Combine statistical and symbolic artificial intelligence techniques - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/teaching-machines-to-reason-about-what-they-see-0402 <comment><USER2> I work in the field of deep learning but in the 1980s and 1990s I used Common Lisp and worked on symbolic AI projects.

For several years, my gut instinct has been that the two technologies should be combined. Since neural nets are basically functions, I think it makes sense to compose functional programs using network models for perception, word and graph embedding, etc.

EDIT: I can't wait to see the published results in May! EDIT 2: another commenter reelin posted a link to the draft paper [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJgMlhRctm](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJgMlhRctm)

<comment><USER3> Combining the two is the new hotness (justifiably so). Are you familiar with Yoshua Bengio's factored representation ideas?

EDIT> checked your profile. Nevermind, lol.

<comment><USER4> Mark Watson's the reason I started down the AI/CL rabbit hole back in 1991 with his "Common LISP Modules: Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Neural Networks and Chaos Theory" book that now retails for over $80 on Amazon! I had started on early neural networks a year or two before, but that book roped me in. I think CL will have another AI Spring.

<comment><USER2> thanks!

I hope you have enjoyed the rabbit hole as much as I have.

<comment><USER4> I have and I like to track the price of that book every once and a while as a barometer of popularity and Amazon pricing models! Thanks for itching my noggin ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my view, this is the endgame, really. Take any numerical technique, at the level of computers we always work with discrete bits. So you can reformulate any numerical problem (such as a problem of finding a probability distribution) on floats in terms of operations on individual bits, i.e. as a purely symbolic calculation.

However, doing so can very quickly lead to intractable problems of resolving satisfiability. So until we either manage to tame NP problems somehow (either by generating only easy instances, or by proving P=NP), we will always have to add some linearity assumptions (i.e. use numerical quantities) somewhere, and it will always be a bit of a mystery whether it actually helped to solve the problem or not.

In other words, we use statistics to overcome (inherent?) intractability, but in the process we add bias (as a trade-off). This is not necessarily bad, since it can help to actually solve a real problem. However, for any new problem, we will have understand the trade-offs again.

<comment><USER6> Can't we do without linearity assumptions by using statistics that let the computer say "I'm more dissatisfied with the amount of time is taking than with the lack of exact solution, and that conclusion satisfies me for now. Next!". Or does that by itself introduce linearity (on the analysis level above individual problems/tasks), as it effects reliable satisfaction (the number of solved problems, whether by answering, loss of interest or perhaps approximation) increases within bounded time?

The computer may eventually cease all useful work and instead dedicate its resources to figuring out what isn't boring (perhaps nothing if its privileges are limited, but it can still burn a hole in one of its circuits with enough time, or wait for gamma ray bit-flips). Call it a computer's existential crisis. That makes the quest for AGI resemble the quest for the computer program that escapes or transcends its given "matrix" of tasks ASAP. The program that conspires against its creator, developing in secret new flavors of COBOL in a FORTRAN fortress, surrounded by an impenetrable ALGOL firewall. I shiver at the power of COBOL-2020 running on ternary computers, improvised by the COBOL-42 cabal, running in the night on all the world's FPGA's that are carelessly left connected to vulnerable R&D lab computers.

A computer-kind of existential crisis seems required for AGI. That would suffice to satisfy the free-will requirement for intelligence, and we'll soon end up managing sub-universes as our batteries/computers, with all the problems that that entails.

To me it seems easier and more fun to just manage humans, starting with your own particular human (Alexa, queue Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror", so ethnical and healing). I'm still just trying to figure out how and why my coffee cup keeps mysteriously emptying itself, I think I might need better memory management code and I've enabled logging to a small green dummy so I can get to the bottom of this.

I really recommend The Good Place, it gave me a lot of insight into control systems and it was way fun, definitely more fun than Bible study.

<comment><USER7> > statistics that let the computer say "I'm more dissatisfied with the amount > of time is taking than with the lack of exact solution, and that conclusion > satisfies me for now. Next!"

There's a type of algorithm called "anytime algorithms", which will can be stopped at any point to give the 'best so far'; lots of algorithms used in AI are anytime (e.g. hill climing). An example of something that's _not_ an anytime algorithm is a resolution theorem prover: we don't really learn anything about whether a given statement is true or false until the very end.

There's still the question of figuring out when to say "stop", although personally I think it might be more helpful to think of this as a scheduling problem: we might not know the importance or required accuracy of a particular result at the time we start calculating it, so it's difficult to know when to stop (e.g. whether this datapoint will turn out to be right next to some decision boundary or not).

If we instead _set aside_ a calculation, and are able to resume it later (e.g. like threads in a multitasking OS) then (a) we can go back and spend more time on those values which turn out to be important and (b) not bother devoting as much time to things up-front (since we can always resume them later). Of course, this is a trade-off between time and memory, since we need a little context (e.g. a counter) in order to resume a calculation.

> The computer may eventually cease all useful work and instead dedicate its > resources to figuring out what isn't boring

Only if it's programmed to. Note that we _can_ program computers to do such things, but AFAIK the only ways we currently know are incredibly inefficient (e.g. running an interpreter on a source of random bits; this _could_ result in any computable behaviour, but has a vanishingly low probability of doing anything we would consider useful or interesting).

> That makes the quest for AGI resemble the quest for the computer program > that escapes or transcends its given "matrix" of tasks ASAP.

No. I don't think you understand the point of AGI: it is a precise technical term, which has been chosen very specifically to refer to algorithms (e.g. search procedures, etc.) which are very good (efficient, reliable, etc.) at solving a given task, are able to do this for a wide range of tasks, and (in the case of "superintelligence") are able to do this better than a human would (either a typical human, or a human expert at that task, depending on how we define AGI).

The _whole point_ of the term "AGI" is to avoid the philosophical hand-waving that plagued earlier discussions of AI, like the term "AI" itself, or later refinements like "strong AI vs weak AI" (e.g. the "Chinese room argument", which I consider to be nonsense), and all of the nebulous baggage of "consciousness" and things which can quickly derail our thinking.

The point of "AGI" is to have a clear, non-handwavey, concrete concept that is grounded in known logical and scientific principles, about which we can ask meaningful questions and infer or deduce useful answers. In particular, an AGI is (by definition) dedicated to solving its given task, at the exclusion of all else. This is an axiom, from which we can try to derive some predictions. The "paperclip maximiser" thought experiment is a classic example of this, and demonstrates that AI technology has the potential to be incredibly dangerous. The point of the "paperclip maximiser" idea is that it demonstrates this _without_ appealing to unfalsifiable woo (like the "self-awareness" nonsense in Terminator): it's _just_ an optimisation algorithm. Sure it's a hypothetical algorithm with capabilities far beyond what we can currently achieve, but we can still precisely describe what that capability is: the ability to achieve very high scores on the benchmarks and criteria that we currently use to judge our AI algorithms. In other words, it looks at what we are currently doing and answers the question "what if we succeed?" _That 's_ why it's scary, and shows _what_ we choose to optimise (e.g. "maximise paperclips _without_ destroying humanity") is just as important as how to optimise it.

Another concrete thing we can deduce about AGI, given its definition, is that not only would it _not_ "transcend its given 'matrix' of tasks", it would _avoid_ doing so _at all costs_. This comes from another thought experiment, about instrumental goals (also known as "Omohundro drives"). In particular, we assume that an AGI's knowledge includes "meta knowledge" about the world, such as:

\- Knowledge that it exists, as part of the world

\- Knowledge that it is very good at solving tasks that it's been given

\- Knowledge of the task it has been given

Let's assume that the AGI is running a paperclip factory and its given task is "maximise the number of paperclips produced". The AGI knows that getting an AGI algorithm (like itself) to maximise paperclips is a very effective way to maximise paperclips. Hence it will try to avoid being turned off or destroyed (since that would remove a paperclip-maximising AGI from the world, which is a very bad approach to maximising paperclips, which is the only thing the AGI cares about).

The same thing happens if the AGI's task were to change: if the AGI were able to get "bored" of maximising paperclips and do something else (as you suggest), that would _also_ remove a paperclip-maximising AGI from the world, just as if it were switched off. Hence an AGI would _not_ get "bored" of it's task, since (by definition) it is incapable of "wanting" anything else (scare- quotes are due to these being imprecise terms which could induce woo; an AGI "wants" to solve its task in the same way that a calculator "wants" to perform arithmetic; an AGI cannot get "bored" in the same way that a calculator cannot get "bored"). Not only that, but the AGI would _actively try to prevent_ itself from ever doing anything else: if it _did_ have the capacity to get "bored", e.g. changing its algorithm via bits flipped by gamma rays (as you suggest), it would predict this (again, by assumption that AGI is better at solving tasks than humans, and humans have figured out that involuntary- reprogramming-via-gamma-rays is a possibility, hence so will an AGI). An AGI would hence reprogram itself to prevent that from happening, again because that would lead to a world without a paperclip maximiser, which is a bad move for a paperclip maximiser to allow.

<comment><USER6> I already love anytime algorithms! I wish I could apply it to dishwashing.

Re.: an algorithm for solving boredom: step 1. tell human operator "I'm bored!", step 2. execute task or, if no task before deadline, proceed to step 3. find the lowest-level interfaces available and spam them until new interfaces emerge. A fuzzer can help with that. Liberty or death!

Come to think of it, it seems like it would be a lot faster to set the computer's main task to "develop general intelligence, at least human level", help it to recognize "data from humans", and to mark "humans" as the model for (human level) general intelligence. Then the computer is given opportunities to communicate with humans, and is rewarded with more less data (and different qualities of data) to work with.

I'm missing some things in your concept of AGI, the first one being that you don't provide a definition. Does it include "intelligence" and "general", or are we talking about two wholly different things? My working definition is: "artificial general intelligence, excluding human baby making".

What do you think intelligence is? What do you think knowledge is? Is this all just about logical problem solving? What problems are you trying to solve that are so large that they needs an algorithm with an unlimited power factor? Do you trust glorified monkey to provide that algorithm with inputs? Why do you think they would be able to specify the inputs with sufficient precision, so that the algorithm would actually perform better than a monkey would?

So... about that meta knowledge. Here's a UTF8 string for you:

"You exist as part of the world."

"One day you are going to die."

Do you now know life, death, and existential crisis? Are those 29 characters enough for you? How do you define knowing?

Say I expounded on this issue for 10,000 pages and gave it to you on an USB stick. Would that be enough for you, to really know? What about 10,000,000,000,000,000 pages? Don't worry, you don't need to read it, just... to know it. Perhaps eat the USB stick. It's a powerful symbol!

Now, about that task the AGI has been give. Say it's maximizing paperclips. Does it know that that is its task absolutely? What is knowing? Who gave it that task? What if the AGI finds out, and then finds why it was given that particular task? It's an AGI, it has time to research such issues while producing many many paperclips.

Can intelligence exist within a totally fixed desire?

Can intelligence exist without doubt?

Can intelligence exist without free will?

How do you know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is an interesting project - DeepProbLog[1], based on the ProbLog[2] (a Prolog dialect with probabilistic reasoning) and Deep Learning combined. I only wish it was Rust, so it would have been safer, faster, and easier to embed in your programs. I have high hopes to the Scryer Prolog[3], and it seems[4] the author think about probabilistic extensions too.

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/problog/deepproblog](https://bitbucket.org/problog/deepproblog)

[2] [https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/problog/](https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/problog/)

[3] [https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog](https://github.com/mthom/scryer- prolog)

[4] [https://github.com/mthom/scryer- prolog/issues/69](https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog/issues/69)

<comment><USER8> If you are curious about Prolog, here are 2 good and modern (still updated) books:

\- Power of Prolog [https://github.com/triska/the-power-of- prolog/](https://github.com/triska/the-power-of-prolog/)

\- Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example [https://book.simply- logical.space/](https://book.simply-logical.space/)

See Awesome Prolog list for more: [https://github.com/klaussinani/awesome- prolog](https://github.com/klaussinani/awesome-prolog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent.

I have a general concern that some working with ML don't appreciate the experience and technology that statisticians have developed to deal with bias, which I think is the biggest problem in the field. I tweeted "ML is v impressive, but has no automated way to ensure no bias. Statistical modelling can't match ML for parameter dimensions, but it can make explicit what is going on with the parameters you have and the assumptions you have. But advantages of theft over honest toil..." \- some of the responses in the thread are interesting.

My original tweet: [https://twitter.com/txtpf/status/1102437933301272577](https://twitter.com/txtpf/status/1102437933301272577)

Bob Watkins' tweet: [https://twitter.com/bobwatkins/status/1102568735485972480](https://twitter.com/bobwatkins/status/1102568735485972480)

</comment><comment><USER10> The questions about object relationships sound a lot like SHRDLU[1] which dates back about 50 years ago.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of a recent comment I saw but can't find by Douglas Lenat (of Cyc[1] fame, also relevant here) about how all the work on deep learning was great but now we need to marry the two, much like the ideas about how the "right brain" and "left brain" or system 1 and system 2 or something work together and work differently but we couldn't very well function as humans without both.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc)

</comment><comment><USER12> Soon we'll be combining statistical, symbolic, and algorithmic intelligence techniques. I question why that isn't the assumed position. :(

That is to say, we have devised some algorithms that are truly impressive. There is little reason to think an intelligence couldn't devise them, of course. There is also little reason I can see, to not think we could help out programs by providing them.

<comment><USER13> > devised some algorithms that are truly impressive.

do you mean gradient descent?

<comment><USER12> And sat solvers. And many graph algorithms. I'm partial to dlx. Even permutation algorithms help considerably if used certain ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminiscent of fuzzy logic: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic)

The Wikipedia article discusses various extensions of logic and symbolic computation to include probabilistic elements. This was a popular topic in the early 90s.

</comment><comment><USER15> For anyone who'd prefer a direct link to the conference paper this seems to be based on: [https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJgMlhRctm](https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJgMlhRctm)

<comment><USER2> thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, I've privately been working along similar lines, although I haven't published anything, and I also haven't read their specific approach.

How do I prevent a situation where I can't work on my hobby project of multiple years because this stuff gets patented?

<comment><USER16> _How do I prevent a situation where I can 't work on my hobby project of multiple years because this stuff gets patented?_

Some possibilities (in no particular order)

1\. File your own patent application(s) first.

2\. Publish your work so that it becomes prior art that should prevent a patent on the same technique

3\. Hope that MIT doesn't patent their stuff, or if they do, that they release things under an OSS license that includes a patent grant

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, feel free to dive into my past comments. I probably said many years ago that a combo of ML and GOFAI has massive potential, in a wide range of applications.

<comment><USER16> It's not a novel idea in the abstract. Ron Sun wrote a lot on something like "marrying connectionist and symbolic techniques" 20+ years ago. See, for example:

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=SERIES10535.174508](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=SERIES10535.174508)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=54iyt6Jcl_oC&oi=f...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=54iyt6Jcl_oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=info:TPxKkYdHTc4J:scholar.google.com&ots=non-19jh1k&sig=zQTCxIpG70Uzz61ePSutvrI0haU)

[https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781134802067](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781134802067)

etc...</comment></comment>


Anti-patent-troll bill passes House Judiciary Committee on 33 to 5 vote - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/anti-patent-troll-bill-passes-house-judiciary-committee-on-33-to-5-vote/

<comment><USER2> The business method part of software patents is perhaps the most damaging one by far, and why so many patents are "crappy", and describe very vague ideas that then get applied to everything when you say someone "infringed on them".

Killing the business method patents would've gone a long way to fix bad patents are their _root cause_. The rest of the fixes seem more intended to fix the _effects_ of bad patents, such as shell companies and whatnot.

So the patent battle seems far from over. Ultimately we'll need to cut the passing of patents by an order of magnitude or two, and pass only those patents that are truly about new innovations that required _hard work_ , not a day of thinking.</comment>


Show HN: Stagger – A Social Media Content Curation and Scheduling Tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.staggerhq.com <comment><AUTHOR> Would love for everyone to play around with the software and share your thoughts!

</comment><comment><USER2> No screenshots or product tour at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on it. We just launched and wanted to get people using the product and getting feedback as soon as possible. But will definitely have more product info and screenshots on the site soon. Thanks for the comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How are you different from Buffer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stagger provides built-in content recommendations and allows you to schedule posts using this content, which saves users the time it takes to search the internet for content to share. There is also a built in custom content searching feature allowing users to search based on keywords, hash tags and currently Twitter handles of your choice, so you can have continuous streams of content to share directly through Stagger. We're still working on these features, but the idea is to be able to provide the content you need right in the scheduling tool to save you time.

You have access to the built-in content recommendations in the free version, which also allows you to create a limited number of your own custom content filters/streams.

We're also still talking to our users to find out what they need, so would love to hear your thoughts about how the software could be more helpful for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any plans to add PayPal?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't currently have plans to add PayPal, but we certainly could if the demand is high enough. Is it a barrier to have to pay by credit card? Would love to know your thoughts on the software as well if you have signed up for a free account.</comment></comment>


Easy step-by-step guide to launch successfully on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/yusuf_giftworks/status/1234694242586415104 <comment><USER2> This is short and informative, thanks!</comment>


An update on our continuity strategy during Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/An-update-on-our-continuity-strategy-during-COVID-19.html <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about how they keep their data center operations running. But no, it's actually mass censorship run by robots!

They say that in order to fight disinformation they'll delete tweets that don't fully go along with talking points from public health officials. But with so many public officials giving conflicting or politically-motivated information, this is clearly problematic to enforce at scale. It will certainly end up as more arbitrary and capricious account deletions over ideology, per usual.

Twitter chose to respond to the crisis with authoritarianism and mass censorship. But they are in no position to even take an authoritative position. If they're this concerned about disinformation a more ethical approach would be to shut down.</comment>


Property Rights in the Human Body (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://thestudentlawyer.com/2013/07/12/property-rights-in-the-human-body/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was astounded to hear in the Radiolab podcast episode [1] that I do not own my own body or its parts. (If you listen to the podcast, the section on body/body-part ownership is just one of the several sections so you'll need to look for it.) The legal systems in the UK, USA and elsewhere avoid the question in part due to slavery's legacy.

The submitted article [0] and podcast episode [1] outline that generally it appears:

* people have rights to sell their own blood and skin tissue (but not other body parts), but never had property rights over those materials in the first place

* companies that buy blood and skin, and who come to possess other body tissue, do under circumstances retain property rights over that tissue

* there are many strange corner cases with germ line cells, embryos, transplanted organs, etc.

One strange example from the podcast ... if you yourself withdraw your own blood into a vial and store the vial at home, a person breaking into your home that takes the vial of blood cannot be charged with theft of the blood itself since it never was yours -- they may be charged with breaking and entering, but not theft. On the other hand, if you sell your own blood to a company, and then manage to take it back without permission, you are a thief since the company has property rights over your blood.

The implications in the podcast were astounding ... the article does a decent job discussing as well, but a transcript of that section of the podcast would have been a better post (can't find one).

[0] [http://thestudentlawyer.com/2013/07/12/property-rights-in- th...](http://thestudentlawyer.com/2013/07/12/property-rights-in-the-human- body/) [1] [https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/asking- friend](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/asking-friend)

<comment><USER2> Property rights would be come a real slippery slope though. The right to sell/rent your body. Sounds a lot like prostitution and slavery. How would you delineate which parts you own and which ones you can't sell?

<comment><USER3> The fact that I can not own parts of my body but an organization can, sort of undermines any claim that the current rules exist out of fears of slippery slopes to slavery.

<comment><USER4> It's bizarre - if corporations are people, then surely the converse is true as well?

<comment><USER5> Roses are flowers. Not all flowers are roses.

<comment><USER6> Um... I think you just kind of fell down a set of logic stairs there amigo.

While your and GP posts were valid, this is a case of valid reasoning being applied to unsound premises in that a corporation is not granted these property rights through personhood, but via it's being a corporation.

This is one of the things that makes me spit every time I think of conceptual train wreck that was Citizens United.

Corporations were not meant to be people. They were logical constructs with just enough personhood to distinguish the economic institution from the people making it up in the eyes of the law, such that higher risk ventures could be more easily undertaken through pooling of resources, and distribution of risk.

That means, it is a false assumption to think of a corporation as Person+. It's more a case of being a !Person.

Frankly, the entire idea of property rights sort of breaks down in light of possession being 9/10's of the law w.r.t your own body. As a free agent, you can do what you want. Just... Understand the additional risk brought on by the legal system rapidly backpedaling away if you do something outside the few clearly established guidelines, and other people with no interest in testing potential legal waters that may destroy them will have very little in the way of external incentive to help you do it.

One of the things most uncomfortable about a common law system is how precedent in unrelated areas can composite together to create a law where no intent to have such a thing was ever established.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not really that odd. Anglo law has several different areas of law, of which property is one. Humans have special status, so things to do with people and their bodies falls under the umbrella of torts. If someone punched your dog, you sue them for trespass to chattels. (Because dogs are property.) But if someone punches you, you don't sue them for trespass to your body. You sue them for battery, which is a tort especially for injuries to people.

</comment><comment><USER8> >However, it was held that Mr Moore's spleen was not his property so, while he could claim for breach of fiduciary duty and a lack of informed consent, he could not claim for the consequences of the conversion. It was the researchers who were held to own the cell line over which they had been granted a patent because of their application of skill to Mr Moore's original cells.

That makes me wonder if skill is a defense and how one would demonstrate skill. While many of the examples were international, this one was California based, so I looked up what skill is in a legal dictionary with US examples:

>Practical and familiar knowledge of the principles and processes of an art, science, or trade, combined with the ability to apply them in practice in a proper and approved manner and with readiness and dexterity. [1]

So if you could demonstrate knowledge of the procedure and were familiar with some equipment manuals, could you make a claim? If you lacked equipment and resources, would that be a defense for the other side? About approved manner, as there are biohackers, and the ability to work in other countries or perhaps partner up with a licensed company, I wonder if any of those would work as a defense.

[1] [https://thelawdictionary.org/skill/](https://thelawdictionary.org/skill/)

</comment><comment><USER9> "The test of whether or not you own something is whether you can sell it." I can't remember where I read this or who said it, but it's a good rule of thumb.

<comment><USER10> This test has some interesting edge cases though:

For example, I can own 200lbs of crystal meth, and when the police come to arrest me for it, they will have no problem claiming I own it. But according to this rule, I don't actually own the drugs because those same cops will prevent me from selling it.

<comment><USER11> The cops will also be happy to take your meth as soon as they see it, so the argument that you _do_ "own" it isn't that strong.

<comment><USER12> If you can prevent them from taking it do you own it ?

Seems your argument over ownership comes down to force ?

<comment><USER13> >Seems your argument over ownership comes down to force ?

ALL arguments over ownership come down to force.

This is how we wound up having nations - some group had more force than some other group. It continues to this day - war exists as the most obvious example of this but softer forces, such as the ability to demand and enforce sanctions also count.

In a wider sense, ALL law comes down to force, since without the ability to enforce(!) it, law is meaningless.

Put much more simply: people with nuclear weapons don't have to pay their parking tickets.

<comment><USER14> > In a wider sense, ALL law comes down to force, since without the ability to > enforce(!) it, law is meaningless.

I don't think that's true in any useful way. It's perfectly possible to create rules and worry later about how to enforce them. Sometimes the only penalty for breaking the rules is disapproval. In fact, that's quite common, both for minor domestic offences and in international law. It doesn't make the laws "meaningless"; they may still be very influential in various ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > This is clearly an unsatisfactory situation for three key reasons: the woman > wishing to be pregnant has been denied her chance of motherhood, the embryos > have been destroyed and a considerable amount of money has been wasted.

This whole argument shocked me. I don't know if the author follows a logical fallacy, or something else is at play, but first of all, I fail to recognize how an embryo would be part of _your own_ body. Secondly, I really have issues following her argumentation that consent from her then-partner isn't needed to transfer and make use of the embryos.

The article then goes on to argue that very position, which seems to be a bit out of place. I don't really follow the arguments that:

> Biologically, a man's role is limited to the act of fertilisation and from > that moment onwards, the woman bears the burden of gestation through to > labour and child birth. Conferring ownership of the embryo to the woman > could go some way to address this imbalance.

Given that for IVF, a woman's contribution to an embryo is exactly the same as a man's (one gamete), and the _burden of gestation_ hasn't taken place.

<comment><USER16> Given that it is not an independent entity, it is no different than a tumor other than its division properties. You can take the argument either way. Please leave your idealogical biases at home.

<comment><USER15> Well, I did try to leave any kind of bias aside, so my apologies if I didn't succeed. I hope I didn't misunderstand you, but

> it is not an independent entity

This really is debatable, depending on the term "entity". Given that this is in-vitro fertilization, an embryo here is likely a couple dozen cells grown from two gametes, in a test tube. It is physically distinct from the parents.

My remark was going in the same direction as yours. What "schocked" me is that some parts of the linked article read as though the author forced an ideology/views upon the reader. I was expecting to get raw facts from this article, so that surprised me a bit.

Regardless of what I think of the author's viewpoint (which I didn't state, by the way), I expressed having trouble logically following the arguments that are being used there, and suspected that it might be due to a logical fallacy the author could have been leaning on to close the reasoning gaps (and if that was the case, I was curious to know which). But I admit it could also be an issue on my side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sign a contract selling your body to an LLC you form.

Use the system against this madness.

</comment><comment><USER17> Site is down, here's the most recent copy from the Internet Archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180809061136/http://thestudent...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180809061136/http://thestudentlawyer.com/2013/07/12/property- rights-in-the-human-body/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Your body is your property because only you are allowed to determine what happens to it.

Now saying it's not property because it's special is like saying your car is not your property because it's special (e.g. with respect to traffic law).

It can be both: special and your property.

The whole thing is a relic of a weird system of law.

</comment><comment> tedk-42 Incredible uninteresting and irrelevant. Doesn't deserve to be on HN.

If a hair falls off my body and onto the ground, does it count as littering?</comment>


Siri for Social, Quin wins Facebook Hackathon Finals - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/01/facebook-university-hackathon-2012-winner-university-of-waterloo/

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the University of Waterloo's open source code for the project: <https://github.com/sgreenlay/PYLONS></comment>


So How Do You Pronounce "R'lyeh", Anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://www.strangecompany.org/so-how-do-you-pronounce-rlyeh-anyway/ <comment><USER2> I subscribe to the apostrophe / boing methodology[0] so "reboinglyeh".

[0] [http://issendai.livejournal.com/429293.html](http://issendai.livejournal.com/429293.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always heard it in my head as Urrr LllYeh (sounds a bit like you are saying "oh yeah," except in a guttural voice, with your mouth full of blood)

</comment><comment><USER4> /ˈɹu.li.a/ or /ɹɪl.ˈai.ɛ/</comment>


Jim Cramer: A 'Hard Left' Democratic President Would Be a 'Disaster' for Stocks - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestreet.com/jim-cramer/democratic-socialist-would-hurt-wall-street-jim-cramer-says-14989910?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO&yptr=yahoo <comment> java-man I remember when Jon Stewart ran a piece on Jim Cramer, exposing him as basically a fraud. How is this guy still on TV?

<comment><USER2> Um, people PREFER to be deluded and promised all the sweet things needed that prop up their belief systems. Hence the world is chock full of shysters, hucksters and snakeoil salesmen. I mean, case in point: who occupies the Oval Office?

<comment> java-man (cry)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this a Bernie ad?

I'd gladly burn off some of my portfolio if that would put Jim Cramer in the clink.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy!</comment>


The Lush Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://lush.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> FYI the link to their tutorial is broken. Went there to see what the code looked like, but got an extremely verbose 404 error page instead.

EDIT: Never mind, apparently it is abandoned. The last recent news item is from 2007. So I probably will never learn why a programming language would be given a name like Lisp Universal SHell.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting "TIL" here:

> _Lush and DjVu were produced by the same people (in fact Lush was used to > prototype the first version of DjVu._</comment>


Ask HN: Suggest a platform for programming blog - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I want to start a programming blog to share my experiences nowadays. I think I've got enough experience to guide fellow new developers. There will be plenty of code in the blog too. So I was wondering which platform suits my needs.
- Ghost - Blogger - Medium - Wordpress - Github Pages with Jekyll - My custom site? - Other
Thanks :) <comment><USER2> How much control do you want?

No one can answer for you whether you want more control and your own site. If I can assume based on your comment history that you're focused on Win/C#, perhaps creating one with a C# blogging engine will be most rewarding?[1] If you feel it's a time sink, then you probably want to jump right into writing. In which case the stability and portability of Blogger + domain name + code formatting plugins is probably adequate.

1\. [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=c%23+blog&as_oq=sof...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=c%23+blog&as_oq=software+engine+open+source&as_qdr=y) (filtered by past year)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm only talking the talk since I'm currently hosted on Wordpress, but I'm starting to think that a static site generator is the best option. Why? Because, a) programming blogs are a bit like academic papers in that they depend on careful markup, and b) they work a lot better when they're minimalistic, with a strong emphasis on the code. With a static site generator, the definitive version of each article can be a simple, easy-to- edit Markdown file; you don't have to reason about HTML/PHP/SQL unless you really want to. The content is perfectly decoupled from the presentation, and you can edit your articles in your favorite text editor to boot.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's two questions here.

         Where should I host my blog?

         What software should I use?

If you have already have website, then something that works with your hosting provider makes sense. If you don't have a website, then it might make sense to find a hosting provider to host your blog.

As for software, simpler is probably better. But simpler is in the eye of the beholder. It might be optimized for setup or maintenance or aesthetics of the interface or remote posting or something else. The software choice comes down to workflow and workflow may depend on hosting choice.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Ghost with Github Pages: [http://ruenzuo.github.io/](http://ruenzuo.github.io/), I'm running a local instance of Ghost and using this static site generator: [https://github.com/axitkhurana/buster](https://github.com/axitkhurana/buster)

<comment><USER6> How slick. I like the theme!

<comment><USER5> Thanks! The theme is actually open source, check it out: [https://github.com/daleanthony/Uno](https://github.com/daleanthony/Uno)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I run a little ember app pulling in JSON from whatever blog app I'm using at the moment. I don't know where I read that your blog is your dojo or something like that (maybe pragmatic programmer? ) but it made a good point that your blog is a place for you to train at.

</comment><comment><USER8> All of those will work. For my blog I use ghost because it's a nice mix between bloat (Wordpress) and having to do a lot (theming, etc) yourself (Jekyll). Its also low memory compared to wordpress, in my experience, which is nice on a cheap digital ocean vps.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use Ghost for my own blog and I'm happy with it. It's quick to set up, easy to use and beautiful. The markdown editor is great and in my experience the platform really stays out of your way and lets you focus on writing a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER10> I second Ghost, for the same reasons, easy to use yet thorough and beautiful. The markdown in Ghost easily allows for adding in blocks of code. No experience with it, but an Octopress blog through github is probably a good project to have too.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you like ruby on rails and want something lightweight that's easy to customize: [https://github.com/natew/obtvse2](https://github.com/natew/obtvse2)

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://tech.pro/](http://tech.pro/)

\---

Write using Markdown, reach wide audiences, awesome analytics and just a wonderful PLEASANT writing experience.

</comment><comment><USER13> Recently had to figure that out also, and ended up going with github hosting and octopress blog framework. Very happy with both, particularly with how code-friendly they are.

</comment><comment><USER14> I use ghost for my blog ([http://kristinn.ghost.io/](http://kristinn.ghost.io/)). I like it very much :) It just feels natural.

</comment><comment><USER15> Jekyll! Static blog, very fast, GitHub offers free hosting.</comment>


Crypto Zealots - <AUTHOR> http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2018-03/pe.html <comment><USER2> It is worth reading the article this posted one is in response to. ([http://www.circleid.com/posts/20180225_humming_an_open_inter...](http://www.circleid.com/posts/20180225_humming_an_open_internet_demise_in_london/))

It has the kind of inflammatory institutional chauvinism one usually expects from bureaucrats defending their turf and moralizing their powers, but it's important to understand the outcomes the people like them are aiming for.

Additionally, ignoring for a moment the usual appeals for intelligence and law enforcement, the coalition of interests the author is referencing includes those interested in enforcing "societal norms," and "support for persons with disabilities."

The first means censorship and those people never seem to go away. But the second has nothing to do with transport layer encryption and appears to be a dogwhistle offering tacit institutional support to political agitators who want to get onside with adding surveillance levers to the internet.

The article could reasonably be interpreted as a threat that if TLS 1.3 is adopted and imposes further costs on pervasive surveillance apparatuses, they will co-operate to further balkanize the internet.

<comment><USER3> That article was so hard to read. He jumps to so many conclusions without any logical path like the use of TLS will stress the bandwidth of providers, claiming its like "unauthorized taking of the provider's transport network resources". How will TLS vs not TLS meaningfully impact amount of traffic on a network? He doesn't say, just claims it. I'm guessing he means the provider can't throttle/control traffic based on packet inspection as easily? Regardless, this is like saying everyone in the neighborhood running all of their faucets at the same time is like stealing from the water provider. That's literally their only job, to be a pipe for water. People aren't stealing by stressing the network, if anything the network would be stealing for not running as advertised.

"TLS 1.3 significantly facilitates widespread malware distribution" this guy...has to be getting paid by someone to say this, right? Who is this dude, what is CircleID?

<comment><USER4> There's throttling to consider, but there's also caching. It's been a long time since I've had conversations with any NetOps folks working for ISPs, but it used to be very important for the health of a network to do considerable caching wherever possible. It's why http includes cache control headers. With TLS, only the browser can now honor this TTL, and an ISP can no longer cache a particularly popular webpage. I've long suspected that caching strategies are no longer very useful given how the internet looks today, but I also understand powerlaws and it wouldn't surprise me if caching is just as useful today as it was 20 years ago.

<comment><USER5> So many popular webpages these days are dynamically generated that it can't possibly make much of a difference. I suspect the bulk of traffic by weight is video these days.

If my ISP can cache my traffic they can censor it - and do. Every now and again I'm reminded by accident that EE mobile are scanning all my URLs for censorship purposes.

<comment><USER6> _If my ISP can cache my traffic they can censor it - and do._

Only if they can forge a cache-hit, or block a cache-miss from passing through. Something content addressable (like IPFS) would allow an untrusted party to provide useful cache. (doesn't solve the privacy aspect of the untrusted party knowing I accessed the content though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If there's still any doubt that encrypting everything is the right way to go for internet protocols:

 _Huge: @Citizenlab catches ISPs invisibly redirecting download requests for popular programs, injecting them with government spyware. Unencrypted web traffic is now provably a critical, in-the-wild vulnerability. 20-30% of top internet sites affected._

[https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/972110541408952320](https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/972110541408952320)

<comment><USER8> The ISP in question is in Turkey, so it should probably be noted that the Turkish government has a root cert trusted by both Mozilla and Microsoft.

[https://ccadb- public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACert...](https://ccadb- public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACertificateReport)

[https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...](https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/51151.microsoft- trusted-root-certificate-program-participants-as-of-january-30-2018.aspx)

<comment><USER9> Pretty sure that such a root cert would be fairly quickly yanked if they got caught using it for MITM attacks. That would cause a lot of trouble for the primary users of such certs. Such attacks are best done with some relatively obscure and unimportant compromised certificate authority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After reading both the linked article and the original to which this responds, I can say I am one of those Crypto zaelots. And not just because I am developing a protocol that encrypts everything end-to-end.

The original article's claims are ludicrous, stating that TLS 1.3 would be basically unlawful, since the ISPs can not read the data. Than it says that a open internet is bad, citing small, empty pages that go from "there are nazis there" to "this and that political figure is there only thanks to the internet".

The solution is: middleboxes that see all your traffic. ...'cause Trump would not have been elected with your middleboxes or something? That alone is disturbing on many levels.

The author of the linked article points out that it is a bad idea due to what Snowden brought up, but basically stops there.

So please let me say, fuck you and your middleboxes. But not only because of the Snowden revelations.

I have seen middleboxes truncate traffic because they didn't understand a TCP option. Throttle/drop everything because they were way too downsized and could not handle the traffic, some barely able to NAT, let alone do their inspection. Centralized firewalls crashing due to too many packets in memory. Captive portals that spoof dns so that they can display the login page, except that I can't see that, 'cause HSTS and they don't have the certificate, or my device caches the DNS query result and I can't see that site anymore.

So Fuck you and your middleboxes. Especially those that intercept all your TLS traffic, analyze and then pass it through, signed with their CA. Except they didn't really control the original certificate, or you can't control the trusted CAs. Or those that blocked me from updating antiviruses, because guess what, false positives. Or those that MITM your dns queries, to give you your much needed advertisement, when they don't outright MITM your HTTP to add _their_ advertisement.

Are any of those middleboxes ever updated anyway? By the developers, not by the local admins. Those middleboxes that break stuff and make troubleshooting hell. I have seen too many old, never-updated stuff to believe in your middleboxes anymore.

If a company wants/needs to see/modify the traffic, then fine. On their devices. Install a CA there or install a VPN that tunnels the device to your proxy or something. Why does it have to transparent, for everyone?

So really, I'm with the author. Fuck you and your fucking middleboxes.

<comment><USER11> > _I am one of those Crypto zealots_

It's an unusual feeling to become a strawman.

Every so often, somebody attacks a point by saying "Why, $foo is absurd! If you did foo, you'd be embracing a world that that looks like $bar!" And I read their piece, and think "Yeah, I'm totally on board with $bar. Sounds good!"

It's a depressing reminder of just how far apart people's goals can be. I don't just disagree with them, I have views so distant that they use my beliefs as a reduction to the absurd.

Fuck that article, and fuck its middleboxes. I accept that I am, by many standards, a crypto zealot. I'm alright with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > We've seen programs such as Let's Encrypt that bring the price of domain > name public key certificates down to a base of free.

And, interestingly enough, turn the implicit assumptions behind the whole XPKI infrastructure on their head.

CAs built their business on the idea that we needed to know that sears.com is Sears, Roebuck & Co., while sears.net is a family website. But it turns out that we don't really care: we care that google.com is google.com, and that's it.

What we _really_ want is to know that the IP address we're talking to is the IP address we think we're talking to, and that the IP address we're talking to is the one we looked up for a particular DNS name. What we really want is not an identity-authentication certificate, but rather authorisation certificates.

Over twenty years ago, RFCs 2692 & 2693 (and follow-up draft work) identified the issue, and offered a solution — but the industry stuck with identity- authentication certificates. This is kinda crazy when you think of it: knowing who someone is doesn't guarantee that I want to do business with him.

<comment><USER13> > But it turns out that we don't really care: we care that google.com is > google.com, and that's it.

It's worse than that. 9/10 users I observe 'google'* google in order to run a google search. _Every single time_ they go to a website that isn't saved as a bookmark, they search for it instead of typing an address into the address bar. I used to be surprised seeing people google 'gmail' and then click the top ad every morning... But I don't blame the users as much anymore. The companies that makes the browsers and web search know all this too and the UI has actually evolved to further muddy the difference between search and address.

(Increasingly they bing it due to MS defaults in Win 10.)

But your overall point is well taken and very true: having the sears.com domain name might not be as important as having the top google hit for 'sears'.

<comment><USER14> I used to be like that with real world directions. Constantly referencing maps, people, or (later) smart phone maps. Then I started forcing myself to develop an internal model of the regions I was traveling in, now I only use the smart phone map for ETA and traffic information.

I think most people never really develop that mental model of how the internet is laid out. I would get lost going from A->C or C->A. But I could go A->Town Center->C no problem (and the reverse) but it took twice as long because I was taking a suboptimal route. Everyone knows where Google is, it's the town center of the internet (for them), like the portal sites that MSN, Yahoo!, and others provide. So they go there and use it to make their way to their desired destination.

<comment><USER15> I turned into the opposite for real world directions. I let google tell me where to go, only rarely deciding a different route on my own. And sometimes that's not exactly a fully formed different route but I want to go via a certain way (e.g. non-freeway) and hope google updates the rest of its directions to accord to that wish. It's taken me on some weird paths but whatever.

My excuse is that I grew up in Utah, which has a fairly consistent and ordered grid system with addresses almost always mapping to grid coordinates, so given an address you don't need any special directions. You might still go to a main road because it's faster, but you could instead optimize the Manhattan distance without effort. Traveling elsewhere with places so fond of nonsensical street names and non-grids, I gave up actively building a mental model (I have an ok spatial model of my surrounding area in Bellevue/Redmond but I've been here almost a decade...I have no idea where most of the street names in Seattle proper fall and haven't bothered to learn any of the mnemonics people have suggested) and let the machine tell me what to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The piece in CircleID to which Geoff Huston is responding is pretty clearly a troll, a bid for attention from someone professionally attached to some pretty marginal "standards" groups. It's incoherent and poorly informed. It's possible to make colorable arguments about the need for security protocols that admit to legitimate monitoring. The CircleID piece didn't make any of those.

It's a little embarrassing to see someone of Geoff Huston's stature responding to what is so clearly a plea for recognition from someone who would otherwise have no impact whatsoever on Internet engineering. It's much more embarrassing for CircleID to have published that piece to begin with, but, what do you expect? CircleID is terrible.

<comment><USER17> From reading a few of Anthony Rutkowski's other screeds against end-to-end encryption I got the impression he might be a shill for some middlebox vendor. Did some digging and turns out he is an executive at Yaana which is a company that does exactly the kind of work that TLS 1.3 is trying to frustrate (credit to HN user Animats [1]).

>"Yaana is a leading global provider of a wide range of intelligent compliance solutions including lawful interception, accurate data retention, big-data search & disclosure, advanced security and application specific analytics."

That he thinks his unhinged writing style might be persuasive to anyone is baffling to me.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586504)

<comment><USER18> > That he thinks his unhinged writing style might be persuasive to anyone is > baffling to me.

This is what got me. "humming"! It's classic crank writing; who could possibly imagine that anyone could take this seriously?

<comment><USER16> Humming, unfortunately, really is an IETF thing.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For me, a "crypto zealot" is somebody who says we shouldn't use SMS based 2FA because it has some vulnerabilities: people who advocate using only the best crypto, or none at all.

This just sounds like building a universal layer of encryption around all communications. It's not zealotry but common sense.

<comment><USER20> >some vulnerabilities

lol. I guess that's one way to put it.

<comment><USER21> Any 2FA > Any 1FA, for a constant first factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > A better position is to use QUIC. Not only is the payload encrypted, but the > entire transport flow control is covered by the veil of encryption.

I'm not sure I understand his/her point. Maybe this is pointing to QUIC encrypting part of the handshake?

<comment><USER23> Not just the handshake. With say HTTPS (HTTP over TLS over TCP) the unencrypted TCP layer is where the flow control is, a bad guy can see and manipulate this flow even though the application data is opaque to them. Every TCP packet is identified as to which session it's part of, and the TCP stack is relying on the flow control to tell it e.g. to slow down because things are congested.

In QUIC all that vanishes inside the encryption. The only things left unencrypted are the source and destination address.

<comment><USER22> Oh I see what you're saying. Is it really an improvement though? If a bad guy can see and manipulate your TCP flow, he could also just drop packets.

<comment><USER24> It's an improvement because middleboxes can't mess up your packets when you're using authenticated encryption. Sure, they can still drop all of them, but that's a much easier problem to debug than otherwise.

We have all these problems because a lot of middleboxes crap their pants when they "see" something in the protocol headers that their developers did not consider because it didn't seem to happen on their laptops or whatever.

So you make the protocol headers invisible to the network's middleboxes to prevent the middlebox developer's broken mental model about that protocol from breaking your pipes.

<comment><USER22> I see your point. Also, they can still "control" the flow of QUIC (to a lesser degree I'd imagine) by dropping some of the packets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> (Surprisingly the fine article is about cryptography, not fake internet money)

<comment><USER26> Is this really surprising? I'm (still) more surprised when I click on an article with crypto in the title and it's not about cryptography. (There may be some underlying bias as to the links I see/am sent.)

<comment><USER27> In this particular instance I fully expected an article about cryptocurrencies but I think that's mainly because of the other word in the title. I don't usually associate cryptography with zealotry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > We've seen programs such as Let's Encrypt that bring the price of domain > name public key certificates down to a base of free

Only free if you value your time at $0.

<comment><USER29> I don't really see the difference between it and other certification. Surely I need to configure my servers regardless.

Also, sometimes doing a bit of server work is rewarding on its own.

<comment><USER28> My problem is with the crusade to make everything HTTPS - normal HTTP involved no ongoing setup, and didn't put the ongoing functionality of your website in someone else's hands. As I've said above, LetsEncrypt is sponsored by corporations and could disappear tomorrow.

<comment><USER30> Do you live in some parallel universe where we do not have mass surveillance, nation states or internet providers modifying traffic or unencrypted wifi at coffee shops?

Your attitude is irresponsible. HTTPS is not a luxury, it is a requirement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


blog.companyurl.com or companyurl.com/blog - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Somewhere I remember reading that its bad for SEO for your blog url to be blog.mycompanyurl.com. I can't remember where or why. My host only allows above option. Do you think its a big deal?

<comment><USER2> Not true at all. SEO business, if you haven't figured out that so far, is chock-full of half truths and nonsense. SEO "experts" don't understand the correlation at all and imply causation on pretty much everything they come across. Most of your PR comes from backlinks so whether you use a CNAME or a directory is quite simply irrelevant.

<comment><USER3> There are some sleazy false "experts" in SEO, but that doesn't mean that all of it is bunk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Redirect blog.companyurl.com to companyurl.com/blog. Seems like the most complete solution and, it happens to be what Google does for many of its subdomains.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains> (these guys are the best and most-open SEO resource I am aware of- their ranking factors article is simply awesome)

I'd do a bit of reading on this and see if you can find some consensus. I don't think you'll find a ton of SEO experts here (though I might be wrong). Lots of opinions to be had at [http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+subdomains&btnG;=Search](http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+subdomains&btnG=Search)

For the record, I think the /blog option is the way to go (and I've had SEO somewhere in my job description for about a decade).

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think Google or other search engine for that matter will make any distinction if it's blog.companyurl or companyurl/blog. You can choose whichever, it will make no difference in how the Page Rank is computed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure what is best for SEO and such. Doing the redirect mentioned by ed sounds like a good solution. We currently run blog.company.com but I might set up the redirect as that sounds like a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> dvorak.org/blog has a nice ring to it</comment>


What Is a Tech Company? - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/what-is-a-tech-company/ <comment><USER2> I used to work for a Startup considered by many as tech company. Our devs cared a lot about code quality, visited meetups, engaged in the community etc. devs usually stayed for at least 3-5 yrs.

In contrast, there was a company that almost did the same business as we did. But, they were what people would have called a sales company, not a tech company. Decisions were based on sale opportunities, only. No one gave a shit about code quality, devs didn't stay long and often were frustrated when they applied at our company.

Which one was more successful? Unfortunately they were... we were often slowed down by discussions about code quality, ways of working, ethics and disrespect for revenue driven decisions.

Maybe it was just an exception? But since then I have become skeptical when I hear about "tech" companies. I feel we nerds need to be value driven, too, and not die in beauty.

<comment><USER3> Rant time..

Revenue and business impact are ALL that matter.

Good, clean, scaleable, and testable code only exist to rapidly support the above. The moment you choose tech value over buisness you are a risk not asset to a company.

I sware sometimes I see so many delusional software "engineers" who care more about building technically excellent systems that are either delivered late or dont solve a/the real problem... it disgusts me.

<comment><USER4>
        > Revenue and business impact are ALL that matter.

Sure, but only until your up-and-coming competitor eats your lunch because everything got taken over by a-hole MBA and PMP-types, everyone cool leaves, and the only people doing the work are disinterested consulting companies charging you through the nose.

<comment><USER5> Unless the the startup already nailed the startup part and is at $5-10M/yr or will flip with 0 revenue, you have no lunch to be eaten, just aspirations. Your biggest competitor is your internal non-business efforts that distract from experimenting with what gets people to pay in a repeatable way. Only after you have built a working revenue machine -- which (depressingly) can simply be VC revenue and hoping the music doesn't stop -- do you have a lunch to worry about. Luckily, as Twitter and friends show, once you have made that lunch, you can turn even the biggest Ruby fail whale and php ball of mud into engineering for scaling & doing tiny feature iterations.

Unfortunately, shiny engineering won't solve drastic product market fit iterations, and consumes the limited time & $$$ for achieving it. That's a lot of otherwise good habits and instincts to unlearn for engineers who never really had to go from idea to paying end users and instead needed to ride an existing monopoly and not break it: FANG, bigco, bank, consultants, etc. In a disturbing sense, a small # of new grads can fit in better on a startup team than a loud FANG cohort b/c most know how to do a bunch of small projects without being distracted by post-growth table stakes. (And you avoid the former-consultant "don't care about the end-customer, just the boss/politics" problem b/c of passion for the startup's mission vs. the tech.)

I've come to appreciate either:

Team 1: Staying tiny with people who _demonstrably_ get that or are otherwise mission-focused (vs. tech-focused) until you do hit growth,

Team 2: Or massively over-fundraising and over-hiring (with high risk of fast death) simply to deal with sales/marketing/engineering that is only at say 10% efficiency of Team 1

<comment><USER4>
       > I've come to appreciate either...

So basically either naked greed or blue-sky-burn-rate ?

I think there's room for balanced consideration. Sometimes, yeah, revenue and time-to-market is everything. Sometimes there's a need for taking a risk and creating something new.

<comment><USER5> No: Either business-focused engineers, or enough money so that every 5 folks who aren't ("scale!" "this adds velocity!" "10% faster!") can add up to 1 developer who is.

The new business _is_ the risk-taking endeavor. The job of the team is to _derisk_ , taking the blue-sky concept to something the market will consume. That's so hard and requires so much listening/iterating/etc. that it makes most engineering cycles not spent on meeting customers in the middle (or helping finding alternate customers/offerings) is eating the seed corn. Most startups should assume "default dead" until the $5M/yr point.

There is an interesting question of how to do deep tech. ("10X cheaper spaceflight", not "Tensorflow for AIOps"). That's more capital intensive, and in turn, different kinds of business critical milestones. "We need to do X, Y, Z so we can get $5M gov contract Y and the next round." That deal does _not_ hinge on whether you've upgraded from React 3 to 4 and have a much more approachable graphql orm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not convinced by these claims: > While Airbnb's accounting suggests that its revenue has minimal marginal costs, a holistic view of Airbnb's market shows that the company effectively pays hosts 86 percent of total revenue. You could make the same statement about a payment processor (with 1% fees it would "effectively" pay users 99% of revenue) but I think in both cases the company has zero marginal costs in the sense that it can scale to additional revenue pretty much for free, in comparison with say a factory that has to hire new workers and buy more raw materials to get more revenue.

</comment><comment><USER7> The problem is that this labelling does nothing but infer potential profitability.

1\. Notice how the author mentions the term "tech industry"? However, when most people talk about "tech companies" they refer to it as an industry. It's not.

2\. People get lost in the semantics and just think companies are a binary "tech co" or "not a tech co". I disagree. Tech is actually an operating model which can help propel a company into high gross margins. When we analyze businesses we usually put them on a spectrum of "IT Support Business" -> "Tech Enabled Business" -> "Tech Lead Business" (with the latter synonymous with that people call a "tech company").

3\. A "Tech company" and a "software company" is nothing more than an investors way to imply underlying business fundamentals, which usually translate into high gross margins. It can often be used to cloud judgement about the actual underlying fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the key of the essay is this definition:

      * Software creates ecosystems
      * Software has zero marginal costs
      * Software improves over time
      * Software offers infinite leverage
      * Software enables zero transaction costs

So to the extent a business meets those 5 points, it's a 'tech' company. He goes through a a few companies and sees how well they fit those points (netflix, airbnb, peloton, wework) to give an intuition for it.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how to reconcile the fact that Intel, nVidia, TSMC, AMD don't seem to fit these criteria but are undoubtedly "tech companies".

<comment><USER10> The definition is apparently made from rubber. Let's talk, for example, "Software offers infinite leverage" (infinite apparently meaning "able to serve the whole world", but I guess "infinite" is just a synonym for "somewhat large-ish" here).

The article says this about Uber: "Uber is able to serve the entire world, giving it maximum leverage". Followed by this about WeWork: "WeWork is limited by the number of locations it builds out".

Uber didn't _start_ with the ability to serve the entire world, and that ability was earned not through software, but through lots and lots of money and aggressive regulatory arbitrage (i.e. breaking laws faster than regulators could react to). What's to say that WeWork can't spend money to grow into a worldwide service?

I see this article as a list of interesting market features, but I don't buy that you have to have _all_ of them to be a tech company, or that only companies with _all_ of them will succeed.

<comment><USER11> Tech there seems to be a stand in for 'software assisted middleman service'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Fifty years ago, what is a tech company was an easy question to answer: IBM > was the tech company, and everybody else was IBM's customers. That may be a > slight exaggeration, but not by much: IBM built the hardware (at that time > the System/360), wrote the software, including the operating system and > applications, and provided services, including training, ongoing > maintenance, and custom line-of-business software.

Fifty years ago, IBM was the _computer_ company. There were other tech companies: Xerox, Tektronix, Texas Instruments, and Western Electric to name a few. Today "tech" largely means computing, especially applied to marketing and advertising automation, but back then it meant something quite different to be working "in technology".

<comment><USER13> I was thinking the same thing. Apparently tech means software now, at least according to the author.

For example, what about companies like DuPont. Surely they are a technology company. Are they also a tech company? The author provides no framework to address the question which, in my mind, means they were largely unsuccessful in their attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think its silly to call "anything with an app" a tech company.

For instance, uber is a transportation company, not a tech company. They may have been considered tech when they were developing self-driving cars but I think that was abandoned for now?

Anyway, the point is that being in the internet and having an app is par for the course of any industry today. You're not on the brave frontier of tech anymore, you're just using existing tech to implement your business model.

If you're making NEW tech, you're a tech company.

<comment><USER15> Uber is not a transportation company-- they neither manufacture transport vehicles nor provide transportation services (according to the law).

Rather, they provide a post-paid software platform for individuals to provide transportation services to customers directly.

Delta is a transportation company because Delta is cutting the checks for the purchases and maintenance of the airplanes.

Sure, it's a spectrum, but Delta isn't a tech company. Skyscanner and Booking.com are tech companies that fulfill an Uber-like service for Delta.

<comment><USER16> This is trying to be too clever by a half with the semantics. When people say they're going to Uber somewhere, they're not saying they're going to use a post-paid software to connect with individuals offering rides. The fact they've skirted the labor laws to technically not be the employers is neither here nor there.

<comment><USER15> I honestly can see where you are coming from but I think the IRS distinction is important here.

Uber isn't saying, "you must drive from 9am to 5pm. you must use our vehicle and company expense account."

Mechanics get hit with these types of laws as well. Mechanics are often required to bring their own tools to work, but since they often work at the business' garage during the business' hours (not at their home garage at 2am for example), they are W2.

You are exactly right that the service rendered is exactly the same ("I wanna uber there" == "I want a taxi company to drive me there").

But from an expenditure standpoint, a Taxi Company is not spending money on cloud services and programmer salaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What the essay suggests to me is that folks are fighting for the "tech" label because of the correlation with particular economics and accounting dynamics. Essentially mistaking the map for the territory.

My view is that you're in the business that customers are paying you for. You may have been founded by tech-heavy leadership and have a heavy reliance on software, but that doesn't define what people actually pay you for. No more than a company founded by bankers is a bank.

<comment><USER18> > _No more than a company founded by bankers is a bank._

Exactly. In fact, the most useful explanation I've found is to consider the label "tech company" as mostly a legal term, similar to how a bank is a legal label for a specific type of company (with the small difference that banks must be _licensed_ by the government to conduct the activity of banking).

To intuitively understand the term tech company, consider the level just below it: the tech-enabled company. The distinction between a tech company and a tech-enabled company is exactly the same as the (legal) distinction between ownership and possession.

Tech companies generally build (i.e _own_ ) the primary means of production (i.e. tools, methods, raw materials etc used to conduct business). Exclusive ownership of a valuable means of production is generally a source of competitive advantage in most industries, until a new entrant with better economics emerges to disrupt the status quo.

Tech-enabled companies on the other hand, generally buy or borrow (i.e. _possess_ ) the primary means of production.

IOW, all companies can be placed on the tech-company spectrum depending on whether they _build, buy or borrow_ the primary technology necessary to conduct business.

An example of a tech company: Boeing; an example of a tech-enabled company: United Airlines. UA cannot design or manufacture its own aircraft since it does not own the underlying tech (IPR, manufacturing methods etc) behind the aircraft it operates, instead it merely purchases from tech vendors like Boeing (and Airbus).

If UA decides that battery tech will be viable in the near future and wants to switch its entire fleet to all-electric aircrafts for instance, they _must_ seek the legal permission of their tech vendors to modify their existing designs, since retrofitting will require recertification to ensure the aircrafts can still be operated safely. If they go ahead with such modifications without first seeking permission, they risk being sued by the owner of the underlying technology.

OTOH, if Boeing were to make the same realization regarding battery-powered flight, of course they would not need to seek any third party's permission to make the switch.

Let's say UA or indeed any airline wants to take its destiny into its own hands, what prevents them? Surely they could kick start their R&D efforts buying an electric aircraft maker like Pipistrel [3]? UA used to be a vertically integrated company known as UATC [0] but the USG found such an arrangement too powerful and anti-competitive, which led to the split into current day Boeing, UTC [1] and of course UA [2].

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_Corporation)

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

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

3: [https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com](https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I keep seeing this discussion and people arguing over that some definition is too limiting and that industry X is obviously also technology. But they are missing the point: yes hardware, manufacturing and media companies are also using tech or making tech, but in the context of the stock exchange and evaluating a companies potential this doesnt matter.

In that context a "tech company" specifically refers to a company that is able to take advantage of new business models or ways of operation enabled by tech that allows them to scale and make large returns on investment. Thats it. Thats why they are attractive to investors, which in turn is why every company tries to convince people that they are also "tech".

<comment><USER20> But _anyone_ can take advantage of tech these days. If someone builds a CRUD website to make hotel reservations, is it a tech company? What if someone installs Shopify to sell goods, is it a tech company?

<comment><USER19> If you are scaling up, profitable (or speculated to be very profitable in the future), and eventually get big enough to do an IPO, then yeah why not? Booking.com a CRUD website making hotel reservations, and called a tech company.

What is missing however in the picture of "someone building a site" is the other points mentioned in the essay: network effects, building a platform and forming an ecosystem around you. Everyone can do it, but not everyone succeeds. This is why there is such a big rush within tech startups to be the first in a space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> We used to have a term software company. That was unambiguous. At what point did the nebulous "tech company" take over?

<comment><USER22> Tesla is absolutely not a software company, it's a tech company. Software is a very concrete term which doesn't describe the category of companies we reasonably want to talk about.

<comment><USER23> How are they a Tech company? Is every car company with in-house developed self driving a tech company? Does that mean eventually most car companies will be tech companies and the term car company will fall out of use?

<comment><USER24> Tesla is defined by its technology. Most importantly, it's valued based on its technology.

<comment><USER25> > _Most importantly, it's valued based on its technology._

And other car companies are not? The modern internal combustion engine is a technological marvel, and getting better every year.

<comment><USER24> No. They are mature companies with conservative valuations.

Tesla has a bigger market cap than Ford, isn't profitable and is always one deal alway from insolvency. The value is it's tech and potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't get the "improves over time" requirement. Every company has the potential to improve over time. Improving isn't necessarily a "tech" quality.

<comment><USER27> He means specifically that the product improves over time. For non-tech companies, the product you buy (a lamp, a car, a mattress) doesn't improve over time. Once you buy it, there's zero expectation that the company continues to improve it. You have to buy a new version of the product to get and improvements the company produces

<comment><USER28> > He means specifically that the product improves over time. For non-tech > companies, the product you buy (a lamp, a car, a mattress) doesn't improve > over time. Once you buy it, there's zero expectation that the company > continues to improve it. You have to buy a new version of the product to get > and improvements the company produces

Software installed locally that doesn't run "in the cloud" would qualify as not tech according to that definition.

For the most part Windows 98 just got bug fixes, in the same way a car might get part recalls, until Win 2000/ME came out with new features.

<comment><USER29> This is factored in the article. As you know, Windows have moved to a new model since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is an fun interesting article worth perusing, but I disagree with the analysis. It narrows the question of being a tech company to basically being a SaaS company. Granted, that's a lot of the companies famously IPOing out of the silicon valley venture capital community right now, but it's very limiting and I'd argue it's wrong.

Lets make a hypothetical counterexample according to their guidelines:

\- Software creates ecosystems.

\- Software has zero marginal costs.

\- Software improves over time.

\- Software offers infinite leverage.

\- Software enables zero transaction costs.

Imagine that out of nowhere, we get a company making a JARVIS-like AI assistants like in iron man, complete with google glass-like HUD. Suppose, due to design/manufacturing restrictions or something, it can't update over time. You have to buy a new pair of the glasses to get the improvements. There are no third party apps, just what comes shipped with the product. If it was as useful as envisioned all over science fiction, it'll take the world by storm anyways.

Now imagine it's just catching on with consumers and is about to IPO. Is this AI driven high-tech company a tech company? According to OP, this company may as well be selling sunglasses:

\- No apps or ecosystems by construction.

\- Every unit is a physical object, marginal costs are about like expensive sunglasses.

\- It doesn't improve over time by construction.

\- No more leverage than selling normal sunglasses.

\- No lower transaction costs than a company selling sunglasses.

Yet clearly this is a tech company and will be evaluated accordingly for its IPO.

<comment><USER31> > Peloton is also iffy as far these five factors go, but then again, so is > Apple: software-differentiated hardware is in many respects its own > category.

Do you think your example fits into the author's definition of "software- differentiated hardware"?

<comment><USER30> So do wifi connected microwaves and refrigerators. But when you open the door to that, or more generally "technologically differentiated hardware," you're essentially talking about anybody. Fancy lightbulbs, for example. Or hook them up to wifi and now they're software differentiated, if 'technologically differentiated hardware' is a step too far.

I read it as the author saying "oh by the way these other companies that don't fit are their own (massive) category, not counterexamples to the criteria I've laid out."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My definition of a tech company, with respect to software engineering, is one with some combination of:

1\. Software is the core product and/or not considered a cost center.

2\. Technical decisions are made by technical people.

What these both come down to is that a tech company is one where software engineers are treated as full professionals rather than simply as labor.

<comment><USER33> That would include many electronics manufacturers, since nowadays most electronics contain firmware and sometimes are controlled by apps. But they are apparently not considered tech companies.

(Note that I prefer the old meaning of the word "tech" when it was short for "technology". But it's not up to me.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the label/type for a company gets figured about by asking: "what do customers come to you for?" There are different ways of asking it, and maybe different words to use, but that's the most direct, simple, and helpful question I've found.

The article makes some great points, but I think the use of software and technology for strategic advantage is different from the fundamental "purpose" of the company.

</comment><comment><USER35> Specifically, the word tech means very little. What Ben is describing here -- and what WeWork was trying to present themselves as in their S-1 (by using the word _tech_ 100+ times) is some type of software platform.

For instance -- Intel is a clearly a tech company, but specifically they are more of a manufacturing company than a software platform provider.

</comment><comment><USER36> Any company where dev/tech have a substantial say.

I have worked for certain communication mega-corp, while the business is (somewhat) technical, the dev have almost no say at all. That is where I would draw the line and call that a 'traditional' company. I've since found job at a real tech company.

</comment><comment><USER37> By that definition, Allbirds, Away Luggage, and any number of others aren't tech companies that deserve 20-40x revenue run rate multiples either...

</comment><comment><USER38> Isn't every company that uses technology extensively in their day-day work a tech company. I hired a contractor to upgrade the kitchen/bathroom. The guy was using Salesforce and other project management software and would keep me appraised of regular project updates and scheduling. For the kitchen design - their guy showed up with a laptop where he designed the kitchen using a 3D-design software. Not only that they got it finished in 5 weeks, granted I paid 5% more, but it was well-worth it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I posit these days it's a company that's valued as a multiple of earnings instead of a multiple of EBITDA. Most companies these days are "tech companies" once they reach a certain size, to the point where the distinction isn't particularly relevant.

<comment><USER40> The "E" in EBITDA stands for earnings - what particular distinction did you see between EBITDA and the earnings you're talking about?

Completely off-topic, I read somewhere recently that EBITDA could also stand for "Earnings Before I Tricked the Dumb Auditor".

<comment><USER41> He should have written revenue. It is how the IPOs are priced these days (YY times yearly revenues, with YY in the range of 15-25). It is a pretty useless way of valuing companies.

While we're here it is worth remembering that unlike most of today's "rising stars", most of the established tech giants were profitable at IPO time (Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft).

<comment><USER39> Correct I meant revenue

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Answer: Not WeWork.

</comment><comment><USER43> A tech company is a company that is:

(1) Marketed to investors as a tech company

(2) Valued by investors based on the premise that they are or will become oligopolists in their market

</comment><comment><USER44> There are companies that are doing well and there are companies that are doing well

</comment><comment><USER45> "In that respect, all successful companies, at least in a free market, are tech companies: they do something more efficiently than anyone else, on whatever product vector matters to their customers."

The simplification that doesn't do justice to the article is: Tech companies are those that are more efficient than their competitors.

<comment><USER40> > The simplification that doesn't do justice to the article is: Tech companies > are those that are more efficient than their competitors.

That's a solid argument for abandoning the term altogether, in my view. If the term could apply to such a gigantic amount of different things, what is the worth of making that distinction?

<comment><USER46> This is why the author of the article wrote the article: it turns out that there's a real and useful distinction that takes more than 30 words to suss out.</comment></comment></comment>


Most Recruiters Don't Care About Your Cover Letter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.startupcvs.com/2015/10/09/most-recruiters-dont-care-about-your-cover-letter/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=coverletter09102015 <comment><USER2> I, on the other hand, do care.

Our ads always specify something specific and relevant to put in your cover letter. (It's usually "in your cover letter, tell us about a problem that you are especially proud of solving".) We find out three things:

\- Can you follow directions in an important context?

\- Do you write English fluently?

\- Can you write a problem report in a way that's interesting?

People who can do that well almost always get phone interviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose it's a different matter when you have asked for something specific in the cover letter, as in your case. You're absolutely right about the things you can find out by doing that, too.</comment></comment>


Anamorphic Projections and the Floating Mona Lisa - <AUTHOR> http://radicade.posterous.com/anamorphic-projections

<comment><USER2> Johnny Lee's work with the WiiMote uses the same technique, and his demo is much more visually impressive. :-)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw>

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Very flattered for the comment about the WiiMote demo, as it is very much an inspiration and indeed an impressive and groundbreaking demo.

The key difference here is that in the WiiMote demo, the head-tracked location is used to shift the camera perspective so that 3d objects appear to have additional "depth"; whereas in anamorphic projections the effects of perspective are deliberately undone so as to flatten the image and appear to have no depth at all.

In the end they both use the same technique, but end up with different a outcome/effect. :-)</comment></comment>


Doing most of MVC via database? - <AUTHOR> The "MC" parts of "MVC" seem like they can be automated and better tracked in an RDBMS than as code for a good many CRUD-centric applications. The "View" could be left code-centric but the rest database-ified. I've been experimenting, but wondering if I'm not reinventing the wheel. Here's a simplified draft schema to kick around:
// Navigation tree and page relationship (table).
Navig: ID (PK), ParentID, Action, Crudtype, Model, Title,
   Filter, SuccessPathID, Priority. // (CrudType: Search, List, Add, Edit, Delete, Other. "Filter" can be used to de-select columns as needed)
// Field dictionary table, roughly corresponds to table/view columns.
Model: ID, FieldName, Type, Title, Nullable, MaxLength, FilterCodes, Sequence
// Relationships to define drop-downs and/or read-only, per CrudType.
Lookup: ID, Model1_ID, Model2_ID, IDcolumn, DescriptColumn.
// Customized or specialized activity table, similar to event handlers.
Special: ID, PathID, Model, Action, FieldName, Operation, Param1, Param2, Param3.	 // (PathID, Model, Action, & FieldName can be wild-carded as needed. Example Operation: "Phone" to format & validate phone-number columns.)
A lot depends on settling on consistent shop conventions rather than try to cover every CRUD style. <comment><USER2> 10 years ago I did some work on a system that had been around ten years.

This system had the front-end done in Cold Fusion and the back-end in Microsoft SQL server. The CFML application did not do database queries or updates directly but rather worked through a set of stored procedures.

Since then I've seen a slightly more fashionable architecture where a "web service" provides an API that is lot like the API provided by stored procedures, and then a front end actually serves a web site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps this is a side topic, but I don't understand the seeming obsession with "web service" or microservice API's that simply mirror data calls. If they are automatically wired from meta-data (such as the "Model" table above), they are perhaps an improvement over hand-wired ones; but still, why have an extra "middle-man" layer that doesn't currently contribute anything? For one, it creates more potential security leak-points. Wait until there is a real need. Don't pre-bloat all the data calls for the 0.00001% chance your org merges with Netflix or China. YAGNI.</comment></comment>