Cryptocurrencies are the tulip mania of the 21st century - <AUTHOR> https://devolutionreview.com/bearish-on-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> Tulip mania was caused by the government changing futures contracts into options. The mania happened in these financial instruments, not actual tulip bulb prices.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Legal_changes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Legal_changes)

Many bubbles are caused by government actions. Our own housing bubble was fomented by numerous bad policies.

Bitcoin is not a creature of government but is actively opposed by many of them.

<comment><USER3> But it doesn't mean that the bubble is not there. Governments don't create bubbles. Human nature does.

<comment><USER4> > Governments don't create bubbles. Human nature does.

And yet, OP just provided evidence of a case where, previously, we assumed a specific asset bubble was caused by "human nature", but in fact it looks like it was created through the government inadvertently creating risk-free speculation in options contracts for this very asset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I consider this clickbait at this point. This is the exact same thing that has been said during every single boom in Bitcoin's history. You may like Bitcoin or not, but the concepts of cryptocurrencies and the technical development that the blockchain represents are here to stay. They are being adopted left and right by the banking sector all around the world.

<comment><USER6> And tulips are still being bought and sold. Bubbles tend to have a life of their own, regardless of the MacGuffin they are organized around.

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

I don't know about cryptocurrencies in general, but ICOs seem to me to be mostly foam.

<comment><USER7> Bubbles also tend to be driven by leveraged investment. See kindleberger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bitcoin has existed for eight years[0] at this point, other cryptocurrencies, such as litecoin, have existed for six years[1]. Tulip mania was fairly short lived with its peak lasting only a few months (November to May)[2].

Yes, the hype is overwhelming but I think tulip mania is bad comparison, a better comparison would be AI winters or tech bubbles.

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

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#History)

<comment><USER9> Tulips had existed for a long time too. Neither tulips nor bitcoin are worthless, both are/were just extremely over valued. The current surge in bitcoin pricing has only really started from May of this year.

The last time this happened with bitcoin about 4 years ago the surge only lasted a couple of months.

<comment><USER8> Tulip supply is inflationary since tulips create more tulips. Bitcoin is more similar to the market over Superman #1 than Tulips, as Bitcoin has a known and fixed supply. However neither Superman #1 nor Tulips are not as liquid or as difficult to counterfeit as Bitcoin. In fact there has never existed a collectible as difficult to counterfeit as Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tulip references are the tulip mania of the 21st century.

<comment><USER11> Disagree! Tulip references are still a buy for the forseeable future.

<comment><USER12> Regardless of whether tulip references are in a bubble, there still remains intrinsic value in a decentralized system that can transfer a tulip reference halfway around the world without fees or government interference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bitcoin certainly has an intrinsic value (because it is a globally accessible medium of exchange). However just like gold its value is also most likely way above its intrinsic value. The intrinsic value of gold primarily consists of industrial applications + jewelry. Compare the price of 1kg of gold to the price of 1kg of palladium: It's $42k vs $29.5k, although palladium is much more important for industrial applications and less common in the earth's crust ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust)). So why does gold have a much higher price? Because people continue to believe in it as a way to store value. The same thing is happening with bitcoin. As long as people believe bitcoin will be useful as an asset the price will stay high. But because of that, bitcoin is a speculative asset just like gold.

<comment><USER12> I seem to recall that the Lakota people and specifically Black Elk would refer to gold as "the yellow metal that drives the wasichus" [white people] "crazy." They had no use for it whatsoever, so its value to them was 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was skeptical of Bitcoin when I first heard of it. Now I think that it's here to stay. I don't think ICOs are a bubble either (not all of them at least). I think that we need more ICOs to increase the capacity of the internet of cryptocurrencies.

Digital currencies address a real problem; government and institutional manipulation of money. Traditionally, everyone has been forced to drink from the same pond; world governments decided what the economic environment would be in any given country - Because of this, some generations or specific groups of people have been set up for failure.

If you're born in a country whose monetary policy or economic environment is working against you; cryptocurrencies provide an idealistic escape hatch; an alternative way of valuing your labour and your potential.

The traditional fiat financial system has been corrupted by an army of traders, venture capitalists, investment bankers, bureaucrats, lobbyists and corrupt politicians; their actions have damaged the public perception of fiat currencies and have been devaluing them.

Fiat currencies are no longer seen as the product of meritocracy; but as the product of luck or corruption.

Regular people are not the ones driving up the price of cryptocurrencies; they're driven up by rich people who are (perhaps inadvertently) voting against the same system which made them rich in the first place. Maybe this is what Karl Marx had in mind when he suggested that capitalism could destroy itself.

Bitcoin is not a bubble; a true bubble grows until it pops; then it stops growing. Bitcoin has popped many times in the past and has always recovered.

<comment><USER15> Setting BTC aside for a moment how are ICOs not a bubble?

There is no ICO that has not raised way more money than necessary.

Then you add that most ICOs are little more than a white papers with some pedigree and you have the makings of a bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The are many many angles to look at cryptocurrencies that make that assertion not true. For example, beyond the ICO mania, cryptocurrencies make the dream of a global Kickstarter possible. Many people from developed countries don't realize how difficult is to have something like this globally.

Another important difference is that part of the community is self sustainable and doesn't depend on external funding.

<comment><USER17> But the ICO mania is exactly this global Kickstarter you mention. ;)

The main problem with ICOs is that there are not many independent auditing organisations. I know only of ICOrating, but even this seems inadequate.

<comment><USER16> > The main problem with ICOs is that there are not many independent auditing > organisations.

That is right but we are talking about a "thing" that is completely new. Future ICOs will have more due diligence, that is natural and it is unfeasible that they can continue with just a whitepaper in place. BTW, one sector in my company works specifically with ICOs and we are working with some real companies, doing and selling real products, and they plan to launch their ICOs in the next 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Today I learned that the tulip mania wasn't real. [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo5414939...](http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo5414939.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Internet companies are the tulip mania of the 21st century. Or at least that's what I was being told at the start of the 21st century. These people should get together and settle on _the_ tulip for the 21st century.

As with the Internet company scenario, the tulip forecast short-term is partially correct. Long-term, as with the Internet, what comes next will be far, far more valuable and globally so. Blockchain technology will touch, essentially, every person on the planet. It doesn't matter if the successful rider is Bitcoin or CoinX, just as it didn't matter if it was Sun Microsystems or Webvan or Dr Koop.com or Lycos that made the most off the potential of the Internet.

[http://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/](http://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought deep investigation into 'tulip mania' revealed it wasn't nearly as severe as people claimed. If bitcoin really is worthless, then it would have an unprecedented place in bubble history.

</comment><comment><USER21> We're at the peak of the Gartner's Hype Cycle for comparisons between tulip mania and bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER22> BTC was the one and only crypto currency to exist I'd think it has some value. However when there are many crypto currencies why does BTC have any value?

Eg if ETH starts being used for most transactions, and BTC started crashing in value would anyone feel a need to keep it?

<comment><USER23> This argument makes no sense. "If the euro exists, why does the dollar have value?"

Edit: The above is a rhetorical question.

<comment><USER24> If businesscards, party flyers, and other pieces of paper exist, why do dollar bills have value?

<comment><USER25> Not sure if this is rethorical, but it's a great question. In hacker-news- pedantry tradition i will answer:

A. A dollar bill represents an accounting entry in a bank account. Banks are the third party that facilitate trust and the rules by which 2 actors trade. B. Dollar bills are legal tender for the payment of taxes. They are enforced by government, which is the sole legal arbiter of coercive action. Taxation requires every citizen to hold a reserve of state currency. C. Due to the specialized printing process dollar bills are, at least theoretically, hard to counterfeit. D. Ubiquity as trading mechanism, barter requires double coincidence of wants (rare) or interpersonal credit (lack of third party oversight to guarantee fair play). When holding assets, these can deprecate (or appreciate) in value, and would need to be converted in cash holdings to avoid the impracticalities of barter exchange. E. They are an convenient way of turning digital entries into tangible user objects, since they hardly take any space.

I'm sure you could keep the list going. Notice how cryptocurrencies satisfy a lot of those conditions. Also notice how bitcoin in particular fails at a number of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If we look at all of history up until recent times (let's say until 1971), currencies were simply commodities with certain properties. The properties that made a commodity a good currency were portability, uniformity, divisibility and durability.

Commodities have value because they are useful. A pear is useful because I can eat it. A shirt is useful because I can wear it. Gold is useful because I can use it to conduct electricity or have my tooth filled.

Since gold is portable, uniform, divisible and durable, it makes a good currency too. Up until 1971, people carried around little pieces of paper (even more portable than gold) redeemable for gold as a kind of currency.

Cryptocoins are worthless. They have no value. The proponents of cryptocoins cast about the world looking for commodities with value to compare cryptocoins to and found none.

But then they came across the post-1971 dollar/euro. It is not immediately clear why these pieces of paper are being used post-1971. Seizing on this confusion, the cryptocoin advocates point to the one thing in the world they could find without obvious value and say "we're just like this - but better".

Another gulf of confusion they exploit - they tell us technical people that this has value for financial reasons we wouldn't understand as technical people. Then they go to the financial people and tell them this blockchain technology is too complex for them to understand, but it's valuable. As few people have a foot in both worlds, it's a gulf for this scam to walk into.

The market cap for Bitcoins, Ethereum, Ripple etc. is $137 billion which is absurd. Dogecoin is supposed to be worth $100 million despite its creator coming out and saying it was a joke and this valuation is absurd. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon all have noted how Bitcoin is, as Munger puts it, "rat poison".

I witnessed the subprime mortgage bubble in 2008, the dot-com bubble in 2000, and now we have another one. Whereas Pets.com or a suburban development had some value, albeit overinflated, the $130 billion crypto"currency" market cap is absurd. It is going to crash to near the $0 mark at some point. As Keynes noted though, markets can remain irrational longer than you and I can remain solvent.

<comment><USER25> What you describe (money as proxy for commodity) is one school of thought that is increasingly under attack in academic circles.

See for instance Money by Eric Lonergan; Debt by David Graeber; Money, The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin; Theory Of The Monetary Circuit by Augusto Graziani; Soft Currency Economics by Warren Mossler; Creating Economic Order by Michael Hudson; Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East by Michael Hudson.

These argue that accounting systems (and even writing, according to some) grew out of interpersonal debt/credit relations. Money then grew out of these accounting systems, as a token representation of the abstract accounting entries. In this view, money is fundamentally a kind of social contract, rather than a representation of some stored potential trade-good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there innovation in Block Chain? Yes.

Are crypto-currencies over inflated? Yes.

We can see the path from commodity currency, to paper, to fiat was a long and messy road history makes this clear. While in all likelihood crypto may very well supplant fiat the likelihood it'll happen in 1-2 generations is slim.

Furthermore if history is a guide the replacement of Fiat by crypto will likely happen by mistake, or in such a small way few will notice.

<comment><USER28> What are the obstacles to replacing Fiat? I think people underestimate the combination of payment method and value, but I also just haven't heard a good argument against.

<comment><USER27> Okay here is one: We haven't.

A strong argument can be made the USD (and most the world's curreines) are backed by oil as oil may only be exchanged for USD.

Furthermore inflation tracks oil sale perfectly since the petro-dollar started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> China is already clamping down on BTC. Wait till the US intelligence agencies find that it's being used by ISIS (or some other villain du jour) to fund/support domestic terrorism. When Coinbase and other exchanges are regulated out of existence and no US-based corporation can legally transact in BTC, the price of BTC against major currencies will collapse.

Ignoring the price of BTC, I would bet against Bitcoin purely on technical grounds. If the transaction fee history is correct [1], then it would suggest that the economic feasibility of Bitcoin as a payment service diminishes as it scales, and, with a peak mean transaction fee of nearly $9 USD last month, the blockchain cannot even support its own current popularity.

[1] [https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc- eth...](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth-bch- ltc.html#6m)

</comment><comment><USER30> What a fresh, new take on the situation.

*sigh

<comment><USER31> You were being sarcastic but I agree - it's a new take. The author is saying crytocurrencies shouldn't be about their valuation, yet that's the sole focus of attention (in the media) these days.

I'm bearish on Bitcoin yet bullish on Ethereum because of other factors besides their valuation such as roadmap, potential and usability.

Usability is also the biggest complaint of the author. It's one of the biggest factors preventing mass adoption.

<comment><USER32> Eth? the one that keeps getting hacked?

<comment><USER33> ETH has never been hacked. In fact, it can't be hacked. What you mean to say is that DAPPs can be hacked. DAPP's can have unintended functionality that can be exploited, but that has nothing to do with ETH. It would be like going back to the mid 90s and saying, "this World Wide Web thing will never work because it keeps getting hacked." Doesn't make any sense, it illustrates your unfamiliarity with the subject.

<comment><USER34> "On Wednesday 19th July, 2017 a bug found in the multi-signature wallet ("multi-sig") code used as part of Parity Wallet software was exploited by parties unknown. As of the time of writing, three wallet accounts holding large balances of ETH have been compromised and the balances moved into accounts held by the attacker."

[https://blog.ethcore.io/the-multi-sig-hack-a- postmortem/](https://blog.ethcore.io/the-multi-sig-hack-a-postmortem/)

<comment><USER35> Parity is a 3rd-party wallet application and is not Ethereum.

<comment><USER34> Parity accounts for roughly 5,000 of all Ethereum nodes (of which there is no "official" "1st-party" implementation) [0]. As a result of being so popular, Parity users were collectively robbed of $30,000,000 of Ether due to the multisignature (typically used to _secure_ funds versus single-signature- required transacting) smart contract bug.

[0][https://www.ethernodes.org/network/1](https://www.ethernodes.org/network/1)

[1][https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen- pa...](https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-parity- wallet-breach/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> cached version : [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://devolutionreview.com/bearish- on-bitcoin/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I asked this question in another thread but really haven't seen a satisfactory response yet:

David Karpeles admitted at trial to running bots on Mt. Gox, and such bots were implicated in the rise of Bitcoin's price up to $1000 in 2013. Bitcoin has experienced a similar jump in value over the past year. If Mt. Gox successfully manipulated the price of Bitcoin using bots in the past, how do we know other exchanges aren't doing the exact same thing right now?

Don't get me wrong, I think there is potential value in Bitcoin as a distributed/frictionless method of money transfer, however as an asset/investment I think it's extremely risky and I'm not necessarily sure the run up to $4000 reflects its underlying value: the ecosystem is largely unregulated and as such there is a greater risk of fraudulent activity and manipulation that would not be permitted under a regulated market. Especially if the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin transactions makes such manipulation harder to detect.

I am curious if anyone who has recently put money into Bitcoin has thought about this, and if so, what made them to decide to invest anyway? Am I just being paranoid?

<comment><USER38> « _how do we know other exchanges aren 't doing the exact same thing right now_»

It's very simple. Before 2013 MtGox was the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world with the most volume (something like 80-90% of the market—I don't remember the exact numbers). They effectively defined the price and the bot could control it.

Nowadays there are dozens/hundreds of exchanges around the world. One bot trying to increase the price on one exchange would get severely arbitraged through other exchanges, and the cheating exchange would be quickly driven into insolvency.

Also Mark Karpeles was a sole proprietor of a private company. He had free reigns and no one to answer to. It was easy for him to decide to run this fraudulent bot. The chance of the same illegal manipulation happening at very high profiles exchanges like Coinbase/GDAX or Gemini who are VC-funded and run by respectable executives is very low.

<comment><USER37> So you think there's zero chance of collusion between exchanges as well? Isn't there some evidence that bots are currently active on major exchanges? I keep hearing about suspicious activity on Bitfenix... aren't they one of the largest exchanges?

> The chance of the same illegal manipulation happening at very high profiles > exchanges like Coinbase/GDAX or Gemini who are VC-funded and run by > respectable executives is very low.

Yeah, I don't expect this to be occurring at US companies who presumably could be prosecuted for fraud. But what about other companies that are based in countries with less regulation (or with regulators that could be paid to look the other way)?

<comment><USER38> The Bitcoin market cap grew from $1 billion in 2013 to $65 billion today. The larger it gets and the more exchanges exist, the more difficult it becomes to control/cheat the price with a fraudulent bot like MtGox did.

You seem to be confusing legitimate bots (written by traders to use an exchange's API) with the MtGox fraudulent bot (which was using fake dollars injected in the trading engine by Karpeles). These are 2 very different things. Of course legitimate bots exist, but I don't believe that any big exchange today (including Bitfinex) runs fraudulent bots capitalized with fake money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> « _Instead of the vastly changed future with digital currencies and the breakthrough of the Blockchain technology we were promised, we've just been stuck with a huge bubble and growing complications_ »

This guy simply needs more patience. The social & economic changes that cryptocurrencies sparked are barely beginning. They _will_ take decades to fully unfold. Just because "it" hasn't happened yet doesn't necessarily mean cryptos are worthless and will all crash to zero.

It is true, however, that there is a bubble. But there are always bubbles at various points of the development of most revolutionary technologies. And Bitcoin's bubbles are becoming tamer over time.¹ In fact they are becoming tame enough that Bitcoin's returns are sometimes beaten by blue chip stocks: in 2016 AMD went up 420% but BTC only 170%.

¹ It took 1 month to go 10× from $120 to $1200 in Nov 2013, but 1 year to go 10× from $490 to $4900 in Aug 2017.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks like the site is inaccessible due to resource limits being reached.

<comment><USER31> Go to google and enter

cache:devolutionreview.com/bearish-on-bitcoin/

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Scenario: The US bans all banks and credit agencies from transferring money to/from bitcoin exchanges. Most of the other powerful countries follow suit.

Now what?

<comment><USER14> Investment would shift to 'weak' countries which support cryptocurrencies and potentially cause a flip the economic order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Tulips had no innovation. Not sure why techies don't get it. Its so simple that this is a wrong comparison but every two months someone writes an article about it. It's beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hacker News teaches me new things daily, see I thought Bitcoin was a decentralized payment network, that is a solution to a class of distributed network communication problems known as Byzantine generals problem.

I did not realize Bitcoin was actually a Plant or more specifically a flowers bulb. I have been using computers my whole life, I had no clue I could run flowers on my machine, also flowers would allow me to create value using electricity, and send value over TCP/IP without a trusted third party.

Go ahead and sell your bitcoin or whatever the fuck you want to do because your clearly too dumb to understand a protocol, or the abilities a protocol can provide.

Wait a minute Bitcoin can't be a flower, I mean it doesn't die during the winter, also my cat has never tried to eat it.

</comment><comment><USER43> I love how if you think something is a bubble, you can just compare it to any bubble in the past, ignoring all of the nuances.

If you want a parallel to Tulip Mania, you have Beanie Babies. It was pure asset inflation for the sake of asset inflation. There was no innovation (except in markets for distribution of the asset), just wild speculation on things that were almost completely useless.

I do think cryptocurrency is in a bubble, but I see it far closer to Railway Mania or the Dot Com bubble. In both cases there is a clear cut demonstration of potential utility even pre-bubble, meaning there very likely a post-bubble future for the technology, even if the landscape changes drastically in the meantime. Railway mania in particular had plenty of failures, but it also had many companies that were viable but just overvalued, and even beyond that, there were plenty of companies that thrived post bubble.

I have my own speculations as to who will come out alive when the bubble crashes, and it certainly wont be anything tied to "smart" contracts, which has been the source of most of the ridiculous market behavior as of late (ERC20 especially). Others will survive on their merits, and I'll say this much: If it isn't low latency, low energy consumption, highly liquid, and traceable, it's as good as dead.

<comment><USER44> I am not sure I would compare the invention of the internet or the development of railways to cryptocurrencies. At best, cryptocurrencies are a very minor technological development.</comment></comment>


The forgotten 1909 hit that introduced adultery to American popular music - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/06/sex_and_pop_the_forgotten_1909_hit_that_introduced_adultery_to_american.html

<comment><USER2> The Esperanto translation the newspaper provides is fairly literal: "Ho! Vi kaprido!" "Kapro" is the Esperanto noun for "goat," and the "-id" suffix means "child." So it is translating "kid" as "a baby goat." Is there a better translation? I guess it depends on whether "kid" implied a baby goat or a human child back in 1909. If it meant a human child (which I'm guessing), then a better translation might be "injo," which is the affectionate form of "ido," "ino," or (putting them together) "idino."

<comment><USER3> Did you even read the article or is this just tolling? Or a bot?</comment></comment>


Google fights to keep four executives out of prison over video clip - <AUTHOR> http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6855178.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=4947818 <comment><USER2> The real culprits are the makers of the video camera, for not requiring any recorded video to be sent to a moderator first before storing a single bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hilarious and ridiculous. Google could legitimately afford to pull out of all business in Italy, close all offices and reject traffic from IP addresses originating in Italy. It'd be interesting to see that as a precedent.

<comment><USER4> I am not a lawyer and I really have no idea how these things work...but wouldn't Google's stockholders sue the executives if they made a decision like that? It would surely harm their profit and the stock price, so wouldn't it be a breach of fiduciary duty?

<comment><USER5> Tongue in cheek as it was, this suggestion would most likely improve google profits long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The way things are in Berlusconi's Italy, I would not be surprised if this case is being kept alive by his friends to benefit his media companies which are undoubtedly pissed off at youtube.

Imagine if Rupert Murdoch became president of the US. That is, in a nutshell, the situation with Berluscony and Italy.

<comment><USER7> Murdoch did by proxy for 8 years. It wasn't pretty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's hard to consider a free and public internet service provider as a "content provider." In the case of television and print, this makes sense as the people providing the content are under the employ of the organizations distributing said content. This is definitely not the case for content-driven sites based upon public submission.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is the end of user-created content in Italy.

Fortunately other countries are not this irrational. Today.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's totally nuts.

24 hours is probably a little on the sluggish side for a response, but still well within the accepted normal response time for a takedown notice (or a cease and desist).

I really fail to see how the executives can be directly held personally responsible for this, and how it could possibly amount to 3 years in jail _and_ a fine if they're found guilty.

<comment><USER10> if they are guilty, they'll just go to a higher court and so on until they are allowed to go to the European courts where they certainly would win the case. It might take a few years to get there tough

<comment><USER11> That's my thought too. There might be political pressure in Italy to hinder competition to traditional media, but once this goes to the European courts, it's only going to go in Google's favour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> YouTube isn't profitable yet, is it? Google should just block Italy from accessing YouTube for awhile.

(That said, I have no idea if YouTube is at all popular in Italy. This could backfire if another video site fills it's place)

</comment><comment><USER13> Crazy. What on earth are Vivi Down hoping to achieve?

EDIT: ok, it appears they want Google Italia to switch to premoderation.

<comment><AUTHOR> As if that's even remotely feasible.

<comment><USER14> Of course it is. It will far bit of money and man power but it's not infeasible by any stretch of the imagination.

<comment><AUTHOR> Feasible = economically feasible. According to some youtube stats on average every minute 10 hours of video is uploaded, that means that you'd have to have people screening 2 manyears of video _every_ day, that translates if you take into account three shifts of workers to about 2000 ftes.

If one of those happens to be slacking on the job when that privacy invading video comes by you are _still_ open to a lawsuit, and now you have a much bigger problem liability wise because by screening you took responsibility for the content.

That 10 hours every minute is a november 2006 figure, no idea what the current amount is.

<comment><USER14> First of all, videos originating in Italy would be a substantially smaller subset of the global figures so I don't believe the task is so incomprehensibly vast as you may think.

Second, I think the legal complaint here is that there is no _attempt_ at screening the content until it has already been published.

I obviously don't agree with it, but it's what's being contested by the plaintiffs. And I think just showing you have safe-guards in place would show a proper intent and meet a standard of reasonable prudence.

But back to the technical issue of screening.

The solution is easy. Drop the realtime requirement. Say:

"hey, sorry Italians, we have to screen everything, we've got 100 people working on it around the clock and your video will get uploaded in two week's time. We'll email you when it's ready."

It'll make youtube less attractive, sure, but every other video publisher (vimeo, justin.tv, et al) would have to do the same thing so all in all, the courts will be happy, the italian users will have a diminished service, and the world will spin on.

<comment><AUTHOR> From some other pages about this case:

(italics mine):

"Prosecutors say they _are aware_ Google cannot screen all videos, but maintain the company didn't have _enough_ automatic filters in place as well as warnings to users on privacy and copyright laws. They also say Google didn't have _enough_ workers assigned to its Italian service in order to react quickly to videos flagged as inappropriate by viewers."

So, they already know screening isn't feasible, for the rest it's really only about a matter of degree, and that should carry jail terms ?

<comment><USER14> I'm not defending the prosecution's legal position, only your claim that it would be infeasible to screen the content.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're entitled to your opinion that it's feasible.

Just as I'm entitled to mine, and it seems to be shared by Google, and the prosecution in this case.

Of course that is not a guarantee that I'm right.

But let's just say that maybe for 5 years or so I operated an office with people screening live video and because of that I'm all too aware of how fallible that is. You'd have to screen double, have an open channel between your screeners and the uploaders, and you'd need positive identification of everybody in every video uploaded.

And our screening parameters were a lot less strict than what google/youtube would have to operate under in order for this to be done so that in the future this could not have happened.

For one, any video that has a person in it could be construed as a breach of privacy, so now you have to figure out who that person is, maybe ask their permission and so on.

The burden of proof that a video is ok to upload should lie with the uploader, only they have the ability to make that call, everybody else is missing just too much context.

And why would a child with Downs have different privacy rights than anybody else ?

So a ruling that would be favourable to the plaintiffs would quickly be seized by follow ons from other people that felt that their privacy was somehow violated, possibly in different media (text ? photographs ?) and so on.

If there ever was a slippery slope example than this would be it, and I think it really ought to stop right where it is at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree with the prevailing sentiment here regarding censorship of user submitted content on sites like youtube. I can also see it would make more economic sense for google to simply deny the service to Italy if the case succeeded. But wait a minute! Doesn't google already censor content for China?

<comment><USER16> It's not about retroactively censoring, it's about proactively making sure the content isn't there in the first place, aka monitoring, which would be impossible at scale.

Also, monitoring would open Google up to even more liability: "We're not quite sure if this video is illegal, let's bring it to court. Hey, the courts have found this video to be illegal! And you reviewed it and approved it. You're responsible!"

<comment><USER17> Google does proactively censor:

Search for June 4th: google.com 2,780,000 hits, google.cn: 164 hits

Try posting a blog entry and reference "June 4th" in it and see if it ever shows up in google.cn

Don't be evil, unless there's yuan at stake...</comment></comment></comment>


Anyone doing a startup in embedded systems? - <AUTHOR>

As I understand this site is mostly visited by webdevs and most of the projects sponsored by YCombinator are web startups.<p>I am more into embedded systems and wondering if anyone is doing a startup in embedded systems? If so, what are you doing and what has the process been like(how did you get the idea, how did you proceed, finances etc)? <comment><USER2> I've been planning out/working on an home router app for the last 2 years. But I'm only used to pushing bits, not atoms.

I'd love to hear how someone successfully released and launched an embedded system. +!</comment>


How to make water bounce - <AUTHOR> http://www.grcblog.com/?p=364 High speed video on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvrqFvNTIY&eurl <comment><AUTHOR> High speed video on YouTube here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvrqFvNTIY&eurl](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvrqFvNTIY&eurl)

</comment><comment><USER2> Its a great video, and a great scientific achievement. Just not sure if it makes sense for this forum.</comment>


Are partial derivatives the computational primitives of deep neural networks? - <AUTHOR> https://keplerlounge.com/neural-computation/2020/01/26/partial-derivatives.html <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr

1\. The typical deep neural network tutorial introduces deep networks as compositions of nonlinearities and affine transforms.

2\. In fact, a deep network with relu activation simplifies to a linear combination of affine transformations with compact support. But, why would affine transformations be useful?

3\. After recent discussions on Twitter it occurred to me that the reason why they work is that they are actually first-order Taylor approximations of a suitable analytic function.

4\. What is really cool about this is that by this logic partial derivatives, i.e. Jacobians, are computational primitives for both inference and learning.

5\. I think this also provides insight into how deep networks approximate functions. They approximate the intrinsic geometry of a relation using piece- wise linear functions.

This works because a suitable polynomial approximation exists and all polynomials are locally Lipschitz.</comment>


Real time tactical action set in a deadly sci-fi universe for dual screens. - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/opposablegames/salvaged

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: This is my friends game and they are trying to bootstrap to get it into development, I think its a cool idea as you Play simultaneously on your PC and mobile device.

The team are super nice, hopefully we can get it to the target.</comment>


Google+ API a Technology Review - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apievangelist.com/2011/09/16/google-api-a-technology-review/ <comment><USER2> 12/31/1969 - alrighty then, someone has a time machine.

Other than that, I agree api is still lacking, I am sure it will improve over time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Time machine fixed. Thanks.</comment>


The First-Ever Banner Ad on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-first-ever-banner-ad-on-the-web/523728/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is the first time I've seen the You Will ads, they're awesome! Modulo some laughable glitches like paying the toll with a cc in the car and phone booth video calling. But the fact that the majority of the predictions were spot on makes these oversights even more interesting.

Most of what the ads predicted became reality in 10-15 years, i.e. 2003-2008. Where are the ads that predict technology for 2020?

<comment><USER3> I'm especially interested in how deeply embedded phone booths were to people who should have thought past them. A lot of SF / futurist stuff from the 60s to early 90s thought people would still be tied to fixed locations for telephone and network access.

I've always wondered why that was, especially when some form of mobile phones have been around since the 80's, or even earlier with very expensive car radios which could tap into the phone network. I guess the phone booth was such a fixture of the landscape that no one could imagine a world without them.

<comment><USER4> I find the most interesting aspect of this observation to be the notion that we have a similar present-day blind spot and the associated exercise in predicting what is that blind spot(s).

<comment><USER3> You're correct. That's the fun part. What's especially fun is that the blind spot is often something which has already been developed, and didn't sell well in its first iteration, or is common in prototypes and SF / futurist stuff but no one thought it would ever be widely available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironically it looks like you can't view that page with an add blocker installed.

<comment><USER6> I use uBlock Origin and the website works.

<comment><USER7> I'm in Safari with I-don't-remember-what adblocking (looks like I have ghostery?). Just pressing BACK when the anti-adblock message shows up lets me see the original page! That was an easy fix. Turns out I'd just been closing Atlantic pages as soon as that message appeared for no reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the AT&T tv commercial from in the article: [https://youtu.be/TZb0avfQme8?t=30](https://youtu.be/TZb0avfQme8?t=30)

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember feeling scandalized the first time that I saw a banner ad on the web. I also remember the epic flame wars on Usenet (sic transit gloria mundi) when Canter & Siegel made the first commercial spam campaign.

At times, I have wondered how much of the Internet would shut down if ads were forbidden. Sometimes, that thought sobers me. Other times, that thought gladdens me.

<comment><USER10> The "Green Card Spam" basically ended USENET by violating the spirit and agreement those participating in that system more or less adhered to.

They had no respect for the norms, for basic politeness, and instead wanted nothing more than to make money, no matter how many "snowflakes" were upset.

Not unlike a certain businessman running for President...

<comment><USER11> Is there some sort of law that all conversations in 2017 must somehow involve a shoehorned reference to our current president?

<comment><USER10> It's because sometimes you don't have the power to stop someone who has no regard for the rules.

Design systems that can self-correct better. Give the rules more bite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't mind banner ads. I don't like the privacy-sucking invasiveness of online tracking they come with. If someone could craft a banner ad that did not have this problem, I'd whitelist their site in my ad blocker.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://thefirstbannerad.com/](http://thefirstbannerad.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I even remember that I installed software in the late nighties that showed a banner while you were online. The promise was that you would earn money by allowing this ad to float on your screen. I don't think I ever got payed, and, probably related, I think I removed the software shortly after installing.

</comment><comment><USER15> On a related note, what is the first banner ad you remember seeing?

For me it was the X10 camera ads around 2000: [https://www.geek.com/news/x10-ads-are- useless-545130/](https://www.geek.com/news/x10-ads-are-useless-545130/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The AT&T ads were remarkably prescient.

When they came out, computer assistants, smart watches, video calls and automatically paying tolls were far off science fiction. It makes sense that they were so early to jump on the iPhone.

<comment><USER10> That was a different AT&T, the one that still had an interest in trying to define the future.

The AT&T Apple badgered into offering the iPhone was a hollow shell of its former self.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> First-ever banner ad and it's already click bait, lol

</comment><comment><USER18> and the rest is history...</comment>


Design for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sdras/design-for-developers <comment><AUTHOR> The broadcast is live now (about 6 hours remaining): [https://frontendmasters.com/](https://frontendmasters.com/)</comment>


Jacob Appelbaum, Wikileaks editor, detained by US customs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10662989

<comment><USER2> > _"When you have been waging war for 10 years, who are you to say that?" Mr > Appelbaum said. "What are you thinking, writing these people's names down? > And what are you doing in concrete terms to protect these people?"_

A very good point. Anyone in the chain capable of viewing the documents would be capable of selling out such information to people who would pay. Anyone care to guess how many people that could be? Any low-level with a passing glance because they're in the vicinity must be accounted for as well.

My guess? Thousands. Not as many as exposed to Wikileaks, by any means, nor are _they_ helping the individual's security at all... but that's not really their goal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gratuitous harassment of whistleblowers at the US border and Wikileaks' director unable to visit the USA at all. Hiding documentation of official misconduct in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by persecuting journalists.

Is this what we elected Obama for?

<comment><USER4> As the saying goes "Don't you get it? It doesn't matter who you vote for, Government always wins!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope this leads to more transparency by the US government to it's citizens.</comment>


Unambiguous JavaScript Grammar - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bmeck/UnambiguousJavaScriptGrammar/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> Author seems to be mostly concerned by code loaded as a module being treated as strict 100% of the time.

Literally every difference that they list is strict mode (and the usual misunderstanding of |this|)

<comment><USER3> What usual misunderstanding of |this| are you referring to?

<comment><USER2> People keep trying to apply lexical scope for |this| when it is always the left hand of the function refernece expression, e.g.

Lhs.foo()

Lhs[foo]()

And

Foo() // where lhs is implied to be the scope object defining Foo

The last one seems to be what makes everyone super confused, but it is logically:

GetScopeWith("foo").foo()

Strict mode changes /one/ thing about|this|: whether the value of |this| undergoes object coercion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        function foo(value) {
          value = value || '';
          var args = [].slice.call(arguments);
          args.unshift(this);
          return args;
        }
        foo(null);
        export {};

If your module does nothing but side-effects during _load_ time, screw you.

<comment><USER5> That's generally and edge case and totally supported under the proposal by being explicit about with respect to `export`.

I think being explicit about the intent of your code is a good thing after all.

</comment></comment><comment> nv-vn Why can't this be done as a module declaration? I.e. a file would be prefaced with `module Main;` to declare that it's a module and give it a name.

<comment><USER6> That requires modification to every file using ES modules, and new syntax. The proposed solution only requires modifying files which do not have an import or export statement, and does not need new syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who else thinks that this whole mess around trying to implement ES modules demonstrates that they were a bad idea to begin with?

</comment><comment><USER8> Where is the BNF?

<comment><USER9> There's no BNF, this is not a language spec or full grammar, it just describes an addition to the existing grammar to denote a module.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> yeah, i just use it for scripting browsers, which don't support most of that shenanigans. for real work i use languages that are not a week old. I have no idea what exactly is being discussed there, other then it requires a syntax hack with `exports {}` to break the new standard.

<comment><USER11> > I have no idea what exactly is being discussed there

Criticizes it anyway .. something something JS is bad. Thanks for your high level input.</comment></comment>


Show HN: N1ED – new generation WYSIWYG HTML editor for a modern web apps - <AUTHOR> https://n1ed.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, everyone! Our team is tired of the limitations of existing HTML visual editors and has developed its own, taking as a basis CKEditor.

Our WYSIWYG HTML editor allows you faster design beautiful responsive content for your website or app.

Main benefits \- clean and vanilla js code \- easy integration to any javascript framework or any backend systems \- library with addons \- develop own add-ons \- simple image uploading and editing

Links: Our demo [https://n1ed.com/demo/n1ed](https://n1ed.com/demo/n1ed) Download and install [https://n1ed.com/docs/installation](https://n1ed.com/docs/installation)

Go to the site to know more and watch a video. Share your feedback here! Thanks you!</comment>


Remapping Caps Lock on OS X Mountain Lion - <AUTHOR> http://palmer.im/2013/01/remap-keys-os-x-mountain-lion/

<comment><USER2> Not a bad idea to use caps lock for a different key, but i guess it is not the big time saver to use it as cmd+r - takes pretty much the same time.

i also needed a tool to remap some keys - i'm living in germany but i'm using a us-int. keyboard to have it easier on coding. but also i wanted to use german letters: äöü without holding aou pressed and then press the number i need in the overlay of special chars.

now i have it on alt+a/o/u

i used Ukelele ([http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&...](http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Ukelele)) for it - pretty easy tool, where you can create your complete own keyboard layout and set it up with your own icon and so on. And without less steps then explained in your todo list.

who might is interested in this us-german-layout (<https://github.com/marvwhere/usgerman>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Remapping Caps Lock to Control is a worthwhile alternative for heavy bash/vim users. Makes shortcuts lie Ctrl-D a lot more natural to type. Besides, it's super simple to do in OSX settings.

<comment><USER4> Not only vim but also emacs. In fact, OS X affords an emacs readline-like capability throughout all text fields (just like bash). So you can use C-d to delete characters, C-e to go to the end of line, C-a to go to the beginning of a line, and a ton of other shortcuts mapped to Ctrl.

<comment><USER5> I use a modified US layout on OS X for retaining proper touch typing posture while using emacs: <http://cl.ly/image/372T2o2X0T0r>

Symmetric Ctrl keys that are easily reachable from home row makes a huge difference. I've moved '\' key to 'Insert' because I never use 'Insert' key (before that I'd configured Right Shift to insert '\' when it is not used as a modifier and insert '|' when I press both Shift keys at once but I couldn't set this up using Xmodmap so I went with a cross platform solution).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is Cmd+R such a hard to reach combination to warrant the precious keyboard real state Caps Lock occupies? Me, I double mine as both Ctrl and Esc by using the excellent xcape <https://github.com/alols/xcape> on linux, and KeyRemap4MacBook otherwise.

I actually find it more relevant on my mac than on my linux box, since Ctrl on the Mac is in a horrible position, and it opens up a whole world of new easy shortcuts that conflict with little else. Plus Ctrl-C and Ctrl-L (clear) on the terminal.

<comment><USER7> I use my caps as both ctrl and escape by having it mapped to control. Then if you need escape ctrl+[. It requires one finger from each hand and is very quick to press. Then if I want to page up or down in vim I still have the ctrl button easily reachable for ctrl+d and ctrl+u, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the thing I was afraid of about OS X. I'm using Arch Linux and I'm in love with Linux per se. I would love to buy Apple computers because of all the great things they offer (I saw it as Linux with complex things somewhere hidden, plus, Windows-like support for apps and games) and I would allow myself to do it because OS X is Unix based and it has decent terminal. This article somehow destroyed my hopes — it's too much to remap a key.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree that Command-R is a silly thing to remap to. Remapping to Control (which can be done through System Preferences) helps not only with bash and vim but with emacs keystrokes which are standard throughout the Cocoa text controls. This is one of the very first things I do when I set up a new Mac.

</comment><comment><USER10> My caps-lock gets mapped to escape. On linux, or at least the flavors I'm using, this is super easy: Just drop the following into ~/.Xmodmap

        !! Delete the caps lock key
        clear lock
        !! Make caps lock map to <esc>
        keycode 0x42 = Escape

<comment><USER11> Another option is to run setxkbmap after X starts (using a ~/.xinitrc file or your favorite desktop environment's autorun feature.

      'setxkbmap -option caps:esc'

      'setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps' (my preference)

      'setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps'

Debian (and derivatives) users can edit the last line in the /etc/default/keyboard file to do this globally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A cool thing that PCKeyboardHack can do is have key remapping only apply when you're in a certain app. So, for example, I have Caps Lock mapped to <C-a> but only when I'm in iTerm2 (for switching between windows in screen)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have it remapped to backspace (colemak layout). The problem I had under OS X was that key repeat didn't work. Additionally setting Capslock in the OS X settings to control solved that problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have mine mapped to escape, for vim.</comment>


Google's Ray Kurzweil on the computers that will live in our brains - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/googles-ray-kurzweil-computers-will-live-our-brains <comment><USER2> The thing about Ray Kurzweil is that he's basically entertainment, in the same way William Gibson or George Lucas are entertainment. He excites and inspires the lay population, but is ultimately pretty weak on the non-fiction part.

There aren't any scientists that are saying, "hey, no, that whole advancing technology thing sounds like a terrible idea!" Of course that would be awesome. The reason Kurzweil gets ragged on by the scientific community is because when it comes to specific claims and technical details, his batting average is terrible. His books are notorious for making technical statements that are just simply wrong. One of my favorite graphs from "The Singularity Is Near" is a plot of linear versus exponential growth with a point labeled on the exponential curve, "the knee of the curve". He was trying to make a point about how exponential growth looks slow until it hits some "knee" and then it takes off. Hey, anyone, what's the derivative of e^x? Exactly. The neuroscience background he brought to "How to Create a Mind" was first-year grad student at best.

Kurzweil is _a_ director of engineering at Google, not _the_ director of engineering as per the article, and Google has many of them. He is an entertainer who attracts attention and sometimes asks interesting questions. I wouldn't worry too much about specific technical statements he makes today. He's way out of his research area of OCR and text-to-speech.

<comment><USER3> Some say most of his singularity stuff has to do with his personal fear of death. He's good with hardware predictions, he doesn't understand software nearly that well. And his understanding of biology is trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "When computers can achieve these things it's not for the purpose of displacing us it's really to make ourselves smarter," Kurzweil says. "And smarter in the sense of being more loving... Really enhancing the things that we value about humans."

Sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part. Does he have any strong arguments for why superhuman intelligence will be chiefly interested in bettering the human condition, without displacing us in important ways? Certainly can't find historical evidence for this, in the way human beings have treated less intelligent species, or even less developed human civilizations.

<comment><USER5> I have nothing to back this up with (just like Kurzweil.) but I have a gut feeling that if superhuman intelligence were to emerge, it would quickly become preoccupied with things only it can think about, and largely indifferent to the needs and concerns of normal humans. It may also become frustrated by not being able to explain things in a way that we understand, and may just give up on trying.

Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, or The Powers in Vernor Vinges "A fire upon the deep" are what I'm thinking of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I lost a ton of respect for google when they hired Kurzweil, and more when I realized they put money into the singularity thing. Didn't they realize that Kurzweil will tell them what they want to hear for free, too?

<comment><USER7> Oh come on, you can slight Kurzweil for his whacky futurist theories, but allowing him to work with Knowledge graph seems like a tremendous use of his talents. His insights (and accomplishments) in machine learning aren't to be taken lightly.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Call me a luddite, but I found these 2030 comments from Ray Kurzweil extremely disturbing.

<comment><USER8> Don't freak out. I'm personally dubious of most things he says. The ideas are often evocative, but I feel he has no grasp of the practical difficulties of his claims.

<comment><USER9> Except that he has been building leading-edge artificial intelligence systems since he was a teenager and studying those practical difficulties you mention for decades, and has now been hired as a Director of Engineering at the world's leading information technology company to lead the effort to build the most capable natural language understanding system ever created.

Would you like to be more specific about those technical difficulties that Mr. Kurzweil hasn't grasped? Or are you just saying that because you find it hard to believe his predictions?

<comment><USER10> > _Except that he has been building leading-edge artificial intelligence > systems since he was a teenager and studying those practical difficulties > you mention for decades,_

Except that you can do all these things and still be prone to wishful thinking.

Especially if there was a traumatic event involving, say, the loss of your father, an event that makes you obsessive about your mortality, eternal life through tech et al.

Linus Pauling even had two nobels, but he was saying BS about Vitamin C. And Wilhelm Reich was a smart guy too, until he got lost on his own make believe world. Ditto for Nash, ditto for Godel, Howard Hughes, the list goes on.

Genius and insanity are not that far. And merely-brilliant (which Kurzweill is) to obsessive wishful thinker, are even closer.

Especially if you have an audience of ex-hippy rich Californians that like to hear your transcendental techno-religious jive.

<comment><USER9> Maybe we should all be a little bit more obsessive about our mortality.

I think that if you can look at all of the amazing transformations technology has made in the last century and not have high expectations for even more incredibleness then you are not understanding reality correctly.

<comment><USER10> > _Maybe we should all be a little bit more obsessive about our mortality._

This generally leads to an early grave, emotional paralysis in real life, and the "thousand small deaths" of the coward. Like Howard Hughes, Godel, Michael Jackson, and tons of other examples.

Nothing worse for living your life to the fullest than being obsessive about mortality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Google Now, a voice-activated search assistant, launched on iPhone this week"

I listen to marketplace every day, and they always seem to make mistakes like this when talking about technology.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did anyone else catch Ray Kurzweil's supposed twitter account in the article?

<https://twitter.com/raykurzweil2035>

</comment><comment><USER12> _> >"Like if I see a television commercial for baby diapers, I'm annoyed by it because I stopped buying baby diapers 30 years ago. But if I get an ad for something I really care about, some new supplement let's say, then I actually appreciate the ad."_

He's already talking like a Google public relations robot. Google has been trying to substitute ads for content and trying to get people to go along with it. Of course Google can show you a multitude of sites about supplements and maybe 2-3 ads, not 30 ads and a few results (buried by ads.) Just because an ad is "relevant" doesn't mean it's anywhere near the same, financially speaking, for the user. Of course Google can do whatever they like, provided it's legal, but then we have the right to question their motives.

I don't care if this gets down-voted to oblivion by the ever-busy, MV worker bees

<comment><USER13> > Google has been trying to substitute ads for content and trying to get > people to go along with it. Of course Google can show you a multitude of > sites about supplements and maybe 2-3 ads, not 30 ads and a few results > (buried by ads.) Just because an ad is "relevant" doesn't mean it's anywhere > near the same, financially speaking, for the user.

Evidence?

<comment><USER12> You want evidence that the most advertised product is not necessarily the "best" one? OK, but right after I prove that the sun rises, more or less, from the East.

<comment><USER13> Of course not, that was not what I meant. So what is the evidence they are actually substituting ads for content?

<comment><USER12> Chew on this: [http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.searchenginejournal....](http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/05/625x552xmiddle-school-search- ads.jpg.pagespeed.ic.VJwEW-pvW4.jpg)

[http://www.fuzzone.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/credi...](http://www.fuzzone.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/credit-cards-on-google-results-page.jpg)

[http://www.localseoguide.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/Goog...](http://www.localseoguide.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/Google-Comparison-Ads-1.jpg)

<comment><USER13> Ah. Well, I can scroll down. But it does reminds me of complaints about the shades of yellow used. It is #FFF8E7 BTW. On some laptop computers, it does look more whitish the more you tilt the screen to the front. As for why, read Douglas Bowman's infamous post about why he quit Google for clues.

<comment><USER12> _Well, I can scroll down._

So scroll down. who cares. Most people don't scroll down and probably most don't know that they clicked on ads.

Adios now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Leap Motion ship date delayed to July 22 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/leap-motion-controller-ship-date-delayed-until-july-22-due-to-a-need-for-a-larger-longer-beta-test/

<comment><USER2> I have to say I am immensely disappointed. I pre-ordered/signed up for a devkit over a year ago now. The disappointment level for me is high because I got an email a week or two ago saying it would be shipping to me in May.

I was already disappointed as I felt having backed them (to an extent) for so long, I would at least be getting the hardware before it was commercially available in stores like BestBuy.</comment>


In Software: Simplify, Simplify - <AUTHOR> http://codeclimber.blogspot.com/2009/01/simplify-simplify.html

<comment><USER2> Beware the "Analysis Paralysis" tarpit ...

Ever notice how every simple (simplistic) piece of advice that's obviously true has an equally simple (simplistic) piece of advice that's obviously true, and exactly opposite.

"He who hesitates is lost" vs "Look before you leap"

Yes, code should be simple, but sometimes it can only get that way _after_ you've written the wrong version. Sometimes it's only then that you really understand the problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> While reading all the lengths he was considering going to to make the thing blink, I just assumed an animated .gif was not an option. Seems pretty darn obvious.

<comment><USER4> "Seems" being the key word there. Its the same reason that sooo many people get screwed in the stockmarket. They look in the past and in retrospect, the great upheavals seem to obvious that they think that they can predict them and before they know it, they are down 50%. Same with great ideas. The concept of the wheel may seem simple to us now but I wonder how much thought it took to come up with it for the first time.

<comment><USER5> I don't think he's saying, in hindsight, after reading the whole article, that an animated GIF was obvious.

He's saying that he thought of the animated GIF option before coming to the end of the article, but that it was so obvious to him that he assumed the fact that the author had neglected it meant that it wasn't a possibility for technical reasons.

<comment><USER3> Precisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just spent five days researching how to generate PDFs dynamically or alternatively how to fill PDF forms dynamically from a server-side script. Just so anyone who purchased a ticket to our concert can print it out themselves (the ticket will include a barcode which can be scanned using a mobile phone with Java and a camera).

Then it dawned on me that I could simply point them to a (HTML) page which they can print out. Believe me, I felt stupid.

(But at least I learned about PDF forms, (X)FDF, and JavaScript in PDFs. Oh well...)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's easier to find the simpler solution after you implement the complex solution.</comment>


Show HN: Call Congress, a calling server for activists by taskforce.is - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tfrce/call-congress

<comment><AUTHOR> You can test it live by calling (415) 413-4137 or by adding your phone number to the end of this URL:

[http://220.127.116.11/create?campaignId=default&userPhone=](http://188.8.131.52/create?campaignId=default&userPhone=)</comment>


Show HN: Sinja: RESTful, {json:api}-compliant web services in Sinatra - <AUTHOR> http://sinja-rb.org/ <comment><USER2> Looks great. I find it funny that there seems to be a surge of these snazzy JSON API libraries _right after_ I struggled through manually implementing the spec for an API project.</comment>


Show HN: Blacklist websites, donate to charity when you visit them - <AUTHOR> http://zachschnell.com/donate/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! This is a Chrome extension I've built between classes. I linked to the blog post explaining the project, but here is a link to the Chrome store: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/donate/ejlaogipbpi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/donate/ejlaogipbpicpboioglpoiblobhdaokj)

I open sourced the front end ([https://github.com/zchr/donate- extension](https://github.com/zchr/donate-extension)). Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.</comment>


Show HN: All-pair similarity search on millions of sets in Python and on laptop - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ekzhu/SetSimilaritySearch <comment><USER2> I see the terms "python" and "search" and "millions of sets" and think data science... except that in the data science contexts with which I'm familiar we're looking at billions of records among petabytes of data. I know the article is about what can be done on a laptop but I'm left wondering if this is a neat small-scale proof of concept or something that scales and I need to research more when I've had coffee rather than bourbon.

<comment><USER3> Data science is about drawing conclusions from data, not the size of it. Most data science happens on datasets numbered in the hundreds rather than those in the millions.

<comment><USER4> This is interesting - I am a bit confused about Big Data and data science etc. If I suggest my thoughts would you mind redirecting me?

\- We have lots of data in different databases and just need a unified view (ETL / data warehousing) - it's where most data in most businesses is. trapped. Next steps: common data definitions across the company, top level imposition to get a grip

\- We can pull data together but need it to undergo what-if analysis or aggregation for reporting. This is usually regulatory or data warehousing?

All the above are "size of Enterprise Oracle / other RDBMS". You could have billions of records here but usually billions comes from dozens of databases with millions each ...

Big Data seems to be at the point of trying to do the ETL/Data warehousing for those dozens of different databases - put it into a map reduce friendly structure (Spark, Hadoop) and then run general queires - data provenance becomes a huge issue then.

Then we have the data science approach of data in sets / key value stores that Inwoukd classify as predictive - K-nearest neighbour etc.

I suspect I am wildly wrong in many areas but just trying to get it straight

<comment><USER5> I don't understand your point, you're trying to make complexity out of simple concept imo.

Data science: the science of using data to draw conclusion. Can be thousands/hundreds of datapoint. Can be billions. Does not matter.

Big data: subset of data science applied to "big" dataset where the most trivial approach reach their limit. It does NOT mean billions of datapoint easier, it probably just means that it is not well suited for a spreadsheet anymore basically.

<comment><USER4> I guess my point is how to classify different environments - to know which tool to use when.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regarding the similarity function used: I haven't studied it myself, but read this a long time ago:

[http://www.benfrederickson.com/distance- metrics/](http://www.benfrederickson.com/distance-metrics/)

</comment><comment> a-dub Which hash function are you using for the minhashes for the LSH benchmark? Example code from datasketch seems to indicate SHA-1. Is there good reason for that? Have you tried out murmur? I wonder if it improves runtime?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure Murmur3 would improve performance, but I doubt it would improve the indexing time very much. I can give it a try.

Update:

In IPython using pyhash library (C++):

      import pyhash
      h = pyhash.murmur3_32()
      timeit h(b"test")
      703 ns ± 4.8 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)

      import hashlib
      timeit hashlib.sha1(b"test")
      217 ns ± 5.87 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)

<comment> a-dub

      import pyhash
      h = pyhash.murmur3_32()
      timeit h(b"test")
      576 ns ± 3.01 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)

      import hashlib
      timeit hashlib.sha1(b"test").digest()
      518 ns ± 5.3 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)

      import mmh3
      timeit mmh3.hash(b"test")
      156 ns ± 0.704 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)

Worth keeping in mind that pyhash and mmh3 close out the hash immediately where hashlib needs digest() to call sha1_done().

That said, mmh3 seems to give a respectable 70% speedup! (assuming 32bit hashes are acceptable) ... actually, let's compare apples to apples:

      timeit mmh3.hash128(b"test")
      180 ns ± 1.34 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)

Still pretty awesome for the little test!

...

And for something more realistic:

      timeit hashlib.sha1(b"test"*4096).digest()
      21.9 µs ± 594 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)

      timeit h(b"test"*4096)
      6.81 µs ± 38 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)

      timeit mmh3.hash128(b"test"*4096)
      3.03 µs ± 14.5 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)

An order of magnitude! (well, close)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I thought the Python builtin hashlib was more convenient (and more random). But yes you are right, good implementation of murmur3 hash is much faster.

<comment> a-dub SHA-1 is specifically built to have special properties as a secure hash function. As I understand it murmur actually comes from this world.

I also had a gander at some more of the datasketch source. I notice that you compute H_n(x) by x_n = (a_n + b_n * H_0(x)) with a_n, b_n being random seeds....

That's pretty cool, I was doing it by H_n(x) = H_n-1(x|n) and thought it would be pretty quick, but just applying a random round directly after to one hash value from precomputed seeds looks much faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you were curious about the reference to MinHash in the OP, I just wrote a gentle guide to the MinHash family of algorithms (including our recent research extending it to probability distributions.) [https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsx...](https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/)

</comment><comment> bra-ket How does it compare to Spotify "annoy" LSH [https://github.com/spotify/annoy](https://github.com/spotify/annoy)</comment>


Sorting the World: Google Invents New Way to Manage Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_sorting <comment><USER2> A more accurate title would be "Google Popularizes Way to Manage Data known to Practioners for at least Last 20 Years"

</comment><comment><USER3> Fairly weak article, details please?</comment>


XSS attacks on Googlebot allow search index manipulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/xss-attacks-googlebot-index-manipulation/ <comment><USER2> Here are the steps to reproduce the attack from what I gather:

1\. Find a vulnerable site. The author picked Revolut, a 3-year old, well- funded fintech startup. Others might be found at [https://www.openbugbounty.org](https://www.openbugbounty.org).

2\. Inject the script. The author did so by tacking a URL parameter containing script content to a link he obtained from the Revolut site.

3\. Preview the attack with Google's Web Rendering Service, which apparently uses the same version of Chrome used by Googlebot.

4\. Submit the link to Googlebot for crawling.

5\. View the cached page from the Google results page.

> I reported this to Google in November 2018, but after 5 months they had made > no headway on the issue (citing internal communication difficulties), and > therefore I'm publishing details such that site owners and companies can > defend their own sites from this sort of attack. Google have now told me > they do not have immediate plans to remedy this.

Translation: Google declares open season on this attack.

<comment><USER3> >Google declares open season on this attack.

This has always been the case, people have been exploiting this for _at least_ a decade.

<comment><USER4> Was the first I was thinking

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related: "In the past 3 months we surveyed all internal XSS bugs that triggered the XSSAuditor and were able to find bypasses to all of them." \--[http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/07/18/google-chrome- is-...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/07/18/google-chrome-is-ditching- its-xss-detection-tool/)

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing with this vulnerability is that it is just an XSS.

It has nothing to do with Google apart from the fact they don't run GoogleBot using a recent version of Chrome.

The other thing is that if I understand correctly, this could work without JavaScript. You could just inject HTML <a> tags to inject links in XSS vulnerable website.

PS: Apparently Google Bot has been updated to the latest version of Chromium which means it is even less a vulnerability on Google's side.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. The breathlessness of the article made no sense to me. It's like someone writing, "Did you know that if someone breaks into your home, they can rearrange the books on your bookshelf‽" Well, yes, of course they can but if someone has broken into my house, unauthorized alphabetization is the least of my worries.

Similarly, if there's an XSS vulnerability on my site, Google search index manipulation is pretty far down on the list of things I'm going to be worried about.

<comment><USER8> Think of it more like a DDOS. If they break into your house, you have bigger worries. If they break into the houses of a hundred thousand strangers, and use them to demonstrate that their site should get all the search results and your site goes on page 5, what can you do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I accidentally found this circa 2008. I found a xss vulnerability on a local news website, where I could inject js into the webpage URL.

I then posted a poc on my blog. The poc will create a img link to my blog.

To my surprise my blog ranked 2nd for the news name. The only explanation that I can think of was googlebot followed the poc link and thought the news site has a link to my blog. Of course this is only possible if googlebot execute js, which was not a standard for other crawlers at that time.

I believe the blackhat term for this is Google Bowling. Correct me if I'm wrong.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Googlebot is based on Google Chrome version 41 (2015), and therefore it has > no XSS Auditor

It is no longer true: [https://searchengineland.com/google-will-ensure- googlebot-ru...](https://searchengineland.com/google-will-ensure-googlebot- runs-the-latest-version-of-chromium-316534)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Since Googlebot executes Javascript, this allows an attacker to craft XSS URLs that can manipulate the content of victim sites."

In some imaginary future with ubiquitous headless browser-based bots, having Javascript disabled might actually be a good test for "Are you human?"

</comment><comment><USER12> Google is depreciating the xss auditor anyway - [https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/google-deprecates-xss- aud...](https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/google-deprecates-xss-auditor-for- chrome)

</comment><comment><USER13> No fix citing "internal communication difficulties", perhaps Google could use, I don't know, some kind of tool. I too work for a huge company, and oddly enough we also have communications difficulties sometimes despite all of our tools. But we not a technology company, seems like a Google should be better at this.

<comment><USER14> "internal communication difficulties" does not mean "I can't talk to the person", it means political infighting or the responsible team doesn't care/see it as a problem.

<comment><USER15> There is probably a long winded explanation somewhere how this is actually a feature and not an exploit.

<comment><USER16> Well, how are you going to fix it without removing important features like submitting pages to the index? There are no perfect XSS auditors; you can fairly consistently work around Chrome's, which is why they're giving up on it now.

I don't see any realistic solution to this problem.

<comment><USER17> I can imagine the search teams response now...

"If your site has an XSS, then anyone can make any content appear on that domain... So why's it so bad if anyone can also make anything appear on the domain in Google Search? - we're just reflecting reality.

Next you guys will report that you wrote a comment in hackernews and that appeared on google search too!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mining Monero on googlebot anyone?

<comment><USER19> It's not going to stay long enough on one page to do so.

<comment><USER17> it stays on a page for 30 seconds, and has a pretty decent CPU.

I'm going to guess you could get a decent amount of monero mined...

Googlebot will only visit a page if it thinks that (on average across the domain), there are ~99 human visitors for every bot visit. So you'll have to hide the monero miner on a popular domain.

<comment><USER20> That definitely is not true. I know sites that have higher share of bot visits than 1%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Also if googlebot has been fixed and the chrome fix the url, you can however exploit the bug of xss with an proxy web [https://www.hidemyass- freeproxy.com/proxy/it-it/aHR0cDovL2Jl...](https://www.hidemyass- freeproxy.com/proxy/it- it/aHR0cDovL2JlZGJyZWFrZmFzdC5iZS9lbi90dW5pcy02NjI_c2x0X2NpdHk9JTNDL3NjcmlwdCUzRSUzQ3NjcmlwdCUzRXZhciUyMHglMjA9JTIwZG9jdW1lbnQuZ2V0RWxlbWVudHNCeUNsYXNzTmFtZSglMjJwYWdlLXRpdGxlJTIyKTt4WzBdLmlubmVySFRNTCUyMD0lMjAlMjJDaWFvJTIwVmluY2Vuem8lMjI7YWxlcnQoJTI3dmluY2Vuem8lMjBzaSUyMG51JTIwc3RydW56JTI3KTslM0Mvc2NyaXB0JTNFJnNsdF9uZWFyYnk9Njcy)

or open the main url with firefox browser: [http://bedbreakfast.be/en/tunis-662?slt_city=%3C/script%3E%3...](http://bedbreakfast.be/en/tunis-662?slt_city=%3C/script%3E%3Cscript%3Evar%20x%20=%20document.getElementsByClassName\(%22page- title%22\);x\[0\].innerHTML%20=%20%22Ciao%20Vincenzo%22;alert\(%27vincenzo%20si%20nu%20strunz%27\);%3C/script%3E&slt_nearby=672)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is actually not bad. Maybe it will make site developers aware of XSS and motivates to fix it?

It isn't Google's job to fix your broken sites.

</comment><comment><USER22> This issue no longer applies since Googlebot now runs the latest Chrome: [https://searchengineland.com/google-will-ensure-googlebot- ru...](https://searchengineland.com/google-will-ensure-googlebot-runs-the- latest-version-of-chromium-316534)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious if the author had just injected a URL as plaintext, no JS involved, does the Googlebot also follow strings that just look like URLs?

</comment><comment><USER24> brilliant use of XSS here. This is just great.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nicely laid out for the black hatters!

<comment><USER26> They are probably already aware of this if they do this sort of black hat SEO type stuff.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this particular technique is as old as the hills.

CVE-2007-1287 was abused for this specific purpose over a decade ago, and remnants of that still occasionally show up in google indexes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks like Tom's blog is toast atm - 502 error. This is why we can't have nice things.

</comment><comment><USER28> > This presumably manipulates PageRank

Is PageRank still used by Google?

<comment><USER29> This was on a post a few days ago [0]:

> Ex-Google-Search engineer here

> The comments here that PageRank is Google's secret sauce also aren't really > true - Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20442044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20442044)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will all non-violent drug offenders be released from prison? - <AUTHOR>

If prohibition ends and the "war on drugs" comes to an end, is it possible that all non violent drug offenders might be released from prison? <comment><USER2> I don't think there are offenders in prison for just smoking a joint. I also don't think they will make Cocaine, Heroin, or Crack-cocaine legal anytime soon (which is most likely why someone is still in prison).

On top of everything, legalization still won't mean you can become a dealer with no rules. There will still be heavy regulations. Vicodin is a legal drug, yet you can still go to jail for going around regulations and selling it out of your house.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a chance that the War on Drugs will end. The USA has spent the last 50+ years demonizing some drugs. We have prosecutors whose entire career has been wrapped up in prosecuting drug offenders. It will require a generational change to stop the War on (some) Drugs.

Several federal agencies exist solely to perpetrate the War on Drugs. That's a lot of white welfare to get rid of quickly.</comment>


ICANN Loses Control of Its Own Domain Names - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/04/icann-pwned.html <comment><USER2> Loved the filename: icann-pwned.html! Thanks to the anonymous web monkey with a sense of humour. And no offense about the monkey think, I hope - I am a web monkey too. Aren't we all.

</comment><comment><USER3> The real WTF is that the ICANN thinks domain names have anything to do with security. If you want your users to know your site is you, you need a certificate that your users trust. Anyone upstream from the user can poison DNS caches.

</comment><comment><USER4> "ICANN said Thursday that new, unspecified security measures should prevent such attacks in the future."

      (if (member domain *ICANN-domains*)
          (error 'security-error)
          (really-transfer domain))</comment>


Useful Things I Learned from Having My Genome Tested (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.abetterwaytohealth.com/5-useful-things-learned-genome-tested/ <comment><USER2> I'm a bit leery to take advice from a person who is willing to take multiple DNA tests and analyze their research, and yet according to her About page, turned to Chinese medicine and practices quack pseudoscience herself.

DNA tests have their merit - I did 23andMe because as someone who is adopted, it gave me a rough blueprint of what to expect in terms of long term health risks. But even with their assessments, they're all based on research studies and not your actual body. For example, 23andMe claims I'm Factor V Leiden, and yet a blood test confirmed this was not the case. So even with a high confidence rating on 23andMe, it was wrong, so now I take everything from 23andMe with a grain of salt.</comment>