Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html <comment><USER2> It's a pleasant surprise to see my old power supply article on the front page of HN today. I'd never given much thought to power supplies before researching that article and there's a lot more to their history than I expected. In particular, Robert Boschert seems like he should be a HN hero for running a startup from his kitchen table that had a huge (disruptive?) impact on the power supply industry.

There are a bunch of comments below about wall chargers. I investigated wall chargers too - see [http://righto.com/charger](http://righto.com/charger) \- and there's a lot more inside them than you'd expect.

Let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER3> Is there any way for me, without destruction or an oscilloscope, to work out how reliable my ~$15 USB chargers are? What about portable USB batteries? (3.7V LiPo + converter = large amounts of money apparently)

Edits after going through the article and comments:

* Weight - hard without a reference weight, but I'm going to guess that cheaper chargers are going to be lighter

* UL mark search at [http://database.ul.com/cgi-bin/XYV/template/LISEXT/1FRAME/in...](http://database.ul.com/cgi-bin/XYV/template/LISEXT/1FRAME/index.html?utm_source=ulcom&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=database)

* Heat & noise?

It seems like the chargers will also react to the quality of the power coming out of your socket - a comment in the USB charger article references 110V power on Indian trains being a bit hit and miss. I'd say this is the same for power on BC ferries too.

Would quality (noise levels?) of mains power be why my Lenovo laptop got a hell of a lot hotter on a Qantas A380 aeroplane? (which supplies 110V at 60Hz). It's normally plugged into Aussie 230V (240V) at 50hz.

Sidenote: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country) is a really good article.

<comment><USER2> There's no easy way to tell how good a charger is just by looking at it. Generally you get what you pay for - if you order a "Genuine Apple iPhone OEM charger" on eBay sent from Hong Kong for $3, I guarantee you it will be a low- quality fake. But a $15 charger from a brand-name manufacturer should be reasonable quality.

Fake chargers will copy the UL marks and labeling, so that doesn't help you. Of course, if it says "Designed by Abble" or "Designed by California", that's a pretty good indication of non-quality :-) (I've seen both of those on fake iPhone chargers - it should say "Designed by Apple in California".)

The one thing people notice from bad chargers is their touchscreens malfunction when plugged into the charger. Bad chargers let through enough electrical noise to overwhelm the very small signals that touchscreens create.

When you say your laptop gets a lot hotter at 110V, do you mean the charger or the laptop itself. Chargers are generally a bit more efficient at 240V than 110V, so I wouldn't be surprised if it is a bit hotter. But the output is exactly the same, so I wouldn't expect the laptop temperature to change. If it's hotter, I suspect ventilation is different or you happen to do CPU- intensive applications on planes.

<comment><USER3> >When you say your laptop gets a lot hotter at 110V, do you mean the charger or the laptop itself

I mean the area of the case directly above the power input got a lot hotter than usual. This was tested over a couple of hours of the flight while the laptop was running in both high performance mode and the lower power modes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a little lesson I've learned about claims of theft of revolutionary products: they're always false. Innovation and invention are continuous and gradual processes, with numerous precursors and multiple independent and simultaneous origins. It's basically evolution. There is no such thing as intellectual theft, nor are there revolutionary products, nor are there genius or original inventors.

There's just dumb plodding incremental innovation by connecting past ideas together into useful products.

Everything is a remix. There are no revolutionaries, only winners writing their own versions of history.

Good entrepreneurs copy. Great entrepreneurs steal.

<comment><USER5> What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps a fair observation for someone living in biblical times. (And with no knowledge of several technological upheavals that came before or after.)

OTOH one can do what people tend to do with religious texts rightly or wrongly, look beyond its obvious falseness and charitably reinterpret this. Maybe this is even an expression of conservation of mass; that we are not creating newness, simply re-arranging matter. Or perhaps it says that _despite_ technological change (possibly deemed surface-level change even if nontrivial), some essential part of life and society continues to resemble its former self.

I will say this part is much more accurate:

> No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not > be remembered by those who follow them.

I'm often bummed out by descriptions of famous and important people from 100+ years ago. Name after name of people you've never heard of, all deceased. It can be depressing to think of our present, or even our future, and the future of those that will come long after us, as appearing in the same light.

<comment><USER5> > Name after name of people you've never heard of, all deceased. It can be > depressing to think of our present, or even our future, and the future of > those that will come long after us, as appearing in the same light.

Yep. Most of the book is along these lines. I don't always understand it, but sometimes it really hits home. Like this:

"I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun."

In a community that values "do"ers so highly it's depressing to consider where all that work ends up. How many products are wiped out, how many companies bought and dismantled and how much of the code you pour your heart and soul into now will even be around in 10 years?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Devil's advocate:

Jobs: _" Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one _like_those_used_in_oscilloscopes_."_

TFA: _" It turns out that Apple's power supply was not revolutionary"_

Indeed. If we believe Jobs, it was used in oscilloscopes before.

Jobs probably exaggerated/boasted/lied when he spoke of "ripping off", but this article isn't 100% honest with the facts, either.

<comment><USER8> You quote selectively from Jobs. Here's the part that's actually his claim:

>> "That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was," Jobs later said. "Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod Holt's design."

Jobs wasn't just claiming Holt's power supplies were built like those in oscilloscopes, but that it was practically the ancestor of all modern PC PSUs.

The article conclusively dismantles that claim.

P.S. The oscilloscope reference seems to be a Red Herring. From the article:

>> One puzzling aspect of power supply discussion in the book Steve Jobs[1] is the statement that the Apple II's power supply is "like those used in oscilloscopes", since oscilloscopes are just one small use for switching power supplies. This statement apparently arose because Holt had previously designed a switching power supply for oscilloscopes,[82] but there's no other connection between Apple's power supply and oscilloscope power supplies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Funny how the first comment of that article links to an older HN submission:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047)

<comment><USER10> a lot of interesting articles turn up periodically, as new generations (or cohorts) discover them all over again. I love this, and I'd never have found it if reposted. It's a pity there aren't a few curated archives for gems such as these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have never had the impression that Apple had revolutionized power supplies. Honestly, I am happy if I am not forced to use a three-pin plug and the power supply works reliably.

<comment><USER12> Me either, I didn't realise it was a common misconception.

<comment><USER13> According to the Steve Jobs quote, it isn't:

"Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books but he should."

<comment><AUTHOR> Just saw the movie "Jobs" where some time is spent on the features of the power supply. Having not heard of this before, I went searching and found this page. It is older and associated with the release of the original book biography, but still interesting. Figured others might share a curiosity about this facet of the story...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is what I called a well researched article.

<comment><USER15> Dat Reference List.

And not just a list of links, but with commentary by the author detailing why he thought it important and where specifically to look! It's almost as much fun reading through the reference list as it is the main article.

<comment><USER16> > Dat Reference List.

What does this figure of speech mean? I've seen this before, where someone puts the word "Dat" before a noun, and I have absolutely no idea what it means.

Like I know "dat" can be slang for "that," but "That Reference List" makes no sense to me either.

<comment><USER17> "Dat" not only means "that", but also an admiration (perhaps of the lusty variety) for the item thereafter described.

Most infamously, the meme "Dat Ass" is used, but "Dat X" is commonly used on Reddit, Imgur, and other meme sites to express attraction to some object.

In this case, "Dat Reference List" just means that the reference list is very impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple almost never revolutionize technologies they turn them into businesses which is quite different IMO.

<comment><USER19> Another way of saying this is that they revolutionize businesses by applying technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know what it that's led to the big improvements in power supplies over the last ten years or so? Wall warts have shrunk tenfold.

<comment> nappy-doo Wall warts used to work as a step down transformer and a linear regulator ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regulator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regulator)). The step down transformer is the big brick like piece of the wall wart.

More modern transformers are switch mode supplies ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched- mode_power_supply](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply)). Switch mode supplies (like the OP describes) are smaller, run cooler, and (nowdays) cheaper than linear supplies.

The main thing that's happened is IC manufacturers have made switch mode controllers cheap, and reliable. As a result, most wall warts are going away, to be replaced by switched supplies.

<comment><USER21> There isn't any significant hardware-wise difference in most SMPSs between today and say 20 years ago. The main cause for essentially every wall wart being SMPS is simple economies of scale and globalisation: * Difference between power supplies for different countries amounts mostly to plug shape, you don't need different transformers for 110 and 230V. * The whole power supply is smaller and lighter, so it's cheaper to ship it around the world * SMPS is simplest way to meet requirements on cos phi, efficiency and idle power in some jurisdictions.

In end when you are designing product that does not have any special requirements on power quality (like precision instruments) or customer expectation that it should be big and mostly empty (home AV stuff) it is simply cheapest to order SMPS wall-warts from China in bulk.

<comment><USER2> It makes me happy that there's some technical discussion on this thread. One thing I'd like to add is that linear power supplies are better for AV systems because switching power supplies have a lot more RFI and electrical noise, which can be a problem when you're dealing with small analog signals. (This noise is also why cheap wall chargers can cause your phone's touchscreen to malfunction, since they have very small signals which can be overwhelmed by noise.) So they aren't using linear power supplies just to make the AV box more impressive, but for functional reasons. (See www.ti.com/litv/pdf/snaa057b which explains why unregulated linear power supplies are good for audio systems.)

<comment><USER21> My point with AV equipment was that these things tend to have somehow standardized sizes and mostly empty cases. Thus shipping cost tend to be dominated by "volumetric weight" and not real device weight. EMI/RFI from SMPS is valid concern for these applications but not as significant as it is often claimed to be.

More significant issue is cost: you need power supply that supplies slightly weird voltage rails that essentially has to be custom, even off the shelf SMPS modules tend to be significantly costlier than wall warts and you don't have any reason not to just stick big transformer in there (even more so because you essentially don't care about regulation of the more loaded rails)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The claim "...and they all rip off Rod Holt's design" is classic "reality distortion field" salesmanship. Lesson learned: don't be humble when you're the pitch man.

Even the claim that every other computer maker used switching power supplies certainly wasn't true at the time of the Apple II; its direct 6502-based contemporary the Commodore PET 2001 had a standard heavy transformer bolted to its thick metal chassis and large capacitors under the hood.

</comment><comment><USER23> "I readily admit that there are some things that I don't have the faintest idea what i'm talking about." \- Steve Jobs, 1997

He was a human being and made mistakes; can we _please_ let this shit go already?

<comment> shawn-furyan So because Jobs once admitted to being a bullshitter, his claims are beyond scrutiny? Even when those claims are repeated as fact by secondary sources?

This article isn't grinding an ax. Rather, it's an interesting investigation of a little examined aspect of computer history that happened to be kicked off by skepticism of a claim that actually turned out to be false.

<comment><USER23> > _So because Jobs once admitted to being a bullshitter, his claims are beyond > scrutiny?_

Yes. In the _real world_ , we call this "taking it with a grain of salt." Think about how many other interviews with other celebrities you've been concerned about fact-checking.

> _Even when those claims are repeated as fact by secondary sources?_

This is not and should never be Jobs' problem.

> _This article isn 't grinding an ax. Rather, it's an interesting > investigation of a little examined aspect of computer history that happened > to be kicked off by skepticism of a claim that actually turned out to be > false._

It's concern trolling. It's pseudo-intellectualism analogous to people who bring up Ben Franklin's mistresses whenever someone brings up his inventions. And it's ridiculous that someone would write a fully-researched analysis of an off-handed comment whose clear intention was to praise an employee for his contributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is like saying 'Apple didn't revolutionize tablets - Microsoft did'.

It's pretty ignorant to keep attacking Apple for not 'inventing' every aspect of every technology they use. That simply is not how the industry works for any company.

When Apple 'revolutionizes' something they do so by understanding how a particular technology can be applied to deliver value to users. Period.

This same logic applies to Google. It's hard to dispute that they 'revolutionized' search, and yet they did not invent crawlers, minimal search interfaces, or even using backlinks to rank pages. What they did was to combine these things into a brilliantly engineered solution.

This is yet another linkbait semantic argument that gains attention only because it attacks Apple.

<comment><USER16> Did you even read the article? The fact that you are speaking in generalizations strongly suggests that you did not. Steve Jobs made some very specific claims, the article debunks them in great detail.

<comment><USER23> Have you ever worked with C-level executives before? They frequently speak in soundbites like this because they have to have a 30,000 ft. view over their company while at the same time picking out highlights that can be used in interviews like this.

What's really notable is how much shit Steve Jobs gets for completely off-the- cuff comments like this (I mean, we're talking about oscilloscopes here), yet no one bothers to mention the fact that here we have a CEO giving credit to one of his employees by name. Does the CEO of your company even _know_ your name? When's the last time a CEO has given _anyone else_ recognition in an interview?

<comment><USER2> Rod Holt (who developed the Apple II power supply) was Apple employee #5 and the VP of engineering. So of course Steve Jobs knew who he was.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Network Solutions is now a Web.com Company - <AUTHOR> http://about.networksolutions.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> So Dan Grossman was nice enough to correct me on this. [http://www.networksolutions.com/blog/2011/10/network- solutio...](http://www.networksolutions.com/blog/2011/10/network-solutions- acquisition-by-web-com-completed/)

The source of my information was an email I got this morning from Network Solutions saying they are now a Web.com company. Must just be a excuse to market to customers.

<comment><USER2> Or the deal took 2 years to go through. Not sure what this means for us..</comment></comment>


Bitcoin: On Line Currency Taking Off - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/06/09/bitcoin-on-line-currency-taking-off/ <comment><USER2> This is nuts. I received 5 Bitcoins about a month ago, and didn't really think twice about it. I just checked, and if the current trade price holds, then I now have $146.50.

That's a phone bill payment, for just being lucky. Pretty sweet.

I'm trying to sell them right now on MtGox, and I'll post how much I actually walk with after fees.

EDIT: Since typing this, I've "lost a dollar". Trade price now $29.091 * 5BTC = $145.45 ... I've sent my 5 bitcoins to MtGox, but the site says it probably won't register for a couple hours. Then I have to place a trade order.

EDIT2: While typing the above edit, price went to $29.685 * 5BTC = $148.42 ... extremely volatile right now!

EDIT3: That's odd. This article has completely disappeared from the front page, with 26 points (and posted 1 hour ago).

EDIT4: This article was killed? What for? Um.. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ben Rooney was wrong. At the time the article was published, BTC was trading for ~$30 not ~$15. Also, here is a site that uses web sockets to provide real time order info and price resistances: <http://mtgoxlive.com/orders></comment>


Transacting $10k or more in cash could make you a criminal under proposed law - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-20/transacting-$10,000-or-more-in-cash-could-make-you-a-criminal/11429230 <comment><USER2> Note to reader -> Proposed law in _Australia_

Aussie government seems to pull this kind of Orwellian nonsense as if the Patriot Act insulted their impetus. Carrying this much money in the US can have similar issues, like civil forfeiture and the ability to seize cash in an arrest.</comment>


MVC Podcast: College CS teacher and industry dev talk about weekly tech topics - <AUTHOR> http://mvc-the-podcast.github.io/2015/12/14/episode-12-pokemon-yahoo-zuckerberg-qa.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm Marty Stepp, and I teach computer science at a major university. Recently my good friend Victoria Kirst, who works as a developer at a major industry company, and I decided to start an amateur tech podcast. Each week we talk about various topics of interest in CS/tech news. We've done 12 episodes now.

The goal is to talk less about gadgets ("the new iPhone 6 Plus is out!") and more about issues of interest to coders and computer scientists. We aren't really professional-quality, but we're having fun and wanted to post here to broaden our audience.

If you have any feedback for us, or a suggestion for a topic you'd like to hear us talk about, please let us know! Thanks for listening, and please Like/Subscribe/Share to be notified of our new posts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you want to listen to some of our past episodes, I would say our best one so far was the discussion of diversity in tech in which we had my colleague Cynthia Lee on as a guest.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most enjoyable language/framework you build projects with? - <AUTHOR> <comment> jadzia-dev UI wise: React JS with hooks. I can build everything on the webserver side and do everything with Async requests. It's great... as for on the webserver side... let's just say Not Python.

<comment><USER2> > let's just say Not Python

I'm genuinely interested in learning the reason here

<comment> jadzia-dev I deeply dislike the almost lack of compile time errors in Python. I like my programming language which as long as I know what I'm doing it will likely be correct once it compiles.

<comment><USER3> How is that different from JS, which you say is your favorite? Sure, you can have Typescript, but you can type your Python code as well and use something like mypy. I would understand disliking Python if you said your favorite was something compiled like Go or Rust, but it's surprising to me you dislike Python so much while still liking JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went from Laravel (PHP) to Symfony (PHP) to Flask (Python), and Django (Python). Django feels the best to build medium-big stuff quickly, but all of the ones mentioned above are decent. Frontend-wise Angular feels too bloated, Vue.js 2 is nice (waiting for v3), but looking into Svelte and feeling excited about it.

CSS I'm comfortable with Bootstrap and Bulma, but want to look into Tailwind for future projects.

</comment><comment><USER5> C# / WPF. Unfortunately, it's become obsolete (WPF), and M$ is pushing UWP into view. I have lots and lots and lots of issues with that, I could probably write a book on it.

They're working on WinUI 3.0, and that __should __be the holy grail of UIs (when it comes to C#). I 'm pretty skeptical, so we'll see...

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Ruby on Rails - can prototype very fast SaaS like products while still enjoying the language

2\. Elixir with Phoenix - building my first product with it and I like how it pushes me to think more about my code

</comment><comment><USER7> For web applications: Django. For Linux desktop applications: GTK+. For "portable" desktop applications: Qt (because of its tooling).

</comment><comment><USER8> Svelte/Sapper

</comment><comment><USER9> As a Rookie: Go without any frameworks. Also very curious about Phoenix/Elixir

As a pro: Laravel/PHP.

</comment><comment><USER10> Flutter

</comment><comment><USER11> Go. No frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Spring boot + JSP for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> .NET Core / C#

</comment><comment><USER14> ruby + rails for web qt for desk vuejs for js

</comment><comment><USER15> Ruby on Rails

</comment><comment><USER16> Pharo

</comment><comment><USER17> Next.js and Sequelize</comment>


The penultimate guide to stopping a DDoS attack (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.unixy.net/2010/08/the-penultimate-guide-to-stopping-a-ddos-attack-a-new-approach/

<comment><USER2> Why is it the penultimate guide? Is there a follow-up with the ultimate guide? I'm not a native speaker and the title confuses me. Can someone explain?</comment>


Varoufakis: IT technologies will overthrow Capitalism - <AUTHOR> http://failedevolution.blogspot.com/2016/05/varoufakis-it-technologies-will.html <comment><USER2> Varoufakis and this author phrase the argument strangely. The gist is simple: technology will reduce the demand for labor, so we will no longer need to compete in a capitalist society. I think he's right to fear a society in which the elites control all technology, but it's a bit unfounded to fear a Matrix- style dystopia, wrt destructive AI or mind control or some misreading of Baudrillard's simulacra. The fear, in the short-term at least, should be about dealing with the jobs that technology eliminates.

For me, it's about people - when truck drivers are eliminated as a profession by self-driving technology, what will they do? And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits/savings from lower labor costs to the people.

I think this article deals with the 'technology v capitalism' question in a better fashion, without delving into robots controlling our minds or whatever other nonsense Yanis meant this time: [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase- robots/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/)

<comment><USER3> > And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits > from lower savings to the people.

Having an occupation does not give you some eternal right to income. You need to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being eliminated. That is why people build savings, which is really just a form of investment.

The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective than the top down order of some government mandate that, with a stroke of a pen, recklessly interferes with the lives of millions of people, in a wide range of circumstances, with a cookie cutter solution.

<comment><USER4> I am perhaps misreading, but your tone sounds unnecessarily callous.

I think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed - or, if you prefer, _able_ to be responsible for their own future. There is ample evidence to suggest that we need to be preparing for a society where this is not feasible.

      > The spontaneous order of the free market is always going
      > to be more effective than the top down order of some
      > government mandate  ...

Not necessarily, but it's kind of missing the point, and implies those are our only two options (so, no choice at all).

The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made. That it's about to break and we don't know what will happen, and worse, that we're seemingly not preparing for the transition to some other political / economic / social structure, is the alarming bit.

<comment><USER3> It might come across as callous, but I'm only being realistic about whose responsibility it is to take care of an individual. The compulsion of government should not be used to make one individual responsible for providing for another. That is as morally abhorrent as slavery.

> think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of > jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed

If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide for someone who cannot.

If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality.

>The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made.

There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous fear- mongering.

<comment><USER4>
      > The compulsion of government should not be used to make one
      > individual responsible for providing for another. That is as
      > morally abhorrent as slavery.

Crikey - that escalated quickly.

Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of _providing_ for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc).

There's a clear trend over the last several decades showing precisely the reallocation of wealth from working classes to middle / upper class. Here in AU we've just had a budget presented that, once again, provides welfare for middle / upper, with an increased tax burden to the lower / working. It's not as though this is a once-off event, or something that our friends in Europe or the US haven't been noticing either.

      > If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive
      > without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide
      > for someone who cannot.

Could you describe your thoughts on the contra situation there -- where there isn't, and you _don 't_ happen to have enough wealth to survive.

I'm guessing you've enjoyed some good fortune in regards the circumstances of your birth.

      > If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of
      > a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest
      > now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality.

I really don't know if you're trolling. It's not just about truck drivers, though they're a good example because a) there's lots of them, b) today the job they do is essential to western societies, c) once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest.

If your answer to this kind of problem is 'it sucks to be you', then I hope you're not in a position of contributing to public policy.

      > > The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that
      > > Yanis (and many others) has made.
      >
      > There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous
      > fear-mongering.

Did you read the OP?

What evidence would satisfy you? Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations (well, lots of announcements, but subsequent analysis of these generally reveal they were hugely optimistic - never delivering what they promised)? Clear decline, almost universally, of the wage component of GDP? A belief that an increase in the sophistication of technology and automation can increase the job market?

<comment><USER3> >Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc).

No that is not what government is all about.

The just purpose of government is to coordinate usage of communal property, for the general betterment. So levying a split rate property tax, to pay for national defense, would be a just exercise of government power, because the average person is better off with a portion of land rents being spent for this purpose, than the land title owners collecting this portion.

Where there is justification for the government using force against an individual, it is in subduing and punishing those who who violate people's rights. Banning theft is okay. Banning marijuana usage is not. This is basic non-aggression principle stuff.

>where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive.

Then I either ask for help or resign myself to my fate. Robbing people cannot be justified, and legalizing such a solution is not sustainable.

>once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest.

Then they better start saving now! Their financial situation cannot be made someone else's legal responsibility, or else you create a political system where political activism can net you resources coerced from others, and one where the consequence of your irresponsibility can be passed on to others against the other's will. It totally perverts capital allocation and incentives, and is rank authoritarianism.

>Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations

There are always huge layoffs in an economy with hundreds of millions of people.

Statistics on large scale trends contradict the OP. We have seen unprecedented automation over the last 40 years yet today in the US the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since 1963. Similarly all around the world over the last 30 to 40 years we have seen rapid automation and hundreds of millions of jobs being replaced by machines, yet there has been massive growth in the total number of jobs, increases in wages, and improvements in standard of living, over the same time span.

Anything less than statistics on global trends in employment is totally invalid as evidence for technological unemployment, and unsusprisingly, the author provides none.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the funniest thing about historians and, more than any other, the Marxists: they believe in historical laws and historical processes. They think history has a purpose and a meaning. They believe we are in an unavoidable journey towards what they think is progress. And they think their "progress" is the only possible progress.

They look like those children laying in the grass and seeing images, forms and patterns in the clouds. But the patterns are not there, they are just imagined.

</comment><comment><USER6> It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this:

In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about.

In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and coming economic center in East Asia.

<comment><USER7> Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. We're reaching the point where microeconomics can be computationally scaled up to the macro level. The economic activity of every human and all capital can be tracked and modelled. This is very likely to produce results that will out-predict, and out-perform markets.

<comment><USER3> You're neglecting the fact that the complexity of an economy scales with computational power and algorithmic efficiency, meaning the simulations of the economy can never catch up to the economy in fineness of detail.

Economic activity can only be effectively coordinated through decentralized market calculations that a centralized computer simulation cannot match, that incorporate the vast troves of private knowledge that a governing authority is not privy to.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: AdWords for finding talent, co-founders, jobs, and other opportunities - <AUTHOR> http://vrkt.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN: a while ago I invited you to visit a very early build of our new startup. On June 8 we finally opened up to the public even though (technically) still in beta.

On behalf of the Venturocket team, I'd like to re-invite you to take a look and see how we've learned to quantify human talent.

Thanks!</comment>


Quick tip for remembering names at, during and after meetings - <AUTHOR> http://www.dgsiegel.net/news/2013_07_04-quick_tip_for_remembering_names_at,_during_and_after_meetings

<comment><USER2> That's an old truth that your name is the sweetest word in the World to you. Apart from this method, Associations(Mr Z looks like my Maths teacher and Ms B sounds like my neighbour) and Impressions help a lot(you usually spot something bright or suprising about the person you meet for the first time: e.g. like Mr Green is the guy with the wig, and Ms Blue is the lady who talks too fast etc. ). The best thing is to combine these 2 methods with the Repeatition and polish them with making up a Story about the group -but that's more to remember the people for lifetime:).</comment>


AI alternative – the science behind 'artificial swarm intelligence' - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-artificial-swarm-intelligence-uses-people-to-make-better-predictions-than-experts/ <comment><USER2> The same Swarm Intelligence predicted the Superbowl Contenders here: [http://unanimous.ai/unusuperbowlpicks/](http://unanimous.ai/unusuperbowlpicks/)</comment>


Bitcoin Brain Wallets: A flawed, dangerous idea. - <AUTHOR> http://www.bn2b.com/bitcoin-brain-wallets-dangerous-idea/ <comment><USER2> There is some seriously bad misinformation in this article, and I feel like maybe the author isn't really familiar with basic information theory.

> If you literally just use 4 or 5 dictionary words, someone is going to crack > it fast. Bad people can write a program to try a kabillion combinations of > words and it will run fast.

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. If you _randomly_ choose a sequence of 4 or 5 dictionary words you'll have a strong password. This is simple math. The author then tries to support his point with this gem:

>One of the wallets, with the password "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" was cracked in 7 hours,

Well, "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" _isn't_ 5 randomly chosen dictionary words. It's an extremely common 5 word sequence and has nothing like the entropy of a random word sequence.

The most important thing about pass phrases is that you have to choose the words randomly. You can't go pulling phrases from movie lines, and you can't even come up with them yourself. You need an unbiased process like a computer or a dice roll to generate it for you.

More subtly, you shouldn't be picky about the phrase. If you keep generating new pass phrases until you find one that's memorable, you are drastically reducing the entropy of your phrase. It is plausible that an attacker could build a model that limits their search to memorable phrases, and then you'd be in bad shape.

And this last point is where pass phrases need work. What we need is a system for randomly generating passwords that guarantees some level of memorability without sacrificing entropy. Fitting them to roughly sentence formats is one possibility (e.g. adj noun verb noun), so that we can visualize something happening. But it's not an easy problem.

<comment><USER3> >>>Fitting them to roughly sentence formats is one possibility (e.g. adj noun verb noun), so that we can visualize something happening.

That "mad-libs" method does reduce entropy quite a bit. I don't know if it reduces it enough to make the password crackable, but the search space is much smaller than just 5 random words.

<comment><USER2> That's true. What I should have said was that we want to make the entropy easy to measure. If I flip through random passwords until I find one that's easy to remember, I have no idea how much entropy I've lost. But the mad-libs method should let us know exactly what our effective key length is, and allow us to make up for it with longer phrases if needed.

Edit: Another technique that I find useful is to place the four words into a more memorable sentence. For example, if I pull "frequently scared earth understanding" from passphra.se, I might have trouble remembering that raw sequence of words. But if I put it into a sentence like "I am frequently scared, but the Earth is understanding.", then I have a much more evocative sentence that I'm likely to remember. I usually will just use that whole sentence, punctuation and all, because hey, extra entropy. Dropbox's zxcvbn tool[1] estimates that pass phrase at nearly 128 bits of entropy.

[1] <https://github.com/lowe/zxcvbn>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a lousy article. Pass phrases are strong if you exclude anything that's been in print and if you use random words.

Use something like diceware. Ideally, use a 7 word phrase with a good password safe.

The article doesn't use any numbers, and so the author doesn't have a feel for just how strong a passphrase is compared to a password.

Also, the author seems to be missing the point of the xkcd comic. You can create a strong password. $xK!r88w82;)|@N?c463)fpD2SAtRNQq But very few people do this. Because of poor password policies people have a password. PASSWORD. They then modify that to conform to the policy. Must include numbers? PASSWORD89. Must include specials? !PASSWORD89

These are trivially easy to find. Firstly because the limited amount of modification available means other people would have tried it first, and those words will now be in dictionaries. Secondly, crackers can auto-substitute characters in wordlists.

</comment><comment><USER5> >If you literally just use 4 or 5 dictionary words, someone is going to crack it fast. Bad people can write a program to try a kabillion combinations of words and it will run fast.

xkcd uses math and I don't see much wrong with it either. You're use hand waving and anecdotes. You can't just say "it will run fast." Unless computers get infinitely fast, there will always be intractable problems.

And you realize that "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" is an _extremely_ common phrase, right? It has no relation to the entropy in 4 random dictionary words. The thing about cracking a password is you don't have to know the exact format if what you're grasping at is a bunch of low hanging fruit.

</comment><comment><USER6> He talks about how the XKCD article password is commonly known as if this is worrying for some reason. But it's no surprise for anyone getting started with brainwallets who has gone to brainwallet.org and noticed that the default passphrase entered into their client side generator is 'correct horse battery staple'. The chance of you coming up at random with a phrase that is the default in a popular brainwallet generator is so low as to not be worth worrying about.

The other thing is that the article completely ignores the possibility of generating a new private key in the normal way and memorizing that. It's only the same number of digits as seven phone numbers which while certainly difficult is well within the range of any moderately determined human of normal intelligence. I suspect that most people have 7 phone numbers memorised as it is.

If you're truly paranoid about security, doing that gives you just as much security as anyone else using bitcoin.

<comment><USER2> >The chance of you coming up at random with a phrase that is the default in a popular brainwallet generator is so low as to not be worth worrying about.

1 in 2^44, in fact. Unlikely enough that if you tried once per millisecond, you'd expect it to happen only once in 550 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first one I tried, in similar style, was "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog": [http://blockexplorer.com/address/13w4Hn1BJQM4bjZZgYtXpyp4cio...](http://blockexplorer.com/address/13w4Hn1BJQM4bjZZgYtXpyp4cioiw29tKj). Fortunately, its balance is also now at 0.

<comment><USER4> I think I accidentally downvoted you. Sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article misses the real flaw with the pass phrase; pass phrases aren't really 2^B (where B = bits obviously) entropy. They're D^N entropy where N = number of words and D = size of the dictionary. The OED has 171K words in it, so say you're using a 7 word phrase that's ~4.3 * 10^36 possibilities. In reality most people's vocabulary is no more than 60K words whch gives us 2.8 * 10^33.

If instead you use _only_ 16 character password with no dictionary words (i.e. completely random or sufficiently randomized memorable words) you have 3.4 * 10^38 possibilities.

3.4 * 10^38 > 4.3 * 10^36 > 2.8 * 10^33

I think everybody should use what works for them, and pass phrases are easy to remember but they have the exact same trade off that using pure dictionary words does at shorter lengths; it's easier to crack.

<comment><USER2> A couple of problems. First off:

>If instead you use only 16 character password with no dictionary words (i.e. completely random) you have 3.4 * 10^38 possibilities.

You're confusing characters and bytes. If you limit yourself to what can be typed on a typical keyboard, you're looking at a set of 95 characters, not 256. That gives you 4.4E31 possibilities (or ~105 bits of entropy). If you limit yourself to what most password fields will accept, it's more like a set of 75 characters (optimistically), giving you 1E30 possibilities (~100 bits).

Secondly, I'm not sure the comparison is fair in terms of memorability. 7 words will fit easily in my working memory. 16 characters will not. If I have an exceptional working memory, I might be able to fit 10 characters in it, and suddenly we're down to 63 bits of entropy, compared to 77 bits for a 7 word pass phrase, even if we limit ourselves to a 2000 word dictionary. And committing those 7 words to long term memory is still going to be _way_ easier than committing the random 9 character string.

Incidentally, 77 bits is very close to the 80 bits that NIST recommends for the strongest passwords. 63 is quite a long way off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Completely agree with the article.

Whether you realise it or not, what you want from a private key is lots of entropy.

A simple pass phrase is easily cracked, a complicated one is hard to remember (and it needs to be remembered exactly).

There may potentially be a small amount of middle ground here, particularly if your memory is very good, but what happens if you get dementia as you get older?.

If you must use a pass phrase, use it to encrypt a truly random private key, this way the only the private key is exposed to the blockchain. An attacker would need the encrypted copy of your private key to brute force it, don't keep this online unless you need to send bitcoins.

<comment><USER10> So, you're wrong about the entropy in the pass phrase. XKCD goes into the math, and for a sufficiently long phrase, there's plenty of entropy. And yes he takes into consideration there's only so many English words.

<comment><USER9> I have had this conversation before, what is "sufficiently long"?.

Remembering 10 random words in order isn't that much easier than 10 random alpha numeric chars and symbols. The words might have some mnemonic value, but the point is, if you need entropy, don't mess about, use a real private key.

<comment><USER4> You realise that a 10 word Diceware passphrase is significantly stronger than a 10 character (alphanumeric + specials) password, right?

95^10 = 5.9873694e+19

7776^10 = 8.0828128e+38

<comment><USER9> Yeah and both are weaker than a truly random private key, I give up, it's only money after all.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by "truly random" random private key?

How much computing power is needed to attack a 7 word Diceware passphrase?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Brainwallets are good as long as your passphrase is long and very specific to what you want it to be.

Read this post <https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/3840286>

</comment><comment><USER12> Bitcoin itself is a flawed and dangerous idea. What makes the value of money is the trust you put into the economics institutions of some territory. Value of money should not be derived from some computational tricks but should be the reflect of the real economy. The other explanations including some from Wall street (remember Subprimes ?) are just big misredirections some conmen invented to take a lot of money from your pockets. Bitcoin is just a modern version of a pyramidal scheme. Think of it as pyramidal scheme 2.0

<comment><USER13> Bitcoin the system and the blockchain is brilliant. The adaptable difficulty and the hashcash chaining can be used for a lot of stuff where for various reasons you don't trust a central authority.

Bitcoin the currency is a different beast. Well if you have to rope the value of money to something - computational power is not the worst thing possible in an increasingly. digital world

<comment><USER12> I agree with you when you say "Bitcoin the system and the blockchain is brilliant." this is a brilliant misdirection like when a magician distract your attention to hide the real trick.

Why do you want to rope the value of money to something else than trust ? I know this is low tech and very old but a trust based system can work even for the digital economy. Of course to work properly a trust based system need some conditions which are not met today : transparency and dissuasive sanctions if someone cheat.

I think we need to upgrade our financial system but we need more transparency not more opacity.

<comment><USER13> Have you by any chance read the Sten (Cole, Bunch) series? There the currency is pegged to the antimatter because it is the perfect fuel and is the only thing moving the economy.

The problem with trust based systems is that trust is a fickle thing. If it was up to me I would peg a currency to the kWh. It will create dynamic equilibrium because it will be constantly consumed to create GDP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This actually misses the worst problem. Brain wallets are essentially unsalted. You can build a gigantic rainbow table once and then watch those addresses forever after.

And you aren't attacking a single address at a time. You're attacking them all in parallel. Even if the expected time to crack one password is very long, the expected time to crack some password can be much, much smaller.

<comment><USER2> >This actually misses the worst problem. Brain wallets are essentially unsalted. You can build a gigantic rainbow table once and then watch those addresses forever after.

The phrases generated by passphra.se have 44 bits of entropy. That means your rainbow table has to be on the order of hundreds of petabytes. I have doubts that the attack you're proposing could be implemented in practice. If it were a problem, you could just tack on a few more words and take the table into the yottabyte range.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but I'm highly confident that a significant fraction of users are not using passphra.se or similar.

They're making something up, and humans are extremely bad at generating high entropy that way.

<comment><USER2> Yes, people should never come up with pass phrases out of their brains. A good entropy source is an absolute must. As I mentioned in another comment, even flipping through something like passphra.se until you find something especially memorable is shooting yourself in the foot because you're discarding an unknown amount of entropy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So is there any safe way to store bitcoins? It's getting kind of frustrating to not have a best practice.

</comment><comment><USER16> Excellent! The first of today's several Bitcoin threads! All board the fail train, next stop mom's basement leeching electricity with 20 badly set up graphics cards and fans.

<comment><USER4> > next stop mom's basement leeching electricity with 20 badly set up graphics > cards and fans.

No one does that any more. The amount of computing power in the blockchain is impressive. FPGAs didn't last too long; people are using ASICs now.

It's a shame if all those farms of GPUs are wasted. I guess I should have looked on ebay for people selling them off cheap. Or maybe they're just being used for protein folding now.

It's interesting that by tying mining to value has driven people to create home clusters and now people have developed ASICs. It'd be cool if those could have some other use in future.</comment></comment>


Patent that cost Microsoft millions gets invalidated - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/game-companies-knock-out-patent-that-slammed-microsoft-with-388m-verdict/ <comment><USER2> This is probably an unpopular opinion on HN but I don't think patents should be transferable. If only the inventor were allowed to benefit from a patent it would work closer to the original intent of the patent system which was to incentivise creators. Since then it's purpose has been perverted into a right to own IP. Ownership of IP only benefits lawyers and patent trolls. Please note that I'm not talking about trade secrets which are another thing altogether.

<comment><USER3> The inventor can benefit from a patent by selling it.

Maybe they don't want to raise millions of dollars and spend years building a business that may or may not eventually generate $20 million in profit over the next couple decades, and would rather just sell it now for $1 million and get back to creating!

Even if they wanted to take the time and risk to use it directly, the skills required to invent something and the skills to profit from it aren't necessarily the same.

<comment><USER4> > Maybe they don't want to raise millions of dollars and spend years building > a business

But see, _this_ is the valuable part! _This_ is what we should be rewarding! The idea is worthless without execution. The concept that someone who simply had a relatively trivial idea should be able to extract rent from someone else who had the same idea but actually spent years executing on it and building a real business that benefits actual customers, taking on significant risk to do so, is repugnant.

<comment><USER5> This isn't absolutely true, if ideas are worthless without execution then corporations would never spend millions and millions inside their R&D departments creating inventions which may or may not come to market.

The assumption that ideas are always trivial isn't correct, sometimes the inventor spends years and years perfecting a design in his own garage, but doesn't have the means to bring it to market. Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? Nothing is wrong with the final invention nor is it from the lack of trying to bring it to market, he just doesn't have the financing necessary to pull it off.

<comment><USER6> _Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work?_

The patent isn't a reward for his work, though. The patent is a reward for having an idea and filing for it. The inventor could just as easily spend years in the garage and come up with nothing patent-able, thereby obtaining no reward.

<comment><USER7> The patent is the opportunity to be rewarded (paid) for your work, instead of ripped off. Sans patent, BigCo just takes your great idea.

<comment><USER6> Sans patents, BigCos are forced to compete in a commoditized market even more cutthroat than generic drugs (since those are at least regulated by the FDA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a romantic notion with patent law about the garage inventor who invents the better mousetrap, patents it, and makes a fortune.

Has this ever happened?

Lone inventors who did patent things seems to have spent their time in court rather than getting rich (Eli Whitney, Edison, Wright Bros.).

<comment><USER9> Edison was probably suing more than getting sued (that's the reason film production moved to the West Cost)

Apart from that, I guess it's really rare.

<comment><USER8> Edison sued, was sued, was used as a pawn in patent lawsuits, and was often hired to invent a way around other patents. Whether the net of all this was positive or negative for him or society is hard to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The headline makes it sound like Microsoft spent millions to buy the patent, but it was used against Microsoft and others to extract millions.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, now that you mention it, I see how it could mean what you thought. When I first read it, I read the correct meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always wondered why anyone not creating products behind their patents should be allowed to profit off of them. If I make a new concept and patent it and publish my idea into the market I should have my patented protection on my product. If I buy a patent for something I don't produce, heck, if I don't even produce _anything_ in my company, I shouldn't be allowed to keep said patent. I'm not a patent expert or a law expert, but some things just bug me out.

Edit: typos and such

<comment><USER13> You could view patent collector to have roughly the same role as debt collector: it's a specialization of enforcement for certain type of social contracts in our system. In programming term, they would be an abstraction black box the free others (creator) from doing mundane unnecessary jobs.

Now, of course the current implementation of IP is pretty shitty. And there are argument to be made that the assumption of "no patent/ idea protection === no incentive for people to create thing" is flawed to start with.

<comment><USER14> Imagine how awful it would be if a debt collector set their own prices. And debts were racked up with extremely-vague terms from people you never met.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Microsoft did not invalidate anything

> claims to own the concept of "product activation" in software, had all > claims ruled invalid by the Patent Trademark and Appeals Board (PTAB)

>The PTAB case against Uniloc's patent was filed by Sega of America, Ubisoft, Cambium Learning Group, and Perfect World Entertainment

Microsoft paid the settlement and went on with business

> It was Uniloc's lawsuit against Microsoft that provided the company with its > original headlines.

> Microsoft settled for an undisclosed sum

</comment><comment><USER16> Can you sue to get your money back after a patent had been declared invalid?

</comment><comment><USER17> Uniloc may be a troll, but the issue of patent lawyers entirely--not just a little bit--writing their experts' "opinions" for them is a real one. Only the PTAB allows this; federal courts take a very different view.

<comment><USER18> I actually know Ric and some of the guys who worked at Uniloc. Back in the day, they were doing real development work and R&D on activation and licensing systems. The nature of the business may have changed after the Microsoft thing happened, but there's a lot more to that story than ever makes it into the headlines. All you hear now is the spin. Calling them trolls is sexier than doing any kind of fact checking I guess. Microsoft (and others) helped create the modern Uniloc by ripping off their IP, making it more profitable to enforce their patent than to use it to their advantage or license it. As long as the patent system exists in it's current flawed form, users have two choices... license the patented IP they use or roll the dice. People who own patents HAVE to enforce them or forfeit their rights, that's not really much of a choice.

<comment><USER17> I don't doubt that there's more to the story, and I'd be interested to hear it. However, it's not true that patent owners lose their rights without enforcement the way that trademark owners do. All you need to do as a patent owner to maintain rights is pay the renewal fees.

<comment><USER19> That's not quite true:

[http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.as...](http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.aspx?news=e6ca16c5-081f-4128-83d3-0699e2070381)

<comment><USER17> The right to file a new claim at any time is what we're talking about, not the right to pursue a particular old claim after an extended delay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does this mean Microsoft can sue for their settlement back?

<comment><USER2> Not if they didn't own the patent at the time they were accused of abusing it. Patent ownership does not work retroactively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> List of patents used as prior art:

5,077,660

5,199,066

5,291,598

5,509,070

5,956,505

</comment><comment><USER22> It is heartening to see that US Software patents are starting to expire (the patent in question here did so in 2014). So eventually we will be able to put much of this nonsense behind us, even if the lawmakers don't wake up and smell the coffee anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tesla is the best example. His patents plus VC became Westinghouse.</comment>


If you aren't taking notes, you aren't learning. - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/influencers/20130702175823-659753-if-you-aren-t-taking-notes-you-aren-t-learning

<comment><USER2> wrong. different people have different learning styles, so while some people may learn from writing notes others may learn from listening, reading or even saying things aloud. one of the best things i've learned from peter drucker is that one key to success is to understand your learning style: [http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-learning- styl...](http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-learning-styles-quiz)

<comment><USER3> I was just about to point out that learning styles had been fairly thouroughly debunked, but I see your own link says that too:

"While the idea that students have fixed, specific learning styles is not supported by scientific research, providing students with multiple ways to learn content has been shown to improve student learning".

Your link also seems to conflate the topics of "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles", the self-diagnostic quiz seems aimed more at the former.

<comment><USER2> Well don't take my word for it, but if you have a chance read what Drucker has to say: [http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~peterb/3005-001/managingoneself.pdf](http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~peterb/3005-001/managingoneself.pdf)

And yes maybe that's just anecdotal, but I've applied that approach in my own life and was pleased by the results.

<comment><USER3> It's a bit beyond anecdotal. His anecdote compares the performance of someone getting the written questions for a press conference at least half an hour in advance and for whatever random reason latches onto the "written" rather than the "half hour in advance" part.

His assertion that "there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both" is, as far as I'm aware, entirely unsupported by science, and not even defined by Drucker in any useful way.

Yes, his general message of "know thyself" is fairly sound, but most of the specifics in that article are feel-good babble.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  What is your favorite 'Frozen Pizza?' - <AUTHOR>

We are looking to add a new product to the Grovara.com catalog - looking for a US Manufactured Frozen Pizza Product - what do you think? <comment><USER2> It's not delivery it's Digiorno

</comment><comment><USER3> Newman's Own

</comment><comment><USER4> Dr. Oetker</comment>


The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sale-sold-for-half-its-valuation/ <comment><USER2> I wrote about this too - linked in the article. [https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc- leave-1-billion-o...](https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc- leave-1-billion-on-the-table/)

The travesty is that ISOC has given up a sure-fire stream of $55+ million/year in tax-free income, along with the ability to easily grow that to over $100m/year with price increases - all for just over $1.1 billion.

As any r/personalfinance reader can tell you a rule of thumb for endowments is to spend a maximum of 4% of your assets each year. This means $44m from the $1.1bn, which means ISOC is immediately worse off than they were forecasting for this year (~$55m). Alternatively use the Yale method, which in today's low-return market will yield similar or worse results.

Moreover it's clear that ISOC are not behaving as the sharpest of investors, so we can imagine that the endowment might be be poorly managed or over-spent.

<comment><USER3> The bigger issue is that org was given to PIR to manage in the public interest. It was not supposed to even be a moneymaker for ISOC, they were just supposed to be the stewards of .org in the public interest. The fact that it's worth even $1 billion shows that they're operating it in the interest of the ISOC and not the public interest. ICANN should simply create a new entity that will charge break-even fees for registrations and stop trying to tax .org registrants with mandatory charitable donations to a dubious charity.

<comment><USER4> It's worth noting that the former ICANN CEO, Fadi Chehadé is highly involved in this sale. This timeline also seems to suggest that current members of ICANN are also biased towards the sale of the .org domain, ICANN may not be interested in the views of the people who currently have .org domains.

From [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/isoc- pir-...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/isoc-pir-..). :

"March 2019:

ICANN receives 3,300 comments uniformly opposed to the change and 6 in favor of removing price caps, and sides with the 0.2% minority.

May 2019:

PIR responded to the comments with an open letter that said,

"We are a mission-based non-profit, and would never betray the trust that you have put into .ORG and us."

On 7 May, Chehadé registered the domain for EthosCapital.com.

On 13 May, ICANN decided to lift the price caps anyway.

On 14 May, Ethos Capital was incorporated as a new investment firm founded by Brooks. Ethos Capital has two staff: Brooks and Nora Abusitta-Ouri, a former ICANN SVP who later worked for Chehadé and was also a classmate of Chehadé."

<comment><USER5> So basically ICANN itself is corrupt and must be replaced wholesale with a proper public interest steward?

Maybe people are protesting the wrong thing. The sale of .org is a symptom, the underlying cause is a bad regulatory framework for internet names.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Internet naming is a situation where artificial value is assigned to a nearly valueless resource for the purpose of collecting rent.

There's no technical reason we can't have multiple systems for translating names into addresses. There's no longer any technical reason for having neatly organized dot separated addresses based on TLDs.

Allowing the translation of any text string into an address is entirely possible with present day computing power, and a truly distributed system similar to the global routing table would work to organize different providers announcing their own name domains.

Maintaining the old DNS TLD domains is stupid and subject to manipulation by corporations and corrupt politicians.

Like this sale.

<comment><USER7> I heard this argument a few times now. But are domain names not important for internet security? Https certs prove that the entity you expect communicates with you, given that you know the domain name of that entity.

<comment><USER6> It's one way to do that... but the present format and management of the domain name system isn't important. You can create a security certificate for any form of text string and use it to validate the other end of the connection.

The certificates are essentially a trusted authority saying cryptographically "we have verified this is really the person you think this name is" and that can be done for any identifier. Also, this system was set up before public key encryption became common, and there are plenty of other ways to accomplish the same function with PK crypto.

<comment><USER7> Ok, but how is a domain name essentially different from 'any form of text string'? There needs to be some central registry, unless you are ok with such long strings that nobody will effectively double check, that they are correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related past threads:

"Save .org": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677)

"Take action to save .org": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582)

"Why I Voted to Sell .org": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960)

"ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355)

<comment><USER8> Dupe of "Take action to save .org" with some discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677533)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, the level of corruption and self dealing here is remarkable. Chehadé was the CEO of ICANN until a couple of years ago.

> On May 7th, Chehadé registered the domain for EthosCapital.com.

> On May 13th, ICANN decided to lift the price caps anyway. The decision was > made by ICANN staff, not its board, evading the obligation to publicly carry > out due diligence and explain board decisions.

> On May 14th, Ethos Capital was incorporated as a new Boston-based > "investment firm", founded by Brooks — who stepped down from running the > 60-person team at Abry to do so. Ethos Capital has two staff: Brooks and > Nora Abusitta-Ouri, a former ICANN SVP who later worked for Chehadé. [0]

Then a couple of months later, surprise, .org gets sold to Ethos Capital... Almost as if this was the plan the whole time...

Here's hoping that somehow these crooks actually end up in jail...

[0] [http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann- and-r...](http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann-and- regulatory-capture-the-dot-org-heist/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what the level of awareness of this is in the nonprofit community itself. Something like the National Council of Nonprofits would seem to be in a good position to file a suit or at least raise awareness among its members who might be interested in forming a class.

While a major charity like the Salvation Army certainly doesn't care if a single, sub-$100 annual expense doubles or even goes up by a factor of ten, thousands of small organizations across the country might care enough to band together and take action.

<comment><USER11> Former member of the worker coop that bid to run .org when ISOC won here.

Technically .org is not just for American style "non profits", I it was and should be any thing else that doesn't fit the other big 5 eg jwz.org.

That was the problem a lot of shady stuff goes on in the Charity world ("but its for charity") notorious for bullying often much worse than the behaviour of wall street or city bankers and traders.

I feel that a more sensible approach such as ours would have been better served - as coop members tend to be stroppy bastards and would have stood up for the common good - a lot of our ISP side in Manchester where members of alt 2600 .

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Take a page from the Donuts book: create multiple price tiers for popular > domains, up to 100x the base rate.

> Raise rates for long-time owners of common words. They weren't using that > premium space anyway.

This is forbidden by the .org registry agreement, 2.10(c): [https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org- agmt-...](https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt- html-30jun19-en.htm)

<comment><USER13> And amazingly won't matter under the new owners who get to write their own rules. That's why everyone is upset. There was a vote that allowed .org to set whatever prices they wanted right before the sale.

<comment><USER14> His link was to the updated agreement. The sale doesn't allow the owner to write their own rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Sullivan suggested that their goal is to return roughly the same annual revenue as they have been getting from PIR — around $50M. Of course this time it would come without the possibility of expanding the underlying business year by year."

This hurts my head. Needless to say, the returns on this fund will be _far_ less assured than the returns on simply maintaining the .org business as it was (especially with Goldman managing the fund).

Impressively, even ISOC comes out a loser from this deal. Only Ethos wins, but then, that was surely the point.

<comment><USER16> Waiting to hear who are ISOC gets new gigs in the Ethos orbit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If this is really the case, someone(s) very possibly took and gave bribes, and we're going to see Federal scrutiny all over this.

<comment><USER18> No, we won't. Not unless you help set that in motion. Have you contacted the DA already?

<comment><USER19> Note that in the U.S., district attorneys are normally the prosecutors at the state court level. At the Federal level, most prosecutors are "U.S. attorneys" or "assistant U.S. attorneys".

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

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

<comment><USER18> Right, so: the DA. Because as incredible as this is: neither ICANN nor ISOC are controlled or run by the federal government.

As much as people think that the organization that oversees internet naming must be federal (because how could it not be, they control stuff for the ENTIRE COUNTRY AND BEYOND), both ICANN and ISOC are literally just private industry non-profit organisations, like any other 501c3. If you want to sue them, or you want them sued by government, you're going to have to contact the DA for the state(s) they are registered in.

<comment><USER19> The reason that I mentioned the distinction was that you suggested contacting DAs in response to romaaeterna's prediction that "we're going to see Federal scrutiny". Contacting DAs might be the most appropriate way to handle a problem, but in itself it probably won't lead to Federal scrutiny of that problem.

<comment><USER18> Unless you found a loophole that allows the federal government to even form an opinion on this matter before it reaches federal courts, a non-profit selling its asset is a matter of state law first, and transgressions or questionable ethics are a matter of state investigation, not federal.

As insane as that might seem for something as far-reaching as "the ownership of the .org top level domain".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I bought an org domain back in the 90s, and have been using it as my personal domain (i.e. also primary email address) ever since.

While, granted, I was perhaps a little silly to go org (it seemed like a good idea back then!), it's mildly terrifying that my personal footprint on the web of 20+ years can now be held to ransom by a random VC firm, and to keep my own email address I might have to pay an additional $$$ annually.

Sigh.

<comment><USER21> Extend your domain lease by 10 years at the current yearly fee. Gives you some time to migrate if you choose to.

<comment><USER22> That's a bad deal unless you actually need ten years to migrate, which you probably don't. Better off to take a year or three at the 10% annual increase and then stop paying entirely (~364% of the existing rate for three years, with payments made in the future rather than the present) than to pay 1000% of the existing rate right now.

<comment><USER23> 10 years is a long time, maybe until than its bought back to non-profit, you never know. Also it allows you the luxury of starting worrying about your migration later. If you could invest that money now with more than 4-5 times US interest rates (which is the price increase I would expect), then I would consider this a bad deal.

<comment><USER22> If it's reverted back to non-profit then prepaying is still a bad proposition because then you're paying today the same amount you would be able to pay years from now -- and paying it to the for-profit entity now instead of the non-profit entity later.

And I don't see any reason to expect the annual probability that it's transitioned back to a non-profit to be a lot different in the future than it is right now, which means that if it makes sense to migrate then it doesn't make sense to wait. Especially when continued use of the domain only increases the migration cost as it gets further distributed as your active contact information.

<comment><USER24> Isn't the price like $12 a year? So prepaying 10 years would be $120? That's not an insignificant amount, but it's not like you're going to make a life- changing profit by investing it either.

Locking down [your-name].org for 10 years carries its own value proposition beyond the mere calculation of price today vs in the future.

<comment><USER22> > Isn't the price like $12 a year? So prepaying 10 years would be $120? That's > not an insignificant amount, but it's not like you're going to make a life- > changing profit by investing it either.

For most people there aren't a lot of individual decisions that will cause you to make a life-changing profit on their own, but it's making little decisions again and again that adds up.

> Locking down [your-name].org for 10 years carries its own value proposition > beyond the mere calculation of price today vs in the future.

The premise is that you're going to immediately migrate away from using the domain. Which means that any further use of the old domain just keeps you invested in it, and it's not worth a whole lot if you're not going to use it for anything.

There is also something to be said for minimizing the profits of the entity screwing you over, even if it's only by a little, because that adds up too.

<comment><USER21> If you stop leasing a domain, you should be very sure that you changed your e-mail address at all the services you ever used and informed all the contacts of your new e-mail address. Because the second you let your domain expire, someone else might gobble it up and receive all the e-mail addressed to you. If you keep leasing for multiple years even after migration, you can be sure to catch any services/people still mailing you at the old address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The reason for this is because former Ethos members are involved with ICANN and are probably making money because of the sale

<comment><USER26> Follow the money.

If they invest with GS, see how much is left after 5-7 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if it is allowed but it sure would be amusing if ICANN decided to grant .org to someone else now, leaving Ethos with a worthless carcass.

<comment><USER11> Anyone know anyone with a spine at ICANN I am sure that I could find people who might be interested Ivan Pope for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Honest question: since .org is relied on world wide, why are just two US state courts the only ones with the legal power to review the sale?

<comment><USER29> You've got the causality backwards. It isn't "the whole word uses this, so we decided to put two US state courts in charge of it".

It was "only two US state courts are in charge of it but the whole world decided to start using it anyway".

No one _forced_ anyone to use the US DNS system. They all knew what they were signing up for when they joined the public internet in the 80s and 90s and haven't spend any time or money lobbying for a change.

<comment><USER30> > They all knew what they were signing up [..]

Really? Knew as in "ticked a box" or as in "informed consent"?

<comment><USER31> You should not tick boxes if you are not informed as to what they do.

<comment><USER32> Not very pragmatic in the general sense, with the length of ToSs and signatures and check marks on forms. There's a difference between having the ability to read and review forms and informed consent before ticking boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My favourite part is that they didn't own it really. We told them to run it for us. It's like if my property management guy sold my house and took the money.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's almost like someone figured out how to cash out. Just about any percentage kickback on a billion discount is life changing money.

</comment><comment><USER35> Are registries allowed to charge different prices for different domain names?

E.g. can they ask google.com for $1B to renew and mygrandmascookiecompany.com for $20 to renew?

<comment><USER12> In the case of .org, non-uniform renewal pricing is only allowed if "the applicable registrant expressly agreed in its registration agreement with registrar to higher Renewal Pricing at the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and conspicuous disclosure of such Renewal Pricing to such registrant"

So Ethos wouldn't be able to screw over existing registrants with non-uniform renewal pricing.

Source: Section 2.10(c) of [https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org- agmt-...](https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt- html-30jun19-en.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> it looks like an inside job when the CEO of ICANN sells the .Org TLD to himself...

</comment><comment><USER37> I find it very curious that NPR has not covered this story, _and_ that they are notably missing from the list of organizations that signed at savedotorg.org. Especially because they are a .org!

I mean, I'm not trying to imply it should be attributed to malice, but are they asleep at the wheel or what?

</comment><comment><USER38> This is one of the most blanetly and openly corrupt transactions in modern history. It saddens me that it looks like they are going to get away with it as well..

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a good chance to stop our dependence on DNS and move to things such as .onion domains instead (which by the way help avoid the whole certificate CA mess).

<comment><USER39> Absolutely agree. Every site should also available on the onion network. This would put some pressure on DNS operators. This would also help dissociate the onion network from criminal activity. The more sites become available as hidden services, the more legitimate the network becomes.

<comment><USER40> I agree, but I would say that .onion addresses should already be seen as being entirely legitimate. Let's not forget that Facebook's onion address (facebookcorewwwi.onion) is the main target of "darknet" traffic by a very wide margin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Isn't there a technical resolution possible here where outsiders set up a new root for .org and people can change their allegiance and leave them to rot? That way Ethos capital (what a disingenuous name) paid $1B for nothing at all.

<comment><USER6> Yes, you just have to get everyone who might want to access a .org address or their DNS provider to recognize the new root.

That's the problem - you have to get organizations - some of whom are deeply invested in making money off of DNS - to agree to not do so.

Or you just ignore the existing system and build a new one... once enough desirable sites are in the new one, then the old one will fade away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The article says that a national bond fund may have fronted the endowment without turning .org into a for-profit. What does this mean?

<comment><USER43> They could have sold bonds (raised money via debt) as an alternative to selling .org. They probably would have gotten a good yield considering the stability of the .org revenue stream.

<comment><USER42> But would buyers of national bonds consider buying debt from a non-government entity? Would they be willing and able to model the investment without a good understanding of the Internet industry?

<comment><USER29> They buy trillions of bonds from GSEs every day. This wouldn't be any different. Agency debt is a well understood thing.

<comment><USER42> Thanks. I find this topic fascinating, even though I know nothing about it. Do you have any recommendations for reading material to learn more?

<comment><USER44> You might try ([https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporatebond.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporatebond.asp)) for an overview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's so hard to stay angry and not just default to sad.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ok honest question fellow comment reader - what are you going to do about it? This is the 5th or 6th article I've seen on this transaction, with hundreds of comments each.

Ethos Capital does not give 2 shits about your comments here.

Are you writing to the DA like this article suggested? What else can you do?

Myself, I don't personally care that much. But I see a lot of people here obviously do, and I don't really see that energy translating into action. I would like to see it move forward in a positive direction, so I'm asking the question of you - you don't like it, what are you going to do about it besides complain here?

<comment><USER47> The DA (and others) are a lot more likely to care about this if it gains press attention — preferably national and preferably well beyond the HN audience. Keep sending those emails to the DA, by all means. But if anything happens to this deal, it's going to be 100% driven by press attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Can the URL be updated to use HTTPS, which is fully supported on blogs.harvward.edu?

[https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire- sal...](https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sale-sold- for-half-its-valuation/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Maybe they can use the money to buy some shares in Ethos. They seem to be going places.

</comment><comment><USER50> For all the people who keep saying there's no application for blockchain: here's one. Namecoin was a bad implementation, but the concept is sound.

Letting companies control domain names serves no purpose. They don't prevent domain squatters, they've censored on behalf of governments in the past, and now they're allowed to gouge nonprofits on .org domains.

A decentralized domain name system wouldn't solve all these problems, but at least we wouldn't be paying rent-seeking middle-men to provide terrible service.

</comment><comment><USER51> I still can't really believe someone can sell a building block of the world wide web like .org tld. Who runs .net? .com? .edu? .info? Can they be sold, too?

<comment><USER52> Yes all of those are private now. .com is still with ICANN (which is now an NGO), .net is now VeriSign, .edu is Educause NGO, .info is Afilias (coop formed by several independent domain registrars)

<comment><USER53> .COM's registry is Verisign, just like .NET.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is there a benefit to locking in pricing today for say 10 years? I assume the major registries, such as namecheap and godaddy, will allow a longer term buy in?

<comment><USER55> Another way to look at it - is there a downside to locking in the current price for 10 years? It doesn't _seem_ if Ethos do end up with it that the prices will go anywhere but up.

I renewed my .org for 10 years.

<comment><USER56> You are supporting a broken system. Chances are it won't get fixed. The better option may be to support a new, decentralized name system instead.

I'm hoping this incident will provide new energy to these efforts.

<comment><USER57> The whole reason people are upset about this deal is because it's not possible to just "switch" to an alternative name system without breaking the whole internet. What you're suggesting is unrealistic.

<comment><USER56> Is it? All it takes initially is support by the browser makers.

<comment><USER57> Endorsement by browser makers is not enough, because browsers are far from the only software that uses the internet. We would need to rewrite every single one of these software to successfully make the transition. In an ideal world where legacy software don't exist and people would rewrite their software to adjust to new standards overnight, yes it might work but that's just not the way things are. Worse, things would break badly when we have different software using conflicting naming systems. I'm pretty sure nobody would want to spend time debugging that kind of mess.

Now, even if browser support is all we need (it's not), how can we possibly explain this to users? Many, many links, bookmarks, and URLs would break along the way, causing confusion and harm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm probably going to regret asking this and I apologize for my ignorance but I thought .org's were all government and nonprofit. I didn't think anybody owned it nor that the entire domain could be sold?!

</comment><comment><USER23> Wait, if you can no longer trust ICANN, does not that mean you cannot trust the whole internet (domain name system) anymore?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would assume that ICANN itself may give up its non-profit status in time. That doesn't make them untrustworthy in general -- they will only exist so long as the system they administer is reasonably useful -- just trustworthy for fewer things (don't expect them to implement any sanity check on prices, for instance)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I love the smell of some rent extracting capitalism in the morning...

</comment><comment><USER60> The reason it sold at half it's valuation is because the valuation was bullshit.

It's like some guy claiming his classic car is worth 25,000 dollars. If nobody is offering 25k for it then it's not worth 25k. Period, end of story.

<comment><USER2> They didn't appear to shop the offer.

It's like that 'some guy' selling his classic car to a classic car dealer who was walking by, without first testing the price with experts or posting an advertisement.

<comment><USER61> Except in this case the "some guy" is selling the classic car without actually owning it since it actually belonged to a public museum, and the dealership was just set up last week by the former director of the museum who just happened to retire the week before that.

There seems to be some kind of breach of fiduciary trust here somewhere, heads should roll at ICANN even if all of this was somehow not in violation of any laws.</comment></comment></comment>


Calculating the Cost of Storing PHP Sessions Using Amazon DynamoDB - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/04/scalable-session-handling-in-php-using-amazon-dynamodb.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder what happens if the DynamoDB service were to ever go down? I know EC2 has had its fair share of issues. Great idea, but I still think storing sessions in a database is best, that might just be me though.</comment>