The Tax Haven That's Saving Google Billions - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201043146825.htm

<comment><USER2> I wrote an article on this transaction that I had posted to the HN community that breaks down a number of the points and explains how it works.

<http://cameronkeng.com/hn-how-do-i-pull-a-google/>

A few things you should consider about international taxation is that it's complicated and only works because they have the infrastructure to sustain it.

 __Disclaimer, I'm not saying what they're doing is right or wrong, but simply placing it into context __

1\. Individuals have a hard time using international tax law similarly because of CFC rules (closely-held foreign corps). If anyone owns more than 10% of a foreign company they must include or report the income as part of their current earnings.

2\. The effective tax rate is only "2.something percent" of income the income google earned outside the US.

3\. To have an APA (Advanced Pricing Agreement) with the IRS is incredibly expensive and time consuming because it's like getting audited in advance and then justifying it before you ever do anything.

4\. You need to pay at a minimum a big 4 accounting firm 10 million to start a project of this complexity over a number of countries.

5\. The dutch companies are simply a "conduit" to allow the money to ultimately reach the Caribbean island tax havens because they have no income tax and simply charge a flat tax of 15k.

6\. On cperciva's note, this tax plan could be considered "post-poning income recognition" but in reality it effectively is never repatriated or brought back into the country because google is such a multinational company. They could use the money for their international business very easily or they could use their foreign cash reserves to purchase an asset in a foreign country and still retain the ownership by the US main company.

I could go on for a while but this is just a the tip of the iceberg.

I've practice this area of taxation before as a CPA so I could give you a number of other examples.

<comment><USER3> Does this get any easier if you do the original incorporation offshore?

<comment><USER2> Yes possibly, if you're able to source the income offshore and keep it away from the united states. Then you'd be able remove it easier. But, as a shareholder that owns more than 10% of the company. It effectively cancels any of the tax benefits.

There are some creative ways to remove yourself from the equation but it's pretty complicated.

Is this Brian? lol

<comment><USER3> Yep that's me, always interested in this sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an article from 2010 that's already been submitted to HN in the past: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815457>

Personally, I find the sub-headline misleading. The subhead reads "Google uses a complicated structure to send most of its overseas profits to tax havens, keeping its corporate rate at a super-low 2.4 percent." But I believe that number refers only to Google's overseas tax rate. This more recent article [http://news.yahoo.com/googles-tax-rate-still-seems-very- low-...](http://news.yahoo.com/googles-tax-rate-still-seems-very- low-213223063.html) says that Google's overall tax rate was 22.2% in 2009.

<comment><USER5> Which is still ridiculously well below the stated 35% corporate tax rate in the USA (source--IRS <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1120.pdf>)

<comment><USER4> Note: I am only speaking for myself personally, not for my employer.

I did a little searching, and [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us- microsoft-tax-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-microsoft- tax-idUSTRE76Q6OB20110727) says that in their last fiscal years,

\- Microsoft had an overall effective worldwide tax rate of 17.5%.

\- Google's effective tax rate was 21%.

\- Apple's effective tax rate was 24%.

\- IBM's effective tax rate was 25%.

Then with a bit more digging into (independent Senator from Vermont) Bernie Sanders' twitter feed, I saw:

\- General Electric had an effective tax rate of -45.3% from 2008 to 2010: [https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132791467994386...](https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132791467994386432)

\- ExxonMobil had an effective tax rate of -38.3% in 2009: [https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132835853536989...](https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132835853536989186)

\- Merck had an effective tax rate of -1% in 2009: [https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132927696131985...](https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132927696131985408)

\- Boeing had an effective tax rate of -1.8% in 2008-2010: [https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132973012763938...](https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132973012763938817)

\- Verizon had an effective tax rate of -5.4% in 2009 and 2010: [https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132944059814785...](https://twitter.com/#!/SenatorSanders/status/132944059814785024)

Again, I'm just speaking for myself personally, not on behalf of my employer. My issue with the article was that I felt like it focused on Google when a broader perspective on corporate tax rates would have been more helpful.

<comment><USER2> Not to discredit Matt or his point, but I think the illustration of percentages does very little in illuminating valid points when it comes to taxation because most people don't understand the mechanisms and the theory behind tax law at this level.

I agree with Matt that the focus on Google is unfair, but the use of these one off statistics without an in depth review of the companies named above for the last 10 years is also unfair (Yes it takes a review of the past 10 years to establish a proper understanding of a company's tax position).

But, I will qualify that GE has an amazing tax team and the oil and gas industries are a beastly at lobbying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My knowledge of international corporate tax law is practically nil, but if I understand this correctly, the money sitting in Bermuda is still subject to taxation when it gets brought back into the US; so Google isn't _avoiding_ taxes, but is rather _postponing_ taxes by doing this.

<comment><USER7> I don't believe that Google is actually _just_ postponing taxes. Instead, they are also being selective about what money they pay it on. Basically, the money has been obtained in Ireland, sent to the Netherlands, and then Bermuda. So it hasn't touched the US, and they don't owe US taxes. They can then do two things with that money. One, they can bring it into the US, pay taxes on it, and use it to do whatever it is they plan on doing with it, or, two, which I think is more likely, they use it to finance international business, and they _never_ pay US taxes on it. However, there hasn't been any "loss" to the US per se. If anything, it's the Irish who should be up in arms

<comment><USER8> The Irish are probably not going to be too upset that companies are taking advantage of the system that they setup in order to attract large companies and the associated financial/legal industry. It's not a case of big companies exploiting the poor Irish.

<comment><USER9> Except, from the original article, I don't get why they don't just set up in Denmark & avoid setting up in Dublin altogether. They must be doing _something_ worthwhile with those 2,000 Irish employees.

Disclaimer: I'm Irish.

<comment><USER10> This is just a guess, but if they were set up in the Netherlands, wouldn't they have to pay Dutch taxes? My impression is that they don't have to pay Dutch taxes because the money is just passing through the Netherlands, not being earned there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 These tax-avoidance schemes have great names - the "Double Irish" Arrangement and the "Dutch Sandwich": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_Arrangement>

</comment><comment><USER11> This is going to sound like a 99% rant, however this article perfectly demonstrates a scenario where tax-avoidance benefits few at the expense of the greater populace.

To quote the article: "a company's obligation to its shareholders is to try to minimise its taxes and all costs, but to do so legally"

Let's talk about who those share holders are: In tech companies the largest percentage of shares usually belong to the founders or the investors. Meaning that the tax minimisation is directly profiting few, and in some cases a single individual.

Regular persons do not have the financial clout to either purchase shares, even in low volumes which would see so little of the avoided-tax-returned-as- profits. Similarly small companies don't have sufficient funding to set up elaborate tax minimisation schemes, effectively forcing them to bear the brunt and be less competitive.

Governments deprived from tax income then turn to the population to bolster their coffers, and often to remain popular the tax rate is kept lower than required - which means cutting back on programs which benefit the greater good. We've seen some pretty ridiculous examples of how underfunded the education sector is becoming. (Somewhat hypocritical when the education sector is responsible for creating the skilled individuals that fuel these companies.)

Stopping international loopholes is incredibly difficult, however there is still plenty that can be done to entice companies to not start them in the first place. Incentive rates could be introduced which allow companies (especially smaller ones) to take advantage of a lower rate in exchange for certain business restrictions that limit these sorts of activities.

</comment><comment><USER12> Trying to tax multi-national corporations is futile and encourages huge amounts of rent-seeking. We should just go to a low flat corporate tax rate (say 10%). To offset that we should stop taxing capital gains at a lower rate and crack down on tax avoidance by high-income individual taxpayers in the US.

A corporation can run their activities from Bermuda or wherever they want, but corporate executives and shareholders aren't going to move to a shitty low-tax jurisdiction if we up their rates.

<comment><USER13> It's "futile"? Really? Is that just shorthand for saying that you oppose trying hard enough to do it successfully?

I don't think it's futile at all. I think we lack the national will to do it, largely and obviously because of the folks who are in control of the relevant decisions.

I'd be more sympathetic to your argument (and just fyi, I am not entirely unsympathetic as it is) if I had some confidence that adopting a 10% flat tax would actually result in corporations paying that amount.

Taxing capital gains at a LOWER rate? Are you serious? Reagan/Bush/Bush trashed those rates to such an extent that it seems laughable to advocate lowering them any further. They're non-existent.

<comment><USER12> With corporations, taxation is very complicated. The law is complicated because its tries to be sensitive to the question of who should be taxed where for what, and the facts are complicated because it's hard to find out exactly what revenues are being made and what they represent. You can always throw more enforcement at the problem, but that costs money, and your yield is uncertain because companies will just spend more money on tax lawyers to shift things around.

Taxing individuals is a lot simpler. You live in the US, you pay US taxes on all your income.

Also, I said we should stop taxing capital gains at a lower rate. There is no reason for it, and it just distorts the market, shifting activity from spending to saving.

<comment><USER14> > Taxing individuals is a lot simpler. You live in the US, you pay US taxes on > all your income.

Not quite as simple as that, actually. As a US citizen, you have to pay US taxes on your income even if you live and work in another country. Which sounds a lot like the problem that Google and other companies successfully avoid: a jurisdiction claiming tax on income taking place entirely outside of their jurisdiction. Individuals just have fewer options to help them avoid this problem; I suppose you could call that "simpler".

(Also, I'll carefully note that you said "simpler", not "simple". The latter rather obviously does not apply to the US tax code.)

<comment><USER12> The point is that a corporation can relocate activities on paper to the Bahamas to avoid taxation. A US citizen can live and work in another country and try to avoid tax that way, but few people are actually going to do that. All of the places someone might actually want to live have higher tax rates than the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is exactly why high taxes hurt startups. How can a startup/small business compete profit wise against Google or another large company when they are paying a much lower effective rate. Since their tax burden is so much lower they can charge a much lower price, effectively pricing any startup/competition out of the market.

We just need a super low corporate tax with zero loopholes that make it less expensive to just comply vs hiring hundreds of lawyers and accountants to move around money.

<comment><USER16> Although you would reduce the amount of fraud with a lower tax rate, you would also decrease your income. The goal is to have the highest income possible, even if that implies fraud or optimizations.

Big companies will always have an advantage regarding taxes: they can provision more easily, pay people to optimize, lobby, etc.

I'm not saying you have an optimal tax rate in the USA, but the naive approach regarding this problem will probably not work.

More information: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_tax>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How hard would it be to set up a system for startups, or at least mid-sized corporation to get the same tax breaks in mass? For example, could a company handle setting up all the holding companies & bank accounts around the world and make the process more affordable by doing it for hundreds of companies at once? You could share the same mailing addresses for each of the companies and the cost of keeping up w/ all the tax laws would be amortized across a much larger group of corporations.

</comment><comment><USER18> For a paper that discusses the Google example in some detail see Ed Kleinbard's "Stateless income's challenge to tax policy".

[http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/tax/symposia/Documents/Klein...](http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/tax/symposia/Documents/Kleinbard%20final%20v3.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wait a second. These are earnings that Google international made. So, yes, perhaps they have weaseled out of paying taxes in the UK or various European countries but IMO they shouldn't owe the US a dime of that money. It wasn't made in the US.

I find it really frustrating that people talk about discuss these things as "look at all the revenue the US lost because of this!". Sure, and look how much the mafia lost on it too! Both of these armed groups could have made more money if they just extorted foreign agents and took their money (calling it "protection money" or "tax" or whatever seems appropriate).

</comment><comment><USER20> An earlier Hacker News discussion on this article can be found here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815457>

</comment><comment><USER21> good, google creates more value than the average government program.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Tax Haven That's Stealing From Your Government

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to know how much of the $60 billion tax shortfall the US government doesn't receive ends up in being spent by Google (at their discretion) on public works, education etc.

I don't know enough to suggest this is (or isn't) the case, but perhaps this model would allow companies who genuinely want to look after their community to basically choose how money, that would otherwise be tax money, gets spent.

I think lots of people would rather see money spent on public health and education than lots of other areas tax money gets diverted to.

Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that this will take off anytime soon...

<comment><USER24> That's called a charitable deduction, and it's already part of the tax code.

Google isn't using the charitable deduction; it's simply using a loophole to avoid U.S taxation on income earned from non-US sources. Whether this is bad depends on your view on taxation.

<comment><USER19> >it's simply using a loophole to avoid U.S taxation on income earned from non- US sources

Income earned from non-US sources on US soil or outside of it? The thing that infuriates me about my home country is that they think I owe taxes on money I've earned while living in a totally different country. What stops, say, Russia from deciding I owe _them_ taxes too?</comment></comment></comment>


How To Send 1 Billion E-mail Marketing Messages Per Month - <AUTHOR> http://mikehillyer.com/email/how-to-send-one-billion-email-marketing-messages-per-month/

<comment><USER2> Apparently "how" means keep hinting at buying software from your company. There wasn't a lot of new information here.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, I've used their software in a former life, and it's quite good for the specific job of pushing out that kind of volume. I'd be tooting my horn about it if I were them, too. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was hoping that this was a cautionary tale that ended with someone in prison, but sadly not (yet).

</comment><comment><USER5> The pollutants should choke on their own toxic waste.</comment>


MBA vs. Bloomberg Terminal Subscription - <AUTHOR> If you had to pick one, mba (100-200k over 2 years ) or Bloomberg terminal subscription for 5-10 years ? <comment><USER2> Don't bother with an MBA course. Just go read "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman. It covers the stuff business tracks do for MUCH cheaper. It'll save you a ton of money, and you can make a better investment. Seriously... grad school for business is _NOT_ worth it. It wasn't worth it for undergrad, either.

I was a business major for undergrad. I'm kicking myself for not having just started with a CS major from the outset.

<comment><USER3> I have that book, but have only skimmed it so far.

I don't know why everybody online keeps saying this. I haven't studied economics, but a full university degree cannot be just this superficial treatment of a zillion topics that the book provides. One page on profit. Two pages on the balance sheet. Three pages on pricing.

I just refuse to believe that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless you're planning to go into a career in equities/fixed-income research, or trading, I don't see why you'd want a Bloomberg terminal. I don't even know if they make subscriptions available for individuals.

An MBA's value isn't based on surface-level stuff like coursework on marketing or strategy; you can get that anywhere. It's in the recruitment network that a high-ranking school attracts. It's the difference between having Google or Goldman send alums to campus to interview people, and applying online into the black box of an Application Tracking System.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I don't even know if they make subscriptions available for individuals.

They do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This definitely seems like an Apples to Oranges comparison.

It is highly dependent on what your goal is / how you want to leverage either of those things.

A bit of perspective on B-school: \- The value is primarily in the network you get exposed to (students, professors, industry veterans, alumni etc). This is something that can help you throughout your life. \- It's also a great way to switch careers, to a certain extent, or even move up the corporate ladder (some companies even sponsor the MBA) -- both of these you can do without an MBA -- but may require a lot of hustle. \- In terms of classes/courses, I would argue that you can get access to 80-90% of the course material / learnings from online courses/MOOCs/blogs etc -- depending on what you are trying to learn.

However, the opportunity cost, especially if full-time, is crazy. It's basically 200K + 2 years of salary.

The Bloomberg terminal on the other hand, is something you can try/use for a year, while working and see if you are getting what you want out of it, and then continue or stop.

Once again, definitely dependent on what the end goal is.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would choose a MBA because it can open doors to some good careers, plus the connections can be valuable.

A Bloomberg is rather useless imo. Anything you can find there is already public information and you just are on the same level playing field as everyone else with no edge. no thanks

</comment><comment><USER7> Most universities have Bloomberg terminals so you could use them if that is what you were looking for.

I think the real question here is what would generate more value.

I used to work at a company similar to Bloomberg and I can tell you that an individual user who would purchase the terminal subscription is most likely sophisticated enough to be using it at a high level (options, futures, swaps etc..), has a high tolerance for risk and wouldn't mind burning a load of cash "experimenting"

Earning an MBA might get you a better job in the long run, but again you are giving up 2 years worth of income so if you can survive that then why not. I think I would go for the MBA if I had to pick

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to do both, but the opportunity cost of even a weekend professional mba program is too much... bloomberg i can do from home.

i was thinking of getting the bloomberg terminal partly for my curiosity, partly for teaching my kids about trading and researching something outside of youtube and google. Since they are too young to go to business school anyway.

it seems like for the price of private k-12, college, professional schools, if you just buy some data subscriptions like bloomberg, wrds, lexisnexis and if they are self learners, it might prepare them to get more out of school later.

</comment><comment><USER8> MBA at a top school hands down. The network you build with stay with you forever. One of my regrets is not getting one and now is too late.

</comment><comment><USER9> MBA if you want to signal to top tier employers.

Bloomberg if you will be able to turn a 25k/yr subscription into > 25k/yr of gains to offset the cost.

The capital gains needed to offset the subscription to Bloomberg are pretty steep, so unless you have millions or you can get some limited partners to give you money, I doubt it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER10> People are hedging their answers. I'd go with the Bloomberg terminal and a lot of books.

</comment><comment><USER11> The value in the terminal is you get access to their chat rooms. Those are good, I am not speaking from first-hand experience but from what I saw other analysts doing at their desk and how they find trade ideas, but it's better to make some money through a career and use that to funnel your trading. The MBA would open many doors and can increase your salary, but with all careers, networking is crucial.

If you want to make money, come trade with me, no Bloomberg terminal needed. ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you considered CFA instead of MBA, and saving/investing/networking the difference?</comment>


Building a natural description of images - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html?m=1

<comment><USER2> As an example of how hard this is their bottom left image _A herd of elephants walking across a dry grass field_ is somewhat wrong. The field is not dry, and there is not much grass. However, they classified it as Describes without errors.

What's interesting about this is slightly wrong image analysis might yield a reasonable description.</comment>


Linux Performance Analysis - anand-s http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/linux-performance-analysis-in-60s.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty cool because back in the dot com days I got paid huge amounts of money to do what they did in the first 60 seconds. I started at $1000/day and the phone rang off the hook. Talked to a friend and he said "double your rates" and I said "WTF? I'm not worth $2000/day, that's crazy". He said "double your rates". So I did, phone still rang like crazy. I got up to $4000/day and had 5 days/week work. Went to $8000/day and got about 3-4 more days and then it dried up.

And that is how I made payroll for BitKeeper in the early days.

I think it's cool that this stuff is far more common knowledge these days. All I was doing was figuring out if it was CPU, network, disks, file system, vm system, memory. 99% of the time I knew what the problem was in a few minutes, all the real effort was tracking down what program (or programs) were causing it. Funny enough, most people didn't care what cause was, they just wanted to know what to buy to make it not an issue. Crazy amounts of money being thrown at Sun equipment.

<comment><USER2> Did the money dry up because you got too expensive or because the dot com bubble burst?

<comment><AUTHOR> $8K / day in 1998 or 1999 was too much. I suspect I could have gone on until the bubble burst at $4-$6K.

I stopped because I had enough money for payroll and wanted to work on my startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good to see people sharing extra commands!

I had written some follow on commands at the end of the article, but trimmed them to make it shorter. They were:

      # CPU
      perf record -F 99 -a -g -- sleep 10; perf report -n --stdio   # and flamegraphs
      execsnoop       # from perf-tools
      turbostat

      # Memory
      cat /proc/meminfo
      slabtop

      # Disk
      df -h
      iosnoop         # from perf-tools
      pidstat -d
      iotop

      # Networking
      netstat -s
      tcpdump
      tcpretrans      # from perf-tools

Where perf-tools is [https://github.com/brendangregg/perf- tools](https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools).

</comment><comment><USER4> that's a pretty awesome summary. to that i would add:

* `iftop` that allows me to quickly check which network streams are hogging the machine (this is a little like sar -n DEV 1 but much more detailed!)

* `tcpdump -c 100 -vv`- poor man's alternative to iftop or systat if they're not available locally

* tail those logfiles, with systemd it's even easier with journald as all logfiles can be checked at once: `journalctl -xf -p notice | ccze -m ansi` (ccze colors the output, purely optional)

* probably more i am forgetting now

the great takeaways in the article for me are:

* pidstat: great to have an average, beats top for sure

* back to basics: hit dmesg, vmstat and iostat first, as you learned in the beginning! :)

<comment><USER5> I'll add to your list with htop. Its a little nicer than plain ole top.

<comment><USER6> And `glances` is pretty great for big-picture stuff, all-in-one. It's not as precise on CPU/memory as htop, but you get network bandwidth, disk I/O, disk usage and more.

<comment><AUTHOR> No love for dstat? Glances looks cool though, thanks for that one.

<comment><USER4> glances (which i just discovered recently) is pretty awesome, definitely something i'll try out more next time i need something similar.

dstat i already knew about, somehow forgot it in the listing, definitely a must as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The link redirects to the blog frontpage for me, but [https://media.netflix.com/en/tech-blog/linux-performance- ana...](https://media.netflix.com/en/tech-blog/linux-performance-analysis- in-60-000-milliseconds) works.

<comment><USER3> Odd, that URL messes up the pre tags when I load it in Chrome or Firefox (desktop). [http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/linux-performance- analys...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/linux-performance-analysis- in-60s.html) looks right.

<comment><USER3> A blog redesign was launched today, which has messed up the pre tags. Hopefully fixed shortly...

edit: old version is (PDF) [http://www.brendangregg.com/Articles/Netflix_Linux_Perf_Anal...](http://www.brendangregg.com/Articles/Netflix_Linux_Perf_Analysis_60s.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real gem for me in that article (particularly since I already knew about those linux commands) was the USE method [1] and then consequently finding the TSA method [2] on the same linked site.

[1]: [http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html)

[2]: [http://www.brendangregg.com/tsamethod.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/tsamethod.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want more from Brendan Gregg on analyzing performance, be sure to check out his book, Systems Performance: [http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0133390098](http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0133390098)

<comment><USER9> There was an interesting interview with him earlier in the year on Software Engineering Radio where he talked about his book: [http://www.se- radio.net/2015/04/se-radio-episode-225-brendan...](http://www.se- radio.net/2015/04/se-radio-episode-225-brendan-gregg-on-systems-performance/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Direct link to the blog post (the OP is redirecting to the list of blog posts for me):

[https://media.netflix.com/en/tech-blog/linux-performance- ana...](https://media.netflix.com/en/tech-blog/linux-performance-analysis- in-60-000-milliseconds)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any way to analyze memory bandwidth usage?

I've had a couple of programs over the years that I wondered if we were just hitting memory bandwidth limitations but I couldn't find any way to prove that, or even particularly gather evidence.

<comment><USER12> It will show up like CPU usage - the hyperthread that is waiting for memory will appear busy executing.

perf can record hardware counter events - use "perf list" to see the list - including those that count frontend and backend stalls (stalls in the instruction decoding and execution stages respectively). A high stall ratio / low instructions per cycle throughput is an indicator that you're running into memory bandwidth limitations.

<comment><USER13> You've also reminded me that while they do show up as CPU time, they wouldn't be 'user' time (for example in the output of the command 'time')

<comment><USER3> If it's user-mode loads and stores, which for applications is pretty common, it is user time. Easy to test.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that, I'll take another look at it and see what I've been missing then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Pidstat is a little like top's per-process summary, but prints a rolling > summary instead of clearing the screen. This can be useful for watching > patterns over time, and also recording what you saw (copy-n-paste) into a > record of your investigation.

top has a batch mode: "top -b" will print all processes periodically to the terminal, without starting the curses-style UI, providing the same "rolling summary".

<comment><USER15> "pidstat 1" prints active processes, making it much less noisy that top -b, and therefore highlights malevolent processes. I think the top equivalant would be "top -b -i", though that has more output and is a bit noisier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Don't miss this step! dmesg is always worth checking.

Best advice given in the whole article. Many times I go to check something that "can't figure out what is wrong." dmseg | tail and then the swearing begins on their end.

<comment><USER17> Can you imagine a world where the Windows System Event Viewer was this useful?

It's amazing how much time one useful error message can save.

Also, I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't drill down into what the actual problem was in his example. That java process is of course suspicious, but that might just be the video server and expected behavior.

<comment><USER18> dmesg and being able to run most things in a terminal to check what its doing (grumble, skype, grumble) is likely what has drawn many to Linux in the first place.

And a likely source of misgivings regarding recent developments in the ecosystem...

<comment><USER16> journalctl is a good tool. I really like SystemD but wish we still had plain text logs.

<comment><USER19> One improvement (which may or may not be related to systemd, but is in newer kernels) is that dmesg has timestamps enabled by default which makes it much easier and `dmesg -H` is really nice as well.

<comment><USER20>
      dmesg -T

Has been available for _years_ to print out human-readable timestamps. Check to see if dmesg is an alias to that on your system. Also, -IIRC- dmesg has printed system-uptime timestamps with every line since _at least_ the early 2000's.

One caveat: the times printed by dmesg -T will be incorrect if the system has suspended to RAM or disk.

Check dmesg(1) for more info! :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hmm, that java process has 0.227 TB of mapped virtual memory and 3090% CPU..

<comment><USER22> You sound like you doubt the readings. This is netflix, I assume they have some pretty hefty kit backing up their service.

For a massive server the CPU reading might not be unusual. Maybe it has 32+ CPU cores and a multi-threaded java app is spinning most of them.

Also remember that on a heavily loaded system the task that is reading CPU use is itself competeing for time. Timing issues and other monitoring vagueries can make such readings noticably imprecise (though for CPU time usually in the downwards direction by missing tasks that started+worked+ended between readings).

The 233GB of memory seems high but there are possible explanations for this. A server with 32+ cores is not unlikely to have a lot of RAM too, the motherboard in my home server supports up to 128GB so perhaps that large java process genuinely does use more then 200. Also all that memory might not really be in use: it could have been allocated but never accessed so it isn't yet holding pages in RAM or swap for all of it.

<comment><USER23> Probably r3.8xlarge.

<comment><USER24> jinx!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm wondering if there's a way to automate this kind of analysis to give you condensed, interesting points of a system performance status. À la powertop for power management.

<comment><USER26> There is, look up Conky

<comment><USER25> Conky doesn't tell you what's wrong with your system (À la powertop 2.0). It just present the information differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I had one of my EC2 instances (Ubuntu 14.04) lock up on Monday morning. I use it to run a Ruby on Rails app and to do a handful of ETL jobs. The website wasn't able to load and I wasn't able to SSH into the box. So, I went into the AWS console and rebooted the instance. This has happened 3 times in the last 6 months. It looks like the CPU spikes up to almost 100% around the same time when the instance locks up.

I'd love to be able to identify the root cause of the instance locking up. It seems like this article is more about the commands you'd run to assess the health of an active/working EC2 instance and not one that you're unable to SSH into. Any idea on how to identify the problem with my EC2 instance?

<comment><USER28> I can recommend atop[1] for that. It runs every ten minutes by default and writes lots of information to /var/log/atop/atop_YYYYMMDD. With that you can examine what happend before the crash, just open a file with atop -r /var/log/atop/atop_YYYYMMDD.

[1] [http://linux.die.net/man/1/atop](http://linux.die.net/man/1/atop)

<comment><USER29> A nice atop tutorial: [https://lwn.net/Articles/387202/](https://lwn.net/Articles/387202/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome article! One point of contention, though:

>and stolen time (by other guests, or with Xen, the guest's own isolated driver domain).

This isn't necessarily true. If there is any sort of credit scheduler interaction ( [http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler](http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler) ) resulting in the CPU being throttled, it will show as steal. Steal actually just means the CPU was not in a runnable state, which can be caused by multiple things, but predominately throttling by the CPU scheduler.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great list with "standard" tools that you'd find on most systems by default. From my experience for virtualized servers you might also look at:

\- system and stolen cpu to show virtualization overhead and VMs starvation for CPU (in vmstat)

\- interrupts and context switches which might indicate that VMs might be running non-optimized OSs or non-paravirtualized drivers (vmstat)

\- abusing VMs/Containers (platform specific), ie for KVM: virsh vcpuinf, virsh dominfo

\- socket summary and dig from there: ss -s

</comment><comment><USER32> This is yet another awesome contribution from Netflix.

Just curious though, anyone know of a similar type of writeup or post regarding windows?

I have an MSSQL box I want to kill with fire - but I would like to be able to measure its perf with as much insight as I might on a comparable linux box.

What is the best way to measure disk IO perf on a windows box, specifically?

<comment><USER33> xperf/wpr. Launch wprui, select First Level Triage and Disk I/O and File I/O, make sure logging mode is set to Memory, then click Start.

Let it run for a minute, click Stop, then open up the generated ETL in WPA.

From there it's hard to tell you what to do in WPA. Documentation isn't the greatest, but this link is close to what you're trying to do: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_pfe_blog/archive/2013/03/19/trou...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_pfe_blog/archive/2013/03/19/troubleshooting- sql-server-high-cpu-usage-using-xperf.aspx)

Drag in the relevant graphs into your current view, and understand how the yellow bar aggregates data. MSSQL probably has event providers - you might want to look those up and add them to wprui when you generate your ETL.

<comment><USER32> Thank you!!

<comment><USER33> If you have any questions, send me an email and I can help. See profile for email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seems like the link opens a different page from the original ? Original Link : [https://media.netflix.com/en/tech-blog/linux-performance- ana...](https://media.netflix.com/en/tech-blog/linux-performance-analysis- in-60-000-milliseconds)

</comment><comment><USER35> Do you use a application monitoring solution in production? An APM records all such data and you can drill down (starting from pretty graphs down to call stacks and long lasting SQL snips).

</comment><comment><USER36> Good page,

Here is another quick performance view. Install atop a better top replacement and watch for anything showing up in red colors.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anybody got a different source? Apparently I'm not allowed to watch netflix at work (or view their blog).

<comment><USER3> Printed as PDF: [http://www.brendangregg.com/Articles/Netflix_Linux_Perf_Anal...](http://www.brendangregg.com/Articles/Netflix_Linux_Perf_Analysis_60s.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My goto are htop, and for network: nload.</comment>


Deadly Mexico earthquake had unusual cause - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/deadly-mexico-earthquake-had-unusual-cause-1.22586 <comment><USER2> Similar to the New Madrid earthquakes (1811-1812) in the US. These intraplate earthquakes also cause more damage than other earthquakes of the same size because they travel greater distances than the more common ones near plate boundaries. The less fractured bedrock in the middle of plates propagates the energy with less loss.

<comment><USER3> Same with the 2011 Virginia earthquake!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _But this quake was different: it occurred within the Cocos plate as it > warped or bent, not at the boundary with the North American plate, according > to the US Geological Survey.

"The type of faulting that occurred here does not usually produce earthquakes of this magnitude," says Polet. "There have been others in the past 50 years of similar type and location, but none that was even close to this size." It is still too early to say why the earthquake was so massive, she adds, but "it is sure to inspire much future research"._

Cause isn't too clear but the scenario sure appears unusual. What vector of pressure would cause a tectonic plate to flex or bend like a drum?

<comment><USER5> I'm curious, how viable would a controlled underground atomic blast be in this scenario?

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that the thousands of tiny detectable tremors each day worldwide involve as much energy as several atomic bombs exploding every day. The energy to move hundreds of cubic miles of rock even a nanometer is difficult to imagine.

<comment><USER7> Which suggests finding a place with constant tremors might be worthwhile to try to harvest energy from? Possibly just by having a material that generates a current when flexed?

<comment><USER8> It's nearly impossible to predict earthquakes so I don't see how this could be feasible at all. Scientists have been trying hard for decades with no luck. It's been one of the most impenetrable natural phenomenons. At most you get decade+ long likelihoods of the number of earthquakes of x strength, across a very large geographic area.

Even in places with a high number of them it's very challenging to give probabilities of when, where, or how often they'll hit.

There's a good reason the predictions for the upcoming US Westcoast major earthquake is always given within the span of centuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quick explainer about intraslab/intraplate subduction zone events (a slab is a subducting plate):

There are two major classifications of crust on earth: oceanic and continental. Oceanic crust (mostly basalt/gabro) is quite a bit more dense and thin than continental crust (mostly granite). Both float on the more dense mantle like big rafts, but the much thinner and denser oceanic crust sits ~3 km lower on average, creating ocean basins. In fact, the cold oceanic crust (and its attached subcrustal lithosphere) is in some places more dense than warmer mantle at depth; this density contrast is part of the convection cells in the mantle that drive plate tectonics.

When an oceanic tectonic plate converges with a continental plate, the denser oceanic plate slides underneath, at a subduction zone. ( _edit:_ I tried some ascii art to illustrate but HN deleted the spaces and ruined it; I fixed it in a comment below.)

There are three types of earthquakes that happen in oceanic plates in subduction zone environments. The first, most familiar and strongest are subduction zone or 'megathrust' earthquakes, like Tohoku (Japan 2011). This is an earthquake caused by the release of stored energy due to frictional locking between the downgoing oceanic plate and the upper continental plate.

The second type is an 'outer rise' event. These are almost always small (M~6 max) and not very damaging. This is caused by the flexing of the oceanic plate as it gets ready to dive down (@stephengillie, this is the stress you're asking about).

These types of earthquakes are easily observed because they're shallow and relatively well understood.

The third type of earthquake is what the Mexican event was; it's an earthquake that happens within the subducting (downgoing) slab/plate at depth (see diagram in comment below). It's not clear exactly why these happen but the pattern of energy release is consistent with vertical(ish) contraction and horizontal(ish) extension, i.e. normal faulting. The best explanation for _why_ a downgoing slab would be contracting vertically and extending horizontally is that it is slowing down as it descends, probably due to a decreasing density contrast between the cold (but warming) slab and the mantle around it. So basically the downgoing slab is buckling like a train would if the front train cars slammed on the brakes but not the back train cars. Actually the best way to visualize this is to think about dropping a flexible rubber sheet (that is more dense than water) into a pool. It will continue to sink in the pool but more slowly than in the air above, and will buckle at the interface due to the buoyancy contrast.

But (unlike at the surface) we can't directly test this hypothesis because we don't really have any data on the velocity field to see if there is a deceleration of the downgoing slab (plate). Many of these deep intraslab events, particularly at 100-700 km depth, are thought to be associated with density changes in the downgoing slab as it undergoes mineralogical transformations to thermodynamically restabilize in vastly different P-T conditions.

<comment><USER9> Ok thanks to @temporal here is the diagram. It's a cross-section of a subduction zone, i.e. it's in a vertical plane (not map view).

                   0
                  0       depth (km)
      o->____====Δ== <-c  -0
             \
      (fast)  * <-e       -50
               \
            d-> \         -100
      (slow)     \

The 'o' is the oceanic plate (thin line), the 'c' is the continental plate (double lines), 'd' points to the downgoing slab, 'e' points to where the earthquake occurred. O and C are the surface of the earth. 'fast' and 'slow' indicate that the slab is sinking/subducting fast at shallow depths and slower at deep depths. The Δ is an arc volcano that is smoking (like Mt. St. Helens or Fuji) that are always present above subduction zones because at ~100 km depths, the subducting slab loses some water which rises and then melts the upper mantle and lower crust of the continental crust above (these rocks are very hot and adding water lowers their melting temperature without changing the actual temperature much).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _"I said 'this is it' and even thought about jumping out the window. I got > very scared. "_

I've never considered this as a survival option during a quake. I suppose the consideration is between getting crushed should the building collapse vs surviving a 23 story fall onto ???.

<comment> King-Aaron I think it's more of a 'quick and painless exit' option rather than the potential of being crushed alive over the course of hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So earthquakes can happen anywhere now? Sounds kinda scary. Hope they will find better methode to find out about this before they happend.

<comment><USER12> They always could. An earth quake does not need to come from a fault line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A bit far-fetched, but: I read one theory that artic icebergs melting did not produce a rise in sea-level was because the crust may have moved slightly vertically with the change in ice-mass weighing it down.

If the crust is getting slightly redistributed in one place, might there not be some pings and bongs elsewhere?

<comment><USER14> I think you may have some slightly crossed wires...

Land ice, such as that which covers Greenland and Antarctica, does indeed depress the local crust. Exactly how much we're not quite sure, but ice penetrating and non-penetrating radar observations over both places has revealed that as the ice mass decreases, the crust uplifts, very slowly.

This actually amplifies sea level rise, as you have both the melt water and the additional displaced volume from the uplifted land to account for.

As to pings and bongs, totally. A lateral movement in one place or expansion or uplift could all increase tension elsewhere, which would then be released as an earthquake. The most readily observed example of this is aftershocks, which are often hypocentred near but not at the original hypocentre.

<comment><USER13> Thanks! Yeah, icebergs didn't seem to quite make sense.

But if the basic idea is sound, is it a possible explanation for this Mexico quake, despite the artic being so far away?

[Though it seems more likely to me that 50 years of data isn't enough to tell whether a geological event is unusual or not...]

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't say it's an explanation, but there's certainly a causal link between all major geological activity on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Click baity title.</comment>


Grooveshark Shutdown - <AUTHOR> http://grooveshark.com

<comment><USER2> This came as a shock to me today as I went to GrooveShark to get some coding done (love listening to film scores while I'm in the zone).

I always assumed the site was legit (musicians were getting paid a la other streaming sites) because it looked professional and was so mainstream.</comment>


Third-Party Instagram Apps and Websites Cease to Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/02/instagram-third-party-apps-websites-dead/ <comment><USER2> I created a classifieds platform around Instagram posts and been operating since around April 2015. When filling out their form and creating a screencast begging for access back, I get denied stating that their API is not for "one off projects."

YouTube shows that they haven't even watched the screencast they asked me to make, just flat out denied without spending any time on my API request.

It's their product and they can do whatever they want with it, but the annoying thing is that they had released an API for people to play with, people built features around it, and now the features do not work. This kind of disrespectful dismissal make me really reluctant to spend time integrating other APIs in future things I make.

<comment><USER3> I will never integrate with a 3rd party API unless I have some sort of contract which prevents them from yanking the rug out from under me. Sadly, the sort of developer-hostile TOS that Instagram uses is all too common these days: "Instagram may change, suspend, or discontinue the availability of any Instagram APIs at any time. In addition, Instagram may impose limits on certain features and services or restrict your access to parts or all of the Instagram APIs or the Instagram website without notice or liability." ([https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/api/](https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/api/))

<comment><USER4> Then you're never going to be able to integrate with any APIs. Even the best free APIs have clauses that the provider isn't liable for any damages caused to you due to their changing their mind about the business they want to be in.

In this case, though, Instagram gave people over six months to transition to the new process and workflow, and for us, our approval took less than a week. IMHO, this is a good example of the right way to transition applications over.

<comment><USER5> They should have done a soft shutdown to alert developers. Half of the developers didn't even know about the upcoming change because Instagram emails just end up in junk.

<comment><USER6> They've had a notice at the top of [https://www.instagram.com/developer/](https://www.instagram.com/developer/) since late last year.

>> Any app created before Nov 17, 2015 will continue to function until June 1, 2016. On that date, the app will automatically be moved to Sandbox Mode if it wasn't approved through the review process

<comment><USER7> Let's be real, after a project is finished, no developer is going to randomly keep watching the docs page of one of the probably many APIs they used for it.

<comment><USER4> But they also were emailing - I got like five emails for my personal projects warning me that things were changing. Plus it was reported in the tech press:

[http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/17/instagram-new-api- change...](http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/17/instagram-new-api-changes/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/17/just- instagram/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/17/just-instagram/)

I'm really not sure what more people expect instagram to do.

<comment><USER8> We never got any emails from Instagram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This appears to be just in line with the typical lifecycle of a social network. There was a recent comment which outlined it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829562) I'd say Instagram is entering stage 3 (locked content and curated feed).

</comment><comment><USER10> "Coincidentally" they released a new set of business tools ([http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/145212269021/new- bus...](http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/145212269021/new-business- tools)) on the same day. I have no insider info but I think this is mostly about capturing the analytics market that was previously served by 3rd parties.

There were also a lot of spam apps (buy likes/followers) on the App Store/Play Store and this move removes most of them. They're also avoiding a Tweetdeck situation when a 3rd party client gets too big to ignore. Good for them, bad for users.

Disclosure: I made an Instagram client for iPad ([http://retroapp.net](http://retroapp.net)). Funny that since some apps have moved to private API and now can do more than public API (no upload, no Direct access).

<comment><USER11> I'm also the author of a Instagram client ([http://photodesk- app.com](http://photodesk-app.com)) and I went through the trouble of applying for their new API and got all permissions granted by specifically catering to businesses / brands. However, it is quite frustrating to see other apps (like flume) just flat use the private API. I wonder why I went through all this trouble in the first place. If Instagram at least did something about these private API clients, it would be worth applying for the official one, but as it stands currently, I'm doing worse.

<comment><USER12> Except that I saw your comment, looked at your app, looked at flume, bought your basic app then immediately upgraded to the pro version. Your app does exactly what I need with no bullshit. Cheers!

<comment><USER11> That's awesome! Thanks for buying pro! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Happened to me recently at SoundCloud. Bonus: they deleted all of my unrelated music, followers and likes without any warning or method of appeal.

We asked for this.

<comment><USER14> Yep, as long as we develop extensions and tools for platforms with ToS like that, we are to be blamed. It reminds me of most developers' blissful ignorance of CLAs and merrily pushing patches to projects where they hand over copyright ownership to the likes of Google, Ubuntu, Microsoft, etc., while probably not being aware that their code can be relicensed into anything without their future consent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wanted to build a small side project utilizing Instagram, and when I read their API ToS, I was completely demotivated. Everything having to be about brands drilled in the fact that I, the user, am the product, and my interest in the platform even as a consumer dropped significantly.

I now post very rarely and almost never browse. Occasionally I'll look up a particular hashtag relating to some car/motorcycle I like, but that's basically it.

The curated feed shift (has that happened yet?) was also very bad news for me.

<comment><USER16> The "curated" feed is rolled out gradually. My older account already have it while my newer account does not (I still check both currently). Really ruins the experience ("Wait did this happen yesterday? Oh no actually 3 days ago" etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if there's going to be any noise over this outside the developer community. There was when Twitter pulled this nonsense, but their third party clients had massive followings. I, personally, have never heard of a third party Instagram client.

This has happened with so many services over the years, that one would think developers would be more enthusiastic about educating the end user with libre software. I do that aggressively with people I know. Too much to ask?

<comment><USER18> > Too much to ask?

It's just that for services like that the wealth is the data, they don't want 3rd parties to profit from their precious data. Instagram (free) API was shitty anyway, so I bet not a lot of developers was using it. Twitter API and data is far more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminiscent of one of Twitter's early mistakes

<comment><USER20> Not really sure the demographic of Instagram really cares about anything other than the Instagram app.

<comment><USER16> Probably more of the power users (brands and celebrities) that uses 3rd party analytics. Instagram is clearly trying to move people to their upcoming Analytics feature.

<comment><USER20> Yeah completely agree. This makes sense for them to lock it down and offer business incentive. Good on them honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Going to miss my RSS feeds.

Won't be long before I can't access Instagram altogether without an account, much like Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seriously, what stops people from simply using the API keys and routes from the official app?

Instagram can't revoke the keys because that 'd kill the app for those who don't upgrade their apps all the time, the only thing they could do is to pressure the app stores to take apps down - but I wonder on what legal grounds?

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

<comment><USER22> Non-US persons and companies are not bound by this; also, the app developer does not bypass access controls himself...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, that sucks. I set up a small website with contact info, wish lists, etc. for my wife and I. It also included both of our Instagram feeds. As of today, hers is disabled and mine works :/

</comment><comment><USER25> My only usecase for Instagram "app" was to embed client's feed in their own webpage. It doesn't look good right now, I don't think this usecase is allowed, it's not in the approval list.

I just can't understand this, business X wants to embed their own damned feed on their own page, how should they do it now?

I've hacked together a way to use unofficial API [https://instagram.com/query](https://instagram.com/query) but it's a bit iffy to use this.

</comment><comment><USER26> I had to remove the Instagram integration from my site because of this.

</comment><comment><USER27> I always thought that they would wait with this until they finally made an own iPad app, but that seems to be not they case.

Maybe it's because their mobile website is finally quite good, but looking at the Facebook Web Messenger story[1] I'm surprised they go that route.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834935)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm wondering if one day we will have laws that will prevent companies from building silos that cut off independent developers.

<comment><USER29> Why. Why does a company not have the right to decide whom to give access?

<comment><USER28> Because it is something that we as a society do not desire. The data in those silos is _our_ data, not _their_ data (unless you want to live by the letter of the law rather than use common sense). It saddens me that a large part of our culture is locked behind the doors of youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter.

<comment><USER30> What makes it ours? And if one should follow common sense rather than the law, why is your proposed solution a law?

<comment><USER28> > What makes it ours?

The fact that we created that data.

Here is an analogy. If I buy a piece of paper and it contains an EULA that says that any works written on that paper become property of the manufacturer of the paper, then would that be legally binding? If so, then do we want to live in a world where paper manufacturers have control over our intellectual property?

Note that paper is a commodity product, but the same holds for online video services, and messaging services. The ones we are using today have no or little competitive edge over other services (other than network effect), they were just lucky enough that we chose to use them.

<comment><USER31> That's a completely non-related analogy. A better one is if you were to go to a university, become a student, use their facilities, and do research there, then the uni rightfully owns a percentage of any IP you come up with there. It's in their ToS when you signed up and that's what you have chosen to stick to. It's no different if you use FB or Instagram; you've agreed to their ToS that data you've pushed through their service is their's to do what they want with. If you're not happy with that, move along and use something else- perhaps print your photos onto your hypothetical paper and share them using that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like that Instagram has an API but they make me feel like I'm begging them for access. I've finished my app so long ago but I've put off applying for production access because I'm afraid of how my screencast will be received.

</comment><comment><USER33> Always wondering why these big companies don't just get people to pay to use their APIs. Why not leverage the popularity they have into becoming a content provider for other spin off products?

<comment><USER34> Because there's value in owning your own tail. That your tail would be ten times longer if you didn't own it is of no value to shareholders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Banning useful third-party services and doing almost nothing agains spammers… I receive 5-10 follows/likes from spam accounts every day.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Don't store or cache Instagram login credentials."

So, a app needs to ask for a login and password each time it access Instagram?

<comment><USER37> Well that's just good practice. Apps would normally ask you to log in once, receive an API token from the server, and continue to use that for the rest of the tokens lifetime. When the token expires, it'll prompt you again for your login.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure but consider that every endpoint in the API needs a login. That means that you can no longer construct a simple feed widget of a hashtag for your website.

<comment><USER37> Oh, I didn't see that part. That's a lot more inconvenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know how long the application review process is to gain access to the new API is?

<comment><USER38> I applied yesterday when my app broke and was approved today. So less than 24 hours.

<comment><USER32> oh wow. thanks I'll apply today. I've been putting it off thinking it's going to be a huge thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reminds me of zenefits vs ADP

</comment><comment><USER40> So just in time they're shipping global curated timelines, you can't make an app that sorts posts back in chronological timeline? What a coincidence!

<comment><USER41> Instagram have left open the option that in the future the curated timeline may also adjust the _content_ of your feed so even if you could fix the ordering at a temporal level, there would still be omissions.

> As we begin, we're focusing on optimizing the order — all the posts will > still be there, just in a different order.[0]

Also the "promoted post" feature which they have in their new business tools[1] looks like down the track it will incorporate a feature where businesses can pay for their regular Instagram photos to appear in more feeds. Which means even more that the `/posts` endpoint which you hit as a user is controlled by Instagram

[0]: [http://blog.instagram.com/post/141107034797/160315-news](http://blog.instagram.com/post/141107034797/160315-news) [1]: [http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/145212269021/new- bus...](http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/145212269021/new-business- tools)

<comment><USER42> > optimizing the order [for advertisers]

Has anyone ever said, "ya know... Something's not right about the order of my Instagram feed. It seems to be all chronological!"</comment></comment></comment>


OK Google, support donations to free and open source software - <AUTHOR> https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/hey-google-support-donations-to-foss <comment><AUTHOR> Google's recent actions are threatening the livelihood of open source developers.

It's worth noting that Apple allows free apps to link to their Patreon pages, and nonprofit organizations may also use Apple Pay to collect donations within apps.

> 3.2.1 Acceptable

> (vi) Approved nonprofits may fundraise directly within their own apps or > third-party apps, provided those fundraising campaigns adhere to all App > Review Guidelines and offer Apple Pay support. These apps must disclose how > the funds will be used, abide by all required local and federal laws, and > ensure appropriate tax receipts are available to donors.

> 3.2.2 Unacceptable

> (iv) Unless you are an approved nonprofit or otherwise permitted under > Section 3.2.1 (vi) above, collecting funds within the app for charities and > fundraisers. Apps that seek to raise money for such causes must be free on > the App Store and may only collect funds outside of the app, such as via > Safari or SMS.

[https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/](https://developer.apple.com/app- store/review/guidelines/)

</comment><comment><USER2> meanwhile on the flipside we should develop benign side loading sites, and trust verification of some sort, so there is a motivation for g009le to do so[support donations].

as things are, the rejection of donation ware is a method of inhibiting competitive upstarts.</comment>


For Hackers: How long to learn .Net? - <AUTHOR> I'm a non programmer with no coding knowledge who is working with a .Net/Java programmer of 9 yrs on a startup.  I'm keen to be able to help out, but expect that would take years.  At the very least, I think it will be useful to understand how difficult certain things are and what is involved in tasks.  What is the best way forward for me to learn (any resources that help speed the process up and make it interesting are welcome) and how long would it take? <comment><USER2> I write C# professionally in my "day job". It's not a bad language to learn if you're just starting out with programming. It's not something that you'll pick up overnight, but if your cofounder is interested in mentoring you, that's the best way to learn. DO NOT under any circumstances bother with any Microsoft certification course training materials. They're utter garbage. I learned from Troelsen's Pro C# and the .NET Platform:

[http://www.amazon.com/Pro-2008-NET-Platform- Fourth/dp/159059...](http://www.amazon.com/Pro-2008-NET-Platform- Fourth/dp/1590598849/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202425361&sr=8-1)

Then again, I was coming from a programming background, so YMMV. I would probably try going to the bookstore and flipping through some of the .NET books, and deciding which one feels like it's a good fit.

Before you take the leap to learn .NET, though, make sure your cofounder is on board. You'll need his/her help and support.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to disagree with nkohari a little bit about C# being a good language to learn if you're just getting started out with programming. C# is a very big language and it may be hard to fit into your head without at least a little programming background.

If you're more interested in just getting a view into the programmer's world and have a feel for "difficult" vs. "impossible", I would recommend starting to dabble with a smaller language first. Something like Python or Ruby would be an excellent place to start.

You don't need to be a "programmer" in either thing to start grasping concepts, but they are small enough that you can tinker around to get a feel for things.

Once you have some rudimentary knowledge about the very basics of development, THEN I would focus on learning C#.

It is a nice language, but there's a lot to learn - especially since the .Net stack is so large.

<comment><USER4> > I would recommend starting to dabble with a smaller language first. > Something like Python or Ruby would be an excellent place to start.

While I'd also recommend starting with something other than C#, I'd be hesitant about using the phrase "smaller language".

Good Ruby or Python is a deeper subject than C# (IMO); I agree that it's easier to get started in either of these, but becoming proficient in the language itself may actually be more difficult.

As you say, the .NET ecosystem, like Java's, is large and many-headed (I'd argue Java is even worse) and using it efficiently can be a steep climb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> i'm pretty much in the same situation as you - just two months ahead. I found that the best way to learn is to find a simple project that you would like to do and do it. I am doing a web based project management site.

That way you will learn as you go, and have the joy of seeing something that works, and that you have built yourself. It will probably be buggy as hell, and sometimes you will want to tear your head off. But when you get it working it's great. And before you know it you have grasped the basics.

That's how it worked for me anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> The problems on topcoder are really great, because the time pressure really forces something to stick, and you also get access to sources of solutions from top notch programmers.

</comment><comment><USER8> if this is asp.net then learn html and mark up the designs. That will free him up more than having to work with your code. I love it when working on a project and someone hands me great xhtml and css and I don't have to think about that side of things.

</comment><comment><USER9> C# will be a little difficult if you don't have any programming background but it isn't impossible. Although books will help, you will learn a lot from some other programmers. This is actually true for any language. The easy part of learning the language is the syntax but the using it effectively is gonna be harder. Looking at others code and understanding it will really help.</comment>


Building CentOS 8 - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8 <comment><USER2> This is cool. I remember going through this exact thing when RHEL 7 got released. It was many weeks before CentOS 7 was ready, and then a little longer still before Digital Ocean and other providers had images available.

It can be hard to wait, but it's worth it. Looking forward to CentOS 8!

Oh, also worth saying that if you create a Red Hat developer account they will give you a free copy of RHEL to test with. If you're planning to deploy CentOS 8 and want to test now, that can be a good way to get going before the CentOS 8 release.

Also, thank you Red Hat! You guys are amazing. The entire world has benefited from your work. I've been a happy Fedora user for many years, and I deeply appreciate how you've made my life better. Thank you for building an amazing set of distros, and thank you for pushing forward many of the huge projects that improve our lives such as Gnome and many more. _Thank you_ for your commitment to open source and for living your values. You are heroes to me :-)

<comment><USER3> Definitely not worth it if you want to utilize the benefits of updated software. I encourage everyone to switch to Ubuntu or another Linux distro over RHEL... You'll never look back.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes stability trumps up-to-dated-ness. I know I can run yum update without breaking the system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Timelines are always fascinating for me to see, given the massive amount of effort that goes into building something like this. Even though it's essentially a "it'll be ready when it's ready" post, and we obviously know CentOS 8 will be released at some point, I'm still very excited about it. Thanks for all your hard work!

If anyone working on this is hanging around here, are there any particular challenges that are unique this time around? The init system not changing again must be quite nice, as mentioned in the post.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another group of unsung heroes are the people who do the repos like Remi and EPEL

</comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating to see the amount of uncoordinated (with RHEL) effort going into that, despite Red Hat now basically owning CentOS and employing the main devs.

<comment><USER8> This really puzzles me too.

If I understand correctly, basically what CentOS does is taking the source code of RHEL, debranding it, and rebuilding it?

Now that CentOS is officially affiliated with RH, why isn't RH just starting with with a placeholder brand in the source code (like "$BRAND$", or something more sophisticated to avoid conflict with all programming languages), and substitute the brand for "RHEL" to make RHEL, and for "CentOS" to make CentOS?

<comment><USER9> Why doesn't RH just rebrand CentOS as RH while keeping RHEL for enterprise customers to increase brand recognition?

People also feel more "official" too.

<comment><USER10> Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat Consulting

Officially, Fedora & Fedora Server are the upstream for RHEL Workstation and RHEL, respectively.

<comment><USER9> I see that but upstream means bleeding edge which is not exactly what CentOS users are looking for and if there was something like RH "community edition" which is essentially CentOS (with RH logo) that gets released with a fixed schedule after RHEL (instead of after somewhat random moment for CentOS), it can make people more comfortable instead of relying on the current community to make sure to get their debranding and releasing of CentOS right. And also it may be easier for people to upgrade to RHEL if RH provides an official way from such "community edition".

People like and want the stability of RHEL and relying on the community to get started with RHEL-like distro could be a concern.

If you embrace the existance of CentOS, why not do that fully as part of RH family?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been playing around with RHEL 8 a bit at work. I like the direction. Definitely looking forward to CentOS 8.

Work on eradicating old stuff continues. The "system python" setup also feels like an inspired choice which should make it easier to deploy python stuff on top of RHEL 8

With RHEL 7, trying to install newer versions of software via SCLs (in cases where it's advisable) never felt like they were well-integrated. The new module system seems extremely promising; fewer people will have a reason to use eg. Ubuntu if RHEL provides the new stuff via modules.

Other than that, it doesn't seem like there's much that would surprise people who are already familiar with RHEL 7.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thank you to the project maintainers; while RedHat does release the source code anyone who's actually compiled from source knows that it's never push- button easy

</comment><comment><USER13> can't they just use sed to replace Red Hat with CentOS ;) :D

<comment><USER14> From the page:

"No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)"

<comment><USER15> Tap once or twice on your sarcasm detector and see if it's running. It might just need calibration since it didn't pick up the tone of the message or the emoticons.

In the worst case, a complete overhaul might be required.

You might want to test it on this message and note the result.

Here are some emoticons to complete the test: ;) :) :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Typical Red Hat... takes over CentOS and now they are going to take their sweet time to update it and we'll end up with a bunch of EL distros again because Red Hat can't automate anything. It really should be built the same day as RHEL. I don't know anyone who uses RHEL anymore though because they are so antiquated.

<comment><USER16> Opensuse and suse do their work almost in sync, now that is so fluent that you could convert existing opensuse install into SLES. I just can't understand why RH don't wan't more customers coming from CentOS.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h You can convert RHEL<->CentOS just like that, too.

Edit to clarify: RHEL and CentOS are binary/ABI compatible to the point where you can switch repositories, overwrite a couple key packages, and now you have the other system.

<comment><USER3> So much so that it will take them weeks, if not months, to build it.

<comment><USER17> Converting "existing opensuse install" means converting a server from CentOS to RHEL. That is done in minutes.

Getting the source code for RHEL, making the necessary modifications and releasing it as CentOS is a whole different thing.

<comment><USER3> How is it different? It is literally compiling a bunch of packages and creating an ISO or install method. You can do this yourself and store the packages in a searchable repo like most other Linux distros. Void was created and is well maintained by very few people, and so was Alpine when it started. With a little automation this should have been done at the same time RHEL was released.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mega-wars that shaped world history - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-mega-wars-that-shaped-world-history/ <comment><USER2> *since ~1796, in case anyone else went searching for the Punic Wars.

<comment><USER3> I was looking for the battle of Tollense

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

Trojan war would have been nice too

<comment><USER4> The real Trojan war was an uneventful raid on a coastal city, one of hundreds that happened in that region and era. Just one that happened to inspire a particularly gifted poet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do folks forget the precursor to WW1 - the franco-prussian war?

That was a huge war! Lead to German unification, over one million casualties (if you count civilians) and slightly less than that if you don't.

<comment><USER6> And Germany defeated France in 6 months, which 43 years later gave the Germans confidence that France would surrender by Christmas 1914...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > WWII is the quintessential transformational war, not only because of the > sweeping changes it brought to the global order but also because of the > decades-long shadows it cast over the rest of the 20th century.

This is funny because my history professor used ww2 as the quintessential example of a non-transformational war. Nothing essential changed as a result of ww2. All those lives lost for essentially nothing. The power structure pre- ww2 ( US, Britain, Soviet Union ) was precisely the same post-ww2 ( US, Britain, Soviet Union ). The same people who ruled the world before ww2, ruled it after ww2 without any systematic change. There was no paradigm shift as a result of ww2. The international world order remained in place.

WW2 was the bloodiest war. It was the most destructive war. But it wasn't transformational because the side trying to cause a transformation ( reshape world ) lost and they lost badly.

<comment><USER8> WW 2 is the war that took the USA from an isolationist power to global policeman. Conversely it set the UK (and to a lesser extent, France) on the path of liberating their colonies. It also set the state for the UN to be created. And the groundwork for a new international norm against wars of conquest.

Yes, the same countries wound up staying in charge. But it transformed the world.

<comment><USER7> > WW 2 is the war that took the USA from an isolationist power to global > policeman.

The US was never isolationist. It's one of those lies that we tell ourselves to pretend we aren't an empire. If we were isolationists, we would be a 13 state nation.

Our first vassal nation was japan and we got them in the 1850s. But of course, we'd never call them that since that's what empires do.

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

Go read up on the spanish american war and the colonies we got from that ( also in the 1800s ).

And of course wars to prevent freedom of the philippines, etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War)

Go read about the Great White Fleet.

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

For an isolationist nation, we sure did get around.

> Conversely it set the UK (and to a lesser extent, France) on the path of > liberating their colonies.

Path of "liberating"? The UK and France didn't liberate anything. The indians, vietnamese, etc all fought bloody wars to free themselves from their brutal colonial masters. Tens of millions of indians, vietnamese, algerians, sub- saharan africans, burmese, etc had to die to liberate themselves. India, vietnam, algeria, etc weren't given their freedom by the "gracious" brits, french, etc. The british, french, etc colonizers were never the good guys.

> And the groundwork for a new international norm against wars of conquest.

How convenient since the world had already been conquered by the winners huh? Not much left to conquer other than land dominated by the "winners". Also it wasn't anything new. The league of nations already laid the groundwork. Funnily enough, germany and japan weren't too fond of that since they had just begun their quest for conquest.

> Yes, the same countries wound up staying in charge. But it transformed the > world.

The former negates the latter. If you could point out the fundamental ( paradigm shift ) that occurred because of ww2, I'm all ears. Instead of saying it transformed the world, point out the transformation.

<comment><USER8> In the 1800s the US was indeed expansionist. But their view was that of Manifest Destiny - it was the USA's manifest destiny to expand and control the Western hemisphere. To that end the USA launched wars (eg against Mexico), fought against colonial powers, and so on.

However it was also a defined sphere of influence. The USA was late to both WW 1 and 2 because what happened in Europe was widely felt to not be the USA's affair. Privately we armed one side, but we didn't fight. It was not until the Kaiser attempted to form an alliance with Mexico that the USA entered into WW 1. And not until Japan attacked did the USA enter WW 2. After WW 2, the USA proactively looked for opportunities to engage world wide.

On the colonies, all of the European powers had put down rebellions repeatedly. After WW 2 they moved towards transferring power to local authorities. And their desire to do this was codified in the UN charter. See [https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter- xi/index.h...](https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter- xi/index.html) for verification.

<comment><USER7> > it was the USA's manifest destiny to expand and control the Western > hemisphere... However it was also a defined sphere of influence.

China is in the western hemisphere?

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

Japan is in the western hemisphere?

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

Is the philippines part of the western hemisphere?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War)

> After WW 2, the USA proactively looked for opportunities to engage world > wide.

Simply not true. We proactively looked for opportunities before ww2. We even briefly invaded russia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War)

> On the colonies, all of the European powers had put down rebellions > repeatedly.

They tried to put down independence movements after ww2 also.

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

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

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

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

> And their desire to do this was codified in the UN charter. See > [https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter- > xi/index.h...](https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter- > xi/index.h..). for verification.

Wow. Empty virtue signaling words. With such empty words, one wonders why so many colonized peoples had to die after ww2 to free themselves from their brutal colonizers?

Seems like there are a lot of people defending the brutal colonizers. I wonder why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author completely forgot to include the thirty year war, it was instrumental in completely breaking Habsburg hegemony "almost" overnight on the historical scale, and opened way for historical shift of power to Western Europe from Central, and Eastern Europe.

<comment><USER10> The Thirty Years War also confirmed that the primary legitimate basis for power would be noble birth instead of ordination by God - a shift begun by the Reformation.

The French Revolution/Napoleonic Wars began the shift away from noble birth and WW I&II confirmed that the primary legitimate basis for power would be ownership and property.

<comment><USER11> By ordination by God you mean ordination by the local religious authority, right?

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings)

<comment><USER11> That's a religious justification for noble birth. The system it backs up _is_ heritable monarchy, it didn't precede it.

<comment><USER12> _That 's a religious justification for noble birth._

No. (See: Chinese Mandate of Heaven; the multiple examples of people claiming to be ordained by gods and similar higher powers historically despite no or little connection to nobility, so on.)

 _The system it backs up is heritable monarchy, it didn 't precede it._

Assuming this is true (which seems highly dubious), what are you contesting? Their claim is that God ordained their rulership, not that 'local religious authorities' did. Regardless of existence of the entity in question, _" the primary legitimate basis for power would be noble birth instead of ordination by God"_ is the right thing to say.

<comment><USER13> >(which seems highly dubious)

Seems trivially true, to me. The european feudal system developed out of the late roman imperial system, that would have vicars and dukes, with the dukes representing secular military authority.

Also, off the top of my head, I think somebody like Charlemagne (as the first guy I know who merged military rule with the support of the pope) would have been wholy interested in christian support for secular reasons (and vice versa). Being the roman emperor, appointed by the pope, would presumably help with his legitimacy in Italy and Gaul.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently, 'world history' started in 1850?

Good to know!

</comment><comment><USER15> > And in 1918 the victorious powers, dictating a new European peace at > Versailles, would not have credited that Adolf Hitler, a destitute, neurotic > would-be artist and gassed veteran of the trench warfare, would within two > decades undo their new order and plunge the world into its greatest war.

According to a book review discussed recently here, Hoover did. Said book review totally transformed my understanding of him. And OK, not Hitler personally, but conceptually.

<comment><USER16> > dictating a new European peace at Versailles, would not have credited that > Adolf Hitler, a destitute, neurotic would-be artist and gassed veteran of > the trench warfare, would within two decades undo their new order and plunge > the wo

Well, when you're too timid to occupy defeated enemies, you get another war.

That's why Russia insisted on occupying Berlin in WW2.

A little-known fact is that the USA proposed enslaving Germany, which leaked out and is why there was no chance of peace talks. The USA wanted to decimate the population, deindustrialize Germany and make them peasant farmers. Russia subsequently succeeded in doing that.

In a way it's a backhanded compliment to how much the Allies feared them.

<comment><USER15> > Well, when you're too timid to occupy defeated enemies, you get another war.

The US occupied Germany for decades. At first, very clearly, killing substantial numbers of resistance fighters. And then more subtly and covertly. Its occupying force was ostensibly to ward off the Soviet Union, but there was a domestic role as well. And its policies in Japan were similar.

That's the thing about the US. While there are numerous well-known examples of ham-handedness, US interventions have generally been so subtle and covert that their mention is readily discounted as conspiracy theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is excerpted from "Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years," first published in 2008. If some portions seem outdated, it's not just you.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the author is underselling WWI.

1\. Undid the Ottoman Empire. If the Ottomans had limped around for 20 more years, they would have found themselves in a century drunk on oil, while in charge of the majority of the world's oil reserves. The Ottomans would have been the global superpower of the latter half of the 20th century.

2\. Rise of Communism. Lenin was an outcast living in Switzerland when the Tsar was overthrown. He arrived in Russia -- delivered there by Germany and with significant German funding -- two months after the interim government had taken over. It was a liberal democracy, not unlike the government of the US or France, that had the most power when Lenin arrived. Even if the Russian Empire had still fallen, the century probably wouldn't have fallen under the shadow of communism.

3\. The center of world banking moved from London to New York City. After the end of 1916 or so, Britain was pretty much broke, and the war effort was to a significant extent funded by NYC bankers. London indebted themselves greatly to the US, and wherever you were in the world, if you wanted something to do with money, you went to New York City to get it, because England didn't have any. Of course, for these loans to mean anything, Britain would have to win the war (and reparations) which leads us to...

4\. USA as world police. The US wanted nothing to do with European, Asian, or African politics. Even Teddy Roosevelt's "imperialist" attitudes were limited to North and South America. If Wilson wanted all the NYC banks to not go bankrupt, he'd have to enter the war- which he did. And thus began America's role as world police rather than a regional power.

5\. The Belfast declaration and the catastrophic carving of the Arab world on arbitrary lines. Israel's foundation was laid down in 1917 by England declarating their intention to create a Jewish state in Palestine. And the borders drawn up on meaningless lines in the desert rather than along ethnic boundaries plunged the Arab world into a century of sectarian violence and chaos.

6\. The Ottoman Empire would have gladly sold oil to Japan during their wars with China. (which likely still would have happened) Japan never would have had the quarrel with the United States that lead to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

While I'm not trying to minimize the human life cost of WWI, I actually don't think the death toll of the war was really all that significant. China's had a dozen or so civil wars with higher death tolls. More people died of the flu in 1918 and 1919 than all combat deaths from 1914 to 1918 combined. But WWI had an outsized effect on world history. I think it's probably the most transformational event in human history since... I dunno, Columbus introducing the Americas to Europe.

I don't know what the world would look like if WWI didn't play out the way it did. But it wouldn't look like this.

</comment><comment><USER19> The article mentions the come-from-nowhere stories of people like Hong Xiuquan and Adolf Hitler, but I see these figures as catalysts of larger forces that had been in play for decades.

I see two major mega-wars in the past 300 years within the western world, whose history I am most familiar with. Both were results of a rising power challenging the existing superpower for supremacy.

The first was the stretch bookended by the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, which I think can causally be combined, especially when factoring in how French finances following the Seven Years War and American Revolution contributed to the French Revolution. These wars were a Thucydides trap as Britain was challenging France for European supremacy. Britain succeeded in displacing France at the top.

The next megawar was the German challenge to Anglo-American supremacy, which took place in WWI and WWII. Germany failed to displace the Anglo countries.

Both war were Thucydides traps with different outcomes, and the severity of the conflict and long shadow cast by the wars is due to the stakes involved.

<comment><USER20> WW2 as some sort of Anglo-challenge must be a uniquely American school system PoV.

<comment><USER19> WWI and WWII can be seen as one war, which was the attempt by Germany to displace the UK and wider Anglo world as the dominant western power. I think it makes sense to group the wars together.

I don't know how widespread this view is.

<comment><USER21> Not very widespread. You may not have a very long view on history. Take a look at my username (I'm "English" by the way). Just in case I need to spell it out: Gerdes ~= German.

Those two wars had very different reasons despite Germany being a participant in both of them. Russia (famous for not being Anglo) was a major player in those wars as well and we should not overlook Japan etc as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The British conquest of India, which spanned the late-18th and early-19th centuries, killing millions of people, and affecting the fate of hundreds of millions seems to be strangely absent.

It's not even mentioned as a footnote.

<comment><USER21> "Renowned scientist and best-selling author Vaclav Smil meticulously charts the single largest cause of non-natural mortality in the 20th century."

The article is about C20 mate.

<comment><USER22> The article meanders quite a bit, wandering into the 18th and 19th centuries.</comment></comment></comment>


Go North Korea Beat Portugal in the World Cup final tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/north-korea-is-telling-its-citizens-that-their-team-is-in-the-world-cup-final/

<comment><USER2> The video was deemed fake:

"Hi Moderator of /r/NorthKoreaNews here!

This is bullshit of the highest magnitude.

The South Korean and Japanese press monitor broadcasts from North Korea and they're silent on this claim. North Korea has already publicly announced their support for the the South Korean team - [http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/news/news_IK_detail.htm?No=10...](http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/news/news_IK_detail.htm?No=103338). Even more importantly the North Koreans are actually able to watch the World Cup on State TV - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPyHoDcwbzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPyHoDcwbzE). Football is extremely popular even in North Korea.

The only evidence here is this Youtube video that seems cleverly spliced together from stock footage of North Korean Media."

via /u/systemstheorist on reddit's /r/wtf. SOURCE: [http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/2aij3x/according_to_nor...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/2aij3x/according_to_north_korean_television_their_soccer/civo0wu).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is obviously a fake.</comment>