Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA - <AUTHOR> Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too. Especially when every press outlet says we (female tech founders) are as rare as a mythical creature. So how about getting them answers straight from the source (female tech founders). If you belong to this group do a quick intro about yourself before answering questions. If you don't and want to learn more about the HN female tech entrepreneurs, feel free to ask as a reply.
My turn:
Name: Diana
Startup: http://DoerHub.com (dogfooding: http://www.doerhub.com/for/doerhub )
Role: Founder, wrote every non-open-source line of code (Rails, JS, D3, Neo4j, Node.js, MongoDB) on the site in a grad school dorm room.
In tech since: 1998 (Age 13). Haven't stopped since.
How did you start?: Started in rural Bulgaria and parents couldn't afford a computer so I volunteered at internet cafes to learn HTML and JS online after hours, then did graphics in flash, then Action Script, evolved to writing data mashups, custom JS libraries, rich visualizations for CNN during elections, CMS front-end architecture, full-stack web products from there.
Why did I start: had a pen-pal girl from Sweden who was a year older than me and had built her own website. Once I realized I can learn for free and the world could see my work I was addicted (lived in a censored country for a while so that mattered).
Proof of cred: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dianazink and http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/3.0/search/SearchProcessor.js and http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/3.0/search/customSrchProcessor.js used by CNN, NBA, and some other sites.
Has your gender made any of this hard?: I'm not muscular, so building online stuff is actually easier on me than the "reputable" jobs my grandfather said I should do instead.
Ask away. <comment><AUTHOR> These are the selling points for CS that worked really well in my conversations with 10-18 year-old girls so far (Aggregated so you can use them for your niece if you find the opportunity) :

\- You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a _cringe_ Justin Bieber _/ cringe_ fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how.

\- This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan site for XYZ band.

\- You can make something that millions of people are sharing and using tomorrow and you don't have to ask your parents for money to do it.

\- You can make more money as a teenager building stuff in a day than did the average worker in my country in a month.

\- You can work from a tropical island if you want, or anywhere on the planet, really.

\- The quality of your work can be proven immediately and the duration of your experience shows in the size of your portfolio, so every hour you make things they can help you in perpetuity (no way to get that as a teacher, nurse, or model).

\- You can graduate college in the US in one of the worst years for immigrants ('07), with no visas available, and still get multiple job offers at companies of your choice because of the point above.

\- The jobs are growing, not shrinking in this industry. It is a new form of literacy you will need to know eventually.

\- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

<comment><USER2> > \- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

Amen! Brain power is indeed a beautiful thing.

<comment><USER3> > \- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

Not sure about that but "Single" hacker girls get hit on quite

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This would likely be more apt for reddit, which does AMAs. I respect you, but this sets a rather polluted and boring precedent. Founders not from tech hub cities, founders over 40 years old, founders who grew up poor, founders who were born outside USA, etc etc. Everyone is unique in many ways, many more interesting than race or gender.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it here because I enjoy this community and I want to reduce the awkwardness of the many recent "women and tech" discussions here. I hope other female founders on HN can chime in as well.

<comment><USER5> TBH I find the "rural Bulgaria" bit to be far more interesting :-) Did you have any exposure to Soviet computers? Like their clone of the Sinclair Spectrum say? Did you learn trinary in school? Do you say "reverse Polish notation" or know it by a different name?

<comment><AUTHOR> I love these questions! Yes, I started on "Pravets" 8 and 16 ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers) ) with BASIC and Pascal. We also had these robot hands you could maneuver with the Pravets machines. I would travel 250 miles to get the huge sheet-sized disk with a plumber game on it from my cousin in Sofia to show it off to classmates in Tutrakan. Karateka was also huge. For reference, my hometown had no traffic lights or english teachers (I started learning English from Cartoon Network because I could only study German, French or Russian at school until 8th grade.)

I was 8 years old when I started dabbling with Pravetz in the school lab and the 16 year old "Informatics TA" pulled me aside one day to show me a picture of two people kissing to tell me in the most awkward possible way that he wanted to kiss me. Who does that to an 8-year-old? I just ran back into the lab.

I think Reverse Polish Notation is called the same in Bulgaria (CS after the age of the internet is taught mostly in English back there I think).

<comment><USER6> Learning English from Cartoon Network? What sort of vocabulary does that result in?

<comment><AUTHOR> It develops the ears mostly. I could see so many friends getting the same basic understanding as well. When I went to an English Language School for High School I failed my first written test, because I wrote a letter in Germish (English words, German spelling). I worked for Cartoon Network briefly a decade afterwards and the CMO told me they hear that story often. I think few things did more for the spread of English as an international language than good movies and cartoons. German was my second language because RTL had the best american movies at the time cable TV came to my hometown (and English wasn't an option).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What attracted you to computer science? Put another way, why do you think it is that when your penpal showed you the website she built your reaction was "cool" instead of "lame...." (especially in 98 when the web technologies were much more primitive)?

<comment><USER8> The second thought is not really attached to the first question. Having a desire to make a website/making a website has little to do with computer science.

<comment><USER9> Telescopes can make people interested in physics, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Name: Silvia

Startup: [http://www.allthecooks.com](http://www.allthecooks.com)

Role: Founder, wrote the iOS app and some server stuff.

How did you start: HTML Blogging when I was 13.

Why did I start: The internet is a really cool thing.

Proof of cred: [http://www.linkedin.com/in/silviacurioni](http://www.linkedin.com/in/silviacurioni)

Has your gender made any of this hard?: no

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Silvia, thank you for jumping in! Feel free to add your answers to the AMA questions. It would be helpful to have multiple perspectives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any tips on entry points for coding that you've found worked well or badly?

For example - a few years back I saw several young folk move over into coding by poking away at their MySpace pages to make them do "cool" things. For those people it seemed to be the same sort of starting point as the '10 PRINT "HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10;' type stuff did for mine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to aggregate those as a sub-thread. You make a great point with the MySpace example. Legos with built in robotics might be fun as well. I never had a lego (too expensive) and I only saw the $200 robotic kits in college in the US. In Chicago, a state organization is trying to create a programable robot with LED lights to get kids interested in coding and putting together simple hardware hacks. I think that is a great idea. I think a programmable robot kids can create and control with an iphone app would be great as well (paint-by-numbers hardware + software hacking).

It is true that the more we lower the threshold, the more people will dabble with hacking. It may or may not produce more great hackers in the short run, but in the long run it will create a shared literacy that puts hacking higher on the priority list for parents and kids 10 years down the line. You don't just share code, you share a value system when you teach that.

<comment><USER11> Sorry - missed that sub-thread. Good stuff.

I'm interested that some of those seem more social than how I got into coding. I was the cliche fat-nerdy kid who spent many, many hours with the computer rather than interacting with humans ;-)

It's one of the things I noticed from the MySpace folk - they were very much more oriented towards sharing/showing their stuff with others.

<comment><AUTHOR> The checklist I mention comes from conversations I've had with young girls in the US (seeing what resonates with them). I thing I would attribute the social stuff to a lesson I got from a KPCB guy at F8: Major startup innovation happens every 14 or so years because it takes that long for a new generation to grow up with the existing technology (today that's social) as second nature. Then (frequently) some tw/teen kid (Jobs/Gates, Zuckerberg) stepping on that invents the next big thing while tinkering. You can see that process evolving tech from hardware, to PC, to browser, to web, to social, to mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice. One of my first thoughts was do you have any specific communities that you go to for advice from other women? Some of the ones I know of are Debian Women and Linuxchix. Have you ever tried enterprise selling? I'm curious how you deal with mostly male upper management? What about loans or venture capital? Do banks or VC's treat you differently? Do you have any women in tech you follow? When I was a boy I would devour any book on Microsoft because I idolized Bill Gates for taking on the suits at IBM. What's your experience hiring in the past?

I realize i'm asking about stereotypes that may or may not be in Bulgaria. The whole point of this post is to confront those stereotypes so I just ask what everyone may think at one point or another.

<comment><AUTHOR> I look up to Reid Hoffman, Jobs, Drew Houston, Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer - founder/product people who put so much love into their products that you can feel it. In order to build like that you have to be so immersed into the problem and so painfully aware of its every nook and cranny it hurts. Those guys translated real-life human processes into frictionless online experiences so good, they save lifetimes worth of hours for society daily. That is what I want to do when I grow up (but do it for the execution process). The process of taking a pursuit from an idea to a fulfilled or fundable project with the right team, mentors, and exposure anywhere on the planet in the matter of hours or just a few days.

I haven't tried to raise VC money yet. Self-funding for now. I want to build a product so good its numbers cannot be ignored. Currently trying to get access to advisors who have been there before me with similar problems.

And I genuinely hope this doesn't prove true: ( [http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/11/02/how-female- en...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/11/02/how-female- entrepreneurs-can-get-venture-capital-game/Ahn0XfhG3WABm8Q4uoAq6O/story.html) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I noticed that, by default, you don't make the doerhub.com profiles public. Somebody has to explicitly choose to do so.

I'd be interested in understanding what pushed you in that direction. It would seem like it might slow down growth?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to make it a go to place for people to establish and grow their identity as doers - to nurture their pursuits and benefit when they help others (If you are great at something you can mentor and invest/contribute open source in that field. The social capital you generate from doing that should come back to you as help in areas you are trying to grow in). Not everyone is comfortable putting that out there (especially non-hackers) and if they do, having real relationships with the other users on the site first helps. I would rather sacrifice short-term growth to build a product that really rocks and is spread by users in the mid-to-long term.

<comment><USER11> Cool. Did you get that feedback from users in some way (interviews?) - or is it something that you're testing now with the site?

I'm interested coz I'm involved with a new community site and think about different ways to grow the audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got feedback from interviews with non-technical users and a couple of top universities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This might be more successful on Reddit in the startups/entrepreneurship subreddits.

</comment><comment><USER14> Curious background and I admire you for just going for it. Just some curious questions..

a) who are some of your inspirations?

b) describe an ideal society without gender disparities. what would that look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Role models really help. Seeing other women around who have been successful really helps. I think if one female tech founder produces a unicorn startup that exits above 1B, the dialog will get a lot easier. It's a matter of time.

I don't think anyone consciously hinders women (or other groups) from doing well in tech. Many cultural (advertising driven) perceptions made the "gateway drugs" to CS unfashionable for girls for many years (likely inadvertently).

In the startup world finding advisors may be a bottleneck, but hacking is the ultimate meritocracy and nobody can stop you from doing well (it is you vs the machine and you vs the problem). The numbers don't lie - if you build products that sell themselves most self-respecting investors will not say no to a solid company (whether you are purple, transgender, or from Mars).

If you know what you are doing, the challenging part may be getting into the close-knit SV networks when you are an outsider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the situation like for women in tech in Bulgaria?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bulgaria is a very patriarchal country, but education up-to-and-including high-school was/is fitting for CS (math is required every year and it is a frequently chosen concentration). The same applies to many eastern european countries, I assume. There is a lot of "sand in the opportunities engine" after that stage, so many smart young people prefer to get their undergraduate and graduate degrees elsewhere (Germany, US, etc). One of the teen girls I mentored just started working in Germany as a Software Engineer. Most of my classmates are abroad. For CS, a good math middle-school and high-school education and a fun component (competitions) seemed enough for the peers I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I Respect all entrepreneurs, and it seems to me the 'attention' the 'mythical' female hackers gets perpetuates the stereotypes we are trying to break. It is fairly obvious it draws attention on the fact that generally we don't 'expect' this type of person? Please explain why this fine young person is getting any attention besides her gender?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Kelvin0,

I respect your opinion and I think those who want attention usually go to the press with some sobbing story about the tech world's insensitivities towards them. They don't expose themselves and their work to the full scrutiny of one of the best hacker groups in the world (its gut-wrenching enough to do that just to your startup). If this thread is any good the people who read it should go from debating stereotypes about women to spending 30 minutes to teach a teen girl they know the love of hacking by showing them something cool they can do on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too.

I'm curious what exactly you find tiresome about it.

Is it the sexism that often spawns these discussions? the implication that women need extra help? the bad attitudes often displayed in comments? etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is more productive to focus on fixing things going forward, than trying to place blame by resurfacing or redefining stereotypes. I'd rather us spread "gateway drugs to hacking" for everyone to use regardless of gender, race, or location. (plus I want us to surface more of the dormant role models we have on HN and elsewhere instead of letting journalists put dramatic spins on a plot that claims female tech founders are on the brink of extinction)

For example, I have a 5 year old niece. Every single gift I have sent her for holidays and birthdays is a way to trigger and express creativity (a drawing board, a guitar, a music box, a basketball hoop, a stomp rocket) and none of them is pink. If her father (who is an SE) doesn't teach her how to play with code in the next 2 years, I will.

<comment><USER17> As a follow up I'd be curious if you have any ideas on how to fix things....

Its probably supposed to be obvious too, but what exactly do we need to fix?

Although I don't think female tech founders are going extinct or something I do believe based on data that they are a minority and that is not being blown out of proportion particularly - although I base that on the overall data that women are a minority in STEM fields in general. The idea that they are a minority is imo valid - but I don't think that itself is a problem - we are we not conversely worried about the minority of men in the care, fashion or sex industries for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What are your plans for DoerHub this year?

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep building it up. Add github and linkedin logins, build up the collaboration and contribution metrics features, grow at places where people and projects are really interesting, add to the team, maybe apply to an accelerator. This is my life moving forward. I love crafting every peace of it and I want to build it in a way that energizes the community within to do more, generate more, and amplify its amplifiers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wait.. you started working _professionally_ in IT when you were 13? Very impressive! Especially since in that time and place the most computers at homes were Apple II clones and most people didn't have them.

Do you feel your location matters for your start-up and for you as a founder?

<comment><AUTHOR> I started building websites and getting paid to code at 13. In 1998 building web sites was only possible if you were self-taught via the web, so market in Bulgaria and Europe (UK, Belgium) was quite lucrative. Not sure if that qualifies as _professional_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What books (if any) did you read that you find particularly inspiring? Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the first few years this is the stuff that helped:

\- W3Schools + A List Apart + CSSZenGarden (on WebDev)

\- Code Complete (on Software Engineering best practices)

\- JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

\- A Bulgarian niche forum and community on flash/web development called FlashBG (Similar to HN in some ways)

\- Flash to the Core by Joshua Davis (he was taking regular photographs, breaking them down by color fragments in ActionScript then reassembling them to form abstract designs) [http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Core-Joshua- Davis/dp/0735712883](http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Core-Joshua- Davis/dp/0735712883)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If we assume that the male female ratio should be 50/50 how bad are racial ratios?

</comment><comment><USER22> What was your greatest hack and what did you enjoy most about going it?

<comment><AUTHOR> On the code side, I love what I'm doing right now with Neo4J and the DoerHub badges and topics. I am trying to use graph database searches to surface people who are strong in areas you are weak in and weak in areas you are strong in when you do a search for a topic. Also trying to apply NLP to ensure the system recognizes related topics (cancer and healthcare for example). My latest work is usually my favorite.

On the non-code product side I hypnotized NBA.com users with the Social Spotlight product you can see on its homepage now. It used to generate higher duration of stay than any page on the site including video. I did it by re- created the "Monument to Change" Stanford GSB flipping tiles effect with an unending river of the most interesting images and tweets from the NBA conversation on social media. There was some FOMO mixed with good content, mixed with a mesmerizing effect.

On the brick and mortar side I created a forge-detecting technique for printing coupons for a bakery in Bulgaria by mixing Inks with different reactions to water. Had to do it because competitors were trying to forge the coupons and put the bakery out of business. In the end though, the hack ended up getting an employee of 10 years arrested, because, as it turned out, he was swapping cash for his own home-printed version of the coupons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Got any open source projects?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking about open sourcing this: [http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc](http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc) but as the primary hacker on DoerHub I haven't found the time to clean up the code.

Technically, most of the code I wrote before my startup is source-visible, since my former employer doesn't obfuscate JS. If you dig into the CNN js files you will see the SearchProcessor, CSI Manager, ads js, custom local storage libraries, and other stuff I wrote or contributed to that also repeats on NBA.com, CNN Money, etc (I was a part of the front-end core-developer team and wrote library-agnostic custom js libraries). However, I founded my company and started writing code on it the day after I quit my employer, because it had very tight IP ownership of everything generated while employed (we asked for an opportunity to open-source some of our stuff, but it wasn't approved by the time I left).

If DoerHub is successful I believe it will help worthwhile open-source projects get a lot more support and exposure. I think I can add more value by amplifying the amplifiers in the short run.

<comment><USER24> Unless you mean in the sense of removing passwords and similar, you don't need to clean up code for it to be worth open-sourcing.

<comment><USER25> You don't strictly need to, but most people want to make sure the code the open source is at least commented and free of embarrassing mistakes, shortcuts, antipatterns and whatnot.

<comment><USER24> That impulse is exactly what I was trying to counter. It's far better to put "bad" code out there (and you may even find someone improves those things for you) than wait to tidy it (which often never actually happens).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'll go first.. Why in the world would you feel a need to make this post?

<comment><USER8> I think she pretty clearly explained why she felt a need to make the post - she feels underrepresented and also wants to prove a stereotype wrong.

I'll go second... why in the world did you feel it necessary to mock her post?

<comment><USER27> go into a cpu design or fpga lectures at most universities. she doesn't just feel underrepresented. she is.

nonetheless this post imho is in the same category as i'm 15 and made a gazillion apps.

ok, you care about women? and their future in tech? go to educate parents in school for gods sake, not the people that already know that if you raise your kids to be pretty princesses, they will become pretty princesses instead of hackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have presented in front of teen girls at events and mentored girls individually. The tech bug catches on best anywhere between age 8 and 14 when you see a role model for something fun you can enjoy doing that is an "gateway drug to CS". At that age parents don't matter but peers do.

When I was that age, just one of my classmates mocked me for trying, but a few other fellow tinkerers and I started competing in high-school tech competitions and that brought us together. Having other doers around made it even more fun and addictive. As a teen girl I was a minority in local hacker clubs/cafes at the time, but that actually meant I was getting hit on by the boys (mildly and jokingly, and I always brushed it off to keep tinkering), not really hindered.

<comment><USER27> there is no tech bug. there is a thing that you enjoy what you get good at(the dilbert author wrote about it too), no matter what it is.

also, as a person who caught on very early, i wouldn't advise people to study cs. for people that are really good at the stuff we're talking about here. cs without the right peers is one of the most disappointing experiences there is. imagine a professional heart surgeon having to go through basic medical exams for 4 years, that's why comparably few doctors are interested in migrating to the us.

but on a sidenote i don't really get the latter tbh. to me it seems like it would be great to share common interests as is the case for most other professions. yet, when it comes to hackers, being sexually interested in one another seems to be put down as douchebaggery. no wonder most of us stay alone, while douchebags like lawyers flourish.

<comment><USER6> I think you're entirely wrong. First off, lots of people don't enjoy things they're good at, and enjoy things they're not good at. Having sung in choirs, I've seen ample examples of both.

And "catching the tech bug" just relates (IMO) to the moment where you see computers as a source of almost limitless inquisition. And I agree with OP that that most often happens between the ages of 8 and 14.

Also, having studied CS in university and really enjoyed it, I don't share your pessimism about the degree.

Finally, lawyers date each other, as do other sorts of geeks (included CS geeks), but there isn't the extreme gender disparity in college that one sees in CS courses, so one woman is unlikely to be the target of so much unwarranted male attention. And also, lots of lawyers are nice people, just as lots of CS people (men and women) are douchebags.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


State Farm app uses iPhone sensors to grade your driving habits - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/02/state-farm-app-uses-iphone-sensors-to-grade-your-driving-habits/ <comment><USER2> It is ironic that distractions are by far the biggest cause of collisions, and State Farm releases an app that is a distraction while driving.</comment>


The Hacker's Guide to Getting Press - <AUTHOR> http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-press/

<comment><USER2> Very well put together. PR can also depend on a lot of other things, like news cycle, poliTECHal climate, season and the aurora borealis factor (a vast trove of other unknown influences). I think getting out there often meeting people and being happy with what you do, can help open untold doors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article as always. I can't believe people aren't throwing money at you to come work for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw this on my phone when I woke up and made a note to come find it.. and it's a few pages down amongst older posts with lower scores. Seriously, who is flagging this? It's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is awesome. And you'd think journalists would get overwhelmed, but 99% of people are too lazy to follow through with something like this so that shouldn't be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the very detailed guide.

Word of caution: As with any marketing effort at a start-up, don't put too much time/money into something before testing it. This won't work for every company. For all you know, you may get better results from just speaking with your customers more, so that they love you and tell their network about you.

</comment><comment><USER7> For tactical pay-for-results pr, try our startup [http://PRMatch.com](http://PRMatch.com)

It's sort of like 99 designs for PR. 100% free to list your story and 100% risk free -- name your price, name your placement wish list and only pay if you actually get press.

<comment><USER8> Which countries/languages can we seek placements?

<comment><USER7> We are US based, but have contacts in Europe. Email me if you want to discuss a specific use case - Anthony @ prmatch.com</comment></comment></comment>


Science podcasts: analysis of global production and output from 2004 to 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/23/298356 <comment><AUTHOR> This study identified and analysed 952 freely available English language science podcasts.</comment>


So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes

<comment><USER3> All that slagging off of Squid looks pretty stupid now that Varnish are implementing... their own OS independent disk and memory management! (see [https://www.varnish-software.com/blog/introducing-varnish- ma...](https://www.varnish-software.com/blog/introducing-varnish-massive- storage-engine)).

Maybe those Squid developers weren't such knuckle-dragging morons after all.

<comment><USER4> Unwarranted hostility aside...

The fact that Varnish changed over the years neither invalidates this article, nor vindicates Squid's design.

On any remotely modern system (say, 2006 or later), Squid's design is absurd. The critique in this article is spot on. Squid basically pretends that the operating system's virtual memory system and disk cache simply don't exist, and spends it's time working against them. This does cause exactly the kind of problems detailed in the article.

Of course, that's because Squid is not Varnish. Squid was designed a long time ago, with maximum portability in mind, and intended to run on operating systems with very poor VM and disk cache systems. With that in mind, Squid's design makes sense. It just doesn't make sense on newer systems.

In Varnish, all of this work was delegated to the operating system. This works very well. It's certainly a lot simpler than Squid, in addition to being a lot faster.

As long as most of your hot data can fit in the disk cache, at least. The infrequently used parts, which could well be a lot larger than the frequently used parts, can be kicked out to disk by the OS, and although reading them back in incurs a performance penalty, it's not that bad. It only really affects less commonly accessed data, and doesn't interfere with everything else.

The original varnish design works great for that. It's less good if your entire working set fits in RAM (in which case, the slightly newer malloc-based system is faster because it has lower overhead, but becomes much slower if you really need to swap).

Varnish starts to fall down if your working set doesn't fit in RAM (in which case, you're doomed regardless), or if the total cache is really huge (think somewhere in the terabyte range).

The new storage engine mostly just re-organizes the existing mmap-based caches. It has better cache eviction algorithms, which give a much higher cache hit rate, and much lower internal fragmentation. That alone accounts for nearly all of the performance benefit.

The only I/O change I can find is that it uses the write syscall to write newly cached objects to the file directly, rather than writing to the mmap file. That allows them to replace the contents of those pages atomically - <USER2> OS will just drop them into the disk cache, rather than potentially having to re-read them from disk if they happen to not be in the cache.

All of the reading, memory management and I/O is still done by the VM and disk cache systems of the OS. That hasn't changed.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the details. It still stays that the original Varnish design was also less than optimal, even for the computers of 2006, and that the more recent changes made it using the hardware better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previously, on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874304)

<comment><USER7> And, even earlier (also with excellent commentary and occasional rebuttal): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554656)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's still interesting to read about people minimising the number of syscalls and memory copy/allocation actions. When I was working at Zeus on their webserver back in 2001, it had a lot of effort devoted to exactly that. Strings referring to chunks of header rather that malloc-and-copy. A stat() cache to avoid touching the disk.

</comment><comment><USER9> God, what a mess we are in.

I can't wait for memristors to become commercialized and get TBs of register speed memory on every processor core. None of this cache, paging, NUMA nonsense.

<comment><USER10> This is not a problem solved by memristors. The more memory you have, the more addressing and multiplexing you need to address it. The delay in a multiplexer grows logarithmically with the number of inputs. With a cache, it is even worse, because you have to address it by the real address, not the address in cache. So there will always be a hierarchy of speeds, unless you can figure out a completely different way to design a multiplexer.

In the best case scenario, memristors give us TBs of NVRAM.

<comment><USER9> I am not a hardware designer, but are you saying one large 64 bit multiplexer to access the whole memory would be impractically slow ? Even if we don't get register speed, it would simplify software design, wouldn't it ?

<comment><USER10> Yes, it would be slow and large. Because it's large, you'd get less memory in the same area. Another factor is that RAM and CPUs are usually on completely different dies to begin with, which are manufactured with somewhat different processes so you can't just copy and paste them onto the same chip.

Incidentally, this is what computers looked like 30 years ago. You could have a CPU with a bunch of address and data pins wired up to a RAM chip that would give you whatever address you wanted right away.

Loosely speaking, a modern computer still works the same way, but memory speeds haven't kept up with CPU speeds. So, to make our software run faster, we put layers of smaller, faster memory between the CPU and the larger, slower memory. But the hardware hides all of this from the software: you don't have to care, unless you want to optimize things. So we have registers, L1 cache, L2 cache, RAM, SSDs, HDDs, and the network. You can write a program today and all seven layers of caching might be mostly transparent, some more so than others.

A lot of this complexity is in the hardware, and other parts of it are in the OS. Application developers have it easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Or you just use mlock to prevent a civil war ? (Prevent the kernel from paging it out)

<comment><USER10> Locking pages to try to improve performance is a dangerous game.</comment></comment>


Run Node.js in Android app - <AUTHOR> http://geekonjava.blogspot.com/2016/10/run-nodejs-in-android-app.html#.WA2RzcrzoCA.hackernews <comment><USER2> Rhino on Android is extremely slow because it can't compile for Dalvik, I remember seeing this a while back and wondering why it didn't go with V8</comment>


NoSQL: If only it was that easy - <AUTHOR> http://bjclark.me/2009/08/04/nosql-if-only-it-was-that-easy/

<comment><USER3> I'll be honest (and chances are I'll get a great explanation as to why I'm wrong), I don't understand the whole YeSQL-NoSQL argument.

Relational databases, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, are great for some things -- especially when you need to (put simply) divide and recombine various pieces of information easily. JOINs. UNIONs, etc. are fantastic when you need them, and it's where relational databases excel.

On the other side of the equation are hash and "document" databases, which are mostly key-value stores with some unique functionality (e.g. the indexing feature of Tokyo Cabinet Tables). These are great when you need to store a large volume of data, but don't need to frequently recombine the stored data in many different ways. You can run simple queries with some hash DBs and retrieve specific data, by key, at the drop of a hat; this is where (for the most part) key-value stores win out over relational databases.

It is clear, at least to me, that these two classes of DB serve two different purposes, with some overlap. By that logic, I see no reason why they can't happily co-exist in a single project. In fact, I'm using multiple database formats in a single application without any problem. Sure, there is a little more management and some extra logistics involved, but the point is that each type of database is used with its strengths in mind.

I'm not going to force MySQL to be a giant hash table when something else will do the job better, and I'm not going to force Tokyo Tyrant to try and be a relational database (not that I really could).

Am I wrong in finding a happy medium between multiple technologies?

<comment><USER4> I think you are missing another fundamental difference. The NoSQL solutions are more like a dynamically typed language where as the YeSQL ones are statically typed.

In NoSQL, I don't have to tell the database layer what I'm stuffing into the value (or even how I'm building the keys). Of course the application is taking on a lot of responsibility that previously belonged in the persistence layer.

I think this is the true draw to the NoSQL philosophy. Especially when you consider the apparent (to me) rise in meta-programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know that being schemaless is fundamentally different. Instead of thinking that key/value stores are schemaless, I think of them as having a single rigid schema: key and value. The data you stick into a k/v db will still have essentially, a schema, you just end up writing your application to be flexible to data inconsistency.

The comparison to dynamic vs static typing doesn't hold much water.

Can you explain how meta-programming relates to this topic at all?

<comment><USER5> Metaprogramming: I think he/she is associating schema-less DBs with dynamically typed languages and metaprogramming, and static typing with languages such as C that tend to lack sophisticated metaprogramming facilities.

I'm not sure it's a valid comparison, though: OCaml has a statically typed Lisp-style macro engine (camlp4), for example. (In all honesty, though, I've never used it. Lazy evaluation, the packaging system, and other language features cover many of the same use cases.) I think it's a case of assuming the C family's type system is the cutting edge of static typing, when it's actually pretty archaic.

The point about K/V databases having a rigid schema of (key_type -> untyped_value) is a good one, by the way. Of course, association tables (AKA "dictionaries") are pretty versatile as a basic collection type - looking at Lua, Python, Awk, or Javascript. They're not ideal for all cases, but they're a good start for most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The subjunctive: if only it were that easy. Actually, it is in English because we only ever really notice it in a few places...

Grammar nitpickery aside, good article. Is client-side hashing really that big a deal? I don't know from first hand experience because I've never bothered with these things yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a big deal when you do it the first time. It's a big deal when you need to start adding servers. What do you do?

<comment><USER6> I don't have scaling problems, I don't have sites that big, yet.

<comment><USER7> He's pointing out a situation where it becomes a bigger deal, to answer your question. While there are solutions in practice for this situation, it can be painful.

<comment><USER6> I thought he wanted to know what I did. Since I already said I don't know much about this problem domain, I'd be curious why it's a problem when you start adding servers.

<comment><USER7> One such bad situation would be if you have numeric keys that you shard based on a mod 2. You do this because you want to distribute data between 2 servers, so one will get all even keys and the other will get the odd keys.

A few months down the line your load gets so high that you need to add a third server, but your sharding mechanism is based on mod 2 - so you need to hack around this in one of many ways to utilize the third server effectively.

Make sense?

<comment><USER6> So don't people just publish client libs that handle the details for you? It doesn't seem like an unsurmountable problem, but once again, I've never dealt with it in practice.

<comment><USER7> _So don't people just publish client libs that handle the details for you?_

Sometimes, but oftentimes sharding issues are unique enough that they require custom solutions when the backend technology does not support it natively.

<comment><USER6> And these sharding issues don't happen with the things he marks as "scales!"?

<comment><USER7> That is correct. Things like S3 can expand without issue, and others like Voldemort handle partitioning data natively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thing there's an explanation to the NoSQL movement and why non-rdbms are gaining popularity these days.

Not a long time ago, if you had to handle 1 billion records then you were already big with piles of $ sitting beside you. Then you would just call Oracle or Greenplum (or whatever) and say "Hey, I've got some million $ here, care for it? I just want to be fast(tm)"

Lately it is quite possible to be small and forced to handle millions of records daily or struggle with new technologies that require less man power for development but need scaling a lot earlier (e.g Rails). You have limited resources and if you can get away with Tokyo Cabinet on a single machine instead of a 100k mysql cluster then you get to live longer.

As any new cool technology it'll get some hype and then fall back to being the right tool for the job. It's good to have some alternatives to RDBMS, some problems are really not relational.

</comment><comment><USER9> Before relational databases, you know what was the standard? Hierarchical databases, aka key-value stores. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_system#Hist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_system#History) Since then, object oriented databases have come and gone - <USER2> hierarchical DB.

I wasn't there when it happened in the 70's, but I think it's essential to understand why relational beat hierarchical then; and to understand what has changed since; because only then can we make an informed prediction.

I think the issues were efficiency and ability to analyze the data. Anybody know what the actual reasons were?

<comment><USER5> There's a major niche in which hierarchial DBs are quite common - filesystems. While there have been attempts to graft relational features onto them ("journaling" overlaps strongly with transactions, symlinks, etc.), apparently most people haven't historically considered the ability to do arbitrary joins over a whole filesystem to be worth the impact it would probably have on performance.

Also: _Hierarchial databases are very different from key/value stores._ K/Vs are flat (joining, batch consistency checks, etc. are usually done clientside in a faster/safer language than the DB was implemented in, such as PHP), while hierarchial databases are (naturally) hierarchial. If a client searches for data in a directory, it will only see the nodes in that directory, or those found by walking any subdirectories. While this can be _very_ fast (most records won't be in the same directory, so the first operation has already reduced the search space considerably), much data fits poorly in trees, and constantly rearranging subdirectories or adding symlinks is at best a workaround for the massive conceptual mismatch.

OTOH, it's a good fit for some cases - we're communicating on a hierarchial database right now. As moving one comment thread from one post or parent comment to another would be incredibly rare (if it were possible), a lot of DB functionality to allow flexibility in data modeling can be discarded. Modeling the discussion as a tree of nodes (S-exps, in this case) with pointers to parent comments, subthreads, user IDs, etc. is pretty straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why doesn't Oracle Coherence ever come up in these discussions of RDBMS alternatives?

I've been going over its documentation, and it looks like the cat's meow in getting rid of the database scalability bottleneck. Think of it as memcached done right. Coherence has automatic clustering, needs almost no configuration, supports many flexible distributed schemes, easy API. With Clojure and Scala, you don't even have to use Java to use it.

Has no one heard of it? Does it get no love because it's commercial and (probably) expensive?

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Does it get no love because it's commercial and (probably) expensive?

Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Peer pressure. I have never seen this in any other light.

The "versus" mentality of this stupid meme comes from those either proselytizing or stubborn. Plain and simple.

If you're too ignorant to understand what is the appropriate tool for your situation, or offended by the perceived alternatives, then you should withdraw from this topic.

<comment><USER4> _If you're too ignorant to understand_

That's not fair. Everyone starts out as ignorant. I think the "versus" mentality helps less informed people separate two fundamentally different approaches to persistence.

There's a lot of information in this post. Granted, it's just one person's opinion. Take it for what it's worth and move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great post. NoSQL seems to be a band-aid. And for some problems, the best solution is to rip off the band-aid :)

My thoughts at <http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/look-ma-nosql/>

SQL has survived because it is reasonably portable, is descriptive and has a rich ecosystem. NoSQL is a response to a problem but it is one that will not get mainstream adoption because it is non-standard.

It is a great stepping stone; what comes out of it is hopefully a standards based scalable data storage and retrieval system.

</comment><comment><USER13> Coincidence... I'm looking for some simple caching layer right now. But what I need is that data is distributed to all server nodes. I don't care about insert time that much. And the only thing I need to store is a 'unique string -> string' map. (very short strings)

Can someone recommend any solution? I'd be perfectly happy with a "replicating memcached"...

</comment><comment><USER14> "What am I going to build my next app on? Probably Postgres. Will I use NoSQL? Maybe"

I just spent some time evaluating several k/v stores for a new project. My conclusion: These things may be useful when I'm ready to optimize. Until then, I'll put everything in postgres.

</comment><comment><USER15> Most of the noSQL information I've read appears to be more focused on caching, speed, scalability, distribution, etc. To me SQL is a query language, not an RDBMS. "noSQL" is unfortunately misnamed (and rhetorically loaded) although it's much catchier than "noRDBMS".

</comment><comment><USER16> I stopped reading as soon as he posted something looking like a dictionary definition.

<comment><USER7> Hopefully you don't always stop reading thoughtful pieces for trivial reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> im sure people affiliated with or users of the respective projects will take issue with points made. all told, however, the main takeaway for me is what i already knew and which the author mainly drives home in the last paragraph. specifically, use and take advantage of all the tools out there including the ones in the nosql camp and the more mature rdbms camp. and simply, get started already!

projects im working on now sometimes have the same data represented differently in different systems to take advantage of what those systems have to offer. many of them mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't think the primary drive or hype behind NoSQL is _performance_. I think it is that SQL has become some sort of norm for data persistance, when in many cases a SQL database isn't necessary, or even optimal.

<comment><USER19> Right: there are multiple possible benefits of "NOSQL" (nonrelational): (1) scalability; (2) better performance, and (3) easier coding and development especially with agile development methodologies. With certain of these products, notably the document-oriented stores (MongoDB&CouchDB), development is more natural as object<->relational mapping goes away. That is a nice benefit even for the smallest of projects.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely, it feels like you're just working with hashes and arrays, as opposed to SQL-tables masquerading as such.</comment></comment></comment>


Zeo (sleep tracking device) website no longer accessible - <AUTHOR> http://myzeo.com?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> It just makes me very sad that there was no official e-mail to warn and suggest users to download the history and reports from the website.

Not mentioning the fact that a lot of knowledge base was at that domain that is not accessible now. I've spent quite some time experimenting with their python raw data lib and it was a great fun to bridge EEG scanner and binaural beat generators. Very sad to see one of the greatest EEG hardware for hobbyists shut down.</comment>


Segment (YC S11) Raises $27M for Its "One API to Rule Them All" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/09/segment-raises-27-million-for-its-one-api-to-rule-them-all/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER3> Congratulations! The Segment tools are amazing, and the team is 100% dedicated to success.

For example: I wrote a complex iOS app, and was having app store issues related to metrics; the CEO of Segment came to my office to help, and we looked at the app together, including source code and libraries, to diagnose the issue. This kind of excellent help is why I recommend Segment to all my clients.

<comment><USER4> That sounds scalable

<comment><USER5> [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I run a website and I actually want to send all my data and as much of my users' data as I can possibly collect to, say, ten different vendors, then Segment looks great.

On the other hand, that means that I'm giving ten different vendors the ability to monetize all the data my site generates essentially for free. This is great for them, kind of crappy for the users who get tracked and monetized, and terrible for me, because I'm not realizing the value I generate.

I'm frankly rather surprised that Condé Nast doesn't try to _prevent_ third- party tracking of its readers so that it can realize more of that value itself. After all, why should an advertiser buy a high-value targeted add for display on a Condé Nast property when it can buy the same ad _with the same Condé Nast-dervied target_ for much less on a site full of cat pictures?

<comment><USER7> > _" On the other hand, that means that I'm giving ten different vendors the > ability to monetize all the data my site generates essentially for free. > This is great for them, kind of crappy for the users who get tracked and > monetized, and terrible for me, because I'm not realizing the value I > generate."_

Presumably you are not directly sending data to any vendors you are not receiving value from. In the analytics world, it is kind of understood that if you use Google Analytics, you should have an expectation that Google is using that data however they see fit. Same holds true with other vendors unless they explicitly say otherwise.

As such, the burden (rightfully) falls on the site owner to properly vet their vendors to make sure they work with companies whose business practices align with the site owner's data policies.

Nobody is forcing you to integrate with vendors who don't adhere to your standards, but not everyone has the same standards.

So at the end of the day, I'm confused by your point about how this is terrible for you since you're not realizing any value that you generate. You are exchanging data, money, or both, in exchange for a service. It is up to you to determine what that is worth to you and whether you are paying a fair price, but it isn't Segment's fault if you decide to partner with companies that give you a raw deal.

<comment><USER6> When I said that sites don't realize the value they generate, I didn't mean that they don't get something else out of the deal. Google Analytics is a genuinely useful service, for example.

I suspect that a lot of sites aren't thinking hard about the tradeoffs, though. The benefits of using these services are immediate and obvious, whereas the costs are rather more subtle.

I heard a fascinating talk last year by John Gruber about ways of monetizing content outside the usual sell-tracking-rights-and-accept-ad-bids model. (Check out what he does at [http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/](http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/). The whole site seems to be entirely devoid of third-party tracking.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fan of Segment. Their team are super helpful. Recommend it. I've not really found a reason yet to not like them. Sure sometimes you need a lit bit of ad- hoc work, but the benefits outweigh the costs in my opinion. Sometimes the engineers aren't in charge of the decision making process on analytics, so selling management an "insurance" policy, which is how I see Segment, is very powerful to get things done. Service provider not working out for you? Switch it. No code changes.

Also, I don't believe the argument you can get away with one provider. MixPanel told me they don't do emojis in email subjects because their CEO doesn't approve of it. Don't want to get anyone in trouble, but I kid you not I have that email and instantly made me look elsewhere for email service - <USER2> should 1 person dictate my companies marketing strategy? Segment prevented a lot re-work for this.

Anyway, in short, Segment is good for the market because it means services have to up their game as lock-in isn't as strong...except for Segment's!

<comment><USER9> The system is great. Only reason I have had to dislike it is that they would forward messages out of order. I think that might be fixed now after I told them to look into lamport clocks. It caused some problems with forwarding to Intercom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really wanted to like the product, they are a great team and the potential sounds amazing. But for me, I found that while they do cover the basics in each product they integrate with, often I want to use special features that they either don't offer or that it becomes to cumbersome to use. I am talking mainly mobile SDKs where each service offer something else like Mixpanel's a/b testing and intercom in app messages etc.

They cover a whole spectrum of products so different in their value prop that I think just can't capsulated with a single api

<comment><USER11> Give it time

<comment><USER12> no need when theres better solutions out there already.

<comment><USER13> Haha, shameless plug by mParticle CEO. Good luck with that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Omniture hasn't existed for years. I'm sure an Adobe exec starts twitching every time he sees that.

<comment><USER15> Not half as bad as anyone who has ever had to use that god-awful product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love the tool using it since beta. Its an obvious pain point brilliantly executed. Between segment and google tag manager the analytics instrumentation has become exceedingly easy and better documented in the last 3 years.

And I know from experience lock in is immense, once you add an analytics tool there is no turning back. With segment you can play the field more easily, ofcourse while being locked in to segment :)

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Initially, the team was building a competitor to Google Analytics or > KISSmetrics, but they had also built a library called Analytics.js that > wrapped all the analytic services and APIs together.

They released an open source version of this library on GitHub, and it just started growing by itself. That forced them to reconsider their focus. What people actually wanted, as it turned out, was a simple analytics API._

I'm not sure I follow this description of the company's pivot. What is the difference between their own analytics service and an abstraction over another company's service? Why do media companies need to use so many similar analytics services, e.g. the 30 odd trackers on many news sites?

<comment><USER18> > Why do media companies need to use so many similar analytics services, e.g. > the 30 odd trackers on many news sites?

Let's see what we can find on CNN right now:

Clicktale, analytics for their design team with things like click heat maps and scroll maps.

Optimizely, A/B testing to compare the results of layout changes by serving variations of each page to portions of their traffic.

Turner corporation's internal analytics tools, for who knows what.

A tag for PostRelease, which distributes media for content-based advertisers, like advertorials and videos.

Usabilla, a tool for surveying user satisfaction.

Dynamicyield, which personalizes page content to specific visitors.

Krux Digital, which is about tracking people across multiple devices for a better measure of how many real people are on the site, and then segmenting that data for the advertising sales team.

Moat, which measures viewability of ads, i.e. what portion are actually seen by people rather than just being loaded below the fold.

Scorecard Research, which is audience measurement and surveys.

Chartbeat, which is real-time analytics specifically for the editorial team. It shows them what stories are hot and trending at that specific moment, which directs what headlines get pushed up, what journalists get assigned to cover, what stories get pushed off the front page, etc.

Outbrain, which adds the "more stories you might be interested in" type stuff to the end of each article, which are actually ads.

The rest are tags for serving banner ads through Google, their own ad server, and various exchanges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't know much about the business side but huge fan of TJ as a Nodejs dev. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER20> I use Segment at work and think it's great. Their enterprise options are pretty hefty and impressive, good on them for raising the round!

</comment><comment><USER21> We use Segment and love it. It keeps our code simple and makes it easy for us to turn on and off services (especially for non-technical team members), their debugger makes QA'ing instrumentation really efficient, and their team is amazing and really helpful.

</comment><comment><USER22> What creates the requirement to send data to multiple analytics services? Wouldn't you want to send it to one capture and analytics service and then funnel that into whatever line-of-business applications you need?

</comment><comment><USER23> meh. to me the offering of segment carries very little benefit. it's great being able to swap in and out of different SaaS but honestly, I did not find the value offering to be significant because you end up fiddling with less than 3 or 4, 10 at extreme cases.

Ultimately, I ended up going with Mixpanel because they offered pretty much everything I wanted in analytics. I have integrated Segment everywhere but ended up ripping it all out once I realized that I had bought into the marketing.</comment>


Ask HN: Computer Generated Non-Existant Human Face (realistic)? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> www.makehuman.org , but they're not hyper realistic</comment>


Swedish Government Scrambles to Contain Damage from Data Breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/world/europe/ibm-sweden-data-outsourcing.html <comment><USER2> Here's a summary of what foreign powers got access to:

\- identities of undercover operatives \- personal identity data of everyone with a driver's licence \- people with protected identities \- location of all army vehicles \- money transport vehicles \- classified infrastructure information

Even worse: when they realized they'd leaked photos, home addresses and SSNs of protected identities, they sent a clear text email asking the contractor to clear them from the database manually.

<emotional rant> My country is a joke.

SÄPO knew about this in 2015, and recommended against it, but the Transport Agency still went through with the deal. How they could even be allowed to do that is beyond me.

The director general of the Transport Agency, and the person ultimately responsible for the leak, was fined a mere $8500 (which is half of what she allegedly would earn in a _month_) for leaking highly classified information to foreign powers - an act that would be punished as high treason in any sane country. Either she knew exactly what she was doing, meaning the Russians paid a meagre $8500 for full access to a database containing top secret information, or (more likely) she was just that stupid, meaning possibly hostile powers got this information for free.

But hey, that's Sweden, where incompetent people become director generals of big government agencies, and any screw up they get caught with is excused by saying that you didn't know better.

Here, Swedes believe that Trump is such a catastrophe, and wonder why Americans could vote for him. We should instead look at our own pathetic "feminist" government, and ask ourselves how and why we got here.

But hey, luckily for everyone we don't have nukes. We'd probably accidentally give the launch codes to Saudi Arabia/Palestine, and respond by giving the person responsible for the leak a small fine while the rest of the world burned in the war that erupted after Israel got nuked. </rant>

<comment><USER3> Well, she was also fired (finally) and her career is finished. I agree it was monumentally stupid. But "punished as high treason"? Treason requires intent. She most certainly did not _intend_ to be criminally disloyal to the country. Merely being ignorant and incompetent is not treason.

This is a major fuckup but let's be real. Our country is a "joke"? I know complaining is a national sport in Sweden, much like in many other countries, and I can rage about plenty of idiotic things going on. But _on the whole_ , things are _in general_ pretty good, relative to most other countries in the world. Move elsewhere and you'll just find a different set of things to be mad about (perhaps more, perhaps less; and there's always a bunch of Swedish expats who complain that things don't work like in Sweden).

<comment><USER4> Wait what? She knew that was a possibility and that it is highly illegal and still she went through with it.

I would say that is having intent if anything. I love my country but I think she should be punished a lot harder. Arkebusering på slottsgården. But since that will never happen, 12 years in jail is probably enough.

<comment><USER5> Is that word from the same root as arquebus?

<comment><USER2> Yes, correct: [https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkebusering#Etymologi](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkebusering#Etymologi)

Ultimately, both words come from low German "hakebusse".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reading the article, I am reminded of the story of the famous Swedish ship, the Vasa [0], which sank in the XVII century because, ultimately, no one wanted to say no to the king: when the engineers saw there was a massive problem ahead ("your boat don't float"), the management didn't dare tell the King, leading to catastrophe[1].

It's a good lesson, I hope we learn it someday.

[0] : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_\(ship\))

[1] : I'll admit it is a fantastic chance for historians and tourists alike: The wreck, pulled from the waters perfectly preserved, is a must-see in Stockholm

<comment><USER7> For some reason, I think parts of this writeup were debunked, but it's still one of my favorite reads:

[http://faculty.up.edu/lulay/failure/vasacasestudy.pdf](http://faculty.up.edu/lulay/failure/vasacasestudy.pdf) [pdf]

Thank you for reminding me about the Vasa!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest problem with this story is not that it happened, it is that it could happen again. IT issues is heavily underestimated in government agencies and corporations [1], viewed like it' nothing important. The same goes for politicians, they don't give so much attention to IT at all.

The problem is of course lack of knowledge. They don't understand how important it is and that it is one of societies most critical infrastructure today.

Hopefully this incident will be a lesson to politicians and government agencies to care more about security and IT in general.

[1]: [http://www.sakerhetspolisen.se/publikationer/fallstudier- och...](http://www.sakerhetspolisen.se/publikationer/fallstudier-och-artiklar- fran-arsbocker/sakerhetsskydd/-bristande-it--och-informationssakerhet-hos- myndigheter-och-foretag.html)

<comment><USER8> There is a lot of resistance, universally it seems, to the concept that outsourcing is different to in-house development/administration. It doesn't even seem like its a knowledge issue, but rather willful ignorance. Cost, convenience, and less likelihood to be blame for faults is more important than security and control.

To take one example, only government entity that I know that don't outsource email would be the military, and even there I doubt the in-house use is 100%.

<comment><USER9> It's darwinian; if you don't deliver the savings you are out. One solution would be rigorous research that demonstrated that insourced onshore operations were more effective and cheaper in the long run. But no such research exists, is that because it's hard to do or is it because the result is that offshoring and outsourcing is cheaper and as good?

<comment><USER10> no its because vested interests want to prove that outsourcing is all rainbows and unicorns.

<comment><USER11> Ronald Coarse won a Nobel Prize for his work on transaction costs, and how those (usually hidden) costs should be considered when companies externalize business functions.

Coase's writings and teachings lead directly to the idea of accounting for all costs in any business or outsourcing endeavor, or "Total Cost of Ownership."

That's just an example of "vested interests" proving that outsourcing is not all rainbows and unicorns.

<comment><USER9> One thing I've noted is the budget and effort that outsourcers put into killing corporate IT. Not only in the frank effort (as in one outsourcer ringing my CEO and telling him that I was "a problem" luckily my CEO thought this was hugely funny) but also more with more subtlety - sponsoring research that is aimed at undermining incumbent IT. For example, cost metrics derived from peer studies that show that everyone is spending too much - there's money on the table to be had. This generates a cycle of cutting, internal and then when the money is not delivered in full consultants are brought in to "help access the value".

In house has no budget for this, we rely on the public space and academia for validation and fair insight. It's telling that Coarse was active from the 30's to the 70's as was J.K. Galbraith who wrote about the technostructure. Managerial capitalism has been slaughtered, bits of it are flopping around weakly. It seems to me that the neo-liberal replacement has helped billions out of poverty in China, India, Indonesia and so on, but this is an unstable situation. It's not clear that the greater good can continue to be served if the economies of the west cannot be reconstructed to provide far larger numbers of stable, interesting and reasonably well paying jobs. Neo-liberalism has failed in that sense and seems not to have anything to say about it apart from "tough, you lot had it too good for too long and now you have to be as rich or poor as people in India and China." Which implies dictatorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The top ministers in charge of this scandal are impeached by the opposition. Our prime minister Stefan Löven is having a press conference tomorrow at 10am (+1gmt) and possibly the entire party will resign to hand over power to the Moderates (right wing) because of this.

<comment><USER13> I guess the most likely scenario is that the current PM tomorrow at 10am will announce that the current goverment has resigned and that it's then upon the Speaker of the Riksdag/Parliament to try to form a new government that will meet the acceptance of the parliament.

One note: the "right-wing" alliance of four parties who was behind this impeachment notice (I should use more quotes, they really are centrist as a group) parties earlier today announced that they would _not_ seek to form an independent government with the help of Sverigedemokraterna, the anti- immigration and rightwing-ish party currently polling at around 20-25%.

Instead they would seek to form a new government together with the social democratic party they just claimed was not trustworthy.

Yes, it's odd.

(On the whole though I'm happy that we can have a political crisis like this without the country falling apart. Everyone is behaving perfectly orderly.)

<comment><USER14> It is more than odd and it will only serve to steer more voters to the Sweden Democrats (SD).

For those not totally in tune with Swedish politics, the current government (S - social democrats - and MP - Miljöpartiet, 'environmental party') more or less stumbled right out of the starting blocks as the opposition voted down their budget. This would normally have ended with a resignation followed by a new formation attempt or new elections but this did not happen, the reason being the 'threat' of SD getting in a position of power. At that moment SD had the support of around 13% of those Swedish voters who actually turned up to vote. The opposition - which had just voted down the budget - now supported S and MP staying in power, enacting the budget proposed by the opposition. This became known as the 'decemberöverenskommelse' (December agreement).

Of course the ruling parties - S and MP, both left-wing - did not try to implement the budget as the opposition intended, they more or less went their own way. Already marred by a few scandals - e.g. the forced resignation of the minister for housing (MP) when his rather tight connections to the Erdogan- regime in Turkey, his mingling with the 'Grey Wolves' [1] (a Turkish ultra- nationalist organisation) and his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood became clear even to those who tried their best not to notice - the government stumbled along without any clear plan or direction. While they produce a lot of hollow rhetoric about their 'ethic values' (the Swedish concept of "värdegrund", [2]) and boast about being the "first feminist government" they have not acted decisively on real issues cropping up in the country, often going so far as to deny the issues. This has led to comparisons with the infamous Iraqi minister for Information, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf [3] who was known for stating things as he wanted them to be instead of the way they were, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence.

All this served to push more and more people towards SD, the social stigma of being associated with this party notwithstanding. If the "opposition" \- quotes around the word as it is no longer clear whether the parties of the "alliance" can be considered to oppose the current government as they did support its rule under the December agreement - does go along with S and possibly MP (which by now has lost enough support to end up under the 4% threshold) they will lose even more voters to SD. In the latest poll by Sentio the combined support for the current government parties was 26.2% while SD got 26.8%, in other words there is more support for SD in Sweden than for the coalition of S and MP. The trend has been for support for SD to roughly double every four years (the election period in Sweden), from 3% to 6% to 13% to now 26%. It is unlikely for this trend to hold but it is certainly possible for them to end up with about a third of the votes in the country. Disenfranchising these voters will have a disastrous effect on the trust in politics and politicians in Sweden, a trust which is already at bottom level.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_\(organization\))

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4rdegrund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4rdegrund)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al- Sahhaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf)

<comment><USER15> > _Sweden Democrats (SD)_

For those not following the rich drama that is Swedish politics:

"Sweden Democrats or Swedish Democrats (Swedish: Sverigedemokraterna, SD) is a nationalist political party in Sweden that was founded in 1988. The party describes itself as social conservative with a nationalist foundation, however the party has been described as far-right, right-wing populist, national- conservative, and anti-immigration. The party had its roots in Swedish fascism and was a part of the white supremacy movement in the late-1980s; initially, it was characterized by right-wing extremism and activism. Among the founding party officials were several people that had formerly expressed strong support for the ideology of Nazism. SD's logo from the 1990s was a version of the torch used by the UK National Front, until it was changed to an Anemone hepatica flower in 2006 (Swedish: blåsippa)."

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

<comment><USER14> Sweden as a country has a history with extremism, 'Nordic' nationalism and national-socialism, this includes nearly all parties from all sides. The social democrats (S) were in cahoots with the nazi-regime in Germany in the second world war and agreed with parts of their ideology. That this started long before before the war is clear when looking at e.g. the founding date of the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology by a social democrat and a farmers union leader in 1922 [1]. It was on a proposal from Sweden and Switzerland that nazi-Germany started stamping passports with a red "J" to indicate that the carrier was considered to be Jewish, the stated reason being that this made it easier to refuse those people access to those countries.

These nationalist and extremist tendencies did not die with the end of Nazism either. The social democrats also have a murky past when it comes to relations with e.g. the DDR (German Democratic Republic, i.e. eastern-Germany) and other communist regimes. With the rise of Olof Palme and his followers the social democrats, and with that Sweden turned away from Nordic nationalism and instead went the diametrically opposite direction - another example of the Swedish tendency to go for extremes. Palme was impressed by what he considered to be the "success" of the DDR and spoke in praise of their "successes" without any mention of the way they treated those who did not follow the party line. He also admired Fidel Castro's Cuba and other similar countries.

This fascination with political extremes continues to this day, an example of which is the left-wing "Researchgruppen" (research group). This is a left-wing NGO intelligence service which proudly considers itself to be "the Swedish Stasi" [2]. Like the original Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the east-German intelligence service which kept records on millions of people and had informants spread throughout the population) they keep a database of people with 'dissenting' political views, most of the contents of which comes from burglary. This "research group" works together with the left-wing magazine "Expo" which had and has several prominent social democrats in their leadership.

In the second world war Sweden used the motto "en svensk tiger" (which means both "a Swedish tiger" and "a swede keeps silent") to remind the populace to secrecy. This term can equally well be applied to the attitude within the social democratic party and for that matter the communist/'left' party which has a history of its own worth revealing. Swedish social democrats like to see themselves as shining beacons of solidarity and openness. They'd do well to do some research into their past to try to avoid past mistakes.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statens_institut_f%C3%B6r_rasb...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statens_institut_f%C3%B6r_rasbiologi)

[2] [https://www.dagenssamhalle.se/sites/default/files/archiveima...](https://www.dagenssamhalle.se/sites/default/files/archiveimages/tweet.jpg)

[*] [https://www.dagenssamhalle.se/nyhet/granskare-som-inte- tal-e...](https://www.dagenssamhalle.se/nyhet/granskare-som-inte-tal-en- granskning-14461)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another IBM stuff up... anyone remember the Australian Census screw up? [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay- over-$30m-i...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in- compensation-for-census-fail/8057240)

<comment><USER3> I don't know how much blame you can put on IBM here.

\- The Transport Agency decided to outsource operations, and IBM won the contract (April 2015)

\- The following month, the head of the agency _decided to ignore_ certain laws about privacy, secrecy, etc., as well as the agency's own requirements about information security

\- The Swedish Security Service, Säpo (basically our FBI), immediately got wind of this and started investigating, ultimately recommending - in November 2015 - to put an immediate halt to the outsourcing

\- The Transport Agency decided to ignore the advice of Säpo and handed over operations to IBM in December 2015

Here's a good timeline: [http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/detta-vet-vi-om- transportst...](http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/detta-vet-vi-om- transportstyrelsens-it-skandal/)

<comment> bjelkeman-again IBM really should be able to see that this is a very questionable contract and not take the contract.

<comment><USER17> At this point (and historically for many years), it seems like there is no circumstance upon which an IBM salesperson or any of their management (right to the top) would ever say No to receiving more money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hopefully we can have a public discussion about ethics and vendor responsibility once the dust settles. If the government was so negligent that we may get a new one, then perhaps the vendor should have been aware of it? Perhaps they shouldn't have suggested such a solution in the first place? Perhaps they should have outright refused? Perhaps they should have demanded that the government change the law before proceeding? In what country do you get a free pass from the law just because the customer says so?

These vendors are being paid big money, and unlike our elected government officials, they are expected to be knowledgeable - experts in their field.

<comment><USER19> How would the vendor know the client has sensitive information that they shouldn't share. Sounds like a client responsibility.

IT sales people are rarely experts.

<comment><USER18> I agree that would be the case if the vendor was providing infrastructure or platform as a service. But I don't think that's the case here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "no one was ever fired for buying ibm" no so true anymore =p

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess the old saying "Nobody got fired for buying [from] IBM." isn't true any longer?

<comment><USER13> Well, one person was already fired for buying this kind of IBM, but that was just the director general of the authority that leaked the data. The thing most swedes have an issue with is that the government tried to silence the leak for like two years (people really dislike being actively lied to). If they had owned it, I don't think it would have been such a big deal.

<comment><USER22> It is an old truism that it is the cover-up that gets you. I.e. when we look at scandals, the thing that people generally get in trouble for was part of the cover up rather than the original scandal.

Given that this is common knowledge, why do cover-ups keep happening? Theory (A): the failed cover-ups we hear about are only a tiny fraction of the successful ones, so on average it is rational to try and cover things up. (B) cover-ups are not rational on average, but some bias in human psychology makes people do it anyway.

I am inclined to believe both, even though they contradict each other. I am also working on a (C) involving multiple parties drawing each other into the cover up in such a way that the person who takes the fall is not the principal who started the trouble.

<comment><USER23> People cover up things because at the time when the cover up starts the damage/cost of exposing the problem and taking the blame far outweighs the cost of doing a cover up. As time progresses (the simple view is) one of two things can happen, either the incident blows over and so the cover up was worth it, or the person needs to keep maintaining and increasing the cover up, thus increasing the damage/cost of the cover up.

In this way we end up with cover ups that cause more damage and are more costly than the original incidents, even though at the onset just owning up to the error would be less costly in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is different because it concerns a government, but as long as the CEO doesn't go to jail for IT breaches (Sony,...) and grossly negligent IT decisions (British Airways), nothing will change with data security.

The second the law changes, CEOs will make it a personal matter sound decisions are made.

</comment><comment><USER25> Frankly I pin this down on IBM Sweden who knowingly cut corners in order to land a juicy government contract and satisfy its margin targets. Clearly not caring about the customer's best interest.

<comment><USER26> The biggest crime is that they decided to use IBM in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "It said that the project manager for the outsourcing agreement admitted during questioning that "he had no knowledge whatsoever of how to ensure security."

You'd think someone would come in an consult on this, however, and setup basic protocols. A PM isn't expected to be a security expert -- that's what security experts are for.

<comment><USER28> That's what you get when the government pays 3/4 of private companies in salary. When you pay peanuts you get monkeys as they saying goes.

Also any type of consultancy work would probably have to go through "offentlig upphandling" which means the government puts out a proposal of what they want done and companies bid with the contract going to the lowest bidder. However someone has to formulate the requirements and that ends up going back on the original PM. Oh, and since the contract goes to the lowest bidder, what did you get when you payed peanuts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is rather hilarious, as most of Sweden's IT sector learned over a decade ago that outsourcing is worthless

</comment><comment><USER30> \- identities of undercover operatives...

This is terrible. When will people learn to NOT use computers at all for some things. Use typewriters and spend a little bit more on administrative workers. You trade in processing efficiency for making these catastrophic breaches rarer.

<comment><USER23> I think for actual security you need to practice physical security. No matter if the data is stored on paper or electronically, you will still need to air gap it, and have security and clearance protecting that data.

To put it into perspective Manning only got the data out because they were lax about securing the CD-burner in the computer he was using.

<comment><USER30> Absolutely. But computers and centralized data make physical security easier. Old fashioned typewriters, paper files, and manual indexes for searches are safer (for very specific things), because you simply just can't haul all of it out. For a decent set of paperwork you'd spend months or years xeroxing everything. Leaks may happen but may be smaller. Processed and redacted data may still be put on computers for searching. It's a tradeoff with obvious serious disadvantages, but one that can save the operations and even lives of the good guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The article doesn't mention many specifics, but I'd say when it comes to national security, Sweden has bigger (and more apparent) long-term issues than a handful of known IT professionals from Eastern Europe having access to private DBs.

<comment><USER32> It blows my mind that rich country like sweden outsource super important info to ibm but on the other side accepts 'refugees' heavily.

<comment><USER33> I don't understand the connection between the two. Do you mean the financial considerations?

<comment><USER32> > I don't understand the connection between the two. Do you mean the financial > considerations?

Yep.They try to save money on the most crucial part of every country and yet they spent vast amounts on so called refugees.It does not make any sense to me..

<comment><USER34> Why do you say "refugees" in quotes and "so called refugees"?

<comment><USER4> Most likely because they are coming through Denmark and is not really fleeing from war anymore.

<comment><USER34> That just moves the goalpost though. Denmark could say the same to Germany, and they to southern countries. Should the beach-cities of Italy carry all the responsibility? Should we in Norway not help humanity, because there are some other borders between us and the problems?

(Not aiming this at you)

<comment><USER35> No, it doesn't just move the goal posts - international law does make the first peaceful ground different by being the place a refugee needs to settle their status first.

The refugee infrastructure in Italy (and Turkey, and Greece, and Jordan) is stretched thin and breaking, as this law was not written for the current situation. And as a result, Italy asked for help, did not receive it, and is now threatening to use a loophole to grant every refugee seeker some EU status that would make them effectively pan-european refugees -- but that has not happened yet.

Assuming you are norweigan -- didn't Norway recently threaten closing the Swedish border if Sweden doesn't reign on their refugee situation and stop them from crossing to norway?[0] Not sure if this speisa is reliable, remember reading it in a reputible source but can't find one right now on Google.

[0] [http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.1917/migra...](http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.1917/migrant- chaos-norway-is-considering-closing-the-border-with-sweden.html)

<comment><USER34> > _Assuming you are norweigan -- didn 't Norway recently threaten closing the > Swedish border if Sweden doesn't reign on their refugee situation and stop > them from crossing to norway?_

Yes, as has happened elsewhere in the world, we have elected a government based on fear, FUD, protectionism and anti-immigration.

I don't support us sitting on a throne of riches, leaving the rest of the world to deal with the problems, though. This is of course my personal belief, but I also think not doing it this way is shortsighted and will leave everyone, including us, worse of in the long run.

<comment><USER36> Overstretching infrastructure won't make it any better for anyone. Imagine the lifeboat which accepts everyone and sinks because it cannot support the weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The further the data gets from the original designers of the system, the less likely it's being protected properly.

I've seen this time and again not just in outsourcing but also in regime change at companies where employees and management turn over.

Pretty soon you've got a whole host of legal contracts with customers and regulatory promises saying you provide X, Y, Z encryption, data redundancy, offsite backups, support contracts, and so on -- but you're doing none of it.

I wonder to what extent outsourcing ends up being cheaper precisely because they're not following the framework that the in-house crew implemented and hopefully stuck with.

</comment><comment><USER37> "With friends like these, who needs enemies"

And in this case people did get fired for buying IBM

</comment><comment><USER38> This is a very very curious incident. Advice from SAPO was not taken. And almost literally everything has been exposed because someone in the transport authority wanted to proceed? Incredible. Kompromat was it?

</comment><comment><USER39> How sure can you be anyway that vetted and authorised people won't do evil with the data they are entrusted? That's what this has me wondering.

</comment><comment><USER40> I just hope the other governments watch, learn, and maybe maybe listen to us once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER41> Watching "Kingsmen" last night feels very timely.

<comment><USER13> All-right, I have to ask; what is the correlation you see between that movie and these events?

<comment><USER42> Kingsmen's ending takes place in Sweden and features both a Swedish prime minister and a Swedish princess of which the protagonist has anal sex with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't know why they are making such a big deal out if it?!

I always thought Sweden is such a transparent society with open insights into how much everbody is earning and so on.

What do they have to hide? /s</comment>


Ktask: optimizing CPU-intensive kernel work - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/771169/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why parallelization of a kernel task is a good idea. Zeroing a page shouldn't take that long. Especially on modern processors. Also what else is a heavyweight task besides zeroing a page?

<comment><USER3> The processor may be fast but the DRAM has not kept pace. So it does take a long time to zero pages. The CPU is mostly idle waiting on its write queue - but from the OS perspective is not available for other work just as if it were factoring primes.

I always thought x86 could benefit from block memmove/memset hardware external from the CPU.</comment></comment>


Why Apple is really more expensive than Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://listeningtoreason.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-apple-is-really-more-expensive-than.html

<comment><USER2> _But calling this price fixing is tantamount to saying that Apple has the right to set the royalty rate for the entire digital music industry._

I find it amusing to be talking about whether they have the _right_ to specify their price structure. As far as I can tell, it's still some healthy market forces at play, I don't think the line to monopolistic behaviour has been crossed just yet.

What I don't quite understand about this whole debate is the variable pricing part. If I go into a shop selling CDs these days, almost all the albums are going for almost exactly €18 (~$28) except for the occasional special offer on albums that are a few months old. (as opposed to new releases or the back- catalogue) There's hardly any differentiation in price going on there. Are retailers playing the Apple game as well? Or is the whining about price fixing really the record industry complaining that it can't charge crazy money for _all_ music? (if you ask me, €18 is more than enough - and we in Europe don't even get to buy cheap-ish MP3s from amazon)

<comment><USER3> _healthy market forces at play..._

Wait, we're talking about the _recorded music industry_ , right? An industry that continues to exist only because a massive regulatory structure prevents me from just _giving_ you a copy of all of my albums?

You might be able to convince me that, on balance, this is a _good_ monopoly... if the public domain still existed. Which it doesn't. (Thanks, Mickey Mouse and Sonny Bono!) But, whether you approve of it or not, it crossed the line of "monopolistic behaviour" more than a generation ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Upmodded primarily for Reg's responses in the comments, which clarify his argument.</comment>


No Cash Needed at This Cafe: Students Pay the Tab with Their Personal Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/29/643386327/no-cash-needed-at-this-cafe-students-pay-the-tab-with-their-personal-data <comment> swingline-747 Orwellian as some other companies' business models, but worse in some respects.</comment>


Reddit: What is your favourite intellectual joke?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fzek1/what_is_your_favourite_intellectual_joke/

<comment><USER2> All right, before this is flagged or ignored into oblivion, I'll take this opportunity:

Q. What's worse, ignorance or indifference?

A. I neither know nor care.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anything regarding recursion, like this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2304657>

<comment><USER4> or <http://www.google.com/search?q=recursion>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keynesian economics. (although, actually, macroeconomics in general might count...)</comment>