Show HN: A tangible programming drawbot for kid learning - <AUTHOR> http://gobot.stoneware.tech <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but I'm not entirely sure how it would let a 'lego collection come alive', maybe a video? (Or a video further up if I missed it).

Nitpick: Very tall and thin fonts only really work on high DPI screens. Worse if it's white text on an image.

<comment><AUTHOR> To me, its the imagination not the motor that makes lego alive. It could be designing a path on some scenic map, and letting the bot to load and move the lego parts around.

Video is coming later this month when approaching crowdfunding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fantastic. I bookmarked the page and will check it again. I would like to order one for my kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Lozzo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like the concept, but whos Hui-Yang Zhang?

See the disrupting squad, the description is a bit atypical.

<comment><AUTHOR> A senior bankrupt hardware manager formerly in Shenzhen who would do anything legal to make himself rich again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you deliver in Brazil?

<comment><AUTHOR> We can always deliver, and maybe what you are really asking is maintenance. Since we are a small startup, it could difficult for us to setup a maintenance point in Brazil. Open source it and let community be able to fix some bug could be an option later.</comment></comment>


Automated Reports with Jupyter Notebooks (Using Jupytext and Papermill) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/capital-fund-management/automated-reports-with-jupyter-notebooks-using-jupytext-and-papermill-619e60c37330 <comment><USER2> I don't think Jupyter notebooks should be used for automated jobs. They're great for exploratory stuff but once things are getting fleshed out and cleaned up, one should move to proper python files that can be unit tested and versioned without having to go to crazy lengths...

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I've always been puzzled with how extensively people use Jupyter notebooks, despite how deficient they can be in many situations. Don't get me wrong, I have used them a lot and I still use them on occasion, but pretty much the only times I would really reach for them are when I want code + documentation to reside together.

So if I am prototyping things that also would benefit from Markdown + Latex comments/documentation, it is far superior to a script with text comments. The only other situation where I've found them to be pretty useful are when utilizing their interactive widgets to let the end user explore the data in interesting ways.

But most people seem to use it as an IDE when it is quite deficient compared to something like PyCharm. Even for quick prototyping, I find PyCharm to be far more useful because a) I can directly run things in the IPython console, b) Examine variables in the variable display widget, c) Attach a debugger to the console at any time and start debugging with an unmatched debugging experience in Python land, d) Easily have the correct venv be utilized by the IPython console, e) Have outstanding linting + code introspection + autocompletion, f) Have sane git diffs that make it easy to use version control appropriately and frequently unlike with Jupyter notebooks, and probably a bunch of other benefits that come with having access to a powerful IDE. All of these make rapid prototyping much faster than anything I can achieve in a Jupyter notebook.

I've also been pretty unimpressed with the quality of the average Jupyter notebook that I find on Github repos. They encourage dumping everything into global state, rely on state across code cells in non-obvious manners and in general result in ugly scripts that need a lot more work if they had to be refactored into modular packages/modules.

Running automated jobs from Jupyter seems a bit crazy and I hope people stop to think whether that is the appropriate path to take when trying to write automated jobs.

<comment><USER4> The reason Jupyter notebooks are so popular is that people who only learned to code or are learning to code to enable some kind of analysis can easily do it without needing to get much of anything else set up. If all you really need is to read in some data, do some statistical tests, and make some plots, I'd argue it's by far the simplest solution. Many academics don't need much more than this. Similarly, when a data scientist or product analyst is just doing analysis, not much more is needed.

Your comments about what Jupyter notebooks incentivize are definitely true (I'd argue its part of the appeal - people new to programming often don't immediately grok types of state and Jupyter kind of just says "eh, work around it"). I certainly fall victim to it and often wish for a week of "the expectation is that you will go through your notebooks and create modules or packages for them".

I also agree that running automated jobs from Jupyter isn't an optimal solution, but for many companies, if it means a data scientist (whose coding skills are primarily statistical) can get a report into production without a single engineering hour, it's often worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome article - I'm wondering, for "Publishing the Notebook" part of the workflow, have you ever seen Kyso ([https://kyso.io](https://kyso.io)) - disclaimer, I'm a founder. We started Kyso to make it easier to communicate insights gained from analysis to non-technical people by converting data science tools (e.g. Jupyter Notebooks) into conversational tools in the form of blog posts. You can make public posts or have an internal "data blog" for your team, where you push your work to Github and it is reflected on Kyso. Would love to hear your thoughts on how it could fit into existing workflows.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great article. The package that ties notebooks to git-friendly markdown equivalents sounds it solves one of the main problems with using jupyter.

</comment><comment><USER7> I dream about native version of Jupyter, without the need of a browser, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Probably a Vulkan-rendered widgets. Would improve performance by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER8> I think Visual Studio Code will add that feature

<comment><USER9> Visual Studio Code itself is "a browser, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS", no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What library is the author using, containing the sundial visualization?

<comment><USER4> Looks like Plotly to me.

UPDATE: Plotly confirmed via looking at the notebook source repo: [https://github.com/CFMTech/jupytext_papermill_post/blob/mast...](https://github.com/CFMTech/jupytext_papermill_post/blob/master/plots.py)

<comment><USER10> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


Java "Damaging" Students - <AUTHOR> http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/08/01/22/0217200.shtml

<comment><USER2> Robert Dewar (the prof behind the comments) has the largest laser disc collection I will probably ever see. Thousands.

He would throw parties in his huge 5th avenue penthouse apartment in Manhattan. They would usually involve choice science fiction screenings on a projector, often biased towards Star Trek.

The jolliest Ada lover evar.</comment>


Did a Rogue NSA Operation Cause the Death of a Greek Telecom Employee? - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/death-athens-rogue-nsa-operation/ <comment><USER2> If true, this fills in a lot of details to previous coverage and confirms the U.S. involvement which was suspected for years, not to mention answering why they'd put so much effort into compromising Greece.

Schneier gave it a bit of coverage when the story started to break back in 2006:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/phone_tapping...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/phone_tapping_i.html) [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_greek...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_greek_w.html) [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretappi_1.html)

The IEEE Spectrum had a long piece back in 2007:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens- affair](http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair)

(Wikipedia has links to a bunch of foreign coverage I hadn't seen before, which appear to share the same general suspicion without hard proof: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004–05](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004–05))

</comment><comment><USER3> I was a friend of Costas since our years in the University and of his fiancee since she was in the elementary school.

When we learned that he had "committed suicide" nothing about the wire tapping scandal was known of course.

At his funeral everybody was saying things like "how he lost his mind". I was telling to everyone that "people do not lose their minds and commit suicide like that", "something else must be behind this death, which is not suicide".

You see this was not a conspiracy theory that was born AFTER the scandal was uncovered. The suicide assumption was just not a plausible scenario in any case.

</comment><comment><USER4> details about the hack: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens- affair](http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm missing the relevant comparisons to the similar Italy case.

</comment><comment><USER6> So... Why was this removed from the first page?

</comment><comment><USER7> no nooo, It was an accident, just like that GCHQ guy found dead naked in a suitcase padlocked from the outside.

</comment><comment><USER8> If yes: get those criminals.

</comment><comment><USER8> fuck.</comment>


Why do many programmers defend/support intellectual property theft? - <AUTHOR>

Computer programmers and other people involved in the development of new technology generate extremely valuable IP on which most of them depend for their living.  Some depend on this directly by selling what they produce and others do so indirectly by selling advertising space or consulting services.  More than in almost all other fields (music and movies being clear exceptions), technologists depend on a proper respect for intellectual property to prosper.
And yet on Hacker News and most other technology-oriented forums and news sites, the overwhelming consensus seems to be pro-piracy.  This strikes me as childish and silly and I honestly don't understand how people - especially people who should be smart enough and thoughtful enough to think clearly on the subject - can have such wrong-headed views on something so important to them.
Piracy is immoral and corrupt (the Pirate Bay guys made a bundle off of other people's software, music, and movies), it discourages innovation and has strong anarchistic elements to it.  Other than selfish convenience for the pirate, what possible justification does it have?
Can anyone explain why they support piracy without resorting to misapplied notions of free speech?
We who create should be united in defending our rights to control and to profit from our labors. <comment><USER2> People who do math (in a large sense that includes programming) often have a streak of Platonic realism: the idea that ideas are less _invented_ than _discovered_.

Lots of important code boils down to identities:

        a^0.5
        == sqrt(a)
        == (b such that b×b == a)
        == (a certain line of x86 assembler)
        == (a certain line of python)

Or equivalences:

        Turing machine
        == lambda calculus
        == Java Virtual Machine
        == Haskell
        == Conway's game of life
        == Excel

Or other relations:

        worst-case runtime of X ≤ worst-case runtime of Y

The notion of owning necessary relationships between concepts is at best problematic. It's not helped by the fact that a lot of pretty obvious ideas get protection. The first one that comes to mind is US patent 4941193, which covers doing fractal image compression in the way that any competent programmer hearing the phrase "fractal image compression" would immediately imagine. There's no incentive to license that kind of patent to the little guys, and the little guys don't want to do the paperwork anyway, so a lot of things like fractal compression have stagnated because someone _owns the predicate_ that images are often self-similar.

This is obviously not the whole story. There are benefits to society, and specifically to programmers, from moderate IP protection. But I think it's is a reasonable answer to your question. The default attitude for hackers seems to be that anyone should be able to implement anything in the literature for any purpose. If you have the technical ability to circumvent what you see as immoral restrictions on knowledge of the structure of the world, you're likely to do it.

(I'm not trying to argue for this view in this comment, only to point it out.)

<comment><USER3> The original question seemed to pertain more to copyright than to patents - the patentability of software is very much debatable, but the copyrightability of the works of science/art/cobbled together messes that we make seems pretty clear?

<comment><USER2> I'm not an IP scholar, but my impression is that patents and copyright have basically the same intent; the only big difference is that patents are for methods and copyrights are for expressions.

Where you draw the line between methods and expressions, or discovered and invented things, depends on how much you like Plato's style of thinking. We can imagine people on either extreme of realism/idealism arguing (A) that 1 = 1 is an invention of our mathematical system, or (B) that _Girl with a Pearl Earring_ is merely the discovery of the pre-existing fact that that pattern of paint is pleasing.

Likewise, as things stand now, I can copyright a map. There's an obvious argument against this: I didn't _make_ what the map shows, and I can't _own_ the fact that land is the shape it is. And an obvious argument for it: it took real work to research, design, and produce, and this deserves a reward. I think that hackers generally tend to come down further on the first argument's side than most people do.

<comment><USER4> _it took real work to research, design, and produce, and this deserves a reward._

That's not necessarily the US's position on copyright, either. See Bridgeman v. Corel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think the consensus here is particularly strong in any direction.

As for reasons, it varies by person, but a few common reasons for not being hugely in favor of "intellectual property" despite working in an intellectual area:

1\. Even if well-meaning originally, intellectual property may actually harm innovation and innovators in certain areas (especially with the terrible state of patent law, but also with very long copyright terms).

2\. Not everyone buys the analogy with property (many libertarians, for example, don't). That doesn't mean copyright should be abolished (even if it's not really property, it could still be a useful concept), but it does put it in a different category.

3\. Objections to the manner in which governmental police and investigatory power is used to enforce it. Unlike with normal property, fully enforcing intellectual property laws requires quite invasive government powers, since people can violate them without even venturing off their own property (copying music between USB drives, say).

4\. Objections to the collateral damage caused by private-sector attempts to control copying, either technical measures like DRM, or contract-law measures like EULAs, especially since these restrictions tend to be aimed at stopping even legitimate tinkering, which is important to many hackers.

I would tone down the language if I were you, though, if you want to have an actual discussion (if this was just an opportunity for a rant, then never mind). Your post comes off as condescending and belligerent, yet you don't appear to actually have a strong command of the relevant issues or even awareness of the arguments, which is a poor combination.

<comment><USER6> Intellectual property is an interesting issue because of what it says about people and how they approach things.

(a)Your opinion is your own. There isn't a political left-right position here. If you have a position climate change, nationally provided services and welfare, etc. that are associate with a political camp you can't derive an IP position from this. It's also hard to derive an opinion from fundamentals. A person's opinion here, is more than on other issues, his own.

(b) It's very easy to know enough to be dangerous. Understanding why 'patents encourages innovation' or 'IP fragmentation' discourages innovation. But, issue is multifaceted and hard to reduce to a manageable number of parameters. Even the most theoretical advocates of one side or another generally talk about balances (tweaking patent expiration, fair use laws) rather than fundamentals. Knowing enough to sound smart is easy. Knowing enough to have what is a well thought out position is pretty hard.

Put these two together and it tells you about how a person thinks. For example, if one has a lot of knowledge, some interesting insight but still doesn't have a strong opinion that tells you a lot about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Violating the terms of a copyright license by making an unauthorized copy is not the same thing as theft. If I steal your car, I have one car and you have none; if I copy your data, I have a copy of your data and so do you. You have not been deprived of property, so there is no theft.

If you offer to sell me a copy of your data for $X, but I decline, then choose to get a copy of the same data from someone else for free, I have stolen nothing, since you still have your data. What you have lost is the opportunity to offer me a lower price, which I might have accepted. This is not the same as theft, and I am far less sympathetic to this vaporous loss of potential than I would be to an actual loss of goods or services.

As far as your belief that intellectual property can be extremely valuable, or that people involved in the development of new technology necessarily depend on it for a living, that is commonly claimed but does not correlate well with my experience. My career only took off when I started giving my software away - I made more money selling my consulting services than I ever did by selling licenses for my software, and freeware gave me a better reputation than shareware ever had.

Conversely, for a stretch of about five years not one line of code I wrote actually shipped, because the companies that owned the rights to my code changed strategy, went out of business, or simply lost interest in the project. I have heard similar stories from other developers. Think of all that work gone completely to waste, because it was all locked up behind a wall of "intellectual property!"

As far as software patents go, they have only negative value: they are worse than a zero-sum game. Patenting a software idea is a great way to make sure no software developer will ever read about it, since nobody wants to be liable for triple damages due to willful infringement. The only value a software patent has to anyone is the opportunity to sue a large corporation.

In summary, I don't agree that intellectual property necessarily has significant value, and I don't agree that violating pointlessly restrictive copyright licenses is necessarily harmful. Nor, for that matter, do I think "strong anarchistic elements" are a bad thing.

The justification is that making it easier for people to get what they want is generally a good thing. Violating the artificial gatekeeping privileges of an arbitrary rightsholder in order to increase the general happiness sounds like it is probably a good thing most of the time.

<comment><USER8> If you look up what property really means, it is not a physical object/possession, it's an abstract _right of disposal_ over something. If you steal my car, I cannot dispose of it how I choose, and if you take my data without permission, again I can no longer dispose of it how I choose. So you have, in fact, deprived me of property in both cases.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't matter if you reframe it that way. You can _never_ dispose of mental things how you choose. The mind doesn't work the same way as physical things, which is why pretending that "intellectual property" is the same thing as physical property is a non-starter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Precisely because they understand "intellectual property" well enough, for example, not to uncritically accept that violating license terms = theft.

</comment><comment><USER11> Intellectual property is a misnomer, or at least a weaker form of property. It's not about free speech, but rather about the particulars of owning an idea which may reside in another mind. Calling it theft outright is framing the question. Of course people are against _theft_ , but if their ideas of theft are different, they are referring to different things.

Furthermore, there are three distinct cases where IP is understood differently: trademarks, copyright and patents (I suspect you are referring to copyrights). Some people may be against only one or two forms of IP, while accepting the others.

<comment><USER12> IP refers to database rights, too (most similar to copyrights, but distinct from it).

<comment><USER11> What are database rights?

<comment><USER5> A form of copyright on a collection of facts. In the U.S., the famous "telephone books aren't copyrightable" case ( _Feist v. Rural_ ) held that mere compilations of facts aren't copyrightable, because they aren't a creative work, and copyright is intended to protect only original, creative works. Collections with some degree of creativity in the selection and arrangement might count, but an alphabetical listing of all people in an area code with their phone numbers was held not to possess any creativity.

Other countries have more of a "sweat of the brow" view of copyright, that it's intended to protect any work that took effort to produce, so even a compilation of mere facts could be copyrightable, if it took a lot of effort to compile them. The EU now has a separate pseudo-copyright for databases that wouldn't otherwise be copyrightable (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive>).

The main people pushing that are, as you might guess, those who have amassed a lot of data that isn't protected by normal copyright. For example, stock- ticker data is not copyrightable (it's just a mechanical listing of facts), and the companies that make a lot of money licensing it aren't happy about that.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I was not aware of that aspect.

<comment><USER13> Which basically proves the point that "Intellectual Property" isn't property: not everybody has even a similar view of what the phrase denotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A large part of the issue is that many major copyright owners have proven themselves to have very little regard for law or morality themselves. When the RIAA blackmails people (with very little evidence against them) and forces them to pay a few thousand dollars for a settlement or be sued into oblivion by a battalion of corporate lawyers, the masses will hardly defend the RIAA. Or when they try to write laws to spy on and censor the entire Internet for their direct gain, many people get very upset at the implications. When game publishers sell games that are so heavily DRM'd as to be difficult to play legitimately while still trivial to pirate, people shrug and get the pirated copies if they want to be able to play.

On the other hand, there have been lots of stories where creators have open discussions with pirates, without reflexively making them the enemy, and are rewarded by respect and increased sales. Pirates are people too, and many act with a higher moral compass than you might expect, though it may differ from your own.

I think it's not so much that piracy is seen as good, but that it's not as evil as some would make it out to be, and the other side makes themselves so unsymphathetic that nobody cares about them.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think the majority of people are pro-piracy, it is just that they are "hackers". Hackers try to figure out how to hack things to their needs.

Online music started with Limewire and ended with iTunes. I feel this is the fate of a lot of other forms of media. A frustrated group of hackers will thwart the current system until there is a viable market option. Most people, if given the chance, will pay for what they want.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm sorry people copy your stuff.

I'm not one to tell someone else how to run their business but could it be that relying on fragile concepts such as "Intellectual Property" are not a good method for gaining the ability to control and profit from your labors?

Personally I've always relied largely on the reputation I've built up for being able to solve the problems of my clients but your mileage may vary.

I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really hard at something and get nothing back for your effort.

<comment><USER17> "I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really hard at something and get nothing back for your effort."

That implies I could spend a year writing a million godawful poems and it would be unfair not to pay me for them.

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry you feel that your poetry isn't any good yet.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who said that everyone has about a million words of garbage in them they have to get out before they can write well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are many things in the world that can be used for good and bad, and supporting the existence of those things does not mean that you're in favor of the bad parts.

Some companies that sell content have decided to use a heavy-handed approach (DRM), demonstrably punishing their _paying_ customers. They are not looking for new ways to make perhaps even more money in the Internet age; they are only trying to preserve what is arguably a dying business model. They ignore legitimate questions like, "if I can't afford this and you give it to me for half price, and I can easily share it with 10 of my friends, will that generate sales you wouldn't have otherwise seen"?

The "pirates" are a bit like a rally to restore sanity: they provide what people actually want (which is NOT "free movies"), and frankly content companies have been too stupid to realize this outcome. Not everyone cares if a download is free. What they _really_ want is freedom from the bullshit that is digitally shoved into DVDs these days (like previews you can't skip, commercials when you've already paid for content, and other restrictions on what you can do). They want to play something they've bought on one device, and not have an error box come up when they shamefully try to play it on another device that they also own.

If you're wondering why artists don't see much money, take a look at the insultingly small percentages they get from their rich overlords.

<comment><USER4> _which is NOT "free movies"_

I call bullshit. That's exactly the case, as I've heard it plenty of times. Freedom from the joke that is DVD + "Digital Copy" is what _I_ want freedom from. Not so much the case with the bulk of other people. Plenty like to pull out these types of oh-so-plausible ideological rationalizations when pressed, but p2p is largely accounted for by "I want it and I don't give a fuck."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I haven't seen any evidence that people here are "pro-piracy" but concerning your first paragraph I'll argue one reason for why many software developers may not be terribly thrilled with the current notion of "intellectual property".

The majority of software developers are employees of corporations. As such they typically receive only a small fraction of the economic benefit derived from the value they create. The current economic system simply does not allocate benefits proportionally to created value. This fact will worsen as technology continues to increase the efficiency of labor. By the 20's millions of people will be losing their jobs to automation (probably not programmers, that will take a few more decades) and labor, the primary mechanism society has for distributing wealth, will essentially cease to exist.

I don't know what will happen at that point but it is clear to me that the current system is unsustainable.

<comment><USER20> _The majority of software developers are employees of corporations. As such they typically receive only a small fraction of the economic benefit derived from the value they create._

If I choose to work for myself, then usually I am accepting a much higher degree of risk. Maybe I am developing a new product, and I don't have a portfolio of other products to fall back on should my idea fail. Maybe my business is too small to take advantage of certain economies of scale.

If I choose to work for a corporation, there is a good chance that the two risks above, and many of the risks you may come up with, have been mitigated to some extent. Also, chances are I probably work in a large team. So the economic benefit is divided among more people. Furthermore, the mitigated risks warrant less return.

It's all about the trade-offs that economics so wonderfully covers. I have to disagree with your statement.

<comment><USER19> Sure there are trade-offs but it's very difficult to quantify how much you're giving up and how much you're getting in return. A corporate developer is constantly building up the IP portfolio of his company, but how good an idea does he have of the long-term value of his contributions ? If you knew that the value to the company of your work was 10x your salary would you still want to accept the trade-off or would you start looking for other options ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you support copyright without resorting to the misapplied notion of having the right to control and profit from your labors?

There are long established rights, 'natural' rights if you want, that pertain to things like being able to do what we want with the things we own and the information we have.

Copyright is a government granted monopoly, which is supposed to be temporary.

The right to control and profit from your labor does not extend to restricting the basic activities of other people.

If you have valuable skills, you can charge for them. The market for services doesn't evaporate when copyright is eliminated.

One problem with long term copyright is that it disconnects _doing_ creative work from _profiting_ from creative work, the opposite of it's original intent.

Piracy is morally neutral.

</comment><comment><USER22> the answer is simple, developers are typically analytical so it's easy to calculate the opportunity cost of getting something for free versus buying it.

i think people kind of block it out of their heads that it's illegal because everyone does it, it's plenty available, and nobody you really know gets sued for it. there's some high philosophical reasoning perhaps behind it as well, i'm just consuming the content, i'm not making money off it. so there are various things at play here. i don't think any developer, when it comes down to it, agrees with piracy for profit or not giving authors credit for their work, i think most people would agree it's wrong when put under the fire.

i think in terms of defending our rights, the code we write is often times not completely our rights, i.e. if you work at another company, or any said group of open source software that you may bundle e.g. GPL, LPGL, etc. so there's a lack of ownership and therefore a lack of being able to identify with IP like someone writing a song or book.

i think to say that piracy is immoral and corrupt, that's another topic since morals aren't universal. who's to say that some aggressive marketer isn't brainwashing you or using some tactic to pluck your hard earned money and putting lots of red tape between you and your artist? who's to say your favorite artist isn't turned on by greed and fame, two things that i would consider immoral and corrupt. the point is that i don't think morals apply to this argument.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think the attitude is so much pro-piracy as anti-regulation and pro- getting-stuff-done. Hackers tend to be naturally averse to the two traditional means of combating piracy: government regulation and DRM. Government regulation requires bureaucracy, which hackers hate. DRM creates obstacles to getting stuff done, which hackers also hate.

I agree that piracy is probably a big enough problem to make the aforementioned potential solutions a lesser evil. But I doubt there's any way the hacker community will accept that.

<comment><USER13> _piracy is probably a big enough problem to make the aforementioned potential solutions a lesser evil._

Got any particular citations for that? I happen to think exactly the opposite, that we've already gone way to far to mititage an almost non-existent problem.

I'm dreading the day when I can't use "bittorrent" to download the latest Slackware distribution, because using "bittorrent" automatically makes you a theif.

<comment><USER23> > Got any particular citations for that?

[http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/index.htm?postversion=2010020309)

Making the pie smaller ultimately leads to lower quality.

I am virtually certain people will argue that this argument is invalid for whatever reason, but I'm pretty sure that'll be more indicative of the bias seen among hackers than anything else.

<comment><USER13> CNN? Really, seriously?

That's almost certainly CD or album sales, from a source at least as reliable as CNN: [http://www.pollstar.com/blogs/news/archive/2010/01/07/704350...](http://www.pollstar.com/blogs/news/archive/2010/01/07/704350.aspx)

But it looks like overall, sales are up: [http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/...](http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/Will%20Page%20and%20Chris%20Carey%20\(2009\)%20Adding%20Up%20The%20Music%20Industry%20for%202008.pdf) I will grant that's for the UK, not worldwide, but still, a good indicator.

Further, in a competitive market, the price of a good tends to fall to the marginal cost of production. That's Free Market Econ 101, and we're all Free Marketeers, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The cost of producing (in an economnic, not artistic sense) has fallen to almost zero. Why wouldn't we expect revenues to fall like that?

Also: >I am virtually certain people will argue that this argument is invalid for whatever reason, but I'm pretty sure that'll be more indicative of the bias seen among hackers than anything else.

Then why bother to ask the question? You've just stated that you're not going to listen to answers, except maybe if they confirm what you already believe ("bias towards piracy").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not pro-piracy, but I don't see it as an offense as serious as stealing either.

In my opinion, copyrights and patents are the things that discourage innovation, not 'piracy'. They make it unnecessarily difficult to do anything, especially for smaller companies, because almost everything is encumbered in a complex web of cross-licensing. This makes it no longer about leading in technology, but about hiring tons of expensive lawyers.

Invention is not about protecting what has been. It's about staying ahead.

</comment><comment><USER25> > our rights to control and to profit from our labors

I'm all for profiting from socially useful work for hire, when nobody was going to volunteer to provide it. But you can't control your IP. You can only control _other people_ while they're using it. And that I find odious, an evil which isn't necessary. A system that successfully prevents copying is too intentionally crippled to be a tool worthy of human beings.

As it happens, I'm going to a mashup show at jwz's club in a couple of hours. They're using art as the ingredients for new art, which of course imposes a tenuous existence in a legal grey area, when it's the kind of innovation we should never have granted authors the power to prohibit (rather than merely profit from).

</comment><comment><USER26> Physical things aren't copyable (though their brand logos are, but product imitation is another story). Perhaps currency is the only thing that really needs to be protected against copying for an economy to function, and many governments are the main culprits in "copying" (i.e. inflating) currency.

</comment><comment><USER27> James Besson of the Boston University School of Law has studied the economics of software patents and intellectual property. His Research on Innovation web site, <http://www.researchoninnovation.org/>, has several interesting papers.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe because they realize that "intellectual property" isn't really property as we usually understand the term. It's just a clever phrase coined to influence the way people think about the issue, like "cyber bullying".

</comment><comment><USER21> You know, when a bunch of people you think ought to be intelligent and extra logical take a moral stance that seems to run counter to their own interests, that should _really_ make you think they're on to something.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think jrd79 doesnt care, he just wants to boost his carma

</comment><comment><USER30> Speaking only for myself: I strongly support people sharing as much music and whatever else as they want because the RIAA / MPAA are thieves. Those organizations have strongly supported making people pay _per device they own_ which is just fucking ridiculous. If I buy a CD, I should be able to listen to it in my car, on my ipod while walking, on my computer at work, and on my stereo at home. Until the RIAA/MPAA/artists start advocating for reasonable laws, I just can't be bothered to care. Not to mention their insistence on DRM.

Frankly, I view this as a solved problem -- itunes has demonstrated that as long as prices are reasonable and the service is extremely convenient, most people will just pay instead of bothering with p2p stuff.

Since I largely view Congress as owned by Disney et al, I view p2p effort / thepiratebay et al as a more than justified counterbalance.

<comment><USER4> _Those organizations have strongly supported making people pay per device they own which is just fucking ridiculous. If I buy a CD, I should be able to listen to it in my car, on my ipod while walking, on my computer at work, and on my stereo at home. Until the RIAA/MPAA/artists start advocating for reasonable laws, I just can't be bothered to care._

There's the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. Your argument does nothing to justify use of p2p for what you haven't already purchased; I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the occurrences of "I bought that album last decade, and I'm not paying for it again." account for a stupidly small portion of p2p.</comment></comment>


Multiple Monitors UX Specification - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aHvJ-iIw-59bXTYBmIhQqEx0za2h9jpFE_RhZ2VOvJc/edit?authkey=CJO5wPkH&hl=en_GB&pli=1

<comment><USER2> I think part of the problem with Ubuntu's UX direction has been the extreme reliance on context for everything. Menus change location and contents, buttons change their behavior or just disappear, all in the name of 'sleek'. It drove me mad and ended up being counter-intuitive for the non-geeks in the family.

</comment><comment><USER3> The sad this is, that this whole specification is centered about the classical stacked window management paradigm and the assumption, that one window can be placed at only one screen at a time. However given modern compositing WM methods it was perfectly possible (and is implemented by experimental WMs) to place windows independently on multiple screens.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, did Ubuntu finally realize that quite a few people actually use more than one display?! That's so amazing. Only a few years behind Windows and Mac... But what's a few years in the realm of computers. ;)

Maybe one day they'll also realize that most of their potential users come from the Windows environment, so forcing some unnecessary UI differences against decade-old habits (like min/max/close buttons on the left) is a great way to drive _most_ people away.

Heck, maybe one day they'll even fix those trivial bugs that linger in Ubuntu for years... Like being able to change a desktop wallpaper from the Image Viewer more than once in a row.

One of those days (maybe around 18.04 LTS) Ubuntu won't make you feel like ripping your hair out because of the most trivial inconveniences. And maybe then I'll be able to recommend it to people.

.

[And that all typed from Ubuntu 11.10, which I use for 4 months now.]

[And yes, I know you _can_ use more than one monitor with Ubuntu right now, but what I'm saying is that it's troublesome (compared to Windows 7) and very buggy.]

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it is so buggy. I used to love having a three monitor setup in Windows, where during the day I would work on two monitors, then at night I would switch to my third monitor for watching videos and things on.

It's impossible to do this in Ubuntu without physicall pulling out cables.</comment></comment>


The startup whose founder partied on Ibiza while his company burned through $21M - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-fling-social-media-app-died-2016-11 <comment><USER2> Ironically, he should have just put the $ in Facebook, bitcoin, google, Amazon stock, make 2x+ his money and then just given the original $ back to the investors.</comment>


Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection - <AUTHOR> http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-0... <comment><USER2> This link is invalid because the DOI is incorrect. Also, this is pointing to a proxy service and not the primary publisher URL.

This article ("First online: 01 February 2014") is at [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4) . The abstract is:

> Not so long ago, a well institutionalized predatory journal exposed itself > by publishing a hoax article that blew the whistle for its devastating > influence on the academic affairs of a small country. This paper puts that > experiment in context, gives all the important details and analyzes the > results. The experiment was inspired by well-known cases of scientific > activism and is in line with recent efforts against predatory publishers. > The paper presents the evidence in detail and uses it to analyze the > publishing practices of the offending journal, using established criteria > for assessing predatory publications. That journal somehow acquired an > impact factor and charged money to publish thousands of "scientific" papers > without any peer review. Since the impact factor is the major official > evaluation criteria for scientists in Serbia, these papers disturbed the > whole academic evaluation process. Credentials acquired by those > publications form a strong obstacle to institutionalized reasoned efforts > against such practices. This case warns the whole community of the long > lasting damage when journals with low publishing ethics are taken seriously.

Edit: Ahh, I see. It was posted because the article's author, dragandj, commented at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185577) and pointed to sci-hub.io. For the submission URL, rfreytag then copy/pasted the visible <a> text, which HN truncates, rather than the link URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, good catch: [http://link.springer.com.sci- hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-0...](http://link.springer.com.sci- hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4) is indeed working - for now.

The whole point of pointing to Sci-Hub is to illustrate the way research is made inaccessible from original sources by paywalls.</comment></comment>


Subliminal side-channel attack on the brain of brain-computer-interface users - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6052 <comment><AUTHOR> I took the permission to editorialize the title to better reflect what this is about. The original title is "Subliminal Probing for Private Information via EEG-Based BCI Devices", where EEG is "electroencephalography", and BCI is "brain computer interface". This work follows the proof-of-concept presented at USENIX in 2012 and titled (less obscurely) "On the Feasibility of Side- Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces" [1].

[1] [http://intelli- sec.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/Usenix12_EEGattack...](http://intelli- sec.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/Usenix12_EEGattacks.pdf)</comment>


Show/ask HN: I'm thinking about making a feed reader. Should I continue? - <AUTHOR> http://davidjohnstone.net/pages/new-feed-reader-idea

<comment><USER2> I like the idea of a minimalist, stripped back version of Google Reader, however, I think you'll struggle to get $20/year out of people with the amount of quality RSS readers you can get for free. Find an audience before you start building this thing and build it based on feedback of what they liked/disliked about Google Reader and the other RSS readers out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you might be right. Nothing's set in concrete, so if I do go ahead with this project, it's entirely possible I will change some of my ideas. Getting feedback is exactly what I'm here for. Thanks :-)</comment></comment>


Warren Buffett might have saved Lehman (if he knew how to work his cell phone) - <AUTHOR> http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/09/15/warren-buffett-might-have-saved-lehman-if-he-knew-how-to-work-his-cell-phone/ <comment><USER2> I saw the CNBC interview with Mr Buffett.

Diamond called out of the blue at a bad time seeking insurance. This insurance was to cover BARCLAYS CAPITAL whilst it manouvred in purchasing negotiations.

Diamond wanted insurance because the British Government had refused to allow Barclays to purchase Lehman without a lengthy consultation process. Buffett or not, the takeover sounded very unlikely.

Nothing here has to do with Buffet himself. From the gist of the interview he was just commenting on how quick the collapse was. The interviewer asked him as The Guest, if he had any interesting stories from that time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I imagine that if Warren Buffett had really been interested in taking the deal, he would have chased it up. If someone offers me what I think is a good deal on a many-billion-dollar asset, I'll find the time to make a followup phone call "Hey Bob, what happened to that fax you were gonna send me?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Unlikely. Buffett's intuition that the deal for Barclays to buy ALL of Lehman is fishy, was probably spot on. And more information would not have changed his mind, and the insurance he might have offered to Barclays would probably have been to expensive for them to go ahead with the deal.

<comment><USER5> If preventing the collapse of your entire financial system is predicated on the idea that one guy can use his cellphone, I'd argue you're fucked no matter what. But yeah, I'd guess that this was one of those missed calls "of convenience".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or if Barclays knew how to use their fax machine?

</comment><comment><USER7> Actual article:

[http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/09/15/warren-buffett- co...](http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/09/15/warren-buffett-could-have- saved-lehma/)

</comment><comment><USER8> A very similar event took place between Buffet and LTCM.

<comment><USER9> I imagine that he plays up the technophobe image so he has a polite way to decline an investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Buffet has gone on the record as supporting Democrats and tax hikes for the rich - is this an attempt to smear him and paint him as both out of touch AND somehow responsible for the collapse?

<comment><USER10> How so? His inability to operate his cellphone is irrelevant. He asked the guy to send him a fax. The guy sent him a text message or email instead. Buffet looked for a fax, and found none so assumed that the guy had given up. How exactly does this make him 'out of touch?'

He was playing to his strengths by asking for a fax instead of trying to use features of his phone that he didn't understand. It's not his fault that the guy on the other end of the line said, "Fax!? That's too old-fashioned! I'll send him an email/text instead!"

As others have stated, if he was really that interested in the deal he would have called the guy back and asked why he hadn't received a fax.

<comment><USER6> You don't think the headline is a little accusatory _and_ insulting?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Corrgan.io – A simple web app for testing a financial GAN - <AUTHOR> http://www.corrgan.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> CorrGAN is a GAN model useful for sampling realistic financial correlation matrices. CorrGAN.io is a simple web app for testing the model. Which matrices are real? Which ones are fake?</comment>


Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53469839 <comment><USER2> It seems like they tested for antibodies, but this article makes no mention of challenges to the real virus.

It's important to remember that vaccines for previous coronaviruses (SARS/MERS) had reports of generating anitbodies, but also causing immunopathic responses or immune enhancement syndrome:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/)

[https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218](https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218)

>Is it safe?

It's really really to early to say yes or no, and the fact that the article tries to make a claim either way, is worrying. Vaccines for new families of viruses traditionally take years or decades to develop. We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes (and it may not be possible due to the nature of those viruses).

I've had all my vaccinations; I'm not an anti-vaxer. But I do have concerns on trying to push out any novel vaccine in less than two years without adequate testing.

Although this virus has killed many, the risk factor for it is nowhere near high enough to warrant an emergency vaccine. There are trials underway for inhaled steroids that look very promising, and there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market.

Having a viable treatment option seems much more valuable and safer than vaccinations in this particular case.

<comment><USER3> >We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes

Good thing this isn't a retrovirus.

>But I do have concerns on trying to push out any novel vaccine in less than two years without adequate testing.

They started on this vaccine about 9 years ago, originally for the first SARS/MERS. They just gave it to 1,077 people and all 100% produced the desired effect, and the worst symptom reported was fatigue/headache that resolved on its own within 24 hours, or sooner if taken Tylenol/paracetamol. We're losing ~150,000 people worldwide EVERY MONTH to this virus, how many more months/deaths should we wait until we're sufficiently satisfied that it's safe?

<comment><USER4> > They just gave it to 1,077 people

That's a good start. But for example, how many of them were pregnant, and at what stages? I would guess none. That would be the most famous way to get this wrong.

I hope they are thinking hard about the optimal roll-out strategy, though. It should surely be faster than in normal times. It might well be that you should run very very large not-quite-trials as the first stage of general distribution, and watch their evidence in real-time.

<comment><USER5> Right, we should just test on nobody instead.

Of course we're gonna test this on the healthiest, least-likely-to- accidentally-die humans, what's the point?

They explicitly did a pregnancy test on everyone who can be pregnant to preclude the possibility, just in case.

<comment><USER6> But then we have no idea how those vaccines will work in the real world where, when we need N% immunity achievement for herd immunity, a >N% of the population is not considered healthy (and also haven't been proven safe for). There have definitely been cases in which pregnancy is excluded from studies to prove safety with horrible consequences to pregnant people and their children.

<comment><USER4> It seems entirely logical to me to first test on healthy young people. It's a big step forward from mice! You might learn a lot.

But there are quite a few more steps from there to treating the population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The actual paper:

[https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb- assets/Lancet/pdf...](https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb- assets/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673620316044.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> > _ChAdOx1 nCoV-19_

If I didn't have the context of 2020 and this article, I would swear that was an auto-generated random password.

<comment><USER9> Chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored Oxford vaccine #1, targeting novel coronavirus 2019 (aka SARS-CoV-2).

Seems pretty well-named.

<comment><USER10> It's accurately named. All I can say is "well-named" is in the eye of the beholder, and I'm fairly certain you're not in marketing.

<comment><USER9> It won't get a trade name until it goes to market.

We just don't normally hear about pre-market drugs in mainstream media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is good preliminary news. The real question if this vaccine prevents you spreading the disease or effectively turns you into an asymptomatic spreader. There also outstanding questions if this works well for elderly people, as vaccination are generally less effective if you are older. Basically news worth a small cheer, not an exuberant celebration quite yet.

<comment><USER12> If everyone gets the vaccine then does the distinction matter? Genuine question not rhetorical.

<comment><USER13> It would matter for those who can't be vaccinated (the immuno compromised, very young children) or for those whom the vaccine might not be effective (very elderly with weak immune responses)

It would also matter for eradicating the virus. If it keeps circulating, and vaccines only provide protection for less than a lifetime, then we will have to keep vaccinating just about everyone in the world indefinitely. Any place that falls into civil strife could also expect a virus outbreak eventually.

It would still be great to have vaccine that merely made the virus without effect! But eradication would be better.

<comment><USER14> > then we will have to keep vaccinating just about everyone in the world > indefinitely.

Which is to say, it'll be like the seasonal flu and not a pandemic. Yeah, we can tolerate that.

<comment><USER13> Well, it really depends on the timeframe. If we need a new one every two years, no problem. If every six months, that's worse.

Current flu vaccine coverage is 24-50% depending on jurisdiction, once per year. So, aiming at, say, 80% coverage twice per year would be 3-6x the current level of flu vaccination effort.

Not awful, but tiresome.

<comment><USER14> You don't need 80% coverage though. Influenza would be a pandemic too (and has been!) but is well controlled by the existing regimes. There's nothing all that notable about covid really, beyond its novelty. Once the bulk of the population has some immunity, even if incomplete and even if it needs a regular refresh, we hit herd immunity: R0 drops below 1 and the disease stops spreading. There's no reason to expect this to work any differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good, but the real question is whether the immune system will "remember" the vaccine for long enough. From [1]:

> Although the magnitude of neutralizing antibody (nAb) responses correlated > with disease severity, there was a rapid decline in nAb titres in most > patients within 3 months after onset of symptoms. [...] However, the > consequences on secondary immune responses and their ability to prevent > reinfection remain to be determined.

[1]: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0405-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0405-3)

<comment><USER16> The immune system works that way that even single digit amount of antibodies can start a chain reaction very quickly.

I don't think it's possible to say a yes or no answer if somebody has immunity using a lab test today.

Though, the vaccine is only needed to last long enough to eradicate the virus. If mass application of vaccine can plunge the r-factor well below 1, it should be more than ok if its protection only lasts 3-4 months.

<comment><USER17> How long does it take to vaccinate the entire world?

If the each contaminated person transmits it to two other people, you'll need to keep half of the people immune to each at any single time. If you are doing this by vaccines, you'll need to give it to half of the people on that immunity window.

And you must also syncronize it internationally.

<comment><USER18> At a billion doses per year it's still 8 years to manufacture the vaccine for everyone. That's assuming no supply chain issues. Moderna needs 2 doses which means only 500M protected per year which pages it to 16 years. I think the Oxford vaccine needs only 1 doses but because it uses a weakened virus there's a chance a person develops covid-19.

Then you need to administer something like 300 doses per second globally, if you have 1B doses.

This is also assuming the virus doesn't mutate during that time (it mutates very slowly but it could still happen).

The vaccine really needs to give multi-year protection otherwise it won't be viable in the long run.

<comment><USER19> To be honest, there is probably a power law graph in play here when it comes to how many people are infective and infect others. If we can vaccinate / prevent spread in the demographics that are prone to mixing a lot / threaten spread, we can quickly curb it and then focus on people who are less likely to contract it / spread it around.

<comment><USER20> It feels like some of the demographics most likely to spread have overlap with groups unlikely to accept vaccinations.

Source: Live in Lansing MI where the nutty politicization of this issue is out of hand and there are redneck "anti-mask" protests seemingly once a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious why the share price slide after the mainstream news.

Sure, there have been rumours about the Lancet paper for a few days, maybe these were priced in already - and AstraZeneca has promised to manufacture it at cost or near cost. Still weird the market reacted this way

[https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/astrazeneca-...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/astrazeneca- stock-price-reaction-oxford-covid19-trial-positive-results-2020-7-1029410447)

<comment><USER22> Outside of publicity, I don't see this as having an enormous impact on profits. Companies will be compelled to produce the vaccine in any event, and will be compensated, but I can't imagine governments would be purchasing the vaccine for any large markup.

<comment><USER21> I think it depends on the company, AstraZeneca CEO already said a while ago they will be manufacturing this at cost or near cost, this is a time for big pharma to give back. Some drug companies like Gilead though have very high markup, paid by the taxpayer.

And some bioteh companies with mRNA vaccines in phase 1/2 trials like Moderna and Biontech, or protein treatment like Synairgen have seen share prices skyrocket.

I guess the assumption is they will be collecting fees from the IP and/or future contracts for other drugs if this works out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oxford vaccine is among the front runners. This is really good news. They plan to finish their final trials before October this year.

If all goes well, we should be looking at major relief by this year's end.

<comment><USER24> That's unrealistically optimistic. The best case scenarios I've heard have it being deployed to healthcare workers late this year, and then hopefully be made available across the globe to approach the herd immunity threshold by the end of 2021, at least in some countries/communities. End of 2021 is an optimistic timeline to be talking about "major relief", and that's assuming no one messes with vaccine availability... Until then, we all need to take this extremely seriously and do everything we can to prevent spread.

<comment><USER25> They plan to make a million doses available by September, possibly more:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- oxford...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-oxford- vaccine-res/over-a-million-doses-of-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine- possible-by-september-researcher-idUSKCN24L1TW)

<comment><USER26> Is a million doses "major relief"?

<comment><USER27> Certainly not, but considering there should be 100M available by the end of the year, it seems like they are scaling up the production line considerably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)31604-4/fulltext)

The paper (I'm sure it's been posted somewhere in thread). Surprisingly readable (if you have a basic understanding of immunology and Google), go check it out.

The TL;DR is they administered the vaccine to many people and compared the immune response, as measured by various immunology assays, and it elicited a noticeable response for every assay very close to the same responses from actual COVID patients. There were plenty of mild to moderate side effects, but they were reduced quite a bit using paracetamol (Tylenol, basically)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" Levels of T cells peaked 14 days after vaccination and antibody levels peaked after 28 days. The study has not run for long enough to understand what long-term immunity may look like."_

 _"Is it safe?

Yes, but there are side-effects. There were no dangerous side-effects from taking the vaccine, however, 70% of people on the trial developed either fever or headache. The researchers say this could be managed with paracetamol."_

This sounds like really good news, anyone with medical background disseminate this further?

Edit: here is the lancet article posted on /r/COVID19 sub and extract

[https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140-6736(20)31604...](https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140-6736\(20\)31604-4)

Background:

The pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) might be curtailed by vaccination. We assessed the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of a viral vectored coronavirus vaccine that expresses the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.

Methods

We did a phase 1/2, single-blind, randomised controlled trial in five trial sites in the UK of a chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored vaccine (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein compared with a meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MenACWY) as control. Healthy adults aged 18–55 years with no history of laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection or of COVID-19-like symptoms were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 at a dose of 5×10¹⁰ viral particles or MenACWY as a single intramuscular injection. A protocol amendment in two of the five sites allowed prophylactic paracetamol to be administered before vaccination. Ten participants assigned to a non- randomised, unblinded ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 prime-boost group received a two-dose schedule, with the booster vaccine administered 28 days after the first dose. Humoral responses at baseline and following vaccination were assessed using a standardised total IgG ELISA against trimeric SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, a muliplexed immunoassay, three live SARS-CoV-2 neutralisation assays (a 50% plaque reduction neutralisation assay [PRNT50]; a microneutralisation assay [MNA50, MNA80, and MNA90]; and Marburg VN), and a pseudovirus neutralisation assay. Cellular responses were assessed using an ex-vivo interferon-γ enzyme- linked immunospot assay. The co-primary outcomes are to assess efficacy, as measured by cases of symptomatic virologically confirmed COVID-19, and safety, as measured by the occurrence of serious adverse events. Analyses were done by group allocation in participants who received the vaccine. Safety was assessed over 28 days after vaccination. Here, we report the preliminary findings on safety, reactogenicity, and cellular and humoral immune responses. The study is ongoing, and was registered at ISRCTN, 15281137, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04324606.

Findings

Between April 23 and May 21, 2020, 1077 participants were enrolled and assigned to receive either ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (n=543) or MenACWY (n=534), ten of whom were enrolled in the non-randomised ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 prime-boost group. Local and systemic reactions were more common in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group and many were reduced by use of prophylactic paracetamol, including pain, feeling feverish, chills, muscle ache, headache, and malaise (all p<0·05). There were no serious adverse events related to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. In the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group, spike-specific T-cell responses peaked on day 14 (median 856 spot- forming cells per million peripheral blood mononuclear cells, IQR 493–1802; n=43). Anti-spike IgG responses rose by day 28 (median 157 ELISA units [EU], 96–317; n=127), and were boosted following a second dose (639 EU, 360–792; n=10). Neutralising antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 32 (91%) of 35 participants after a single dose when measured in MNA80 and in 35 (100%) participants when measured in PRNT50. After a booster dose, all participants had neutralising activity (nine of nine in MNA80 at day 42 and ten of ten in Marburg VN on day 56). Neutralising antibody responses correlated strongly with antibody levels measured by ELISA (R²=0·67 by Marburg VN; p<0·001).

Interpretation

ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 showed an acceptable safety profile, and homologous boosting increased antibody responses. These results, together with the induction of both humoral and cellular immune responses, support largescale evaluation of this candidate vaccine in an ongoing phase 3 programme.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am wondering how the vaccine genetically impacts on these people who are already recovered from Covid-19.

<comment><USER29> I would imagine that people who've already recovered from covid-19 wouldn't need/get a vaccine, but I am not a doctor.

<comment><USER30> The team behind the ChAdOx-1 vaccine have said that similar vaccines they worked on in the past (SARS1, MERS) triggered the immune system in a different way than getting the virus itself and it's expected that the vaccine-derived immune response would last longer than natural immunity. They have re-tested people they immunized for SARS1 and they still showed immune responses over a decade later.

So the idea is that the vaccine would still be potentially useful to those who have already had the disease.

<comment><USER28> I see. Thanks for sharing the information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> question about this and vaccines in general... would this be beneficial to someone who already contracted the disease? at the early stages at least? would it help that person recover faster or lessen the effects of the disease?

<comment><USER32> My web search suggested that normally existing vaccines aren't helpful this way, but that there is ongoing research on "therapeutic vaccines" that would be.

[https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/features/treating-disease- wit...](https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/features/treating-disease-with- vaccines)

The article says none are currently available as treatments for any infectious disease.

<comment><USER33> We might be talking about different things, but many vaccines are potentially useful post-infection particularly for slower diseases, as it doesn't necessarily help the actual infection, but can help prevent it from spreading to new cells.

It's highly dependent on the disease, how it spreads, etc. But it is a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> one thing about the Oxford vaccine is that when vaccinated you are still able to pass on the virus , despite having the anti-bodies to fight it. It's excellent news nonetheless

edited with some references

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and- diseas...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and- disease/doubts-oxford-vaccine-fails-stop-coronavirus-animal-trials/)

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus- vaccin...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-vaccine- oxford-trials-concerns-transmission-astrazeneca-latest-a9521241.html)

<comment><USER2> Why is that the case with the Oxford vaccine? Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER35> I'm curious what they meant as well. Perhaps what they meant was the potential period where the virus is replicating in the body before the immune system detects it and kills it. I suppose even someone with the vaccine would have a very short-lived period of viral replication? Or perhaps they simply meant that humans could be fomites (eg, it gets on someone's hand, then they shake your hand, etc?)

Honestly I'm just guessing here. I suspect this is not a real concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Prof Sarah Gilbert, from the University of Oxford, UK, says: "There is still much work to be done before we can confirm if our vaccine will help manage the Covid-19 pandemic, but these early results hold promise."

</comment><comment><USER37> This article text should be much earlier.

 _> However, all these approaches are at the absolute boundary of science and have not been proven to work before. More traditional methods of vaccine development are also being investigated. The company Valneva is taking the whole coronavirus, inactivating it and then inject it._

One name for approaches "at the absolute boundary of science" is _research_. Only one company is named as developing an actual vaccine. We need new category names for the many competing treatments which are still in research phases, including those which utilize genetic engineering.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's a little worrying that the UK already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine, even though it hasn't passed trials yet.

I understand that tons of resources are being poured into making a vaccine, which will make developing this vaccine a lot faster.

However, this still makes me worry that the media ( and the UK government in part ) is showing false potential false hopes to people that read this article. Yes, we might get a vaccine next year, but we might never get a vaccine either.

</comment><comment><USER39> At this point I'm becoming more worried about distribution rather than finding a working vaccine.

One in six people (in the UK) said they'd refuse a vaccine if it became available, and another one in six weren't sure. (YouGov poll)

It might make distribution to reach herd immunity difficult.

<comment><USER40> We need more information than that poll. Someone unwilling to take a brand new vaccine is not inherently the same as some loony anti-vaccer. It's not obvious to me that it would be sensible to be first inline for one of these vaccines that have been developed so quickly.

<comment><USER41> Indeed. With a US presidential election in November, any vaccine delivered in October and touted by the current administration will be met with extreme skepticism, even by those who routinely take vaccines.

Remember hydrochloroquine?

<comment><USER42> yeah that's really sad. Having a pandemic during an election year was a bad idea :)

There's a big difference between the hydroxychloroquine fiasco and a developed vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine was something that showed early promise and seized upon by one political side but when it didn't live up to the hype it was seized upon by the other political side.

A vaccine is developed over time and the results released for all to see at each stage in the development. It's much harder to over-hype a vaccine and I think politicians learned their lesson.

IMO, in the US at least, if you refuse the vaccine then insurance should require cost of Covid19 treatment to be 100% patient paid.

<comment><USER43> That's like asking MSM patients who don't wear condoms to bear the entire cost of HIV medication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Call me cynical.

1\. This vaccine race seems like "first one gets eternal glory" scenario, which might pressurise scientists to take shortcuts, which may be bad.

2\. Even with successful vaccine trials, wouldn't take atleast an year to setup supply chain capable of distribution?

3\. Virus mutates very fast, is it possible that all these early vaccine trials resulting in super virus which can't be killed by any kind of immune system.

<comment><USER45> 1\. Pretty easy to assay the vaccine itself and the blood of vaccine recipients and figure out (1) is it what they're saying it is? and (2) does it do what they're saying it does?

2\. No. Google around for this; there's plenty of info on how this can be done more quickly. Also, "even if we find a vaccine it will take a year or more to produce it at scale" is no reason not to develop one or to celebrate progress in such development.

3\. Possible? Uh, sure, yeah, most things are _possible_. Probable? I'm not aware of any evidence suggesting that "early vaccine trials result in super virus" is a remotely probable scenario. If you are aware of any such evidence, please post it here because I'd like to read it and update my view accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> From what I am hearing the antibodies that you get from having the actual virus do not provide protection from re-infection for very long. I cant find the source but I think it was a Medcram lecture. Would antibodies be from a vaccine be more effective at preventing infection then getting the actual infection? I thought usually it was the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER47> We will never eradicate this disease due to the large number of anti-vaccine folks.

<comment><USER48> [deleted]

<comment><USER49> I do worry about anti-vaccine people. I don't think that because someone falls for propaganda they should die from a preventable disease. Their kids shouldn't either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> My understanding is that with the flu shot scientists and epidemiologists essentially make an educated guess as to which strains are going to be prevalent in a particular year.

Why is COVID-19 different where the expectation is that one vaccine will prove a panacea. The virus has already shown that it can mutate similar to the flu vaccine.

<comment><USER51> Influenza is a family of related viruses. COVID-19 is actually the disease caused by the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is the actual virus, and it is only a single virus in the family of coronaviruses. Other coronaviruses include SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and a host of others which just cause a subset of the common cold.

This should be compared more to something like the H1N1 outbreak, which was a single influenza virus that was particularly deadly for some subset of people. That was just one type of influenza.

<comment><USER52> Stupid question - why will a coronavirus vaccine take so long even when they say people are working at an incredible pace if we can produce a new flu vaccine each year? Are scientists guessing strains multiple years in advance so there is time to produce a vaccine or something?

<comment><USER53> Its not stupid. Its a new vaccine, to treat a new virus thats is in a class of virus thats never had a vaccine.

if that makes any sense?

the yearly flu vaccines are tweaks to an already understood vaccine, (minor releases) Sometimes there are major releases but thats for a jab that targets a different class of flu (h5n1 vs h1n2)

this is an entirely new vaccine, for a virus that has never had a vaccine, so its more like a v1.0 release on a new platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Also notice this trade-off [edit: I'm saying this with a neutral tone, and not implying anything, so that a more informed person can elaborate on it]:

[quote]

 _Is it safe?_

 _Yes, but there are side-effects._

 _There were no dangerous side-effects from taking the vaccine, however, 70% of people on the trial developed either fever or headache._

 _The researchers say this could be managed with paracetamol._

[/quote]

Unrelated PS: What's the deal with these one-sentence "paragraphs", BBC? I think I know the answer: it is the "modern medicine" for lack of attention spans. (What about the side effects to _this_...)

Unrelated PS-2: I didn't notice that someone else here has already quoted the above part. Sorry for the duplication.

<comment><USER55> Don't the regular flu vaccines have the same side effects?

<comment><USER56> Yes. Although I know intellectually that I should get an annual flu shot, my animal brain kicks in every time to remind me that I feel crappy for a day or three after each one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> At 1077, this is indeed a promising result. I genuinely hope this isn't yet another marketing stunt(of which we've seen a lot lately). Mind you,

> The vaccine - called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 - is being developed at unprecedented > speed.

Seriously? Did they ask a 9 year old to pick a nickname?

<comment><USER58> My first thought when I saw the name : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Shadoks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Shadoks)

<comment><USER59> >> "When one tries continuously, one ends up succeeding. Thus, the more one fails, the greater the chance that it will work."

Philosophy of French '60s cartoon birds eerily similar to modern software development methodologies</comment></comment></comment>


The Rich Get Richer, Internet Edition - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/11/the_rich_get_richer_internet_e.php

<comment><USER2> what's wrong with the rich getting richer if the size of the pie gets bigger? Sure they may have gotten a larger percentage of the total traffic, but how much more net traffic is there in 2006 vs 2001?

I'd rather have 1/8 of a 14" pie than 1/3 of a 8" pie.</comment>


Django Advent - Small Things (Mar 5, 2010) - <AUTHOR> http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/small-things/ <comment><USER2> Django advent was an awesome idea. Sad to see it go, but I have a feeling with the success this release it will be back for 1.3!

Thanks to everyone who participated.

<comment><USER3> Just chiming in - indeed an awesome idea. An element of suspense and a great way to get (more) excited about Django.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Django Advent. haha, I like it. If only you got a chocolate every day too..</comment>


Travel hacking isn't just about points and mileage - <AUTHOR> https://grabr.io/blog/9-travel-hackers-that-every-thrifty-backpacker-should-follow <comment><USER2> Saving a boat load on traveling? Yes, please!

</comment><comment><USER3> Actual title: "6 Travel Hackers That Every Thrifty Backpacker Should Follow"

<comment><USER4> Yep! And URL says 9 :)</comment></comment>


Bitcoin is not a good consumer product - <AUTHOR> http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2015/4/13/bitcoin-and-cryptocurrencies/

<comment><USER2> Hmm, calling bitcoin slow is a little strange. Are you talking about confirmations, where other networks take 100s of days? But since it's "not a technical post", I wonder whether technical knowledge is invited to his discussion.

Whether confirmations happen instantly (violating physical speed of light constraints imposed by reality) or take minutes or even months (ahem, Visa etc), does not seem to play any important role into whether something is fit for a consumer product. I'll give an example: even in the case of Visa's network, consumers are somewhat isolated from the long confirmation delays, and the costs imposed by confirmation delays are shoveled on to the merchants anyway. This is not because a centralized system like Visa requires that design, but rather because they made those choices when providing a product to merchants and consumers. Likewise, others have made similar products with bitcoin. That bitcoin confirmation delays are shorter has no bearing on whether a business can hold funds for 80000 days or whatever you want. This has little to do with suitability for productization. But perhaps this point is too nuanced for "a post that isn't technical".

My own opinion is that I don't really mind whether consumers are "directly" using bitcoin or not. I mean, I certainly don't care if they are manually bitbanging out their own bitcoin transactions or clicking buttons telling software to make transactions. That's a really trivial detail in the scheme of things....

As for being "completely incapable of handling transactions on the volume of the banking system itself", you mention settlement but I don't think you go far enough. Please, tell me the "correct" number of transactions for a civilization such as ours would create daily during normal activity. What is the "right" number and how should it be decided? Should the system exclude the transactions from someone making 100 trillion transactions per minute? What about 1 quadrillion per day? I suspect that this is an unanswerable, totally boring question. Instead, transactions should be based on batching and settlement, which is where the ideas for payment channels is coming from. There's also some recent talk on these lines called "lightning network". More broadly, see [http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/33405247/](http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/33405247/)

Some argue that bitcoin is not "wasteful" because there is a real, meaningful use to byzantine agreement. I would recommend [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic- faq.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf) and [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf) and [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/alts.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/alts.pdf) for some light reading on this subject.

 _Proof-of-Work (PoW) works because of the economic restriction provided by the second law of thermodynamics. Even though you can 't know you're in the consensus set, you can put a raw economic cost on the probability of you being tricked. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work to tie Bitcoin consensus to a fundamentally scarce resource, namely negentropy. It is possible to use another physically scarce resource instead, but there is no alternative to the universal scarcity of negentropy. As maaku puts it, "I could be an AI trapped in a simulation with no knowledge of the outside world other than the foundational laws of physics, and from that be able to assert the validity of proof-of-work."._

As for Stellar and Ripple I would encourage you to read the recent discussion on HN where critical ledger vulnerabilities were enumerated quite thoroughly again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687)

"Doing away with banks" has not really been advocated by any of the bitcoin developers. You should perhaps consider the possibility that your sources are lying to you? I don't know, there's no "anti-bank" feature built into bitcoin itself. Anyone can participate on the network, and you seem to agree especially re: why it bothers with Sybil resistance anyway. (As for governance, obv. the project more closely matches the bazaar-style development environment.)

"Does not scale"... well, to be fair, Visa also can't handle 100 quadrillion transactions per second. While the current network is not operating at 10k transactions per second observable by looking at mempools, it may never because of the existence of payment channels. Sorry, folks. (But nobody seems to be complaining about not being able to count the "true" number of users, so..... I suspect that deep-down this is a non-issue). Also check gavinandresen's posts, those were fun.

51% attacks don't do what you think they do. Having lots of hashrate does not mean that consensus rules get thrown out the window. If that was true then the bitcoin network wouldn't have survived its first 12 months.

Hopefully my response has encouraged you (or someone else) to think carefully and critically. I also would like to encourage programmers to look around for the source of knowledge or where it comes from; in bitcoin, the primary sources are going to be the bitcoin source code and whitepaper, and not journalists (because journalists have often not read the source code to find out what's going on).

<comment><USER3> > Whether confirmations happen instantly (violating physical speed of light > constraints imposed by reality) or take minutes or even months (ahem, Visa > etc)

Visa payment confirmations take a second. Until settlements are final it takes 6 months because of chargebacks. However that's because of the Chargebacks and not because the system is incapable of settling quickly on the side of Visa.

The Bitcoin design does not permit that, because you cannot forcefully charge a user later or reimburse them. The protocol has no support for that.

> Please, tell me the "correct" number of transactions for a civilization such > as ours would create daily during normal activity. What is the "right" > number and how should it be decided?

The correct number is infinite. Whatever the amount of transactions is, the system needs to scale to that level. Banks have found various ways to achieve that by layering different systems together, Bitcoin however has no solution for this issue.

> As for Stellar and Ripple I would encourage you to read the recent > discussion on HN where critical ledger vulnerabilities were enumerated quite > thoroughly again: > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687)

Those are only vulnerabilities if you already find the current banking system vulnerable. Fundamentally banks that exchange payments need to trust each other today. Ripple or Stellar just accept this and accept that as part of their designs. Within that frame of thought, the system is secure.

> "Does not scale"... well, to be fair, Visa also can't handle 100 quadrillion > transactions per second.

It does not have to, because the system for the most part is a black box. How it works internally is irrelevant for the operation. If the Visa network would hit a technological stumble stone, they can replace parts of it or rewrite individual transactions. You cannot do that with Bitcoin.

> 51% attacks don't do what you think they do. Having lots of hashrate does > not mean that consensus rules get thrown out the window. If that was true > then the bitcoin network wouldn't have survived its first 12 months.

Having lots of hashrate can do quite a few things to your network. The reason bitcoin survived the first 12 months was a combination of many factors. If you want to bootstrap a cryptocurrency today that is bitcoin compatible you will have a problem on your hand. Miners just need to point their rig elsewhere and you're done.

> Hopefully my response has encouraged you (or someone else) to think > carefully and critically.

I hope this goes both ways.

<comment><USER2> > The Bitcoin design does not permit that, because you cannot forcefully > charge a user later or reimburse them. The protocol has no support for that.

Well, yes, it's true that there's no direct "chargeback" primitive. But really giving someone back some fungible BTC is really just a matter of signing another transaction, which is already a primitive in the protocol or whatever.

> The correct number is infinite.

There are real physical limitations to information processing objects: [http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/The%20physics%20of%20informa...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/The%20physics%20of%20information%20processing%20superobjects%20-%20Anders%20Sandberg%20-%201999.pdf)

> Whatever the amount of transactions is, the system needs to scale to that > level.

.. even given the existence of physical limits? I suspect that a correct number is going to be "a system that allows any transaction to occur, but that prioritizes settlement" or something. This is the sort of problem that deserves stochastic simulation methinks.

> Banks have found various ways to achieve that

(Surely you don't mean infinite transaction volume. I'll assume for now that you don't.)

> Those are only vulnerabilities if you already find the current banking > system vulnerable. Fundamentally banks that exchange payments need to trust > each other today. Ripple or Stellar just accept this and accept that as part > of their designs. Within that frame of thought, the system is secure.

Huh, actually I still disagree with you. So, I would argue that the current banking systems are using a different technical system for securing their accounts. They are not using decentralized consensus. They are not using "distributed systems". They are using something very different. They do not have to worry about replication failures or sybil nodes. Ripple, Stellar and Bitcoin all claim to, and I suspect only Bitcoin does based on my examination of their implementations and consensus mechanisms... [as elaborated in that link]

> they can replace parts of it or rewrite individual transactions. You cannot > do that with Bitcoin.

Hmm that is an interesting claim. Do payment channels count as rewriting transactions? This is where transactions are replaced with successor transactions before they are confirmed in a block in the history. (my 2 second summary)

> Having lots of hashrate can do quite a few things to your network.

So 51% attacks (causing deep reorgs) can make their own coinbase transactions, change the order of transactions, fiddle with transaction malleability, exclude or censor transactions, include later transactions earlier in history. But they can't violate consensus rules (is not a trust issue), and I was replying to this aspect from your article text. Btw, reorgs happen quite frequently at the tip of the blockchain. Deep reorgs are exceedingly rare by comparison, but you can definitely catch a reorg of 1 to 3 blocks deep multiple times per day.

> [thinking carefully] I hope this goes both ways.

Always. It's been a pleasure. :-)

<comment><USER3> > Well, yes, it's true that there's no direct "chargeback" primitive. But > really giving someone back some fungible BTC is really just a matter of > signing another transaction, which is already a primitive in the protocol or > whatever.

The point of chargebacks is that they exist on all payments in the creditcard network. When you pay with a creditcard you expect it, when you accept creditcard payments you do the same. Chargebacks are also not mandatory for Visa/Mastercard networks. For instance Maestro goes over the Mastercard network but settles much faster. It still allows reimbursing invalid payments but it's charged differently.

From a consumer point of view I think chargebacks need to be a strong element. Bitcoin might get this separately, but it needs this as a strong consumer facing feature: "this payment uses bitcoin insured" or whatever you would call it. Right now that does not exist and from my understanding, adding something like this would be nearly impossible to build, because chargebacks work as there are legal repercussions for misuse.

> .. even given the existence of physical limits? I suspect that a correct > number is going to be "a system that allows any transaction to occur, but > that prioritizes settlement" or something. This is the sort of problem that > deserves stochastic simulation methinks.

Physical limits in what environments? Bitcoin right now does not survive a network partition which I think is a problem. Other systems exist that can allow subsets of the network to trade with each other and clear at a later point when the network heals. I don't argue for crazy things, I'm just arguing that Bitcoin cannot compete with already existing systems when it comes to scaling up to that level and providing the same level of service.

> Huh, actually I still disagree with you. So, I would argue that the current > banking systems are using a different technical system for securing their > accounts. They are not using decentralized consensus. They are not using > "distributed systems". They are using something very different. They do not > have to worry about replication failures or sybil nodes. Ripple, Stellar and > Bitcoin all claim to, and I suspect only Bitcoin does based on my > examination of their implementations and consensus mechanisms... [as > elaborated in that link]

Banks have to deal with consensus as well if they engage in correspondence banking. Bitcoin attempts to guarantee that funds exist whereas banks don't do that. They send numbers around that are not based on anything. I think that's a big difference in philosophy more than anything else. Stellar and Ripple just attempt to modernize that aspect, provide it with a standardized protocol and replace humans with computers and to make it easier for new companies to participate in the network.

> Hmm that is an interesting claim. Do payment channels count as rewriting > transactions? This is where transactions are replaced with successor > transactions before they are confirmed in a block in the history. (my 2 > second summary)

How would you go about tracking those payments then? As bitcoin has no real confirmation system for payments the current best bet you have is making an address up and waiting until something arrives there and then to wait for some amount of time until you can be reasonably sure that the money belongs there. With the Mastercard network right now (from my understanding) I can sever the links between Austria and the rest of the world, and I can still clear transactions from an Austrian account to an Austrian account and once the rest of the network reappears, nothing problematic happened. Bitcoin requires global consensus, so you cannot work on sub-partitions of the network.

> So 51% attacks [...] can't violate consensus rules

I should probably reword that part.

<comment><USER4> > From a consumer point of view I think chargebacks need to be a strong > element. [...] right now that does not exist and from my understanding, > adding something like this would be nearly impossible to build

A "chargeback" facility already exists-- if the sender and reciever choose to opt into it... E.g. [https://www.bitrated.com/](https://www.bitrated.com/)

How that feature set evolves will be interesting to see. The nice thing about it is that its optional and per the participants wishes, so it can take the shape and form suitable for the application.

> Bitcoin cannot compete with already existing systems

Are you referring to the Bitcoin currency or the Bitcoin network (as it exists today)? There are many ways to transact Bitcoin currency without directly using the bitcoin network (payment channels being one example) that can offer different tradeoffs while still preserving Bitcoin's base avoidance of centralized trust.

> How would you go about tracking those payments then?

Payment channel payments are purely between the participants. They can operate completely partitioned (and even offline).

The funds are effectively held in escrow in the Bitcoin network until the destination of the funds decides to terminate the channel and accept the greatest amount moved so far (or, if the receiver does not broadcast, the channel times out and the send can claw the funds back.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Things Caches Do - <AUTHOR> http://tomayko.com/writings/things-caches-do

<comment><USER2> I like Mark's introduction to caching, a bit more detailed, without pictures: <http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/>

<comment><USER3> Me too :)

<comment><USER4> Nice cached response.</comment></comment></comment>


Ford dumps Microsoft for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140224-708784.html

<comment><USER2> Actually they will be using QNX, not Linux. Per the article.</comment>