LLVM Relicensing Effort - <AUTHOR> http://llvm.org/foundation/relicensing/ <comment><USER2> For those out of the loop like me, the Apache 2.0 license exceptions they are addding are:

> As an exception, if, as a result of your compiling your source code, > portions of this Software are embedded into an Object form of such source > code, you may redistribute such embedded portions in such Object form > without complying with the conditions of Sections 4(a), 4(b) and 4(d) of the > License.

> In addition, if you combine or link compiled forms of this Software with > software that is licensed under the GPLv2 ("Combined Software") and if a > court of competent jurisdiction determines that the patent provision > (Section 3), the indemnity provision (Section 9) or other Section of the > License conflicts with the conditions of the GPLv2, you may retroactively > and prospectively choose to deem waived or otherwise exclude such Section(s) > of the License, but only in their entirety and only with respect to the > Combined Software.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't this just allow an end-run around the license by allowing you to distribute a program that embeds LLVM, whose only purpose is to be an LLVM wrapper to avoid those sections of the license?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure the intention is that it does not allow that. Notice that they say "as a result of your compiling your source code".

That is intended to mean that if the compiler copies in some binary code (to implement a compiler primitive or the like), that it doing so does not require you to treat that code like it is licensed under the LLVM terms.

Note that the LLVM source code is not "your source code", so simply copying in the LLVM source and compiling it will not trigger this exception.

That is not to say that there might not be a loophole. E.G., modifying LLVM to always copy all of its binary code into the resulting exececutable (and licensing those changes under this license), and then compiling a program that wants to embed LLVM. I'd like to think that courts would refuse to allow such abuse, but who really knows.

<comment><USER5> It's blurry to me what it mean for including a libc++ header though? This is not "your source code" but LLVM inline code. How is it different from including a header from LLVM itself?

<comment><USER6> The intent is definitely to handle this as well. (Not really going to try and dig into legal reasoning here.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mark Kettenis' formal objection on behalf of the OpenBSD project: [http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2017-April/112300.h...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2017-April/112300.html)

Theo de Raadt: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617881)

These objections have been largely glossed over by the LLVM community. It's no secret that a handful of corporations are pushing for this change, and not the best interest of the open source community. Especially the larger ones using LLVM, like *BSD. LLVM is already under a permissive BSD-like license (NCSA), as pointed out by jwilk: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700258)

OpenSSL is similarly attempting the same thing with newer versions of OpenSSL, which they went about in a particularly legally dubious way: [https://lwn.net/Articles/717996/](https://lwn.net/Articles/717996/) (For context, OpenBSD maintains LibreSSL).

<comment><USER8> " It's no secret that a handful of corporations are pushing for this change"

This is not actually true, and needs citation/data.

This is actually the foundation trying to keep peace, and in a good way.

"and not the best interest of the open source community"

And this is an unsourced assumption of bad faith.

It's also demonstrably false.

<comment><USER7> [http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2015-October/091536...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2015-October/091536.html)

It's stated as much in the initial proposal.

"1) Some contributors are actively blocked from contributing code to LLVM."

> These contributors have been holding back patches for quite some time that > they'd like to upstream. Corporate contributors (in particular) often have > patents on many different things, and while it is reasonable for them to > grant access to patents related to LLVM, the wording in the Developer Policy > can be interpreted to imply that unrelated parts of their IP could > accidentally be granted to LLVM (through "scope creep").

<comment><USER8> This is not even remotely the same as "a handful of corporations" _or_ "not in the best interest of the open source community".

Also, you elided the other 2 large reasons given, which don't support your point at all.

For example, GCC has an exception for its runtime libraries that it now applies universally for the exact same reasons - desire to share code, etc.

It has that problem even reusing code from other GNU projects as well!

<comment><USER7> > This is a complicated topic that deals with legal issues and our primary > goal is to unblock contributions from specific corporate contributors.

You were saying?

<comment><USER6> The interesting thing is that the vast majority (and for the first year+ all) of the contributors to LLVM who donated massive amounts of time and resources to make the relicensing happen were _not_ from any company that was blocked from contributing.

I happen to know because I was one person who donated my time. I was not in any way blocked. We were trying to find a way to help _more_ people (and yes, companies, because companies tend to pay people) contribute to LLVM because that is one of the things that makes the project stronger.

So saying that the change was _driven_ by these handful of contributors seems really off base. And in fact, my experience during the process was that the most motivated people were individual contributors, if anything pushing and pulling companies along (by finding good ways to address their potential concerns with any change like this).

Anyways, that was my experience from being involved in the process. YMMV of course.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't change the reasons stated in the proposal email. Even if the final legwork was orchestrated by individual contributors, it's clear that the reasons were to appease corporations and not the community at large.

It would be unlikely for any open source project to begin such a massive undertaking to re-license, from an already permissive license, without at least some corporate incentive/initiative to do so. No doubt lawyers were paid.

I understand what you're saying, but it is also being disingenuous.

<comment><USER8> "That doesn't change the reasons stated in the proposal email. Even if the final legwork was orchestrated by individual contributors, it's clear that the reasons were to appease corporations and not the community at large."

Except it's not, since the community was the one who desired those contributions in the first place.

Seriously. You are going off making a lot of assertions without knowledge, evidence, or data.

Truthfully, if this is how the community you belong to operates, i'm somewhat glad they will no longer use LLVM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This page is missing one crucial piece of information: what's the current license?

It's (a BSD-like) University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License:

[https://releases.llvm.org/7.0.0/LICENSE.TXT](https://releases.llvm.org/7.0.0/LICENSE.TXT)

<comment><USER10> huh. I assumed it was already Apache 2 and they were adding an exemption. This does change the reading quite a bit. They're asking all their contributors for a pretty big relicensing.

<comment><USER11> but it's a relicensing which is fairly close in spirit, isn't it?

Sure, apache 2 has the patent stuff, but I fail to see how anyone would object to it.

<comment><USER12> > how anyone would object to it

OpenBSD is objecting to it like so[1]:

> [...] In particular, if you use code under the Apache 2 license, some of > your rights will terminate if you claim in court that the code violates a > patent.

> A license can only be considered fully permissive if it allows use by anyone > for all the future without giving up any of their rights. If there are > conditions that might terminate any rights in the future, or if you have to > give up a right that you would otherwise have, even if exercising that right > could reasonably be regarded as morally objectionable, the code is not free.

> In addition, the clause about the patent license is problematic because a > patent license cannot be granted under Copyright law, but only under > contract law, which drags the whole license into the domain of contract law. > But while Copyright law is somewhat standardized by international > agreements, contract law differs wildly among jurisdictions. So what the > license means in different jurisdictions may vary and is hard to predict.

[1] [https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html](https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html)

<comment><USER6> True.

FWIW, this is really the only strong objection we've heard to the overall direction of this change.

<comment><USER7> And considering all the interesting work that OpenBSD is doing to Clang, i.e: retguard [0] [1], ROP gadget reduction framework [2]. Ignoring the fact that two major open source *BSD operating systems use and ship LLVM/Clang as their default system compiler. Their entire system compiled with clang, LLD as the default linker for an increasing number of supported platforms. A ports tree with between 10,000 (OpenBSD) to 30,000 (FreeBSD) ports compiled with Clang, maintaining patches upstreams won't take..

.. You might think that objection would be listened to more readily, or do the interest of a handful of corporations hold greater weight?

OpenBSD will undoubtedly be forced to fork LLVM 8, and likely have to take on the burden of asking individual developers to dual-license contributions they backport going forward. This will place them in a similar position they had with GCC, since the GPLv3 license change.

[0] [https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/e688c2b0648a80551cf735...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/e688c2b0648a80551cf7353d9f455c7cbb98f13c)

[1] [https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/9866f44de26a847eaed067...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/9866f44de26a847eaed067d23d8660b7dca51614)

[2] [https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/c0f0c565f0b312e55b410b...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/c0f0c565f0b312e55b410ba69f4b621a01ef54cb)

Mark Kettenis formal rejection on behalf of the OpenBSD project: [http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2017-April/112300.h...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2017-April/112300.html)

<comment><USER6> FreeBSD is OK with the license, so AFAIK, it is just OpenBSD.

We did listen, but we have specific goals that after a great deal of discussion are best addressed with the approach of the Apache 2 license. The objection was to those _goals_ in many ways, not to the particular mechanisms.

And we really did listen to the concerns about the goals (specifically providing strong protection against patent issues) but there was strong consensus in the community that this was a real problem we wanted to address, and so we moved forward.

I am truly sad that this will cause issues w/ the OpenBSD community, but we had consensus and needed to make progress.

<comment><USER13> I think I know what you mean when you say "consensus" here, but that's not what "consensus" really means. Perhaps you want a word more like "majority".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Although Apache-2 is sometimes seen as a license-of-choice by major proprietary software companies like Google, the license itself is actually well-written. It explicitly offers a patent clause to protect contributors and distributors from patent lawsuits from the copyright holder. I found even RMS recommends using Apache-2 as a permissive license for minor programs that don't need copyleft. So unless you explicitly support BSD/ISC, perhaps you could give some consideration of using it as a license for your next program.

AFAIK, whether ISC/BSD/MIT style licenses offer a patent clause is still unsettled.

 _UPDATE: See JoshTriplett 's post, Apache-2 has license compatibility issues that prevent some code reuse, now I think BSDplusPatent license instead of Apache-2 is a better idea for small programs._

<comment><USER15> Apache 2.0 is not a great choice if you care about license compatibility, unless you include an exception as LLVM is doing here.

Another good choice is [https://opensource.org/licenses/BSDplusPatent](https://opensource.org/licenses/BSDplusPatent) , which combines the 2-clause BSD license with the explicit patent clause from Apache 2.0. That gives you GPLv2-compatibility as well.

(Note that this is unrelated to the unfortunately similarly named license from Facebook, which is not a FOSS license.)

<comment><USER16> IMHO the license incompatibilty problem is rather minor:

Firstly, AFAIK all of the licenses that ALv2 is incompatible with are obsolete and superseded versions.

Secondly, the ALv2 is file-scoped, so you can typically combine a library licensed ALv2 and another one with an incompatible permissive or weak copyleft license.

In practice this means that you'll have a problem combining ALv2 with old versions of strong copyleft licenses, e.g., something licensed GPLv2- _only_.

This is certainly an issue to consider for a project like LLVM, but of lesser importance for the majority of smaller scoped libraries.

<comment><USER15> GPLv2 comes up reasonably often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> TypeScript has a similar problem, where depending on some compilation flags you end up inheriting their license on your compiled output. I've been trying to get them to fix it but it is stuck in lawyer limbo:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/tslib/issues/47](https://github.com/Microsoft/tslib/issues/47)

<comment><USER6> If you can reuse the legal mechanics of the new LLVM license, maybe that helps? We spent a ____LOT __ __of lawyer time trying to get this right.

<comment><USER18> I just want to say, it's slightly mind-boggling to see two Googlers on a thread talking about how to adapt legal work done for a mostly Apple-owned project to improve the licensing of a Microsoft product.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't call LLVM "mostly Apple owned" at this point. It has a huge range of contributions from Apple, Google, and many others. Even Microsoft! =]

<comment><USER18> Fair point, though it certainly was try at one point. In any case, doesn't detract from the point I was trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks mostly harmless, yet this made me pause: "The effort has been overseen by Heather Meeker".

The same Heather Meeker that started the whole "let's relicense FOSS projects with confusing non-FOSS licenses because we don't like that AWS is using our code"-buzz that's been debated a lot lately.

<comment><USER20> It's not really surprising that companies wanting a new software license hire a world-class expert in the field to help draft it. Any evidence she "started the whole..." instead of doing her job as a lawyer?

<comment><USER19> > Any evidence she "started the whole..." instead of doing her job as a > lawyer?

I'm not sure how that's a contradiction. Of course she can start something while doing her job.

Evidence: [https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/) "The Commons Clause is a license condition drafted by Heather Meeker" [https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against- open-s...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-source- abuse/) "Heather Meeker wrote both solutions, supported by feedback organized by FOSSA."

<comment><USER20> Wouldn't you say the companies that asked her to help create these licenses "started it"? I think for the question if another effort is suspect just because it involves her the source of the motivation is IMHO relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone explain how the current licence is a problem for the following:

* Encourage ongoing contributions to LLVM by preserving a low barrier to entry for contributors.

* Protect users of LLVM code by providing explicit patent protection in the license.

* Protect contributors to the LLVM project by explicitly scoping their patent contributions with this license.

* Eliminate the schism between runtime libraries and the rest of the compiler that makes it difficult to move code between them.

* Ensure that LLVM runtime libraries may be used by other open source and proprietary compilers.

Is it because the other license is relatively unknown? Can anyone shed light on why they didn't opt to go for BSD or MIT license? (is it the patent protection stuff?)

<comment><USER22> The first mailing list post is a pretty good dive: [http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2015-October/091536...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2015-October/091536.html)

In particular, the Apache license is a very clear and more importantly very well-accepted mechanism of licensing relevant patents and not irrelevant ones. The BSD and MIT licenses may or may not license patents depending on how you (or the courts, really) interpret "Permission to use ... is hereby granted ...."

They also had a custom scheme for dual-licensing the runtime libraries that get linked into compiled binaries. The new scheme grants a non-attribution license based on the fact that it ended up in your code after running clang, not which repo it was in, which makes it easier for LLVM to refactor code between repos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's why the D language is all Boost licensed. We would have made it public domain, but that isn't a legal concept in some countries. Boost is the closest we could find to public domain and corporate lawyer approved.

</comment><comment><USER24> OP: This has been underway several years. Is there a recent turn of events that should be considered as we view this page?

<comment><USER6> We are successfully moving towards the next bug milestone which will put the new license in place going forward. This is likely among the most potentially disruptive steps as we need to ensure subsequent contributions are under the new license (additionally). We're targeting mid January pretty firmly now to make the cutover. We'll be sending a detailed message to the LLVM lists about this today.

And as the other responder mentioned, part of this has involved directly contacting all committers in the last two years (more recent committers more than once) to ensure we have everything we need to minimize disruption and make the cut over.

<comment><USER25> I sincerely hope it ain't a bug milestone ;)

<comment><USER6> Doh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rvp-x I don't understand how licenses that make claims about patent lawsuits (GPLv3, apache) can be re-using code from licenses that don't make patent claims (BSD, etc.). I didn't promise not to sue anyone for royalties.

<comment><USER26> Their license doesn't bind your behavior, since you didn't release your code under that license. However, it is probably the case that your code was also not released under any license that forbids reuse by a downstream that does make patent promises. (Does such a poison-pill anti-patent-promise license even exist? I'm not aware of it.)

It might be a communications issue, that users of the downstream might assume they won't get sued by you. If such users have money, they should hire competent legal assistance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The url shown in the header [0] doesn't exist:

> The requested URL /LICENSE.txt was not found on this server.

[0] [https://llvm.org/LICENSE.txt](https://llvm.org/LICENSE.txt)

<comment><USER28> [http://llvm.org/foundation/relicensing/LICENSE.txt](http://llvm.org/foundation/relicensing/LICENSE.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Semi-related:

[https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/](https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Yeah what's the TL;DR but for dummies?

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if LLVM has a code of conduct? It would be an interesting project to develop a new open source CoC whose mere existence is a violation of itself. :-)

<comment><USER32> > I wonder if LLVM has a code of conduct?

It does indeed. It was mostly non-controversial, except for [AFAIK] one notable departure, de Espindola [1]. Lattner's response [2].

> ... new open source CoC whose mere existence is a violation of itself.

I can't tell if you're just being silly or if you're referring to an actual contradiction related to relicensing and/or the CoC.

[1] [http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2018-May/122922.htm...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2018-May/122922.html)

[2] [http://nondot.org/sabre/2018-05-02-Rafael.html](http://nondot.org/sabre/2018-05-02-Rafael.html)</comment></comment>


SwivelCard uses regular paper and has a USB drive embedded - <AUTHOR> http://www.swivelCard.info

<comment><USER2> These guys need to re-record this video several times until it's not painfully obvious that he's reading off a script. There's no emotion in his delivery at all; he sounds super bored.

This also seems like a solution desperately looking for a problem to solve.

<comment><USER3> he sounds super bored? he sounds really enthusiastic / passionate about his product to me.

it's surprising to me how different perceptions of how people express themselves can be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" Are there privacy issues since the cards use analytics and tracking? No, swivelCard uses the same sort of analytics and tracking that you would encounter with virtually any website."_

I would replace that "No" by a "Yes". Also, educate me: does "virtually any website" do tracking?

<comment><USER5> > Also, educate me: does "virtually any website" do tracking?

Yes. All web hosting comes with web stats as part of the standard service. Web servers come with logging enabled by default. To have a website with no tracking of its traffic, you'd have to build your own server/instance, and edit the web server software configuration to disable the logging.

Third-party tracking like Google Analytics also has more than 50% penetration on the top 100K websites. More sites than not are not only tracking you themselves, but sending every visit to third parties.

<comment><USER4> I thought tracking wasn't logging ("we remember what you look at") per se, but "we remember where you are whenever you use our stuff", but I agree, the difference isn't that larg for desktop use, given that most web servers log IP addresses.

I also reread the web site, and couldn't find a privacy statement. I think there should be one, and hope the product will come with one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the vision, but confused on what you're actually selling. After reading the FAQs, I was expecting a card that has physical memory and a foldable USB connector, but it seems this an NFC tag implementation that invokes a URL and is "designed for a connected experience". You're referring to this as 'unlimited storage' and 'wireless' technology.

I'm not interested in NFC tags.. I want ephemeral USB cards with physical memory. Analytics is important, but secondary in this form.

<comment><USER7> tzm,

Kevin from intelliPaper here.

NFC tags are not on all models - so I think we got you covered if you don't want NFC.

I'm curious what use-case you see. I can probably get you what you're looking for.

We have plans to extend the firmware, and I'd love to see a self-destructing chip - or lock the content to only a few uses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have been following intelliPaper [1] for a few years now ever ever since a close friend quit his job to go hack on this full time with a small team bringing the technology to market with manufacturing in the USA. It really is a cool story about what goes into the product they have today [2] and some of the challenges the company has gone through to get where they are, including having to survive a flood in manufacturing! [3]. For all those of you that work in manufacturing you know first hand the challenges that goes into ramping up production to more than 500,000 units a month [4]. Drop a quick note to the CEO Andrew DePaula and give him support[5], little words of encouragement mean alot to all of us pursuing our passion - and these guys are! I wish intelliPaper the best.

Update: There is little publicly available information about what is inside intellipaper. There is a small note from cypress [6] that enCoRe V USB microcontroller might be used. They should bring out an additional contact and make the 10-bit ADC accessible! I'd put a little DMM app in my business card, or add a long wire and do a SDR radio. now that would be cool.

[1] [https://www.intellipaper.info/](https://www.intellipaper.info/)

[2] [https://www.intellipaper.info/technology/](https://www.intellipaper.info/technology/)

[3] [http://www.krem.com/news/Edwall-businesses-clean-up-- 2460786...](http://www.krem.com/news/Edwall-businesses-clean-up-- 246078631.html)

[4] [http://www.spokanejournal.com/local-news/intellipaper- ramps-...](http://www.spokanejournal.com/local-news/intellipaper-ramps-up-to- roll-out-new-product/)

[5] [https://twitter.com/intelliPaper](https://twitter.com/intelliPaper)

[6] [http://www.cypress.com/?rID=94593](http://www.cypress.com/?rID=94593)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great product but I'd love for you to talk more about the product and less about the world of information, without piano music. There are way too many Steve Jobs keynotes on kickstarter and it's a terrible cliche.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the concept, but posting this type of video on Hacker news is going to question the core technology vs the pitch. The way it is demonstrated makes it seem as if the card itself has flash memory, and has a wireless receiver. So basically from what I can devise. Each card has a unique code that basically accesses cloud storage that logs your ip address and location on use, that is understandable (or is it just a site redirect). But, I am a little confused by the core technology of your supposed wireless feature, what am I missing here?

<comment><USER10> OK I see you indicated it is using NFC. But all the iPhone models from what I know of don't even have NFC, let alone instant response from their proximity.

<comment><USER10> Also what type of cost will be associated with these type of NFC chips, I can't assume a mass production of these would be inexpensive with those chips. Wouldn't just keeping the USB with the printed metallic ink and a QR code be more economical for mass production? Or will you have two separate models perhaps?

<comment><USER7> Kevin from intelliPaper here.

We offer two separate formats of SwivelCard.

NFC is a really good fit for some markets, and other markets don't have the adoption. By including NFC as a premium option, we can reduce the cost of just the USB experience and offer it for less.

<comment><USER11> Intriguing product. Where can I get a sample?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your website is broken on my nexus 4. Parts of the content are overlapping and the video is half covered.

Edit: Not to mention the top menu taking up a load of screen space.

<comment><USER10> It seems to be using a responsive site with issues of a overlay. The logo is also not flush with the mobile header. Should use a PNG logo with a transparent background, using a white background for your logo is causing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There probably was some point at which technologists still exchanged physical business cards but wanted people to access their digital content, but I get the sense that the physical card is decidedly on the way out, in favor of people directly connecting on Twitter or Github. It seems like, at least in the tech sector, the period when this would have been useful is already over.

<comment><USER7> Apendleton-

Kevin from intelliPaper here.

SwivelCard has bee a very good fit for many of our customers. One use has been to focus conversations.

Consider a situation where you manage a portfolio that is constantly changing, and you want to draw attention to aspects of it and personalize your pitch to a client. How cool would it be to have a face-to-face conversation focusing on real issues, and end with

"I've made a few notes. Use this SwivelCard to access them. They are secure and only you have access to this information." No, I don't need your email address - and there is no account to create or manage."

<comment><USER14> But you can already do that with a USB stick? It's not like they're expensive.

<comment><USER15> jahewson, I can carry 50 swivelCard with me to a networking event. I'd need a bag to do the same with a USB. Even if I had the plastic credit card versions of the same.

Beyond carrying them around, my swivelCard has access to every discount offered by the USPS for bulkrate and EDDM campaigns.

<comment><USER14> > _Consider a situation where you manage a portfolio that is constantly > changing, and you want to draw attention to aspects of it and personalize > your pitch to a client._

Handing out 50 cards at a networking event isn't a personalized pitch, you've not really backed up your argument. Not sure what USPS has to do with that discussion either, I hope you're not advocating sending these as junk mail, we have enough waste as it is, are they recyclable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This idea would have been more intriguing 5-10 years ago when people were more used to plugging stuff in and out and cloud based services weren't so ubiquitous. It appears that they took a long time to develop the USB part and missed the boat on that. Even the card's NFC chip, which seems to have been an afterthought in development for this product, is a more compelling feature that its main selling point.

I simply don't see this product's utility as a business card. If I want to get in touch with someone after receiving their business card, the only information I need from that business card is their email address; I'm not going to plug in a USB device just to get that email address. If I want to save all the info on the card, Evernote is already better and simpler at solving that problem.

The only people I can see this possibly being useful to are photographers for sharing their portfolio, but, again, it would have been a lot more useful for that purpose 5-10 years ago.

<comment><USER15> saroshk, great points. However, I feel you don't understand our solution completely. First off, their is an inherent need for print-to-web solutions. This has been an obvious demand with technologies such as augmented reality, quick response codes and near field communication. This demand has been created mostly by marketers. The advancements in the algorithms that effect both Search Engine Optimization and Email is making marketing online a difficult thing.

This has created a push back over to direct marketing and self-promotion.

Our swivelCard platform isn't a solution for a USB drive. If that was the case, I'd agree completely with your comment. Our swivelCard platform is closing the gap on print-to-web compatibility issues. Globally only 1 in 5 people own a smart phone. Things like QR, NFC, AR, Evernote only provide a solution for a very small part of the problem. USB "PORTS" on the other hand are in abundance. This fact makes swivelCard the most universal solution for anyone looking to reach a large audience/demographic with a print-to-web solution.

I also wanted to touch on your point regarding "getting an email address". I agree, I doubt anyone would plug in a swivelCard to get someones email. To be honest, swivelCard makes an email address a moot point. I can take one swivelCard and assign it to you and give you direct access to my laptop via a screen share. Or I can take one swivelCard, attach it to a dropbox shared folder and share information with you that way. Yes, we could do that via an email, but I'm sure you and I both can agree in the world of sales (business) some people don't share their personal information (email).

You also mentioned "cloud based services". The idea behind cloud based platforms is to keep people connected to an experience. Almost all cloud based platforms can be shared through a simple URL. swivelCard lets you exploit this feature by simply copying and pasting that URL into any point of communication on the card. Meaning, I can take 200 swivelCards and attach them to 200 separate dropbox folders.

You are correct in regard to some of our existing customers like photographers and videographers. And they do use it to share their portfolios, but the more interesting use-case you haven't imagined. A photographer can actually use swivelCard as a cross-sell. Instead of including a CD with digital versions of client photos they can sell their personal business cards as a part of the photo packages.

When you stop thinking of swivelCard as a thumb drive and start thinking about what it really is, you'll understand it has limitless potential for sharing digital/cloud based solutions that are accessible by everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They lost me in the video at "We patented the technology ..." _closingtab_

</comment><comment><USER18> Many companies have policies disallowing any foreign USB-Sticks. This diminishes the value of this concept in a professional environment significantly.

<comment><USER19> Particularly the software people and generally tech-savvy crowd are hesitant to stick foreign devices into their computers, and for good reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not sure how analytics could work/changing drive remotely without the user needing to install something. Doesn't sound overly safe/practical.. Unless it requires a network connection (ie the USB just holds a shortcut to a page on the swivelCard site).. Which sounds crap.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting concept, and probably really useful for people on the go.

I'm guessing you're doing the web redirection to the site of your client, or is this incorrect?

If you are doing the redirection, I'm curious why you decided to not also include a QR code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there is a backend interface that allows the card owner to direct each individual card to any webpage they want. We do include QR code (printed on the back of the cards) and NFC inside.

<comment><USER19> If someone sticks it in their USB port, what do they see? A URL shortcut file they need to click on? Or some kind of fancy executable software?

<comment><USER7> borpik -

Kevin from intelliPaper here.

On SwivelCard the drive drive shows up labeled 'iPaper' and presents a file named 'Double-click to launch.html'

Once loaded, the browser redirects to your selected landing page.

If connectivity is not detected, a message indicates internet was not detected, and prompts to reload the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems like these are meant for mass distribution.

If I got one and wanted to dispose of it, would I throw it in the trash, the recycling or would I need to dispose of it as e-Waste?

</comment><comment><USER23> Moo.com already have nfc business cards. And I really don't see the USB part being remotely useful.

<comment><USER24> As far as I can tell those are still "coming soon" and not actually available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This will sound overly negative, but I'm asking from an old-fashioned perspective...but why is this easier/better than just printing a URL on a card...in that situation, the card-giver also has the ability to update the content on that destination. Or, why can't the technology be as simple as a read/write stick?

The product seems to envision an idea of a "connected experience" not yet deliverable via a website...but what is that, exactly? The intention is that the card-receiver is going to keep inserting this USB stick to check out if the card-giver has updated the portfolio? If the impression/conversion hasn't been made at first insertion of the USB stick, not sure how this card would be any less discardable than a typical business card...

Also, what are the dependencies...if SwivelCard's cloud service goes down, does that hamper the experience of the end-user?

The IntelliPaper tech seems very cool, but business cards don't seem like a lucrative form for it.

<comment><USER7> Danso -

Kevin from intelliPaper here.

We appreciate the honest perspective.

I'm always looking for ideas - what comes to mind for lucrative forms of intelliPaper? (If you don't mind sharing...)

I'll jump around a bit here...

USB offers a familiar experience for accessing data. Many markets respond very well to this experience.

In our other products you can specific the digital content of the usb chip - and if you don't want to link to the intelliPaper servers for redirection (or even do something else entirely) we have a well-versed team to assist you. The SwivelCard product-line offers simplified features for mass production and adoption and doesn't offer these extended options.

Read/write is coming to intelliPaper - and we're exploring that impact on SwivelCard. We're not there yet. One concern I have is that if YOU can overwrite your own card before distributing it, should the person you give it to be able to do the same? I'd like to think you would be able to control that. We're currently refining the firmware, and exploring what methods work best for the average users to connect to the card to write to it without folding it. We'll likely come up with a small helper socket to assist in physical connection for reprogramming, but this is not refined yet.

Yes. Hosted/online services can, and do, go down. If the cloud goes down, SwivelCard is offline. While not ideal, most online services experience this problem and we've taken steps to reduce this happening. We're willing to embrace this because of the flexibility it affords the product. Given that static content can be obsolete fast - we're willing to work with the cloud because of the flexibility it provides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yeah, I'm totally sticking this piece of shit in my USB port.

<comment><USER15> pmf,

No doubt some people will just simply refuse to adopt certain technologies.</comment></comment>


Disqus shows ads to everyone but the admins/site-owner (Zedshaw) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/394334044487307264

<comment><USER2> Is ad the only means a free product can survive at scale like Google, Facebook and Twitter? Free services (of good quality of bad) entice users to use their service and trap them into their cage for advertisers to peek at.

</comment><comment><USER3> For the record, this can be disabled in the Admin panel, but as said, this is opt-out without much disclosure that it's indeed opt-out.</comment>


Chess legend Viktor Korchnoi has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36464406 <comment><USER2> Korch was within one game in a long match of winning the world championship two different times in his forties. The champ was a young twentysomething Karpov.

Then he went on to be the best fiftysomething chess player ever to play the game in his fifties. And the best sixtysomething in his sixties. And the best seventy-something in his seventies.

He had a stroke right around age eighty but managed to slip in at least one win against American grandmaster and world championship candidate Fabiano Caruana in 2011 after he turned eighty, so he was the best ever of that decade as well.

Chess players usually peak a bit before thirty. Korchnoi defected after forty. As a dissident under the Soviet system, Korchnoi didn't have the chance to prove himself in international competition in his twenties or thirties, but he may have been the best in the world for a long time before Karpov or Fischer reached the championship.

<comment><USER3> Has any other 80 year old, or 70 year old, legitimately beaten a grandmaster?

<comment><USER4> Capablanca likely could have if he hadn't died relatively young (age 53). He had been staging a serious middle-age return to high-level play at the time and was an extraordinarily gifted player: when Arpad Elo developed the rating system, he compiled ratings for past players and ended up assigning Capablanca what was at the time the highest rating of any player in history.

Meanwhile Garry Kasparov is now the same age Capablanca was at his death, and continues to play at a very high level; he still holds a FIDE rating of 2812, down from his peak of 2851 and historically second only to Magnus Carlsen's peak of 2882, and in April finished third in a blitz tournament where he put up a 2-1-3 record against eventual champion and GM Hikaru Nakamura.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He is the reason I took up playing Caro-Kann again, and the primary inspiration for my feeling that it's much more fun to play as Black -- a feeling that got me back into chess after years away.

<comment><USER6> Heh, just noticed your username. Caro-Kann player confirmed. :)

<comment><USER7> Can you explain that? Caro-Kann is 1. p4 c6. I can't quite work out how to munge that to p4wnc6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read a study the other day that concluded that neuron regeneration can occur well past middle age. I think that's the only explanation for what happened here. He was easily the toughest senior citizen player that has ever lived.

<comment><USER9> Depending on what you mean by regeneration (renewing vs replacement), it's not clear it's a good thing. There is some indication that neurogenesis in the hippocampus is a cause of memory loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> He came so tantalizingly close to being world champion. Besides the two World Championship matches with Karpov, one of which he lost by a single game, the 1974 Candidates final also decided the championship following Fischer's abdication.

<comment><USER11> Given the soviet chess machine stacked the deck against him his whole life the chances are on a level playing field he'd have been a good world champion.

They tried it with Fisher but his genius was such that he smashed through the barricades and won anyway with as close to a perfect performance as a human has ever achieved.

<comment><USER12> Genius sure; but I think Fischer just could not be needled by Soviet/KGB sheenanigans - there was just no personal connection; and being American the possibility of assassination was out of the question. Korchnoi from the time of his defection onwards suffered from this fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=15866](http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=15866) has a list of notable games.

<comment><USER14> The man was extraordinary. A couple of more detailed obituaries:

[https://www.chess.com/news/viktor- korchnoi-1931-2016-1214](https://www.chess.com/news/viktor- korchnoi-1931-2016-1214)

[http://en.chessbase.com/post/viktor-korchnoi-dies- at-85](http://en.chessbase.com/post/viktor-korchnoi-dies-at-85)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My favorite chess lecturer analyzes a Korchnoi win from each of the previous 6 decades.

[https://youtu.be/1n6yLPNj_Pk](https://youtu.be/1n6yLPNj_Pk) "The Legend: Victor Korchnoi - Ben Finegold"

If you've never seen Ben Finegold lecture from the St Louis Chess Club, he's hilarious (relative to the subject matter).

</comment><comment><USER16> Kasparov's tribute [https://www.chess.com/article/view/garry-kasparov-on- viktor-...](https://www.chess.com/article/view/garry-kasparov-on-viktor- korchnoi)</comment>


BMW Adapts Apple Genius Model in Its Dealerships - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article/news/bmw-adapts-apple-genius-model-dealerships/239683/

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially ...

"Inspired by Apple retail stores, BMW is requiring dealers to hire young, tech-savvy employees to handle questions about its vehicles on the showroom floor."

Yet another reason to be tech-savvy - if not young!</comment>


Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend? - <AUTHOR>

Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend for no good reason? Just out of curiosity... <comment><USER2> This is not new behavior, people have made small useless apps on the weekend for a long time.

This is, however, the first time it's been possible to get such wide visibility of these kinds of projects thanks to HN and the rest of the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not? If it's fun and harms no one, I don't see why one shouldn't create "small useless apps" in her spare time. If anything, you should pat folks like that on the back for trying new things (assuming they're new to the person making them).

</comment><comment><USER4> You said it - _just out of curiosity_

Try it sometime. It's fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am actually, the issue here is not that i don't like these projects, but i cannot give meaningful feedback on them... When you develop any sufficiently big project, most of the assumptions and specifications change over time. This is evolution. And what i criticise is, whether it is a good idea to show a half-baked app and make people think that it is useless. I believe waiting a bit more and developing the app and then posting it makes more sense. For all the learning practices, i agree it is very valuable experience, but just let them evolve...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> well, my intention was asking why such small things, i think mvp is overrated, people can put together a meaningful set of features and produce a real product, probably not in a weekend but in a month or two or six... then it makes more sense for the audience to check the featureset and give more meaningful feedback. That's my opinion at least. Don't get me wrong, i appreciate and support all the efforts by these bright people, but...

</comment><comment><USER5> who's to judge 'useless'

<comment><AUTHOR> No one, actually it's the character limit for the title. :) I didnt mean to be hostile or disrespectful. I just believe that they need some more time in the evolution process, make the app better and then ask for feedback, which at that time more likely to produce more meaningful feedback from the community...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's called 'playing'.

</comment><comment><USER7> cuz there's good TV on during the week?

</comment><comment><USER8> Practice? To scratch an itch?

One could argue that Twitter is a 'useless' app that realistically could have been prototyped over a weekend. I'm not arguing whether it is or isn't, but it's certainly popular.

My favorite 'weekend' app of the moment is Word Wars[1], which happened to be built during a hackathon.

I'm putting the finishing touches on "By A Bus", which is a source code escrow service activated by a dead man's switch that I started tinkering with yesterday, after reading this HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761>

Why am I doing it? I thought it would be a fairly easy thing that could be knocked out pretty quickly that would solve the problem of what happens to source code when their developers die. Source code escrow services are complicated and expensive, but with "By A Bus", you can just choose to escrow your Github-hosted source code so that if you die, all (or some of) your private repositories can be open sourced, or 'willed' to other open source contributors to take care of.

It is useless? Well, now it certainly is, and even after it launches, it might still be except to a small percentage of developers. I'll have learned a little more about the dotcloud infrastructure when it's done, and learned the GitHub v3 REST API, which I'd never touched before.

This kind of experience isn't exactly groundbreaking, but the more little things I can touch, the better off overall I am to be able to handle new things that I haven't seen before, or figure out how 'thing a' will interact with 'thing b'.

Most importantly though, small things can grow to be bigger things. Twitter wasn't exactly the hyper-mega trending analytics engine it is today when it first launched, but it grew into that as its creators realized how people were using it. Google started out as a search engine, and is now one of the biggest companies in the world. The best ideas start from small beginnings, and I'd much rather have a small project that a few hundred people like than a Facebook-sized project that nobody does, and I'll have wasted a lot less time in getting there.

[1] - <http://wordwars.clay.io>

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't get me wrong, the title is put together because of the character limit. I truly appreciate and like the idea of putting together bootstrapped apps, i work for one of those ideas going into maturity, but then don't you think you lose one silver bullet you have. Other people's feedback is important, especially on HN, so i was thinking of using it wisely and show them a developed feature-set, at least some level of maturity. I am sure, twitter's thing is not the idea of micro blogging and following and such, but rather the feature set they have put together and served and scaled for the long time they are alive. Otherwise competition would crush them, remember Google Buzz...

<comment><USER8> They exist NOW because of their extended feature set, and that they were able to monetize all the data they found that they had access to.

They existed originally because they had a dirt-simple microblogging application that people liked. If they had spent a year developing it and people didn't like it, they would have wasted that year.

The goal of an MVP is to do exactly what you say is so valuable -- get customer feedback. If you're solving a problem that people have, it doesn't matter if your application is ugly or has all the features it might have a year from now -- it only matters that it exist in whatever minimal form it can exist in that solves that problem.

If you wanted to compete with Twitter, then yes, you'd have to release a better product. But then, you're not building an MVP. You're not 'testing the market'. The point of an MVP is to see whether or not people even want it. To see if you're actually solving a problem. To see if anyone will pay for it. If you're testing out a truly new idea, then that's what you need -- to get it in front of customers ASAP to find out if anyone is willing to pay for or use your app at all.

Dropbox started out with just a video[1]. No working product whatsoever. He figured if he could show people what his software aimed to do, then he could find out if they'd pay for it. The alternative was to spend a year or two building a product that he couldn't sell. Why waste a year of his life?

[1] - <http://youtu.be/7QmCUDHpNzE>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Learning.

</comment><comment><USER10> attention. notoriety. ad revenue. it's fun. boredom. any of the above.

</comment><comment> far-I nothing is useless.</comment>


Show HN: Intents – Get linked with people that see what you see - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm working on a new paradigm of a social network, that uses visual searches to link groups of people who are interested, inspired and connected to what they're looking at.
I mean, you just take a picture and Intents show you communities of people (I would love to call them "Tribes"), who've taken a correlated picture. And of course you can interact with them. Here the link http://www.intents.me
My vision is to connect people with the same intents, now with a simple picture (analysed with AI/CV algorithms) and in the future, I would add a JS framework (chrome extension?) that also connect online people who are browsing websites correlated with the images.
Example: Online shoppers looking for a cool Nike sneaker connected with influencers and people who've taken a picture of those shoes.
Does this make sense? What do you think about it?
I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback.
Best,
Matteo <comment><AUTHOR> Thank you guys for the feedback. I'll answer both the comments telling you more about what I have in mind.

I'm the CEO of Leva, this company here www.leva.io. We work in the field of entertainment and retail, building unique context-aware machines with mechatronics and computer vision technologies.

From this spring, I've been focusing/obsessed by this idea of crossing cyber- lives of online shoppers (indoor in front of a computer) with outdoor shoppers. The latter are people with their smartphones, in front of the physical products that the others are seeing on their browsers at home. What if we put together users with the same "browsing intentions", with people that are out there with the real things in front of them?

Plus, we think about browsing activities, as individual "jobs". But what if those become collective? What if an influencer could guide a group of online shoppers through different websites/opportunities? At any given time, thousands of people are willing to solve same problems online: buying shoes, food, book a hotel, flight, enjoy something, etc. Those people are related in some way, and only together, in some cases, they can achieve advantages. Like what happens with the shopping teams of the Chinese Pinduoduo, or the users of the American Drop.

A case study could be the one I mentioned before, teens with low-budget that want to buy a particular Nike sneaker, want to be a part of a shopping team, to get discounts or feedback directly from people who have those shoes in their hands. Maybe influencers or people that are in malls right now in front of those shoes? Perhaps they'd like to receive real-time feedback about the quality/materials/sizes/prices?

The value proposition needs to be adequately defined, and this message could seem a bit messy, with many opened ways. That's because it is just the beginning.

We need to do user research to understand pains better, get user feedback and define the real personas of the market segment. For now, this is just a business hypothesis. We'll be doing interviews to the first leads to understand what they want, and we'll define the features of the first MVP.

Does this answers your questions? What's your point of view/suggestion?

</comment><comment> jerome-jh Looks like you are only to meet people with very shallow interests + why would you like to connect with influencers?

</comment><comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea. What experiences led to it?</comment>


Should a funeral be held just before the person dies? - <AUTHOR>

The ceremony could be viewed live by the dying person from his/her hospital bed. <comment><USER2> Shouldn't the funeral goers be spending time with the dying person while they can?</comment>


How will we build an artificial human brain? - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5906945/how-will-we-build-an-artificial-human-brain <comment><USER2> I think saying that Goertzel approach is "hard-coding of artificial general intelligence" not at all what he is doing. I think its more like hooking together a bunch of narrow machine learning algos into a specific configuration that he thinks is a lot like how our brain works.

See his project here: <http://opencog.org/></comment>


CERN pushes storage limits as it probes secrets of universe - <AUTHOR> http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=FF726AD5-1A64-6A71-CE987454D9028BDF <comment><USER2> The filter is known as the "trigger". The trigger has several levels, so that the data rate is reduced by an order of magnitude or more at each level. The lowest levels are done in hardware for speed. The upper levels are in software for flexibility.

Designing the trigger is extremely complex, since the various detectors within each experiment have greatly varying response time. Only data from fast detectors is available for the low level trigger.

In addition, the speed of light is a real barrier for the lower levels of the trigger; by the time the debris from a collisions reach the outer reaches of the experiment (this is usually where the muon chamber is), there have already been an additional collision at the center.

(The speed of light is about 1 ft/nanosecond, the radius of the muon chamber in CMS is about 25 ft, and the time between bunch crossings is about 25 nanoseconds.)

The design of the trigger is a very important and often contentious process. A bad trigger will throw out important physics events, and trade-offs can favor one physics search (e.g. the Higgs) over another (e.g. supersymmetry).

</comment><comment><USER3> Alright; I'm confused.

First they say that they "generate around 1 petabyte of data per second"

Then they say "ATLAS produces up to 320M bytes per second, followed by CMS with 220M Bps. The data from ALICE amounts to 100M Bps and LHCb produces 50M Bps." only that sums up to 690M Bps ... definitely not 1 petabyte per second. (That is, assuming that 1M Bps means 1 million bytes per second, or just under 1 megabytes per second.)

And then, later on, they talk about a different mode in which "more data is produced by the four experiments, about 1.25G Bps in total." which is still not 1 petabyte per second.

What's going on?

<comment><USER4> I used to be the sysadmin for a high energy physics lab as we prepared for the ATLAS experiment to come online. (It was a long wait, following helium explosions and such.) The reason you see so many different numbers is that they cannot possibly record the full flow of information. CERN has a very large buffer that the collision sensor data is fed into initially, which is analyzed in realtime to determine which chunks of data are likely to contain significant information. Those chunks are kept, and the rest are discarded. This bothered a lot of people, since they are probably throwing away interesting scientific data, but they are limited by current storage technology.

Further preliminary analysis is performed on the retained data, broadly categorizing the energy and other characteristics of the collision. That allows individual physics groups around the world to download only the data that is likely to pertain to their specific research, e.g. the Higgs boson, multiple dimensions, etc.

There was some talk of transferring data via Bittorrent or perhaps a custom protocol involving fountain codes. That never got off the ground. Instead, the Russians were working on a custom peer-to-peer system with a monolithic centralized set of indices, a system which is hopefully working better than it used to.

P.S. - Here's a hummingbird-speed video of building our prototype fileserver node for local physics analysis of ATLAS data [before I learned about electric screwdrivers]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y6MpPNqxmw>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was a very good and very detailed talk given by Tony Cass from CERN at the LISA 2010 conference. The talk gives a much more in-depth look at the environment at the LHC. The link below has the audio, video and slides from the talk. Look for "The LHC Computing Challenge: Preparation, Reality, and Future Outlook"

<http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/tech/>

</comment><comment><USER6> How long do these experiments run? 1.25GB/s doesn't seem all that bad if the experiment is only seconds-minutes in duration.

<comment><USER7> Generally you would fill the machine, then circulate beam "stable", until it wears out (loose luminosity), then dump the remaining, and start again. This is called a fill, and can last several hours. A fill has several runs, some experiments automatically change runs every hour. A run is generally with a given filter (trigger) setting/detector configuration. You would run 24/7, but due to the filling cycle, waiting for ramping up and stable beam etc. will give you "idle" overhead. Furthermore, you are "lucky" to reach flat top stable beam: magnets can quench, power supplies will trip etc. giving unscheduled downtime. Then there is scheduled downtime (like just recently), which can last years :)

So all in all, you would get a few dozen weeks of real operations a year, which would include some stable beam (if you aren't into beam gas studies or cosmics).

<comment><USER4> Do you know what the actual average uptime has been per operation? I have never seen that number.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, the metric for benchmarking is delivered/recorded luminosity. The machine delivers, and the detector records. It is this efficiency that funding agencies are shown in the periodic reports.

Strictly speaking, (down)time can be "irrelevant", in the sense, that with higher luminosity you get more data (LHC can catchup on Tevatron easy). You can have 5 nine uptime, with 1 bunch circulating, or lots of bunches of particles (the beam is not continuous, it comes in trains of particles). So one thing is, that you also go for as many bunches as possible...

But the periodical reports are on cdsweb, because of the public funding agencies ie. for the machine itself, setting an upper boundary: "Downtime statistics over the 2010 run" -- Chamonix 2011 Workshop on LHC Performance, Chamonix, France, 24 - 28 Jan 2011, pp.70-74. Then the DAQ of your experiment of choice comes on top of this...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could fuzzing generate code? - <AUTHOR> Fuzzing can be used to find bugs. Could it be used to fix obscure bugs, bugs in complex data flows, by fuzzing over inputs? Could a fuzzing like approach be used to generate code (even code we have no chance of comprehending) that patches a n obscure bug? It seems possible. By extension could fuzzing generate code against arbitrary constraints? <comment><USER2> Not completely off topic, but not really serious either : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)

<comment><AUTHOR> My counter example: Complex life / Darwinian evolution (infinite monekys + objective function).

The other option is genetic farmer ETs 'lifted' us from proto-humans, or complexity is DNA + morphic resonance.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: does exists something like github for translations? - <AUTHOR>

I need to translate 100-200 strings to localize an iOS app and I was searching for some online service where you can post your strings and let people "pull request" translations, free or paid. Can you help? <comment><USER2> [http://transifex.com](http://transifex.com) is one option</comment>


Blueprints for Apple's New Campus - <AUTHOR> http://cdn.macrumors.com/images-new/downloads/FloorPlan_Cross_Section.pdf <comment><USER2> Don't forget Job's presentation of the building to city officials (good video to watch):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2632158></comment>


How Go is making Resource Guru faster - <AUTHOR> http://blog.resourceguruapp.com/go-language-google-cloud-platform/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: They switched from RoR to Go.</comment>


Ask HN: What Internet content/services do you personally pay for/subscribe to? - <AUTHOR> Gaming networks, video on demand, productivity... that sort of thing. <comment><USER2> FastMail for email provider, bunch of servers and that's pretty much it.</comment>


All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11482/amd-cpu-updates-threadripper-64-pcie-lanes-epyc-june-20th <comment><USER2> I was of the opinion that Intel will only face real competition when arm reaches parity with desktop class cpu. Nice to see AMD rise back up again. Hope Intel is not able to strong arm the oems like last time when AMD had design wins but Intel using anti competitive practice stalled its growth till it was able to catch-up and later go ahead.

<comment><USER3> I doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems.

The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for _exclusively_.

Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compiled for Windows on ARM.

<comment><USER4> > It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as > very few applications are compiled for Windows on ARM.

That wasn't the reason. It was because Windows RT was artificially locked-down to only allow sandboxed "apps" from the Windows App Store to run. There's not much of a use-case for only glorified web-service clients on a machine with a desktop UI regardless of the ISA they're compiled for.

Had MS allowed arbitrary ARM code to run on the Surface RT, free of sandbox restrictions, I think the platform would still be alive today - probably as a successor to Windows CE for kiosk applications.

(Though there is now finally a non-locked-down version of Windows 10 for ARM... so let's see...)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it required the Windows Store, and additionally at that time it could only have WinRT (unrelated to Windows RT; basically the old name for UWP) apps. These days you can put Win32 apps on the store. If Microsoft allowed Win32 ARM apps on the store, maybe Windows RT would have succeeded. Maybe. Software publishers probably wouldn't have wanted to lose that control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Before you get excited about unleashing the power of 16 cores on your desktop... I have recently upgraded from the 4-core to 6-core i7 with roughly the same frequency/turbo and noticed that compile times have actually increased.

Disappointing, I thought, especially because in addition to extra two cores I now sport a quad-channel DDR RAM. Well, turns out that compiling my Go projects does not generate enough "hot" threads, and the Linux scheduler keeps moving them around between 6 cores, letting the cores to "cool down" and drop to 1.2Ghz idle frequency. Meanwhile the 4-core box is happily spinning at 3.4-3.8Ghz during the compile cycle.

The only way to make the 6-core box to perform was to enable "performance" policy for intel_pstate which leads to the CPU running at its full speed even at idle (not great). Once I did that I saw the performance increase by 50%.

Here are the compile times of the same project on both machines with different CPU frequency scaling policies:

      governor/cpu       4-core 3.4Gz      6-core 3.3Ghz
      </comment><comment></comment><comment>       </comment><comment></comment><comment>-     </comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      standard           13 sec            15 sec
      performance        11 sec            9 sec

As far as I know, AMD does not have an equivalent of intel_pstate in Linux kernel and relies on legacy ACPI governor which isn't as sophisticated as Intel's (where the CPU is more self-regulating) and I wonder what kind of effects to expect in regards to performance / power consumption if I go for Ryzen.

<comment><USER6> Solution: Keep all CPU's active.

go build main.go &

go build main.go &

go build main.go &

go build main.go &

go build main.go &

go build main.go &

/s

<comment><USER7> I get that you're being funny, but there's a valid question in there.

Does go not support parallel build jobs? If so then he should be setting the count to six instead.

<comment> old-gregg The bigger question, at least for me, is either high-core machines improve your desktop experience if you're mostly running low-threaded workloads, for example a web browser.

One humble piece of evidence I gathered says that no, more cores make your low-threaded applications run slower because the Linux scheduler keeps placing them onto "cold" cores running on idle frequency, and once they "spin up" the thread gets moved to another cold core.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have _4 PCIe M2 SSDs_ (that's a bit under 16Gbps bandwidth, assuming RAID0), and still have 44 lanes (the number in the top-end Intel CPU) to spare for GPUs and other peripherals.

<comment><USER8> I don't fully understand. So 1 SSD need 1 lane. How many lanes need something like NVisia 1080Ti? What use of the remaining lanes? If I want to build something like 1 CPU/1 GPU/1 SSD configuration without additional peripherals, 62 lanes will be effectively wasted?

<comment><USER9> A GPU _can_ use 16x 3.0 lanes, theoretically. In practice 8 lanes is enough, people have measured performance between 16x and 8x, it's almost the same.

SSDs use 4x, if you do buy an NVMe drive that is. (In my country, these things are TWICE as expensive as SATA SSDs lol)

<comment><USER10> Maybe for games, but for cuda this is certainly not the case. Double the lanes is double the host to device bandwidth.

<comment><USER9> "CUDA" is not a particular application. You could very well be doing something with CUDA that does extremely little data transfer to/from the host, but a lot of computation on the GPU. Like mining :D

Also, host to device can be bottlenecked by memory speed on either side.

<comment><USER10> CUDA meaning GPGPU. All I was pointing out is that there is definitely a bandwidth doubling going from 8 to 16 lanes. It's used extremely often by people using the cards for compute. Mining may not have that issue, but deep learning and other applications do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We all benefit when AMD is a player.

And this player is fighting HARD right now. Me gusta.

<comment><USER12> I've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.

<comment><USER13> Some years ago I read a moderately well fleshed out proposal to create a European semiconductor consortium as a sort of an Airbus for CPUs. My recollection is that, while it was somewhat flawed, it was an idea with significant merit.

<comment><USER14> They should do the same for software companies that produce software for the governments, with the requirement to open source the software.

<comment><USER15> This is coming from an area where Microsoft has a vicegrip on all government software to the tune of 99% of the market, and then runs smear campaigns and tries to bribe politicians in that last 1% to adopt them.

Most politicians are technologically illiterate and when the people they know are those with the most money to get closest its going to be big corporate interests that get their ear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Salient point:

> all 64 lanes being _enabled for all ThreadRipper_ SKUs. This will be broken > up into 60+4: _60 lanes directly from the CPU for feeding PCIe and M.2 > slots_ , and then another 4 lanes going to the chipset

And

> the 16 core processor will for most purposes be half of an Epyc processor

Epyc (formerly Naples) is the server-grade arch with 8 memory channels, 32 cores and 128 PCIe lanes per socket.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if it's the same silicon as Epyc, just ThreadRipper gets the worse bins.

Or maybe there's one less chip in the package?

<comment><USER17> ThreadRipper has 2 CPUs in its MCM, and Epyc has 4.

<comment><USER5> Ah, so the high-end ThreadRipper would contain the same chips as a high-end Epyc, just twice as many, and likewise for the lower-end variants, I guess? That makes sense.

<comment><USER16> > just twice as many

Half. Epyc gets 4 MCM[0], ThreadRipper gets 2 (with each MCM containing 8 Ryzen cores)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- chip_module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chip_module)

<comment><USER5> Uh, right. Got it the wrong way round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Competition is supposed to bring prices down, yet Intel released i9 processor for an insane prize (nearly 2000$).

If AMD manages to ship similar performance (not necessarily higher) at a lower price... Sooner or later Intel will have to slash its prices.

Looking forward to such times.

<comment><USER19> But it did. Intel reduced their 8 core processor prices from 1000$ to 600$. See their new lineup: [http://imgur.com/a/LSpau](http://imgur.com/a/LSpau)

<comment><USER20> Basically Intel has been greedy / hasn't had the competition. The _result_ of Moore's law is still quite possible it seems. Even with a slowdown in chip density; computing prices can fall on similar historical curves now that AMD is competing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Relevant link [1] for background informations on expected shortcomings of the recently announced concurrent Intel CPUs.

[1] [http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/30/intel-announces-x- series-...](http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/30/intel-announces-x-series- without-details/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Threadripper & EPYC are a truly epic move to jump into the dense GPU workstation and server market! With a Threadripper you get four x16 GPUs without PLX or three + a couple of SSDs.

Time for @nvidia to switch the DGX boxes to @AMD CPUs? :)

</comment><comment><USER23> 64 lanes would be good for something like 4-6 GPUs @ 8 lanes per, and some high speed storage/networking?

Anxiously awaiting Intel's "I am not left handed either" response.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, depending on the configuration it would maybe even be enough for 7 GPU's with 8x PCIe 3.0 (60 of the 64 are feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, 4 go to the chipset). Seems like it will be a nice CPU to use for machine learning.

Other sites also report that it will support 2 TByte of RAM like the single socket Naples/Epyc, but LRDIMM and official/validated ECC support was not mentioned in the stream.

<comment><USER24> Oh, yer will be very nice for Machine learning I can see a lot of people getting this.

Also even though they did not mention it for lower end servers. Servers currently using a single Xeon.

> official/validated ECC support

Given all the other Zen cpus have this i think it will, after all it is just 2 ryzen CPUs with a load of PCI!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any word from AMD on support for Thunderbolt 3, now Intel are making it available royalty-free?

[https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world- thunder...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world- thunderbolt-3-everywhere/)

<comment><USER16> They've only announced it would be royalty-free circa 2018:

> next year Intel plans to make the Thunderbolt protocol specification > available to the industry under a nonexclusive, royalty-free license.

no point in AMD saying anything at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do the extra PCIe lanes help the GPUs for deep learning applications, or is the data typically pretty localized on the GPU board?

<comment><USER24> Yes, massivly deep learning is all about learning from data. With the work I have done I have seen that currently unless you buy a 2xeon server you can't get enough data through to justify haveing 4 GPUs on one machine. So commonly its cheaper to break out to multiple machines, but this then has an impact on how you code your learning since communication between the GPUs then is much slower.

Think of training a NN to learn cats expressions and such Meme txt to go along with pictures of cats. So 1) you collect as many cat memes as you can (easy,... 40k memes of cats later) you start training... you need to normalise all the images you need to extract the meme txt and normalise this and you need to feed this through your tenso flow (or other system) to train it. This means pusshing your small data sample of 40k through the GPU and back out and possibly doing this a lot, there is no way they will all fit on your GPU and even if they do you need to get them on there in the firrst place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does any remember the DEC Alpha? Windows NT 4.0 was ported to it. The Alpha was a 64-bit RISC processor. (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) An ARM is just an Advanced RISC Machine. RISC architecture has an instruction execution advantage over CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) that is what Intel is famous for. Although they did have a i860 and i960 RISC which many of them were for embedded military systems.

Other RISC systems were from Silicon Graphics, with their MIPS processor were used for 3D graphic processing. RISC has shown that it has its place in the computing world time and time again.

My personal appeal is their low power requirements and compact designs. Obviously cell phone manufactures like it too for the same reasons.

<comment><USER28> Yes, I actually managed a SQLServer computer running on a DEC Alpha machine. I don't remember anything specifically wonderful about the DEC other than it was one of the biggest servers I had seen at the time and it had a large ducted fan in the front for cooling. Neato!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If the clock speeds are decent (and the price is reasonable) this will be my next workstation CPU. Can't wait.

</comment><comment><USER30> I didn't see pricing info in the article. Has that been announced anywhere?

<comment><USER14> No, there was also no word on official/validated ECC support, only that Threadripper will launch this summer. But people hope for something between 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$ for the 16 core CPU. 999$ would be awesome, but 1499$ sounds much more realistic, maybe even more, since it has a much larger socket, high end platform bonus etc.

<comment><USER24> > there was also no word on official/validated ECC support

I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given.

> 999$ (since it is two Ryzen R7) and 1499$

I think it will be more around the 999$ but the motherboard will be quite expensive, it is after all basically a duel CPU main board. Don't expect to pick up a board for under 500$

<comment><USER14> > I think given all the other Zen CPUs support it i think that is a given.

Yes, Ryzen can use ECC if the motherboard maker supports it, but ECC support is not validated. [0]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def6vs2/)

<comment><USER24> I think that in the end this will be down the mainboard makers to get validation so possibly will not be validated on non-server style boards. But if there is demand given epic is basicly the same thing just bigger im sure they will do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I dare say, that might be enough lanes....</comment>


Capitalism Cancels the Passions - <AUTHOR> https://musingmind.substack.com/p/mind-matters-cbc <comment><USER2> Why is this flagged???? I argued with many people on this site that people here are indocteinated... But really? People can't even stand reading something which is well argued and contradicts their belief?

<comment><USER3> And I'm not even sure it strongly contradicts the (largely) Libertarian beliefs here on HN. For example, it appeals to economics over morality: "Forget Morality, Contemporary Capitalism Is Bad Economics"

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As the author of linked article, I'll add 3 things to this mix:

1) For those criticizing the article for claiming capitalism is the result of intentional design, that it was "devised" rather than emerged organically from historically contingent forces, they're absolutely right.

It was just sloppy writing on my part to suggest capitalism is anything other than an emergent phenomenon from a complex stew of factors. That's not my claim, just my sloppy representation of Albert Hirschman's thesis (who doesn't claim that either).

2) But that capitalism was seen as a system that would nullify our passions by diverting attention to our interests, is not my claim, but Hirschman's. If you want to critique that, I highly recommend Hirschman's "The Passions and the Interests."

3) Why was this submission flagged? Is there such thing as the Hacker News Capitalism Defense Force, and might they actually have flagged this for its critical undertones, or did I violate some other rule?

<comment><USER3> I guess I'm having trouble separating "passions" from "interests" but it seems that there are earlier definitions of these words with somewhat different meanings than they way they're commonly used in the modern context.

Interesting article. We do need to explore what comes after neo-liberalism as we're going to need something to replace it soon. You refer to an article on mutualism - it sounds like it has some similarity to distributism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title instantly reminded me of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" authored by Deleuze & Guattari. A very interesting text on micropolitics of desire.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _"The passions were wild and dangerous, whereas looking after one's material > interests was innocent or, as one would say today, innocuous."_

Oh, the irony...

</comment><comment><USER6> According to this article, some people believed that self-interest = capitalism and capitalism = safety. Very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's extremely hard to square the basic premise of this article: capitalism was created so that passions wouldn't result in autocratic regimes, with the apparent retreat of liberal democracy across the western world. It's also hard to square this hypothesis with the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism in countries recently exposed to capitalism, such as China & Russia.

<comment><USER8> Edit: note that this point is unfair to the original comment it's responding to, which was repeating the argument of the article—the point should stand against the article, not the parent.

Eh be careful of talking about capitalism in terms of it being "created" it perpetuates one of the old lies of capitalism: that it is an inherently _rational_ system (in your formulation, a designed one).

Capitalism grew organically out of evolving practices around markets and trade and redoubled and reinvigorated itself through works of economic theorists like Smith, who argued it was "rational" because of certain of its properties. However it is important we get away from this notion of capitalism being somehow a "rational" thing since it has bred profound economic irrationality through the inequitable distribution of resources, leading to irrationality in other spheres as everything is reduced to abstract exchanges (see climate change)

Edit: This criticism also applies to the OP article, which also falls under the spell of representing capitalism as some sort of intentioned system.

<comment><USER9> I think your point that most pro "capitalism" folks will take issue with is that while there has never been a system in which all resources are perfectly allocated, it is believed that the information in prices set by a free market can do a much better job of allocating resources in the long run than any other known system, (including communism, socialism, or an autocracy).

So sure, free markets are emergent properties of human activity, and therefore are influenced by human traits such as greed and fear, resulting in bubbles and crashes in the stock market. But I suppose that's better than 3+ years of famine during the Great Leap Forward.

<comment><USER10> Except they never offer much evidence to support this statement. "Capitalism exists therefore it is efficient". While one can point to the proposed historical alternatives, it's not an automatically conclusive argument that "not-capitalism" was the problem in say, Soviet Russia as opposed to the fact that the government was defacto a brutal authoritarian dictatorship (i.e. not democratic) that was also incredibly corrupt (I mean, corruption is essentially pure capitalism in action - monopolize a resource and charge what the market will bear for access).

It's a very specific American thinktank led strain of thought that declares America's success is "capitalism" and not robust and responsive democratic institutions which aggressively try and prevent corruption.

<comment><USER11> Capitalism inherently resists corruption more than other systems because nobody is expected to work for anyone's interest but their own.

Systems like socialism and communism require some central economic decision authority which controls what people can eat, drive, where they can work and travel and live. These people are expected to do this for the good of others, yet they hold tremendous power. Such power attracts corruption and cannot be defended from it. So socialist systems always become hopelessly corrupt as the do-gooders are instantly outcompeted in the race for power by people who only care about power. Because of course the power-hungry will gain power better than those who want power only to do good; the power hungry are fighting 100% for the goal while the do-gooders are fighting for another goal as well. It's no contest.

Worse, since that central authority has both economic and police power over people, there's no practical way to replace it. A corrupt corporation can be peacefully outcompeted or allowed to die, but the government itself cannot be - it must be overthrown with mass violence.

Systems like anarchy require that individuals self-organize into collectives and work for the good of the collective instead of the good of themselves. Of course such systems become corrupt 5 minutes after scaling beyond Dunbar's number, because there's no mechanism to punish free-riders (aside from some kind of mob justice, or a hyper-invasive police authority).

Unlike socialism, capitalism is decentralized. The government doesn't need to hold so much authority over the details of peoples' lives - where they work, what they eat, where they travel - so there's nothing to corrupt. There is no center of power to corrupt, nowhere for the power-hungry to steal from the do- gooders. There is only the contest to make money; a single goal which is inherently attractive since it brings status and wealth and sex, but when you accomplish this goal you also do good as a side-effect.

So it's not democratic institutions preventing corruption in capitalism. Capitalism is inherently resistant to corruption in a way that socialism and anarchism aren't, because the individual incentives are aligned.

<comment><USER8> That's a nice armchair theory of capitalism, but I don't know how anyone could look at how advanced capitalism has actually manifested in America and make those claims.

> central economic decision authority which controls what people can eat, > drive, where they can work and travel and live.

I don't think this is accurate. There are plenty of systems one could describe as "socialist" in varying degrees in which this is not the case.

> These people are expected to do this for the good of others, yet they hold > tremendous power.

Sounds like FAANG c-levels and boards?

> Such power attracts corruption and cannot be defended from it. So socialist > systems always become hopelessly corrupt as the do-gooders are instantly > outcompeted in the race for power by people who only care about power.

Kind of like how someone who only pursues economic incentives in capitalistic societies will usually wind up with more power and higher quality of life than someone who sacrifices the pursuit of capital for the pursuit of other things like an ethical calling, e.g. help the poor, spread the truth, etc.

> Worse, since that central authority has both economic and police power over > people, there's no practical way to replace it.

Lobbying comes to mind. The recent protests in America and how they unveiled sources of police funding (surprise, often corporations) comes to mind.

> A corrupt corporation can be peacefully outcompeted or allowed to die, but > the government itself cannot be - it must be overthrown with mass violence.

Interesting--what major corporations or monopolies were "peacefully outcompeted" in the history of American capitalism? As far as I'm aware all of them needed to be broken up explicitly by government intervention?

> Systems like anarchy require that individuals self-organize into collectives > and work for the good of the collective instead of the good of themselves. > Of course such systems become corrupt 5 minutes after scaling beyond > Dunbar's number, because there's no mechanism to punish free-riders (aside > from some kind of mob justice, or a hyper-invasive police authority).

Citations? Actually, the reality of open-source software itself would argue against this notion quite strongly. At its origin point OSS was largely autonomously organized groups working toward common good. It wasn't totally free of nastiness in certain corners, but it also wasn't disastrous by any means.

> Unlike socialism, capitalism is decentralized. The government doesn't need > to hold so much authority over the details of peoples' lives - where they > work, what they eat, where they travel - so there's nothing to corrupt.

How interesting. Here in America, the government still seems to play a pretty big role and is mostly funded by major companies where capital has concentrated. Also, when did the memo get sent out that American capitalism and global capitalism are _corruption free_ (tm). Let's ignore things like child labor, foxconn, sweatshops, backroom deals, money laundering, lower taxes for the rich, and all the rest of the laundry list of naughties that have managed to creep their way into our pure, much better system.

> There is no center of power to corrupt, nowhere for the power-hungry to > steal from the do-gooders.

Right, until you realize having one instrument of value (capital) _is centralization_ and breeds the very things you're claiming its free of, only in more subtle forms (which makes it harder for wage laborers to even fight against the system since the mode of oppression supports gaslighting of the kind you've seem to have fallen for)

> There is only the contest to make money; a single goal which is inherently > attractive since it brings status and wealth and sex, but when you > accomplish this goal you also do good as a side-effect.

Sure work hard and prosper. Anyone can do it. Going from the projects to being a big billionaire CEO is no problem even though the quality of your education, your quality of life, your access to the instruments of capital, etc. is all determined by the relative economic status of your originating conditions, right? Yes it does happen in rare cases, but _again_ we're talking about the construction of an _equitable_ economic system, not one in which 0.000001% of the little guys manages to scrounge his way to the top through a mix of good luck and perseverance.

> So it's not democratic institutions preventing corruption in capitalism. > Capitalism is inherently resistant to corruption in a way that socialism and > anarchism aren't, because the individual incentives are aligned.

This armchair notion that there are "inherent mechanisms" in capitalism making it "more fair" while there are literally people laughing their way to bank while _providing no actual production value to the economy_ (those centralizing middlemen like banks, wall street, etc. that capitalism supposedly eliminates) swarming around you is perhaps the starkest evidence that one has drank the capital kool-aid.

I don't mean to be harsh, but economic systems are _not just abstract theories_. They are _actually realized, practiced things_ that we should examine _empirically and theoretically_ and attempt to understand and change. Capitalism in the theoretical vacuum of abstraction and over-simplification does no justice to the empirical realities of capitalist systems and the inequalities they perpetuate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I can't resist making a point about "capitalism" and "socialism." Rand used to identify certain terms and ideas as "anti-concepts," that is, terms that actually function to obscure our understanding rather than facilitating it, making it harder for us to grasp other, legitimate concepts; one important category of anti-concepts is what Rand called the "package deal," referring to any term whose meaning conceals an implicit presupposition that certain things go together that in actuality do not. Although Rand would not agree with the following examples, I've become convinced that the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" are really anti-concepts of the package-deal variety.

"Libertarians sometimes debate whether the "real" or "authentic" meaning of a term like "capitalism" is (a) the free market, or (b) government favoritism toward business, or (c) the separation between labor and ownership, an arrangement neutral between the other two; Austrians tend to use the term in the first sense; individualist anarchists in the Tuckerite tradition tend to use it in the second or third.[12] But in ordinary usage, I fear, it actually stands for an amalgamation of incompatible meanings.

"Suppose I were to invent a new word, "zaxlebax," and define it as "a metallic sphere, like the Washington Monument." That's the definition — "a metallic sphere, like the Washington Monument." In short, I build my ill-chosen example into the definition. Now some linguistic subgroup might start using the term "zaxlebax" as though it just meant "metallic sphere," or as though it just meant "something of the same kind as the Washington Monument." And that's fine. But my definition incorporates both, and thus conceals the false assumption that the Washington Monument is a metallic sphere; any attempt to use the term "zaxlebax," meaning what I mean by it, involves the user in this false assumption. That's what Rand means by a package-deal term.

"Now I think the word "capitalism," if used with the meaning most people give it, is a package-deal term. By "capitalism" most people mean neither the free market simpliciter nor the prevailing neomercantilist system simpliciter. Rather, what most people mean by "capitalism" is this free-market system that currently prevails in the western world. In short, the term "capitalism" as generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business.

"And similar considerations apply to the term "socialism." Most people don't mean by "socialism" anything so precise as state ownership of the means of production; instead they really mean something more like "the opposite of capitalism." Then if "capitalism" is a package-deal term, so is "socialism" — it conveys opposition to the free market, and opposition to neomercantilism, as though these were one and the same.

"And that, I suggest, is the function of these terms: to blur the distinction between the free market and neomercantilism. Such confusion prevails because it works to the advantage of the statist establishment: those who want to defend the free market can more easily be seduced into defending neomercantilism, and those who want to combat neomercantilism can more easily be seduced into combating the free market. Either way, the state remains secure."

</comment><comment><USER13> I would phrase it a little differently: _capitalism cancels vanity_.

Up until the 16th-18th centuries (in Europe), the best way to get rich was to use force to loot/steal from others. Capitalism was the result of a set of institutions which allowed for more widespread trade, and profit from innovation.[1] These institutions took money from the rich who used their wealth for vanity projects (the passions this author desires), and gave it to the innovative problem solvers and inventors.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7863046-the-most- powerfu...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7863046-the-most-powerful- idea-in-the-world)

<comment><USER14> That's not phrasing it differently, that's changing the whole meaning of the article and it's title.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I intended it as a modest proposal.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the article brings attention to a very important aspect of Capitalism, but I cannot agree with the author's conclusions.

Capitalism doesn't cancel passions. On the contrary, it directs them into a constructive direction. And other people willing to pay money is a very strong indicator that your passion is net positive. There's nothing wrong with being passionate about making craft beer. Or artisan bread. Or niche software. This is how most modern companies were founded. This is how the Western society was built.

You break the feedback loop and people start being passionate about tribal feelings. How to take from someone else, rather than create your own. How to make the alleged oppressor's life worse, rather than your customers' lives better.

I think, if we wanted to preserve a civilized society where happiness prevails over suffering, we should find a way to restore the old school pre-corporation Capitalism, rather than focusing on destroying it completely.</comment>


Cybertrolls increasingly target women - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cyberbullying-cybertrolling-increasingly-target-women-monica-lewinsky-ashley-judd/ <comment><AUTHOR> _" "We suck at dealing with abuse," Costolo told staffers in an internal memo. "We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues... I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this."_

Hard problem to solve. Not sure what the solution is, the source appears to be, _' the weak men of the Internet'_.</comment>