History tells us what may happen next with Brexit and Trump - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tswriting/history-tells-us-what-will-happen-next-with-brexit-trump-a3fefd154714?source=linkShare-61f92bfed688-1531977721 <comment><USER2> > My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most > people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don't see that > it's happening again.

This is what Timothy Snyder calls "politics of eternity". There is no progress, history repeats itself, no point trying to change anything.

It's the natural counterpart to "politics of inevitability".

At first we believe progress happens by itself, and is inevitable. We don't need to do anything. Democracy, rule of law, personal liberties, human rights are just better than any alternative, so they will win automatically. Time is a line that might move left or right but mostly it moves up, towards better situation for everyone. "End of history" basically.

When this doesn't happen the natural reaction is to move to politics of eternity - nothing really changes, history is a huge circle that happens over and over and we have no way to change what happens, so there's no point trying.

Reality is - it's neither constant progress nor a cycle. It's chaotic, and we have (small) influence over what happens. But it's very useful for people with power that we think we don't.

I'm Polish. I remember (barely) communism, and what most people in the west don't get is how Russian propaganda works. It's not that everybody believed that USSR and communism is the best. Almost nobody believed that in 80s, and literally nobody believed that near 1989.

The propaganda was focused on making cynics out of people. Yeah maybe we have it bad, but they are full of bullshit too. Their liberties and human rights are just a facade, like here. These people protesting are all paid or spies. Free press is an oxymoron, press is always paid by someone. Just ignore all the news, you won't know what's true anyway. Why not choose the press paid by your own country over press paid by enemies?

"Everybody lies" is much easier thing to believe than "we are great and only tell the truth and they lie", and once enough people believe in it - change is impossible, because all protests and movements are distrusted, and people are lazy and prefer not to do anything when it's not clear who is right.

> Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn't.

Fear of another war CAUSED WW2. Appeasement was why Hitler could get as far as he did.</comment>


Ending the Infographic Plague - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/ending-the-infographic-plague/250474/

<comment><USER2> The problem is that the idea of visually representing information has caught on with the general masses -- and 90% of everything is crap.

It wasn't really all that long ago that terms like "infovis" or "datavis" were novel and new to the great majority of people. Sure everybody was familiar with standbys like bar charts and scatter charts, but the idea that you could cram complex multi-dimensional data into a single, novel, picture was relatively new as a discipline.

So now everybody and their aunt wants to "visually represent information" even if it doesn't make sense to do so, or the representations chosen artificially distort the information.

The problems are many but boil down to three essentials:

\- the art department produces this stuff ("it's visual, so it must be the art department's job"). This is a department that is fundamentally wrong for producing representations of quantitative information. But I'm not sure giving it to the bean counters, statisticians, engineers or other nerdly disciplines is any more right.

\- it's _hard_ to come up with new and novel ways of representing information. Tufte's come up with approximately _one_ \- sparklines. And he's widely considered the king of the discipline. A couple others get bandied about ad- naseum, Napoleon's March for example, and as a discipline it seems more geared towards taking apart other people's efforts at novel visualizations rather than producing new, good ones. Innovation in Infovis is rare.

\- even when falling back on traditional techniques (bar charts everywhere!), they are open to abuse or misinterpretations depending on how the data is viewed. Have 1000 entries but only room for 10 in the graphic? Drop the other 990! Use logarithmic representations when linear would be better. Focus attention where you want with colors or other indicators. By choosing how the viewer gets access to the tables full of boring numbers, you can influence what you want them to see.

Infographics _can_ be an entertaining way of educating the non-quantitatively minded reader without presenting tables full of boring figures. But I agree they are widely misused.

<comment><USER3> I go one further to say that infographics, as referring to the kinds of things that _should_ be produced, should almost always supersede tables of boring figures. As it turns out, even if you're quantitatively minded and interesting in the particular topic being analyzed... it's still better to see a well- designed chart.

I mean, I can't help but look at the chartjunk tsunami and see opportunity instead of just so many dire straights.

\---

Also I don't feel that the real need is in innovation of new standard charts but instead in the field of merging visuals with quantities in a way that is fluent to human psych.

<comment><USER4> Having worked in Academia, charts are often used to reveal trends in large data sets. This is particularly true these days when the data is gigabytes of multi-dimensional measurements that require processing to derive the underlying properties. The only good way to present data like this is in charts.

Graphics are now very important to presenting your science! The results can't speak for themselves, because no one can understand them in less than a few days of study, so they need a translator.

Sometimes people do create the equivalent of link-bait info-graphics that do their best to make a small result look large. It's usually balanced by the rest of the paper being light on details.

These infographics are just the newest version of sound-bytes and headlines. They don't tell the whole story, but they tell enough that you can tell your friends and pass out the link, and feel like you know the subject without having to spend more than 5 minutes reading. What we're missing is the balance of listing methodology and explicitly listing sources. There's little to no onus on the publisher to fact-check their data.

As long as we live in a society with 1-minute clips on the evening news, we'll have crappy infographics.

<comment><USER3> Sure, and I currently work in academia and agree.

Doesn't mean we should worship the soundbites, though we do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These "infographics" really don't deserve the name at all. They're almost 100% chartjunk and have a data-ink ratio approaching zero. It's almost as if the people who make these read Tufte and decided to do the exact opposite.

On the other hand, doing the opposite of Tufte is a pretty good algorithm for pushing a point.

</comment><comment><USER6> Misleading facts aside, infographics and Top N lists are a worrying trend on the Internet in which discourse is polluted with mindless content farms that are less concerned with disseminating facts than they are with getting clicks.

I know it sounds elitist, but personally I pine for the years of professionalism and expertise in the media. Crowdsourced content sounds great in theory, but in practice, nobody has the talent/attention span/spare time to do it right.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would have preferred an in-depth examination of a few examples, rather than a very brief look at a single part of a dense infographic. Errors are not forgivable, but there's a difference between a single error on a sheet that contains three dozen facts which are sourced and many deliberate distortions on a sheet with a few facts, none of which are sourced.

I'd agree that many infographics are just awful at conveying information; people aren't trained in stats to create or read these graphics.

<comment><USER8> infographics were once a good way of summarizing a crowded quantitative analysis easily. but somehow recently due to a bunch of them flooding the net,i am feeling an infographic fatigue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a blog that I've enjoyed reading about bad charts and infographics:

<http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/>

Lots of interesting material there.

(I have no connection to the blog other than as a reader.)

<comment><USER10> Junk Charts is addicting. I laugh. I cry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem isn't the infographic it's people spouting bullshit statistics. This is hardly a new problem, learn which sites are trustworthy and which are not.

The only 'problem' is that infographics are really good at getting across a message and far more human friendly than just statistics.

<comment><USER12> Similar to correlation and regression. Great concepts, and can add a lot of implied rigor to a mountain of BS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having just finished reading Tufte's _Visual Display of Quantitive Information_ today, the example infographics make me want to cry.

</comment><comment><USER14> While it is certainly a problem that many info-graphics misrepresent information to skew public opinion or attract viewers, picking one aspect of a rather dense packet of information and calling it wrong is hardly a public service.

There's a real information problem being represented here but non constructive commentary isn't going to make it better.

Perhaps a more adequate title for the article would have been: "Be cautious of Infographics."

But then again I guess that doesn't misrepresent the content of the article enough to garner the viewer-ship they were looking for.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's a pity that infographics are abused so often, because they're honestly not a terrible way to communicate interesting statistics. I mean, the fact that they're getting ordinary people to look at data and pass it along to friends is pretty impressive. They do have an accountability problem though. Someone should build a platform for making, sourcing, and commenting on them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand his points about the Princeton graphic. from the Princeton page he links to:

> *The projected budget increase in the financial aid program will continue > significant enhancements the University has made over the past 12 years, > including replacing all required loans with grants that do not need to be > repaid. This year the average grant for a student on financial aid is > $36,000. These efforts have dramatically increased the economic diversity of > Princeton's student body. The 60 percent of this year's freshman class on > financial aid is a striking change from the class of 2001 -- the last class > admitted before the enhancements to the aid program -- when 38 percent of > the freshmen were on aid.

<comment><AUTHOR> The infographic being criticized in the article, an infographic trying to make a point about a public policy position, may not have used the most meaningful fact in the first place. If the issue is cost of imprisonment per inmate per year, then the correct comparison is to the spending per full-time student per year, which at Princeton and several other universities is higher than the billed full list price tuition, because Princeton has other sources of revenue besides tuition.

Spending per full-time student figures are collected by the United States federal government, by law, and are reported on the College Results website maintained by a nonprofit organization.

[http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=18...](http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=186131)

AFTER EDIT: While doing other things away from my computer, I thought about how the submitted article relates to the culture aspired to here on Hacker News. In February 2009, Paul Graham wrote an article "What I've Learned from Hacker News"

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

looking back on the first two years of Hacker News. He wrote then, "There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments." He thought at that time that the steps Hacker News takes to keep out bad stories have been largely successful, and to this date there haven't been any big technical changes (certainly never downvotes on submissions) to screen out bad stories. The author of the submitted article says, "Think before you link" in her example of an infographic about the problem described in the article, and goes on to say, "So before you pick up that infographic, give it a good, hard look." This is the desired culture here on HN. Early in my 1132 days of participation here on HN, I asked more experienced participants if the expectation here is that links are submitted for comment, even if the submitter disagrees with the link, or if submitting a link is an implicit endorsement that the link has at least minimal quality. The participants who kindly replied to my question overwhelmingly said that I and participants here in general should just submit links that they endorse as worth a read, not crap links to stir up comments of disagreement. I agree with the author of the submitted link here that infographics are too eye-catching and resist efforts at fact-checking, and that is is worthwhile to check the underlying sources and facts before passing on a link to an infographic. Way back in 1954 the author of How to Lie with Statistics

[http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell- Huff/dp/039...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell- Huff/dp/0393310728)

pointed out that some lies about statistics are most easily performed with display graphics. Readers have to be on the lookout for such issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know if I should say thank you or not. I want to say thank you because I agree that infographics have become a plague. But I'm also grateful because there overuse has led me to leave some awful blogs.

</comment><comment><USER17> With great respect to the well informed comments here, anyone working at a B2C startup should at least consider the benefits in traffic and brand equity that regularly producing attractive and digestible infographics can provide.

Even without meeting HN level quality standards, many users appreciate these types of visualizations.

</comment><comment><USER18> The annual cost of Princeton tuition in 2010 was $48,580. This is not true. That's the cost of tuition + room/board + etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a step in the right direction, actually. Instead of just filling the internet with keywords, they're filling it with information. Now we just need to train the SEO companies to make it good information and advertising will, for the first time in... ever, actually align with the public good.

</comment><comment><USER20> The general complaint should be a different point - it's the misrepresentation of data that is the real culprit here. Infographics are just a way to represent or misrepresent data.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is not specific to infographics, any article can present biased information.

> _which shows that nothing like a majority of either sex are working over 40 > hours per week_

The graphic clearly shows that the majority _is_ working 40 hours or more... he goes to International Labor Organization that confirms the data and then claims that they have "no source" - they _are_ the source! So everything confirms the data presented in the original graphic, yet he finds it _wildly implausible_. Who's biased?

<comment><USER22> Are you referring to the author? Megan McArdle is a she

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> VCs seem to like infographics: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/visually- launches-to-automa...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/visually-launches-to- automate-the-making-of-infographics/)

$2mm to an infographic company - how do they expect to make a return? I have no clue what goes through VCs heads sometimes - I guess they get caught up in hype.

Speaking of hyped companies - what has happened to qwiki, quora, turntable.fm and shaker?

<comment><USER24> Turntable is blowing up, in a good way, as near as I can tell. They closed their 'B' round a couple months ago: [http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/SF2011/2011/09/13/turntable- fm...](http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/SF2011/2011/09/13/turntable-fm-closes- that-7-million-round-fred-wilson-joins-board/)

<comment><USER23> Really - how do they plan on making $? Who would buy them? I don't know _anyone_ besides VCs and a few friends that used it while it was getting all the hype. Now I know nobody that uses it now that the fad is over.</comment></comment></comment>


Pebble Launches Dictation API to boost apps with voice recognition - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/15/pebble-launches-dictation-api-to-boost-apps-with-voice-recognition/ <comment><AUTHOR> Being an NLP guy myself, I think this is a big BIG BIG deal and was really hoping that it would be Apple that would provide a way to hook into the voice recognition interface back when they were talking about their watch. :-(

Voice recognition has begun to come to our devices in the most unexpected way. The old way of thinking was that voice recognition would come via a powerful process running on a powerful PC, locally (remember Dragon Naturally Speaking?). In fact, if you look up many US patents re: voice recognition, you will see inventors who explicitly say that it's not possible to have voice recognition over a streaming connection.

Today, the easiest way to access free voice recognition is in your Chrome browser, with Google only very recently bringing Speech to Text to the Mac version (they've had Text To Speech for a while, I think). Firefox's bringing it out real soon and MS is... well... I dunno. They've got Cortana and Satya Nadella recently enjoyed using it so much that he probably doesn't want his users to have anything else :-) .

The unintended side-effect of this slow creeping of voice recognition tech into our devices is that it's gonna spawn a whole host of Medium articles on Design and I'm probably gonna have to subscribe to them to have some artist tell me how users would like to use my tech :-(</comment>


FreeBSD on the POWER8: it's alive - <AUTHOR> http://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2015/02/freebsd-on-power8-its-alive.html <comment><USER2> It's great to see IBM move slowly towards an open POWER architecture. At Red Hat we have access to lots of POWER7 and POWER8 hardware and it really is the fastest hardware available for anything, many times faster than x86-64 (of course with a massive cost and power budget to go with that). But when am I going to be able to buy POWER8 hardware for myself?? Is the expensive and experimental Tyan mobo the only thing?

<comment><USER3> It's worth nothing that IBM /does/ have a virtual loaner program that provides free access to POWER7/POWER8 servers for software development. System i (OS/400), System P (AIX/Linux/FreeBSD [eventually])

[http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/pub/systems/vlp](http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/pub/systems/vlp)

Current spec is a 8286-42A @ [http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s824/specs.html](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s824/specs.html)

<comment><USER4> Also if you dont want to sign up (it is not a lot of hassle, but you have to use a VPN and instances only stay up a week), OVH has a Power8 cloud with a small and big instance size.

[https://www.runabove.com/instances/ibm- power8.xml](https://www.runabove.com/instances/ibm-power8.xml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting development, let's hope that IBM will pick this up and run with it as an officially supported OS at some point. It would give lots more room upwards for when you're about to max out a single server x86 set-up.

It won't be long before someone runs a top-of-the-line X86 to Power8 benchmark using FreeBSD.

Here is such a comparison using linux:

[http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092914-story02.html](http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092914-story02.html)

<comment><USER6> Eh. IBM chip is faster at IBM selected benchmarks? Shocker. Also no mention of price.

<comment><USER7> It does illustrate a point, though. I would guess Intel is faster overall, but for the right applications POWER and SPARC can be faster.

<comment><USER8> Namely, most applications that benefit from parallelism will benefit from POWER or SPARC, since both platforms pack a high number of cores _and_ a high number of concurrent threads per core.

This doesn't sound like much for consumer devices (PowerPC was the gold standard for gaming consoles last generation, but now Nintendo's the only one still using POWER in any significant application), but with Erlang/Elixir and Scala (among other languages renowned for facilitating "easy" parallelism) being the latest hot shit right now, these advantages are going to be much more significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great use for Erlang (e.g. WhatsApp)?

Given that Erlang can scale near linearly with more cores and it's not uncommon to have 100+ cores for a single Power8 node - it makes me wonder how much investigation has gone into Power8 as an architecture for companies who have highly network centric products like WhatsApp.

Edit: WhatsApp is a highly network centric product and they also run on FreeBSD / Erlang.

Edit 2: If you want to try out Power8, OVH has cloud compute available of Power8 at [https://www.runabove.com/instances/ibm- power8.xml](https://www.runabove.com/instances/ibm-power8.xml)

<comment><USER8> I think that scalability aspect is precisely why Google (IIRC) is on the OpenPOWER board; there's been hinting that they're interested in developing their own server boards in-house based on POWER8 (or perhaps a future generation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> \- he's figured out the KVM issues, their lack of support for some mandated hypervisor APIs and other bugs

\- then found the existing powerpc pmap (physical memory management) code wasn't very SMP friendly

\- also found the PS3 hypervisor layer isn't thread-safe

These are some of the reasons that I care about NetBSD (which runs on some 56 architectures with its single codebase) so much -- the real-world work supporting real-world architectures can pay off everywhere -- it's not just academic work or nostalgia/eccentricity.

<comment><USER8> Being highly-portable also helps to make sure that your code has a maximum of cleanliness and correctness; this is one of the primary reasons why OpenBSD, for example, emphasizes the importance of being portable to everything from x86 and POWER systems to Zaurus PDAs and VAXen, even though portability isn't an explicit objective of OpenBSD like it is for NetBSD.

<comment><USER9> I love NetBSD, don't get me wrong, but inevitably you will end up with a messing subsystem if managing multiple architectures because you won't be able to avoid situation like this:

if (x86)

      // do ...

else (Power)

      // do ...

else (PPC)

      // do ...

<comment><USER10> From [http://www.netbsd.org/about/portability.html](http://www.netbsd.org/about/portability.html):

> Every effort is made to keep everything cleanly split into 'Machine > Dependent' (MD) and 'Machine Independent' (MI) areas. For example, an > Ethernet chipset would have a single MI core hardware driver, which would be > matched with appropriate MD bus attachment code for a given platform. Not > all drivers are as clean as we would like for historical reasons, but any > new driver will be, and old drivers are in the process of being converted > across.

Machine dependent parts are built to a hardware abstraction layer (HAL)[1] interface, so that spec gives a single abstraction that the hardware-dependant code is built against, and can operate w/ the rest of the OS. As I understand it, this is facilitated by the _build system_ (not a mess of if/then in code) like this[2]:

      .if ${ARCHSUBDIR} == "mips64"
      ARCHSUBDIR= mips
      .endif
      .if ${ARCHSUBDIR} == "powerpc64"
      ARCHSUBDIR= powerpc
      .endif

These are also the sorts of problems that are addressed by considering "lots and lots" of targets -- it'd be unmaintainable otherwise.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Portability](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Portability)

[2]: /usr/src/sys/arch/Makefile

EDIT: ws

s/it's be/it'd be/

s/that spec give/that spec gives/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone with access please run some cpu benchmarks ala anandtech? Thanks!

<comment><USER12> Sure, which ones would you like me to run?

(email@example.com)</comment></comment>


Experts Find Mt.Gox Only Lost 386 Bitcoins Due To Transaction Malleability - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/27/experts-found-that-mt-gox-lost-a-mere-386-bitcoin-due-to-transaction-malleability/ <comment><USER2> The title is not accurate. Mt.Gox could have lost _at most_ 386 BTC to transaction malleability. From the report's conclusion: " As such, barely 386 bitcoins could have been stolen using malleability attacks from MtGox or from other businesses."

In other words, the set of "successful" transaction malleability attacks totalled a sum of 386 BTC among which some may or may not have been targeted at Mt.Gox (impossible to know without knowing Mt.Gox addresses).

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, that would also mean Silk Road stole its users' coins. They couldn't have lost 4,400 coins to malleability, which is what they blamed the theft on. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk- ro...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk- road-2-0-hacked-using-bitcoin-bug-all-its-funds-stolen/)

<comment><USER3> Nevermind, I'm mistaken. After reading the paper more carefully, it's saying only 384 coins were involved in successful malleability attacks before Feb 7th (when Mt. Gox stopped withdraws). But between the 7th and the 13th (when Silk Road announced they'd lost their coins), the number of coins involved in malleability attacks increased to almost 300,000 BTC: [http://i.imgur.com/H8YVLXO.png](http://i.imgur.com/H8YVLXO.png)

As such, it's entirely possible that SR lost 4,400 coins due to malleability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While very interesting, the scope of this study is limited by the fact that their data collection only goes back to January 2013, so anything that happened before that was not considered. I don't want to defend Gox, but it is conceivable that they lost significant amounts of BTC prior to this via TM and were just doing business with a deficit of BTC.

<comment><USER5> Has anyone tried analyzing the actual blockchain for likely malleated (malled?) transactions? Depending on which form of malleability was exploited (see: [https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691](https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691)) it should be fairly easy to separate "normal" transactions generated by "normal" clients and intentionally malleated transactions.

<comment><USER6> The past tense is "malleableized".

<comment><USER7> "Modified"?

<comment><USER8> Mauled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How easy/difficult would it be to assemble and analyze the full set of transactions going back to mt gox's start, assuming we know what we're looking for and can just sift through looking for those, as the researchers did?

</comment><comment><USER10> It may be inconvenient to keep as much of your holdings in cold storage as possible, but it's much more convenient than assuming the third party service you're using is secure/not a bad actor.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't know much about this, but is it possible that Mt Gox simply stole the bitcoin themselves and blamed it on hackers? I imagine the coin is supposed to be cryptographically protected, but I don't know where users stored their keys. Bitcoin is so new that we all seem to have bought the malleability loss claim, but it could have been a red herring. Disclaimer: That is all speculation, I know nothing about this.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why people are saying that Mt. Gox may be under a gag order. They're based in Japan, so an American gag order seems like it's not applicable. And while the US did seize some millions of theirs from US banks, their bitcoin cold storage wallets were probably based in Japan, not the US, so there's no way the US could seize them. And even if they did seize them, there's no evidence at all suggesting that they could compel Mt. Gox to remain silent about it.

Mt. Gox absolutely could have stolen the bitcoin themselves. It's still one of the more likely scenarios.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it's likely at all. It would have been discovered by now if that were true. If you want to get away with stealing $400 million you certainly don't do something that invites the maximum amount of scrutiny, as they did in closing Mt. Gox in such a haphazard, clearly minute-to-minute manner. If their aim was to steal $400 mil and get away with it they would have shut down the Mt. Gox operation in a much more graceful, deliberate, and mysterious way.

Plus Karpeles does not strike me as a criminal mastermind. Maybe that's why he's a mastermind?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems to suggest that if someone did a thorough audit of MtGox's mess they might be able to figure out where these bitcoins went.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, Mt. Gox's accounting appears to be nonexistent. For example, they recently revealed that they found 200,000 of the missing bitcoin. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone analyzing the blockchain had a clue that those particular 200,000 bitcoin were still under Mt. Gox control, let alone traced where any other bitcoin went.

<comment><USER13> I think you're wrong, reddit was tracking those coins and said Gox still controlled them over a week before he announced he'd found them. However I think you're right about accounting being non-existent.

<comment><USER3> Really? Hmm, do you have any links I could look at? I thought they'd found some other large quantity of coins, but not the ones that have remained inactive since 2011 (the ones Mt. Gox said they recently found).

Thanks for the info!

<comment><USER13> I recall this [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/210s3t/keep_digging...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/210s3t/keep_digging_into_gox_we_may_have_prompted_the/)

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I remember similar threads. But the 200,000 BTC that Mt. Gox found has remained inactive and unmoved since 2011. I can't find any Reddit thread that discovered those inactive coins before Mt. Gox did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While this doesn't explain MtGox losses, this is still around 200k$ at today's worth, enough to interest a lot of criminals

</comment><comment><USER15> How can I get in on the class action lawsuit?

<comment><USER16> Even in a best-case scenario, you'll be lucky to get anything at all. Even assuming there is a successful lawsuit, and after all of the assets have been divided up, and after the lawyers have taken their fees, in 10 years maybe you'll end up with $20. Maybe.

<comment> daniel-cussen I doubt it. IANAL, but it must depend on how much money you lost.

<comment><USER17> Have you ever been part of a class action?

<comment> daniel-cussen I was invited to one last week, actually, but don't know if I'll get involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know this sounds trollish, but why is the tech community so bullish on Bitcoin when theft seems so rampant/easy?

</comment><comment><USER19> 386 - not a round number but a pretty recognisable one nonetheless.

<comment><USER4> It is a very rough estimate that mainly serves to give us an idea of the magnitude of possible theft due to TM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Experts? Conspiracy. Inside job... _sigh_ Popcorn. Bored. Ambivalent. Shadenfreude. Apathy.</comment>


Marree Man - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marree_Man <comment><USER2> Google maps satellite view for those curious. [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Marree+Man/@-29.5335821,13...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Marree+Man/@-29.5335821,137.4639693,4044m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1)

<comment><USER3> The satellite image looks slightly different from the Wikipedia image. In the satellite image you can clearly see an ear, and the man is looking to the left. In the wikipedia image, it seems as if the man is wearing a mask and looks to the right. The band over the head is not visible in the satellite image.

<comment><USER4> The satellite picture is much clearer; the 'mask' on Wikipedia is probably the hair of the satellite image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Why do people assume this could not have been done without GPS? Maps have long been created by triangulation, is there any reason that process could not be used backwards to create a terrain feature from a map?

<comment><USER6> In fact, such lines were recreated without the help of GPS or flight: [https://westerncourier.com/41241/news/students-recreate- nazc...](https://westerncourier.com/41241/news/students-recreate-nazca- geoglyph-at-western/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also interesting are the Blythe Intaglios along the California/Arizona border: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios)

</comment><comment><USER8> Article misses an important point: what is the latest date it definitely wasn't there? There's nothing in the article that makes it more recent than 1928.

<comment><USER9> Erosion, for one. probably historical aerial photography as well, but that's not mentioned.

It is light on details such as how it was made (mechanics). But erosion has meant its needed to be redefined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My parents went on a joy-flight over Lake Eyre and Marree Man a few months ago... the lake was full for the first time in years after flooding in Queensland and it was was the highlight of their whole trip. Funnily enough they had never heard of Marree Man until the trip - it's certainly something of an enigma here in Australia.

</comment><comment><USER11> My family in South Australia has lived a 10h drive from this their entire life and no idea it existed. I should really visit.

<comment><USER12> Ah .. very australian. I live in middle europe and there are many places just "10h" drive away I have never visited and probably never will ..

But aside that, I doubt it will look spectacular close up.

<comment><USER11> A 10h drive in Central Europe can get you far :). Australia is a vast emptiness as soon as you leave the coast. Also I'm hoping I can get the geoglyph in frame with a drone though I haven't done the math to see whether that's possible within the confines of the law in terms of altitude (120m max altitude in Oz).

<comment><USER12> Yes, I know ... been to your emptiness before, thats why I said, "very australian". Distances are relative, I know. Here I think long before doing a 2 h drive ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Although 1/10 of its size Nazca lines[0] are pretty impressive too and they were made 2k years ago. Why couldn't have this been made a lot far back.

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

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone knows what he is holding in his right hand?

<comment><USER15> FTA

> The Marree Man geoglyph depicts a man holding either a woomera (a throwing > stick once used to disperse small flocks of birds) or a boomerang (but see > Plaque section below).

<comment><USER16> That's not exactly the description I would go with for a woomera. The woomera is not thrown, and acts as an extension of the arm when throwing a spear. A boomerang is more likely to be used for flocks of birds, so the definitions may have been mixed up.

<comment><USER17> People might know it better as an _atlatl_. Generically, it's a "spear- thrower". It's amazing how much difference they make - good fun to make in the backyard!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Namecoin - A DNS alternative based on Bitcoin [guide] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2011/05/12/namecoin-a-dns-alternative-based-on-bitcoin.html

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of nic.d and hoodwink.d</comment>


How to setup a Tor hidden service? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/arthtyagi/how-to-setup-a-tor-hidden-service-5gpn <comment><USER2> Here's the same thing, but from the official wiki and explained better: [https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion- service.html....](https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion- service.html.en)</comment>


IPhone 3GS jailbreak update - iDevTeam waiting to release - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iphone-dev.org/ <comment><USER2> Smart.

But it's sad that people will buy hardware that conspires against them to make their life difficult. If you really want a "jailbroken" phone, why not support companies that are making that functionality available voluntarily?

<comment><USER3> Because they're not nearly as awesome.

<comment><USER2> Not sure I agree. The iPhone has great visual effects, but the Android phones I've played with seem a lot more usable. Google services integrate wonderfully, and the third-party apps tend to do cooler things. (Hello tethering, location awareness, etc.)

<comment><USER4> Serious question: Does anyone have a good link to a more _technical_ comparison of the iPhone OS, Android, and WebOS? Not necessarily the phones themselves, but of the current and future potential of those platforms? I've done a little searching, and there's a lot of information out there; maybe one of you has seen something more technical that explores each platform in more depth.

I'd love to support WebOS, but it's still incredibly young, and I'd hate to switch to a platform that ends up dead-ended.

<comment><USER3> [http://lifehacker.com/5173441/android-versus- iphone-30-the-s...](http://lifehacker.com/5173441/android-versus- iphone-30-the-showdown)

less technical, but including webOS:

[http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/69907/smartphone- os...](http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/69907/smartphone-os-smackdown- webos-vs-world)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ruby String Basics: Ruby Silent Cast - <AUTHOR> http://bparanj.blogspot.com/2015/09/ruby-string-basics-ruby-silent-cast.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Ruby Silent Casts Why silent? What's in it for you? \- Your brain has to fill in the blanks \- You will be able to connect the dots and develop the understanding yourself \- No one likes to read documentation. These videos will be live coding with no reading. \- You can listen to something else while you watch the videos \- Easy to brush up basics before the interview \- Free to watch on browser and reasonable price for download option</comment>


Year of the OpenBSD desktop - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tintagel.pl/2016/04/22/year-of-the-openbsd-desktop.html <comment><USER2> Based on Thinkpad compatibility, it's a stronger desktop OS than FreeBSD. I'm rooting for them.

<comment><USER3> I too would like to see OpenBSD succeed on the desktop, but according to this blog post they some serious performance issues that need resolving first: [http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/firefox-vs- rthreads](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/firefox-vs-rthreads)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much ongoing work. Mostly affecting Firefox in the browser front. Try -current with Chromium I don't feel a difference compared to GNU/Linux.</comment></comment></comment>


The plan to turn half the world into a reserve for nature - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200318-the-worlds-largest-nature-reserve <comment><USER2> "Finding ways for people to live inside nature reserves, rather than trying to keep people out with walls, can help preserve biodiverse habitats overall."

Our immediate call to action (as yet another zoonotic disease threatens to infect _every_ urban civilization on earth) is for all people, particularly in major cities, to disperse to their homes, and isolate from groups of more than a 10 or so people. And do this for many months (up to 18 months if I read the ICL/Ferguson paper correctly).

And that's just for _this_ virus. Expect another in 10-20 years.

I'm beginning to think that urban life, with all its benefits, may not be worth it in the long run. Specifically, I'm informed by James C. Scott's recent "Against the Grain" ("Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states?"), and also by Daniel E. Lieberman's "The Story of the Human Body", particularly his chapter on farming and the resultant explosion in fertility (due to women having babies every 2 years instead of the 4 years of our paleo hunter/gatherer mothers).

I will say the most (only?) delightful thing to observe is the lessening of so much political bullshit. Trump looked absolutely petrified in his speech last week.</comment>


FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/52fcc2c3146b5875a1ec0fb7460dd382ab0e5b3b <comment><USER2> Point of order: removed GCC /from the base system/. Ports still have a range of GCCs and some ports still depend on GCC. The GCC in base was well over a decade old, and it was that particular version for the same reason macOS shipped an ancient version of bash for a decade: it was the last one licensed under GPLv2.

This is effectively an administrative change. (Not to downplay the work!)

</comment><comment><USER3> The title is highly misleading. First, it's the ancient GCC 4.2.1 from 2007. Next, it's removed from the FreeBSD build system, which means it's no longer used in the internal development of FreeBSD and you can no longer build FreeBSD with GCC. Meanwhile, GCC is still maintained for userspace and the latest GCC 9 is included in the FreeBSD Port [0], you can install it on your machine for your personal use. Finally, the commit message said "At this time all supported architectures either use in-tree Clang, or rely on external toolchain (i.e., a contemporary GCC version from ports)", so I assume even with GCC support removed, you can still build FreeBSD, if you insist, with an external copy of modern GCC.

Suggested alternative title: FreeBSD has Removed GCC from Build Infrastructure.

[0] [https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd- ports/blob/master/Mk/bsd....](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd- ports/blob/master/Mk/bsd.gcc.mk)

<comment><USER4> I disagree, for anybody who knows how FreeBSD works the title is perfectly clear IMO. They removed FreeBSD from the base system. Of course you can still build GCC from ports, but that's not part of the base OS.

It's as if MacOS decided to stop shipping bash by default. Of course you'll still be able to install it yourself, but it's not part of the OS anymore and you can't rely on it being available and supported.

FreeBSD is not Linux, it's a full OS, not just a kernel. There's a very clear line between what's part of the base system and what's not.

<comment><USER5> > _I disagree, for anybody who knows how FreeBSD works_

That excludes the bulk of this site's readers.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but then the distinction between the base system and ports will be lost on them too, and saying that it's merely been removed from the build system doesn't do this news justice IMO, it's more significant than that.

Maybe we could compromise with "FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system" or something similar.

<comment><USER6> > Maybe we could compromise with "FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base > system" or something similar.

I think this would make the best headline.

<comment><USER7> > _Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or > linkbait; don 't editorialize._ > ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))

Which would make the headline that is most in accordance with the guidelines here:

"remove GCC 4.2.1 build infrastructure"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know the whole space well, but there are posts about FreeBSD and IBM today moving to clang.

Is there some tipping point where gcc has too few significant end users to stay relevant? I'd hate to lose the diversity.

<comment><USER9> It's unlikely as up until now it was the only compiler capable of building the Linux kernel (due to its reliance on some GCC extensions to the language).

It is primarily non-GPL platforms/systems/companies that are switching to clang for it's much friendlier license.

Edit: "~now" rather than "now"

<comment><USER10> Building the kernel with clang has been possible or a while. [https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNote...](https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#linux- kernel):

 _" With support for asm goto, the mainline Linux kernel for x86_64 is now buildable (and bootable) with Clang 9. Other architectures that don't require CONFIG_JUMP_LABEL=y such as arm, aarch64, ppc32, ppc64le, (and possibly mips) have been supported with older releases of Clang (Clang 4 was first used with aarch64).

The Android and ChromeOS Linux distributions have moved to building their Linux kernels with Clang, and Google is currently testing Clang built kernels for their production Linux kernels."_

That was in September 2019

<comment><USER9> Yes, I consider within the past year to qualify as "now," but I've updated my post :)

<comment><USER11> Within the past year is more nuanced. Clang was building working kernels since clang-4. X86 developers decided to require asm goto around Linux 4.20, which regressed clang builds for one architecture, until clang-9 implemented it. You could still build LTS kernels without asm goto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I removed GCC from AOSP a month ago.

[https://android- review.googlesource.com/q/topic:%22rm_gcc%22...](https://android- review.googlesource.com/q/topic:%22rm_gcc%22+\(status:open%20OR%20status:merged\))

<comment><USER12> We never had it in Fuchsia being LLVM/Clang only from day one. Technically zircon had a GCC builder for a bit though to compare kernel builds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So FreeBSD was supporting GCC 4.2.1 but not upgrading to newer GCCs over the years. GCC is currently at 9.2.

Apparently the reason for this is GCC's move to GPL v3. So FreeBSD was forced to remain using GCC 4.2.1, GPL v2.

As far as Clang goes, is FreeBSD tracking/upgrading to newer Clang versions? I assume the answer is yes but I don't know.

<comment><USER14> Yes, they are updating it regularly: [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/UPDATING?revision=35849...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/UPDATING?revision=358497&view=markup)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anybody explain the hate/aversion towards GCC? As I see it clang used to generae more meaningful error messages thats why many people turned toward clang. But it seems those days are gone.

Gcc still produces better=faster machine code. So why the hate? Are there political reasons involved?

<comment><USER16> > Are there political reasons involved?

GCC is more spaghetti than Clang, less modular. But yeah, it's mostly political/business/legal related. A lot of people hate copyleft with a passion like Apple and Google, who hire lots of people to work on LLVM.

The idea seems to be that LLVM will eventually catch up to GCC on quality of generated code.

<comment><USER17> Google didn't move to clang/llvm because they hate copyleft. They moved because people who work on compilers prefer to work on clang/llvm, and if you have a compiler group you need to keep them happy.

<comment><USER18> It's probably also true that the FSF is more of a pain to work with than absolutely necessary — they want copyright assignment, have some abhorrent code style, and _still_ insist on tracking useless diff summaries in ChangeLog files long after the invention of RCS systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could someone explain the particular pain points of GPLv3 as it relates to use of gcc?

<comment><USER20> The main issue with GPLv3 is the so-called Tivoization clause. It basically states that if you have a product that ships with any GPLv3 software, you need to give your users the ability to install a modified version of anything you included that's GPLv3. Which basically means you can't lock down your device.

That's totally fine if you're talking about a workstation, laptop, or server. But it's a big security risk on an embedded system like a smart TV, mobile phone, or game console - both from an IP protection point of view, and also from a botnet/pwning point of view.

FreeBSD (and others presumably) don't want their users to need to worry about accidentally installing something from the core system and finding themselves in violation of the GPL.

<comment><USER21> That's a rationalization though, not the reason. FreeBSD's GPL "exorcism" efforts had been going on long before FSF started floating ideas about GPL 3.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> FreeBSD has removed GCC from base system but GCC is still available as a port

</comment><comment><USER23> What about binutils? Is it removed too?

<comment><USER24> Mostly, we still have a couple of binutils hanging around:

\- ld.bfd on 32-bit powerpc (should go when lld 10.0 is in FreeBSD)

\- GNU as on i386 and amd64 (expected by some ports, and needed to assemble one file in the base system on amd64)

\- objdump (expected by some ports, but not used in the base system)

These should be removed in FreeBSD 13.0. More details are on our Wiki, [https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase](https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well from my understanding FreeBSD was using an old version of GCC mainly because licensing reasons. What's so annoying about the licensing around GCC is I see a lot cases where the code generation is still better than clang. Although clang matches GCC in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER26> I guess we shouldn't be surprised. BSD has no philosophical reason to keep GCC over Clang, and if Clang is delivering better performance for them, obviously they're gonna use it.

<comment><USER27> Where does it say that it delivers better performance than GCC? AFAIK the main reason they switched is the license.

<comment><USER2> Regardless of what the situation was back in 2007, one tends to imply the other over time: the version of GCC is ancient now (because of licensing issues) and of course clang will do better: it has an extra decade of compiler development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In the future, gcc will be remembered (fondly!) as historically significant between the time periods of simple unix-based K&R C compilers of many years ago -- and Clang, of the past few recent years...</comment>


The Assembler Developer's Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/RollYourOwn/index.html <comment><USER2> _The ADK contains over 75,000 lines of code that an assembler author will not have to write themselves._

FASM ( [https://flatassembler.net/](https://flatassembler.net/) ) is also written in Asm, and far less than 75kLoC. It is also a complete assembler.

IMHO HLA is not what I would consider "real" Asm --- it's more like an intermediate language between Asm and C. The syntax is somewhat like what you'd get if machine instructions were C functions. I don't think I've actually seen any projects use it, besides itself.

I used to recommend the author's Art of Assembly book, before he switched to using HLA.

<comment><USER3> TI has an assembler for some of their processors that also looks like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last time I seriously considered giving ASM a go, I checked Randall Hyde's [author of this developer's kit] books on Amazon and the majority of reviewers had the following problem with it - it has neither Microsoft's nor AT&T's syntax but instead something that you have slim odds of encountering in real world, making things weird.

Which is why I also ultimately passed on it and looked into MASM instead, hoping to have fun reversing games on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER5> I read through chapter 15 on the "back end" of the assembler. I was hoping to read about how the opcodes got turned into binary codes during code generation, however I didn't see any literature on that part of the topic.

How is that done in practice, is it just a giant lookup table for the particular ISA being targeted? Does anyone have a good resource for learning about this part of the back end?

<comment><USER6> I've never implemented an assembler but I did implement a few toy disassemblers and emulators and you'd need a bit more than a simple LUT for many architectures.

In particular some ISAs have "modular" opcodes so to speak, where a machine opcode contains several fields that can be mixed and matched. For instance the ARM instruction set has a 4 bit condition code in each instruction so "add" "addeq" (add if equal) and "addne" (add if not equal) are basically the same opcode with a different condition flag.

Furthermore not all instructions have necessarily the same layout, so your "LUT" must also contain enough information on how to pack the opcode and its operands correctly.

Lastly assembly opcodes don't necessarily map one-to-one with machine code, it's not rare that a single assembly directive would result in multiple machine opcodes.

For instance in MIPS assembly "li $t0, 0x42" will generate a single opcode (probably something like "addiu $t0, $0, 0x42") while "li $t0, 0x12345" will generate two ("lui $t0, 1; addiu $t0, $t0, 0x2345"). In ARM Thumb the "bl" instruction is actually encoded with two successive 16bit opcodes.

EDIT: actually I just remembered that I did implement a very basic MIPS I assembler, here's the codegen portion: [https://github.com/simias/rustation/blob/master/src/assemble...](https://github.com/simias/rustation/blob/master/src/assembler.rs#L340)

MIPS is a really simple ISA though, I suspect an assembler for x86 would be a lot more... more.

<comment><USER5> Interesting in about the ARM modular opcodes.

>Lastly assembly opcodes don't necessarily map one-to-one with machine code, it..."

Sure, I didn't mean to imply there was a 1 to 1 mapping between opcode and machine code only that there must be some indexing into LUT as an initial step.

>"MIPS is a really simple ISA though, I suspect an assembler for x86 would be a lot more"

Indeed the x86 ISA is not for the faint of heart.

Thanks for the link to your MIPs assembler, very cool.

<comment><USER6> ARM has actually a lot more modularity in its opcodes, in particular it has a whole bunch of different addressing modes for its ALU operands (register and register, register and immediate, register shifted by a register, register shifted by an immediate, register rotated by a register, etc...).

There's also the "flag set" bit which says if the instruction is supposed to update the CPSR status flags or not. And then there's the conditional execution flags I talked in my previous post.

So with all these combinations you can easily end up with hundreds of possible encodings for an "add" mnemonic.

And you have similar shenanigans for memory access instructions (load word, load word and increment after, load word and increment before, load word and increment before, load byte and sign extend...)

So you'll probably end up using a combination of multiple LUTs and a bit of code to put it all together.

<comment><USER5> So its sound like the addressing modes on the ARM are as varied at x86 then?

<comment><USER6> That's very much possible, but I'll admit that I never really looked very closely at the x86 instruction encoding, mainly because I value my sanity. Good thing I mostly work with ARM environments these days...

<comment><USER5> Can I ask what you develop? I'm also curious how long it took you to be comfortable developing on ARM?

<comment><USER6> Embedded development, which nowadays is synonymous with ARM.

But my knowledge of the instruction encoding comes mainly from writing this pocketstation emulator: [https://github.com/simias/pockystation/](https://github.com/simias/pockystation/)

It's not complete yet unfortunately, I'll have to get back to that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are alternative search engines good enough for me to replace Google? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking of switching from Google.com for my searching.<p>Does anyone have any feedback on how effective the competition is? <comment><USER2> DuckDuckGo would be my recommendation. It is "good enough" for general searching, but I still have to use Google at work to find technical things slightly faster.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, DuckDuckGo is great. Actually, it's sometimes smarter than Google the way it displays information directly on the site (e.g. the definition of a word)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had tried this a while back, and found it depends on what you're searching.

For technical topics, I had found bing had a preference towards the articles from the microsoft developer network. It also had a bias towards MS technologies.

For example, looking for something vague like real time web server, bing gave a couple results from asp.net pages on the front page, while google seemed more balanced. Google had one link to NodeJS while bing had none.

You could experiment this yourself. I sometimes keep different tabs with different search engines and pick what I like best.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bing is normally fine.

When I use Google, I use [http://startpage.com](http://startpage.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's easy enough to try, why don't you give it a go and see for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER7> If Google search works for you - why replace it? just curious..

<comment><AUTHOR> It feels to me like Google results are the outcomes of SEO.</comment></comment>


What would happen if Facebook were turned off? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/02/14/what-would-happen-if-facebook-were-turned-off <comment><USER2> It's funny to read such articles hypothesising about Facebook being gone. I left Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn about 1 year ago. I was hardly getting any use out of it anyway; not even Messenger. I did a similar thing to Reddit. Quit it cold turkey. These days, I hang out on Mastodon and HN. As it turns out, I don't give a shit about what my extended family and old classmates are up to, and they don't really give a shit about my hobbies and political views. Staying in touch with fellow nerds is far more enriching.

<comment><USER3> If only bands I like add RSS flux to their website, I'll follow you in a minute !

Perhaps it's because I'm a bit old (47) but I never geeked the urge of adding « friends » for having a big number of friends, so I am mainly interacting with 3 or 4 people on FB, as everybody's gone now.

But I get news from the band I follow, gig dates and stuff.

I once missed Porcupine Tree having a gig in my town (a lot of work at that time) in 2004 and that's the main reason I subscribed to FB (many years later but still) to never miss a gig of anyone again

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the article, referencing a study where researchers got a bunch of people to quit Facebook and then studied what happened:

"They consumed much less news, and were thus less aware of events but also less polarised in their views about them than those still on the network. Leaving Facebook boosted self-reported happiness and reduced feelings of depression and anxiety."

^^ this is why I'd like to see it broken up or shut down. There's so much vitriol in everyone's faces every day, it greatly contributes to the general unreasonableness of politics today.

<comment><USER5> This isn't so much a problem with Facebook, but just gated communities in general.

Heavy moderation by participants push out opposing view points until all that's left are echo chambers.

The downside of this trend is the vast majority of people don't tend to realize they are in an echo chamber and take what they are interneting as gospel because people tend to trust the wisdom of the masses.. they just don't realize the masses are carefully culled.

IMHO problem is worse on Reddit, but likely affects more people via Facebook.

<comment> barry-cotter Heavy moderation is why people don't hate each other even more. When I started using Twitter I followed loads of people who disagreed with me politically who I thought were intelligent. Lots of them are, and thoughtful but it just made it really obvious that there's still plenty of support for people and views I consider odious. Non-filtered news consumption leads to a more accurate picture of reality in which huge portions of the population hate each other and there's an excellent chance of widespread violence at the level of the US in the 1960's again.

[https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of- rage/](https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/)

>> "People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States." — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

> Recently, I had my head torn off by a book: Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage, > about the 1970s underground. It's the most important book I've read in a > year. So I did a series of running tweetstorms about it, and Clark asked me > if he could collect them for posterity. I've edited them slightly for > editorial coherence.

> Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn't > be. The 1970s underground wasn't small. It was hundreds of people becoming > urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, > restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People > really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would > bring it about.

<comment><USER6> For anyone else curious, just found an article on this: [http://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america- burrough/](http://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I effectively quit... I still have an account, but I have not checked it in any way in several months. Life is much improved - i am definitely happier. I also read and interact here and other non toxic places more which I think is an improved way to spend idle time

</comment><comment><USER8> People would rejoice, as they moved deep inside the next trap.

</comment><comment><USER9> Party like it's 1999?

I am every day glad i finished my undergrad before facebook was a thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you think about Facebook as an empire, it's worth considering that people who have lived under empires don't generally go back to living as they did before the empires showed up. They typically want a better empire to live under.

<comment><USER11> If you think it's an empire.

Also nobody needs a empire except for the emperor

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> After games started popping up I left facebook only as a photo storage where my family can see my/our/their photos. I also use FB messenger to talk to a total grand of 1 person that doesn't use any other messaging service.

</comment><comment><USER13> I deleted my facebook account maybe a year ago. It was like ripping off a band-aid.

It felt bad for a short period of time due fear of missing out on family/friends and whatnot. But shortly after I realized that I'm feeling less distracted and not falling into the scroll-hole as often.

And as a small bonus, on my last birthday I received actual texts and calls from actual friends instead of "me too" comments on a fb post.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Those booted off enjoyed an additional hour of free time on average_

What to people who spend an hour or more a day on Facebook actually do there? I log in once or twice a week to look for pictures from my family and maybe wish someone a happy birthday (which is a pretty shallow interaction since I only do it when Facebook tells me to).

But what do people do when they spend much more time there? Read and respond to posts?

<comment><USER15> They scroll endlessly watching photos and videos on the feed, many of which are shared by others or come through page subscriptions. They may also hit like or tap on some reaction. Actual comments are a lot lesser in magnitude.

One hour a day on Facebook is too short a duration for most of these people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The world would rejoice that a service that does less good than it does harm is gone. We would be less polarized. We would be less narcissistic. We would be less depressed. We would also we able to pickup our phone and call any body we truly wished to stay connected to. And we would not have an avg of 1500 friends

It would be a cause for celebration.

</comment><comment><USER16> I quit for the third and final time a few months ago. My kids text pics, etc. We have a group family text thread. I don't like being tracked and my data being sold. Facebook is a very negative social force and a conduit for misinformation. So many fools that believe the "news" they read on FB.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think nothing would happen. I mean, the stock market would dip a little, possibly, but people would simply adjust their lives with no real problems.

Thankfully Facebook remains a tool of whimsy for most people, not one of necessity. There are plenty of other "distractions" in life that will occupy our time.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm... I think the bigger issue would be the loss of Messenger. In my opinion, Facebook as a platform is dead. A lot of people in my friends list have stopped posting altogether. Myself, I post once or twice a month for things that I thing my friends would like to watch/see.

</comment><comment><USER16> The real problem with FB is addiction. People especially kids get a shot of dopamine for every "like" on social media. It is also an escape from reality and it is possible to carry on a fantasy life. This experience isn't going to end well.

</comment><comment><USER19> Welp. Certainly the zillions of sites relying on Facebook authentication would be a serious issue. Clearly there would have to be some type of winding down period, as a cold turkey cut off would be massive on scale.

</comment><comment><USER20> I could reduce my /etc/hosts by 1000 lines, that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER21> It would be much harder to promote new products and businesses through ads.

<comment><USER22> Would it, or would it just be cheaper and more effective? Internet is still not a majority of advertiser spending, Facebook does not have a majority of Internet advertising, either.

<comment><USER23> I think it'd be cheaper and less effective. The benefit for advertisers on Facebook is that the rate of click throughs is significantly higher than the more shotgun-style advertising that was in use before Facebook and Google started managing so many ads across the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would be a happier and more productive person.

<comment><USER25> So why not quit already? I mean if you really think that...

<comment><USER26> Indeed. You literally have nothing to lose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kids nowadays don't use Facebook. So I guess it will die together with its generation of users anyway.

</comment><comment><USER28> Progress for Humanity will happen

</comment><comment><USER25> What's facebook?

</comment><comment><USER29> The news industry would collapse because they would have nothing else to write about? The news industry would collapse because one of the biggest news distribution platforms would cease to exist?

I would be happy since I won't have to hear about facebook on HN again.</comment>


Show HN: Website-based chatbots that don't need AI - <AUTHOR> https://landbot.io/hn/index.html <comment><USER2> Hi everyone, this is Jiaqi from Landbot.io Landbot started as an experiment from a technical bug we had with another product, but soon we realize it has great potential. After some hard work, we are finally releasing the new version. We would love to hear feedback from the community!

</comment><comment><USER3> Media is hyping the AI part because it is catchy, but using mostly/only quick replies and buttons gives a much better UX IMHO and a frictionless communication.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the comment! After seeing how poorly AI chatbots performed, we decided to adopt the approach of using interface-based interactions. We also realized that the concept of chatbot is not applicable to every use case. Where we find it has the best fit is for lead generations on landing pages.</comment></comment>


Bill Gates on AI danger: 'I don't understand why some people are not concerned' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/?tid=pm_business_pop <comment><USER2> Bill certainly is a great human being and great inspiration.

However, at this point I feel he is speaking from 10000 ( or more) feet higher. Sure, there is technological advancement day by day but robots and AI taking over human , I don't see it happening for next 25 years at least.

AI assistants such as Siri, Cortana , Samantha, GoogleNow are still in infancy state. Reason why Cortana or Samantha was born is, because Siri was born in rich corporate home.

There are people right outside SV ( ever heard of Oakland?) who struggle for food, home, healthcare and due to mental illness every single day. These common people can't satisfy basic need. Just 15 -25 miles outside best innovative tech hub. All these people know and do every day is to try and fulfill basic needs.

Why would they be concerned with AI when there is no food itself ?

Elites like Bill would certainly think that what if a machine comes out and wipes out stock market , well guess what, its not going to happen.

Unfortunately, we live in society where we don't innovate for betterment of human lives but innovate for gaining more capital. Rich people simply buy these innovations.

If you spend 10000+ hours and come up with innovative and you are poor, there is far greater chance that either your innovative will be sabotaged or will be bought for pennies.

I feel like Bill could try to be more realistic sometime.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am rather feared that few rich and/or powerful try to get control over this new evolving technology by scaremongering and possible government control.

We should be more afraid about this than possible dangerous AI applications.</comment>


Verilog sources for Western Digital's open source RISC-V core - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1 <comment><USER2> First of all, kudos to WD. This makes me feel good about spending $1500 on their spinning drives just last week.

But on a more practical note, what kind of board and toolchain does one need to get this going on an FPGA? Is there a readme somewhere that would walk one through the process?

<comment><USER3> Depends on what you want to do I guess.

You'd need a SoC variety of FPGA with a memory controller as I didn't see one in this code base. Putting this in an FPGA seems feasible.

But I see some challenges. It looks like it's a Harvard-architecture core. That means separate buses for data and instructions, which is not common outside of embedded or specialized systems. I'm sure you can setup GCC to work with this, but it would be a project.

You could build (or find) a memory controller that can multiplex separate instruction and data buses to a single memory space... decide data will be in memory range A and instructions in memory range B, and inform the linker where to put code and data.

I'd probably start by downloading whatever free versions of the fpga tools the vender's offer and see if I can synthesize the code with any of the targets and how well it fit. (assuming someone else hasn't posted that info already). If it isn't going to fit in anything supported by the free version of tools, I probably wouldn't go any further with it myself.

Assuming that it did fit, I would switch gears and would build a simulation testbench, and start tinkering to see how it worked as compared to the docs. If it really is strictly harvard, I'd build a bridge to the FPGA's memory controller that could map two buses to a single memory space. If I got that far I'd start working setting up a compiler and linker to map out code and data partitions to that memory space.

At this point you might be ready to build all this and load the FPGA, but you have no peripherals (like ethernet or a vga). I'd consider slaving it to a raspberry pi or something like that. I saw a debug module in the github repo, so that might be a good thing to expose to the raspberry pi. Or pick a simple bus like i2c and use that to get some visibility from the r-pi into the risc-v state and bridge over to the ram.

\---

Another direction you could take would be to get something like a snickerdoodle. I believe it can boot linux with the arm core in the FPGA, and it has the peripherals you need like ethernet(wifi) and access to an SD card. So the direction I would take there is trying to supplant the ARM core with the RISC-V. So the effort there would be to disable the ARM core, which ought to be straight forward, and build a wrapper around the RISC-V core to be able to talk to the peripherals in place of the ARM.

Given that it's an ARM core, I'm sure all the internal busing is AMBA (AHB/APB/AXI), so it's probably pretty reasonable to try this.

<comment><USER4> > I'm sure you can setup GCC to work with this, but it would be a project.

FWIW AVR is not only Harvard, but code memory addresses point to 16-bit words, and data pointers to bytes. Yet, gcc works great (mostly). It is mainly a matter of whipping up a good linker script and directing code and data to the appropriate sections. Not particularly hard, although Harvardness does leak into your C code, mostly when taking pointers to functions or literal sections stored in flash.

*mostly — gcc long ago stopped taking optimization for code size seriously. Unfortunate for uCtlr users, as for small processors like the AVR optimization for size is pretty much also optimization for speed. Gcc has had some pretty serious code-size regressions in the past — but mostly not noticed by people not trying to shoehorn code into a tiny flash space.

<comment><USER5> It's surprising to me that the RISC-V ISA specification is loose enough that a core could be considered RISC-V-compliant and yet also need a linker script to accommodate its peculiarities.

<comment><USER4> ?? linker scripts are about the layout of the executable. The OS (if there is one) is the driver of that. ISA spec is an orthogonal concept.

<comment><USER5> On x86-64, the page tables control memory access permissions (rwx). The layout and semantics of these page tables are defined by the ISA and work the same on any processor. You wouldn't need to lay out your binary differently on Intel vs. AMD, for example.

It sounds like AVR, by contrast, has some parts of the address space that are (x) only and others that are (rw) only, even though other RISC-V processors don't have this restriction. That seems odd to me.

Maybe it's not as odd if you think of memory as a device that is mapped into your address space. ROM could be mapped into an x86-64 address space and be read-only -- even if the page table said it was writable it would probably throw some kind of hardware exception if you tried to actually write it.

<comment><USER6> (AVR isn't RISC-V)

Having page tables at all is completely optional on RISC-V. This is a chip with no MMU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They have an open-source software simulator for this as well: [https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv- ISS](https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv-ISS)

I'm curious how the performance compares to other open-source cores

<comment><USER8> From cursory glance they have operand read bypass and branch prediction. Operand read bypass speeds things up considerably (factor is 1/N, where N is pipeline length) and the presence of branch prediction hints at speculative execution.

There are two ALUs.

It seems like highly performant core.

<comment><USER9> >"From cursory glance they have operand read bypass and branch prediction."

I'm not familiar with "operand read bypass", is this the same thing as "operand forwarding"? Is this a pipeline optimization? Might you have any link you could share on this?

<comment><USER8> It is the same thing. Just different name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does it compare to BOOM [1], both RISC-V and both open source.

[1] [https://github.com/riscv-boom/riscv-boom](https://github.com/riscv- boom/riscv-boom)

Edit: Not sure why I am getting downvoted, isn't this a valid question?

<comment><USER11> Because you're comparing a workstation class out-of-order CPU design to a teeny tiny embedded chip lacking an FPU or even a unified code/data cache. It's like saying "how does the Intel Atom compare against the AMD Ryzen Threadripper core?"

<comment><USER12> Compared to the most other RV32 soft core implementations, this one is far from being teeny tiny!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be their dream come true if the hw oss community (very small) takes this up and develops it into something huge like for sw projects. There is so much manpower needed to develop these kinds of things - what better way than oss.

However, too little, too late, ee industry. An entire generation of top tier college students have pretty much skipped ee.

<comment><USER14> Lots of unsubstantiated claims here. WD doesn't need the OSS community, the community won't make or break the project. They're a 'nice to have' at best. Remember, if this really means savings of $X (that goes to ARM ??) per unit of storage shipped, given their volumes, they'll gladly fund this to the finish line. Claiming WD _needs_ the OSS community is like claiming chrome/Google needs the community. Sure, the community contributions are valuable, but the core funding and heavy lifting is always in-home.

As for a whole generation skipping EE, no evidence.

<comment><USER15> Looks like royalties are somewhere in the 2% range for ARM[1]. There's also whatever markup companies like Marvell charge to WD. It sounds like WD sells around 40 million drives per year. So, even a savings of 25 cents per unit would be $10M/year.

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries- part-1-h...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-how- arms-business-model-works/2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would have been awesome if they joined the effort of developing FIRRTL[1][2] and using it as a universal (LLVM-alike) hardware intermediate language, better suited modern chip design needs than Verilog or VHDL[3].

[1] [https://github.com/freechipsproject/FIRRTL](https://github.com/freechipsproject/FIRRTL)

[2] [https://aspire.eecs.berkeley.edu/wp/wp- content/uploads/2017/...](https://aspire.eecs.berkeley.edu/wp/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/Reusability-is-FIRRTL-Ground-Izraelevitz.pdf)

[3] [https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19)

<comment><USER17> It's a neat idea, but to me, that's like it. For SW, LLVM serves two-way: 1)target any (supported) arch you like with your language of choice, 2)customize your toolchain to generate native machine code (i.e. GPU shader langauges) from any (supported) language.

I'd say putting yet another middleman between your logic compiler/netlist and what you actually use is not the best course of action for HW implementations. Even HLS has a big friction for use and is hardly picked up, with its obvious, immediate advantages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been meaning to get started with RISC-V for some time now but can't find much on it for total beginners online. Can anyone recommend a starting point for a total noob?

<comment><USER19> Since RISC-V uses Chisel instead of Verilog, you will probably need this first: [https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel- bootcamp](https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel-bootcamp)

For actually learning RISC-V, you can check out these books: [https://riscv.org/risc-v-books/](https://riscv.org/risc-v-books/)

The Patterson and Hennessy book is a great starting point and the RISC-V reader is great reference.

<comment><USER7> > Since RISC-V uses Chisel instead of Verilog

What do you mean? The core here is entirely Verilog/SystemVerilog

<comment><USER19> Sorry I am an idiot how do I edit/delete my comment so I can erase this misinformation?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Unfortunately, if you don't see an edit button on the comment then you can't edit it anymore. But props for admitting you're wrong and trying to correct it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So this is the logic of the controller in Verilog. But I don't see any test scripts. I am not an expert in logic design, but it seems to me that validation is at least as expensive and time consuming as the actual creation because you cannot afford mistakes in the ASIC masks. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER21> You are correct. The most difficult part of a design is not the design itself, it's all the documentation and the verification environment around it.

This is a nice gesture but hardware is a bit different than software and dumping a bunch of RTL code is not really useful.

<comment><USER22> A full environment that could get you to a blinking LED off of an FPGA would be the complete dump, but I don't see the value in downplaying publishing a bulk of code that all others have hidden behind lock and key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great work, many thanks to WD. As far as I see only a subset of the SystemVerilog features is used. Is there a "coding standard" somewhere available specifying this subset with a rationale? Is it mostly to be compatible with Verilator? Is there information available why they used Verilator and how it has proven itself?

</comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain a bit what's happening around the division? [https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1/blob/...](https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1/blob/master/design/exu/exu_div_ctl.sv)

Or give me some google keywords? Is there a link with the pentium bug?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h This? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug)

Edit: This is just the top result from [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pentium+cpu+bug](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pentium+cpu+bug)

<comment><USER24> Link-> relationship

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wester Digital if you are reading this!

Pleeeeze I want to have access as an end user. I'd like to do a predicate push down and be able to write into the DRAM buffer and the flush a commit. Or pin certain blocks directly into DRAM. Pleeeeze!

<comment><USER15> This person got pretty far with the Marvell ARM WD drive controller in 2015: [https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware- hacki...](https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware-hacking- part-1.html)

Also see: [http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1](http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Shut up and take my money!

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this code just for a processor, or an SOC? How is this different from the open source Shakti processor being designed by IIT Chennai?

</comment><comment><USER28> The link assume you know and this as well. May be in both has a few short paragraph for those not in to appreciate and say thx you.</comment>


Microsoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, EFF Urge Supreme Court to Scrap Oracle Patent Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/26/google_java_supreme_court/ <comment><USER2> Title is incorrect, this is not a 'patent' case, it is a 'copyright' case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are correct. That is my mistake.

Oracle is attempting to define their ownership of an API primarily as one where they have a copyright to it rather than a patent. There is apparently a not insignificant difference between the two definitions in legal-speak.</comment></comment>


Math Journal Editors Quit for Open Access - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/31/math-journal-editors-resign-start-rival-open-access-journal <comment><USER2> As a former System's Librarian YES! This is such a racket. You sell new Journals to libraries and you made your living just doing that. Some of the Journals are hundreds of dollars to have in print. Libraries then put the old journals in behind the new one for about 18 or so copies. The older ones get stored in boxes and collect dust. Occasionally (10 out of a thousand students will come in and ask for help to find a journal. That was all.

As Journals came online they solved the storage and accessibility problems for the library. $30,000 a year to save your library team all the work and increase accessibility is AWESOME sales pitch. Within 3 years our $30,000 bill became $90,000 and today my old library has 3 less librarians due to the cost of digital access (Or so I am told). Digital Access = free money that they never got till now. Also many Journals are not included in the digital access for 12 to 18 months so that their print business stayed at the same level and so did the storage for libraries.

To think of all that and the fact that most of the Journals's research has direct use of tax payer funds but not give tax payer access is crazy. Also knowledge is power and all our top knowledge is behind closed doors. Drove me nuts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Readers might also be interested to hear that Timothy Gowers, Cambridge mathematics professor and one of the foremost voices of the Elsevier boycott, has pioneered the creation of a peer-reviewed mathematics journal which acts as an Arxiv overlay and is free to publish in.

[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis- an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv- overlay-journal/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope this is just the beginning. What would make this easier is a free platform for article submission and refereeing. That usually takes away 90% of the menial work of inviting referees, storing reviews, managing revisions, etc. Some non-free options such as Editorial Manager and Elsevier's own system are slow and awkward.

<comment><USER2> This has been going on for decades but it doesn't seem to touch JSTOR and company much at all in the long run. AKA Read that in this article.

They are thinking that this might be different but I guarantee you there are plenty of other University Professors that would love to have the title of Chief Editor to make them look good to their school's administration and ease their research load.

<comment><USER4> Well, even with infinitely many greedy would-be EiC of a paid-access journal it just takes one open-access journal in the same area with some well-known editor to change things.

The problem is not that at least one such paid-access journal exists, it is that it takes time for any journal to earn reputation. Once that happens, you probably get a lower teaching/research load as an EiC of an open-access journal as well.

<comment><USER2> Work flow is also the issue. As a researcher many just pop into their one database MAYBE two and see what's in their walled garden.

I would work on getting people to use Open Journal search engines but then they were disappointed in the inconsistent quality of journals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good for them. The academic publishing industry needs a good shakeup.

</comment><comment><USER6> Evidently their contracts didn't have a proper no-compete clause. </s>

<comment><USER7> No-compete clauses rarely hold up in court anyway.

<comment><USER8> Most of the governance board is in Europe:

[http://www.mathoa.org/sample-page/governance- structure/](http://www.mathoa.org/sample-page/governance-structure/)

Depending on the country, the non compete will be invalid. e.g. UK where this would be listed as 'restraint of trade' if the previous publisher was not still paying the editors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- compete_clause#Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- compete_clause#Europe)

Also, they're only valid within the same country so if the editors happened to move country then the non-compete would have been invalidated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> E-JC is also notable for combinatorics: [http://www.combinatorics.org/](http://www.combinatorics.org/)</comment>


Medicine Crow, one of the last links to Battle of Little Bighorn, dies at 102 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/04/native-american-war-chief-joseph-medicine-crow-dies-aged-102 <comment><USER2> Would have been a more interesting story to actually hear some of the actual retelling of what happened from the scouts that were with Custer.</comment>


Ask HN: Internet Service Plans, upload = download? - <AUTHOR>

Why do ISPs offer internet service plans that don't offer equal uploads and downloads? <comment><USER2> Because it's easier to regulate knowing more people download / stream than upload. Only people in general uploading significant data are business or file sharing.</comment>


The 'Real' reason why few IITian's do a start up - <AUTHOR> http://ubiquitary.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/the-real-reason-why-few-iitians-do-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> Very Sensational. And very little proof to back it up.

I dont know if IIT Delhi is the most entrepreneurial - because some is running around with a watermelon helmet and produced a movie? :)

Any cohort, be is the top 20% or the long tail, will have few risktakers. how does having the IIT Tagline make things any different?

Even by your own thought process, I wouldnt say they dont want to fail, they just have a very different notion of success and I'm sure they believe they are successful. Let them be.

At the end of the day, whether we choose to become entrepreneurs, fight the daily battles of life, or take a route that pays well - we have to stay true to our Dharma (that's really what it all comes down to).

PS: It does look like IITians and IIM grads find their way into the ecosystem - most of them as venture capitalists. About 60% of the Associate Partners in Indian Venture Capital firms come from IIT / IIMs (lower from 80% as to 5-10 years ago). Thats out of a sample of 1500 AP Positions (roughly)

Source ([http://bestengagingcommunities.com/2012/07/10/how-to-get- a-j...](http://bestengagingcommunities.com/2012/07/10/how-to-get-a-job-as-a- venture-capitalist/))

<comment><AUTHOR> Well running around with a watermelon helmet is catchy, isnt it? ;-) Anyways, I do not intend to say that having IIT tagline makes anything different. But I am aware of the quality of students there. (I do not mean that there aren't quality students elsewhere. It's just that this is the environment I am aware about.)

In fact, the bottom line of the article that most important trait you need when you start up is the willingness to fail. If you don't have that, it does not matter what your background is or how smart you are, you aren't going to succeed as an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER2> Disagree. If you arent hallucinated by the vision that you can somehow change the world, you wouldnt dare step out either. One has to be a masochist to want to set up themselves for failure.

Once again, its not the embracing of failure, but what you perceive as failure. Most start out for the fact that they love what they do and would do it even if they werent paid for it - its the learning along the way, the friends they make and the experience that drives them. The payout, is a bonus. Failure is not going anywhere, and not even getting a lesson out of it or growing a new skill.

There is nothing wrong with the article. You are setting yourself up for some trouble when you claim you know the "real" reason - backed by zilch data, and just pure perception :)</comment></comment></comment>


Want to freak yourself out? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/iamdylancurran/status/977559925680467968 <comment><USER2> Interesting but what should be of greater concern is how this collected data can be used and the fact that you can't have them delete it.

It frustrates me when even very smart techies get caught up on data collection when we know advances in ML and behavioral psychology have made it so that these companies and governments can do some scary and downright disturbing things.

For example: Sure, I don't like it when google plots on a map every place I travel to via location history. But of greater concern would be collection of gyroscope and other sensor data from my phone. Does <bigcorp> know how I walk,handle my phone and what other devices are usually near me? Can they use this and other seemingly innocuous data over time to recognize or infer behavioral patterns about me? Is any of the content I consume being filtered or customized based on this collected data?

Can FB for example induce depression and cause n% of people to commit suicide? Can this data be used to manipulate employees to staying at or leaving a company,or applying for or declining a position?

This is what concens me greatly,not whether or not google has a naked picture of me or if someone at FB has knowledge of my phone or text conversations.

Sadly the public is completely clueless as to what is at stake -- it isn't just privacy.

<comment><USER3> You _can_ delete it, at least sometimes. For example, here is how to do it for Google location history:

[https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't use any form of social media due to privacy concerns but this person clearly doesn't understand the concept of caching despite being a "technical consultant and web developer". Or he's deliberately sensationalizing things that he knows to be innocuous.

<comment><USER5> Caching implies short term use. Yes, all of the things he mentioned could be useful for short term caching.

We both know that modern social tech is built on big data crunching, meta data analysis, and using "micro-pyschology" (adding up all the small habits) to influence people.

Do you use a search engine? Do your friends use Social media? Have you been photographed in the last 3 years and stored on a google/facebook server? As much as you want to believe "your data" is not a part of this dataset, you are absolutely a node on this graph.

My fav eye-opener: Facebook tells you about your friend's photos that you could be tagged in. Most people forget that facebook could also tell you about the _strangers_ photos you are in, but it would freak you out.

<comment><USER4> I agree that much of what he's showing does not need to be kept by Facebook or Google or whoever else and I've argued for strongly incentivizing companies to keep as little data as possible elsewhere. I just feel like he's presenting his material in a highly sensationalized manner with the express goal of stoking as much fear and outrage as possible among a less technically-inclined audience.

I suspect that restricting facial recognition in Facebook photos to friends of the photographer increases accuracy by a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Consider myself un-freaked out. I guess if you turn off these settings, and don't feed Google any information, they don't really know very much about you. I'm certainly not upset by anything they seem to know, to the extent that any of it is even correct.

<comment><USER7> Also in one of the tweet he says that his takeout is 5.5gb which also includes his whole email history and gdrive which probably take up most of the space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> re: "the file is 5.5GB BIG, which is roughly 3 MILLION Word documents"

If this includes all your email (including attachments), this shouldn't be surprising. After all, a big selling point for switching to Gmail was that you can keep all your old email forever.

<comment><USER8> It also includes your youtube videos (you have uploaded).

So maybe "the file is 5.5GB BIG, which is roughly 1 movie" would also be a fair comparison to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Google stores your location (if you have it turned on) every time you turn > on your phone, and you can see a timeline from the first day you started > using Google on your phone

This turned out to be useful when I couldn't find my new $600 phone (and battery was dead).

Turns out it has been in a park overnight after slipping out while I was playing soccer with the kids.

Unfortunately, I had location off on an earlier phone, and I never did find that one.

<comment><USER10> Location history has been super useful to me on several occasions:

-Find my way back to a cabin in the woods where I had been earlier (I had the address, bur google maps couldnt find it).

-Find that restaurant I went with some friends a week ago

-Verify if my credit card was compromised, or if I actually had spent 30€ mysef that night

<comment><USER11> Right, these are nice but you could also, yknow, just track it yourself...which is what is happening actually, but then you're giving it to google

<comment><USER9> Track it myself...where?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given the fact that Google apparently stores the pictures you've taken with your phone (at least on Android?) and Snapchat saves all of the pictures you've sent with it for an unknown amount of time, wouldn't that reasonably mean that both companies are storing child pornography on their servers? Snapchat in particular.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this word for word (picture for picture) the same BBC article that was on the front page yesterday?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might be, I don't know. It came through on my Twitter feed and I thought it was interesting.</comment></comment>