Einstein: Why Socialism? (1949) - <AUTHOR> http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps, if an "Einstein" were to run the economy, state ownership of the means of production, and central planning, would be workable. The problem is that eventually the "Einstein" would perish or be replaced, and the lesser replacement would be a disaster.

There is nothing preferable in a few oligarches (or plutocrats) running everything as "the government", to capitalism. In fact, at least capitalism is somewhat distributed, and capitalists have a vested interest in pleasing their customers. Not so with government!

I'm a huge admirer of Einstein in general, but in this he was far outside his area of expertise!

<comment><USER3> Aren't you also outside far outside your expertise?

Oligarchy is a political form. Capitalism is an economic form. They are neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive.

Consider that China is often used an example of state capitalism, and Russia as an example of corporate oligarchy.

Even North Korea has capitalists in all but name. See [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/29/north-korea- cap...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/29/north-korea-capitalism- new-business-elite) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another an example of how, the fact that a person can contribute to the design and construction nuclear bombs does not automatically make him qualified to condemn the rest of the society to produce what he and his brethren deem desirable.

Hayek explained the problems with socialism in the 30s and 40s. His contemporaries laughed at him; he won the Nobel prize in 1974.

[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic- sciences/lau...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic- sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html)

As Mises pointed out, these self-appointed enlightened people "... forget that a dictator, too, may act differently from their wishes, and that there is no assurance that he will really try for the `best,' and, even if he should seek it, that he should find the way to the `best.'" [http://blog.qtau.com/2009/12/food-for-thought-mises-on- socia...](http://blog.qtau.com/2009/12/food-for-thought-mises-on- socialist.html)

If those don't make sense to you, I recommend "Moscow on the Hudson," "Demolition Man," and "Logan's Run."

<comment><USER3> Is this the same Hayek who defended transitional dictatorship, and believed that the Pinochet government was a good example of the sort of dictatorship that would likely lead to a liberal government?

<comment><USER4> I referred specifically to Hayek's work in the 30s and the 40s for which he won the Nobel prize in 1974 ... About the time the Rational Expectations Revolution was beginning to gain momentum.

Now, while I actually lived under dictatorship, and did not enjoy it one bit, I must say, if I am forced to make a choice between Allende and Pinochet, I'll go for Pinochet every time. Just look at where Chile was before Bachelet was elected, and where, say, Argentina, and Venezuela, and Brazil are ...

<comment><USER3> Your original statement was that just because Einstein knew physics doesn't "automatically make him qualified to condemn the rest of the society to produce what he and his brethren deem desirable."

That needlessly gendered statement is identical in structure to my objection that Hayek's understanding of economics doesn't "automatically make him qualified to condemn the rest of the society to" dictatorships, even if only temporary.

Gunnar Myrdal shared the prize with Hayek but had quite different views on government, and regarded Hayek as a reactionary. Myrdal was, among other things, a member of the Swedish Parliament for the Social Democrat party. You can therefore only conclude that the Nobel Prize committee was recognizing those areas of economics where Myrdal and Hayek had similar views. You cannot extend that recognition to include all of Hayek's views.

If forced to choose between having all of my limbs cut off and having just my foot cut off, I think I could express a clear preference as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk is serious about tunnels - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14391410/elon-musk-tunnels-traffic-tesla-spacex-boring-company <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13482082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13482082)</comment>


Finding Great Dev Talent   - <AUTHOR> http://edurev.com/blog/2007/04/10/finding-great-dev-talent/ <comment><USER2> These guys are doomed.

To repeat what I've said elsewhere: we need a succinct term for non-technical people who think they should be doing startups and just have to find some programmers to realize their visions. You can't call them suits or MBAs because most of them didn't go to B-school and don't wear suits. What to call them?

<comment><USER3> What about "Free Lunchers"? They think that it's a hot market so they can easily create a company and then flip it for some cash?

<comment><USER4> Whereas you are in the market for the hard work, I suppose?

<comment><USER3> I prefer to think of it as being in the market because you've a passion to solve a problem. There's going to be hard work involved in solving a real problem that people are facing and solving it in a way that's pleasant for the average user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe a lot of startups also need to realize that an enthusiastic person with years of experience and an incomplete degree is better than most college graduates with no real-world experience.

Seriously. The amount of degree snobbery in these startups founded by Stanford (and other top-level school) graduates is ridiculous. They are turning down tons of great developers everyday, most likely.

<comment><USER6> It's one of those silver lining things. You end up doing your own start-up instead, which is usually what you preferred anyway.

I wonder how many top developers are vanishing from the workforce because their start-up succeeded. A year or three of hard work and then retirement.

Or they end up owning/running some other business, where they aren't using their most highly developed skill, programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Startups think they can just say they use Ruby on Rails and that will attract super star hackers. Just because it 'seems' that many hackers are moving to RoR doesn't mean they wanna work for you. You should tell them why they should work for you. Just as you're looking for good talent, they're looking for a good environment in which they can be learn and practice they art.

<comment><USER3> As someone who's looking for talent, let me ask you what you'd be looking for. Here's what I think high quality developers are looking for; I'd love your thoughts on whether I'm out to lunch or not: 1) Chance to be part of a great engineering team 2) Chance to solve complex problems facing users 3) Opportunity to push the limits of what's possible with technology 4) Ability to influence company's strategy and design

Let me know your thoughts.

<comment><USER8> I think your list cuts across the spectrum too broadly. Younger, more inexperienced developers should be looking, number one, to work with people who know a ton more than they do so that they can learn from the greats. Older, more experienced devs will want more influence on design (although maybe not strategy).

I think the solving complex problems part is not a real factor. Every business has its problems, and most of them are non-trivial (otherwise, everyone would be in the business), so while it's maybe your job to convince someone that your problems are worth solving, it's not necessary to prove that your problems are hard.

I also think most hackers get less joy out of pushing technology to the limits and more joy out of doing something well. Sometimes those may coincide (scaling Rails, for example) but often times pushing technology to the limits means you're not solving the problem elegantly/economically. Take Google for example; they've got the most powerful distributed computation system in the world, but it's done on some really crappy PC's.

<comment><USER6> > Younger, more inexperienced developers should be looking, number one, to > work with people who know a ton more than they do so that they can learn > from the greats

Do you know anyone who actually learned this way? I, and others I know, learned mostly from reading (docs, books, code, tutorials, etc.). Great developers who are actually working don't want to be interrupted every time some inexperienced person needs help.

I also find presentations at conventions to often be painfully slow at conveying information. I can read in 5 minutes what it takes a presenter 30 minutes to talk about, and further, I can get answers to specific questions that always pop up when a presentation glosses over the details. Plus, if I already know something about it, I can just grab the knowledge "diffs" rather than sitting through 15 minutes of introduction.

Google is the #1 tool I use when programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> mentors are a great thing to have, and good ones are hard to find. It's not someone you bug every time you have a little problem with your code, but someone who's been where you are now and can give you advice over a few drinks after work.

I can think of two colleagues who were critical in me ditching wage slavery and becoming a freelancer, one is a programmer, the other is a CTO but started as a network guy. I didn't learn much from them about being a developer, but I sure learned a lot about being a professional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is big shit

<comment><USER7> Elaborate</comment></comment>


Google, on Crawling JavaScript Sites and Progressive Web Apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.seroundtable.com/google-on-crawling-javascript-sites-progressive-web-apps-21737.html <comment><USER2> I'm guessing Angular already handles these perfectly?</comment>


Ask HN: Why did Amazon buy Alexa? - <AUTHOR> In 1999, one can understand Amazon's need to study patterns around emerging traffic trends in dot com's that could lend to its fledgling online business. Fast forward to 2020, how does Alexa.com fit into Amazon's business model? Does it have anything to do with AWS? <comment><USER2> If the acquisition in 1999 made sense (it certainly did), the question might be whether the act of spinning off the company makes sense in 2020.

I don't have an answer, but I suspect that spinning off the company is just a worse choice than keeping it or shutting it down. Maybe the same concept applies to IMDB.

Perhaps it's the same reason why Netflix hasn't spun off DVD Netflix. It's profitable, but it isn't attractive to sell to someone else.

I am just speculating.

<comment><USER3> IMDB is a very useful product connection & marketing platform for Amazon for their Prime & Hollywood business. Having quality assets in Hollywood, is worthwhile for multiple reasons. Besides that, Bezos is a Hollywood prestige junky, and IMDB is one of the highest traffic sites in the entertainment business (in the world in general also).

BoxOfficeMojo by contrast is more like the old Alexa.com, it's almost worthless at this point. It has a bit of traffic they can use for marketing, so Amazon recently remade the product to update it a bit (first design update in like 12 years). Other than that, it's not very valuable.

It's an impressively dumb move that Amazon has made with Alexa.com. They should have entirely abandoned the name, when they went with Alexa for the name of their home consumer gadget product ('intelligent speaker'). They should have handed the domain to the new Alexa gadget product, so when consumers type in Alexa.com they get what they would expect to; and it should be marketed everywhere with that domain associated to the gadget.

Just rename the old Alexa web stats product and be done with it. If they think they can make some money off of it via AWS, that's fine, do it with another name. There's zero name value in keeping Alexa.com tied to what it is now. Call it the AWS Web Stats Service and hand Alexa.com to the AI product for consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was wondering how Amazon can afford Alexa. Running the service must cost a lot and it's not like they can show ads</comment>


TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html <comment><USER2> Are K-Pop Stans the same as K-Pop Fans, but with the Stan connotation from the Eminem song?[1]

This is the first I've ever heard the term, the author of the article doesn't attempt to define it at all, and I'm wondering if it's a name that the fans (stans) chose or was given to them because of their zeal... because that is quite the negative connotation.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_\(song\))</comment>


Amazon: Lack of Redundancy - <AUTHOR> http://webgadgets.ws/roller/strange/entry/lack_of_redundancy <comment><USER2> It seems like most of the complaint in the first half (before the author starts talking about redundancy technologies) isn't actually about redundancy at all. It's a complaint that they have these XP laptops that they can't actually develop on and need access to their linux desktops.

Isn't the solution, y'know, simply to give the developers _linux_ laptops and put the non-essential junk on windows boxes under their desks? Or inside a vmware instance? I'll admit I was shocked that they're using Outlook. I actually interviewed there many years back and was impressed at how sane the whole environment seemed. Maybe things have changed.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is part of why I do everything in the terminal

latency is acceptable, even when my workstation is on the other side of the globe, and I can buy a new workstation for 'change in the couch' money. (I currently have a $300 Everex CloudBook (via nanobook) I got at Wallmart for the bus rides. that and a usb 3g modem, and I'm good to go.)

Backups are easy. Granted, the box isn't entirely redundant. If the motherboard blows on it, I've got to run to the datacenter and fix it or restore from backup to another box (if I'm remote) and I have a problem if the datacenter goes up in smoke, but it's been a pretty reliable system so far. The disk I'm on is mirrored, so I've not actually had to restore from backup in a few years.

But yeah, it's nice because I can take a total 'it's disposable' attitude towards any laptop or desktop. If it gives me trouble, format and re install. If a client wants me to use one of her workstations, no problem (though I change the password from somewhere trusted when I'm done.)

Heck with a sufficiently advanced cellphone I can console in.

<comment><USER4> Any sufficiently advanced cellphone will have SSH.

(Yes, it's a riff on Arthur C. Clarke.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> More like lack of an article... (I got a 404. Mirror?)

<comment><USER6> Talk about lack of redundancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazon Redundancy: prioritize this feature. Next.</comment>


Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/11/why-ethereum-is-outpacing-bitcoin/ <comment><USER4> This is an ad. _" Jack du Rose is a cofounder of Colony, an Ethereum-based operating system for open organizations."_

Whatever that is. (It seems to be a scheme for monetizing StackOverflow rankings.[1] Or something like that. If it even exists. The web site is all pretty pictures with no content.)

Most altcoins crash after a while. See Coin Market Cap.[2]

[1] [https://colony.io/](https://colony.io/) [2] [https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/)

<comment><USER5> Colony is a well known organisation in the Ethereum community. Giving presentations on multiple devcons of Ethereum. Knowing that they have been around for a while gives him the authority to share his opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _As a "hard fork" looms, which looks set to split Bitcoin into two separate > currencies that will have to fight for custody of the Bitcoin moniker_

This already happened to eth when the creators hard forked the chain in an effort to roll back operations of an eth application that was used in a way that the creators did not anticipate. If this didn't kill ethereum why would it be a problem for bitcoin? Fortunately for bitcoin, there isn't a highly influential and transparently self-interested creator lording over the project.

> _Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from tens of minutes to several > hours, depending on how busy the network is._

An unsolved growth problem for the reining incumbent that remains unsolved by ethereum. Transactions take a long time because decentralized proof of work verification is slow. A lot of people will say "proof of stake is coming!!!" but it's essentially vaporware and all signs point to the conclusion that it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Yeah, people are working on it, like all vaporware.

> _Ethereum is actually a platform for new kinds of decentralized (often > financial) applications (dApps) that run on a peer-to-peer network of > computers_

Except this isn't actually happening in practice. I am yet to see any "new kinds of decentralized applications", just toy applications that have no practical purpose besides internet roulette

> _TL;DR: Bitcoin's dominance is slipping because its utility is limited and > weakening versus other more recently developed, less politicized > cryptocurrencies._

Bitcoin's dominance is not slipping because it's utility was marginal to begin with and eth certainly doesn't offer much in the way of compelling improvements over bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> > it's essentially vaporware and all signs point to the conclusion that it > will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Here's the ethereum proof of stake code that will go live on ethereum sometime this year: [https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/sim...](https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/simple_casper.v.py)

This is the actual production code (though of course still in draft form, under review)

> just toy applications that have no practical purpose

The UN uses an ethereum app to send aid to Syrian refugees via vouchers: [http://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid- to-10000-sy...](http://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid- to-10000-syrian-refugees-using-ethereum-blockchain/)

<comment><USER6> > _Here 's the ethereum proof of stake code that will go live on ethereum > sometime this year_

Until it goes live, it's vaporware. The issue isn't "can proof of stake code be written" the question is "will eth continue to function safely and correctly using a proof of stake system"? We'll talk when it hits production.

> _The UN uses an ethereum app to send aid to Syrian refugees via vouchers:_

The details are not really clear from the article. How does this work? Why was this possible with eth but not with bitcoin or dogecoin or any other cryptotoken? How do displaced Syrian refugees accept, manage, and spend digital currency? I am highly skeptical of this without lots of details.

<comment><USER7> > Until it goes live, it's vaporware.

That's a ridiculous definition. So nobody can advertise that they plan to add a novel feature to a piece of software, even if the code already exists in draft form, without being labeled a vaporware peddler?

<comment><USER6> The standards are higher for the cryptocurrency sphere which is notorious for extreme hyperbole, tons of hype, and poor results to match it, _especially_ when you're talking about code that is supposed to solve the single most difficult problem of blockchain currencies.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you insofar that cryptocurrency protocols involve economic game theoretic challenges that are impossible to fully validate without running in full production. It's 100% fair to remain skeptical of POS until we see a successful launch of the system... but that's different than saying something is "vaporware".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. [https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong- about-ethereum-80...](https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about- ethereum-804c9a906d36)

It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

<comment><USER9> People have been expecting the crypto bubble to pop for almost a decade now, but prices continue to rise.

At some point you have to admit that this isn't tulip bulbs.

<comment><USER10> Prices continually rising is an argument for how this _is_ tulips.

The valid counterargument would be that the tulips are largely being used for something other than trading tulips.

<comment><USER11> Tulips have SOME intrinsic value. If doomsday comes, the world is over.. a toolip can be planted outside your house and it looks a little bit more pretty. Or maybe you can eat it.

Gold has SOME intrinsic value. It is very good for certain applications, I believe trace amounts are used in compute parts. Worst case you can make something shiny to look at, that will be rust proof and easy to shape.

What is the intrinsic value of ETH or Bitcoin? It literally has nothing to back it.

<comment><USER12> For ETH, that's not really true: you can use it to pay for computation on the Ethereum blockchain. The value you assign to that computation may not be very significant, but it's hard to justify the notion that it's zero.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue the value of the computation is strictly less than zero, because I could do it cheaper without using Ethereum at all.

<comment><USER13> thats like saying that the value of gasoline is less than zero because you could just walk the distance without polluting the environment.

computing power is inherently valuable. the value of AWS is less than zero because you could just buy a computer and do the computation cheaper at home. duh.

<comment><USER10> The value of the trickle of gasoline to get me to my kitchen is less than zero. To use it I would have to waste considerable money architecting a way to get my car indoors.

The value of AWS is greater than zero because spending my day monitoring my server would be exponentially more costly than paying Amazon to do it at scale.

And Ether is worth less than zero (as a computation engine) because I could develop and run the computation in less time by opening vim, even if the Ether was free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The ICO mania definitely contributes to this, but so does the worry about a Bitcoin split. I've read a lot about it and could not give you a coherent answer of what is likely to happen and what would be the impact if it does or does not happen. So people like me (probably in top 5% of knowledge among Bitcoin holders about the technical aspects) put holdings in other coins to wait and see.

The coins that stand to benefit most from this are the ones traded on GDAX -- Ether and Litecoin. And Ether has the most breathless hype going for it right now. And this is the same advice I give to the non-technical people in my life who've jumped in late and don't have a Poloniex or Bittrex account to trade other coins (sign up for GDAX, balance things with a wait-and-see attitude towards August 1st).

BTW - my 89 year old farmer grandpa who can't even get wired internet at his house now has a crypto portfolio, in case you're looking for bubble indicators. (And if you ask why my advice wasn't to avoid an investment you don't understand -- well, I am bullish on crypto long term and they really wanted to get in, and view it as a gamble, so . . .)

<comment><USER15> I assume you sold him on the investment tho

<comment><USER14> He sold himself just on whatever is said on Bloomberg etc. And he views it about like laying $$$ on the Georgia Bulldogs to cover against Alabama, so I'm not going to put up a fight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's pretty clear what's happening. Ethereum (ETH) is rising because people are buying into initial coin offerings (ICOs). They aren't holding ETH, so they don't care about the price of ETH rising in terms of Bitcoin (BTC) or dollars. The ICOs are the significant holders of ETH. They haven't sold their ETH because 1) the price of ETH is still rising rapidly, 2) they don't yet need to access the funds for development, and 3) smart contracts connected to token sales usually allocate ETH for future use. Eventually, ICOs will begin to sell or distribute their ETH to fund the development of their projects.

<comment><USER17> I don't think that is true at all. Most people can't even get in on the ICOs.

<comment><USER18> It's not about "most people," it's about "most cash."

The "whales" are buying ICOs left and right, and dumping their Bitcoin/other altcoins. That's the main reason for ETH's rise.

Eventually some of these ICOs will prove to be scams, or will get hacked with catastrophic results, and ETH's price will fall again. It doesn't necessarily mean it won't rise back-up again, but by then we'll just have to see if ETH is still a top 2 coin to get.

<comment><USER17> Ok show me data on what percent of the market cap is from ICOs. Bancor's recent debacle raised 150 million and that is the largest ICO yet. Ethereum has a 36 billion market cap as far as I know.

<comment><USER19> It's a question of liquidity, not of "market cap".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could someone that understands crypto better than me explain why Bitcoin's fees and transactions times have become so high all of a sudden? Is it just a matter of network congestion, or does it have as its root some underlying mathematical factor instead?

Hoping to get a better answer here than on reddit. /r/bitcoin and /r/btc are both biased echo chambers.

<comment><USER21> Bitcoin blockchain has a limit of 1MB of transactions in a block. This was set in 2013, when Satoshi put it in place. He didn't give much explanation for it, but it was probably to avoid a spam attack. He said it could be raised later: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg151...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg15139)

There are arguments for and against increasing the blocksize.

For:

\- Support more transactions per second

\- Lower fees for users

Against:

\- Hardfork requires all full node operators to upgrade, or they could see incorrect balances

\- Lower fees mean that miners make less money

Also, generally, there are some philosophical differences between the sides. The big-block side usually wants bitcoin to be more like a payment network, wherease the small-block side typically views it more as digital gold and store of value.

<comment><USER22> "Lower fees mean that miners make less money" \- not really. There are two mechanisms:

      1. The congestion would mean bigger fees
      2. In bigger blocks there will be more transactions - so more fees in the block

The most probably cancel each other.

Actually the big miners seem to be in favour of the Bitcoin Unlimited big blocks. What they want to stop is SegWit which is needed for scaling bitcoin off chain with Lightning etc. There is a conspiracy theory about that - and it actually makes sense to me - which is that SegWit would eliminate ASICBoost (which is an optimization technique that is implemented in some ASIC miners). But there is also another narrative that Lightning would mean banking entering the Bitcoin community - and that is why it should be stopped.

Bitcoin can never become a good payment processor - this would require many orders of magnitude bigger blocks (now bitcoin can process about 7 transactions per second, VISA can process 50K transactions per second). And while storage for bigger blocks grows linearly - the other algos have probably worse complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So a guy from a company selling Ethereum is telling us why it's better then the stuff they've copied?

</comment><comment><USER24> It's simple - Bitcoin is stagnant and full of politics and holy wars where as ETH is implementing everything Bitcoin promised 5 years ago.

Bitcoin is facing an existential crisis August 1st (UASF) that some view as liberation and others as extortion. As if BTC wasn't high risk enough!

Yes we haven't seen a single ICO that has resulted in anything worth anything yet and we probably shouldn't any time soon. Yes the rise in ETH the last few months is comical. Yes there are plenty of scams out there right now and some we don't even know are scams yet. But it's damn exciting.

Anyone with an imagination can see this. It's the wild west and it's fun and crazy. And there's a real opportunity here to do something different. 99.9% of these early things are going to fail but there will be a breakthrough eventually I believe. And when that happens...

<comment><USER7> Nicely said!

And we should add to that that the exciting parts of ethereum may never fully exist in ethereum itself: It's totally plausible that this tech could instead be adopted by another project before becoming wildly successful. However, this doesn't make ethereum tech any less interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Between this and Fred Wilson's recent comments, it's pretty neat seeing a meme take shape right before our eyes.

I'm not saying this article is wrong, but that it offers little substance.

My pet theory is that Ethereum will transiently surpass Bitcoin in market cap in the next weeks, triggering a 5x surge in Bitcoin's price. Ethereum will then follow, and what happens next is anyone's guess. Why do I think that? Uh..heuristics.

<comment> aaron-lebo Why is Ethereum's price rising? It's because of breathless articles like this. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wonder how much this guy has invested?

If those dapps are so great, why isn't there a single one that regular people are using today?

<comment><USER15> You could say that about the internet 30 years ago...

<comment><USER6> And? You're remarking on a surface-level resemblance to the greatest communication and economic innovation in human history. It's a disingenuous comparison.

<comment><USER26> Judging by the size of financial industry, the electronic money which could be programmed to do things with money without human help 24 hours per day is a serious threat to many companies in finance.

<comment><USER6> > _do things with money without human help 24 hours per day_

This was already possible before cryptocurrencies, hence how I'm able to buy anything online at any time of day and have it delivered to me within 24 hours.

<comment><USER15> blockchains with smart contracts can automate away entire financial industries; title holding company comes to mind.

<comment><USER6> Explain how smart contracts would automate away a title holding companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of articles mention the likes of Intel, Microsoft, Infosys, Samsung, J.P. Morgan etc — are building software using Ethereum or some other blockchain platform. But I wonder if they actually are just forking the code off of Github and creating their own blockchain or ethereum-based Microsoft token, or Intel token for their own internal use and this is being misrepresented by cryptocurrency-owning journalists.

It seems to be too risky for big companies to build DApps for the authentic Ethereum when they can't predict that the price of gas won't quadruple again. Creating their own blockchain could mean cheaper or free gas with all of the upsides to using ethereum and an added customization ability.

If this is true, then the price increases in ethereum have been unfounded.

<comment><USER28> Other companies use private ethereum blockchains. The worst part is that Ethereum community called Ripple a scam coin because banks don't actually use it for transactions but they didn't care to realize that ethereum is the same

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Ethereum has raced ahead with technology that not only does everything > Bitcoin can do faster, in higher volume, and at lower cost — it does a lot > more besides.

Statements like these frustrate me, because they paint a picture as though Ethereum is a strict upgrade to Bitcoin, without depicting the many sacrifices that Ethereum has made to get its advantages. The word blockchain in general has completely changed meaning - no longer does it specify systems where there is no trust involved, instead it specifies systems that create a high interoperability between money and applications.

There's a huge difference in the security and decentralization model of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leadership, actively rejects the pursuance of one, and works hard to build a network that simply can't be attacked.

Ethereum on the other hand has a powerful central leadership, and moves faster and does things that are in general far less secure. When they hit road bumps like the DAO attack, the 'Spurious Dragon' chain split, or other major network events, they fall back on their central leadership to resolve the issue quickly.

That's really not decentralized, and it's completely different from the vision that Bitcoin originally painted. It's a completely valid model, and it's a step up from using a fully centralized platform like the Google Cloud, but ultimately the Ethereum foundation and surrounding leadership has the ability to push through controversial changes, something that is strictly rejected by the Bitcoin philosophy. It's also not clear what will happen if someone like the US Government leans into the Ethereum Foundation asking for things like capital controls. Bitcoin doesn't have a leadership for the government to lean into - it's going to be a lot harder to add captial controls to Bitcoin than to Ethereum. Depending on who you are, that's either an advantage or a disadvantage, but at the very least it's a very clear distinguisher.

For that reason, Bitcoin is far more interesting to me as a technology. It's the first and really only, technology that allowed something like a monetary system to stand completely independent of a leadership or a governance structure. Ethereum hasn't achieved the same thing, that much is made obvious by the fact alone that they don't know what the core consensus algorithm of the network will be in 18 months (maybe it will switch to a yet-undefined Proof-of-Stake, maybe not).

Don't get me wrong. Ethereum is doing interesting things. They've completely changed the way people thing about money and applications, and made it possible to apply money to everything. But it's far less secure, and it Ethereum today simply wouldn't work without its central leadership. To me, that makes it not much different from any other technology out there - <USER2> giving us new and more efficient ways to do things that we have already been doing.

But anybody who thinks that Ethereum is a strict upgrade to Bitcoin has completely missed the point, because Ethereum does not have the core value proposition that Bitcoin provides. Bitcoin is a complete financial system that you can use without needing to trust anybody. Not the developers, not the miners, not the government. Bitcoin is extremely impressive, and definitely is a technology in a class of its own.

</comment><comment><USER30> "In a world where people are used to online payments being confirmed instantly, Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from tens of minutes to several hours, depending on how busy the network is."

Online payments (via traditional means) are by no means "confirmed instantly". The _authorization_ happens more-or-less instantly, but that's only the first of multiple steps in the transaction process; the actual transfer of funds often takes at least one business day, if not more.

<comment><USER31> There's two ways of interpreting "online payments" here. Through the lens of ACH/wire payments, your point is spot on.

However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc.; that's certainly how I interpreted the sentence. I'd argue that those services are better comparisons for P2P payments, especially in the US, where most consumers are not able or inclined to give out their bank information to receive an ACH payment.

Compared to those incumbent online P2P payment services, Bitcoin really is starting to lag behind in that regard.

<comment><USER30> "However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc."

And my remark is still applicable there, since they're basically just frontends to the traditional ACH/wire payment system (at least in the case of Paypal; I haven't used Venmo much, so I'm not as familiar with how it works). Unless Paypal is paying the seller before receiving actual funds from the buyer, I'm not really seeing how this would be any different of a situation.

<comment><USER31> Well, in that case I disagree with your point ;)

From a user's perspective, the transaction is confirmed when the app says "transaction confirmed", i.e. the second you press the "send money" button. I think that's what the OP was getting at.

As you correctly point out, the transaction could still bounce if the user has insufficient funds, but that's not in the happy path. Most users' experience with Venmo/Paypal is that they get a "confirmation" immediately, and then they move on. The happy path for a BTC transaction involves minutes to hours of time without even getting a _provisional_ ACK from the network, at any point in which your payment could fail and require a retry, or the payor could cancel.

(The time taken to finalize the payment is much less with BTC, but since modern payment systems paper over that detail, I argue it is not relevant to the user-facing concern that the OP is commenting on. Perhaps it is something that users _should_ be more concerned about, but consider the use-case of trying to buy a cup of coffee with BTC. Nobody is going to wait 2 hours for a transaction to complete in that use-case.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> the only way to be in on ether is to hold it. That's true for individuals and for large institutions joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Behind the scenes, large institutions are buying up Ether and anticipating that it will become a part of the financial system (either that or it will become a shadow financial system, and they are therefore incentivized to be early adopters). There's no way to short ether or bitcoin. Everyone who is in is long. dapps don't do much right now (and there's a lot of writing about ponzi scheme dapps), but this is very early days and the flexibility of the ethereum platform is just starting to be fully understood. The article is right about the limitations of the bitcoin blockchain. Some commenters here are right about pieces like these being great advertisements for the platform and driving more buying. 1 Ether > $1000 USD in a matter of months, if not weeks.

<comment><USER33> Do you have a citation for large organizations buying up ether? I only came across articles mentioning corporations forking ethereum code and testing it out for other purposes.

<comment><USER34> [https://entethalliance.org/members/](https://entethalliance.org/members/)

<comment><USER33> Where does it say they are buying up ethereum?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have a question regarding the morality of buying these coins: 1\. In buying I provide liquidity and add to the perception they have value. 2\. I am aware they are a big Ponzi scheme and vulnerable people may lose money they cannot afford to. 3\. However altcoins may be a "too big to fail" Ponzi scheme, which like the property market, will rise seemingly forever. 4\. I would rather be on the inside than the outside if it does. I'm on the outside of the property market in the UK after correctly assessing it was a pyramid, but wrongly believing it would crash and not be propped up. 5\. Good and vulnerable people might lose their savings because I have enabled a perception that these markets are not pyramid schemes.

Please advise.

</comment><comment><USER36> Research the exchange Poloniex. They have played a major role in the creation of tens of billions USD in "value" in altcoins over the past 2 months. There is zero transparency on their operations or ownership or supposed licensing.

<comment><USER15> Polo Exchange is sketchy; but Ether is on many, many exchanges now

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why Ethereum's _price_ is outpacing Bitcoin - <USER3>

The pace of adoption leaves much to be desired. And if you think bitcoin is hard for the layperson to understand, ethereum is a whole other can of worms.

<comment><USER34> Ethereum's adoption has already surpassed Bitcoin's with several metrics: number of transactions, trading volume, mining reward, and number of nodes. ETH also has ~80% of BTC's market cap.

True, it does not have the name recognition that Bitcoin has, but its not just a price bubble that is driving this.

This site has real time updates as to the status of the "flippening": [http://www.flippening.watch/](http://www.flippening.watch/)

<comment> aaron-lebo Every single one of those metrics could be driven by speculation, they don't say anything about real-world adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't follow the cryptocurrency world much. The last time I tried to really look into all the coins I bought some Monero. Monero seems the most sound technically and cryptographically.

Can someone explain to me why one alt coin like etherum gets more attention/value than others? What is it doing that is novel, or makes it more secure, or more anonymous than say Monero?

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't that basically a currency with hyper-deflation? Shouldn't a currency be relatively stable to be useful for payments?

<comment><USER40> Absolutely agree, and Ethereum is a great platform for building those stable currencies. Check out Stabl and Maker for two orgs trying to make this happen.

But its also trivial to issue fiat-backed tokens on Ethereum (at least from a technical PoV). See Digix who is doing this with Gold.</comment></comment>


Boeing Finds New Software Problem That Could Complicate 737 Max's Return - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-finds-new-software-problem-that-could-complicate-737-max-return-11579290347 <comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/B5ERA](http://archive.is/B5ERA)</comment>


Electronic Handheld Game Museum (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.handheldmuseum.com/ <comment><USER2> This brings back memories. I had a few of these before finally getting an NES. My favorite by far was the tabletop version of After Burner: [https://handheldmuseum.com/Tiger/Afterburner.htm](https://handheldmuseum.com/Tiger/Afterburner.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> I got one of these for a birthday when I was a kid: [https://www.handheldmuseum.com/Grandstand/Jack.htm](https://www.handheldmuseum.com/Grandstand/Jack.htm)

I played that thing for hours. The fact that it was solar powered and thus never needed batteries replacing was just magical to me. At some point I guess I swapped it for something useless.

Picked up a couple on ebay recently :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I owned mostly Nintendo handhelds back then. Anyone looking for a bit of nostalgia try this:

[http://pica-pic.com/](http://pica-pic.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Fantastic. This combines both nostalgia for early web design and many of the games I had in my youth (Mattel Football, Baseball etc plus Coleco's Head-to- Head series).

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, their forum is rocking phpBB 2.x. They must have patched it manually, 12 years is a long time to run outdated and insecure web software.

<comment><USER7> I love that mid-1990s early web vibe.</comment></comment>


The Automated Dungeon Master - <AUTHOR> https://technicshistory.com/2020/01/23/tangent-the-automated-dungeon-master/ <comment><USER2> That went on for a long time before getting to the point.

 _" Trained on gigabytes of input, GPT-2 is uncannily good at producing sensible text by simply predicting the next word that should follow a given list of input words."_

There are now a few systems like that - autocomplete with a big text database. They have no underlying model of what they're talking about. So, after about three sentences, you realize the output makes no sense. It's just words strung together with probabilities that match known text.

This seems to be where machine learning gets stuck. There needs to be some underlying model of the subject matter to have a useful dialog. Outside of well defined subject areas (sports, weather, travel planning, shopping, etc.) that barely exists. Frustrating to see this half a century after Eliza.

Chatbots have the same problem. Either they force you onto a specific track, like a phone tree, or they just natter endlessly without going anywhere. I've been playing around with Rasa lately. This is a chatbot which uses Tensorflow to match user questions with canned answers. That's about all they get from the machine learning part. Outside of that it's a phone tree engine. There's a file of "smalltalk" questions and answers, so it can natter better.

 _What do we want? Chatbots!_

 _When do we want them? Sorry, I don 't understand the question."_ \- bag at chatbot conference.

<comment><USER3> I suppose the NLP idea has been for first RNN and LSTM and now that Transformer and friends to act as a kind of memory. Mostly those memories have been pretty black box however, and it is interesting if ideas from data structures etc. could be useful.

<comment><USER4> Ideas from "data structures" will keep you stuck in the problem GP is talking about. The problem being lamented isn't that we don't know clever tricks for representing the training that a machine has undergone (as well as various tricks for having 'memory'), it's that for there to be a meaningful output for certain domains, there needs to be a thoughtfully implemented model that codes what it is to be (for example) a DM. Said model is, of course, ridiculously complex, so we won't see anyone coding it by hand anytime soon. We'd sooner have ways to copy the relevant bits of a human brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

A few of you mentioned Dwarf Fortress. I am aware of it, and considered adding a section on it after Elder Scrolls, but this was already twice the length of one of my usual posts, and I wanted to 'ship it.'

It was pointed out that I only presented two alternatives in my conclusion, but there's a third of a super-dense procedurally generated world a la Dwarf Fortress. I agree this was an oversight on my part. This points in the direction of an interesting subtlety about whether a rigorous simulation is what you really want at all - the DM 'simulates' a world in a way that is highly biased towards adventure, excitement and fun.

I may go back and revise to try to bring in some of these points at a later date.

One person mentioned the Mythic GM simulator, I'm aware of that also, but a) it's a very niche product and b) it still requires _someone_ to GM, that person may just also be the sole player. It does provide a biasing function so that you can by 'surprised' by outcomes and guide your own adventure in unplanned directions. It actually is more in the realm of a DM aid, as some have mentioned this may be the most fruitful direction for AI, as an aid rather than a replacement for a DM.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a dungeon master, I have to say I did not expect my job to be automated so quickly

<comment><USER6> Would you want to? I also wonder the goal vs the means. Do I want a virtual DM? Part of the experience/journey is the social component/ enjoyment of a campaign.

A part of me hoped he mentioned Skyrim in his article, since it is a landmark edition (and same can be said for the two earlier titles) in the sense that people still create new content and adventures for it almost a decade on. Creating an endless adventure.

Some are working on an open source implementation of it, and it would be interesting to see that work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the conclusion that AI dungeon might be the first glimpse of new kind of roleplaying game.

One tiny point i miss in the article is a reference to Dwarf Fortress, probably the most advanced fantasy world simulation.

<comment><USER8> Yes. DF shows that with a complex simulation, emergent behaviour is enough to make for a very compelling game experience. Similar dynamics are at work in other simulation games such as rimworld, factorio and oxygen not included (obviously not in the fantasy genre). However I do think having a human involved could sometimes make the DF experience better by tipping the scales in favour of a more fun experience rather than what DF players call a "Fun" experience.

For example, recently I built a beautiful fort. Everything was working great and all my idiot dwarves were happy. Fluid dynamics worked slightly differently from my expectation and confusion around the presence or absence of a wall caused by the tileset meant that I went to fill my well I had a whole river running down through my base and slowly filling it up from the bottom with no accessible top entrance remaining. I had the choice of letting my guys drown or a massive grind to fix the problem during which probably 2/3rds of my base would have starved to death and/or gone into a tantrum deathspiral. I chose to just stop and start a new fort. An experienced human DM could well have decided to essentially change the rules of the simulation and thereby given me some out that allowed me to rescue the situation through heroic effort and sacrifice and get back on track.

This is the problem with pure emergent behaviour from complex simulation. There's lots of interesting stuff that can happen, but you can paint yourself into very boring corners also and the simulation doesn't care about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is easy to see a procedurally created game replacing a mediocre GM.

But it's extremely difficult to see any kind of procedurally created game being able to create the sort of experience you get with a really good GM.

It is the difference between writing a story together or playing along in someone else's story.

<comment><USER10> > It is the difference between writing a story together or playing along in > someone else's story.

A 100% this, a good GM actually doesn't really know much about where the story is going -- you play to find out what happens. I also have a hard time imagining an automated DM effectively 'failing forward'. Every skill check players make should change the game state, pass or fail.

Never, ever let your players roll the dice and tell them "Sorry, you don't see anything". Every check should be an opportunity to move the story... somehow.

<comment><USER11> This is actually why I think it's viable. The mistake is that crpgs try to tell a very particular story, and procedural generation stops at creation. But that's not the GM's job.

The GM's role is to create and _simulate_ the universe, and to fudge the simulation (and the players) a little to keep it entertaining.

And (sufficient) simulation is definitely something we can hope to do -- though few games really try.

But the automation has a slightly different role than your GM.. it's goal is not to "move the story forward", but rather to craft a universe so interesting the players will move forward on their own! The automation should not be rolling to find out whether something is behind the door.. it should simply be checking if the simulated creature has wandered there.

The drudgery of true simulation then must be mitigated, and the tools for mitigation are the job of the game designer and the hueristics of the simulation. That is, you need not simulate the atom, nor the food & lifecycles; just enough of the system to allow it to change and adapt on its own (and ideally be self-stabilizing to a degree; probably best done by acknowledging the players only explore a single dungeon, but it's affected by a world outside of it; this is the opportunity to inject whatever corrections are necessary to stabilize the environment, avoiding the problems of Ultima Online)

<comment><USER12> I disagree - the current RPG trend is away from simulating a world and towards crafting a narrative.

> The automation should not be rolling to find out whether something is behind > the door.. it should simply be checking if the simulated creature has > wandered there.

The better example is the GM deciding if there's anything interesting that could be behind the door. If yes, then you're rolling to find out the terms of the engagement. If no, if it's not interesting, then you're done. There's nothing behind the door.

To automate that, an AI would need to be able to gauge how "narratively interesting or emotionally meaningful" something is. I think we're a little way off from that.

<comment><USER11> >the current RPG trend is away from simulating a world and towards crafting a narrative.

Yes, making the mistake of the mediocre GM -- trying to lead the player(s) into following _your_ story, instead of enabling them to create their own. The ideal GM (at least, for me, someone who strongly prefers ADnD to DnD5) _maximizes player agency, while constraining it by the rules of the universe_ (and also operating as a manager, because you're dealing with meatbags where one guy will happily try to spend 5 hours dicking around in the bar when the rest of the party wants to go to the dungeon, and another idiot will be trying to "troll" the group, in the most uninteresting fashion).

The core narrative (and every GM inherently brings with him a narrative he wants to tell) is incentivized, in much the same way any open world videog- game RPG has a main questline, but the ideal GM allows for departure from it as long as its interesting.

The narrative-focused GM, and RPG, will only allow such a deviation so far as it doesn't detract from the main narrative, because there is only one narrative the GM has interest in telling.

Narrative-focused RPGs may be the current trend, but that doesn't make it a good trend.

>To automate that, an AI would need to be able to gauge how "narratively interesting or emotionally meaningful" something is. I think we're a little way off from that.

You're correct, but my point is that we don't actually need, or even really want that, for our imaginary automaton.

Humans, by their nature, will bring the emotional impact, and fill in the details of the narrative, _entirely on their own_ , if they are enabled to do so. They will assign personalities to blank-slate NPCs, they will craft their own reasons for doing whatever they do, they will spin their own tale, so long as the system will allow it (and as long as its sufficiently limited; for whatever reason, limitations breed creativity). You just need to provide an environment that reacts to the players, and sufficiently interesting ways for the player to interact with the environment.

Give them a gravity/portal gun and players will come up with all kinds of stories..

In a tabletop, the GM enables the reactive behaviors of what would otherwise be a static map. In a cRPG, lacking the GM, you get a static map (except for very specifically defined reactions, usually determined by narrative events). In most open world rpgs, you get a large map and multiple narratives, but still rather static. In a simulation, you get the reactive environment; the closer the RPG approximates a simulation, the closer we get to the GM's role -- to react to player input (rather than prescribe it)

This is in much the same way that _any game can be fun_ if you toss in multiplayer, and give players sufficient controls -- the players will do all the hard work of setting goals, spinning tales, emotionally attaching themselves to arbitrary constructs.

Games don't need narratives, they need agency. Then the narratives come for free.

<comment><USER12> You conflate "narrative" and "GM-controlled narrative". These are not the same thing.

The current trend enables player agency because the table as a group decides the narrative, not just the GM. It's about the table as a whole deciding what it most narratively interesting to happen right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Probably the game that is closest to being full AI would be Dwarf Fortress. You can play it in Adventure mode and you can literally talk with NPC's who all have backstories and lives.

<comment><USER14> It's unlikely that the author knows much about DF. The final conclusion, is missing the third possibility which DF has managed to achieve.

There are so many procedural permutations that it's effectively an innumerable number of (often clunky) combinations which lack much structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I saw Telengard played on a friend's Commodore 64, I thought for sure it was the end of Dungeons & Dragons forever. Who would want to bother with getting a DM and buying lots of books when you could get the same thing from a computer whenever you wanted?

Glad I was wrong!

<comment><USER16> Telengard was great fun, but it was still similar to a rogue-like in the sense that you were just walking around a dungeon trying to kill, loot, and not die.

I always heard it was procedurally generated but the layout was always the same for me. Looking into it, it seems that to save on memory, the levels are "generated" on the fly, but from a set of seed numbers that were hard coded into the game and didn't change.

I tried mapping for a while but lost patience. Good thing I did because it allegedly has something like 2 million rooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not including the "Mystic" system seems like a huge oversight. It's an analog game system that works using yes/no questions, 2D10, and a probability table. It's not too elegant, but it works wonders. It can be used to assist the DM, or as a full-on DM emulator.

<comment><USER18> (1) It's called "Mythic", not "Mystic"

(2) the Mythic Game Master Emulator actually leaves all of the details to either the players or a human GM, it just provides directional guidance. It would be interesting if you could use it to provide a framework around which an AI could provide detailed descriptions, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a great article. I've been considering where this will head with gpt-2 dungeon master showing how far AI has come.

While I agree with the article that so far everything digital has been a noble failure, I feel there is too much discussion between AI vs humans. I think the future is in AI-assisted human DMs. Software may not be able to "entertain and dazzle" with the creativity of humans but it can help coordinate many routine tasks in any dnd game allowing the human DMs to focus their time on the components that make the adventure fun.

<comment><USER20> Does it show how far AI has come? It produces a game that is fundamentally unplayable, and because it's purely based on a model of language doesn't have a very obvious path to improve, since there's no underlying model of the thing it's trying to represent.

Are any of these applications of GPT-2 that attempt to use a pure language representation as a way to sidestep modelling the underlying principles actually successful? I feel like I've not actually seen any real successes.

<comment><USER21> AI Dungeon is _very_ playable if you are make an attempt to guide it in the right direction. If you try to confuse it, though, you will very likely succeed.

<comment><USER22> I agree if by "make an attempt to guide it in the right direction" you imply "suspend disbelief and critical thinking, excuse/actively-imagine-away dumb and nonsensical output and try to convince yourself that there is something rather than nothing there".

In other words, AI dungeon is very playable if you delude yourself into a state of continuous confirmation bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think there are other forms of dungeon mastering that use little or no AI while delivering the same if not better experience.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great article about a topic that has fascinated me for quite some time. Please excuse the wall of text.

Procedural generation can provide unlimited amounts of content seeded from finite effort. It's still mostly hand-crafted, just at different abstraction level. Building blocks are constructed manually and algorithm that fits them together is also carefully designed and fine tuned. It is used often in indie games because of lower effort needed to give illusion of huge amount of content. Meanwhile AAA companies can afford armies of level designers to make a detailed words. I guess everyone agrees that human design beats procedural and current AI. It is more varied, imaginative and purposeful - the 3 ingredients necessary for immersion. The crowd-sourced approach has not yet been successfully applied, to best of my knowledge.

The work that GM is doing can be quite valuable, and yet it only reaches few players of that campaign and is remembered vaguely. What if we could capture and store GM responses to player prompts? What if other sessions could reuse these responses and build on them to create new responses? The basic use of recorded responses is to automate mundane actions and checks (fights, lockpicking...) so that GM can focus on creative stories and arcs.

I've thought about this for quite some time and came up with partial solution. The automatic response system could consist of rules that are hand-crafted by GM while the session is played. Each rule is response to some action and changes the world state. So, each rule has to store the name of action, portion of world state that GM considers critical for that action, and how the world state is affected by action.

For example, let's attack an orc with a sword. OK, the GM decides that player's strength, sword sharpness, orc's agility and a dice role are important in this interaction, so GM marks them as such. Because D20 dice came out as 12, GM decides that attack was fairly successful, and changes orc's state to severely injured. This interaction is saved and the gaming session moves on. Later on, the same interaction 'attack with sword' is repeated by with different world state. If important parts of world state are the same/similar, then same result can be applied. If GM decides that existing rule is not applicable, then differentiating world state is marked and different results are entered and stored under a new rule. Now system is has two rules for 'attack with sword' and can automatically choose between them, based on which rule matches the world state the most. With time the system becomes rich enough to simulate this action under various conditions, while still being able to accommodate new situations with help from GM.

Such rule-based system can be visualized as bunch of simple state-charts that are built on the fly, and they interact together by modifying global state. I can imagine this simple mechanism would be good enough for combat mechanics, crafting system, simple NPC simulation (moods, dialogs, quests), inventory interaction, terrain manipulation... It should be enough to hand-craft a rich immersive world?

The hard part is coming with data structure that can capture rich world state in enough details without overwhelming the GM. The structure would have to model locations with objects, each with its attributes. All this would have to be relative to character who wants to preform the action. I'm considering graph databases, but don't have enough experience with them to move onto implementation :(</comment>


Show HN: See Google's Data on Real User Site Performance for Any Site - <AUTHOR> https://crux.run <comment><USER2> PSA: be very careful with what you query in BigQuery on this dataset! You will be billed $5/TB scanned. I was using this dataset a couple weeks ago for fun, and ran up a $60 bill in about 10 mins. It's important to understand that using WHERE doesn't shrink the size of your query; instead your FROM clause should only be limited to a single date or month... not '*'

<comment><AUTHOR> This is EXACTLY why we moved this data into our own database for Crux.run. We took the JSON export of the Crux database and cleaned and loaded it into a database on a single server. E.g each of those queries are hitting a single box in us central

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some of that information in the docs : [https://docs.crux.run/#/introduction?id](https://docs.crux.run/#/introduction?id)

But yeah- BQ can get very expensive very quickly if miss step

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is based on Google's Chrome User Experience database. Some details are available at [https://docs.crux.run](https://docs.crux.run) You _could_ query this data with BigQuery - but this tool does all the aggregations for you (and has a REST API).

</comment><comment><USER3> The input placeholder is confusing. It prompts the user for "[https://"](https://") \- but it doesn't require this.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's helpful- and especially since we then directly strip it :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> None of my sites are in the database.

<comment><USER5> They need 10k+ views a month for them to be in the CrUX database

<comment><AUTHOR> Also the database is origin specific - so "foo.com" and "www.foo.com" are different records- same as the Google source in big query

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Trailing forward slashes seem to confuse it. I pasted `[https://news.ycombinator.com/`](https://news.ycombinator.com/`) and it thinks the website is not in the database.

</comment><comment><USER7> Our engineering team (at Plumbr.io) built this as a marketing tool: [https://ismysiteslow.com/](https://ismysiteslow.com/).

All of the reports we show are based on crux data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though it's a single metric point I like the comparison! It's always fun to compare two web optimization companies. E.g Fastly and Cloudflare. [https://crux.run/report?domain=www.Fastly.com](https://crux.run/report?domain=www.Fastly.com) [https://crux.run/report?domain=www.Cloudflare.com](https://crux.run/report?domain=www.Cloudflare.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting.

It shows bing.com having DOM load time of 4 seconds, and Google.com almost double at 7 seconds. Any ideas why this happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is weird- I checked bigquery and see the same thing. Note that's the p95 - maybe more mobile users for google.com than bing?

<comment><USER9> Can you segment by Geo? It may be that users with slower connections or phones use Google more

<comment><AUTHOR> We can't do geo segments (yet) on Crux.run but we could test against bigquery directly</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Native scrolling and iTerm2 - <AUTHOR> http://filippo.io/native-scrolling-and-iterm2/ <comment><USER2> Nice! Until now I've been using

        imap <silent> <Down> <C-o>gj
        imap <silent> <Up> <C-o>gk
        nmap <silent> <Down> gj
        nmap <silent> <Up> gk

in my .vimrc to give me mousewheel scrolling in vim.

The advantage of putting it in my .vimrc is that I have mousewheel scrolling on the server no matter what computer I log in from.

The disadvantage is that I'm locked into vim and it won't work for someone using, say, emacs.

<comment><USER3> "set mouse=a" works better

<comment><USER4> Thank you for posting that. I can now use my mouse wheel on my mac to scroll through documents in vim.

I can also SSH into a Linux box from my mac and the mouse wheel works in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, I always had scrolling with iTerm2, even with vim, weechat, htop, etc

<comment><USER6> Yup, same here. Just tested it. I don't understand what's new here; can anyone explain?

<comment><USER7> This is for applications that put the terminal into a specific mode (or modes) that don't work. The example given in the patch linked to is man, but really it seems to be an issue with most pagers. What the patch does is hook into that mode being set and start translating mouse scroll events to arrow key events. The easiest way to see the problem is to run "man man" and try to scroll up, then scroll down. Up looks like it works because iTerm is saving that output, but scrolling down doesn't. If you do something like "less +200 rfc1918.txt" to start in the middle of the file you'll find that you can't scroll up either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does iTerm2 support the old bookmark system from iTerm yet? I'd love to upgrade but that's essential to my workflow.</comment>


Matching Binary Patterns with Erlang - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/l1x/matching-binary-patterns-11kh <comment><USER2> It's even more powerful when you can have a length in your header and match the binary length to the value inside the binary

The major advantage to all this is that by being declarative you aren't going to mess up with binary codecs by getting lost in piles if statements to validate your binary lengths and prevent strange packets from messing up your system.

<comment><USER3> And optimization can happen.

<comment><USER2> true but for 98% of internet-protocolley things the network's gonna be the bottleneck, at least, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that's my NTP code they're pointing to! [https://github.com/mnp/erlang- ntp](https://github.com/mnp/erlang-ntp)

AMA?

Erlang seems optimized for several problems and network packet mangling is one of them.

<comment><USER5> I want to get some hands on experience with networking and am looking for a side project. Do you have any suggestions or know of any projects that I can use for inspiration?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't take much to get started.

A good start for reading is the concepts around IP, especially how protocols can encapsulate each other, also known as layers. Skim [1] maybe. The definitive reference used to be the W. Richard Stevens books cited there.

Next pick a fun, simple protocol you're interested in. Consider ICMP, Echo, DNS, or if you like NTP, see OP's fine writeup to repeat the experiments. Skim the IETF RFC [2] for your protocol, especially the bitmap diagram.

Install Wireshark and play around dissecting packets on your network, noting how it shows you the layers and bitfields as above.

The most important step is to write some toy code for a client, server, or peer for your fun protocol. As above Erlang makes it simple to take apart packets directly referring to the bitfield diagrams, but most stacks should have a packet inspection library you can mess with. Wireshark will help watch your work.

Another good thing to learn is routing. If you have a BSD or Linux box or a Raspberry Pi, learn some IPTables or BPF [3]. Play around with writing your own firewall rules on your box. Play with how the OS sees networking, ie netstat, arp, and route outputs.

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

2\. [https://ietf.org/standards/rfcs](https://ietf.org/standards/rfcs)

3\. [http://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> The next protocol is DNS! :) It is a bit tricky but I have the working parser for the header. Looking into how I could parse qname with that octet thing going on.

[https://github.com/n0hup/elafi/blob/master/apps/dnscache/lib...](https://github.com/n0hup/elafi/blob/master/apps/dnscache/lib/dnscache/server.ex#L27)

It will be running on raspberry nodes (kind of replacing Pihole).

<comment><USER4> Nice. How do you feel about Elixir, seeing as how you're working in both? I'm happy with straight erl but always curious about the other grass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I learned Erlang first and I really like it I have no issues with its syntax. I do not even understand people complaining about it. Elixir is just Ruby(ish) syntax on the top, it does not add anything (or takes away anything) at least to me. I write a lot of F# so I think I probably like it because Elixir took some of the features from F# (or ML languages). It is nice to have a pipe operator. One piece of functionality that is nice to have is fmt. You can format your code before committing to the repo, this takes away some of the bikeshed arguments. Other than that I am not using much from Elixir. Jose is a really smart Erlang guy though. He used to hang out on IRC and StackOverflow answering Erlang questions. Straight Erlang is fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a toy bloom filter I wrote a decade ago with this syntax: [https://github.com/senderista/erlbloom](https://github.com/senderista/erlbloom)</comment>


I am calling from Microsoft and we detected an issue with your win installation - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1082650738927591425.html <comment><AUTHOR> in English:

The phone just rang at the CCC.

"Sir, I am calling from Microsoft and we have detected an issue with your windows installation."

JACKPOT.

I was connected to someone who spoke German. How convenient.

The nice lady helped me to set up the RDP access in the Windows 7 VM.

She then led me through a lengthy process. The system was infected, you could clearly see that at the terminal output (only really colored in red).

"There is a service fee to clean the system."

"I have my credit card data stored in a file, wait a minute."

The lady then copied the file directly to her own computer. Then it became quiet in the line. Perhaps the ransomware coupled to the file was responsible for this, which otherwise serves as a test payload for customer systems.

Of course, the variant only encrypts five files and then stops. So if you set it that way. Much cursing and the conversation was abruptly interrupted from her side.

Maybe I call back, pretend to be a Microsoft employee and offer to disinfect the computer?

source (in German): [https://twitter.com/grauhut/status/1082650738927591425](https://twitter.com/grauhut/status/1082650738927591425)

</comment><comment><USER2> Extremely inhumane and cruel! Similar to punishing poachers for barely making a living and not the black industry/market.

Some poor man/woman on the other side of the line probably lost a day of work because of this!

The best thing to do with these scammers is to ignore.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. They said they have encrypted some files on the scammers computer by planting supposed banking credentials which they did copy without any consent. Having watched some similar experiences in YouTube I can say theft of banking credentials or personal data is commonplace. They probably did prevent misuse of some stolen banking or personal information.

<comment><USER4> its possible they unintentionaly gave a scammer a sample of ransomware code they could then reverse engineer. the results could be an asymetric irony. they could have made the scammer even more formidable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More of this please!

<comment><AUTHOR> here (old but gold DEFCON18 talk) Pwned By The Owner: What Happens When You Steal A Hacker's Computer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwpg- AwJ0Jc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwpg-AwJ0Jc)</comment></comment>


A few fun python lines for your deploy script if you're on a mac - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.ca/1888312

<comment><USER2> If you've got Growl installed (and if you've had your mac longer than a day - you probably do), then you can use growlnotify to dump messages on your screen.

I use it in long running scripts (like deploys).

        growlnotify -t "Deploy" -m "Complete"

</comment><comment><USER3> Shell script version

      #!/bin/bash
      VOICES=("agnes" "kathy" "princess" "vicki" "victoria" "bruce" "fred" "junior" "ralph" "albert" "bad" "bahh" "bells" "boing" "bubbles" "cellos" "deranged" "good" "hysterical" "pipe" "trinoids" "whisper")
      MSGS=("deploy is now complete" "deploy complete" "deploy completed" "sir the deployment has finished" "hey the deploy is done" "look at this cool deploy" "deployment completeed")
      VOICE=$RANDOM%${#VOICES[@]}
      MSG=$RANDOM%${#MSGS[@]}
      say -v ${VOICES[VOICE]} ${MSGS[MSG]}

</comment><comment><USER4> You can always add

      && say Done

to the end of long-running commands and it just works.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use something like this for notifying about broken builds in our continuous integration environment, but on linux with "festival". I don't know if this utility has voices or not, but it works pretty well:

echo Joe Strummer broke the build | festival --tts

<comment><USER6> This looks like a very old version of the manual (I'm off to install it and take a look at a newer one) but festival does appear to have voices: [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/festival_2...](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/festival_24.html#SEC97)

 _edit_ That appears to be the newest version of the docs. You can select voices by calling the function (voice_voicename) in interactive mode. So something like this works:

        echo -e "(voice_nitech_us_rms_arctic_hts)\n(SayText \"this is a sentence\")" | festival

On Fedora, I had to install the festvox- packages to get other voices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This idea is both cute and useful. I frequently run a deployment script and switch to another window (e.g. HN) only to forget about the deployment. I will definitely be using this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Any linux equivalent?

<comment><USER9> You can use espeak for voice.

> espeak "Hello World"

<comment><USER10> flite is also good (simple). I used it to find the sound card model that would properly work with my laptop: [http://aeminium.org/slug/software/shell/#test- hda-intel-mode...](http://aeminium.org/slug/software/shell/#test-hda-intel- models)</comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to the ELF Format: The ELF Header (Part I) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.k3170makan.com/2018/09/introduction-to-elf-format-elf-header.html <comment><USER2> Those that enjoy this, might also get a kick out of Brain Raiter's series on manually writing on ELF and making it as small as possible:

[http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...](http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Where is the latest ELF spec hosted these days? IIRC it used to be hosted by SCO _shudder_.

<comment><USER2> As far as I'm aware, there's no single central, authoritative specification like an RFC, but the OSDev Wiki lists links to several resources, SCO's included:

[https://wiki.osdev.org/ELF](https://wiki.osdev.org/ELF)

Better yet, `man elf` is essentially a roff port of the main SCO spec. For the architecture-specific stuff, I've gotten the most mileage out of just perusing `/usr/include/elf.h`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That readelf output after changing the elf version with a hex editor seems like a bug, displaying a literal "%lx".</comment>


Firefox extension: switch all Google Ads to contextual non-personalized/tracking - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/non-personalized-google-ads/ <comment><AUTHOR> This isn't an ad-blocker. Instead, this extension enforces an optional Google Ads policy that disables persistent tracking and personalized ads on every website instead of leaving that decision up to individual publishers. It gives you back some online privacy without draining your favorite creators and websites of all funding.

This policy is designed to comply with the strict requirements of the GDPR.

[https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670312](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670312)</comment>


Google adds always-on VPN to its Project Fi cellular service - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/google-adds-always-on-vpn-to-its-project-fi-cellular-service/ <comment><USER2> > _"...you'll have the peace of mind of knowing that others can't see your > online activity, " Google's blog post says. "That includes Google—our VPN is > designed so that your traffic isn't tied to your Google account or phone > number."_

It doesn't mention logging the traffic (even metadata) and what it would do with the logs. Any VPN service that you don't run yourself requires you to trust the provider.

Centralized (and large or widespread) services by companies remains a concern, as with many online platforms and services. Would I trust Google more than my ISP or some random VPN provider? Very likely, yes. But this is still worrying.

<comment><USER3> Basically they will be collecting anonymized traffic data.. This enables them to collect all of a user's traffic data on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does that mean that they can inspect all of your traffic (or at least the metadata since most sites are served via TLS nowadays)? I'm not implying they are doing that, but it's an interesting thought.

</comment><comment><USER5> They say that Fi only works on a few Android phones, but as far as I've been able to tell, it works well on iPhones as well.</comment>


Transmission (BitTorrent client) v2.90 contained malware on OS X - <AUTHOR> https://www.transmissionbt.com/?v=2.91 <comment><AUTHOR> Forum post with a little more information: [https://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17834](https://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17834)</comment>