Bill Gates: The Billionaire Book Critic - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/fashion/bill-gates-the-billionaire-book-critic.html <comment><USER2> I love reading, but read 20 or max 25 per year. So what I do read I want to be really good. That's why I like lists like Bill Gates' (and the subsequent discussions on HN) - they help in finding the gems to read.

I also like writing reviews of what I read (mostly on Amazon [1]). Writing the review helps me remember and understand the contents better - so it benefits me. At the same time, I think it helps other people decide if they want to read the book for themselves. If not, then they got what I considered most important from my review.

[1] On Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member- reviews/A1CG7W9QANKGOB/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member- reviews/A1CG7W9QANKGOB/) but occasionally also on my blog, like what I recently wrote about Ghost in the Wire by Kevin Mitnick [http://henrikwarne.com/2015/12/27/social-engineering-from- ke...](http://henrikwarne.com/2015/12/27/social-engineering-from-kevin- mitnick/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Mr. Gates says he reads about 50 books in a year, eschewing digital readers > for old-fashioned books on paper. When he is busy with work, he reads about > a book or two a week but will consume four or five in the same period while > vacationing with family.

huh?

<comment><USER4> Work: 1 to 2 per week

Vacation with family: 4 to 5 per week

Other: zero to x per week

Total: 50 per year

<comment><USER5> What is a week other than work or vacation? Those account for all days of the year, by tautology if nothing else. (except for the unemployed, I suppose, but him being retired I would think it's impossible to be unemployed).

<comment><USER6> This is why the Europeans make fun of us. b^)

<comment><USER7> As an European, I can't say I get it either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really enjoy his reviews. He gives perspective why the book at hand is relevant, and succeeds in telling me what to expect from it, not only in terms of content, but often also style.

I haven't read many of his recommended books, but quite a few have are on my Amazon wishlist for later buying.

</comment><comment><USER9> For those doubting whether Bill actually writes the reviews you should take a look at: [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books).

Of the many books Bill has read, 81/195 have reviews (approximate). Given that he's reading on the order of 50 books a year, let's assume he's been at this for 4 years. That would be about 20 book reviews a year, and each book review on average probably takes him an hour or two to write, get feedback, and revise. (They are not really that involved: [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/XKCD](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/XKCD))

Seems like it is totally doable, and would not even really take up that much time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone believe Gates is personally authoring this list?

I've worked with a few celebs over the years. Be them CEOs or models, they all have "people" to handling this stuff. I wouldn't be surprised to hear gates reads none of these books, that the entire scheme is handled by his PR. Worse yet, many extremely wealthy people believe "they" create things when they in fact pay others to do the real work. I'd need lots more evidence before I'd believe that someone like Gates is actually typing the words.

But even if he is reading these books, there is this from the OP:

""'We don't have any say over what Bill chooses,'" she said "'We just leave it on his desk and he reads what he wants to read.'" Ms. Kim lucked out"

They "don't have any say" except that they appear to be able to shortlist books. Getting your book onto the desk of a reviewer is 90+% of the effort needed to secure a review. The ability to place anything on the desk of a billionaire is the sort of influence for which people pay good money.

<comment><USER11> > I've worked with a few celebs over the years. Be them CEOs or models, they > all have "people" to handling this stuff.

How many of them were largely self-taught engineers who made tens of billions of dollars and then started methodically giving all that money away? (at least then the comparison would be interesting)

It really is not much of a stretch to assume that Bill Gates is an outlier.

<comment><USER10> Wealth brings "people". Even recluse billionaires have people, law firms, to manage their public images. It isn't personal. When you have billions to protect you need a team.

<comment><USER11> I think you're very badly missing the point. Reading is how someone like Gates becomes Gates and stays Gates. This particular set of tasks we're talking about is exactly the sort of thing he wouldn't necessarily want or need to outsource.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter being sued for 'misleading' investors ahead of last year's stock decline - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12954286/twitter-lawsuit-misleading-growth-stock <comment><USER2> I think they genuinely believed their own hype. And then instagram/snapchat happened and stole away an entire generation who cared more for narcissistic photos and sexting than snarky political jibes in 140 characters or less.

<comment><USER3> Also, Snapchat is simply more fun. Twitter is dull in comparison.

<comment><USER4> Snapchat is slower than a snail, it's UI is a mess without any kind of user manual, it eats battery like nothing else (because it ALWAYS keeps the camera on)...

Maybe I'm just too old to "enjoy" this.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the twitter web UI is also awful and slow.

<comment><USER6> God yes. There's something so surreal about it taking 5500ms to load 605KiB worth of content over 87 requests to display a screen of ten 140-character tweets.

And their direct message section ... almost completely unusable. I've had it run so slowly that I could type out a sentence, stop, and watch it type out one character per second of the sentence I had typed.

Unfortunately this has just become the new norm on the web, so there's no longer any pressure on sites to optimize for speed/performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really don't get these lawsuits. To me it looks like a bag holder suing the bag.

\- A is lucky or has insider knowledge and sells to B who is unlucky, ignorant or duped.

\- C are other shareholders now having traded

If company i.e. the bag has to pay out B then

\- A got lucky

\- B got put neutral

\- C i.e. a neutral third party investor is coughing up the money

Makes no sense but keeps the courts busy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Twitter is the post-'Eternal September' USENET. It's declining due to the same forces.

</comment><comment><USER9> PSLRA, GTFO

</comment><comment><USER10> They are so desperate for revenue that the narrative and what is allowed to stay trending is something that can be bought. A good example of this is BLM (regardless of what you may think of the cause). I don't use twitter primarily because of its obvious censorship and the blatant propaganda use (BLM and arabic/islamic spring).</comment>


NPM registry in numbers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.futurice.com/npm-registry-in-numbers <comment><USER2> This is a really interesting analysis.

        From these graphs we could come up with some reasonable boundaries. Packages that:
          - have more than one version: 71853
          - are over two weeks old: 42106
          - had a new release in the last 360 days: 71277

        There are 31888 packages satisfying all three conditions above. Though it's only one third of all packages there, the amount is still enormous.

Now, if only I could search those 31,888 packages on NPM alone if I wanted to.

EDIT: By the way, for anybody reading this article not familiar with the JavaScript ecosystem, this is interesting:

        Mocha is clearly the most popular test framework, while nodeunit is way behind. And no-one seems to use Jasmine.

Jasmine _appears_ to be unpopular within the JavaScript community but in reality that just accounts for those in the NodeJS and, more recently, the subset of the front-end JS community who use NodeJS tools in their projects.

Mocha, the most popular test framework, has been a Node module since late 2011 [0], whereas Jasmine has only been one since mid-2013 [1]. I have a hunch that the majority of Jasmine users aren't on-board with the movement of front-end JS and NodeJS ecosystems merging, and since Jasmine [3] doesn't really aim itself at NodeJS projects, it's far less likely to be used in any project which uses NPM for dependency management.

Not really that important, just interesting :)

[0]: [https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha/commits/master/package....](https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha/commits/master/package.json?page=5)

[1]: [https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine/commits/master/package.js...](https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine/commits/master/package.json)

[2]: [https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine](https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine)

<comment><USER3> Jasmine is hopeless for serious node apps, that's why. It lacks critical features that are long standing and bitterly complained about by node developers due to the hostile and half-assed responses from the maintainers to those issues.

<comment><USER4> > It lacks critical features

Like?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We are working on including more accurate and detailed health metrics into the upcoming re-launch of the npm site. We're definitely going to be including stuff like GitHub stars (but this disadvantages non-GitHub projects), downloads, number and recency of versions, dependencies (and dev-dependencies) and are considering allowing people to filter by license and passing tests. We're also adding the Collections feature which will allow people to curate groups of packages they use or think work well together, and that will feed into rankings as well.

We've barely scratched the surface of the ways we can improve npm search, and we'd value any ideas the community has. If you have specific suggestions, I've created an issue over at [https://github.com/npm/newww/issues/131](https://github.com/npm/newww/issues/131) for you to throw them into :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> > It seems that CoffeeScript isn't anymore popular for new projects.

I'm happy to see some research behind what my gut has been sensing for a while. The distinction between "popular" and "popular for new projects" is very important too. Is anyone else talking about whether-or-not this is an active downward trend?

<comment><USER7> That's not to say that packages aren't being written in CoffeeScript as source and then being compiled to Javascript for distribution. That wouldn't require CoffeeScript to be in the deps at all if a dev doesn't use build tools (gulp- coffee, browserify+coffeeify, etc).

<comment><USER8> I agree, I would be interested to see how many packages are written in CoffeeScript but then compiled for NPM or the open source community.

It is interesting to get people who will not support your project if it's CoffeeScript... I would think this is the driving force and not so much that CoffeeScript is not popular.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, which is too bad. It's one thing to not contribute to a project if the source isn't to your liking, but it's another to flat out not use the compiled version.

Besides, I've found that writing CoffeeScript is pretty much like writing Javascript. Different syntax, but the semantics are almost entirely 1:1, leaving out the class stuff (which I don't often use). I've introduced CS to many JS devs and while not all of them loved it, they were able to get up to speed very quickly. But I understand peoples' objections to it - I think they're wrong, but I understand them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is really impressive how fast NPM grows, last year in July I created two network graphs to visualize NPM dependencies. There were about 35000 packages a year and 2 months ago, that number almost tripled. The top 3 packages (underscore, async, request) in terms of number of dependent packages kept their positions.

You find the graphs and some more info at the following URLs:

\- [http://exploringdata.github.io/vis/npm-packages- dependencies...](http://exploringdata.github.io/vis/npm-packages- dependencies/) (takes a while to load, use Chrome or another Webkit browser)

\- [http://exploringdata.github.io/vis/npm-top-packages- dependen...](http://exploringdata.github.io/vis/npm-top-packages- dependencies/) (includes only packages with at least 10 dependent packages)

\- [http://exploringdata.github.io/info/npm-packages- dependencie...](http://exploringdata.github.io/info/npm-packages- dependencies/) (info post)

</comment><comment><USER10> > It looks like underscore is more popular than lodash. I think this table is > flawed.

I think this way of going about data analysis is flawed... "I don't like this conclusion, so I'm going to massage the data until it supports my preference".

I do agree that it'd be nice if the npm maintainers went about clearing out all the dead projects though.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I don't understand that. Why would lodash automatically be more popular than Underscore?

<comment><USER7> As tbassetto said, I can't see any reasons to use Underscore over Lo-Dash. Performance is on par or better, AMD/CommonJS modularity out of the gate, and their CLI can be used to build a minimal version of the lib based on the functions you need.

I wrote an article on how you can analyze source code and produce a minimal Lo-Dash build in only 73 characters: [http://jjt.io/2014/07/18/analyzing- source-files-to-automatic...](http://jjt.io/2014/07/18/analyzing-source-files- to-automatically-create-custom-lo-dash-builds-in-73-characters/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Always remember to check the licenses of transitive dependencies. There are packages which say they are licensed under MIT, yet they depend on an (A)GPL package! That might or might not to be an issue for you.

I recommend using a tool like license-checker to create a list of all the licenses. It also shows the unknown ones, so you can start digging for the licenses. Like the article states, there's a large number of npm packages without licenses. I've usually made pull requests whenever I stumble upon a package with missing package.json license information, and I hope the situation is slowly improving.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm really impressed, PyPi only has about 37,000 packages[1] and it has been around for much longer. Really shows how far Node has come.

It would also be interesting to see the average number of lines each package has.

1\. [http://tomforb.es/how-much-code-is-there-in-the-python- packa...](http://tomforb.es/how-much-code-is-there-in-the-python-package- index)

<comment><USER14> It's not as impressive if you consider that people make modules for everything, no matter how trivial. Case in point: [https://github.com/blakeembrey/upper- case/blob/master/upper-...](https://github.com/blakeembrey/upper- case/blob/master/upper-case.js)

<comment><USER11> I've found myself infuriated by this recently. I do understand the desire to compartmentalise everything, but the last time I installed Express (a web framework) I also had to install modules to read POST bodies and serve static files. Quickly my JS file becomes more require() statements than anything else - it just doesn't seem worth the hassle to me.

<comment><USER15> There are higher level frameworks, Express is meant to be very minimalist. It is also usually a good idea to serve static files directly through Nginx or a CDN. If you find yourself always requiring the same modules in most of your files, a common pattern is to have a `common.js` file where you export all your modules and you then only need to have one `require('./common')` at the top of your files. I personally don't really like this pattern as it makes refactoring harder and is usually a sign of bad architecture.

<comment><USER4> > There are higher level frameworks

Like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What tools were used to discover and digest the data? I'd be very interested in the process behind this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Short version: node.js of course!

A bit longer one:

One can fetch `jsverify` package metadata from [http://registry.npmjs.org/jsverify](http://registry.npmjs.org/jsverify) and all current packages are listed in [http://registry.npmjs.org/-/all](http://registry.npmjs.org/-/all) (this one is special, its size is around 50MiB). Please cache your results, let's not DDoS the registry.

There are around one gigabyte of nice JSON data. After initial fetch you can traverse it using any tools you want. I naturally used node.js for that too.

<comment><USER17> If you'd rather work with a SQL database, here's a module that attempts to put NPM into a Postgres database: [https://www.npmjs.org/package/npm-postgres- mashup](https://www.npmjs.org/package/npm-postgres-mashup)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, someone had time and motivation to write all of that boilerplate there. Yet e.g. the license parsing is very naive: compare [https://github.com/npm/npm- www/blob/99020b5b3e21607dab24cd69...](https://github.com/npm/npm- www/blob/99020b5b3e21607dab24cd69a79f4bd7c6a63c70/models/package.js#L193) and [https://github.com/rickbergfalk/npm-postgres- mashup/blob/56d...](https://github.com/rickbergfalk/npm-postgres- mashup/blob/56d77cc3a66fd5aaa870dbd578ad899b5fe32d68/npm-postgres- mashup.js#L392)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the version distribution graph it is evident that npm hosts 0 packages with 25k+ versions, one package that has almos 20k versions and 40 packages with 0 versions.

That seems to be at odds with the numbers quoted in the rest of the article. Strange.

(Hint: please do label the axis on your graphs. thanks.)

<comment><USER19> They are labeled (now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Note to the author: when presenting numbers in a table, one should place them in a separate column and align them to the right. It makes them easier to compare.</comment>


The Mathematics of Changing Your Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/books/review/the-theory-that-would-not-die-by-sharon-bertsch-mcgrayne-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I had to do a double take when I saw Bayes's theorem on that illustration - "wait a second, did I read that domain name correctly"?

Even more surprising is that they would use the terminology of prior and posterior probabilities and the like, applied correctly. It gives one the impression that the author knows what he is talking about.

I don't know how motivating this article would be to someone without training in probability theory, though. I mean, it's all well and good to be factually correct, but showering people outside of the field with technical terms and "weird" claims can, I think, be very counterproductive.

Concerning the theorem itself, no effort was actually made to at least rephrase it in a more friendly way. It's not enough to just poke fun at yourself with "(trumpets sound here)". Many people, even with formal mathematical training do not intuitively understand why it is true, and without that, applying it for probability calculations would feel like hollow and mindless mechanical work.

To that effect, I also recommend Eliezer's explanation, found at [0]. I must admit that I kind of glossed over it, because I had the correct intuition regardless of not formally knowing the theorem (no idea how to reproduce that, unfortunately, because it would be a pretty good tool), but even so, I found it both funny and informative. And as a bonus, it doesn't assume that you have any rigorous training in mathematics (a common misconception among mathematical explanations).

[0] : <http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes>

<comment><USER3> > Even more surprising is that they would use the terminology of prior and > posterior probabilities and the like, applied correctly. It gives one the > impression that the author knows what he is talking about.

Well, the author of the review is John Allen Paulos, a mathematics professor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An intuitive expanation of Bayes' theorem:

<http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes>

<comment><USER5> An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem:

<http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13156>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I can understand why probability textbooks present Bayes' Theorem as

P(A|B) = [ P(B|A) * P(A) ] / P(B),

I've always thought the following rewrite makes more sense when the probabilities represent degrees of belief:

P(A|B) = P(A) * [ P(B|A) / P(B) ]

In other words:

(posterior belief) = (prior belief) * (evidence adjustment)

Also, while Bayes' Theorem follows from probability axioms, Bayes' Rule for updating beliefs in light of new evidence (which has the same formulation) is justified by Cox's Theorem:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxs_theorem>

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there any way for us paywalled people to read this?

<comment><USER8> Apart from the obvious (buy a subscription), you can open the link in an incognito/private-browsing session, since the NYT monthly page limit seems to be based on cookies.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Wishful Thinking - <AUTHOR>

I dream of leaving home in North Carolina for a place where people have crazy, incredible aspirations and balls of steel. Where is this place? <comment><USER2> > a place where people have crazy, incredible aspirations and balls of steel.

The people and place may be as close as your own backyard> [http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/techflash/2014/10/1...](http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/techflash/2014/10/10-north- carolina-startups-to-watch-ncta.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.temporaldoorway.com/gallery/galtsgulch/galtsgulch...](http://www.temporaldoorway.com/gallery/galtsgulch/galtsgulch1920x1080.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you a dev and interested in improving healthcare?

We just moved to Oakland for cheaper rent. Mostly ok, but it is fun to play "was that fireworks or gunshots" once a day.

</comment><comment><USER5> Silicon Valley or New York. I've never been there, though, but that is my dream and this is where I'm going the first chance I get.</comment>


Startups Can Avoid a Class Action Lawsuit with a Single Clause - <AUTHOR> http://blog.upcounsel.com/startups-can-avoid-a-class-action-lawsuit-with-a-single-clause/

<comment><USER2> Arbitration clauses inside a TOS are evil in my opinion.

I can definitely see the desire to stop a class action lawsuit that seems to punish the company and benefit only the attorneys, but in a TOS situation I would say it crosses the line.

<comment><USER3> In many non-evil (consumer friendly) jurisdictions any such clauses are invalid and not binding even if signed with blood in full consent, and only serve as decorative filler in agreement text.

California is not such a jurisdiction, apparently. Yet.

We the people can (and should) vote to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also it would be nice if UpCounsel.com said somewhere toward the top of the screen that it's only available in California.

I just spent 5 minutes writing up a legal help request before I got to the State field that only has CA listed -_-</comment>


Lifehack question: How do you read a business book? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for tips, tricks, recommendations and methods. Do you use a highlighter? Do you have a coding system? Do you use Evernote? Do you post-its?
My objective is to read more business books to expand my horizons as well as pick up new ideas to implement. I'm in the middle of reading "18 Minutes" by Peter Bregman and am feeling inspired. But there are so many ideas, I find myself frustrated because I'm not sure how to keep track of them all.
In general, I like to read business books both on my Kindle and in my hands with a physical book. Recommendations for both would be awesome. <comment><USER2> My recommendation is to reflect on what you read. Here's why:

I'm actually trying to cycle off reading business books. I've read so many that I need to spend time implementing what I read, rather than taking in more information. I'm like a chain reader, putting down one book and then picking up another without spending time reflecting on what I learnt.

I noticed this pattern so I've started trying to identify 3 things I learned and/or could implement to my own business upon finishing a book. For me, the reflection on what I learned is more important, I'm not much of a note taker but have the ability to retain vast amounts of information. If something really hits me, Ill put it in Evernote. Without the reflection piece this is probably relegated to my subconscious. I'm actually thinking of going back and trying to think of 3 things from each book I've read previously that I can now record.

This morning I finished the book Focus by Al Ries. It's good.

Here are the 3 things I learnt (recorded upon finishing in Evernote): 1\. Focused companies are more profitable. 2\. Brand extension is bad. 3\. Focus may cause shrinkage in the short term but is far better in the long term.

Hope that helps.

Recommended books: \- How to win friends and influence people (timeless classic) \- How to get Rich by Felix Dennis (spammy title, good read) \- Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrari (networking tips) \- Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (any business that focuses on customer service is going to do better) \- Purple Cow by Seth Godin (classic) \- The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E Gerber (a great mindset to have for your business) \- The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes (slow start but simply awesome) \- All the 37signals books \- Lean Startup (obviously)

These are just of the top of my head.

I don't keep books. I figure I can always buy them again if I need.

I gave up tracking what I read, but Goodreads.com was good of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I started taking notes of business books in a "books" journal in Evernote. It's MUCH slower to read but I can (and do) go back to my notes to solidify concepts or cross-check them with things I read in other blog posts or books.

I find it also helps retention, by taking notes, I'm really focused on understanding what I read and how it applies to past challenges, current ideas etc.

On the other hand, there are books I've read this year for which I don't have notes if I read them on the kindle (in the subway for example), and then it's much harder to remember what it was about and how I can use it in my life.

So: take notes.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't worry about keeping track of everything. Instead I surround myself (literally physically) with all the non-fiction books I buy and leaf through them when I get bored or need new ideas.

I still buy Kindle books but anything I really want to learn and need to be enveloped by (recently was statistics/machine learning) I buy physical books and add bookshelves to my home.</comment>


Geography of Emotion: Where in a City Are People Happier? - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07632 <comment><USER2> Are people really happy if they have to do Check-ins and tweet?

</comment><comment><USER3> I would argue that certain personality types are more likely to "tweet" and "check in" and therefore cannot be statistically representative of the general population. So to base your research on such a dataset could be skewing the result quite significantly.

</comment><comment><USER4> While they analyzed Tweets from Los Angeles, they seem to have contributed nothing to the question of whether or not Disneyland is, in fact, the "happiest place on Earth".

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of the -- Chigago? -- city app where citizens could report the locations of potholes on the roads in Chicago and the city would send repair crews time permitting...

What happened? The upscale trendy neighborhoods were all pothole free and the lower economic class neighborhoods got bumpier.

Making jumps from foursquare and twitter to "valuable information about land use and utilization of services in urban areas" seems like a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER6> Is this because the upscale neighborhoods were more likely to have phoned to do the reporting?

<comment><USER5> At that time I think it had to do with disproportionate smartphone penetration (since it was a smartphone app, not a phone number, you just tap it when you see a pothole and it sends your geodata).

But then and now, even close to 100% smartphone ownership, I think it's the same thing with disproportionate app penetration. What social groups actually use foursquare and twitter and with what frequency?

<comment><USER7> I believe this can be generalized to all minority oppression. Minorities' views / needs not being honored since they're in the minority, or have a minority level of access to valuable / high-utility resources.

Solution: high-level resource owners share in the _human experience_ of low- level owners, determining ad-hoc and with empathy how to extend support / normalize quality of life.

<comment><USER5> What?

I'm fairly positive this has nothing to do with oppression except in a wildly politicized worldview where somehow lower socioeconomic areas were actually prohibited access to the reporting functionality. As far as I'm aware this wasn't the case, it was a completely unintended side effect of a good idea: we can save money on pothole patrols by letting people report potholes and then fix them in a queue-like order from when they were reported thus lowering costs and improving response time...

And here they are trying to make city planning decisions with something that I think will probably suffer the same bias. It's not an intentional classist plan, it's just not fully thought out (although I don't know this, maybe if I read the paper they will talk about controlling for this effect).

And I don't see anything in your solution that would solve anything, you seem to have just thrown a ton of hotwords into a grammatical structure...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has sentiment analysis successfully conquered sarcasm yet? Twitter is ripe with it.

<comment><USER9> I don't know about conquered, but there are certainly some attempts to at least partially account for it.

Though, perhaps that is why you specified conquered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > data from the Twitter microblogging platform to analyze the properties of > these areas. Specifically, we have extracted a large corpus of geo-tagged > messages, called tweets

lol</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for your tech blog and are you happy with it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for something that supports commenting and syntax highlighting out of the box, preferably something that uses static pages so it's fast and easy to manage. Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> I know a lot of developers use Octopress and its many variants. Tie that together with one of the comment services (e.g., Disqus) and you're pretty much set. Or you can just link every post to a HN submit and direct readers to your HN submission.

You can then deploy to Github or just some CDN.

I don't particularly find it appropriate to use WordPress as a tech blog. It just sends the wrong message in my opinion.

That said, I am of the opinion that developers should take pride in developing their own blog platform. It's conventional wisdom after all that building a blog platform on a modern framework only takes (a few hours | a few days | certainly not a week).

I put together mine [1], including the javascript in about 3 days. People tend to hate the background, but I wanted something a little more visually engaging and I'm not a graphic designer. :)

[1] <http://tiamat.tsotech.com/simplest-of-webapps>

<comment><USER3> I think your blog looks really nice, has some nice transitions. It's good to look at but I couldn't read more than a paragraph without getting distracted. I would put the text on a solid background, having the stuff moving behind text while reading it breaks my concentration.

<comment><USER2> Ah, thanks! Incidentally, you can also turn the background off using the menu at the bottom right. I use local storage to remember a user's preference.

<comment><USER3> But I LIKE the background! haha, just not behind the text that's all.

Edit: I added background-color: #26282a; to .bodytext and it's much more enjoyable for me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After writing my own blogging app in Django and being unhappy with it for months, I switched to WordPress some time ago. I blogged about my reasons for switching here: [http://ankursethi.in/2013/03/okay-wordpress-you-win-this- rou...](http://ankursethi.in/2013/03/okay-wordpress-you-win-this-round/)

In summary: WordPress has a neat dashboard, thousands of plugins, and wonderful themes. Writing and maintaining a blogging app is boring. I prefer to spend my time blogging and programming, rather than programming admin dashboards for blogging apps.

People will tell you that WordPress is slow, which is true. To remedy the situation, you should: (1) use a PHP opcode cache (I use php-apc) and (2) use a caching plugin (I use W3 Total Cache). That's about it.

I'm quite happy with my setup. It's not the fastest or the hippest, but it works great for my blogging needs. My advice would be to choose whatever makes you happy, and then stick with it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Pelican, but a lot of people like Jekyll, too. Pelican has good documentation, and I like that it uses a makefile because I was able to painlessly add in my own deployment command that pushes to S3 and an option for compressing CSS and JS.</comment>


Show HN: Slidebox – A damn fine photo manager for your phone - <AUTHOR> http://slidebox.co <comment><USER2> This looks really clean - however the only thing that would prevent me from using it is it doesn't seem to have any privacy controls. Can I sort photos into a password-protected album?

Spotted a typo.

>Please check your email to confirm singup.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just applied for Winter 2016! We're looking for some tough questions to answer! What do you guys think? Do we have a shot?

<comment><USER3> Firstly, maybe you should remove the (YC W2016) from the title. It is kind of confusing and led me to assume you were already a YC backed company. It's kind of unnecessary too, IMO, but I may be 100% wrong on this.

But about the app itself —

Love the simple design! You could add the "Available on App Store" button which looks more neat. But the app, and the website looks cool.

I think there is insufficient data for most people to tell you if you have a shot at YC. This is only ONE side of the whole story, which is PRODUCT. We may need to know about user stats, and so many other things. There may be some very experienced folks here who can help, though.

Best of luck, and I hope you get in! Kudos, my friend!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are right about YC W2016 title. I'm actually going to delete this thread and start a general YC W2016 candidates forum -- I think that works better.

<comment><USER4> Yes, we took that out. It implies that the company was funded by YC.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the first world war - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21591853-century-there-are-uncomfortable-parallels-era-led-outbreak <comment><AUTHOR> "We show that the intuition that trade promotes peace is only partially true even in a model where trade is beneficial to all, war reduces trade and leaders take into account the costs of war. When war can occur because of the presence of asymmetric information, the probability of escalation is indeed lower for countries that trade more bilaterally because of the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains.

However, countries more open to global trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country.

Using a theoretically-based econometric model, we test our predictions on a large dataset of military conflicts in the period 1948-2001. We find strong evidence for the contrasting effects of bilateral and multilateral trade. Our empirical results also confirm our theoretical prediction that multilateral trade openness increases more the probability of war between proximate countries. This may explain why military conflicts have become more localized and less global over time."

[http://econ.sciences- po.fr/sites/default/files/martinp/CEPR-...](http://econ.sciences- po.fr/sites/default/files/martinp/CEPR-DP5218.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> The parallel that was drawn in the article is that the U.S. is playing the part of Britain (a waning super power), China plays the part of Germany (a country with an emerging powerful economy and national pride) and Japan plays the part of France. It is an eerie comparison. At that time, many thought that the close trade ties of those countries would prevent war. The comparisons are not perfect of course. It does seem like there is an approximate 50 year cycle of large conflagration, perhaps because that is the approximate human generation, just enough time for people to forget the futility of war. Hopefully history will not repeat itself, but it often does.

<comment><USER4> Also, by 1914 the world was recoveing (slowly) from a very deep depression, and changing its energy sources.

But I'd argee that China does not feel the same pressure that Germany felt by the time... And Russia didn't enter the analysis at all. Times are very similar, but they are also quite different, depends on how one looks at it.

Anyway, I'm hating to see what I think at the headlines of the mainstream press. I tought it was bad when they ignored all the problems, but it's worse when they acknoledge them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thankfully, I don't see WWIII starting anytime soon...

But I've always strongly thought the "globalisation will make war unthinkable" argument is naive. We're tribal creatures -Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true.

As the author hinted at - Russia, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and France were each other's biggest trading partners - by far! Heck, a Belgium company built both the Belgium fortifications... and the German artillery that eventually breached them!

Nowadays, the entire world is trading... but Europe in 1914 was a good example of this principle applying continent-wide.

Convince society the other side is evil and a threat; dismiss and degenerate the peace-mongers as unpatriotic... and economic interest be damned.

<comment><USER6> >Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true.

I interpret history as "nationalism used to trump economic interests". A lot of has changed since. Most countries are representative democracies, and it's more difficult for leaders to go into a war.

As for the tribal argument, I think the "nation state" is dying. Tribes are subcultures these days[1]. The internet connects me to my subcultures (like Hacker News), and it matters less every year what country I happen to physically live in. There's also the argument that the world is more united these days (particularly thanks to the European Union and somewhat because of United Nations).

1\. [http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So...](http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society)

<comment><USER5> >Most countries are representative democracies, and it's more difficult for leaders to go into a war.

I agree representative democracies are far less likely to go to war. I also don't think war is likely anytime in the present era. On the other hand, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are not representative democracies. They represent a fair portion of earth's landmass, population, and potential destructive power. I'd say the trend towards democracy has already peaked, and authoritarian governments are on the rise.

>As for the tribal argument, I think the "nation state" is dying.

I think we have very different worldviews on this subject, so a debate isn't going to be productive. But from where I'm coming from, it's easy to be idealistic when we're living in a golden age of peace and prosperity (despite the great recession). I'm more pessimistic about humanity in times of scarcity, disasters, and conflict.

> There's also the argument that the world is more united these days > (particularly thanks to the European Union and somewhat because of United > Nations).

I truly hope post-WWII institutions like these continue to have force for as long as possible. I think the world is safe from major war as long as this continues. But eventually, be it 50 years or 500 hundred years, they will fall.

<comment><USER7> You could make a fairly strong argument that these days the US is not much of a representative democracy; and that it is more of an elite oligarchy which performs a theater of democracy for public consumption. When overt criminal activity by elite institutions goes unpunished (see NSA, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, etc.) and popular movements for reform are crushed (Occupy) or coopted (Tea Party); it's hard to claim the moral high ground for our form of governance.

<comment><USER8> > You could make a fairly strong argument that these days the US is not much > of a representative democracy; and that it is more of an elite oligarchy > which performs a theater of democracy for public consumption.

To the extent that you could make such an argument "these days", you could make an even stronger argument for the same thing at almost any time in the past history of the U.S.

<comment><USER7> Well, you could, but there are ebbs and flows. And right now the party of money seems to be riding roughshod over the party of the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Only morons like the economist would look at the US not being interesting in getting involved in a war in Syria -- where we would have to choose sides between an evil regime and al-qaeda -- and conclude "This betrays both a lack of ambition and an ignorance of history." In fact, it betrays rather a good grasp of recent history -- see both Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe America has finally learned to beware Republican assholes volunteering your (but not their!) children for war. One can dream, anyhow...

</comment><comment><USER10> No nuclear armed country has ever been invaded and war between two nuclear armed countries seems ridiculous.

On the other hand, as the article says, people in 1914 were making similar claims about the interdependence of their economies and their new technologies.

Still, it's quite a different situation.

<comment><USER11> yeah, I think if someone breached the borders of the US, Russia, China, India, or any other nuclear-armed country they'd get a (small) nuke dropped on one of their cities for sure.

Also, China makes most of the world's everyday stuff, I don't see how they would drop all those customers for a war that would bring in less profits and will leave them starving afterwards (cause no one would trust them with their factories anymore). The pre-WW1 trade ties were peanuts compared to today...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's an interesting time to be writing articles like this. Afghanistan, Iraq then the 2008 financial crisis. America lost prestige and the economy shrank considerably. These factors, real and perceived, coincided with the ongoing rise of China who for the most part avoided a real let down. I suspect that when we look back in 5 years from now we will really see 2013 as the last year of this low point. The US economy is _finally_ rebounding - Q4 GDP looks very impressive. With lowered deficits and an improving job market citizen interest in politics will lessen. This will increase the ability of the US to play a more proactive role internationally again. Secondly, there are very troubling signs coming from China in terms of their own banking system. We know there's a shadow banking system and many failed enterprises are propped up. And, they're still a 1 party authoritarian state. I'm not sure how long the Chinese people will be ok with that; especially as their population ages and their middle class expands.

I wonder about the next 10 years or so and whether the US will rebound and China will finally face challenges they can't simply overcome via spending.

<comment><USER4> "I suspect that when we look back in 5 years from now we will really see 2013 as the last year of this low point. The US economy is finally rebounding - <USER2> GDP looks very impressive."

I'm pretty sure one can find a similar quotation from 1913.

<comment><USER12> That is a fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently read a fabulous history of WWI (G.J. Meyer's _The World Undone_). What struck me is that if you modeled Europe in 1914 as a distributed system, you'd see incredible latencies between decisions being made and decisions being carried out. Kaiser Wilhelm and King George (first cousins!) were negotiating to stave off the war long after Germany's decision to mobilize, and might very well have succeeded were it possible to reverse the mobilization decision. The German generals insisted it wasn't. And even before then, Germany's decision to mobilize was based on reports of Russia's decision to mobilize, which also took weeks to carry out. If communication and military latencies were shorter, maybe the war could have been avoided. It was like the world's worst race condition.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's really hard to see anything big starting up in Europe, since all the countries are now officially democracies, and those that are at the corrupt end of the spectrum are not the most powerful. R. J. Rummels arguments about how democracies don't go to war against each other are pretty compelling. [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MIRACLE.HTM](http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MIRACLE.HTM)

I guess the biggest potential problem would be China, but do they really have any allies for their side that would cause a "world war"? Seems to me like if they started anything, then it would be them against the entire west, and as long as we don't feel compelled to invade them, they don't have a lot of power eh can project.

<comment><AUTHOR> The concern isn't China bombing Germany. It is China pushing to establish itself as the East China Sea's regional hegemon. This would involve displacing Japan, a conflict likely to pull in the U.S. That risks drawing in, at a minimum, the U.K. and Australia.

A U.S.-China conflict would shoot decades of progress in the head.

<comment><USER15> Of course I would have to wonder what about Japan would be worth a war with the U.S.

Logistical value perhaps, for example by denying the U.S. the bases they currently have there, but certainly not for resources?

<comment><USER16> The Chinese in general still feel humiliated by their treatment at the hands of the western powers and then their occupation by Japan in WW2. Furthermore they have an issue of not having enough resouces to feed their growth. Who ever owns the islands (more then one set - China is arguing with Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Philippines) has the rights to exploit the oil/gas fields in the ocean beds around them.

Now to the story. I can see the parallels to the run up to WW1 however there is one large difference. In WW1 there was no real dominate military power (i.e. has complete unmatched and overwhelming force). The fact is that the US military so overmatches everyone else that it would be a very short war. Blood and a mess but still very short.

<comment><USER17> "it would be a very short war. Blood and a mess but still very short."

You may wish to read up on attitudes immediately prior to WWI. And there were three dominate military powers at the start of WWI, Germany the land empire able to call up 5M men in days, Russia with infinite manpower but so logistically messed up they never get to use them, and the British Navy dominated the waves, which was a pretty big deal as this was toward the end of the colonial era (although Germany didn't get to play colonialism which was arguably part of the problem)

Seriously, the franco prussian war was only a couple months adn the protoGermans won decisively. They really did expect to be done, one way or another, by winter time.

WW3 will probably be something like NK implodes and tries to blow up SK and .jp along with it (australia?), and China and "the west" argue very forcibly about who will dominate the area in a post-NK, perhaps post-SK and post-.jp world. At least if I was writing an Alt Hist type novel thats where I'd generally go.

<comment><USER18> > NK implodes and tries to blow up SK and .jp along with it (australia?)

I certainly wouldn't want to live in Seoul if (when?) that comes to pass but wouldn't be too worried even in Japan - it's a good 1000km, and I don't think NK has the tech to get much precision at those distances. Certainly they don't have stealth missiles which would be able to evade JP's considerable number of aegis equipped vessels. They could likely do some damage but I doubt it would be catastrophic.

As for Australia, I wouldn't be worried at all - that's well into ICBM territory, a whole different technological level and NK have never demonstrated anything even close. Not to mention Hawaii is actually closer to Pyongyang than Sydney - if they really can lob missiles ~8000km, why not go for the Great Satan himself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not a very good analysis of the causes of WWI or application to today:

Problems:

1) Cultural attitude of "eh, war is not so bad and higher tech means we'll be home by xmas". See franco-prussian war and the most recent "world war" being Napoleon's activities in the decade after the revolution a century ago. I'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena. Of course that can change quickly, 90% of everything Americans see is from 5 media companies or whatever, so they can turn on a dime.

2) Germany surrounded by rapidly growing and arming enemies and no allies but Austria, paranoid lash out. But can you blame them? China surrounded by, um, Japan on one side? Is NK threatening to invade? Who exactly is supposed to invade China next decade if they don't invade today? Why would they be paranoid? Yes, maybe NK could try this scheme, but...

3) The root cause of the war being the ottoman empire decaying and almost dead and everyone wanted a lucrative piece of it. (edited to add, and no one wanted a competitor to get a piece of it, and willing to go to war to prevent it) Incredible trade opportunity. Maybe if you put the American Empire in its place and position this in the latter half of the 2000s century and starving people want our rice/corn? Anyway the sick man of Europe lead to crazy allegiance switching in the years prior to WWI.

4) The article skipped several points WRT the German/British alliance thing, Germany was a continental Army power and the UK had a spectacular navy. One nutcase admiral on the German side got them all into navy building leading to disaster WRT the natural alliance. Other than the crazy admiral (Tirpitz?) they were natural allies and their royalty were related, something crazy close like the Kaiser was Queen Victoria's grandson or something. Aside from the obvious trade issue that was brought up.

5) The dangers of multiculturalism. Austrian Empire was a multicultural nightmare basically think conditions in modern Iraq, no majority and everyone hates everyone and the only thing holding it together is a strong empire. Then the independent Serbians start going nuts so to prevent revolution spreading into their own empire the Austrian's fight the Serbians and the game is on. So, uh, who is the nervous feeling multicultural empire with the neighbor in revolution? Gonna try for USA again? Maybe with a .MX revolution next door? I think this is stretching it.

6) Speaking of revolution, Russia was falling apart internally and didn't do so well externally against the Japanese but holy cow do they have resources and manpower, so what better external distraction than a war? Again, I'm just not seeing it. Another allusion to the USA?

7) Who plays the part of Italy? Decades of "we're your ally" "nope just kidding". Another allusion to the USA maybe WRT having Japan's back?

Note if you have the USA play all the parts of WWI then its not much of a WWI anymore, is it?

In groups men are by nature irrational not rational, there is nothing inconsistent with the old quote about WWI being impossible because its obviously futile, yet they had a war anyway. I'm sure WW3 would be completely futile, we'll still have it anyway, but I don't think it'll be this decade and USA vs China or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I 'm not seeing much warmongering as a cultural phenomena._

In the U.S., perhaps not. But nationalism and remilitarisation are flaring up in China and Japan, respectively.

 _Who exactly is supposed to invade China next decade if they don 't invade today?_

China, with good reason, perceives itself as being surrounded by U.S.-allied countries looking to suppress its growth. Since growth is the currency the Communist Party trades for its seat of power, this is a potentially existential issue to the elite.

 _The root cause of the war being the ottoman empire decaying and almost dead and everyone wanted a lucrative piece of it._

The American Pacific alliance would be a loose analogue today. China may think it can establish a suzerainty over, say, the Phillipines, betting the U.S. will balk at another costly intervention.

The Economist's point isn't that we're going to have a war in a mold of WWI - all the seats need not be filled. It's simply warning that while we're watching the S&P 500 soar to record heights on the back of booming productivity and resurgent globalisation we shouldn't ignore the fireworks that are playing out over a handful of unmanned islands in the East China Sea.

<comment><USER19> Go look at US action movies, video games, etc. There's plenty of warmongering going on. Heck, just within the last year we had a mass media frenzy over the prospect of bombing Syria.

Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now, and on the whole doing quite poorly. If any country ought to not be warmongering...

<comment><USER17> That's wimpy warmongering as in "police action" and far away. Psuedo- colonialism.

Real USA warmongering would sound like, "We're gonna invade Canada and take all the maple syrup as our manifest destiny or we'll die trying".

Even the attitude of the Italian-Ethiopian war would be more hard core than the USA now.

Depressingly, our war mongering looks more like serving an arrest warrant in Detroit than being in a world war. Militarization of cops is the depressing part.

<comment><USER19> Colonialism was mostly war as business as usual too. WWI was the exception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If we want to talk historical parallels a better one is the invention of the printing press and the invention of the internet. The printing press destroyed the Catholic Church's social and political power at its peak.

The internet has destroyed the traditional news media's ability to set the political and social discourse and thus agenda. The NYT and ABC, NBC, CBS are no longer able to set the political and social agenda, like everyone else they are following the internet. Recall that the recent 60 Minutes puff job on the NSA (and secondarily a hit piece on Snowden) fell flat and was generally panned by independent voices on the internet. This gambit was telling in that the powers that be are still playing by the old playbook. 25 years ago this 60 Minutes "news" report would have ended the discussion.

To echo the point of the Economist article, this is a dangerous time and nuclear war is one very real possibility. We are living in the middle of the greatest social revolution in the history of mankind, since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago, and nobody can really say how it will play out.

Read this article by Clay Shirky from 2009 for a better explanation;

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and- thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the- unthinkable/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The article is full of oversimplifications like WWI was "because of Germany". Oh , yeah. Why thinking when you can blame someone else?.

An article about WWs in the Economist should talk about economic data, about banks burning and destroying the savings of decades of the work of the people. They need to talk about Oligopolies, about Roosevelt(Teddy) trying to do something about that , but at the end the biggest of all(the Fed) being created in 1913.

They need to talk about Africa and middle East, and India colonies and commerce at the time.

But this has a problem: It is not as easy as "blame the Germans!"

"The second precaution that would make the world safer is a more active American foreign policy. "

Oh yeah, again.

"Barack Obama has pulled back in the Middle East—witness his unwillingness to use force in Syria. "

Wow, this is the better line of all. If something Syria has shown us is the willingness of US to use force in Syria, only being stopped by China and Russia.

"But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries."

Today the US is the biggest bully of all. If any parallelism is to be extracted from WWs to today is countries like China behaving like the US of the past, as creditors of the world, while the rest of the world overspends and get in as many wars as possible to protect their turf.

</comment><comment><USER22> On some level I am quite glad that china, its neighbors and the US are arguing over some rocks and some identification zone.

It looks more like an ritualistic show fight you sometimes see in the animal kingdom than an eve of war.

For that matter I am quite glad that they are not rattling their sabers about Taiwan...

Nothing about the disputed island would be worth even a very small scale war, much less the risk of a bigger one. There's just no profit in it. On the other hand, battles about islands (like the Falklands War) tend to cost a lot less lives, especially civilian, than any land-based war.

No, this is more about China trying to harness nationalistic emotions on the one hand and their "opponents" not wanting to present China with an opportunity for actually profitable wars or threats.

If for example the US and Japan would back down, China might "negotiate" the annexation of Taiwan in the near future, which would be profitable. There have been rumors of such attempts already, and China's military buildup makes this ever more realistic.

</comment><comment><USER23> paywall!

"Once you've registered, you can read up to three articles each week."

pretty sure I've not been to economist.com in a while. :/

<comment><USER24> New private browser window, or delete economist.com cookies. In firefox with the pentadactyl plugin for vim-like keybindings: "<Esc>:cookies economist.com clear" .

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is anyone else seeing a Breitling ad featuring WWII fighter planes and "sexy" girls winking at the pilots?

Really unfortunate pairing.

(Really the sexing up of war is pretty distasteful under any circumstances but this just takes the cake.)

</comment><comment><USER26> There is one major difference: Since the Snowden affair, the United States no longer have allies.

<comment><USER27> The Snowden affair made ZERO difference to US alliances. Seriously zero. The US will still be able to depend on UK, JP, AU, NZ, CA, SK etc.

Alliances don't get torn up because of a bit of spying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> awesome!

</comment><comment><USER29> Another weak article from the british Economist.

<comment><USER30> Another weak article from the Daily Mail featuring the BBC's John Simpson:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530571/100-years- Wo...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530571/100-years-World-War-I- I-believe-stand-crossroads-history-John-Simpson.html?ico=home^editors_choice)

I think that these right-wing organ-of-the-secret-state propagandists are all fairly clueless.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Make a lowlatency, realtime multiplayer game with edge computing - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrometa.co/blog/castleknight-building-a-global-realtime-online-multiplayer-game-chat <comment><USER2> It would be nice if there was more discussion of the architecture and how the service achieves its claims. How are users synced reliably without a central server? It's not a matter of reducing latency at all costs. Game server architecture is based on the concept of server authority that prevents hackers and cheaters from performing client-side operations from altering the "source of truth" that lives on and is only altered by server-side operations. This looks like a fun approach to learning the API but there isn't enough information to justify replacing existing hand-made systems built for online games.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi gatherhunterer Great feedback - I'll add a few links on to the docs on architecture and things like consistency of data (short answer is this a geo distributed data platform with consistency gaurantees).

Thanks also for the great point you made about "altering source of truth" \- we will look into how best to provide those gaurantees as well. Our underlying data structures are an event source on an append only log - so we can go back to see the provenance of changes to make sure there was no cheating but we dont expose that externally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of the text in this blog post was plagiarized from here:

[https://itnext.io/how-to-build-a-realtime-multiplayer- game-i...](https://itnext.io/how-to-build-a-realtime-multiplayer-game-in- javascript-using-pubnub-5f410fd62f33)

See copyscape comparison:

[https://www.copyscape.com/view.php?o=17791&u=https%3A%2F%2Fi...](https://www.copyscape.com/view.php?o=17791&u=https%3A%2F%2Fitnext.io%2Fhow- to-build-a-realtime-multiplayer-game-in-javascript-using- pubnub-5f410fd62f33&t=1564606589&s=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.macrometa.co%2Fblog%2Fcastleknight- building-a-global-realtime-online-multiplayer-game-chat&w=20&i=5&r=5)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your comment. We're resolving this issue, will update the post, and include full and clear attribution.</comment></comment>


100,000 Synthetic Trees Could Help Combat Climate Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/03/100000-synthetic-trees-could-help-combat-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> I'm for planting 100,000 'real' trees. All kinds. Everywhere. 100 times that in fact.

But when it comes to CO2 processing I'm with algae. Not ponds, but highly engineered, sustainable facilities that create jobs requiring solid educations.

I look at the picture and think that's where 100,000 cameras are going to go.

<comment><USER3> _highly engineered, sustainable facilities that create jobs requiring solid educations_

You're suggesting building in unnecessary complexity?

<comment><USER2> No.

Solid biological and chemical backgrounds for research, analysis and quality control. Engineering backgrounds to design, build and maintain facilities and infrastructure including IT and automation. Business backgrounds to develop new markets, manage finances, employees, operations, etc.

<comment><USER4> Creating jobs is never a goal in anyone's best interest when trying to propose a solution to a problem.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. I believe, however, that processing CO2 using algae would probably produce better paying, higher quality (including entrepreneurial) opportunities in the long run.

Unless this whole CO2 problem is incorrect, it seems to me it's going to take a lot of human ingenuity and effort to solve it.

In that regard, if it creates jobs and careers in the process -- good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry, but these "Synthetic Trees" seem to be incredibly stupid. Trees (real ones) serve several funtions, the ones most important to this being: They remove CO2, and the turn it into oxygen. All that these Synthetic trees do is take CO2 out of the air, and shove it underground to store. This may just be me, but this sounds like the kind of thing that will have massive ramifications a century or so down the line.

<comment><USER6> Maybe. But according to a number of climate scientists, we've screwed the earth by then if we keep pumping it into the air.

It's not the perfect solution, but it's nominally a better scenario. Who know what we might do with a huge load of CO2 in 100 years? We might have industrialized photosynthesis, so we can convert it all back to oxygen and coal.

<comment><USER5> The thing about CO2 and O2 is that its a loop. We breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. Plants "Breathe" in CO2 and "Breathe" out O2. It just seems very dangerous to me to sequester a lot of that underground, more so than climate change.

<comment><USER6> The deal with the climate change CO2 is that we've pumped out an enormous surplus of CO2 _beyond_ what is tied up in that loop. Note, that all that CO2 came from oxygen that was once in the atmosphere, and we're still breathing fine.

If the CO2 that would be caught by these trees would otherwise be "breathed" by plants, there wouldn't be a problem. CO2 doesn't bother the climate as long as it's down here, it's in the stratosphere (I think. One of the -pheres) it becomes a greenhouse gas.

<comment><USER5> Right, so trying to balance this cycle by pumping it back underground doesn't seem to be the right solution (unless these synthetic trees can operate without being powered). Otherwise all we're doing is creating a second, closed loop of: Pull Carbon out of the ground (in the form of fossil fuels) -> burn, turn into CO2 -> capture out of atmosphere, put back in ground. Unless we the trees do it without using up more fossil fuels to do so, it doesn't seem entirely effective.

It just seems to me to be a bad idea to create a second CO2 loop rather than just strengthening the one that already exists. Yes, the synthetic trees may be more effective, but you get more than just CO2->O2 out of a tree.

<comment><USER6> We don't don't need to balance the cycle, it's perfectly balanced on it's own, we want to avoid generating large amounts of CO2 that won't go into that cycle, because it will make a greenhouse effect -- either by not emitting, by scrubbing and storing (this solution) or by enlarging the cycle (plating actual tree, algae etc.).

I'd think that if we can convert the CO2 back to coal, we'd want to dump it in a hole somewhere, not burn it. The point was to get it out of the way until then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would be curious as to the energy + carbon emissions required to manufacture one of the artificial trees.

</comment><comment><USER3> "You know? They're growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down. Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to it's full height from a boggy swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It's life! It's life!"

Laurie Anderson - Sharkey`s Day

</comment><comment><USER8> Serious question: how do trees, which exchange CO2 for O2, help climate change? More specifically, isn't the problem that too much CO2 is way up there? How do trees down here help that?

<comment><USER6> It's down here before it's up there. The idea is to stop it before it goes up (by "cathing it" quickly, or by not emitting it at all), because once it's there, there's not much to do about it.

<comment><USER8> That's the only thing I could think of too, but then thought... if smokestacks (et. al.) are dumping it up there quite above tree heights, that's just gone, right? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I really don't know how this stuff works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are these more efficient than real trees? I read before that our solar panels are more efficient than photosynthesis at generating energy from sunlight.

<comment><USER6> The object, as I understand it, is scrubbing CO2 from the air, not generating energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazing to read all these comments. One would have thought that whoever is part of the HN scene is highly educated and reasonably knowledgeable. Obviously not so. Research is only just beginning to copy the way real tree leaves operate:

[http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/klug/Research/Artificial%20Photosynth...](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/klug/Research/Artificial%20Photosynthesis/ResearchAP.html)

In the meantime it is probably even better to just reduce CO2 out put rather than try and store it. But as people seem to be unable to kick a habit easily - even if it may kill them longer term see smoking - why not store it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Climate change is a normal earth cycle of warming and cooling trends. So don't believe the hype. However I would never say no to more trees.</comment>


Time, Consciousness and Quantum Events in Fundamental Spacetime Geometry [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/sites/default/files/Time%20Consciousness%20and%20Quantum%20Events%20in%20Fundamental%20Spacetime%20Geometry.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Theory TL;DR

"But what about time itself? Henri Bergson concluded that time is "grasped by, and belongs only to, inner consciousness". But what is consciousness? In the Orch OR model, with the equivalence of quantum superposition (e.g. of tubulin protein conformations) and spacetime separation consciousness is a sequence of OR events which reconfigure spacetime geometry "non-computably", and hence non-algorithmically. Thus with each conscious moment a new organization of Planck scale geometry is selected irreversibly."</comment>


Cleaning up bad bots (and the climate) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/cleaning-up-bad-bots/ <comment><USER2> This is similar to hashcash proof of work concepts that inspired Bitcoin. Use proof of work to make not traffic expensive, to create a financial disincentive for running the bot.

I'm curious to see if Tor users get impacted by this.

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

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there something better than a CPU intensive task? They obviously are worried about the power consumption.

I'm thinking a memory and time intensive task that is minimally CPU intensive would be better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Grandma's DSL router is about to get much warmer.</comment>


FCC struggles to convince judge that broadband isn't "telecommunications" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/throttling-of-firefighters-hurts-fcc-case-as-it-defends-net-neutrality-repeal/ <comment><USER2> I'm spoiled by SCOTUSblog's case analysis in terms of legal tea leaf reading, which ArsTechnica is most definitely not, but I'll try to do it anyways. If I understand the case properly, there's a few different moving pieces going on here.

On the first, whether or not broadband can be classified as information service... I expect the ruling to be that it can be. The fact is that the FCC had classified it as such in the past, and only very recently changed that classification. We can sit here and laugh about how minimal the support is (the only information service that the FCC can find to cite is DNS, after all), but this amounts to (from a legal perspective) challenging the technical definition of the agency providing said technical definition, which is generally destined to fail (see Chevron).

There is a wrinkle, of course, that the FCC's _process_ for making this determination is flawed, so it's possible that the court could rule that, while the decision per se isn't wrong, the process is wrong, so the FCC would have to go back and redo that. This article doesn't give much of a clue as to how the court would rule here.

The last question is if the rules here preempt local rules. I've always thought this argument had a tough time, because the argument of the FCC is (in effect) that it doesn't have the authority to regulate broadband as an information service but its non-authority to regulate them preempts states' authority to regulate them. For federal deregulation to preempt potential state regulation, it has to be fairly explicit in law, not just an agency decision. It looks like there is some pushback here in that the judges think that the FCC's deregulatory claims here are too broadly scoped.

Given Ars's editorial slant, I'm assuming that we're getting most of the pro- net-neutrality segments of the argument cherry picked, which would lead me to conclude that this is not going to be a ruling that net neutrality advocates are hoping for.

<comment><USER3> They leave the problems for the very end, where they note that the supreme court has already said that classifying a cable modem as an information service is an allowed reading of the law.

My overall impression reading the definions is what salawat said, that something about the ordinary use of language isn't happening. But even with those definitions my question would be if broadband isn't a telecommunication service then what is the telecommunication service it is over?

Unfortunately, "the supreme court was just plain wrong last time" is not really allowed in legal decisions. It sounds like at least one of the judges wants to argue that since ISP email is no longer generally used things have changed.

<comment><USER2> I haven't read the decision in question carefully, but I did skim some of the briefs in this case. My understanding is that the decision basically said "broadband is providing both telecommunication and information services, so it's acceptable to classify is information service." Mozilla et al. is arguing that the information services broadband--e.g., Usenet, personal website hosting--used to provide are no longer being provided, so that broadband companies are no longer providing the information services needed to let them be classified as information services.

<comment><USER4> > My understanding is that the decision basically said "broadband is providing > both telecommunication and information services, so it's acceptable to > classify is information service"

I don't see why these are mutually exclusive. If they are both, shouldn't they be subject to both sets of rules? Or perhaps they should be required to separate them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "[FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson] said broadband is an information service because Internet providers offer DNS (Domain Name System) services and caching as part of the broadband package."

"For broadband itself to be an information service, ISPs have to offer something more than a pure transmission service."

DNS is integral to the utility of the web as an "information system"\--not really a user friendly service to have to enter the IP address to order on Grubhub. Yet, DNS can be provided by a third party. It's the sort of thing you add to your service to make it easier for users to adopt. But if you take it away, then don't we just have a telecommunication service?

<comment><USER6> Not only that, but websites don't have TLS certificates securing their IP- address-form hostnames. The user's browser probably wouldn't even allow the site to load, if the web server even accepted the IP address as a hostname to begin with. The modern web is virtually useless without DNS.

<comment><USER7> The poor decisions of developers in relying on the crutch of DNS does not somehow magically elevate IP routing away from being a telecommunications service.

I _can_ establish a completely IP based network infrastructure that provides valuable service to customers at broadband speeds. It wouldn't be fun, but it would work. That's inarguably telecom, based on their argument, because it wouldn't involve DNS.

If you try to argue against broadband being telecom because it has an automated yellow pages, I don't know what to tell you except you're outright lying about the science, and attempting to perpetuate a maliciously narrow tooled definition in bad faith.

Now that we bring up the topic, what the heck is an information service other than a service that serves information _over a telecommunication line_ thereby rendering it a _telecommunication service_?

I feel like I live in a different universe from these people. Like there's fundamental rules or mechanisms I've learned about using language to render a shared experience/common worldview with others that are just absent in these types of proceedings.

It has gotten to the point that when I read or listen to these types of things, what people _aren 't_ saying sticks out more to me than what they _are_ saying. It's infuriating.

<comment><USER8> "I feel like I live in a different universe from these people."

It's the same universe. Remember that it is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends upon not understanding it.

The real paymasters behind the leadership of the FCC expect the FCC to continue drawing the distinctions that serve their interest. Any understanding of the matter that is contrary to "the FCC can't regulate broadband" is, therefore, incomprehensible.

It is simple, bald-faced regulatory capture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is all politics. There's nothing reasonable about it.</comment>


My clock - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nixpulvis/clock <comment><USER2> The Readme doesn't tell me anything. What does "max7221 ds1307" (the whole content of the file) mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah I should update the README For sure. Both of those are chips (ICs). I should also provide a link to the AVRM libraries which are crucial to this working.

The DS1307 is a RTC (real time clock). The MAX7221 is an LED driver.

Maybe I'll even add a picture of the hacked together curcuit.

More information can be found at [http://nixpulvis.github.io/nixpulvis/projects/clock/index.ht...](http://nixpulvis.github.io/nixpulvis/projects/clock/index.html)

[https://github.com/nixpulvis/avrm](https://github.com/nixpulvis/avrm) [https://github.com/nixpulvis/ds1307](https://github.com/nixpulvis/ds1307) [https://github.com/nixpulvis/max7221](https://github.com/nixpulvis/max7221)</comment></comment>


Why you should never use Socket.IO - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/uWebSockets/uWebSockets#benchmarks-table---validate <comment><USER2> I like the library but the title is pure clickbait. I expected an article arguing this position, not a github repo. The github repo simply does not explain why "you should never use Socket.IO" \- performance is not necessarily the only feature Socket.IO offers, it could be API surface, etc..Socket.IO is also two parts - a client and a server, and this library is just a server.

The title is doubly worse because it doesn't actually promote the library. You could quote the repo instead - "mWebSockets - a lightweight, efficient & scalable WebSocket server"

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't consider a 60x performance overhead reason enough? And yeah, thanks so very much for flagging this post!

<comment><USER3> If there is a 60x performance difference, why not put that information in the title? The title doesn't even mention uWebSockets, and it is clearly your intention to promote it. In the future, please avoid using link-baity titles like this on HN.

The reason I've selected socket.io for projects in the past is because of the awesome documentation and slick marketing, not because of snarky attacks on other libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciate there's a drop-in replacement line for existing socket.IO apps. Thanks for making something awesome

</comment><comment><USER5> The killer Socket.IO feature for me is being able to talk to clients from other server processes using socket.io-redis and socket.io-emitter [1].

Any ideas how we can achieve something similar using µWS? I guess using it as the engine in Socket.IO would do it, but let's assume we want to get rid of Socket.IO entirely.

[1] [http://socket.io/docs/rooms-and-namespaces/#sending- messages...](http://socket.io/docs/rooms-and-namespaces/#sending-messages- from-the-outside-world)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can I have opinions from someone who have already used this?

<comment><USER7> Sure. The only thing SocketIO really has going for it is built-in support for falling back to long polling (for browsers that don't support websockets). That said, if you're using socketIO in production, you'll have to deal with memory leaks that aren't your fault (eg. even if you stick to boilerplate code). If you just want something quick and easy for a hackathon or personal project that you never want to scale, go for it. Otherwise be prepared for a rewrite, or increased hardware costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hard to take a "socket.io killer" seriously when it doesn't even implement bare necessities like message_id callbacks:

        socket.emit('msg', 'hello', (err) => ...)

At which point the nice part of using socket.io is that there are a variety of clients (and server impls) so every one of your users doesn't need to implement things like message_id callbacks.

<comment><USER9> That can be implemented with a simple switch statement. Or using node's built in eventemitters in two lines:

        const e = new EventEmitter();
        socket.on('message', msg => e.emit(msg.data.type, msg.data));

Also websockets have far better server and client support. There's websocket implementations in basically every major language as well as most popular load balancers on the market today.

When socket.io first came out it was very needed. But now websockets are supported in all major browsers, including mobile: [http://caniuse.com/#search=websockets](http://caniuse.com/#search=websockets)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what your snippet is demonstrating, but it's not demonstrating message_id matchup.

The client stores its own message_id -> callback mapping, it has to send some sort of reply id for the server or agree on some other mechanism, and it's not something you want to have to build on every project, just like exponential reconnect backaway.

And I'm not sure why you'd want to use the native WebSocket API by itself except on toy apps.

<comment><USER9> You're talking about a light layer on top of websockets to implement a request/response protocol. This can be done pretty trivially on top of websockets in dozens of ways, though if what you want is request/response you should consider using HTTP directly.

You never have to "build it again for every project" if you put your code in npm. But I guarantee you there are dozens of libraries like this in npm already. (Just like there are dozens of libraries to do exponential reconnect backoff.)

The right approach is to build / use light layers on top of websockets to solve these problems. Socket.io is the wrong solution. Its the wrong solution for _every_ problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Care to share why Socket.IO is so poorly implemented? It seems to be a small wrapper around the socket protocol—what could be written so poorly?

<comment><AUTHOR> My keyboard would wear out if I listed everything wrong with Socket.IO. Simply put: it is one of the worst pieces of software I have ever stumbled upon. And the ratio hype-to-quality is off the charts. It's success lies in the fact that most users don't check their numbers and simply follow what everyone else is doing. Combined with the marketing of being "the fastest" which logically means "there exists no such solution in any universe, that outperforms it".

I would recommend WebSocket++ or libwebsockets (if you are not going with µWebSockets).

<comment><USER4> Socket.IO came out years ago. Yes, it is slow compared to recent implementations, but it's still valuable to give props to your predecessors.

<comment><AUTHOR> WebSocket++ was written at the same time as Socket.IO and performs about 30x better. I give credit where credit is due. I also criticize projects where criticism is due.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good post, but will sadly go unseen due to elections. Will try to share it once things calm down!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I just finished the Socket.IO benchmark and wanted to show my findings (both in relation to my own project but also in relation to the existing alternatives) Socket.IO is simply a tremendous fuck-up no matter what perspective you have.</comment></comment>


The need for pluralism in economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2016/08/13/the-need-for-pluralism-in-economics/ <comment><AUTHOR> This blog post by Steve Keen, Professor of Economics and Head of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London, is an excellent summary of the flaws of the Neoclassical Economics school of thought that currently dominates policy making world wide. In it, Steve also discusses alternative approaches to modeling the macro economy that made apparent the inevitability of a Global Financial Crisis well in advance. For those unfamiliar with Steve Keen's work in heterodox economics, this post should be a perfect primer.

<comment><USER2> Good stuff, and I'm interested in Keen (not sure I'll admit to being a fan yet, though he's interesting, rigorous, and is presenting some strong challenges to the economic mainstream).

I wish this had taken off a bit. I'd encourage you to resubmit it and ping email@example.com to see if it might get stronger visability. Though I suspect HN may not have sufficient economic depth to let this take off.</comment></comment>


Joke about blowing something up on Twitter, get arrested - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7016266/Man-arrested-under-Terrorism-Act-for-Doncaster-airport-Twitter-joke.html

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately in this day and age terrorism is very, very real. It is most definitely _not_ a joking matter. Yes, it might seem to be overkill. However, overkill is much better than thousands dying because the joke was actually real.

<comment><USER3> Is terrorism really any better or worse that any other time since world war two?

<comment><USER2> Possibly not the threat. In my limited experience (I'm a late teen) the reality of attacks are much more real. WTC Bombing. Oklahoma City. 9/11. Those all happened in my lifetime.

<comment><USER4> All of those happened in the US. This incident was in the UK and unless I'm mistaken the UK had a crapload of IRA bombings in the 80s and early 90s. It seems the UK is _much, much_ calmer now.

<comment><USER2> Yes. It is. I meant worldwide terrorism is the issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How has Satoshi Nakamoto been so good at opsec all this time? - <AUTHOR> I don't understand it. Every other major figure online who people wanted to identify has slipped up at some time or another. Leakers like Edward Snowden? Got identified by the government. People running black market services like Dread Pirate Roberts and the guys behind AlphaBay? Identified by law enforcement. Hoaxers in the media world like JT LeRoy and the guy behind the blog 'A Gay Girl in Damascus' got identified by the public or press.
Same goes for everything from famous authors with pen names and infamous internet personalities like violentacrez from Reddit.
So how has Satoshi Nakamoto avoided all this? Has he really never made a single mistake that could give away his identity? Is he some super expert at keeping his identity secret compared to the thousands of others who've tried and been exposed.
How has Satoshi avoided having his name and personal details revealed online? <comment><USER2> One of the most fun theories I've heard came from a friend of mine. He believes Satoshi hasn't been found because there isn't _a_ Satoshi, but rather that it was a code name for a major research project.

Creating, designing and building the first version of Bitcoin is complicated and spans a number of fields of expertise.

Most of these fields of expertise only have a few truly exceptional practitioners who would be capable of the original thought.

You then have to factor in the peculiar nature of:

1) Not touching his new wealth of initial Bitcoins.

2) Disappearing into obscurity.

3) Being able to avoid being discovered (or nobody actually trying that hard to find him).

Occam's Razor principle would suggest all of that is less likely to have some altruistic single brilliant individual create Bitcoin and then leave. It's more likely a team of individuals would create it under a pseudonym, dissolve after completion of the project and then no longer have access to the accounts/keys.

Large government agencies would have the ability to bring top minds together, and less interest in liquidating the initial Satoshi Bitcoins.

Why would they want it? There are plenty of reasons governments would want a public ledger system. Unlike some of Bitcoin's spin-offs, Bitcoin isn't actually really private at all. It would be great for tracking and stopping crime.

Of course this is all a theory that sounds like it's out of a spy novel, but I think it's good fun.

The other likely possibilities is that Satoshi could have been older and passed away, or he truly is some brilliant mind who is well hidden.

<comment><USER3> The problem that I see with your theory is that it would be very difficult for so many people to keep this a secret.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it falls into the problem conspiracy theories do. It's incredibly hard to keep a secret when it goes beyond one or two people, especially when what's being hidden is a major controversy or something a lot of people are interested in reading about. If it was a government project, it'd only take one leaker wanting some quick cash from the media to blow the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Edward Snowden? Got identified by the government.

No, he chose to identify himself. The government had no idea.

> Private Manning?

Got snitched by a betrayer. This should not happen. He was very naive to trust an anonymous figure head.

> Dread Pirate Roberts?

A php guy. Enough said.

> The truecrypt drug king from Rhodesia?

Good opsec, but lured to Africa. He was way too big.

Lots of good hackers have good opsec. Almost nobody got caught.

</comment><comment><USER5> I suspect he is either long dead or in prison.

Another thing is, unlike people like Snowden he does not have much heat after him. He is a mystery, but that's it - looking for him is pointless, since it's not like he can do something governments want him to stop doing or have something governments want to seize from him.

It would be like going after the parents of Osama Bin Laden - it's not like they could have told him to stop terrorizing.

<comment><USER6> Maybe they had an accident or something.

I mean good people die all the time, just like regular people...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> He hasn't, law enforcement almost certainly know who he is. and there is significant evidence it's Nick Szabo and/or Hal Finney.

Most people in the community believe it's probably one or both of them. Hal Finney died in 2014. Also, it's better for Bitcoin if he is never found as the bitcoin holdings of Satoshi is so large if they were to become active it would crash the price of Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't remember how The FBI initially identified The Dread Pirate Roberts but they had to set up quite an operation to find conclusive proof and arrest him, including undercover agents and months of surveillance. Probably nobody has tried that hard to find Satoshi.

<comment><USER9> Somehow I don't think the guy that designed bitcoin is going to get caught using an email address with his real name to post programming 101 questions on stackoverflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scott Adams of Dilbert fame once suggested this intriguing theory of Bitcoing being the work of a benevolent post-singularity AI: [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/103051092096/how-the-robots- wil...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/103051092096/how-the-robots-will-take- over)

While perhaps not particularly likely I think he does have point. What better way to slowly but steadily as well as clandestinely introduce beneficial changes to human society than to create a decentralised currency in order to influence financial markets and the flow of capital?

</comment><comment><USER11> It's probable that no one looked as hard for Satoshi as for the other people you mentioned because law enforcement isn't after him/her.

</comment><comment><USER12> Because he disappeared before people looking for his identity. It is hard to keep your identity when people are looking for you.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dead people have the best opsec.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nick Szabo is one of the members of the Satoshi Nakamoto team.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dave Kleiman was Satoshi Nakamoto.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hal Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto.

</comment><comment><USER16> Planning and prudence. Otherwise unknown to date.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto.

<comment> D-Coder I am Spartacus!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> OP is Satoshi. Case closed. ;)</comment>


Ask HN: I own a niche image upload site with 400k uniques but now what? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone, I've owned reversegif.com for almost two years now. Its an awesome app that lets you upload and reverse animated gifs. The site is by far the community favorite, and has been pulling in 400k uniques per month steadily for the last two years.
Its serves such a niche purpose I don't know where to take it from here. Financially the site performs poorly - barely covering hosting  on a month to month basis. But I want to utilize the traffic and add more features that would bring the community value but I dont know where to go from here.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Are your uniques coming from page views, or just image views?

If people are actually viewing the pages, there's a lot you can do to increase revenue.

If they're just linking hosted gifs directly, though, that's a harder problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats 400k uniques, pageviews are a bit higher. All of the users actually view the pages as we dont allow gifs to be viewed / hotlinked directly.

<comment><USER2> Aha.

In that case, I'd strongly advise more than one ad per page. 2-3 is good.

If you can, run 'em through Google Adsense: I don't know what you're using at the moment but Adsense has consistently been the highest performer for me, CPM-wise, short of running my own direct-sold ads.

And do test different layouts. I've found that changing ad layout on a page can literally be a 10x multiplier on ad income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's time to exit and move on to next idea. Sell your site before somebody creates a clone.

<comment><USER4> @OP - if you're considering such idea - hit me up :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I would be interested in selling - email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You have one ad position right now that I can see. Increase that so you can cover hosting without problems. Maybe allow people to pay an annual fee to remove ads and have more storage space or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ask the community for feedback. I think adding a "don't reverse" checkbox while against the whole point could make people host their gifs there, even if they don't want it reverted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking at the analytics, most of the users are redditors which by default use imgur to host any images including gifs. With that said we do have a feature to unreverse gifs so while viewing a reversegif, you can simply click on it to revert back to the original.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should email me tom at buysellads.com

We help thousands of pubs sell self serve ads to contextually relevant advertisers.

We are also bootstrapped and love indie pubs.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you can monetize it more than the hosting costs. More ads, better positioned.

Ahh, but your traffic is all from reddit, so maybe not. Damn adblockers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Freemium? Imgur is evidence users will pay for extra features and support you.</comment>


Show HN: Housem8 – Track, share and split tasks and expenses with housemates - ciaran-ifelse https://housem8.app <comment><AUTHOR> This is going to be very useful for tracking expenses in my household! Awesome!</comment>