Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39579321 <comment><USER3> I've seen it argued that, paradoxically, the richer and more egalitarian a society is, the more the differences are magnified in the kinds choices individuals of both genders make. So Russia being a poorer nation with less paths to success would lead more women to make career choices based around economics, while in Sweden, a richer welfare state, economic factors may be a lower driver.

<comment><USER4> > I've seen it argued that, paradoxically, the richer and more egalitarian a > society is,

The former-Communist East-European country I lived in as a kid was a lot more egalitarian than most of present-day Western countries and the women were treated pretty much the same as men were when it came to work. I remember as a kid that I regarded my mother going each morning to work and returning in the evening as a very normal thing, and I regarded the few kids' mothers who weren't doing that as being lazy (to this day I still think that a stay-at- home parent is a lazy human being).

State-run kindergartens were also of much help for women back then.

<comment><USER5> > _The former-Communist East-European country I lived in as a kid was a lot > more egalitarian than most of present-day Western countries_

That really depends on how you measure gender equality and general freedom though.

> _to this day I still think that a stay-at-home parent is a lazy human being_

You're just being too judgemental though. If a family is wanting for nothing and they agree that one parent should stay at home to spend more time looking after the family, why not?

<comment><USER4> > That really depends on how you measure gender equality and general freedom > though.

Like I said, gender equality was pretty well established. "General freedom" doesn't have that much in common with equality, we can all be equal but not free. I'd say that for further reading on the matter Mona Ozouf's essays on "liberté, égalité, fraternité" is a good starting point (a related article about it in French: [http://www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/mona-ozouf-pas- simple-de...](http://www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/mona-ozouf-pas-simple-de- faire-vivre-la-liberte-et-l-egalite-04-04-2015-10582676.php))

> You're just being too judgemental though. If a family is wanting for nothing > and they agree that one parent should stay at home to spend more time > looking after the family, why not?

I know this point-view might be seen as judgemental, it's just that I see people not contributing back to society with their work-time as not giving it all. It's not a matter of money, I am a little marxist inside me and I do believe that work it's one of the things that define us as a species. I've heard my ~84-year-old peasant grandma' saying that she was very upset that her legs were hurting her because she wanted to continue working.

<comment><USER3> >I know this point-view might be seen as judgemental,

It is judgmental.

>it's just that I see people not contributing back to society with their work- time as not giving it all

Child-rearing has societal benefits. It's one of the key reasons why children from two parent-households do significantly better on average than children from one. Either they get the benefit of dual income or a full-time parent.

>I've heard my ~84-year-old peasant grandma' saying that she was very upset that her legs were hurting her because she wanted to continue working

I believe that but it's a choice.

<comment><USER4> > Child-rearing has societal benefits. It's one of the key reasons why > children from two parent-households do significantly better on average than > children from one. Either they get the benefit of dual income or a full-time > parent.

Link to studies on that? And I mean comprehensive studies, not the ones limited to the US.

<comment><USER6> They won't be able to provide, because it turns out the differences basically evaporate when you control for the financial stability of the households. It's just that one-parent households (especially in the US) tend to be a _hell_ of a lot less financially stable than two-parent households.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a Russian who got university education in Russia and worked in both Russia and Canada, I can confirm that the reasons are both cultural and economic. First, for the big part Soviet Russia did not have a sizeable percentage of stay-at-home mothers: women were _expected_ to work, childcare was absolutely free, tight living conditions made multi-generational families, when retired grand-parents took care of children, a norm. It is also true that once young women chose to work they tried to maximize the earnings while not going to high-paying jobs traditionary considered male (think police or oil rig jobs in Siberia). It used to be law and business degrees, but now it means STEM.

<comment><USER8> Not actually been - so clearly you have more experience -

but from observations of Russians I've seen I'd also say that:

a) Intelligence is strongly valued in general, with women being no exception. There is no native faux-ironic 'im a math geek nurrrg so i have to be awkward because noone understands me' or 'look at the nerd what a dork' culture..

b) Russian women aren't afraid of being strong willed, and this is also valued

c) Russian women seem to have a stronger notion of 'womanhood' and 'sisterhood' \- similarly 'adulthood' and 'solidarity' are more generally valued - so hiding behind or supporting immaturity and selfishly infighting is less dominant/accepted

d) The general cultural philosophy seems more (despite bad eggs as anywhere) a focus on personal excellence and service to community/society/nation, rather than a desire for personal gratification according to abstract self-selected individual preferences

e) People call out BS when they see it, and this is considered a good thing, rather than 'being rude' or 'disrespecting everyones right to their own opinion'

So while perhaps sexist jokes and activities are allowed in some areas, in other areas actually acting on them - or letting them get to you or not calling them out in others - is dishonourable, a personal 'cultural liability' (e.g. cause for being ostracised), and to be avoided.

Of course there are exceptions everywhere, and this is observation and generalization - not an absolute statement of fact, also put with a bit of an ideal spin to underscore the argument..

I definitely would think the socialist economic system did a huge and perhaps bigger part to normalize women in the workplace and in these industries, but some of these cultural factors I think were pre existing and also help facilitate the pattern..

Some of these used to be more prevalent in US society as one example, but have been devalued over time.. So, if correct, perhaps the 'right mix' is support for women in these industries, but also a culture which values intellegence, integrity, community, and excellence rather than personal achievement for selfish reasons irrespective of the means..

<comment><USER9> > but some of these cultural factors I think were pre existing and also help > facilitate the pattern..

I would agree with this. Here is a Soviet cartoon based on a Russian folk fairy tale about smart and mighty wife rescuing her husband from king's prison:

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

Here is another version of this fairy tale:

[http://www.eliterarysociety.com/tag/stavr- godinovich/](http://www.eliterarysociety.com/tag/stavr-godinovich/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe because like men all over the world, Russian women aren't specially "encouraged" to go into tech? Maybe nobody has to tell them or tell anyone to 'like science'. People just do.

The same argument goes for women in science. Albert Einstein was told he wouldn't amount to much. Doesn't mean he 'got discouraged' and quit physics. That's not why we do science - for public appreciation - we do it because we love it no matter what anyone else says. This is the point that the girls in tech people miss I think.

Instead of buying your daughters lego sets with women wearing fancy lab coats and looking into telescopes, buy them gyroscopes, or electronics kits, or lego's own DIY robot? None of the toys mentioned above feature gender and actually give a sense of what science is about.

I'm open to hear your thoughts, especially from women.

<comment><USER11> Yes, because each one of us is an island, and we're not influenced by society at all as it is.

I have a two year old and I can tell you fighting against pinky-princess girl culture is a battle. As a parent, it's you vs basically the rest of society that sends a million little cues about what girls are supposed to do. I had this conversation with my daughter the other morning:

Daughter: I want to be a boy when I grow up. Me: Why is that? Daughter: So I can be an astronaut!

Of course, I explained that girls can be astronauts too. And I've never done anything to set her expectations differently. But they just absorb this stuff from the ether of our culture. At her age, she's picked up on the idea that only boys are astronauts, and girls are ballerinas and princesses and shit.

<comment><USER12> No. That is the not real problem here.

The problem is a certain things have a very high barrier to entry. Getting into such things requires over the natural amounts of persistence and other myriad life skills for which you need a certain level of biological independence(like not having kids for example).

These barrier to entries vary with each profession. They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones. Most of these career type jobs where continued work is required. Taking long breaks, asking for lesser working hours(While having colleagues at office who would be pushing 15-18 hour workdays) and other such things makes you a bad worker even if you were to somehow work hard and gain initial access. Net result is people feel they are better off doing things where their contributions have some meaning than having to compete with 16 hr shift workers against whom you are set up to lose by default.

This is the whole difficulty with the diversity problem. There is a inherent assumption that things be made easier to accomodate minorities of all kids. Whereas doing well in any profession requires the exact opposite. Harder the things, the better you get by doing them. But that also means, people who are not tough enough for the job get filtered out every iteration along the way.

You just come down to the point that you can't make people do, what they are not ready to put over the necessary efforts to make happen.

<comment><USER13> > They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones.

Well, for the _cool_ CS jobs, yeah, which is _maybe_ 1% of the total. The rest aren't cool—they're brain-meltingly boring, often frustrating, health- destroyingly sedentary, and often (not always) fairly low-status, despite the pay[0]. The way-above-median pay's just about all a CS career's got going for it, for most.

[0] Compare especially the status boost granted by entering either of two full-on professions which, strikingly, kept improving gender balance through the 80s and beyond despite a long history of being dominated by men: law and medicine. Meanwhile, CS/programming started out better, then _got worse_ around the mid 80s, as measured by graduates in relevant majors.

<comment><USER14> But those 1% are all that matter in this context, because they are the only ones doing outreach and are thus the only ones being perceived by outsiders. Nobody (outside the industry) knows what the other programmers do or what their work conditions are, because they don't actively tell anybody.

Partly that's because those 1% _have_ to do outreach to get enough workers willing to endure those conditions, and partly it's because those are entire companies filled with passionate people (because everyone who doesn't love the job quickly quits) and they want to share their passion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If they're anything like my country, Poland, and we were pretty similar before (together in Warsaw pact) there basically doesn't have to be any "encouraging women".

Your gender doesn't matter that much. Both men and women usually pursue most of the majors. And in physics and maths you usually substantial amounts of women.

In IT, being pretty fresh in this part of the world, men are majority but still not overwhelming.

Anecdata: from primary school to the end of my university I've only had male maths teachers for a year and a half.

I don't have an immediate source for this but I have an impression that post- Soviet societies are a lot more equal than Western ones.

<comment><USER16> I can confirm it (born in USSR, grew up in Eastern Europe). It's an interesting phenomenon which I believe can be explained by the fact that the movement for gender equality was started by marxist-bolsheviks in 1900-1920s, almost 50 years before it started in Western countries. Arguably, it was more successful and led to less controversy in society than what I can now see in Western countries. One of the key differences was that gender equality was initiated and led by the Soviet government (i.e. it was top-down) according to Karl Marx's ideology. While, in the West it was initiated and led by civil activists -- i.e. it was bottom-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article totally misses the point. It just picks a single area and wonders why in this particular area women and men are more equal in Russia than in the West. By asking such a narrow question you will never get the right answer. The right answer is that in Russia there is more gender equality in general and therefore in every particular area too.

For instance, from a women-in-business study it follows that the proportion of female-ocuppied senior management positions in Russia is 47% while in the US it's 23% and in UK it's 19%.

[https://www.grantthornton.global/en/insights/articles/women-...](https://www.grantthornton.global/en/insights/articles/women- in-business-2017/)

A quote from it:

"Eastern Europe continues to top the rankings (see figure 3), with Russia in the lead as the only country in which every business has a woman on its senior leadership team. In Poland, the proportion of senior roles held by women has improved by six percent to 40%. The region owes some of its strong performance to the legacy of communist principles which have placed women as equals for generations."

Of course, such a conclusion goes against the main-stream narrative of communism being all about abuse and human rights violations while the West being the undisputed champion of human rights. So the BBC article just have to provide the following paragraph:

"While Russia is doing something right, it's still not there yet in terms of gender parity."

What is this about? Nothing. Whatever the subject is BBC must retain some reservations about Russia however unsubstantiated they are.

</comment><comment><USER17> They had female fighter pilots in world war 2 and the first female astronauts. That was long before anybody in the west could even think of that possibility. Not sure if it's a Russian thing or communism. East Germany also had more female engineers and scientists.

<comment><USER18> There's a wikipedia page with with female astronauts(google list of female astronauts).

Out of the 60 that actually flew to space, only 2 are from the USSR/Russia, and both of them were elected to the soviet/people's representatives, so I'd say female astronauts in the USSR was nothing but a publicity stunt.

<comment><USER19> Random statistics alert. Of those 60 women in space: 2 flew on Chinese spacecraft, 10 flew only on Russian spacecraft, 42 flew only on American spacecraft, and 6 flew on both American and Russian spacecraft (including the one woman currently in space).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> my guess: a cultural and social value placed on STEM subjects. My personal theory is that young women in the West are less likely to get into tech because they are seen as stuffy, the domain of greybeards and model train enthusiasts. Don't forget that people generally pick up their core interest in subjects at a young age where social value and coolness are some of the most important personal objectives (early teen years).

I think the advent of the startup as being culturally associated with youth and creativity (i.e. that they're cool) is helping to rectify this image, but the startup industry has only recently gotten into mainstream culture.

[edit: as tptacek notes, this is not an issue that extends to all of STEM, so I've updated my comment to reflect this. I've left in the highlight on Russia placing cultural value on STEM subjects because I think it's relevant, and that saying Russian culture places value in programming but ignoring the value of Maths, Science and other logical pursuits like Chess would be giving a partial and inaccurate picture. Also, I'm not Russian myself so this is purely an outside-looking-in perspective.]

<comment><USER21> > less keen to get into tech because they are seen as stuffy, the domain of > greybeards and model train enthusiasts

I find this kind of justification a pretty sexist view against women that they'd pick their entire career path on such frivolous details.

<comment><USER22> I think that 18 year olds in general (there are obviously exceptions) don't necessarily have a good idea of what they want to do. Looking to cultural norms, and asking "Can I see myself doing that" is probably not uncommon in the filtering process of selecting a major.

This seems like a decent survey of the topic (major selection by incoming students), with some references to a few studies at the end.

[https://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2013/06/disconnect-choosing- major...](https://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2013/06/disconnect-choosing-major/)

'In contrast with the evidence that first-year students are most likely making uninformed choices when determining a major, the common four-year curriculum path colleges and universities use assumes that students enter college prepared to make a decision regarding major and, ultimately, career path. Unfortunately, the reality is that students are most likely not developmentally prepared to do so.'

There's nothing unique to women here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> the reason there are many women in tech is simple: IT jobs pay ridiculously good compared to non-IT jobs and barrier of entry has been lowered enough for even non-techy women to realize they can train for few weeks and get a solid paying job as junior QA. and when they are smart and went for math/technical education - being software developer is a no brainer, it pays easily 10-100 times better than average job in any other sector.

same thing is happening in ukraine: [https://s.dou.ua/files/lenta/salary- report-dec-2016/fem-titl...](https://s.dou.ua/files/lenta/salary-report- dec-2016/fem-titles.png)

full survey: [https://dou.ua/lenta/articles/salary-report- dec-2016/?from=s...](https://dou.ua/lenta/articles/salary-report- dec-2016/?from=salaries)

compare to previous surveys: [https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/demography/dec2016/](https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/demography/dec2016/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think there's a high correlation between the relative salary for a techie compared to other jobs in the same country and the amount of women you see. The US pays a lot better than The Netherlands and has a much higher percentage of female programmers. In countries like India or Russia a developer earns even more compared to other traditionally well paying careers.

Maybe a smart girl is so smart she's not going to get underpaid for her skills?

<comment><USER18> Eastern European here: in 2003 when I joined a computer science university I had ~15% female colleagues; as the net salaries for programmers have reached ~70% of the western european levels(while average salaries are nowhere near that level), I see about 40% of the interns being females. So, this might not be politically correct, but yeah, I think women pursue safe, well-trodden paths while men are much more likely to be single-minded risk takers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> because there are fewer stereotypes. Maybe well be a leftover from communism as well, when individualism was strongly discouraged and the only way you could stand out is by doing your job well. Individualism I mean in all aspects of current society - choice and variety of this. I suspect there is a similar trend in China as well.

<comment><USER26> >because there are fewer stereotypes. Maybe well be a leftover from communism as well

It think this is the main reason. Stereotypes are great for capitalism. I can speak only for germany, but in the 90es i felt, there was a movement to reduce this gender stereotypes stuff, but this got completly reverted in the last 15 years or so. Nowadays there exists a Kinder Surprise Girls Edition with pink flowers on the packaging and special potato chips flavors for men and women (WTF). I also recognise the effects frim this in my personal environment, with young parents going full into this stereotype things. The boy has to play football from day one he can walk. The younger daughter can not wear clothes from is older brother because they are not pink and she is put into ballett school ignoring that she obviously prefers football too. It's a real shame!

<comment><USER27> > The younger daughter can not wear clothes from is older brother because they > are not pink

From the industry point of view, hand-me-down is a bug that has since been fixed, at least 50% of it. Business cannot uphold ideas when they are at odds with profit (single companies can, as long as they are not public, but business as a whole can't).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good for them. Hopefully after we reduce the gender tech gap, we can focus on fixing the far below-replacement-level fertility in Europe, North America, and Russia. Personally I find it to be more pressing, but it gets barely any press...

<comment><USER29> Why? It's not like we are in risk of running out of humans on the planet.

<comment><USER30> IQ is highly heritable[1], and if smart people are having zero or one children, that should be of concern to everyone.

It's possible that nutrition + butts in school seats created the Flynn effect, where the population's IQ rose. The next century might see the reverse.

[1] Per gwern: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729085)

<comment><USER29> Are you saying people in Europe, north America, and Russia are smarter than people in the rest of the world?

<comment><USER31> How does they say this?

Smarter people get fewer children. IQ is inheritable. This only says we get more and more dumber people around the world in general. Maybe parts of the world with more births get the m faster than the rest, but still everyone gets them.

<comment><USER29> The OP said they are concerned with birth rates in those countries and they replied to the question why with a post about IQ.

<comment><USER32> I think this stems from the idea that smart people are having less children in those countries, not that those countries have smarter people. Who do you think is more likely to have 7 kids, an engineer or an unemployed person in rural Alabama?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Russia has a very low birth rate for native Russians. Here in the US, having kids and working in engineering is difficult. My wife took 5 years off and it has definitely affected her pay and advancement. Low pay and little vacation maybe have something to do with it too.

Both the wife and I are engineers. Our daughter shows no interest in tech. She does like to mix stuff, so maybe Chem E. Though I'm not going to prod her. STEM just does not pay over the long term.

<comment><USER34> > Russia has a very low birth rate for native Russians

That was true 20 years ago but no longer true today. Russia is in a period of relative baby boom and fertility rate is now higher than in most European countries (except France, Sweden and Ireland I believe). It's already quite difficult to put kids in school!

Of course the effect is bound to peter out in a coming decade.

<comment><USER35> Does this count for native Russians and Europeans?

Europe for the most part has a negative native birth rate, the positive birth rates come from immigrants.

<comment><USER34> With all the huge number of immigrants there are, they're still at around 20% of population in most countries and thus unable to seriously "move the needle" on fertility rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Provocative idea: maybe modern Russia is just bad at getting men into tech, so that a relative large part of the existing STEM inertia left over from Soviet days falls on women? Not saying that it is true, but from my outside perspective, it _could_ be part of the puzzle.

Also, the Soviet era contained a lot of progressives in terms of gender roles. That is easy to forget with today's stereotypes of male-exclusive buddy networks on all levels of economic success and high-heeled golddiggers. (again: outside perspective! I don't know the facts on the ground, just talking about perception)

<comment><USER36> That's a good question! Has anyone ever met a male Russian programmer? I don't think I've ever heard of one! /s

<comment><USER27> That's where the word "relative" comes in!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Being from that part of the world, I think there are two factors - first, a lot of previous generation females are in engineering/stem - back in soviet times there were a ton of engineering positions and therefore a lot of women went on to fill them. Today this lead to a lot of engineer-mothers who encourage their daughters to be same.

Second, and I think more important, is that engineering jobs pay - <USER2> especially so today. Given the issues with economy there, being an engineer (not just software) yoru'e almost guaranteed to find a job, either at home or remote/abroad.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe 70 years of praising progress and science had some lasting cultural effect.

<comment><USER39> If you think that USSR "praised progress and science" for 70 years, I have some grim news for you...

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'd be really interested to see some thorough research into the possible factors behind this.

I've personally zero experience with Russian culture beyond what makes it to the media.

From a Western perspective, we've a society that promotes and idolizes women based on their looks and sex appeal. Young girls look up to and subscribe to the snapchats of people like the Kardashians and other transient entities with a very low social value-add but a very large capitalist value add (product promotion, sales, etc.).

The visibility into successful women outside of these looks or "personality" orientated industries is about on par with the modern man. Successful female scientists and successful male scientists receive roughly the same media or social coverage. Successful female business people and successful male business people receive roughly the same, etc etc. (all anecdotally based / personal experience / intuition).

There's also a (social?) pushback against successful non-media women bringing themselves to the spotlight (such as Sandberg) for being seen as pushing themselves into the spotlight for being successful despite being a woman.

Like others have suggested, it could also have to do with the lack of routes to prosperity offered in Russia vs the West. As a whole, women in the West are have far greater access to self-actualization than men in the West, which also spreads the same women across many more routes while condensing men into a more fixed set.

Again, all non-academic and anecdotal but intuitively I feel that, like many other social issues in Western society, the heavy capitalist nature of our society is likely the root of any "issue" we perceive here.

<comment><USER41> I can't speak for all of Russia, but most Russian women I've encountered seem to have an even stronger desire to look good than many Western women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> They didn't have a culture that depicted everyone in tech as terrible smelling, overweight or scrawny, socially inept losers.

</comment><comment><USER43> Because the basic premise of the article is wrong. Nowhere where I worked the ratio of women in tech positions has exceeded 10%. In many ways people here are way more sexist.

At my former job my superior told me that he had a job application from a woman and said to me basically "women can't be programmers, their brains are just wired differently" and asked me if I met any women programmers. I said the gender doesn't matter, and yes, we had one woman programmer at a job before that one, and she was pretty good (but yeah, just one). Anyway, he actually hired her, so I'd like to think I changed his mind.

<comment><USER44> And that is IMO the way it should be done: standing up and saying the obvious with enough power that it actually get heard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This article massively exaggerates the positive attitude Russians have towards women in tech. My Russian mother keeps telling me time to time that there must be something wrong with me that I have this genuine interest in tech things being a girl, because "all this physics and computers is not a girl's business"...

As some commentators already mentioned, Soviet Union tried to make no distinction between male and female professions. But nowadays social roles of men and women are strongly polarized and Stem mostly considered as not women's business.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's fascinating that she would think "there's no problem at all", but this is a quite common opinion in Russia.

However, if other Russian tech women from Skolkovo state dramatically different things, who's bullshiting: Anna, BBC or both?

[https://sk.ru/news/b/articles/archive/2016/03/08/celebrating...](https://sk.ru/news/b/articles/archive/2016/03/08/celebrating- women-in-science-and-technology-on-international-women_2700_s-day.aspx)

<comment><USER47> Skolkovo is a Potemkin village, all real work is being done elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > According to Unesco, 29% of women worldwide are in science research, > compared with 41% in Russia. In the UK, about 4% of inventors are women, > whereas the figure is 15% in Russia.

These numbers seem ludicrously high regardless of gender. I'd be surprised to hear that 29% - almost 3 of 10 - _men_ were scientists. Is what they're actually saying that 29% of scientists are women worldwide, but in russia it's 41%? That would make more sense.

<comment><USER49> It's just a typo for 29% of science researchers are women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "Only 14 percent of Russian women confirmed they were using birth control pills." ([https://rbth.com/society/2013/03/28/russian_women_prefer_abo...](https://rbth.com/society/2013/03/28/russian_women_prefer_abortion_to_the_pill_24379.html))

Maybe not taking artificial hormones keeps women interested in science and tech?

</comment><comment><USER51> In reality Russia neither encourages nor discourages to go women into tech. But there's a long tradition way back from the Soviet years, when women flew in Space, worked as ministers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER50> Russian women also have fewer prejudices against male scientists.

</comment><comment><USER52> isn't this because there were very few males left after WWII (because they all died) to enter the workforce, so women had to step up to fill in the gaps?

I think I remember reading that there were so few males left that the soviets literally bussed males around the country to impregnate women so they could rebuild their population.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is it? I had one female engineer at my previous job, and one female engineer at my current job. Out of a medium-sized team.

Some other less-technical positions held by women, still much less than 50%.

</comment><comment><USER53> same thing in China as well - Chinese ladies and men are both serious in their studies. I think it has to do with the national psyche developed during the harsh years of Communism where either inherited wealth or proving academic mettle meant getting a comfortable lifestyle.

In Soviet Union, it is no secret how much the scientists, mathematicians as well as intelligent people (e.g. chess players) were revered on national level.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's because Russia isn't a particularly nice place to live. From the article:

> Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful > approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely > focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more > likely to be rooted in Stem subjects.

They do tech because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life.

Similar considerations explain why female university students are more likely to do STEM subjects in Iran than in Sweden.

This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies.

<comment><USER55> Without engaging in any of the rest of your comment, I'm going to call out again the attempt to shift goalposts from tech to STEM in general. Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields, but, of course, it is not: women are far better represented in other STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering have similarly acute gender disparity. The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50, and some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women.

<comment><USER56> so would you say those fields that have >50% women would need to work on their gender diversity to include more men?

<comment><USER55> Since molecular biology has something like a 54/46 distribution and tech has something like a 19/81 distribution I'd probably tell anyone who told me I should focus on the injustices of molecular biology to shove it up their ass.

<comment><USER57> 54/46 is considered gender equal ratio in Sweden as its within the 40%/40% line.

However the argument that we should put our focus based on how high the gender unequal distribution is is an _fascinating_ argument since here in Sweden we have a perfect record of every employed person profession (as part of the tax record). We can list every professions and their gender distribution, and naturally very few of the stem professions are at top or even in the top 20. Worst two professions (of each gender) had midwife and floor tile worker at both >99.4% of each representative gender.

The data for female dominated professions was midwife and dentist at 99.6% and above, with pediatric at 98%. For male dominated profession at 99%-98% it is tile worker, mechanic, thin plate worker, carpenter, concrete worker, electrician, and last plumber. With 90% of people working in a profession with less than 40% women or 40% men, IT with a distribution of 81%/19% is quite average and unremarkable on the list. molecular biology, being in that small 10%, is much more remarkable because it actually has a gender equal distribution.

<comment><USER55> In case this needs to be spelled out for you, and I apologize if it doesn't, but the subtext of there being a unique gender disparity in tech not shared by thematically similar STEM fields, let alone STEM in general, is that the causal agent is misogyny.

<comment><USER44> I'm aware that you are a celebrity here and I'm a nobody.

And I agree with you in a lot of things, including that we should make workplaces more inclusive.

But being right does not entitle you to be rude, passive agressive, using various tricks to silence everyone.

Think about this: if someone else behaved like you are doing now (edit: in this whole thread) - and wasn't a celebrity or otherwise safe - they might very well have to face unpleasant consequences (edit: was something like might very well have to find a new job).

<comment><USER55> There's nothing passive about my take on this problem. And nobody's being "silenced", at least not by me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Are you telling me the countries that could care less about spamming elegant PR pieces every other day about women in technology, have more women engineers?

Can we brainwash them with a Chinese version of Kardashians or something?

<comment><USER59> Please don't do this here. These threads are problematic enough without it.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164831) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> In 1988, 64 percent of Engineers were women in USSR

</comment><comment><USER60> Offtopic: I dated a girl who programmed ICBM guidance blocks from Russia :)

I'm so proud of this fact :)

</comment><comment><USER61> Probably the same way they're so good at getting 9 year olds into the Olympics.

<comment> nommm-nommm That's China, not Russia and while its almost indisputable that age falsification happened nobody was that young, more like 14. I think one even confessed to being underage a few years later.

Its worth noting the age limit for gymnastics was only raised to 16 in 2000 and many previous Olympic gymnasts competed while 14, including Nadia Comăneci who earned a perfect score (which was until then considered unobtainable, the scoreboards weren't equipped to even handle that score) at 14. Of course, at the time, the Chinese athletes were competing against other athletes that followed the age rules which, arguably, gave them an unfair advantage.

That's all irrelevant though because the whole subject is totally off topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> It's the wrong question.

Which is ironic, since the inability to ask to right question (about the US) is indicative of the problem (here). The question tech here should be asking is: If our "party" is so great (and being the self-absorbed Kool Aid drinkers that we are, we're 100% certain it is), how come so few outside our immediate circle wants to come to our party? Maybe it's not them? Maybe it's us? Could it be us? No!!! Never!!! It can't be us.

THAT is what should be the mindset of trying to understand to problem. It's not. Funny tho'. Tech is willing to solve all the rest of the world's problems. But it's unwilling - and unable? - to solve its own.

Yeah I know. Let the down votes begin. Please feel free, cause that only proves my point.

<comment><USER5> What are you even on about???

        1. We don't understand what our problem is.
        2. Nothing we try seems to really work.
        3. So we compare ourselves to places that don't have the problem.
        4. We hope the differences shed some light on the things we are doing wrong so we can change.

Why exactly do you think they take other countries as case studies?

<comment><USER62> Did I type too fast for you? :)

Let me break it down. Nice and simple...The answer isn't in Russia or any other country for that matter. The answer is in the mirror. IF you're willing and able to look into it.

The key to problem solving is...wait for it...to identify the right problem. But before that, it's admitting you have a problem. So how exactly does looking at Russia help? (Hint: it doesn't.) And now, look at that, we're back at the mirror, or should me.

p.s. Thanks for the DV. As already mentioned, it only makes my case stronger.</comment></comment></comment>


Tricks with Monte Carlo Simulations - <AUTHOR> http://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/3/3/6-amazing-trick-with-monte-carlo-simulations

<comment><USER2> This post has an opportunity to find the error bars on its estimate of π. The estimate came out as 3.14616.

The number of in-the-circle counts is S ~ binomial(N,p) where N=1e5 and p=π/4, which we'll take to be 0.75. Then

      var(S) = p(1-p)N ≤ N/4

and the standard deviation of S is the square root of this, or about ∆=137.

(If we weren't willing to use a guess for p in the variance above, we could use the universal bound of N/4.)

The estimate of π is (S/N) __* 4, so the sdev on the estimate of π is (∆ /N) __*4 = 0.0055.

So the estimate turned out to be a little less than one standard deviation higher than π. Which is satisfying.

\--

The point being that, for just a little extra work, you get not only a Monte Carlo estimate, but also a bound on its error. Sometimes the bound is just as important as the estimate.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the most interesting application of Monte Carlo that I've come in contact with is for pruning the game trees for Go (the game). It was similar to using minimax, except the tree was only evaluated at points chosen by Monte Carlo and decisions were made from there. From what I know, this seems to be one of the better methods for playing go ATM.

<comment><USER4> This approach is known as Monte Carlo Tree Search, which usually follows a weighted search by how good the move is until it finds a leaf in the explored tree. Then it makes a new set of leaves for its moves and scores the path by randomly making moves until the game is finished and propagating the result up the path to the root. The wikipedia article has a better explanation: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search)</comment></comment>


A Linux botnet is launching crippling DDoS attacks in excess of 150Gbps - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2987580/security/a-linux-botnet-is-launching-crippling-ddos-attacks-at-more-than-150gbps.html#tk.rss_all <comment><USER2> Rate limiting on password logins ought to be the default, not some optional extra that only the security savvy know to install.

Defaults matter: not implementing rate limiting by default in sshd has left an open door for these people to walk through & attack the net. Sure, you can blame people for choosing poor passwords but, given the reality of the millions of machines out there, as programmers we _know_ that some of them will have poor passwords because people are people. Failing to code with that expectation in mind is doing our users a disservice.

<comment><USER3> To make matters worse, the debian openssh .deb, that i installed to get the client, configured an autostart for sshd, without asking.

<comment><USER4> Debian's policy is that if you install a service, you intend for it to run by default. Since services _aren 't_ installed by default, this is a fairly defensible position, though it's been commented on many times.

It's possible and fairly straightforward to disable autostart of services through either old-school SysV init or, I suspect, systemd.

Upshot: running complex systems _isn 't_ entirely trivial.

<comment><USER3> Yes, a desktop computer is a complex system, that's why I leave these not entirely trivial plumbings to the system programmers. The downside of this is the exploited systems that potentially everyone has to suffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Attackers install it on Linux systems, including embedded devices such as WiFi routers and network-attached storage devices, by guessing SSH (Secure Shell) login credentials using brute-force attacks._"

I'm seeing that - endless attempts to log in as root over SSH. It's apparently aimed at random IP addresses - it was hitting a newly installed server that wasn't even in DNS yet.

Here's what the attack looks like:

        Sep 30 00:06:39 s3 sshd[29144]: Failed password for root from 126.96.36.199 port 44450 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:42 s3 sshd[29185]: Failed password for root from 22.214.171.124 port 11229 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:42 s3 sshd[29188]: Failed password for root from 18.104.22.168 port 12106 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:44 s3 sshd[29185]: Failed password for root from 188.8.131.52 port 11229 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:44 s3 sshd[29188]: Failed password for root from 220.127.116.11 port 12106 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:46 s3 sshd[29185]: Failed password for root from 188.8.131.52 port 11229 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:46 s3 sshd[29188]: Failed password for root from 126.96.36.199 port 12106 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:48 s3 sshd[29201]: Failed password for root from 18.104.22.168 port 33446 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:49 s3 sshd[29212]: Failed password for root from 18.104.22.168 port 34570 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:50 s3 sshd[29201]: Failed password for root from 18.104.22.168 port 33446 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:51 s3 sshd[29212]: Failed password for root from 22.214.171.124 port 34570 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:52 s3 sshd[29201]: Failed password for root from 18.104.22.168 port 33446 ssh2
        Sep 30 00:06:53 s3 sshd[29212]: Failed password for root from 188.8.131.52 port 34570 ssh2

<comment><USER6> so fail2ban, disabling root logins, and key-based authentication are the answer?

<comment><USER4> A large portion of it, yes.

Limiting SSH to specific IPs or netblocks, and/or specifically _excluding_ those you're likely to never use, would also help cut down on the attack surface. Not that hosts _within_ your perimiter don't get compromised, but there are far fewer of them.

2FA including keyfobs is yet another option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Get a range of ip addresses where you will log in from (your DSL address ranges from home for example), and block all other ip addresses on that port. You may want to add some other hosts you control to that whitelist as well as a backup in case your ISP changes addresses. If you are the only one that is supposed to access some ports, then block everyone else. (use last -a to see all the places you've logged in recently to start making your whitelist).

You can also rate limit new connections to ssh depending on your use cases. So even if your whitelist is beaten you limit the number of attempts.

Now add fail2ban, so that even at 10 new rate limited connections per minute they get banned after X failed attempts.

Change the default port of ssh, to make it harder to find.

Remove password authentication, and make sure you have good secure keys.

You can also disable sudo, and root logins perhaps. As well you could try 2 factor auth, and perhaps move your keys to a secure(encrypted) USB drive.

But really, whitelisting who can connect to ssh in the first place will stop 99% of the automated brute force attacks, with all the rest stopping the remaining 0.99%.

<comment><USER8> If you configure your SSH server for a limited, secure set of ciphers and HMACs, these automated attacks won't even get to the point of attempting authentication.

[https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure- shell.ht...](https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html)

Since following the above guide, my auth log has been filled with nothing but this:

        Sep 30 09:46:00 myserver sshd[74033]: fatal: no matching mac found: client hmac-sha1,hmac-sha1-96,hmac-md5,hmac-md5-96,hmac-ripemd160,email@example.com server firstname.lastname@example.com,email@example.com [preauth]

Of course, I can't use old SSH clients to connect, but it's a good tradeoff, IMO.

<comment><USER7> That's very good hint, thanks.

There's only been a couple of remote ssh exploits (that I'm aware of) and both of them were stopped by white listing. If you can figure out your address ranges, I think it still makes sense to white list. I guess also the bots will catch up with modern ciphers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To what end would people do this?

> The most frequent targets have been companies from the online gaming sector, > followed by educational institutions, the Akamai team said in an advisory...

Doesn't seem like you'd ever make any money doing that. I suppose one competitor could target another. Not sure if its a valuable thing to do. I just dunno what the point of DDoS is besides ransom-type stuff.

<comment><USER10> Speaking from experience (Of getting hit, not running one of these services!) - Gaming is a particularly juicy target, you can set up a basic front-end that allows people to 'hit' certain IP addresses offline for x amount of time in exchange for money. Its use is quite common in certain games like League of Legends, CS:GO etc.

<comment><USER11> I assume to gain an advantage in PvP? If so, how does the attacker identify the IP address they want to hit?

<comment><USER12> OK, DDoSing and lagswitching has been a big deal in the Destiny community recently, so here's what I know:

In Destiny, there's often a weekend-long PvP showdown with top-tier in-game rewards. The game type is 3v3 with no matchmaking, so you must bring your own team; the best rewards are for winning 9 in a row. If your team disconnects, it counts as a loss (no cowards here!).

The way Destiny is set up, one player's console is considered the "host" and all the other players connect to it. So if you or someone on your team (a 50-50 chance) is the host, you can see the IPs of everyone in the game by monitoring network traffic. If not, you can still see the host's IP.

Find out IP of any opposing player, aim the botnet, fire. Boom. You've instantly got a one-player advantage. Repeat ad nauseam. Suddenly going 9-0 isn't so daunting.

The worst part? Unlike other network manipulations, this one is a lot harder for Bungie to prove. But you can bet they're working on it, and they aren't shy about wielding the banhammer if they find cheating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Calling it a Linux security issue is a bit erroneous, a weak Ssh password on BSD will get you hijacked too. Or Osx, or even Windows!

<comment><USER14> Sure, but if the payload in this example is a Linux binary then it won't do anything to an OSX/BSD/Windows machine.

If the payload is an interpreted script, or something that's compiled (if it can find a compiler, etc) then it may be able to infect different OSes.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if Linux emulation on BSD / plan9 / cygwin will run it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is, in my experience, another interesting and unintentional side effect of a free OS.

When the OS is free, the engineers I've talked to who have been tasked with using it to implement their product are generally less experienced (which is to say less expensive). And the entire impression I get is that there is some cost minimization going on. Some sort of psychological trick that if its an expensive OS you need some expert engineer to bend it to your will, but if its free and seems to be everywhere, well you can hire an intern to do all your integration, development, and testing.

<comment><USER16> Maybe, but out of the box a typical linux distro is fairly unsecure. There's no rate limiting of password guessing, no default password policy, no default fail2ban behvaiors, usually no firewall enabled by default, no auto-updating service on by default (or any at all), etc.

Some popular linux services are scary unsecure. Samba runs as root, which is a security nightmare considering its that poorly implemented reverse engineered crapfest with a long history of security problems.

Popular FOSS projects hosted on linux are bad too, like the recent massive hole in Drupal and the endless Wordpress holes (I bet this recent one is WP related). Not to mention heartbleed, shellshock, etc.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a cheap and common OS for junior people to use, its just the OS needs to be shipped with sane defaults. This will never happen in the typical world of FOSS for fear of breaking things and "keeping things simple" and "you should know what you're doing." The problem is many people don't know what they're doing, at least in terms of security. An authoritarian attitude regarding security that would tie developer's hands is the antithesis of FOSS culture.

I think the status quo of endless hacking is just the way its going to be until everyone gets serious about security. What that means exactly is hard to say, but shifting to some type of memory managed language (Rust perhaps?) and sacrificing some performance for security are probably what its going to look like. Even then, botnets aren't going to go away, but might be small enough where they aren't able to do DDOS's like this regularly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My VPS had a default username/password called testuser, I never actually noticed it existed till my server got taken over by some chinese bruteforce attack. Every time I rebuilt the server that user account was created, apparently it is part of the image used by my ISP.

My point is that many people probably have their servers taken over in a similar way without even realizing it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm pretty curious, why is this particular botnet noteworthy? There's a plenty of kids on efnet capable of pushing that

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the best way to make sure that your system isn't part of this?

<comment><USER20> `PermitRootLogin = without-password` in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Same thing for non-root: `AuthenticationMethods = publickey`

And when buying a router, buy something that will get regular security updates, or where you can put OpenWRT.

<comment><USER21> From openssh 7.0 release notes:

      * PermitRootLogin=without-password/prohibit-password now bans all
        interactive authentication methods, allowing only public-key,
        hostbased and GSSAPI authentication (previously it permitted
        keyboard-interactive and password-less authentication if those
        were enabled).

It mentions that previously without-password it would still allow keyboard- interactive logins. Should be fairly easy to fake for a botnet!

<comment><USER22> I still prefer "PermitRootLogin=no".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How do the botnets come to be named? Is it named by whichever security firm finds it?

<comment><USER18> There's no official rules on this, usually the botnets are named by their developers and renamed by AV developers for marketing purposes.

This results in stupid shit like kaiten.c which is a *nix bot from 20 years ago now being known (and detected) as "OSX/Tsunami".

This is actually harmful as it makes researching whatever infection you got harder when every AV vendor decides to give a very well known malware a different name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The biggest attack surface is probably cgi scripts (php etc).</comment>


Show HN: Codeblock.js - Editable, runnable javascript code blocks - <AUTHOR> http://filepicker.github.io/codeblock.js/

<comment><USER2> I read this as cockblock.js and was expecting something more amusing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've tried clicking on run and then refresh. I repeated this process 8-9 times and then the animation in the first example started to lag considerably.

<comment><USER4> Duplicated. Not sure why. Will have to do some more digging but created a github issue for it.

<https://github.com/Filepicker/codeblock.js/issues/1>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is dues to a memory/cpu "leak" because when you press reset it doesn't run "clearInterval". This could be done via introspection on the code to "undo" any running intervals/timeouts when the reset button is pressed, but the notion of "reset" is to reset the text, not reset the code, so leaving as is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Broken in Chrome Version 27.0.1453.81 beta.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. Thanks for reporting. Mind creating a github issue with a screenshot? <https://github.com/Filepicker/codeblock.js/issues>

Or if you elaborate more here, I'll create the ticket for you.

<comment><USER6> I guess I have the same issue with Chromium (29.0.1506.0). Codeblock demos won't work because 'codeblock.js' is served with the wrong MIME type (i.e. 'text/plain') and the browser refuses to execute it. You could host your JS file on GitHub pages (i.e. 'github.io' domain) to fix this issue.

edit: Sorry, I didn't notice you were not the poster. I'll create an issue.

<comment><USER7> GitHub intentionally does this now to prevent hot linking. The MIME-TYPE is set to `text/plain`, which the browser then denies running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also related: <http://github.io/nornagon/live>, uses esprima to transform into a live-editable model that can be updated without recompiling if you just change literals.

</comment><comment><USER9> An alternative which supports other languages and uses CodeMirror rather than Ace editor: <https://github.com/HubSpot/executr>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha nice... well now there's two!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> kind of related, you guys may or may not be interested in <https://github.com/leeoniya/preCode.js>

basically, it's a small snippet which lets you write code within textareas without having to mangle them in the source, like un-indenting. i've been using it a lot for writing static docs/demos for my projects.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there any reasons to be worried about security?

</comment><comment><USER12> I like it! Nice work, filepicker team

</comment><comment><USER13> Sandstorm is very good.</comment>


Pagerdutyduty - Manage on-call schedules with YAML criteria - <AUTHOR> http://www.olark.com/spw/2013/12/pagerdutyduty-generating-pagerduty-schedules-2/

<comment><USER2> Scheduling is such a hard problem. What other tools do people use for scheduling shift workers?

<comment><USER3> I built schedulejs ([http://bunkat.github.io/schedule/](http://bunkat.github.io/schedule/)) when I needed to solve this problem for my own services. It lets you define very complete schedules (working hours, vacations, dependencies, breaks, etc) and then generate conforming schedules. It's a library and not a stand-alone tool, but it wouldn't be hard to build something on top of it.

<comment><USER4> That looks great -- and if you're ever looking to to some JS work in SF, shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com.

With scheduling, the hardest part seems to be the UI. It's the MS Word problem, everybody wants a simpler UI, but everyone uses has one complicated task and it's a different task.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree and that's why I open sourced the scheduler library and not a UI for it :) Schedule UIs should always be created specific to their usage domain otherwise they get out of control pretty quickly. Love PagerDuty by the way, but I'm not even a developer so I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want me mucking around in your code base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This would actually make for a pretty neat ansible module.</comment>


How a Band of Rebels and Pioneers Launched Wired's First Website 20 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/wired-hotwired-anniversary

<comment><AUTHOR> In-depth interviews here:

[http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/10/the-webs- first...](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/10/the-webs-first-banner- ads/)</comment>


Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/lenovo-buys-ibm-server-business-for-2-3-billion/ <comment><USER3> Fascinating that IBM's entire lower-end server business is worth about two thirds of Snapchat.

<comment><USER4> That's because social websites are in the business of taking money from speculators and unsuspecting investors. The valuation doesn't represent their revenue-producing capacity, just the fact that they can be traded by speculators for the (remote) possibility of becoming the next Facebook.

<comment><USER5> LINE, a free messaging app in Japan, made $194m in a _single quarter_ , and its high margin business continues to grow fast. It's monetized through virtual goods and partnerships. And yet, it's nearly unheard of in the US.

I'm not sure if SnapChat is a winner and if their multi-billion dollar valuation is correct, but there's there's still whitespace in the market and plenty of money to be made.

[http://www.techinasia.com/line-app- financials-q3-2013-sees-r...](http://www.techinasia.com/line-app- financials-q3-2013-sees-revenue-194-million-bucks/)

<comment><USER6> LINE makes 80% of its revenue from stickers (20%) and games (60%). I can't see stickers as a workable revenue model outside of Asia. As for games, it may work, but I don't think Westerners like the idea of integrating their games into their messaging apps/services. After all, Facebook tried this with games, but nowadays people prefer to play standalone game apps on their mobile devices.

<comment><USER7> Stickers are as crazy as hats.

<comment><USER8> For those who did not get the reference, Valve paid out 400K$ in the first week of 2014 [1] to item creators for Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which are purely cosmetic video game items ("hats") [2].

[1] [http://steamdb.info/blog/43/](http://steamdb.info/blog/43/)

[2] [http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/04/16/how-to-make-a- living-s...](http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/04/16/how-to-make-a-living- selling-virtual-hats)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The US continues to puzzle me.

China is seen as aggressor in Cyberwar, Chinese hard- and software is accused of having security problems, there are lots of discussions about the more aggressive role of China in Asia, the US has a huge trade deficit with China, China is accused of spying, ...

But the US continues to sell its companies and its business to China and imports stuff from there more and more.

Does the US have an idea what to do to balance the relationship - <USER2> sending the Navy or let bomber airplanes fly over disputed areas?

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/us-china- defense-u...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/us-china-defense-usa- idUSBRE9AP0X320131127)

Note the US government needs to approve such deals:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-14/make-it-easier- for-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-14/make-it-easier-for-china-to- buy-u-s-businesses.html)

<comment><USER10> What's irritating to me is that many of the people who claim to be pro- national security and defense cheerlead the whole process of outsourcing our sovereignty piecemeal to China.

<comment><USER11> They do?

<comment><USER10> Many American conservatives, arguably the bulk of the mainstream conservative party, have elevated globalism above national independence by embracing libertarian ideas about the role of national governments with respect to international commerce. At one time, conservatives favored reducing unnecessary burdens on international trade, such as tariffs, as a means to the end of greater national prosperity. Today, they quite often deny the very legitimacy of the national government exercising its sovereign powers to manage or limit trade to maximize national prosperity. This represents a fundamental change in thinking with tremendous implications in light of the continued growth of international corporations.

<comment><USER12> _Today, they quite often deny the very legitimacy of the national government exercising its sovereign powers to manage or limit trade to maximize national prosperity. This represents a fundamental change in thinking with tremendous implications in light of the continued growth of international corporations._

And that's a good thing. We don't need governments mucking about, artificially distorting markets with their heavy-handed intervention. Look at where that's gotten us in the past.

National independence? Who cares, "nations" are an outdated idea anyway. I don't want "national prosperity", I want "everybody prosperity" with no regards for where in the world you live and work.

<comment><USER10> You're entitled to your opinion, but it's a distinctly radical rather than conservative one. And that was the point of my post: to point out the inconsistency in purporting to believe in national independence while embracing radical libertarian and globalist ideas about international markets. Conservatives don't purport to believe that "nations are outdated" and that "everybody prosperity" is more important than "American prosperity."

<comment><USER12> _You 're entitled to your opinion, but it's a distinctly radical rather than conservative one._

Yeah, I have no use for conservatives personally.

 _And that was the point of my post: to point out the inconsistency in purporting to believe in national independence while embracing radical libertarian and globalist ideas about international markets._

Fair enough. I thought you were saying something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note, only their low-end x86 business, not the POWER servers.

<comment><USER14> Or even more profitable MainFrame (Z Series) which is still growing

<comment><USER15> Z for mainframe, I for iSeries (think AS/400 - but now these machines are huge), and P for AIX.

the installed number of those three is immense and in many organizations most people would never suspect.

<comment><USER16> Like what organizations for example?

<comment><USER17> Look at, for example, Jack Henry & Associates [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Henry_%26_Associates](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Henry_%26_Associates)

Their core banking stuff, which powers the $600 million capitalization local bank I use, is System i (AS/400) based as I understand it.

<comment><USER16> Right, that's not actually surprising to me, I know banks still use mainframes, and I thought it was well-known. Same about airlines, and heavy- duty control systems (say, sewage control for a large city or something) that are likely to be legacy. I was wondering what could be organizations I wouldn't even suspect.

<comment><USER18> I believe O'Reilly auto parts has an AS/400 at each of it's stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the grand scheme of IBM's business strategy this makes sense. They sold off their consumer PC market to Lenovo already. The hardware game is not where the big money is. Would you rather be selling relatively cheap hardware or have an army of high end consultants billing out at $250+/hour? You can contract IT infrastructure, application development, BPM, legal and many other services from their professional services division. Want to start an international bank? IBM's financial services and global services will help you out. This is purely just the next step in their evolution to a pure services company with some top notch talent.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure IBM wants to be a pure services company, in fact, software sales is a high margin business that makes IBM a huge chunk of change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> IBM still has their usual business of building questionable enterprise applications to fall back on. That or continue building $200-million supercomputers for the NSA. Eh...Sorry, I meant Department of Energy.

</comment><comment><USER22> International [used to make]Business Machines

<comment><USER23> They should just be International Patenting Machine

<comment><USER24> International Consulting Machine

<comment><USER25> International Virtual Machine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's the press release which gives a bit more information: [http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43016.wss](http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43016.wss)

</comment><comment><USER27> But not in time for IBM to include the one-time gain to offset the one-time losses in the earnings report this week.

<comment><USER20> Surely the deal could have been announced earlier in the week, if they wanted it to. Some other reason caused them to wait to announce it.

<comment><USER28> They are saving it for the next quarters.

They will run out of things to sell soon enough, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll repost my comment from TheVerge:

 _It just boggles my mind that a decade and a half after Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution came out, which I'm sure every CEO has read so far, there are still so many companies that repeat every damn mistake in the book. Heck, IBM is actually given as prime example for why big companies fail, with their past failure in the micro-computer market.

I mean look how crazy this is. IBM sells the server business because it's "not profitable for them":

"It's underperforming because of the cost of doing business on IBM's side," he said.

But on the other hand, Lenovo wants it because they consider it a profitable business:

"Low-cost servers are the fastest-growing, most attractive area of the server business right now, so this would make sense,"

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-18/ibm-said-to-be- in-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-18/ibm-said-to-be-in-talks-to- sell-low-end-server-unit-to-lenovo.html)

This was written to the letter in Innovator's Dilemma – a decade and a half ago – and yet IBM still failed to see it coming. Some companies just deserve to burn. There's no excuse._

Companies getting disrupted need to adjust their cost structures, if not they need to create entirely new business spin-offs that can act as independent businesses. This was discussed in Innovator's Solution. It would've given them the ability to actually make money off of this "fast growing sector" like Lenovo calls it. But because of their current cost structures, they can't do it now.

They are now moving up-market to software and services, and letting Lenovo, a down(er)-market player take this business away from them. What do they think will happen in 5-10 years? Lenovo (or some other PC player/new server player, currently) will move up-market yet again, and do what IBM does cheaper, while still being very profitable, while IBM will be forced to sell that business, too. The solution to disruption isn't to run away (at least not in the long- term).

This will happen to Intel, too, within 2-3 years. Right now, Intel makes 70 percent of its revenue from ~$200 chips in the PC market. In 2, maybe 3 years at most, that business will be completely commoditized, as ARM chips reach similar performance levels at much low cost.

Intel has tried, with little success, to enter the mobile market, but right now they aren't making any money, and are in fact _losing_ money with Atom chips, especially since they're paying OEMs to buy their chips [1] (anti- competitive? You tell me).

Trying to succeed with Atom is sort of the right solution, but if they aren't going to make money with their own cost structures, then it's going to fail. Trying to succeed with Core chips by lowering power consumption is a losing proposition because those chips are much more expensive.

[1] - [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245530/How_Intel_is_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245530/How_Intel_is_buying_a_piece_of_the_tablet_market)

<comment><USER30> One company wants 50% profit margins, and the other is okay with 20%. The same business may be great for one and something that is dragging down the other.

<comment><USER31> I imagine that when you are already making Intel based laptops and workstation, adding low end Intel based servers to your production line has a lower marginal cost than it would for a company that only makes Intel servers.

<comment><USER32> They already make servers: [http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/servers/](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/servers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is that because 2.3B was not enough to buy Nest? :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Having worked at IBM I know they will do anything to make the quarter numbers look good. This $2.3bn will help for some time but I wonder what they will sell next.

</comment><comment><USER34> Too bad IBM didn't trade it and get Thinkpad back.

<comment><USER35> I've been happy with my Lenovos. We had a bunch of T420s at my last employer, and they were solid.

Likewise, my personal X220 has held up fantastically.

Some of the new laptops follow annoying market trends (bastardized keyboards, lack of IPS screens, hard to repair, lack of connectivity options), but every other brand is doing that too.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-levin > Lenovo said it would settle the transaction with $2 billion in cash and the > balance in its own Hong Kong-listed shares.

Now this is the interesting part of the article. This means that IBM will own $300 million in Lenovo stock. Sure, it may dump them for cash, but it now has a stake in Lenovo, the company that 'has overtaken HP and Dell to become the world's biggest manufacturer of PCs.'

</comment><comment><USER36> Is the market for low end servers still viable ? The alternative to a low end server is the cloud server and it is much better option financially.

I think we would see a trend where companies would sell hosted infrastructure solutions ( e.g. MS Exchange, sharepoint etc. , Databases , firewall, etc.) and throw in a cluster of low end servers for free.

<comment><USER37> We're talking hardware here - whether you own it yourself, or it is "in the cloud", there is still a metal box somewhere behind it all, so there is still a market for those metal boxes.

<comment><USER38> Yes, but the biggest cloud providers build their own hardware. Google, Facebook, Backblaze, and more to come I'm sure. Intel and Micron and Foxconn will remain happy, but vendors of turnkey servers perhaps less so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It immediately reminded me of the mini-mills example from Clayton Christensen's amazing talk on Disruptive Innovation [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g)

</comment><comment><USER40> Isn't Lenovo beginning to encroach into monopoly territory? I keep hearing how they are purchasing large chunks of the current PC market.

<comment><USER38> Hardly. HP and Dell cover most of the same ground, from laptops to mid-size servers. And the consumer space has Apple of course, and the enterpise has...SuperMicro? It has been more or less like this for some time now.

<comment><USER41> SuperMicro doesn't sell pre-built machines. However, in the case of our small company, they have received the lion's share of the money we spent on high performance hardware in the past couple years, as we no longer buy pre-built machines for our cluster. We buy our desktops and laptops from Dell, though.

<comment><USER42> Same here. I looked at HP, IBM and Dell but the first two make you go through awful 3rd party vendors that seem stuck in the 90s and while I liked what Dell had to offer it was just too expensive unless you NEED the prosupport in which case it's not a terrible deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They were dumb to get rid of the "Netfinity" branding. And even dumber to sell the division. $20 EPS, here we come!

<comment><USER44> Well the article mentioned 7,500 employees so that has to be close to the billion dollar range for salary/benefit reduction. So that is one way to go after $20 eps...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What does IBM even do these days? It's like Nokia selling their mobile phone division to Microsoft.

<comment><USER44> IBM does enterprise software and professional services. It's much more profitable than low end hardware. They are one of the largest software companies in the world. A lot of consumers just don't get as much exposure to the brand to realize how big it is. If you've ever worked in the corporate world you would know.

<comment><USER38> I have worked in the corporate world for a decade, and the only things I have seen IBM used for were servers (x86 and Z Series). Not once has someone said, hey let's get some software from IBM. Now we'll get our servers from Lenovo. I hope their excellent industrial design doesn't suffer (as it did a bit in the ThinkPad line).

<comment><USER44> They bring in close to $30b in revenue each quarter and only a small portion of that is hardware. It's quite possible you do use IBM software and don't know it because you know it as another brand they bought or you work with a competing vendor and really don't have any IBM software. It's also possible you aren't in an enterprise shop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> After IBM acquired softlayer technologies, this is a natural move.

</comment><comment><USER47> kind of fun watching IBM just disintegrate in slow motion

<comment><USER48> Well, they're changing...

Honestly, for years watching them sell stuff and gradually back out it's looked like they were dying. Now it's very clear that they are making a gigantic bet on Watson and Watson like technologies. That's exciting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> So the bazillion dollar question is: when will there be more open source hardware in commodifying desktop and low-end servers businesses?

</comment><comment><USER50> So much butt hurt here...x86 is a low margin commodity with too many companies out there racing to the bottom. I for one applaud to IBM's decision to evolve their business.</comment>


Review my startup - Plura Processing: Web Traffic = Grid Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.pluraprocessing.com/games

<comment><USER2> You aren't the first company to try grid computing on personal computers, so once people stop talking about how cool the idea of grid computing is or how to protect the web surfers rights, they'll start asking the hard questions. Like, how you're going to make money.

How do your paying customers feel about their data being strewn about the Internet? How does your processing interfere with the game that the user is playing? What kind of problems have you earmarked as being particularly parallelizable like this (ie what is your marketing plan?), and how usable is your API?

At the end of the day, is going through the effort to rewrite a program to work on distributed Java applets going to produce substantially more processing for the customer dollar than a $150 headless dual-core 1gz board with a gig of RAM running C++? You say that you can provide a $1500/yr savings over EC2, but this is only for applications that are "embarrassingly parallel", and will certainly require hiring a programmer to write code to run in tiny chunks on lots of clients. Will this cost less than $1,500? Worse, it will be money up front instead of spread out over a year.

You could say that the system is best leveraged by clients looking for a lot of compute power on a budget, but those are the people most likely to build their own grid. When you can get linux running on a dual-core 2.0gz for $200 / node, spending that money every year on an untested platform that will require substantial development work and vendor tie in, your service is going to be a tough sell.

You will be the only people interested in writing code for this platform, so please repost when you know which algorithm you can run to gross $10 million a year.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all very good questions and we certainly know that we're not the first company to do grid computing on PCs. :)

First, $1500/node-year (or even $200/node-year) comes to a very substantial amount of money for our target customers. These customers use 10000s of nodes and buy high-end computers and pay a ton for network, power, cooling, and support personnel.

My background is in HPC and I've faced and solved these issues many times. We have a multi-pronged approach to using the compute power: 1) We are definitely writing our own apps on top of Plura. It's a great source of compute power and we have lots of ways we want to use it ourselves. 2) We have a short list of very high impact embarrassingly parallel customers that are evaluating Plura. We intend to help our customers absorb the porting cost associated with Plura. 3) We are open to letting students and universities use Plura's excess capacity for free. We've had several nibbles at this already.

That being said, we realize Plura is not for everyone. It is for a subset of the class of embarrassingly parallel applications out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are there ample warnings to, or explicit agreement with the user that his/her CPU time is going to be used by non-game functions? This seems suspiciously like theft of services.

When I run any process I expect it to restrict all its actions to servicing direct functions related to that process. Plura is expressly unrelated to ANY process/game it is bundled with.

I would personally be annoyed/angry that a program I was using, web-based or not, was using my computer's resources to make money without my knowledge. In fact, you're not just using my computer's resources, you're also drawing more power from my electrical grid, because a processor doing more work consumes more electricity. That's something that directly costs me, the end user, more money. So I would absolutely classify this as theft of service unless the user explicitly agrees to have Plura running in the background.

If there is ample warning to the user, I am fine with this, and would consider it a good idea. Otherwise, it feels really sleazy and wrong.

<comment><USER4> I can see your point, but wouldn't be any ad-driven website/game be considered theft of service?

A ton of flash ads might have a bigger impact on your system performance (and on your wallet, if your ISP charges by traffic)

<comment><USER5> At least ads are visible. A zero-pixel Java applet seems like it's over the line IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, we just launched our private beta for Plura.

I submitted our game page as the HN link, but www.pluraprocessing.com has more general information.

Take a look and tell me what you think. We've been paying our alpha affiliates for months now and are ready to take on a much larger pool of affiliates in our beta. "Affiliates" are the people that put Plura on their site, browser game, or other content (even download apps) and get paid for their user time.

<comment><USER6> It seems like there is potential for a much bigger market than games. Streaming video and audio... fantasy sport applets, etc. Is plura just starting with games since they provide what I suspect are ideal conditions (already using CPU and running long enough to for Plura to actually do some work).

<comment><USER7> There is a big search in the gaming industry for new sources of revenue. Development costs are skyrocketing but income is not. Retail and subscription are the big two, with online advertisements growing in popularity. If harnessing players' compute time enables a gaming service provider to offer a better product at a lower price, this could be a win for the gamer, the game company, and the ultimate computing consumer.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like you read one of my other threads ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346832>

And, yes I totally agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is an innovative approach to getting more people involved with grid computing for major computations and a clever way to market it in general. However, I agree with some other people here, there has got to be some sort of licensing issue. As much as the whole "you clicked okay to the TOS, you gave us permission." is a tank in court, it still seems to risky. If nothing else, it would risk users no longer using the games from the providers using that service if they found out that their computer slowed down at all during playing that game because it was doing things it wasn't supposed to. Not that I would likely have a problem with it, but lets face it...the general public is slap happy with lawsuits.

Also privacy issues in the entire concept. I didn't notice any (note: I didn't go out of my way to find one either) way for the end users to directly go and see exactly what kind of materials were being processed and what data, if any, was being collected from the user's machine. That might also be a source of trouble in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting comments. First, let me explain that the client side runs entirely within memory; the hard drive is not touched at all. All processing or computation is done within the Java sandbox. In other words, you are not giving us unfettered access. In fact, it's quite the opposite. :) We follow everything listed at <http://java.sun.com/sfaq/>, whether we're running an applet from the browser or from within a desktop application.

Second, although we encourage disclosure, we leave the disclosure up to the individual sites and some have chosen to use some form of opt-out or opt-in. That being said, we also provide a TOS that they can use for disclosure if they choose. If the disclosure is done in a positive way, the users should see the benefits of getting more game features for free.

<comment><USER8> Nice rebuttal, I wish you the best of luck, it seems like something with a good amount of potential. I especially liked your perspective on because the gaming services do this and you pay them for it, they can implement better features for their own users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh well, most Flash stuff already runs my CPU to 100% even when it's clear it shouldn't. (100% CPU to display a static "Game Paused" screen? Give me a break!).

\---

"After receiving the WU, the user's computer will perform the computation. The game developer can control how much of the user's CPU is devoted to computation by setting the % usage (either statically or dynamically)."

How do you accurately control the amount of CPU a program takes in user-space? Can you really have a process that will restrict itself to using no more than 25% CPU? (Also, 25% of a fast CPU is more than 25% of a slow one)

<comment><AUTHOR> The apps that we're running right now control it pretty well using a sneaky trick. We can't get much computer information from java in an unsigned app, so we measure how long each sub-part of a work unit has taken and sleep an appropriate amount of time. For example, if we are trying to use 25% and a sub-work takes 100ms, we sleep for 300ms. This effectively gives us 25% usage of the available CPU. It will be no higher than that anyway - it might be lower if something else is using substantial CPU time.

As far as the fast versus slow nodes, we normalize everything based on the average computer that completes work each day. So a fast computer may earn 2X or more what a slow computer earns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very clever.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Monthly payment = $2.60 times # avg. simultaneous users times CPU %_

It sounds dishonest to summarize this as 2.60$ per user per month. It is 2.60$ per user, _if that particurlar user plays non-stop for 30 days straight, assuming 100% CPU_

In other words, you get 1 cent per 3 hours of play time. To get 100$ per month, you need 10000 users, playing one hour every week or so. (hopefully, my math and interpretation is correct)

<comment><AUTHOR> We put it in terms of average simultaneous users because that's the way a lot of affiliates think. They say, we have an average of N people playing the game at any given time.

For websites and other affiliate types, we say we pay $15/MWU (million work units) where a work unit is 15 seconds on an average node (the system-wide Plura average node performance).

<comment><USER11> Fair enough. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's with the payment being per-user per-month? Why not just straight per- work unit? Isn't a user who plays the game 20h/m (or at least leaves their browser window open that long) more valuable than the one who only plays for five minutes?

<comment><USER13> It is in fact per work unit. See the "How it works" page. It's $2.60 per month per _concurrent_ user, which is the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This does strike me as verging on unethical; you (and your affiliates) need to make very clear statements to end users that you will be using their computers to do other processing while they are playing.

That said this is a pretty cool model, and I'm sure that most people would be happy to let a few of their CPU cycles pay for the game they are playing.

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess it's time to null-route pluraprocessing.com.

In other words I really really really don't like hidden or undisclosed functionality in whatever the software I am running. Especially if it is explicitly _designed_ to utilize my otherwise idle resources.

Few years back my friends and I were talking about putting a DES brute-forcing client into a flash applet and then sticking it on a high-traffic site. It never went anywhere beyond a discussion though exactly because of the ethical issues involved.

</comment><comment><USER16> Run a distributed GA. Plura becomes self aware on August 29th, 2010.

</comment><comment><USER17> I applaud your effort. Great idea! Personally, I can see this widely used, on both the user and customer side. Man, why didn't I think of that! hahahha.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is an awesome idea. I have actually been working on a game that I have been looking for a platform/revenue model for - this is perfect!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Fill out the form on the website and we'll get you signed up in the private beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This could be huge!

      There is no question there will be plenty of affiliates/CPU time (re)sellers.
      The real question is whether there is big enough demand from those who need grid computing.

You had a quote from some quant guy, I suppose sciences is another market, not sure about others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We are really focused on this as well. :)

Here's a blog post we wrote comparing us to Amazon's EC2 for HPC apps: [http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/comparing- pl...](http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/comparing-plura-to- amazons-ec2-for-high-performance-computing/). Our numbers should be very compelling for certain types of applications compared to the cost of building your own clusters or using an EC2-type service.

There are definitely certain applications where this form of grid or cloud computing (I hate to use such a popular buzzword) will enable apps that weren't possible before. Previous attempts at grid computing for HPC depended more on philanthropy instead of having a scalable business model that allowed the addition of 100s and 1000s of nodes at a time.

<comment><USER20> 1) I think this is a really smart idea, and hope it works well for you. It seems like a win for everybody, as long as the end user knows what's happening.

2) You maybe should look at the phrase on savings in your paper:

"if your application is suitable for Plura, you can save 7X on your compute costs".

I take this to mean you save 7 times your compute costs, where it should be six sevenths of the cost. There's a difference, and your customers will understand it. Sorry if I've just misunderstood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to use a "purchased" CPU to make internet (http) requests?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and no. We have created a signed applet capability in the Plura infrastructure, but we have not pushed this out yet. In the future, if an affiliate chooses, he can request work units for a signed applet that would allow them to make http requests. We will probably pay more to affiliates that do this and will certainly require user opt-in. Our normal applet is unsigned and cannot make http requests due to the java sandbox.

We have one company (80legs.com) that is developing a web crawling solution using Plura. We are using a different model to acquire the nodes for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Folding@Home is of April 2009 sustaining over 8.1 PFLOPS [1], the first computing project of any kind to cross the four petaFLOPS milestone. This level of performance is primarily enabled by the cumulative effort of a vast array of PlayStation 3 and powerful GPU units.[2] The entire BOINC averages over 1.5 PFLOPS as of March 15, 2009[3]. SETI@Home computes data averages more than 528 TFLOPS[4] Einstein@Home is crunching more than 150 TFLOPS[5]

</comment><comment><USER23> It's an interesting idea but it kind feels like cpu robbery to me..

</comment><comment><USER24> [http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2007/06/ajax-based- supercomputi...](http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2007/06/ajax-based- supercomputing.html)

nice indeed ;P

</comment><comment><USER22> i like what you are doing, i just don't understand the commericail opp when these guys do it at the univ. for free?Folding@Home is of April 2009 sustaining over 8.1 PFLOPS [1], the first computing project of any kind to cross the four petaFLOPS milestone. This level of performance is primarily enabled by the cumulative effort of a vast array of PlayStation 3 and powerful GPU units.[2] The entire BOINC averages over 1.5 PFLOPS as of March 15, 2009[3]. SETI@Home computes data averages more than 528 TFLOPS[4] Einstein@Home is crunching more than 150 TFLOPS[5]

</comment><comment><USER25> Would this work in a JS+HTML AIR app? The Plura for websites iframe code seems like it would work if you got the AIR sandbox requirements right.

Also, what is the average CPU percentage your developers run on their clients systems?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, we tried to do this, but we can't run Plura in Adobe AIR. AIR uses Webkit for its browser, but Adobe has removed support for browser plugins, including Java.

<comment><USER25> That's too bad, this sounds like a great monetization scheme that's close to painless for the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we'd love to find a way for it to work. If you have any ideas, let us know. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Really cool concept. One cosmetic issue - when you mouse over the links on the right side, the underline makes the text below look really cramped. A few more pixels of padding would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious about where the money is coming from, i.e., what kinds of computational problems are you solving for your clients, and what kinds of clients have hired you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's an example: [http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/example- appl...](http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/example-applications- using-plura/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hey nice concept! May be personal, but I don't like the color-scheme. Game developers work for and with love, so probably they want some colors with love ;)

<comment><USER29> Yeeess.. that one game out there that's not about killing, maiming, conquering and dismembering various adversaries, I think it might be about love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It is probably a silly thing to say... but I was working on something like this some time ago. Now I wish I had followed through with it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does it have to be a game? What if I have a site or two that get good traffic but not a lot of page reloads because it's all Ajaxy?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it does not have to be a game. We're just focusing our initial affiliate marketing on games because of the higher engagement.

The type of sites you mention will work well too. Send us a note through the Contact Us page on the website and we can help you figure out how much you could earn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of the issues that I see with this approach is that for most applications the scaling issue is data scaling rather than CPU. Here's why I think you will run into scaling issues:

Lets assume you have a gigabit line out of your colo. Lets also assume that your average game client is on a cable modem with a 1megabit connection. That gives you capabilities to stream work units to 1024 clients simultaneously as an upper limit. In keeping with an average 1 megabit client, it will take 3 minutes to stream down a 20 megabyte work unit, maxing their connection. 1024 concurrent clients * 20 megabytes = 20 gigabytes. So you're looking at 3 minutes of overhead transfer out, and likely another 3 minutes or so of overhead transfer of results back from the client. So that's approximately 6 minutes per gigabyte just in transmission overhead. And it gets worse as clients are added to the system, since you would need scale out your datacenter just to handle coordinating all of the clients. Which begs the question: why aren't all those servers just doing the dang work already?

That kind of overhead limits this technique's usefulness only to applications which have relatively high computational complexity and relatively small amounts of data. And those applications do exist, however they're pretty far from the day to day needs of most companies. Sun found this out the hard way with their Sun Grid project, which last time I checked was a failure. Sorry, I really wish you the best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we quite aware of all of these issues. My background is in HPC and my previous company was a successful exit to a major oilfield services firm. My software and its descendants are used on nearly 100,000 CPUs.

We are definitely focused on the applications that have extremely high compute/io ratios. In general, these boil down to either high compute problems with no real data or problems where the data can be shared between multiple work units. An example of the latter is stock market analysis - the nodes download stock data for a few stocks and stay busy running different combinations for a very long time.

<comment><USER32> So that brings up a good issue, namely the proprietary nature of the code you're distributing. For instance, stock market analysis firms zealously guard their algorithms. Let's say I'm a potential customer: How will you protect my bytecode from being stolen by competitors when it has to be run on unmanaged machines in the wild?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. There really isn't anything that stops someone from reading and trying to interpret the byte code.

There is some protection in the fact that you never know what type of work unit is happening at a given time. The algorithms are typically each snippets of code instead of full applications, so someone would need to piece together quite a lot of information.

Of course, if someone is particularly concerned, they can run a jar obfuscator.</comment></comment></comment></comment>