, as a political dissident, you had to choose between organizing your protest on Facebook or Vkontakte, Facebook's Russian equivalent, you'd be far better off doing it on Facebook."

Lol, no, you aren't.

What you do is use every platform available.

<comment><USER22> "What you do is use every platform available."

Lol, no, you don't.

What you do is exclusively use one of the "darknet" platforms:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29)

Of course, _everybody_ wins from using one of the encrypted distributed p2p platforms, not just activists.

<comment> guard-of-terra If you're an activist, you need numbers. Eyeballs. You don't care about surveillance - you care about censorships. So you use everything.

For private coordination, that's another matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The whole idea of surveillance truly doesn't bother me because there is literally nothing I can do if the higher end government did ever decided they wanted me. Since the 50's they've had the ability to listen into conversations via a laser on a window: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone) and if anyone really ever believed that the internet would be much different they probably didn't think it all the way through.

Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data they can get your data.

The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their nation.

People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now, what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail for 10 years?

That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.

<comment><USER26> I don't personally object to _individual_ surveillance; there's nothing fundamentally wrong with getting a warrant and watching an individual with the reasonable suspicion of them committing a crime. Sometimes that process is abused, and that does concern me, but as you suggested there's little to do about that other than push for oversight.

I do, however, object to mass surveillance of all traffic, with the goal of either retroactively looking at the records or putting together patterns.

And I'd like to see both legal and technical solutions to that problem. Legal, in that I'd like to see enough pushback to demonstrate widespread belief in the fundamental _wrongness_ of mass surveillance, and technical, in the form of systems to enforce the inability to tap communications at any point other than the two endpoints. I'd like to see our networks and communication protocols designed to make it impossible to spy on traffic between two parties without either the consent and cooperation of one party or an ongoing security breach of the physical systems of one party. That would result in a world in which you can't cast a broad net, but instead can only do targeted surveillance of specific individuals.</comment></comment>


C++Next - <AUTHOR> http://cpp-next.com/ <comment><USER2> Everyone who is interested in the evolution of low level C based languages owes it to himself to track the OOC project. It looks nothing short of spectacular.

<http://ooc-lang.org/>

<comment><USER3> Good webpage, I like that it isn't shy about getting right into simple examples of source code. More language websites should be outlined like this.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the nice feedback =)

Usually half the reactions are "hey I didn't even read the frontpage but I know all about your language and you're mistaken because you're not the same as C++/Objective-C/D/my mom".

Why isn't Reddit/FriendFeed more like HackerNews :/ ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not to unnecessarily complain about design, but 23px body text is borderline unusable.

<comment><USER6> OTOH, I always find it refreshing when websites don't use tiny 10px fonts -- the "I've taken a graphic design course, and I think small fonts are cool" thing. In other words, 23px might be a bit big, but it's better than too small, at least on a 120dpi screen. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > You must have Javascript enabled to view this site.

Uh, why?

<comment><USER8> The author is not as incompetent as they claim to be. The content is accessible if the bizzare stylesheet is ignored.</comment></comment>