Decentralization: I Want to Believe - <AUTHOR> http://adamierymenko.com/decentralization-i-want-to-believe/ <comment><USER2> I think that the concept of "Zero Knowledge Centralization" is the key novelty of this article.

If the (sufficiently small) centralized parts can be made so that they're oblivious to the content and can't discriminate it; if their only practical choice is to work or not work; then most of the disadvantages of centralized systems go away.

Sure, you might disable such a system by destroying the centralized nodes; but it does prevent using them for the much more likely risks such as censorship or MITM attacks for eavesdropping or impersonation.

<comment><USER3> If you're willing to accept some zero-knowledge centralization, then the feature set of things like Bitcoin begin to look very weak. Bitcoin spends so much energy solving the double-spend problem that other desirable aspects of a monetary system (transacting offline, fast transactions, provisioning for lines of credit, anonymity) are largely not addressed.

Stefan Brands described a digital cash system using zero-knowledge signatures more than 20 years ago that provides far greater payer and payee anonymity than the blockchain, and is fully distributed with no requirement for full- time network connectivity to engage in trade. The only real downside is it requires a traditional bank at the backend to act as an honest reserve.

[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm) \- half way down, under the heading "PROTOCOL 5" for a high level description of operation.

Many people don't realise that the only substantial benefit unique to Bitcoins Blockchain architecture is the lack of central issue from a reserve bank.

<comment><USER4> It's only when you _badly_ want to forego the need for centralized trust that decentralized solutions begin to make sense. There's a large cost to decentralization, which is why Bitcoin isn't nearly as interesting as a mere payments innovation, vs. a distributed economic system that operates outside the purview of the State. Calling Bitcoin a "payments innovation", while technically true, completely glosses over its fundamental value. [1]

[1] [http://cointelegraph.com/news/112183/bitcoins-political- neut...](http://cointelegraph.com/news/112183/bitcoins-political-neutrality- is-a-myth-amir-taaki-interview)

<comment><AUTHOR> The other day I wondered if Bitcoin might not be considered a kind of AI. The fundamental value of Bitcoin is in the fact that the block chain is itself a trustable third party. Does that make it a citizen? A nation state?

Still... I wonder how Bitcoin would stand up to a serious attack. Imagine the Chinese government wanted to kill it. They could build 51% worth of ASIC in secret and spring it on the network all at once, taking over the net and maybe just wrecking it. It might cost them so much it would not be economically beneficial, but if it were done for political reasons they might not care about actually profiting from it. It would be a military attack.

Of course flying a plane into the Federal Reserve headquarters is also possible. At some point you have to accept that any system can be attacked.

<comment><USER5> The other thing to keep in mind is that 51% doesn't let you destroy the network, it just lets you spend money twice _maybe_. And if the Chinese government double spent, or helped other people double spend, it would all be on the public ledger. There would be a record of the forks, and there would be people to testify "I sold X to Y and the tree forked".

So it's not so much that Bitcoin would be destroyed, as a new avenue for theft would open up. Probably temporarily, as other groups would respond by fighting back with more computational power and probably with ad-hoc blocking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a while I wondered whether proof-of-stake is possible, or whether all attempts would suffer from the "nothing at stake" problem. About a year after my initial pondering, I found a solution after rummaging through old academic papers.

The problem as you stated feels like it should be solvable. The CAP theorem is not relevant here -- you're not bound by strong consistency because you don't need to provide connectivity 100% of the time. There is strong geographical stickiness in connections, so that looks like something to exploit. Combined with smart localized buffering of packets near the destination, it looks like a solution should exist.

The solution may not be compatible with your existing semi-centralized solution, which may be blinding.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. This kind of network also cannot truly be partition tolerant, not if the partition is between the two nodes that are trying to establish a connection!

The article is fairly vague - what is the risk of Sybil attacks exactly? (I looked at the FAQ, but it's sparse on details; only glanced at source.)

Is it some kind of spoofing? Since addresses are supposed to be collision resistant and tied to public keys, it should be possible to discard all messages regarding a peer that don't come from it. Although 40 bits is actually way too small...

Denial of service by pretending to be able to route to a user? Okay, but there should be some way to punish IP addresses that consistently fail to route things they claim to be able to... complicated, but not impossible.

Of course, I've only thought about this for 10 minutes, while the author has studied it for a long time. I'm sure they have more insight about the problems, but without more details I can only speculate.

<comment><USER2> If you allow the nodes themselves to determine which nodes are trustworthy (instead of a centralized solution), then an example Sybil attack would be a botnet with a huge amount of identities managing to either vote that Botnode12345 is totally trustworthy, and that all data should be sent to it, or that NiceGuyGreg, comex, peterisp and a bunch of other nodes "consistently fail to route things they claim to be able to". Both ways can make the system unusable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It has been seen over and over again, that people don't want and don't care about decentralized systems. Major problem is that decentralized systems are basically mobile hostile. Some companies have used these solutions to limit burden on their servers, pushing to burden to clients, which are then unhappy about it. Clients can consume a lot of cpu time, memory, disk space, disk access, cause lot of network traffic, be potentially used to generate DDoS attacks, or malicious traffic etc. All are great reasons why not to use decentralized solutions.

Zero Configuration is also basically impossible because you have to bootstrap the network some how. Fully decentralised solutions still require bootstrap information. Which is unfortunately hats enough for many and therefore works add efficient show stopper.

Last nail to the coffin is that most people really do not care about security at all. User base is after all just a small bunch of delusional geeks.

Otherwise something like RetroShare would be widely used.

I've been considering and wondering these same questions for several years. Btw. About bitcoin style messaging check out bitmessage.

<comment><USER9> You make a lot of cynical, flawed assumptions. People do care about security and the increases to the degree of their awareness. But whether people care or not about security/decentralized implementations is irrelevant. People may not necessarily care how it's implemented, doesn't mean that the implementation is therefore any less important. That's developer's jobs to fix.

The challenge remains to create something that is simple and convenient to use and is at the very least on par with popular alternatives. Nothing more than that. Counting all the ways a decentralized implementation in principle is going to supposedly struggle without mentioning a longer list of problems with centralized systems is being excessively negative and cynical and for what purpose?

<comment><USER8> I was personally quite sure that trackers and other download sites would be replaced with distributed systems. Instead sites like TPB and others continue to use centralized systems. I'm of course pro distributed & anonymous systems, that's the reason why I've been studying those for years. I'm kind of disappointed how little those are used, if used at all.

When TPB guys said they would make something cool, I naturally assumed they would release a fully decentralized, pseudonymous, anonymising solution, which would replace bittorrent which is inherently dangerous because it leaks so much metadata as well as reveals to whole world what you're downloading. Instead they released something (technically) lame, the piratebrowser. Which just allows accessing their site via Tor (basically working as proxy), even if it's blocked locally.

I really do like Freenet & GNUnet design, because relays do store and cache data, creating a lot of sources quickly for popular data. Many systems have serious flaws, bitmessage is not scalable with it's current design. Most of other fully decentralized systems suffer from flooding, sybil and metadata leaks. I personally played a little with a bitmessage creating over 100k fake peers just for fun and it worked beautifully flooding the network with noise and generated junk control traffic. Because it's distributed solution, up to 10k junk messages were stored on each peer, wasting also disk space. Decentralized design also makes nodes running the system vulnerable unless additional steps are taken to limit resource consumption. After resources need to be limited, then it's a great question what should be limited and how that affects the network.

Like the original article says, it's really hard to come up with solution which wouldn't be bad in someway.

When mobile devices get more and more common, the fact is that it's really hard to beat the centralized solution. Of course the system can be partially distributed so mobile clients can connect to one spot only. Server hubs doing routing and data storage. But basically that's no different to email, DNS and web at all. So no news here either. After all, email isn't bad solution at all. It's secure (if configured correctly) and it's distributed. - Yes, I'm one of those running own email servers, as well are my friends too.

Final question is, how to protect metadata and hide communication patterns. As I mentioned in my post about Bleep. It didn't impress me at all. [http://www.sami-lehtinen.net/blog/bittorrent-bleep-my- analys...](http://www.sami-lehtinen.net/blog/bittorrent-bleep-my-analysis)

I'm not attacking the original article writer. He clearly has done a lot of job and considered options as well as written clearly and well about it. But I'm just thinking these issues in completely technical manners.

I'm happy to hear comments. I'm just cynical because the distributed systems didn't turn out as popular as I would have expected and wanted.

What I would like to see? A perfect fully decentralized P2P network running as HTML5 App which wouldn't require installation. That would be something which I would rate as pretty cool currently.

<comment><USER10> Didn't TPB move to all magnet links years ago? Finding peers through DHT is certainly not anonymous, but it's decentralized.

<comment><AUTHOR> BitTorrent Kad is one of the only huge scale totally decentralized systems in use today.

I wonder if it could stand up to a big Sybil attack though? Most of the black hats that could do it don't because they all watch illegal movies and have no motive to attack that network. I would bet you a donut the RIAA and MPAA have talked about it, but actually doing it could expose them to civil and even criminal penalties since it would technically be computer fraud and abuse.

<comment><USER8> Actually I do think that fake peer injections are used. Sometimes there are some fresh new torrents that can show something like 80k seeds and 100k downloaders. Yet you can't connect almost any peers. It's exctly the attack I used against bitmessage, and was fun to perform with edonkey and emule servers. Worked nicely even before DHT based systems. Basically you could down smaller sites by injecting sites IP and port to peer to peer network, because now all nodes looking for peers would try to connect those sites. Afaik, this has been used to introduce DDoS situations earlier. Especially if client tries to connect hosts multiple times and doesn't immediately flag potential peers which it can't connect. But this is all very basic stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can you compare ZeroTier with Skype's P2P design?

Edit: The 1400-page "Handbook of Peer to Peer Networking" (2010) has a good list of relevant papers. Even though the book itself is expensive, many of the papers are available elsewhere.

[http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-09751-0](http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-09751-0)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's similar to the original pre-Microsoft design in many ways, but ZT is actually less asymmetrical in that client and "server" run the same code. A supernode is just a regular node blessed as such. (And at a fixed address with a lot of bandwidth.)

Supernodes are important because they permit instant on, rapid lookup, and almost instant nat traversal. They also bridge sparse multicast groups as described here.

[https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/wiki/Multicast- Algor...](https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/wiki/Multicast-Algorithm- Notes)

Both Skype and Spotify have backed away from p2p. In Skype's case I suspect PRISM. I don't know why in the case of Spotify. That seems like an ideal application. Since a file is not a moving target, a lot of the problems in distributed databases disappear. That's why BitTorrent magnet links van work pretty well, though I bet a determined attacker could Sybil the Kad DHT to death.

<comment><USER11> Would there be any benefit in allowing users to optionally choose supernodes, e.g. providing ways for supernodes to disclose identify information or even to run a business the way VPN/proxies do today?

In other words, if some nodes have to be centralized for technical reasons, apply a decentralized, Web-of-Trust, out of band, policy/reputation approach to governance and auditing the identity of the supernode operators.

E.g. Supernode N is in City A, owned by Person B, regulated by Country C, packet-inspected by ISP D, and is vouched for by the following list of DevOps infrastructure auditors.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would fragment the network, almost like NAT. Instead of just being able to link up by address, I would have to know what trust choices you'd made.

A federated model or some kind of expanded hierarchy is possible but it would still have a center or at least a certificate authority. Otherwise you get Sybil.

<comment><USER12> This is a new topic for me, so apologies if this is an obvious notion, but what if one of the properties of a super-peer is a certain level of transparency and auditability so that any peer can verify its operation? That is, the super-peer contributes bandwidth and reliability because those are the resources unique to it, but the decision-making aspects and operational state of being a super-peer could be out in the open.

<comment><USER2> You can't verify the 'decision-making aspects and operational state' of a human or remote server, they can fake anything that you can check. Crypto tech allows us to verify possession of some information or token, or a proof of work, but that's it.

Either the supernode _can 't_ do anything bad even if it's malicious (such as bitcoin miners) and you don't need the transparency or it _can_ do something bad and then you can't audit it remotely, you need trust.

If "something bad" is altering data, then if you can detect if the data is 'proper' (such as bitcoin transactions), then a node simply can't fake data; but if you can't detect it then you need to trust the node. The same for reading data, if it's cryptographically impossible for the node to read your messages, then you don't need to audit that node; but if it's possible, then you can't be really sure unless (and probably even if) the node is under your full control.

[edit] Ahh, and if by 'verify' we mean not 'automatic verification that the system can do' but 'human verification where I check that Bob seems to be a nice guy, and thus his node _can 't_ be evil', then we're back to the original post - either centralized certificate authority chain, or Sybil problems.

<comment><USER11> > You can't verify the 'decision-making aspects and operational state' of a > human or remote server

If the node is running an operating system that supports a dynamic root of trust, it's theoretically possible to perform a remote attestation for binary hashes of all software & config running on the remote node.

Not suggesting that is easy, but it can be done with the right hardware (TXT, TPM) and Linux software stack.

<comment><USER2> Nope, that's just delegating the problem to the trust chain - it assumes that the TPM does as it should be; and that noone in the chain ever signs anything wrong. That assumption is obviously wrong, there are many public incidents that show that the core signing keys of pretty much any 'trusted organization' can be used by three letter agencies to sign malicious code as, say, valid windows updates; and that both hardware and OS should be assumed to contain backdoors - especially in the TPM chain.

In addition, having a true and valid hash of my OS, software and config doesn't give you any true assurance - a security hole in that software or OS can easily give an ability to execute arbitrary code, so the "proper configuration" can behave in whatever way, despite being verified. That's what I meant by saying that you can't be sure if it's not doing anything bad, even if you completely control the node - if the underlying math ensures that reading or altering X isn't possible, then it's okay; but otherwise you have to hope/trust that it doesn't. This is meant by zero-knowledge systems as opposed to 'secure' systems that simply ignore knowledge that they shouldn't look at.

<comment><USER11> > a security hole in that software or OS can easily give an ability to execute > arbitrary code

> if the underlying math ensures that reading or altering X isn't possible, > then it's okay

If an attacker has access to a zero-day exploit that can compromise the OS, could they compromise random generation of numbers and weaken the zero- knowledge system?

<comment><USER2> They can weaken _your_ part of the system by compromising your machine or your keys, but compromising the centralized node (either by an exploit or a subpoena) shouldn't change anything if that system is zero-knowledge; a compromised node can do no more than an actively malicious node.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are we thinking of the problem incorrectly? Math may actually be our enemy here. (Egads!)

So yes, for a fixed problem domain, the information transversing it requires topological constraints. Or another words, the fact that the data is structured requires the network to be traversible.

So how about this? We remove the structured requirement from the data. My device "knows" several other devices. Each device has some biometric identifying data to show who is using it currently. Those devices send my device unstructured data and app code from time to time. Each device decides who and what to share things with and whether and how much to trust incoming material. The data and the app are linked through a cataloging system provided by the sender.

The trick is this: each device really only makes one decision: how much do I trust the other devices? If trust is established, the app and code can continue to propagate. So we're sort of making viruses a good thing!

Now your data has no structure, so there's nothing to coordinate. If some of the initial apps helped folks communicate, then you could communicate to those you trusted. I could imagine some "master" data types that all devices could use: URL, IPv6, Text, HTML, JSON, XML, email, IM, etc. You could even have some master device types.

The beauty of this is that you start building security at the same time you're doing anything else -- because if you don't, somebody's going to own your machine, and rather quickly. Each device has no knowledge of the whole, but it has to quickly evolve a very complex and nuanced understanding of what it's willing to store and do for other devices.

I don't think the math would work on this at all, but I think it's a workable system - much the same as a cocktail party is a terrible place to interview people, yet lots of folks end up with jobs because of conversations held around cocktail parties. (Do people still have cocktail parties?)

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article, something I have given thought several times as well. I agree a fully decentralized approach is a more fundamental and a harder problem than is often assumed and one that is still actively researched in academia.

A few interesting efforts that I rarely see mentioned in this context may add to your opinion on the matter:

\- the creator of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, has been working on a successor on and off for years, his site offers some context and in 1 of his own comments there are a couple of pointers to his currents efforts in this area, you'll find it from here if you're interested, updates are a bit scattered throughout different media and time :)

\- another field that is not that fundamentally different in what it wants to achieve is 'content centric networking' which is advocated by PARC and is backed by some of the oldschool networking guys/researchers. A wikipedia page is here but i don't really like it: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking)

A presentation by Van Jacobsen of PARC on the subject can be seen here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zOLrQJ5kbU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zOLrQJ5kbU)

the talk seems intended for a low tech audience at first and i can imagine staying concentrated is hard here but imo the talk does deliver.

The problems these two encounter and are trying to solve are of a different nature than what I see in most projects - which i think often get entangled in nonfundamental problems and eventually ending up in a unrecoverable mess because these fundamental issues were never addressed, because it's hard and may be impossible currently... In my opinion cooperation/adaptation in lower osi layers will be needed to achieve the efficiency, security and decentralization you mention, single purpose application may be easier to get away with. Whether this will ever be able to happen or not is maybe more a geopolitical discussion than a technical one, complicated stuff, we'll see :)

<comment><USER14> Forgot to add the url for Petar's site, tried the edit function but it seems to be broken?

Here it is: [http://www.maymounkov.org/kademlia](http://www.maymounkov.org/kademlia)

<comment><USER6> I second the old school research. If you have the funds, get an ACM membership or similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > There aren't any decentralized alternatives to Facebook, Google, or Twitter > because nobody's been able to ship one.

This makes it sound like a technical problem, but it's also at least partially a market problem. It's much more straightforward to squeeze revenue streams out of centralized walled gardens like these than decentralized equivalents.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but this is at least partly balanced by the fact that decentralized systems cost considerably less to operate. With my own example, I've already calculated that I could handle over a million concurrent users on a few hundred a month in hosting costs. If I had to relay all that bandwidth it might be hundreds of thousands in costs.

A decentralized Facebook would have less revenue, but also negligible hosting costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The paper quoted as reaching the same intuitions about the CAP-like limitations ("On the Power of (even a little) Centralization in Distributed Processing") makes a simplifying assumption that is not valid for decentralized systems that are... "interesting" (for lack of a better word).

The assumption is (quoting from the Conclusion): "For example, the transmission delays between the local and central stations are assumed to be negligible compared to processing times; this may not be true for data centers that are separated by significant geographic distances." This sounds to me awfully like an "oracle machine ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine)). It has "more computation" and it can decide instantaneously on where to apply it. I'm skeptical of generalizing the result from the paper to all distributed systems, in particular, the ones where latency-to-effort ratio doesn't fit into the stated assumption.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare with cjdns?

Also have you looked into eventual consistency?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're different things architecturally. cjdns is cool but as far as I know could not scale really really huge or survive, say, a Sybil type attack by someone with NSA or top-tier black hat hacker group expertise. I'm not sure my system could survive that either, but the problem is I'm not convinced a centerless mesh _can_ be made that robust.

I know some community mesh nets have used it with some success. Just because something has limits doesn't mean it can't be very useful for lots of applications.

<comment><USER17> What if the entire network was a VPN where you the operator know all the nodes that are part of it. Would it still be vulnerable to the sybil attack?

<comment><USER11> Related: Tinc open-source VPN with some P2P properties, [http://blogs.operationaldynamics.com/andrew/software/researc...](http://blogs.operationaldynamics.com/andrew/software/research/using- tinc-vpn)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps we need to think about the problem a bit differently. We tend to think pie-in-the-sky when we think decentralized computing. But what is it that we really need? I am happy with all my files being on _my_ computer. But it would be nice for them to be _backed-up_ in a decentralized cloud store, and accessible from anywhere, if need be. But I can accept some latency in the later if I don't have access to my own systems. That's all I really need. I suspect that's all most of us need. We don't really require the internet to be our personal hard drive.

</comment><comment><USER19> > There aren't any decentralized alternatives to Facebook,

> Google, or Twitter because nobody's been able to ship one.

Diaspora and identi.ca(/pump.io) are decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. Admittedly not in fully decentralized sense the author is talking about, but that isn't their problem. People don't use them, because people don't use them.

<comment><USER20> Some people do use them though, and they actually work.

<comment><USER21> Diaspora doesn't "work" for the definition of "work" that most people use.

Suppose I wanted to join Diaspora. I search for "diaspora" on Google. The first result is the Wikipedia article, and the second is a link to joindiaspora.com. Cool, looks promising, but when I click on the link I find this:

"JoinDiaspora.com Registrations are closed"

But OK, maybe there's hope:

"Diaspora is Decentralized! But don't worry! There are lots of other pods you can register at. You can also choose to set up your own pod if you'd like."

So I click on "other pods" and I get sent to a naked list of sites. No explanation, no basis for choosing among them. Many of them in hinky-looking international domains.

OK, so I go back and click on "Set up your own pod", which takes me back to joindiaspora.com. At that point I give up.

Diaspora may work for hard-core geeks, but it doesn't work for normal people.

<comment><USER19> The "official" diaspora site has always been aggressively self-sabotaging. I don't know why. If you want a reliable, well maintained pod [http://diasp.org](http://diasp.org) should do you.

<comment><USER21> "Registrations here are closed"

<comment><USER22> I'm guessing that language was hard-coded into the landing page and got pushed to diasp.org in an update, and nobody noticed. It looks like you can still sign up there by clicking the signup link.

<comment><USER21> OK, but my point remains: a regular person who doesn't hang out on HN is not going to have a good UX signing up for Diaspora.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really interesting. About a year ago I spent some time thinking about the concept of building semi-decentralized versions of typical web apps with WebRTC and a series of trusted centralized hubs.

</comment><comment><USER24> Could Ethereum perhaps function as a blind idiot God of the internet?

<comment><USER25> You mean an oracle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > There aren't any decentralized alternatives to Facebook, Google, or Twitter > because nobody's been able to ship one.

Untrue.

[http://gnu.io/](http://gnu.io/)

<comment><USER27> You've just made his point for him. When he says no one has been able to ship one what he means is not that no one tried to create one or even launched one. What he means is that no one created one and launched it with more than a small group of niche users.

[http://gnu.io/](http://gnu.io/) will only ever be used by niche users and will never get to the size or even utility of Facebook,Google, and Twitter. Pretending otherwise is just willful blindness.

<comment><USER28> I think there are 2 reasons for that.

1\. building distributed systems is a lot harder 2\. so deploying/building centralized systems just gets on the market faster and is quicker to develop for

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The OP wrote: _There aren 't any decentralized alternatives to Facebook, Google, or Twitter because nobody's been able to ship one._

Well, that's what my company's been working to change. We started a little earlier than the Diaspora project was announced. And we've already designed the whole platform and built over 95% of it. As for the list, we have slightly different priorities.

#1 - we are putting this way lower on the list, and consider it unnecessary if the network is really distributed. Just like Google Plus's "Real Name Requirement" is unnecessary because if Bill Gates doesn't want me to see his real name, he doesn't want me to find his account via that name. It's more to enrich Google than to help people. The current IP system and DNS / Certificate Authority system can a good compromise for this, and notably they rely on centralized, albeit, delegated, mechanisms. One could argue that acquiring a domain can be completely decentralized in order to prevent censorship. But none of that is required for real time point-to-point connectivity, because with total privacy, you won't find the node you're looking for unless you follow a path through the network by which it wants to be found. All the nodes in that path would have to be online as you navigate them, but that's about it. I'll call this requirement #1a.

#2 - Absolutely. This would probably be shifted to #1 for us. For example, if I am on NYU's network and I friended a few people, and then I go join Columbia's network, it should seamlessly reconstruct my social graph there from the people who are also on Columbia AND want me to know that. Requests for information published by multiple parties would have to be routed correctly and responses would have to be combined. And so forth.

#3 - For you this is part of #2, but also assumes #1. Of course, to accomplish this, two nodes sharing a session would simply need to agree at all times to use one (or more) other nodes which are currently online, to pick up the session. If your device goes out of range of your WiFi and switches to some other network, it still contains the routing information for that node. This is a bit different in that it doesn't require #1, but only #1a.

#4 - I guess I do not need to worry so much about lower protocol levels, but basically if you can assume https, then that's enough (although you are at the mercy of the certificate authorities until TLS starts to use Web of Trust instead of x.509). Usually, people run clients instead of servers, and they choose to trust some server to run an application. Presumably this server would not be blocked by its internet service provider -- in fact it may be a wifi hotspot in an african village that doesn't even have internet. It would be a single source of failure, but only for that subnetwork. In a distributed social platform, one could easily just go use another server hosting the same app.

#5 - Private, encrypted, secure communication gets tough for some applications. For example, multi user chat or mental poker where you may not trust other participants. So until we have zero-trust technology for everything, people trusting a server of their choice seems to be a good general solution. And all this communication once again relies first on a reliable identity for users, apps, servers, etc. which can of course be achieved by self-signed certificates, but needs to be more seamless across networks as per #2.

#6 - Everything I've described above can be decentralized in the same sense the internet is -- smaller networks joining into larger ones. But you don't really need a central DNS, you don't really need a centralized identity. I also assumed you did, until February of this year when I met with Albert Wegner from Union Square Ventures. Our system was already able to handle everything as decentralized, but we wanted to have unique ids for every user in SOME database. Then we realized that this isn't necessary.

That said, there is one problem with the web's security model that does not allow apps to truly be decentralized. The problem is that, if I sign in using one app somewhere, and then visit another app, the other app doesn't know where I've signed in or which account I prefer to use. People attempted to solve it with proposals like xAuth which are merely stopgap measures ... but to date, no one has really been able to make identity totally seamless because of it.

In short ... I now disagree that #1 should be the biggest priority, because every doesn't REALLY need to be able to connect to every other node on demand, but only to nodes it has encountered while using the network. That makes everything able to be distributed.

As for the CAP theorem, I guess the reason you can't maximize Availability and Consistency while at the same time having Partition Tolerance is because subnetworks can disconnect at any time, and if you need consistency you'll have to wait for them to reconnect. But many problems do not require consistency across the WHOLE system! That's why we've chosen to extend the web model, where clients connect to a server they trust, and this can be used to power chatrooms and other group activities. Partition Tolerance within this subnetwork is only limited to splits within the subnetwork, not outside of it. And since the network consists of very few nodes compared to the whole world, the splits happen rarely, and the rest of the time, we can have high Availability while preserving total Consistency.

</comment><comment><USER30> The first link to IP sums up the misgivings I have with statically typed languages, that I could never quite put my finger on:

"If you're using early-binding languages as most people do, rather than late- binding languages, then you really start getting locked in to stuff that you've already done. You can't reformulate things that easily." -Alan Kay

The problem for me is not so much that a variable has a static type once it's been set. It's more that the variable shouldn't even exist in the first place. The way we concentrate so much on variables in C-based languages is really kind of absurd, once we stop to consider that they are only temporary holding sites for the flow of information.

I had never quite made the connection before that this is really the problem with the internet at large. We're focussing on websites, IP addresses, servers, etc, when really it's all about the information and the relationships and transformations that connect it.

The distributed internet that eventually replaces the one we pay for now will probably work more like a solver, so we'll create a request or query of some kind and the network will derive the solution, which most of the time will amount to simply fetching the data that matches a hash. It will be interesting to see what happens when we throw out archaic protocols like NAT that reduce everyone to second class netizens, and even abandon the idea of data bound to device or location, and think of it more as a medium like time or space where we can freely exchange ideas without having to depend on central points of failure or limiting protocols.

What kind of haunts me though is the leverage that this will give software. Imagine how much more powerful the internet is compared to, say, a library. Now imagine if instead of having one computer, with all the limitations we can't even perceive anymore because we've been stuck in these limiting paradigms, we each have thousands or millions at our disposal. I picture it a bit like wolframalpha.com except with natural language processing, so you could ask it anything you wanted, and even if it couldn't find the answer, it would do its best to reconstruct the missing pieces and get you close to your goal anyway. I just feel in my gut somehow that this will be part of the basis of artificial intelligence, and this general way of storing, retrieving and transforming information by hash, diff, or schema-less relationship and probability works from the lowest level logic gates and languages like Go up to big data APIs like Hadoop. Like maybe what we think of as intelligence is a subset of a universal problem solver. I guess that's why I'm so interested in a free, distributed internet. It's like right now what we think of as the internet is really the inside of a cage, and we can see out through the bars and imagine an ecosystem where countless ideas are evolving untamed.

I'm not sure if I've said anything at all here, but hey, it's Saturday so might as well post it.

</comment><comment><USER31> No FreeBSD support in ZeroTier One? :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Todo. I'm doing some refactoring to make it easier.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Grumbles.js – Detects when your users swear out loud - <AUTHOR> http://knpw.rs/grumbles.js/ <comment><USER3> Fun fact: this won't tell you which bad word. Google's implementation of the speech API returns asterisks for words it deems bad. See:

[https://github.com/knpwrs/grumbles.js/blob/master/src/grumbl...](https://github.com/knpwrs/grumbles.js/blob/master/src/grumbles.js)

It's also interesting to see which words Google determines is bad, and which they mysteriously don't. The API does real time processing of sentence structure and will return "<three asterisks> on me" and "cum to the park" correctly, based on intent. (Sorry for the offensive speech!)

For a side project I needed to find every single English word/phrase the API would filter. Stumbled upon that in amazement.

(Side note: speaking a long list of bad words into a microphone very slowly was the most fun QA I've done)

<comment><USER4> I get that this is a free service and all, but I find that ridiculous. They are basically crippling the functionality of a service that is global and it is not aimed at a particular application, based on a very localized interpretation of what is nice to say and what is not... this should be controlled at the application level, the API providing at most hints about the tone.

Depending on what you use it on, this could render the service useless. Imagine using it to, I don't know, trying to identify Pulp Fiction sentences against a corpus of scripts. It would fail spectacularly.

Another example context on where this could fail very quickly is when considering people from other languages, e.g., if I'm not wrong, saying "Jesus!" might be impolite in (some contexts of) the US. In Spain, we say "Jesus!" when you sneeze, instead of "Bless you!" (and, in general, we are outrageously foul-mouthed compared to the US).

<comment><USER4> By the way, I can't edit my comment any longer, but when I said:

> In Spain, we say "Jesus!" when you sneeze, instead of "Bless you!" (and, in > general, we are outrageously foul-mouthed compared to the US).

..it may sound as if "¡Jesús!" ("Bless you!") is foulmouthed - when in fact is something a four-year-old would typically say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ignoring the unlikelihood of someone actually authorizing microphone permissions (because it's no fun if we take that into consideration), what are some good use cases for this library.

Reminds me of those rumors that swearing at an automated phone system will usually cause it to direct you to a human operator. I've never given it a try myself to see if it's true.

<comment><AUTHOR> A code review app can measure WTFs / minute, as in the classic web comic: [http://imgur.com/a/BHlkA](http://imgur.com/a/BHlkA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Your browser does not support the SpeechRecognition API. :("

HURRAY! And, it never shall.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the most interesting part of this for me is the fact it relies on the the SpeechRecognition api to return swear words redacted with asterisks.

See for example George Carlin's "Seven dirty words" as returned by the SpeechRecognition demo [https://cl.ly/3A1F0r3U1H1D/Screen%20Shot%202016-09-03%20at%2...](https://cl.ly/3A1F0r3U1H1D/Screen%20Shot%202016-09-03%20at%204.49.14%20PM.png)

<comment><USER8> Agreed, it's neat to see an anti-feature being subverted such that it becomes a feature.

(The anti-feature being the enforcement of American prudity onto what should be an indifferent API.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nifty idea - but I couldn't trigger it. Must be because it detected my sweet choir boy nature, and knew that my attempts at profanity was 'cute' rather than grumpy!

</comment><comment><USER11> Tinfoil hat aside, I kinda like this.

We work with a decent number of older, non technical people, and our product team would love to be a fly on the wall to hear where they're frustrated in the product. Obviously due to security concerns we could never implement something like this, but in a perfect world this would be a killer feature.

</comment><comment><USER12> What the fuck is this shit doing on HN?

(Just kidding, for those who can't detect sarcasm. That's a killer idea - build an app that detects sarcasm in text, deploy on HN, have a happier community.)

<comment><USER13> IBM's Watson doesn't detect sarcasm, but it does detect anger in your post.

[https://tone-analyzer-demo.mybluemix.net/](https://tone-analyzer- demo.mybluemix.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, because I really want to have my computer listening in on everything I say and snitching (with context) to an unknown listener if I say a bad word.

Cool tech. Uncool use.

</comment><comment><USER15> because that's not creepy.

</comment><comment><USER16> It works but Chrome's Web Speech api seems slow. Test at [https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html). The Web Speech api doesn't work on mobile browsers, would be a lot cooler if it did.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't like the idea of streaming every visitor's audio to Google servers as they're viewing the site.

<comment><USER18> The Speech Recognition API doesn't go to anyone's servers, it's entirely done in the browser, and is fully available offline as well.

<comment><USER19> Is it open sourced? Can it be used on Linux?

Any links are appreciated

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ok, I know this is pedantic, but grumbling is not shouting swear words - <USER2> fact it's the opposite of shouting.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ha ha, funny idea! After examining my own behaviour the other day I realised that if I ever owned a store that faced the street, I would totally put a microphone in the window to get customer feedback from after-hours window- shoppers: you can't solicit that kind of honesty!

<comment><USER22> At the grocery store the other day, my wife and I were deciding between a few items. The thought occurred to me that a microphone in the aisle would be huge for customer feedback! A few seconds later I realized that it would just be a feed of people yelling at their kids/spouses... not very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Neat idea but the piece of shit ;) couldn't detect me calling it one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Worked for me: [http://imgur.com/a/43Ksu](http://imgur.com/a/43Ksu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Geeze Louis! What the heck? Gosh darn it!

Is there a southern grandma setting?

</comment><comment><USER25> FYI, only single words worked: fu## and sh##. Didn't print out entire phrases, even when I simplified the swear words (stemmed them).

</comment><comment><USER26> Although the demo takes some time this is awesome! Thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER27> Does this mean that Chrome is always listening on my computer's internal microphone?

<comment><USER28> You have to allow it first on a per-website basis

<comment><AUTHOR> You actually have to allow it per-website per-visit (not even per-session).

<comment><USER18> no, it's per domain.

You only need to per-visit when it's an insecure localhost endpoint or something similar IIRC. (or if you have an extension which clears that setting every page load)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Geek "Must Do Before You Die" Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/05/04/the-geek-must-do-before-you-die-checklist/

<comment><USER2> A lot of this is IT "stuff". Am I the only geek in the world who doesn't like this crap? I love programming and I'm really into geek culture and tech, but I absolutely hate installing or fixing operating systems, hardware and utilities software. These are painful time sinks you have to undergo to set up a productive work environment, but I don't derive any fun from messing around with configuration files or formatting disks. Sorry.

Related: I'd rather sweep the streets than work as sysadmin.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but for a different reason.

I prefer to work on things that no one else is working on. Either because they don't know about it, they don't think it can be done, or they don't know how to do it.

Every time I catch myself doing sys admin work, I think, "There's probably a million other people who could do this, why am I?"

OTOH, analyzing a business problem, then designing, developing, and implementing a software solution that no one else ever has, now _that's_ the kind of stuff this geek must do before he dies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me or are too many of these things entirely too easy? There are surely people who have done most of these things before they were twenty years old. (I'm not one of them, but then again many of these things weren't invented by the time I was twenty.)

Aspire to something that can't be done by following an Instructable.

(That's probably why this list is such weak beer: Every entry is an excuse to link to the equivalent of an Instructable. The goal that can be outlined in one page is not the true goal.)

<comment><USER5> This list was a bit of a let down. I'm 21 right now, and I definitely had over half of this list done before my 20th birthday.

It's not so much a list of things that geeks must do as much as a list of things that people with geeky personalities have already thought about doing or have actually done.

I was really hoping for a list of things that geek types should try to do that they naturally wouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My Programmer "Must do before you Die List"

1) Implement lisp within itself. Implement lisp in ruby.

2) Write your own Webserver.

3) Truly understand Haskell and Monads

4) Write a useful genetic algorithm.

5) Build a working neural net.

6) Finish SICP.

7) Work through and finish On Lisp.

8) Build a highly concurrent server application with erlang.

<comment><USER7> Nice list, but you'd be surprised how little work it takes to build a functional web server. I know I was when a couple of friends and I wrote one in Haskell on a rainy day. We were just scratching an intellectual itch of course, so there was plenty of stuff it didn't do, but it served up HTML files and images just fine.

<comment><USER8> I agree. Writing a web server is a trivial programming task. Want to do something networking that's hard? Write a TCP/IP stack: that was my first real job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meh.

1\. Build a telescope by grinding your own mirror and use it to see Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons.

2\. Make a chain mail shirt

3\. Build a Stirling engine and/or steam engine.

<comment><USER10> > 2\. Make a chain mail shirt

...from pop can ring tabs. :)

<comment><USER9> <http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/armour/mail/mail.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, the Russian programmer scene must be very different from the US because I've literally never met anyone like this in Moscow. Maybe some of my sysadmin friends would score around 10%, but not more. As for those of my friends who went on to work for Google, Microsoft Research or started their own tech companies - I don't think any of them would score above 5% ("Make A Website With HTML").

Upon some thought, the very idea of a "geek checklist" seems misguided to me. I've always tried to do 1 new thing instead of 100 old things, and anyone who succeeds in that gets my respect automatically regardless of their geek points.

</comment><comment><USER12> Most of these seem to be easy means to rather shallow ends, to me at least. Paying my sixteen-year-old nephew to do these things for me would be easier, and just as satisfying.

The only activity on this list I actually enjoyed was learning how to pick a lock. Not as a means for breaking and entering, but as a skill and an end in itself.

To me, it is all about learning to create something, preferably with a certain artistic value. Over the last few years, I have:

* Designed and built a clock (out of wood, steel and ropes).

* Designed, printed and bound a few notebooks and diaries, and two books.

* Improved my writing skills; both fiction and non-fiction. Wrote several short stories and started a working on a book.

* Bought a fountain pen, re-learned proper penmanship and developed a personal script.

* Learned how to run correctly and started running barefoot (I run 50 miles per week now).

* Borrowed my uncle's SLR camera, learned a lot about photography.

* Wrote, recorded and edited a short movie with some friends.

* Studied music theory and started playing the piano, albeit with to much ambition. I'm just not able to express myself through classical music. These days, I prefer to play blues on my guitar, or jazz standards (1930s-1940s) or stride piano when the mood is right.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Write a compiler

2\. Compile a Linux kernel

3\. Write a web server

4\. Finish SICP

5\. Work on a major (ok - at least widely appreciated) open-source project

</comment><comment><USER6> The "won't ever do before I die" programmer list:

1) Prove P = NP

2) Build a quantum computer

3) Write a program that will pass the Turing test

</comment><comment><USER14> There is no doubt that I am a geek, but I was really surprised I had done as much of this list as I had.

Seems to me this is a list of stuff that if you are a geek you have probably done most of.

</comment><comment><USER15> There aren't really life "things to do" but just sys admin tasks that you should probably do if you wanted cred within that circle.

</comment><comment><USER16> 1: invent holodeck 2: ???? 3: no longer care about profit

</comment><comment><USER17> I these are all mundane things, are geeks supposed to so much without ambition that there is nothing truly grand or life changing on the list?

</comment><comment><USER8> The geek thing that I (currently) fancy doing is build a OISC using relays for the logic, punched cards for the program and magnetic core memory.

Probably use the subneg instruction.

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

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't imagine anyone thinking "I must 'Shrink a Website URL' before I die!" That list seems more like things today's geek (Geek 2.0, as illustrated on that site) would brag about to his/her other friends while sitting in a coffee shop (via Twitter, of course).

<comment><USER19> Not to mention that anyone who's ever posted a link via Twitter has probably used a URL shortener.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What about tangential activities that aren't techie per se but are connected to the geek mindset at a deeper level?

</comment><comment><USER20> These aren't very deep.</comment>


WTF is up with Dell? - <AUTHOR> http://markmaunder.com/2009/wtf-is-up-with-dell/

<comment><USER2> On the stupid smirking idiot appearing in your emails:

It's marketing. They don't understand that you don't give two shits how much smiling is going on in your email. The marketeers are used to doing mass marketing to people who want $300 workstations for their houses, not people interested in buying some server hardware that they'll hopefully never see after it goes into the rack.

They don't get that no matter how many smiling guys in suits they put in your email, it isn't going to change the hardware your asking about. These people seriously believe that if they show you crappy hardware with a smiling silk- tie-guy, you'll be happy to buy it because the silk-tie-guy gives you a good feeling when you see it, and you associate that good feeling with the crappy hardware.

Sorry, ranting; we just got a new batch of marketing drones at my job who want to spam the living-hell out of our customers with this sort of garbage. I've been arguing with them back and forth about it for the last few days and I'm not making any progress.

<comment><USER3> What you're saying makes _sense_ , but I'd like to see the data. In a split test of that email and one without the guy, which would win?

Sadly, I bet it would be the one with the guy.

<comment><USER4> I remember a survey that said essentially that (I tried for a couple minutes to find the link but I can't).

I forget the actual numbers in the study but my recollection was that the number of people who read an e-mail with a picture of a smiling person on it was significantly higher. They attributed this to a couple factors...

1\. When you differentiate people tend to pause. So someone going through 20 e-mails of all text will pause on the one with a picture for no other reason than it's different.

2\. People tend to reflect emotion from other people and a picture can trigger that to a lesser extent. This is a well established psychological tendency that people have. Imagine yourself walking up to a group of your friends who are all laughing at something. Even without knowing what they are laughing at you'll instinctively start to smile. Same concept.

Hence the theory that people are more likely to read an e-mail with a smiling person's picture.

<comment><USER5> > So someone going through 20 e-mails of all text will pause on the one with a > picture for no other reason than it's different.

So when every other marketing email has a picture of a recently-laid soul patch guy, it will make sense to send plain text again?

<comment><USER4> The irony of my comment above is that I'm just the opposite. A picture of any kind embedded in the content is usually my cue to move along.

<comment><USER2> Mine too. In fact, I think that there is even a filter for spamassassin that marks emails with embedded images as "spammy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> how come dell doesn't automate the quote process? I don't want to fuck around with a salesguy, just tell me what it fucking costs.

This is half the reason I build my own servers. It's impossible to decide what tradeoffs to make when the true cost of those tradeoffs is hidden behind some sales asshole.

<comment><USER7> I love up-front non-predatory pricing. I hate wasting my time with salespeople, though sometimes you can work out a better deal with them.

My preferred vendor is Silicon Mechanics: <http://www.siliconmechanics.com/>

They sell SuperMicro equipment, they list prices, estimated power draw, etc, all up-front. You can add machines to your shopping cart, checkout, and you're done.

They've always provided us with fantastic customer service, and stepped up to replace/repair anything that didn't work right, even if the cause wasn't entirely clear (such as a hard drive issue that could have been OS related, but turned out to be a Seagate firmware issue).

<comment><USER8> Dell does provide prices on their website. You can pull out your credit card and buy a server without talking to anyone. The purpose of a quote is to negotiate a better price.

<comment><USER7> _The purpose of a quote is to negotiate a better price._

I know, which is why I said exactly that in my post =)

That said, I prefer vendors that simply charge everyone the same reasonable price, rather than having such a large profit margin that they can afford to:

1) Pay a sales team to finagle over quotes.

2) Slash their prices on demand.

Obviously, things are a bit different when you're buying in truly massive quantities.

<comment><USER9> Dell's process has always had that "car salesman" feel... I can get you a better price - Let me talk to my boss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sounds like one of those future management case studies everybody will learn about in business classes in a few years. "Why did Dell fail? Well, they sacked all their sales people and nobody could buy their product!"

I remember studying one of those. Can't remember the company off the top of my head, some retail electronics outfit. They sacked all their senior sales people on the floor to save money and ended up going out of business because people could find anybody to help them adequately when they were in the store with money.

<comment><USER11> That was what happened to Circuit City.

<comment><USER10> I think that was the one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I bought a couple 1U servers from dell. Since none of my credit cards would go over a few thousand for a single purchase I called Dell up to ask if I could send them a check. I got transferred 12 times! I'm not kidding you, I was counting. Eventually, when I got to 13, I couldn't understand a word the guy was saying so I just hung up.

During those transfers they asked if I was charging them to my companies account. I couldn't believe how easily they were going to allow me to charge a personal purchase to the place they were going to be delivered.

Eventually I found out that their web interface allowed you to split a purchase over a few credit cards. Few years later they are still running with zero problems. Get them with DRAC, its great.

Bottom line is, if you are buying from Dell, either you are a "Dude, I'm getting dell guy", or a company with an account. If you are just buying a few rackmount servers, dont fit a profile and can get serious hassles.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is this what the world has come to? I need to get a semi-popular blog just to get human customer service?

</comment><comment><USER14> Dell told the community college I am sys-admining for that we couldn't buy the special, we had to buy on GSA pricing (not educational since we are on Tribal land). The $499 package became $999 and it took weeks to find out why we were not considered an education institution.

Needless to say, we went elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hate talking to sales people--that's why I buy reconditioned Dells from websites that publish their prices.

</comment><comment><USER16> May I ask how this qualifies as news? Or how it even affects anyone other than the original poster?

I mean, the dude's marketing agent was laid off and the new guy didn't do as good of a job (or the emails didn't reach). And?

<comment><USER17> Maybe this story is riding the coat-tails of the AA story about how "big companies just don't get it". Who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't recall the last time I ordered a pre-built server from anywhere. I build my own. I know the cost, no gimmicks, no countless e-mails back and forth with sales people. Done on my time frame and my budget.

<comment><USER19> I think the last PC I bothered to build myself was a Pentium 4 some ages ago.

Since then I've decided that the two pennies (or otherwise insignificant amount) I save building myself is not worth the time it takes to assemble it, not to mention keeping up to date on current HW trends, configurations, sockets, power supplies, mobos etc etc.

Pretty much all hardware these days are technically overspec'ed compared to the load I can put on them, so as long as your needs are not high-end, pretty much any moderately modern Xeon should do.

I just buy a preconfigured setup from Dell, it just works, and at worst I'll buy some extra RAM and drives elsewhere later.

Maybe that's not how you like it, but for me it means zero hassles, zero work and a guarantee which is for the system as a whole working unit, not just single components. I couldn't be happier, and the days of building systems myself is definitely over.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, have to take my server down quick. Getting DoS'd with the HN visits. Back up in a few minutes after reconfig to make it a little faster. :(

<comment><USER20> You host your own blog? WordPress.com is your friend. Get on the cloud, man! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Crazier than not getting a response from a Dell salesperson... describing that stock photo guy with the soul patch as cute.

</comment><comment><USER22> check your spam / junk folder!

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been chasing Dell for two weeks about an order. Two people from here have spoken to nine different Dell people over four call centers between us and emailed five Dell people three or more times each and still going nowhere.

All I needed to do was write a grumbly blog post and they'd sort it out within 3 hours? Why did nobody tell me!

</comment><comment><USER24> Mark,

In the past you have flowed about the wonders (price) of Dell on the Seattle tech startups mailing list. One stumble in the relationship, and you're telling the world how awful they are. You even went so far as to publically mock the appearance of your Dell sales rep. This type of public bullying might not produce the desired outcome. That is, if your desired outcome is to get a good price on your server and maintain a relationship with your vendor.

Sales reps are human beings, fallible and fraught with human problems. Perhaps your rep came down with a certain flu and forgot to tell his/her customers who their secondary is. As a customer of Dell, I keep all of my "sales team"'s contacts in a text file, for this very reason. (For the record, I hate dealing with Dell, and choose HP or Sun whenever I have the option.)

If you feel Dell is untrustworthy, consider moving on. HP and Sun are superior alternatives who are willing to match Dell's price. You just need to know how to work the channels (for HP call up CDW, for Sun look for Tim Van Loan). Also, Supermicro resellers like Silicon Mechanics, PogoLinux, or Penguin Computers sell servers comparable to Dell's crappy commodity hardware, and will likely beat Dell's server offerings.

From an infrastructure management point of view, your model is broken if you cannot afford a few extra days in provisioning. Consider multiple suppliers, or rethinking the model. Cloud and Dedicated server models are designed towards infrastructures that require rapid resource provisioning.

<comment><USER25> "Publically mock the appearance of your Dell sales rep?" That's gotta be a stock photo. Can a Dell sales rep even afford that tie, let alone that hair cut?

<comment><USER13> Can he get laid?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love systems76.com new thin Lemur laptop with Ubuntu

forget Dell</comment>


Ask HN: Have access to an EIDL loan, what should I do with it? - <AUTHOR> I finally got [pre?]approved for the EIDL program - I originally applied nearly 2 months ago, more interested in the "free" grant portion of it, which was immediately exhausted and I haven't seen a peep about it since.
Anyway, I am approved for $18k at 3.5% for 30 years ($88/month payment) with first payment due after the first 12 months (it looks like the first year nothing is due.)
I'm curious what ideas people would have for how I could use this? I am just a freelancer with a day job, so I don't need a loan to survive, but if there was something worthwhile that I should be looking into, I am all ears. Using it to bootstrap a new business, or purchase an existing business/idea, etc? <comment><USER2> Honestly, why take the loan if you don't need it and don't know what to do with it. Even at 3.5%, you'd pay an extra $11,000 over the course of the loan. (Less if you pay it off early.)

But unless you have a compelling reason to take on debt... why would you?

<comment><AUTHOR> also, ideally the rate of return on whatever venture or investment would be higher than that interest rate, so even if the loan was not paid off immediately, it would still be profitable. it's just an extra chunk of money being offered but needs to be in a justifiable "business" sense.</comment></comment>


Get Married First, then Focus on your Career - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/get-married-first-then-focus-on-your-career/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/terrorist.asp](http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/terrorist.asp)</comment>


Distraction free app for composing research papers and pillar content - <AUTHOR> https://monsterwriter.app/ <comment><USER2> "Show HN: " in the title would get more visibility.</comment>


Map: Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism - <AUTHOR> https://richarddawkins.net/2016/01/map-publicly-funded-schools-that-are-allowed-to-teach-creationism/ <comment><USER2> Links to a Slate article.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_public_schools_mapped_where_tax_money_supports_alternatives.html)

There's also a correction in the Slate article:

 _Correction, Jan. 27, 2014: This article 's headlines originally suggested that thousands of public schools in Louisiana and Tennessee are teaching creationism. While those schools are permitted to teach creationism, it is unclear how many are actually teaching it, and the headlines have been updated to reflect this._</comment>


Fantasy Maps That Put the World's Tallest Mountains Side by Side - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/maps-of-the-tallest-mountains <comment><USER2> This was actually a fascinating read. The mountains are normalized to a generic pyramid shape, not for simplicity of comparison among them, but rather because most mountains that can be seen as a whole from the ground are pyramid-shaped volcanoes.

</comment><comment><USER3> This calls for me to cite by super most favorite page in all of Wikipedia: _topographic prominence_.

See, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographic_prominence?wprov=s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographic_prominence?wprov=sfla1)

/Acey

</comment><comment><USER4> To see the full resolution image: [https://media.davidrumsey.com/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/J...](https://media.davidrumsey.com/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/JP2K/RUMSEY~8~1/162/11124045.jp2&x=0&y=0&width=12000&height=7800&level=0)</comment>


The Man Behind Trump's Facebook Juggernaut - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the-man-behind-trumps-facebook-juggernaut <comment><USER2> Having just read Targeted ([https://www.amazon.com/Targeted-Cambridge- Analytica-Whistleb...](https://www.amazon.com/Targeted-Cambridge-Analytica- Whistleblowers-Democracy/dp/0062965794)) This story has a completely different angle, and I have the feeling some people are trying to take credit for other peoples work.</comment>


How does an introverted tech founder with no free time network? - <AUTHOR> I am not a fan of social media.
I live in a city that doesn't have a strong tech presence. I work FT a software dev team lead. I am a dad. I spend all hours possible building my own startup.<p>Any advice or suggestions on how I can meet like-minded individuals? <comment><USER2> Being a dad gives you numerous opportunities to network with other parents. You can do it for free while waiting for the soccer practice to end or the last school bell to ring. Depending on your situation, there may be other options.

This network might not give you direct access to the people you want to talk to, but that seems to be the idea behind networking. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

If you don't regularly write a blog, you might consider that. It's a way to have people interested in what you're doing contact you rather than the other way around.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will consider starting to blog.. It has been a thought for a while now but it may be time to start. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Man, I feel like I wrote this post. The problem is absolutely familiar to me.

What I do in order to socialize / find people who can complement projects that I'm, working on? I write to my blog and share posts on topics that I care about in local social communities. Then I monitor a reaction. Also I like to join discussions in the social networks where potentially I can find some people with the same vision :)

<comment><AUTHOR> glad to know I am not alone. thanks for the suggestions</comment></comment>


Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/237841650/chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant/ <comment><USER2> Didn't the ukranian government cover the plant with a dome cover?</comment>


Shots Fired at Munich Shopping Centre - k-mcgrady http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-36870986 <comment><AUTHOR> Really alarming that this is starting to happen on an almost weekly basis.

So sad to me, violence from another part of the world spilling into Western Europe, an area that's finally settled into stable and peaceful democracy after millennia of war.

<comment><USER2> there is still no word if this is an act of terrorism or some deranged person with a weapon.

<comment><USER3> Are those not the samething? I'm sure a terrorist is also a deranged person

<comment><USER4> Yes, but terrorism has a political goal, some one who's simply insane doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Facebook have activated their 'Safety Check' feature: [https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/munich-germany- shooting...](https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/munich-germany-shooting- jul22-2016/)

</comment><comment><USER5> News alert from the Washington Post says at least two dead :/

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/german-police-seal- off-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/german-police-seal-off-mall- area-in-munich-after-shots- fired/2016/07/22/6567e6d8-502c-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> live updates from reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/live/xatezzbcvxxy](https://www.reddit.com/live/xatezzbcvxxy)

</comment><comment><USER6> The police in Munich are now saying that at least several have been killed and injured. Sky News saying that police report multiple shooters, with none in custody.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Flagged into oblivion within 20mins. I was hoping people would choose the 'hide' option instead of flag but no they chose to kill a discussion for other people they don't want to part of anyway.

<comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099576)

<comment><USER8> I'd caution against drawing general conclusions about HN from spot observations about what does/doesn't get flagged. People usually fall prey to cognitive biases when they do so, e.g. thinking that the community is against them somehow. We're all primed to feel that way; the feeling just hops to different things depending on our different identities.

Occam suggests you needn't look for "Anglo bias" as an explanation for why a story gets flagged when the thread includes "We must get rid of Merkel and the refugees" followed by "What do you suggest, gas chambers?"

(Not that there isn't inevitably going to be something like "anglo bias" on an English-language website. But FWIW the moderators here are acutely aware of, and grateful for, and interested in, the international aspects of the community—definitely including the German ones.)</comment></comment></comment>


IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2019/11/ibm-sonic-delay-lines-and-history-of.html <comment><USER3> Acoustic delay lines were also used in calculators.

[http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/friden_ec-130_-_ec-13...](http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/friden_ec-130_-_ec-132.html)

<comment><USER4> Something I kick myself every time I think about it was an old desk calculator I was given as "junk" by the owner of the first software development company I worked for.

I was 18 years old, and loved to get old electronics to tear apart for the parts, and this calculator was no exception. It was completely transistor based, and used nixie tubes for the output. And it had a memory function! But it didn't work properly, and so I dug into it.

All the while wondering where inside was the "memory function" \- I didn't see anything that looked like memory, just tons of transistors. But there was one curious thing - a metal box, very light weight (made of aluminum or something), with four wires leading in and out of it (two on one corner, and two on another). It was hermetically sealed, and so I broke out my tools and attacked it with gusto.

Inside, attached to some ceramic "knobs" which had the wires attached where they led it - was a coil of wire - 2 or three loops. What was it for? I had no idea - and tossed it aside.

In the end (after a couple of moves, meeting my now wife, etc - you know, life), I didn't even keep the nixies - those got sent to goodwill or something. It was only much later did I realize what I had destroyed.

This was long before today's modern internet - circa 1992 or thereabouts - <USER2> I didn't have any easy way to look things up short of traveling a good distance to the library. I honestly wish I had kept that calculator whole; it would have gone nicely with the small "computer museum" collection I have going today (star of it is an Altair in desperate need of a good cleaning and restoration).

But back then, I was just a dumb kid, doing dumb things. Ah, well.

<comment><USER3> I used to have two PDP-8s that did not survive moves. If I had only known what they now sell for on eBay..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my first required digital design lab I picked as a final project the problem of building a Nim [1] playing circuit. I almost used an acoustic delay line to hold the game state. This was long before the days of RaspberryPi or any other microcontrollers. (Our lab at MIT still used the predecessor to TTL logic known as RTL logic.)

I didn't end up needing the delay line, I got by with around two dozen flip flops instead.

How times have changed!

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim)</comment>


Fewer Than 1000 Brits Googled "What Is the EU?" After Referendum - <AUTHOR> http://steve-patterson.com/less-than-1000-brits-googled-what-is-the-eu-after-referendum/ <comment><USER2> The cracks continue to show in the media blitz, which is actually a media meltdown reflecting the meltdown of the elites, against Brexit. First, the petition for a second referendum was revealed to be a fraud. Now, the story that Brits somehow didn't know the implications of Brexit and, worse, somehow didn't even know what the EU was, is revealed to be greatly exaggerated.

The author put it very well:

>I've never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating.

<comment><USER3> I'll say this first: I personally think the referendum was a terrible idea. Economically, I disagree with the result. This notion of "prosperity in 10 years" with "a bit of a recession in the short/medium term" burns the working class the most. It's not fair on workers at all to throw the dice like this.

Nevertheless, it is absurd to predict the collapse of the UK because the pound tanked. Most people pressing for a Brexit probably expected that, and many may profit from it. Similarly, the turbulence so far is a non-event compared to the banking crisis.

I would feel better about Brexit if it had a plan behind it. Equally, if Scotland would be extended an invitation to vote for its independence and then EU membership. Of course, this (apparent) lack of planning is not the fault of the electorate.

I think the big issue now is indeed the response from an elite which has had its pretty face scratched. All that these desperate articles on Brexit loopholes reveal is that, since people who profit from speculating are thinking about such loopholes, you can bet that the likes of Boris Johnson (or any Conservative for that matter), who will prefer or profit from preserving the status quo, are thinking about the same things.

About how they can reimagine or circumvent the idea that the majority voted for. About how a Brexit can be converted into a downgrade from EU to EEA membership, or how the Brexit might be indefinitely postponed. It might make economic sense, but there will be a lot of perplexed people out there watching "BoJo" become a hero who handled a difficult situation by failing both sides of the Brexit debate in equal measure.

Of course the kind of thing Farage has in mind is absurd, of course, but a Brexit doesn't have to be a tragedy. People just have to realise that for a profitable solution, the EU must be identified as a competitor as well as a friend.

Personally, I think Cameron and Johnson planned the whole thing from the start. Boris acting as a Trojan horse for Cameron/the remain campaign. He was never a Eurosceptic, until suddenly after the Leave campaign started gaining momentum.

I have no proof, just a _whisper_. Observations of the both of them, and Angela Merkel's sudden "patience is a virtue" approach after a phone call from Cameron over the weekend followed by a cocky return to parliament by the incumbent prime minister.

And no, it's not wishful thinking. I don't enjoy recessions more than the next person, but the recession is not _guaranteed_ no matter how many times the banks warn against it. I am not concerned by nations or identities. I believe in realpolitik and economic strength. If Brexit turns profitable, it will have been worth it. I'm just speculating for the sake of speculating.

<comment><USER4> > they can reimagine or circumvent the idea that the majority voted for. About > how a Brexit can be converted into a downgrade from EU to EEA membership

The ballot paper said "leave the EU". What that looks like is apparently negotiable and dependant on political realities, since no one actually knows what people intended when they voted leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me, or have the mainstream media lowered their journalistic standards to compete with sensationalist blogs (e.g., HuffPo, BuzzFeed, etc)? This sort of thing seems to be happening with increasing frequency, even at NYTimes and friends.

<comment><USER6> > Is it just me, or have the mainstream media lowered their journalistic > standards to compete with sensationalist blogs

Sensationalist blogs got a bit ahead, on the same trajectory, of where mainstream media was already heading, and that gap has significantly closed, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being a Brit who believes I know more about the EU than the median Briton does, but less about it than Wikipedia does, why should I be ashamed to google "What is the EU?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, the way many media outlets grasped at any available pro-remain narratives after the results was quite funny.

Kind of the same thing was happening to news about Trump - first it was "The polls can be wrong", than "He may have won Iowa, but he will have a hard time continuing", then "Still could be a contested convention", and now it's "Delegates are dumping Trump". It's like they are trying to change reality just by pretending it's different. Sadly, it is not, and I think we would be well served by facing that head-on.

<comment><USER9> Cruz won Iowa, not Trump

<comment><USER8> I knew I should've fact-checked that, but I hope my point is clear anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it it funny that people think that someone who doesn't know what the EU is will vote to leave it anyway. And then somehow remember the letters E and U long enough to google the grammatically correct phrase "What is the EU?". With correct title and punctuation too.

Of course, such people are always on the other team, never on one's own. Something that even Google probably doesn't know.

</comment><comment><USER11> For reference, here's the discussion of the Washington Post article the author refers to, which hit 411 points on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11970344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11970344)

Also, a related article from yesterday:

"Inappropriate Uses of Google Trends"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11987414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11987414)

</comment><comment><USER12> Google Trends related tweet that some sensationalist news linked to:

\- [https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/746303118820937728?l...](https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/746303118820937728?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER13> fuckin scroll-assisted JS ...

<comment><USER14> Why do people do this? Does it look better on systems that don't have smooth scrolling or something?

<comment><USER15> I think if you're using a traditional clicky mousewheel it might be less awful.

<comment><USER16> Not at all. I'm used to my "awful" clicky scroll. I know subconciously that a scroll click is equal to a certain distance down the page.

When I then scroll 3 clicks and I've almost cleared the entire page because of smooth scrolling, that's no fun.

I'd much much rather janky jerky scrolling consistently across all sites than the odd one or two smooth scrollers

Don't even get me started on smooth scrolling when it comes to using a bit of a dated computer. Scroll... wait for the js to catch up and the page actually scrolls.

Edit: may have misinterpreted where the awful was directed. I deal with a lot of Mac users. Apologies if I did misread it, leaving comment intact for posterity

<comment><USER17> Glad to see someone else who hates smoothscroll. I absolutely despise smooth scroll - especially since it is a _browser option FFS_. If I wanted it, I'd enable the option. I don't want it - which is why I disabled the option.

As a developer, a sincere "Fuck you" to every developer who adds this to their sites. I shouldn't need to add this to my 3rd party filters:

        !Disable Smoothscroll
        */smoothscroll.js

ps: I find the above rule blocks maybe 80% of all smoothscrolling on websites, thankfully.

E:

Unfortunately not this site as it uses a Jquery plugin called niceScroll() which is anything but...Running this in the console will remove it.

         jQuery('html').getNiceScroll().remove()

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fewer, not less.

<comment><USER19> Comparatively speaking, 999 is less than 1000. They might have constructed it that way. One doesn't say 7 is fewer than 9.

<comment><USER18> You removed the discrete units from the text ("Brits") and then made a point that holds true only when discussing comparisons that do not have discrete units.

7 is less than 9. But 7 Brits are fewer than 9 Brits.

<comment><USER19> True. It depends if the emphasis is on the mathematical number or not..

A number less than one thousand represents the number of Brits who queried...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's only Dutch factchecker quits over political ad exemption - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/27/facebook-only-dutch-factchecker-quits-over-political-ad-exemption <comment><USER2> For everyone doing all the hand-wringing about Facebook, doesn't existing media (newspapers, TV, cable, etc) already NOT "fact check" ads run on their networks?

<comment><USER3> False advertising is normally a crime ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising))

I think (suspect) the trick FB is using is not unlike Uber / Airbnb where they fall just outside regulation. Meaning that sponsored content on FB is just "self-regulated"

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, can you remember the last time a big (any?) company got nailed for false advertising? I remember reading marketing material my old company would send out and I knew the application didn't do $the_thing they said it did.

<comment><USER3> Actually yes [1], but penalties seam to only be imposed on foreign companies.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/03/hyundai- and...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/03/hyundai-and-kia- fined-100m-for-misleading-customers-on-fuel-economy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude Nu.nl is the news-outlet with least journalistic activity of all publications in NL. It is basically a one-on-one copy of AP.

<comment><USER5> It makes sense that they lasted longer than Leiden University before quitting, then. Facebook couldn't even make the token concessions needed to keep at least one low-effort rag on board?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just can't get my head around why political speech is permitted to be false..

Have Facebook ever actually given any solid reasons for this decision?

<comment><USER7> People should be allowed to be wrong. It's that simple. If you disagree with this you're not a very good person (fact).

<comment><USER8> Water is not wet. It's that simple. if you disagree with me you're not a very good person(fact)

<comment><USER9> I don't have a problem with you advertising that water is not wet on Facebook using your own money.

<comment><USER10> I'd have a problem with it if it was part of a campaign to replace all water with Gatorade. People spending their money to be publicly stupid is not a problem, but people spending their money to make other people be stupid in ways that impact my life is.

Our democratic policy is resilient against a certain level of deliberately- induced stupidity, since stupidity does tend to be self-defeating. But at sufficient levels, it can do a lot of damage to everybody else before it finally defeats itself.

I'm not saying that this can be fixed by the trivial addition of fact checkers. But I don't think that "it's your money" is sufficient reason not to try various solutions. Your right to swing your money around ends where my nose begins.

<comment><USER9> Can you not just _disagree_ with it?

Why do you need to _ban_ it?

<comment><USER10> I didn't say "ban it". I said that a variety of options were on the table.

As for disagreeing with it... I can disagree with it until it takes on the force of law. Then I'm _required_ to agree with it, or at least, to live with the consequences. Political speech takes on an aspect of force in a way that other speech doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fact-checking is misleading, because it makes some people believe that facts are completely objective and you can verify or disprove them without any bias. In the end, most fact-checking outlets just repeat propaganda of the political parties they align with.

<comment><USER12> Can you provide some facts that would be subjective?

<comment><USER13> In the realm of media, there's a lot of equivocation with the word "fact". I believe in the existence of objective facts in the general sense. But when we're using the term in the context of our current media environment, a lot of "facts" are actually conclusions that contain heaping helpings of opinion, if you really dig into them. There's a lot of telling you what to think and not a lot of bare facts, because who wants to read boring bare facts? Assuming the bare facts are even reported accurately between the place where they were collected and the final reporting (see almost all popular science articles, where even when "facts" are being reported they still get screwed up).

Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." As I've commented before, even the apparent objective fact that "Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything else was worse, or if they agreed with X and voted against it as part of some other political deal, or what. Even the "bare fact" "Politician A voted against X" can be treated in a way that turns it into an effective lie, even if it is nominally 100% true. That is the sort of "fact" we deal with in the media environment all the time, and it isn't as objective as we'd like it to be.

<comment><USER14> >"Policy X will help group Y in manner Z."

While true that conditional statements about the future ("X _will_ help") is not falsifiable, it is still a well formed if-then statement. The statement must be either true or false even though we can't derive a proof one way or the other. I disagree that we have to just throw our hands up and accept belief in unfalsifiable "subjective facts". I can easily fix your statement. Watch me:

"Relevant organization W projects that policy X will help group Y in manner Z."

Now your belief in "X helps Y in manner Z" is no longer blind but derived from trust in organization W. If you don't want to trust W you can dig deeper into their methods and data. There is no link in the chain that can only be filled in subjectively.

>"Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything ..."

If you looked closely you would see "therefore politician A hates Y" is a false conclusion from a true premise. Not to victim blame here, but if true facts are leading someone to false conclusions then that's on them for being bad at critical reasoning. The facts aren't subjective. The flaw is in the wetware. Human brains have exploitable bugs. We call them "fallacies". The hotfix was released in the education system. It hasn't reached everyone yet.

If the public can't be trusted to evaluate facts presented to them then the very premise of democracy is flawed anyway.

<comment><USER13> "I can easily fix your statement. Watch me:"

But that's missing the point. My point is entirely about what the media calls "facts" and what gets called "facts" in these sorts of discussions and by "fact checkers", not whether or not in some hypothetical universe the media could indeed deal in objective facts alone. The fact that it could be done correctly does not mean it is done correctly; or to go with a traditional philosophical formulation, ought does not lead to is. Correcting _me_ doesn't help anything, you need to convince the media.

And you will not do that, because dealing in psuedo-facts suits them fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is your movie and music preference related? - <AUTHOR> http://notes.variogr.am/post/53245962722/is-your-movie-and-music-preference-related

<comment><USER2> When I briefly worked at last.fm I experimented with giving movie recommendations based on music you liked. I didn't have a license to use the movie data on a public project, but it seemed fun and effective when we tried it among ourselves.

The article's anecdotal examples notwithstanding, you can do some very good recommendations just with sheer volume of data - much as Google won the search engine wars by ignoring page metadata and just using the text. I'd be interested to see actual evidence as to whether these "deeper" recommendations are actually more effective.</comment>