Drones Are the New Threat to Airline Safety - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-04/drones-are-the-new-threat-to-airline-safety <comment><USER2> If a bird strike through an airplane engine can cause major damage to an engine, it's not hard to imagine a drone being able to cause damage. I think there's got to be some education about no fly zones near airports. Lots of this seems to be common sense, but anyone with some cash can buy a drone and fly it in improper areas.

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

<comment><USER3> I think birds are more destructive than drones because they travel in flocks, increasing the potential for a catastrophic complete loss of power during takeoff.

<comment><USER4> I imagine also that skin and bones are _much_ harder than PCBs and paperthin plastic / styrofoam most drones are made of.

<comment><USER5> It would seem that, at airplane speeds, mass would be the primary concern. While the first thing you hit on a drone is its cheap plastic propellers and superstructure, at its core is a dense battery, which can be fairly heavy on the common DJI phantom drones (DJI 3 weighs 1280 g (=45 oz. ) with battery.) For comparison, a common pigeon (is that the bird that gets hit?) weighs ~9-13 oz.

Having said that, I don't know if these are the drones that pilots are spotting. They're the most common enthusiast drone (~$500-$1k), though I'm sure they're outnumbered by the junk toy variety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are ~500k drones registered in the US with the FAA

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/02/08/faa-drone- regi...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/02/08/faa-drone-registration- eclipses-regular-planes/80002730/)

So the total market value of all drones posing significant risk to aircraft is probably on the order of $50M. If one of these were to accidentally down an airliner of 100 people, that would be $1B of damage, using the ~$10M statistical value of human life in the US.

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

So even if you think it is generally bad to impose strong regulations based on merely hypothetical risks, this might be a place where it makes sense.

<comment><USER7> Also, I think they predict (probably correctly) that it's only going to become more popular so they might as well regulate it before it's too late

<comment><USER8> It is already regulated:

> Current FAA rules restrict drone operators from flying within five miles of > an airport and above 400 feet

The issue is either a lack of awareness of the regulations, or, perhaps a willingness to flout the regulations.

Many people people think little of driving 10-15mph above the speed limit, and will only slow down when speed-cameras are installed and visible. Perhaps the answer is visible publicised enforcement.

<comment><USER9> The speed limit was once informed by traffic safety engineers, but has been artificially lowered by environmentalists (gas engines are most efficient at 45mph) and "safety at all costs!!!!" politicians. Which is why I think little of driving 10-15 mph above the speed limit when I can safely do so. (Most commonly on highways and rural roads.)

<comment><USER4> > _Which is why I think little of driving 10-15 mph above the speed limit when > I can safely do so. (Most commonly on highways and rural roads.)_

Frankly, this is why most car accidents happen. Drivers thinking the rules don't apply to them.

I'm all for _much_ stricter enforcement of traffic laws, even if the speed limit is "lowered by environmentalists" (they kind of have a point here though; also probably the only rule drivers blatantly ignore more often than speed limits is safe driving distance). We can have a discussion about adjusting the laws, but first people need to actually obey them. Otherwise it's not civilization, it's a jungle.

<comment><USER9> Safe driving distance! Yeah, that's huge. I am strict about keeping a 2.5-3 second distance. On the other hand, my cousin is a slave to the speed limit--- but that means when we carpooled to Portland during friday rush hour, he set it to cruise control and had a 0.5 or 1 second gap behind him and the next driver.

I'm 29, above average intelligence, strong visual-spatial, never been in an accident. The rules don't apply to me. ;) This country doesn't have "discussions" anymore, there's no incentive for a politician to increase the speed limit or get rid of mandatory minimums. So fuck it.

Let me know if you ever visit Seattle, it'd be cool to run into you!

<comment><USER4> > _I 'm 29, above average intelligence, strong visual-spatial, never been in > an accident. The rules don't apply to me. ;)_

Haha :). Well, glad to hear that, and I hope you won't have to be in (or witness) an accident ever.

> _This country doesn 't have "discussions" anymore, there's no incentive for > a politician to increase the speed limit or get rid of mandatory minimums._

Yeah, mine neither. I think it's a global phenomenon in the West now.

> _So fuck it._

I still _want_ to believe there's a better way...

> _Let me know if you ever visit Seattle, it 'd be cool to run into you!_

Why thank you :). The same if you happen to visit Poland (especially the southern areas)!

<comment><USER9> So, here's a path to safer driving. I think that the electronic devices you can add to cars to track acceleration & movement will be really helpful. [http://blog.esurance.com/drivesense- discount/](http://blog.esurance.com/drivesense-discount/) With big data, and knowing when they were in an accident, we'll be able to identify more signs of bad driving. But just having an accelerometer/GPS on the car isn't quite enough...

I think there's a lot of potential in self-driving cars to identify bad drivers. When you have thousands of cars using LiDAR to accurately track the movements (and crashes) of human-driven cars, we'll gain a better understanding of what makes an unsafe driver, and we'll be able to identify incidents that were _almost_ a crash. With more LiDAR-recording cars on the road, insurance companies could ask Google to send them examples of bad driving for all their insurees.

So, one day, I might get a higher bill from State Farm because hey, they have evidence of me being an unsafe driver. If it's backed by data, then I'm in favor of it.

Haha! I'll absolutely reach out if I visit southern Poland. But I was making a pun--- "run into" is also used in american english to describe a car crashing into something. i.e. "I ran into a stop sign."

<comment><USER4> Yeah, sensors and tracking technology will be helpful. Self-driving cars even more, but before that I agree tracking seems like a reasonable way to go (despite the privacy issues), and there's even a way to reliably feed the results back to the drivers - insurance companies have a strong incentive to use this data, and the drivers I know are surprisingly responsive to the potential of getting their insurance rates raised ;).

> _Haha! I 'll absolutely reach out if I visit southern Poland. But I was > making a pun--- "run into" is also used in american english to describe a > car crashing into something. i.e. "I ran into a stop sign."_

I suspected you might have been doing it, but decided to assume the non-pun interpretation was also true :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's true that a problem could happen, and I'm glad the risk is being taken seriously, but a lot of these reports (if not the overwhelming majority) feel like pilots' UFO reports from the '60s. There are no photos, there are no radar traces (often over some of the most carefully controlled airspace in the world), there is no any sign that the drone wasn't a bird or something or even existed at all. I'd like to have harder data on how often this is actually happening.

<comment><USER8> There's a world of difference.

1\. There is evidence that drones exist.

2\. The reports are being made by qualified recognised professionals, who are, at the time of reporting, clearly in good health, good state of mind, and sober (or they would not be in command of an aircraft).

3\. The reports are sometimes made in real-time (pilots reporting to ATC over radio whilst on approach), or very shortly after the incident.

4\. The reports are detailed (in some cases even describing the colour of the drone).

5\. The incidents are backed up by secondary reports: e.g. drones being reported around an airport without necessarily causing an airprox incident.

All that said, perhaps better data would help document the degree of risk. The drones that are directly radio-controlled (rather than having a programmed flight-plan) will usually operate on a small set of standard frequencies, which could be monitored and recorded. Add some video surveillance, and this could add more documentary evidence to the reports.

<comment><USER10> I'll give you Point 1, of course, but points 2-4 apply just as well to the UFO reports. Many of them were from experienced professional pilots, reported immediately after the incident and with great detail. UFO skeptics wrote a number of books on the topic back in the '70s; they're worth reading if we're about to go through another period of people reporting mysterious objects in the sky that never quite manage to show up on photos or radar.

<comment><USER8> > points 2-4 apply just as well to the UFO reports

> mysterious objects in the sky that never quite manage to show up on photos > or radar

You are quite right to refer to UFO reports that came from highly qualified pilots, etc. Those were reports made by highly trained professionals, with lots of detail, etc.

I would counter that by saying that pilots in that era were encouraged to report any strange/unidentified experience. So they genuinely reported anything that could add weight - either for or against - such as lightning strikes, odd cloud formations, odd solar events, etc.

And those UFO sightings were specifically things that, despite all the detail, were, by definition, not identifiable. And given the description of most of the objects, they would have expected them to show up on radar (given the described size, and the understanding of radar at the time…it's quite possible that a combination of new stealth technology and the era's radar limitations obscured this possibility).

The main difference is that all of those phenomenon were _unidentified_ : the pilots never had sufficient detail to match their evidence to a real-world experience.

I'm sure that during that era there were also all sorts of airprox events that were recorded, but didn't necessarily have all that much follow-up since, simply because the circumstances were clear and identifiable.

In these drone reports, the pilots have clearly and succinctly identified the issue.

It's one thing to report vague lights, and suggest it may be a UFO (because there's nothing to identify what Flying Object might be causing the lights); it's a very different case to very accurately describe a drone, report it as a drone, and have strong correlation with other reports of drone flights near that airfield.

I really wouldn't give too much credence to the lack of photos or radar.

As mentioned before, the dimensions of most drones preclude detection on most radar (not that they _can 't_ be detected, but that most radar systems will filter them out as noise), and the fact that almost all commercial jets don't have a set of dashboard cams, that gives enough reason to understand why there isn't an overwhelming wealth of evidence for drone airprox events.

<comment><USER10> > The main difference is that all of those phenomenon were unidentified: the > pilots never had sufficient detail to match their evidence to a real-world > experience.

There were no real-world experiences of UFOs, but it's not correct to say that pilots didn't know what to expect -- flying saucers with a very specific description were a well-established part of popular culture. A saucer-shaped object at a great distance that moved quickly, made sharp turns which would be impossible for a fixed-wing aircraft, and which would eventually disappear as if it had moved straight away at high speed, was the standard description. It would have been in the mind of any pilot, and indeed exactly that description popped up innumerable times in the UFO reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I looked at the list of sightings they published, and within a few entries (specifically entry #10) found one purporting to have sighted a drone at 19,200 feet. (while the plane was at 19,500) This seems like an absurdly high altitude for even a commercial drone, let alone the stuff people are buying for personal use. Is it even possible for commercially available drones to fly at this altitude, or could these be false-positives?

</comment><comment><USER12> Two things are clear,

a)The consumer drone industry is already adopting no-fly zones (some in firmware) and the FAA has moved quicker to regulate this technology than any other technology before. This is being squashed before it became a problem. I wish the government did the same for other "dangerous" technology (guns anyone?).

b) Putting "drones" in a news article is the click-baitiest clickbait. There hasn't been actually any substantial news/incidents around drones that had to be covered on a national level, other than the reactionary regulations. Let's just admit to that.</comment>


Converting Search into Navigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-navigation/

<comment><USER2> I do not get his criticism. If I search Amazon for "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", most of the results should qualify for "a highly protective yet girlish phone case as a gift for her daughter".

What should this mother have done? How does a "competent searcher" approach this?

The most important search skill for Google is "The first results are ads! Look for the slightly yellow background!"

<comment><USER3> I agree. The only mistake the user made with the search query: "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", is failing to realize that she probably only needed to search for "impact resistant iphone 5 cover". Products on this page may already have an option to choose pink. The fact that Amazon shows a lot of related products on a page is basically a form of category search, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting perspective, "users are incompetent" versus "search technology is incapable (or badly implemented)".

<comment><USER5> Pretty much my thoughts on this. In my experience of searching for things in several fortune 500 websites who can afford to implement good search engines, I end up searching their sites with google... Example search: whatever item site:microsoft.com ... which 7/10 times quickly finds exactly what I was looking for.

It's possible however that I tend to find what I want quickly than possibly some people because my google-fu is better than the average. A couple of my family members are in fact horrible at searching. They call me on the phone at least once every 2 weeks, because they can't find somehting on the Internet that I could find in my first search attempt. One probably because of low IQ and the other because of poor written English skills, neither of which can be easily fixed by merely 'learning to search better'.

Lastly, if all search engines functioned mostly the same both in terms of input method (keywords vs human questions) or syntax requirement (special commands or characters), then yes, learning to search better could have significant impact, but I find this is hardly the case.

<comment><USER4> > _In my experience of searching for things in several fortune 500 websites > who can afford to implement good search engines, I end up searching their > sites with google_

Same experience here. I've been thinking of creating a good search engine that sites could implement, but I'm not sure how to start on it or what their needs are exactly.

<comment><USER6> I think many good search engines already exist: CloudSearch, Elastic Search, Lucene, even Google Site Search. Often the difficulty with search is not the engine but rather deciding what to put in it - what documents? What fields are searchable? Which fields are facets? What to use as a list for synonyms? How to handle stemming?How to support multiple languages etc.

Those configurations can make a world of difference in the quality of a user's search results.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Has a "Problem" Problem - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/silicon-valley-has-a-problem-problem-b34437a57e99#.kxehhns7q <comment><USER2> The real "Problem" problem is the following. Almost all the easy problems have been solved. The biggest problems are the following: Housing for all, Transportation, Medical insurance, food, and water. These aren't just technological in nature. They're more political than technological. Unfortunately, this day an age, even for the most minor political innovation (example: Uber) solving those political problems takes a vast army of lobbyists: that's the ultimate "Problem" problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nicely written article on the adage of first-world problems. They're always there. Yes, the author is correct in comparing those 'problems' as insignificant when compared on a world scale, but they're still problems in a sense. There's nothing wrong with doing everything within one's ability to strengthen their local community. Problems are problems, no matter what the size.

</comment><comment><USER4> Eh, they only keep saying it's a 'problem' because its Medium and that presumably gets more clicks for the author. Saying something is broke gets a lot more attention than saying its an obstacle we've fixed.</comment>


Elixir plugin for SublimeText 3 providing code completion and linting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vishnevskiy/ElixirSublime <comment><USER2> There's a typo in your readme: You ask people to install SublimeLinter3, but the package is actually called "SublimeLinter" in package control.

</comment><comment><USER2> Btw, if anyone tries to use it on Windows like I did: It _almost_ works there, I submitted a pull request that fixes it. Writing this here so Windows devs reading this on HN don't dismiss this plugin over a few little issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was looking for something like this not but a week ago! The previous ST 2 plugins for elixir don't seem to work well (or at all).

<comment> chao- I was in the exact same situation at the exact same time. Glad to hear I wasn't the only one who was a little confused at the under-functionality (possibly just outdated?) of the current Elixir syntax package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, fantastic (hopefully), was just looking for something that improved on the current package. As long as it stops autocompleting `do` to a docstring I'll be happy.

<comment><USER5> Just for curiosity, what is the "current package" you refer to? If it is something in the official one ([https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir- tmbundle](https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir-tmbundle)) please open up a bug report! :D

<comment><USER4> :) I will do that when I get back to playing around with Elixir next week; this is little lax but I _think_ I just installed the two available elixir packages, one of which was the textmate bundle, so I'll have an investigate. I'd ended up avoiding doing anything about it by saving a snippet.

BTW, thank you for creating Elixir. It came at just about the right time for me, looking for an approachable FP language, and I started investigating it at just point it was stabilising at v1. I've been learning it for about a month or so, and the ease at which I've picked the concepts up I've found extraordinary. You've put together an extremely approachable, functional language with ace documentation, and the tooling is great so far, and improving spectacularly quickly, cheers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And here I was hoping for an alternative to sublime clang which only seems to work in ST2 :(

</comment><comment><USER7> The heading does actually say for which language this is: elixir.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't tell what languages this is supposed to support?

<comment><USER9> This is for Elixir.

[http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this support JavaScript as well?

<comment><USER10> wow, derp! the screenshot looked like Ruby to me; I assumed "Elixir" was the name of some code-intelligence plugin. Finally, well-deserved down votes, I suppose.

<comment><USER11> No, I got excited as well for a JS intellisense plugin from the title too.</comment></comment></comment>


Yelp tried to strong-arm us - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/b76d01/yelp_tried_to_strong_arm_us_today/ <comment><USER2> It's a sad but predictable pattern you see from everyone from the Better Business Bureau to more recent companies.

Being established isn't enough, eventually they have to push on those whose information / access they provide.

Personally I gave up on Yelp as years ago I could see so many reviews for places by people who clearly had no clue what that place even was. Such as if you go to a Neapolitan pizza place... you really shouldn't complain that the pizza is "just thin crust". Or the always great "this place isn't as good as X" where X is a place that costs 3x as much....

<comment><USER3> Its not just enough to make money, you have to make increasingly more money every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds like a misleading / high-pressure sales call, but if you read into it carefully there's nothing that indicates to me anything illegal, scammy, or even anything that would back up the claim that Yelp penalizes businesses that don't advertise.

A charitable interpretation is that the salesperson is basically claiming there were 21,000 searches the business showed up in, where they could have been shown at the top if they advertised.

<comment><USER5> There are many cases of yelp doing these actions (we obviously don't have the source code as hard proof):

[https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/09/yelp-accused-hiding- posi...](https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/09/yelp-accused-hiding-positive- reviews-non-advertiser/)

[https://raymondfong.net/a-candid-yelp-advertising-review- is-...](https://raymondfong.net/a-candid-yelp-advertising-review-is-yelp- ripping-people-off/)

[https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive- rev...](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-reviews- business-refuses-pay-advertising/98695/)

<comment><USER6> For my clients they basically said that if we didn't purchase and edit our page with them. That our competitors ad's would show on or page. (No mention that yelp basically puts them there.) So if we paid and setup our page they would cease to show our competitors? Nope, they would move to the bottom of the page where most visitors end up anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why should I believe a self post? There's a weird anti-Yelp cult but never can the people who claim Yelp is involved with nefarious business practices provide any actual proof.

Yelp employees don't know about these practices.

Yelp says it doesn't have these practices.

And these people can't ever offer substantive evidence for the outrage porn they're writing.

I'm thoroughly convinced after reading countless of these types of posts that the anti-Yelp sentiment is purely born out of salty business owners who don't like the fact that they get terrible reviews from an experienced audience.

This post does not belong on HN. There is nothing worth discussing about this story except to fulfill someone's outrage porn fetish.

<comment><USER6> You don't have to believe it. I believe the post because I have experienced this similar behavior with two clients that were involved with yelp. And both times yelp tried to use scare tactics to get me to purchase their services on behalf of my clients. I won't go into detail. But this is more than some anti- yelp cult like some people from yelp would love for you believe.

<comment><USER7> >You don't have to believe it.

I know I don't. I asked why I should. The principle behind the question was providing rational evidence to lend credence to these stories. Your statements don't offer anything that help with this.

<comment><USER8> The only "rational evidence" you could ever get is Yelp stats and they're obviously biased.

Or you could compile anecdotes into actual data, read between the lines of their reports on retain rates.

<comment><USER7> >Or you could compile anecdotes into actual data,

So we should believe the IRS does actually call people and ask for their information? Because if you think listening to these types of posts are the equivalent of massaging anecdotes into actual "data", that's the conclusion you're going to come to on either subject matter.

Or we could realize the fundamental ego-stroking absurdities of these posts, take into account there's no evidence, take into account that no employees former or current say that Yelp is involved with nefarious business practices, and take into account the business' own statements on this matter, and come to the very rational conclusion that these posts aren't based on any actual actions taken by Yelp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing about this seems credible or interesting enough to be posted here. These stories emerge every so often, and they rarely seem to exist beyond Reddit. I'd be interested in this if it could be verified, but as it is this is internet rumor momgering.

<comment><USER10> What would you require for verification?

<comment><USER9> I'd trust a reputable news outlet to do the vetting of the story, but that never seems to happen with these Reddit posts. They just become cultural artifacts and get repeated ad nauseum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds like a scam call. Did the user verify that the agent was in fact in any way associated with yelp, and not just someone trying to blackmail a business owner? As a domain owner, you get these scammy SEO agents pretending to be affiliated with google all the time.

<comment><USER12> really? Based on otherwise pristine reputation for Yelp?

<comment><USER11> No, of course not. But over the years I've heard tons of anecdotal and second- hand stories about yelp doing variations of this but nothing concrete or well- documented. That, and knowing that these kinds of scammers exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, the Reddit comments seem to mention Google as a better alternative.

<comment><USER14> So this is where it gets frustrating. When I'm heading to a new city for business meetings (which happens often) Google is great about auto-magically surfacing restaurant names close to where I will be. It's much faster and easier to use than Yelp.

But Google's "reviews" aren't really reviews at all. They're one-liners that people type into their phones, without telling me anything about local specialties or WHY some particular dish was good or bad. (What's "too spicy" for someone might be just what I want, etc.)

The best Yelp reviews are really informative. They're quirky and opinionated, but that's part of the fun of reading them. I routinely collect a couple Google-generated names and then look up the places on Yelp to get the real deal.

I understand that Yelp's sales team plays dodgy games with merchants to "fix" negative reviews, or to shake down merchants who don't buy ads. Wish they didn't.

But from a consumer standpoint, a seriously flawed Yelp is still more useful than a deluge of momentary burps from a Google system that is practically insight-free.

<comment><USER15> Google has the annoying tendency to ask people to rate and review places they've been near. When they get it wrong you get reviews like "never been to this place 1/5 stars".

I wish Google would incentivise helpful reviews and better verify that a user has actually been to a place before prompting them to review it. Something as simple as creating a guide on how to write a meaningful review could probably go a long way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do wonder —with so many examples— how they avoid being charged with racketeering or extortion.

<comment><USER17> Because it isn't true? Because it's an unverified self-post on reddit, one of the least trustworthy places on the internet?

<comment><USER16> This is _far_ from the first individual report of this, and what happens if you don't pay. It's allegedly been happening for years. See other comments in here for more.

<comment><USER18> And yet they've still avoided being charged with anything, which suggests that stories might be less credible than they first seem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good time as ever to mention that Foursquare is still great in every big city I try it in.

<comment><USER20> > Good time as ever to mention that Foursquare is still great in every big > city I try it in.

Isn't their new business model basically track your location and sell the data to anyone with money? The title to their website it literally "Foursquare - The Trusted Location Data & Intelligence Company" ([https://foursquare.com/](https://foursquare.com/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Okay, you keep on going on about Yelp. Why do I care about Yelp? Seriously now, let's think about this for one second, okay? I've been in business for 24 years. Why do I care if Yelp has a review about me? Do you think I really care about Yelp? I don't give a fuck about Yelp!</comment>


Extending Markov to Hidden Markov - <AUTHOR> http://www.edupristine.com/blog/hidden-markov-modeling <comment><AUTHOR> Markov model is great tool for predicting and modeling systems where discrete events happen in discrete time-steps. There are some special cases though where we are interested in states underlying the events observed, and events do not map to states in one-to-one or one-to-many fashion as had been requirement so far. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) where unknown hidden states are of interest but correspond to multiple observed states</comment>


Did Reddit's April Fool's gag solve the issue of online hate speech? - m-waton https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/in-memoriam-reddits-72-hour-live-graffiti-wall-as-a-social-experiment/ <comment> m-waton We all know the answer is no but their April Fool's Day was interesting to watch. There was collaboration across sub-reddits that should normally have no interaction. People seemed (anecdotally) to work more towards a collective goal than against. I just found it very interesting to watch.</comment>


The Talented Mr. Huxley (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/novemberdecember/feature/the-talented-mr-huxley <comment><USER2> One of my favorite assignments in high school (2007) was after reading _1984_ and _Brave New World_. The teacher of our Dystopian Literature class prompted us to elaborate on who we thought was right overall, Huxley or Orwell.

It was a sobering exercise realizing that there's a fair amount of Orwellian and Huxleyan prophecies in our modern world, but we tend to focus more on the 'scarier' Orwellian ideas.

<comment><USER3> Your high school had a specific class called Dystopian Literature? Now that's an awesome elective to specialize in.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, as an English elective. It was great; I loved it.

<comment><USER4> Interesting use of semicolon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tried reading _Brave New World_. It was atrocious. It was such a heavy- handed, corny, poorly written caricature of the left. I'm baffled by its enduring popularity among intellectuals.

<comment><USER6> It's fascinating that you see it as a caricature of the left, given that Huxley was a left-leaning pacifist who even today would be far to the left of at least the last 4 Democratic presidential candidates on quite a few issues.

Sadly, the entire western world is just a lot more authoritarian than it was during Huxley and Orwell's time.

<comment><USER5> There's nothing about sympathizing with or even being on the left that prevents criticism of the left. The left is infamous for the amount of internal bickering, denunciations, and recriminations that go on.

That said, Huxley's critique of the left (if it can even be called that) didn't seem like one based on any left-wing principles or ideas. I really don't know where he was coming from on that. It really felt like it could have been written by some cheap right-wing tabloid. Maybe that's why it was so popular.

<comment><USER6> This is sadder still. You're saying you feel pacifism and anti-war sentiments are no longer a part of the left?

Huxley was critiquing Hitler and especially Stalin. Is that your idea of "the left"?

<comment><USER5> No. Not in the least.

I wish I had I had a copy in front of me, so I could give you specific examples. It's been a long time since I read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (2015)</comment>


Ask HN: How to educate clients in Software Development process - <AUTHOR> Hello HN community, I'm having issues dealing with a client who paid me to develop their digital product. The client is no a tech guy, so he pressure us to get thing faster but without any logic behind, and we are working just to deliver, and i don't like to work like that. What's the best way to onboard my client in the in and outs of software development? <comment><USER2> You can share the progress of current work. Milestones achieved etc. What's missing, what are the next steps, schedule. Etc.Etc. He probably don't know that you are making good progress towards goals sets. Be more transparent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Teach them about what "in scope" "out of scope" and "scope creep" mean.</comment>


Silicon Valley CEO Resigns for Threatening to Kill Donald Trump - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2016/11/video-silicon-valley-ceo-resigns-after-threatening-to-kill-donald-trump/ <comment><USER2> I said while the pitchfork crowd was leftish (back in the ancient days before November 2016), I say it now when this one is on the right - stop it. Stop destroying people's lives for stupid shit they say on the internet with mob justice.

There is good standard for true treats, there are working courts and competent secret service. It is their job to decide if he is just posturing or the real deal.

The passions are high at the moment. Learn to give people some slack.

<comment><USER3> > The passions are high at the moment.

OK but saying you're going to kill the president is just exacerbating the problem. I'm fine with people saying this behavior is unacceptable from a CEO. If you want to say things like this, use an anonymous trolling account.</comment></comment>


Google finances Fake News ecosystem - <AUTHOR> https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/covid19-disinfo-seo/ <comment><USER2> That's pretty obvious -- fake news makes money the same way everything else makes money. The remarkable thing is that it's something that people would be motivated to pay for, but they don't have to. Some troll farms receive state and corporate funding, but they can make tons of money the old-fashioned way.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-381-who-will-fact- chec...](https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-381-who-will-fact-check-the- fact-checkers/)</comment>


YouTube Music App now preinstalled on Android 10 devices - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/09/YouTube-Music-App-Android10.html <comment><USER2> "We're Google. Here is our app that you never use and never will because you're paying for one of competitors. Did we mention it comes with preinstalled and cannot be removed?"

This is getting ridiculous. Back in the day when I bought a PC/Laptop it would come with a lot of bloat. Rarely any of it was by the creator of the OS (Microsoft that is). It always was done by the manufacturer. Now we can enjoy bloatware from both the creator of the OS, and the bloat from the manufacturer.

This is getting ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another reason to root your device?

Does anyone ever use the apps that are pre-installed? Maybe google calendar and that is about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Huawei Mate 30 lack of Google services starts to look more and more appealing :)</comment>


Roger Ebert: Celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/death_to_film_critics_long_liv.html <comment><USER2> I agree with Ebert's points, but I would put it differently: People who _persist in reading newspapers_ are being trained not to think. There are fewer and fewer such people, because newspapers have long since abandoned the thinking person's market.

Fortunately, this isn't the early 1990s anymore. If I want to read (e.g.) Roger Ebert I don't need to force my local paper to carry him.

<comment><USER3> What is supposed to replace newspapers?

<comment><USER4> Websites, of course. The real question is "What is supposed to replace advertising" because web advertising doesn't work very well. My guess: Rich non-media people like George Soros will bankroll news organizations. This already happens with some small political magazines.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind though, gossip sites like perezhilton make close to $1,000,000 per month.

<comment><USER4> Keep in mind that pornography is a 97 billion dollar international business. [1]. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar, yes? And yet, one reader of Commentary magazine is worth a million listeners of Howard Stern.

[1] <http://www.editmymovies.com/pornography_statistics.html>

<comment><USER5> I could spend an hour on that stat page.

I think the same type of people that only read newspapers won't migrate to anything better on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always thought Ebert was too lenient on movies (as he famously says, he goes to movies to enjoy them; I've always liked more critical film reviewers), but I've loved every article he's written for the Sun. It's made me appreciate his attitude a lot more.

In particular, his criticism for how the press handled Twilight. I lost my love for newspapers through 2006-2007 with their handling of the book series. If you haven't read them, the books are _disgustingly_ bad; high schoolers have a better track record in terms of quality. And newspapers and "old media" never once referred to it. They'd focus only on the popularity and on the many people who liked it, which was a really self-serving story.

I really hope people start speaking up against that sort of news reporting. It's killing the news. And I think that old news is going to end up dead as the Internet gains prominent, but god - what an ugly death.

</comment><comment><USER7> Newspapers no longer have monopoly on information, and since educated consumers are increasingly searching out alternative information sources on the web, newspapers have to concentrate on the casual reader. And the casual reader is interested in celebrity - it has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It's not making us dumb, humans have always wanted to know about their queens and aristocracy.

Challenging material, or material that only appeals to some upper crust 10% is going to move to a medium where only the 10% who are interested in it get to see it. A mass paper needs to appeal to the masses, this not only makes commercial sense, but it's logically right. If some guy has no interest in some massive review of a huge book written in big words he does not know, then why should this review be in his paper?

Being average is a good thing, and specialists should not complain that the average people are no longer interested in what they have to say. Instead, they should focus on the people who are actually interested in them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Business idea: A daily subscription-only film review e-mail written by a collection of recently laid-off movie reviewers.

</comment><comment><USER9> In all fairness, while most newspapers may be devolving into gossip columns, some of them still strive to maintain some dignity like WSJ, NYT, etc...

<comment><USER10> I learnt about the incomming subprime crisis not from those newspapers. I was from economic blogs and it was more than a year ago. Dont you think newspapers have lost some of its usefullness, if they cant see these kind of events coming?

<comment><USER11> Or we're finding out how useless they were all along. The web allows us to dig for what -we- find important; -we- become the editors. And that will keep stupid people stupid, but allow smart people to become much smarter.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Domains Already #1 in Google for "Domains" - <AUTHOR> http://www.domaininvesting.com/google-domains-already-1-in-google-for-domains/

<comment><USER2> Seems like another good point for antitrust/monopoly investigation.</comment>


Why Monzo's bank transfers weren't working on the 30th of May - robinson-wall https://monzo.com/blog/2019/06/20/why-bank-transfers-failed-on-30th-may-2019/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a well-written post-mortem for public reading. I encourage people to read through it.

Being someone who also works in the payments space currently, relying on gateways, I have gone through several similar outages, where we detected a gateway issue causing an outage, notified the gateway who ack'd... and then we waited. More than one time, like Monzo, we built a workaround on our end, before the gateway provider could even mitigate the outage.

Hats off to the Monzo team, who clearly have a solid oncall and incident mitigation strategy in-place. They determined an outage happening in 4 minutes, built a workaround as best they could and deployed it in 2 hours, while it took the gateway provider 9 hours only to mitigate their change that caused the issue the first place. Granted the issue seemed complex, this is still slow.

Unfortunately, in cases like this, the best one can do is make sure there is a clear SLA in-place with the third party, with a contract stating financial liability in case the third party fails to meet this SLA. Monzo will not tell us much about this part, but I suspect the gateway will have to pay a hefty fee to Monzo, as their availability dropped to under 99% for this month, which should trigger payments/fee reductions from the third party with a well- written contract. It is good to see they are pushing the third party to do a proper post-mortem and prevention actions, as well as holding them accountable.

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER2> What I think is fascinating is not just that we applaud Monzo for this, but that we allow other important services that control our lives to get away with revealing nothing about what happened or what they've changed to prevent it. Can you imagine any large bank (for the US, say JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, etc.) putting out a note with this level of transparency, accountability, and clear direction to change?

For more about what makes a good apology, see [https://withoutbullshit.com/?s=apology&submit=Search](https://withoutbullshit.com/?s=apology&submit=Search) by Josh Bernoff, a former Forrester editor and a very direct writer.

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine one of those giant banks having this kind of outage.

<comment> robinson-wall It happens all the time, and they just don't tell you. We get automated notices when banks connect and disconnect from the Faster Payments network, something happens every few days. Not always this length, but occasionally.

Just yesterday a major high street bank stopped sending payments for an hour, and was telling customers on Twitter that there were no problems.

Hell, the central system (what I called the Hub in this article) had a 12 hour split brain meltdown last July which had banks emailing each other spreadsheets back and forth for two weeks afterwards.

<comment><USER4> Who manages the 'hub'?

<comment><USER5> Faster Payments is managed by Pay.UK who contract the infrastructure to VocaLink (which is 93% owned by MasterCard).

Pay.UK are currently holding a procurement exercise to find a new operator for Faster Payments [http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/infrastructure- renewal](http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/infrastructure-renewal)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clear, detailed but accessible, plans in place moving forward, apology read sincerely, providing support to affected customers immediately, and answering follow up questions to technical users who are interested in more detail.

A+ job on handling the unfortunate situation, Monzo.

We can only hope more companies follow this great example.

<comment><USER7> Every time I see a company say "we're sorry" I can't help but think about the South Park episode where the BP CEO says "we're sorry!" It's either that or the one with the Time Warner employees with the nursing flaps in their shirts.

<comment><USER8> Using "we" in any public announcement, writeup, blog post, etc. is always in danger of sounding contrived.

<comment><USER6> Personally, I prefer something written in a relaxed style rather than a formal-voice only in most cases, especially for blog posts.

Formal only generally comes across, to me, as cold and distant. Great for a persuasive essay or other mediums where you want to remove the topic from the author, not so great for communicating with your audience and wanting to come across as sincere.

If anything, a strict formal-voice only _blog_ post would come across, to me, as contrived.

To each their own.

<comment><USER8> I'm not advocating for formal over relaxed. I find blog posts work best in a relaxed style from the first person singular. This sort of apology should come from an individual at the top, and make reference to the whole team. You're probably right about personal differences though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> robinson-wall I just posted this semi-technical post-mortem on Monzo's about why we had an outage with Faster Payments (UK bank transfers) last Month.

I'll hang around here to answer any more technical questions if anyone's interested.

<comment><USER9> You guys are using Form3 for FPS, is this correct?

<comment><USER10> We can take an educated guess...

[https://status.form3.tech/incidents/wyhyxydxgh30](https://status.form3.tech/incidents/wyhyxydxgh30)

<comment> robinson-wall I would note that this status page says "Our FPS Direct gateway provider".

<comment><USER10> Fair point. FWIW I thought your postmortem was excellent, and certainly puts Form3's to shame regardless of where the blame lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a perfect post-mortem. Their communication and support has always been really good. I've been using Monzo as my primary bank account ever since they registered as a bank, and I've converted a lot of friends to it. But... over the last year, the iOS app has fallen in quality: long UI freezes, frequent sign-outs with no explanation, silly UI bugs. My non-technical friends have noticed the same issues. It's a real shame.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. This caused me to leave them for Starling Bank, though I'm considering switching back - I'd rather take a faulty app but good customer support than a good app but no support at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> @robinson-wall Nice writeup, definitely raises the standards in the banking industry! I have a few questions:

1\. Was this post-mortem part of an official process or something of an individual initiative? I saw it published on the blog, but it might be helpful to have this information disambiguated from marketing material on a separate site: [https://status.cloud.google.com/summary](https://status.cloud.google.com/summary)

2\. I'm not sure how payment processors work, but would having multiple payment processors from Monzo's interface make sense from a cost/benefit perspective?

3\. Any plans to expand to the U.S. anytime soon, or recommend any banks that follow Monzo's best practices? ;-)

<comment> robinson-wall 1\. A mix of both, we have a culture of being transparent by default - it's one of the first things that attracted me to come and work here. I was the incident lead for this on the day, and volunteered to write up this post- mortem. I did have help from colleagues in the marketing team to try and make this as accessible as possible.

As another poster mentioned we already have a status page where we post about incidents as they happen (though obviously not in quite as much detail as here). Personally I think our main blog is a reasonable place to have this .

2\. Multiple redundant payment processors would be great, but ultimately infeasible. As a settling FPS participant we have to have a single Bank of England settlement account, tied 1:1 to a "bank code". Multiple sort codes map to a single bank code, and migrating sort codes between bank codes is non- trivial.

It'd be great if we could migrate sort codes easily between redundant connections, but as we build our own Gateway we'll have complete control over how our failover mechanisms work. Here's to much greater uptime in the future!

3\. As another commenter mentioned - yes! We're just doing staff testing for now, but we've got a waiting list up. It'll be a prepaid product issued by another bank before we get a US banking license, just like we were in the UK a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER14> I'll ask unashamedly, any plans for the EU?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The software bug at the heart of the problem:

 _The bug was in a computer program the Gateway uses to translate payment messages between two formats. When the program was operating under load, the system tried to clear memory it believed to be unused (a process known as garbage collection)._

 _But because it was using an unsafe method to access memory, the code ended up reading memory that had already been cleared away, causing it not to know how to translate the date field in payment messages._

So apparently a dangling reference.

<comment><USER16> Is that really proper use of the term garbage collection? If you are doing memory management manually, it sounds more like the lack of garbage collection. Unless they were using an unsafe GC for C/C++?

<comment><USER17> Sounds like they were hanging onto a pointer to an object allocated by GC. For example, in Python/C API if you use a borrowed reference PyObject* after it has gone out of scope and been GC'd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a very well-written postmortem. It's clear enough that a non-technical customer effected by the outage could understand the explanation, at least at a high level. It's also detailed enough that a technical person can trace the root cause to a buggy garbage collector in format transformation function. The whole thing uses clear language with a bare minimum of jargon. Nice work!

<comment><USER19> > the root cause to a buggy garbage collector

Or, rather, unsafe access of memory managed by a garbage collector:

> The bug was in a computer program the Gateway uses to translate payment > messages between two formats. When the program was operating under load, the > system tried to clear memory it believed to be unused (a process known as > garbage collection).

>

> But because it was using an unsafe method to access memory, the code ended > up reading memory that had already been cleared away, causing it not to know > how to translate the date field in payment messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I still don't understand with bank transfers is: what control is there to ensure that debits and credits are offsetting. Doesn't this rely on the bank be being honest? Can't the sending bank just not debit the senders account?

<comment><USER21> The sending bank is on the hook for that money when everything gets settled up, so it has a strong incentive to perform that debit.

<comment><USER20> what is this settling up? how does that work?

<comment><USER22> I can speak to how it works for card processing and ACH is most likely similar. To participate in payment processing in the banking network, you have to have a Merchant ID that is tied to a bank account. The processor or gateway is holding a suspense/escrow account on your behalf throughout the day and when a batch of transactions settles, it will resolve the balance difference with your bank account. The amount of payments allowed into or out of your escrow account is set by the processors based on your company's financial health and a risk analysis since if you just debited say $10 million from the escrow account and you only had $5 in your account, the processor would need to collect that debt from you, and they do not have a guarantee that they'll be able to do so. This is how it works for debit cards and bank accounts since $ amounts are real. It's slightly different for credit cards because the $ amount is in a way fictional, so they don't do the escrow holding and just temporarily "allocate" part of the credit limit (this is called an authorization) and when it is settled this is "captured", which enqueues the authorization for future processing. A few days later it will process and be included in a lump sum of funding into your merchant account. This reply is my personal understanding and meant for educational reasons and doesn't represent opinions or viewpoints of any company, and should not be considered advice of any kind and it may be inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thank you for posting this. Great read, and nice to see the team at Monzo sharing this level of detail: consumable but still detailed.

</comment><comment><USER24> The project I'm currently working on has a QA lag of 4-5 _days_ for code to reach production.

I'm seriously impressed they were able to deploy mitigations to product twice in the same few hours, especially given they are a bank (and a small one, at that), and the consequences of fucking up are enormous.

It's been said here many times already, but I'll join those saying "well done" for handling this so well, and for the extraordinary level of transparency!

</comment><comment><USER25> Somewhat related question: How can Monzo offer 1.55% interest while the interest with most banks is around 0,3%?

<comment><USER26> The savings accounts are offered by third party banks, not Monzo.

The 1.55% rate is fixed term for 12 months with no withdrawals

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just curious - whats the stack you guys run ?

I'm wondering what do you use to call these external processing APIs. I assume these are blocking calls.

<comment> robinson-wall There's a good writeup by Oliver, our head of engineering, about our tech stack on our blog[1] with an accompanying Kubecon talk[2].

TL;DR- Largely Go microservices running on k8s, with http-based RPC calls for synchronous communication, and kafka for asynchronous communication.

As for sending and receiving of this kind of payment message, they are largely async but it does depend on the payment system we're talking about. When we build our own FPS gateway we're going to have to have something to manage "sessions" (TCP connections) which will block waiting for a response to an individual payment messages. Right now our communication with our third party Gateway is via a queue.

[1]: [https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank- bac...](https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend/)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkOY7DgXKyws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkOY7DgXKyws)

<comment><USER27> actually I kind of like this one - [https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp- content/uploads/2018...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/06/SED616-Monzo-Bankbuilding.pdf)

We have learnt a lot from you guys as we build out similar systems in India. Thank you for putting this stuff out!

Quick question that I have always wondered about - would you have used something like Uber Cadence ([https://github.com/uber/cadence](https://github.com/uber/cadence)) as the core of your infrastructure if it had been available back thhen ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been using Monzo less and less since I moved to the US due to the cost of topping it up. It's really sad that there is no true equivalent to Monzo here :(

<comment><USER29> TransferWise has a debit card and full banking facilities, I assume they are available in the United States?

<comment><USER30> Yes, I used Transfer Wise borderless card in the US in 2017

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not related to the outage, but any plans to provide banking on pc's instead of just phones and any plans to provide small businesses accounts in the future?

<comment><USER32> Yes, they've had job positions open for more web work. I think they will expand this.

They already offer business accounts. I have one open for my Ltd company.

<comment><USER33> I registered my interest a while ago but they haven't given me one yet, so I wouldn't say they offer business accounts, so much as they're going to/are testing this.

Starling does offer business accounts now, but you can only have one Person of Significant Control, i.e. over 25% owner. There is no monthly fee with their offering though, so it's probably the better offer.

<comment><USER32> Note that Starling will prevent you opening a business account if you've held a personal account in the past and closed it. That was the position I found myself in.

For what it's worth, I've seen some suggestions regarding business account pricing on the Monzo Slack, and there are plans for separate tiers (including a free tier which lacks some of the more advanced accounting integrations).

<comment><USER33> I use a monzo personal account, would be more than happy using them for my ltd if and when they support me doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > They later tell us they believed that datacentre was introducing the > corruption

What now? Their datacentre was ... rewriting (presumably) encrypted packets?

<comment> robinson-wall Sorry, perhaps this isn't very clear as I've tried to simplify the explanation to make it accessible to a wide audience.

What I meant here is they could tell that the corruption was being introduced by some component in their infrastructure, and they were only observing it for messages passing through one of their two active-active sites.

<comment><USER35> I understood that as you intended.

It's a fine line between understandable to laymen and people been pernickity sadly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tldr; unsafe memory management in a third party's software corrupted dates (under high load, due to garbage collection), causing transactions to fail or get reversed.

</comment><comment><USER37> You can do anything at monzocom</comment>


Bill Ackman Surrenders in His Five-Year War Against Herbalife - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-ackman-surrenders-his-in-five-year-war-against-herbalife-1519854456 <comment><USER2> For anyone interested, the documentary Betting On Zero is very good (on Netflix). I'd be curious to hear how the film came together and got financed. It certainly has an agenda and Bill Ackman comes out looking pretty good vs Herbalife.

That said, Ackman looks a lot less good in episode 3 of "Dirty Money" regarding Valeant (also on Netflix).

Obligitory "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" quote.

EDIT: Just noticed Herbalife owns bettingonzero.com. They put up a "FAQ" saying Ackman secretly funded the doc and they're promoting the link with ads on Google.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that Ackman seems to have been doing against Herbalife exactly what his opponents were doing when they were shorting Valeant. With Valeant, Ackman seemed pretty naive and/or delusional about its value and operations.

(That said, Valeant still exist today, despite its extremely immoral and shady past doings. I was dismayed to find recently that one of my favourite brands, CeraVe, is actually a Valeant company.)

<comment><USER4> No need to worry then, Valeant sold CeraVe to L'Oreal last year.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, thanks. Apparently the deal was completed in March. I guess it takes a while to update the products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recommend reading Bronte Capital's take on this. He regularly evaluates short opportunities mostly related to fraud.

He actually visited Herbalife clubs before making a decision on shorting. He's not a fan of Ackerman.

[https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/search?q=herbalife](https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/search?q=herbalife)

<comment><USER6> Wow, thank you for sharing this. It was an illimunitaing read and made change my opinion on Herbalife. Comparing it to AA makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER7> AA = Alcoholics Anonymous in this context, in case you were wondering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Baby Buffett" Bill went long on Valeant, a company so evil that it makes diet smoothie MLM Herbalife look like the Salvation Army, yet people here apparently still think he's a good guy because of his sympathetic portrayal in _Betting on Zero_. Ackman not only is not a good guy, he's also, like most hedge fund managers, completely incompetent:

> The losses in each of the past three years — of 4, 13.5 and 20.5 percent — > come against gains in the S&P 500 of 19.4 and 9.5 plus a 0.7 percent dip, > respectively. The Pershing losses took its net assets to $9.3 billion from > $18.3 billion.

[https://nypost.com/2018/01/10/ackmans-pershing-square- fund-t...](https://nypost.com/2018/01/10/ackmans-pershing-square-fund-to- slash-management-fee/)

PSCM can't even consistently beat the S&P 500, and Ackman's already on his second fund after having blown up his first (Gotham Partners)--why on earth would anyone give this guy their money? Because he's handsome and a smooth- talker, I suppose.

<comment><USER9> He sure deserves his lumps over Valeant but let's not play pretend. There are plenty of monsters on Wall Street who will gladly destroy great companies for short term profits.

Eric Ries has the right idea with the long term stock exchange.

<comment><USER10> What is the LTSE? From their website it doesn't really seem like they do anything other than some apps for entrepreneurs?

Often the mechanism for destroying great companies is plundering one group of stakeholders to pay off equity and management. E.g. firing long-time employees, underfunding/changing pensions, over leveraging, or risky regulatory strategies that they won't be around to face the consequences for. I don't see how what stock exchange something is listed on has much effect on any of those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a shame. Herbalife is clearly an MLM, a modern form of a ponzi scheme. Their long term value is clearly zero, they just didn't manage to tank in the period Ackman projected.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it's an MLM but unfortunately, they have a business model that works. Amway is an MLM that survived a similar attack as Ackman vs Herbalife. Ackman did not bring anything new to the fight. I wished he would have won since many people lose money since they feel that Herbalife will sell itself. They're not ready to put up with the low pay and long hours until they reach the upper ranks. Most people just give up and lose their investment.

<comment><USER13> Most people can't reach the upper ranks of any MLM due to how they are structured. It's like a consulting shop you need more leaf nodes than managers.

<comment><USER14> You don't really climb or reach in an mlm. You just build lots of people under you to make money.

In most mlm compensation schemes, you would receive the same amount of money if you were at the very top of the pyramid or somewhere much lower, assuming you have the same size team built below you.

<comment><USER15> But the one at the top has a bigger pyramid than anyone below. The early adopters have also cleared the pool of most of the easy catches, so your chance of building the pyramid is reduced.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that you don't really "climb" or "reach the top" \- if you aren't at the top, you can either fail or succeed by building underneath you, but you're not going to get to the top and the one above you will forever have a bigger pyramid than you do.

<comment><USER13> Leaf nodes quit, the specific people in the chain above you gain as you grow but just because someone get in at stage 2 does not mean anyone is still under them.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but the top nodes almost never quit. Once you have that sweet, sweet residual income trickling in, you have no reason to quit.

That being said, as I mentioned above, the top nodes don't necessarily make more money than those below them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -John Maynard Keynes

Looks like another case of this applying. Though it's sad, I am heartened to know that giants can succumb to this too. Lord knows it's hit me enough.

<comment><USER18> Why is it god given inevitable that this is somehow a bad investment? Plenty of companies make their money deceiving the poor or defrauding their customers, lots of the consulting joints come to mind..

<comment><USER19> Surely it's a bad investment for anyone who has morals. People may assume that others generally aren't evil and so will not support obvious (to them) scams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While it feels icky to root for a billionaire hedge fund manager who probably couldn't care less if I lived or died, I was kind of pulling for Ackman. Herbalife _is_ a complete scam, and in a sane universe they wouldn't have any valuation at all. But no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Sigh.

<comment><USER21> It goes way beyond the American public, they're global - in at least 95 countries. I guess that's how they're managing to keep the scheme going as long as they have.

Really does seem like a strong bet that they will go to zero.

<comment><USER22> The lifecycle of an MLM company: Utah, then the rest of the US, then the world

<comment><USER23> Why do you say Utah? Near as I can tell Herbalife came out of California.

<comment><USER24> Orrin Hatch

See: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/us/politics/21hatch.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/us/politics/21hatch.html)

<comment><USER25> Orrin Hatch represents the herbal supplement industry, not the MLM industry. Herbalife happens to be in both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hate MLMs so very much.

There is a good book called False Profits by Robert Fitpatrick about the MLM industry.

So much of our culture is some version of sucker capitalism.

<comment><USER27> _> So much of our culture is some version of sucker capitalism._

It's amazingly difficult to find examples of businesses considered "successful" that aren't somewhat pyramid-shaped.

And as soon as I find one, it turns out it relies on a larger ecosystem that itself is pyramid-shaped.

None of these enterprises can survive for the long run, but since in the long run we're all dead, maybe it only matters if you can ride the wave in the short run??

<comment><USER28> How is In-N-Out pyramid-shaped?

<comment><USER29> According to a cursory Google search, In-N-Out has stated it will never go public or issue franchises. So they are less "pyramid-shaped" than a lot of businesses.

However, nothing is forever and philosophies can change. Look at the saga of Chipotle, they were so very full of themselves, and now they have someone from Taco Bell to pick up the pieces of their shattered reputation.

Any "family business" undergoes instability as generations hand off to new ones.

Interestingly, someone has been selling _fake_ In-N-Out franchises in California. So you could say that even if you don't want to be pyramid-shaped, the pyramid sellers will find _you_.

<comment><USER28> They are not pyramid-shaped at all. Running a successful franchise does not depend on your ability to recruit other franchise owners and then collect rent from them.

<comment><USER29> You can interpret "pyramid-shaped" how you please. The way I interpreted it, was that businesses that are not pyramid schemes per se, nevertheless pay off early investors with later investors' money.

Having a successful public company involves recruiting investors, and being successful in franchising involves recruiting investors.

And, if you have a successful business that is just a family business, maybe you want to sell it at some point...

As I wrote, you can define "pyramid shaped" as you please, but if nothing can be "pyramid shaped" without literally being a "pyramid scheme", then the term "pyramid shaped" has no reason to exist - that violates normal assumptions about reasonable discourse.

<comment><USER28> Pyramid shaped refers to crap like HLF where the only way to actually be successful is to get more people to do the exact same thing you did.

You can have a successful In-N-Out and your success absolutely does not depend on someone then buying a franchise on your referral that you skim off of.

<comment><USER29> _You_ are not the one who initially used the phrase "pyramid shaped", so I don't see why you would expect others to defer to your authority on what it means.

Given the cooperative* nature of normal conversation, one must assume (at least initially) that there is a reason for saying "pyramid shaped" rather than "pyramid scheme". The obvious interpretation (to me) is that there is a continuum between pyramid schemes and non-pyramid schemes.

Objecting to the placement of In-N-Out _near_ the "non-pyramid scheme" end of things, on the basis that it is _not at all_ a pyramid scheme seems like an aesthetic preference for binary categories - that's all right for you, but other people may generalize.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The real untold story of guys like Ackman and most of Silicon Valley is their sales and fund raising ability. Because he sure as hell ain't a good investor. Yet he still manages billions of dollars of investor funds. At this point he's like a bizarro world Gartman.

<comment><USER31> Ackman's fund got to where it did, because he actually produced a string of great returns across a decade and a few monster hits (such as Canadian Pacific). Investors would have never given him that level of capital otherwise.

The fact is, Pershing stomped the S&P 500 across a decade, from Q1 2004 to Q1 2014 (without anything from Valeant contributing). Which very few fund managers ever manage to do. Most are lucky to beat the S&P 500 at any point. You can call it luck, which it could be obviously, across a decade that's quite an unusual string of luck.

2004: 42.6% return; 2005: 39.9% return; 2006: 22.5% return; 2007: 22% return; 2008: -13% return; 2009: 40.6% return; 2010: 29.7% return; 2011: -1.1% return; 2012: 13.3% return; 2013: 9.7% return; 2014: 36.9% return; 2015: down the ship goes with VRX

More likely, based on his actual track record over time (including spotting the mess with MBIA years before anybody else), Ackman is a decent investor. His seeming arrogance and stubbornness appears to be the culprit more than lack of skill. He refused to throw in his cards early when losing hands came up. It's what separates decent investors from great investors like a Buffett, who will typically cut an investment the moment he realizes the business is a dog (that his instigation thesis was wrong), rather than stubbornly fight the tide. Ackman likes to fight, and has an immense ego, that's what got him on VRX and Herbalife. Can he learn from those mistakes and become a better investor? He'll have to, or most of the money he'll be managing will be his own.

<comment><USER29> I think that's not exactly wrong, to refer to "a few monster hits", but you didn't mention his single best investment, which overshadows all others. General Growth Properties turned a few million into almost $2 billion.

My impression is that Ackman is simply a gambler who got really lucky once and that has allowed him to raise money and squander it on a scale that compensates for his successes.

Certain famous investors have talked about how it's not so hard to run across some big winners over time; what's really hard is to avoid big mistakes.

There's something particularly perverse about calling a fund that owns a small number of risky stocks a "hedge fund", I might add.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This makes me sad. I don't care about Bill Ackman being right or wrong about Herbalife's business.

What I care about is that I truly believe that the world would be better off without MLM. If you have ever read sites like Pink Truth, it is gut wrenching how these business prey on people.

I had hoped that this would be a turning point...

</comment><comment><USER33> Imagine someone super rich shorts Herbalife like Ackman did, lobbies congress to make Herbalife's business model illegal, and then profits from the short position. Would this be conflict of interest legally, or is this just how crony capitalism works in the US nowadays?

<comment><USER34> Imagine someone invents something currently illegal then lobbies to make it legal, in order to sell it. This is just capitalism and liberalism, and it's a good thing.

<comment><USER35> How is this a good thing?

What if it's illegal for a good societal reason, and lobbying is just throwing enough money at enough of the right people until they succumb and legalise it?

It's never going to be cut and dried 'a good thing'. In some instances it will be and some it won't.

<comment><USER36> It might be a good thing if you think the natural progression of a governmental system is one where entropy increases til' things can't change, and you think that governmental systems trend negative in aggregate.

I'm not yet convinced of the above, but my trajectory points that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Read Amway vs (the world?) and you'll understand why Ackman lost.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amway#Pyramid_scheme_accusatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amway#Pyramid_scheme_accusations)

<comment><USER37> Come on, tell us more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> unpaywalled: [https://outline.com/YPct](https://outline.com/YPct)

</comment><comment><USER39> I have some family pretty deeply trapped in Lularoe's "MLM", the fact Herbalife is still legal and solvent doesn't give me a lot of hope for a rosy outcome for my fam

<comment><USER40> Anecdata is not proof, but plenty of people actually make money in LuLaRoe from sales rather than the pyramid structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Similarly, David Einhorn and Greenlight continue to get squeezed by the price- insensitive investors of NFLX, AMZN, and TSLA.

He has yet to capitulate positions, but very well may do so soon, as he was forced to apologize to Greenlight investors for recent serious underperformance.

<comment><USER42> I have no opinion on the future price/direction of these stocks.

From end of 2017 to today:

NFLX: 192 to 291 51% gain in two months AMZN: 1169 to 1512 29% gain in two months TSLA: 311 to 343 10% gain in two months

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I still do not understand why these people choose to reveal their positions. In ackman's case, it actually made people a lot of money because other people who didn't like Ackman got together and said 'hey what if we take the other side of this because we think that there's another puff left to this cigar."

<comment><USER44> May be at that level they hope to play the market by revealing...more people could get behind the call

<comment><USER43> If anything, reading about it from the 13f attracts more attention. ( i.e Buffet), but for Bill and Mr.Dalio, does not seem to be working out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ackman has purchased put options, which, in my understanding, is not surrender.

<comment><USER46> That was a while ago. Today he said he closed all positions in Herbalife (stock and options).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Mr. Ackman first alleged in December 2012 that Herbalife, which sells > through a network of distributors, was an illegal pyramid scheme and would > be shut down by the government. He had personally pledged to take his > campaign "to the end of the earth," though he added that Pershing Square > would abandon the bet if it got too risky.

Who surrendered ? Bill Ackman or Pershing Square ? Both ?

</comment><comment><USER48> Ackman pays about $100 million annually to maintain his short position [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ackman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ackman)

</comment><comment><USER49> I can't view the article behind paywall, but there was a recent documentary about this short position.

Worth a watch: [http://bettingonzeromovie.com/](http://bettingonzeromovie.com/)

<comment><USER50> While I agree that Herbalife doesn't seem like a very kosher company, it's probably also good to realize that that documentary was probably heavily skewed towards the viewpoint of (and probably somehow co-financed by) Ackman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Mods, the title please. It hurts.

<comment><USER52> Should be fixed now. Submitted title was "Bill Ackman Surrenders His in Five- Year War Against Herbalife".

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Probably means it's a good time for a short-term short.</comment>


Dictionary definition of 'siphon' has been wrong for nearly a century - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/may/10/dictionary-definition-siphon-wrong <comment><USER2> That is hilarious. I just checked the dictionary at my desk (American Heritage Dictionary I got from a used bookstore) and it's wrong also.</comment>


UN chief concerned nuclear 'coffin' leaking in Pacific - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/un-chief-concerned-nuclear-coffin-leaking-pacific-064421511.html <comment><USER2> Good documentary on this called _The Dome._ Free to watch here: [https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dome/](https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dome/)</comment>


Salary Guide for Software Developers in Barcelona - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jobsbcn.com/index.php/2015/09/28/developers-salary-guide-october-2015-barcelona/ <comment><USER2> If these salaries are accurate it is a sad prospect for developers coming from other cities like London or Berlin to Barcelona. Salaries in London are three or four times higher than there. Sure the city is becoming a startup hub, but can they maintain these low salaries for long?, will investors keep funding startups in Barcelona if salaries go high? Or is it all just a bubble, like famous and longtime spanish investor Luis Martin Cabiedes says?

Spain it's always been a hostile place for entrepeneurship, hope it changes soon.</comment>


Examining IPv6 Performance – Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://www.circleid.com/posts/20160819_examinning_ipv6_performance_revisited/ <comment><USER2> A good start but doesn't examine one case that I'd like more data on: most deep packet inspection boxes can't handle IPv6 so the packets pass right on through, unimpeded. I've heard it's provides a speedup and it seems totally plausible: without some ISP's marketing panopticon or (shudder) JS injection, it seems like your connection should be much faster.

<comment><USER3> Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the deep packet inspection systems I've seen to date are passive. They take a copy of the bitstream on the wire and don't impede that stream in the slightest.

<comment><USER2> I guess I was simplifying too much. I meant generic middleboxes that do everything from read-only DPI, to transparent caching, to content injection, etc. They're out there and they're annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious to know whether there's a difference if you break it down into mobile vs desktop users.

</comment><comment><USER5> who cares much about cross continent requests when you care about performance? if you're on that situation, ipv4 v 6 is moot.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is time for IPv8, which will be _upgrade_ for IPv4, not a complete replacement.</comment>


Conservative GC: Is It Really That Bad? - <AUTHOR> https://www.excelsiorjet.com/blog/articles/conservative-gc-is-it-really-that-bad/ <comment><USER2> The problematic code in the article is, AFAICT, using an object finalizer to free manually allocated memory; such approaches seldom work well, even with precise GCs.

Thread stacks are effectively manually allocated blocks of memory. You create a thread, which allocates the stack, and as long as the thread lives, the stack is kept alive - it's self-sustaining. The thread must die by explicit programmatic action, which in turn will free its allocated block of stack memory.

Using finalizers at all is usually an anti-pattern in a GC world. The presence of finalizers is a very strong hint that the GC is being used to manage resources other than memory, something that GC is a poor fit for, because other resources almost certainly have no necessary correlation with memory pressure; and GCs usually only monitor GC heap memory pressure.

That's not to say that there aren't plenty of edge cases where you can end up with lots of false roots that artificially lengthen object lifetimes with a conservative GC. Putting a thread stack in your cycle of object references and relying on GC pressure to break the cycle isn't a strongly motivating one to my mind, though.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree with you about finalizers! However, please note that this "threadReaper" code is from JDK class, so, the problem can appear on every application that just use Timer class.

Of course, there are many other examples of false-roots, but this concrete class caused unexpected OOMs on several applications of our clients, so we made this small sample and used it for sanity checking during implementing precise GC (and then mentioned it in the post).

<comment><USER4> I take it you are part of the ones behind the article? Did you ever see the papers about a conservative variant of immix, which would be both compacting and conservative?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I wrote this article.

No, I haven't read those papers before, but after your comment I took a look at one of them.. and it is very interesting! Thanks for mentioning it.

But, if I understood correctly, the excess memory retention is still a problem in conservative immix?

<comment><USER4> It is mentioned in one of the papers (or possibly the doctoral thesis, which is nice as it gives an overview of the whole chain of improvements) that it can still happen but that it is much better compared to what they benchmarked it against (boehm, iirc). Hard to tell if it delivers what it promises though..

<comment><USER3> It would be very interesting to run our sample with Timers on this GC. In that paper I found a link to their implementation, but unfortunately it is unavailable.

<comment><USER4> Link is dead, but code is on Github somewhere. Dunno where I found the link to it but I am away from computer for a few days so I can't really look it up for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly enough, SBCL on x86/x64 has a conservative, but moving, GC. It can know some, but not all roots precisely, so it pins any objects that are reachable through conservative roots.

It's earlier implementations were on RISC chips that had 24 or more GPRs so the implementation was simple: 2 stacks and divide the local registers in half for boxed and unboxed values. This obviously didn't work when porting to x86 which had far fewer registers.

The ARM port I believe uses the non-conservative approach, despite having 1 less register than x64 (the x64 port was derived from the x86 port so uses the same register assignments).

<comment><USER6> > divide the local registers in half for boxed and unboxed values

Fondly remembers the separate address and data registers on 68000. Why didn't they go back to this approach for x86_64 (16 registers), now that no one really cares about 32 bit x86?

<comment><USER5> The conservative GC approach has worked well enough in practice that nobody is going to do the work. Also there is a performance tradeoff in non-allocating code: Sometimes you need more unboxed registers, other times you need more boxed registers so with only ~6 of each[1] you will run into register pressure.

1: 2 stacks means 2 stack pointers and 2 frame pointers leaving only 12 registers left for values; it's also possible that the SBCL ABI uses a global register for something else as well, which would leave only 11. PowerPC is a really luxurious platform in which you have 32 GPRs so even if you use 8 GPRs for various bookkeeping purposes that leaves 24 remaining, which is enough for pretty much everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not an expert in garbage collection techniques, but this article does not even mention locality of reference (copying GCs improve locality on each compaction) and how many cache misses are introduced by increased fragmentation. Are there any benchmarks on this?

<comment><USER5> On SBCL the bigger win for using a copying collector isn't the locality of reference (which helps with some loads, but hurts with others), but rather the fact that you can make an allocation be about two instructions in the non-GC case (pointer increment plus a bounds check).

I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about how much faster this is than malloc/free until a question came up the other day here on HN to the extent of "why would anyone dynamically allocate an object that is smaller than a cache line?" In lisp a commonly allocated structure is a CONS cell which is two pointers in size, and is often smaller than the cache line. It would be very wasteful to do a malloc/free of 8 (or 16) bytes, in C but throughput is approximately identical compared to stack allocating them with SBCLs allocator.

<comment><USER8> It never gets as fast as stack allocating variables. Consider a loop:

while(1) { Integer n = new Integer(....) vs int n = ... }

A C compiler would allocate the n variable on the stack, making the "allocation" completely free. But in a GC:ed language, the n variable would be bump allocated once every loop. That wouldn't in itself be so costly, but every so often, a GC cycle would be needed as the garbage accumulates. Furthermore, in C the address of the n variable stays in place while in a GC:ed language it moves a bit for each loop.

That is why escape analysis is a fruitful optimization. It takes heap allocated objects and attempts to stack allocate them, similar to how a C compiler would do it.

<comment><USER9> > But in a GC:ed language, the n variable would be bump allocated once every > loop.

Citation needed. I don't know of any GCed language that heap-allocates local variables in this way (well, maybe SML/NJ does, but I doubt it). Certainly not Java or any Common Lisp I've ever used.

But I agree with your larger point: heap allocation is never quite as fast as stack allocation, once you factor in the additional GC load. I don't actually know how close it gets with modern collectors; would love to see some numbers.

<comment><USER8> C# does and Java did before the escape analysis optimization became default. You can find numbers in this old article from 1999: [https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~harrold/6340/cs6340_fall2009/Read...](https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~harrold/6340/cs6340_fall2009/Readings/choi99escape.pdf)

"and the overall execution time reduction ranges from 2% to 23% (with a median of 7%) on a 333 MHz PowerPC workstation with 128 MB memory."

The benchmark is 20 years old so it is kind of out of date. I don't know of any modern benchmarks. I suspect that the difference would be much bigger nowadays because programmers don't avoid allocating small local objects as much.

<comment><USER9> Oh, now I understand what you're saying. I got thrown off when you said "the address of the variable n [...] moves a bit for each loop". This isn't quite right; it's not the address of the _variable n itself_ that changes, it's the address of the allocated object that it points to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A safepoint in x86 is nothing more than the instruction mov [rip+0x1234], eax. That shouldn't cause a major slowdown? Also, safepoints are useful for features other than gc. For example, you can inspect a running thread's callstack. That is useful when debugging and when objectifying a thread's state.

Stack maps can be made a bit smaller by pushing and popping all registers from the stack during gc. That way, you only need to store the values of stack locations in them and not of individual registers.

Btw, the article is really good. This is the kind of stuff I keep coming back to HN for!

<comment><USER3> Right, but even a single instruction placed on every backward branch and at the epilogue of every method causes noticeable impact on the performance. This is especially important in highly optimized code and that's why optimizing compilers like HotSpot C2 (and JET as well) try to remove as many safepoints as possible. Sometimes it even causes troubles like in this case:

[https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-5014723](https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-5014723)

Good point about inspecting thread's callstack. Indeed, with conservative GC we had a problem: many popular profilers were incompatible with JET because they inspect threads at safepoints and we had none. When we implemented the precise GC, this problem disappeared and it was an additional benefit for us. However, there are alternative ways to gather thread's callstack out of safepoint. We use them to avoid safepoint bias in our profiler. You can read more about it here:

[https://www.excelsiorjet.com/blog/articles/portable- profiler...](https://www.excelsiorjet.com/blog/articles/portable-profilers- and-where-to-find-them/)

\----

Thanks for kind words! I'm glad that you liked the post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Conservative GC would probably work well enough for the JVM because there are no value types or inline arrays which more easily masquerade as roots, ie. a random sequence of bytes as used in crypto or hashing would yield a lot of false positives.

By comparison, the CLR is a much worse fit, because value types and stack/inline/fixed arrays means false positives would be much higher for some applications.

<comment><USER3> You are right, such things as value types or inline arrays are not introduced in Java language (yet), but still JVM can allocate objects including arrays on the stack if this objects are not escaping into the heap. Of course, not all objects fit this condition, but the problem remains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Chakra Javascript engine uses a conservative generational mark and sweep collector with many phases running in parallel to code execution. It looks like Chakra is now on github (and with an MIT license). In chakra the GC is called it a 'Recycler', which can throw one for a loop when searching for the GC implementation.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is just off the top of my head, but it made me wonder: are there any VMs that put a stack map header of some sort as a literal in the stack?

E.g. for each frame the compiler orders roots first and then other primitives. Then, as you enter the frame, write the number of roots to the stack. When the GC walks the stack it can see precisely which are roots.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that it all depends on the liveness of the variables. The same value on the stack can be a root at the begining of the method as the corresponding variable is still alive, and later it becomes useless as the variable is already dead. So, you still need to know a location of each live reference at every safepoint (and that means several stack-maps for each method).

<comment><USER12> You can zero them when they are not live.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, we've tried that. It was one of the attempts of improving conservative GC (no dead values on the stack => no false roots). Unfortunately, it causes noticeable performance degradation, so it is easier to consult with stack maps about liveness of the variable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> le-mark So does this analysis extend to libgc/Boehms gc, since it's conservative as well?

</comment><comment><USER13> The pain from conservative GC depends on how much your address space you are using.

In the 32-bit age, you ran into problems more and more as your heap approaches the GB range. At some point the probability that you end up with a false root that keeps a lot of garbage alive goes to 1.

In the 64-bit age we get a respite, although many systems don't really use 64-bit pointers.

</comment><comment><USER14> A useful hybrid is possible and useful in some circumstances: conservative scan for roots, which point into a precisely traced heap.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is something that I just love about Go. Get rid of the GC stalling like you have with Java.

<comment><USER16> The primary difference is that Go creates less garbage than Java. Of course this results in significantly shorter GC pauses but they still exist.</comment></comment>


Australian bill to create back door into encrypted apps in 'advanced stages' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/13/australian-bill-to-create-back-door-into-encrypted-apps-in-advanced-stages <comment><USER2> anybody have any input if this is feasible for apps like Signal?

How would this be technically feasible? \- have a backdoored version on Google Play / App Store? \- MITM the SMS registration? \- Force WhisperSystems to run a different binary? \- Jam communications if they can't intercept?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I want to give the Australian government ideas, but I doubt I'll come up with anything original, and I can't resist imagining how I'd do it if I was the authoritarian type.

They obviously can't touch foreign organizations and services directly, so they have to influence what happens in Australia. They could force ISPs to block the IP addresses of the services. They could also make it illegal for people in Australia to have a device that can't be unlocked by the authorities, and make it illegal to install encrypted communication apps. That way, if they get a wiretap and discover that they can't decrypt the communications, they can simply arrest and charge the person for that.

Edit: I doubt the Australian government could actually get away with this approach. Encrypted apps have gone mainstream and too many people would be upset if they were banned. Hopefully the Labor Party would oppose such a bill and it wouldn't make it through the Senate (no guarantees).

<comment><USER3> Luckily for us they're probably not competent enough to enforce it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't imagine the politicians themselves to be competent enough to even understand the problem and write the legislation. But maybe they employ people who can.

The technical details of the "encryption with backdoors" would be left to the companies that have enough presence in Australia that they need to conform to it.

The enforcement against criminals using encryption would be as simple as the police finding that they can't decrypt the contents of a wire tap because the app isn't backdoored.

<comment><USER3> To bad they didn't employ people who understand this stuff to stop them from making stupid decisions on the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are at the top, they employ who they like, and being generally ignorant psychopaths they employ people who will pander to them. It's too bad the population won't elect people who understand stuff in the first place.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>