Infrared thermometers to screen for Covid: more marketing than medical evidence - <AUTHOR> https://www.cebm.net/2020/08/screening-for-covid-19-with-infrared-thermometers-more-marketing-than-medical-evidence/ <comment><USER3> Good to see an article calling this out. Temperature-screening might catch a few people who know that they have a temperature (or are just not feeling well) and are going to "tough it out".

Here in the Portland, OR area I've noticed a definite change in how many people are wearing masks. At the grocery store, 2 months ago there were about 5% of the people not wearing masks and they all tended to be men in their 30s and 40s. At convenience stores in more suburban area, I was the only one in a mask. Now it seems like 100% of the people are wearing masks.

Wearing masks, not temperature checks, is what seems to be our best option.

<comment><USER4> I agree completely on masks being preferable to this, but I wonder whether it may have some utility anyways, because even if it does not catch many asymptomatic people, if it is widely deployed and it catches _some_ people, those people don't go on to spread the virus, and then if you deploy those measures broadly, you have managed to halt a few potentially exponential sources of spread.

I should hasten to add that I'm not an epidemiologist, so I don't know whether this is true. But my intuition suggests that even if this is just partially effective it might still be worthwhile in the context of national efforts to control the spread, which is a numbers game.

I think this is a crucial distinction between "security theater" and "hygiene theater" \-- security risks are not contagious and don't have the same potential for exponential growth that virus transmission does.

<comment><USER5> As a doctor, I really do think this is 'hygiene theatre' (that is, forehead/IR temperature checks).

Last week I rocked up to operate at a hospital I irregularly work at which has recently introduced checks (as opposed to all public hospitals which have had this in place since March). In theatres we were talking about how useless it was. One of the nurses said someone tested high last week. They made the person sit in a chair for half an hour and then re tested them and granted them entry. To some degree I get it. I mean, my state is only recording 15-20 positives a day across almost 20,000 tests so the pre-test probability is small. On the other hand, what's the point of a policy if it doesn't change anything.

Another aspect of 'hygiene theatre' - when the apple stores reopened in sydney I happened to be one of the first back in (by coincidence). I visited late on the first day. I was initially impressed - security guard scanning, handing masks out. Inside the sales rep who served me had a mask continually falling down his face and kept grabbing at his face and readjusting. I eventually capitulated and told him he was wearing it upside down (metal bit across bridge of nose needs to be squeezed). Mask hygiene is important but pretty much everyone is so slack with them that, whilst they may be decreasing aerosolisation, they would be actively increasing spread of body fluids on surfaces, since so many people put a mask on and then immediately give up hand hygiene.

It's all a bit depressing

<comment><USER6> > One of the nurses said someone tested high last week. They made the person > sit in a chair for half an hour and then re tested them and granted them > entry.

While 30 minutes seems excessive, this makes sense. Your surface temperature is heavily biased by your environment's temperature. Letting one settle in a controlled environment to test is reasonable to see if it's really a fever (temperature will stay elevated) or due to environmental factors.

An issue is that anyone could ice their forehead in advance and beat the test. Dunno if too low of a temperature triggers a fail. In theory, everyone should have to sit in a controlled environment before forehead testing, but at that point, may as well do tympanic checks.

(Among many other issues, like the massive variance that's probably accepted because of unreliability of surface temperatures as a proxy for internal temps)

<comment><USER7> I biked to a non-doctor appointment in 80+ degree heat recently. A guy thermometer-gunned my forehead before coming in. I was outside and visibly sweaty, but I still had to warn him that given the circumstances, my temperature might appear a bit high. I don't know if people are really thinking through any of this.

<comment><USER8> Did it read high? I have been checked by IR thermometers hundreds of times and have never tested above 36.9C which seems to be the gate temp around here. I too have sometimes been hot and sweaty and it didn't seem to affect the results much. I cannot even enter my own apartment building without passing an IR thermo check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's security theater, much like the TSA. The temperature guns used at restaurants at gyms seem hard-coded to 97.7F but at least everyone involved can say they were "doing their part" to stop the spread. Whether it works is of secondary importance to making people feel like something is being done, even though in practice there's very little anyone can do.

<comment><USER10> I had an appointment recently where they took my temperature upon entering the building and the receptionist scribbled the thermometer reading down and circled it at the top of the forms I had to fill out: "28C". Which made me wonder whether she didn't notice that the reading she took was wildly inaccurate or just didn't care.

Future historians will wonder why various medical records show people with acute idiopathic hypothermia in the middle of July 2020.

<comment><USER11> > Future historians will wonder why various medical records show people with > acute idiopathic hypothermia in the middle of July 2020.

You underestimate how many people in the database (from any time period) will have a recorded body temperature of 0, thanks to weak typing and buggy null coalescence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not just marketing, but also politics. For example, early on in the pandemic, the Chinese government launched a push to reframe their response as a shining example for the rest of the world rather than a failure - and at the heart of this propganda effort was a publication explaining their approach so others could copy it, which claimed the whole thing was founded on mass IR thermometer screening to find people to test. (The document did not appear to be an accurate description of how China actually suppressed Covid-19.) The WHO then jumped on this, doing a tour of major Western publications to amplify China's claims. Journalists and politicians in Western countries also then merrily lept on this to go after governments they disliked, pointing at the lack of IR temperature screening to claim that their governments weren't taking it seriously like those in places like China.

<comment><USER13> This is a nice sounding story but I don't think it's true.

There were already publications from China in early February stressing that tracing the virus via symptomatic cases alone would not be enough to stop the spread. Here's one from Feb 11. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1)

China suppressed the virus not by IR scanning but by a well publicized system of travel restrictions and contact isolation/quarantine of anyone who had been in contact with a known case, regardless of whether they had a fever or other symptoms.

All this was public knowledge in February and can be verified by reviewing preprints and news articles from then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Had a long conversation with my dog's vet about these thermometers. He used one I had not seen before, an intra-eye thermometer. It measured the temperature _through_ the eye, the temperature based on light from the dog's optic nerve/retina. That is as close to the brain as one can get without cutting holes. Too bad it isn't allowed for humans yet.

It isn't hard to understand his difficulty with normal infrared thermometers: they don't work through fur. But in all animals (us included) temperature can vary many degrees depending on where it is measured. The face/forehead is not the best place if you are looking for 'core' temp. People with reduced blood flow (ie heart disease) will have much cooler foreheads. They may have a fever but their foreheads could appear rather normal.

<comment><USER15> > Too bad it isn't allowed for humans yet.

Why is that? Is there any danger?

<comment><USER14> I don't see any dangers, it is just a sensor detecting infrared light, but getting a device "human rated" is a complex process. There might not be a sufficient market to justify an $90 thermometer for humans.

Here is a similar device, with a picture of it being used on a dog: [https://www.reichert.com/product_details.cfm?skuId=3125&skuT...](https://www.reichert.com/product_details.cfm?skuId=3125&skuTk=1065101262#.XyiNix- YXLk)

The scatter plots of eye/ear/rectal temperature in this article are on point to the covid situations. Variations of +/\- several degrees are observed, showing that IR temperature scans might be less than useful in detecting mild fevers. (Also, stubborn cat refusing to open eyes)

[https://www.theveterinarynurse.com/research/article/investig...](https://www.theveterinarynurse.com/research/article/investigating- the-use-of-non-contact-infrared-thermometers-in-cats-and-dogs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found the reference [0] more useful to bring home the point made in the article that using these termperature screening devices gives one the false assurance that they can ignore the physical distancing and mask measures.

(i) Many thermal cameras and temperature screening products were originally designed for non-medical purposes, such as for building or site security. Businesses and organisations need to know that using these products for temperature screening could put people's health at risk.

(ii) Temperature readings from temperature screening systems will measure skin temperature rather than core body temperature. In either case, natural fluctuations in temperature can occur among healthy individuals. These readings are therefore an unreliable measure for detection of COVID-19 or other diseases which may cause fever. Furthermore, infected people who do not develop a fever or who do not show any symptoms would not be detected by a temperature reading and could be more likely to unknowingly spread the virus.

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dont-rely-on- temperature-...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dont-rely-on-temperature- screening-products-for-detection-of-coronavirus-covid-19-says-mhra)

</comment><comment><USER17> I concluded a long time ago that most of the response to Coronavirus boils down to "security theater".

There is a subset of the population that wants to be told that whoever is in charge is "doing something."

Compliance with that "something" never seems high on the list. Honestly, some people seem to like that as it gives them something extra to gripe about.

<comment><USER18> There is another subset of the population who's response to the threat is to deny the risk, accuse others of living in fear and pretending that it is a hoax.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. Stupid comes in many flavors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The elephant in the room: my org tried a bunch of them and none of them (even the expensive ones) were at all reliable. If you're trying to discern between 98.6F and 100F... they were useless for that.

</comment><comment><USER20> We desperately need cheap and simple means for mass screening of symptoms.

On the other hand, I have visited a DHL warehouse to ship some things in the Bay Area recently. Before I can enter, a guard at the door points an infrared thermometer at my forehead. "Eighty-five degrees! Come on in, sir!"

<comment><USER21> >Before I can enter, a guard at the door points an infrared thermometer at my forehead. "Eighty-five degrees! Come on in, sir!"

sounds like they used a general purpose infrared thermometer rather than the ones designed for medical use.

<comment><USER22> We've got an expensive infrared medical thermometer (purchased long before Covid) and it appears to be quite accurate for everyone in our family except me. According to it, I am pretty reliably dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> But I think it effectively scares people to stay at home.

I remember having a hell of a fever during H1N1 going through a airport being scared they would catch me and I'd have to quarantine. Because it was continue or get stuck I continued, if it was just walking into a store....

</comment><comment><USER24> A Customer of mine is installing an "AI-based temperature screening system"[1]. It's retailing for over $3K. Based on the manual it looks like a facial recognition access control security product (it can interface with the industry standard Wiegand protocol) with an infrared thermometer bolted on and a bunch of gross profit thrown in for good measure. The manual has the look of being a product rushed to market.

[https://www.richtech-ai.com/product-page/aatss-v2-pro- enterp...](https://www.richtech-ai.com/product-page/aatss-v2-pro-enterprise)

<comment><USER12> Presumably the "AI" part is that it knows not to set off an alarm if the person's cup of coffee has a fever, as has apparently happened at automated temperature screening points in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just thinking out loud: Wouldn't it be possible to get much more accurate temperature readings by having people open wide and imaging the backs of their throats? This could still be done at a reasonable distance.

Of course, that would require people to stop long enough to take a reading, and would be useless for the products trying to scan crowds with an unattended camera and AI.

And, of course, nothing is really going to help you if the thermometers are inaccurate to begin with.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it does get much better accuracy. My company is developing temp screening/survey answering entry kiosks, we've put a lot of effort into getting higher accuracy than the generic imported kiosks.

Forehead temperature is highly variable with ambient conditions - <USER2> while walking in reduces surface temperature, but sitting in a low-humidity air-conditioned car with your face in the morning sun increases it. After as little as 60 seconds in a conditioned space, though, skin surface temp is pretty much normalized.

The camera scanners are using Flir microbolometers, which have a huge amount of noise/calibration variation, even on a per-pixel basis. The handheld guns and kiosks which require alignment are using thermopile sensors work much better for employee check-in, they have like a 1:10 spot size so you need to be within a foot or so of the sensor and intentionally align yourself with the sensor. The reading takes about 2 seconds to align and measure, which is fine for clocking in but, as you said, doesn't work in a crowd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have an infared thermometer I've been using for cooking, and it often gives readings that vary quite a bit. Now some of that is measuring the actual variance of temperature at different points in the pan / pot / etc. But I've also pointed it at myself and got readings that weren't super consistent and definitely weren't core temperature - I think I usually see around 93 on people with it.

Generally those readings can vary a few degrees even if you are using it well. It's just not made to measure fractions of a degree.

So I was wondering how infrared could possibly work... Not really surprised it doesn't, but the stats at how bad it has been in the past (h1n1, Ebola) are shockingly bad. I guess I was hoping there was some medical variant of these thermometers, which is accurate in the 95-105F range, and the cooking thermometers just sacrificed accuracy for range. But it sounds like that's not the case.

<comment><USER28> The medical versions are different. They're not just reporting the actual surface temperature of the user's forehead. (Which is going to be a few degrees lower than core body temp)

They compensate.

I have an iHealth unit that Wyze was selling a few months ago. I check my temperature several times a day. I believe it's quite accurate. In the mornings it'll read 98.2˚F, afternoons I'm at 98.4˚F, and just before bed it'll read either 98.4˚F or 98.6˚F.

The fact that it's this consistent with the intraday variation gives me some confidence in it. But, granted, I have yet to have a fever. (That I know of!)

I'm not sure what it uses to arrive at the answer. It could be as simple as adding a fixed constant or multiplier to the forehead surface temperature. Or it could separately measure the ambient temperature and factor that into the radiant heat coming from my forehead to arrive at an answer.

<comment><USER29> The medical ones probably only take into account the average emissivity of human skin (which varies somewhat by race/genetics, which they do not account for).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> During the start of the COVID pandemic, two of my friends traveled to Florida for a cruse. Naturally, they were quite worried about the prospect of getting on a plague ship in a foreign country.

Fortunately, the cruise operator was giving everyone a forehead IR thermometer scan, before letting them board the ship.

Unfortunately, at least one person ahead of them in line happened to scan in, and be let on board, sporting a cool temperature of ~85 degrees. I'm not sure if 'body temperature of a two-hour-old-corpse' is a symptom of COVID, but this did not ease my friends' anxieties for the duration of the trip.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yeah this topic is trifle with issues

Most common problem: operator error. Are you reading the temperature correctly? Tip, it should not be read directly from the middle of the forehead [https://www.seattlechildrens.org/conditions/a-z/fever-how- to...](https://www.seattlechildrens.org/conditions/a-z/fever-how-to-take-the- temperature/)

If the temperature reads anything lower than 36C, _you 're doing it wrong_ and it's very easy for people to get a non-medical IR thermometer, start pointing at people and "checking temperatures"

That being said, it seems Covid-19 fevers are usually more intense than flu fevers (even H1N1 ones)

<comment><USER32> Back in the day we purchaised an instant in-ear thermometer, which can also be used for forehead temp. measurement too. The selling point was that with restless baby it's easier to measure the temp. Prior to that we used a common in-mouth (and possibly other side out) kind of beep thermometer.

Alright, 15bucks later, I tried it on myself... red alert, fever-fever, when in-ear. Hmmm, roll around forehead -- ambient temp.. The old-fashioned palm- to-forehead -- obviously, no reason for alert. Finally, test with the old in- mouth thermometer- all normal.

Reading the instructions only confirmed the unreliable nature of the instant readings. We kept it anyway for "backup", but for practical use continued with the "slow" in-mouth beep-beep, it also helped that it looked like a froglet.

Apparently, a success of in-ear measurement is a direct view of the eardrum by the sensor, which is not always possible, esp. with babies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As someone with a documented medical issue which results in occasional fevers, but is dangerous to no one but myself, I absolutely will throw a fit if I'm ever denied entrance to anywhere on account of such a fever, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Everyone else in this thread seems to be focusing on the problems with the probability of fever given that someone's infectious, when the real question is the probability that someone is infectious given that they have a fever, which might be due to anything else.

But medical discrimination is okay in 2020 I guess.

</comment><comment><USER34> 'Hygiene theatre' is the term some have settled on for the proliferation and implementation of this kind of thing: [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge- hy...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene- theater/614599) (subsequently posted to the SSC subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hzily8/bewa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hzily8/beware_of_hygiene_theater))

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm sure I remember reading that most patients admitted to hospital with Covid don't have a high temperature.

</comment><comment><USER36> That was a pretty obvious theater. I know a case of people being positive just by driving in a hot day. All days are hot here, at this period of year. Unless you are literally on fire, Is an useless piece of junk

Wearing masks on the other hand is not a solution if people does not respect spacing. The disease is stoppable only by vaccines at this moment. Most of us will catch it before that. This is the reality.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favourite computer programming quotes - <AUTHOR> Please also write the author <comment><USER2> Right now I can think of one which is not about programming itself but uses a programming analogy to explain politics:

"Being POTUS must be like inheriting a 240 year old code base and being asked to fix it in 4 years while half your team tries to sandbag you."

source: [https://twitter.com/gblache/status/784201528110448640](https://twitter.com/gblache/status/784201528110448640)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." \-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

(Programming wasn't the original context; design in general was.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Christopher Alexander writing in his preface to Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns of Software."

> In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits > young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of > standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good > as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, "Of course not, > that isn't what I am trying to do. . . . I could never do that."

> Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: "That standard must be our > standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile. > That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect > of my students." Gradually, I show the students that they have a right to > ask this of themselves, and must ask this of themselves. Once that level of > standard is in their minds, they will be able to figure out, for themselves, > how to do better, how to make something that is as profound as that.

> Two things emanate from this changed standard. First, the work becomes more > fun. It is deeper, it never gets tiresome or boring, because one can never > really attain this standard. One's work becomes a lifelong work, and one > keeps trying and trying. So it becomes very fulfilling, to live in the light > of a goal like this. But secondly, it does change what people are trying to > do. It takes away from them the everyday, lower-level aspiration that is > purely technical in nature, (and which we have come to accept) and replaces > it with something deep, which will make a real difference to all of us that > inhabit the earth.

> I would like, in the spirit of Richard Gabriel's searching questions, to ask > the same of the software people who read this book. But at once I run into a > problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres > of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people > writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program > on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which > has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson's dictionary? Can you write a program > which has the productive power of Watt's steam engine? Can you write a > program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our > civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as > Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"?

</comment><comment><USER5> "PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."

— Jon Ribbens

</comment><comment> a-saleh Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. (Andrew S. Tanenbaum in Computer Networks)

</comment><comment><USER6> Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.

</comment><comment><USER7> A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

</comment><comment><USER3> "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." \--Donald Knuth

</comment><comment><USER8> Never deploy shit on Friday! (Colleague)

</comment><comment><USER9> ? Why do functional programmers homeschool their kids? \- Because they hate classes

I read this in a tweet: [https://twitter.com/msafi/status/782383733525454848](https://twitter.com/msafi/status/782383733525454848)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is my favourite one: Programming is like kicking yourself in the face, sooner or later your nose will bleed. Kyle Woodbury

</comment><comment><USER11> Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

— (Mis)attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, 1970

</comment><comment><USER12> 'Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.'

Larry Wall

</comment><comment><USER3> "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." \--Grace Hopper

</comment><comment><USER3> "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." \-- Phil Karlton

<comment><USER13> I know this as "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not programming specific: TANSTAAFL.

Also, Garbage In, Garbage Out is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Everything is fast for small n."

</comment><comment> chestnut-tree This is a quote by Niklaus Wirth, a Swiss computer scientist who has created many programming languages, most famously Pascal. It's a long quote, but I like it very much:

 _" Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. It is maintained for commercial reasons only. Object- oriented programming (OOP) solidly rests on the principles and concepts of traditional procedural programming (PP). OOP has not added a single novel concept, but it emphasizes two concepts much more strongly that was done with procedural programming.

The first such concept is that of the procedure bound to a composite variable called object. (The binding of the procedure is the justification for it being called a method). The means for this binding is the procedure variable (or record field), available in languages since the mid 1970s. The second concept is that of constructing a new data type (called subclass) by extending a given type (the superclass).

It is worthwhile to note that along with the OOP paradigm came an entirely new terminology with the purpose of mystifying the roots of OOP. Thus, whereas you used to be able to activate a procedure by calling it, one now sends a message to the method. A new type is no longer built by extending a given type, but by defining a subclass which inherits its superclass. An interesting phenomenon is that many people learned for the first time about the important notions of data type, of encapsulation, and (perhaps) of information hiding when introduced to OOP. This alone would have made the introduction to OOP worthwhile, even if one didn't actually make use of its essence later on.

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming. Static modularization is the first step towards OOP. It is much easier to understand and master than full OOP, it's sufficient in most cases for writing good software, and is sadly neglected in most common languages (with the exception of Ada).

In a way, OOP falls short of its promises. Our ultimate goal is extensible programming (EP). By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system. EP implies that the addition of a module is possible without any change in the existing modules. They need not even be recompiled. New modules not only add new procedures, but - more importantly - also new (extended) data types. We have demonstrated the practicality and economy of this approach with the design of the Oberon System."_

Taken from: [http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html](http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html)</comment>


How Does Mapbox Offer a Job In JavaScript Output? - <AUTHOR> http://coybit.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-does-mapbox-offer-job-in-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> This is the most absurd method I have ever seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you think so? By this way just developers see the job offer.</comment></comment>


Killing the Abraham - <AUTHOR> http://caterina.net/wp-archives/105

<comment><USER2> It was a close call but I survived.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best part about this article was the Buffet quote: "Invest in a company any fool can run, since some day a fool will." Other than that- I don't think it really relayed anything but the CEO/founders influence corporate culture and that it is reflected in the product, which isn't news and doesn't really serve purpose other than to get employees a reason to bow to their founders and hope they don't leave.</comment>


Tails 4.4 - <AUTHOR> https://tails.boum.org/news/version_4.4/index.en.html <comment><USER2> Really interesting distro to just test things and to use Curl without exposing your real IP.

However, it always bothers me when Tails detects the virtual machine VirtualBox as being nonfree.

<comment><USER3> Does curl not expose your IP? I was under the assumption only the official browser used tor.

<comment><USER4> Tails routes all TCP traffic through Tor and blocks UDP (since Tor doesn't support it). To learn more check this out: [https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/Tor_enforcement/](https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/Tor_enforcement/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thx for making Tails, the world doesn't know what you did for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is tails actually safe to use? Has it been audited by someone who is trusted in the sec community? And that's not even to talk about whether tor itself is still good.</comment>


US to start charging visitor entry fee this summer - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article7123827.ece

<comment><USER2> Interesting that "many" of the knock-off websites are in North Korea. Looks like they're getting pretty desperate in the internet-fraud department.

</comment><comment><USER3> Folks, the only way to really get these things killed off is for your home country to reciprocate. Until US-ians are made to do what they make others do, there will be no pressure applied to Washington to change things. Fingerprints? Do it with indelible ink. Fees? Ask for cash. Rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER4> Unless you also hit the CongressCritters who make these laws with those things ... and will they notice a $10 fee??? ... you're not likely to get anywhere with that approach. Very few of them care about the little people.

And upsetting one or more CongressCritters could be very bad for a lot of countries.</comment></comment>


The Dasher Project - happy-go-lucky http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/ <comment><AUTHOR> The wiki at [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked- in_syndrome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome) says:

 _Assistive computer interface technologies, such as Dasher combined with eye tracking, may be used to help people with LIS (Locked-in syndrome) communicate with their environment._

</comment><comment><USER2> Basically imagine inputting text with your mouse like this:

[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/images/newdasher.g...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/images/newdasher.gif)</comment>


Lodsys in a Panic to Keep Apple Out of Suit - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110828073533134

<comment><USER2> Lodsys is not "confused on the law." Lodsys's _argument_ is confused on the law, Lodsys the entity is perfectly aware of the law and is attempting to "exploit" the law and the system.

It's a clear case of "Gotcha, you neglected to get wording protecting your developers, so even though we all knew what you thought you were licensing, we'll try to screw you just because it doesn't cost us that much to try."

<comment><USER3> Is that really what they're doing though?

The reason I ask is that their attempt to get discovery on the Apple license suggests that they don't know what the license covered (remember it was taken out not with Lodsys but with a previous patent holder).

If that's genuinely the position then they don't know what sort of case they've got. At the very best it would seem that they are hoping that there is enough wiggle room in the license to give them something but the request points to this being, at least to some degree, a punt as much as a clever legal move.

But to me what this really looks like is what we suspected it was all along - a legal shakedown of small, vulnerable developers without the finances or expertise to fight it.

Lodsys may or may not have a water tight legal case but from what we're seeing here they're certainly not geared up for a hardcore legal fight rooted in a solid basic case. Instead what they're doing seems to be throwing everything they can at it regardless of merit and hoping that something sticks.

In some situations that's a perfectly reasonable strategy - essentially if you're trying just to delay things and rack up costs for the other side to make settling look appealing - but against Apple who have enough money to fight this from pocket change and a vested interest not just in winning but in crushing you to put anyone else off the idea of ever trying this sort of thing again?

<comment><USER2> Well obviously I'm speculating out of my ASSets, but legal discovery goes beyond "show us the contract." They get to grill the lawyers and managers who drafted the contracts, review emails written about the contracts, and so forth. they ought to get a look at just about everything that might come up as evidence in a suit.

So I don't know for sure whether they know what's in the contract, but I would not say that just because they're asking for discovery, therefore they have no idea what the contract says.

<comment><USER3> That's true but at the very least it suggests a weakness in what they have in place at the moment.

And what's written in the contract certainly can't be contradicted by anything before it. At best they're going to be able to fill in the gaps.

EDIT: I am also not a lawyer but this seems to be relevant: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parol_evidence_rule>

Essentially where something exists in the contract in writing it can't be amended or contradicted by any other source.

What other material can be used for is to prove / disprove validity, provide clarification around ambiguity and so on.

That would seem to suggest that Lodsys at the very least aren't confident that the contract as written completely supports their case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very little in this sort of thing surprises me, but this passed the threshold: "Lodsys next argues that it should be granted the right to conduct discovery on the Apple license in order to establish that the license doesn't grant whatever rights Apple claims." Apparently, Lodsys doesn't even know what license has been extended to Apple. Which is slightly less silly than I'm making it sound because it was the previous patent owner that did it, but still.... does seem a rather disadvantageous position to be trying to prosecute litigation from, almost to the point of bad faith if not actually over the line.

<comment><USER5> It's like Microsoft/SCO all over again, only this time it's Myhrvold/Lodsys.

<comment><USER6> Was there ever any shred of evidence that the actions of SCO were influenced or directed by MS? I'm legitimately curious.

<comment><USER5> Mostly circumstantial, but I think the duck test passes:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO- Linux_controversies#Microso...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO- Linux_controversies#Microsoft_funding_of_SCO_controversy)

<comment><USER7> It kind of funny when you think about it: Novell sold DR-DOS to Caldera specifically so Caldera could sue Microsoft (Novell didn't want to do it themselves for PR reasons). Caldera would reach a settlement with MS in 2000 and, later that same year, would use some of those funds to help finance their purchase of SCO.

It seems to me that, in a limited manner, Novell reaped what it sowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we start referring to Lodsys as Lodsys/Intellectual Ventures? IV makes money off these suits as well...

<comment><USER9> But Apple from IV...

[http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/entrepreneur/...](http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/entrepreneur/article7127608.ece)

"Now he has attracted more than $5 billion (£3.4 billion) from Intel, Sony, Apple, Nokia and Microsoft to fund cutting edge research into green power and technologies for the developing world."

Should we start referring to it as Lodsys/Apple?

<comment> wes-exp To be fair, aren't those companies just victims of IV's patent shakedowns rather than IV co-conspirators?

<comment><USER10> It's fair to say they're both. By these companies and institutions backing down, they exacerbated the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've seen the current software patent debacle compared to a nuclear standoff. Reading this article made me think of another analogy: Gangs. How long until independent developers will need to either join the Bloods or the Crips in order to fall under the umbrella of their protection? Unless you are a paid-up member of the Apple or Google development programs, you are a potential victim of random drive-by-lawsuits. Even if you are a member you may get shot at, but the gang will retaliate on your behalf.

</comment><comment><USER12> This isn't quite the point of the article but holy crap is this an awful patent:

"[a] communication element associated with each of the units of the commodity capable of carrying results of the two-way local interaction from each of the units of the commodity to a central location"

What on earth could that NOT mean?

<comment><USER13> It couldn't mean when each unit communicates independently to the central location. The app uses the app store independently from the upgrades to purchase upgrades. Instead of talking to the upgrade locally and "carrying the results of the two-way interaction" to the app store.

That's my opinion on the legalese because Apple shows screenshots of the app store in the middle of the communication process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm confused on this -- Is Webvention another IV spinoff like Lodsys, or are they an actual independent patent holding company?

<comment><USER15> Webvention (which is really one guy Dan Abelow) was the company which originally filed the patent. IV/Lodsys bought the rights to the patent from them (him). Note this is how IV gets their patents - they purchase them from existing patent holders for the most part.

The confusion seems to be that Apple actually licensed the patent from Webvention, not Lodsys and that license would transfer with the sale of the patent rights. From this filing it looks like Lodsys hasn't read the existing licenses which transferred over, which is a bit absurd.

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I know that IV buys patents up and then doles them out to litigation- only spinoffs, but I didn't know how far down the line Webvention was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has it been confirmed yet that Lodsys is a trolling front for Intellectual Ventures?

<comment><USER17> Lodsys shares an "office" (a nondescript door in a corridor of empty rooms) with one of Intellectual Ventures' known shell companies. I'm sure it's just a coincidence...

<comment><USER16> I wasn't trying to express skepticism - the whole thing smells pretty bad. I was just looking forward to seeing the nail in that coffin :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many servers did you have/need at your startup's launch? - <AUTHOR> Did you have enough disk space and bandwidth at your launch? How much space did you have? <comment><USER2> I would say it depends on enough factors that pinning down an answer here is going to be difficult. I would recommend however, that if this is a web and SQL type data focused site, that you split those services if at all possible.

You can get a single beefy box and run apache/nginx/lighttpd(what???), mysql, memcached and anything else all on one system and there are certainly people that make it work... but given the number of times I have been called in to fix these kinds of scenarios and make them work properly, I can say from experience that if you expect any amount of traffic you invest in the ability to abstract these various services away from a single machine with ease (or just have them separate to start with).

Perhaps if you do not have a lot of operating capital to begin with, virtualization/cloud options would be a good place to start. You can have with virtualization that single beefy machine and still separate out the various pieces of the infrastructure and then allow to add additional virtualization hosts to the cluster usually with a click or two.

I am happy to answer other questions to scaling (within reason) if you post in response or mail me. I'd rather you start things in a good direction and give away free advice than see a company fail because of architecture decisions which hobble expansion in the future!

</comment><comment><USER3> We're launching in January with a dedicated server (quad core, 32GB RAM) on which we have a single VPS (with _only_ 8GB RAM) - this gives us plenty of options going further, either I can set up load balancing, add resources to the VPS, make more of them with distributed concerns (database, app, session...), etc. And with Hetzner, it's also very cost effective, like 60 euros per month.

Not sure that is the best way to go, but that's how we'll roll.

<comment><USER4> Hetzner has crazy prices. Compared to AWS, one does ask himself if amazon cloud is the right solution

<comment><USER5> I'm not familiar with Hetzner, but another thing to consider is whether the "crazy prices" are sustainable (and they may well be -- again, I'm not familiar with the company).

<comment><USER6> Hetzner exists since 1997, it's a well known provider at least in germany for many years. So it's not like they will go bancrupt. They probably just know how to be cost efficient out of experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At Qard.at we used 3 Heroku dynos for: web server, mobile API, and our CMS. We used MongoLab for our MongoDB database. We also used Amazon S3 for static assets like CSS and images. The system was tested with Blitz.io and could scale to 7M hits/month. Our monthly fees were less than $1. The takeaway from this is not that you should run your company on free services, but that you can get started for (as good as) free with a scalable architecture which is then easily transferrable to AWS or similar once the need arises.

<comment><USER8> 7M hits/month is 2.6 hits/second. #justsaying

Also, how are 3 Heroku dynos less than $1/month? 2 non-free dynos are $40 right off the bat.

<comment><USER9> My bet is they are set up as three apps, in which case, you get 1 free dyno per app (all of them).

<comment><USER7> Sorry typo. 7M hits per day. It was tested with 250 concurrent users, and page load times consistently stayed below 300ms (measured end-to-end).

Andrew is right, we set up three different apps and so each is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> blekko needed 700 servers at launch for our web-scale search engine. We figured an index of a few billion webpages was the minimum needed to give reasonable results.

This is definitely not a one-size-fits-all sort of question!

<comment><USER2> Hah! Yeah, I imagine that this answer is probably outside of the question the OP is asking, but I do always enjoy hearing about scaling requirements for projects outside of those I have dealt with. Do your requirements (If you don't mind me asking) require a more disk, memory or CPU focused infrastructure?

<comment><USER10> To let our programmers be a bit lazy, we want fat (2-socket) nodes. That allows us to do things like have gigabyte-sized tables in memory on all nodes for instant access.

At that kind of server core count, it turns out that we can keep 8-12 disks busy, when crawling and indexing. For serving results, it turns out that we can keep 2 ssds busy, and, 96 gigs of ram seems to be the sweet spot.

The one thing we don't stress so much is the network. We're very conscious of locality, and we can get away with having 1 gigabit to all the nodes. We use beefy 10 gig switches in the middle to give high bisection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It depends hugely on what you are doing. At Kickfolio, we needed to think about dev ops and infrastructure right from the start. Kickfolio launched with 13 servers in place (10 Mac Mini's, EC2 load balancers, Heroku front end).

Having been featured on a few large sites, it was enough. We spun up 3 dynos on Heroku for the front end, and in the first week of launch we had gone through a few hundred GBs on bandwidth (not including static assets hosted on Cloudfront).

</comment><comment><USER12> Super-obvious answer here, but if you only have one of something you can't upgrade things, reboot, etc., without downtime, and you have a single point of failure if things go wrong. Having N+1 of each component, ideally with automated failover, makes a huge difference to how easy it is to maintain your system. You'll also enjoy life more when you can wait until the morning to fix something falling over in the middle of the night.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why do you want servers? Are you building a server centric product? Why not use a PaaS like Heroku and some monitoring tools? Then you've got your scaling, your deployment, your security and log aggregation solved -- and you don't have to wear a pager while you sleep.

Each app and service is different, more info about what yours does and it's known bottlenecks would greatly influence answers.

<comment><USER14> Heroku, being on top of AWS, doesn't really have the greatest uptime, do they? There are plenty of dedicated hosting and VPS companies that have better uptimes than AWS at this point.

<comment><USER15> For many early-stage startups at launch, ease of development/ops is much more important to optimize for than uptime, and Heroku excels at that compared to dedicated hosting or VPS. If a quarter of the internet is already down because of an AWS outage, people will survive without being able to access your shiny new "AirBnb for Pets" startup. When you're successful, build out manual infrastructure, sure, but at initial launch it's often worth the tradeoff of potential downtime for the savings in manpower.

Naturally, if your startup is a backup service or something else where having as close to 100% uptime as possible is a truly key feature, then it's probably not in your best interests to rely on Heroku/AWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of my favorite stories about this was from the guys at 500px.com.

When they first launched, their only server was a Mac Mini in a second-tier colo that was run by a friend of theirs. After about six months, they did their first major server upgrade - buying an external USB hard drive for more storage. They bought another two (and a USB hub) a month or so later. This lasted them another four months, until the got to the point where the USB bus was being constantly saturated. Only then did they move to some more enterprisey hardware.

Moral of their story was to use only as much hardware as you need now (while having plans on how to scale up in the short- and medium-term which don't cost you money now), and to worry more about getting users and building a product. Worry about scaling after you've got customers (and data that will show you actual use patterns), as opposed to paying for a complex scaling infrastructure before you've got any users.

</comment><comment><USER17> We started with 1 RackSpace Cloud Server, their most powerful offering, for our development. Our thinking was we'd use cloud servers to scale. Well, RackSpace's top of the line cloud server is, for our application's needs, a total dog. Getting reasonable performance required a server 8 times more powerful than RackSpace offers. And at the rate RackSpace charges for their top of the line dog, we can buy the server we need in 3 months. So, at launch we had 2 servers: one for DEV, one for LIVE; each being 32gigs RAM, 32 cores, & 1.5T disk. Now, 1 year later we've expanded to 6 servers in a half rack with hardware firewall, fully raided up fileShare and passable redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure there is a one-fits-all answer here - specifically regarding disk space & bandwidth.

Are you saving HD video files? Then you will probably need a data store connected to your web server.

Are you just allowing people to post text, small images and such? In that case, 1 server could easily cut it.

With proper software configuration, and a _decent_ hardware config, you can go quite a long way with 1 machine.

Can you provide any details? Maybe someone can help out with your specific question, since the general question you've asked is quite difficult to give a proper answer to.

<comment><USER19> I got the impression he was looking for anecdotes to get a broad impression of what it "usually" takes, instead of advice specific to his situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many problems have two solutions, the solution for "one" and the solution for "two or more". If you really want to be ready to scale I would be a lot more confident with two servers than one. On the other hand, if you are coming out with a true MVP and don't expect the world to come rushing in, then one seems like the right answer if it saves time.

</comment><comment><USER21> At the moment we have 5 small Linode VPSes (1.5/1/1/768/768) for app/db/solr/redis/async-jobs and paying around $200/month.

I've been looking for alternatives, preferably hybrid dedicated/cloud with good RAM/IO for app/cache/db and cloud based storage. Rackspace seems to offer something like this, but at a higher price. Any other suggestions?

<comment><USER22> Linode is one of the cheapest providers of VPSes that are mainstream. I think you will have a hard time finding something comparable. I track web hostign companies for my startup ( <http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting> ) and the only company that jumps to mind is RamNode. But I haven't collected enough data on them to say anything meaningful. They seem to be offering high ram + ssd drives which would match what you're after.

</comment></comment><comment> james-singh One Amazon EC2 'micro' instance when I launched <http://www.nepaladz.com> That too was running on a free server (for the first year). And it was delivering around 200k requests per day at around 40% server load. It is however configured to auto scale as per the load.

</comment><comment><USER23> Only one. I think, simple shared hosting will be ok at launch, depending on your application. But most probably one will be enough at first.

</comment><comment><USER24> We are starting with just one - with the option to push the database service off to a second machine more or less on demand.

</comment><comment><USER25> A few Heroku web and worker dynos.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not sure but I think I read somewhere that Buffer was launched with only one Linode.

</comment><comment><USER27> 1

</comment><comment><USER28> we also started with just one dell 4gb box from leaseweb.</comment>


FedEx Service Alerts: National Service Disruption - <AUTHOR> http://www.fedex.com/us/servicealerts/ <comment><USER2> I wondered what this meant:

> Consistent with the provisions of the FedEx Service Guide, the money-back > guarantee is not in effect for FedEx Express packages due for delivery on > May 2, 2017.

So I found the section "Money-Back Guarantee Policy" in the Service Guide. There are several sections describing the guarantee and a list of specific limitations and exceptions, one of which is:

> 2\. The service failure resulted, in whole or in part, from any of the > circumstances described under the Liabilities Not Assumed section.

And in the Liabilities Not Assumed section, the end of item D states:

> disruption or failure of communication and information systems (including, > but not limited to, our systems).

\---

After all that digging, I went back to the very first paragraph of the Money- Back "Guarantee", which states:

> We offer a money-back guarantee for our services. This guarantee can be > suspended, modified or revoked at our sole discretion without prior notice > to you.

1\. Why do they even need to list all the exceptions and limitations if the "guarantee" can be revoked for any reason?

2\. Why is the word "Guarantee" used in the name of the policy? It seems deceptive to offer a promise that essentially means nothing.

I'd rather see it called a "Money-Back Policy" and have it only list the specific cases where it _does_ apply. At least then the customers would have a better idea of what they were buying. It is too hard to figure out what does and does not apply when only negatives are listed.

<comment><USER3> I looked into the "Guarantee" issue a while back when I felt dissatisfied with Comcast despite their "Customer Satisfaction Guarantee". Unfortunately it seems Guarantee is just a meaningless marketing term.</comment></comment>


Show HN: We're building the personal semantic web - <AUTHOR> http://backstit.ch

<comment><AUTHOR> We just opened our product for public testing and would love to hear what you think.

By semantically defining content we aim to:

\- Provided a consistent UI toolkit for articles, photos, products, etc.

\- Allow for personalized filtering (ex. all status updates allow for black/whitelisting by submitter)

\- Dynamically implement piping of data from one source to another (ex. all products can be searched for on Amazon)

I'm around to answer any questions/comments that you might have.

</comment><comment><USER2> With Google killing iGoogle late next year ... this looks like a natural replacement!

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually started work on backstitch before Google's announcement but seeing the number of petitions to save the service as well the outraged comments by the passionate user base we are more than happy to step in as a replacement :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nicely done, but personal home pages flopped 5 years ago, why will this work now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We feel that now is a time of unprecedented noise when it comes to managing our digital lives. Five years ago we weren't juggling the shear number of blogs, daily deal sites, and multiple social feeds that we are today.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which burning problem you'll solve today? - <AUTHOR> You wanted to make the world a better place, Considering Today's Scenarios, which is the most important problem, you will solve first and why? <comment><USER2> I will continue to change myself to be the way I would like others to be. I will continue to behave in ways I would like to see repeated by others.

Bottom up change, it's the only thing that scale nicely and works sustainably in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I don't know what the big Scenarios are, but I would be interested to know how humanity could keep on with the impressive technological progress and increases in productivity while simultaneously remaining true to our biological roots. That is, gathering together in urban metropolises (with all their advantages) while still integrating the best parts of our ancient environment: living in nature, forging deep relationships, meaningfully engaging in small communities etc.

Compared to what our living environment was for hundreds of thousands of years, it has changed so rapidly lately that I suspect that the human psyche has troubles keeping up. This results in unnecessary stress, anxiety, depression, feelings of meaninglessness, loneliness, drug abuse etc. "modern" problems.

Humans are very adaptable and I kind of enjoy living in a city, but I still wonder how much of the human experience we are missing because our biological blueprint was molded by thousands of years of natural selection in a totally different environment, and the modern experience just might fall short in some ways.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Experimenting to see if a practically useful monad library can be made for a popular statically-typed language: Java[0] or TypeScript[1]

2\. Always wanted a type-safe way to construct efficient SQL queries building bottom-up as in SQL rather than left-to-right as in ORMs[2].

3\. A framework using (1) and (2) so building backends are not time-consuming or error-prone. Still in early stages.

[0] [https://github.com/karmakaze/moja](https://github.com/karmakaze/moja)

[1] [https://github.com/karmakaze/monadts](https://github.com/karmakaze/monadts)

[2] [https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql](https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql)

<comment><AUTHOR> Number 2 seems particularly useful for devs, As they are ones who suffer most of writing complex SQL queries using "ORM".

<comment><USER4> I've come to realize that there are two camps here: those who appreciate SQL's structure and those who like the left-to-right ORM navigation of relations.

I do have to admit that it is awfully convenient to use a REPL to write a long chain query using an ORM. I do often run into limitations, and knowing that the solution in plain SQL is so simple is very annoying. The idea is to allow convenient composition, but following the structure of SQL rather than parent- children navigation so there aren't paint-yourself-in-a-corner cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Getting myself more money, so I will have access to a larger share of the limited resources on this planet.

<comment><USER6> Love the brutal honesty (or sarcasm?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> May sound boring and small but it is a burning problem I'm solving today, we're adding SSO or single sign-on to Tesults ([https://www.tesults.com](https://www.tesults.com)) - long overdue and requested at this point by many teams. Hope to have it done by next week.

Not as grandiose and admirable as Space X and Neural Link but in a small way we do make the world a better place, we even have a promise, giving open source developers, small teams getting started, individuals and educators free SaaS to handle something that would otherwise be pain to do on their own anywhere near as well.

<comment><USER6> Ah SSO: the wheel we all get to reinvent. Good luck.</comment></comment>


Valve secrets spill over in new Steam documentary app - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/ <comment><USER2> I used to be a huge Valve fanboy, but throughout the years they've managed to burn away all of that goodwill through a combination of not building good games anymore (or at least not releasing them, as I learned in the article), and pioneering microtransactions and loot boxes (read gambling) added to their existing games that profit mainly off of gamers with poor self control (most of whom are literally children).

Although I also blame the gaming community as a whole for collectively rejecting the subscription model for games, which made the much more exploitative f2p + microtransaction/lootbox business model the only real viable option for games that require ongoing development.

<comment><USER3> I don't know enough about the history of microtransactions and loot boxes to evaluate your charge that they "pioneered" them, and that indeed could be quite important to any calculation of how much goodwill they deserve.

But I know that in making that calculation, I personally couldn't give less of a shit about whether or not they released Half-Life 3, when they've been _the_ patron saint of gaming on Linux. Which they haven't just barely saved from oblivion, but been the biggest single force in turning into an actual viable competitor.

I hope I don't need to explain why that matters for reasons that go beyond whether or not you are personally directly invested in gaming on Linux.

Their strongest recent competition (Epic) has not just been indifferent to gaming on Linux, they've actively done enormous damage to it: they've bought exclusive rights to popular mainstream games which fully supported Linux, and _removed that support_.

Though the picture is further complicated in that the other big competitor, GOG.com (run by CD Projekt, the Polish developers of the Witcher series), are _easily_ the best citizens altogether, most importantly for their commitment to DRM-free distribution. But they also aren't the ones doing Proton.

<comment><USER4> > GOG.com (run by CD Projekt, the Polish developers of the Witcher series), > are easily the best citizens altogether, most importantly for their > commitment to DRM-free distribution

The commitment is weaker than they want it to sound. They're selling quite a few games now that require an internet connection or a serial number in order for multiplayer to work, or even just to access some of the single-player gameplay.

Refusing to call something "DRM" doesn't mean you're DRM-free.

<comment><USER5> > They're selling quite a few games now that require an internet connection > [...] in order for multiplayer to work

How else would online multiplayer work? I suppose there's the community-run server model, but you're asking vendors to potentially do some pretty major re-architecting.

GOG's games are entirely DRM-Free for single-player and local multiplayer. For experiences that are inherently tied to online services, the concept of DRM- Free ownership doesn't really work.

<comment><USER4> > How else would online multiplayer work?

Right, because I said "multiplayer", obviously I meant "multiplayer over the internet".

Multiplayer would work by letting you connect however you want.

> you're asking vendors to potentially do some pretty major re-architecting.

From a game architecture perspective, there is no difference between connecting to someone else over the internet, and connecting to someone else over a LAN. As far as the networking stack is concerned, the difference is that in the second case, you're most likely using IP addresses that are reserved for non-internet use.

But wait, there's more!

> How else would online multiplayer work?

You could just... NOT require a registration when connecting to the internet. Remember what I said about requiring a serial number? Try thinking of a more iconic, prototypical example of DRM.

> GOG's games are entirely DRM-Free for single-player and local multiplayer.

No, they're not, this is just false.

<comment><USER5> > From a game architecture perspective, there is no difference between > connecting to someone else over the internet, and connecting to someone else > over a LAN. As far as the networking stack is concerned, the difference is > that in the second case, you're most likely using IP addresses that are > reserved for non-internet use.

Well, but you're assuming the server software is actually designed to be run on end-user PCs, and not some proprietary server architecture that also hooks into a bunch of other company stuff.

> You could just... NOT require a registration when connecting to the > internet. Remember what I said about requiring a serial number? Try thinking > of a more iconic, prototypical example of DRM.

So I guess the question here is, what is the purpose of buying DRM Free games?

To me, it's the knowledge that as long as I can find compatible hardware, I will _always_ be able to run a game, no matter what external server somewhere someone decides to take down. This is very powerful, and it's the difference between truly owning an experience, and renting temporary access to one.

As long as an external server is required, all of that goes out the window. Any game that uses that model is inherently a rental. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, if the experience couldn't exist any other way. I buy tickets to movie theaters, and Broadway shows, and plenty of other "temporary" forms of entertainment.

If the multiplayer already requires an external server, what does it matter whether or not there's a serial number? To me, it makes absolutely no difference.

> No, they're not, this is just false.

What single player / local multiplayer games on GOG have DRM?

<comment><USER4> > What single player / local multiplayer games on GOG have DRM?

#1. This question is not asked in good faith; games purposefully include centralized internet multiplayer, while not including local multiplayer, and this is itself a form of DRM.

#2. Northgard applies DRM even to single-player modes. You cannot use them without simultaneously connecting through the Steam^W GOG client.

[https://www.gog.com/game/northgard](https://www.gog.com/game/northgard)

<comment><USER5> > Northgard applies DRM even to single-player modes. You cannot use them > without simultaneously connecting through the Steam^W GOG client.

I'm not seeing anything about this in reviews or elsewhere on Google? The GOG page itself states:

> Please note: The GOG Galaxy Client is required to access online features for > Northgard.

But, offline singleplayer seems to work fine by all accounts. I'm actually a bit tempted to buy the game to verify absolutely.

<comment><USER4> Note this forum thread, titled "Warning: GOG Galaxy is required to use conquest mode.":

[https://www.gog.com/forum/northgard/warning_gog_galaxy_is_re...](https://www.gog.com/forum/northgard/warning_gog_galaxy_is_required_to_use_conquest_mode)

So no, offline singleplayer is not working fine by all accounts, it is not intended to work at all, and this was fine with GOG when they reviewed the game. (If you start the game, you will see the message "You need to log in through GOG to access Conquest" displayed in a tooltip over its grayed-out button. It's not something you could actually miss, if you were reviewing the game.)

Did you really think I was just making this up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you > will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the > most

What do they say about this? What is it that they found that invalidated this "premise"? I can't seem to find anything in the article.

<comment><USER7> I think it's almost certainly going to lead to a bunch of prototypes and half finished games, which is very fun. Finishing projects is not.

Ultimately though, jumping between a bunch of cancelled projects is not fulfilling and likely to lead to burn out in the long run.

<comment><USER8> I wonder whether that means that The Valley of Gods will eventually be finished... or to the contrary, not at all.

This is a game which was being developed by a studio called Campo Santo. The devs were hired by Valve, but they could still work on their game at Valve. At some point, the devs were really happy (based on their social media accounts) to switch and devote all their time to Half-Life Alyx instead, and the development of their original game was put on an indefinite hold. Now that Half-Life Alyx was released, what does that quote imply for The Valley of Gods?

<comment><USER9> I'm still mad about Campo Santo. I couldn't give two shits about Alyx or Half- Life or any other of Valve's games. But they _had_ to consume one of the most promising story-focused indie studios and relegate them to making games I just have zero interest in, and don't have anything really interesting to say or let you experience about the human condition. Firewatch felt like a real story about real people. Alyx et al are just completely different genres. Now we're never going to get another Campo Santo game and it's a significant loss for gaming culture.

<comment><USER10> I really relate to this. I LOVED Fire Watch. It was absolutely stunning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I heard lack of effective management structure was a far worse consequence of Valve's unusual structure. Heard influence became based on connections and favors, not good results or ideas. Heard many good projects died, even ones that would make sense to a third grader (HL3 L4D3). Hearsay but its all over internet if you're curious

<comment><USER12> People talk a lot of shit about Valve without having a clue, a consequence of their secrecy and their position as a premier game developer. I wouldn't trust anything that is said about Valve that didn't come from someone who has worked there.

Tyler McVicker/Valve "News" Network is a major component of this. His interviews with Valve are great. His speculation is trash.

<comment><USER13> a lot of these comments about valve stem from the somewhat infamous tweets of a former valve dev, though

here's the first link i found [https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee- describes-ruthless...](https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes- ruthless-industry-politics/)

<comment><USER14> Yea but thats still ONE guy who might be bitter for one reason or another. It's hard to get an objective look at Valve like this.

What we get is utterly filtered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I am doing the math right it's 14 years since HL3 was announced.

If I am doing the math right it was also 14 years between the initial announcement of Duke Nukem Forever and it's release. Guess HL3 is about to become the longest-running vaporware game.

It is only nine years between the release of the second book in _The Kingkiller Chronicles_ and now, despite its author's claim around the time the first was published that all three were ready to go in quick succession. But it is 27 years since volume 4 of David Gerrold's _War Against The Chtorr_.

<comment><USER16> HL3 (Half-Life 3) was never officially announced, unless you mean Half-Life 2: Episode 3, which was cancelled a while back

<comment><USER17> Episode 3 was never even officially cancelled I believe. Valve just stopped talking about it, stopped answering questions about it, then everyone just started assuming Half-Life 3 was coming instead.

Ending Episode 2 in the way that they did, then just letting Episode 3 evaporate was a real slap in the face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >... combat sequences through procedurally generated towers and buildings, chained together by crafted plot events.

There's a fantastic game out right now called Hades from Supergiant Games (of Bastion fame, this one could comfortably be called "Bastion 2.0") which does this roguelite-action-rpg genre very well. Highly recommended, checkout the trailer from the recent update: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNrt43epkG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNrt43epkG0)

<comment><USER19> Hades really did a fantastic job at doing narrative in a Roguelite game. I loved how you get bits and pieces of story along the way.

That being said, I don't really see Valve making a game like that for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish.

Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it.

Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years.

To put it in perspective lets look at auteur studios held in similar regard as Half-Life.

(I'm ignoring side releases, just focusing on mainline games)

\- Half-Life: HL2 2004, HL:A 2020 \- Kojima : MGS3 2004, MGS4 2008, MGS5 2014, Death Stranding (worth pointing out his studio was rebuilt from nothing for this too) 2020 \- Rockstar : GTA:SA 2004, GTA4 2008, RDR 2010, GTA5 2013, RDR2 2019

If Valve hadn't had steam, the company would not still exist today with that output. If HL:A good, yes. But we put it next to Rockstars output in the same time and it's not even the same league.

Something has seriously gone wrong within Valve and I think the charitable way to frame it is "Oh they just care so much they only release when its perfect" but I'm not really buying that, I feel they have instead of being freed creatively by Steam they have been shacked by it.

Steve Jobs sales and marketing speech comes to mind [0], the people calling the shots are only focused on running a digital videogame Walmart, artists push and push get burned out by not shipping and leave. At the head of it I guess Gabe just doesn't have the passion or care enough about creating art to push for anything else.

Now if you're a big Valve fan what I'm saying might annoy you, but really think for a second. What have you as a Valve fan been denied because the people in the company care more about running a store than making art. What games exist in the reality where Valve never made steam.

[0] : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4)

<comment><USER21> > I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating > things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me > finish.

> Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an > insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is > insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point > of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming > purchases are funneled through it.

> Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about > profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un- > compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the > company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years.

It's the Google problem. Once you have an automatic money printer, the only important job is making sure the automatic money printer still works. There's no incentive to improve it, because it's still printing money, and there's little incentive to make other products better, because whenever you look at the big revenue chart, the money printer in 90% of the pie chart, so who cares about the other parts.

<comment><USER22> It's amazing, really.

Through making Half-life, they stumbled into getting 30% of the PC gaming market for all time. Through making professional half-life mods, they stumbled into the uncontrolled world of loot box windfalls (plus via Dota 2, a professionalized mod of blizzard's game).

Like google, they probably fancy themselves as a kind of skunkworks laboratory that has the luxury of time and resources, able to accomplish what others can't.

The two exceptions: While I've always been a skeptic of VR, their advancement of it is admirable. And while I've long hated the steam software (complaining about not being able to increase the chat font size for 10 years, without digging thru hardcoded css files), the recent influx of game stores that are equally crappy makes steam look ahead of their time. (How many years before Epic adds download throttling? Oh right, fortnite is printing money).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > we were wrong that you will be happiest if you work on what you want

I'm not sure that's true. Perhaps the right conclusion would be "we were wrong that _it would be best for the company_ if you work on what you want".

<comment><USER24> I mean, you think people are happy when they never get to finish their projects and no one ever gets to play their games? I certainly wouldn't be. In fact, I would start to question what I was doing with my life.

<comment><USER25> My grandmother always said "if you want to have an unhappy life: just do whatever you want all the time", and I think about it a lot when finishing a project. The first 50% of any project is so fun - the rest is hard work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Translation: "we were wrong that letting you work on what you want will make us happiest"

</comment><comment><USER27> So...Half-Life 3 confirmed?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised they worked with

Geoff Keighley ⊂ (Mountain-Dew ∪ Dorito)

<comment><USER17> They've worked with him many times. He's done similar "Final Hours of..." projects for the original Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Portal 2. He's had a close relationship with Valve for decades now.</comment></comment>


Utopia: A Decentralized P2P Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> https://u.is/en <comment><USER2> totally doesn't seem sketchy in the slightest ;p though advertisment is on point and well done...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah was wondering what people here think. The videos are cool</comment></comment>


Is Bitcoin Broken? - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=310

<comment><USER2> This is pure innuendo.

The Bitcoin paper at least presented a thorough argument. Andresen, who did not seem (in his Bitcoin Reddit post) to have grasped that argument, is obviously unhappy that "Bitcoin" didn't get a preprint or approve its presentation to the press. But the authors of the paper signed their name to it; the lead author is a lecturer at a serious university.

Instead of rebutting any technical point the paper makes, Andresen casts aspersions, alludes to a "peer review" process that would not have prevented the paper's publication, and then suggests the paper is flawed technically. Well, how?

Here, instead, is a vastly superior critical response by Ed Felten:

[https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so- br...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after- all/)

<comment><USER3> Hi, Author of the referenced blog post [2] here (and one of Felten's grad students).

Let me lay out the argument from our post in a more technical way: the biggest problem with the Eyal/Sirer paper is that they don't think about the problem as an equilibrium problem, but rather argue about what's best from the perspective of a particular player. This leads them to propose a strategy which is not even optimal for any player (we prefer to think of Bitcoin as a kind of consensus game, in the game theoretic sense. See our earlier paper on the topic [1]).

They argue that Bitcoin is not incentive-compatible by virtue of the strategy they demonstrate. I think this question needs to be the crux of any Bitcoin research paper. I'll define "incentive compatible" to mean one of two things

(1) (weakly incentive compatible) If people follow their incentives, rather than the rules of Bitcoin as written down and understood by the community, then there _exists_ an equilibrium in which all players follow the rules.

(2) (strongly incentive compatible) The above equilibrium is the only equilibrium in Bitcoin.

The question of whether the current Bitcoin ruleset is incentive compatible strikes me as the most important Bitcoin research question: it answers whether Bitcoin, as a system, will continue to be stable over the long term. A secondary question is to ask "what rule sets could exist which would be incentive compatible?" Obviously, if the answer to the first question is "no" then the second question is more important.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5874786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5874786)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689254)

<comment><USER4> Gavin's post is not innuendo; he's just trying to be diplomatic in my view. However, I could not agree more with deepblueocean: figuring out if and under which conditions the Bitcoin network will tend toward an equilibrium in which all players follow the rules should be a priority for researchers. It's the biggest question mark hanging over Bitcoin's future.

I also agree that the Eyal/Sirer paper seems naive about markets.

\--

PS. This thread should be at the top of this page. (Currently, another thread I started is at the top; I hope this thread shoots up past it.)

<comment><USER2> If you'd like to cast Andresen's innuendo in the best possible light, I won't object.

But my assessment of his post is descriptive, not normative. When you respond to a detailed technical report by criticizing the way it was presented to the press, then suggest technical flaws without actually explaining what those flaws are, that is innuendo.

Maybe you feel innuendo is warranted. Whether the mining game in Bitcoin is or isn't tenable over the long term doesn't much matter to me, because I'm one of those people who feel Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, and has a spot price today that represents in part irrational excitement about Bitcoin and in part a cynical scalping of that excitement by speculators. Bitcoin could be the most solid imaginable distributed cryptosystem and I'd still have problems with it.

I was motivated to comment about Andresen's post because I was also struck by his Reddit comment on the ES paper, where it seemed that random laypeople on Reddit were better prepared to discuss the technical implications of the paper than he was.

<comment><USER4> I see your point, but still doubt that Gavin intended his post as innuendo. My assessment is that he's not yet ready to respond to the paper with carefully written, fully-thought-out, detailed technical counter-arguments, but wanted to assuage the Bitcoin community and address all those "sensationalistic headlines" put forth by "reporters on deadline" with an 'official response' as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"...it is unfortunate (but entirely predictable) that the release of a not- yet-peer-reviewed paper generated so many sensationalistic headlines. Peer review works best when everybody involved is given time for conversation and debate without being contacted by reporters on deadline."_

Translation: next time, please send us the paper in advance and get it peer reviewed before you start talking to reporters.

 _" I'm not going to write about the specific claims in the paper... However, it is good to note that in my initial review, I believe the paper's assertion of a fundamental flaw is based on some over-simplified assumptions about how the bitcoin mining market works."_

Translation: the paper's claims are probably wrong.

<comment><USER5> Why do they pander so much? It's hard to imagine pg ever writing something that tiptoes around like that, yet pg has been in dozens of situations requiring a public response to a perceived problem. He's never pandered, yet he's never suffered for it either. So is pg just a better writer than Gavin, or is this an academic tradition, or...? Just curious.

<comment><USER6> They're trying hard not to discourage academic research into Bitcoin, or to scare off security researchers. They desperately want _more_ security researchers. I actually think Gavin is handling this very well, and the response seems well-measured.

That said, the way this whole paper has been released smacks of sensationalism. I'll take the Eyal at his word that he's concerned with Bitcoin's future, but failing to adhere to the standards of responsible disclosure and entitling a blog post "Bitcoin is Broken" really make me wonder about what they're trying to do, other than self-promote.

Besides, this basic attack is something that has been discussed since 2010. There may be a few subtle differences in the paper, but based on my reading of the blog post, this is an attack that mining pools have even accused each other of doing a year or two ago. It's a potential problem, but definitely not a "Bitcoin is fundamentally broken" problem as the blog post claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gavin Andresen writes: > Peer review works best when everybody involved is given time for conversation and debate without being contacted by reporters on deadline.

In other words, the entire institution of science (computer science in this case) is better off if the individual researchers are careful about presenting things to the press and make sure to review things carefully before publishing.

But the incentive for individual researchers may not be aligned with this. An individual researcher might be able to advance their career by going to the press (particularly about a hot-in-the-news-right-now topic like Bitcoin) and by making sensational claims ("Bitcoin is 'Broken'!") even if the overall scientific enterprise suffers. After all, had you ever heard of Ittay Eyal or Emin Sirer before this? Given these skewed incentives, at least a few people will "cheat" the system by going to the press, and those people will profit by it.

Rather like Eyal and Sirer's claim for Bitcoin miners.

\- - - - - - - - - -

To discuss the merits of the paper itself (rather than Gavin's response), if a mining pool were to utilize the strategy described in the paper it would result in that pool repeatedly releasing new chains that are longer than the existing blockchain but which fork one OR MORE of the previously released chains. While this is allowed under the Bitcoin protocol (this is the way that forks in the chain get "healed"), it is also rather obviously visible. So if certain miners were following this protocol then it would quickly become obvious that they were doing so. The community would then be able to take actions to redress the problem.

<comment><USER8> I thunk it misses a fundamental point which is that this would be detrimental to the network. the assumption is that miners would join the dishonest/unethical miner to increase their block rewards, however it would be at the cst of bitcoins overall value and succcess. So you may get 25% more coins but you have coins that are worth less.

<comment><USER3> I think it's interesting to calculate how much less the BTC/USD exchange rate would have to be as a function of how much power the ES-adversary has. It's substantial!

One could even imagine creating "poison pill" derivative instruments where someone agrees to sell a lot of BTC if some predicate over the blockchain becomes true (such as a predicate that's only true if ES-mining is happening).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So basically: "I do not have a comment at this time."

That's fine and all. But not very newsworthy.

<comment><USER10> Except he did make a comment, although not a concrete one:

> However, it is good to note that in my initial review, I believe the paper's > assertion of a fundamental flaw is based on some over-simplified assumptions > about how the bitcoin mining market works.

<comment><USER11> Not playing by the rules as stated in the paper, can result in greater than expected return. It can also return less than expected, and on average you gain the most by being a well behaved mining node.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way bitcoin is broken is that there are people with VAST wallets that could be state actors. If the CIA truly did invent bitcoin then they have immense power on it and it's stability. The hard part about this risk is that there is no way to mitigate it.

<comment><USER13> There's absolutely nothing to suggest that any state actor created Bitcoin.

<comment><USER12> Actually there is quite a bit to suggest that a state actor created bitcoin. Satoshi is probably three people and the CIA and NSA don't really screw around when it comes to this type of thing. Even if they didn't create it, they had the man/computer power to control large chunks of bitcoin.

<comment><USER14> > Actually there is quite a bit to suggest that a state actor created bitcoin.

Not really. Most of the arguments are based on false premises, like the claim that the codebase is of high quality or has never had serious breaks. I've looked pretty deeply into Satoshi, and nothing makes me think it's not exactly what it looks like: one guy.

<comment><USER13> Every claim like this that says the code base is high quality has me rolling with laughter. The core developers at still trying to fix some of the crazy oversights that Satoshi left in the core code.

<comment><USER15> And even if it were, in what world does high-quality code imply state actor?

<comment><USER16> The part of the world where professionals who are able to write high-quality code are well paid for quality work.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but why does that mean government money? There are tons of very, very good programmers outside of the intelligence-industrial complex. "It's good, therefore the CIA made it" is unbelievably terrible logic.

<comment><USER14> "It's bad, therefore the CIA probably didn't make it" is fine logic; therefore the reverse also works fine - probabilisticly. If P(CIA|good) > P(CIA), then P(CIA|~good) < P(CIA).

<comment><USER15> Logically sound but significantly negligible. I'd say P(CIA|~good) is very small, but P(CIA) is _also_ quite small. P(CIA|good) >= 50% iff the CIA produces at least 50% of the good security-related code in the world. I don't see it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>