A smart plug to monitor your router and automatically reset power if WiFi fails - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/communities/115308608951565782559 <comment><USER2> Interesting to see that. It turns out that around a month ago after seeing the Raspberry Pi project that send a tweet to Comcast when internet connection is slow, it gave me the motivation to use my Raspberry Pi 2 to do the following:

A- every 15 minutes check my internet connection: connectivity (reaching Goodle DNS host),

B- if connectivity fail, execute D-2 below, if not see next step below

C- then use SpeedTest download / upload; if download/upload speed are too slow then attempt a second test 30 seconds later

D- if the second attempt fail again then:

1- send an SMS with Twilio to my cell phone to let me know the modem will reboot, and wait 10 seconds

2- issue a "off" command to my Belkin Wemo (cable modem plugged into it), then wait another 30 seconds and issue a "on" command

On top of that I have installed InfluxDB + Grafana on my Pi so I can log the connection latency to Google DNS, and the download/upload speed. Example:

[https://imgur.com/gallery/dgeFR](https://imgur.com/gallery/dgeFR)

The Belkin Wemo command do use only my local Wifi, so even if the modem is down since my Pi is on the same LAN it can control the Wemo without problem.

It was a fun little project for my Pi. All written in Python. If anyone interested I can probably post the code somewhere.

[ _updated for formatting_ ]

<comment><USER3> How do you get to twilio when the internet is down?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is just the American version of the Kankun wireless plug with a script on it. The Kankun plug is like 1/4 of the price: [http://m.aliexpress.com/item/32613551938.html](http://m.aliexpress.com/item/32613551938.html)

There's a whole community about hacking these plugs: [https://plus.google.com/communities/115308608951565782559](https://plus.google.com/communities/115308608951565782559)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! We changed the URL to that second link, which seems like it might be the most substantive. The originally posted URL was [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BU2ALGO/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BU2ALGO/).

<comment><USER6> Would be nice if this information was more visible.

I was quite surprised that the link leads to some random G+ page about "smartplug" hacking while people here are talking as if it was a commercial product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A neat idea but why not take that $60 and buy a router that didn't require resetting. They do exist. My Asus router just never needs reset. I have it on an ups unit and the only time it is reset is to do firmware upgrades.

<comment><USER8> How are you supposed to find out which ones don't?

<comment><USER9> Look at the brands that focus on quality/software vs. releasing new models every 3 months.

In my experience Pepwave/Unifi/Microtik are good prosumer brands.

For more consumer-y stuff, it might be worth it to have a look at the Apple/OnHub routers too.

You can also pick up enterprise gear on eBay at pretty good prices, brands such as Cisco/HP/Aerohive/Ruckus etc., but configuring/updating might be a pain.

<comment><USER10> I've bought Ubiquiti point-to-point wireless gear before, and really liked it, but note that their APs don't do well with many simultaneous clients: [http://www.wlanpros.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Wi-Fi- Str...](http://www.wlanpros.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Wi-Fi-Stress-Test- Report.pdf) (page 30)

This isn't so much a problem with the regular UniFi APs, but the UniFi AC AP costs $300!

<comment><USER11> I picked up a UniFi AP AC Lite for $84 a couple months ago and couldn't be happier with it. For home use, the full version is probably overkill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just buy a new router if you have a buggy one that needs restarted all the time.

This is silly and illogical, if you have a reliability problem fix it, adding more parts is not likely to help. What happens when this smart plug malfunctions and restarts your router every 5 minutes?

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Without naming the brand of router I have in an effort to not start a brand debate, I must say when you actually end up spending more than $40 on a wireless router, the quality greatly improves. When I lived with my family, I thought resetting wireless routers was the norm (all my friends agreed it was a normal thing). Then I moved out and bought my own equipment. 5 years and counting and the only time this thing has been power cycled is when my home lost power in a storm.

You'd be far better off putting the money you'd spend on this gadget towards a better wireless router and call it a day.

<comment><USER6> > I thought resetting wireless routers was the norm (all my friends agreed it > was a normal thing).

Trust me, hanging or rebooting is the best of the bad things your router can do to you.

I had one which would pass LAN->WAN packets without NAT translation if the _endian-swapped_ destination address matched the LAN address block. Want to access X.1.168.192 on default settings? Sorry, not today.

And, of course, I didn't use 192.168.1.0/24 but 10.0.0.0/8\. It took me _weeks_ to figure out that the thing those few websites which suddenly stopped working had in common was IPs ending with .10 .

This was few years ago and since then I haven't bought a single router which wouldn't run OpenWRT or at least DD-WRT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For half the price you could buy a Raspberry Pi that just runs a simple watchdog program doing the internet connectivity check. Upon a problem, it could connect to your modem's web admin page and launch a restart from there.

<comment><USER15> And if the modem is not available?

<comment><USER16> Connect a transistor to a gpio pin to drive a relay and power the modem through that.

<comment><USER2> Something I need to try... I haven't yet dig into all the wonders of the Pi gpio and that sounds like a fun project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a little skeptical about this product having had experience with some of these WiFi plug devices and as echoed by others, the price of this device is much higher than it should be.

I've been using Ankuoo and Maginon devices quite a bit at home -- they run around $25, are easy to setup, conveniently communicate information to Chinese owned domains (ok, that bit bugs me, but I've blocked the communication) and they are a script away from this product.

If this is based on the Marvell Chipset that so many of these devices are based on, I wonder how frequently it'll reset the router not because WiFi went out but because the device dropped off the network due its own problems. I've had some _very_ spotty results with a device that I had plugged into the same power strip as my router and a large number of other devices. Despite being 4 feet from the router, it continually dropped off the network until I moved it to a wall outlet far away from the power strip (I'm guessing interference from the myriad of moderately high wattage equipment I had plugged in but I'm no EE).

Something like this could be made on-the-cheap with a CHIP and a relay ($10 for the CHIP $5-10 for the relay, $~1-5 for USB power) and a little bit of scripting. Personally, I've wanted a feature like this since my router and cable modem are not easy to get to when I (rarely) need to cycle them. I purchased a 4-port relay and plan to pair it with a Banana Pro, wire it to Ethernet, set it up on WiFi and coupled with software running on my OpenWRT router, have it decide which to cycle in the event of an outage. Even with that complex of a build, I'm looking at $55.00 including power (which doesn't count much for me since I've got a USB block with an available port that I plan to use).

</comment><comment><USER18> The WiFi may work without the internet working. Is there a plug that checks that? I get a lot of outages on the internet link side of things, not so many on the local wireless.

</comment><comment><USER19> The @internetofshit Twitter account is already on this one:

[https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/708565761330176000](https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/708565761330176000)

"On one level: this is a great idea On another level: WiFi routers shouldn't be so shit that this exists"

"So many people saying they actually want this thing?! It's apparently real"

</comment><comment><USER20> Is it normal for routers to need to be reset periodically? Seems like a pain.

<comment><USER21> I have one that looses the internetz when a newer macbook or an iphone cause noticeable traffic. After a reboot it's fine for a while.

ISPs in Germany can force you to use their router. I have a proper one which remains unused :/

<comment><USER22> Just connect your own router to ISPs one, set it to the bridge mode and disable wifi on the ISP router. Done.

<comment><USER21> It's not actually the wifi that fails, it's the internet connection. tried that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is one of those ingenious inventions that make you ask: "Where have you been all of my life". Perfect for coffee shops, or when the router's in a room that you can't access without waking anyone up.

Of course in an ideal world, wireless routers would be smart enough to reset themselves, without having to add another $60 to their price. But we are only in 2016.

<comment><USER24> No, in an ideal world companies would stop making cheap, untested consumer shit that degrades after a few weeks uptime (looking at you, TP-Link). Luckily products unlike these exist, but not many might know about them, so this is a completely unnecessary product (hilariously overpriced as well) profitting from the ignorance of end users...

<comment><USER25> Isn't this just an example of the halting problem? As in, you can't prove that a program won't ever halt.

<comment><USER26> The halting problem doesn't say that you can never prove that any given program won't ever halt, just that some programs (written in a Turing-complete language) are undecidable. You _can_ write a program which can be proven will or won't ever halt.

But the typical solution to this particular problem is to correctly employ a watchdog[1] that will restart your program if it halts. In fact, this wifi- monitoring plug is serving as a watchdog itself.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> D-Link routers are the worst for this. About every 2 weeks it would require a set. I found ASUS to be way more reliable.

</comment><comment><USER28> Interestingly, this thing, made in China, has almost zero sales in China. Its price is a bit high, if compared to TL WR703n, which can do a lot more things. [http://world.taobao.com/search/search.htm?_ksTS=145780791366...](http://world.taobao.com/search/search.htm?_ksTS=1457807913660_20&spm=a21bp.7806943.20151106.1&search_type=0&_input_charset=utf-8&navigator=all&json=on&q=kankun&cna=ZcrJDkAKZxgCAUCmbHpzICzD&callback=__jsonp_cb&abtest=_AB- LR517-LR854-LR895-PR517-PR854-PV895_2461)

</comment><comment><USER29> You can also add a watch scripts that pings a known address and if does not work it reboots the router. Zero hardware required which is better than throwing electronic waste in the environment.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Identification of a modem: automatically reset modem when anomalous behavior is detected."

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dobots/crownstone](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dobots/crownstone)

Prior art. So you can just get our open source power outlets without patent- pending stuff.

</comment><comment><USER31> A super cheap way to do this is proactively reset your router every night at 3am by power cycling it with a $12 plug-in timer. Of course it doesn't fit every use case and it doesn't solve every problem , but it will alleviate problems related to long running that all to many routers seem to suffer.

</comment><comment><USER32> Where/when do you live guys ? Who buys a router that needs to be restarted (and even fails) ? :) I have a Netgear something that acts as a wifi router and I do not have to restart it, I don't understand :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I have a Netgear WNDR4300.

I reboot it about once a year, as in, it has been rebooted three times that didn't involve firmware updates in its entire life, or about five times total.

If your router is that flakey, just replace the router.

</comment><comment><USER34> Simpler version is mechanical timer with reset every N hours.

<comment><USER35> In case of TP-Link routers in crowded WiFi space that would be 15 mintes.

<comment><USER14> I've never had a problem with TP-Link over about the last ten years and 3 modem/routers. I have heard lots of other people complaining about them though.

<comment><USER36> What's different about your setup? Do you filter electricity with an uninterruptible power supply? Cable lengths? No other equipment nearby? Good ventilation?

<comment><USER37> I have a pair of TP-Link WDR-3600s. Both run OpenWRT "Barrier Breaker" and they've been rock-solid. One is on a filtered UPS (the main router), but the other one is just plugged into the wall and usually has a loaf of bread on top of it (the wireless relay in the pantry). Both have been fine, so I don't think it's the power supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Oh great, there's a patent pending.

</comment><comment><USER16> SBCs are so cheap at this point just grab one of those and put hostapd and iptables on it.

<comment><USER38> In order to do that, I'd first have to learn what any of those things are, and why I'd want to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's like a physical IISreset. A recognition and acceptance of failure and/or generalized bad quality.

</comment><comment><USER40> Where's the EU version?

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd prefer a router with a AA battery slot, so it doesn't go down in the first place.

<comment><USER42> Different problem.

To summarize: many consumer level routers tend to lock up due to firmware bugs, hardware defects, or overheating. Because they're closed devices, the solution is usually power off/power on & let the restart clear up any issues and restore proper wifi functionality. This device ingeniously automates that step.</comment></comment>


More Americans see man who leaked NSA secrets as 'patriot' than traitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/12/us-usa-security-poll-idUSBRE95B1AF20130612 <comment><USER2> So, in summary, the difference between a patriot and a traitor is just PR. Pun intended.

<comment><USER3> Wow... good job! But now that Snowden left the US, he must be an ex-patriot. The traditional response is an extradition request.

<comment><USER4> "The traditional response is an extradition request."

Which, if not met, is followed by a massive invasion and subsequent decade long occupation, judging by the Afghan fiasco. :)

<comment><USER5> Not if that country is China...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What really pisses me off is that Democrats seem to support Obama in anything he does; half of them think this kind of shit is perfectly fine, likely because their team is the one doing it. Really sorely disappointing.

<comment><USER7> What are you talking about? Do you have any evidence for this? Or was it just some democrat you talked to who supported mass surveillance? You think the 30% of Americans who believe Snowden is a patriot are all non-democrats?

<comment><USER8> WSJ writes:

"A survey ... found that 56% believe that broad-based government tracking of telephone records is acceptable ... More Democrats than Republicans found it acceptable, a reversal of findings in a similar poll taken when George W. Bush was president ..."

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732490400457853...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324904004578539791260216814.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> traitor XOR patriot.

This is so narrow minded in my opinion. Snowden has done something good to the world, because US administration is secrectly messing with everybody around the globe.

Stop considering it happened only within US borders or as an internal matter. US and US media still are using a group (country) scale reduction to draw some bad opinion on Snowden, divide and gain some people to this spying dementia.

If you look on an international scale, the trivial question would be : hero or villain, and the answer is quite obvious.

AAaaaand somebody is knocking on my door...

<comment><USER10> > _If you look on an international scale…_

I keep thinking about how in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the same things have been going on (if not more overt), and I wonder if their citizens have as much apathy as ours?

<comment><USER11> My experience is that everyone everywhere these days loves their country and distrusts their government. The question, as always, is how individuals and groups of people navigate the government and vice versa. The specific limits vary from one place to another but the attitudes seem remarkably stable over time too.

For example in medieval Iceland, one of the major protections against unreasonable search and seizure was a combination of limiting the number of people who could be involved in searching for a stolen item for example, and also mandating all the places where the MUST search. So you could only have so many bondir searching for a stolen item and they couldn't selectively search farms. Instead they were required to search all farms between two suspects. this made very indiscriminent searching impractical.

<comment><USER10> I've recognized that too. But with that, do you think there is any room to grow (as individuals and as a global society) under these circumstances (> _everyone everywhere these days loves their country and distrusts their government_ )?

Personally, I find it hard to _love my country_ (not even sure what that really means to me) or any country I've been in for an extended period of time. Maybe it is because I keep abstracting country back to ever changing lines on the ever changing maps drawn throughout history. Though, I'm not saying that there are some places that I wouldn't rather live over others.

> _The question, as always, is how individuals and groups of people navigate > the government and vice versa. The specific limits vary from one place to > another but the attitudes seem remarkably stable over time too._

Maybe that's why it is easy for some individuals/organizations to play chess games between nation states for whatever (usually business) reasons? At least that's what is going on in my head now about the larger geopolitical landscape in relation to some national and some international issues…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see him as more of a responsible citizen with a big brass pair. It's the 50+% who apparently don't mind what's going on as long as it keeps them safe from terrorism that I consider traitors.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sample size is 645 people - I don't think that's large enough to mean anything.

<comment><USER14> It depends on how they drew the sample. It's certainly large enough, statistically speaking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Surprise: press has large effect on what people think was actually leaked. I'm sure 99% of those interviewed have no idea what he actually leaked entailed. I'd be more interested in a study that asked people if they knew what they were actually outraged about. A majority of the insinuations of the original "leak" have since been retracted and those actually following the details of the story have no belief that there is anything illegal going on.

Real opinion pieces that actually ask the hard questions like "should the government know less than Google" are all but ignored, in favor of 6 year old backdoor "zero-days", frontpage'd on HN, for applications that have been out of favor for even longer, or politically motivated 'stub' court cases that aren't expected to go anywhere. It has all the indications of a coordinated media event, not a real political scandal. Nobody really cares what's going on, we just care that there is popular support going forward. Popular support for what exactly? for general NSA outrage?

<comment><USER16> > I'd be more interested in a study that asked people if they knew what they > were actually outraged about.

To list a few reasons people are outraged: -Surveillance has been revealed that seems to far exceed what is authorized by the Patriot Act -The executive branch refuses to release the legal rationale on which it justifies the surveillance -Senior officials have lied to Congress about the scope of surveillance -Congress has not properly been briefed on these programs -There programs were kept secret unnecessarily -These programs are extremely dangerous to a free society -It appears this is a serious overreach in executive power, indicating a breakdown in the checks and balances of a functioning representative government

> A majority of the insinuations of the original "leak" have since been > retracted

I don't know of any insinuations that have been retracted. The NSA slides say one thing, and the companies say another. There is still much to resolve.

> and those actually following the details of the story have no belief that > there is anything illegal going on.

This is completely false. There seems to be a claimed legal basis for what's going on (which happens to be an extreme interpretation of the Patriot Act that even its author states goes beyond what it was written to authorize). But it hasn't been ruled on by a court because the executive branch claims it is too secret for judicial review. When that obstruction is removed, it's likely to be found unconstitutional.

Sure, people you interview might not be able to clearly express the reasons they're outraged. But there are at least three tiers of reasons to be concerned. Please consider reflecting on the fact that a claim of legality is not a claim that something is not terribly wrong and dangerous for society.

<comment><USER17> Here is a summary of the Guardian story and what has been changed: [http://www.zdnet.com/the-real-story-in-the-nsa-scandal-is- th...](http://www.zdnet.com/the-real-story-in-the-nsa-scandal-is-the-collapse- of-journalism-7000016570/)

"Updated June 10 to include a quote from a follow-up article in the Post directly contradicting its initial claims and another observation after the release of the leaker's identity."

<comment><USER16> That's a summary of the Washington Post story and what was changed. It looks like the Washington Post reporting of this was a disaster. Not only did they initially publish language that was more sweeping than the Guardian, but they had absolutely no backbone and edited their story when companies said the NSA slides were wrong.

It seems the claims of the Guardian have not been edited, proven incorrect, or retracted. I haven't re-read their entire article, but it appears to be the same one that was initially published.

It appears that the exposé you linked eventually concludes: "According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general's report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows "collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company- controlled locations," rather than directly to company servers." Looking at this from a process perspective and not a technical one, it appears there is little functional difference between this and "direct access" to servers. And it perfectly explains why the NSA presentation cut to the point: you get data from the company's systems without the company being involved.

It's up to the companies and the NSA to clarify things, but it appears the NSA slides are likely correct in terms of process, if not in technical terms.

<comment><USER17> It looks like the Guardian is changing their story as of today: [http://www.mediaite.com/online/fulsome-prism-blues-the- guard...](http://www.mediaite.com/online/fulsome-prism-blues-the-guardian- offers-2nd-worst-clarification-ever-on-nsa-story/)

<comment><USER16> That link is to a ridiculous "story". See my responses in the main thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5876943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5876943) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877115)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can think of a word that rhymes with patriot for this guy.

That said it was great to hear the congress and the heads of the departments agreeing that the entire process deserves review. There was zero animosity, etc at the finance committee meeting today. Very cool to see when the government is working, a dialog is happening, etc.

But this guy is the ultimate sophomore, and if you ask me he was turned by China or just by some dreams of entering into some 31337 hax0r club illuminati.

All for leaking a powerpoint detailing what was codified in law over the past decade.

<comment><USER11> As things continue to develop in Hong Kong I am more and more impressed by his choice of venue. I would not call him an idiot and I would not want to wager anything important on my chess skills against him.

Hong Kong is actually the perfect place because he is able to play three distinct groups off eachother. The immediately obvious parties are the US and China who both are likely to look at this in terms of what he knows, but then there is also the large-scale concern in Hong Kong over encroachment by the Chinese government so he is able to play Hong Kong off China as well. It is one thing to play two groups off eachother but three gives him a significant chance.

Moreover an extradition request would be a total game changer. Right now it is a game of chicken. Extradition procedings woudl turn it into a game of national security assets and intra-Chinese politics.

The fear of him already being turned by the Chinese is another thing he is able to play off of.</comment></comment>


Even pure functions have side-effects - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/05/18/pure-functions-have-side-effects/ <comment><USER2> Wow. The argument in the original post that is linked to about scalability and functional programming is almost exactly backwards. Resource usage here is a silly red herring.

Keeping code free of side effects means you _can_ scale it. Try scaling out to multiple machines when you have a fundamental bottleneck like serialized state in your code.

All data-parallel programming techniques, dating back from at least 1985 with the connection machine lisp, and whose modern friends include MapReduce, come from unshackling ourselves from too much state.

These benefits come from making software _more_ functional, not _less_ functional.

</comment><comment><USER3> A (pure) function is a mathematical concept. Saying a pure function can have side effects is like saying a line has a thickness because no one can draw a line with no thickness.

</comment><comment><USER4> TL:DR; Pure functions still use memory and CPU.

Very insightful. I forgot code ran.

<comment><USER5> Mock him if you like, but he puts his finger on a real problem. When I encounter a library or language that makes a big deal about being "declarative", I now consider that a black mark against it, not a feature, because what that translates to is usually "You still have to tell it how to get the thing you want, but since we thought we could abstract away all such performance issues, we've made it impossible to introspect or fix any performance issues you may encounter, and the language will require bizarre contortions to get acceptable performance."

Example the first and one of the biggest: SQL. Sure, it's a declarative language... after you learn how databases work, after you learn how indexes work, after you profile your biggest hitting queries and work out how to rewrite them into semantically equivalent queries that perform orders of magnitude faster, after you learn how to deal with sharding, after you learn when to denormalize and when not to, after you learn the necessary performance hacks that trick the indexer into doing what you need instead of what it thinks is correct, and after a few more things I could go on about, it's a declarative language where you don't have to worry about performance any more. Yup, totally declarative.

I like Haskell, but only because I can _mostly_ (although not entirely) see through it.

 _"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."_ \- Douglas Adams

Anything that claims to be declarative is lying. All declarations in some given environment entail some process that will be used to obtain your results, you will not be able to get good performance if you don't know that process, and actively obscuring those processes only makes it harder.

You can't afford to ignore the side effects of "pure" functions.

<comment><USER6> In the same vane, is the classic article [Evolution of a Haskell programmer](<http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html>). Its just the factorial function written in different styles in Haskell, each with very different performance implications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What does the literature say about a pure function that throws an exception? For example, what of an asynchronous exception like out-of-memory or stack?

<comment><USER8> I don't think pure functions are supposed to throw exceptions, instead they should return error values.

<comment><USER9> The Maybe and Either type classes are typically used to model exceptions in Haskell.

<comment><USER10> There's actually some discussion about how to handle errors in Haskell. See: [http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/08/8-ways-to-report-errors-in- ha...](http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/08/8-ways-to-report-errors-in-haskell- revisited/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The main thing a statically typed pure functional language tries to do is force you to "mark" the side effect in your code with type annotations. Various effects can be modeled with different types. Many of these types still support some form of composability, which promotes modularity--a major goal of functional programming.

Whether every effect can and should be modeled in this way seems to be an open question that depends on the semantics you wish to apply to your programming language.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anybody know what presentation software the guy in the PyCon talk was using? That looked pretty slick.

<comment><USER11> Looks like Prezi <http://prezi.com/></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/?hn <comment><USER2> This is really interesting, but the fact that you have submitted it twice and mentioned it twice in comments begs the question: why?</comment>


The Hacker Dish (Makhlouta) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tasteofbeirut.com/2010/01/the-hacker-dish-makhlouta/

<comment><USER2> Another entry in the ever-expanding Catalog of Mushy Hacker Metaphors. Joining the classics (painter, rockstar, poet) and newcomers (ironman competitor, marathon runner, martial artist) is 'farmer'. Looking forward to 'pterodactyl' and 'balcony'.

</comment><comment><USER3> This would explain the extraordinary prevalence of Lebanese hackers

<comment><USER4> I had no clue of the prevalence.

A couple of us are here <http://answers.yallastartup.org/>.

<comment><USER5> We're successful because our moms send us lots of zaatar for the morning of a big pitch :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Beans & rice, a worldwide staple. Calling this "hacker" seems like a stretch though.

<comment><USER7> Dumbing this down to just 'beans & rice' is a bit ignorant. In my culture alone we have at least 5 dishes with grain components that all taste vastly different from one another. As to the comparison, grains are often a more 'practical' type of food as they're cheap, have a long shelf life, and are quite diverse, possibly making them more appealing hackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. The dish can last for days, with little preparation (other than the pre-soak).

It's a high calorie meal that'll keep me filled for hours. Pretty ideal when I need to just lock down and code for a long period of time.

<comment><USER8> Not quite in the same league but a British delicacy has been my hacker fuel for years: Beans on Toast. The name is the recipe, just try and get the proper tins of Heinz beans for true authenticity.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Omar Ramos-Lopez, Laid Off Employee, Remotely Disables 100 Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/17/omar-ramoslopez-car-hacke_n_503163.html?view=print <comment><USER2> The radio news down here in Austin is saying the so-called "hacker" is a car salesman that was fired from one of the many used car dealerships down here.

They are also saying he took home (stole) a peice of special hardware used to call over the phone lines and disable cars for people who fail to make their payments. Something the finance manager would use from time to time.

No much hacking, just a theft and several phone calls over his home phone land line.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone here making money writing on Substack? - <AUTHOR> Hey there!
I've been blogging on Medium for almost a year.
Some of my articles got quite high and I could make a few hundred bucks a month from it. But, Medium is behind a paywall, and many of the articles there is clickbait & low quality. I do not want to be a writer there.
I always wanted to start writing a newsletter. A few weeks ago I found out about substack. It looks pretty neat, plus, I could migrate all of my Medium posts.
So, my plan is to write a small daily recap of TIL & articles I was reading over the day for free subscribers. And, writing my long reads for paid subscribers.
My questions: 1. Anyone making money on Substack here?
2. How do you promote it?
3. Could you recommend any good example of a Substack on tech & entrepreneurship?
My substack: https://codarium.substack.com/about
Thx! <comment><USER2> I don't know Substack, but I checked out a couple of blogs prompted by your question.

I read their "how to get paid on Substack" article and they work up some revenue projections/examples based on things like a conversion of email subscribers to paid monthly subscribers of 10%. That seems really really high.

I would have estimated an email campaign open rate of 10% not a conversion rate of 10%. I would have expected a conversion rate in the 1% range or less.

In my experience, people in general don't really want to or expect to pay for information on-line. They will pay to be "entertained" through for example Patreon, but not for information and particularly not text based information.

I hope you find success but I would be cautious about using some of Substack's estimates. Hopefully I am wrong.

For what it is worth, your NewsCatcher project looks interesting. Is your intent to use this new blog as a practical example of using it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx for reply.

Regarding NewsCatcherAPI, I plan to do some examples that I will post on our website (newscatcherapi.com).

Some big works will be also posted on my sub stack, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it's going to be hard to build an audience with a paid newsletter from the start. It seems like you should write for free + Patreon. As you build your email list and audience you can then start including non-intrusive ads or your own offers, for example an ebook. Eventually once your audience is large enough, you can add a premium list and convert your existing, already highly targeted audience.

Nathan Barry has a book called Authority which basically talks about this.

</comment><comment><USER4> i assume this guy is hes well know and continues use substack, idk if he gets a special rate due his previous success

[https://taibbi.substack.com/](https://taibbi.substack.com/)</comment>


Air Force Maj. Harold Hering and the forbidden question that cost him his career - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-how-cold-war-major-harold-hering-asked-a-forbidden-question-that-cost-him-his-career.html <comment><USER2> Interesting read. Would make huge sense to juxtapose this with the Russian who also didn't turn the key, his consequences and life outcomes.

The not so hidden scary part is the sotto voice "it's still not resolved" part. I guess this is why the pugwash clock keeps up in the top left quadrant.</comment>


Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed to Sacrifice Pedestrians - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3064539/self-driving-mercedes-will-be-programmed-to-sacrifice-pedestrians-to-save-the-driver <comment><USER3> Programming language designers have been meeting in secret in order to make critical decisions related to the advent of ubiquitous self driving technologies. A decision on how to handle this is imminent. Participants include all mainstream languages, C, C++, Python, etc.

The currently winning proposal is to extend the standard "if" conditional statement (or the closely related "switch" construct) to include another option designed for self driving cars.

Programmers today can opt to use "if", "else if" and "else" or "case" and "default". The proposal would be to add a "fuck!" option to these statements.

While usage isn't fully defined yet, the idea is that there are instances when no reasonable decision can be made. In these cases "else" or "default" don't quite capture or convey the critical nature of having to make what is, effectively, an impossible decision. Hence the introduction of "fuck!". Here's example pseudo-code:

        if(some_condition):
        {...}
        else if(some_other_condition):
        {...}
        else: // Unknown but not critical condition
        {...}
        fuck!:  // Critical condition for which there are no good options
        {...}

Language designers expect to issue an official announcement within the next five years. As is to be expected, there are no good options here and they hesitate to even suggest that "fuck!" should be integrated into these languages but they seem to have no options left at this point.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1) This is from 2016.

2) Mercedes will face huge, possibly ruinous lawsuits from the families of anyone killed by a self-driving Mercedes. And investigations from legislators.

In the example they give, the Mercedes would choose to kill multiple innocent bystanders to save one occupant in the vehicle...even though it is a mechanical failure of the vehicle that put anyone at risk in the first place.

Technologists have this absurd view of the future where they think that "computers" or "AI" are magical fantasy words that makes real-world consequences go away. But if that horrific event were actually to come to pass, the programmers of the vehicle would likely be tried for manslaughter, and I'd give _at worst_ even odds on a conviction. I'd also put money down on the NHTSA banning self-driving Mercedes (and possibly even all self-driving vehicles) until their programming is corrected and audited. And on vigilantes everywhere vandalizing every Mercedes they see.

</comment><comment><USER5> > So far, the highest-profile death in a self-driving car was when a Tesla > crashed on May 7, 2016, while in Autopilot mode.

Ugh why does the media keep repeating incorrect information?

That was not a self driving car.

It was a car with a driver who was not paying attention.

The reasons for his not paying attention are up for debate (ranging from he _perceived_ the car, incorrectly, as being self driving, to he was being careless, to the utterly crazy assertion that Tesla or Elon intentionally tricked him into thinking the car was self driving...).

Regardless of where the truth on the driver's reasons lie, the underlying fact is that the car did not have self driving software installed on it yet.

<comment><USER6> I think we've had this discussion a number of times on HN ( * ). Calling a certain driving mode "Autopilot" rather than "cruise control" sends a message. A lot, if not most people, perceive the message as being "self-driving car". The fact that Elon deemed fully autonomous self driving cars just around the corner a number of times certainly doesn't help. I personally lost track. Are we at full self-driving capability yet? Or is it in 2020? Should be any day now, right?

Just for entertainment, here's a headline from the Tesla website from 2016: "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" [1]. I know, in the post they make clear that the software is not there yet, but how many on HN (and on the internet in general) are not a little bit guilty of reading only the headlines?

[1] [https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced- now...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have- full-self-driving-hardware)

( * ) by "we" I don't mean the two of us, just the HN community in general.

<comment><USER5> >A lot, if not most people, perceive the message as being "self-driving car"

But it's reasonable to expect better than this from the media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is quite a useless article IMO. No-one drives selflessly and suicidaly altruistic anyway. The article's author is shaming and criticizing Mercedes for making this design decision, while ignoring all the practical aspects of the technology. These sorts of decisions will have to be made by self-driving cars at some point, and its not like self-driving cars will be murderous and seeking out people to splat. I'm sure that if a life has to be taken and a machine is going to be judge, jury, and executioner - most people would generally prefer that the machine spare them. Considering that this tech is on its way in the near future regardless if ethical philosophers are ready or not, and barring some legislation forcing a set of priorities for the machine to take into account, I would prefer that the car I spent tens of thousands of dollars on prioritize my life over someone else's. It would be a sales and PR embarrassment/nightmare to market that the car might sacrifice its occupants if the car deems that it's for 'the greater good'.

<comment><USER8> >I would prefer that the car I spent tens of thousands of dollars on prioritize my life over someone else's.

The risks of travel should fall on the traveler, externalizing them onto bystanders is wrong and invoking the cost of the machine is monstrous.

<comment><USER9> Considering the cost of the machine is inevitable, but that cost calculus will ultimately include a lot more variables than the MSRP.

Ultimately these machines need to be insured. The fact that the decisions can and will need to be pre-programmed will ultimately result in the market for insurance dictating the least cost to the insurer has ultimate say over the programming.

What we have in the interim is just a chicken and an egg problem while insurers gather enough data to determine the real, "costs" including lawsuits.

Google SawStop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know this was from 2016, but I'd think that a self-driving vehicle would be programmed to recognize, at a minimum, all humans in the direction of travel, and would command the vehicle to avoid such obstacles - as much as possible and within the limits of physics and its mechanical systems.

In an accident, it should continue to do this to the best of its ability. Let's say something weird like a ball joint fails while driving at speed on the freeway. Now, for those of you that don't know, in a regular car this is a bad situation - essentially, your wheel is about to fall off and you have limited to no steering control.

But if the car hit the brakes, turned the wheel (however ineffective that may be), and/or did other inputs to try to avoid a pedestrian on the sidewalk, or another car, or whatever - in an attempt to come to as safe a stop as possible...

...but it still injured or killed somebody - then I'd say it did the best it could, same as a good-to-great driver would. Assuming it logged everything about everything; what went wrong, when it sensed it, what it did in response, what it saw or sensed, etc - then I'd say it should be exonerated, or at worst "charged" with involuntary manslaughter or something of that nature.

If it was programmed (whatever that means, ultimately - I'm just an amateur self-driving vehicle enthusiast; I've taken a few MOOC courses on self-driving vehicle technology, including the Udacity nanodegree for Self-driving Car Engineers - so I know some things about how this stuff really works from a code and mechanical and sensor perspective, but I am no expert) to do the best it could to avoid the situation, but it still failed - and it could be shown it tried - then can we hold the vehicle, the owner, or the manufacturer responsible?

I suppose if maybe the driver (owner?) knew they had a failing ball joint (or whatever) that led to the accident (how they would know this? especially on a fairly new vehicle) - maybe fault or blame could be laid there. Or if road conditions caused the problem (chuckhole causing a blowout at speed?) - <USER2> the city/state?

<comment><USER11> Yea you would think the best decision is the one that leads to the least damage to the car and by extension the least number of objects hit. Even if the decision were people vs concrete pillar, it's perfectly reasonable that a human driver would also choose to save their own life at the cost of others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find these kind of discussions about AI cars odd...

Do AI cars really have to choose who to potentially wound or kill in a collision situation? Should the AI analyze absolutely everything before making any control choices whatsoever? Why? What if the time spent on this analysis will lead to more casualties?

Humans act in a random way when faced with a vehicle collision situation. Some freeze and fail to act, some divert to either left/right, some hit the brakes too softly, some hit the brakes hard, some accelerate by mistake (!) and so on.

Fully autonomous computers driving cars, if it ever will happen outside of more or less ideal road and weather situations [x], will be like humans, except with more deterministic (and limited) choices of action. I have a hard time believing there will be rationalizing over the perceived value of potential victims or anything of that kind.

[x] I mean conditions of high winds with watery sleet and darkness sprinkled with water glares, near zero C, very bad visiblity, in a situation when my car might say "sensors blocked".

Edit: footnote. I still don't know how to do footnotes properly.

</comment><comment><USER13> At some point we're going to have an entirely new field of study specifically for this situation. I propose the name "Quantitative Philosophy". The goal is to merge AI research, philosophy and law to determine the "correct" choice in complicated situations when the agent of action has time to consider all possibilities.

Without a by-in from academia, law, legislatures and society as a whole, any action Mercedes takes in this situation will get them in trouble. In addition, we could either see premature or delayed adoption of AI.

<comment><USER14> Ethics already has a lot of very "quantitative" problems it deals with: for example, see all the variants of the trolley problem where there is a concrete number of individuals to save/kill on each track [0]. Or Hardin's lifeboat [1].

Further, CS is not the first quantitative discipline to need to deal with ethical problems attached to hard numbers of human lives. For example, Medical ethics deals this problem with eg triage in emergencies and engineering ethics has had to deal with it for as long as people have been building things. So there is a lot of prior art to be built on.

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

[1] [http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_et...](http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Car manufacturers have absolutely no incentive to care about anyone outside the vehicle until they start being held liable for collisions and that's why any talk about self driving cars being safer is naive at best or disingenuous at worst.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't a human driver also choose to hit the pedestrian if it was either that or smash head first into another car?

<comment><USER17> Depends on the driver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Those ML and AI engineers better rethink that logic, as it is equivalent to the reckless taking of human lives, i.e. criminally negligent homicide.

</comment><comment><USER19> But only if they are perceived as a potential threat to the car's shiny paint finish.

</comment><comment> 076ae80a-3c97-4 This article was published in 2016.</comment>


MSI GeForce RTX 2070 GAMING Z Performance Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/10/14/msi_geforce_rtx_2070_gaming_z_performance_review/1 <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: slightly faster than a 1080.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I have my new title be? - <AUTHOR>

My current title is front end engineer. My boss wants to give me a title change/more responsibility. I'm pretty much allowed to frame my title any way I want. So I would like to see what would be the best title change for my resume and allow me the greatest flexibility in the future:
Senior Front End Engineer Front End Technical Lead Lead Front End Developer
Or some other permutation? Thanks in advance for any input. <comment><USER2> Senior Lead Technical Engineer of Software Design and Development Affairs for Front End,UX/UI

</comment><comment><USER3> His Holiness Via Lactea Maximus, Grand Emperor of the Galactic Cluster, Potentate of the Southern Quadrant, Imperator of Countless Worlds</comment>


Health insurance exchange launched despite signs of serious problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/health-insurance-exchange-launched-despite-signs-of-serious-problems/2013/10/21/161a3500-3a85-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Specifically a test a few days before launch when " _It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously._ "

But the government bureaucrats and perhaps political appointees in HHS' CMMS, which took on the role of integration including testing, evidently including this level of testing, launched anyway, after which the site locked up shortly after midnight....</comment>


Apple releases U2 album removal tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540 <comment><USER3> It was a bizarre choice to throw the album into everyone's library, rather than just feature it on the iTunes front page as a free download. They probably wanted people to discover the album faux-serendipitously, but I feel they showed a profound lack of understanding of (or disregard for) people's music listening habits and preferences.

<comment><USER4> What does this decision, vetted by dozens of executives I imagine and definitely by Cook himself say about our Cloud-ified technological lives?

Its just crazy to me that they can just throw music into your collection without even asking for permission. There's something really arrogant about Apple right now. I'm not sure what other word could possibly describe this.

What boggles my mind even more is that U2, for all its popularity, is a poorly aging nostalgia act. Heck, I'm an old Gen-X'er and I barely remember their heyday with the Joshua Tree. Tweens and Millenials probably only see them as a band their parents listened to. There's really something off-putting about this. If it was Kanye or something, I could see the appeal, as he's popular now and has a wide-range of fans, but U2? We've long outgrown stale classic rockers and music popularity is very much not this monolithic structure anymore. If anyone should know this, you'd think the guys who run iTunes would.

<comment><USER3> I personally don't find it as sinister as you make it sound. It's mostly just a user interface/experience issue. I don't see much relevance to privacy issues or the cloudification of life.

<comment><USER5> Did you completely miss the hundreds of nude celebrity photos taken from the cloud two weeks ago?

<comment><USER3> I'm not referring to that situation. I'm saying that I don't find any particular relevance of the U2 situation to the celebrity photo scandal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was an interesting marketing failure. Looking at the Twitter feed for 'u2 iphone', it was clear that a lot of people took umbrage at what they thought was an invasion of their music library, or thought they had been hacked, or otherwise felt it was a mistake.

Then the word spread that the album had been given away for free. But U2 and Apple had gone to great pains to explain that Apple "bought" the album for its users as a gift.

I feel sorry for the support people who had to field calls about this stuff this week. What a half-baked marketing stunt.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a pretty good deal for Interscope:

"At one point Thursday afternoon, 26 U2 titles charted simultaneously on iTunes top 200 albums rankings, Apple and Interscope Records representatives confirmed to Mashable on Friday. Meanwhile, U218 Singles landed in the top 10 in 46 countries."

[http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-album-itunes-chart- apple-r...](http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-album-itunes-chart-apple- release/)

<comment><USER8> But it's a record with a huge asterisk, like Major League Baseball records of players using steroids. If buying your own album in order to get it into the charts is legitimate, I'm a millionaire because I pay myself thousands of dollars per minute _.

_ (some of those dollars may be the same ones over and over again)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, another way to game the system is to include your album with concert ticket sales. That counts as a sale officially, but you probably aren't losing many "real" sales since your fans probably have the album already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://itunes.com/soi-remove](http://itunes.com/soi-remove)

This is a direct link. It looks like a scam website, especially the form that pops up after you press "Remove Album". I would never trust that if I were a person literate enough to know where not to enter your passwords, but not enough to know about SSL certificates.

<comment><USER11> This is very unclear: "Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again."

Huh, so if I remove it from my account, it will be no longer available for a "redownload" but then I can just "get it again"? Lots of vague sentences here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it fascinating how polarised a lot of the comments are. It's either:

* People will complain about anything. Why be so ungrateful? You don't like it; fine, don't listen.

* How did Apple ever think they could get away with this? It's invading my personal music library.

Fundamentally, it seems that people have very different mental models of what a 'cloud' computing service is. For some people, it's still 'their' music/library, and so this is an invasion. Maybe that's how it should be in an ideal world, but it's not how it currently is. Hopefully, for these people, they'll come away with a better understanding of some of the tradeoffs we make when we decide to use cloud services, even if we don't realise it at the time.

This is probably all made worse because iTunes started as a non-cloud service, but is now some weird hybrid, which is probably why there are such differing attitudes towards it.

I think we can all agree this was a marketing fubar though. A download link would've been much better, and hopefully Apple will realise just how confusing their current set-up is, with even some people who _wanted_ the album not being able to figure out how to get it...

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm guessing that this decision had a lot to do with U2 looking at their legacy.

With this push release, they can claim their album is on the most devices ever, most listened to album ever, etc, while still collecting a large pay check from Apple at the same time. If apple wrote the contract in such a way that each download is considered a sale, then U2 suddenly has the most successful album of all time in terms of "sales".

I don't think there is anything wrong with this if its the case, but with their history of success and age, its understandable if they start looking at their career in terms of how they rank against bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

To clarify for some people, this in now way is to "blame" U2 for this. I'm just trying to see this from the U2 perspective.

<comment><USER14> Blaming U2, or shifting a sizable chunk of the blame to U2, seems like Apple apologist talk.

It just doesn't sound like Bono and The Edge (does he capitalize the "The"?) to sit around and discuss the nuance of forced installs vs a free download. I doubt they would be so insecure in their place in pop history to "force" one group of specific technology users to download their album.

My personal theory is that Tim Cook wanted to have something that was "his" in keeping the iPhone as part of the cultural zeitgeist and not just another really good smart phone. Steve had his pursuit of the Beatles , Tim has his "gift" of U2.

<comment><USER15> > (does he capitalize the "The"?)

Yes. Though now that U2's an Apple product maybe it's time to switch to rounded Edges. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was such a dumb idea. Just make the thing free, and if people want it they'll get it. Bad time to be doing anything that could be construed as "creepy", when you're getting into the payments business.

Dumb.

<comment><USER17> If they had done that, they could have exposed U2 to very bad PR: for example if the number of actual downloads was ridiculously low :P

<comment><USER16> Indeed, so they took the PR hit themselves. How umm... noble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> After seeing this article, I looked into my music library in my iPhone, and sure enough, there it was. What a jarring experience. Especially since I've been wanting to clean up my music library for a while now, to get rid of old songs that I don't listen to. I don't appreciate Apple thwarting my efforts there.

<comment><USER19> Its strange because it is there, but it didn't actually download. You can stream the songs and you can download them. Maybe they should have pushed a notification from the music app saying "Free music if you want it"

<comment><USER20> It's the same experience as if you'd purchased the music on one device and viewing your purchases on another. - it's also the same experience if you use iTunes Match on several devices - I use the streaming method a lot for those 16GB devices where I don't want all my space used up by my music collection on iTunes Match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish they would let you delete other songs that you have bought.

<comment><USER22> They do let you hide purchases so that they won't show up on in the music list on iOS and iTunes. They won't let you delete a purchase, which makes sense.

It's confusing because they're using purchase history as a basis for your entire library, which might not sync up with your mindset for your music list. I've definitely hidden past purchases that I know I'll never need easy access to.

<comment><USER21> Ok cool. so the feature does exist.

[http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4919](http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4919)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't they have to download it to everybody's library for U2 to get the credit for a digital download/purchase?

This looks similar to the way Jay-Z sold a million+ of Magna Carta Holy Grail a year ago. Get a deal with a smart phone company to bundle their album with new units. Then show the RIAA the digital download stats, and bam! Platinum status.

I guess in this case the album is pushed to existing devices, but as long as somebody pays for the sale (even if its 'pre-bought' by a company or through a deal) it still counts. Seems like the new way to fudge numbers.

<comment><USER24> Nielsen's SoundScan rules prohibit reporting any album purchases that weren't made for 50% or more of retail value.

That said, they broke the rules for the Lady Gaga album that Amazon sold at a massive discount while making public statements that they _weren 't_ breaking their own rules.

Not sure if Jay-Z's sales were counted as well but I would definitely consider it Platinum* with an asterisk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thank goodness for this although it should be entirely unnecessary.

Both my kids turned up yesterday and asked me why the hell I put U2 on their iPads.

</comment><comment><USER26> I heard a lot of people complain that the album had been automatically added to their library. I'm glad that they made a simple way for people with limited knowledge to remove it.

I still don't understand why the songs were automatically added and downloaded. Why were they not simply made available for free on iTunes?

<comment><USER27> I think it depends on your icloud settings. If you set music to automatically download when added to your library, the song would just pop up on your device.

<comment><USER28> Correct. The album was simply added to everyone's iTune's Library, if on your iDevice under the iTunes & App store settings had 'Music' enabled for 'Automatic Downloads' then any new purchases (including free) would be automatically downloaded onto your device. If you don't have that setting enabled, the album wasn't downloaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is very unwarranted of Apple to push content without user permission. Just because it's free doesn't mean I want it. There's a reason many parties have a "no gift" policy. People don't want stuff just because it's free.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have this exact same problem on google music. They give you tons of free pop stuff and I HATE almost all of it. There's no way that I have discovered to remove it from your library either (at least from the phone's interface). This prevents me from shuffling all the songs in my library because 90% of them are shit pop songs I don't like.

Edit:

It appears you can remove songs one at a time. But you cannot remove entire albums Google has added to your library. see: [http://imgur.com/a/CrsKN](http://imgur.com/a/CrsKN)

It appears you CAN do this from the website.

<comment><USER31> I have Google Music All Access and I've never experienced Google plopping songs/albums in my library that I didn't explicitly request.

How is this happening to you?

<comment><USER30> I am also a subscriber. It's just always been there in my library. tons of crap from kanye, john mayer, xzibit etc.. I think I've finally got most of it cleared out. It's taken me two hours to delete everything they added via the web interface.

<comment><USER32> Have you perhaps logged in with a Nexus device? I know that my Nexus 7 (2012) came with quite a bit of free media to promote the recent redo of Google Music, Google Play TV/Movies, etc.

<comment><USER30> yes. maybe that's it. I've had a galaxy nexus, a nexus 5, and two nexus 7s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> But what if I have other U2 albums in need of removal?

<comment><USER34> Well, in that case, you probably bought this onto yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Apple should have realized how personal music choices are for a lot of people. Shockingly aggressive move on their part.

On the upside I got another episode of 'U Talkin' U2 to Me?'

<comment><USER36> Exactly, their whole product range is prefixed with an 'i' as in me - <USER2> personal stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've been (politely, but firmly) going back and forth with iTunes support on this and had already written a draft to Tim Cook that I planned to send today. This is welcome news.

On a side note, how likely is it that we'll ever hear a correction from U2's record label as to the success of the launch? Spoiler: no chance.

Edit: > Bono added that Apple had "paid" for the giveaway…

I was too quick to post without reading.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if there is a long-term strategy behind it, and this is a first step towards getting consumers to accept content being pushed onto their devices. Ads, basically. By giving away a new album, they get consumers to think of pushed content as something good, as free stuff.

Perhaps next time it will be only half of the album. Or the tracks will only play 5 times before they're removed again.

</comment><comment><USER39> Where was this tool in 1996 when we really needed it?

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady I surprised how much this pissed people off. It wasn't downloaded to your device unless you had turned automatic downloads on - it was just added to your iCloud. So free music not taking up any of your space. And if you did turn on auto-download just fucking delete it. Swipe left: delete. It's not difficult.

<comment><USER40> It's not about the difficulty, it's about the invasion of what is considered personal space. Even if people realize that your iCloud is on Apple's machines, they expect to be managed and viewed by them alone.

To the pissed off, this was like your landlord entering your home while you were away and leaving a CD as a gift. And your landlord is a multinational company, not exactly an intimate friend.

<comment> k-mcgrady IMO it was more like your landlord popping a free CD in your mailbox. A minor inconvenience if you don't like the CD but nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm guessing that whomever is responsible for this idea at Apple will no longer have the ability to do this again.

I honestly thought to myself, did I drunkenly buy a U2 album? How much did I drink.

Just wish I could do the same thing to remove certain free songs out of my account for good.

</comment><comment><USER42> I like free music. So it's hard for me to understand the fuss. Its still weird to see Apple not tuning out the bad press anymore. They listen to criticisms way more than ever.

<comment><USER8> Most people will enjoy a free cup of coffee, but if you pour it into their lap with no warning, they might get a little upset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't think there would be a similar reaction if a free game turned up in our respective Steam libraries, ready for downloading.

<comment><USER36> Ok, I don't use either Steam or iTunes, but from what I gather it wasn't "ready for downloading" (implying the user has some choice in the matter) but was pushed onto the device without their knowledge.

<comment><USER44> Not an Apple user, but from my understanding, it was placed in your media library, where you could then stream it. Actually downloading it to the device required extra steps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'll just leave this here:

[http://youtu.be/fGOrm9rzm7A](http://youtu.be/fGOrm9rzm7A)

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, I guess you can really say that the album went "viral".

</comment><comment><USER47> So, no apology?</comment>


Ask YC: euro vs dollar vs export? - <AUTHOR>

Just read in the German newspaper: german businesses are worried that the high euro will hurt their foreign sales. Now I am wondering, naively trying to understand economics: isn't a high Euro a result of high demands for European goods? In other word, is that another example of an extremely absurd headline, or am I overlooking something?<p>It's just the kind of headline newspapers blurt out on a regular basis, so I would be interested to understand it. <comment><USER2> They're not mistaken to be a bit worried, if a lot of their demand is from the US. To really start understanding these things... probably the best thing is to follow some good economics blogs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Naturally, it get's harder for foreign countries to buy European goods, I understand that. It just seems as if the cause is too high a demand for European goods to begin with, so there is not really anything to worry about? At the moment the statistics are still good, apparently, as demand is still rising.

The other scenario might be that the markets are saturated, like, if Germany were to produce 10 billion cars per year, but there is only demand for 10 million cars. But then they could lower their prices or just produce less cars (thus saving costs), which would probably be equivalent to the Euro falling?

<comment><USER2> I think the problem is more that the dollar is falling than that the Euro has risen, and a lot of it has to do with money flowing around, debt, interest rates and lots of other things that I'll admit that I sort of grasp when I read them, but haven't digested well enough to explain them decently.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess if the rest of the world went broke, it would be bad news for export. Good products, but no buyers. But the exporting country would still have their presumably superior efficiency, so they can't be too bad off.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Cookbook for Machine Learning: Vol 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.inference.vc/design-patterns/ <comment><USER2> I studied post-grad ML and I can say you _really_ don't need to go this deep to _use_ ML - check out [http://fast.ai](http://fast.ai) for a code-first practical crash course :)

<comment><USER3> The author fails to mention this, but this is meant to be a cookbook for machine learning _research_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone more at home in statistics than ML/CS, it's funny that I find this easier to understand than the more 'true' cookbook style postings. The real 'grok' for me would be this kind of mathematical intuition, combined with real data examples. I always learn by just trying to recreate models in books, down to the algebra. If you can feel it and inspect it, you'll get it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really appreciate his sharing his notes that translate fairly complex math into something like an intuition. It fits in a helpful (but sparsely populated!) niche between academic papers and tensorflow-for-software- engineers tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER6> I must admit I did not understand even the basics of this posting. I Need to start way further behind this level of abstraction.

<comment><USER7> Yep. Second formulae and I'm out of my league. Is it just me that gets frustrated when things aren't explained? What do I have to study to be able to read this

θ∗,ψ∗←argminθ,ψg(θ,ψ)

With no prior explanation and say, yep, now that you put it that way, it's true?

<comment><USER8> Notation is notation. I think it's hard to come up with a single guide because a lot of conventions depend on the area.

In the context of optimization, a star refers to the value of the variable that minimizes (or maximizes) a function you're interested in.

You will also see a hat over a variable ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_operator#Estimated_value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_operator#Estimated_value)) sometimes (from statistics) which is an estimate of some quantity from data (and that estimate may be obtained by minimizing a function - solving an optimization problem)

By the way, this is the first result when googling argmin: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arg_max](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arg_max)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Idk about you guys but this is not what I think of when I hear the word "cookboook"

<comment><USER10> I would love to learn more about machine learning as a web developer, but simply put it's a different industry with entirely different constructs.

I found a great article[1] that at least helped me build a simplistic understanding as a modern developer.

[1]. [https://simpleprogrammer.com/2017/10/02/machine-learning- mod...](https://simpleprogrammer.com/2017/10/02/machine-learning-modern-web- developer/)</comment></comment>


C++ Core Guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/ <comment><AUTHOR> Came across this by accident and thought it was an interesting approach to to high level modern C++ guidelines.

Fairly approachable even to myself with limited knowledge of the language.</comment>


Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in Covid-19 Patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30228-5/fulltext <comment><USER2> gives me [https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/Music_of_the_Spheres](https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/Music_of_the_Spheres) vibes

</comment><comment><USER3> It's changing people BRAINS!!!!</comment>


Asterisk vs. FreeSWITCH - <AUTHOR> http://www.anders.com/cms/266 Little dated, but very interesting, especially the comments <comment><USER2> I've been noticing a pattern in the free-software world. Product A becomes a flagship implementation of something. Sendmail for smtp, Apache for http and so on. These are early implementors, lots of people get behind the project, a hundred different paths are taken. In the mean-time there are lots of experimenting, tweaking, and reworking to the entire suite/stack for that something, which get rolled into the original implementation. This results in a giant, lumbering beast of an application. It contains this collective history of the entire movement. All the abortive bits, blind alleys, weird idiosyncracies must be kept, because someone, somewhere depends on it.

All the old timers think this is the bee's knees. Everyone else however gets sick of the giant, and you get exim or nginx, in a hundred varieties that perform better for certain common (or uncommon) subsets of use. These better performing "lightweight" versions shed the cruft and are widely adopted by those who no longer care about say, http servers, and instead just want a simple strut.

Anyway my point is: is it at all surprising that FreeSWITCH has come in to do fill the Asterisk role as a voip strut?

<comment><USER3> That is often the case, but have you seen the Asterisk code base? It's amazing that it compiles, let alone runs for more than 5 minutes.

<comment><USER2> How is this different than what I said? In my example/metaphor Asterisk is the crufty lumbering giant..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not surprised.

I've been an Asterisk user, Admin and Coder since 2003 Asterisk's internals has some issues to be truly concerned about. The MOST concerning part is the attitude of the community-- it's not longer a fun loving open source community but more of a "How can I make more money from this?" At least that's my opinion and experience while trying to hammer out some changes to chan_sip this last month.

<comment><USER5> Anyone diving inside the chan_sip is a brave, brave man. My general feeling from working with asterisk code is that if you ever, in any situation see code like this:

        while(pkt->owner->owner && ast_channel_trylock(pkt->owner->owner)) {
          sip_pvt_unlock(pkt->owner);
          usleep(1);
          sip_pvt_lock(pkt->owner);
        }

run! Run away and don't look back!

The code basically translates to - "as long as noone freed our important structure's owner-owner (but someone works on it) unlock our owner for a split-second so we don't deadlock and pray we don't crash" (if you want to know why we don't crash, ask oej, because he's the only person who can actually explain who holds which lock at this point and why the owner won't be freed - which of course leads to other people making modifications that break this rule).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm quite interested in getting into the business of switching local small businesses from proprietary PBX systems to open VoIP hardware. Anyone got some tips for getting into the field? I'm a competent programmer and system admin but my but I have little knowledge of telephony.

BTW, my impression of Asterisk vs Freeswitch matches the article. Asterisk is pretty ugly in terms of implementation and configuration. However, at this point Asterisk has much more (still small) traction in the marketplace.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm kind of looking for interesting/fun/profitable(?) ideas... That is why I submitted this article

Modularity and ability to integrate with almost anything(socket, events, http etc - that's just a guess) simply fascinated me.

<comment><USER5> If you want real integration possibilities, look at Yate too. It's got a bit steeper learning curve, but seeing the whole PBX as lots of completely independent modules and the core as a message synchronisation engine only is very refreshing. After having fun with all three solutions, Yate is my favourite (even if it has a much smaller development group and community currently - these guys are serious about what they do).

You can also integrate with everything, because the external module interface is a simple text protocol (no - a sane one - not sip kind of simple). Use php, perl, bash, python, java, etc. as you want - helper libraries are provided.</comment></comment></comment>


Solitude and Leadership: If you want others to follow, learn to be alone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ <comment><USER2> The article has the most perfectly placed advertisement box. I read...

 _I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the "brag" in admissions lingo, the list of the student's extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12._

...and then there was the advertisement box. My blood was starting to boil because I have a serious philosophical problem with having to do the "right" kinds of extracurricular things to impress an admissions board to get into college. OK, it's sour grapes, but _that_ is a college I'm not interested in attending (ditto for Google).

Then the kicker:

 _So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world- class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, "excellent sheep."_

Amen! The world needs plenty of excellent sheep, but I'm not interested in being one of them.

<comment><USER3> I always thought it was really stupid and soul-numbing to do have the "right" activities to impress someone too, so I mostly ignored all the advice and did what I wanted during high school. Then I applied to one of the elite colleges mentioned in the article (mostly because my parents threatened to kick me out of the house if I didn't at least _apply_ to college, and if you're gonna go through the trouble, might as well go for the top) and got in anyway.

Same thing with Google: I always figured that I wouldn't want to work at any place that cared where I went to college. But then I applied anyway, as an experiment, got in, and it turned out I loved it.

If I had to give some unsolicited advice (yeah, modulo luck and all that), I'd say to live your life the way that makes _you_ happy, but if it happens to make some elite institution happy too, why not give it a try? There are some very real benefits to a college like Amherst or an employer like Google. While they're not worth making yourself miserable over, they can be a pretty nice perk if your interests lay in that direction anyway.

Also, I've found that what high-caliber institutions really want are people whose passions make them come alive. For exactly the reasons the article mentioned. There are lots of sheep that want to get into Google for the six- figure salaries and 3 meals a day and resume boost. There are comparatively fewer who want to get in because it's like being a kid in a data-mining candy shop. Organizations want the latter kind, who're usually the ones with the clearest ideas of what they want to get out of life.

And if they don't, fuck 'em.

<comment><USER4> So, to summarize your experience or advice: At the center, figure out what _you_ like and do what engages you naturally. On the fringes, keep a portfolio of small bets with the outside world and see what engagements come out of that. I like that advice, seems like a good way to wander through life.

<comment><USER3> Exactly.

It occurs to me that this is a good way to run a startup too. Figure out what your core competency is and do that. But on the fringes, keep exploring other opportunities and see what may come of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author's characterization of leadership sounds to me a lot like clinical depression. This isn't altogether surprising to me, as I keep stumbling upon pieces of research or philosophy suggesting that depression has an evolutionary purpose. I think the essential property is that a depressive isn't able to ignore important problems the way a normal, functional person is able to, especially long-term problems. The hitch is being able to address those problems, rather than being overwhelmed by them.

<comment><USER6> I listened to the 2004 intro to Psych lectures by professor Wolfe at MIT. I thought it interesting that he pointed out that depressives have a more accurate portrayal of reality and how thing really are than "normal" people.

<comment><USER7> But did he say how much of this was because they themselves make it this way? If you're depressed about e.g. not being able to get a girl then you'll probably do things that make you appear creepy and you _won't_ be able to get a girl.

Contrast that with a normal person who believes in themselves. Sometimes they're wrong but they're not affected by (negative) self fulfilling prophecy.

<comment><USER8> I don't know what Wolfe said, but something I was reading a while back said (to a first-order approximation, anyway): optimistic/non-depressive people take credit when things go well and blame things beyond their control when they don't go well. Depressives tend to own up to their responsibility for things that don't go well much more accurately (by "accurate" they meant, as I recall, what impartial observers would agree would be the case).

For example, an officer at Big Investment House would credit his own brilliance for making bajillions of dollars, but blame the collapse of his foolish enterprise on Regulators/Sun spots/Everybody ELSE being too goddamn greedy.

EDIT: typo office -> officer

<comment><USER7> I'm still not convinced. I had a bought with (suicidal) depression for several years (brain injury) and it's true that I didn't take credit for things I didn't do, but instead I blamed myself for _everything_ , even things way beyond my control (e.g. "It happened this way because you deserve to be miserable"). Many things I evaluated to being beyond me, and sure enough they were. Because having convinced myself I couldn't do it or wasn't worthy, any effort I made was half-hearted or actually negative. Which lead to more depression.

Now maybe I'm too optimistic about what I can do sometimes, but I think you get further that way because sometimes you talk yourself into things that "on paper" should have been beyond you.

Maybe I was more accurate before. But it was because I was skewing the results. Also note that it's easier to think you can't do something and then fail when you could have succeeded than to think you can do something and succeed when you otherwise would not (i.e. it's easier for your own belief to skew results on the negative side than the positive).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a seriously great article.

One thing bothers me, though. This description of what a leader is, doesn't it fit Kurtz exactly? I can't help feeling that this is only part of the story; that we need something more than leadership alone.

<comment><USER10> It is called ethics. To paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, the essential ethical experience is the face to face encounter with the Other. It is how one re-acts at that moment of connection, with something wholly unknown to them that is the most basic of ethical moments. One has an essential responsibility to the Other (and of course the Other has a responsibility to the individual). A responsibility born at that moment of tension. To deny and reject the Other is to reject responsibility for one's own actions. Only when a responsibility for Other is shouldered has one shouldered the responsibility for one's actions.

We need leaders who take responsibility for their actions, and for the actions of their organizations. How can they do that if they do not take responsibility for the Other, the other nation, the other company, the criminal, the competitor, the enemy? Only if a leader takes this responsibility can he truly independent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't forget to check this other article : [http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an- el...](http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite- education/) Great too.

</comment><comment><USER13> lkmg: What in the characterization of leadership here sounds like clinical depression? I really didn't pick that up. However, one can point to leaders, among them military leaders, who showed what now perhaps would be diagnosed as bouts of depression--Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Marlborough come to mind.

Wasn't this posted before?

<comment><USER5> Solitude and isolation. Dwelling on problems for long periods of time. Not being satisfied with life as usual. Preferring to think before (or instead of) acting. Taking a long time to complete a seemingly simple task, because you can see the full ramifications of the task and how difficult it really is. Concern with the abstract and the illusionary/visionary instead of the immediate. Some of the attitude towards focus and concentration, although that varies.

In short, I think that depression can be somewhat characterized as a sensitivity to, or inability to filter out, certain perceptions, especially abstract concerns. What the author is advocating seems to be a conscious effort to seek those perceptions. My opinions are, of course, biased by my own experiences.

<comment><USER14> As someone who's experienced depression, I still don't see the connection between depression and any of the things you listed.

<comment><USER15> I do. However, I think it may be superficial. I do not think depressed people are overall as successful as the true leaders are, common sense says they may be less successful than the general population.

<comment><USER14> Maybe I'm more broken and depressed than I thought, since the isolation, solitude, dissatisfaction, thoughtfulness, and so forth all remain with me even when I'm not feeling down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good message, good content, but that was some dry presentation.

I suppose the problem with every graduation speech is that it's some knowledgeable wise person _up there_ talking essentially down to a bunch of life newbies _down here_. That is so rarely going to be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER17> \--snip--

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it's time to stab him in the back.</comment>


T. Rowe Price Voted for the Dell Buyout by Accident - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-13/t-rowe-price-voted-for-the-dell-buyout-by-accident <comment><USER2> I've genuinely never learned so much about a topic from an article that so blatantly buried the lede.

I'm actually more intrigued by the emergent complexity in highly regulated systems thanks to the build-up. It's fascinating seeing the layers of abstraction in stock ownership, to the point where I'm wondering if it's all ripe for disruption.

<comment><USER3> The complexity is a feature that allows investors to play fun games with each other. Let's not take that away from the investing world.

<comment><USER4> Why does the Government place so many layers of regulation just to vote? Don't shareholders want it made easy for them vote on the future of the company?

<comment><USER5> How is this the government's fault? Mostly this seems to be awkward financial machinery built by the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you liked this, you should subscribe to Matt Levine's daily newsletter: Money Stuff. Reading it is the highlight of my morning commute: [http://www.bloomberg.com/view/topics/money- stuff](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/topics/money-stuff)

<comment><USER7> Second that recommendation. There's a lot of stuff to check out but even just flipping through his analysis is really informative. If you're interested in financial shenanigans (or bond market liquidiry) this is the thing to read.

His writing is a national treasure (well for financial news anyways)

I don't think he 100% gets the technicalities of bitcoin though, but hey even bitcoiners don't get that...

<comment><USER8> _> I don't think he 100% gets the technicalities of bitcoin though, but hey even bitcoiners don't get that..._

Whether or not he gets the technicalities, what he writes about bitcoin and blockchain makes far more sense than 99.9% of what's written on the topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> TL; DR: share management is built on a pile of electronic and legal hacks implemented over several decades. One layer misfired, and people (think they) lost money. Maybe we should rebuild it all but it's such a huge clusterfuck and involves so many entities, it will probably never happen.

<comment><USER10> If Intuit is influential enough to suppress income tax reform, I have no doubt that the cacophony of financial institutions involved will do whatever it takes to ensure they can continue skimming their margins off the tops of their pieces of the machine.

<comment><USER11> Intuit is just kinda helping along a system that's already built up to allow politicians to give tax breaks and incentives for political reasons instead of just simply generating revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with the premise of the article. I don't think that the proxy voting system and share ownership is opaque because it is boring - it is opaque because that is precisely in the mutual interest of all the middlemen you deal with to buy and sell and hold stock.

<comment><USER13> I see, and make, this argument often in relation to a lot of things.. with one caveat, which I think is important.

The 'because' in "it is opaque 'because' it is in the interest of.." does not have to be a causal because, or even an intentional 'because'. Most conspiracies I have known and loathed are, for better or worse, simply emergent. Each party can be relied on to play their part in conspiracy because playing their part is how the conspiracy came to be.

As I said, I think this is an important distinction. Not least as the hangup most people have about believing in such complex and wrong behaviour, is that so many people can be so smart and organised and so intentionally evil. But it is a real eye opener when you realise these things can function without organisation or intent..

<comment><USER14> Software engineers work in a field where accreted complexity exists at every turn. Windows has 20-years of bug-for-bug compatibility because of the pressures of hundreds of millions of people relying on it every day. And it's also a field where the dangers of rerwrites are well known and appreciated.

So why is it that many engineers are so ready to see complexity as the product of conspiracy, rather than organic evolution, in every other field?

<comment><USER12> >So why is it that many engineers are so ready to see complexity as the product of conspiracy, rather than organic evolution, in every other field?

So you are saying that separating voting rights of millions of shareholders and granting them to the hands of a few elites at banks is just a total evolutionary accident? I don't recall getting the option to restore the voting rights of the shares in my index funds - and nobody appears to offer it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Imagine Matt Levine writing a story on your favorite heisenbug.

</comment><comment><USER16> > But usually it is more complicated than that. [...]

> But usually it is more complicated than that. [...]

> But usually it is more complicated than that. [...]

> But usually it is more complicated than that. [...]

Nice rhetoric there.

(Advanced capitalism: it is complicated, it is.)

</comment><comment><USER17> That was an extremely entertaining and fascinating article on an extremely complex topic. Thank you!!

</comment><comment><USER18> As the author mentioned, shareholder voting is ripe for disruption with a blockchain based system. What is the market size at stake for the middle-man companies?

<comment><USER19> The author also mentioned -you know- building a solution on 1980's-era tech, namely a _single_ database of _actual_ (rather than proxy) shareholders and contact information/voting instructions/other useful info:

"You could just, you know, build a big database of who owns shares, and transfer shares on that database, and not rely on a system in which people own shares in brokers' databases and brokers own shares in DTC's database and DTC owns shares in companies' (transfer agents') databases. The big database could send out voting instructions directly to the shareholders, cutting back on the outsourcing. You could build a new system, from the ground up, corresponding to the actual practices of finance rather than to the archaisms that they're built on." [0]

No need to go all blockchain and shit, just consolidate the mess of systems into a single well-designed and well thought-out one.

[0] That 'graph is -incidentally- the 'graph that immediately _precedes_ the one that mentions The Blockchain(TM).

<comment><USER20> So what I imagine when we talk about a single database is just some mapping of stock shares to owner. So to keep track of who owns what share, when some shares gets transferred you just update each row accordingly. (Imagine a stock with 10 total shares and X sells to Y shares #1, #2, #3, you'd just update the table and set owner=Y where share id is in (1, 2, 3))

But for such important financial data you don't want to just update your table and throw away your history. You'd like to also keep a record of what changes occurred. Maybe you'd like to audit your database, and find out the path of ownership from which a current owner obtained their shares. Maybe you'd like to make your history immutable, so as to not have headaches later on trying to validate the current state, or to discourage tampering with the database.

So now you have a datastore where the current state relies on an ever-growing stack of immutable changesets. This sounds exactly like what we talk about when we talk about blockchains. There are people who define a blockchain more strictly (e.g, The Blockchain(TM) with decentralization and crypto), but I think the author was going for the former meaning.

That is to say, you can implement a blockchain and still be using a single well-designed and well thought-out database.

<comment><USER19> > So what I imagine when we talk about a single database is just some mapping > of stock shares to owner.

Mmhmm. Keep simple things as simple as possible.

> So now you have a datastore where the current state relies on an ever- > growing stack of immutable changesets. This sounds exactly like what we talk > about when we talk about blockchains.

Well, if _that 's_ what a "blockchain" is, then git [0] was doing blockchains _way_ before they were cool.

> There are people who define a blockchain more strictly (e.g, The > Blockchain(TM) with decentralization and crypto)

I can see not having a distributed ledger, but if you eject the cryptographic part of it then you don't get any of the tamper resistance. Without that, all you have is a linked list. And -as we all know- "linked list" is a much less sexy phrase than "blockchain".

[0] And -if we drop the cryptographically verifiable history part- pretty much _every_ VCS _ever_.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the U.S. Is So Behind on Coronavirus Testing - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/why-coronavirus-testing-us-so-delayed/607954/ <comment><USER2> We have largely given up in the UK at present, only get tested if you're hospitalised.</comment>


Bing recommends Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.forevergeek.com/2009/08/bing_recommends_google/ <comment><USER2> Google, Bing and Yahoo do not have themselves as the top hit for that query either. Zoning in on Bing here and taking that as a recommendation is not entirely fair. <http://www.bing.com/search?q=search+the+web> gives google <http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=search+the+web> gives google <http://www.google.com/search?q=search+the+web> gives yahoo

Everyone here knows it's perfectly possible to manipulate queries to all engines to return top results for their rivals.</comment>


Drones Marshaled to Drop Lifesaving Supplies Over Rwandan Terrain - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601190/why-rwanda-is-going-to-get-the-worlds-first-network-of-delivery-drones/ <comment><AUTHOR> View the New York Times article here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/technology/drones- marshale...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/technology/drones-marshaled-to- drop-lifesaving-supplies-over-rwandan-terrain.html?_r=0)</comment>