Librem 5 phone shows the cost of being different - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands-on-a-proof-of-concept-for-the-open-source-smartphone/ <comment><USER3> I again quote /u/whiteinge on Reddit¹:

" _Let 's assume the project is over-promised and will be late and under- deliver. […] None of that is as bad as NO smartphone alternative to Google and Apple, let alone an open and privacy-focused alternative. I'm a Linux user and I very much want a Linux phone. And there has been so, so many false starts and near misses over almost a decade. My patience and goodwill for Purism and the Librem 5 is effectively infinite. It's not over until they shutter the doors or can the project. Until that happens I will continue to hope they limp over that finish line no matter what._"

1\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/dm2smy/is_the_libre...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/dm2smy/is_the_librem_5_being_targeted_in_a_viral_media/f54gaur/)

<comment><USER4> There are also the Pinephone and perhaps the Fairphone, for varying degrees of openness. Maybe a few others even?

Neither of these are completely in the open but all three are probably good enough for making an enthusiast operating system run. They are all variations of relatively well known, sometimes even documented, hardware, with lots of necessary peripherals with non-free firmware blobs.

Some make efforts to only communicate with these non-free peripherals over standardized protcols, which is the "good enough" part. For community oriented mobile operating systems, 2020 is probably going to be the best year yet.

Price is also a factor. Many more people will tinker with a $200 phone than a $800 one. It's probably better to cut corners with your first model in order to hit a price point that gets enthusiasts on board. Raspberry Pi did that and have gotten incrementally more open with time.

<comment><USER5> > It's probably better to cut corners with your first model in order to hit a > price point that gets enthusiasts on board.

Disagree. Viral is more important for a new product like this. Which means beating naysayers over the head with things working undeniably well.

See: Tesla Model S, Surface tablets made by MS themselves, Google's Nexus line of phones.

<comment><USER6> >See: Tesla Model S, Surface tablets made by MS themselves, Google's Nexus line of phones.

All bad things to compare to. In all of your examples, these lines were all established long after the companies entered the market. This is a device trying to create a new ecosystem from a company that hasn't produced a phone before for an ecosystem that basically doesn't exist yet.

Right now it should be seen as a prototype (and it is). But whereas Google, Tesla, and Microsoft have large numbers of engineers these projects rely quite a bit on community support. Imagine if Tesla launched the Roadster but couldn't service it themselves, instead relying on independent garages to figure out the best ways to work out servicing and bugfixes?

For these projects it's better to keep the specs modest (less thermal issues/faults), the price affordable (more developers can afford to purchase one), and the perception of support good (so people aren't on the fence because the manufacturer calls it quits or goes out of business a year later). It's especially important to keep the price low enough that the first models could be seen as hobbyist/secondary phones because making a phone ecosystem is really friggin hard.

Viral works when you're trying to sell a videogame, not when you're trying to create an ecosystem from basically scratch (or even just carve out a niche). No matter how Librem tries to market itself, it's a niche product with limited appeal especially regarding their price point. In this sense, too much attention from the wrong kind of consumer at this time will be their undoing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The most frustrating part of the Librem 5 right now is easily the power > management, which isn't nearly complete. The phone is dead nearly all the > time, because so many basic charging features we normally take for granted > don't work. First, the phone doesn't seem like it has any kind of idle power > mode. It is hot from the minute you power on until the battery dies, even > with the screen off. You can't leave the phone on the charger overnight to > charge it—you'll wake up to a dead phone. I think what is happening is that > there's no trickle charge, so the phone charges to full, then stops > charging, then the battery dies.

Yikes. In my mind, this isn't actually a phone in its current form. It's like a small desktop computer put into a plastic case with a battery.

I have never seen the case up close until this point. It truly looks like a crude hobby project, almost to the level of being 3D printed.

I have no idea why Purism didn't leave most of the hardware design to someone who already has a generic modern smartphone done and completed, then they could have added on to it by swapping out some proprietary bits. Instead we get this Frankenstein of a project, sold to the public long before it's done (along with marketing copy that makes the company look unethical - <USER2> should be big warnings on the store page about how far along this project truly is and what you're getting for your $750).

The worst part about this is that it makes all open source projects look bad. It makes them look like a bad compromise. And that's not true at all - a lot of open source projects are great alternatives, and many are even better than their proprietary competitors.

$750 gets you an iPhone with sophisticated cameras, the fastest mobile processor on the market, and software support for 5 years if not longer. Walk into stores across the country to get service and support. What Purism is telling us is, essentially, if you want to take a stand against the proprietary world, you have to _give up everything_. You have to use a chunky, ugly, crudely assembled phone. You have to give up acceptable power management. And you _still_ have to pay $750, all of this on the cusp of Apple releasing a new $399 phone according to rumors, Google selling $399 phones, and budget brands like Motorola providing an absolutely acceptable experience for under $200 on some models.

<comment><USER8> > _I have no idea why Purism didn 't leave most of the hardware design to > someone who already has a generic modern smartphone done and completed, then > they could have added on to it by swapping out some proprietary bits._

Either you didn't actually read the article or you're being intentionally obtuse. They very clearly state the reason that they couldn't use the regular supply chain. All the usual suppliers refused to work within the "confines" of OSS.

They were lucky to find a CPU that works at all within their definition and needs. If you read the article you'd know that the author spends the entire first page explaining the compromises that were made in favor of OSS. There is no supply chain for this sort of project. Purism is the first company to actually attempt it.

Look, I have no horse in this race, I'm a happy Win and iOS user, I have no plans on changing that. But I commend the effort and definitely believe in the mission.

OSS hardware _is_ a compromise right now! That's just a fact. People like you who can only see the flaws and refuse to understand how we got here are unhelpful.

<comment><USER7> I may seem unhelpful here, but I'm also taking this from the perspective of a potential customer.

If you read Purism's marketing on their website, read the blog posts, and the verbiage on the store page, and then you run out and buy this phone, you'll be under the impression that you're getting something much more close to functional than it actually is.

Essentially, this product should be labeled as an early development kit. But the marketing on the website is even trying to sell this to parents, who should absolutely not buy this phone for their children (because it's not done and it'll be dead anytime you try to call them because the power management is broken).

<comment><USER9> The revision being sold (Evergreen) hasn't been released at all yet, it's scheduled for Q2. To get the earlier revisions that are being shipped already you had to explicitly opt in and double confirm via e-mail that you're aware of possible issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article doesn't mention the PinePhone, which I consider pretty shoddy journalism.

The PinePhone is a competing project with slightly lower specs, similarly good FOSS purity, that is slimmer, ships today and _costs 1 /5 of the price_.

They clearly market it as being for tinkerers at this point and all the software support Pine64 is working on is getting the kernel running, leaving the rest up to the 5 (!) involved distribution communities.

<comment><USER9> Disclaimer: I work for Purism.

I have received a PinePhone (early "BraveHeart" batch - the regular one doesn't ship yet, mind you) a few days ago. Although the specs seem "slightly lower" on the paper, I think it's important to note that Librem 5 has twice as fast RAM bandwidth and its GPU easily goes rounds around the PinePhone's. The eMMC is also around 30% faster on the Librem 5, and its killswitches are actually usable in everyday scenarios. The difference is quite easily perceivable when using both devices with the same software. It is a pretty neat device, sure, but I think it's important to be honest about how those phones compare to each other.

Also, PinePhone requires firmware blobs being stored on your rootfs for WiFi, Bluetooth, and (optionally) camera autofocus. Librem 5 has them stored on separate flash, making the peripherals that need them self-contained as per FSF recommendations. Both devices are pretty FLOSS-friendly in my book, but some people do care about that difference.

<comment><USER11> More information on blobs for the PinePhone [https://www.pine64.org/2020/01/24/setting-the-record- straigh...](https://www.pine64.org/2020/01/24/setting-the-record-straight- pinephone-misconceptions/) "The WiFi module communicates with the CPU over SDIO and BT is over UART – neither of these connections provide direct access to CPU memory." Also, for the modem, it doesn't have any shared memory with the CPU. Communication is via USB and I2S.

<comment><USER9> Yes; the interfaces are pretty much the same as on Librem 5 - the differences are in WiFi/BT firmware blob loading and the fact that L5 has them on replaceable M.2 cards, while on PinePhone they're soldered to the board.

Librem 5 also has a separate GPS module, while PinePhone uses the one integrated to the GSM modem.

(PinePhone BraveHeart edition also has some sensors connected via the modem, but AFAIK that's going to change in later revisions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We should all buy a librem 5 phone as a show of support.

<comment><USER13> Or maybe rather buy the Pine Phone that comes from a company with actual embedded/mobile hardware experience (Pine64 boards, Pinebook, etc.) and based on early prototypes seems to work fine ? Not to mention costing less & not being shrouded in tons of marketing like Librem 5 does.

<comment><USER14> Both should be encouraged

<comment><USER7> After reading the article it seems like Purism made fundamental design mistakes and started selling this phone to the public long before it's ready.

I don't think that should be encouraged. If you follow their blog and product description page and then place an order you're just about hoodwinked into buying something that's claimed to be at least mostly working.

I don't think that's ethical, even if the hardware and software itself is.

<comment><USER15> I just want my devices to be as upgradeable and future proof as my desktop is. If giving my money to either of these companies brings me to closer to that dream, I'll do it. Though the pinephone's $150 is a much better way to show my support than the librem's $750+

<comment><USER16> PinePhone's $150 currently does not finance the software development in any way, and will bring just around $10 per device in the future to external software teams (and I believe the price of the final batch is supposed to increase a bit).

Librem 5's price, on the other hand, finances a whole team of software developers that develop things people can (and already do) also use on their PinePhones. It also helps to move the SoC support forward, as PinePhone mostly relies on already existing sunxi efforts.

If you can't afford a Librem 5, get a PinePhone, but if you're explicitly about getting "closer to your dream" then Librem 5 seems like a much better option when it comes to showing support.

<comment><USER13> In the end I think Pine Phone actually does more for open mobile software development than Purism. Rather than sponsoring a new mobile OS effort built mostly from scratch (Pure OS) financed from selling a limmited number of expensive devices, the Pine Phone provides a cheap and accessible platform for all the existing mobile OS efforts (Sailfish OS, Ubuports, Plasma Mobile, Maemo Leste, etc.). As far as I can tell as being part of the Sailfish & Maemo community, this is working quite nicely with a lot of interest and work being done by community members to get Sailfish OS and Memo Leste running on the Pine Phone (and also the Fxtec Pro, another nice new reasonably open device with a hardware keyboard).

<comment><USER9> > a new mobile OS effort built mostly from scratch (Pure OS)

I'm not sure where does that come from. PureOS is a very lightweight Debian derivative which is built around regular GNOME. Majority on the work happens directly on upstream and benefits everyone even on desktops. Even parts that were actually built from scratch, like phosh, are being built with interoperability and reuse in mind (you can run phosh on any layer-shell compatible Wayland compositor, like sway; and run phoc with other shells as well, such as MATE). Also, libhandy is meant to augment existing Gtk widgetset, as opposed to some other efforts like UBports or Plasma Mobile that require you to completely rewrite your applications to use new QtQuick frameworks, as there's no effort being made to make regular Qt Widgets usable on phones.

Vast majority of the work put into mobile PureOS is just improving Debian and GNOME to work well on mobile.

(PS. Just today I've seen a community member sharing a video of Maemo Leste running on the Librem 5 on Matrix... ;) postmarketOS with various shells, including Plasma Mobile, also works already, and UBports developers already received their devices, so we may see it running there soon as well)

<comment><USER13> Sure, there are many base libraries Pure OS on the Librem 5 uses, but most of them have never really been used on mobile devices and as you mention require qite signifficant enahancements.

Then in comparison, there are libraries that have been used on mobileLinux devices for a while and even open source native applications (mostly on Plasma Mobile & Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS apps are still sadly mostly closed source).

Not making use of and extending all the mobile friendly software almost seems like starting from scratch to me.

BTW, what telephony midleware is Pure OS using ? Ofono, FSO or something else ?

<comment><USER9> Well, I've seen the effort needed in the past to lay the foundations (when working on SHR and FSO) and see what's needed now (when working on PureOS). The difference is massive - turns out that thanks to things like always- connected 2-in-1 laptops with mobile broadbands and hidpi touchscreens, lots of things that you simply had to make "mobile specific" in the past can be just reused from the desktop now; and improving them makes things better for all GNU/Linux users, not just mobile ones.

The telephony middleware is a great example of that - it uses ModemManager, which is a part of a regular desktop stack and already well-integrated in GNOME (and other DEs) for many years. Thanks to that, you can just plug a USB 3G/4G stick to your laptop, install Chatty and start SMSing - just like that, plug'n'play (you may even be able to make calls if your modem exports audio over USB, but it's rare).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The unintended consequence of this phone being modular and, in theory, upgradable, is interesting. Some people wouldn't mind having a thicker phone as a consequence.

Unfortunately, the case is just awful and there's no excuse for this. Low standards - as seen in many consumer-facing FOSS products - must be to blame here.

<comment><USER18> Sounds like an opportunity to deliver high quality FOSS products. Why did the major manufacturers fail to capture this market?

<comment><USER17> The vast majority of customers do not care, while the remainder isn't willing to pay the premium to make it worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FTA: "You can make phone calls, and you can receive text messages, but you can't start a new conversation with a contact."

Did the author actually make a phone call? If so, what was the quality?

FTA : "There's no way to access the camera."

So no idea if the device actually will take a photo or video or know what the quality of those outputs will be.

Considering that an iPhone 11 Pro would cost $60 per month over 2 years, could some of us Patreon this project at like $30 a month and let them hire up enough to land this?

I have doubts that a sales model vs the incumbents is going to have enough runway. Given the quote from teddyh / whiteinge, maybe it's just better to do more upfront funding instead of expecting open projects to follow the same physics as venture capital.

<comment><USER20> You can make phone calls. The call quality is fine. I don't think its VoLTE yet, but its the same quality you get on an Android phone.

You can also start a text via contacts too now. There's been a lot of progress in a month.

Source: I have a Burch phone, and made a phone call.

I don't know if you realized this, but that's exactly what they did. They made a kickstarter on their website to finance making the phone. They released some of the hardware iterations to earlier backers, and made sure they understood that its a beta product now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They really need to lower their specs to make this more affordable. I have no problem using slower hardware, on the contrary, it saves battery. Maybe they planned a cheaper version?

I'm also a little curious why they didn't choose an open android fork.

<comment><USER22> why don't you go with the pinephone then?

<comment><USER21> I agree that the pinephone is cheaper, but the specs are still too high for my taste.

<comment><USER23> $150 for the PinePhone is a lot cheaper. I'm not sure how much cheaper you want it to be.

<comment><USER21> There are cheaper phones, it's not hard to find pretty good phones that are around 70 euros.

<comment><USER5> Why don't you use those ones, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER21> Because they're often full of malware or bloated with other stuff.

<comment><USER24> > _Because they 're often full of malware or bloated with other stuff._

I wonder why they're able to be sold more cheaply?

<comment><USER25> One thing of note is that many of the cheapo Android phones that are also high-spec don't necessarily come with malware from the factory - that $79 price is the real price, running AOSP. They will happily sell you it for the real price!

But if you live in a different country, your only choice might be through reshippers/resellers, who will root the phone and install their own malware onto the system partition for $1 in profit, seal it back in its box, without the factory's knowledge. This happens somewhat-frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So if they are using Gnome, no wonder they don't have icons on the front screen. They'll need a Gnome extension for that.

</comment><comment><USER27> wait, so is it purchasable right now ?

<comment><USER28> Their site [1] says 'buy now, get in 6 months', so sort of...

[1] - [https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The hardware is fine but the price... Isn't that too much for a toy?

<comment><USER23> The PinePhone is a much better price ($150) and quite a fun toy as the OSes develop to a much more usable state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Did they solder the vibration motor to the motherboard?

</comment><comment><USER31> So it's effectively unusable due to power management problems. Weird that they're selling something so broken. Let's hope they can fix the power management.

<comment><USER20> It is actually much better now. I have a Birch phone and it is very close to being a viable daily driver. The only thing that stops me from using the Librem 5 as a daily driver is that MMS does not work.

I think when they get to mass production batch, the Librem 5 will be a usable replacement phone.

<comment><USER32> Hows power management? Can you get 24 hours on a charge?

<comment><USER20> Power management is much better now. It stays much cooler than before. Right now its around 4-5 hours on screen time.

Assuming they upgrade to the 3500 man battery, it could reasonably go all day.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We're NASA and we know it (Mars Curiosity) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QFvNhsWMU0c#! Now, this is neat way to celebrate engineering and science with swagger.<p>Yo, where goin ta look for ice (life)...  Gotta calibrate, gotta be precise... <comment><USER2> Please don't invent article titles! The correct title is "We're NASA and We Know It". Guess how I'm sure? _I copied the title from the linked page_.</comment>


"In 2018 the blockchain/decentralization story fell apart" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1079759096272818178 <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. A small clarification: there are some legitimate criticisms of the Register piece that I cited in the first tweet, but I merely cited it as an example of why I think the hype is calming down. The arguments I make are independent of that piece; the limitations I point out have always been there, rather than something new that happened in 2018.

I also wanted to add a couple of points that I didn't get to in the Twitter thread.

 _Economics._ Blockchain technologists seem to overestimate the extent to which new insights in economics are needed to understand cryptocurrencies and blockchains, as opposed to applying basic principles from economics and game theory. For example, a recent paper shows that thinking about miners and attackers in terms of stock and flow exposes important limitations of the security of Proof of Work. [1] I learnt of many other such examples at a recent conference on the economics of blockchains. [2] So I think a lot of the "cryptoeconomics" hype is misplaced.

 _Privacy._ It's often taken for granted that decentralized architectures will improve privacy. This seems obvious given everything we've learnt about Facebook, but a better way to think about it is that decentralized systems exchange one set of privacy problems with another. I coauthored a paper a few years ago skeptical of the "decentralization ==> privacy" story in the context of social networks [3], but I think many of the arguments in that paper apply to blockchain/dApps that are being built today.

[1] [http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/Economi...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/Economic- Limits-Bitcoin-Blockchain.pdf)

[2] [https://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/cryptocurrencies-and- blockch...](https://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/cryptocurrencies-and-blockchains)

[3] [http://randomwalker.info/publications/critical-look-at- decen...](http://randomwalker.info/publications/critical-look-at- decentralization-v1.pdf)

<comment><USER2> As I mentioned in the Twitter thread, my chief criticism of cryptocurrency since the beginning is it's naivete of the history and politics of money.

The discussions about economics applied here focus too much on microeconomic rather than macroeconomic arguments. So they end up missing the point entirely which is this:

Money isn't a neutral instrument and it's not something that can be decoupled from societal/political concepts and structures.

You can evaluate it as though it is neutral, but it has not ever been and will never be a neutral instrument because of the historical tendency for resources to pool and therefore become power centers, among other things.

Therefore if you view cryptocurrency as having the primary intention to de- couple commerce from coercive power structures [1], then you'll see immediately the historical problem. Namely, history doesn't favor distributed power, especially not when it can easily be co-opted by the powerful systems in which they rely.

In the best case scenario for crypto-utopians, millions of people transact and do commerce on a decentralized currency. In that case, whatever sovereign is most impacted, will then either outlaw commerce by crypto by force or require parity with the sovereign currency and control of the crypto currency through tax payments. This has happened multiple times over the centuries with alt- currencies and they are killed off by the most powerful (see: Most powerful economy/military) organization.

Politically, there is nothing different about Bitcoin than there was with the confederate states dollar for example.

[1] From the original whitepaper: "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party." [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > history doesn't favor distributed power

In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Clearly, sovereignty matters to groups of people.

"Sovereignty of _money_ does not matter to LARGE groups of people" \- might be a more defensible argument.

<comment><USER2> _~200 nations instead of a single world government_

The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government. Consider that until the Sumerians established cities less than 7000 years ago, humanity was just thousands small traveling groups of nomads with no defined borders.

Sovereignty gets a lot of lip service, but in practice most people don't really want it. It's a lot of work.

<comment><USER4> > The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government

Is it? I believe there are far more countries now than 30 years ago.

We seem to have some more powerful international organisations now than a century ago, but earlier than that we had world spanning empires, and Europe was less than 10 countries before WW1.

I want to believe that we're heading towards a star trek like unified post scarcity planet, but I'm unsure we're not just seeing a local trend.

<comment><USER2> It's misleading actually because unincorporated territories or completely unmanaged or ungoverned groups could be counted in a "sultinate" and it would effectively mean nothing.

Much how King Arthur, Lord of the Britains was not known to the members of the anarcho-syndicalist commune.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Joel "Nostradamus" Spolsky in 2001:

> Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a > peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the > architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, > completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the > name of a song and listen to it right away.

> All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. > Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital > funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists > dripping with glee as they copy each other's stories: "Peer To Peer: Dead!"

> The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: "Can you imagine a program > like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?" Then they'll > build applications like Groove that they think are more general than > Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets > you type the name of a song and then listen to it — the feature we wanted in > the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn't peer-to- > peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it > would have been just as popular.

I've thought about that essay a lot in the past couple of years. For all of the merits of BLOCKCHAIN I never found it very useful for conducting transactions. Sure, that's the machinations of the federal deep state lizard illuminati, but also it always felt like architecture and ideology were the point, and serving an actual need was an afterthought.

<comment><USER6> Today's most popular blockchain application is centralized exchanges. The main use case is to send fiat, play with the markets and then hopefully withdraw more fiat than you put in. The improvement over traditional online gambling is minimal.

The Silk Road, which kickstarted Bitcoin adoption, brought a much more interesting improvement over the status-quo. Suddenly, acquiring illegal drugs was easy and safe(r). That was the Napster of blockchain.

We will talk about blockchain again when a similarly disruptive use case is found/created. We're missing a couple of crucial pieces of infrastructure before the "people's money" use case can even be put to the test (decentralized fiat on ramps, convenient wallets, scalable price stability, fast confirmations).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> His points about blockchain are compelling but I disagree with "blockchain/decentralisation" part. Blockchain is _a_ decentralised ideal, but so is BitTorrent, so is Tor, and so on, to some significant extent. To say that decentralisation failed because blockchain failed ignores all the other technologies which are serving people well.

I think the distinction between "decentralised" ( _i.e._ federated) and "distributed" is important (as decentralised is often used as an umbrella term to cover both).[0] There are tons of federated projects out there from Matrix to Mastodon, and there are initiatives to make federated networks more decentralised (such as the integration of Kademlia DHT in BitTorrent).

No need for pessimism I think. :)

[0]: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Hoelscher/publica...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Hoelscher/publication/260480880/figure/download/fig1/AS:297257619476480@1447883147178/Centralized- decentralized-and-distributed-network-models-by-Paul-Baran-1964-part-of-a.png)

<comment><USER8> Also, the blockchain has introduced (AFAIK) the idea of using append-only databases to build decentralized applications, and this is currently used in very interesting new techs which have nothing to do with currencies or economics (like secure-scuttlebutt). The "dweb" is becoming a thing, IMO.

<comment><USER9> That is very not new - even transaction based decentralized databases technically date back to the 1980s - even if they received less practical use. The theory of databases are pretty old and practically ancient in computing terms.

Before blockchain was a thing much less a hyped one cloud computing used it and before that some databases practiced 'tombstones' for databases. The easiest way to maintain absolute consistency has been known to be not really deleting things but marking them as 'deleted' and leaving them to be ignored by default until consistency can be achieved. That was the approach when cloud computing dawned to make things scaleable and avoid the bottlenecks and load- balancing server overhead.

Transaction based databases are logically equivalent to an append only database. If you have a list of transactions that add up to the same resulting database state - with the option of more versatility if you don't constrain things to be operational order insensitive.

<comment><USER8> I see, thanks to you and @weego for historical context.

It makes me realize that git is probably some kind of append-only database too (and used for decentralization too).

I guess I can still thank blockchain for having introduced the idea to me.

<comment><USER10> The similarity goes deeper than that, given that git uses Merkle trees as does Bitcoin. There's hashing and in the typical use case there is even some distributed consensus process involved although often in git human decision making takes the place of an algorithm.

Some good discussion here: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46192377/why- is-git-not-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46192377/why-is-git-not- considered-a-block-chain)

I think the water gets muddied by people who know very little and yet have an opinion as well as by people who know so much they can't see the forest for the trees (if you'll allow the pun).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The part I found especially compelling: "Blockchain proponents have a vision of _society_ in which centralized entities are weakened/eliminated. But blockchain tech is a way to build _software_ without centralized servers. Why would the latter enable the former? It's a leap of logic that's left unexplained."

<comment><USER12> How so?

Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state. Seems pretty clear to me.

<comment><USER13> > Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state. Seems pretty clear to > me.

No, they don't. There is no technological or cryptographic answer to the state's monopoly on legitimate force, its duty to execute the law, or any of its other functions that create and maintain the business environment.

It occurs to me that much of what crypto-lovers want is actually radically undemocratic. Vestigial states that can't do the bidding of the electorate because they're unable to hold companies to account and so on. People of this inclination are the death throes of the globalist dream: it is a fine thing indeed that the nation state looks to be reasserting itself in the face of one of California's more embarrassing wet dreams.

<comment><USER14> >It occurs to me that much of what crypto-lovers want is actually radically undemocratic.

It's just the latest iteration of the libertarian fallacy, embodied in code - that a market can exist without a governing body to make sure it doesn't get sold.

<comment><USER15> Basically whenever you create a vacuum of power, it gets filled eventually by a few individual actors - i.e. Bitcoin miners being predominantly Chinese at this point.

<comment><USER16> And what exactly are they able to do?

People love to talk about how many miners are in China without mentioning that they really can't do much, even if they get over 51%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The blockchain hype fell apart. Which is good, given that it bears no resemblance to reality, and came less from practical applications of the idea and more the one that blockchain tech was 'magic' and was going to magically fix every industry in existence. Companies sprung up based on blockchains and crypotcurrencies and what not that didn't need them in the slightest, and where their only reason for existence was 'get VCs to invest/hype up gulliable people on Reddit'.

But blockchains have their uses, and those where they do work well will hopefully be done better without the lunacy. Decentralisation isn't dead/falling apart either, and in that sense... well I think its time is still coming.

After all, privacy is a hot topic now. Facebook and Google are getting lots of bad press. Mastodon is (somewhat slowly) taking off. The ingredients are there for change, and at the end of the day, it's really just UI + network effect holding it back now. If someone made a good decentralised Facebook/Reddit/YouTube alternative, I definitely feel it could capture the market. Anger is building up with these sites, and the more they force ideologies/censor/shut down people and groups for corporations the more popular an alternative will be. Heck, I feel the time may be right for a decentralised Patreon competitor right now. Imagine a way to support creators which VISA/Mastercard have no easy way to stop, which makes PayPal and co irrelevant and cannot be shut down by angry Twitter posts. That may come up in a few years or so.

But yeah, blockchain hype fell apart, some decentralisation hype fell apart, but blockchain as a concept still has its uses and decentralisation could still have its time to shine.

</comment><comment><USER18> OP used an argument I see too often: that the (current) market success of centralization is evidence of centralization's superiority with consumers. For instance:

> Open platforms can't win by directly appealing to users on philosophical > grounds, or even cost (see Linux on the desktop). Mainstream users have no > good reason to directly interact with blockchain technology—or any piece of > code—without intermediaries involved. Openness and decentralization matter > to _developers_.

I think _both_ centralization and decentralization can appealing to consumers, depending on the case and on zeitgeist.

For instance, personal computers were decentralization of computing power, back in the days when the Mainframe (centralization) was dominating. Apple is a decentralized computing company. Often decentralization can become businesses through products, read more [https://staltz.com/layers-of-the- internet-economy.html](https://staltz.com/layers-of-the-internet-economy.html)

There are also other "stealth" success examples of decentralized software and protocols that are directly appealing to consumers, such as the Camera and Gallery apps on smartphones and the use of JPEG (open standard) and Bluetooth (open protocol) to create (offline-first) and socially share pictures.

The problem with "decentralization" in 2018 is that it was a buzzword related mostly to blockchain technologies, and software built with those were often shadowing and imitating the recent success that tech giants have accumulated. But decentralization goes way back and its success cases are so ubiquitous that we take them for granted and leave them out of the discussion.

<comment><USER19> > personal computers were decentralization of computing power, back in the > days when the Mainframe (centralization) was dominating

This "decentralized" computing power as an accidental side effect. Personal computers (and open protocols) caught on because they were thought, by consumers, to _fulfill a need_. The number of people for whom that need was "decentralize $x" is a rounding error.

<comment><USER18> One very basic value proposition of decentralization for consumers in the context of the internet is offline usage. When you're in an airplane, that's when the need to have the capability at the end device becomes most obvious, and decentralization directly fulfills that need.

<comment><USER20> Blockchain isn't decentralized in that sense is it? What can you do offline with BTC or other crypto?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't read too much into this. The authors don't want to release neither the report or even which the 43 use cases are: [http://merltech.org/blockchain-for-international- development...](http://merltech.org/blockchain-for-international-development- using-a-learning-agenda-to-address-knowledge-gaps/#comment-155)

> The purpose of this blog was NOT to address the use of blockchain, or any > DLT, for digital crypto-currency or even financial applications, nor was it > to disparage, debunk, or dispel ANYTHING. We were, and remain, technology > neutral. If anything, we would say that more testing is warranted, but would > advocate that the results of those tests be publicly and fully available.

> There is no report. The only product that resulted from our research process > is this blog, as Linda Raftree correctly pointed out.

> A "use-case" is very different from a "case-study", the former being more > conceptual and the latter requiring significant data for research purposes.

> Regarding sharing the list of the 43 use cases, Linda was also correct that > the purpose of the this blog was not to "name and shame" and doing so risks > distracting from the work we felt has achieved its goal, to motivate > conversation around these issues.

Two projects are linked from the blog post:

[https://exonum.com/napr](https://exonum.com/napr)

[http://www.amply.tech/](http://www.amply.tech/)

I have not heard of either before.

This tells us nothing. Basically they have randomly picked 43 out of thousands of projects and won't even publicize which these projects are, or the methodology they used.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sure it is true - the "business cases" for blockchain are all rubbish.

But it is not for the reasons listed; there are no parallels to airlines or gold mining and so on.

Decentralization for cryptocurrency is about making them resistant to legislation: With properly decentralized cc you can pay your druglord, terrorist, launder money, gamble, insider trade, hype pump and dump a scam ... and the government can't shut it down or prove that you own any.

That is the killer use case. And the only one.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not at all convinced by the argument about centralization happening because that's what people want. In Israel, for example, there is, in fact, a conspiracy. Though not a hidden one at all - just one which is very hard to defeat.

Israel has a very centralized market controlled by just a handful of oligarch families. The same guys control the insurance companies, pension, the fuel supply, the banks, etc. The prices are too high and the service isn't great not because that's what people want, but because competition is stifled, in cooperation with the politicians, who need the oligarchs to keep funding them.

I don't think a decentralized currency would be a magic trick which would instantly solve this larger problem of economic centralization, which people most certainly do _not_ want - but it could certainly help break the existing cycle by taking away power from the politicians.

<comment><USER24> That is just capitalism, Marx wrote about this a long, long time ago. Lenin came along with a solution to this a century ago however that revolution resulted in a different type of centralisation with the 'workers of the world' not uniting into the cooperatives that could have prevented the surpluses of capitalism ending up in the hands of the few. Instead there was dubious central planning with party officials calling the shots rather than these mythical worker heroes. Socialism and communism was an existential threat to international finance capital nonetheless, hence the Cold War.

The cryptocurrency boom was greed driven with the fig leaf of 'smash the Fed and fiat currency'. The people that got into it were not that smart, a case of 'fools rush in'. Nowhere in the cryptocurrency discussion was there any appreciation of the history of capitalism, which requires considerable study to get any meaningful knowledge of. If you are studying graphs of alt-coin fluctuations all day and gambling on these things then you aren't going to take time to read all the required texts (or even the 'white papers' on how these silly coins are supposed to work).

There are ways to address the evils of capitalism, for instance we haven't heard of the 'Tobin Tax' in a long, long time and discussion of how much capital banks should have in reserve hasn't happened even though the crash of 2008 revealed problems in that area.

Despite everyone working so hard for this money stuff we, as a society, are remarkably unconcerned with figuring out how it all works and how we can build a currency system that works for everyone with liquidity to make money work for us instead of us working for money.

I would be very interested in further reading on how the economy of Israel works, if you have any links then do share. I am detecting more antisemitism going on in the world at the moment with the polarised views that have not served us well historically. People muttering about international finance being a Jewish conspiracy tend to have no idea about Jewish history or how we got here. Hence I would quite like to know more about the story of the rich getting richer in modern day Israel.

<comment><USER23> > Nowhere in the cryptocurrency discussion was there any appreciation of the > history of capitalism, which requires considerable study to get any > meaningful knowledge of.

This is false. I recommend listening to Trace Mayer, for example.

> I would be very interested in further reading on how the economy of Israel > works, if you have any links then do share.

I recommend Guy Rolnik[1] and Yaron Zelekha[2].

[1] [https://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/WRITER-1.4968179](https://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/WRITER-1.4968179) [2] [https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-yaron-zelekha-s-crusade- to-...](https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-yaron-zelekha-s-crusade-to-save- israel-from-itself-1.5234889)

<comment><USER24> Thank you so much. I clearly over-generalised regarding the cryptocurrency crowd and their knowledge of capitalism, glad I did as I now have Trace Mayer to read properly.

I keep forgetting about Haaretz, again thanks for the quality reading material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's a mistake to conflate "decentralization" with "blockchain". One is not necessary for the other and decentralization has not fallen apart. I'm not even talking talking about mastodon either. I don't use it. The many to many relationship that torrenting is the epitome of decentralization, is very effective and has been around for nearly two decades at this point.

I'm just a random guy on the internet but who is this guy to talk about these subjects in such broad terms? Lay off the misused hyped up tech, please.

<comment><USER26> > I'm just a random guy on the internet but who is this guy to talk about > these subjects in such broad terms? Lay off the misused hyped up tech, > please.

He's a Princeton professor who's written a book about blockchain technology and taught several university courses about it. And he's been studying decentralization issues for a long time.

I don't think that Prof. Narayanan means to say here that decentralization requires blockchains, but rather than the optimism that blockchains provide a comprehensive solution to incentive, coordination, and scalability problems in decentralized systems has run up against very serious problems and counterexamples.

If you want to see some of his broader concerns about the tradeoffs of decentralization in other contexts, you should ask him, since he's reading this HN thread. :-) (edit: and he posted it himself)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If blog posts published as Twitter threads make you as impotently outraged as they do me, try this: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1079759096272818178.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1079759096272818178.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> The irrational blockchain/decentralization hype story fell apart and good riddance!

The technology trudges along, a lot slower than the hype beasts would like you to believe.

<comment><USER11> For me, when technology trudges along it's in response to some sort of use. E.g. solid-state data storage started out being used in exotic situations like flight recorders. Later came camera usage. It evolved over the decades to become dominant in phone and laptop storage; perhaps eventually it will drive spinning-rust storage out of existence.

What are the equivalent real-world use cases for blockchain tech that are a) delivering economic value not achievable by other technologies, and b) are paying for sustained innovation?

<comment><USER28> I'll address the elephant in the room:

Primary use case currently: moving money/value to somewhere or someone that some centralized entity doesn't want you to move it to.

That covers real world uses from skirting high remittance fees to the infamous dark net markets.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I appreciate the frankness.

Regarding remittances, I don't believe any blockchain technology has made a significant dent in the market. If you have data otherwise, I'd be interested to see it. But I live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of money transfer places, and all of them seem to be conventional.

As to the rest, I think we're talking about light financial crime. (Light because the heavier sort isn't big on having a permanent public record.) It's hard to know, of course, but is this usage going up or down? I had the impression that KYC/AML efforts were putting a big crimp in it. Either way, it seems self-limiting to me, in that significant success invites more attention from various authorities, which strongly discourages participation from people who would like to remain on the right side of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> phoe-krk The Fediverse is a successful case of decentralization.

You can't say that decentralization as a whole is a failure or, worse, that blockchain is synonymous to decentralization; saying so would be an insult to e.g. the original World Wide Web.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think we are entering a cryptocurrency winter for much the same reason the first AI winter happened: too much promised too fast, and hand waving away really massive unsolved problems.

</comment><comment><USER30> I still have trouble understanding how a system designed to facilitate global consensus can be considered decentralized. Sure maybe the hardware is decentralized but the resulting data structure is just like the centralized systems it aims to replace. Call me when your cryptocurrency is offline first.

</comment><comment><USER31> There must be some law or corollary to the effect of "In any decentralized network, 20% of the nodes will control 80% of the transaction value (Pareto Principle)."

Critical mass adoption of blockchain will just trigger major capital investments by existing centralized agencies.

</comment><comment><USER32> FYI: I've collected the best of tweets from two top crypto / blockchain critics. See Best of Bitcoin Maximalist - Scammers, Morons, Clowns, Shills & BagHODLers - Inside The New New Crypto Ponzi Economics [1] by Trolly McTrollface and Crypto Facts - Decentralize Payments - Efficient, Low Cost, Fair, Clean - True or False? [2] by Nouriel Roubini

[1]: [https://bitsblocks.github.io/bitcoin- maximalist](https://bitsblocks.github.io/bitcoin-maximalist) [2]: [https://bitsblocks.github.io/crypto- facts](https://bitsblocks.github.io/crypto-facts)

</comment><comment><USER33> The 'blockchain decentralization' story is hurting, but the 'decentralization' itself, as a concept, is still gaining momentum, though it has few real vectors of enablement, i.e. few vanguard products.

</comment><comment><USER34> There is a very basic argument, not against decentralization per se but about its real power: even imagining a future where you can decentralized social networks like Facebook, at the end people interacts with the service through an application and this application dictates what the user sees beyond the protocol.

For example, OpenBazaar is a decentralized marketplace but if people search for products in the GoogleBazaar site, GoogleBazaar can sort or hide the items as they wish not matter how perfect the decentralization protocol is.

</comment><comment><USER35> Would blockchain have evolved differently if it's first major implementation was not Bitcoin? BTC generated a huge amount of wealth from nowhere, and it seems like most blockchain ideas where just trying to duplicate it's success. To the general public blockchain and BTC are synonymous.

<comment><USER36> It didn't generate it. It moved it from elsewhere.

<comment><USER37> Can you explain what you mean?

If the blockchain issues 1000 BTC to various miners who sell them to 1000 people for USD$1 each, and then some time later 100 of those people are able to sell their coins for USD$100, then the total amount of money that's been moved out of other investments is USD$11,000, but the total market cap of Bitcoin is USD$100,000 so can't I say that USD$89,000 was "generated"?

Although really none of that USD ever disappeared, it's ostensibly still going into USD denominated assets, so... well I don't know what to say about any of this.

<comment><USER38> It depends on what you mean by "generated". Sure, in that scenario some people made money off of bitcoin. But did it actually generate anything of value?

Properly conceived, currency is a proxy for genuine economic value. Bitcoin mining generates nothing but bitcoins, which then are valuable because... other people say they're valuable? I fail to see how this differs from a pyramid scheme.

<comment><USER37> So by the same token, would you say banks don't generate any economic value?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is an extreme "we told you so" moment, isn't it? But then successful completion of the project was never the goal, just selling blockchain tech to enterprises to generate BTC price rises.

<comment><USER40> Actually this happened 5 or 6 times already and crypto rebounded within a couple years every single time.

So, there was no "told you so" moment for me at least. If you're apt to invest in new technologies and don't invest in crypto soon, there will be a big "I told you so" moment for yourself I think.

(imo people being forced to admit they were wrong and missed a golden opportunity is part of the reason for the extreme hatred of cryptocurrencies. As a counterexample, there isn't any hatred of Linux, for not conquering the desktop, which is a technology which also failed to meet expectations. The funny part of it is, is that the negative feelings towards themselves for not investing get projected onto the technology itself, meaning they are blind to the positive sides of it. This manifests as the boom/crash cycle as we see it, since most people are blind to the progress of the technology until it is in their face. Then everyone rushes in, and due to the rapid increase in price, the "buy because it's going up, fast" mentality springs up, recreating the same bubble for the 8th time, the same crash, the same outwardly projected self hatred and the same cycle repeats, yet again. And people never see their own role in it... It amazes me how this human trait manifests itself and plainly laid out for everybody and yet no one is able to see it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> One way to look at the decentralisation is to look at what happened to Internet's first decentralised platforms such as Youtube. It started as anybody can have a channel but what ended up happening is organisations and full time youtubers ended up garnering most attention on the platform.

Centralisation is an inevitable outcome of human groups. I wrote more on this on my blog [https://invertedpassion.com/decentralization- continuum/](https://invertedpassion.com/decentralization-continuum/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Blockchain tech and decentralization are orthogonal.

<comment><USER43> A blockchain running on a single node is uninteresting. Decentralized/distributed consensus is part and parcel of why one would use a blockchain.

<comment><USER42> I am thinking of a non-public blockchain, say used to clear bank transactions. It might or might not be externally visible, but only authorized entities could add to it. So, not distributed like Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is a very sane and down to earth rebuttal of crypto

ActualMoney sucks for a lot of reasons, crypto is addressing very few of them and adding several problems on top of it

</comment><comment><USER45> I've taken a step back from crypto-startup news in 2018. Are there any bright spots? Interesting projects to follow?

<comment><USER46> Maybe mlbcryptobaseball.com? Baseball cards do seem like one of the few things it would be cool to "tokenize", and they've made a deal with the MLB to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Cryptocurrency is just alchemy for the internet age. Same failures, same etiology, same promise of unexpected insights in another, future form

<comment> man-and-laptop This looks like trolling.

Blockchain was the first serious attempt at solving the problem of distributed concensus without centralisation. One application of this outside of cryptocurrency is to DNS (see Namecoin).

Cryptocurrencies at the very least make black market trading more efficient. See Silk Road.

Also, the analogy to alchemy needs a lot more explaining. I don't see any connections.

<comment><USER9> Well there are several from the 'get rich quick scheme' aspect vs lead into gold aspects to the fact it is trying to get what they want by properties of analogy. That they can turn processing power into the new gold. Then there is the literal magical thinking like the sun and gold must be connected because of the same color therefor if we create a scarce currency it will be a useful commodity and gold shares properties of the sun, also the sun's rays created gold. Alchemists pursue the same goal obsessively trying to get what they want despite the mechanism for it just plain /not being there/. Similarly Cryptocurrency even if it perfect in security and privacy would run into interchange issues. You would need teleportation to bring commerce beyond government control.

Gold is a very apt comparison given the gold-bug rhetoric they were in pushing deflationary currency despite its history of failures resulting in fiat currency. The gold standard resulted in /many/ wars for the sake of gold just so that they wouldn't have their economy size capped by lack of currency - leading to considerable loss of /real/ value and massive suffering. Ironically having too much gold also created inflation issue. Having currency that can inflate with the economy instead of something else arbitrary is what the strength of fiat currency is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Nothing fell apart, its all part of the process, just like the dot com bubble and bust, crypto/decentralisation is not going away. Economics always wins. Someone will make a better, regulated version, that works.

<comment><USER49> > Economics always wins.

Yep, supply and demand. Currently there's no demand for crypto/blockchain as appropriate substitutes already exist.

<comment><USER50> > no demand

" _No_ demand". Isn't Bitcoin still trading for several _thousand_ dollars? Maybe you, and maybe most people, don't have any want for cryptocurrency, but don't let that make you think that _nobody_ has demand for it.

<comment><USER15> Most of the increase in transactions you see now are from HFTs speculating, who generate demand on any high-risk instruments if they think it has a return somewhere. Demand for Bitcoin as an asset isn't that different from any other commodity, but demand for Bitcoin as a currency is not there as many competitive substitutes exist.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-16/high- spee...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-16/high-speed- traders-are-taking-over-bitcoin-as-easy-money-beckons)

<comment><USER51> And that's when the transactions are even real. There's significant evidence that >80% of volume is wash trades used to drive traffic to fraudulent exchanges.

[https://www.blockchaintransparency.org/](https://www.blockchaintransparency.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Success rate of blockchain project is not 0%. Many people have became rich this way. Many people use cryptocurrencies actively.

<comment><USER51> > Many people have became rich this way.

Some people have made money through speculating on cryptocurrencies or tokens. A similar, if not larger, number of people have also lost money this way. More importantly, the "success" of these traders has nothing to do with the underlying technology -- they could have been similarly successful in trading any other financial instrument.

> Many people use cryptocurrencies actively.

Like who? And for what? Mainstream merchants have generally been moving away from accepting cryptocurrencies, often due to price volatility or long transaction times. Some people still use cryptocurrencies to make illegal transactions online, but certainly not "many people", and in any case I'm not sure that's a success...

<comment><USER52> > Some people still use cryptocurrencies to make illegal transactions

Illegal ≠ evil. Some countries introduce and enforce ridiculous laws that only benefit the ruling regime and their oligarchy and not the people. AFAIK in countries with crazy governments like Russia and Venezuela cryptocurrencies are considered a relatively reliable (and accessible) investment instrument letting people to save their money when the government does some bullshit to ruin the national currency rate.

There also are legitimate things (e.g. porn sites subscriptions) that people don't want to show up in their official credit card statements as that would be a shame in the context of their society's dominant culture.

It also feels kind of hypocritical to consider whoever smokes weed in e.g. Canada a normal person but whoever does this in Korea (where it's outlawed) a wicked one.</comment></comment></comment>


W3.org down? - <AUTHOR> http://w3.org <comment><USER2> It looks like MIT hosts www.w3.org: <http://bgp.he.net/ip/18.104.22.168>

<comment><USER3> Yes. MIT is one of the three global hosts for W3C and the one handling North America. They host us physically (W3C has office space as part of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) and they host our machines and network.

It may be folks in other parts of the world can get to our servers in other parts of the world, or maybe there's a single point of failure in the current configuration.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the info. At the moment, www.w3.org recursively resolves to the same MIT IP address for me from hosts in GB, NZ, and JP, so it looks like there is a single point of failure, at least for the website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A cool thing about Aaron's activism was that it involved building things, circumventing censorship, and spreading information, rather than sabotage and denial-of-service.

<comment><USER5> Oh fuck no. 1. He recognized it 2. Whatever Aaron's activism methods was is no necessary relevant for the ddosing protestors

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Down here.

And here: <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/w3.org>

</comment><comment><USER7> You can always check <http://isup.me/>. Looks like it's down!

<comment><AUTHOR> The question mark was unnecessary, yeah - of course I checked to make sure before posting

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have any news on W3.org and mit.edu? I'm currently left assuming it's an attack after Aaron Swartz's death, which is pretty saddening.

<comment><USER8> just the TC article: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/13/mit-edu-doj-gov-w3-gov- all-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/13/mit-edu-doj-gov-w3-gov-all- currently-down-following-investigation-into-swartz-tragedy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related to mit.edu Anon takedown?</comment>


Google to Start Charging for Prediction API - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/google-to-start-charging-for-prediction-api.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d2868a5f268affe%2C0 <comment><USER2> Absolute limit of 60k means it's not worth investing in if there's a chance you will hit that limit.

<comment><USER3> Somehow, Google APIs always end up broken like that. Why don't they just have the balls to scale up like Amazon does?

I guess it might change. Google App Engine is finally beginning to make sense, be it mainly for intranet applications.

<comment><USER4> I see you two have some pretty big plans on your mind! Care to share what is it you're building that 60000 predictions per day just won't cut it?

<comment> tha-dude ... easy, benchmarking your own algos against the prediction API on large- scale data sets. I presume that's what 90% of the people who received their account during testing did anyway :-D I did 15k requests in about 10mins at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have examples of apps that actually use the prediction API?

<comment><USER6> Wanted to use it with Google Analytics for a kind of recommendation engine of the form "users that liked this page also liked...". But they never approved my request and a 60k request limit won't cut it either.

<comment><AUTHOR> an alternative: <http://www.directededge.com/> (YC startup)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To me a big weakness of the prediction API when I checked it out was that it cannot handle (i) missing values or (ii) sparse data formats. Both are very common in real life data.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know what machine learning algorithms they use?

</comment><comment><USER9> btw, you don't need Prediction API to detect a language. One could use Translate API [1]:

      >>> detect_language_v2("Tous pour un, un pour tous, c'est notre devise", open('api_key.txt').read().rstrip())
      [u'fr']

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4545977/python-can-i- dete...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4545977/python-can-i-detect- unicode-string-language-code/4546813#4546813)

</comment><comment><USER10> Now, they talking business.</comment>


Upcoming changes in PHP 7.1 - <AUTHOR> https://dotdev.co/upcoming-changes-in-php-7-1-76ebea53b820#.9m09otnet <comment><USER2>
        // Results in 10
        $total = 'I ate 3 bananas yesterday' + 'and I ate 7 bananas today';

"[this example] contains numeric values, so everything else is stripped out, and the sum of those are used to calculate the total of 10. But it would still be nice to see a warning, as this may not be intended behaviour."

 _this may not be intended behaviour_

 _may_

<comment><USER3> Why not? In PHP you concatenate strings with a "."

        $total = 'I ate 3 bananas yesterday' . 'and I ate 7 bananas today';</comment></comment>


Who Can Name the Bigger Number? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html <comment><USER3> "Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm."

In 2001, David Moews ran a BIGNUM BAKEOFF competition on the comp.lang.c newsgroup, where each entry had to be a C program (512 non-whitespace characters or fewer) returning a number from main(). The winner is the program that returns the largest number, assuming an arbitrarily-large int type.

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thr...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thread/1511694ab8570ccc/540218fdfa4b2ab8)

After reading Scott Aaronson's wonderful essay, you won't be surprised to hear that the contest was won by a theoretical computer scientist, Ralph Loader. (Second place was taken by Heiner Marxen, who is mentioned in Scott's article in connection with the Busy Beaver problem.)

Ralph Loader's remarkable program is at <http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~suckfish/busy/reduced.c>, and the documented and unmangled version in <http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~suckfish/busy/busy.tar.gz>

David Moews' discussion of the entries is at <http://djm.cc/bignum- results.txt>

<comment><USER4> I find it hilarious that three people thought to return the highest possible number by underflowing unsigned ints (that are being treated as arbitrarily large ints). It's a funny hack even if it doesn't teach you anything like Loader's does.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how that is relevant when the problem assumes an arbitrarily large int-type. It's trivial to return the largest possible value (INT_MAX) for any fixed-size int-type, but a such _does not exist_.

Basically, many posters are missing the point that it's a mathematics challenge, not a C-challenge, which is excusable since it's posted in a C-group.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, which I find hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I'd want to say here is "the largest number nameable using 1000 symbols in second-order logic" (not original, I think someone else won a contest that way). But the fact that someone can ask "Which formulation of second-order logic?" probably defeats this unless you can also, in those fifteen seconds, cite a standard formulation of second-order logic and a standard axiomatization of number in that formulation, otherwise it's an ambiguous specification. HOL is a standard and formal formulation of higher-order logic that I can think of in fifteen seconds, but I wouldn't be able to think of a standard formulation of Peano Arithmetic that was already in HOL.

Actually, now that I think of it, "the largest number nameable using 1000 symbols in HOL plus a successor symbol" might work, since you can define addition, multiplication, etc. in higher-order logic using only a successor symbol.

Interesting fact: This is a fundamental jump up from first-order logic, which is a fundamental jump up from Busy Beaver, and then once you're there, it's operating at the highest level of abstraction that I know about or have ever heard of. There are things you can do to make that number bigger - picking a different ordinal for the order of logic, recursing over how you get the number of symbols - but they all amount to saying "plus one", and not jumping to a qualitatively different level of abstraction. Once you abstract over second-order logic you are, so far as I know, _done_.

<comment><USER7> I don't know what qualifies as a "qualitatively different levels of abstraction", but for all practical purposes, you're never done. Given a formal system for building numbers, you have a sequence B(n) of largest numbers created with n symbols in that formal system. You can _always_ step outside that formal system and make a construction that leaves someone stuck in the formal system in the dust. For example, take B(B(n)). You could then formalize this process of stepping outside of formal systems, only to find yourself in a new formal system. The only limits on how fast you can "go meta" are limits of your mind.

<comment><USER6> You could always add one to the number, too. Turning B(n) into B(B(n)) is pretty much the same thing, it just takes B(n) and makes it the base function of ordinal recursions you already know how to construct. It doesn't jump outside the system by very much.

Going meta is really hard work. When people think they're "jumping out of the system" over and over again, they're usually actually playing in a pretty small sandbox. If you take someone who's naive about going meta and ask them to construct a large number, they often don't get anywhere close to Ackermann numbers. They think they're being brilliantly creative and recursing at the speed of light, while actually spending huge amounts of complexity to create much smaller numbers than a mathematician could describe in a few lines of code. Similarly, someone could play around all day with grand hierarchies of ordinal halting oracles, or "jump out of the system" for a billion years on end by applying the functions to themselves, and never get anywhere close to the size of the numbers that you could talk about by making the jump to first- order logic.

And after you make the jump to second-order logic, I don't know of any more other jumps like that of comparable size.

<comment><USER7> My point is that if two mathematicians play this game, there is still lots of room to be clever. Even though both will know the idea of looking at numbers nameable in a some formal logic, the more clever of the two will beat the one with fastest handwriting (I'm assuming hours or days - not seconds - <USER2> compete).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951095> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492615> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514955>

<comment><USER9> Very interesting that it was submitted so many times yet only now has it gotten this many votes.

<comment><USER8> A comment with this link did get some interest though: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378776>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surely not every day, but frequently enough, I read a submission and related comments on HN and say to myself, "Ahhh, this is why I continue to come to HN!".

This is definitely one of those.

<comment><USER11> I have seen it hovering here and there on the front page, and finally opened it. No regrets, it was probably the best submission I've read here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Graham's Number?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number>

<comment><USER13> Let g = Graham's number. Then use Knuth's up arrow notation. Then (and this is perhaps cheating) use a non-computable function like the busy beaver function, which grows faster than ANY computable function. That last step may in fact not be cheating, because it might be possible to prove a lower bound and therefore prove that it's higher than the opponent's number.

Pretty notation here:

<http://mathbin.net/50035>

<comment><USER14> If the busy beaver function _runs on a computer_ , it is _computable_ , unless I missed something pretty interesting.

<comment><USER15> A busy beaver is a Turing machine that runs for more steps than any other machine (having the same state machine size) but eventually halts (rather than looping forever). The busy beaver _function_ measures the run times of all busy beavers, the maximum number of steps you can get out of each state machine size. Apparently Radó proved this value eventually grows larger than any computable function.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#Non- computability_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#Non- computability_of_.CE.A3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the fundamental points of Kolmagorov's algorithmic information theory is that the function for the largest number algorithmically representable by n bits of information is incomputable.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity>

</comment><comment><USER16> Something like

(9||||9)!

Using knuth's up arrow notation

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation>

And a factorial for good measure

<comment><USER13> I certainly demolished your number in this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1539866>

Also, why use | when you can use ↑? ;)

<comment><USER16> You're right, you've got me certainly beat by unimaginable orders of magnitude.

How does g↑(sub_g)g compare with BB(g)?

<comment><USER13> I have no idea how they compare. The former is incomprehensible and the latter is both incomprehensible and non-computable. My intuition tells me the latter is much larger, because a computer could "easily" calculate the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine > exactly what number you've named, by consulting only your card and, if > necessary, the published literature._

but there isn't enough entropy left before cosmic heat death to evaluate 9^(9^9).

</comment><comment><USER18> Just for fun, here's my shot: The number of steps required to compute the solution to the travelling salesman problem for each quark of every subset of every permutation of quarks in the universe in space-time.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure if quarks have "positions" in the exact sense of the word, so I don't think there's a metric you could apply here to get distances for which to solve TSP.

Suppose there was a metric between quarks. To be clear, are you saying: take all quarks in the universe. Take their powerset P. For each set S in P, create the complete graph K_{|S|} where edge lengths are distances. Let TSP(x, K_{|S|}) be the number of steps required to solve TSP. Sum TSP(K_{|S|}) for all S in P.

Let n be the number of quarks in the universe. The size of the powerset is 2^n. For each S in P, since TSP is solvable in exponential time, we'll upper bound the number of steps by 2^n. In other words, for each powerset, you're cost for solving TSP is at most 2^n. Therefore, the number of steps is at most 2^n * 2^n = 2^(2n), which is far smaller than say Ackermann(6, 6).

<comment><USER18> Touche.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The traveling salesman problem asks for the shortest route connecting a set of cities, given the distances between each pair of cities. The rub is that the number of possible routes grows exponentially with the number of cities."

Is it just me or does the traveling salesman problem have (cities-1)! solutions? thus it is not exponential? and is in fact far more annoying?

<comment><USER21> Factorial grows faster than exponential.

<comment><USER20> This is my point, which I apparently failed at communicating.

<comment><USER21> Oops, I just failed at reading.

As the person below answered, there are less naive ways of doing it. Check out: <http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/index.html> if you are interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 2 things

1) <http://qntm.org/planar> obviously not the largest number but pretty big.

2) <http://www.ephraimkishon.de/en/my_favorite_stories.htm> The story Jewish Poker is at least one take on the old joke mentioned in the intro, and a fun read.

</comment><comment><USER23> Definitely check out his other essays too!

</comment><comment><USER24> a more interesting challenge would be the biggest number using each of the ten digits only once.

ready, go.

<comment><USER25> 9876543210

If I'm also allowed an operator, 3↑⁹⁸⁷⁶⁵⁴¹⁰2

<comment><USER24> ha, yes allowed operators, as many as youd like.

<comment><USER25> Then the best I can come up with on no notice is 2 ↑^(4 ↑^(6 ↑^(8↑^(9↑10)) 7) 5) 3.

That would be trivial to increase substantially by using some other notation for the hyperoperation, but I'm going with the presumably most familiar one. I'm sure there are bigger numbers - specifically, Wikipedia mentions Conway chains, where a→b→c = a ↑^c b, and so 2→3→4→5→6→7→8→9→10 should be quite large indeed.

<comment><USER13> Excellent! I hadn't thought about it, but at a glance I'm pretty sure your ordering and grouping does generate the maximal result. However, the parent comment said as much punctuation as you like, which allows for unbounded expressions with unary operators like the factorial!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It looks like many commentators did not bother to read the full article. Neither did I, but I remember not to use "infinity" and "number of atoms in universe".

</comment><comment><USER27> Put the Factorial, exclamation mark after each exponent.

</comment><comment><USER28> /Eagles music, singing/

welcome to the hotel David Hilbert...

</comment><comment><USER29> Aleph Null?

</comment><comment><USER30> My daughter at bedtime says she's giving me infinity times infinity time infinity kisses. That's the biggest number, I don't care what any of you math whizzes have to say about the matter. ... OK, let's call it the best not the biggest.

<comment><USER31> It's going to be a long night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> a1 = 10^10

a2 = a1^a1

...

a_n = a_(n-1)^a_(n-1)

My number is a_(a_(10^10))</comment>


Is Bitcoin's Promise Going Up In Smoke? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/19/is-bitcoins-promise-going-up-in-smoke/ <comment><USER2> This is the third article I've seen today by Vivek Wadhwa. The first two were the same, syndicated on WaPo and Singularity Hub where he is staff...then this Techcrunch article. He sure seems intent on putting down Bitcoin.

<comment><USER3> These articles are part of the "it's not Bitcoin, it's the blockchain" pivot.</comment></comment>


Where are all the Growth Hackers? - <AUTHOR> http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/

<comment><USER2> "A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth", I find this the definitive guide for a growth hacker. I think a better definition is needed something more than a looking for scalable.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is the Dribbble community so selective? - <AUTHOR>

I've been wondering lately, why the Dribbble community is so selective about who joins and who doesnt. I understand that this prevents amateur crap from appearing on the homepage (or any other page), but I'm still confused at whether giving the users the power to invite members is the right way to expand.
Another emerging trend is for people to "win" invites. I mean, this makes sure that only good quality work and worthy designers make it to the community, but most of the times, it requires word of mouth and/or even knowing people personally to get drafted by them.
I put together a quick portfolio at : arsalanbashir.tumblr.com, and it was kinda confusing as to what I should do next, because there isn't a set "method" to get drafted. It depends on the whims of somebody else who may or may not even take your work seriously.
What is your opinion about this? Is this the right way to scale a user base?
Thanks <comment><USER2> I think it's a great way to scale a user base! 'Bigger' isn't always the answer. Dribbble knows that exclusivity is powerful and makes people produce a higher quality of work, especially as it is a community of designers judging designers. Being a Dribbble member is now a standard that designers aim towards.

Personally, to get drafted on Dribbble I'd use some of the free PSDs they produce, I'd tweet & thank the creators and link to the work I had created. Do re-bounds of others popular work, take it in a new & fresh direction giving ample credit to the original creator. Integrate yourself with the community even before you get the invite.

Focus on quality over quantity, so instead of having an ever growing portfolio, cap it at 10 or so of your best pieces. If you create something new, something less awesome has to be booted to make space.

Any piece that is less than awesome work only serves to dilute your other work.

Arguably I'd say you could get into Dribbble just on having 2 or 3 absolutely pristine images and showing you are a designer that is generous within the community.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the beginning, Dribbble had to throttle growth, because it was a very large side project and not their full time job. I still like the idea of people being responsible for who they bring into the community, kind of like the mob.

I'm not sure if there is an algorithm for when they send out invites to people; it seems to be something that happens every so often, and there is a finite amount of them. Seeing as how many people use Dribbble as a place to find more work, I feel like there is more at stake than just making sure that the best work rises to the top. It's not my site to run, and the majority of people don't want to see those parts of it change, so I don't think it will.

I will second your feelings on the "contests" that people who do have invites run. It seems these gimmicks aren't really about finding great talent, hell, that's all over the place, but it seems like a formula for getting more Twitter followers and retweets, as that is always part of the "contest rules". If you have an invite, just give it to someone who deserves it, it's that simple.

My advice if you are trying to get more industry attention and you can't seem to get an invite is ask around and see if someone will simply share one. There are some cool people in the web industry who will, usually people who are the most well-known (hmm...there's a lesson). The other alternative would be to set up an account on something like Behance. I like the ability to tell a story on Behance with a project, and show all the steps and thought process anyway. Showing the thought process behind your decisions is a lot more valuable in many ways.</comment>


Yerba Mate: the Wonder Drink for Business & Social Good - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1690766/yerba-mate-the-wonder-drug-for-business-social-good

<comment><USER2> As a yerba mate drinker for years I am excited to see some support for the farmers. I am afraid that companies like this bastardize the real thing and dilute it's significance in the minds of the (north)American mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> OK, the purpose is noble. However the title really looks like an ugly spam. Find another one, please :)</comment>


Chinese Food on Christmas: Data of a Jewish Tradition - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/12/chinese-food-restaurants-jewish-christmas-tradition/577747/ <comment><USER2> There's an older article that attempts to explain the motivations for this with a more narrative approach: [https://tbshamden.com/images/TBScontent/safetreyf.pdf](https://tbshamden.com/images/TBScontent/safetreyf.pdf)

In addition to the 'welcoming' nature of the food, it points to the cooking style as nicely aligned, with Chinese cuisine almost never using milk with meat, and the mixing of ingredients leading some to a bit of creative ignorance.

>They loved to eat egg rolls in Chinese restaurants because the pork and seafood tasted delicious, but were so minced that they could pretend these ingredients were not there.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was an older NY Times article about Chinese jews...

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/world/asia/china- kaifeng-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/world/asia/china-kaifeng- jews.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Do the employees sing carols?

[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1004151-christmas_story](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1004151-christmas_story)

</comment><comment><USER5> Chinese food and movie.

<comment><USER6> I did this every Christmas I lived on Long Island.</comment></comment>