Ask PG: Limits on competitive startups? - <AUTHOR>

I've been running an early concept in the same space market as a recent YC graduate start up.  I have been following the team closely.  My approach is different and bypasses/solves much of the regulatory & technical challenges they have been encountering.
Does YC self-limit accepting more than one attempt at a problem?  Basic reasoning suggests it would be counterproductive to fund two competitive businesses.
Also, are there any controls in place that prevent any inside game being shared with these competitive companies? <comment><USER2> Quoth the FAQ:

\---

Will you fund multiple startups working on the same idea?

Yes. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. The way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing.

In practice it has not turned out to be a problem, because most big markets have room for several slightly different solutions, and it's unlikely that two startups would do precisely the same thing.

<http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

\---

With regards to "Also, are there any controls in place that prevent any inside game being shared with these competitive companies?" your main security is that YC are honest, not that there is a special Arc module which PG turns on to firewall off parts of his brain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry, I`m not PG, but I couldn`t help but comment. I hope you don`t mind.

From everything I`ve seen about YC and PG, they seem to value the co-founder much more than the idea. So the second attempt may work, where the previous attempt failed, because the people were better.

My favourite story about YC are the guys from Reddit. When they applied, their idea was to develop an app which let you pre-order your coffee from Starbucks and avoid the line. The idea didn't go over too well, but PG and JL really liked the co-founders, so they brought them back and worked out a better idea. They realized that these guys were special enough that the idea didn't matter.

As for controls to prevent inside gaming...I'm curious to know the answer to this as well! Are companies encouraged to brainstorm together? If so, do they have to sign anything?</comment>


Music publishers: 'Copyright should be technology neutral' - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10370513-261.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

<comment><USER2> _They also want online music stores to cough up fees for 30-second song previews._

Surely such previews fall under "fair use"? They are excerpts of a larger work, unusable except to give an idea of how the whole piece sounds. And they don't decrease the value of the author's work -- if anything, they increase it.

It sounds like the publishers are trying to make a short-term gain while crippling their industry in the long run.

<comment><USER3> _Surely such previews fall under "fair use"?_

The music industry has made it abundantly clear for almost 30 years (since the early days of tapes, really) that they believe fair use does not actually exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> "Technology should not be used to strip rights from songwriters, composers and music publishers"_

Technologically stripping rights from music purchasers, on the other hand, is a sacred right?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is DRM a technology by their definition? If yes, we can twist the argument and state that copyright doesn't need DRM because DRM is a technology.

Hey, it's a twisted hack of "logic", but it might work.</comment>


Pyship: Static Python for desktop apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/burrows-labs/pyship <comment><USER2> Another route is to compile via Cython with the interpreter embedded.

[https://github.com/cython/cython/tree/master/Demos/embed](https://github.com/cython/cython/tree/master/Demos/embed)

You could take your existing Python code and simply change the .py extension to .pyx and compile with the `--embed` option.

Of course, it requires compile dependence on Cython.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Currently only supports OSX

Not sure how this is particularly useful then, since OSX ships with python 2.7. Something like this could be useful on Windows / Linux since they don't necessarily have a python installed, or if it was bundling 3.5.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried shipping a python application to end users while relying on the OS X system python? In my experience, this is an extremely painful process.

You would either need to do all of your development/testing with the system python or ensure that you're development environment is compatible with the system python (including stuff like distutils.util.get_platform(), [https://github.com/MacPython/wiki/wiki/Spinning- wheels](https://github.com/MacPython/wiki/wiki/Spinning-wheels)).

What do you do when Apple doesn't update their python with some patch you want?

<comment><USER4> Yes, I do this for my project.

Although, I do not attempt to install any libraries, I keep everything in the application bundle and set environment variables as needed.

It is limiting in the sense that I must use the Python version that Apple does but at the same time, the shipping executable is downright tiny compared to most Mac OS X applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you modifying sys.path() to load the dependencies that are shipped with the app; or some other technique?

<comment><USER4> I use the location of the script to find the absolute path to the bundle (MacOS folder), from which I can work backwards using ".." to find other things like bundled libraries.

In my case some of the libraries are also compiled so I have a starter script that sets DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, PYTHONPATH, etc. and runs a 2nd script that can then successfully import whatever is required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So...like pex but worse?

[https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex](https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if Python can't support something like starkits/starpacks from the Tcl world ?

There's a somewhat similar Perl implementation but it extracts files to the real filesystem and executes them rather than just reading from a VFS.

<comment><USER7> That's basically what pyinstaller is. It's not quite the same (extracts files to the temp directory), but it's the same general idea.

A lot of Python applications on Windows are distributed this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the command in the readme for computing dependencies of arbitrary projects.

</comment><comment><USER9> How is this different from py2app?

<comment><AUTHOR> I initially tried using py2app/py2exe/cx_Freeze, but stuff kept crashing. They're trying to do something considerably more complicated than my 90 LOC bash script; namely trying to bundle your application, it's dependencies and the python interpreter into one package.

This bash script just gives you a python interpreter that should run on any system. From there, your install script can setup a virtualenv, grab dependencies and do whatever else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this different from eGenix PyRun?

</comment><comment><USER11> Nuitka compiles python into a native executable

[http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html](http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html)</comment>


Algebrite, a computer algebra system in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://algebrite.org/ <comment><USER2> Very neat! Would you consider adding a TeX() function to format the output strings into LaTeX? This functionality is very useful for someone who needs to present their results.

I'm doing some coursework for my MSc in math, and have taken to using CASs (Maxima, and Yacas via RYacas) to explore/validate my assignment questions/answers. The automatic TeX formatting in those systems has been an essential feature.

<comment><USER3> Separate Latex libraries already exist, why not simply extend one of those?

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-levin There is also a comprehensive mathematical library for JS called math.js [1]. It has no dependencies, supports powerful symbolic computation, as well as many mathematical functions. It implements a useful subset of what one expects a CAS to be able to do.

[1] [http://mathjs.org/](http://mathjs.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like Math.js a lot. It is (mostly) a numerical library though (apart from units of measurement and the ability to define functions). I'd challenge that it supports "powerful symbolic computation": CAS traditionally solve equations for example, manipulate polynomials, simplify expressions, add/multiply polynomials/vectors/matrices having elements expressed in symbols rather than having values, that sort of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be interested seeing this coupled with a NLP library and a graphing library if this could be used to make a wolfram-like clone.

</comment><comment><USER5> There needs to be a javascript flavor/js based language that allows operator overloading...so that there can be something like numpy in javascript. I love js's semantics much more than python's so it'd be great to do quick and dirty numeric stuff in js.

<comment><USER6> Aren't all numbers in javascript double precision.

<comment><USER7> You're right, but I guess you're being downvoted because nobody wants to hear it. JavaScript will never get anything like numpy, because it doesn't have integers. Doing mathematics without integers is like driving a car without wheels.

<comment><USER8> It does: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Type...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Typed_arrays)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's very cool.

The API seems fairly similar to SymPy. It would be great to have a CAS that can perform simple operations in the browser, and ship more complicated things to a SymPy backend (or another CAS).

[http://live.sympy.org/](http://live.sympy.org/) is great, but do we really need to call the backend for everything?

</comment><comment><USER10> beat me to it, I develop www.jasymchat.com which is based on Jasymca ([http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/](http://webuser.hs- furtwangen.de/~dersch/))..I was thinking of porting Jasymca to a Javascript.

<comment><USER4> I'd love for someone to try and put this into real hardware.

Computers have advanced but calculators haven't.

Calculators are only focused on school kids, not on people who really need to get things done.

I'd love to have octave or scipy on a piece of dedicated hardware.

<comment><USER11> A Mathematica style program for tablets that could convert handwritten math using common notation into symbolic constructs would be absolutely amazing.

<comment><USER12> This does what you want: [https://webdemo.myscript.com/#/demo/equation](https://webdemo.myscript.com/#/demo/equation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome!

Not knowing much about how a CAS is implemented, I'm curious -- what is it that causes the integration demo to take so much longer than the other examples? Does it have to do some kind of search to find the correct sequence of manipulations?

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what method this system uses for definite integration, but it is likely one of Simpsons, Gaussian, and Clenshaw-Curtis. These are numerical methods that, for the best accuracy, require lots of steps of evaluation. Depending on the error bounds you want, it could take a while.

Edit: also the nonlinear square root term may cause difficulty.

People might find this interesting: Maple uses Clenshaw Curtis as the default, but will switch dynamically to Gaussian if singularities are detected.

<comment><USER15> This would be relevant to numerical integration.

However, as it gives as answer some multiple of pi, it must've performed symbolic integration, which also suits the general design of the library better. There are some methods for performing symbolic integration but often trial and error with lookup tables and tricks (substitution etc) is faster.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, actually using the Risch algorithm is usually a last resort in a lot of CAS' because it's fairly intensive and also will often produce answers in a form very different from what a human would give. It's also famously difficult to implement, so if this library is using it without a thick layer of tricks and heuristics then that's probably where the slowness comes from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sorta offtopic, but the logo reminds me of [http://ich.deanmcnamee.com/pre3d/](http://ich.deanmcnamee.com/pre3d/) , except that one has the cute behavior when you move the mouse.

<comment><USER18> Close! Your link has the tetrakis cuboctahedron, while TFA has the pentakis dodecahedron. The spinning on mouse is really cool; all logos ought to have that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is admittedly a nitpick, but, seriously people: there are no good reasons (although plenty of bad ones) to continue using CoffeeScript. Just write ES6†.

† ES2015 for the super-pedants :-)</comment>


The Downround Tracker - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker <comment><AUTHOR> Just scroll down on the page to see the entire list of companies. No need to sign up for email list.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone running a free app want to try a in-ram MySQL NDB server on me?   - <AUTHOR>

Yeah, so there's a lot of talk about how MySQL is 'not enough'  both from the Oracle RAC people and the couchdb and other non-relational data stores.  Many of these people advocate going to things like SSD, which costs almost as much as ram, while others suggest SAN (which is often more expensive than ram, when you include the infrastructure costs, and the fact that most databases are relatively small.)
A few years back, when MySQL 5.0 was in late beta, I set up a MySQL ndb cluster to handle Dspam for a fairly large mailserver I was in charge of.  It seemed to work well, and was really fast.  I thought this would overrun the other database solutions with the ease of a man outrunning a small child.
In the intervening years, I've been less involved with databases.  I've only needed to touch them for accounting and other performance insensitive applications.
Anyhow, I find the problem interesting.   As far as I can tell, NDB is awesome, but I have nothing but synthetic benchmarks.  Real load is different.
anyone with real load willing to test that with me?  I can donate 3 CPUs and 9-17GiB ram to the project.  I would implement on my Xen-based VPS platform[1].  (I'd have the servers on separate power;  I can even put them on separate uplinks)
my motivation:  well, if I'm wrong, I want to know  so I quit giving people shit.  If I'm right, and NDB is the answer to MySQL performance problems, I'd like the publicity of saying so.
Also, if the MySQL NDB cluster is as good as I think it is, I'd like to sell it as a service.  It's a natural choice, as I'm already setup to host as much ram as possible at the lowest cost possible.
I'm looking for someone who currently has a database that is on a MySQL server with around 4GiB ram, that can't respond to queries in an acceptable timeframe, or perhaps someone who has multiple MySQL servers. If the queries are write-biased, even better (I suspect that regular mysql will do about as well as mysql cluster when it comes to reads, due to filesystem caches, until you start adding more nodes.)
If the experiment is successful, I can continue hosting  you for free.  The MySQL cluster hosting service will require credibility.
[1]http://prgmr.com/xen/ <comment><USER2> I am very interested in your project and I hope you publish your results. I don't have a suitable database project, unfortunately.

I have been experimenting with master-slave replication in MySQL. I am interested in performance, but redundancy and high availability are more important to me.

I have a question -- if you are doing high end RAM based MySQL servers, won't running them in a virtual machine introduce other issues ? Shouldn't these be standalone real computers ?

<comment><AUTHOR> also, what's high-end about an in-ram database? It's all cheap commodity parts; my cost for a full on 8 core box with 32GiB ram is well under $1500, and around two amps of (American 120v) power. This is decidedly low-end, until you get, you know, a few marketing guys and 3 vars in the mix and start paying double for hardware put together by people who don't believe that ESD is a problem.

<comment><USER2> It's awesome that you can get servers like that for those prices these days. One of my customers recently purchased a similarly configured PowerEdge.

What is high-end about the database is you are trying to get high-end performance. Having all the data in RAM is the "close to the hardware" part of getting that performance. Having multiple computers is the parallelism part of that performance. Having virutualization sticks a software layer between MySQL and the RAM, and if you have other VMs running on the hardware, then any performance numbers will be dependent on what the other VMs are doing. Of course, if you have all the NDB nodes running as VMs on the same machine, then that will never be as fast as one NDB node running native on that same machine.

If you are using the virtualization environment as a way to partition customers, consider that MySQL already does this well. A web hosting shop can have a singkle MySQL server and give each customers a database or databases and a user / pass to access only their own stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


ZFSin: A Windows kernel-mode ZFS driver - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lundman/zfsin <comment><USER3> Wow.

Of the 26 items in the _Milestone_ section, three (near the bottom) are currently not done. All the rest are. (The last one should read "swim". And I hope that last one definitely happens!)

The first substantial commit ([https://github.com/lundman/ZFSin/commit/6ea8093d48da0a0abc3b...](https://github.com/lundman/ZFSin/commit/6ea8093d48da0a0abc3b24f3e985b525052de27e)) includes a large pile of code. It's clear this was (wisely) built out privately to begin with. I wonder how long it took to get to the above commit point.

While unrelated, thanks very much to the author for the TIL on how to do Windows kernel development! TIL about the free Windows VMs too.

I've opened [https://github.com/lundman/ZFSin/issues/6](https://github.com/lundman/ZFSin/issues/6) to hopefully prompt a license file to turn up.

<comment><USER4> > TIL about the free Windows VMs too.

Not quite free, just an evaluation version that expires after a while.

<comment><USER3> Ah. I'd middle-clicked that link but not actually looked at it before hitting Submit. :)

That page says the images expire 12/1/17\. So that's... two months from now? Huh. That's... 341.33MB per day in bandwidth (20GB over 60 days). Weird way to measure it (the cost of continually reconfiguring would theoretically be higher), but I had a really tiny Internet cap for a few years some time ago.

<comment><USER5> Windows licenses aren't _that_ expensive. If you need a copy of Windows more often than the trial image makes feasible, you should probably buy a copy.

<comment><USER6> A Windows 10 Home edition costs 145 euros, pro is 260 euros, it's not exactly impulse purchase territory for me.

I never use Windows because I want to, I use it because I have to. So paying hundreds of euros to have the privilege to use an OS I don't care for just because some developer decided not to make their application portable is very hard for me to swallow.

Especially now with the built-in ads, telemetry, OneDrive and whatnot. You're not going to guilt me into purchasing a copy of that garbage fire of an OS just so that I can boot up the odd windows-only application every other month.

<comment><USER7> The cheapest version of macOS for anyone that needs to use it, costs 570 € in Germany (Mac mini) for the very first version, excluding the free upgrades.

Any other commercial OS at enterprise level is way beyond that in developer licenses.

<comment><USER8> That's just wrong. You could (or still can?) buy mac os installation dvds in an apple shop for 30 bucks (iirc my sister bought one a few years ago) also the "upgrade" to sierra is free without any limitation on how many machines you can legally install it on so you can create an installation medium (you can install it in qemu or probably even use coreboot with a modified tianocore to actually install it). Oh and you can download the source for the kernel (I'm not sure which versiin this really mirrors and I'm not a mac guy so I don't care) here [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/) Just because you can't easily buy a copy of it at best buy and install it without some hacking on any random computer doesn't mean that you can take the price of the cheapest mac _hardware_ say that's the price of the os and call it a day.

Also your comment did completly miss the point of the parent comment.

<comment><USER9> > also the "upgrade" to sierra is free without any limitation on how many > machines you can legally install it so you can create an installation medium > (you can install it in qemu or probably even use coreboot with a modified > tianocore to actually install it)

There may not be a limit to how many machines you can legally install it on (I'm actually not sure), but the license is very clear as to _what_ machines you can install it on (i.e. only Apple hardware). Though in reality it's been quite some time since Apple tried to enforce that provision very hard, and never on individual users installing it themselves on usual PC hardware.

> Oh and you can download the source for the kernel (I'm not sure which > versiin this really mirrors and I'm not a mac guy so I don't care) here > [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/)

The kernels are usually pretty up to date, but the public code is an even smaller portion of the OS than the Linux kernel is (many key drivers are not open source, and forget anything approaching the level of the UI).

<comment><USER8> I just went into my study and got my original snow leopard dvd (the one my sister bought) and I can't find the part that states this.

> but the license is very clear as to what machines you can install it on > (i.e. only Apple hardware)

Would be nice to get a reference on that. But ignoring this my point still stands that pjmlps comment was more a misplaced snarky remark against apple that missed the point. But hey I neither use Mac OS nor Windows (only in the circumstanced when I'm forced to offer support) so I don't really care :)

But a PS: Most hardware you buy comes with a Windows license so people who don't want to buy Windows can probably still use this.

<comment><USER10> It's in the EULA:

> 2\. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.

> A. Preinstalled and Single-Copy Apple Software License. Subject to the terms > and conditions of this License, unless you obtained the Apple Software from > the Mac App Store, through an automatic download or under a volume license, > maintenance or other written agreement from Apple, you are granted a > limited, non-exclusive license to install, use and run _one (1) copy of the > Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer_ at any one time. For > example, these single-copy license terms apply to you if you obtained the > Apple Software preinstalled on Apple-branded hardware.

There's also section 2B(iii), that is for copies obtained via Apple Store, that allows you to run virtual machines:

> iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of > the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments _on each Mac > Computer_ you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for > purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software > development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.

Emphasis mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _vdev_disk.c spawns a thread to get around that IoCompletionRoutine is called in a different context, to sleep until signalled. Is there a better way to do async in Windows?_

Instead of creating a thread and blocking until being signalled in the continuation of an IO, enqueue a work item to continue work at PASSIVE_LEVEL (i.e. schedule a continuation).

Async means continuations, otherwise you're blocking.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows- hardware/drivers/ke...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows- hardware/drivers/kernel/guidelines-for-writing-dpc-routines)

<comment><USER12> I tried that way first, but because it called the callback at different level, and ZFS grabs a mutex, it just died. Which why I changed it to spawn a taskq to wait for the callback to come back, then tell ZFS about it. So it is async right now, I'm just not happy it has to create yet another taskq to handle it, for each IO request.

<comment><USER11> I'm far from expert at NT kernel programming, but I do know that there's not much you can do in the callbacks from interrupts, which is why you use a deferred procedure call (using Io/ExQueueWorkItem) to continue at a level where you can do more things, like potentially blocking calls. The work item execution of the DPC proceeds on a system worker thread, rather than a thread you had to spawn yourself.

But perhaps that's what you did. If you're still stuck, I suggest you email Larry Osterman (email@example.com) for a clue; Larry has worked on the NTFS driver and he's responded to my emails in the past. For an improved probability of a useful response, I'd send him a link to a Stack Overflow question, so that other people benefit from the reply also. (This is a general rule for emailing people for developer help, you'd be surprised how many random people email system / compiler developers for coding assistance.)

<comment><USER12> Ah that looks interesting. I will research that once I leave SF

<comment><USER13> Another expert to contact: Trent Nelson from [http://pyparallel.org/](http://pyparallel.org/) a few years back.

He pops up here occasionally to defend Windows unique I/O subsystem¹, and monitors Twitter².

¹ [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:trentnelson&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:trentnelson&sort=byDate&type=comment)

² [http://twitter.com/trentnelson](http://twitter.com/trentnelson)

<comment><USER14> Hardly needs 'defending'. It's superb.

<comment><USER13> Yes, maybe evangelising would be a better word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was kinda bummed when Apple announced that they are going with APFS instead of ZFS. I think ZFS is one of the biggest engineering feats in last decade or so of software engineering. It still needs wider adoption.

<comment><USER16> How do you think they could achieve wider adoption?

<comment><USER17> The problem is the license, which ZFS on Linux covers a bit here: [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/FAQ#licensing](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/FAQ#licensing)

You can see some of the fun hoops you have to go through to get ZFS as your root filesystem here: [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root- on-...](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-ZFS)

For now I just have 4 disks in a ZFS-raid for storage, and then I have installed my OS on a separate SSD.

<comment><USER18> Ubuntu has it built in and ready to go. But not for the root drive (that way lies madness).

<comment><USER19> It's not difficult really (assuming one can/is willing to RTFM), just a little more involved and time-consuming to get set up. I've used ZFS on / on Ubuntu a handful of times and all of the machines I use on a daily basis (a high-end workstation and a pair of laptops, all running Arch Linux) all use ZFS exclusively.

<comment><USER10> I have one (centos) machine with zfs on /. Looking back, it was a mistake - <USER2> always dread, when I see grub update in the yum update list, what will break this time.

And of course, after each kernel update, link your /dev/by-id/... devices into /dev and rerun grub2-mkconfig by hand. Otherwise, you won't boot the new kernel you just updated.

If this machine weren't a pet, it would be wiped clean and reinstalled with xfs /.

<comment><USER20> ZFS and CentOS are not a good combination, in my experience. The Red Hat/Oracle feud doesn't give RH much incentive to be ZFS-friendly, and the interaction between DKMS and weak-modules is a fiasco.

ZFS woes, and Red Hat's penchant for yanking hardware support (like a PERC/4e RAID controller I encountered this spring), have brought me to the point that the only new CentOS installations I'll make will be KVM guests.

The last straw for me was the 1708 release, when the ZFS modules failed to build, leaving my home NAS stuck on the old kernel. Out went CentOS, in went Ubuntu Server. No regrets.

<comment><USER10> In my case, Ubuntu makes PITA running stuff I want to run (especially FreeIPA/sssd/gssapi integration). On the other hand, I'm using kmod repo for ZoL, not DKMS, because I wanted to avoid having a compiler and dev packages on the server in the first place. CentOS/RHEL have kernel ABIs, why not use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are they ever going to implement built-in encryption in this Windows ZFS driver? I can't see it in the Milestones listed by the Github project. My pools largely make use of native encryption, so this is quite useless to me without it being able to import keys and decrypt the drives.

<comment><USER12> Just a matter of cherry-picking it in. I'll get around it it soon

<comment><USER22> Fantastic. If/when encryption stabilizes that give a solid cross-platform fs with both encryption and snapshot support. Hopefully there'll be something for Apple users as well.

Would be ironic if Linux has so-so fatx support because of patents, and OS X lacks zfs because of patents..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know anything about this author? Is this likely something that's been developed for a business or is it "just" a hobby project (albeit a seriously impressive hobby project!!)?

<comment><USER24> Jorgen Lundman is also a main coder for the OpenZFS project afaik. I've seen his name many times since the very early betas of the OpenZFS macOS port that I've been using back in 2012/2013\. I don't know how it's financed, but I'd think it's not just a hobby.

<comment><USER12> Just a hobby, working on it because I want to :)

<comment><USER25> Your hobbies make my hobbies look pathetic. Kudos :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is exciting to see. I currently have a separate NTFS disk for Windows on home machine - it would be awesome in the future to share a single mirrored zpool between Linux and Windows.

<comment><USER27> wait what? Can you do that - do you mean with both operating systems live?

<comment><USER3> Most definitely no.

You'd still need to go for SMB or NFS for that.

If this is possible I would consider it one of the most impressive things I'd ever seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> ZFS supports connecting a pool to multiple computers at once, but only by way of locking the pool as a whole, and as others have pointed out it's unlikely to work even then. There's too much feature divergence.

NFS is what you're "supposed" to use.

<comment><USER3> Hah. ZFS really does have every single almost-reasonable feature baked into the design :)

Problem with NFS is that it's really glitchy. For example I cannot disconnect my laptop's (higher-power) USB Wi-Fi dongle when I want to move around, because the PHY disappearing from under my NFS mount produces a kworker that consumes 100% CPU.

The good news: I found a Red Hat bugzilla thread with repro info that perfectly matched what I was seeing, which identified the root cause and generated an upstream kernel patch that completely eliminated the problem. This all happened a couple years ago, for kernel 3.8 or so.

The bad news: I'm using kernel 4.1.6.

(I'll upgrade eventually, and see if the problem has conveniently disappeared. If it hasn't, I'll make the effort to switch to SMB. I'll also see what happens if I trigger this bug on a kernel with NFS compiled as a module at some point... >:D)

<comment><USER28> There's also interesting technologies that use ZFS as a base layer too such as MarFS which effectively provides network based object storage (or lustre etc) - [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_spr...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_spring17_07_inman.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> He's doing as a hobby but he isn't against any support you can give him [https://www.patreon.com/lundman](https://www.patreon.com/lundman) :)

</comment><comment><USER30> But why? I'm thinking for data recovery. I'm hoping people wouldn't try to set up a ZFS fileserver within windows.

<comment><USER31> I would love to have an advanced file system that works on portable drives across multiple OSes.

ZFS is not designed for this use case, but at least it is something. Having compression, encryption, integrity checking, and data duplication on a potentially flaky external drive would be killer features.

<comment><USER30> That would be awesome. I'd love to have c or root on zfs as well. That could make clients really easy to back up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> But wait! WinFS (or whatever its name) is just around the corner!

Sorry. Couldn't resist. Microsoft promises something better than NTFS - something "object oriented" or "database driven" \- since before I moved to Windows NT 3.5.

<comment><USER33> You joke but ReFS has been out since Windows 2012. Combined with Storage Spaces, there is a lot of overlap with zfs.

<comment><USER32> I will concede it's close to what we have with ZFS, LVM+XFS or BtrFS, but, still, it's not quite up to what WinFS promised in terms of semantic awareness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is this not an IFS driver?</comment>


Dart 2.0 is now available - <AUTHOR> https://www.dartlang.org/dart-2 <comment><USER2> Similar thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17705958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17705958)

<comment><USER3> Since that one was posted earlier, we've merged the comments there.</comment></comment>


Python Trademark Filer Ignorant Of Python? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2013/02/responding-to-pythons-batsignal/index.htm

<comment><USER2> A lot of programmers in my dinky third-world country haven't heard of Python or Ruby - most folks here think web development begins with Java and ends with PHP.

That said, I think that CEO is full of shit.

<comment><USER3> It's one thing for a programmer not to know about the existence of Python, but it's another thing entirely for sysadmins not to know (their websites run Debian). To make matters worse they are trying to develop their own cloud platform, so they would need somewhat more sophisticated sysadmins than if they were just hosting a simple PHP website.

I would guess that at some point one of the developers/sysadmins brought up the fact that their name conflicted with an open source programming language, and management choose to ignore them.

<comment><USER4> No technical staff were consulted at all:

      Tim confirmed that he'd not involved any technical staff
      in the decisions he'd made about the Python product brand,
      and told me he regretted that as it would probably have
      helped him understand the likely reaction to his trademark
      challenge.

<comment><USER5> In a quick Google search [http://www.google.com/search?q=python&pws=0](http://www.google.com/search?q=python&pws=0) (I hope I've killed personalization correctly.) the Python-language gets 9 of the first 10 places, and the Python-snake gets only one place and the news section at the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IANAL, but I think the PSF's trademark is on very shaky ground.

CMU Common Lisp has had an innovative, high-performance compiler called Python since _before_ van Rossum invented the scripting language. A Common Lisp compiler and a programming language are, seems to me, very much in the same market space; I do not think the PSF could successfully argue in court that they do not overlap -- certainly not at the same time they were arguing that a cloud service _does_ overlap a scripting language.

I'm sure van Rossum was unaware of CMUCL's Python when he named his language. But that doesn't matter in trademark law; you don't get to claim a trademark someone else is already using just because you didn't know about them.

And I believe that using a mark that was already in use gives you a very weak claim, if any, to your trademark.

CMUCL is, by the way, still in use.

<comment><USER7> Irrelevant. If you don't defend a "Trademark", any rights you have to it go away. You're required to DEFEND your Trademark to keep ownership -- and even if you have a common-law Trademark (which is what you're claiming CMUCL has on "Python"), if you allow someone else to register a Trademark at the federal level and fail to oppose the registration, you can lose your rights that way.

IANAL, but I've read a lot about Trademark law, and I've talked to more than one IP attorney about it. For reference, see for example [1] and [2]. It's not like patent law where prior art can invalidate a bad patent. It's defend-it- or-lose-it.

[1] [http://www.blackweb20.com/2009/11/25/the-consequences-of- not...](http://www.blackweb20.com/2009/11/25/the-consequences-of-not- protecting-and-defending-your-trademarks/)

[2] [http://www.adlilaw.com/importance-of-monitoring-your- tradema...](http://www.adlilaw.com/importance-of-monitoring-your-trademark/)

<comment><USER6> You're missing my point. I'm not suggesting at all that the CMUCL developers would want to stop the PSF from using the name Python. That would be the situation that your argument is relevant to.

No, I'm making quite a different point, about the ability of the _PSF_ to stop _anyone else_ from using the name. In order to be able to assert trademark rights against someone else, you have to have a valid trademark to begin with. If your use of the mark was never exclusive to begin with, I don't see how you can claim to have an exclusive right to it now.

Perhaps in the US, since the PSF has registered the mark and the CMUCL people didn't contest it (in time), the PSF now has an exclusive right to it. Although here another point comes into play: I've never heard of the PSF attempting to prevent CMUCL from using the name. Supposing they haven't, a case can now be made that the PSF has failed to defend it and therefore has lost their exclusive right to it. So I think that can cut both ways. CMUCL has no exclusive right to the name -- I seriously doubt they care -- but if some third party started to use it, I wonder if the PSF could prevail over the latter in court.

But all that aside, this case is in the EU, where as far as I understand, the PSF has no registered trademark anyway. I think POBox Hosting could make a very strong case that, since CMUCL's Python has certainly been used in the EU, the PSF has no _exclusive_ right to the name there.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure they would be fine with stopping anyone from having an exclusive trademark, as a second prize. Because you know, the company in the EU is trying for an exclusive trademark. So, maybe they loose the best option, but win when they don't have to rename _everything_ because it violates someone's exclusive mark?

<comment><USER6> See my reply to Volpe below.

<comment><USER8> Wow you are a total shill. Obviously PSF is acting hostilely as you are insinuating, because they wanted to minimize confusion, or maybe they just wanted to minimize confusion.

<comment><USER6> I am not a shill. I am a longtime user of CMUCL and its now-more-popular fork, SBCL. The name collision has been an annoyance for years -- I always have to qualify which Python I'm talking about. This hardly minimizes confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Regardless of whether or not he had hear of Python (which I find very unlikely), if one planned to register a trademark, one would have to do some research in the first place. And that would involve a google search at the very least. And at least on my results even the bloody _real_ Python (snake) shows up first a dozen or so pages back after only Python (language) links. And his dinky little company never comes up. So, yeah. Pretty obvious he's lying - or very, very dumb. Either way it does not show him in a good light and not as someone I'd like to do business with.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to believe a cloud storage company was really as ignorant of Python as they claim.

Let's hope they drop the claim, and we can all move on with our lives.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm sorry, the CEO's position is ludicrous.

Which business leader, in this day and age, hasn't tried to google their own company's brand name to see what comes up?

Oh...what are these pages upon pages of stuff about Python (programming language) which shows up when I type Python, Python Hosting, or Python UK...

Nope..never heard of Python (PSF), nope...not me...nope...

</comment><comment><USER12> Find it interesting that Veber are portrayed as the victim, in this piece from the Register here: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/19/python_versus_veber_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/19/python_versus_veber_trademark/)

Would expect better reporting and questioning from El Reg.

<comment><USER13> Wow ... I knew the English language was capable of such a construction but I never thought I'd read "expect better reporting and questioning from El Reg"[The Register]

The Register (and The Inquirer after it) ported the classic British tabloid format to tech reporting, all I'd expect from El Reg is sarcasm, climate change denial and exclamation marks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if part of their problem is that they will get sued for poBOX cloud software and Storage -- since there's already another player with a very similar name in the exact same market. ( <http://box.com/> )

</comment><comment><USER15> A fine example of backpedalling and talking shit.

</comment><comment><USER16> Standard double-speak ... if you can't get away with something, you hope to get out of it without problems. I won't defend those who are implementing the DDOS, but I do hope it's a warning to others who have the opportunity to "play nice". I believe that OSS and corporations can coexist (sorry RMS).

<comment><USER17> > I believe that OSS and corporations can coexist (sorry RMS).

RMS doesn't disagree with corporations (the FSF is a corporation) or even with commercial use of software (the freedom to use software for commercial purposes is explicitly included as a fundamental freedom of software).</comment></comment>


A Solution for Bad Teaching - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/opinion/a-solution-for-bad-teaching.html

<comment><USER2> Over time, technology will solve this problem. Professors will get replaced by robots and pre-recorded video lectures. There's already NLP AIs that can grade research papers. Technology to check papers for plagiarism and grade tests have been around for some time. Professors will go the way of the Blacksmith...

<comment><USER3> Do you think that's a good thing?

<comment><USER4> I think ergoproxy has (unfortunately) never actually had a good teacher.

We've had textbooks for a few thousand years now (depending on how loose you want to get with the definition of "textbook" \-- I mean a body of codified adn recorded knowledge). Books are great. Videos are great. MOOCS (which in most implementations are basically just fancy textbooks) are great.

They still aren't teachers, and never will be until we have Strong AI.

Teachers aren't going anywhere.

<comment><USER5> I question whether teachers actually are necessary. Most people object, but when I went to school the main function of the teacher was just to reiterate what the textbook said in lecture form and grade assignments, most of which were designed to just get you to read the textbook or pay attention in class.

The main reason textbook learning isn't effective is because it requires willpower. No ones forcing you to do it or stopping you from walking away. But that seems easier to solve.

<comment><USER4> You can't ask a textbook or video for clarification.

A textbook or video can't see your facial expression (or even read what you've written online) and figure out that you're confused or headed down the wrong track.

A textbook or video can't decide that a certain approach isn't working at all and shift to a different analogy, example, or whatever.

"Wow, the whole class looks stunned. Maybe I'd better explain that again, or in another way." Any good teacher has done this many times.

Some of these problems may be solvable, but canned video lectures aren't going to do it.

<comment><USER6> You can ask Stack Exchange type sites, IRC and forums and people who practice whatever it is you are learning. If a kid learns how to find the right person, whether it be a peer or an adult, that can help them with their uncertainties and provide clarity, that is the best teacher. The job title of teacher may go away for many out there that practice their profession, but the notion of a teacher won't. Many of us get the opportunity to play that role when someone seeks out our guidance on a subject we are knowledgable and passionate about. Hopefully this continues to escalate to the point that when those pupils reach adulthood they feel the same responsibility towards younger generations when their advice, expertise and counseling is sought.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IBM spends $3 billion to push the far future of computer chips - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-spends-3-billion-to-push-the-far-future-of-computer-chips/

<comment><USER2> The article gives 1/1000 the width of a human hair for 7 nanometers, but I think it's more like 1/10,000 isn't it? (taking about 70 micrometers for the hair's width, see [1])

Also a bit puzzled by "III-V materials: Today's chips usually use carbon, which is a member of group IV of the periodic table of the elements" \- they mean "usually use silicon," right?

[1] : [http://www.nano.gov/nanotech-101/what/nano- size](http://www.nano.gov/nanotech-101/what/nano-size)

<comment><USER3> The article was silently updated. It now says:

       Today's chips usually use silicon,
       which is a member of group IV of
       the periodic table of the elements

I hate it when authors/websites are too gutless to acknowledge mistakes, but instead just quietly change text.</comment></comment>


Middle Classes Around the World Grow Weary of Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-02/middle-classes-around-the-world-grow-weary-of-democracy <comment><USER2> The most important part of this article is its last paragraph: "Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations."

With that in mind it is understandable that the rest is a over-generalization that tries to find a one-size-fits-all explanation for political development in various countries all over the world, lashing out at every "bad" guy.

For example, Evo Morales is mentioned once and even that in a questionable context - the cited "little respect for any institutions [...] a vibrant private sector" were actually what got him elected in first place - and not by middle class but the dead poor who could not afford tripled rates for water[1] and did not want to sell out their natural resources[2]. Contrary to what the article claims later, this did not lead to economic devastation but to "economic growth [...] higher than at any time in the last 30 years, averaging 4.9 percent".[3]

Maybe a disrespect for institutions, esp. when then are called IMF, is not a bad thing after all.

        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_Water_War
        [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_gas_conflict
        [3] http://cepr.net/publications/reports/bolivian-economy-during-morales-administration</comment>


Show HN: Embedded v8 inspector integration with chromedev tools front end - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hsharsha/v8inspector <comment><USER2> How is this different than node --inspect index.js

<comment><AUTHOR> This is to debug embedded javascript application which does not depend on node. It gives same functionality as node inspect.</comment></comment>


How to start a (game) business - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/abyssi/starting-a-new-game-business-1030080

<comment><AUTHOR> Although game specific this touches upon key topics for any software startup e.g. importance of people, customer development engineering, where to find money and most importantly why would you start a new business.</comment>


Searching the cloud just got a whole lot easier - <AUTHOR> https://starthq.com/blog/searching-the-cloud-just-got-a-whole-lot-easier

<comment><USER2> I'm happy StartHQ user, specially when i'm looking for github repositories or just checking up a latest version of some software packages.

For example, it comes very handy when i want to search latest releases of core.async.

One option is use `lein search core.async`, but it takes time to download maven index and its info is limited. But startHQ ables me to search it on github, bitbucket, stackoverflow and versioneye simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd imagine this would be much less funny without the cloud-to-butt extension, so please everyone else go get it.

"Searching my butt just got a whole lot easier"

<comment><AUTHOR> It literally took me 5 minutes to get that, thought we had a typo in the post.

<comment><USER3> Yeah sorry I didn't realize it went and "corrected" my comment before I posted it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this make sense when people do a combination of comment, while the company doing well.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is brilliant service!</comment>


March Madness - SQL Azure - sys.dm_exec_sessions - <AUTHOR> http://thomaslarock.com/2012/03/march-madness-sql-azure-sys-dm_exec_sessions/ <comment><USER2> What's your fondness for posts from thomaslarock.com?</comment>


Holovect: Holographic Vector Display - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2029950924/holovect-holographic-vector-display <comment><USER2> How does it work?</comment>


PGHoard: Tools for making PostgreSQL backups to cloud object storages - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aiven.io/2016/04/postgresql-cloud-backups-with-pghoard.html <comment><USER2> How does this compare to WAL-E?

[https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e](https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e)

<comment><AUTHOR> Both do mostly the same thing with some differences. The biggest difference currently could be that WAL-E uses the PostgreSQL "archive_command" to send incremental backups (WAL files) in complete 16 megabyte chunks, whereas PGHoard uses real-time streaming with "pg_receivexlog", making the data loss window much smaller in case of a disaster.

<comment><USER3> You can set archive_timeout to something like 1 minute to bound the window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Takes care of realtime WAL streaming, compression, encryption, restoration and backup expiration among other things. Open Source and written in Python.

<comment><USER4> Curious if it backs up to other cloud storage providers in vendor neutral ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently S3 (AWS + compatible), Google Cloud, OpenStack Swift, Azure (experimental), local disk and Ceph (via S3 or Swift) are supported. More can be added quite easily as the object storage logic is behind an extendable interface.

Which vendor neutral protocol are you interested in using?

<comment><USER5> What will happen when the Storage (swift or ceph) is offline for some time?

<comment><USER6> PGHoard can archive PG's WAL segments in two modes: streaming directly using pg_receivexlog or as an archive_command to archive complete segments.

When PGHoard is used in streaming mode it keeps reading new segments from PG and stores them in compressed & encrypted form in a queue ready to be uploaded. The segments will stay there until they can be uploaded.

When using archive_mode PGHoard handles the operation synchronously so PG won't actually remove or recycle the WAL segment in question until the command completes.

Postgres will keep running normally in both cases, but the files will be queued in different places, compressed or uncompressed. This may cause your disk to fill up eventually, but PGHoard will trigger an alart after a configurable number of upload failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you prevent segments from being removed while they're not yet received by pg_receivexlog? wal_keep_segments or replication slots?

<comment><AUTHOR> A replication slot can be used by defining it in the pghoard.json configuration. However, the slot needs to be created (and removed after no longer needed, important!) manually. We've been planning to add more automatic replication slot management to PGHoard.

<comment><USER7> Good. Without archiving or slots in place, you really can't rely on such backups...</comment></comment></comment>


Why the monarchy needs Meghan? - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/can-meghan-markle-modernise-the-monarchy <comment><USER2> > Submission Title: Why the monarchy needs Meghan?

From the HackerNews Guidelines:

.. please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.</comment>


Start ups: Berlin vs London - <AUTHOR> http://martinvars.com/post/33358789886/start-ups-berlin-vs-london

<comment><USER2> The language barrier is definitely a problem for countries like Germany and it's startup industry (at least looking in from the outside it is). While they are one of the safer economies in Europe, and seem to be holding the whole thing together at the moment, their reputation for not taking risks would also prove problematic.

Then again, that's only the point of view from someone looking in, it's probably entirely different for German people themselves.</comment>


Thom Yorke's beautiful new nightmare - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/thom-yorke-anima-album-review-terrifying-beauty/592750/ <comment><USER2> After listening two hours of Radiohead and see this article ;)</comment>


Australian Opposition backtracks on plans to implement Internet filter - ryan-allen http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-05/no-internet-filter-says-turnbull/4939156 <comment><AUTHOR> Translation: We only changed our stance so people will vote for us and once we are in power, we'll make it opt-out again because it'll be too late and we have nothing to lose.

Remember John Howard famously saying there wouldn't be a GST and then introduced a GST? Replace John Howard with Malcolm Turnbull and GST with opt- out Internet filter and it reads the same...

<comment><USER2> John Howard actually went to an election over the GST. He lied about it the first time, but it's not as though he then passed it into law without warning.

<comment><AUTHOR> No he just said he wouldn't do something and then did it.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but instead of just lying and introducing it without a mandate, _he sought a mandate_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It was suggested to me that the original policy statement was probably a sop for evangelical fundies, who are amongst other things absolutely obsessed with the wickedness and deviltry of teh intarwebs.

I don't really know why they went back on it so precipitously. Maybe Malcolm's mates made a phone call and explained that it was a fucking stupid idea to install the exact mechanism that future governments could 1. turn into a compulsory scheme and 2. use to filter material other than pornography.

I would be interested to know if this was released without Turnbull's approval. It's a sorry story if it was.

</comment><comment> ryan-allen Even though they're saying they wont do it, it's pretty typical of Australian politics to simply change their mind again once they get in to power.

<comment><USER3> You'll find that it's pretty typical of _global_ politics. Say one thing, then do another once you have the power.

So typical, and so typically unpunished.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am normally a cynic and wouldn't put it past either of the major parties in this election but I highly doubt they ever planned for a mandatory internet filter.

The current government has tried more than once to implement a filter and it has only been because of the Greens and the LNP blocking it that it hasn't gone through. If they really wanted a filter, they could have just let it pass when Labor tried to implement it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Libraries are bastions of the idea that information is free and an inalienable right. The internet is basically a library at your fingertips.

To allow such censorship to happen is an affront to one of the most basic of human rights.

But we've already given it up in fear of a few Windows viruses and spam, so we deserve what we get. Fearful children require protection.

</comment><comment><USER6> What we're seeing here is a demonstration of the divorce between politicians' private beliefs and their public electoral platform, and even more problematic, a sign of the breakdown of our democratic system.

Back in the day, politicians had an idiology, and you could trust them because you knew that they really believed in what they were saying. But this started to change after the Second World War, when some politicians realized that if they believe in a minority position, they were not likely to win. So what did they do? They publicly advocated something slightly different, something slightly more likely to win, while privately holding onto their own beliefs. And then they moved a little more, because everyone is doing it and they had to get closer to that perfect center, where they could get the most votes.

Skip forward a couple of decades and what you get is a system in which the only way a politician can get into power is by outright lying about his or her beliefs. If you're honest, you probably won't get elected: there's always people out there who are just echoing focus groups. But if you're dishonest, maybe you can push through some of the things you privately believe in, without anyone noticing. Those private beliefs don't even need to be self- serving, you can genuinely believe in them being the right course of action.

So when you're a politician looking to get elected, you pick some issue you think many people feel strongly about and take a position.

Of course, the people in your focus group might change their opinions from day to day. Or maybe they're influenced by the mass media, controlled by powerful elites seeking to use the masses for their own gain. Or maybe your focus groups just aren't very representative.

Whatever the reason, something went wrong: it turns out you picked the losing (minority) side. There's an outrage, your ratings plummet, your opponents vow to enact the opposite policy. Now you can either 1) try to salvage the situation by changing your public position (but not your private beliefs), or 2) stick with your guns and not get elected for sure. Even if you're genuinely just looking to gain power to do good for the people, the only viable choice you have is is option 1.

However, this is a short term optimization. People actually do remember your promises. They hear you saying "X!" one day and "not X!" the next, again and again and again, and so they stop believing in politicians, whatever they say.

Now you've got yourself a system in which even honest politicians (the ones who never succumbed to the corrupt system) are no longer believed. All politicians are now percieved as liars, whether they are or not, and this makes the content of their proposed policies irrelevant. But people still have to vote for _someone_ , and now the only way to win is by making yourself stand out on some other level: presentation. You have to approach the sneakiest PR firm, hire the best spin doctor, have the biggest war chest, get the best television ads, and then maybe you can win by deceiving enough people into voting for you. This is the dominant approach in the Anglosphere, where the difference between 'winning' and 'losing' is a gaping chasm, and where buying influence is both easier and more widely accepted.

If your political system isn't so conducive to manipulation by the raw power of money, that's not very effective. Thankfully, people are still willing to vote for someone they think is just like them. So they vote for the person who has a real talent for public speaking, who identifies popular grievances, but who very much is _not_ a politician. But politics is contagious: when you get elected, you can't help it, you become a politician. You get infected by it, and by all of its associations. And thus you fall out of favour with the people who elected you, and the cycle begins again. This is a type of populism that's common in continental Europe, because coalition governments mean that you don't have to get an absolute majority to gain political power.

And this has had an effect on the established political parties too. Politics is now just a career in which the issues are no longer so important, a politician can always implement a couple of policies that benefit a certain powerful group. You might even delude yourself into truly believing that what you're doing is right. In return, that powerful group will give you a 6 or 7 figure job when you leave politics. Maybe couple of positions on the boards of large corporations, or a lobbying position, to make use of your political contacts.

This is a vicious cycle, where each of the effects is another cause exacerbating the problem. I chose to start at a certain piece of this whole mess because it fit well with what's happening in Australia now, but you might as well start at the corrupting effect of the mass media, or at the rise of the focus group, or anywhere else.

I guess this is where I should be coming up with a simple and straightforward solution. Sorry about that.

<comment><USER7> I hope everyone takes the time to read through this because it is spot on.

(I have a US perspective, this may not apply) I think a start to the solution is to increase the number of politicians per citizen. The original numbers would have a much larger congress than what is in place now. Gerrymandering should be illegal, if a district goes out to sea and back at high tide that needs to be a crime. First-across-the-fence voting needs to go[1]. None of that will ever happen, however.

[1] Although UIAM Australians have a separate system and that's still not good enough.

<comment><USER2> It is impossible to develop a system that satisfies all the Arrow criteria. In practice you compromise. Australia's system is a sophisticated series of compromises that has evolved partly from a local reformist streak in our politics and partly because our Constitutional starting point was after the US civil war.</comment></comment></comment>


Home Studio Setup Costs Compared – 1980s And Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/2020/9/8/home-studio-recording-costs-compared-1980s-and-now <comment><USER2> The oddest thing about this Cambrian explosion of possibility at dirt cheap prices is what it did to my creativity: It actually hurt it.

I started just a tad later and fully digital than the gear in this article, so the floppy discs I got Scream Tracker on with its included samples plus whatever I could rip from a few .MODs I could get my hands on had to do. There were four tracks. There were a hundred samples, half of which was obscure crap (and even those found their use).

Building with it and making them sound awesome, plus discovering the amazing tricks the OGs of tracker & demo culture did with their editors (sliding and bending notes! dead stops in the middle of the sample!) was endless fun.

Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.

<comment><USER3> I see this pattern a lot I wonder if it's been named and discussed before.

I think creativity likes having small struggles and challenges.

<comment><USER4> I think this (alleged) Orson Welles quote says it best: "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

(Information on the quote's provenance, for those who might be interested: [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art- limit/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art-limit/))

<comment><USER5> The similar quote I've heard is, "Form is liberating." I feel like I heard this in the context of poetry in high school, but Google turns up a bunch of references to _The Mythical Man Month_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You don't even need all the equipment listed in the article. I've been making music for years with just my laptop, a cheap Focusrite audio interface ($150), a pair of studio headphones (Sennheiser HD280), a cheap keyboard (Akai MPK Mini) and copies of Ableton and Serum synth.

You can still spend an inordinate amount of money on hardware and software. If I bought every plugin I really wanted, I would likely end up spending a couple of thousand. Throw in a better audio interface ($500+), a good keyboard ($400), a pad controller ($200+), and a better computer ($1500+) and you can easily add up to several thousand dollars.

But the point remains: it's absurdly cheap to start producing music today. You can get near studio quality with gear that, outside of your computer, won't cost more than $1k.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been saying this to the people I teach for years... And bear in mind that you can run multiple copies of an effect (providing your computer has the cpu power to do so), whereas back in the day you would get only the physical effect you actually bought. Mixdown with multiple compressors was just a dream - typically you'd have a couple of good channels of compression, then maybe a few more 'workhorse' units such as alesis 3630, and everyone else would have to go without.

This also doesn't take into account the improvement of much equipment today. I used to dream of a seck 1882, back in the day. I finally owned one about 10 years ago. It was bloody awful! Noisy as hell, and the EQ wasn't any good. Never meet your heroes!

<comment><USER6> It goes to show how good producers before the digital era were. Albums you'd consider 20th century masterpieces were recorded on 4-track recorders. They'd record a section, bounce it to one track. Record another section on the second track, then merge the two tracks. And so on. Incredible amount of hard work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing that's easy to get lost with all this gear explosion is none of it's really a good starting place without initial musical knowledge, which does not come from fooling with recording gear or DAWs.

Because I was in computers first I was super attracted to this stuff and wanted to make electronic music, even to the point of taking a college elective on it back in the late 90s.

But it's all useless without knowing about chords & scales and harmonies and all that stuff unless you're just going to follow recipes for creating EDM from the web. You need the physical skills to play a keyboard or guitar or anything really to be able to input data too.

The first piece of gear to get to start making some serious progress is something like a very simple electronic keyboard/piano, a dirt cheap used acoustic piano (free a lot of the time now) or a simple acoustic guitar.

Strip away all the options, learn then start exploring the electronic options.

Everyone loves to talk about someone like Moby but usually doesn't mention he could sing, play piano, play guitar, and play bass before he started putting samples together. Lots of musical knowledge before adding the electronics. (His book is great by the way!)

<comment> m-hilgendorf I strongly disagree, and I say that as a classically trained musician. You can do pretty much everything with a mouse and (QWERTY) keyboard today. We've worked really hard to democratize content creation and lower the barrier to entry, we don't need to raise it by reinforcing the notion that you need a physical aptitude for playing instruments to create art with sound.

The computer can be an entry point for one's journey just the same as an acoustic guitar or piano. You can use that as your platform to learn theory as well as (if not better than) a piano or guitar.

But to get elitist for a moment, there's no better way to learn music aside from private lessons. That's true of any instrument, including the DAW.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if you can really have the perspective on this if you were a classically trained musician. You already knew all that stuff inside and out.

I think a lot of music produced on a qwerty keyboard eschews huge amount of music theory just because it's produced that way.

My perspective was from the other way.. trying to learn it all playing with DAWs and other tools (admittedly a long time ago) and failing. Nothing about these tools will teach you why certain notes sound good together or why certain chords sound good together, etc..

For sure lots of electronic music just tries to skip all that completely though, or follows super strict genre rules where if you follow them it all comes out OK.

But we mostly agree though, the lessons are what make the difference. When I tried to learn this though there was zero accessibility of local teachers who would have taught through a DAW or something like that though. Finding a piano or guitar teacher was something available everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it is worth mentioning that home studios has been quite viable for more than 2 decades. Although no doubt it is cheaper and better than ever.

Moby recorded and produced his super hit album "Play" in his bedroom in the late 90s.

[0] Studio pictures: [https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/bnpmza/mobys_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/bnpmza/mobys_home_studio_while_recording_play_which/) [1] Wikipedia article on play [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(Moby_album)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_\(Moby_album\))

<comment><USER11> (loved this in the Wikipedia above)After his album just prior to Play bombed, and he considered quitting music, he says:

>>> "I got one piece of fan mail from Terence Trent D'Arby and I got a phone call from Axl Rose saying he was listening to Animal Rights on repeat. Bono told me he loved Animal Rights. So if you're gonna have three pieces of fan mail, that's the fan mail to get."[5]

<comment><USER12> I highly recommend listening this this episode: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/brholm](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/brholm)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the recommendation, just listened to it after reading your comment and I second that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unlike other things that have been democratized by modern technology (photography, video, coding, publishing) success in music is still heavily dominated by pretty much the same big gateway keepers as it was in the 80s.

Yes, you could absolutely make a top-40 quality recording with just an iPad but your chances of being popular approaches zero unless you're "discovered" by a label. And yes, you could increase your chances of being noticed doing all kinds of personal marketing (were it helps being an attractive 20-something), but your music will never make it on it merits alone. Thus, home recording will stay as a very expensive hobby for most of us and nothing else.

<comment><USER15> I disagree and think this is changing rapidly, especially in the electronic/EDM scenes. In these arenas, a lot of careers blossom from SoundCloud, YouTube, and having other artists/DJs pick up tracks and play them in their sets. Marketing is still a factor but matters a lot less (many artists even wear masks/helmets). A quality track can (and many have been) made with just a laptop. Martin Garrix released his first hit "Animals" at age 16/17 after one his remixes was picked up by another DJ.

Additionally, music discovery has fundamentally changed because of streaming services like Spotify, as well. Just a couple of days ago there was an article on the front page of HN about how the top 40 tracks on Spotify make up a smaller percentage of the streams than even a year or two ago. Discovery features allow tracks to rise on their merit/listening stats making marketing much less important than it used to be, across genres.

With that said, it's still hard to make it. The barrier to entry has never been lower and thus there is a tremendous amount of competition and talent to contend with now. The determining factor for winning these days seems to be the ability to consistently and reliably release quality tunes over and over again.

<comment><USER16> > Marketing is still a factor but matters a lot less (many artists even wear > masks/helmets).

Marketing doesn't matter any less now than it did back in the day; it's just something the artist is expected to do themselves, rather than something to outsource to a label.

The helmet/mask thing _is_ marketing. It's a gimmick and is half of what built the original hype for guys like deadmau5 and marshmello. It was really novel to see a guy spinning records in a mouse costume, at one point, and that was the reason _masses_ of people discovered, rather than just a few.

Martin Garrix had to find, reach out to, and collaborate with hundreds of unknown artists before he built his network big enough such that Tiesto 'discovering' him was a possibility.

There are hundreds of thousands of people producing EDM and releasing it on Soundcloud/Beatport/etc. A tiny fraction of those people will ever get more than 10 listeners. The ones who do get listeners will hustle like hell to build up their network and broadcast their channels -- i.e. market themselves. Marketing is still the only way to get people listening to your stuff, quality tunes alone won't get you there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its one thing to have gear access, but the second you think "I could make X if I had access to Y" you are already thinking about it wrong. If you want to make music and you are driven to do so you will use what you have to make what you like.

Early hip hop records didnt use samplers, they used pause tapes at least for the demo process. (see ATCQ People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm)

Early electro/house/hip hop used unrealistic sounding pawn shop gear (that has since become rare and sought after)

The beatles had crap guitars and played anyway.

I have a pretty sizable home studio and it definitely helps me craft sound, but it is just a tool not the reason...

<comment><USER18> I once heard the advice "Consider buying gear once you're productive. Don't buy gear to become productive." Once one has the bare essentials it's very solid advice. Having a dozen well-understood parameters to play with is often more useful than a hundred poorly understood ones, which can quickly become paralyzing.

I feel like the older model of accumulating physical gear helped put some limits on how complexity grew in small studios, but that has all been upended by software. There is definitely a balance to be struck between the capabilities of the setup and what will actually result in the best creative output. Creativity often thrives within constraints, and it can paradoxically become harder to work with objectively better equipment.

<comment><USER19> I'm not a musician, but a photographer. I think the gear craziness is probably similar across both areas. I've adapted the don't just buy gear, get out and do stuff to "Don't buy gear until you have a particular problem that gear would solve. If you can, borrow gear to validate." Because, lets be honest, sometimes the gear actually helps - but unless you have the problem it helps for its gonna sit in a corner.

<comment><USER20> Sometimes people hope the gear would help their creative problems and keep on buying new gear but the satisfaction is short lived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree that the price / functionality ratio is much better in modern times. But a significant drawback, which I didn't see mentioned, is that most of those nice hardware buttons, knobs and sliders are now tiny, obscure controls arranged on a multitude of hidden screens on that tiny laptop display, which you have to awkwardly operate with your virtual mouse pointer. Usability in fact suffers a lot if you go "all software".

<comment><USER22> There is a plenty of hardware controls you can buy for your DAWs.

<comment><USER21> I know. But then you are buying hardware again. And the good quality stuff is expensive.

<comment><USER23> Still much cheaper than in the 80s/90s.

You can get analogue polysynth for sub-$500, moog mini clone for $250, a great 16 channel mixer for $200 and so on...

<comment><USER7> > a great 16 channel mixer for $200

Example?

<comment><USER23> I had a Behringer Xenyx a few years ago that was better than anything I had in the 90s. And not to the stereotype of the "cheap" Behringer quality, they're up to par these days.

(Sure, it's no SSL/Neve, but better than any demo/home studio had in past decades - I remember the days of Fostex/Tascam 4track cassete tape recorders/mixers).

<comment><USER7> Check the Behringer X Air XR16/18 out too, it seems great (more expensive though)

<comment><USER23> Thanks. Wow this even has MIDAS pre-amps, heard about those from some premium devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As far as "studio monitors", you should know that a quality set of over ear headphones has better sound reproduction than any speaker. I used to be involved in the pro audio scene, until I realized this.

Its impossible to eliminate echo and stereo bleed with speakers. If you try to EQ a room using mics you will see this clearly. You might get close building an anaerobic chamber, but headphones are still better.

If you're on a budget don't waste money on expensive speakers, just use headphones

<comment><USER25> Cross ear perception of the other speaker is actually desirable, unless you're specifically mixing binaural for headphones. Crosstalk is key to localizing the apparent acoustic image in front of the listener instead of "inside the skull."

If you mix purely on headphones, you can just put a quick filter inline that does a reasonable job of simulating it. Without this you'll have difficulty mixing things well for playback on speakers.

<comment><USER26> What filter do you mean? I'm aware of hardware which simulates it, but it costs around 2000 EUR.

<comment><USER27> See the plugins here, for example: [https://www.pro-tools- expert.com/production-expert-1/2016/5/...](https://www.pro-tools- expert.com/production-expert-1/2016/5/3/do-you-mix-on-headphones-take-your- headphone-experiences-to-the-next-level-with-these-smart-monitoring-plug-ins)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Or alternatively, back then entry level was the Tascam 244 Portastudio, with whatever instruments/mics you could find at a pawn shop. Reverb? Sing in the shower. Way less than 10k.

And a lot bands did this... [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio)

One guy from our school did build a home studio like they describe, but only after getting a record deal and a pile of cash.

<comment> compiler-guy First album I ever worked on was on a 244. It felt amazing to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Really great overview, there are so many pieces of gear that are very hard for a layman to understand. Their descriptons can be self-referential. I've been getting into audio / synthesizers a bit and it is _such_ a hard world to get your head around!

It's remarkable how hard it is to get audio _into_ a computer compared to how simple one imagines it should be. Understanding audio interfaces, mixers, power levels (mic/line/instrument), cable types (TS, TRS, 3.5mm) is not rocket science but it's a bit shocking when you see how hard it is to record anything besides your computer's built-in microphone.

And then there's the whole world of MIDI. It's at once an amazing standard and a confusing dinosaur (more the former) which is, again, shockingly hard to get started with as a n00b. When I started out I assumed I just needed a cable with USB A on one end and MIDI on the other end ... hah!

All that said: this stuff is really fun and it gets cheaper every day (although your wish list also gets bigger ever day). Companies like Behringer get a lot of flak for being cheap but they have made it so so so much cheaper for the casual person to get the hardware they need to try things.

<comment> compiler-guy By today's standards, Behringer is very low end.

But the Beatles recorded their demos and even some early albums on far, far worse equipment. I therefore conclude that Behringer gear is perfectly acceptable for me.

<comment><USER30> Sure it might be 'worse' equipment. However experts were operating it.

And then you further get into an analog vs digital discussion. And that they were recording on 'the best' analog equipment of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm sure there's lots to be said about how the uquity of music production equipment (i.e. a laptop) is turning laptop-produced music (electronica, hip hop etc) into the new folk music; music made and circulated among small groups of people.

And the whole idea of 80-style music "industry" with huge stars and huge physical distribution networks and huge amounts of money being made by a tiny proportion of people was probably just a technological oddity that was never going to last more than a few decades.

</comment><comment><USER32> > There's not much to say about the Yamaha NS10M that hasn't already been > written. Suffice to say they have become the stuff of legend, but not > necessarily because of the sound quality. It was often remarked when people > asked why people mixed on NS10s that if a mix sounds good on them it will > sound good on anything!

That's how most monitoring speakers and headphones sound to me. But they are still very popular with people who only consume music because "professionals use them so they must be the best".

<comment><USER33> You don't buy studio monitors to fill a room with sound and casually listen to music. You buy studio monitors to sit directly in front of them and get an accurate image of what a track sounds like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How does one start creating digital music (today)?

I've got a midi keyboard to practice singing and there was free light version of Ableton included. I guess it is in the same category as PreSonus and GarageBand from the article. I studied music ~10 years ago but have no idea how to start creating digital music.

How and where do I start if for example I like ATB (DJ) and would like to (try to) create something similar?

<comment><USER15> Ableton is great, especially if you are tech-oriented. I suggest you follow along with a couple video tutorials introducing the basics of Ableton to get started. You can make something decent-sounding with just a few tracks and loops. The basic concepts should apply across DAWs. Have fun, and good luck!

<comment><USER34> Thanks! Can you recommend some tutorials/channels on youtube by any chance?

<comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83TxBL3yOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83TxBL3yOE)

followed by

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Zcy8Uu4dw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Zcy8Uu4dw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> On a somewhat related note, here is an excellent short documentary on the making of the score for John Carpenter's Escape From New York: [https://youtu.be/NBw4OXM6ad4](https://youtu.be/NBw4OXM6ad4)

It is particularly interesting to see how MIDI completely changed the game. Getting everything synced in the pre-MIDI age sounds like it was more involved.

</comment><comment><USER36> Some old friends there!

"the Sony DTC1000ES was mixing heaven. It offered 2 tracks of of 16bit @ 48kHz recording and was the ideal machine to master to for those who were preparing tracks for CD pressing."

Note the pictured machine has the HHB modification to run at 44.1 kHz to make it actually useful for CD mastering.

<comment><USER37> I was under the impression mastering at 48khz and then downsampling to 44.1khz afterwards resulted in better quality due to reduced aliasing.

<comment><USER38> The trade-off is that sample rate conversion introduced its own artefacts, though we have much better algorithms (and of course more CPU power) for it today.

I'm not sure that aliasing was in itself a big problem, you're perhaps refering more to the audio artefacts introduced by the anti-aliasing filter. But in any case this wasn't even the biggest problem with converters back then. IME, quantization distortion was a much bigger issue. You had to watch the signal levels really carefully - too loud and you'd get absolutely brutal distortion (sometimes including wrap-around, where the value reported by the A/D converter goes instantly from maximum value to minimum value), too quiet and everything turns into a grainy-sounding mush.

The world changed in the early 90s when delta-sigma (aka "oversampling") converters came along, pretty much solved all these issues, and so allowed the price of decent converters to steadily fall, as normal semiconductor manufacturing economics kick in.

<comment><USER33> These days the benefit of 48kHz is that you get twice the frequency headroom vs 44.1k (from 20kHz to Nyquist), which means that any processing steps using oversampling and antialiasing filters (which you should be using) will either sound better, use less CPU, or both, since the filter has to be only half as steep on 48k.

But that's for intermediate processing, once you have the master you can convert to 44.1 one final time and that's that. One final sample rate conversion with modern algorithms will not introduce any audible differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Some of you maybe remember old DOS game audio setup, the MIDI section usually also had the Roland MT-32 as option. Most of the MIDI of older games was actually recorded on MT-32 and you could hear the music in the original glory by using this device. It was expensive back then and still is - because of collectors and retro gamers. You can even connect it with DOSBox. Later DOS games used General MIDI (MT-32 was before MIDI was standardized) and there were more synthetizers to choose from, but a good pick is Roland SC-55 or SC-88VL. The music sounds phenomenal through the Roland, for example Monkey Island: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20)

</comment><comment><USER40> I read somewhere that Nirvana was given 60k to record Nevermind, at the time they were a very niche college radio band, not expected to be a big thing. Someone did the ROI on that, so yeah the flip side is that you also had the chance to pay for all that gear :)

<comment><USER41> Nirvana is often thought of as sloppy, slacker, etc. but they took their music very seriously. When getting ready to record Nevermind, Kurt Cobain had the band rent a rehearsal space in LA for 3 months and practice every day - it was a full time job. Kurt in particular played, recorded, and wrote nearly every day for years so although he was a creative genius he also put in the work finding the sound and style he wanted to perfect. And he did.

There's a lot of nice stories about in the year leading up to the release and this is just before he got into heroin. Pretty much after the release he started using heavily and all his hard work was given over to it.

<comment><USER42> where can you find some of those nice stories?

<comment><USER41> "Serving the Servant" by Danny Goldberg is a good start. He was Nirvana's manager during this time and was close to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> >suggested midi keyboard

Uses non-weighted keys. Nobody should have to ever suffer a non-weighted keyboard.

<comment><USER44> Yes. Semi-weighted is my minimum. 88 keys if I have a choice. Less than 66 keys is like playing a 2-string guitar.

Just like my computer keyboard: mechanical, clicky, and with sufficient travel and resistance to let me know a key has been pressed.

<comment><USER45> If you are trying to play piano than yes. However pipe organs have never had 88 keys. Weight on pipe organ keys varied (some of the old organs with pure mechanical actions were much heavier than a piano, while modern - for 1920 - keyboards are unweighted). Key size was often smaller than a piano keyboard as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The only issue with this article is that they are leaving out microphones.

</comment><comment><USER47> Their 1980s rig has analog compression and limiting but their new one doesn't. A small but relevant detail.</comment>


The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle may finally be solved - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2016/10/21/the-mystery-of-the-bermuda-triangle-may-finally-be-solved/ <comment><USER2> _For centuries, the notorious Bermuda Triangle — located between Miami, Puerto Rico and the island of Bermuda — has been linked with a high number of unexplained disappearances of aircraft and ships in its waters._

The "Bermuda Triangle effect" has only been around since the 1950s, and since then most claimed disappearances within the triangle have been debunked as either never having occurred or having occurred outside the triangle.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle)</comment>