Lawyer in Charge of Apple's Insider-Trading Policy Accused of Insider Trading - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/ex-top-apple-lawyer-levoff-accused-by-sec-of-insider-trading <comment><USER2> Greed is a wild thing!

Reading through the SEC complaint while he was a very senior executive, he was a very amateur trader.

The risk-analysis in hindsight aka - why risk jail / fines / everything to avoid a $350k loss on $10m+ of shares - is stupid.

But I'd say he clearly overestimated the risk / reward in a very amateur / fear based way.

For instance in one session, he bought ~$1.1m of stock expecting a large pop, and then sold a few days later for a net profit of only $4,500!

That should cover about an hour of his current legal bills.

Lots more detail in the actual complaint:

[https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2019/comp- pr2019-1...](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2019/comp- pr2019-10.pdf)

Eg:

\- Oversaw their entire corporate law division of 30 - 50 - "Levoff was responsible for Apple's compliance with securities laws, including providing legal advice in connection with Apple's SEC filings and financial reporting . . . "

\- Apple had a long standing "blackout" policy where insiders were cautioned NOT to trade at all that he clearly ignored / broke multiple times. Including after he sent the blackout notice updated with "the first sentence of Levoff's February 24, 2011 email stated: "REMEMBER, TRADING IS NOT PERMITTED, WHETHER OR NOT IN AN OPEN TRADING WINDOW, IF YOU POSSESS OR HAVE ACCESS TO MATERIAL INFORMATION THAT HAS NOT BEEN DISCLOSED PUBLICLY."

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not always greed, sometimes it's desperation and I don't say that with any sympathy. When you're surrounded by wealthy people with wealthy spending habits you, sometimes, tend to mirror their spending habits to your own detriment. Unfortunately, "keeping up with the Joneses" is a real thing.

<comment><USER3> Call it any thing you want it's greed. I can understand a developer with $100k worth of stocks trading in desperation because they want to pay off their student loan or buy a house. But this guy had around $10 million. What desperation?

<comment><USER4> Someone who's not a developer with student loan debt might call that greed as well. We are all very sympathetic to ourselves.

<comment><USER5> And yet there's been countless studies about the point at which money stops being about comfort and it's ~$140k/year. At about $200k a year in most of the country and I'll go so far as to say $500k/year in the valley, if you are struggling with money you are being extremely stupid with it. At $10 million you could instantly retire and lead an upper middle class lifestyle off the interest alone in 90% of the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _That month, he sold about $10 million of Apple stock -- virtually all of > his holdings -- to avoid losing about $345,000, the SEC said._

Saving over $300k is sizable, but selling $10M in stock seems pretty risky. Wouldn't this be a huge red flag, especially for someone who works at the company? Seems to be lots of risk and not that much (comparatively) saved.

Or perhaps this was his strategy in flying under the radar, since it didn't net him that much on a percentage basis?

But most importantly, if you have ten million dollars in AAPL (and a job that pays you more besides) why on earth are you taking risks like this?

<comment><USER7> Cops can get tunnel vision. If there's anyone capable of walking right up to but not crossing the "insider trading line" it's going to be a lawyer that specializes in insider trading. If there's anyone that's going to be arrested as a false positive for insider trading it's going to be someone walking right up to but not crossing the line.

I dunno if his lawyer is just very optimistic but "We look forward to defending him with respect to these allegations," is lawyer speak for "I have a mountain of evidence that is going to make these people look like fools."

IMO whether he's insider trading or just barely not it's a stupid risk to take either way.

Obviously this (and every other comment around here) are just speculation at this point since we have no good details.

<comment><USER6> > _"We look forward to defending him with respect to these allegations," is > lawyer speak for "I have a mountain of evidence that is going to make these > people look like fools."_

To me (a former lawyer), that vague statement is definitely not an indication that he has a strong case. He may have one, but that statement comes across as weak to me. It's what you say when you can't offer any specifics about why the allegations are untrue. (As the old lawyer saying goes: "When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.")

<comment><USER7> I guess you could read it that way. Most of the time if you're the least bit guilty then "no comment" is the lawyer's comment. Obviously this comment is nothing of substance but it's certainly more upbeat than "no comment"

<comment><USER8> I disagree, it's extremely common for lawyers to make strong denials to the press. Even if there's nothing to back it up, it looks better from a PR standpoint than a "no comment" which puts the lawyer in a slightly better position when negotiating a settlement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lol remember in the mid-1990's how self regulation of industry by industry was going to change everything? Industry was going to regulate extremely effectively because it understood all the "nuances" and save the government the expense of having to do it. I guess it sort of did change things but for the worse clearly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why would Apple allow senior executives to do any AAPL stock sales outside of a 10b5-1 plan? Why would a senior executive ever sell company stock outside a 10b5-1 plan? That just seems like asking for trouble. The safe thing to do once you reach a certain level is to do all stock sales of company stock through 10b5-1. Anything else is just stupidly opening yourself up to charges of insider trading.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if it's born of habit. People a lot lower down the corporate ladder very often have access to insider information. Either directly or indirectly. When those people trade on insider info it's hard to prove/not worth going after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is this only a civil SEC investigation? This should also have an FBI / criminal component. Perhaps it is coming later like it did with Theranos and Experian.

<comment><USER13> The WSJ article says there's a criminal complaint too, in New Jersey. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-accuses-ex-apple- executive-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-accuses-ex-apple-executive-of- insider-trading-11550081111)

<comment><USER12> I see a State level complaint. I'd like to see a Federal investigation also.

<comment><USER14> They are federal charges: "... according to the U.S. attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey, which filed criminal charges against Levoff".

<comment><USER12> Niceeee

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He would have been better off just holding.

<comment><USER16> reminds me of martha stewart

<comment><USER17> She would've been better off not lying to investigators. She went to prison for obstruction of justice, not insider trading/securities fraud.

<comment><USER11> I always got the feeling she didn't just lie, she pissed them off while doing it.

My mother had to cover insider trading when she was teaching. She said a lot of her students 'didn't get it'. My mother also worked for the IRS, tip don't piss off the enforcement people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Senior director at apple is considered a very senior executive? Isn't the director level the entry point for what would be considered an executive?

<comment><USER17> He was a senior director and corporate secretary. Corporate Secretary would be the "very senior executive" function... though interestingly not senior enough to be listed as an "executive officer" on Apple's proxy statements.

Since he wasn't an "executive officer" he wasn't required to file a Form 4 with the SEC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> He could have hedged with options. In such a liquid stock, probably less likely to get noticed - although - even 10mm isn't much. Does the SEC review insider trades?

<comment><USER19> Most large tech companies actually forbid hedging their stock's equity performance with corresponding options.</comment></comment>


Phone services disrupted across B.C., but emergency calls still working - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cell-services-down-1.5449130 <comment><USER2> I find it interesting that all our major _competing_ cell phone providers were equally affected in a pretty material way by this.

The claim (by Bell) is that a "third-party fibre line" way up in North Bend BC was the root cause of this problem..

I know providers all stick their own gear on the same towers, but I guess I didn't realize how common it was for the top-level providers (i.e. the ILECs) to lease cables (as opposed to running their own). I always assumed this was just the resellers (CLECs) who did it..

I wonder if that cable is fully third-party owned, or belongs to TELUS (the quad-play provider for western Canada) and Bell/Rogers lease capacity from them for their wireless services.

<comment><USER3> Longhaul cable infrastructure is expensive. Especially in Canada where business cases are crippled by thousands of km of emptiness (no opportunity to recover investments). Providers often swap lines through IRU agreements to reduce capital intensity. I've heard but can't confirm the infrastructure in question was laid down by CP and CN rail back in the 90s. I don't know the ownership structure. But I know the railways are still involved in the maintenance.

<comment><USER4> You're on the right track: Was called CNCP telecommunications: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNCP_Telecommunications](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNCP_Telecommunications)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anybody else is having issues loading the article it says a landslide damaged a fiber backbone.

I guess emergency services must have a backup system or maybe there is a low bandwidth secondary that can't handle regular call volume and prioritizes emergency numbers.

<comment><USER6> I worked on wireless infrastructure software about 20 years ago - some of the stuff that counted as 3G.

The phone does not "dial" the emergency phone number. It tells the tower that it needs to initiate an emergency call. At that point, the infrastructure bypasses all authentication/authorization/billing checks and connects to what the infrastructure knows as the local emergency service. It's a standard voice connection, made over the same channels as a normal call, with one exception: if there is no available channel, it drops a normal call to make room.

In this case, some of the potential situations could be occurring: 1) There is still backbone (backhaul) availability, but perhaps the connection to the subscriber database has been severed. No normal calls can be authenticated, but emergency calls don't get authenticated and are thus not impacted. 2) Everything is working normally but at drastically reduced capacity. With the normal load of emergency calls, there is simply not enough capacity for normal calls. If this is the case, it is possible that not all emergency calls are being completed - the emergency operations center would not have the ability to know if this was the case.

<comment><USER7> So, if I go to California with my NY cell phone and dial 911... I get the emergency services of the tower I connected to? Was always curious who I'd get when I'm not near home.

<comment><USER8> Yes. You can always make an emergency call, without service from your actual provided, and without a SIM card.

<comment><USER7> But who answers? California 911 - because that's where I'm physically located. or NY 911 because that's where my phone is from?

<comment><USER9> Based on your location, but I know that there's stories about location not being accurate, remember seeing a report that some Pizza app and ride sharing apps can be more accurate. Someone told me on their cell phone 911 went to state's highway patrol instead of the city police, not sure if true or not since haven't had to dial 911 from a cell phone.

However if you have VOIP, not all VOIP providers support 911 but the ones that do want you to set a 911 address on your account itself, phone number or for a specific Analog telephone adapter - ATA Device from my understanding. I know our cable company provides phone service and the old modem had a sticker warning about VOIP and E911, not sure if the new one does or not since haven't looked at it too much.

<comment><USER10> Just guessing based on how the technology works, but I would presume that when you initiate an emergency call via a cell phone call, the best location indicator that emergency services receive is "somewhere near tower X", since you are just making a voice call.

Apps running on the phone have access to your phone's GPS and can get more precise location data, if you have allowed it. Using an emergency app (Active911, Smart911, etc) will provide more specific location data to emergency services, but these are applications that rely on data and GPS to be working and may not work in as many situations as a simple 911 call.

As far as _who_ receives the call, I imagine it is just based on who the tower is preconfigured to forward the call to. If the tower you are connected to is close to a highway, you'll probably get highway patrol. If you're in town, you'll probably get local police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm working from home today because my work's primary and secondary lines to our data centre are down. We have a tertiary but it's slow. So they didn't want ppl coming in to the office and using all the bandwidth

</comment><comment><USER12> Good that emergency calls still work. In the Netherlands we had a handful of service interruptions (for some regions/providers) in the last few years, and the emergency numbers went down as well. If I remember correctly, the problems were mostly caused by software.

<comment><USER13> It depends on the infrastructure but sometimes emergency calls are routed differently, sometimes over completely different systems. There's a system in the US called GETS that allows federal, state, and local government agencies to make high priority calls over normal commercial phone systems and will also make use of government only phone lines, whatever will make the connection. The agency gets a special code and a certain phone number they dial first (just like using one of those old long distance cards). There is dedicated bandwidth just for these kinds of phone calls so even if all the lines are full, there is a guaranteed 90% call completion rate if the call volume is 8 times higher than normal.

There's a wireless version of this too although it doesn't quite work the same so I'm not sure how effective it really is.

<comment><USER12> The Netherlands has a network for the emergency services that is entirely separated from the normal phone network ("Noodnet"). It has a limited service and bandwidth and normally has no interconnection with the normal phone network (so is not intended or usable for emergency calls from the public), but is designed to be very resilient. I don't think it is used when the normal phone network is still functioning. I have no idea how they test it; it must all be rather expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We experienced this in Central Washington this weekend as well (around Leavenworth and Steven's Pass). Cell service went out late Saturday night and only recovered Sunday afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER15> It looks like this is related to another extreme weather event. An epic rainstorm. [https://www.straight.com/tech/1354721/rogers-and-bell- cellph...](https://www.straight.com/tech/1354721/rogers-and-bell-cellphone- service-down-across-much-british-columbia-wake-rainstorm) climate change is making rain storms more powerful and intense.

<comment><USER16> I'm assuming that the link in parent post is in error and was intended to be this one[0], which specifically mentions the connection between climate change and the extraordinarily high amounts of rain having fallen in the area around the time of the outage:

[0] [https://www.straight.com/life/1354586/pineapple-express- brin...](https://www.straight.com/life/1354586/pineapple-express-brings- stunning-amounts-rain-south-coast-british-columbia)

p.s. I've always liked that these winter rain storms coming into BC, Canada from the general direction of Hawaii are colloquially called "Pineapple Express".</comment></comment>


SpaceX Releases Preliminary Analysis – Strut Failure Likely Cause [With Audio] - <AUTHOR> http://nasawatch.com/archives/2015/07/spacex-releases.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20nasawatch%2FAekt%20(NASA%20Watch)

<comment><USER2> Interesting bit about the parachute recovery, that would have been pretty cool to watch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Elon sounded sad that they just needed to update the software to make it happen. They could have saved the Dragon with this adjustment.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Man, some journalists are so lost. It is so shameful that people have to report about things they know zip about. (in this case they are doing ok'ish).</comment>


Are we facing advertising overload? - <AUTHOR> https://rockstars.media/are-we-facing-advertising-overload/ <comment><USER2> That ship has sailed.</comment>


KeybaseFS and Jekyll - <AUTHOR> https://abhi.keybase.pub/2016/02/12/keybase-and-jekyll.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone have an invite for the KBFS, please?

klaus {at} seistrup {dot} dk

Cheers!</comment>


Debug your programs like they're closed source - <AUTHOR> http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/04/20/debug-your-programs-like-theyre-closed-source/ <comment><USER2> _" Your program communicates with something on a network, but some of the information it's sending is wrong? It's probably sending it with write, sendto, or send."_

If you want to debug network traffic, a higher-level tool like Wireshark[1] (which knows about the packet formats for all sorts of different wire protocols and has sophisticated tools for filtering out just the packets you're interested in seeing) would be much easier to use than looking at system call traces.

Still, this is a great article, and I definitely agree that learning about your operating system's debugging facilities is useful, but in many cases you can save yourself a lot of time by using a tool that's optimized for a particular task.

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

<comment><USER3> Here is a good way I've found to debug network based code:

Step 1: write shell scripts to capture certain kinds of network traffic with tcpdump and output a pcap file (e.g. have a certain function to capture HTTP traffic of a certain kind)

Step 2: open with wireshark and split screen with source code

I'm sure wireshark has a nice way of doing step 1 but I prefer the workflow of typing "foocap example.org" and then looking at the results in wireshark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I suppose this may be a "new way" of debugging for the author of this article, it's hardly a new technique. strace, trace, truss and similar tools have been around for decades now. They're the kind of tools that many developers and sysadmins use without a second thought.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you find strace useful, you should check out sysdig[1]. Sysdig is like strace but uses kernel trace points instead of ptrace so it has a lower probe effect on the running process.

[1]: [http://www.sysdig.org/](http://www.sysdig.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Should I stop feeling guilty now about debugging Java programs on Windows using Process Monitor?

<comment><USER2> On Windows, there's also Process Explorer[1], which can show you all your processes' threads, file handles, etc. (plus all the stuff you can see in Task Manager like memory and CPU usage). And it can search for which process has a particular file open. Very useful.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> strace with Haskell is really messy because of the run time scheduler for green threads.

I would guess that it is similar for other run times that involve similar concurrency management techniques.</comment>


Ask HN: I received an offer. Should I sell? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN.
I received an offer for one of the websites that I own. I'm going to keep the domain private for now for a couple reasons.
1) The site hasn't been sold yet 2) I don't want it to look like I'm simply promoting my site
Here's the story. I run a website that takes literally 5 minutes a year to keep updated. It's a simple one-page html/css site. It is ranked #1 overall on Google for a term that is searched nearly 20,000 times each month.
I've really only had the site up now for 2-3 months despite owning the domain for a year. Since the site has been up it has received over 60,000 page views from 55,000 visitors. This is all from organic search engine traffic... no advertising. In this same time the site has also earned $193 from AdSense.
Here's the stats for September and October so far:
September: 33,450 pageviews - $73.12 October (5 days): 18,667 pageviews - $13.07
Some potentially negative things about the site: contains a trademarked name in the domain. There are plenty of other sites on the internet with it in their domain as well and they are up and operating just fine. The site may only receive this much attention for 8 or 9 months out of the year.
So my question is this... should I sell the site? I was offered $400 (seems sort of low to me). Is the site worth more than that knowing it might be a seasonal(ish) site with potential trademark troubles in the name? Keep in mind the site costs literally nothing to keep up and takes 5 minutes each year to keep updated and accurate.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
If you want additional info I'd love to chat at draftpulse [at] gmail [dot] com or in the comments here. <comment><USER2> $193 in 3 months equates to about 65 a month. In a year, you will net about $772. Conclusion, there is no point in selling it for an amount less than $772, especially given that maintenance only takes 5 minutes of your time in year. I'd probably wouldn't sell it for twice that amount - I tend to be attached to my domain names. Anyhow, think of it as beer money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input! I did think $400 was a bit low. Since selling isn't necessary right now (it's doing just fine without any work right now) I was thinking $1,000 would be the magical number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ryan, Having worked on this site with you I highly recommend you do NOT! sell the site. You have nothing to worry about in risk and the profit is money in your pocket for little to no work on your part. Keep the site unless you get offered the price of what it would make in 2 years. If you need anything or want to talk you have my email.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the language you use is very interesting. "A website that I own" makes it seem like it's a commodity and not necessarily a product which you've put lots of blood, sweat and tears into building. From your description, it sounds like that's the case. So really its just a domain sale. Not sure what the domain is, so I can't be certain how much value that has in and of itself.

That said, the advertising profits alone do give the site value. I'd counter the offer at $600 and point out that, if current trends continue, the site will pay for itself in the next year. But there's definitely a lot of risk involved, so it's worth selling and taking the money now. I would at least.

Unless you want the domain for something, sell it. It's hard to rely on ad revenue. Being able to pocket a few hundred dollars right now is probably a good option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Technically the site has already paid for itself this year and the next 20 or so... (technically because I already had hosting so I'm just assuming the cost of yearly domain renewal).

I agree with the risk part though. Might be better to sell it now instead of rolling the dice with the trademark and ad revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't dream of selling this site at that price.

With no risk or effort you are generating a solid return. Not knowing any details, I'd say you have a good chance of things getting better.

You're risking a few hundred bucks--big deal! You'll make the few hundred bucks over the next year.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you buy into A/B testing, then you probably have the possibility of increasing your revenue significantly, which would drive up your price above the recommendations here. (Disclosure: I think I can guess the site you're talking about from recalling a reference you made elsewhere.) Also, there may very well be CPC referral opportunities associated with your domain which, in- season might yield far more revenue than what you're seeing, although I'm not sure how gray those networks are.

</comment><comment><USER7> $193 in 3 months = 65/month. Since it only takes 5 mins every year, I would say ask for at least 2 years worth of payment which should be roughly $65*24 = $1560.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input. Do you think the potential trademark infringement (that doesn't seem to be a major issue for any other site on the web) would affect this value at all?

<comment><USER7> why should you worry about that ? You already have an offer which means the buyer is well aware. Unless the buyer is negotiating on the basis of trademark infringement. In either case, I think you should stick to this and see. If buyer backs out, you can negotiate a little lower :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How did you get the site to #1 so fast?

On the price, yeah, $400 is low. But then the risk profile of the site is high. Are you in a hurry to get rid of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> The domain is an exact match for the term. It's also a .com. That along with some simple SEO work on the site had it to #1 in about 2 months. It was on page 1 pretty much right away.. then floated from 5-2 on the first page until the last 3 weeks or so.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, hold it and ask the bidder to up their offer. Unless you really need the money. You have to consider why they'd want it too when negotating to feel out their max point. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you do decide to sell, know that you can shop it around on places like dnforum.com

You may get better offers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Shopping it around if I decide to for sure sell is definitely a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did a research on this a while back. Looking at most domains sold at Flippa and other domain sale sites, the final price is closer to the max you can earn in one month x 24 months.

</comment><comment><USER11> Technically you should try and sell at 5x your annual revenue. So given your figures you are looking at 3-4K.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sell it. Get rid of the trademarks and maybe use the money to build a real website.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wait...75 dollars on 33k page views from ad sense? Is that normal?

</comment><comment><USER14> GwZ

</comment><comment><USER15> The way you were talking up the site, I thought the sale price would be $40,000, not $400.

My advice: if you are broke and have no food in the fridge, sell it. If you're doing "okay" financially, keep it. Four hundred isn't enough. I'd be asking for at least $700.

</comment><comment><USER16> You're extrapolating results from 3 months into years? Uh... yeah...

It doesn't sound that easy or stable if you are willing to sell it for 6 months profit instead of using your 5 minutes each year to run it forever and making $900/year.</comment>


10 Most Beautiful Looking Linux Desktops - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/05/17/10-most-beautiful-looking-linux-desktop/

<comment><USER2> These are all ugly and useless. My desktop is better:

[http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/desktop-20080518.pn...](http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/desktop-20080518.png)

Notice how all the space is being used for actual work instead of pretty pictures. Computers are for doing things, not looking at.

<comment><USER3> Nice. I like flat desktops; I will never understand the appeal of faux-3D interface elements.

I must, however, confess to a weakness for transparent terminals.

<http://scratch.flyoverblues.com/screen.png>

<comment><USER4> What are you using to serve your fonts?

<comment><USER3> I don't really know enough about Linux fonts to answer that. The window manager, Ion, does not support Xft because its author hates anti-aliasing, so I'm not sure what is rendering the title bars -- just X, I think. The terminal font is Inconsolata as rendered by rxvt-unicode with Xft support. (Emacs is being run -nw, so it's just using the same terminal fonts.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got excited but #1 is a mockup

<comment><USER6> And for the others no links or clues as to what desktop environment or window manger is used, nor what theme, background, or distro ... basically some eyecandy with no content.

<comment> mark-t Most of them are pretty easy to tell, but many could be done in just about any window manager.

      1. Not real.
      2. Mac4Lin.
      3. Not absolutely clear, but note that thunar's internal menus are displayed in the toolbar instead of the window, like a mac. It could be Mac4Lin again, but I'm guessing it's not real, unless there's something about thunar I don't know.
      4. Enlightenment.
      5. Pekwm.
      6. Enlightenment.
      7. Could be anything. It does have a Gnome footprint on the bottom right, though, so I'd guess metacity.
      8. Fluxbox. (yay!)
      9. I'm not sure. Probably compiz-fusion.
      10. Could be anything.

<comment><USER7> Desktop 10 has "C:\".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> if I'm being honest, I think I prefer Vista to all of those, excepting perhaps the mockup, #1.</comment>


Falcon 9 Starlink constellation mission - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVuS4IS2Kvs <comment><AUTHOR> Launch aborted.

UPDATE from SpaceX: "Standing down today; standard auto-abort triggered due to out of family data during engine power check. Will announce next launch date opportunity once confirmed on the Range"

<comment><USER2> Some engine failure, or at least a metric about it</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much do you spend on your side project - <AUTHOR> I mean for side projects that's not making any profit. I'm setting a budget of $800/year, including hosting cost like heroku, domain name purchase, etc.<p>If you have multiple projects, can you please say the average and max cost. <comment><USER2> I'm currently spending about £50 on server costs and an average of £200 on advertising, which will end soon as I'm switching to other methods.

I also spend money on designers and developers. Even for a side project, there are places I don't have time / skills to go to :) and I rely on external -paid- help.

<comment><USER3> Any recommendations on designers? Always got problems finding decent ones, usually end up chopping Themeforest ones together/appart.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately that has been my weakest point so far. I think I might have the wrong idea about the cost of a great design (i.e. I might not be offering enough to go from good to great).

If you like [https://wormhole.network](https://wormhole.network) I can put you in touch with the designer. She's professional and fast - I just now think it doesn't look as great as I thought at first :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't look at projects in terms of profit, I look at them in terms of interest and thus motivation, learning potential, and possibly maybe way down the line something like profit. The most valuable input is always time, money is pretty much irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER5> $100/month sounds about right. Side projects are hobbies, for which $100/month is not too bad. Just compare that to the cost of operating a motorcycle, a set of golf clubs, owning a horse, building RC cars etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm... hosting costs are around $150.00 / month. Github account is $50.00 / month. Hoovers subscription is $100 / month or so. Co-working at American Underground @ Main is $200 / month. Domain names are probably $100.00 / year counting the occasional purchase of some speculative new domain.

So, whatever all that adds up to. We don't have any customer revenue yet, so I sustain things out of my "day job" salary.

</comment><comment><USER7> Domain costs, now a day I use github pages for hosting so I usually don't have to pay for hosting the domain. A subscription for Photoshop. Sometimes I pay for other software. Might have to start paying for IntelliJ soon.

</comment><comment><USER8> All of mine are profitable or have been stopped.

Couple websites net ~$1000 adsense a year, after $8/mo hosting costs.

Smart mirror raised $4k (lol) seed from university accelerator.

Personal website somehow got a random donation that payed for hosting.

</comment><comment><USER9> Zero, not including time. This include profitable projects. There might be the occasional software purchase like Sketch (like $99). I guess I also pay for my webhost and domain.

</comment><comment><USER10> 5$/mo for DO droplet 7$/mo for private Github repos (could be free if you use bitbucket, but the UI/UX is horrific :() 12$/yr for the domain

that's about it

<comment><USER11> Hi adnanh, Bitbucket dev here. I agree we have a different UI to GitHub, but horrific seems a little strong. Our designers & front-enders spend a lot of time pixel pushing to build out a UX focused on professional teams. We even have a public set of design patterns and guidelines that apply across all of our products[0] if you're curious. That said, we are always iterating on the design and you are of course entitled to your own opinion. I'd appreciate any specific feedback you could give us on the UI/UX if you'd care to elaborate?

[0]: [https://design.atlassian.com/](https://design.atlassian.com/)

<comment><USER12> Not the parent's author, but as a fan of Atlassian products here's some feedback:

\- All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design reminds me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.

\- Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make the ecosystem feel less cohesive.

\- Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.

\- It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much _more_ on my GitHub homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.

\- There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites. GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value. Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your thoughts debacle! Let me address them slightly out of order:

> Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make > the ecosystem feel less cohesive.

I think the minor style differences are in part an artifact of our design process. We have a fairly large portfolio of products these days, and try to avoid dependencies between the release timelines and roadmaps of each. This means that a new design pattern or improvement will often appear in one product several releases before it is syndicated elsewhere. The way this often works on the ground is that a designer will invent a new pattern in one product, see it implemented and shipped, and then later abstracted and incorporated into the Atlassian Design Guidelines and Atlassian UI library that ships with all of our products.

> Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.

Simplifying administration (particularly initial setup) has been a long-time focus of ours, so much so that we codified it into our design principles as "Gracefully reveal depth"[0]. But it's a tough proposition: JIRA is powerful and flexible, but seriously complex, and we're still figuring out how to ease administration without removing or reducing functionality that our customers rely on. We're getting there (check out the admin console in JIRA 7 vs JIRA 6, or any other two consecutive major versions) but I think it will be more or less a constant battle as the products continue to expand in functionality. I appreciate the time you've taken to provide the feedback already, but if you have any specific pain points regarding administration I'd love to hear them.

> All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design reminds > me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.

> It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is > fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much more on my GitHub > homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.

> There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites. > GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value. > Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.

I'm personally not an aesthete in any sense of the word, but this seems valuable feedback. I'll bring it to the attention of our design and brand teams (and see if I can get them to jump in and comment). Thanks again for the feedback mate.

[0]: [https://design.atlassian.com/how-we- design/principles/](https://design.atlassian.com/how-we-design/principles/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I spend about 40USD/month on spreadserve.com. ~10 for Web Hosting, ~10 for Atlassian Jira, and ~20 for Amazon AWS.

</comment><comment><USER3> £40/pm - basically some domain costs and a cheap dedicated server from OVH/Kimsufi

</comment><comment><USER14> Spread out one time licenses costs and VPS and domain. Rought 40USD/Month

<comment><USER14> It is also a bit tricky to count. Would I have bought as good computer if I wouldn't spend so much time coding on it etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> right now, my fixed costs are just the digital ocean vps for $20 and the cost of the domain names

</comment><comment><USER16> ~£200 a month for servers for non-profitable projects

</comment><comment><USER17> about $10 per month got AWS, plus some cost for freelance developers. About $50/Month and that's not making profit.

</comment><comment><USER18> Around 50$ on server as cost

</comment><comment> atom-morgan A libsyn account + time</comment>


Thoughts on OS X Yosemite, Arch Linux and Xmonad - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jakubarnold.cz/2014/11/16/thoughts-on-os-x-yosemite-arch-linux-and-xmonad.html

<comment><USER2> I sympathize with the critique of Yosemite, I really do. But if your problem is "too many small things are broken" and your solution is to use Linux...</comment>


A back door to iOS has been found by Cellbrite - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/06/16/apple-iphone-ipad-security-warning-ios-12-iphone-xs-max-xr/#639775223641 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193808)</comment>


Piston X86-64 Assembler working in web browser and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://pasm.pis.to/

<comment><USER3> That's pretty neat, how you can select a mnemonic and the corresponding bytes are highlighted.

I have to say, though, I had a bit of a confused chuckle at the "marketing copy." This is (presumably) a hobby project, not a product landing page; the serious tone seems very out of place. "Sleek. Fast. Clean. Responsive. Line by line opcode explanation." sounds like something out of an Apple ad. Are you trying to sell me something here?

I liked it when programmer websites were butt-ugly text dumps and proud of it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, all I had back in the day were those quick refs that came with Turbo Assembler and MASM. Occasionally some BBS would have a half-done cheat sheet from an Intel manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would be really cool if this gave more explanation for the encodings. For example, showing the opcode, mod/reg/rm, and displacement components is really cool. What would be even cooler is to say _why_ some bit or combination of bits makes this opcode use, for example, the rax register. This would be more an effort of exposing some tables, referencing manuals, etc. but I think it would give people more of an intuition for the encoding. Another thing to consider would be breaking the encoding down into octal digits instead of hex or binary (or maybe mix when appropriate) to give the most clear presentation of the encoding format. I could see this as a great way to lazily learn.

<comment><USER6> +1 for octal encoding; although some of the 64-bit extension stuff - <USER2> REX prefices - has strayed from that, it's far easier to mentally assemble/disassemble x86 in octal form. Odd that the vast majority of x86 opcode references are exclusively in hex, since presenting the tables in octal makes the encoding look far more regular.

[http://tnovelli.net/ref/opx86.html](http://tnovelli.net/ref/opx86.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No snark, just curious. What's the point of this? Is it for teaching? It's a not a performance thing like asm.js right?

<comment><USER4> Probably more for learning and some work too. It's closer to an IDE like TASM / Turbo Profiler was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now wire this up with Native Client. :-o

</comment><comment><USER9> Instead of writing "working in web browser", I would write "written in CoffeeScript (or Javascript))".

The demo with live opcode display in the editor is pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I missing a joke here?

<comment><USER11> Actually, this is pretty cool for teaching students!

<comment><USER12> I rather have them use something like this,

[http://badsector.github.io/dcpustud/](http://badsector.github.io/dcpustud/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The demo is in 8086 16-bit code though. It would be nice to be able to see 32-bit and 64-bit codes in the demo too. At least 64-bit is the most interesting to me, as the older ones are the most covered on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome! This can come in handy while teaching my Shellcoding class: [http://www.pentesteracademy.com/course?id=7](http://www.pentesteracademy.com/course?id=7)

</comment><comment><USER15> Neat! So, who is going to write Softice for Node.js next? ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty cool. Now, how long until I can take the compiled byte code and run it in an emulated PC that outputs to a canvas screen? :)

<comment><USER6> I suppose this is pretty close: an emulated PC in your browser: [http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html](http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Atwood's Law apply to Node.js?</comment>


The moving sofa problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~romik/movingsofa/ <comment><USER2> In static analysis of forces you can in fact have an irreversible couch/sofa event (as in Dirk Gently's ). It is usually is described as jamming or wedging of the peg in hole problem (see here [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/16741-s07/www/ol...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/16741-s07/www/oldlecture23.pdf) ) and arises when the implied forces can oppose any force to move the object. In this model you can stick a peg in at the wrong angle and it will jam and never come out.

I ran into this when I tried to explain the sofa stuck in the staircase mystery in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. She (a Ph.D. in robotics specializing in dynamics and physics) pointed out an idealized rigid system could jam in this way without any additional exotic explanation (beyond the exoticness of idealized rigid physics).

<comment><USER3> Is this simply because the coefficient of friction between two surfaces is typically smaller when the surfaces are in motion than when they are at rest? If you wanted to reverse the insertion of a peg into a hole, you would have to halt it's motion for an instant, and at that point in time I would imagine you have to overcome static friction to make it move in the opposite direction. Friction forces can be dependent on the normal force between the two surfaces, so it's possible to jam a peg into a hole so that you can't get it out.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately it is merely a math problem. Until the peg comes in contact there is no friction. After it is in contact there is friction, and if the geometry is just wrong enough "virtual forces" to oppose any force. Real matter (which bends) can't have this problem- it is from the rigid model. The non-reversaiblity is this flaw plus the fact there is no friction in the model prior to contact (so there is a non-reverisble feature in the model).

<comment><USER3> It makes sense. After all, in real life I would just wiggle the peg to "walk" it back out of the hole, and that only works if the body is not perfectly rigid, and no body is perfectly rigid.

<comment><USER4> In reality your body could have barbed hooks which insert easily but dig into the walls when you try to pull it out. Wiggling doesn't help there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me quite a bit of the awesome Kuru Kuru Kururin game:

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

Gameplay: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvUZXT_43k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvUZXT_43k)

<comment><USER6> There is a modern game with similar gameplay: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/303430/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/303430/)

<comment><USER7> Also: Duet ([http://www.duetgame.com](http://www.duetgame.com)), for iOS, Android and on Steam is an IMO brilliant variation on this theme.

\- the player piece isn't a stick, but only two dots, one at each end of an imaginary stick.

\- there is no way to move the stick. Instead, the player controls its rotation, and the 'enemy' pieces approach it.

That simplifies the controls to two fingers: one to rotate the stick one way, and one to rotate it the other way.

This game also gets rid of most of the graphics; enemies are simple white rectangles on an almost black background, making the playing field look highly abstract (except for the paint splats left behind when one hits an enemy)

<comment><USER8> Very nice. Saw the other responder's comment and decided to try it, am impressed. I don't play mobile games often; wish I found more simple but creative games like this.

After the first couple levels I was thinking "oh god I will never be able to do this" but now I've cleared the "anger" stage and have started to develop strategies to approach several different situations. Pleasant feeling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I first read dirk Gently shortly after it was published, and got to the Sofa bit, I really wanted a wireframe simulation of it as described in the book, but as screen-saver[1].

These days most if not all people no longer have screen savers, so that wish is likely to forever remain unfulfilled.

\--

[1] I also wanted the rotating Starbug wireframe from Red Dwarf, but to my knowledge no-one has done that either.

<comment><USER10> "Holistic Sofa" is available as an After Dark screensaver for pre-OSX Macs. Completely useless today, of course.

<comment><USER11> YouTube link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A92PMGcquo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A92PMGcquo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I faced this problem in real life, not with a sofa, but with a bed mattress platform. Just out of grad school, my wife and I were moving in to an old craftsman-style house with a staircase that made a 180-degree bend at a landing with a fairly low ceiling. We squeezed the mattress through because it was bendable, but the platform was rigid and no matter what we did it just would not fit. Some measurement revealed that it would not go through the upstairs windows either. We ended up sawing the platform in half (it was made of wood covered in fabric) and re-assembling it upstairs. I screwed L-brakcets to the two halves and connected them with bolts so that we could easily repeat the process when it came time to move out.

<comment><USER13> That's pretty much how they solved the problem on This Old House. Seems like a pretty common tactic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of course, in the real world, furniture is 3D, and the obstacles you move move furniture around are also 3D. Bannister that's 3 feet high, couches with curved arms, ceilings have heights, stairwells...

Part of the fun of moving is trying to figure out how to orientate furniture to get it into a room - or out of the room, since someone already got in there so of course it must come out.

<comment><USER15> >(...) or out of the room, since someone already got in there so of course it must come out.

-Not necessarily; while a student, I looked after the apartment of a friend of mine, who was overseas. When he moved there, we were _just_ able to eke his sofa around the last corner from the stairwell and through the door to his apartment. Just. After much cursing and several failed attempts.

So, what does a good (cough) friend do while the owner is overseas? Get some hardwood mouldings/trimmings/whatever you call those long, thin pieces of wood typically put where wall transitions to ceiling or floor and nail them to the exterior doorframes, making both door openings perhaps 3/8" or so narrower, paint them in the color of the doorframe, sit back and wait.

Then, years later, as he is about to leave town, moving company comes along and everything runs smoothly until one item remains. The sofa. Obviously, it got in - so it'll (as obviously) come out.

Only it doesn't.

We (everybody except the owner and the moving guys were in on the joke) managed to keep a straight face for several minutes.

The moving guys even laughed as they (eventually) left, mollified by a bottle filled with a Scottish export product which we'd kept on hand to ensure no feelings were hurt afterwards.

<comment><USER16> We ran into this at our house. Queen box-spring went up the stairs fine. A year or so later, we re-build the stairs in wood, including the bannisters. A few years later, we bought a new bed, and the old one wouldn't come back down, so out the 2nd level window it went.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a similar problem, "Lebesgue's Universal Covering Problem", also unsolved:

[https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/02/lebesgues_unive...](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/02/lebesgues_universal_covering_p.html)

I wonder if the maths is related at all.

<comment><USER18> Neat. I thing I remember reading about this problem on Azimuth...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Must be said that the final shape looks very similar to animal feces probably because twisting intestines pose a challenge similar to that of the moving sofa problem.

<comment><USER20> Are you sure? 90 degrees angles with the sharp corners?

<comment> ryanplant-au Is that not how you keep yours?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am wondering what kind of solutions an evolutionary algorithm would come up with.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't be surprised if it could evolve from semi-circle segments roughly the current best.

<comment><USER21> The formulation of the fitness function seems to be an interesting problem. The best idea I can think of right now is to randomly apply forces within ±90° of the direction that moves the center of mass roughly in the correct direction in a 2D rigid body simulator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps coincidentally, the ambidextrous sofa has an area scarily close to the sum of inverse squares, \pi^2/6 \approx 1.6449341...

<comment><USER24> I guess if you look hard enough pi really is everywhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you like this, a student at SFPC in New York built a kinetic sculpture about this problem.

<comment><USER26> I think this is it: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BNXT5EQAsKY/?taken- by=sfpc_nyc](https://www.instagram.com/p/BNXT5EQAsKY/?taken-by=sfpc_nyc)

<comment><USER27> yes, that is it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "PIVOT!...PIVOT!" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_PklVas9cA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_PklVas9cA)

</comment><comment><USER29> I showed this to my dad (a math teacher), he said: "When you get to the corner, tilt the sofa up, and then tilt down the other hallway."

</comment><comment><USER30> Indirectly, this raises a concern I have with so-called "Artificial Intelligence" or "Deep Learning".

My first thought about this moving sofa problem is that it would yield an answer to brute-force analysis.

If not, then what about a long series of brute-force approximations to establish increasingly narrow upper and lower bounds? Which might yield an insight about the maximum pattern?

And then this thought occurred to me: if we have such amazing tools nowadays, for doing pattern analysis, and Big Data analysis, how is that we are not able to find patterns in a problem such as this? I mean, could we not find patterns in the ways we find upper and lower bounds, and then use techniques of Artificial Intelligence to see some underlying pattern in the bounds?

This problem is not like "What is the incidence of tuberculosis in Peru?" where we work with incomplete data. This moving sofa problem is an issue where we can work with perfect data.

And yet out current Big Data tools are unable to find a pattern that would provide a conclusion about the maximum?

Problems such as this help establish the limit on what our current Artificial Intelligence can do. If our pattern finding tools can not find patterns in numbers, where we work with perfect access to unlimited data, then we should not think that AI is going to achieve dramatic breakthroughs when working with imperfect data in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER31> We should create flexible walls. Disrupt walls.

</comment><comment><USER32> No doubt this was Douglas Adams's original inspiration..

"Right Said Fred" Bernard Cribbins [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge_4SlJWfl0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge_4SlJWfl0)

"I said to Charlie, "We'll just have to leave it Standing on the landing, that's all.

You see the trouble with Fred is, he's too hasty You'll never get nowhere if you're too hasty."

</comment><comment><USER33> Apropos considering Davis has a semi-permanent population of itinerant couches which migrate almost every other summer. I really could've used this algorithm when some friends and I moved a huge custom couch into a townhome in downtown San Jose which had to navigate narrow stairwells like frickn 3D chess.

Btw: our first house off-campus (right next to the railroad tracks on I St., wish I were joking) had probably three (3) couches, which mostly my mom made a million times more domesticated.

Fun-fact: up until 2002, Davis didn't have an open container ordinance, so it was possible to legally drink in the alley, King of the Hill-style, or just walk around with a beer just like in London, etc. That was back in the day when Velvet Elvis was trying to survive and get an alcohol permit. [0,1]

0\. [https://localwiki.org/davis/Open_Container_Ordinance](https://localwiki.org/davis/Open_Container_Ordinance)

1\. [https://localwiki.org/davis/The_Velvet_Elvis](https://localwiki.org/davis/The_Velvet_Elvis)

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder what shapes an automated heuristic approach (e.g. using genetic programming) would come up with.

</comment><comment><USER35> Nancy the Van Seat [1] was a mobile robotic platform developed at the Stupid Fun Club that was useful for performing moving sofa experiments, but we never tried taking her down a staircase!

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvXG4gQ2FWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvXG4gQ2FWI)

</comment><comment><USER36> Why is right side cut off on mobile? Looked interesting.

</comment><comment><USER37> Clearly, the PIVOT point is the key.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is my browser broken or does this page have a max-width on the content that's narrower than the animations?

<comment><USER39> It's not just you. All the images have absolute pixel positioning, making them overlap the text if you change font size or similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What is the longest sofa you can move around in a Klein-Bottle?

<comment><USER41> What do you mean 'in' a klein bottle.

<comment><USER22> One does not simply....</comment></comment></comment>


FounderCast Episode 1 (this one is edited) - <AUTHOR> http://foundercast.com/2009/09/episode-1-the-premiere/

<comment><AUTHOR> btw, I thought I would help other founders here and let them plug their companies as part of future podcast intros. Just record a short intro in mp3 or ogg vorbis in the following format:

Hi this is <your name> at <your company> in <your location> and you're listening to FounderCast.

Post the link to the audio in the comments for the latest podcast at <http://foundercast.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unlike the unedited alpha/pilot episode this one is edited. We talk about acquiring customers and maintaining customer loyalty and take a side trip down memory lane to talk about how we got our first sale.

Thanks for everyone on HN for the feedback about Episode 0.</comment>


Venezuela Is in Crisis. So How Did Maduro Secure a Second Term? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/world/americas/venezuela-maduro-inauguration.html <comment><USER2> I know it gets lots of accolades already, but "Why Nations Fail" can really help understand why these sorts of things happen.

A lot of people want to look at Venezuela as a place that used to be a progressive country with a strong welfare state, and now it's a broke regime. But it's easier to understand that they never were a progressive country - they never actually had a pluralistic division of power. For a solid decade they could divvy out the benefits of a high oil price. But when times got tough, citizens were not actually given a lot of rights or individual liberties.

To butcher a quote by Friedman (so take it with as many grain of salt as you want), "Countries that put equality before freedom often end up without much of either."

<comment><USER3> > A lot of people want to look at Venezuela as a place that used to be a > progressive country with a strong welfare state, and now it's a broke > regime. But it's easier to understand that they never were a progressive > country

Don't you mean they never were a true scotsman?

<comment><USER4> It's not enough to just point out a possible fallacy. What's your contention as to why the statement "Venezuela was never actually a progressive country" is inaccurate?

The parent comment asserts 1) that progressive countries must have a pluralistic division of power, 2) that Venezuela didn't, 3) therefore, Venezuela was not actually a progressive country, even if it appears to be.

Which of those assertions are you challenging?

<comment><USER3> > It's not enough to just point out a possible fallacy. What's your contention > as to why the statement "Venezuela was never actually a progressive country" > is inaccurate?

My contention is that the original argument is absurd and is just a blatant attempt to whitewash yet another humanitarian disaster caused by a socialist dictatorship.

Any argument on how Chavez/Maduro's dictatorship is not a true scotsman/socialist regime is entirely irrelevant as the dictator of Venezuela, who is also the president of Venezuela's Socialist Party, is very open to any of the many socialist reforms and revolutions that he himself announces repeatedly in his struggle to advance socialism in Venezuela.

And faced with all those indisputable facts, you're trying to argue whether he is a true scotsman.

<comment><USER4> > Any argument on how Chavez/Maduro's dictatorship is not a true > scotsman/socialist regime is entirely irrelevant as the dictator of > Venezuela, who is also the president of Venezuela's Socialist Party, is very > open to any of the many socialist reforms and revolutions that he himself > announces repeatedly in his struggle to advance socialism in Venezuela.

I'm not sure I follow this sentence at all. Yes, Chavez calls himself a socialist and has in the past advocated socialist programs (though not so much currently). That doesn't have any effect on whether Venezuela is actually a "progressive country," "progressive" and "socialist" not being synonymous terms. And, again, you ignore the grandparent's contention that in order for a country to truly be considered progressive, it has to have features Venezuela doesn't have. It _does_ matter, because that's the core of the original post's argument as I understand it.

That is, Venezuela might be somewhat socialist insofar as it has - or has had in the past - some socialist policies, but representing it as an example of a socialist country is incorrect in the same way that representing the US as a socialist country because we have Medicare is inaccurate. (I'd define "socialist" countries which are also "progressive" as being places like Canada, the UK, Norway, France, Japan etc.)

> My contention is that the original argument is absurd and is just a blatant > attempt to whitewash yet another humanitarian disaster caused by a socialist > dictatorship.

What's being whitewashed? Nobody is arguing that Venezuela is not a dictatorship, or that there is no disaster going on. What I'm arguing is that categorizing a country as something just because the leaders of that country would like us to do so doesn't make much sense. Venezuela appeared progressive, and it had many actual socialist policies (again, non-synonymous terms), but most of those policies backslid and whatever it appeared as or wants to be considered now, we can all see it for what it is.

It's not "no true scotsman" to point out that something actually doesn't meet the criteria of a certain definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see a lot of ignorant comments here placing the blame solely on the US (despite the fact that sanctions didn't take place until 2015 and things were already really bad considering Chavez died in 2013 and Maduro is still struggling to get a grip on the country since then.

I visited Venezuela and my wife is from there and the truth is that the country relied on Oil to create a wonderful society where the was incredible poverty and excess wealth with many people in the Urban areas being "alright" in the middle but unaware of the plight that many people suffered. Chavez was a charismatic former military man that had _already_ failed to perform a coup when he rose to power. He appealed to the poor and the soldiers unlike the ruling government and used this to rise to the top. Afterwards he just played his cards right making sure the poor and the military got their (tiny) share while he and his cronies became millionaires. The complete devastation of the economy lies squarely in the fact that they ran their national oil company to the ground and have nothing of value since every wealthy business owner fled or shut down during the last decade.

The fact that Maduro is still in power is a complete mystery to me but I am guessing he is still greasing the right palms but another Coup is coming soon, I can only hope that things improve

</comment><comment> un-devmox For the past week, a Venezuelan house painter has been working at my house. He immigrated to the U.S. 3 years ago. He was a police officer that refused to do the governments bidding, so he fled. As did ~500/700 that were in his police academy.

We just spent the past 2 hours talking about the past and present situations in his home country. I'm beside my self and ashamed that I've been so ignorant to what has been happening.

I don't even know what to say here or even where to begin.

</comment><comment><USER6> Corruption and totalitarian brutality. From China to Venezuela, it keeps dictators in power.

<comment> un-devmox Especially in Venezuela where China and Russia help maintain that corruption and brutality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what scares me. Venezuela was doing "alright" (relatively of course, their economy was too dependent on oil) but chose a path of totalitarianism / Chávez's without apparent fraud ... some people chose this path. And no matter how much deeper a hole they dig, the folks in power manage to dig deeper... still supported by a good chunk of people.

<comment><USER8> _> Venezuela was doing "alright" (relatively of course, their economy was too dependent on oil)_

That bit about oil is a pretty significant caveat. Economists have spent many decades studying concepts like the "resource curse" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse)) -- the way that countries whose prosperity is disproportionately driven by the sale of natural resources (like, say, oil) tend to end up mired in poverty and autocracy -- and "Dutch disease" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease)) -- the way that a booming resource-extraction sector tends to crowd out development of other economic sectors, like manufacturing and services. The Venezuelan economy under Chávez was virtually a case study on these ideas, as he rebuilt the entire economy on top of an upward surge in oil prices. When those prices collapsed, the whole system came down with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why people vote for dodgy leaders is a big question these days.

<comment><USER10> In this case, not really:

1) economy destroyed to the point of famines. They promised food if they won the election and blocking of everything if they lost.

2) they attacked (including with machine guns) the opposition. Tortured opposition candidates. Forced others out of the country, ...

3) They attacked voters at polling stations.

4) They attacked the parliament, a number of parlementarians, and several judges, before, during and after counting the ballots.

I mean it's no mystery how these people got "elected": they didn't.

Nothing shows socialism like these people do: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/26/chavez- daughte...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/26/chavez-daughter- instagram-picture-dollars)

<comment><USER11> >Nothing shows socialism like these people do:

Are you suggesting there's never been a non-socialist dictatorship?

<comment><USER12> Obviously, he's not suggesting that.

The idea is that fascism and socialism are both dependent on a common thread, the elevation of group/collective/state identity over the identity and values of the individual.

Socialism tends to play into a groups (arbitrarily defined, but generally based on wealth, class) with often legitimate grievances, but degenerates into attacks on groups based on envy.......... The Ukrainian experience under the Soviet farm collectivization is an excellent example of this. A great book, by a Russian WW2 veteran who was sent to the gulags by Stalin called "Gulag Archipelago" is a phenomenal insight into this pathology.

Fascist regimes tend to lean towards elevation of a collective ethnic/religious identity over other groups within a nation or other nations which turns the government into an all powerful protector and destroyer of the "other"..

Once the individual is subjugated to the collective in these types of nations, the logical conclusion is that any individual protesting the state is a nuisance to be eliminated, and a traitor to the dominant collective group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Basically he replaced the old congress with a puppet congress, gained control of the military, then cheated his way to it.</comment>


Hackers and Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/09/16/hackers-and-software-engineers/

<comment><USER2> Is Linus Tovalds really a hacker? I think of him as a benevolent dictator bureaucrat.</comment>


Ask HN: How to locate the unread comments on a HN post since I last visited it? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a way? <comment><USER2> I always just go to google and type

site:news.ycombinator.com "{keywords}"

but I'd love to know if there is a better way too...

</comment><comment><USER3> I just coded up a quick javascript solution using PersistJS and jQuery. This comment is to test it out.

<comment><USER3> And it works. Sweet. It's pretty straight forward, just paste this code into your browser window or add it as a favorite:

javascript: var what_changed = document.createElement('script');what_changed.setAttribute('src', '<http://ransomsoft.com/whatchanged.js>);document.body.appendChild(what_changed);

When you run this code it creates a persistant client side store using PersistJS, then it checks each of the comments on the page and if the comment's id isn't already in the store it bolds the comment and adds the id to the store. So the next time you revisit/refresh the page and run the script again it will see which comments you've already read and only bold the new ones.

Please feel free to peruse the source code, it's pretty short, but you should never run anything on your computer you don't feel confident you can trust. Here's a link to the JS I'm loading into your browser when you run this:

<http://ransomsoft.com/whatchanged.js>

I know I'm going to be using this a lot going forward, and hopefully it'll be helpful for other people too.</comment></comment>


What my calendar looks like - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/what-my-calendar-looks-like-11724d3a8b7e#.nus8uil3w <comment><AUTHOR> > What do I do with all that empty space? My job! I design, I write, I think, > I work!

I wish everyone is in position to do that. Until then we will have to disappoint Jason :)</comment>


A new Amazon seller scam - <AUTHOR> https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/a-new-amazon-seller-scam/ <comment><USER2> At the end of this scam, you still end up with your money back.

Unless the scammer is investing the money or holding it in an account with decent returns, while also doing this on a huge scale-- this doesn't seem ALL THAT worthwhile.

Not that I can profess to knowing what goes through the mind of a scammer.</comment>


I Will Never Give Up Property Ownership (and You Shouldn't Either) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CM30/why-i-will-never-give-up-property-ownership-and-you-shouldnt-either-323eb92f4148 <comment><AUTHOR> I have to be honest, I struggled a lot with the title here.

But basically, it's why you should be wary of any 'services' that promise to make your life easily by giving you monthly access to media or everyday things, and why you should buy things outright as much as possible.</comment>


Hacking with LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://0day.work/hacking-with-latex/ <comment><USER2> It's LaTeX, not Latex. And it's TeX-the-language (as opposed to TeX-the- program) that's Turing-complete; LaTeX is a macro package written in TeX.

Also, from 2011: [https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/tex- login.pdf](https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/tex-login.pdf)

 _TeX files are a common method of collaboration for computer science professionals. It is widely assumed by users that LaTeX files are safe; that is, that no significant harm can come of running LaTeX on an arbitrary computer. Unfortunately, this is not the case: In this article we describe how to exploit LaTeX to build a virus that spreads between documents on the MiKTeX distribution on_

 _Windows XP as well as how to use malicious documents to steal data from web- based LaTeX previewer services._

Edit: It seems at least TeXlive has configuration options to disallow access to files outside the current directory: [http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/116927](http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/116927)

<comment><USER3> >It's LaTeX, not Latex.

Who cares, really?

<comment><USER4> People who cultivate a level of attention to detail that is seen as pedantic by many, but that is utterly essential for creating high quality software.

<comment><USER5> Maybe we can get some of those people to work on LaTeX.

For example, why should the commands for upright Greek letters be different for different fonts? \upalpha for one font, \alphaup for another, and \otheralpha for another -- it's a damn mess.

Perhaps someone who's cultivated a level of attention to detail could spend some time fixing this kind of buggy crap, instead of spending time telling people how to properly capitalize LaTeX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > That's because Latex is turing complete and that means...

The article is of course interesting, but it's really annoying to read claims that Turing completeness has anything to do with security. The danger comes from interaction with the external environment, not whether or not the language is Turing complete. If HTML had a "\write" equivalent, it would be just as dangerous. Conversely, the script,

        \newwrite\outfile
        \openout\outfile=cmd.tex
        \write\outfile{\imm\diate\wwrite\args}
        \write\outfile{\inp\iput\cmd}
        \closeout\outfile

Doesn't require a loop or anything indicating a Turing complete language. That said the Turing complete aspects of Latex can be very useful, for e.g. using it to calculate results during compilation. But it's the \write etc that make it dangerous, not \loop.

<comment><USER7> > \newwrite\outfile

> \openout\outfile=cmd.tex

> \write\outfile{\imm\diate\wwrite\args}

> \write\outfile{\inp\iput\cmd}

> \closeout\outfile

Though a longtime TeXer, I've never used the output facilities very much, so it's probably my fault; but I can't understand what this does (hence what it illustrates), and some things seem like typos. For example, shouldn't `\imm\diate`, `\wwrite`, and `\iput` be `\immediate`, `\write`, and `\input`? (I don't know about `\inp`.) What does this do?

<comment><USER6> It's from the article.

<comment><USER7> Oops! I usually read comments first, to see if the article is worth it. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It should be noted that shell escape is disabled by default in standard installations and the -shell-escape flag must be explicitly passed during compilation to enable it.

So if someone is knowledgeable enough to add this flag I would assume that they know what they are doing, such as the guys cited in the article who create an isolated Docker container for each compilation cycle [note: very nice use of Docker!].

<comment><USER9> With the caveat, of course, that when it comes to security you can't just say "Docker and done". Docker is one layer of defense but it's not completely vetted and depending on it to fix all your security problems is a terrible practice to get into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > That's because Latex is turing complete

You don't need something to be turing complete to exploit it and something being turing-complete doesn't mean you can exploit it (except DoS, if the process isn't killed automatically after a while).

</comment><comment><USER11> combining that with a docker container breakout would be interesting

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909622) (Docker container breakout?)

</comment><comment><USER12> ICFP 2008 submission [http://sdh33b.blogspot.fr/2008/07/icfp- contest-2008.html](http://sdh33b.blogspot.fr/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html)

[http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~shicks/icfp08/proof.png](http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~shicks/icfp08/proof.png)

[http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~shicks/icfp08/proof.pdf](http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~shicks/icfp08/proof.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd hoped this wasn't about the software.</comment>


Credit Suisse Warns That Workers Are Gaining Ground and U.S. Equities May Suffer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-31/credit-suisse-warns-that-workers-are-gaining-ground-and-u-s-equities-may-suffer <comment><USER2> I understand the business implications of a higher cost for labor and that the primary intent of the advisory is positive, but yikes, this perspective is so pro-business that it reads like a caricature.

<comment><USER3> Straight out of Das Kapital... Only backwards

An old friend used to always point out to me that if you want to know what's really happening in the world, read the 'bourgeois' financial press, not the 'news'. Ideologues can and will lie and distort at will in tabloids and on TV news, but if your customers are businesses looking to make money, you have to tell things closer to the truth, that's what they're paying for.

<comment><USER4> Marx got a lot of things wrong but he was spot on in his descriptions of capitalism.

<comment><USER5> He certainly didn't understand how wealth is created and confused a temporary situation with an abstract truth.

It is not socialism that has brought millions of people across the world out of utter poverty in the last 20-30 years.

"Economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper in 2009 on global poverty concluding that the world had seen a significant decrease in extreme poverty—defined at the time as living on $1 or less per day—between 1970 and 2006. While even a significant decrease in extreme poverty still leaves much room for additional gains, the decrease in rates of extreme poverty during this period of time is stunning. "

[http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/11/whats- behi...](http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/11/whats-behind-the- stunning-decrease-in-global-poverty)

[http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/karl-marx- the-a...](http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/karl-marx-the-almost- capitalist/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unlike corporations, people don't hoard their money. They spend it. So this is a good thing for everyone long-term.

<comment><USER7> Unless someone is literally putting their money under the mattress, the money is in a bank which is loaning most of it out, so the money is almost never actually "hoarded".

<comment><USER8> Excess reserves are near a record high: [https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCSRESNS](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCSRESNS)

Banks are just sitting on their cash. Also, the Fed is paying the banks not to loan out this money, currently 0.5%.

<comment><USER9> The solution is negative interest rates for banks and corporations, positive interest rates for individuals.

Forces business investment (or dividends), but promotes savings for individuals.

<comment><USER10> It's actually higher prime interest rates. Sure, people can borrow at 3% interest (or whatever is provided) but why would banks want to necessarily want to loan out at such a low interest rate?

<comment><USER9> I don't understand the question. Are you asking why would banks use negative rates?

<comment><USER10> Pretty much. What's in it for the banks to loan out at incredibly low rates? Remember that there isn't only an aversion to high interest rates for people trying to secure loans. The banks want higher interest rates to make loaning worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heavens -- can't let _that_ happen, now can we?

Someone better think of a way to nip this trend in the bud, before things... get out of hand.

</comment><comment><USER12> Many comments are painting this as a bunch of monocle wearing old money aristocrats lamenting the peasants demanding more.

In reality what the report is saying is this: businesses are having to hire more people at higher wages _without the corresponding increase in earnings._ Earnings in excess of costs is the point of equity markets. Ignore that and you have Venezuela. The evil capitalists that you all describe would happily double worker wages if it meant doubling earnings.

<comment><USER13> > The evil capitalists that you all describe would happily double worker wages > if it meant doubling earnings.

fair point. but another point is that, for the last 20 years or so, they've been increasing return to owners (to capitalists) without an equivalent return to labor. now that it's starting to shift a little bit more towards labor relative to capital? oh noes!

EDIT: mine plus aaronbrethorst's point: 1+1=3

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This makes me feel dirty for being an index investor. I want my index funds to make me money, but not at the expense of American workers' quality of life.

</comment><comment><USER15> > We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the > performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please > whitelist the site.

Actually, it speeds up performance and makes the content easier to read by removing distractions. Thanks for your concern though.

<comment><USER16> I am not using an ad blocker but I still got that message... slowing performance and making my experience worse ;-(

<comment><USER17> Neither am I, though I am finding that that message makes it easier to not read any Bloomberg articles.</comment></comment></comment>


Linux Kernel Newbies - <AUTHOR> http://kernelnewbies.org/

<comment><USER2> What am I seeing? The front page hasn't been updated since May 2010.

I wanted to get into kernel development and a couple weeks ago I checked out Kernel Newbies. I was excited to see a list of projects that "Computer Science students" could work on -- that was me. That list has projects from 2007-2009.

<comment><USER3> Hidden gem on this site is the <http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges> page...

<comment><USER4> Indeed, Kernel Newbies and LWN both provide very good summaries of the user- visible changes in each new kernel release.

<comment><USER5> Those are both good. The H is another valuable source for kernel news. They're "Coming In" series is fantastic.

<http://www.h-online.com/open/>

I still miss Kerneltrap though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a few gems here, like this page that describes when certain synchronization techniques are appropriate.

<http://kernelnewbies.org/SMPSynchronisation></comment>


Ask HN: How to take advantage of your film being torrented? - <AUTHOR>

Yesterday, our film company just released it's first feature film(<i>plug</i>: www.bronytalemovie.com) to digital media after a successful festival and theater run. Today it's now on the pirate bay. It was pretty obvious that it would end up on there, but now that it's there, I was wondering what the best possible way to take advantage of that would be? Initial thoughts would be that we could get some free community translations from people who are watching it via sites like subscene.com and opensubtitle.org. Another idea would be to actually join the pirate bay and ask that if you're not going to buy the movie could you at least spread the word, and hope for a sale through word of mouth to friends and family. Any other ideas about what you can do to leverage a movie being torrented?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Iron Maiden found in what cities there music was being most torrented, and went and played concerts there. This helped curbed the piracy and gain new fans. You could hold movie screenings in a bunch of cities and have a place to buy DVDs and other merchandise. Article: [http://www.citeworld.com/article/2115676/big-data- analytics/...](http://www.citeworld.com/article/2115676/big-data- analytics/how-iron-maiden-turned-piracy-into-paying-customers.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting, but it's pretty well impossible to get a theater interested in playing your movie once it's out for public consumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Monty Python added some official high quality videos, and that increased the official sales. HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446807) (56 points, 2000 days ago, 43 comments) (56 points was a lot in those old days).

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for this!

<comment><USER4> Definitely add your spiel to the listing on the pirate bay website... see 'Indie Game the Movie' there.

[http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7700740](http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7700740)</comment></comment></comment>