Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/article/index/245311/sources-nsa-sucks-in-data-from-50-companies

<comment> brown9-2 Marc Ambinder (the author) posted a new article late last night which goes into much more detail: [http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the- mystery-...](http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the-mystery-of- prism)

 _Each data processing tool, collection platform, mission and source for raw intelligence is given a specific numeric signals activity /address designator, or a SIGAD. The NSA listening post at Osan in Korea has the SIGAD USA-31. Clark Air Force Base is USA-57.

PRISM is US-984XN.

Each SIGAD is basically a collection site, physical or virtual; the SIGAD alphanumerics are used to indicate the source of intelligence FOR a particular report.

The NSA often assigns classified code names to the product of SIGADs. These can be confused with the nicknames or proper names of the collection platforms themselves, which may or may not be classified. What PRISM does is classified; the fact that there is a "PRISM" tool that does something is not.

...

So: An analyst sits down at a desk. She uses a tool, like PRISM, to analyze information collected and deposited in a database, like CONTRAOCTAVE. Then she uses another tool, perhaps CPE (Content Preparation Environment), to write a report based on the analysis. That report is stored in ANOTHER database, like MAUI. MAUI is a database for finished NSA intelligence products. Anchory is an intelligence community-wide database for intelligence reports._

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

And here is the core of it:

 _This is all very complicated, and that is on purpose. But this brief tutorial is important. PRISM is a kick-ass GUI that allows an analyst to look at, collate, monitor, and cross-check different data types provided to the NSA from internet companies located inside the United States.

The programs that use PRISM are focused, as the government said yesterday, on foreign intelligence. A lot of foreign intelligence runs through American companies and American servers.

...

Now, these accounts are being updated in real-time. So Facebook somehow creates a mirror of the slice of stuff that only the NSA can access. The selected/court-ordered accounts are updated in real-time on both the Facebook server and the mirrored server. PRISM is the tool that puts this all together. Facebook has no idea what the NSA is doing with the data, and the NSA doesn't tell them._

So, PRISM is the name of the software application(s) used by an analyst that allows them to pull together all the various pieces of data that they receive from these companies, along with other sources, for their analysis.

Which of course, explains why the companies have never heard of this name. There is no reason for them to have.

And what the NSA has isn't necessarily "direct access" to the servers - <USER2> gives the analyst "direct access" to the data that has already been collected by many different means.

<comment><USER4> So the key question is, if this part is true:

> _Now, these accounts are being updated in real-time. So Facebook somehow > creates a mirror of the slice of stuff that only the NSA can access. The > selected /court-ordered accounts are updated in real-time on both the > Facebook server and the mirrored server._

Does this "slice" contain material and accounts gathered only after the legal review that Facebook claims that it performs?

If so, then this story gels with what the NYT reported, that some organizations have built a secure framework to expedite the transmission of requested data...which makes sense, depending on the nature of the investigation...that is...if the NSA has requested data on a suspect on an ongoing case...then they'd probably want that datastore to be updated...in the same way that they want wiretaps to stay on the wire during the investigation.

Note: this is not to say that such surveillance is justified, but that this program makes sense with what Facebook and Google said yesterday and with the reports by the WaPo and the Guardian. Whether this is substantially worse than the other apparatuses we have in place, such as NSL, is also up for debate.

<comment><USER5> Facebook and Google have always been the least transparent imaginable AND they're both in damage control mode AND they're obviously under some DHS gag order. So why anyone would give any credence to a word they say is beyond me.

<comment><USER4> It's not out of faith in Google or Facebook, it's that they have put up a reasonably testable defense rather than what they could've done, which is to remain mostly silent. Moreover, the very size and complexity that most people distrust them for also means that their cooperation with any government function is going to involve a lot of moving parts...it's not likely to be the case that Zuckerberg can lie about something and be sure that those involved all stick to the script.

So given that, I think it's worthwhile to actually test their assertion (I.e. not rush to judgment) rather than patting ourselves on the back with the logical fallacies of:

* "Well, the reports about Facebook and Google must be true because it comes from a group that is itself evil and who I would normally not believe" (the enemy of my enemy is my friend)

* "Well, what else would you expect an obviously evil entity to say after being accused of evil acts?" (circular reasoning).

Again, it's not because Google and Facebook are poor disenfranchised groups that must be sympathized with, but because it feels a little dishonest to subject them to the same kind of inescapable logical trap that our government has used to go after and prosecute suspected enemies of the state

Just out of curiosity...can you really not imagine a less transparent corporation than either Google or Facebook?

<comment><USER6> With PRISM, if the allegations were false, Facebook and Google would deny them, but if they were true, Facebook and Google would still deny them. So the denial carries no information in and of itself. Parsing the denial might bear some clues--for instance, all these companies use the same technicalities and talking points.

<comment><USER4> What are the similar talking points? They both do strongly deny knowledge or participation in PRISM, but that's not really a talking point.

And I don't think it's an either-or situation: either it's the truth and they deny, or it's false and they deny. There's a third option: it's true, and they remain silent.

<comment><USER7> Also, is it such a crazy idea that Facebook, Google, etc. would get together and come up with their _own_ talking points? That was my first reaction on seeing the similar statements -- that they're acting with a common purpose and agenda, but one that's their own, not the governments.

<comment><USER6> Why would companies who aren't collaborating with the NSA suddenly start collaborating with each other to deny collaborating with the NSA? Wouldn't they issue their own denials in their own words?

<comment><USER7> I don't really understand your question. It seems like you're asking why several groups, under attack in the same way, might get together to defend themselves, but I'd have thought that self-evident so -- what _are_ you saying?

<comment><USER6> When you're issuing denials, you don't have to get together and figure out how to phrase your denials unless you're trying to hide something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a section that seemed important to me:

 _One official likened the NSA 's collection authority to a van full of sealed boxes that are delivered to the agency. A court order, similar to the one revealed by the Guardian, permits the transfer of custody of the "boxes." But the NSA needs something else, a specific purpose or investigation, in order to open a particular box. The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said the standard was "a reasonable, articulatable" suspicion, but did not go into details.

Legally, the government can ask companies for some of these records under a provision of the PATRIOT Act called the "business records provision." Initially, it did so without court cognizance. Now, the FISC signs off on every request.

Armed with what amounts to a rubber stamp court order, however, the NSA can collect and store trillions of bytes of electromagnetic detritus shaken off by American citizens. In the government's eyes, the data is simply moving from one place to another. It does not become, in the government's eyes, relevant or protected in any way unless and until it is subject to analysis. Analysis requires that second order._

So, the govt and NSA distinguish between 'having the data' (receiving a van full of boxes, in the metaphor above) and 'subjecting the data to analysis' (opening a box, in the metaphor). They have a broad order for having the data, but need more specific sign-off to process or analyse the data.

This differentiation between 'having data' and 'analysing data' is not one we'd generally make in the IT world - because if they already have the boxes in their possession, how do we know they are getting the right permission before they open the boxes? How is any oversight possible in that situation?

<comment><USER9> > This differentiation between 'having data' and 'analysing data' is not one > we'd generally make in the IT world - because if they already have the boxes > in their possession, how do we know they are getting the right permission > before they open the boxes? How is any oversight possible in that situation?

I don't think it is possible: that's precisely why it's not a distinction made in the IT world: we don't have the apparatus of courts and judges. In the IT world, the primary issue is about security. You have a walled garden and you don't want to let bad people in. Logistics is secondary. Whereas in the IC world, logistics appears to be the harder problem, and keeping the bad people out is already solved to their satisfaction. The challenge is to make sure everyone who needs the data has it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the best explanation is given here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844576)

Prism is probably no more than a mail-merge program that will take your (i.e. NSA agent's) signed court order and convert it into whatever format each company requires. Then it will make the request quickly and easily - <USER3> Google requires a PGP encrypted email, Microsoft wants a HTTPS PUT request, Facebook needs you to upload to SFTP server etc.

<comment><USER11> The NSA doesn't require a signed court order for it's activities though. They're not allowed to spy on Americans (unless that American is communicating with a foreign person) at all. The FBI needs court orders, and is focused on Americans.

NSA is part of the Dept. of Defense, and there are lots of laws/rules/etc. that limit what it can do with US citizens.

<comment><USER12> The issue is the lack of transparency of the laws/rules/etc. and the review and checks and balances problem.

This NSA infrastructure is sufficient for an extremely effective domestic spying network and the only thing stopping them from starting up such a program is the FISA court, where EVERYTHING IS COMPARTMENTALIZED. Do you see a problem with that?

<comment><USER11> You misunderstand. I was merely pointing out that the existence, or lack thereof, of a court order, was completely beside the point as far as the National Security Agency is concerned.

The NSA is chartered and bound to not do domestic spying.

The only thing stopping anybody from doing anything is the law, and the threat of potentially violent enforcement of that law upon them. It's no different for the Agency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me, these are the relevant paragraphs:

It is not clear how the NSA interfaces with the companies. It cannot use standard law enforcement transmission channels to do, since most use data protocols that are not compatible with that hardware. Several of the companies mentioned in the Post report deny granting access to the NSA, although it is possible that they are lying, or that the NSA's arrangements with the company are kept so tightly compartmentalized that very few people know about it. Those who do probably have security clearances and are bound by law not to reveal the arrangement.

This arrangement allows the U.S. companies to "stay out of the intelligence business," one of the officials said. That is, the government bears the responsibility for determining what's relevant, and the company can plausibly deny that it subjected any particular customer to unlawful government surveillance. Previously, Congressional authors of the FAA said that such a "get out of jail free" card was insisted by corporations after a wave of lawsuits revealed the extent of their cooperation with the government.

</comment><comment><USER14> One has to wonder when the 'combating terrorists' (non-state actors) rhetoric will end, especially when it clearly is at the very bottom of the list of objectives regarding internet surveillance. All of this public-private cooperation seems to indicate that the USG is gearing up for an offensive against other state actors (or it's already in progress).

People who self-identify as 'pirates' sometimes refer to the internet as 'the open seas' (similarly representing freedom from oppression and authoritarianism) so it's interesting to see governments establishing 'internet navies' with offensive capabilities given as much attention as defensive capabilities.

<comment><USER15> If so, I want my Letter of Marque and Reprisal. Even if I have to sign it myself.

<comment><USER16> You want to be authorized by a national government to conduct cyber-warfare activities on their behalf? I think these analogies are becoming a bit strained, U.S. Coast Guard handles law enforcement on the seas, not the Navy.

<comment><USER15> Well, not strictly cyber-warfare warfare. And military, not law enforcement; at least, military-like activities against non-state actors. (Ron Paul actually proposed this both as the response to 9-11 and the Somali Pirates...)

 _Nothing_ could go wrong with this :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More detail here than I've seen elsewhere.

In particular, this explanation of what PRISM actually does-

"PRISM works well because it is able to handle several different types of data streams using different basic encryption methods, the person said. It is a "front end" system, or software, that allows an NSA analyst to search through the data and pull out items of significance, which are then stored in any number of databases. PRISM works with another NSA program to encrypt and remove from the analysts' screen data that a computer or the analyst deems to be from a U.S. person who is not the subject of the investigation, the person said."

It mostly sounds like a typical DB query front end, which accesses DBs built up from individual record requests from the tech companies.

But then there's the part about handling different kinds of encryption on the input side, which is puzzling.

<comment><USER18> Could be why this only costs $20 million a year maintaining and upgrading it. Now we need to find out what's really powering this front-end program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cnet reports the exact opposite, according to another anonymous government source: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence- of...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of-nsas- direct-access-to-tech-companies&#x2F);

 _The legal process, the person said, is akin to how law enforcement request information in criminal investigations: the government delivers an order to obtain account details about someone who 's specifically identified as a non-U.S. individual, with a specific finding that they're involved in an activity related to international terrorism._

<comment> brown9-2 I don't think this is a conflict. Once the legal order is made and delivered to the company, the NSA receives a real-time feed of that user's data going forward (and all past data) and uses Prism to pull all the disparate data sources together for the analyst to analyze.

Surveillance isn't just about receiving your past activity and data that already exists - they want to watch suspects use these systems to communicate in realtime to find out who else they are talking to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article is two days old, but seems to contain details that contradict later reports from other sources.

> A FISA order is required to continue monitoring and analyzing these > datasets, although the monitoring can start before an application package is > submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

That doesn't seem to fit with more recent claims that PRISM is just a streamlined interface for presenting FISA warrants to companies. That might be one component, but there appears to be data collection (just not analysis) pre-warrant.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wish more people used Bitmessage. It makes communications encrypted, secret (with deniability) and it also has built-in spam minimization in the protocol itself. It also includes broadcast messages (like Twitter) and chan boards. It makes email look like an old technology.

[https://bitmessage.org](https://bitmessage.org)

<comment><USER22> So it does everything that Email and Usenet can do?

<comment><USER21> Pretty much.

You can't distribute large files like in Usenet, though. Look into I2P + BitTorrent for that, or GnuNet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The NSA is not only instrusive to the point of ridiculous, it's also, as typical of large government organizations, obscenely wasteful of taxpayer resources: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project)

</comment><comment><USER24> > The officials would not disclose the names of the companies because, they > said, doing so would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid.

I too would like to avoid these companies.

</comment><comment><USER25> what are the name of the 50 companies?

</comment><comment><USER26> Any centralized, aggregated data will attract both good and bad guys. The responsibility of safeguarding data also falls on individuals. We are also a party to the whole episode.</comment>


Practically Accurate Floating-Point Math - <AUTHOR> http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/issues/2014/10/mcs2014040080.pdf <comment><USER2> If you are interested in writing accurate numerical algorithms, as further reading I highly recommend reading "Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms" by Nick Higham, which is a very good comprehensive book. Like this article says, floating-point arithmetic is often thought of as mysterious, but it really isn't: it just obeys its own precisely specified rules. I think it's very good to dispel the mystery, so I really like this article.

Another way to do the same type of error analysis of numerical algorithms is to use a parameter sensitivity library. In the end, numerical stability can be thought of as the sensitivity of the final answer to separate independent changes in each intermediate value obtained in the computation of the answer. This is sometimes overlooked, I think, and it's quite easy to implement as well.

I have one quibble. They say "Use (x-y)(x+y) instead of x^2-y^2". This is true, but (in my opinion) misleading: the function (x,y) -> x^2-y^2 is itself ill-conditioned when x is near y, and using a more numerically stable algorithm to evaluate an ill-conditioned function will not improve the function's condition. If x and y are close to each other, the inaccuracy introduced by using x^2-y^2 is close to the inaccuracy due to using approximate values for x and y. So it you have x^2-y^2, I think the first thing you should worry about is whether your computation is ill-conditioned, and only then worry whether it's numerically stable. I say this because I sometimes see people try to evaluate x^2-1, notice it is inaccurate for x near 1, and try to replace x^2-1 with (x-1)*(x+1), which is still inaccurate.

<comment><USER3> The correct way to evaluate x^2 - 1 is by using fma(x,x,-1). Now that Intel and AMD have finally made FMA available in hardware on commodity parts (better late than never!), it's realistic to start using this much more freely.

<comment><USER2> That won't do much for x near 1, because the function x^2-1 is itself ill- conditioned. In other words, it is relevant that the floating-point value of x is itself only an approximation to some true value of x. So computing x^2-1 exactly for a given floating-point value of x does not give a good approximation to the true value of x^2-1. This is a mathematical property of the function x^2-1, and cannot be fixed with any algorithm. This is basically why I consider the example x^2-1 => (x-y)(x+y) misleading.

<comment><USER3> There are multiple ways to analyze computations; condition number is one of them. It is relevant when inputs are assumed to be approximations to some hidden "correct" value. However, this assumption is not always warranted when dealing with floating-point numbers; sometimes, we would instead like to analyze errors under the assumption that the inputs are exact values. When this is the case, fma(x,x,-1) produces a correctly rounded result, whereas (x-1)(x+1) does not, and the ill-conditioning of the function x^2 - 1 does not enter into the analysis anywhere.

If you are used to working with complex computations (most of what is usually referred to as numerical analysis, for example), you likely do not find yourself in the latter situation very often. However, for those of us who work on low-level details of floating-point on a regular basis, the latter analysis is often critical.

<comment><USER2> Okay, I agree, that is completely reasonable. I do usually work with fairly complex algorithms, so I care about individual operations less than about the final result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to tell you, but 99% of so called expert developers don't understand this. For them a real number is a a float (exactly). And I have been fired for saying e-commerce should be done with fixed point numbers. (we do + - * / at most) Headaches really comes with multi currency web sites since conversion brings incommesurability. They also told me that since we are using linear equation most of the time (are we?), errors should dissipates like the breeze (they also kind of say badlands are so statiscally rare that we sould not care).

Anyway, in real job as a dev, when I made a moving average it was the most impressive math I done, and when I was resorting to ifft (convolution with a hammer function) I was told it should not be used because it was unmaintainable because no one understood.

I have been so ... hammered down by computer engineer so sure of themselves that I learnt to shut my mouth to keep my job.

Who really read this?

I love it, but I never did any serious brainy stuff as a dev.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh. It's shameful when people use wrong arguments about _mathematics_ to oppress. I really wish you the best.

This article first appeared in "Computing in Science and Engineering" magazine, so its audience is mainly scientists in various fields who use floating point in their research. Because of that breadth, I tried to make it as accessible as possible, while teaching enough floating-point principles to make debugging make sense.

I honestly hope that everyone who uses floating point reads this.

<comment><USER4> Computer science on the field is ugly.

I went in university to learn physics, so I have my geometry and numerical analysis basic understanding.

I honestly thinks people who learnt it has a cursus for graduating did not care, and that they actually don't understand their difficulties even though they learnt about it. They don't see it is a float.

One of the other misconception I have to fight with is what is time.

CS engineer believe in a perfect synchronized time and timestamp that are monotonicly growing the same everywhere with a 10-9 precision and rely on that for distributed systems. My guts (and general relativity too I guess) are telling me they are wrong.

But since I am stuck reimplementing a bubble sort for phone numbers I don't quite have the time to work on it. I have to live with my tingling intuitions telling me I am either an overpessimistic ass being a pain for my colleague that is becoming obsolete by lack of studying, or the whole industry seems getting more magic oriented than science oriented.

Anyway, like a lot of people I am getting inadapted out there.

At least, I have spare time to work on game of life and complex systems... sometimes, and I have a lovely caring wife, so I am happy either way :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably an obvious error, but on page 81 (second page), they say the following:

        Another correct test case is as follows:
        > (rat (float -1 23 -6))
        - (26) / (34)

In truth, this should be - 23 / 64, which is a very different number. Perhaps there's comical value in an article about accurate math having inaccurate typography?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is indeed a typo. Thanks for catching it.

It's amazing how much you miss when you think you already know what's written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even though refreshing and enlightening, the article doesn't cover another (major) reason why floating-point math is generally avoided (especially in high-performance applications): computational slowdown when dealing with subnormals[1][2].

I feel that there is a lot of overlap between cases where you may want to minimize error while at the same time still be performant (simulations, ray tracing, rendering, etc.). So you're left with a situation where you end up minimizing error, but still being slow.

[1] [http://research.ihost.com/osihpa/osihpa- govind.pdf](http://research.ihost.com/osihpa/osihpa-govind.pdf)

[2] [https://charm.cs.illinois.edu/newPapers/06-13/paper.pdf](https://charm.cs.illinois.edu/newPapers/06-13/paper.pdf)

<comment><USER3> A couple points:

Support for subnormals can easily be disabled (usually be enabling "Flush to Zero" behavior) to allow for better performance on essentially all recent hardware.

Over the last few years, subnormal stalls have shrunk rapidly, and gone away entirely in some cases. Intel started this process with the Sandybridge architecture. These stalls are also greatly reduced in some arm64 implementations.

<comment><AUTHOR> We had this discussion on the Racket user's mailing list a couple of years ago. One user with an AMD processor experienced significant stalls; others with Intel processors didn't.

I don't know the status of AMD's floating point at the moment, but I hope they're doing something about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article (like all other IEEE Computing Now articles) is free to download for a limited time.

<comment><USER7> Is it me, or have all the ells (the letter L) been replaced by ones (the digit 1) in the PDF?

Edit: It's me. It's just a font with sloping serifs, which is what confused me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not necessarily just you. I thought it was wrong when I first opened it. There may be something funny going on with the font - I think the "1" and "l" are switched.

Edit: Never mind, it copies/pastes correctly. The font is just different from what I'm used to.

<comment><USER7> TIL: Prestige Elite [1] might not be the best font out there for programming.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_Elite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_Elite)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since we're on the subject of floating-point numbers in Lisp/Scheme: [https://wukix.com/lisp-decimals](https://wukix.com/lisp-decimals)

This uses the Lisp ratio type in place of floats, to avoid the usual float issues.

ntoronto, any thoughts?

<comment><USER9> ratio's are good to have in any language, or as a library, but surely it's slower, and more memory is wasted (also hard to argue about how much exactly), and it still has to settle at some approximations for irrational numbers like PI which is used quite a lot when floating point numbers are (or at least in my experience).

<comment><AUTHOR> All correct, for exact rationals. Racket's exact rational arithmetic tends to take about 1000x the amount of time floating-point arithmetic takes to compute similar functions, and creates a lot of garbage on the heap. It gets worse, though: with long-running computations, exact rationals' numerators and denominators tend to grow without bound, unless you explicitly round them to a fixed precision. If you take the latter path, you might as well use bigfloats, which wrap MPFR's multi-precision floats, and are faster.

Just looking at the Wu-Decimal page, though, I can't tell whether they're internally exact rationals or base-10 floats. If they're base-10 floats, they have all the same issues base-2 floats have. If they're internally exact rationals, I wonder what they do for division, which the set D isn't closed under.

<comment><USER8> Wu-Decimal uses exact rationals (they aren't base 10 floats). Division works according to normal Lisp semantics, since the CL ratio type is used for arithmetic. Let's say you divide something by 3 and now you have infinitely repeating digits: then it is no longer in set D, and Wu-Decimal no longer considers it to be of decimal type. Instead, it is treated as a fraction, again per standard CL semantics. The "Printing" example tries to clarify this (notice that 1/2 prints as '0.5' but 1/3 remains '1/3').

<comment><AUTHOR> I've monkeyed with a lot of numeric representations, and every one of them involves tough theoretical and practical trade-offs. Returning an exact rational as the result of division sounds reasonable.

My favorite representation so far pairs a signed float in [2^-512,2^512) with a signed integer to extend the exponent range. The idea is to avoid overflow and underflow, particularly when multiplying thousands of probabilities.

(On average, adding a few thousand log probabilities or densities and then exponentiating the sum yields a number with about 9 digits precision. Worst case for adding log probabilities and exponentiating is about 8 digits precision, and for adding log _densities_ it's 0 digits. Multiplying the same number of probabilities or densities retains about 13 digits in the worst case.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best SEO tools for a startup? - <AUTHOR> Startup in question is www.digitalprofile.com. We have poor traffic and want to improve our visibility. <comment><USER2> I'm not necessarily sure there are tools that will directly affect your rankings. I guess if you're using Wordpress the Yoast plugin is pretty good for helping to analyze/correct/optimize the content you're creating. But tools like SEMRush or Moz really only provide data and you need to understand what things to do to act on that data. Honestly, creating quality content (& making sure it's being crawled properly) and building backlinks are the most important tools to ranking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good SEO tools are things like SEM Rush, Moz, ahrefs. That kind of thing. These tools are good for monitoring but they're not going to help you go up in the rankings, or get more traffic.

There are really only two ways to get better rankings and more traffic:

1\. Produce good content that keeps people on your page/site for a long time.

2\. Get quality backlinks.

If you do (1) correctly, (2) should follow without too much difficulty (aka some manual outreach).

<comment><USER4> Be aware that having #1 is fine, but without #2 no one will find it via google.

Be more aware that google says if you manually acquire backlinks you may get kicked out of google or downranked. If you are in a competitive market, your competition will not link to you, and instead will report you to google for doing something. Then they may setup bad backlinks to you.

having to hunt around the web and ask people to take down backlinks is a thing.

Best advice, a stupid viral video that gets shared on fbok, insta, twitter, tiktok etc.. don't count on seo or google they are fickle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best tool for a small budget is ensuring that your on-page (or technical SEO) is in order. The best tools for that are page optimizer pro or SEO surfer, there is also CORA but its a lot more technical.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should write case studies, how X used your product to get result Y.</comment>


I am a time traveler from rhe future here to beg you to stop what you are doing - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/

<comment><USER2>
      I have no way of proving to you I'm really who I claim to be

      Well, you could have printed the blockchain hashes of today and tomorrow...

Interesting. Brings to mind a question: How would time traveler scientifically prove that they are the true thing? I need something that I can verify immediately, i.e. not wait for the future.

Showing some (to me) currently unknown technology wouldn't work because "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed", i.e. he might just be working for a secret corporate or government lab today.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I am long bitcoin and have no plans to initiate any positions within the next 48 hours.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quite realistic scenario ...</comment>


How Math's Most Famous Proof Nearly Broke - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/how-maths-most-famous-proof-nearly-broke

<comment><USER2> From the article: "Cauchy and Lamé hung their proofs on the tacit assumption that complex numbers, like real numbers, can be factored into a unique set of primes. The real number 6, for example, always equals 2 x 3. Aside from reordering the factors (3 x 2), no other product will work. But to Cauchy and Lamé's embarrassment, their German contemporary Ernst Kummer showed that certain complex numbers can be split into prime factors in more than one way."

Well, there's also 6 = 1.5 x 4, etc. It's just in the context of the whole numbers (i.e., integers) that 6 has specifically the prime factorization 2 x 3. And depending on what your notion of a whole complex number is, they have unique prime factorization as well. For example, the Gaussian integers (complex numbers of the form a + b * i, where a and b are ordinary integers) have unique prime factorization.

The Gaussian integers are the n = 4 case of "Consider the complex numbers generated by adding, subtracting, and multiplying copies of a primitive n-th root of unity"; Lamé's mistake, pointed out and built upon by Kummer, was in assuming that the same property of unique factorization into irreducible elements would continue to hold even if n here was replaced by any prime (this assumption fails for the first time at n = 23).

<comment><USER3> > Well, there's also 6 = 1.5 x 4, etc. It's just in the context of the whole > numbers (i.e., integers) that 6 has specifically the prime factorization 2 x > 3.

Not quite. You can easily extend prime factorization to rational numbers by allowing negative as well as nonnegative exponents for primes. The prime factorization for 6 (and any other rational) will still be unique.

If you instead decided to represent the factorization of a rational as a list of factors for the numerator and another list for the denominator, your factorizations would stop being unique... but the first way works just as well.

<comment><USER2> What you say is correct, interpreting "primes" as meaning "the values 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc.". Every positive rational is essentially uniquely a product of finitely many of these values raised to integer powers.

That having been said, what is it that makes these particular values "prime"? It's that they cannot be (nontrivially) decomposed into further factors. But in the rationals, they can be! 2 = 1.6 * 1.25, 3 = 1.6 * 1.875, etc. The inability to further factor 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc., which causes us to single them out as "prime" in the first place, is only on an account of factorization into whole numbers excluding such rational factorizations.

So it's in that context that my comment was to be understood: the fact that 6 specifically has the irreducible factorization 2 x 3 is not universally true, but only true in particular contexts, of which the most common would be the integers. In the mentioned context of the reals, or even just the rationals, we could instead note that 6 (or anything, really) could continue being divided indefinitely, thus having no particular "prime factorization" in the sense of a factorization which cannot be further refined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article is a very interesting popular account of the Fermat-Wiles Theorem and the discovery of the flaw in Wiles's first attempted proof of the theorem. I was glad to see that the article makes the timeline of Fermat's writings on the topic sufficiently clear to support the historical statement that Fermat himself surely didn't have a proof for the full theorem: "Fermat himself had given a proof for n = 4." (Writing marginal notes in the book about number theory he was reading was something that Fermat did early in his amateur study of mathematics, while doing his professional work as a lawyer. Fermat later "published" many proofs in the manner of his era by writing letters to other scholars. Fermat's son published the marginal notations in an edition of the book _Arithmetica_ published only after Fermat's death. If Fermat actually had a proof for the theorem known as his last theorem, he had plenty of opportunity in his lifetime to find other pieces of paper on which to write it down.) I recall that the current textbook _Mathematics and Its History_ by John Stillwell[1] reviews the history of this topic pretty well.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Its-History- Undergraduate-...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Its-History- Undergraduate-Texts/dp/144196052X/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Simon Singh's excellent book also recounts this fairly remarkable story.

I was actually studying Maths at Cambridge when Wiles gave his seminars. People were buzzing with excitement after the first one.

</comment><comment><USER6> For those in the UK, BBC iPlayer has an old Horizon doc on this made shortly after the theorem was fixed currently. It's pretty good, and even has the old "lingering shot until the subject starts crying," except the subject is Wiles, getting emotional about his proof, and it's quite moving

<comment><USER7> I presume that you're referring to Wiles' statement to the effect that, "Proving Fermat's Last Theorem is probably the biggest thing that I'll ever do." As a young student, it made a big impression. Eighteen years later, as a professional scientist, it's even more poignant.

Found it in a NOVA transcript [1]:

"At the beginning of September, I was sitting here at this desk, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. It was the most—the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will. . . I'm sorry."

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2414proof.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2414proof.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with all these proofs is that it'd take someone who already has a Math PhD several years of full-time effort to understand the proof.

Because these famous problems were solved, there is now increased demand for Math PhDs with that specialty.

How do you know if the proof is valid, or if they're just scratching each others' backs and pretending they're all brilliant? You might say "Wait, a fraud that big couldn't happen." Just like one of the biggest investment funds couldn't be a Ponzi Scam? (Madoff)

I.e., the few Mathematicians who know enough to be able to check the full proof might be doing the equivalent of this guy:

[http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student- unco...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-a- huge-fraud.html)

<comment><USER9> > How do you know if the proof is valid, or if they're just scratching each > others' backs and pretending they're all brilliant?

(Professional mathematician here)

Such a conspiracy could never happen. Mathematicians are, in general, scrupulously honest to a fault. There are exceptions of course, but such a scam would need everybody's cooperation.

Moreover, if you have tenure then you would have no incentive to participate in such a fraud (even to the extent of keeping quiet about it). Once you get tenure you are basically working for pride and for the sheer joy of solving problems, and maintaining a big lie would do nothing for either.

<comment><USER10> I would like to both broaden and qualify that statement: scientists are, in general, scrupulously honest where it concerns their work, probably because their work is about 'truth'. Nevertheless, scientists are still people and many people lie and cheat when it suits them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I still find Beal's conjecture very interesting. FLT follows quite trivially from it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal%27s_conjecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal%27s_conjecture)

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://sumnotes.com/pages/a-simple- proof.html](http://sumnotes.com/pages/a-simple-proof.html)</comment>


Should Jailbreaking be Exempted from the DMCA?   - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/should-jailbreaking-be-exempted-dmca

<comment><USER2> X should be exempted from the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA for all values of X.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you invest/manage $20K in startup seed money? - <AUTHOR>

I have wanted to start a company for the longest time. I have $300K ($210K savings + $80K 401K), I'm single, am 31 and I just got my green card. I'm thinking of spending $20,000 on a startup.
(I'm mentioning my total net worth in case theres someone who knows how to handle money better than I do, and can help me maybe use it as leverage for a startup.)
Questions:
1. Do you think I'm nuts to leave a good paying job (12K a month) in this economy?
2. How can I invest/manage the money so that I can maximise the amount of time I get to build a company.
3. Would you try to do the startup part time first? (I've been trying this for a while but it hasnt got any customers yet.)
4. Where should I live to maximise the amount of "startup time" that the $20,000 gives me? Do you think I should open up a "startup house" someplace?
Ideas I've been considering:
1. Live in India and come back for 6 months a year to keep my green card in status. Open up an office in India with 2 programmers. 2. Try to get consulting jobs on the side? 3. Ask my present employer for a part time job. 4. Buy or rent a whole house in which I can host a couple of other startups and thus save some money and create a very useful network to share in my future "trials and tribulations".
I would be grateful for any ideas that you might have. <comment><USER2> You need to build a bunch of inexpensive, low-effort prototypes. Do that while you're employed.

The most important thing here is what will the startup _do_, not how to run it. Spend some time figuring that out.

Anything you spend time on that ISN'T the product (renting out houses, consulting jobs) are a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Been there, done that.. with hindsight my personal recomendations are:

1\. Don't leave your existing job until you _have to_ , keep the income comming. 2\. Spend as little as possible, as late as possible. 3\. Leverage your knowledge and experience.. stick with what you know. 4\. Have fun, enjoy what you are doing.. life is way to short.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please describe your own experience here? I think a lot of people would find that useful.

I'm one of those people who needs to be allowed to have complete independence to do any work so its been hard in a corp environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From your statement, it doesn't seem like you want to "start" a company. My best advice is to angel invest in a company that can use your expertise. A good place to start is YC Demo days. DONT QUIT YOUR JOB!

My question for you: is 12k pretax, if it is how much do you save per month?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi JS,

Why do you think I dont want to start a company. I really do and it "seems" like the fact I cant work full time on it is making it hard for me to create a winner product.

I've never really calculated how much I save. I'd probably have a lot more if I didnt have any hobbies and hadnt partied so much in my younger days.</comment></comment>


100 days of postmarketOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.postmarketos.org/blog/2017/09/03/100-days-of-postmarketos/ <comment><AUTHOR> Some comments on a more personal level about the project: I actually learned about postmarketOS 50 days ago when I saw the previous "50 days of pmOS" post here on HN, and since then I've become a pretty active contributor to the project.

I can't remember the last time I've contributed so intensely to a single FLOSS project and I attribute that to the community being built around developing postmarketOS and the first and foremost goal of having fun while developing, all the while keeping in mind that are much larger long-term goals we would want to get to some day that I very much support.

Props to ollieparanoid and all the other developers working on pmOS, I really enjoy their positive attitude towards technical and community development alike.

</comment><comment><USER2> Having Google as such a huge controlling force over the operating systems on so many mobile devices has scared me for a long time, given Google's business model of the customer and data about individuals - I welcome any well managed projects that set out to offer more ethical alternatives.

<comment><USER3> If you want to be more scared, and happen to own an Androdid device, check the data Google has on you by virtue of Play Services sending information every time your're online.

For example on location history in Google Maps.

<comment><USER4> Is Apple any better on this (real question)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple has their own problems, but their business is to sell products, not to track you. Google tracks you aggressively and that _is_ their business model.

Suggest reading Aral Balkan on this topic [1]

[1] - [https://ar.al/notes/apple-vs-google-on-privacy-a-tale-of- abs...](https://ar.al/notes/apple-vs-google-on-privacy-a-tale-of-absolute- competitive-advantage/)

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, with Microsoft, it's like a weird mixed bag as if they haven't made up their mind yet. They do kinda want to sell you stuff, but they also want some of your data, but not the same data that Google wants, and they may or may not have a good plan on what to do with that data.

<comment><USER6> I suspect we'll end up in some weird freemium model offering with Microsoft. For the right price, everything can be shut off, but Windows 10 Enterprise is all said and done over $500 a seat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This project has come a long way, and it seems ultra cool. When I first saw it, I thought it was going to be more of a "turn your old phone into a Raspberry Pi type device" .. basically a little embedded machine you could use to control other things or maybe home automation.

However it now looks like a much broader project, with some big GUI and driver goals. It'd be pretty amazing if we end up with a Linux distribution you can just install on most old devices and continue using them as little usable Plasma devices.

<comment><USER8> That would be one future I would like to live in!

<comment><USER9> Off-topic: I subscribed to the RSS feed of your blog to get updates on postmarketOS development (just watching from the sidelines), but the new website doesn't seem to have anything like that.

Could you add a way to subscribe, or should I just watch the GitHub repo instead?

<comment><USER8> Thanks for letting us know. For now, you can subscribe [https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org](https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org) \- and I will make an issue to add a RSS feed!

<comment><USER8> Here we go: [https://postmarketos.org/blog/feed.atom](https://postmarketos.org/blog/feed.atom)

(Thanks to new contributor marten-de-vries for implementing it so fast \o/ <[https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues/29>](https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues/29>))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I like the idea of making old devices usable for a longer time, I don't like the approach they have choosen. Android has Java application framework developed by Google that is well tested and stable. It works great and there are many applications written using this framework. There is F-Droid. Why replace it with some linux desktop environment like KDE? It probably is buggy, unstable, not optimized for mobile devices, there are no apps and nobody is going to write them. They are just making another always-broken linux distribution. I am afraid they will also make some awful desktop environment with excess 3D effects and gigantic icons like Gnome 3.

<comment><AUTHOR> The approach postmarketOS is pushing is that of Choice. You get to choose what you want to run on your device, just as with any other Linux distro. No apps, seriously? Take any Linux app, it'll run on pmOS. We're not in the business of building desktop environments, we just package existing software for use on mobile devices. Nor is this "another distro", this is Alpine Linux (is that also broken?) with some extra packages for device support.

<comment><USER11> Will Pokemon Go run?

<comment><USER12> Don't do this here

<comment><USER11> Why can't I point out that running desktop Linux ARM programs is not a useful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I knew anything about kernel or operating design, I would try and port this over to the Nexus 6. Is the developing community for PostmarketOS amenable to newbies in that space?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's really not much to know! If you find a good supported kernel on similar projects like LineageOS / CyanogenMod then you're already that much closer to a working device. The rest is packaging, testing and occasional patching.

As a general overview here's the documentation on how to go about porting a new device: [https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device](https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device)

For anything else, come over to Matrix/IRC and you'll receive all the help you need :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to install this on one of my former phones, but... both of them had some kind of fatal hardware failure.

</comment><comment><USER15> this is such an awesome product, but the name "postmarketos" is too descriptive and sterile.

it's probably the least of their concerns, but i think a name / branding would be helpful.

any HN brand experts? maybe you could make a contribution (in the form of expertise/suggestions)

<comment><USER16> I think it's a _perfect_ name.

<comment><USER15> how come?

i think it could be better because

1\. it's kind of long

2\. it's sterile, devoid of emotion, and hard to link emotion to via marketing or branding

3\. it's too technical - the common phone OS consumer doesn't know what postmarket means, and don't know what an OS is

4\. it works against itself if it becomes wildly successful, and OEMs want to put it on the phone at the time of sale... at that point it's just "MarketOS"?

None of these are a huge deal, or detract from the overall value of the project (it's awesome!); but I can't see an argument for keeping it. what makes it perfect, in your eyes?

And i'm not a brand expert; i would love to see points by someone who knows a lot more about marketing and branding.

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's "perfect", but I think it's named better than most projects are.

1\. There's a shorthand "pmOS". "postmarketOS" is at least easy to Google (PMOS has too many meanings).

2\. It's descriptive and tells me more about what it _is_ than most names do. Maybe they could rebrand for wider appeal later.

3\. The common phone consumer wouldn't pay more attention if it had a flashier name, either. They'll buy a phone based on rumor and what their friends have, and they certainly aren't going to look at replacing the OS with something new.

4\. I imagine that the company might fork the repo and rename it whatever they want, in that case. "Mobilios\ _" , then a tiny text at the bottom "powered by postmarketOS".

I'm not a branding expert either, but I know that it pisses me off when there are 3 layers of branding and marketing before I can get to what the product actually _is*.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


For Roleplayers Who Start Writing - <AUTHOR> https://mythcreants.com/blog/nine-truths-for-roleplayers-who-start-writing/ <comment><USER2> All of this is true if you write to be read.

I used to write a lot when I was younger, but this was always painful. My friend and family would go "meh" when reading what I wrote (they're not avid readers themselves), other writers would "love it", then want to change everything, and I started to second guess everything I was writing, to the point I didn't love it anymore and procrastinated more and more until I had to admit to myself I just stopped writing.

And then, a few years ago, I started playing dungeons and dragons, in play by post games. It was fun, and I did enjoy writing again, even if it was casual writing.

Then it hit me : why not play solo and go a bit further? I started playing alone, doing both the game master and the players, all written (while still continuing other games with people, of course). And this was _incredibly_ fun. It was the same feeling that I had when I started writing younger, but with no obstacles anymore. Plus, because of the dice rolls, even I was not sure what would happen next. I take weeks to create characters with detailed personalities and backstory, I drop them in the story, and I discover them, because it's only when they face a given situation or talk with a given character that it becomes obvious how they will react.

I would recommend that to anyone who loves writing. There's nobody to tell you it's too short, or it's too long, or this section is not detailed enough, or this one is boringly full of details. If you write only for yourself, you can focus on the best things in writing : imagination, and having fun.

<comment><USER3> I've wanted to try D&D, but don't know anyone else that plays. Are there other mediums to play in (i.e. is "by post" still a thing)?

<comment><USER4> Additionally to what others mentioned, Dnd Beyond [1] has a quite active play by post board on their forum. It's great to get started, but games tend to rarely go to the end of the campaign and stop after a few months. It's still a good thing as a first experience.

After that, I would recommend to find friends to play by mail. Somehow, I noticed players less easily give up the game when they're friends. Simply by talking regularly about your first games is usually enough to get other friends interested. Just don't push it on them and let them come by themselves, as it's quite a commitment and will be felt as a burden if they feel they're playing with you just to be nice to you.

[1] [https://www.dndbeyond.com/](https://www.dndbeyond.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good article. On the last point, about delayed gratification when writing: one way, and perhaps _the_ way to complete a long writing project is to enjoy what you are writing, which means you are writing the book that you would enjoy reading. I've tried multiple times to come up with a novel idea that would sell but I ended up never pursuing them. Once I started thinking really hard about a story that I wish someone else had already made, I got started and enjoyed the whole process.

A corollary to this is that you must know what kind of stories you like, which means you have to develop your taste. I don't mean "taste" in the sense that you have the same opinions as New York Times critics. I mean that when you watch a movie or read a book that you enjoy, try to understand what parts of it you enjoyed, what parts of it you didn't enjoy, and how you would change it to make it better. This doesn't just apply to literature. In developing your artistic taste, you could try to understand exactly what part of an awesome painting evokes feeling in you.

After I started thinking this way, I came up with a story that might not appeal to most people but sure as hell felt moving to me. I realized that the story could be told better in a visual format instead of in prose, so I started practicing art again. I'm a perfectionist who hated drawing when I studied art in school, but now that I have this idea in my head I feel very little inhibition in practicing. Instead of wondering how to make my story sell better or second guessing every mark I make, I move forward because if I hesitate I feel like I'm letting down the characters in the story I want to be told.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most good rules always have an exception, Malazan[0] is a fun set of exceptions to these.

If you're not familiar, Malazan is a series of high fantasy novels and they're quite good. Well, they're excellent apart from the first book which is usually what kills the series for people. Just start on the second book if you're interested in trying out the series.

Malazan started as a setting from some campaigns and grew from there, so this feels pretty appropriate to bring up.

\- It has an absurd number of characters. On your first read you will lose track of who Widdershins is. Hell, between books you'll probably forget who Bottle is. This is a listed of named characters[1].

\- A bunch of events that happen in earlier books don't make sense at that point. The setting slowly unveils its magic system and world between each books. By the tenth book, most things that were confusing are justified.

\- Character motivation is usually upfront except for a few characters that define the majority of the plot's direction. Those characters are complete blackboxes. Some of those are viewpoint characters that become non-viewpoint characters.

\- Jokes are sometimes appropriate in even the worst situations because its appropriate to that set of characters.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen) [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Malazan_Book_of_the_Fa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen_characters)

<comment><USER7> > Just start on the second book if you're interested in trying out the series.

Can you keep going from two onward or do you have to go back at some point?

<comment><USER8> Gardens of the moon is sort of required for Memories of Ice. A lot of the characters pivotal in Memories of Ice are introduced in the Gardens of the Moon.

If Malazan book of the fallen is for you, you'll know after reading book 2.

Although, in all honesty: I _wouldn 't_ start with Deadhouse Gates. Although it contains one of the best plotlines in the series, it also contains the worst character, and she drags stuff down a lot. Were it not for having read through the first book, I would've probably stopped because of her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're planning to write a RPG as a story, Microscope[0] is very well designed for this. I've been playing it recently across multiple groups, and it shines for the "big-picture" usecase. It is often used as a "bootstrap- your-actual-RPG-campaign" scenario builder. You play with your group for a few sessions, and you end up with a world complete with plothooks, campaigns, motivations, challenges etc.

The expansion set, Microscope Explorer[1], optimizes the rules a little bit for World-building, but that's entirely optional - You can easily go miles with just the standard rules ("Just Play Normally" is part of the expansion here).

Also, random related trivia: Expanse[2], the famous book series that was adapted into the (now) Amazon-run TV series is a RPG game written down. This explains a lot of character actions that are very much player/character driven, and not plot driven.

[0]: [http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/](http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/)

[1]: [http://www.lamemage.com/microscope- explorer/](http://www.lamemage.com/microscope-explorer/)

[2]: [https://www.cbr.com/the-expanse-series-rpg/](https://www.cbr.com/the- expanse-series-rpg/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much all of my life I have been trying to write, even managed to publish some shorter works and, ironically, ultimately ending up in a 25-years long software engineering career due to writing (it's a long story). I've also done plenty of roleplaying, across a number of different systems (including several of my own).

But the main roadblock in my writing has always been my problem to find a story. I can build worlds and invent interesting characters to no end, and describe cool scenes and situations -- but any attempt to have some kind of a coherent story has always ended up looking like, at best, a second-class rip off of one or another of my favourites works of fiction... :(</comment>


GitHub Spray: Draw on your GitHub Contribution Graph - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Annihil/github-spray <comment><USER2> Interesting, but what if I want to remove it later?</comment>


FlashHeed: Fixes the Flash Ads Z-index Problem - <AUTHOR> http://coding.scribd.com/2010/11/13/flashheed-fixing-the-flash-z-index-problem-for-ads/

<comment><USER2> For those of you wondering why most flash applications leave wmode as window, it's simple because wmode opaque and transparent breaks a bunch of flash behaviors.

It creates performance problems, it creates browser incompatibilities, and in general makes flash worse than usual. (It also breaks accessibility, but I'm not sure if people care about that for ads)

Mode details: [http://justin.everett- church.com/index.php/2006/02/23/wmode-...](http://justin.everett- church.com/index.php/2006/02/23/wmode-woes/)

This page has a good list of known wmode related bugs: [http://xebee.xebia.in/2010/08/29/the-wmode-nightmare-in- flex...](http://xebee.xebia.in/2010/08/29/the-wmode-nightmare-in-flex-some- workarounds-to-resolve-issues-pertaining-to-wmode-settings-in-flex/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been frustrated by this problem for years; the most common occurences being dropdown menus rendered below flash ads on vendors' websites. Even just 2 days ago I saw it on netapp.com (though most of their pages set wmode correctly). I was puzzled that no one seemed to care. I never saw this pb mentioned anywhere on the Net. All of my friends seemed to have never witnessed the pb until I opened a vendor's website to demonstrate it.

I am glad that FINALLY I see an explanation and that people FINALLY start caring.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most flash ads would be inside an iframe on another domain outside your control :/

So unless I've missed something, I don't see how this helps. No amount of javascript can modify flash elements in an iframe outside of the security box.

<comment><AUTHOR> From looking at the ads that appear on Scribd, this isn't the case. I haven't seen a flash ad that uses an iframe coming from Google.

Here is an example of a typical flash ad that I've seen from AdSense: <https://github.com/scribd/flash_heed/blob/master/test.html>

But yes, if the flash is in an iframe from a domain you don't control, there's no way AFAIK to fix the z-index issue.

<comment><USER4> In what version of adsense does it not use an iframe? It's always used an iframe, dynamically generated from js.

The top ad on scribd actually has about 5 iframes.

No idea why my original comment stands a 0. Please do your research people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what has a very serious problem with z-indexing, at least in Chrome? The new YouTube iFrame embeds. They offered a version of the embeds that allowed you to set wmode, but it stopped working a couple of weeks ago.

It's weird, because Chrome had no problem with them at all until version 7, at least on my end. Per axod's comment, I just tried those with this and got nothing.

</comment><comment><USER6> From my understanding, setting wmode to transparent creates harsh performance detriments.

The contents of the SWF are drawn over top of the elements on the page, once per interval. In essence, it is running outside of the browser.

I've had experiences where wmode="transparent" would effect the SWF if I were CTRL+TABing through Firefox's tabs. The SWF would not engage as no official focus had been set because it seems that it is actually "floating" over the page, rather than residing in it.

FlashHeed is probably a bad idea.

<comment><USER7> For Flash games or other page content, I agree that the performance impact of wmode=transparent is to be avoided. But Flash ads are a different story.

FlashHeed is designed to be used specifically on Flash ads that you don't control. If you're embedding rich content on your page (like Flash games) where performance matters, you'll write your own embed tag and can control the wmode directly.</comment></comment>


Sundial: Harmonizing Concurrency Control and Caching in a Distributed OLTP DBMS [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/pubs/sundial.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The author of this paper gave a talk today in UW-Madison about this and his other related works. Sundial is an extension to his previous work called TicToc [1], both of which are governed by the idea called "logical lease."

Logical lease serializes seemingly conflicting transactions by keeping track of logical time of read/write operations, and committing at logical time instead of physical time.

It is hard to get serialization right for DBMS transactions, but this protocol seems straightforward to reason about. Sundial is an application of logical lease in distributed OLTP DBMS, so that transactions can still serialize while using stale cache copies.

I am recently taking some database and computer architecture courses, and this paper seems very relevant to whoever also interested in these fields.

[1] [https://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/papers/2016.tictoc.sigm...](https://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/papers/2016.tictoc.sigmod.pdf)</comment>


Entrepreneurship for the 99% - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2012/06/04/entrepreneurship-for-the-99/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me or does this look like a massive advertisement for Steve Blank's books and program? That's not to say that the books and programs aren't necessarily good, but still.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this most blogs? Even HN is in essence a platform for ycombinator.

<comment><USER4> Same with Avc.com

People like things to be subtle though.

They can also read into things that aren't there.

I offered to help someone the other day in a comment (which I did - then going back and forth with several emails and advice which took time) and was voted down in the one line offer. I guess they looked at my profile and thought I was angling for paid work? The truth is I've helped many people but never asked for payment (although it's been offered.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me that the industries most kinds of 99% businesses enter is zero- sum, which means helping new businesses only hurts the profit of other new businesses or incumbents. Ergo I question what value from an overall economic perspective helping individual entrants to the 99% market holds.

(Here I use as examples the industries defined from the article: construction, retail, health care, lodging, food services)

For instance, if 10 businesses are started, and there is only room in the market for 3, then 7 will inevitably fail. It is possible to improve each's individual odds of success, but to what end? Unless the market these businesses are in grows, any successfully-started new business only increases competition for the others. So lets say that we improve the odds for these new entrepreneurs by educating them. We will also assume incumbents have access to the same knowledge and benefit equally. If the new competitors all enter the market together, all we have done is raise the competitiveness level in the industry, and the odds of failing are still the same.

This is what Peter Thiel discusses in his "perfect competition" argument. (If you haven't read his CS183 notes yet, please do so. They're insightful).

Peter Thiel likens competition to athletes or soldiers beating each other up. They compete to win and that is what they know how to do. But in the end there is only one victor. The rest are losers. And if you improve the competitiveness level of these athletes, all you have done is make the competition fiercer. Now that could be a good thing as it could provide better value for consumers. But the businesses themselves don't benefit from that!

All this program is doing is making more perfect competitors, although what will probably happen is not all will benefit the same amount, as certain businesses will learn and apply these lessons better than others. But from a birds eye perspective, the result is stil the same: the same number of failing businesses. Even if these new businesses you help succeed do in fact "make it", they don't increase the size of the industry (barring technological breakthroughs). They only add more players to a limited pie.

People by nature care more about themselves. Thus they care more about entrepreneurship rather than innovation per se. Entrepreneurship without innovation is about beating up the other guy, simply outcompeting him through energy or maneuvering. Innovation is about doing something better, freeing up time or resources to do other things, which grows the pie for all.

In summary:

Sure a new business may add value by providing a better service than the competitor it beats, but the overall wealth pie of this nation doesn't increase. Encouraging just entrepreneurship without technological innovation is not that useful from a macro perspective. What we need are new entrants who change the game via technological or process breakthroughs. These are precisely the kind of companies that Peter Thiel seems most interested in, according to his CS183 lectures. And I submit that these are the kinds of businesses startups should focus on. Not the other 99% which only increase competition for everyone else.

This is why R&D and innovation are the key to growing the economy. Simply calling for more entrepreneurs, without a corresponding emphasis on innovation, is a flawed long-term strategy.

<comment><USER6> I'm more than a little confused by your comment. In several areas either you or Thiel (I'm not familiar with his thinking enough to know which) are completely disregarding some very basic economics...

 _It seems to me that the industries most kinds of 99% businesses enter is zero-sum_

Um, no. Nothing in the economy is zero sum. Wealth is constantly being created and transferred. I think you are confusing this with the idea of a mature- market at an industry level, but those markets are almost non-existent because they destroy themselves like anti-matter.

 _Unless the market these businesses are in grows, any successfully-started new business only increases competition for the others._

Well, for one thing, if the market isn't growing we are in a recession, and recessions simply aren't permanent states. Recessions destroy themselves, because they are simply forced efficiency finders. Secondly, increasing competition increases pressure to become more efficient and/or innovative, which in turn drives market growth. The whole idea of helping and soliciting help in business is an act of innovation.

In short, your initial point - that of a zero sum market - is flawed, and therefore all your other arguments are too.

Increasing the _quantity_ of entrepreneurs by default increases the _quality_ , because it increases the pressure to compete, and therefore leads to the very innovation you feel is the real solution. You are arguing against the very solution you seek.

<comment><USER7> I don't have a problem with most of that explanation, but am somewhat skeptical of the last point. I don't think there is necessarily a linear relationship between quantity and quality that holds in all market regimes, across the whole range of possible states. Dynamical systems (such as markets) often have tipping points where things get wonky, so it'd at least require some empirical evidence that that isn't the case.

<comment><USER6> I'm talking about markets on the whole, not any particular business.

Let's say you have 5 players selling car tires. There are 1000 cars in the area, and only one brand of tire to buy. For the most part, these 5 players compete on something other than price, since the market is mature. They have 20% of the market each.

Let's introduce 3 new players into this market. They bring nothing new to the market per se, but by default they get some sales (maybe they are closer to the car owner's homes, maybe they have a hot chick at the front desk). Nothing major, let's say they share 10% of the market overall, and the 5 incumbents lose 2.5% of their sales each.

The incumbents panic and look to counter this threat, and one of them happens upon the fact that if you change the formula for the tire a little, you can get a 50% increase in performance and a 20% increase in lifespan with only an extra 5% in manufacturing costs.

Now everyone scrambles: Some into R&D, some into improving customer service, some into death. The overall value of this market increases, because of the 5% increase and corresponding price increase... inflation, if you will.

This innovation happened _completely and only_ because of the dreaded saturation of the market you are complaining about. The quality of the noobies is irrelevant, since the incumbent did the innovation. Point is the innovation happened, and wouldn't have happened without the new entrants creating pressure through competition.

<comment><USER7> Sure, I understand the idealized theory; it just doesn't match what actually happens in most complex systems (take fluid flow, for example, where increasing pressure increases flow rates... until a critical threshold at which flow becomes turbulent). I don't think markets are well-understood enough to apply this idealized theory without empirical evidence that assumptions aren't violated. It's not _a priori_ clear to me that there don't exist situations where increasing market participation leads to decreased market efficiency as friction effects or internal market dynamics start dominating.

<comment><USER6> This is not a theory - it's exactly what happens.

Even a case where an innovation decreased market efficiency (of this does happen - all players would love to have a monopoly), the trend is for the market to work towards increased efficiency.

I'm no hard-core libertarian, but unless you have outside interference in a market - big tire 5 use government to mandate a tire-selling license that presents a barrier to entry - or one of those markets that lead itself to creating natural monopolies, this is the way things work.

<comment><USER7> That's just an assertion based on idealized economic theory; not _evidence_ that things work that way in particular situations. In particular, you haven't explained why there are either _a priori_ or strong empirical reasons to believe that greater market participation never produces adverse effects. Evidence from nearly every other complex-systems discipline, ranging from hydraulics to meteorology to ecology, points in the direction that such "well- behaved" systems characterized by general relationships, valid in all regimes, are quite uncommon; and instead "phase-change" type thresholds at which behavioral regimes change are the norm.

<comment><USER6> >greater market participation never produces adverse effects

I never said it didn't.

I said greater market participation increases innovation by default, regardless of the quality of said participation. You are the only one equating the behaviour of the markets to being either "good" or "bad". The reality is that these are not concepts the market understands or cares about.

Innovation can and does destroy entire markets all the time. But unless you feel innovation itself is horrible and we should be writing these arguments with typewriters and cabling them to each other, you simply have to accept the reality that innovation will occur all the time in every direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In a certain practical sense, aren't "the 99%", i.e. people without any significant cash cushion, precisely the ones who _can't_ as easily take this non-VC, lifestyle-business route? If you need to pay rent and buy individual health insurance, it's a lot easier to do that if an angel or VC is fronting enough money to pay you at least a modest salary.

<comment><USER6> I'd venture 90% of all new businesses have nothing to do with VC money.

In fact, my hunch would be that most are started with personal savings and family money.

<comment><USER8> I agree. The VC-funded startup is for the most part found only in the tech sector. You will never find a VC funded pizzaria, auto-repair shop, carpet- cleaning company, etc.

<comment><USER7> That's true, although most of those businesses' founders also don't have much of a choice: they aren't turning down a 6-figure pizza-delivery job or eschewing pizzeria-angel funding to open their own pizzeria. They just don't have much of a choice but to open it on their own and try to scrape by, sometimes borrowing from relatives, living with parents, getting "free" healthcare in the ER, etc.

I think it'd be a much less attractive choice if you were in an area like tech where you _do_ have the option of a well-paying job or funding, though. Lifestyle businesses are still attractive in tech, but only if you're somewhat better off, either coming from a better-off family, having already had one minor success on a previous business, or spending some time in a lucrative job / consulting career that let you save up a cash reserve. That appears to have been Steve Blank's route as well; he became a self-funding entrepreneur only after first having a few successful exits from funded companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I welcome efforts to help small business owners, but we shouldn't pretend that small business in general drives the economy. The huge jobs and productivity growth that we associate with startups comes from a very small % of disruptive companies, mostly in high tech. (I wrote a bit more about this here: [http://bostinno.com/2012/02/17/bailouts-for-startups- tough-l...](http://bostinno.com/2012/02/17/bailouts-for-startups-tough-love- for-corporate-america/))

<comment><USER10> Small businesses drive employ almost half of all employees (and more than half during boom cycles).

The technology sector has an overinflated sense of the value it provides to the economy in terms of jobs created or productivity growth. Note that the article you cite does not refer to technology startups, it refers simply to new businesses under the catchall "startups."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> He forgot to mention that 90% of all startups produce waste (leveraging VC's money), while 99% of small businesses produce real value simply because they don't have a choice.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Lean Methodology is what small businesses have been doing since companies were created. I assumed that they took it and adapted it to tech business.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great thoughts! But I still want to be an entertainer...</comment>


I lost control of our bank accounts to a phone scammer - <AUTHOR> https://robservatory.com/how-i-lost-control-of-our-bank-accounts-to-a-phone-scammer/ <comment><USER2> Simple rule: if it's inbound it is fraud until you've called the official publicly posted phone number of your bank. Don't ask them for a number to call back, go the website of the bank, verify the domain is the right one and call their service desk. Never ever continue an inbound call like this.</comment>


Want to shadow a YC partner? Apply on WayUp for your chance to win - <AUTHOR> https://www.wayup.com/blog/wayup-shadow-for-a-day-ycombinator/ <comment><USER2> > You'll take over WayUp's Snapchat for the day to give other young people the > inside scoop, and you'll write a piece about your time at YC for our blog. > Knowledge is power, so why not spread it?

That sounds more like a punishment than a perk.</comment>