LaTeX users are slower, make more mistakes, and are happier than Word users - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 <comment><USER2> Previously on HN, with the correct title: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

<comment><AUTHOR> Gah! I really wish the HN submission feature could borrow some ideas from Stack Overflow's duplicate question detection.

(FWIW, the full title is "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development", which is too long for HN, so the previous submission also changed it.)

<comment><USER3> We're planning to work on better duplicate detection in the new year.

<comment><USER4> I like how it works now organically. If the discussion was broadly seen, there won't be any up vote interest, and if not, then it clearly hasn't taken its course.

<comment><USER3> We like that too, and it's by design. A story that hasn't been broadly seen won't count as a duplicate in the new system either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cannot seem to find anywhere in the paper that describes whether the mistakes were counted _during_ or _after_ the participant claimed to be finished. If it's the latter, then it could easily be attributed to the lack of a live preview and spell-checking, which is a technological problem easily fixed.

Moreover, the study only uses extremely small documents (with only a few mathematical equations) in their study. The power in TeX comes from defining project-wide macros and label management, allowing for instantaneous refactoring, tidy management of multiple versions of a document using imports and versioning, and seamless integration with whatever terminal tools you already use.

In other words, this paper's implied conclusions are short-sighted because TeX does much more than print the written word (or mathematical/tabular data). I would like to see the same study extended; make the same groups refactor a twenty page document, replacing one notation with another, reorganizing the sections, adding new figures, and reformatting the bibliography according to a different standard.

<comment><USER6> Yes, collaboration and maintenance is another plus for TeX, which was not considered in this study.

However, spell/grammar checking and the longer edit-compile-review cycle (e.g. when coding TikZ pictures) is still an issue for me where Word probably has an advantage.

Any tool suggestions for grammar checking LaTeX documents? I use vim's spell checking, which is ok, but a tool which understands grammar could be better than a simple dictionary lookup.

<comment><USER5> Though it's a totally unreasonable workaround, I usually draft my TikZ diagrams in an online editor like WriteLaTeX, and copy-paste the finished diagrams into my documents. I'd like to have auto-refreshing documents offline, but I haven't found a tool that works with my environment (vim with a simple build script).

<comment><USER7> latexmk + your document viewer of choice (evince for me) will rebuild your document every time you save. Evince will automatically reload the new document. I use it with vim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The data from the study are available on the PLoS website. The authors coded incomplete documents as mistakes---some participants submitted empty LaTeX documents for the table exercise with hundreds of "mistakes." Since the LaTeX users mean percentage completion was lower than that of the Word users, this may explain part of the authors' finding that the LaTeX users were more error prone as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> LaTeX is incredible slow at first but the true power comes from only having to do something once and being able to put it under version control.

I spent an afternoon getting a presentation template ready, now it's incredible easy to make a powerful, beautiful presentation ready. I tried to do the same thing with Powerpoint and apart from the frustration I always lost a lot of time when I (or Powerpoint) managed to screw up something.

It does in general lead to some embarrassing moments when working with non academics/developers. Somewhere there is a team of artists that still jokes about that developer guy that proposed to do his presentation in Latex.

<comment><USER6> I use LaTeX a lot and nearly exclusively, however _for presentations_ I try to use HTML. I rarely get to do it, because work usually requires me to use certain templates.

Handwritten HTML is just as nice to version control. I can embed rich media stuff easily. I can use transition and other effects (in the rare cases where they actually make sense). I can embed interactive things, which is better than alt-tabbing somewhere else. I can create a pdf as fallback as well.

<comment><USER10> Do you have an html framework or tool you recommend for this? I like LaTeX a lot for its stability and very reliable results, but I've more recently wanted easier embedding without sacrificing this, and hadn't thought of using html.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think one fundamental flaw in this study is that Word is a text editor and LaTeX is a markup format. It is just strange to compare a markup format to an editor. For LaTeX they list that at least "TeXnicCenter, LaTeX Editor, Kile, or WinEdit" were used. Word has a lot of helpful features for writing English Word documents (might be less helpful with Quechua) but the helpfulness of the _editor_ varies greatly in the LaTeX world. I mean, it is possible to produce LaTeX text files from Word and doing so is a great example of how the editor matters.

So this major confound may be why LaTeX users seem so error prone. Word is one of the best editors for English text but maybe WinEdit is not.

I hope this fails to influence journal publishers. It is garbage.

</comment><comment><USER12> I often work with quite large Word documents, and they can become a real pain once you start using some features, like automated table of contents. In fact, if someone edits the document and messes up the formatting, you'll have to edit raw field codes, with are a bit LaTeX-like [1]

[1]: [http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/TOCSwitches.htm](http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/TOCSwitches.htm)

<comment><USER13> Oh, yes. My pain exactly. I think word is, given the huge functionality made very accessible to pretty much anyone who can point at things with the mouse, quite impressive software.

But let a few people edit a Word document in turn, on different computers, maybe with different versions of MS Office, even the simplest 1-page abstract will turn into a bizarre Frankenstein monster where changing one thing in one place, will suddenly create funny effects in other locations... (e.g. observed recently: identing bulletted lists will change the numbering of another, numbered list...) Don't get me started on footnotes changing pages, or jumping around of embedded pictures.

So, for anything requiring collaboration between several people (I have the feeling that editing a word file from different computers, probably by different versions of MS office makes these things occure more often) it's still a mess... and something where LaTeX shines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since they are measuring orthographical mistakes, did they control for spell- checker usage?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really like comparing a screwdriver to a KUKA([http://www.kuka.com/](http://www.kuka.com/)). Given a random object, anyone will be able to screw more screws into it with a screw driver than with a KUKA... But given a large number of similar objects than the story is quite different.

</comment><comment><USER16> Which is why I use Lyx - best of both worlds. You get to use latex equations, the final document is pretty, and the document is readable while editing (i.e. not filled with commands and other crap).

</comment><comment><USER17> Now I know what kind of research is left for the stupid guys.

</comment><comment><USER18> Many Word-haters don't know how good Word is, simply because they are biased for "political/religious" reasons.

It is OK to be a LaTeX-lover and Word-nolover, but you don't have to be a Word-hater if you don't use Word.

<comment><USER11> Don't forget financial reasons.

<comment><USER18> I don't have money to buy a Porsche, but this never makes me a Porsche- hater...

I don't think financial reason alone makes you a hater of a product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is utter bullshit. I can't write equations for my life in Word (mainly because I hate that utter piece of shit) but I can type equations and other content in LaTeX faster than I can write it by hand - admittedly I use LyX which has hints which helps a hell of a lot, but either way - I can still beat Word and by-hand with LaTeX...

<comment><USER20> For raw text, word and latex are equal (raw words, quotes, etc) latex and word are even in wpm. Certain areas of latex beat words in wpm (\ref, \cite) but there are many other areas where word wins.

Anything where you care about how the document loos takes time. Care about how the title page looks? Want to format the bibliography just right? These are issues all I, an intermediate user, have faced.</comment></comment>


Digg is down - <AUTHOR> http://centernetworks.com/is-digg-down FYI, Digg is down. <comment><USER2> I am the only one to see the irony in this? What's the point of posting information about a website that is down? I can understand if its a service like Skype but digg...

<comment><USER3> The reason it's posted is probably because information on the cause of the outtage could be useful to startups. An opportunity for lessons learned...

Obviously this only applies if the outtage is a result of problem with their infrastructure or software.

<comment><USER2> There is a lot of value in lessons learned. In which case it makes sense to post a link to the fix/solution rather than point out that its broken.

my 2 cents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Phew! Now I can go back to wasting time consuming scraped linkbait blog posts.</comment>


Why 90% of eBooks Stink, Ten Tips to a Successful eBook - <AUTHOR> http://www.positivespaceblog.com/archives/why-90-of-ebooks-stink-ten-tips-to-a-successful-ebook/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if that is a marketing scam, but it is interesting in that sense - nicely done. Provocative, digg-friendly title, and mention some supposedly good books in passing (routed through e-junkie - maybe they pay bloggers?).</comment>


Math that feels good: Creating learning resources for blind students - <AUTHOR> https://aimath.org/aimnews/braille_full/ <comment><USER2> I wish aria labels were first class citizens are at least that developers cared about blind or disabled users.

<comment><AUTHOR> One time I was interviewing at a pretty big media company for online publications in the Scandinavian region - has a bunch of magazines and the rights to distribute a lot of international magazines in the region. Probably their biggest magazines were home improvement interior design type stuff (so now people familiar can pinpoint what company it was)

Anyway, the guy in charge of tech was pretty young, early 20s, and at some point in selling myself I talked up my familiarity with wai and wcag and first off he needed explaining what they were and then he said "we don't have any disabled users" which I mean, if there is any company that would have an aging customer base with all that implies it was this company. I basically got a little hot headed and told him he was wrong (I was still polite though), anyway I didn't get the job (not necessarily for that reason bu t it did ruin the mood as it were)

Several years later I was consulting at a major Television company in Denmark (the one you would think of if you thought major Television company in Denmark) and he had recently been made the head of the development there.

Meandering anecdote done - change is supposed to come from the head of the beast, and it ain't coming.</comment></comment>


After CIA leak, Intel Security releases detection tool for EFI rootkits - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/3179348/security/after-cia-leak-intel-security-releases-detection-tool-for-efi-rootkits.html?sf61342414=1 <comment><USER2> No amount of EFI rootkit detection will ever remove the possibility that malicious code is running inside the Intel Management Engine (ME), because code inside the ME would run side-by-side with the bootloader and with unlimited permissions.

Unless Intel provides source code for the ME, it is impossible to 100% know whether unauthorized code is running.

<comment><USER3> Someone at [https://puri.sm](https://puri.sm) almost completely removed the ME. [https://puri.sm/posts/neutralizing-intel-management- engine-o...](https://puri.sm/posts/neutralizing-intel-management-engine-on- librem-laptops/)

<comment><USER4> What's with the free advertising? They were not the ones to do the original work with coreboot or removing the non important parts of the ME. If anything, Purism has lied, taken credit for other peoples work and given people a false sense of "privacy" and "security". "Almost completely removed the ME" is not good enough and there is way too much room to do malicious things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a better link (it is Intel's original blog post):

[https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/business/chipsec- support...](https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/business/chipsec-support- vault-7-disclosure-scanning/)

It includes a few more details about what was released:

      It extracts EFI firmware from flash ROM memory
      automatically if the firmware file is not
      specified.

      We recommend generating an EFI whitelist after
      purchasing a system or when you are sure it has
      not been infected:

      # chipsec_main -m tools.uefi.whitelist -a generate

      Then check the EFI firmware on your system
      periodically or whenever you are concerned, such
      as when a laptop was left unattended:

...

An analysis of the approach they are taking would lead to some pretty easy improvements.

</comment><comment><USER6> Finally some tools for this. Very good. Would this be the first reasonably doable method for extracting all the blobs? Seem like it must be a well-needed foundation to build on for security companies.

But...

      We recommend generating an EFI whitelist after
      purchasing a system or when you are sure it has
      not been infected

Not that I have a better suggestion, but with interdicted shipments and other vulnerable points along the supply chain before a system is in the care of its owner, it doesn't exactly seem like a sure bet that it's clean on arrival. How would one otherwise be "sure it has not been infected"? Any feasible ways?

Next step would be to provide lists of known good signatures from some controlled environment, or at least a consensus system to know whether the version one finds matches the version others have?

<comment><USER7> If you have access to more than one identical system they can be compared. Or there could be a public list of known good hashes as you suggest.

In any case having a tool to even perform the check is great.

<comment><USER8> This doesn't preclude the infect-at-the-factory issue: you'd end up verifying you HAVE the rootkit (and reverting to that if it changes).

<comment><USER7> I'm assuming not all of the machines from the factory will be infected. Because if that were so, then the chances of being found out is high and consequences would be dire for the manufacturer.

If my assumption is correct then buying a retail machine and comparing its firmware to the one you order with your credit card should be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope they also release System Management Mode (aka ring -2) rootkit detection tools.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode#Problem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode#Problems)

That in combination with the Management Engine are ways in which people have been disowned of their own machines.

</comment><comment><USER10> And what if intel is compromised? Mass rootkit installation!

<comment><USER11> Of all the attacks a nation state could do, surely finding a few talented people to get PhDs in the appropriate fields and go to work at Intel and collect a paycheck along with a nice stipend from the nation state is likely among the easiest.

<comment><USER12> Why bother with employees - just go give money to intel to do this. Intel as a system is designed to produce chips that work a certain way, and my understanding is that said system is rather good at what it does, dedicating the time and energy of many rather smart people to making sure things work the way they're supposed to. Why risk throwing a monkey wrench into such a system when you can just point it in a different direction?

AT&T and Verizon don't have 'plant' employees. Much simpler - and legally, safer - to just give the bag of money straight to the corporation.

<comment><USER13> There's more than one country interested in pulling off these attacks. The US can say, "Do us this favor and we won't look too hard at your tax avoidance schemes," but China or Russia might have an easier time planting a few employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This can be done manually using flashrom [1] tool to read (and write) the SPI (and not only SPI) flash and UEFITool [2] to unpack the corresponding image. I've even done some patching for better support of Intel platforms here [3]. Now doesn't have much time to rebase/cleanup/improve it, but hopefully someone will start from where I've finished. Both tools clearly need more love, and I hope current revelations will help to do that.

[1] [http://flashrom.org/](http://flashrom.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool/tree/new_engine](https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool/tree/new_engine) (use 'new_engine' branch)

[3] [https://github.com/XVilka/flashrom/tree/layout_descriptor](https://github.com/XVilka/flashrom/tree/layout_descriptor) (use 'layout_descriptor' branch)

<comment><USER15> I also used flashrom instead because it's very simple to install and use... My problem is trying to verify this against the original (I'm running linux on an old macbookpro), i've got the raw flash dump and extracted the .scap from Apple... but after much searching cannot find a way to extract the raw EFI volume to compare. Any ideas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What does it mean to get this? [https://s.ave.zone/066.png](https://s.ave.zone/066.png)

[CHIPSEC] Modules failed 1: [-] FAILED: chipsec.modules.common.uefi.s3bootscript

<comment><USER17> :(

\-- clarification

Technically all it means, if the error is as advertised, is that the uefi bootscript failed to match. Now, it could be as simple as that UEFI was customized by a vendor. Or it could be something less innocent.

<comment><USER16> I just reflashed my bios and then rechecked stuff, same thing... I did more research and s3bootscript seems to be associated with secure boot. Which I have disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice try CIA and Intel, but I'm not falling for this.

<comment><USER19> and.... what alternative could you possibly have? There's a reason the Russians reportedly moved to typewriters.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/russia- reverts...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/russia-reverts- paper-nsa-leaks)

The entire computing ecosystem appears to be P0wned by various intelligence services. And, its not unique to the CIA or NSA. The Chinese are assumed to have backdoors into most of what ships from their country.

<comment><USER20> _There 's a reason the Russians reportedly moved to typewriters._

Hopefully the Russians still remember how they bugged US typewriters in the US Embassy in Moscow. Then they'll be able to check that their own typewriters aren't bugged in a similar fashion: [http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/](http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> does this code rely on UEFI interfaces to fetch this data? If so, cant the rootkit code just lie to it?

</comment><comment><USER22> Macs lack Secure Boot. This tools seems to be for non-Secure Boot computers. IF it's a Secure Boot system, rootkits aren't supposed to happen, and if they do then there's a hole somewhere that needs fixing.

<comment><USER23> I thought secure boot was about verifying the OS at boot time. Does it also self-verify the EFI code?

<comment><USER22> I'd like to think the existing firmware verifies the signature of a replacement firmware before permitting the replacement. Otherwise we have problems. But at runtime, I'm not aware if there's any such thing as firmware doing a self verification.

EFI binaries though are expected to be signed or they won't execute, that's the point of Secure Boot, and it includes bootloaders and the kernel all being signed. Most Linux distros I'm aware of also sign their modules because permitting unsigned modules could allow you to inject malware right into the kernel just by loading a compromised kernel module.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why has Intel not released this tool before? EFI rootkits have always been a threat...

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know the attack vector for this root kit?

</comment><comment><USER26> Because Intel is totally on our side.</comment>


Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180702/12431840157/uganda-bans-vpns-to-prevent-users-dodging-absurd-new-social-media-tax.shtml <comment> temp-dude-87844 The Uganda OTT tax is probably meant to stifle online political speech and organizing, but the concept itself, taxing most over-the-top communication mediums that use the mobile networks solely as an opaque data pipe (and typically only work with their captive apps) is a concept that merits more discussion than being patently called "absurd". These services aren't interoperable, they exfiltrate data to foreign countries (where they may be subject to foreign intercept), and they surface ads for whose placement these foreign companies are paid. This perpetuates a wealth transfer from Uganda to abroad.

Then again, it's awfully convenient for the President that these services are places where one can organize an opposition against him, and he can use the excuse of rumours, lies, or "fake news" to justify legislating against them. The tax regime now sets up a wealth transfer from every Ugandan to the state, where it will be squandered I'm sure.

What I find frustrating is that most coverage about this falls into the same tired tropes, like pointing out how little most Ugandans make in real US dollars as an insidious appeal to well-to-do westerners to envision the subjects of this tax as downtrodden poor who are being exploited by their (presumably) oppressive government. I thought we were beyond this kind of coverage, and recognize that people in less prosperous countries have the same agency, despite systemic problems with the 5-term Ugandan president's authoritarian tendencies, corruption, voter intimidation, lack of transparency, and poverty.

What this tax will do is hasten the decline of civil society and respect for the current administration's law in Uganda. It will broaden the gulf between the cronies of the President and everyone else, leaving more and more people dissatisfied with the governing party that once promised (and, in fairness, delivered) real reforms. He obviously knows this, and has been making moves to prolong his power as he feels the winds of change shift around him.

<comment><USER2> _exfiltrate data to foreign countries (where they may be subject to foreign intercept)_

If you're, say, a Ugandan dissident would you rather be spied on by the NSA or the Ugandan government? Tunneling all data out of the country may be safer for the majority of people, but maybe I'm falling for the trope of downtrodden poor who are being exploited by their (presumably) oppressive government.

<comment><USER3> Better that users be spied on by no one (like with Briar or Signal), but digital protectionism like what Russia and China do isn't infeasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a professional network engineer this is utterly preposterous. Ignorant government officials who know nothing about how the Internet actually works, trying to fuck with it because it's something beyond their petty attempts at control. When will people realize that blocking VoIP and blocking a ton of other stuff (Ethiopia and the UAE are great examples), in the long term and in aggregate, results in more economic damage and a poorer telecom/Internet ecosystem than allowing all traffic freely? They're short sightedly trying to raise revenue by taxing the mobile phone carriers, who are 95% of the data connections in the country, when they should be focused on allowing telecoms to build better pipes for domestic and international traffic.

Quick edit: People who run major international ASNs and medium sized regional ASNs have a responsibility to not aid and abet this bullshit. Don't contract for government entities that want to implement filtering/blocking of stuff. Refuse to participate with network engineering and architecture decisions and implementation that hurt net neutrality. There is a finite pool of people with the real talent, clue and 15+ years of experience who can build carrier-grade ISP infrastructure. If people want to fuck up their domestic Internet in $COUNTRY, _do not help them_. No matter how lucrative it might appear at first glance.

There is such a thing as ethics in network engineering, just as there is in software engineering. Think long and hard about what you think defines an ethical ISP. If you're asked to do something contrary to that, refuse to participate.

<comment><USER5> Incompetence at that level is malice. Short sightedness is nothing new in politics. As is fucking with the middle class. (I mean with those who understand the problem of blocking certain kinds of Internet traffic.)

<comment><USER4> Oh, it's absolutely malicious. In a typical $RANDOM_DEVELOPING_NATION the amount of corruption and graft that goes on between the "Minister of Communications" and other government entities (quasi-state-owned telco in the UAE for example) is something that has to be seen first hand to be believed. Those who are in power have no interest in actually having something like a diverse IP transit and transport carrier ISP ecosystem (as the US, Western Europe do, take a look at how many carriers and ISPs are connected to the AMS- IX and DE-CIX). They care about their short term personal financial gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm living in Uganda at the moment and have a couple of things to add:

1\. VPNs still work fine (I'm using one right now, though its one I installed on a digitalocean instance - it's possible those receiving lots of traffic have now been blocked).

2\. This tax is unaffordable for many Ugandans (it would be about 5% of the average wage here). Whatsapp is very popular here and this has impacted everybody I know. Most people I've talked to are using a free VPN (they aren't aware of the risks here).

I haven't done much analysis of the blocking yet but I will be doing a more in-depth post about this whole debacle in a few days.

<comment><USER4> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Uganda has a somewhat reasonable diversity of domestic ISP AS that are connected to other east African AS for international connectivity outbound via Kenya and Tanzania. It's not like a single government controlled bottleneck situation (As in Iran, where all ISPs have to be downstream of the government AS, which operates all of the international L2 transport and L3 transit/peering connections).

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure about the peering connections but Uganda does have a good range of ISPs (outside of Kampala connectivity is mobile network only).

The mobile providers are:

\- Africell (was orange)

\- MTN

\- Airtel

\- Smile

\- Uganda Telecom

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title seems misleading -- looking at the image in the article, it appears that the tax isn't on _social media_ per se, but on any service that provides mobile voice / messaging functions over cellular data.

Which is effectively a tax against cellular data being treated as a dumb pipe. Still not OK, but a fundamentally different beast than the title implies.

If you're a telco in Uganda, and you have sufficient sway with the government, why not go for broke and try to tax your way back into cellular voice / messaging revenue streams? They can be quite lucrative: in the UK, I'm paying about £1/GB of data, but a single MMS costs 43p. Turns out you can send a _lot_ of group messages on WhatsApp before it uses 43p worth of data...

<comment><USER8> > The title seems misleading -- looking at the image in the article, it > appears that the tax isn't on social media per se

The title is not misleading at all - the purpose of the tax is to discourage the use of social media. The (likely) president-for-life Museveni has expressed his strong displeasure with social media (particularly when it was used to mock him in the run up to removing term-limits) well before this law was promulgated. Strong-men do well with traditional media, which they can easily control.

Few Ugandans are going to spend 43p (per MMS) to send a meme gif mocking the government to 7 friends - this is entirely according to plan. Nevermind the local police (secret or otherwise) has easy access to MNO's servers compared to WhatsApp or Facebook for their investigations to support the charges of "incitement/treason".

<comment><USER9> Funny you mention easy access to MNO servers. This happened last night - [https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/telecoms-and- tec...](https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/telecoms-and- technology/2018-07-06-mtn-uganda-raided-by-security-personnel-who-disconnect- several-servers/)

<comment><USER8> I am not surprised by this. The excuse they gave came from the left-field though ("investigating intrusion reported by anonymous sources"). I also wouldn't be surprised if there are Italian/Israeli/American "security consultants" doing the analysis behind the scenes in the mold of HackingTeam. A dictator's dollar is just as green, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure why this tax should be labelled as absurd. Lots of countries tax TV, phone already. Taxing social media sounds weird only because no one else has done it yet.

<comment><USER11> Because tax, in general is absurd. You're literally taking people's money under the threat of force. Just because it is done quite universally does not justify the practice.

More specifically, taxes are abused near universally. From the sugar taxes in Seattle (unless you are Starbucks), or forced Union dues that fund political campaigns, the practice is abused. Meanwhile necessary services like police, firefighters, and rescue workers are always under underfunded, even though that's why we think we're paying them.

<comment><USER12> > _You 're literally taking people's money under the threat of force_

Money that would have no meaning, earned for work which would largely be impossible, without said threat of force.

<comment><USER11> That doesn't sound any better. So if I have an asset that I'm not using, it's morally just to take it from me because I'm not using it?

<comment><USER13> The devil's in the details. Depending on the asset and the situation, it may be morally correct to take it, yes.

To give an absurd, extreme example: if you lived in a nation going through a famine and your hobby was watching bread mold, it might be morally just to take away your warehouse of stockpiled bread to let the starving people eat, even if it meant you couldn't continue your thrilling bread-mold-watching hobby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm interested to see how they go about filtering VPN traffic. AFAIK, running openvpn over port 443 is pretty much indistinguishable from normal TLS traffic.

<comment> ryan-c China's gotten pretty good at it.

OpenVPN running over port 443 is generally going to be using a CA that is not a public CA, and issues certificates directly rather than through an intermediate.

Even if you tunnel something over normal TLS, the type of traffic can potentially be determined by analyzing how much data flows in which direction and when.

If circumvention is seen as too widely spread, Uganda may simply decide that all TLS traffic leaving the country must be intercepted by a MitM proxy, and require everyone to trust their CA.

I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be happy to get the contract to provide this service.

These blocks can often be circumvented by methods that do not scale, but if only tech savvy people who can afford to run their own VPN server on a VPS somewhere can circumvent the block, it's "mission accomplished".

<comment><USER15> I feel like China is good about public/shared VPN's. If you set up your own and keep the details to yourself I was under the impression that it'd work just fine. That being said I love to travel and can work wherever but haven't been to CN yet for this reason in particular.

<comment> ryan-c From what I've heard second-hand (my SO has a friend who frequently travels to China), they do actually block people's private one-off VPN servers quite effectively.

Have a look at [https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf](https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf) \- it talks about GFW using machine learning with flow analysis to do this.

<comment><USER16> I took that class (comp 116) a few years ago! Just had some fun finding and rereading my own final paper from the archives (the one you linked to makes mine seem way less interesting). Ming is a really awesome and unique lecturer.

<comment><USER17> If I may ask, why pass the perfectly appropriate opportunity to... link it here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someone needs to make a small sketch of the Uganda government with 7 year olds making up the laws.

Child 1 - "Let's tax people for being on social media to stop them from saying bad things about us" Child 2 - "Yeah that's a great idea. Plus we'll have more money for candy." Govenments notice - "Social media is hereby taxed. Your local ISP will be collecting the tax automatically." People - "Whatever, we'll just use VPN" Government Screams- "AND NO VPNs ALLOWED!"

So much for free speech.

Good luck stopping the tor network.

<comment><USER19> I see this all the time on HN, the dismissal of real problems by suggesting the wide spread use of using highly technical solutions. It is naive and frankly arrogant.

The vast majority of the population, and I'd bet it's even higher in Uganda does not even know what Tor is, yet alone how to use it.

My mom just figured out how to send photos via text message for heaven's sake.

<comment><USER18> It is true the TOR does not solve the problem. But I don't think discussing how to solve it here would do anything for Uganda.

But if anybody from Uganda does find this. It's time to stand up and fight for your rights as a people and not let the corrupt politicians push you around. In the meantime, if you want to know how to use TOR here is a great tutorial: [https://www.pcworld.com/article/2686467/privacy/how-to- use-t...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/2686467/privacy/how-to-use-the-tor- browser-to-surf-the-web-anonymously.html)

And here is the Facebook site for TOR: [https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/](https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/)

Good Luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting (that's my equivocating adjective, anyway) to note that "social media" doesn't just include Facebook/etc. here, it also includes things like:

* LinkedIn

* Skype

which, while sure, are "social media" platforms, are also tools that you might use as a professional to do things like get jobs, or talk to clients, etc.

I'm not sure how pervasive those platforms are in Uganda, but certainly something that could really harm aspiring professionals without much in the way of resources.

</comment><comment><USER21> We've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax. I wonder how a social media tax would go down with the public.

<comment><USER22> Isn't it only a tax on sugary drinks? And from my personal experience it just seems to be pushing people to buy Coke Zero/Diet Coke instead. Most people I know haven't complained much about it. I wonder if it will have the indended effets of reducing sugar consumption.

<comment><USER23> Chicago had a soda tax of a penny per ounce. Unfortunately it included all sodas and juices, sugary or not. There was so much backlash from it they got rid of the tax a few months later. I honestly would have been for it if it didn't include diet drinks. I believe it would have had a positive impact on public health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Or they use this social media tax as disguise to enforce internet censorship

</comment><comment><USER25> >I think it is very unwise to think that because the data consumption under VPN is very high, I think you're aware of that.

nobody is going to call them out on this blatant lie?

</comment><comment><USER26> The reasons being used to ban encryption, including VPN seems to be increasingly trivial and arbitrary.

</comment><comment><USER27> How do you even define social media? Is HN social media?

<comment><USER28> I'd guess the definition goes along the lines "El Presidente does not like what someone said on this platform, so it is social media and banned". It'll be highly arbitrary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Queue the Ugandan Knuckles memes...

</comment><comment><USER30> The government needs money, its gonna get it from you one way or another.

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree with almost all of the frustrated comments here, and the premise of the article.

I was also involved with a major F50 that was warily forced to deal with various regimes trying to filter content.

But consider for a moment:

'Globalization' is having many nefarious effects on the world - and the 'openness' of the internet is generally only a mostly positive aspect from powers that are large and centralized. America is relatively free, and nobody 100x the size of America is going to come along and 'control your internet', and therefore potentially control your economic and political system.

The ubiquitous internet means that a small or mid-sized nation that is not a G7 is at major risk of having the almost the totality of their nation overturned by foreign powers.

Consider: Facebook, or Google, could very easily change electoral outcomes in many nations, possibly even by accident. A small change in their algorithm that suppressed some, and promoted others, an accidental ban of a political group, etc. - can happen. I don't suggest FB or G are interested in this, but remember they also do have relationships with the US Government, and it's reasonable for these nations to be very cautious.

Moreover, an open Internet allows fully malicious actors (hacker groups, bad international enterprises, bad governments), to do some really quite dangerous things to other nations, most of whom are too small to be able to protect themselves.

'The Internet' is the new 5th column if you will, and to some extent it can have more power than government or the Supreme Court in many nations. If 80% of a nation is convinced of some truth/mistruth perpetuated by 'whoever' on the Internet, well, then legality hardly matters. It has more revolutionary potential than perhaps any historical ideology.

Even on the economic front - Globalization means that all of the talent is getting sucked up like a vacuum into centres in the biggest economies. So many of the best go to America. So many European professionals flow into Germany or the UK - to their advantage.

Both of these issues come to head with issues like journalism - it's one thing if 'American journalism' is concentrating in a few American outlets, but imagine if your country was losing most of it's journalistic opportunity and that centralization was happening _in another country_ \- a large country like America with whom your nation may not have a great history.

Tax bases are a _real thing_ \- and though the Internet should in the long run provide more opportunity for local governments, in the present it's causing losses in tax revenues, or at least, those revenues created by new economies are not being realized locally.

Recognize that these issues are a problem, and that the erstwhile 'open internet' which positioned as a very positive and aspirational aspect of global development by American/Western forces, does not necessarily represent the same opportunity in the rest of the world.

So yes, so many corrupt and stupid leaders doing corrupt and stupid things to their own nations, but the answer is definitely not "Just let Google be the Ministry of Truth" for the nations of the world. Definitely not.

<comment><USER4> > Tax bases are a real thing - and though the Internet should in the long run > provide more opportunity for local governments, in the present it's causing > losses in tax revenues, or at least, those revenues created by new economies > are not being realized locally.

nothing is stopping governments from taxing physical, tangible things. Nothing is stopping governments from taxing the gross revenue (such as the WA state business and occupation tax) of ISPs and telecoms in general. Nothing is stopping governments from taxing per-subscriber revenue from mobile phone data connections. The four HSPA+/LTE operators in Pakistan pay a shitload of tax to the government and it works generally quite well.

Where this breaks is when they start deciding to tax specific types of internet content at TCP/IP layer 3, and layers 4-7 in the OSI model. That's fucked.

<comment><USER31> "nothing is stopping governments from taxing physical, tangible things."

When information is the product of the new economy, and where value is created, it has to be part of the tax base.

"Nothing is stopping governments from taxing the gross revenue (such as the WA state business and occupation tax) of ISPs and telecoms in general."

True, but this layer of the value chain is not where the new information economy is being developed.

"Where this breaks is when they start deciding to tax specific types of internet content at TCP/IP layer 3"

'Content' and 'Layer' are separate issues - they are intertwined for pragmatic reasons, and I agree doing it at 'an internet layer' is dumb ... but there's no clear way around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Pathetic.

If I put a sign in front of my home demanding money every time someone passes by that is considered illegal. Even if it's my road that I built. If a government does it it is considered a toll. Even if they didn't build the road.

Should we pay for every hop on the internet? That is where this is going.

Keep it up... This will only further private network development. We will be quite selective on who we give access this time.</comment>


Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://vyomtech.com/2013/12/17/libvirt_the_unsung_hero_of_cloud_computing.html <comment><USER2> We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs:

[https://cockpit-project.org/](https://cockpit-project.org/)

cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, [https://hostname:9090/](https://hostname:9090/) and just works.

RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager:

[https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managing-virtual-machines- rhe...](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managing-virtual-machines-rhel-8-web- console)

[https://blog.wikichoon.com/2020/06/virt-manager- deprecated-i...](https://blog.wikichoon.com/2020/06/virt-manager-deprecated- in-rhel.html)

cockpit has frequent releases, latest:

[https://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-227.html](https://cockpit- project.org/blog/cockpit-227.html)

It hasn't all the features of virt-manager, far from it, but looks promising.

<comment><USER3> > RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt- > manager

For RHEL, virt-manager will still be developed independently.

<comment><USER4> > For RHEL, virt-manager will still be developed independently.

By whom? The _vast_ majority of contributions are paid for by Red Hat [0].

[0]: [https://github.com/virt-manager/virt- manager/graphs/contribu...](https://github.com/virt-manager/virt- manager/graphs/contributors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you haven't tried it, the "Virtual Machine Manager" GUI [1] is also surprisingly usable on Desktop Linux. I use it with both Windows and Linux images, and getting it to work with the usual guest extension niceties is straightforward.

From what I remember, getting VirtualBox or VMware to launch and run properly after a few months of automatic upgrades and not launching your images for a while was always kind of a gamble. With libvirt, everything just seems to work, and your images are just ready to go when you need them.

[1] [https://virt-manager.org/](https://virt-manager.org/)

<comment><USER6> >With libvirt, everything just seems to work

Strictly speaking, you have qemu to thank for that. libvirt is just a frontend for several hypervisors, including qemu (which is what typically used).

<comment><USER7> Libvirt is also responsible for keeping the guest exactly the same after upgrades; a basic QEMU command line does not guarantee that the guest hardware remains the same when you upgrade to a newer version, while Libvirt uses the more complicated and less human-friendly options to ensure that.

Libvirt does a lot more for QEMU than for other hypervisors, so much that libvirtd's initial name was qemud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it's unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question "how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?", which was in fashion when libvirt was created.

It's also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for enterprise on-prem software, but kinda of the opposite of what big providers need and build for themselves.

I wonder what we will look back on as the XML of today. Everything is schemaless JSON and YAML; surely we'll look back and wonder WTF everyone was thinking? But alas, it's probably not a data format at all. Only time will tell.

<comment><USER9> JSON is a bad configuration format simply for the fact that it doesn't support comments. Some parsers do but most don't. XML for all its verbosity and complexity at least has comments where I can quickly try out configuration changes without needing to save the old configuration somewhere else.

Hell, even INI files had support for comments and were just as expressional as JSON. I wonder why we regressed in that regard. Was it just because of the success of JavaScript and readily available JSON parsers? Because I'd argue that an INI parser is just as easy to write.

<comment><USER10> This is exactly why TOML [0] is gaining traction as a simple configuration file format. Rust's cargo has been TOML from day one (`Cargo.toml`) and Python is moving this way with (`pyproject.toml`).

For more general data structures, remember that JSON is a true subset of YAML [1]: Switch to a YAML parser and you can start optionally adding comments to your files while still being compatible with legacy input.

[0] [https://toml.io/en/](https://toml.io/en/) [1] [https://yaml.org/](https://yaml.org/)

<comment><USER11> Yaml is generally derided as too complex and transforming data in unintended ways.

I see a lot of Rust programmers preferring RON over TOML because it is much less complex and doesn't have multiple ways to express the same thing [https://crates.io/crates/ron](https://crates.io/crates/ron)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've build our own automated hosting infrastructure* a few years ago on top of libvirt. Using the libvirt API was a breeze and libvirt is rock solid since day one for us, I can only recommend this project.

* Shameless plug: [https://github.com/OnitiFR/mulch](https://github.com/OnitiFR/mulch)

We're using libvirt-go binding (Daniel Berrangé and his team is doing a excellent job maintaining it!), and KVM/QEMU hypervisior. For a small team like us, it's incredibly valuable to have access to such powerful tools in a such easy way.

<comment><USER13> Mulch looks super cool; you have some great ideas!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Libvirt is really nice. For linux, I also recommend reading the man page of Qemu directly to learn more about internals, it helped me understand a lot. Of course you have to take care networking, disk management on your own but it can be really simple. [https://linux.die.net/man/1/qemu- kvm](https://linux.die.net/man/1/qemu-kvm)

<comment><USER2> There's a nice tool to get qemu command lines from libvirt xml:

      virsh domxml-to-native qemu-argv myvm.xml

<comment><USER15> Nice, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really doubt that AWS is using libvirt. They almost certainly have their own abstraction.

But still, I agree that libvirt is great; I wrote about it here: [http://catern.com/posts/libvirt.html](http://catern.com/posts/libvirt.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Might be true, but don't see any open source work from Amazon in public domain which shows they built their own libraries from scratch to manage Xen and cloud management in early years from 2008.

Indeed it's 2020 and yet to see any major open source work from Amazon (which has benefited a lot from open source itself using Perl, CPAN, C, Java, Linux etc.). In this respect IBM, google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple are far better. Here even Oracle fare better due to acuisition of MySQL and sun microsystems.

I believe the major contribution from amazon might be hiring some of the open source developers to build proprietary systems. Those developers in spare time or weekends continue their open source project, but I do not have any study or articles on it.

Based on my information in 2013, amazon built their cloud using Xen hypervisor and related tools and libraries. Libvirt is one of the key libraries providing beautiful abstractions and language bindings to manage xen on Linux node at that time.

It will be nice if you can point to code from Amazon on low level library like Libvirt for cloud computing.

<comment><USER17> What makes you think it was libvirt instead of the Xen native xm / xl tools?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> for the last month (v6.6.0 and v6.7.0) libvirt has been released with a new key 453B65310595562855471199CA68BE8010084C9C (first seen:2020-07-20). It hasn't been signed or verified by any other source in libvirt / redhat yet. [https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt- announce/2020-July/m...](https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt- announce/2020-July/msg00006.html)

That is preventing downstream distros, like arch, from admitting these new releases into their package repos.

Critical infrastructure, indeed.

<comment> silly-silly Key exists on pgp.ocf.berkeley.edu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't understand this: "Domain is an instance of an operating system (or subsystem in case of container virtualization like OpenVZ and lxc) running on a virtualized machine provided by the hypervisor"

So the domain itself is a virtual machine? What makes it different from other guest virtual machinse?

<comment><USER20> It's unfortunate that when libvirt was originally started (2005) it was a wrapper around Xen, and in Xen a VM is called a domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you want to use libvirt with terraform, this is the project I started to learn Go years ago:

[https://github.com/dmacvicar/terraform-provider- libvirt](https://github.com/dmacvicar/terraform-provider-libvirt)</comment>


Brag to HN: I did it. - <AUTHOR>

Finally.  I pushed out the thing that has been eating my lunch for the last few months.  I'll show you, but you have to come to Houston:
http://houston.startupweekend.org/
I'll be showing off my new project there and we could use a few more hackers.  Come check it out and code with us.
If my site doesn't crash and burn over the weekend I'll post a link here.
I might minify .js first though.
PS. Can't pimp appharbor enough.  They made this possible. PPS.  I hope this will be a testament to the 30+, wife and kids entreprenuers out there that it can be done. <comment><USER2> This seems like it could spawn some interesting projects!

WARNING: Rant

One thing that bothers me that has little to do with the event is the page loading efficiency of the site. It takes an average of 15 seconds for the initial HTML document to load on my 10Mb/s connection. That's not including window.onload JavaScript execution. A couple of things.

1\. You will want to gzip compress your static js and css files. It will speed things up for you.

2\. When you load images in an img tag you will want to define the height and width of those elements so that they load faster (since load times are an issue).

3\. I'm getting a lot of JavaScript errors in Chrome 9. (I haven't tested other browsers)

4\. Put your script tags at the end of your body so that the page can load before the JavaScript is executed. This will help it feel faster. (Is this a WordPress thing that you can't change?)

5\. There are two "Follow Me" tabs floating on the right. Consider removing one (especially since they are overlapping eachother).

6\. Try to combine as many JavaScript or CSS files as you can to minimize requests.

7\. You have included jQuery 1.4.4 AND 1.4.2. Remove one of them.

8\. If you have time, use css sprites. Combine multiple images into a single image and use 'background-position' to get the specific one you want. This would be perfect for something like the Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn buttons at the top.

/rant</comment>


Review: Composition Tools Fargo, Medium, Editorially, Marquee, and More - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/review/520246/as-we-may-type/ <comment><USER2> No: the title is "As We May Type". Mods please fix.</comment>


Google Places API returning a 502 - <AUTHOR> We're getting a 502 from Google Places API.  The only mention I can so far find on the internet is this on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/search?q=places%20api%20502&src=typd<p>Anyone else experiencing this? <comment><USER2> Also facing this.

[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/68937777](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/68937777)

</comment><comment><USER3> Even an unauthenticated request returns a 502.

[https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/nearbysearch/json...](https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/nearbysearch/json?location=-33.8670522,151.1957362&radius=500&type=restaurant&keyword=cruise&key=YOUR_API_KEY)

</comment><comment><USER3> We're seeing that too.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is definitely down.

</comment><comment><USER5> +1</comment>


Do You Need to Write a Business Plan? - <AUTHOR> http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/02/25/do-you-need-to-write-a-business-plan/ <comment><AUTHOR> Writing one can be useful just because it helps clarify your idea. If you can't clearly explain what your trying to do and who its aimed at on paper then you should probably restructure your idea. You dont necessarily have to stick to a business plan format, something like the YC application form can be just as useful.

Of course a lot of the best stuff happens through accident/luck and no amount of planning will help you there.

</comment><comment><USER2> In my limited experience, the best investors don't ask for biz plans. Perhaps instead of a biz plan being the method by which an investor judges an entrepreneur it is a means to adjudicate an investor.

<comment><USER3> The best employers don't require resumes, but it can still be useful to have one lying around.

Also, just because smart investors can create value for the business doesn't mean every investor has to be smart :-)</comment></comment>


Hey, check out this new concept for a chatroom I made - <AUTHOR> http://realtimereddit.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> The conversation moves too fast for the points (karma) to matter. I can't see how this would work.

Comments drop off as the conversation continues, removing any relevancy to the points. You can't "hold" highly-rated comments because they'll end up out of context.

<comment><USER3> This is pretty much a perfect example of an idea so bad, even its creator should have realized it and dropped it before it got anywhere near the implementation stage.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just did it to practice my programming...

<comment><USER4> Exploratory programming is almost always worth it for its own sake. You can't be creative if you take yourself too seriously - so well done practicing your programming and exploring a new concept at the same time. Ideas and understanding you're gathering right now about this will sit in the back of your head and will make your next project just a touch better.

Again, well done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not really sure what to make of this. It's a bad implementation[0] of a chatroom with up and down votes on each message. I don't like the idea of real time karma. There is enough discussion about why something is up voted or down voted when you are constrained by the slowness of a forum system.

[0] Bad because of the way the text wraps if the lines you submit are too long and it requires the use of http. There is only one room, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> To vote all comments up:

        $("#allchats a:nth-child(1)").click();

Down:

        $("#allchats a:nth-child(2)").click();

<comment><USER7> To enable multiple voting:

        votedIds={length: 0, push: function(){}};

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about using the voting to change font size?

And if every user retained a unique id (maybe by using the IP), then the voting would change their font size for every post. And the voting would go back to 0 over time. eg. 1 point an hour.

And limit any ip to 1 message a second. And block double posting.

<comment><USER8> And I have to many ands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is something interesting there, not sure exactly where or how this fits in. Not sure exactly what purpose the ratings serve. It is not like a particularly good comment stays on the screen very long. There is something good here and there is something missing, I just dont know exactly what that is.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hmm I actually see no meaning of karma in this form. I think at first only the upvoted messages should be seen, acting like a condense of the room slowing down the feed.

Then if someone wants he could zoom in to view much more at the same time until he reaches the level of "every message in real time" . Also you should decide if this karma would upvote the user or just that individual message. (sorry I couldn't decide which one because of the floods)

Btw this remembers me of my "zooming feed" idea for merging together top news and most recent feeds in facebook, where one could always go deeper in lesser trending news of his friends.

Edit: Still better trying out then me who just thinks about his ideas and maybe post them in comments.

</comment><comment><USER11> The single best improvement you could make right now is to ban a user based on IP if they exceed a certain amount of downvotes over a period of time. That would at least fix the spam problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> there's something brilliant in here. it's not there yet, but it's a really neat idea. keep hacking away at this, you're on to something cool. and ignore the overconfident naysayers, this is really interesting and new.</comment>


How to fix capitalism - <AUTHOR> http://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/fix-capitalism

<comment><USER2> Well I didn't really understand that article, but I know how to fix capitalism. Though you're going have to pay me to find out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Article in one sentence: You can fix capitalism by moving the real world closer to the theoretical capitalism of micro-econ textbooks.

One of the frustrations I have with politics and economics is the absolute refusal of many people to actually look at how our economic system diverges from capitalism. We hear so often about how theoretical capitalism's mechanisms fix things, but no one ever takes into consideration how well theoretical capitalism is implemented in the real world.

<comment><USER4> I suspect what you're thinking is a "perfect market", i.e., an optimally competitive market with several (implausible) characteristics, such as no barriers to entry, all participants being fully informed,

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that, from a "competition is the ideal" perspective, _profit margins represent market inefficiency_. In a maximally efficient market, no one can make more money than the absolute minimum required to make participating worth their time, because otherwise someone else will come in and undercut them.

A simple, relatively free market is sometimes a passable approximation of a perfect market, but not always.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe that profit margins represent market efficiencies. In a perfect market, profit margins represent value perceived.

If your product will save me 10$ but costs you 2$ to produce, charging 5$ is beneficial to both of us.

The problem we have now is that the current large companies believe that they're entitled to receiving the same profits they've had in the past without innovating or even adapting to the future.

If your value proposition is only worth 2$ to me in the future, why should the government come in and tax all companies in my industry because I don't think you're worth paying anymore?

I suppose that's a simplistic view but then again I've always abhorred working at large companies because of the huge number of people I'd see around me contributing very little. I think small companies will very often beat big ones on both quality AND cost because of the lack of bureaucratic overhead. The overhead though is exactly how the incumbents protect themselves from the newer entrants, entrapping government to create barriers to protect themselves.

<comment><USER4> _I don't believe that profit margins represent market efficiencies. In a perfect market, profit margins represent value perceived.

If your product will save me 10$ but costs you 2$ to produce, charging 5$ is beneficial to both of us._

Except that in a maximally competitive market, someone else would quickly come along and offer to sell you an equivalent product for $4, and then someone else comes along, etc. Competition always pushes prices towards the cost of production.

Of course, cost of production varies as well. In an idealized sense, the cost to produce a product is proportional to the amount produced (due to scarcity), whereas everyone in the market has some price limit below which they would want to buy the product. At a given price point, if the cost of producing an additional unit is below the highest price limit among people who wouldn't buy the product otherwise, it's a net gain for me to make the product and sell it to the person with that limit. Of course, at any price point, there's some people who want the product but not enough to pay that price, and some people who would happily pay more; but that's just the system working as intended.

The end result (in theory) is that every product eventually settles at a price point reflecting optimal resource allocation to production, plus some small profit margin to make the time spent on the transaction worthwhile.

In practice, it's... a bit more complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this article because there are lots of issues pointed out that I feel very strongly in favor of. (For example, the patent system being, sum total, a net harm). The only problem with it that I have is that it feels kind of half baked. There are so many ideas expressed that it almost seems like it should've been explained in an entire book rather than a blog post.

The reason I submitted it is because I thought and hoped it would generate some very interesting discussion here.

<comment><USER5> It's very naive. There's no telling what breaking up any company that achieves 5% to 10% market share would do to capitalism, but it probably wouldn't be good. Would you bother trying to build the next Google if you knew it was just going to be split into 15 pieces if you succeeded? I would not.

It also says nothing two of the biggest problems our brand of capitalism faces, which are perverse incentives and lack of transparency, both of which were leading causes of the recent meltdown and our current health care woes.

<comment><USER6> And good luck fighting network effects. How many Facebooks and LinkedIns do we need? While we could use different social tools, what value is there in more Facebook look-alikes resulting from a breakup? The value of these social tools derives from their network effects.

<comment><USER7> For the specific example of Facebook, it'd quite feasible to have a lot of different services that shared data as needed. It's not the name of the front end that people want, it's the social interaction.

<comment><USER6> That's like saying that we should all share capital. Data _is_ the new capital, and businesses will live and die by how they manage their data and extract value from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "An exception should be made for natural monopolies, but the price of that should be _tight regulation_ , _nationalisation_ , or (best of all) mutualisation."

Tight regulation and nationalization are rewards for growing a "natural" monopoly? This doesn't make any sense. That's not capitalism, it's fascism.

Capitalists would argue that complete lack of government regulation is how you "fix" capitalism.

Almost every point made in this blog post is, at a fundamental level, diametrically opposed to what capitalism is as an economic theory and ideology. The author had drafted a manifesto for an aggressively mixed economy which is ideologically identical to what we have in America today.

<comment><USER9> The author is British, and I think some of these points make sense in the context of the UK. You should see how screwed our privatized rail industry is - itself a kind of "natural monopoly". True capitalism would have the government stop subsidizing them; but then we wouldn't have any trains, and good people wouldn't be able to get to work. Too big to fail again, I'm afraid...

<comment><USER8> I interpreted the word "natural" to mean the monopoly was achieved and exists _without_ government subsidy or special privileged. Capitalism says that the only time monopolies are ever "destructive" or have a "snowball" effect where they can't be stopped, is when the government gives them special privileges (i.e. no one else can build a railroad, no one else can set up a telecom company).

If the government puts up road blocks for new companies to enter a line of business, the market isn't truly free and the mega corporations are free to charge whatever they want and do whatever they want. It would be impossible for there to be a "startup" telecom company or "startup" railroad company.

Interestingly enough, the the railroad companies are the most often cited example what happens when the government messes with the free market. The idea is that because the government has already messed up the railroad market it has to continually subsidize the railroad companies or, you're right, "good people wouldn't be able to get to work". Regulation and subsidies beget more regulation and subsidies.

<comment> alan-crowe "natural monopoly" is economist's jargon. It is basic jargon. Every undergraduate economics text book covers it. Mankiw's Principles of Economics discusses it on page 306. Economics by Parkin and King cover it on page 296. Beardshaw sees to have something against the term, talking instead about "The flat bottomed average cost curve" on page 266. Alchian and Allen discuss natural monopoly on page 290 of Exchange and Production. Google it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your startup idea for 2018? - <AUTHOR> Mine is a social network between retailers and customers to receive custom deals and coupons. what's your idea? <comment><USER2> I don't have any idea how to build a start up. And I don't live anywhere near people who can help me build a start up.

But I do have a great idea!

Without giving too much away about what kind of app this is, it's a missing app that I often see longed for on this forum. There are beginner apps like it and advanced apps, but no intermediate app like the one I have in my mind and heart. I suspect it's because all the advanced apps like it started out as intermediate apps, but said "yes" to every single feature its users asked for until they became that complicated.

It's not the kind of app anyone would spend money for an intermediate version of. But I am extraordinarily excited about using it myself, and other people who I have talked to about it are too. So I think I am going to make the app, make it freely available, and set up a Patreon for it. I have to make it outside work hours though so that slows it down. Maybe I should make a demo or prototype first and set up a Patreon before releasing it to help fund me spending more time on it more quickly...</comment>


Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/in-silicon-valley-plotting-to-get-foreign-born-workers-to-vancouver/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley is losing their source of cheap labor and are now avoiding the law by going to another country.

How is this any different than a company avoiding tax laws by moving its base?</comment>


After 6 years of programming, I'm still a developer. What am I doing wrong? - <AUTHOR> I started my programming in 2008 and have worked on many big as well as small projects. I work on .NET platform mostly. I've worked in big companies and have done freelancing for 2 years leaving my job. This year I moved to a different country and started job as developer (I took whatever I got). I'm quite sure I'm not a bad developer. I have good feedbacks. I've completed projects and earned appreciation. Last week a new guy was hired in my company as Project Manager and he has only 1 year experience and that too not in programming. In networking and stuff and has done some PM stuff for couple of months.
Now I think I'm not in the position that I should be. I can constantly see things that are going wrong in the company. For example, what the new PM does is constantly come to developer and ask a lot of things rather than documenting it. He hasn't been even able to choose right tool to log issues in 2 months. Uses 2-3 different stuffs. Doesn't communicate the progress to the team. Rather chooses specific developer and goes on with it. In other words, isn't connecting to the team.
If the company decided to hire inexperienced PM, why didn't they promote me or even my fellow developer to do so?
Is this happening because I've got brown skin? Or am I doing something wrong? I'm not so interested to do PM job but I'm concerned I'm not being a good developer, or something lacks in me. <comment><USER2> I agree with the other commenters. PM is not a promotion. PM is a very hard, thankless job that is hard to get right. Trust me --- you don't want it. The PM clearly needs help and it seems like you can fill some gaps he has. I do not know the org structure in your company, but I would lobby for you to become the "Lead" developer -- and you can work hand in hand with the PM to make sure the project is organized correctly, that the requirements are being gathered and met, that the tools the developers need are in place. The PM should be able to take the brunt of the "external" networking for the team, and you can take the brunt of the "internal" networking to the team. You can help and learn from each other, as I am sure he has some skills that you do not (they may be soft skills).

<comment><AUTHOR> It clearly is a tough job. Communicating technical as well as business process at the same time can be very challenging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's wrong with being good developer, especially good developer? I have been doing this for 23 years and still love it. Moving from DOS/UNIX->Win32->8051->Embedded OS->vxWorks->Networking->Storaging->Video/Media/Embedded Linux->Android ASOP. Learning new things every months.

BTW, if you checkout the salary level at glassdoor.com, a good engineer/developer salary level is higher than most of the "PM", Director. A lot well run company knew this and respect this.

Personally, I was moved to Marketing/PM type of roles for a while, hated it. Too Much politic, a lot depending who you know, party with, etc.

Good engineers/developers got respect from what you know and how well you code, understanding of issues and formulate/architect a solution. Ok, I am a geek.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment. Makes me feel good. I too want to continue being developer, hopefully I'll become a good one like you. BUT somehow environment within the company presents constraints.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would not ever occur to me to try to 'promote' a developer to PM; it's not a promotion, it's not a normal career path, and most people wouldn't even want to do it. If it appeals to you, let your manager know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm planing to regularly come up with suggestions, options and my thoughts in meetings. May be that would be a starting point ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It happens that if you are good at what you are doing you won't be promoted, because it will be hard to find someone to replace you. So you have to clearly signal that you want to move, because for your manager it might be more comfortable to know that you are here, reliable and productive.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow, wasn't thinking from that angle. thanks a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What you're doing wrong is not being in the job that you want.

Find a position that you want in the company where you are now, or find a position that you want somewhere else. It doesn't have to be a full-on 100% PM job. After all, the guy you mention apparently only has a year experience himself. Everyone starts somewhere and somehow. _Everyone_.

It won't be easy, but it will never happen if you don't try.

As for the specific issues you have with that other guy, those are merely details and they will instantly be irrelevant once you move up or out. Forget about that immediately (I literally mean right this second), and put all your energy into finding your next position, internally or externally.

Get to work. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the reply. You do seem to understand in what situation I am in. Your suggestion seems to be the ultimate solution but being new to the country without much financial backup, I'll have to put this option aside for the time being. However, I constantly think about leaving and doing something on my own every day but without a solid idea and proper plan / backup, its tough one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes you have to seek what you want. It won't always come to you. If you know they are hiring for PM, go into your manager's office and ask to be considered for the position. Outline the many reasons why you would be qualified. Just bear in mind that knowing a bad PM when you see one does not make you a good PM.

A while back, a really senior co-worker left the company I was working at. I knew he worked on things that interested me so I went to the head of the department and asked to take over his work. If I had not stepped up, his work would have been distributed out over the team and I wouldn't have had the opportunities I've had since.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is one of my weakness. I just can't tell people I'm great at what I do or even I'm good. I always feel others are way better than me and always seem to find some fault within me. I always listen more and talk less. When someone has Ideas I respect them and I dnt try to come up with anything because I think I might hurt them or they might feel bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One idea I tend to agree with is the idea that "you are in the position you deserve to be in". If you are in a junior position when you feel like a senior developer, you deserve to be in that position. You might have the skills, but since you've not done anything to put yourself in that position you are where you are.

If you want to be a PM, ask to be considered for a PM role. If you don't get it then apply for PM roles elsewhere. You are rarely given help in this world, so take every opportunity you can possibly get.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment. PM isn't the role I'd want to be in but I just happen to love projects organized, process in place so that I can focus more in my programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> * Did you talk to your employer about your desire to work as a Project Manager?

* Did they provide you with reasons why they don't want you in that role? Since they set the rules, you need to know what they want.

* Project Management is more about social rather than technical skills. Are you a good communicator? Does your employer know that?

* I don't know anything about your skills, but you've just written 260 words in one wall-of-text paragraph. It wasn't that hard to read, but that's not proper style.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've made them clear I don't want to be just an employee who gets in at 9 am and leaves at 5 pm. I want to lead, set up standards within the company on how the projects should be done. I've made it very clear to them that I want to know more about what's going on and not just sit in a corner writing code. But yes, I didn't say " I want to be a project manager". Because I don't think that would be appropriate as I was hired as a developer. And yes, project management is about connecting with your team, making sure they know the bigger picture of the project as well as company and importantly, make sure you give respect to others and not try to be THE MANAGER.

Sorry for my big para. That is what I am concerned about. What do you think is the good style? I fear I don't know these things. That is what I think I lack. Please help me get to a better style.

<comment><USER10> I've taken a Written Business Communications course as part of my studies a while ago which used this book – [http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/essentials-of- business-c...](http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/essentials-of-business- communication/9780176503574-item.html)

It explains the basics – styling, structuring letters / emails / memos, choosing the medium, etc. I'm sure there must be lots of free resources available online for such a popular topic, but I've never looked it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Cheers !!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PM would be a demotion at the companies I've worked at -- or at least a significant decrease in pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I can imagine that. Sometimes PM do not have enough freedom and they end up being just an assistant of the directors

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Suggest reading up on Self-Development, ultimately you're responsible for driving your career growth > [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847538.FYI](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847538.FYI)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for recommending the book. Looks like a must-read for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Beware. I became a manager after 5 years of development. Now, 7 years later I'm back to developing software :) Much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> well, nothing can beat that for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Becoming a manager is not getting promoted. It is a career change. Approach it the same way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't be interested to be a full time manager but I'd surely like to see the team better managed, right tools used, development done in a better process and follow standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Haha if you wanted to be a pm why did you learn how to code?</comment>


Generating and Manipulating Faces Using Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nanonets.com/stylegan-got/ <comment><AUTHOR> This blog explains StyleGANs (by Nvidia Research) and covers some of the clever techniques (Adaptive Instance Normalization, Style Mixing, Stochastic Noise) that you'd need to generate images that you exactly want. Want to see what you'd look like when you are old? The blog also contains all the code you need to experiment on your images.</comment>


WhatsApp Blocked in Brazil for 72 Hours - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/4314561/whatsapp-block-brazil-72/ <comment><USER2> Again...

It's a shame how people seem to completely not mind abusive government around here.</comment>


Hollywood Studios Caught Pirating Movies on BitTorrent - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-studios-caught-pirating-movies-on-bittorrent-121225/

<comment><USER2> So?

This shows that there exists employees of anti-pirate companies who themselves pirate. This doesn't prove that, say, the _head_ of these organisations-- who are the ones setting these policies and conversing with the media-- are the ones doing the pirating.

I can't be a surprise to anyone that people's moral compass doesn't consistently align with their employers.

<comment><USER3> But will one of the studios have the MPAA or some other org file lawsuits against that studio? So what if it was just a few low level people doing it - it happened with the studio's equipment. All of them were gung-ho to send threatening notices to university campuses when some students were pirating. Either their policies should be enforced across the board, or they lose any moral weight in this discussion (which, ftr, I think they lost ages ago).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With the huge damages that can be gained from copyright lawsuits, why don't the studios just sue each other into oblivion over this?

<comment><USER5> Probably because they want to fight collectively under the MPAA for the "greater good".

<comment><USER6> Wrong industry. RIAA is for the recording industry, whereas MPAA is for motion pictures.

<comment><USER5> Oh yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this distinguish between nodes that are only there to collect the IP's of all other users?

<comment><USER8> Those nodes should be run by the studio that produced the movie in question, while this post is, as I understand it, about studio A downloading a movie that belongs to studio B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> LOL now everybody in Warner Bros know who downloaded AssHoleFever: <http://torrentfreak.com/images/warner-pirates.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER10> Meh, the studios will just claim that they were researching torrents and illegal file sharing.

</comment><comment><USER11> How many of those machines are pwn3d?

</comment><comment><USER12> This isn't the first time.

As with the last time a similar story made the rounds, I'm surprised by the cognitive dissonance among those that would sympathize with pirates: when it's Joe Homeowner, an IP address does not identify a person!, but when we find an IP out of Warner Brothers's netblock, the studio "is caught". Let's be honest. In all likelihood, this is an employee sitting around after hours abusing the bandwidth, or a compromised machine, or something -- Warner Brothers very likely didn't have a meeting and say "let's pirate some films".

(This does not reflect upon my views re: piracy/copyright nor which side I'd claim to fall on, which might surprise you after reading this comment, it's merely something I've observed from the pro-piracy camp.)

<comment><USER13> It's not cognitive dissonance; it's a relevant distinction in the law.

Adults aren't responsible for the actions of other adults (generally, and with respect to piracy). So while an IP address can identify a group of adults, it can't ever identify which one was committing piracy.

But corporations are typically responsible for the actions of their employees, that is, they are vicariously liable: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability>. Under at least some circumstances, if a studio's employees are committing piracy, the studio is also liable for that piracy. As long as the IP address corresponds to that corporation, it's "close enough" to signal legal liability (under some circumstances).

<comment><USER12> My comment has nothing to do with the law.

<comment><USER14> I can try to explain it in a different way. Individuals are not and should not be expected to have ironclad control over their connections and monitor all users. If you see traffic from a residential IP you have no idea who initiated it. With a corporate network, on the other hand, 90% chance it was an employee doing it, which makes the corporation responsible. It doesn't matter how many layers of management were involved, and there's even a good chance that the pirate _is_ a manager. I won't blame them if it turns out they got hacked, but I will call them incompetent. Corporations have dedicated IT departments to make sure that only authorized users get on the network.

tl;dr No cognitive dissonance: Corporations vet network users, 99% of homes don't.

<comment><USER12> Even you admit that it's not a 100% chance, which is my point -- we're using an IP address to identify the studio as the responsible party here, which we frown upon for home users.

You talk about the stuff that all defense attorneys do in the residential cases, then say for some reason a corporation should be better equipped to handle it. Which, maybe there's some relevancy to that, but still the root point is: we're using an IP address to identify a responsible party, which isn't a 100% science.

This also isn't a trial, it's a published article.

<comment><USER14> If you show me a residential environment that has a dedicated IT staff that only allows qualified people on the network, then you can assume _one of_ the qualified people is responsible for the traffic. You still have to figure out which one because 'an IP address is not a person'.

I'm applying the same standards to either situation. The way a corporate network is configured (excluding cases of incompetence) gives you pretty solid evidence that AN employee was in violation. You still have no idea which employee, which is why an individual suit like in the residential cases would be highly unfounded. Same standard when it comes to that rule. The only difference is that you can go after a corporation as a cohesive group, whereas you cannot go after a household as a cohesive group.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>