Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system? - <AUTHOR> http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2013/11/11/StackRankingWhyAreAmazonFacebookAndYahooCopyingMicrosoftsPerformanceReviewSystem.aspx <comment><USER2> Here's a question to which most people experience revulsion, but must be thought of and answered honestly:

Why not give everyone the same bonus based on company performance? Make it collective good.

You'll probably think of reasons, like "good people should be rewarded," or "people who do things wrong need to have consequences," but you must realize the alternative is this vile demotivational anti-pattern with even worse consequences.

The right way is to align the company goal with the individual goal, and do it simply and clearly.

American companies need to understand and follow Deming's principles ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles)), or we'll continue falling into the soul-sucking black hole we're already halfway into. He already knew all of this, every bit of what we're experiencing, and our objection to his ideas is nothing more than an ideological almost religious belief that the most effective way to motivate individuals is to rank, rate, measure, and reward them accordingly. In fact, those archaic methods of management only serve to demotivate and systemically destroy culture and productivity alike, and reduces the quality of whatever you produce, be it innovation or physical products.

We know this. Deming's ideas work. They are truth in writing, and knowledge in practice. He pulled Japan out of a post-war recession and made them legends of quality production for pete's sake. _Why can 't we learn?_

<comment><USER3> I am currently reading a bunch of the Toyota Way books, Deming, etc. and sometimes I wonder if one of the most basic assumptions in the West is that the individual is the root and the system is a derived thing. This assumption starts, maybe, with Christianity which tells us that we stand alone before God judged on our individual character, not on our wealth or social position. Buddhism, on the other hand, tells us that even our perception of selfhood and autonomy is an illusion to be rooted out and discounted.

To toss out an assumption as fundamental as these would require a huge realignment of all sorts of things -- how we punish and reward, our sense of self worth, who is good and who is bad, etc. So we don't really want to go there.

I think the West could benefit from a swing to the Systems/ Wholeness side of the dichotomy, but I wouldn't want to discount how powerful and what a creative force our individualism has been throughout the last 2000 years.

(EDIT, PS: Deming is the real deal, and the Toyota Way/ Lean books and movement tries to take some of his surface ideas and implement them without challenging their readers in the way Deming wanted to.)

(EDIT, PPS: Toyota / Buddha says "You see a problem? Change the system." Microsoft/ Jesus says "You see a problem? Roast the culpable individuals, reward the virtuous individuals.")

(EDIT, PPPS: Hegel and his philosophical descendants have the best take on the dynamic movement between individual and collective, without discounting either of the two viewpoints.)

<comment><USER4> Minor point...

I'd say Christianity goes along with the original poster's idea of everyone getting the same reward - ie grace - nothing you do can merit it - it's a gift.

The parable of the vineyard workers explains it - it doesn't matter how late in the day the workers start working - they all get the same reward.

<comment><USER5> Also, if Jesus was interested in "roasting" people, he wouldn't have bothered coming here.

<comment><USER6> And if His old man weren't interested in roasting people, He'd have used industry-wide best practices such as two-factor authentication and salted password hashes on the root server, to keep Satan from hacking into the source repository.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 The evil, destructive, part of stack ranking is when you need to apply the 20%/70%/10% breakdowns to all teams equally, meaning that even a team of 5 people needs to have one and only one "exceeds expectation" person and one person who "needs improvement", regardless of overall team level. It's not clear from this writeup that Amazon and Facebook are applying curves at such a micro level.

<comment><USER7> Stack ranking at Microsoft has a min populaton size (x) - you generally walk up the org chart until the number of employees >= x, and then apply stack ranking to that group.

<comment><USER8> I think opponents of stack ranking generally overlook this fact. Yes, it's terrible if you have a 5 person team, but the data becomes more normal as you add more people.

<comment><USER9> Sort the members of each group of 5. Then take the bottom performer from ten groups and sort them. Take the bottom five from ten such groups and sort them. Fire the bottom ten.

If Google did it, they'd call it MapReduce and it would be the coolest thing ever.

<comment><USER10> StaffReduce

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't there a fundamental difference between the FB rule of restricting the top rating to just 2% of employees and the Microsoft rule of decreeing that there must be a bottom 10% of "poor quality , less talented, undesirable elements" in the workforce.

The FB system doesn't make the non 2% feel rejected and unhappy - it just makes it very hard to be crowned the superstar which I think most people find perfectly acceptable.

To address the relatively longer period of MS employee retention, Microsoft employees (esp the technical ones) in general work on a set of technologies (C#, NT Kernel, SharePoint,...) for which MS is the place to be. They build up expertise and then if they have to leave to join a comparable company, they need to rebuild in a different set of technologies most likely open source stuff of which there is very little in Microsoft.

Now if you are a Linux kernel hacker / Python guru/... at Google/Amazon the world is your oyster - everything you are good at transfers readily to companies/roles of similar stature outside.

Its almost like Microsoft technologies are a moat around its castle that keeps talent from leaving.

full disclosure I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years before leaving.

<comment><USER12> There are lots of companies that love hiring former Microsoft employees because they use the same stacks. Its only when moving to a new tech like google or some startups that there would be a problem, but then again google and facebook opened offices in Kirkland/Bellevue for some reason....the moat ain't that deep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, the obvious pathologies of the Microsoft stack ranking model aside, what are the reasons that a company will want to do this?

The main reasons I can think of has to do with the dangers of getting comfortable in a large company.

It's very easy for a lazy manager to just hand out "A"s to everyone on the team and just cruise along. Slackers are poisonous, but painful to deal with for a conflict-shy, comfortable manager. Actually being forced to think critically about which of your employees are the top performance, and which aren't (and it's a mathematical fact that they're not going to be the same) is a useful tool to keep such a manager on his toes.

Another effect is simply to encourage a certain rate of churn in all teams, to get some fresh blood flowing through the system.

Stack-ranking directly forces the manager to use his human capacity for critical thinking to evaluate his employees, and in such is a useful distraction from that even more disastrous evaluation method: Objective metrics (hours worked, lines of code committed, bugs closed, sales numbers etc).

<comment><USER14> I think managers are inherently in a bad place to review the performance of individuals in the team below them. They're primarily affected by the mean performance of the team, so if one guy is slacking off and the rest of the team needs to pick up the slack, the manager might not notice. I think peer reviews will be more honest. If a peer is doing next to nothing, or providing little to the team while everyone else is working like crazy, you're in a much better position to see that.

<comment><USER15> I think it is a lot more complicated that just that. The root cause here is there is no easy way to quantify one's contribution to the company (or even a team) in software development. Some other professions are easier to evaluate, e.g. stock traders have their own P/L, lawyers/doctors have their own customer billings, etc. Note that I said "easier", but not necessarily bullet proof, because it still encourages people to optimize for short term goals.

<comment><USER14> That's definitely the root cause. I'm not saying peer review is _the_ solution, just that if managerial review is the alternative, I think peer review is better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Standard Big 4 Consulting implementation. It provides value for a few years until employee realize that it's a lot easier to:

1\. Get a job elsewhere 2\. Hide in mediocrity because the effort to achieve a high ranking is greater than the reward by a lot.

In my personal experience with force ranking systems, is that it also drives politics within the organization. As an example:

I once was skipped a promotion because when we went to demo a unit the shipping department did a poor job packing the prototype equipment that I had just spent an entire summer building. Due to the packing job, a single RS-232 pin because slightly unseated causing intermittent behaviors for one of many features. It was still the most successful demo the company had ever given. So success we received a request for pricing the Military 24 hours later, which is unheard of. Despite this the Chief Engineer blasted me for the failure, and our inability to find the issue on site (mind you he was there too). When I brought this up at my review I was indirectly told by my boss that he didn't agree with my rating/rank but it was over his head. After that, I practiced both Items 1 & 2 but discovered that my new company also followed this practice. So it was a rinse and repeat to make sure force ranking is not within my new companies.

</comment><comment><USER17> So what's a better way to do it?

You need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation.

<comment><USER18> Each employee receives a single unit of value. Let's call it a 'credit.'

Each employee then has to distribute all of his 'credit' to other employees.

Each employee then gives away any credit received according to the same original distribution.

Each employee continues doing so until the credit received and distributed reaches an equilibrium.

Each employee is then ranked by the total amount of 'credit' they've accumulated.

Maybe we should call it 'PeopleRank' ;)

<comment><USER19> Presumably this leads to people passes their credit to the worst candidate, in an effort to stop the good candidates from surpassing their own score.

<comment><USER18> Do you have any reason to believe this happens in an iterative model as well?

In this model there's no reason to believe the worst candidate isn't passing his credit to employees just about to surpass you, which would defeat the purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Eh. I'm in Facebook bootcamp now. Between this article about the ranking system, a truly uninspiring (to me --- YMMV) choice of teams to work on, and the press Facebook has been getting lately, I'm seriously considering parting ways and going somewhere else. Nobody can beat Facebook's pay or food, but what good is it if I feel like I lack direction and purpose? How much would it damage my career to say I tried FB bootcamp and didn't feel it was a match?

<comment><USER21> I can't speak for anyone else, but it depends a bit on what you do next. One or two solid jobs down the road, I doubt anyone will really care, but if you do it enough that it looks like you have made a habit of joining up and then not giving it a fair chance based on gossip from outside the company, then yes, that will count against you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems to me that stack ranking can only work for companies that are so attractive for new talent that any new hires are likely to be more valuable than the lowest-ranked current employees. Once a company is no longer so attractive, as seems to be the case with Microsoft today, you're actually pushing out better talent in exchange for worse.

<comment><USER23> Eh? Do you really think their pool of applicants is worsening quickly enough that a bottom-10% performer is better than the median new applicant? They still have bags of money to pay people, you know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Facebook is the company that surprised me here.

Stackrank seems like umpteen other methods whose ultimate aim is to vacuuming people dry and discarding them. This "works" in the sense that if you _can 't_ motivate someone with the challenge, excitement and etc of working for you, there's always money, fear and the-other-etceteras.

Yahoo and Microsoft have lost all cachet to their workplace, and Amazon has always been innovative in the "our engineers have calculated exactly the profit made from turning off the air-conditioning in warehousing and legal has drafted the matching don't-ask, don't-tell contract" sense.

But Facebook using this seems like an indication they've reconciled themselves to being on the way down. That was quick.

</comment><comment><USER25> Because it's easy and everyone else is doing it. Next question?

</comment><comment><USER26> The title of this post assumes MS's stack ranking system is bad. Based off of personal experience, MS has dramatically improved how they do stack ranking. All companies stack rank, even startups. The only difference is that when that is formalized, everyone is on the same page and culture is more transparent.

<comment><USER27> Since you seem to have more knowledge of this than the general public here, can you provide info on how it's been improved of late?

As I understand stacked ranking, there doesn't seem to be many improvements that help when the underlying premise (forced attrition of "poorly performing" employees - where "poorly performing" is a judgement handed down by management) has major downsides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> My impression that these types of systems are more for culling than accurate performance review. Perhaps they need to drop a certain percentage of employees by some target date, and this is the most blame-free way to do it on a large scale.

<comment><USER13> That's not an accurate impression. Microsoft has grown their staff steadily while employing this policy.

<comment><USER29> All that means is that they are hiring more than they are firing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The main takeaway here is that large companies have large-company pathologies. If you don't like that, work at smaller companies.

</comment><comment><USER31> "one person cannot be evaluated and paid in isolation of budgets" \- SteveSi is just wrong on this. This is only true if you have a policy of highly differentiated pay for short term performance and/or have an "up or out policy". ... both of which are in effect at MS.

You can argue it's a bad idea not to have one or both of those policies, but it is certainly possible to have a review system based on what one did, rather than based on the necessary political fight over cutting up the budget pie.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm more interested in why employees don't band together to game the system and ensure a given outcome, then split the winnings. Like a sort of a pyramid scheme - you and a buddy agree that this quarter it will be you who gets promoted and split the bonus/raise with your buddy. Then you get a third buddy and get him in on it if he agrees to let the second buddy be promoted this quarter. Now you're splitting 3 raises among 2 people. Then you get a fourth buddy in and promote the third one and so on. The system ends once the group has too many people at a high position. At that point any new employee joining the company at a low position is screwed, probably. Also at this point infighting will probably break out from people who don't want to split their raises with the ones with less money, given that they don't have a way of advancing any further. Obviously the only way to win at this is to be the very first person who, after everybody leaves, gets left with the highest position and highest salary. Which is why I called it a pyramid scheme.

<comment><USER33> How visible and gameable are the metrics, though? You'd have to ensure your metrics were better than some, worse than others, but NOT so much worse as to be dangerous.

Also, that sounds like a horrible amount of concerns for a developer. I'd like to build and ship code, not worry about measuring performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Although there isn't forced ranking in place, it does looks like Google one- upped Amazon in making it difficult to climb up their corporate ladder by having a promotion process based on pleasing everyone."

This is not true. First, I think it's great that promotion-readiness is decided by an employee and not her manager(s). Second, when promotion packet is written, it gets reviewed by a promotion committee, most likely in another campus, and there is a very high likelihood that promotions are granted more objectively compared to the manager's peers (and up the chain, depending on a target level like it's done in Microsoft, long before peer feedback is written). Promotion committee decisions get reviewed and iterated to satisfy the promotion budget, and those lucky ones who meet the bar, get promoted. Sounds like a pretty fair system to me.

</comment><comment><USER35> It depends on whether there are any checks so that such ranking systems are not abused. I know first hand that such systems are ripe for abuse by those who are connected. I know of an incident when a well connected long term employee performed very poorly and was put in the weeding out category. However because of his connections with Vice Presidents was able to engineer so that someone else was given his place in the ranking and fired. In a way a person was specifically hired to that team, reviews were engineered to give him a bad review in order to remove the well-connected but badly performing manager from the bottom list. This was not uncommon and would happen invariably in order to save the well connected but poorly performing person.

</comment><comment><USER36> Inevitably some percentage of hiring decisions were flawed, either that they underestimated or overestimated the candidate's potential.

These kinds of ranking systems are a mechanism to correct for that error once there is _a lot_ more information known about the employee.

<comment><USER37> That's not how stack ranking works. The only thing that is inevitable is that you will have many teams where almost everybody is either top-performer or low-performer, but they will get ranked on the global scale as if they are equally productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Of course there is a curve in all companies. The question is of interpretation how review scores get assigned (stab in my back and lunches with manager's peers like in Microsoft and perhaps in Amazon), or based on a peer reviews like in Google. Besides, to the best of my knowledge there is no fixed bottom 10% (or any number of percents) in Google/Facebook which ought to let go after each review period, compared to Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER38> I recall Valve having a stack ranking system as well? I haven't heard anything bad about their ranking system though. Maybe it is different considering the lack of managers with the flat culture that makes it better.

EDIT: Article I found on MS vs Valve stack ranking. [http://www.jpuddy.net/2012/stack-ranking-to-gain-team- insigh...](http://www.jpuddy.net/2012/stack-ranking-to-gain-team-insight/)

</comment><comment><USER39> > Why not give everyone the same bonus based on company performance? Make it > collective good.

That pretty much happens when companies routinely provide stock to the employees.

</comment><comment><USER40> Because they hired Microsoft managers.

</comment><comment><USER41> SAP is too!

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do these companies have Microsoft-style stack-ranking systems? Because _many engineers are pussies who don 't fight for themselves._

Imagine if that stack-ranking nonsense were done to a law firm. (Law firms have a very civilized way of managing people out into external promotions if they, after ~6 years, obviously aren't going to make partner. Google "Cravath model".) There'd be lawsuits galore. Attorneys would start legal process just to get embarrassing details (about said stack ranking, perhaps) into the public in discovery. Why? Because they (including the female ones) have balls.

Doctors and lawyers would never put up with MSFT-style stack-ranking. Bankers find clever ways to subvert and abuse it when it is imposed upon them.

But there are a lot of engineers who are just cowards, unwilling to stick up for themselves.

Example: in many companies, negative performance reviews are part of the transfer packet and impede mobility. Being (again) pussies who don't fight for themselves, many engineers just assume that's how things work. No, it's not. You can actually build a legal case on that alone. It's harassment (interference with job duties, here interpreted as using internal mobility opportunities) and already the start of a legal case-- if you get your shit together and start documenting. Use the right words and the bad review will go away.

Stack ranking isn't technically illegal, but if it renders immobile people who perform in good faith (i.e. don't flagrantly blow off job requirements) it does leave the company civilly liable for harassment charges-- interference with job duties. If software engineers collectively grew a pair, it would fall down within minutes.

<comment><USER43> A lot is self-imposed: engineers tend to believe in the idea of a meritocracy and the 20% overachievers. It's the lone hacker ethic. The downside is that if you stick to that, 80% of us get the shaft.

Lots of comparisons to attorneys, on significant difference is that attorneys have a way to advance their career while remaining an attorney. I've got nearly 20 years in this biz and constantly get told that if I want to increase my salary, I need to move into management. I notice a lot of the discussion is around how to get "promoted". Attorneys get promoted to partner, at which point they have equity in the company, and that's not "here's some stock options", you actually have your cash invested in the partnership.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin's Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulation.html <comment><USER3> Today Matt Levine talks about this paper in his daily column:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-13/judge- rul...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-13/judge-rules-at-amp- t-merger-will-be-fine)

"of these two explanations—

1) Bitcoin's rapid and sustained rise is due to the fact that it satisfies a real economic need in an elegant way, and people have responded to that; or

2) Bitcoin's rapid and sustained rise is due to a magical fountain of fake dollars that everyone just decided to treat as real dollars, and that can be used to manipulate its price any time it's in danger of falling—

the second is possibly more impressive. Like, creating billions of dollars' worth of value by building a useful thing is relatively straightforward. Creating billions of dollars' worth of value with a ridiculous perpetual- motion fake-dollar-printing machine is a real innovation."

<comment><USER4> What's the difference between a real dollar and a fake dollar?

All dollars are first-order fake.

<comment><USER5> What's the difference between a fake promise and a real promise?

The government guarantees that dollars are acceptable for paying taxes. For a promise, that's about as real as you're going to get.

<comment><USER6> This may be true, but the government also has the power to control inflation, which limits the purchasing power of those dollars.

See: Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Germany ~1920

<comment><USER7> Debt instruments are based on faith and credit.

Those events are indicative of scenarios where the market lost confidence in the faith and credit of those nations. When you can't sell bonds anymore, you implicitly borrow by devaluing the money.

That's where the derogatory treatment of "fiat" money by goldbugs and cryptocurrency advocates falls down. A government can declare that something is worth a dollar, but the market determines what a dollar is worth.

<comment><USER8> > A government can declare that something is worth a dollar, but the market > determines what a dollar is worth.

So what happens when the government declares that a candy bar is worth a dollar, but the market determines that a dollar is worth half a candy bar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am fully prepared to receive negative points for this comment, but I do not believe there is anything new here. This narrative has been pushed by the media for almost a year now. The article even claims:

> This method is not conclusive, but it has helped government authorities and > academics spot suspicious activity in the past.

I haven't read the entire 66 page report yet, but assume for a second that the relationship between Tether and US dollars is 1:1. This would mean that during a bull market, when the price started to decline, big players invested money to buy up the available supply. Nothing about that seems suspicious to me. They may have chosen to use Tether instead of US dollars for any reason. Perhaps because there are more exchanges that have USDT trading pairs than there are with USD pairs. Or perhaps because it made arbitrage easier (transferring USDT from one exchange to another is much simpler than USD where you would have to first move it to a bank account then wait days for a new transfer to take place).

There is a chart at the end of the report that shows that the Tether issuance continued to increase even as the BTC price was falling. Also it shows that less than 25% of BTC trading volume came from Tether while over 60% came from USD (page 38).

It is funny that claiming that the price decline in BTC since December is manipulation will lead to you getting flamed here and people will tell you that it is just going to its "natural value of zero", but the idea that there was a conspiracy to pump up the price last year is greeted with open arms, and everyone latches onto it (The reality is probably somewhere in between). The math regarding Bitcoin's price increase is actually pretty sound, and I encourage anyone who disagrees to read this article:

[https://medium.com/the-crypto-times/why-is-everyone- investin...](https://medium.com/the-crypto-times/why-is-everyone-investing-in- bitcoin-1e8d88fe6b3)

\---

As a side note, I think if you said this exact same thing about the stock market, it would not be big news at all: "US dollars were used to pump up the stock market after it experienced big dips". And meanwhile BTC is 0.3% the size of the stock market.

<comment><USER10> The issue with using Tethers to pump up the price is that it implies there's billions of U.S. dollars backing up that Tether. If there isn't billions of USD to be found then... what?

The USD pumping up the stock market is undeniably there, but if the Tether pumping up BTC isn't real (real being defined by the 1 USDT = 1 USD), then the price is essentially being pumped up by nothing.

<comment><USER9> But the article and report do not prove that Tethers are not backed by USD. In fact, it constantly says, "If Tether is not fully-backed by dollars". All it definitively claims is that Tethers were used to buy Bitcoin when the Bitcoin price fell last year.

<comment><USER11> There's exceedingly strong _evidence_ Tethers are not backed by USD - <USER2> Tether website claims "frequent professional audits", but they never completed their first one, were fired by their auditor, and cited a document explicitly stating it was "not intended to be, and should not be, used or relied upon" as proof of their reserves.

It's a demonstrably fraudulent claim right there on their home page.

<comment><USER9> That is not strong _evidence_ that they are not backed by USD. That is strong suspicion.

> Lack of transparency does not necessarily indicate fraud

[https://blog.bitmex.com/tether/](https://blog.bitmex.com/tether/)

<comment><USER12> Shouldn't it be incumbent on them to prove that they are backed by USD and not on me to disprove it? They are the ones making the extraordinary claim here.

Given the little we do know about the company the most reasonable assumption is that it is a slightly reworked Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER9> What makes the claim extraordinary? If I wanted to make an easily tradable form of USD on the blockchain, I would take a similar approach. Take deposits in US Dollars and issue an equal number of "dollar backed coins" on the blockchain that can then be sent around from exchange to exchange. Nothing about that seems extraordinary to me.

It is very likely the federal reserve is going to do something very similar in the coming years. They will also print more of their coin at will, but no one is going to make a stink about that cause they have already been doing it for a hundred years.

<comment><USER12> The extraordinary claim that people pumped billions of real US dollars into an upstart exchange with no proper accounting.

<comment><USER9> Ahhhh. Okay that makes more sense. Although at the time they _did_ have accounting and audits. The last audit was September 2017, I believe.

<comment><USER11> No, Tether never completed an audit. Their auditor fired them. Their claimed "frequent professional audits" on the home page encompasses precisely _zero_ completed audits.

[https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship- audito...](https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-auditor- dissolved/)

> Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for > the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit > would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first > company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of > transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any > benchmark against which to measure its success.

<comment><USER9> Wrong. They were fired after their audit in September 2017 which is available here:

[https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-Tether- Co...](https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-Tether-Consulting- Report-9-15-17_Redacted.pdf)

<comment><USER11> That's _not an audit_. It's a memo.

It _explicitly_ states on the first page that it cannot be relied upon.

When Tether posted it ([https://tether.to/announcement-transparency- update/](https://tether.to/announcement-transparency-update/)) they stated " These consulting services _do not constitute an audit_ or attestation engagement, which would include a significantly expanded scope of procedures and take substantially more time to complete."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Link to the research paper: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066)

From the abstract: Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.

<comment><USER14> What if most BitCoin owners know that buying Tether this way is a way to bump up Bitcoin. Therefore they decide to do their part. They don't need to agree on anything with anybody they just understand this is THE way to bump up the price of BitCoin. Is it still a conspiracy?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, in the same way people might understand how MLM's work but don't need to explicitly agree to take part in the less savory aspects of why it might be lucrative. You can understand the game and play it with other actors without any set of well defined rules, as long as you're all working towards relatively the same outcome and you all have the same assets that need to be treated in a particular way to get that outcome ("I'll get mine").

But, I don't think that's sufficient to explain what's been happening in cryptocurrency markets. There's a reason analogous regulations exist in Real (TM) trading. As it stands, it's too easy for bigger (or sufficiently pocketed) entities to manipulate the markets. There's no way to stop them, no way to REALLY track them, and there's every reason for them to do it as long as people keep buying into these coins/exchanges.

I'd wager that people who don't think this is happening are blindlingly optimistic about what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know, I followed all the ride very closely, and I don't think that manipulation played that big of a role. Bitcoin was clearly undervalued at the beginning of the year, when its price was around $1,000. Bitcoin needed a protocol update, however, the community couldn't agree on how to proceed, and there was the threat of a contentious fork, where bitcoin would split in 2. In the end, the protocol update was carried out (SegWit) and while there ended up being a fork (Bitcoin Cash) it wasn't the contentious fork everybody feared.

So once that all those threats were out of the way, the price of bitcoin started climbing really fast. Korean and Japanese people started buying cryptocurrency like there was no tomorrow and the market started to overheat. Koreans wanted to buy crypto so badly, that they were paying premiums of more than 40% compared to the rest of the world. Taxi drivers in the US were promoting ICOs, EOS had huge billboards in Times Square and the euphoria that goes hand in hand with every bubble started settling in.

But everybody knew that the price growth was outpacing the increase in usage of the technology, so once the CME futures launched in December, there were no more huge news in the horizon, and the price started deflating.

So was there some kind of price manipulation going on? Probably. But looking back there is really no need for price manipulation, you can explain the price increase using any economics textbook.

<comment><USER17> _Bitcoin was clearly undervalued at the beginning of the year, when its price was around $1,000._

how could such a determination be possible?

<comment><USER18> Spirit animals.

<comment><USER19> lol. That's a keynesian reference if anyone was wondering :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I don't get about the theory that Tether was used to intentionally manipulate markets, is that if you have a money-printing machine, you don't need to manipulate markets as a business model. You can just print money, that's the business model.

Of course it's possible that that influx of capital will move a thin market. But Occam's razor seems to imply that that's a side effect rather than the intent.

<comment><USER21> It's a money printing machine in the sense they printed 100s of millions of tethers whenever they wanted. Problem is no one will give you $1 for a tether (except a very thin market on Kraken). Instead, they used the tethers to buy bitcoin and pump the price, then cashed out their bitcoin to fiat in over-the- counter deals.

<comment><USER20> Say you print $100M USDT and do this, and the market moves up 10%, and you get lucky enough to find an OTC buyer willing to give you the market price. You rake in 110M for printing 100M. This is still a money printing business model, the market manipulation is just icing on the cake.

<comment><USER22> But printing the money is only useful in that it manipulates the market price to go that 10% higher which is where you make the profits.

If they printed that money and everyone found it worthless and the market didn't response they wouldn't have a business model.

Edit: I guess I should say that's the conjecture of those saying Tether was created purely for profit based on market manipulation. I don't have an inside knowledge on what was going through the heads of those at bitfinix who created it.

<comment><USER20> > But printing the money is only useful in that it manipulates the market > price to go that 10% higher which is where you make the profits.

If you print money you have free money. That's pure profit. Anything else is just a bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The new paper helped push down the already sinking price of Bitcoin and > other cryptocurrencies on Wednesday. The price of Bitcoin fell as much as 5 > percent after the report was published, approaching its lowest point of the > year. Bitcoin is now down more than 65 percent from the highs it hit late > last year.

Well, then. An obvious question is who involved in this paper has just sold Bitcoin short.

Maybe there's a disclaimer. But I've had no luck getting the paper. I've tried to get it from Sci-Hub, but they don't seem to have it yet. And Elsevier doesn't seem to accept Bitcoin. Anyone know a source?

<comment><USER24> [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066)

<comment><USER23> Nope. I clicked "Download This Paper" several times, and nothing happened. But then, I don't have an SSRN account, so that's not too surprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They seemed to have stopped posting in April but this person on Twitter was very active during the bull market in calling out the market manipulation by Bitfinex, [https://twitter.com/bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/bitfinexed) I cannot speak to the credibility but at the very least it was entertaining to read the tweats and responses.

</comment><comment><USER26> And this is news how? That Tether is a nothing has been painfully obvious to anyone paying attention. Of course, anyone paying attention has been avoiding comedy gold...

<comment><USER27> The news is that now we have a detailed 66 page economics paper written about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ridiculously terrible analysis. The obvious assessment is that when people use their tether to buy coins, thereby leaving exchanges, the price goes up as there is more demand. This generally occurs when investors believe they can get an asset for a steal, such as when the Bitcoin price goes down.

</comment><comment><USER29> One part of the article I really don't understand, "The researchers relied on the millions of transaction records that are captured on the public ledgers of all virtual currency transactions, known as the blockchain, to spot patterns." Why is he looking at the blockchain for trading irregularities? Nearly all of the big exchanges just use a database to record trades and no actual cryptocurrency is transferred around except at withdrawal and deposit, so how can the blockchain possibly provide any insight?

</comment><comment><USER30> Any ideas on why "they" appear unable to keep the price up at this point in time and continue fueling the hype? Already cashed out or just impossible to stem the tide of disillusioned people taking their losses and exiting?

<comment><USER31> Maybe they realized people were getting really suspicious of Tether and they couldn't keep creating tether ex nihilo?

<comment><USER32> The people behind tether need to be put in handcuffs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's kind of amazing to me that to this day Tether has yet to release an audit that proves a 1 to 1 relationship between USD to Tether.... We might not have seen the real bottom yet, if suspicion about Tether's insolvency eventually turns out to be true.

</comment><comment><USER34> This all rests on the assumption that Tethers are not backed by dollars as they are supposed to be. If they are backed, it is just a form of liquidity which is in no way manipulating the market, just creating ease of capital transfer between exchanges.

<comment><USER35> They have not completed any audits, and that astronomical dollar value backing up Tether is an extraordinary claim lacking extraordinary evidence. So, I would say it rests on the assumption that Tether is lying and have something to hide, backed by the fact that they haven't completed an audit.

The alternative, that this is not market manipulation, rests on blindly trusting that Tether is backed up by the dollars they claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> [https://hackernoon.com/meet-spoofy-how-a-single-entity- domin...](https://hackernoon.com/meet-spoofy-how-a-single-entity-dominates- the-price-of-bitcoin-39c711d28eb4)

</comment><comment><USER37> "The stock market — the daytime adventure serial of the well-to-do — would not be the stock market if it did not have its ups and downs. (...) And it has many other distinctive characteristics. Apart from the economic advantages and disadvantages of stock exchanges — the advantage that they provide a free flow of capital to finance industrial expansion, for instance, and the disadvantage that they provide an all too convenient way for the unlucky, the imprudent, and the gullible to lose their money — their development has created a whole pattern of social behavior, complete with customs, language, and predictable responses to given events. What is truly extraordinary is the speed with which this pattern emerged full blown following the establishment, in 1611, of the world's first important stock exchange — a roofless courtyard in Amsterdam — and the degree to which it persists (with variations, it is true) on the New York Stock Exchange in the nineteen-sixties. Present-day stock trading in the United States — a bewilderingly vast enterprise, involving millions of miles of private telegraph wires, computers that can read and copy the Manhattan Telephone Directory in three minutes, and over twenty million stockholder participants — would seem to be a far cry from a handful of seventeenth- century Dutchmen haggling in the rain. But the field marks are much the same. The first stock exchange was, inadvertently, a laboratory in which new human reactions were revealed. By the same token, the New York Stock Exchange is also a sociological test tube, forever contributing to the human species' self-understanding. The behaviour of the pioneering Dutch stock traders is ably documented in a book entitled "Confusion of Confusions," written by a plunger on the Amsterdam market named Joseph de la Vega; originally published in 1688, (...)" — John Brooks, in "Business Adventures" (1968)[32]

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow, who would have thought that crazy things could have happened in the absence of a centralized authority?

</comment><comment><USER39> Every time a bubble pops it seems people look for someone to blame that isn't the themselves, (i.e the people who rushed out and put more than they could afford to lose on a risky FOMO decision). I don't know about Tethers involvement, but that is what makes a bubble at the end of the day, not sure how much "manipulation" is needed once it gets started.

Expecting these types of articles will sell pretty well in coming weeks/months as people nursing their wounds look for the "people responsible".

</comment><comment><USER40> wall streeters are liars, opinionated and biased bunch, if there was any manipulation in unregulated crypto markets because they were nascent shouldn't surprise you, why? ponder upon the following:

home prices were not artificially inflated during 2008 crisis

usd or other fiat currencies are not artificially inflated (hint: negative interest rates)

stock buybacks are not artificially inflating stock prices

negative interest rates and bond buyback programs are not inflating economies

hedge funds are not inflated, they just market themselves with buzz words like quant investing, alpha etc. yet most of them can't beat S&P and charge 2-20

business of banks are not inflated, they use 50 year old technology like mainframes and are overstaffed and charge $50 to wire $10 internationally

tech companies are not inflated, they sell your freaking data and sell you ads so that you can buy $hit you don't need

\---- where there are humans involved, there will be greed

</comment><comment><USER17> It's worth noting, SSRN is not peer reviewed, but the NYTimes by omitting this important fact, one can mistake this paper for having the same credibility and soundness as a peer-reviewed paper. Anyone can submit to SSRN. The editorial standards are almost non-existent.

<comment><USER41> Yeah it's like you omitting the fact that it was published by two reputable finance professors who's research specializes in financial market manipulation.

<comment><USER42> Which is a major reason why peer review exists, to prevent authoritative people pushing their agenda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What continues to weird me out here is that Tether's price is _still_ basically $1, and there's basically no risk premium for those exchanges that trade BTC against Tether instead of actual USD. But when the two start spreading, the shit will _really_ hit the fan...

[http://www.untether.space/](http://www.untether.space/)

</comment><comment><USER44> So, the Bitcoin price rose because people bought it (via Bitfinex). The price fell when it was sold. I imagine doing a similar study on transactions from Coinbase (which has a big user base and volume) might reveal similar results.

Is there evidence that this was orchestrated or was done maliciously by a small group of actors. The headline is written like there is more to it.

<comment><USER45> You missed the part about the owners of Bitfinex running a pretend currency and bidding up BTC with it. That's why Bitfinex is different than Coinbase. It was like clockwork, you'd see a dip, a huge amount of Tether's would come online and boom huge volume at Bitfinex buying the dip and surging to new heights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Called it. I tried to tell this petroleum engineer from Texas last December that this whole thing, as awesome as blockchain is, is very suspect and that the market will crash unless the energy solved is solved simultaneously. The concept is brilliant but human beings are involved, so greed will be a factor too.

There you have it.

</comment><comment><USER47> I wonder how soon they are going to draw a connection between this and sec approved bc futures

</comment><comment><USER48> Both Ethereum and Bitcoin mining is very centralized, with the top four miners in Bitcoin and the top three miners in Ethereum controlling FAR FAR more than 51 % of the hash rate.

<comment><USER49> Can you back that up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The biggest bank of the Netherlands is holding an account of Tether. Do you think they are holding billions of fraudulent money without doing due diligence?

</comment><comment><USER51> You don't say? That wasn't obvious at all or anything. Good thing the nytimes was able to let us know in this hard-hitting report!

</comment><comment><USER52> ... as opposed to all other times, when its value is finding a natural balance and not at all driven by speculation, no sir. ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> statistical study finding __no correlation __with Bitcoin prices here.

[http://forklog.net/so-have-we-got-tethered/](http://forklog.net/so-have-we- got-tethered/)

Since both of them appear quite well researched you can deduct why one got 500 upvotes and the other one 98. Power of emotions..

</comment><comment><USER53> This reminds me of paying off debts using Bitcoin, where the dollars have to come from somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER54> Surprised were _, _ and of course _.

</comment><comment><USER50> this is simply not true. the causation and correlation was biased. Tether needs to print when there is volatility is just how the system works to keep the peg

</comment><comment><USER55> In other news, water is wet.

</comment><comment><USER56> Tether is just like a normal bank creating fake dollars. Nothing new or unexpected here.

</comment><comment><USER57> don't big whales have a lot of power in the Bitcoin market?

</comment><comment><USER58> Shocking.

I mean, a monetary system based on gambling, drugs, and smuggling can't be all bad?

</comment><comment><USER59> Omg, no shit? (If you downvote it's fair, I just couldn't resist it)

</comment><comment><USER60> No. Fucking. Shit.

</comment><comment><USER61> love to know how much of the HN community suspected this -- when can we get an instagram poll?? :)

</comment><comment><USER62> In other news, water is wet.

</comment><comment><USER63> No shit sherlock

</comment><comment><USER64> Could we change the title to that of the article, "Bitcoin's Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say"? It currently implies that the New York Times did independent research ("NYT and UT Austin: Bitcoin Prices Manipulated by Tether and Bitfinex") which does not seem to be the case.

I think this is a subtle point but, with the tension surrounding 'fake news', it's critical to distinguish reporting on another's research from disclosing one's own results.

<comment><USER65> Do people take the 'fake news' claims seriously? Even here in HN?

<comment><USER66> Active measures show up on here, this is a pretty big forum with a larger than average number of influential users after all. But typically those posts are down voted pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Real central banks share an incentive to inflate asset prices just as much as Crypto exchanges do (altcoin exchanges take profits in crypto and thus are exposed). The parallels to central banking are astounding to me. Except in crypto this happened at internet speed instead of over 50 years.

(I am not talking about money printing and interest rates, I'm talking about actual assets in bubbles like houses and stocks and cryptoassets. Central banks = nation states and nation states want growth in assets)

<comment><USER11> Real central banks regularly raise interest rates to _prevent_ over-inflation of asset prices.

<comment><USER68> I think banks have an equal and opposite position. Our debts are their assets. Inflation reduces the value of their assets.

<comment><USER69> > _Our debts are their assets. Inflation reduces the value of their assets._

And our assets are their debts.

<comment><USER70> So for states which have net debt position (including the US), it is to their advantage to have steady price inflation (i.e. currency value steadily being worth less and less in purchasing power), so that the debt is steadily reduced in "real terms" size. And this is in fact exactly what many/most governments seek to do, using a combination of fiscal policy levers, including issuing debt (government bonds) and also measures such as QE.

Note the "steady" in the above - part of the value of a fiat currency is in its price stability (which is linked/coupled to the confidence people have in it and in the issuing government).

In both direction (inflationary Vs deflationary) and in stability, this is markedly different from what is happening with BTC.

<comment><USER67> I think you can factor inflation out of it at the international level; USA wants more things priced in dollars (like oil) because we can manufacture dollars but nobody else can – an enormous edge. Which explains why USA foreign policy is what it is in one sentence.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Cost of Software-Based Memory Management Without Virtual Memory - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06789 <comment><USER2> So much of this is application/usage pattern dependent.

Remember those huge page benchmarks? All that perf gain was due to reduced TLB hits. Something you don't have to worry about if your turning paging off.

So, IMHO its not just the couple percent from TLB misses that slow things down, its the combination of a couple percent from TLB misses, a couple percent from the IOMMU, a couple percent from cgroups (yah i've seen double digit loss in some benchmarks from cgroups), or other random kernel features. All combining into significant loss.

IMHO, a large reason that things like ztpf/zseries mainframes still exist is because the code written ~50 years ago, is effectively bare metal transaction processing running on what works out to be basically a modern midrange server's L1 cache. When you add all the overhead of rewritting it "properly" in java with a framework, on a heavy weight virtualized OS it adds a couple orders of magnitude perf loss. So instead of buying a couple million $ machine from IBM your buying a few million in cloud services. Its no wonder IBM's remaining customers have such a hard time getting off the platform.

For a more in touch example, boot windows 3.1 in a VM on your laptop. Install a few apps, and give it a spin. The entire OS probably fits in the L3, and that is reflected by everything being basically instant.

<comment><USER3> I didn't think you could even run code not in an LPAR on a zSeries machine anymore. At which point you still have all the MMUs (and their associated TLBs) turned on. It's just like you're running a unikernel rather than something like Linux, so you should be able to replicate that on commodity hardware for far cheaper.

<comment><USER4> You can run Linux like a unikernel by limiting it to just one core at launch, and giving the other cores 100% to your app. No TLB thrashing, context switches, nothing. Just your code running without any interference whatsoever by the kernel or other processes...

And you can still SSH into your machine, run top, gdb, etc. :-)

<comment><USER3> That's not enough last time I checked. Hence kernels like Kitten that are Linux syscall compatible, but are designed for far less jitter.

[https://github.com/HobbesOSR/kitten](https://github.com/HobbesOSR/kitten)

<comment><USER5> The idea isn't to use the Linux kernel at all for the applications data path. You can have a Linux distro start your application and then once it's running you don't necessarily need to make any syscalls at all. You can pass through devices to userspace directly using tools like DPDK, SPDK, or NVMeDirect so that you could e.g. let Linux handle the gigabit ethernet management port and let DPDK control the 100G Mellanox card. You could boot the server off of some SATA SSDs and use SPDK to give your application direct access to the fancy optane 905P. Rather than using OS threads and have the kernel handle scheduling you can use green threads and still get concurrency even on a single core and still be able to write your code such that you can still meet any latency or throughput requirements you have.

You get all the benefits of a Linux server as far as orchestration and your control layer are concerned but also most of the benefits of running it bare metal like a unikernel.

<comment><USER3> > and still be able to write your code such that you can still meet any > latency or throughput requirements you have.

That's just not true. That's why for example, hard real time work using linux universally runs the real time code in a higher context than the kernel, not a lower one. Going back to the original topic, TPF like unikernels have tighter real time constraints than can be satisfied by Linux, even with all the preemption games you can play. Just like running standard real time code that's, say, managing the speed of turbines in a jet engine, can't be done in a regular linux process. If you really want Linux in either of these envs, you run something like l4linux or rtlinux which creates a higher privilege VMM like component that can give you real time guarantees.

That's because even when you're not using the kernel for data plane ops for syscalls, that core is still subject to kernel book keeping preemption events like TLB shootdown IPIs, and pretty much anything in a for_each_cpu block in the kernel.

<comment><USER5> I'll admit I shouldn't have said "any" latency requirements but I was speaking specifically about optional cooperative concurrency within an OS thread. I realize that this doesn't magically give you a platform on par with the kind of hard real time deterministic performance you get out of e.g. the new Cortex-R82.

But as for kernel bookkeeping tasks still causing preemptions, I'm talking about using isolcpus and nohz_full. Upon digging further there's the proposed task isolation mode patch to eliminate literally all possible preemptions but even without that in practice it seems like the common wisdom of using isolcpus and nohz_full is more or less sufficient. Here's a blog entry from May that tests this exact thing on a modern kernel without using the proposed patch.

[https://www.codeblueprint.co.uk/2020/05/03/reducing- jitter-o...](https://www.codeblueprint.co.uk/2020/05/03/reducing-jitter-on- linux-with-task-isolation.html)

Key point: "I've successfully used this technique to verify that I can run a bash busy-loop for an hour without entering the kernel."

There's certainly things you could do that would cause a preemption but to use your example, you're not going to get an IPI to flush some entry in the TLB if your program doesn't have some shared pages mapped in where the mapping changes. Writing to an mmapped file is going to cause the TLB to be modified once those dirty pages are flushed to disk and if you're only allowing that to happen by kthreads on a different processor then yeah, obviously it needs an IPI to do that. But you have the option of being as restrictive as you need to be for your particular use case. If you don't care about the minor latency increase of an occasional page fault you don't have to go all in on a full RTOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A well motivated exploration.

The paper largely:

1\. Lay the reasoning of direct physical memory programs. The primary argument is that the cumulated complexity in chip and OS, for virtual memory is too large; and that limits the design scope and retards advancement (huge page is used as an example). Meanwhile, 5 major changes needed in OS and application programs to use physical memory directly were listed, which appears fairly straightforward (no doubt more complexity is hidden).

2\. The paper then explored the performance penalty of supporting large continuous memory abstraction in such a new programming paradigm. They proposed 2 cases needed to support the abstraction: dynamic allocated stack, and tree-based array. Experiments are carried out to run modified program that addresses these 2 cases.

One thing I could not easily see is how their experiment rules out the existing virtual memory's impact to their modified programs, which are supposed to not need to use virtual memory.

<comment><USER7> Problems line up on memory fragmentation and dynamic allocation. Systems like Macintosh (before OS X) and Windows 1-3 handled this with an additional level of indirection (handles) and relocation/compaction. You could also do it with smarter code that explicitly tagged pointers so they could be updated when the data moved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What an odd coincidence. Just yesterday, I was benchmarking the overhead of turning on the MMU on an embedded system. It was about a 10% hit in performance, and this is without paging or even changing the mapping at all.

        In this paper, we envision a _physically addressed_software architecture, without address translation, in which the OS hands out fixed-size blocks of memory, and applications allocate data structures across those blocks.

This is essentially nearly every embedded system I've ever worked on. The dumbest possible memory allocator starts at a base and increments, never freeing memory except possibly on a major frame.

<comment><USER9> Doug Lea's malloc is not too difficult to port to embedded platforms and will probably perform better than more naive implementations. Probably need an sbrk or similar, not sure what else.

But IMO maybe paying that 10% is worth it in a lot of cases for the savings in design/development cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Text-only, non-PDF:

[https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/abs/2009.06789](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/abs/2009.06789)

(arxiv.org also blocks any request without a user-agent)

<comment><USER11> It's actually pretty cool of arxiv to provide a gzip of the source files for the pdf, here TeX:

[https://arxiv.org/format/2009.06789](https://arxiv.org/format/2009.06789)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How would you do things like ASLR and prevent people from guessing other software's memory allocation? Resetting a processes base pointer to 0 hides the information about other processes in the system that in a multi-tenant system you probably don't want leaking.

<comment><USER13> It's still possible to have memory _protection_ without having to do address translation. In a more extreme example, imagine every program on a system sharing the same 128-bit address space. There's plenty of room for everyone, TEXT, stacks, heaps, etc, and if you try to step on another program's memory you can still get a segfault. The Mill architecture sort of works this way, except it goes even further by leveraging this in a clever way to perform fast IPC.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7KQnrOEoWEY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7KQnrOEoWEY)

<comment><USER12> Right, I can imagine if you wrap memory allocation correctly you can do that. But CPUs have finite memory, so a program can guess where it sits in the real physical memory, and from that derive a potential list of programs that already exist. You can probably even run profiling and figure out _what_ other software is running, by their allocation totals.

<comment><USER14> I'd be interested in how feasible this would be. Even tiny address spaces like 256 bytes have tons of potential ways to fill it (factors): a process could have : 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or even 256 bytes. How do you identify which are running?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anybody remember Mac OS handles? One solution to lacking VM was to always use pointers to pointers. That way the underlying allocations could be moved around by the OS.</comment>


Mutex Nintendo - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/09/02/mutex-nintendo

<comment><USER2> Ugh, once again Marco succeeds in making Apple's way look like the only way. Here's two reasons why Marco and especially that hack Gruber are both fantastically deluded:

1) Nintendo is the Disney of Video Games. Lots of companies make cartoons & there's tons of theme parks, but there's only 1 Disney. It's a seal of quality, of fun, of playability. Nintendo's reputation, and the consumer mindshare is in this.

You fill yours and your kid's shelves with Disney books, movies, and Nintendo video games and other assorted merch. A $500 very breakable phone with a $100 a month of data services for my 9 year old? I don't think so. A $130 handheld with a few games he's earned from doing chores that he can beat around, drop and otherwise drag and kick around is where it's at. Sure you see the occasional bored kid at a family dinner using their mom's phone to play angry birds. But you see 20x as many with their Nintendo xDS playing Mario Brothers.

Nintendo generally makes lots of money by using slightly older technology to make this year's great new gaming experience. They've survived generations of very competitive onslaught. They've _never_ targeted the high end gamer...from the beginning.

"Nintendo needs the profits of the high end" is quite simply, incorrect. Nintendo profits from pretty much every unit of everything they move. And on top of moving games and systems they have a substantial merchandising business probably second to only Disney.

The only surprise is that Nintendo hasn't been able to get into theme parks and cartoons in a bigger way. A Disney/Nintendo cross licensing for characters would be _amazing_. Bring your kids to Walt Disney <insert park>, your daughter gets to meet all her princesses and your son gets to hang out with Samus and Mario.

2) "But but but", Marco argues, "people are getting used to paying <$10 for a game". Yeah, but those games suck compared to a new Mario title. But let's say that suddenly amazing $4 games started coming out.

Let's play a game, given that kids abuse systems so badly and selection of Apple handhelds is...limited. Would I rather buy a free/cheap Android phone for my kid to abuse or an expensive and fragile iPhone? I can guarantee it would be the one with the lower replacement cost, especially after the first couple phone go in the toilet or down the stairs.

But let's be serious, there's zero possibility that Nintendo will go the way of Sega in the next generation or two. They _dominate_ handhelds in a way Microsoft used to dominate the desktop business and the WiiU, while a technological disappointment in some ways was a carefully calculated system designed to ensure that the big N never lost a dollar on any part of their vertically integrated gaming empire that they sold. There's no such thing as "loss leader" at Nintendo.

And let's face it, phone gaming frankly sucks compared to holding a DS and working a d-pad.

\- edit -

for _anybody_ to get what Nintendo is about should read up on Gunpei Yokoi's "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考) It makes analysis like this really seem very uninformed about the company.

<comment><USER3> The problem I see is twofold. Like Disney, Nintendo is in danger of recycling its old franchises again and again. How much innovation has there been to the Mario franchise? Do we really need another hundred or so Pokemon?

Like Apple, Nintendo has seen great success by adopting the Blue Ocean Strategy with the Wii, but now is expected by the public to repeat that success with further innovation. Innovation is hard, and WiiU isn't very innovative.

Neither of these are insurmountable challenges, partly because the public (either kids or adults) is full of casual gamers who don't really care for a lot of innovative in either their games or their hardware. But it's a bit disappointing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Key phrase:

 _" But I was always thinking of making iOS games and making their own hardware as mutually exclusive."_

For Nintendo, it is. As far as I recall, Nintendo _never_ released one its games on another platform. And Satoru Iwata (Nintendo's CEO) explained it lately [1]. Relevant quote:

 _" By integrating hardware and software, we can be unique. And because we have hardware and software developers in the same building, they stimulate each other."_

Have you ever bought a Nintendo system _just_ for its Nintendo games? I know I did. Several times. The N64 for Mario Kart and Mario 64, the GameCube for Mario Sunshine, the Wii for Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart again...

Maybe Nintendo looks like an idealist in a corporate-driven business, but consumers are somewhat sensible to Nintendo's commitment and that's why they're still successful.

It can backfire someday. Currently, the Wii U is sold at a loss [2]. I don't know how it will sort iself out. A bit too early to tell.

Anyway, Nintendo games on iOS would be _hugely_ successful, but it's neither in their DNA nor in their _long-term_ business strategy, no matter what gaming platform you're talking about (because yes, iOS has become a gaming platform).

[1] [http://www.gamespot.com/news/iwata-explains-why-nintendo- won...](http://www.gamespot.com/news/iwata-explains-why-nintendo-wont-release- its-games-on-other-platforms-6412687)

[2] [http://www.gamespot.com/news/nintendo-continues-to-sell- wii-...](http://www.gamespot.com/news/nintendo-continues-to-sell-wii-u- hardware-at-a-loss-6412671)

<comment><USER5> Nintendo did a mario game for the phillips CDI ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Mario](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Mario))

<comment><USER6> The Phillips deal was essentially a way to annoy Sony, with whom they had a contract that went sour. They weren't involved in any of the CDI games, and they were all horrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it interesting that these hardcore Apple guys talk about putting Nintendo games on iOS when they support a company that makes their own hardware to put their own software on it only. Nintendo has enough money saved up to think of something and I don't see them giving up on hardware. I like that Nintendo takes great care of there games just as Apple does with their software and hardware. Nintendo's strongest business is handheld games yet they should make iOS games. It just doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, if you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget on you, you don't take a Nintendo DS, you take your telephone - it'll give you some gaming on the go, whilst keeping you connected, allowing you to take photos and have a GPS.

Nintendo has to compete against that, and it is not easy. On the other hand, Nintendo could make an absolute killing by selling a gamepad accessory for the iPhone - extra battery life plus a decent d-pad/thumbsticks would be an easy sell for gamers. You could probably even price it at a pretty steep mark-up and make nearly as much profit as they must be making on the DS. Make all Nintendo games compatible with it, and run a licensing scheme so that other game companies can list themselves as compatible with the hardware.

This strategy allows Nintendo to continue innovating where they have successfully done so in the past - specifically with clever input devices. It's been a long time since Nintendo could claim to rule the roost for things like raw processing power, so leave Apple to do the heavy lifting there.

<comment><USER9> >if you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget on you

When would you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget?

<comment><USER8> It does actually happen to me - do you never do that? But I agree, it was an inelegant expression of my argument. I was trying to get across the idea that a phone will do everything for you - you don't have to buy a separate gadget for games, and many people won't buy a separate gadget, either for money, or because they don't want the hassle of having to recharge yet another device each evening, or whatever. I know plenty of people that used to use Nintendo DSes all of the time, that have ended up leaving theirs in a drawer for these sorts of reasons...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best article I've ever read that explained Nintendo's product strategy was written in 2005 by Daniel Cook of lostgarden.com (founder of Spry Fox, creators of Triple Town amongst other games) on the eve of the launch of the Wii, and discusses how Nintendo fundamentally needs a creative environment based around product innovation and new input types that it has control over:

[http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre- innovation...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation- strategy.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I disagree. Mobile gaming is a vast wasteland with a shitty business model. Either you sell a game for peanuts or you go to a freemium model and not-so- transparently squeeze your customers for every penny they are willing to pay. There's no benefit to Nintendo. Alos, touch controls are very limiting for a lot of genres.

Maybe when Apple and Google get serious about mobile gaming, it'll make sense to release AAA, not until then.

However, I do like the idea of targeting mobile platforms as companion devices to Nintendo games or consoles. For example, It would cool if you could use an iPad or iPhone, in lieu of the Wii GamePad. SmartGlass-type stuff is cool and detracts nothing from the platform. Slick mobile app access to your account is awesome. Nintendo should have a presence, but releasing standalone games today is not necessary (didn't save Sonic).

<comment><USER12> We even have developers moving from IOS to the 3ds because of the better margins.

[http://gamerthumb.com/2013/08/01/mobile-dev-abandons- overcro...](http://gamerthumb.com/2013/08/01/mobile-dev-abandons-overcrowded- ios-android-for-3ds-eshop/)

Why would Nintendo go to being lost in the crowd like that.

I understand that both Marco and Gruber see that Nintendo would bring a lot of games that almost seem tailor made to the IOS platform. Animal Crossing is almost a perfect cell phone, but one that is unsullied by micro transactions and the usual mobile bullshit. But they both seem to have a view that what is good for Apple is good for everyone sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nintendo isn't doomed. Period.

People have been saying this since the Gamecube days, and what happened after that? Nintendo Wii. This link[1] has an enumeration of quotes saying things like "Nintendo should stop making hardware", dating back from _2003_.

[1]: [http://kotaku.com/5986942/nintendos-doomed-they-should-go- th...](http://kotaku.com/5986942/nintendos-doomed-they-should-go- third+partysaid-everyone-ever)

 _Footnote: I loathe Gawker as much as most people in here, but it 's the only place I could find a compilation of such _quotes.

<comment><USER7> Admittedly they just need better hardware. If Apple can sell you an iPod Touch for 229$ there isn't any excuse for not making a higher quality system. At least some higher resolution please.

<comment><USER14> Eh. I think Nintendo has (justifiably) given up chasing gamers who prioritise things like resolution- they'll all be fighting Xbox vs PS3 until the end of time.

Instead Nintendo uses cheaper technology to create cheaper gaming experiences. I, for one, am glad they did. I bought a Wii, never bothered with an Xbox or PS3. And I did it for the games, not for the specs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Meh, saying IOS is a gaming platform is a joke. It is a race to the bottom crapfest. There are good games among the chaff but seriously why would Nintendo go from 35 dollars a unit to 10 dollars or less a unit. They will not.

<comment><USER16> The model for many of the iOS games is to sell you in-app purchases, the cost of the game itself doesn't mean much in that system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope that whatever happens to Nintendo, they keep making great games. The hardware needs to be "good enough" to not get in the way. As long as the games are fun, I will keep buying them.

We have a Nintendo 64, a GameCube, and a Wii in my apt, because there are versions of MarioKart and SmashBros that are best on a particular system. But the games, not the system, are the reason we keep them all.

<comment><USER18> I completely agree but the N64 and GC, at least in their European incarnations, look like crap on modern TVs. They were probably fuzzy back in the day too, but the Dreamcast looks a lot better than a GC and they're from a similar epoch. The last under-the-TV console I bought was a Gamecube BTW, so it isn't like I'm spoilt by XBox or anything.

The Euro N64 didn't have RGB and (obviously) neither have HDMI and building the right cable for the GC is... non trivial. Since they were from the 4:3 era you either get a stretched screen or black borders. On the GC it seems to force my TV to stretch all the time even if I set it to 4:3, which is a bit annoying. At least the Game Boy, DS, etc have their own screens built in so this is less of a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Alternatively, Nintendo should make smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nah I disagree with this. I think Nintendo should instead open up the 3DS platform to indie developers, ala Android and iOS. There are top notch games on 3DS and there could be even more if they made it easier to develop and self publish.

Plus, gaming with buttons is so much better than touchscreen gaming, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER21> Square Enix already has these $20 games (old Final Fantasies)

<comment><USER22> These ports belong to one of the worst money-grabs in history. Look at the reviews: Numerous bugs, no updates for recent iphone/ipads and worst of all, the controls just suck for everyone who played the real games or is serious about completing them. [obviously a problem of most touch ports].

I gladly keep a mint SFC with FF3 and Mario Kart packed away than spending a cent on pseudo reminiscent experiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder why many Apple faithful are obsessed with what Nintendo does or doesn't do, should do or shouldn't do. Maybe they're secretly angry that the current CEO of Nintendo started programming on a Commodore PET, and not on an Apple device.

<comment><USER3> I see a lot of similarities between the two companies. A willingness to think different in pursuit of their own hardware standards and form factors (remember how the Gamecube used mini-discs and had a handle for carrying?), huge success from pursuing the Blue Ocean Strategy, the capability to inspire consumer cults (possibly because they are seen as somewhat "purer" than their competitors), and even similar aesthetics (clean off-white plastic-porcelain hardware, the lower-case letter 'i').

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Worth reading if for no other thing this bit of wisdom followed by gaming company examples, like I use Microsoft and its Office competitors after the introduction of Windows 3.0 showed they'd lost their ability to write software that basically worked:

" _Over the last few years, I've learned a lot about competition. The biggest lesson has been that in most cases, products and companies live and die by their own actions, not their competitors'._ "

<comment><USER25> Eh, I like the article, but Marco kind of undercuts this little pearl of wisdom not too far down:

"... Sega threw away the Genesis' tremendous fanbase and success by sloppily releasing the Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn, all of which were overpriced, _uncompetitive_ , and poorly supported by game developers and Sega itself."

No company exists in a vacuum. This is why we promote competition and eschew monopolies, right?

<comment><USER24> Depends. Earned monopolies are not so bad, and Microsoft earned their early Windows 3.x one. At least compared to early OS/2 (crippled by IBM policy limiting it to 286 mode) and everything else I tried at the time.

And not following this field (RSI means I had to give up on games decades ago) I don't know what the author means by "uncompetitive", but if that's in concert with the overpriced, as in less features for more money, it's all of a piece, even if not as dire as the Windows Office examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think a move away form physical media would be a first step. Secondly, the hardware and even software should double as a media center. Lastly, it would be awesome of they had a way to incorporate the 3ds as an optional controller for certain RPGs and such.

All in all, Nintendo may not have its former glory, but it's still a strong contender in the space. They just need to hit their stride again.

<comment> qu4z-2 I'm pretty sure you can buy most 3DS or WiiU games as downloads these days, if that's what you mean. Personally I like my 3DS carts. WiiU discs less so, 'cause I don't already have the WiiU in my hands/can't fit the discs in my pockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can someone explain to me the argument that it's hardware margins that are vital to the bottom line for Nintendo and not software ones? It seems to me the opposite of usual truths when it comes to hardware margins vs software margins.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nintendo already has a device that targets mobile gamers.

</comment><comment><USER29> I loved the Sega Saturn, for what it's worth. Army Men on the Saturn is the first time I played a multiplayer shooter on a console. It was great.

<comment><USER30> I also loved the Sega Saturn. Sega Rally on the Saturn is a deliciously well- tuned game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is not going to happen as long as Nintendo is still making its own hardware. They are going to keep focusing on their own platform.

One could argue Nintendo should make games for the Xbox One / PlayStation 4 if these consoles outsell the Wii U as badly as it looks like they will. But they're not going to.

The reason Nintendo is flailing right now is that the 3DS released with poor battery life and too expensive. The Wii U released with no "must play" games even on the horizon, let alone available at launch. (Still only one side scrolling Mario game, no Zelda or 3D Mario even announced, and Mario Kart is a ways off.)

Marco is right that Nintendo did this to themselves, but both Marco and Gruber know nothing about Nintendo if they think there is any chance of them releasing any iOS games.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup—A website builder to sell films like Louis CK - <AUTHOR>

I would like some feedback on my startup: http://filmpage.com. It is an About.me style page builder to create a page to sell your DVD like Louis CK.<p>If you're interested in working on the project with me, please email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. <comment><USER2> First off, if its a digital download its not a DVD now is it?

Now beyond that, I geek out on design so here's my thoughts. I'm only going to say the things I don't like because I'm wasting your time if I only say the things I do like (If I don't mention it, assume its awesome and pat yourself on the back for it, because overall you did a great job). You've obviously got a cool concept thats headed in the right direction, but the design needs some tweaks.

Make the nav bar smaller. I'd go 60px at max for the topbar. Also less white border on the bottom. 1-2px max there. Scale back the shadow on the bar as well, too much shadow says "I just learned how to use shadow". With drop shadow less is more. My rule of thumb is if you notice the shadow, its too much. You obviously want it to be there to add depth, but you don't want it to be distracting. While your at it, scale the shadow back on the screenshot and other bars as well. Again, less is more. Take a look at apple.com for a good, subtle use of shadows. (I'd even go less opacity than they do, but thats just me)

Green buttons get a bad rep for some sort of psychological connection with spending money. Don't know if thats voodoo web development or not, but I tend to stay away from them.

New money bag icon.

The footer is too tall. Make it only as big as it needs to be.

</comment><comment><USER3> clickable <http://filmpage.com></comment>


Neutered random number generator let man rig million dollar lotteries - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/04/neutered-random-number-generator-let-man-rig-million-dollar-lotteries/ <comment><USER2> Why is any major lottery generating random numbers with a computer? California shows the mechanical ball drop machine on live TV for each draw.[1]

[1] [http://www.calottery.com/happenings/lottery-tv/draw- videos](http://www.calottery.com/happenings/lottery-tv/draw-videos)

<comment><USER3> There are so many different games across different states that you can't televise them all. You could at least televise the generation of a random seed, perhaps, but you'd still need faith in the individual RNGs.

<comment><USER4> You could put on youtube. Each lottery that makes you a shit ton of money has a $5000 lottery ball machine cost. Or even a computer that looks at 1 lava lamp per lottery and uses it as it's constantly regenerating seed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The newly discovered evidence underscores the difficulty of maintaining > trustworthy computer systems that do what they're intended to do. In this > case, it took only one insider to defeat the auditing that the lottery > system was required to undergo. It's not clear if officials have tightened > the requirements to make future tampering harder.

Wouldn't hurt to open source it too. It's not a silver bullet as you still need to ensure the build is stable and the final product is actually running that same code, but at least it gives the public something to eyeball. That plus separation of duties (develop/validate/deploy) delegated to separate people is as good as it gets. To get around that you'd need collusion across all the groups and if you've got that, you're totally screwed anyway.

<comment><USER6> I just ran across this in the book _Seeking Chances_ by Emanuele Bardone:

> Interestingly, one of the techniques used by the banks to dupe the rating > agencies [before the 2008 economic crisis] was to reverse-engineer the > computer models the agencies used to devise their ratings. Reverse- > engineering was facilitated by the fact that the rating agencies made their > computer models public. Thus the banks could trick them starting from > answers and then working backward to get the intended result.

It would seem open-source is not always advisable when it comes to sensitive information.

<comment><USER5> > It would seem open-source is not always advisable when it comes to sensitive > information.

For behavior models like risk ratings sure. A similar example is threat and fraud detection; if scammers know what you're checking it'd be easier to work around.

In this case though the output is supposed to be a "fair" random number. If knowing how it's generated allows you to be able to predetermine it, i.e. exactly what the offender in this case did, then the code itself is bad and public eyeballs might find it.

<comment><USER7> This also assumes that the "eyeballs" looking at the code are doing it for the greater good and not personal profit. Given a big enough jackpot, do you really believe that the person who finds a loophole in the algorithm will do the right thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe he should've been more clever about hiding his attack -- for example if the program runs on the next date, it should delete the infected dll and overwrite it with the original unmodified one.

You can go more clever and deeper with this sort of attack, like in this story: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst- nightmare/answe...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst- nightmare/answer/Mick-Stute?srid=RBKZ&amp;share=1)

<comment><USER9> This man has nothing on Formula 1 ECU coders. Their levels of deception and track covering are beyond impressive.

<comment><USER10> Examples?

<comment><USER9> Benetton in 1994: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Formula_One_cheating_cont...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Formula_One_cheating_controversy)

Once the FIA started demanding access to ECU's, programmers learned their system and figured out ways to produce faked checksums before the race, so that they matched with the post-race checksum. That is, after the traction control and ABS programs self-deleted on the parade lap post-race.

This was common knowledge in the paddock, but no one could prove anything. Even then, everyone was doing it so the field eventually became level. Cheating and "pushing the rules" has a very long and storied past in F1. If you're not caught cheating every few years, most would assume you're not trying hard enough to win.

Edit: Here's a link to a Reddit thread about McLaren's fiddle break. It was a dual braking setup that allowed the driver to only apply the rear brakes. Photographers noticed that sometimes only the rear brakes glowed red instead of all brakes glowing red. Many accused them of using traction control and ABS. In reality, it was just an independent braking circuit (which was illegal). [https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/1ux791/an_old_f1_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/1ux791/an_old_f1_shot_of_mclarens_fiddle_brake_a_second/)

<comment><USER11> Can you point me at some reading material regarding Benetton's self-modifying code and the checksums stuff?

Everything I'd read on the topic - until now - had said they had a hidden mention item - "Option 13" \- that managed the (illegal) traction control, and when confronted with it, they said it was too difficult to remove, but they'd never used it. (Honest, guv!)

<comment><USER9> Rumor was that the other teams developed the self-modifying code, not Benetton. This is all rumor and speculation though. No one's going to come out now and say "Yeah we totally cheated back then" because the FIA could reverse standings and vacate championships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Voting machines have less scrutiny

</comment><comment><USER13> _computer security official for a US state lottery association_

I thought people who would be associated with the lottery association were disqualified from participating?

<comment><USER14> He was. He gave the winning numbers to his brother. Who then tried to claim it anonymously somehow. In fact they went to such convoluted lengths to cover it up, the money ended up unclaimed the first time they did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A single person winning six times would arouse suspicion

<comment><USER16> As ever, greed is the downfall of the ill-prepared criminal. He could probably have won a ~$2 million prize once, left it at that, and got away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _The drawing had to happen on three particular days of each year, two > certain days of the week and at a certain time of day._

Why do these machine have a concept of time and date in the first place?

<comment><USER18> It mentions DLL injection in the article so it looks like the machine is running Windows.

This is one of the downsides of using a commodity OS for absolutely everything, you end up with edge cases where one size fits nobody.

Throw in that the people commissioning the systems are not computer scientists and/or applied mathematicians and you end up with this kind of thing.

I'm cynical, if I had to design a machine to draw lottery numbers it would look like the old style rolling tumbler machines (which is what we use in the UK for the lottery[1]).

If I needed to handle lots and lots of draws I'd keep the physical machines and use computer vision to handle reading the balls with a completely separate system recording the draw as well (so I have an audit trail) EDIT: In fact thinking about it I'd have _two_ CV systems written independently by different organisations/teams with any disagreement halting the draw and raising a flag.

Setting it up so that the person who writes the CV code has no access to the physical machine would be straightforward enough and isolating the recording system from the rest as well.

Essentially no one person in the loop should have access to all the components otherwise this stuff probably _will_ happen.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_%28United_Kin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_%28United_Kingdom%29#Machine_appearances)

<comment><USER19> There is a company which makes ball-tumbler machines for state lotteries.

One security feature it has it that each ball has it's unique RFID tag embedded inside, and the machine checks the tag on ball entry, and only allows a ball in if certain conditions are met. And I think that it can use that RFID tag to also read the output (so no CV is needed).

Some use a ball set only once, they throw it away after a run and use a new one on each draw, and this RFID mechanism can also enforce that (disallow previously used ids).

Even if someone messes with the RFID tags, the (transparent) machine and the output is still visually checked by a commission on each run.

Of course, when this information became public knowledge, immediately some conspiracy theory emerged that the RFID tag can be used to allow only "favored" balls to exit the machine as winners (which is not possible, only entry can be disallowed, not exit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> But secure crypto is bad, and can't be trusted folks! We _need_ to have overseers for all strong crypto and key escrow.

They key escrow couldn't possibly become compromised, could it?

<comment><USER21> Better to let a hundred thousand innocent systems get hacked than to let a single Byte go undeciphered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cudos to the devloper for a long thought out hack. 2005 to 2011. I'm not saying, what he did was right, but he sure was patient about it.

<comment><USER23> I don't think he was patient about it. The contrary -- from what I gathered he didn't wait till 2011 to take advantage of the hack, instead he took advantage of it every year from 2005 to 2011, 6 times.

Which is also why they caught him.

<comment><USER24> He won the lottery 6 times, and on similar dates, after working for the lottery? Why did he think he could get away with that? There are so many opportunities for him to cover his tracks and he missed pretty much all of them...

<comment><USER23> Too confident in his own smarts and the idiocy of others...

It could be dumbness, but it's also a common trait in high IQ people -- I've read stories and know personally lot of them who end up badly, similarly or otherwise...

<comment><USER25> much more an actuaire saying, hey! too much winners, your insurance willl not cover your exceptionnal loss. Where is the 50% fat margin? And then they tried to figure out if cheating was involved.

Still, randomness being random, one day should happen that there are too much winers some years. Else, maybe the cheaters are on the other side of the game.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>