Sean Parker unloads on Facebook "exploiting" human psychology - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html <comment><USER2> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally.

First, it happens through competition. Good psychology hacks are things like tinder's fast paced swiping. Out of the squillions of dating apps, the one with a good hack won. I think Facebook used an identical hack for its first version, the hot-or-not version. Twitter's basic concept. Snapchat's. Lots of examples. All good "psych-hacks" that formed a core of successful products, arrived at through a sort of natural selection process. I suspect that almost any app which does not "solve a problem" leverages some hack instead.

Second, psych-hackers FB actually employ are not psychlogists. They're data scientists doing split tests. If this works like that, will you like more posts. A/B testing is really behavioural psychology expirementation, weaponized.

I think both of these are quasi-inevitable. But, constant optimization towards viral drek is not.

Where I think FB should be sheepish about is allowing the optimization to go on directionless. The only goals are quantitive. Quality is a foreign concept. No one has asked the question "what should FB be." The answer is simply "popular."

This isn't inevitable. Applied to businesses as a whole, you could replace "popular" with profitable. All businesses are under this imperative. But, that doesn't mean directionless. Businesses can strive to be all sorts of things in addition to (or preferebly as a path to) profitable. FB is itself an example of this.

What I want from FB (and Google) is a recognition that they are media companies, the biggest media companies. After that, they need to start dealing in quality. If you only optimize for quantity of reactions, shares and such while disregarding quality you become a shitty tabloid. No taste. No integrity. Just clickbait.

FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?"

<comment><USER3> I'd dispute the notion that Facebook is optimizing directionlessly. It just turns out when your entire business model is "sell ads", then profitability and popularity become synonymous.

I'm very curious if you have a proposal for how to gauge content quality at scale. Back when I majored in journalism, "community engagement" was a massive topic. People wanted to create content that wasn't just "good" in a vacuum, but actually motivated society towards positive change. The theory went that if we reported on social issues in a certain way, perhaps we could influence society for the better. This was even the topic of my capstone project.

In the end, I became disillusioned. My observations contradicted the notion that content quality (news content in my case) matters in either a commercial or social sense when conducted at scale.

In my capstone project, some people volunteered to be interviewed about their volunteer work and their motivations. It was really interesting talking to all of them, but what I found in every case was that these people were motivated by life experiences, not media. I talked to an ex-con who had his life turned around by a books program, so he volunteered with the program when he got out. I also talked to a soccer mom who organized community events for her kids.

This was admittedly a qualitative study on personal anecdotes with a small sample set so it's not hard science. But the hypothesis that content quality is irrelevant at a mass scale seems to hold up in practice.

This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said.

Okay, rant over. I am legitimately interested, though, in any ideas for determining content quality at scale just because it seems like an interesting project.

<comment><USER4> >This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said.

Makes more sense than blaming Russia and Facebook.

<comment><USER5> Why would you think the two thesis cannot work together as force-multipliers? If name recognition matters, then why can't Russian troll farms influence an election by hacking what names you recognize most using Facebook?

<comment><USER4> Because occam's razor says that the mundane reasons (terrible Democratic candidate, poor economy, Trump's name brand value) are more plausible than sinister conspiracy theories involving unimpressive ad budgets pushed by media orgs who just happen to be large DNC donors.

<comment><USER6> Occam's razor applied by neglecting evidence is just bad reasoning.

<comment><USER4> Not if the evidence is poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's many people out there, myself included, who signed up with Facebook years ago and don't use it today. I don't like FB personally but don't understand the steady stream of criticism about -- that it's too addictive, that the site should be curating content in the wake of the last election? Pretty sad if you ask me. FB is not responsible for verifying the truth of every FB news post, nor helping its users to live productive meaningful lives. If you are addicted to FB you should do some soul searching.

<comment><USER2> I was with you until recently. Don't like it, don't use it. I log in once a month. Never felt strongly about FB one way or another.

But lately, I flipped. I think responsibility needs to correlate to some extent with power, to be useful. FB have power now, big power. They are not some site, they're a core social and political institution of society.

In some circles, FB's just a very common way to conduct part of your social life. In that context, complaining about FB is like complaining about your local town square. It's noisy and filthy and making our social time suck. I consider this an appropriate complaint, considering what FB is and does.

"Go start your own social network" is a red herring. It's like saying "if you don't like this country, leave". At least, I consider these similar.

On the news point, I consider this a seperate point and a bigger deal. This is what flipped me. FB is the world's most important news outlet. I think this is undeniable in 2017. They have tremendous power (and responsibility) in this role. News/journalism is an institution of democracy and political life generally. FB decide who sees what news, and this is a huge deal. If they peddle crap quality news, the overall quality of journalism in society deteriorates. The quality of news (taken as a whole, including the news bubbles and everything else) on FB is terrible. It's a valid complaint and we should be louder about it.

<comment><USER8> I love your comment but disagree on one point. I don't think Facebook has ANY obligation to improve the quality of the "news" shared on it.

I favor freedom of speech and freedom of association. If I have a friend who keeps posting BS articles from shady sources (and I do) then I just block them from my feed or simply ignore their posts about current events and conspiracy theories.

I think asking FB, or any other platform, to start policing the quality of what we post is dangerous. What happens is if a story breaks that official authorities deny, but which is actually true. Would you want FB being the arbiter of truth, in such a case, or would you prefer for individuals (preferably alot of them) to be free to do their own research and to come to their own conclusions?

<comment><USER9> But they aren't just an anonymous background hosting provider, they algorithmically promote some posts over others. If Facebook just hosted static pages where all posts were treated equally I might agree with you, but they're actively seeking out "good" content and pushing it to other people.

Imagine you run a coffee shop, and a local political group hosts a weekly get together there. They're weird people, always talking about crazy theories and plans, but they're not hurting anyone and they're great customers, so you don't want to kick them out. If some other people come in and start getting freaked out at the conspiracy talk and "time to march" proclamations, shouldn't you walk over and say "hey don't worry about them, this stuff is completely crazy, I actually looked it up myself since they talk about it every week. I'd be happy to show you some articles if you're worried." Maybe you're not technically endorsing their ideas, but you're hosting them, serving them, giving them a prominent place in your shop. You could put a sign out front that says "I don't endorse anything said in my shop", but that just protects you, not your customers.

Now imagine it's not just a coffee shop, but the only coffee shop, everyone in town goes there, and half of them get all their news just by talking to other patrons. Is there any obligation to pay attention to what's being said and who gets to reserve your best tables? If you didn't want to be involved in this, you should have grown so much. If you buy up every other shop and meeting place in town, you have to accept the responsibilities that come with all that power.

<comment><USER10> If you run a coffee shop where Nazis regularly come to hang out, hold their group meetings, spread their propaganda, etc all while wearing swastika tee shirts, people will call your shop a Nazi coffee shop, and they will be very right to do so - even if you swear that you are not a Nazi and are just doing your best to protect freedom of expression.

This is what Twitter and Facebook are today (Twitter will even hide these accounts in their German digital coffee shop, where spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal, but are fine letting it be for the rest of the world).

<comment> white-flame Both the left-wing zealots & right-wing zealots (and others) peddle their propaganda and skewed opinion pieces on Facebook. It's not like one crowds the other out, like a coffee shop with a shared physical space might. Everybody has their own little view of the world from inside FB, curated to their own preferences and propagated by AI similarity recommendations.

Facebook itself isn't a cesspool of just 1 side, so isn't meaningfully associated with any one. Independent and overlapping cesspools of all strokes form and grow in multitudes there.

<comment><USER10> _> It's not like one crowds the other out, like a coffee shop with a shared physical space might. Everybody has their own little view of the world from inside FB, curated to their own preferences and propagated by AI similarity recommendations._

This statement is incorrect. Twitter has a huge harassment problem, that users have been begging the company to fix for years, to no avail. There are users openly associating with nazi ideology (not exaggerating here - we are talking about users with swastikas as their avatars, nazi references in their bios, etc.[0]) harassing others on the platform. In no way is this people in their little bubble, being perfectly isolated from others who don't share their ideology.

As far as left-wing vs right-wing or whatever, I don't really care. I chose nazis as the main example because this is a very clear ideological group that has been unequivocally responsible for crimes against humanity in the past, against which Twitter chooses to do absolutely nothing (even if this contradicts their own TOS). Well, they choose to do one thing: make those accounts invisible in countries where they would be breaking the law if they didn't. So they literally have a `isNazi` flag in their database, but they only choose to use it to not get in trouble with German/Austrian/etc. law instead of, you know, just banning people who are calling for ethnic cleansing. Great job, Jack Dorsey.

If there are other similar ideologies (left wing, right wing, or other) you would like to put in the same bucket, please do - I have no issues with that. The only fundamental issue is that Twitter is choosing to let extremist, well defined, communities such as nazi ideologues thrive on their platform because growth or something.

[0]: if you really need proof: [https://twitter.com/anp14](https://twitter.com/anp14)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Paul Graham wrote a great piece on this in 2010 [http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html)

> As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest > is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly > common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing > number of things we need it for. > The next 40 years will bring us some > wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol > is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one > without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. > More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about. > You > can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't > think you're weird, you're living badly. We'll have to worry not just about > new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's > what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because > it became addictive while I was using it. Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't > it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no > customs yet to guide you. > And unless the rate at which social antibodies > evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological > progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on > customs to protect us.

That means there's going to be a market for products to manage addiction. My bet would be driven by parents and schools

<comment><USER12> > As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.

There is an expression that could be relevant: Supernormal stimulus, [1].

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

<comment><USER13> NAILED IT

<comment><USER12> Yes, the wikipedia article also mentions:

> Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues that supernormal stimulation > govern the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of animals. In her 2010 > book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary > Purpose, she examines the impact of supernormal stimuli on the diversion of > impulses for nurturing, sexuality, romance, territoriality, defense, and the > entertainment industry's _hijacking of our social instincts_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I went to a hackathon a few years ago. At the end of the hackathon, my team member (about 10+ years older than me, I am in my early 30s) asked to contact her on Facebook. I told her I didn't have one, because I didn't. Not even an account that I didn't log-in to. She gave me a weird look, then frowned, as if I was shunning her. My other team member looked shocked as well.

I thought it was weird that if you don't have a Facebook account you're kind of looked at weird now.

<comment><USER15> About 80% of US, internet-using adults have Facebook accounts. I think her surprise was warranted.

In fact, Id bet that tech-savvy adults aged 20-50 who have Facebook accounts is in the high 90% range.

You are weird for not having one. She isn't weird for expecting you to.

[http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media- update-20...](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/)

<comment><USER16> Would you say he is "weird" for not having one? It's like saying someone is weird for not liking sandwiches. It's just a preference. I have a facebook account but have not logged into it in years. I can't say I feel like I'm missing anything.

<comment><USER17> Who doesn't like sandwiches?? I would say that's pretty weird too!

<comment><USER16> I have a friend who just doesn't "get" why people like sandwiches. So they do exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have to admit, sometimes I worry about the ethics of capturing peoples attention given all we know about psychology now, whether it's through social media or video games or other things where optimizing for people's attention is important. I work in video games, and on the one hand I'm pretty proud of the work I do, but on the other hand you see people get a little bit over- invested in these things and it's easy to wonder if it's totally a good thing to be able to push people's buttons like that. Once you're past the naivety of like "is this fun", and you start thinking in terms of like intermittent reward schedules and ways to monetize players it starts feeling... weird?

I don't know what you can do about it though. I can't imagine any company willingly dumbing down engagement with their product for the common good. I'm guessing that as all these psychological techniques become more prevalent, cultural norms will probably shift to counter.

<comment><USER19> Social climate is really the most reliable way to temper the effect of social media. If the mainstream media wasn't paid for years to repeat the words "Facebook" and "Twitter", it's possible our present would be significantly different. People should not feel as if they must be on some company's advertising platform in order to maintain friendships with people. It's pretty sick that a lot of people feel this way.

Messages about the damaging effects of social media need to be promoted in society, just as we hammered home the cancer-causing effects of tobacco. In fact, it would be great if there was a counter-advertising campaign against social networks that told people how they worsen depression, how many hours/days/years you're wasting on Facebook, and that you can put down your phone and actually do things with your friends. If Facebook has any real value, it can fight negative press. But they won't because they have very little value; just with big tobacco, they'd spend a bunch of money on misinformation and slander, which would come out and make them look worse than when they started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The thing is...by nature humans are a group species. If the group is using facebook, you will be compelled to use this too, either for social validation,feeling of belonging or whatever. You will always be weakened even if you don't need facebook. This is the hack. Even if you don't use it because "I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' you as an individual will always lose power in the group and will always be looked as weak, because in nature, humans are a group species. Sean Parker seems to know this and these guys abuse of this power

<comment><USER21> Of course, if you are a leader, you can sway your entire group to use something else as a primary medium. I've seen a few examples.

The catch is twofold.

Leaders, by definition, are few and far between.

Moreover, for a leader, FB offers tools and prospects to gain an ever- expanding audience. The leader must have a strong aversion to FB to ignore this lure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> pg "unloaded" on this ten years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77173).

The submission can be read here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094843/http://ycombinato...](https://web.archive.org/web/20071109094843/http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html)

Surprisingly to no one, a year later the issue hadn't gone away: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372593)

<comment><USER23> Is this the equivalent of "Android had it first" anytime there's an iPhone feature announcement?

<comment><USER22> For me it is more like "Crack used to be addictive; it still is, and it used to as well."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's such an interesting discussion to me because it's kind of an open question: is the problem really with exploiting human psychology per se? Or is it with exploiting human psychology to achieve non-constructive ends?

The time investment that Facebook exacts from its users far outweighs the benefits it provides — e.g. social cohesion. So we feel much less comfortable with the platform's effective psychological hooks. But take an app like stickK[1], which cleverly recruits social and financial pressure to incentivize user-defined good behavior, and the effectiveness of the hooks don't make us so uneasy. Nir Eyal recently discussed this distinction on the Indie Hackers podcast[2].

I suppose a part of this is due to consent; stickK users consciously sign up to be manipulated. But consent can't be the entire equation, or else we'd let modern-day cigarette companies off the hook. It's 2017 — smokers know what they're signing up for, and yet they sign up.

[1] [http://www.stickk.com/](http://www.stickk.com/)

[2] [https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/023-nir-eyal-of- hooked#...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/023-nir-eyal-of- hooked#1153.017)

</comment><comment><USER25> > When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me > and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You > know, you will be.'

I think the tide has been steadily turning on this. I never did use social media beyond creating an account for work or curiosity, quickly getting bored and abandoning. Sure there may have been a time where I felt a little less connected, but those feelings have diminished over time.

The "workarounds" available for those not on social networking are abundant, and more importantly to me, much simpler and time effective for me to use.

<comment><USER26> As someone who "left" social media I still frequently feel a void from it. Recently I moved back to my hometown and realized I had completely lost touch with anyone I knew in high school. Different phone, didn't port contacts. I know they all live nearby but I feel like I lost them forever.

The bottom line is there is no connection.

<comment><USER19> Before social media, those are people we forgot about and moved on from. And for good reason.

Social media, especially Facebook, seems engineered to create this illusion that we're more connected with our "friends"; while those people may have been our friends in another time, that doesn't mean they're our friends now just because we have Facebook connections with them. If it only takes not having a Facebook profile to not exist to people, they're not really our friends to begin with. I can say this about the vast majority of people who are my "friends" on Facebook; I know for sure that 99% of them will never contact me unless Facebook prods them to post "Happy Birthday" on my timeline. This isn't to say that my connections are bad people, but it's to say that social media has distorted what friendship and human bonding actually mean in order to profit on peoples' loneliness.

It's not difficult for a truly lonely person to come to that conclusion, but that perspective solidified in me when I became real-life friends with a neighbor of mine. It had been several years since I made a non-superficial friendship. And no social medium was required. I was reminded that real friends are actually interested in seeing you, talking to you, and coming to you first when they've got news about something. Just one friend like that is far more valuable than all the "friends" I ever had on Facebook.

You may still feel a void from it, but I do hope you eventually make some real-life connections like I have and forget about your old "friends" entirely. I abstained from Facebook for 9 months, and even near the end I was feeling the void. Going back to it was starkly different and I realized how much of a waste of time it is. I do still use Facebook, but only as a photo repository since I do have some semblance of friends and family on there. Though I'm sure they wouldn't bother with me if I wasn't there to bolster their friend-count.

<comment><USER27> > _Beadie:_ All the guys at the bar, Jimmy, all the girls; they don't show up > at your wake. Not because they don't like you. But because, they never knew > your last name. Then a month later, someone tells them, "Oh, Jimmy died." > "Jimmy who?" "Jimmy the Cop." "Ohhh," they say, "him". And all the people on > the job, all those people you spent all the hours in the radio cars with, > the guys with their feet up on the desk, tellin' stories, who shorted you on > your food runs, who signed your overtime slips. In the end, they're not > gonna be there either. Family, that's it. Family, and if you're lucky, one > or two friends who are the same as family. That's all the best of us get. > Everything else is just...

\-- The Wire

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's fine.. in 10 years when Mark leaves FB and starts philanthropy he will be hailed as a tech savior in a similar vein to Bill Gates

<comment> ng-user I'm going to assume he will never leave FB by choice

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Social media companies are cigarette companies. They should be taxed and frowned upon accordingly.

Remember way back when when cigarettes were cool? Well fast-forward 70 years and that's social media now.

<comment><USER30> That's a very hyperbolic statement. Facebook still has merit as a way to organize and communicate with your social group, even if there are some negatives. For cigarettes, I don't know what positives people can claim with a straight face. That you get to go outside at work for a smoke break?

<comment><USER31> The analogy works surprisingly well.

I really wish I didn't have to breath the Facebook's (and Google's) _secondhand smoke_ every time when I interact with _other people_ (or websites). Just like smoking, putting a "like" button on your website or using any of their services to chat with someone inflicts causes "secondhand" damage on people that choose to people that chose not to "inhale".

> I don't know what positives

Nicotine is a drug. It should be obvious that some people enjoy its effects and/or find it useful. The tolerance effect may reduce those benefits for some (most?) people, but that doesn't change that it had (or continues to have) positive effects.

> claim with a straight face

Maybe you should ask the doctors at the Harvard Medical School[1] _et al_ about the benefits nicotine seems to have for several mental health issues? Now that we are finally moving oast the taboos on any nicotine-related research, these discoveries might lead to entirely new types of medication.

[1] [https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Nicotine_I...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Nicotine_It_may_have_a_good_side) (paywall - google cache bypass: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t8ekKU...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t8ekKUjkJosJ:https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Nicotine_It_may_have_a_good_side+&cd=26&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And the scarier quote is this one: _" Because, you know the [Warren Buffett] expression about compound interest. ... [G]ive us billionaires an extra hundred years and you'll know what ... wealth disparity looks like."_

Having a large ranch of data cows is one of the ways of getting there.

<comment><USER33> It's worth noting that a hundred years ago, people were saying that about Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie. Today the phenomena is exactly the same but the people are different.

Compound interest only works if you can maintain your returns without going negative. Even ignoring death & family members, the world changes around you and your mental models become outdated. A hundred years ago, investing in steel, oil, and automobiles was a sure path to riches. Now, not so much.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, no. Money tends to stay around.

[https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence- in-14...](https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-1427-are- still-the-richest-families-in-florence/)

The Rockefellers are still the 24th-richest family in the US: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2016/06/29/billion-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2016/06/29/billion- dollar-clans-americas-25-richest-families-2016/#3984cb3232f5)

Sure, it takes work keeping up - the Vanderbilts are a great example of what not to do - but money does usually beget money.

Carnegie is, I think, the most interesting example: He gave away almost all his money. His belief was summed up with "The man who dies rich, dies disgraced".

The Carnegie Corporation (a foundation), however, held on to the money neatly - their current endowment is $3 bln.

<comment><USER33> 24th richest with $11B spread across 174 surviving heirs doesn't seem all that rich to me. That averages out to about $60M/heir, which is about what you get for selling a medium-sized technology company with cofounders & investors, or a relatively small one you own yourself, or owning 0.01% of Facebook or Google (roughly first 50-100 employees, if my equity experience with other startups is any guide).

<comment><USER35> With $60m you can live a very nice lifestyle without ever having to work a day in your life. I think that's pretty much the definition of rich.

Just because you can sell a company for that much money doesn't mean it's not a lot of money

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't think that this leap of efficiency in "exploiting human psychology" is anything different from propaganda/marketing leaps of previous aeons. Reading the books of the past, they felt equally exploitative and novel back then.

We've coped with that, our descendants will cope with social networks we've created, as well. Attention management and rapid critical thinking would become as crucial mental capacities as IQ and EQ are today.

If, of course, smart people acquiring these skills over the next generations are still going to have descendants and the volume is significant enough, because typical "exploited" subjects are going to, you bet.

</comment><comment><USER37> Wanted to share something that I think is relevant to this discussion. I'm an avid listener of Rogan's podcast and I found his recent interview [1] with Sebastian Junger very insightful. Junger is a journalist who spent a lot of time with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. He talks a lot about how social media makes us asocial and how a lot of people who experienced war and turmoil oddly miss the experience because it brought everyone closer together and gave everyone purpose, much like what used to happen when societies were tribal. It's a long interview but I would highly recommend giving it a listen.

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

</comment><comment><USER38> Hereis a great talk by Simon Sinek on how these dopamine hits and how technology are affecting the millennial generation

[https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU](https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNU)

<comment><USER39> Good one

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Name recognition is not important in Presidential elections anymore as a way to predict who will win. In the days of massive social media, all candidates have name recognition.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Because I'm a billionaire, I'm going to have access to better health care so ... I'm going to be like 160 and I'm going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords."

Not really an 'immortal overload' but closer to a vampire seeing all of your friends & family pass away while you never age and only those that you decide to keep are allowed to continue living until they arent.

</comment><comment><USER42> > exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with

The hubris! Napster wasn't his idea or tech, Facebook wasn't his idea or tech. This man is the most undeservedly rewarded person in tech history. The commentary that we're dissecting here is tepid and late.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sean Parker has a knack for making billions of dollars off of unethical behavior.

</comment><comment><USER44> 1) It's not just children's brains.

2) That said, when parents use technology as a pacifier, baby sitter, etc. why is that acceptable?

3) Let's say Parker is correct. What are the long term implications? Is The Matrix closer than we hope?

</comment><comment><USER45> This guy just comes off as really full of himself. With the amount of money and success he has had he can be that all he wants, he earned it I guess. But he still comes off as a pompous bitch.

</comment><comment><USER46> "Make them drop their "brains." It's cleaner."

</comment><comment><USER47> Setting aside addictiveness, it's way too spammy, trying to get you to do work to juice some PM's engagement #s. Deleted my acct.

</comment><comment><USER48> Then spend the billions you made off fb taking it down, Sean.

<comment><USER49> I think cancer immunotherapy research is a far better use of his money than "taking down" a social network (with what, guns?)

I've got plenty of critical things to say about social panopticons, but perspective, please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> " _Because I 'm a billionaire, I'm going to have access to better health care so ... I'm going to be like 160 and I'm going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords. [Laughter] Because, you know the [Warren Buffett] expression about compound interest. ... [G]ive us billionaires an extra hundred years and you'll know what ... wealth disparity looks like._"

After Peter Thiel's blood thing, and quotes like this, I think the French were a little too hard on Marie Antoinette.

<comment><USER51> I think this was intended to be ironic? Thought it's funny.

<comment><USER52> Ironic? He's just perceptive and doesn't fool himself.

He sees what he and his friends are doing as potentially immoral and, by telling us, his conscience is asking us to stop him and his friends. At the same time, he's gloating about getting away with it and profiting handsomely. He believes he can't be stopped -- even if he tells us all about what they will do.

He won't stop by himself. It's in his self-interest. He enjoys the power and the technological challenge.

<comment><USER50> If only someone would stop him!

Not holding my breath though. Years from now, he and Thiel will probably be chilling in their dr. evil compounds in new zealand while the rest of us are fighting it out over scraps in apocalypto-shanty-town USA.

<comment><USER52> I have no hope as well. It's the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> " _The inventors, creators — it 's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway._"

All of the recent social media handwringing looks more like dismay over alt- right shitposters co-opting their psyops weapon than a moral awakening.

</comment><comment><USER53> does beyonce exploit human psychology to make addictive music?

does j.k. rowling exploit human psychology to make addictive novels?

does steven spielberg exploit human psychology to make addictive films?

could downvoters explain why it's evil for facebook to present interesting content but not for the individuals above or publishers like the NY Times, who tweak headlines and article content?

<comment><USER54> This comment is pretty disingenuous. It's one thing to create a compelling piece of art; it's another thing entirely to create a platform with no real intention beyond sucking in eyeballs for advertisers.

<comment><USER53> facebook allows people to connect and communicate with friends across the world. profiting from ads is one intent, but it feels biased to say it is the only real intention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Facebook cares about EARNINGS, every quarter. The same thing that made Sean Parker super rich. Not "exploiting human psychology" isn't in their 10k report or mission statement. Yeah, they care about the world being connected or whatever, so they can serve ads.</comment>


DragonFly BSD 4.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release42/ <comment> vezzy-fnord Good to see progress on HAMMER2. The removal of SCTP is a very interesting decision. reapctl(2) has since been renamed to procctl(2), I believe.

DragonFly BSD is an amazing OS that really pushes the limits of the Unix paradigm. For instance, things like process checkpointing as a single syscall with two flags of CKPT_FREEZE and CKPT_THAW, among many other things [1] [2]. Elegant simplicity and powerful functionality.

Any self-respecting Unix (particularly Linux) developer needs to check it out and preferably steal a feature or two. DF is a middle ground between Unix workstation and cluster OS. Anything you do on that ground is bound to be more interesting than Docker.

I've always wondered if someone could add some polish and marketing to make DragonFly a solid competitor to the likes of CoreOS and Mesosphere. It already has similar features neatly integrated with a low cognitive usage overhead, so it's mostly a matter of being a good salesperson.

[1] [http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/](http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/)

[2] [https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/DragonFly_Techno...](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/DragonFly_Technologies/)

<comment><USER2> I'm in favor of Dragonfly removing SCTP. It was okay on paper but never saw adoption and was basically doomed after most firewalls were configured to block it--this is why people are building their own transports on top of UDP these days. It would almost be impossible to launch a new IP magic protocol number now.

I dig the other stuff that Dragonfly is doing too. I've been a longtime BSD fan and I like that there is a strong-willed counterpoint to FreeBSD with a different architectural philosophy. The pressure pushes FreeBSD forward faster than if Dragonfly wasn't around.

<comment><USER3> SCTP is very much alive and kicking. In fact I have just been debugging an issue with it before reading this post. It's used between Mobile Network Elements, especially in the 4G Space, as the transport that DIAMETER sit on top of.

So I agree it's niche, but it's far from a failure.

<comment><USER2> It's cool to hear someone using it, but it's still doomed to be relegated to use inside private networks versus being used as a general use internet transport protocol, which was the point I was making.

<comment><USER3> Ahh, yes. I agree, there's very little SCTP used in public networks.

<comment><USER4> NAT being the big reason. Ironically now more than ever before is the time for NAT to disappear as IPv6 is deployed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been keeping track of DFly BSD for a while now, and I really like where it is headed. The network stack alone is polished enough that if I were to, say, start a local ISP, I would probably be using it as the primary backend.

Dillon's decision to support only x86-x64 I think was a good choice because it helped reduced the workload associated with his multiprocessing/threading system, which is another awesome set of features that I have a feeling will end up forcing Linux and Mach to re-evaluate how they do some things.

For me, I think it may be time to move it out of a VM and onto a semi-regular use machine bare metal.

Once Hammer2 is prod ready I have a feeling I may like it better than ZFS or BTRFS, but only time will tell I suppose.

<comment><USER6> I've recently learnt they are rewriting IPFW ([https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/ipfw2/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/ipfw2/)) to fully take advantage of DFly's features. Eventhough I am not particularly fond of IPFW's syntax and prefer PF it's nice to see that a good SMP friendly firewall is in the works.

<comment><USER7> "Eventhough I am not particularly fond of IPFW's syntax and prefer PF it's nice to see that a good SMP friendly firewall is in the works."

OpenBSD is slowly working to make PF SMP friendly: [http://quigon.bsws.de/papers/2015/asiabsdcon/mgp00033.html](http://quigon.bsws.de/papers/2015/asiabsdcon/mgp00033.html)

<comment><USER8> So is NetBSD[0]... exciting times in *BSD-land...

[0] [http://www.netbsd.org/~rmind/npf/](http://www.netbsd.org/~rmind/npf/)

<comment><USER9> npf is not pf, if that's what you're implying (can't tell?)

<comment><USER8> ah no -- I was only talking about multiprocessor-ifying packet management.

edit: s/package management/packet management/

<comment><USER9> oh, ok, yes -- this is getting traction in almost every project. It's nice to see this won't be a bottleneck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >GCC 5

A bit surprising for a BSD project, seeing as 4.2.1 was the last GPLv2-licensed release and most of the rest of the BSD communities seem, shall we say, not too enthusiastic about GPLv3.

<comment><USER11> NetBSD also isn't bothered much the GPLv3 change of gcc, NetBSD 7 will ship with gcc 4.8</comment></comment>


Node Knockout entries are up - <AUTHOR> http://nodeknockout.com/teams

<comment><USER3> Node Knockout was a hell of a lot of fun. Joyent should get mad props for opening up their space like they did (and if you were in the crowd who couldn't make it, try to do so next time, provided they do it again - <USER2> worth it!).

My team and I made <http://nodeknockout.com/teams/anansi>, which was pretty fun to work on. Actually gave me a lot of material for some writing, because there's quite a bit of hackery we ended up doing behind the scenes to get it to work properly. Extremely fun to push new tech like this.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not really furnished to best, but worth checking out, a Hacker News Reader <http://nko-naughtify.heroku.com/reader>. Appreciate the attention. Really sorry for self promotion :)

<comment><USER5> I like it! I wish I didn't find it cuz my 'noprocast' settings are gonna be hackable in a way :-) Guess what I'm saying is it's really quite good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My Node KO entry is like jsfiddle, but with an event bus and built-in js templates (like erb or jsp). I'll add persistence at some later date.

<http://nodeknockout.com/teams/pants-pants-evolution>

</comment><comment><USER7> I had a great time! Node KO was fun.

I've learned a lot and loved the opportunity to have an excuse to gather my brother and friends from other nearby cities in my apartment for coding and hack on ideas that fills my archive of notes-that-wont-see-the-light-of-day…

Our entry is this one <http://umeboshi-fireteam.no.de> a communication server to be used by web-apps (and webpage) developers that want to distribute the UI control elements over multiple (mobile) devices. Make sure you check out the examples :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Node Knockout was an amazing experience for us (2 person team). Lots of fun and learning!

In one week-end, we learned how to use : RaphaelJS, node.js and Socket.IO (websockets library)

We made a multiplayer geo game at <http://nodeknockout.com/teams/error-500>

</comment><comment><USER9> It was a ton of fun and a great chance to learn about node.js.

My team made a simple file sharing application, <http://nodeknockout.com/teams/done-js>. Our app does not host the upload, it merely connects the sharer to clients over HTTP.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could not deliver my simple multiplayer game.. Will try to finish in the week...

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://nodeknockout.com/teams/celestial-being> ftw

<comment><USER6> Way to go! Single-person teams are really in a minority here. I like the idea and your design is clean. Upvoted.

<comment><USER11> thank you man, was a lot of work</comment></comment></comment>


Need a UI/UX Designer - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I'm looking to hire a UI/UX designer to work on an entire overhaul for our online billing website. Please post your resume. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'd be interested in talking, if you send a quick note to firstname.lastname@example.com i'll forward my resume

Or see linkedin.com/in/fhashemi</comment>


Startup Quote: Thomas Edison, Co-founder, General Electric - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/11990980073

<comment><AUTHOR> The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

\- Thomas Edison

<http://startupquote.com/post/11990980073></comment>


'Alien Bugs' Discovered In Earth's Atmosphere - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1143906/alien-bugs-discovered-in-earths-atmosphere <comment><USER2> Oh come on, what a lot of crap.

So our understanding of how tiny particles move in the upper atmosphere is so perfect that it's more likely we would find alien bugs than be wrong about how particles move up there?

I mean, we have a pretty good understanding of the millions of miles of vacuum separating us from any other world. It might be just a little harder for bug parts to escape the gravity well of another planet, travel through space, and then float around in our upper atmosphere than it would be for us to be slightly less than perfect in our understanding of how high the wind can blow little flakes of dust. In fact, assuming these aren't bugs that live in the vacuum of space, wouldn't they have had to pass through the upper atmosphere of wherever they came from before they could have then jumped to be floating around in space, so they could get here?

I will now mock this in the form of a Holmes mystery:

"So how did the Murder happen, Sherlock?"

"Clearly the butler could not have used the car, as we know it did not have enough gas to make it to where the body was found. We also know that no other person was near enough to the crime to have committed the foul act."

"But what could have happened my dear Holmes?"

"Aliens from Neptune murdered this man."

"You can imply the existence of aliens from a murder, fantastic... But Holmes, how could the aliens have moved the body?"

"Elementary my dear Watson, they stole the key from the butler and used the car."

"Astounding Holmes!"

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Bullshit. Contamination (human error) seems far more likely than extra- terrestrial origins. The best comment from that page:

WHAT ARE THE MACROMOLECULAR COMPOSITION & THEIR GENETIC MATERIALS OF THE SUPPOSEDLY EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL MICRO-ORGANISMS?

Are the 'ET organism' genetic materials also based a polymer of nucleotides (like those on earth), whereby each nucleotide composed of one of the 4 nucleobase (with base adenine, thymine, guanine or cytosine), a 5-carbon sugar (either ribose or 2-deoxyribose) & one or more phosphate groups. DNA profiles are made up of various combinations of the 4 forms (polymers) of nucleotides.

For earth organisms (i.e. viruses, microorganisms, plants, animals), each codon (comprises of 3 nucleobase) code one of the specific 20 amino-acids (AA) of living organisms. A chain of codon in DNA would therefore specify UNIQUE AA chain – i.e. PROTEIN (like protein like enzymes, hormone, co-factors, etc), hence its unique form & function.

Although if Earth life originated from the same extra-terrestrial source, this wouldn't be able to rule out that scenario.

<comment><USER4> Is the opposite of a 'far more' likely possibility, 'bullshit'? A bit harsh unless you can offer a critique of their methods.

<comment><USER3> No, but I can still call bullshit like a poker player against someone claiming to have a royal flush. He might really have it, but I know the odds are heavily in my favor. This claim is made too strongly and too soon (maybe that's the fault of the media and not the scientists involved.) It is very hard to prevent contamination, something which has confounded the best and brightest at NASA time and again. I also know that when people say it's impossible for particles of that size to get up to that altitude, they are making a lot of assumptions about a very complex system. It's very likely that the correct explanation is human error, either in decontamination or in flawed assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hell of a lot of absolute declarations ya got thar, Professor Wainwright.

</comment><comment><USER6> >The findings are to be published in the Journal of Cosmology.

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology)

<comment><USER7> I think [http://journalofcosmology.com/](http://journalofcosmology.com/) itself is better at telling you how ridiculous the Journal of Cosmology is.

<comment> dan-g The amazing thing is that Wikipedia says it was founded in 2009. Yet their website looks like it's straight out of ... 1996?

<comment><USER8> The website was formed in 1996, the light from the website only reached Earth in 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well they certainly look cool, but a DNA analysis might be nice...

</comment><comment><USER10> >"Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here."

>"If life does continue to arrive from space then we have to completely change our view of biology and evolution," Prof Wainwright added. "New textbooks will have to be written."

I think that really sums it up nicely.

</comment><comment><USER11> What about the isotope ratios? Different locations tend to have different isotope ratios, which is the standard way of finding the originating body of a space object.

<comment><USER3> Apparently they plan to repeat the experiment in six months during another meteor shower and test for isotope ratios, so that will lay the issue to rest.</comment></comment>


Tether Critical Announcement - <AUTHOR> https://tether.to/tether-critical-announcement/ <comment><USER2> If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters:

Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement.

The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires. Their clients have ~$400M of USD on deposit with Bitfinex. Their solution: issue a cryptocurrency which is claimed to be 100% backed by USD and say that it is redeemable 1-to-1 for dollars... we just can't actually physically give you the dollars.

Incredibly, this has worked so far. Bitfinex has issued approximately $600 million in tethers, all but $10 million or so in the last 6 months. They're usable on a handful of exchanges, for the purpose of buying BTC and other cryptocurrencies.

Tether claims that someone has stolen 5% or so of their $600 million tethers -- the digital claims, not the underlying dollars sitting at their totally- exists-we-promise bank account. They've made a technological change to the Omni client to disallow transactions on the stolen tokens, but there is no guarantee that they succeed in convincing all parties to use this.

The nightmare scenario for them is 1+ exchanges say "Well, actually, we rely on your money actually being money to list it here, so pick: we delist you or we don't, but we don't have any incentive to apply that patch." [0] The thief immediately exfiltrates to Bitcoin, and suddenly 30 million hot tethers are contaminating the money stream at the exchange, and they cannot be conveniently disambiguated from clean tethers, because money is fungible.

Hilarity then ensues, for values of hilarity which probably mean "bank run" on a bank which is structurally incapable of paying out most holders of money.

[0] Why does Bitfinex care whether their cryptocurrency is listed at other exchanges? Because they need to launder money to support their exchange business. Tethers are institutionalizing a sort of crypto-hawala (or crypto- Liberty Reserve), allowing the physical transfer of real money to happen at legal remoteness to the cryptocurrency exchange.

Bitfinex has an order book filled with something people want. A way to get access to that orderbook is to say "Bitfinex, I want some tether, how do you sell them to me if you can't accept a wire?" Bitfinex might say "Are you a trustworthy US VC? Spiffy. Move $20 million from your left hand pocket to your right hand pocket. The right hand pocket is now ours; here's $20 to $21 million in Tether, which are good for BTC at your favorite exchanges. At some time in the future, a trustworthy US VC other than yourself is going to ask you to buy some tether from them at par value. You will do that, and pay them from your right pocket. If a regulator asks you about this transaction, you bat your eyes and say 'Oh, sophisticated investors doing a cryptocurrency transaction, nothing to see here.'"

Post-script: Is this good news for Bitcoin? Oh this is _great_ news for Bitcoin. If you don't believe Bitfinex's $600 million in liabilities are worth a copper shilling, the only option for getting your value out of Bitfinex is to swap your liability for Bitcoin, which drives up the price of Bitcoin at the margin.

This is exactly what happened in the final months of Mt. Gox.

<comment><USER3> ...except that Tether long predates Bitfinex's wire issues. They're usable on _many_ of the major exchanges (Bittrex, Poloniex, for example). Tether was explicitly created for the purpose of equalizing prices across exchanges. It's indeed possible that they're insolvent, but there is no real evidence of that, just lots of people speculating incessantly without much justification.

Basically everything about the parent comment is factually incorrect. I'm not sure why it's so upvoted. I guess people just like scandal in the cryptocurrency world and would prefer to believe what comports with their preconceptions.

<comment><USER4> I've been in Bitcoin for over 7 years. This type of back and forth is exactly what happened to Mt Gox. And you know what? My friend got the fuck out of Mt Gox before it burst.

When you have to choose between following a pre-bankrun rumour or following unsubstantiated pushback, follow the rumour. It costs you maybe 5% to get out vs 100% if you're wrong and banks / money holders compete on assuring people that there is less risk with their solution so if Tether can't provide assurance then that is their problem. Cut and run.

<comment><USER5> On a side note, the fact that bank runs are rational decisions and that no FDIC-style agency exists to change the incentives seems bad for cryptocurrency in general.

(Possible responses include both "the traditional financial system and fiat currency is actually pretty good" and "someone should run a reliable FDIC equivalent as a business for new exchanges and new coins".)

<comment><USER6> Isn't a bank run only an issue if the bank is using a fractional reserve? Cryptocurrency exchanges aren't banks; they're not supposed to keep a fractional reserve. If everyone suddenly demands all their coins at once, the exchange should have no trouble complying with that.

The only problem is that there's no way to know for sure whether an exchange is running on a fractional reserve or not.

<comment><USER4> The issue is that they do run fractional reserves, even if they aren't supposed to. Much like banks of the 1600s.

<comment><USER3> They claim that they don't. If they do, that is a serious problem. Some of the exchanges have, but there is no evidence i'm aware of that points to any of the current major exchanges running a fractional reserve.

<comment><USER4> The issue is that once there is evidence there is a bank run. Mt Gox wasn't supposed to, but they did. And there are others out there that I hear rumours about having 5 or 10% of their reserves stolen from hot wallets. Sure it's fine if there is never a run, but it's worth pointing out that this is a real threat vector.

<comment><USER3> Ya, no argument from me there. It's definitely a threat. I just don't think it should be stated as fact that they do run fractional reserves without evidence of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc).

Try to look at all this holistically.

How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the lines working?

All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but honestly it really feels like dimished returns in the grand scheme of things.

So many people make money by keeping track of money. So much resources. I can't even fathom it.

Bankers, store clerks, amazon servers, politicians, Dunbar, Stock markets, its crazy.

How much do we allocate to this cause, the cause of keeping track of "who owns what"?

This is not rhetorical, If I had to guess, I would guess that 70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense.

Just think we are mining coal out of the real ground just to mine these "valuable" ones and zeros. What the actual fuck?

It all just seems like a waste.

Use my empty clock cycles to mine and keep track of everyone's virtual coins?

I was behind folding proteins and SETI, and all the other distributed computing ideas. It felt meaningful, like I could help change the world and help raise up the human condition...

Thanks to this post, I just learned what "Tethers" are, and I have to say, I'm so fucking disappointed with this part of the industry.

One of the early promises of cryptocurrency was to "sick it to the man and governments". Now its powered largely by greed and consuming our most important resources in breakneck speeds.

I wish you all luck this this "investment", hopefully the planet will survive this next abstraction of "money".

<comment><USER8> Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinatorial coordination of signals/information on resources between 7+ billion unfathomably complex and independent agents. To me, the staggering thing wouldn't be that "70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense", but rather that the technology known as money is so incredibly efficient that it leaves 30% surplus (in this example) for society to further grow.

<comment><USER9> Really?

You really think that having only 30% of output go into actual, productive endeavour would be a good thing?

It just screams of a completely broken system to me, and inefficiency.

I could understand if your attitude was that, well, it seems it had to be this way, it's the best we can do. But to actually celebrate a ~2:1 ratio of fund- shuffling busywork over production seems crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I work in the sector right now, I'm happy to get paid for it, and I can see a use for what I'm doing (exposing data for use in new services) but really not so much when it comes to using distributed supercomputers and thousands of coders to try to predict tiny market movements. And really not "burning energy as fast as possible to (adversarially) compute transactions on a shared ledger".

<comment><USER10> Just what exactly is your definition of an "actual, productive endeavour"?

Is it really that ridiculous that we dedicate a lot of resources to keeping track of who owns what? We're a mostly capitalist society, right? In a system where private ownership reigns supreme, you absolutely need to keep track of who owns what or we'd have even greater wealth inequality than we have now. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of anarcho-syndicalist structure but let's be honest our greatx10 grandchildren will probably still be capitalists.

This article is a little over-the-top in some spots, but the main point is correct. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in accounting: [https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most- importan...](https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-important- invention-in-the-last-500-years-c90b0151c169)

Cryptocurrencies are trying to make trustless transactions a reality so we don't need a human workforce to keep it all _mostly_ accurate. Don't get too disappointed yet, this stuff is just getting started.

<comment><USER9> A "lot" of resources would be 1% IMHO.

If society is burning up not just a lot, but a majority of its effort in servicing its model (resource tracking), it seems to me something has gone very very wrong.

You need to keep track of who owns what. You don't need to make that such a complicated thing that it takes vast portions of available human effort to track, and sucks in vast portions of the fruits of said effort.

You don't have to be an anarchist to think that that's ridiculous.

We can do that with trust and the vast majority of people don't care.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree that it's a depressing waste of existence to spend one's life keeping track of stuff. Especially if it's not even your stuff. But we've only had the computing power to take a load off us humans for a decade or two. And plus everyone needs a job (pointless or not) or the unemployment statistics start to freak people out. It's sort of the hand we've been dealt, the whole "let's work hard now for a better future we'll never see" thing.

I think the situation will improve dramatically when some of these crypto projects begin to mature. From what I can tell, blockchains are the opposite of lightweight, and personally I'm not holding my breath for one to become useful for anything besides profit anytime soon. I think something like IOTA is a better candidate to be useful (a fee-less directed acyclic graph, not a blockchain). It's more like a new communications protocol that will allow machines to conduct their own transactions with each other. The team's goal is to make it useful first, and if it's profitable too well that's great. Maybe I'm just not that creative anymore, but I can't see a production-quality future for blockchains, and would agree that giant PNW datacenters doing nothing but proof-of-work is a massive waste of resources.

That said, these are mostly just research projects hoping they have one of the big ideas that will win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's some more context:

Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank cut them off.

Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x.

No one really knows how much of that corresponds to actual USD or if anyone can actually withdraw. A famous twitter account ([https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed)) points out every day the ostensible discrepancies between the supposed AUM and public amounts.

I'm generally a huge fan of the goal of Tether (a stable USD backed cryptocurrency), but the proof is in the pudding (i.e the reserves) and your access to it, and both of these are rather questionable.

Full disclosure: I know and am friends with some of the current Tether team and was recruited for RealCoin in the early stages of the project. They are working on a hard problem (asset-backed cryptocurrency on the way that gets the most traction in the market at present, not necessarily the way that inspires the most confidence.

<comment><USER12> Tell your friends they should shutdown the company immediately to avoid prison time. Using USD to back any token or digital asset 1:1 is a serious crime as demonstrated by Liberty Reserve.

<comment><USER13> What...? Liberty Reserve was a money laundering operation and had nothing to do with 1:1 or whatever. If there's something in the US Criminal Code about that, you need to cite it but I believe there isn't.

<comment><USER14> Tether does seem to suffer from exact same problems as LR though, no?

It's structured in a manner that makes it trivial to establish third party exchangers with no KYC processes. There is no KYC for individual Tether users, who only need to generate a bitcoin address to get started.

Only time they do KYC is when you want to exchange via Tether website directly, which is no different from what LR did IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I released a paper earlier this year talking about how we can reasonably lock cryptocurrency to fiat, but unfortunately the space is still rather immature. A single provider of USD tokens is extremely dangerous. Best case scenario would be if there were many companies like Tether and you could spread your token purchases between them automatically to minimize counterparty risk. Stellar and Ripple are closest to solving this since they have fiat trading pairs for each trusted exchange on their network. In the future that could mean issuance from hundreds of banks.

Here is the paper if anyone is interested: [https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin- Volatility-...](https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility- Removal-via-Crypto-Token-Asset-Baskets.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Ripple is a scam and Jed McCaleb has been dumping thousands of Ripples a day since forever. You shouldn't encourage new users to buy Ripples.

<comment><USER16> Ripple is a scam it also predates Bitcoin entire thing was a sever to server bank basically

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Twitter account @Bitfinexed [1] has been calling out Tether and Bitfinex for possible fraud for a while. Time for popcorn, see how this plays out.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed)

<comment><USER18> A lot of good reads on the Medium [1] as well.

[1]: [https://medium.com/@bitfinexed](https://medium.com/@bitfinexed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> $30M here, $30M there... by all means, please keep proving to me how secure and stable smart contracts are!

I'm indifferent on bitcoin, it's a cool idea but there seem to be a lot of these "hammer everything" types that are doing it a disservice across the board.

<comment><USER20> Tethers are not smart contracts. It's a separate crypto blockchain currency from Bitcoin and it claims to have a near 1:1 ratio with the USD, hence the name...it's "tethered" to the USD. This is not unlike some foreign currencies.

<comment><USER21> Well, it is "supposedly" backed up by USD.

A whole bunch of people have been questioning whether they ACTUALLY have that money, very recently, and surprise surprise, there just 'happens' to be a hack that happens right now.

<comment><USER22> Not sure if "a whole bunch of people" equates more than 5 extremely vocal people on twitter and reddit.

Tether published an audit a month ago.

<comment><USER23> It's time for a new kind of bank - a transparent bank.

Exchanges could publish a daily report of their bank account balances for each currency along with a daily message signed by each cold-storage key.

And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each account, which ties out to the bank's balance sheet.

We wouldn't need to rely on historical audits, because we could do our own automated audit every day.

Transparent exchanges with transparent bank accounts would attract funds away from secretive exchanges with secret bank accounts.

<comment><USER22> After the fall of mt. gox there was a huge push to get exchanges to do this.

My guess is that the costs of doing this (security is quite hard: anything that can sign messages using cold storage keys can obviously also empty the cold storage, since transactions are simply signed messages) does not outweigh the demand for this. Most traders don't care (and subsequently get burned).

> And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each > account

I think this is a terrible idea though. Even if done anonymous it gives way too much information about a market and its participants. IMO just use a merkle tree so everyone can check their own balance.

<comment><USER24> There is no such thing as "too much information about a market".

<comment><USER22> Anyone with a lot of AUM looking to invest would beg to differ - or well, they might use the information while trading on a different exchange.

Also draws a nice crosshair on your exchange, so that hackers can exactly calculate cost/benefits as well as learn from your systems (how you divide your cold storage over different addresses, how that changes over time, how money from different dummy accounts effects cold storage in what way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't tether the one that screwed up? They are the ones who got stolen from, why do other exchanges have to bend over backwards and issue updates?

If the attacker is moving fast enough, exchanges probably can't even respond in time. That shouldn't mean that they lose money. If tether reserves the right to delist coins at any time without much notice, why would you ever consider that a safe asset to accept?

<comment><USER26> Situation seems analogous to DAO hack. It was DAO who got stolen, Ethereum was fine, no Ethereum software had to bend over backwards to follow hard fork. Still, it seems post-ETH/ETC-fork ETH is doing fine, and sometimes even considered a safe asset to accept.

<comment><USER27> Problem is the tether is allready spent. So the exchanges where the tether is spent is paying it out their pockets, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tether is handling this completely wrong. They should not hard fork Omni and force everyone to blacklist addresses. Instead, tell everyone to halt on-chain trading, take a snapshot of the chain, then create a new tether token and send them to everyone holding the old tethers (minus the thief). I think the bitcoins Tether would have to pay in transfer fees would be a fitting punishment for their poor security.

<comment><USER29> You can't just keep hard forking even time something had happens. The problem is inherit to digital assets: they can be hacked.

<comment><USER20> Banks can be robbed, museums can be swindled, even credit bureaus like Equifax can get hacked. There's no such thing as hack-proof. That some cryptos will hard fork and adjust shows that the system can heal itself and not be in a permanent state of disrepair. That's not a bad thing at all.

<comment><USER30> It's a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account.

Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we'd at least save a bunch of CO2 emissions.

<comment><USER28> >the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account

This is just giving sentimentality an economic value. Forking should constantly be considered, you should always be looking to maximize the value of your stake.

Imagine two coins A & B with exactly the same distribution, except in coin A a real jerk has 10% of the coins and you know his addresses. You also know almost all of the holders also consider this guy a jerk who will not contribute to positively to the value of the coin (at least not 110%). Its in everyone's best interest to just erase this jerk from the ledger and choose B, everyone ends up with 110% of their original stake.

<comment><USER31> That's literally the tyranny of the majority. Who determines what the majority is? 90% in your example, but what if 65% of people do the same and wipe 35% out? That could easily be done by buying enough of the coins / merging with enough of the users.

That scenario is completely ridiculous and unacceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether > treasury wallet […]

> […] they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD.

How will this ever work in real life?

If I yesterday — right after the hack, but before the announcement — in good faith received $1m in USDT, and paid in Bitcoin, who's liable?

In effect, this policy just shifts the financial burden to innocent people, who may have paid e.g. Bitcoin in exchange for "fake" USDT in good faith.

The issuer needs to take sole responsibility for this. Not because it's the right thing to do, but because the USDT is useless otherwise. How can it be used for payments if the issuer can make a blog post saying "by the way, if you received USDT from this guy then you have nothing"?

<comment><USER33> Presumably the stolen coins have not been spent yet.

> The attacker is holding funds in the following address: > 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of > the stolen tokens

Rip Tether. I'd expect everyone to stop accepting Tether transactions effective immediately. Tether just made their own security breach a collective responsibility. Now you have two types of coins: the clean ones and tainted ones that are useless.

<comment><USER16> What they mean I think is that they have hard-forked their underlying blockchain technology (Omni in this case) and it has a Ethereum Classic style check in it not allowing a specific TX/wallet

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Grab your popcorn, this is just the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER36> I came across this last weekend, which you may find helpful reading for more context on potential fraud with tether and Bitfinex: [https://twitter.com/bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/bitfinexed)

</comment><comment><USER37> Looking at the attacker's address in Omni Explorer: [https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPt...](https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r)

I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct?

They are currently holding $30.9M USDT. If they transfer this to another USDT address, I assume it would show up here, like the 3 inbound tx from 31okFF1rUu8jjPEVuajycTRBp82Nteo4Mv that makes up their balance.

But what if they want to cash out to BTC? If they bought on Bitfinex with their USDT would another transaction appear? And could it then be tracked to the BTC blockchain explorer?

It was claimed that the stolen USDT could be mixed into the main supply of BTC, but I'm failing to understand how that would happen, as it seems traceable from the public addresses.

<comment><USER26> > I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain > addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct?

Yes. Tether is so-called Smart Property (with Property ID 31) stored using Omni Layer. Omni Layer stores transactions on Bitcoin Blockchain. Transaction data is encoded as output script, which uses OP_RETURN opcode and zero value. OP_RETURN opcode allows 80 bytes of data. Omni Layer uses 4 bytes ("omni") of 80 as a prefix to coexist with other systems using OP_RETURN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm super pumped and bullish about crypto and the whole idea of a decentralized world, but there's so much money involved right now (most of it speculative money, and arguably lots of illegal money), that there needs to be some real measures to ensure the security around it.

Crypto has made it easy for people to essentially start a bank, without actually thinking too much about or knowing how to build a vault properly.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here's the text since it seems to be overloaded (italics theirs):

#Tether Critical Announcement

Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet through malicious action by an external attacker. _Tether integrators must take immediate action, as discussed below, to prevent further ecosystem disruption._

$30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address. As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will _not_ redeem any of the stolen tokens, and we are in the process of attempting token recovery to prevent them from entering the broader ecosystem. The attacker is holding funds in the following address: 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r. If you receive any USDT tokens from the above address, or from any downstream address that receives these tokens, _do not accept them, as they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD._

The following steps have been taken to address this matter:

1\. The tether.to back-end wallet service has been temporarily suspended. A thorough investigation on the cause of the attack is being undertaken to prevent similar actions in the future.

2\. We are providing new builds of Omni Core to the community. (Omni Core is the software used by Tether integrators to support Omni Layer transactions.) These builds should prevent any movement of the stolen coins from the attacker's address. We strongly urge all Tether integrators to install this software _immediately_ to prevent the coins from entering the ecosystem. Again, any tokens from the attacker's address _will not be redeemed_. Accordingly, any and all exchanges, wallets, and other Tether integrators should install this software immediately in order to prevent loss:

[https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s](https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s)

Note that this software will cause a consensus change to currently running Omni Core clients, meaning that it is effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer. Integrators running this build will not accept any token sends from the attacker's address, preventing the coins from moving further from the attacker's address.

3\. We are working with the Omni Foundation to investigate ways that will allow Tether to reclaim stranded tokens and rectify the hard fork created by the above software. Once this protocol enhancement is complete, the Omni Foundation will provide updated binaries for all integrators to install. These builds will supersede the binaries provided above by Tether.to. After the protocol upgrades to the Omni Layer are in place, Tether will reclaim the stolen tokens and return them to treasury.

Tether issuances have not been affected by this attack, and all Tether tokens remain fully backed by assets in the Tether reserve. The only tokens that will not be redeemed are the ones that were stolen from Tether treasury yesterday. Those tokens will be returned to treasury once the Omni Layer protocol enhancements are in place.

We will provide further updates as they come available, and we appreciate the community's patience, understanding, and support while we work to rectify the situation in the best possible manner to everyone's benefit.

The Tether Team

</comment><comment><USER40> Cached version: [https://archive.fo/7XoKB](https://archive.fo/7XoKB)

</comment><comment><USER41> Haven't listened to this yet but audio interview with one of Bitfinex's and Tether's main detractors...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY)

</comment><comment><USER42> The advantages of centralisation. You can fork ... without a fork!

</comment><comment><USER43> How are tethers created exactly? Are they not mined? If so, how can they be a cryptocurrency?

</comment><comment><USER29> > _$30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November > 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address_

And will you get it back? By design, no. This is the unfortunate reality of crypto currencies.

</comment><comment><USER44> May be an issue, but $600m / $200b = tiny

</comment><comment><USER45> If you have money on bitfinex, get it out now~

</comment><comment> By-Jokese The page is down, what a coincidence!

</comment><comment><USER46> This week's installment of internet funbux drama.

</comment><comment><USER44> It may be an issue. But $600m / $200b = tiny

</comment><comment><USER47> #buttcoin

<comment><USER16> Use the chrome extension it automatically does it

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to- buttcoi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to- buttcoin/gebbpaadmjjlgjnnljckibmmgkmckdng?hl=en-US)

<comment><USER48> Have all the fun :) While I steadily get rich. I hope they'll make an extension for "fiat money to food on table" when this whole corrupt financial systems comes crashing down (again).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> when you're anxiously waiting for tether to gox the whole market and their critical announcement is ... not that bad

<comment><USER16> Basically clicked it expecting to read what you're describing. I'm not "disappointed" but at the same time I feel the writing is on the wall. I still expect to read something like a MtGox in the next few weeks/months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Bitcoin is crooks' playground! Inside theft, hacks, and everything possible happens as there are enough idiots who hodl and who keep buying at any price in hopes to become millionaires overnight.</comment>


Mask-bot: A robot with a human face - <AUTHOR> http://portal.mytum.de/pressestelle/pressemitteilungen/NewsArticle_20111107_151556/

<comment><USER2> This is cool and I'd love to see it working commercially but the MIT Media Lab demonstrated a nearly identical idea back in the late 1980's. Their digital version was inspired by talking busts at Disney's Haunted Mansion that used film projectors to achieve the same effect back in the 1960's.</comment>


The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later - <AUTHOR> http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2007/07/the-limitations.html

<comment><USER2> Great article and speaking a someone who is actively working with the Netflix prize data on a daily basis the summarize some of the more bizarre quirks of the dataset pretty well. The other problem that he didn't really get into is the sheer size of the dataset, the .txt files are about 4GB in size to hold the 100,480,507 ratings ...

Beyond that I think he missed the really interesting ideas behind the recommender system possibilities. Once a user has enough ratings on movies and there is enough of a cross section of other users rating the same movies the math of the problem starts to create a profile of the user. With that profile it is more likely to be able to find the things the user will find interesting instead of just what the crowd voted most popular.

The real trick is not to use some artificial error measuring method to validate how your algorithm is working but instead to focus on how the recommendation system changes the way the user interacts with your website.

The Netflix prize did a few things that where wonderful for the process of recommendation system, they brought a lot of attention to the field and they gave a huge dataset for people to compare their results with. In the long run, even if no one wins the grand prize, they will have give much more to the field of study then the $1 million.

Oh yeah .. and maybe this January there will be one more YC start-up doing recommendation systems.

<comment><USER3> I will watch that with interest. I have played with Netflix dataset, although not as much as I'd like. You can do a lot of useful things just with it, but in real world it is very useful to use different definition of the problem from the Netflix one. "Similar items" are useful because customers can understand what it means, besides having some abstract "we think you would rate this X".

Also it makes a lot of sense to integrate the other data you have about your items (genre, director). It is actually pretty easy to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From the YC crowd, Reddit and most recently Adpinion seem to try exploiting recommendation systems. My experience with Reddit's "recommended" page tells me it is useless for now. I hope Adpinion doesn't rely solely on getting recommendation system right.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great article. The limit doesn't seem to be in the algorithm (as this article makes clear), it's the ability of a 1 through 5 star system to accurately reflect a person's feelings about a movie.

While algorithms for predicting your upcoming ratings based on your previous ratings may not be able to improve...surely there are some creative ways to re-think the entire system:

Two obvious approaches would be to rate on multiple scales (funniness, intellectual weight, 'light'-ness, etc.), and to include a comment-tracking system alongside the simple rating system to provide a better more complex picture of the film (as Reddit, and YCnews do).</comment>


Moving countries means dropping Office or dropping your existing MS account - <AUTHOR> https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Change-your-billing-information-for-Office-365-for-home-97f4e8f2-a8d6-47e2-8ca8-81667021e87f <comment><AUTHOR> The interesting part (why I've submitted this):

"WARNING: You can't change the country or region that's associated with your account. If you've switched countries and want to change your location, you have to create a new Microsoft account in your new region."

This seems to mean that if you moved countries, you probably stop using the bank accounts in the previous country. But you can't use a French credit card if you have bought Office with a UK credit card -- it is required that the CC belongs to the country of your account. But you can't change your account region. Therefore you have to stop using Office or drop your Microsoft account. Am I missing something?</comment>


Blockchain-Enabled Kiosks Make Coffee Farmers More Money–And Verify Beans - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40405379/these-blockchain-enabled-kiosks-make-coffee-farmers-more-money-and-let-you-verify-your-beans <comment><USER2> Such a cool and pure application of blockchain. I'm still surprised at how slow the financial institutions are adopting.</comment>


Genius Teenagers Develop Theorem That Could Change the Face of Maths - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3304802/Meet-boy-geniuses-developed-math-theorem-calculates-problems-faster-computer-despite-high-school.html <comment><USER2> Is there a sane review of this result? This article is totally overhyped with ridicules claims.</comment>


Build a do-it-yourself home air purifier for about $25 - <AUTHOR> https://www.uofmhealth.org/news/sinus-hepa-0630 <comment><USER2> Am I reading this right, 10% air quality improvement for the diy version vs 100% for a retail device?

<comment><USER2> Um... Why the down vote? "Terrell used a sensitive air-quality meter to demonstrate that one high-end HEPA system brought the particulate count in a dusty room down to virtually zero. His homemade system brought the count down to about 10 percent of its former level."

<comment><USER3> wouldn't that be a 90 % improvement?</comment></comment></comment>


Google Docs for Code Launching on Kickstarter Tuesday. Try It Out Today - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/CodrEditor/status/612243692188008448

<comment><AUTHOR> Codr is a collaborative text editor - like a lightweight Google Docs for code. Codr enables software developers to code together in real-time from anywhere. For web developers, Codr also doubles as a shared reactive work surface: every change is instantly visualized for all viewers via Codr's integrated HTML preview pane.

A Kickstarter campaign for Codr is launching on Tuesday, June 23rd! Codr has been in development for over a year and the initial version is largely complete, but I need your help to bring Codr to the finish line.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow. Codr is a must for long distance pair programming.</comment>