Is MySpace worth 12 billion? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/is-myspace-worth-12-billion/ <comment><USER2> Sure, as long as I don't have to pay it.</comment>


The Diolkos: an ancient Greek paved trackway enabling boats to be moved overland - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos <comment><USER3> Engineering in the ancient world has quite a few examples of "megaprojects" like this one.

Besides the well-known Egyptian Pyramids and Roman aqueducts, one interesting one I've recently learned about was about the columns in the Roman Pantheon were built: They were carved from single blocks of granite and then imported all the way from Egypt[0]:

" _The grey granite columns that were actually used in the Pantheon 's pronaos were quarried in Egypt at Mons Claudianus in the eastern mountains. Each was 39 feet (11.9 m) tall, 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter, and 60 tons in weight.[43] These were dragged more than 100 km (62 miles) from the quarry to the river on wooden sledges. They were floated by barge down the Nile River when the water level was high during the spring floods, and then transferred to vessels to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the Roman port of Ostia. There, they were transferred back onto barges and pulled up the Tiber River to Rome.[44] After being unloaded near the Mausoleum of Augustus, the site of the Pantheon was still about 700 meters away.[45] Thus, it was necessary to either drag them or to move them on rollers to the construction site._"

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#Portico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#Portico)

<comment><USER4> Saw the Pantheon in May and it is very impressive the columns are massive. The inside is equally impressive. It's one of the only, if not the only Roman temple where the interior survived.

So much of the Ancient world impresses me the more I learn. Seeing it amazes me more.

It's sad a lot of Ancient buildings or knowledge was destroyed as the next ruling party or ideology came to power.

<comment><USER5> Just, saying, the Parthenon is not a Roman temple :)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the _Parthenon_ is Greek, but the _Pantheon_ , under discussion here, is Roman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of a maneuver performed by Mehmed the Conqueror during the Siege of Constantinople:

"On 22 April, Mehmed transported his lighter warships overland, around the Genoese colony of Galata, and into the Golden Horn's northern shore; eighty galleys were transported from the Bosphorus after paving a route, little over one mile, with wood. Thus the Byzantines stretched their troops over a longer portion of the walls." [1]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror)

<comment><USER8> As this fascinating WW2 training film for US Combat Engineers demonstrates, improvised roads are still important for modern military operations:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-FDY8uMlsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-FDY8uMlsI)

<comment><USER9> I've travelled on a corduroy road in Alaska. Where the gravel was thin, the road was very rough. Slow going if you want to keep your truck together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm reminded of the movie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo) \- based on a real story, the making of the movie was even more ambitious than the original event.

        "The film production was an incredible ordeal,
        and famously involved moving a 320-ton steamship
        over a hill. This was filmed without the use of
        special effects"

<comment><USER11> A really great movie. That was the movie that got me interested in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog).

He is one of my favorite directors now. I like his documentaries, and feature films. He has a distinctive style, and a great passion, which often comes through the documentaries where he interacts with the characters.

<comment><USER12> He's coming out with a new movie about isolation in the digital age. I am very excited to see it.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "remaining in regular and frequent service for at least 650 years"

Amazing how long-lived many antique structures were. Apart from churches, I can't think of many 650 year old structures that are still used today.

<comment><USER14> Look in places where the city centre is more than 650 years old, hasn't been carpet bombed in WW2 and wasn't popular enough to be replaced by modern concrete or glass&steel highrises.

You will find hundreds if not thousands of towns in Europe with whole streets full of 13th/14th century timber frame/fachwerk houses in the city centre.

There are also dozens if not hundreds of 12th/13th/14th century stone bridges still in use - usually such bridges didn't fall down, but were taken down and replaced with bigger and better ones as cities expanded.

Though ultimately the only reason to keep around old bridges or houses - <USER2> like churches - is nostalgia. The modern version could replace the old constructions at very low costs and with much lower maintenance and better comfort characteristics. Like antique cars, it is the quaintness and historic significance that keeps them up rather than their actual infrastructural superiority.

<comment><USER15> I think you're underestimating the aesthetic value of older structures. Quaintness, nostalgia and historic significance are all slightly cheap- sounding reasons, whereas the value of artifacts/structures as aesthetic production is impossible to dismiss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the tv show "Vikings", Season 4, Episode 8, Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) came up with an ingenious plan to safely reach Paris: Lift their boats up the cliff, carry them across the mountains and slide them back into the river.

</comment><comment><USER17> _" Excavated letters and associated pottery found at the site indicate a construction date at the end of the 7th or beginning of the 6th century BC, that is around the time when Periander was tyrant of Corinth."_

Those crafty tyrants, always up to something.</comment>


The next Hacker News Seattle Meetup is Tuesday, October 4th at 6pm. - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetup.com/HackerNewsSeattleMeetup/

<comment><USER2> In case you aren't in the Washington state area, there are other meetups around the world.

[http://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=Hacker+News&mcId=z9...](http://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=Hacker+News&mcId=z98121&mcName=&lat=&lon=&userFreeform=&gcResults=&op=search&resetgeo=true&events=&submitButton=Search)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll be there with the camera again, need get better at the photography somehow.

More Photogenic Nerds Please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You still need to send me some of those pictures though!

<comment><USER3> Shoot me an e-mail i'll send 'em over tonight when I'm done with work and back at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm new to Seattle and I'm extremely excited for this meetup. New friends here I come!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised to see nearly 100 people signed up so quickly. Excited to be in town and finally able to make this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> I send the invite out to the Meetup group first, so people who are a part of the group get "first dibs." Then I post to HN, and then I send a last message out to the group to catch anyone who missed the first email/forgot/put it off.

There were about 90 people RSVP'd before I posted this thread up.

So if you want to be sure you get a spot next time, join the group and look out for the announcement email! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blarg, I worked at 500 Boren this summer and am going to be back in Jan. Hopefully I'll catch you guys then.

</comment><comment><USER7> Super happy to be a sponsor!

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to have you as a sponsor!</comment></comment>


Plex: a parser and lexer generator as a Rust syntax extension - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/goffrie/plex <comment><USER2> Probably want to choose a better name seeing as plex.tv is pretty well known. Or maybe it's named to be confusing, "I built Plex", i dunno

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I thought the Plex guys started using Rust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, just to clarify...is this a port of the venerable Python lexer generator called Plex? [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/plex/](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/plex/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to be confused with the media server.

Come on, pick a better name.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's also rustlex [1] that have been around for a while and provides rust stable v1.0 support through syntex [2]. I use it for a handlebars implementation [3].

[1] [https://github.com/LeoTestard/rustlex](https://github.com/LeoTestard/rustlex)

[2] [https://github.com/erickt/rust-syntex](https://github.com/erickt/rust- syntex)

[3] [https://github.com/nicolas-cherel/rumblebars](https://github.com/nicolas- cherel/rumblebars)

</comment><comment><USER7> The C comment example seems more simply solved using non-greedy matching. Is that not done because the parser absolutely does not support non-greedy (or minimal-munch) matching?

<comment><USER8> The parsing of C-style comments is a sort of standard example to demonstrate some additional features you have available when your lexer-generator is implemented using regular expression derivatives.

See section 5 of "Regular Expression Derivatives, Re-examined" for details: [http://www.mpi-sws.org/~turon/re-deriv.pdf](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~turon/re- deriv.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unless you are Greg Ewing, you should probably choose a new name.

</comment><comment><USER10> Rename it to parl</comment>


On the business of literature - <AUTHOR> http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2013/spring/nash-business-literature/?src=longreads

<comment><USER2> "..with the kinds of friends the book has, it needs no enemies.." A great read by Richard Nash, who in the 90's founded and built one of the seminal indie presses, Soft Skull. Would be great if he pushed this toward a book. No one else is writing about the history or future of publishing with such a depth of knowledge.

Also, loved the Vonnegut excerpt: "The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness."

Thanks for posting the story.</comment>


Parts of Model 3 Were Being Made by Hand - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-teslas-production-delays-parts-of-model-3-were-being-made-by-hand-1507321057 <comment><USER2> > Unknown to analysts, investors and the hundreds of thousands of customers > who signed up to buy it, as recently as early September major portions of > the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand, away from the automated > production line...

Why is this so accusatory? Was there some guarantee made that the Model 3's production line would be 100% autonomous, ever?

Sounds more like Tesla's doing what it needs to do to ship what it can.

Disclaimer - I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context.

<comment><USER3> > I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context.

[https://outline.com/AbbLRj](https://outline.com/AbbLRj)

<comment><USER4> Thank you. This should be the link in the title. Better still, we should reassess [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938) and ban direct links to pay walled sites.

<comment><USER5> There are still numerous ways to circumvent the paywall [0], or else linking to WSJ would be against the guidelines [1]

[0]: [https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock](https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe Tesla is bringing hand-crafted cars to the consumer market! /s

</comment><comment><USER7> I would have been surprised if this wasn't the case, I think people need a reality check!

<comment><USER8> It _is_ unusual. The article outright quotes an expert on that.

<comment><USER9> It's not unusual. It's in fact a common practice to hand craft components when building new products to full production scale at various stages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The story came from the WSJ which has a reputation of making things up when it comes to Tesla. A second confirmation source would be nice but it doesnt look like anyone else is touching this.

<comment><USER5> I agree, but the Tesla spokesperson didn't deny, and instead shot back with:

> For over a decade, the WSJ has relentlessly attacked Tesla with misleading > articles that, with few exceptions, push or exceed the boundaries of > journalistic integrity. While it is possible that this article could be an > exception, that is extremely unlikely.

I want Tesla to succeed, but as far as I see it, the burden of proof is currently on Tesla as they fell incredibly short of their claimed production goals for Q3.

<comment><USER11> it's not their first car and with a company that claims to be worth more than most of other car producers the inability to build and run a production line/process looks just ridiculous. What is going on there? Maybe they should outsource to China and get the whole manufacturing running in few weeks?

<comment><USER10> Tesla has officially replied to this and denied the WSJ article accusing them of being wrong and purposefully misleading along with images of the production line. [https://electrek.co/2017/10/08/tesla-model-3-elon-musk- image...](https://electrek.co/2017/10/08/tesla-model-3-elon-musk-images- production-line/)

Thanks for the downvotes, god I hate HN karma.

<comment><USER11> Yes, their legal/bs/accusations department is the only one delivering as planned</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game developers must avoid the 'wage-slave' attitude - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid-the-wage-slave-attitude/ <comment><USER2> Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on this.

This is no different than Method One adherents claiming Scrum and Agile project management would never work or that pair programming was a waste of resources, or that managed code would never compete with compiled C, or that front-end development couldn't be separated from back-end development, or app services would ever perform will enough to work, and the list goes on.

Given the right people, the right management skills and ideas, art can be made in a commercial business environment on a schedule.

There certainly are adherents to the old ways. Of pushing people beyond measure. Just go look inside a digital ad agency.

But even those places are learning new ways and getting pushed back by employees that have no interest in work for a penny less than they're worth.

(taking a breath)

That said, I do believe that success comes from giving of one's self. You can't expect to get anywhere or make any money without effort and without some level of "paying your dues".

The people that are successful without paying their dues are an anomaly, and are no different than people that win the lottery. You can't use that subset to make any point.

(breathing out)

If the only way you can make art is with freedom, then that is your way.

But you're simply wrong if you think people can't structure a business around game development that balances life and makes a profit.</comment>


The Cloud Act Is a Dangerous Piece of Legislation - <AUTHOR> https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/internet-privacy/cloud-act-dangerous-piece-legislation <comment><USER2> Despite the article's prolific use of "Attorney General Sessions," the bill would not only apply to him, but to _all_ future Attorneys General.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, so I guess I won't be using any cloud services of companies falling under US jurisdiction any time in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this marked as dupe? It's a horrible article but learning about CLOUD is very important.

<comment><USER4> Related discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16585430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16585430)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone seen an articulate defense of this legislation?

I can clearly understand the opposition, but I am having trouble figuring what is driving the introduction of the bill in the first place. I do not want to fully judge it until I understand what the other side is thinking.

<comment><USER6> > what the other side is thinking.

Generally the "other side" is law enforcement. The more power they have, the easier it is for law enforcement to do its job. People inside law enforcement may be less concerned about giving more power to law enforcement, because they can think "Hey, I know I won't abuse this power, so it's ok."</comment></comment>


Charles P. Thacker Wins ACM Turing Award - <AUTHOR> http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2010/turing-award-09

<comment><USER2> This is a good choice IMO. Even decades later, Thacker is still doing interesting work: <http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/news/features/bee3.aspx>

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. It's also nice to see Xerox PARC (indirectly) pushed to the spotlight. I think a lot of CS students in my generation (and younger) are unfamiliar with all the cool stuff PARC did back in the day.

The book "Dealers of Lightning" is fantastic for anyone interested in the stories behind Xerox PARC and all the other tech achievements that happened there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Funny timing since iPad pre-orders start in a few days which is taking a different approach than the Alto</comment>


Ask HN: What is your solution to data duplication across applications? - <AUTHOR> I work in enterprise and there is an incredible amount of replication and "de-normalisation" across both old and new applications.
I am investigating methods of record linkage, but it does not seem like a solved problem.
Is there a tried and tested method to go about matching the records and fixing the duplication? <comment><USER2> TLDR: Reframe the data duplication problem into a business problem.

It's an incredibly tough problem and I haven't seen it solved with technology alone (mind you, I've been working at banks for the last few years and have usually 100k+ databases so projects usually run out of money before all the data is consolidated!)

From a theoretical standpoint, the way to solve this and the holy grail would be a single source that becomes the system of record. Except all applications are now attempting to become the system of record for their domain which they really shouldn't.

There isn't really a tried and tested method to match the records and fix other than to go in there and create pipeline rules that fix it before it's being saved/ingested. Tools like Trifacta could help.

The real way to solve the problem is a competent IT team at both the executive and operator level to create a proper strategy that also is consistently delivering value as the data cleansing exercise is being done. What this means is having mapped out all the systems, prioritize and identify where the business gets most value from the data cleansing exercise and start fixing it there.

The challenge is that data cleansing exercises are usually multi-year projects. At the same time, you're expected from the business to deliver value so you need to figure out the strategy and consistently get and maintain buy- in from the business. Vendors are always touting their latest and greatest which exacerbates the problems further.</comment>


Nobody Ever Got Rich Working for Somebody Else. #horseshit - <AUTHOR> http://monsef.com/nobody-ever-got-rich-working-for-somebody-else-horseshit

<comment><USER2> "I don't have any exact numbers, but I would guess that there are actually more rich people in the world who got that way working for somebody else than there are rich people who were entrepreneurs at the start."

What kind of argument is that? It's backed by absolutely nothing. It also conflicts with everyone I've ever known.

Also, from the discussion here, the OP's definition of rich is a dubious one: "But generally, I think if you have a couple hundred grand in the bank you're rich."

If you're an employee, and assuming you've already paid taxes on that 200k, and you don't have kids in school or health problems, that's going to get you a few years down the road. It should be enough runway to get a new job with room to spare. As emergency money it's pretty good.

If you're working with 200k in the bank what does that get you? A down payment on a house you can't really afford? Maybe a sports car? Again this is assuming you're not going to put kids through school. That 200k means you're _rich if you don't spend it on anything rich_.

That 200k is decidedly not an amount you're going to retire on. You could take that 200k and start a business, but then we're in conflict with the idea that _starting a business is completely unnecessary_ for obtaining riches.

Having said that, I'd be very curious to know how many startup jobs made an employee 200k richer after they've moved on. Given that many startup jobs (at least in the US) are in the Bay Area with its high rent and high taxes and that the average startup salary is what, 100k? IIRC, 100k is going to put you at close to a 40% tax bracket in SF. So that's 60k - 24k for rent for the year? That's not a lot left for a lifestyle in that area. Assuming you saved very aggressively you could, at the outside, put 20k away a year? So that's 10 years. What could you have accomplished working for yourself over those 10 (critical) years? Possibly less, though I think the numbers are probably in favor of a 10-year entrepreneur in a field with low barriers to entry.

What percentage of the current crop of startups will ever see employees make significant amounts via their stock? If you want to roll the dice that way certainly the numbers favor the entrepreneur.

Work for someone because you believe in what they're doing or you simply need the money. Don't ever do it to get rich.

<comment><AUTHOR> "What kind of argument is that?"

Not a very strong one. I wasn't trying to argue, but rather suggest a new perspective. That out of the very few who strike it rich founding startups, there are many more who have earned a good salary and saved away a good amount of money while working their way up the corporate ladder.

"Rich" is a moving target for most people. As I noted, mine is different than most in the startup / bay area. I've been enough 3rd world countries to know what I need for comfort and happiness in my own life.

To have a few hundred $k in your bank account liquid is meaningful wealth. If you think in only sports cars and large houses, then yes... that goes quickly. If you think about it as the ability to travel, have leisure time, afford quality foods, etc. Then it is a quality of life that most in the world can't enjoy.

I agree with your last point to never do any kind of work just to get rich. Work on what you love, as a founder or employee.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, I'm pretty sure it's a bad argument.

Most rich folks are self-made, full stop. Here's some data: [http://www.benefitspro.com/2012/07/20/fidelity- finds-86-perc...](http://www.benefitspro.com/2012/07/20/fidelity- finds-86-percent-of-millionaires-are-self?ref=rss)

However, I think you're dead on with most of your points. Being self-employed is in the "necessary but nowhere near sufficient" category on the road to wealth. The vast majority of self-employed folks never get rich. The vast majority of them work harder and earn less than their employed counterparts (there's good data on this, but I'm too lazy to Google it).

Short answer: work hard. Be self-employed because it makes you happy and more satisfied, not because you want to get rich.

<comment><AUTHOR> Two issues.

1\. The definition of "rich". I've responded here that I mean a level of comfort that is better than 99% of the rest of the world. Not necessarily millions of dollars.

2\. Yes, a large percentage of millionaires are self-made... But were they self-made thousand-aires? Or did they earn the seed capital they started their businesses with? There are no doubt, those that had not a penny to their name but went and started collecting cans for the refund and used that to invest into a food cart or something... But I think most of those self-made people were able to create their businesses because they had a certain level of comfort that could be defined as rich to most in the world. (ie, if you even have access to get a loan for $100k to start a business, you're rich compared to a huge part of the world population.)

<comment><USER3> We can say that most rich people (as most Americans think of it) were self made or born into it. I think you're right that people should have better perspective on wealth. You should be able to find happiness with more wealth than 99% of the planet. On the other hand, a person earning $50k in New York City is making more money than 99% of the world. But I don't think either of us would call him rich. Context matters. A LOT. Source: <http://www.globalrichlist.com/>

Re: #2... I bet you're right. I bet many (most?) of them had pretty well-to-do parents, a free college education, easy access to credit, friends-and-family investors at their fingertips, etc. It's not a fair game by any stretch, but I think that's a different discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with most of it. Plenty of people have gotten "rich" working for someone else. That's undoubtedly true.

Not everyone has the ability, work ethic, brilliance, and 50 other things required to be an entrepreneur and/or and innovator, let alone a leader. Most of the time, people are just lazy and want the easy way out. So they empower themselves with bullshit reads like "start a company and be rich" when they have zero drive in the first place. Most people that are "rich" never became rich because they wanted money money money - they believed in something, worked day in and day out to accomplish when everyone else told them they're crazy. But they kept at it, worked hard, sacrificed, and money was a result of this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bubs, there are plenty of people that got rich sitting on their asses. But other then that, I completely agree with everything you said.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those lucky bastards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clearly this hinges largely on the definition of "rich." I suspect that as yearly income increases the percentage of entrepreneurs increases. The richest people on the planet generally started or invested in successful businesses, but if you call making 200,000 USD a year "rich" I suspect the vast majority will work for somebody else.

</comment><comment><USER7> All the large tech companies (Public) made the first 100+ employees "rich" by getting them to work for them. "Rich" compared to their peers who did not work at these companies early on. "Wealthy", now that's completely different. You will find that of the 1201 (Mar 2011) billionaires, only 28 worked for someone else.

</comment><comment><USER8> How do you define rich? Receiving a windfall of cash? A high salary? Financial independence via constant cash flow that provides you time/flexibility?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be any of those. "Rich" is able to live comfortably with no financial stress. For some that is a small home in a village somewhere off the grid spending their days fishing. For others it is millions of dollars. But generally, I think if you have a couple hundred grand in the bank you're rich.

<comment><USER9> People who live off the grid also live off the grid during a disaster such as Japan's tsunami. So there is the same trouble from lacking during a disaster as there is in this independence you connect to riches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Needed to be said.

</comment><comment><USER11> 431 words without the word "probability" or "likelihood". And his examples of getting rich as an employee are ... ballmer and marissa mayer. I can't believe he forgot the employees at Instagram -- they're good examples too!

I'm stupider for having read that drivel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still smart enough to use the word drivel, so I don't feel so bad.</comment></comment>


The tragic death of an actor: Molière (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.oup.com/2013/02/tragic-death-of-an-actor-moliere/ <comment><USER2> >"A year later, Molière's _self-mockery_ has grown more explicit. The new play is The School for Wives Criticised, a short, informal sketch, ridiculing Molière's critics in an argument about The School for Wives. Significantly, Molière didn't defend his own play onstage. Instead, he himself played an absurd Marquis, who attacks Molière and his work: 'I've just been to see it… It's detestable.' 'Talk to us about its faults,' says someone. 'How should I know? I didn't even bother to listen,' replies the Marquis."

PDS:

Good comedians/comedy writers -- mock other people...

Great comedians/comedy writers -- mock _themselves_!

<g></comment>


Onyx 0.6.0: Going Faster - <AUTHOR> http://michaeldrogalis.github.io/jekyll/update/2015/06/08/Onyx-0.6.0:-Going-Faster.html

<comment><USER2> It seems to me this will replace Storm for many uses, and it seems they knew this and they've been putting effort into taking on exactly that sort of use case:

"Based on user feedback, Kafka seems to be the the primary means that developers are interested in ingesting data from. We rewrote the onyx-kafka plugin from scratch to essentially mirror what Storm's Kafka Spout provides. That is, the Onyx Kafka plugin will dynamically discover brokers from ZooKeeper and automatically reconnect to an In Sync Replica (ISR) if any brokers go down. We also took a little detour to create onyx-s3. onyx-s3 is an S3 reader that handles faults by check-pointing to ZooKeeper."

<comment><USER3> As a Storm user, I can confirm this. I'm eyeing Onyx with great interest. It seems like the design is cleaner, and the development environment much more reasonable than with storm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really excited to see where this project goes. Has the best "to production" story I've seen from any of the batch/streaming frameworks.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate a bit on this aspect? In which way is it easier to deploy than Spark/Hadoop/...?

<comment><USER4> Onyx feels more like a library then a framework, so it's not as 'heavy' as other frameworks. Also, since it relies on pure data and pure functions, it was actually trivial to get up and running with it when I was evaluating it. There was about 20 lines of boilerplate I needed to copy, and then I just built a workflow with the functions I had already been using and it all just kinda worked.

I was able to develop in the REPL, which was a huge win, and deploying is as simple as uberjar / copy to host.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In another thread recently, someone mentioned that Phoenix wasn't a good name choice for a project because its been used so many times. I feel like Onyx is the same way. This thing might displace the other Onyxes for a while only to be lost to history when some other software project eventually is also called Onyx.

<comment><USER7> As long as Onyx is easily searchable while it remains relevant, I don't see this as a problem. Yes, this particular incarnation of 'Onyx' might be lost to history after it has stopped being relevant. So what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought this was Mac's Onyx tweek tool. I'm disappointed :(

</comment><comment><USER9> Who is using Onyx?

<comment><USER10> We at Cognician are using Onyx to calc stats for our event-sourced Datomic data. User gestures and events go in via the web server, and our Onyx workflow picks them up on the Datomic transaction report queue, runs calculations, and writes them back to Datomic.

We have around 10 workflows to store pre-calculated values and 'short-circuit' reference collections at the moment, and we're adding more all the time as we find hotspots in our web-tier Datomic queries that we want to speed up.

It's wonderful that we can use all the same notions we're familiar with in the rest of our stack (Clojure, ClojureScript, Datomic) – data-oriented, functional, immutable, dynamically typed. We get to use the same simple paradigm for the entire lifecycle of a user interaction. It's incredibly empowering.

We started with 0.5, and patiently fought through the difficulties that HornetQ produced, because despite those difficulties, it was a real pleasure to write code for Onyx. Now that 0.6 is out, with metrics, no HornetQ, a significantly faster dev mode thanks to the core.async transport, and a cleaner lifecycle API, it feels like we've been given super powers!

Michael and Lucas (the two core team members I've interacted with) are incredibly receptive to feedback and tremendously eager to help out if you get stuck, and we have learned a hell of a lot about this game from them.

If you're in Clojure at all, and you need something like this, look no further. Heck, even if you're not in Clojure, you should take a look.

<comment><USER9> What are user gestures?</comment></comment></comment>


Kevin Hale, Co-founder of Wufoo, on Mixergy  - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/

<comment><USER2> This interview is what sold me on Mixergy. If you have a SaaS app, the part about pricing plans is the most important 45 seconds of your day today.

</comment><comment><USER3> I listen to Mixergy as a podcast (not live) and usually end up deleting 19 out of 20 after I listen to them. This interview with Kevin Hale is one of the very first ones I decided to keep.

</comment><comment><USER4> I liked the Thank You card idea Kevin talked about and might have to start trying that myself.</comment>


We're building the GNU system [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/talks/ghm-2014/guix-ghm-2014.20140815.pdf <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but I find -- style flags that are actually commands to be extremely irritating. The new firewall-cmd system is an example of how obnoxious this can be, where every operation requires arbitrary -- prefixes.

While git has received a lot of well-deserved criticism for it's complexity, "git commit" is a lot better than "git --commit".

<comment><USER3> I knew someone would complain about the longopts shown in the slides. That was done to make it easier to understand. Normally, you'd just use the short flag, '-i' instead of '\--install'. Also, in Guix, you would say 'guix package', not 'guix --package'. A full example would be 'guix package -i emacs', which looks fine to me.

<comment><USER4> You're missing the point, it's not about the longopts. install is a command, not an option of a command.

<comment><USER3> Install is not a command, it's a possible transaction type of 'guix package'. Since Guix is transactional, it's perfectly valid to install and remove software at the same time: guix package -i emacs -r zile

<comment><USER4> I suppose you could see it like that although I don't see the use of it. Why not just have straight-forward commands like `guix install` `guix uninstall` `guix search` `guix update`

<comment><USER5> It's going to be much easier to read something like the above,

        guix package -i emacs -r zile

than your alternative:

        guix package install emacs remove zile

Bear in mind that a transaction could get arbitrarily long.

<comment><USER2> "Much easier" obviously means something different for you. So many utilities have "-r" meaning "recursive", for example, so it requires a real mental shift to think of it in these terms.

Describing transactions with arguments seems clunky at best.

<comment><USER5> "Much easier" because you can quickly tell the difference between a package you're installing or removing, versus the action to be taken with the package - as opposed to a bunch of strings of the form [a-z0-9]+ that you can't scan and need to actually _read_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For your convenience, the link to the "mothership" NixOS: [http://nixos.org/](http://nixos.org/)

I've been using NixOS happily for over a year now. The "secret sauce" is the same between Guix and NixOS. The main differences are:

* Programming language (Guile vs Nix)

* Choice of basic building blocks such as dmd / systemd

* Strong preference for GNU tools in Guix

* No support for unfree packages at all in Guix (in NixOS, they're disabled by default, but you can enable them)

</comment><comment><USER7> Just curious. For anyone who has used both Nix and Guix, which one do you prefer, and which do you think is more likely to gain traction (ignoring the 800lb gorillas of deb and rpm, for the moment)?

<comment><USER8> After playing with NixOS the past few days, never touched Guix, I think the former is more likely to be "taken seriously."

The ideas behind Nix/Guix are really interesting and a major improvement from traditional packagement solutions, and personally I much prefer using Scheme than a Haskell-derived DSL to configure my environment and operating system.

The problem is a political one: NixOS ships with current Linux standard technologies such as systemd, while this Guix-based OS uses this GNU dmd project I've never heard of until now, but I have no doubts its features and maturity is a fraction of systemd's (whatever is your opinion on systemd).

All for the sake of the free software radicalism. I love GNU and FSF and everything, but as a Linux user and administrator I'd really like we settle on something and build from there.

I may be mistaken, and open to criticism.

<comment> vezzy-fnord The features are a fraction of systemd's, yes. This is because dmd actually has a concrete idea of what it wants to do, and doesn't just arbitrarily consolidate functionality under the pretense of being a "basic building block to make a Linux-based OS from".

As for maturity, you are mistaken. GNU dmd was first started around 2003, before even launchd existed.

<comment><USER8> Maturity != age, maturity == number of eyes on a project + bugs fixed + real world usage.

As a comparison, the Hurd project started in 1990, Ubuntu in 2004. Which one is more mature? That is, which one would you use in a production environment?

<comment><USER9> You're comparing apples and squirrels. You probably wanted to say Linux or more mature than Hurd despite its 1 year head start, which is not as dramatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had seen the talk at ELS in 2013 (really? that was last year?) and was pretty intrigued back then. Might be some time before it replaces my beloved Slackware but I must say Guix is darn sexy already!

Also, finally, Lisp as a GNU systems programming language is becoming reality. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Will give Guix a spin now, interested in anything posix/real-unix style, which means I'd like to avoid systemd, that also means no nixos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's one of the reasons Guix attracts me as well. By the way, it's interesting to note here that when it comes to directory structure POSIX is much less strict than FHS [0], which NixOS and Guix largely abandon.

[0] [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap10.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Racket is getting pretty popular. Emacs is built on emacs-lisp. And now this is based on guile. I wonder how different these three lisps/schemes are.

I feel lisp enlightenment is long overdue for me. I'm just too busy for the past few years.

<comment><USER13> Elisp is quite old and lacking some modern features like lexical scoping and tail recursion as far as I know. I recall a project for replacing Elisp with Guile: [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs)

<comment><USER14> Elisp recently gained optional lexical scoping[0].

[0] [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Us...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Using- Lexical-Binding.html#Using-Lexical-Binding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks like it's the slides from a presentation... does anyone happen to have link to a video of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Videos from the GHM 2014 aren't online yet. They will probably be posted at [http://www.gnu.org/ghm/previous.html](http://www.gnu.org/ghm/previous.html) eventually. You can find video and slides of Ludovic Courtès' talk on Guix from the GHM 2013 at [http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2013/paris/](http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2013/paris/).

<comment><USER15> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Guile? Great idea. Can someone fix Emacs so that Guile (Scheme) is the default language? Stallman was pretty shortsighted with elisp.

[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs)

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't blame Stallman for being shortsighted with elisp. He began work on GNU Emacs in 1984. Scheme wasn't standardized until 1990.

I agree that Scheme would be a better choice of an extension language, and honestly I think Stallman would probably agree. It's more that changing the extension language would cause a lot of compatibility problems. I hope the Guile Emacs guys can pull it off.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it was standardized 24 years ago. I think Stallman's argument was that too much code was already written in elisp. For example, calc is a huge elisp app. He didn't want to lose apps like this:

[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/calc.html](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/calc.html)

<comment><USER18> Not sure if calc already existed in 1984.

But Stallman argued (in one of the early emacs papers) that dynamic scope is much more convenient for a editor than lexical scoping (as implemented in scheme or Common Lisp)

Dynamic scope makes it easier to change some variable per buffer. With lexical scoping you would need to simulate dynamic scope somehow to be able to change state per buffer.

<comment><USER19> Common Lisp supports both dynamic and lexical scope.

Emacs-like editors have been implemented in it, and there's no fundamental reason that a true Emacs couldn't be.

Scheme is more of a toy; I'd not prefer it to Common Lisp for a production system, whether that system is an OS or an editing environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord It appears that we're quite close to having a usable, if not production-ready, pure GNU distribution. The vast majority of Debian packages have already been ported to its GNU/Hurd.

On the other hand, they made the unorthodox decision to switch from dmd to sysvinit. Probably one of the very little systems to switch _to_ SysV, rather than from it.

<comment><USER8> The PDF talks about dmd. Do you mean they recently decided to switch to sysvinit? Got any link to the discussion?

<comment> vezzy-fnord I'm referring to Debian GNU/Hurd specifically, though it is the _de facto_ main hub for Hurd development.

Yes, here's the announcement: [https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel- announce/2014/05/msg00...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel- announce/2014/05/msg00006.html)

This is the blog of the person who did it, which features detailed development logs: [https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/](https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/)

<comment><USER20> I can't find any mention of dmd in those. Only "proof-of-concept upstream shell scripts"

I started to think: if dmd was revived in 2013, how could Debian/Hurd have started the effort to switch away from it in the same year?

This post talks of Debian/Hurd having "relied on its own init and rc system": [http://osdir.com/ml/general/2014-01/msg61628.html](http://osdir.com/ml/general/2014-01/msg61628.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a VM image for a system running guix? I am having trouble finding one.

<comment><USER21> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/

It requires QEMU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Direct link instead of Google creep: [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/talks/ghm-2014/guix- ghm-2014.20140815.pdf)</comment>


CoderQuiz: sharp coders' skills by questions and quiz. - <AUTHOR> http://www.dennyzhang.com/coderquiz.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the creator of the app. Feel free to contact me by [http://www.dennyzhang.com](http://www.dennyzhang.com)

Thanks.</comment>


Studies on Two-Layer Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/ <comment> barry-cotter > In other words, group selection can happen in a two-layer hierarchy of > nested evolutionary systems when the outer system (eg multicellular humans) > includes rules that the inner system (eg human cells) have to follow, and > where the fitness of the evolving-entities in the outer system depends on > some characteristics of the evolving-entities in the inner system (eg humans > are higher-fitness if their cells do not become cancerous). The evolution of > the outer layer includes includes evolution over rulesets, and eventually > evolves good strong rulesets that tell the inner-layer evolving entities how > to behave, which can include group selection (eg humans evolve a genetic > code that includes a rule "individual cells inside of me should not get > cancer" and mechanisms for enforcing this rule).

> You can find these kinds of two-layer evolutionary systems everywhere. For > example, "cultural evolution" is a two-layer evolutionary system. In the > hypothetical state of nature, there's unrestricted competition – people > steal from and murder each other, and only the strongest survive. After they > form groups, the groups compete with each other, and groups that develop > rulesets that prevent theft and murder (eg legal codes, religions, mores) > tend to win those competitions. Once again, the outer layer (competition > between cultures) evolves groups that successfully constrains the inner > layer (competition between individuals). Species don't have a czar who > restraints internal competition in the interest of keeping the group strong, > but some human cultures do (eg Russia).

...

> You need slack. In the evolution example, animals usually stumble across > slack randomly. You too might stumble across slack randomly – maybe it so > happens that you are independently wealthy, or won the lottery, or > something.

> More likely, you use the investment system. You ask rich people to give you > $10 million for ten years so you can invent fusion; once you do, you'll make > trillions of dollars and share some of it with them.

> This is a great system. There's no evolutionary equivalent. An animal can't > pitch Darwin on its three-step plan to evolve eyes and get free food and > mating opportunities to make it happen. Wall Street is a giant multi- > trillion dollar time machine funneling future profits back into the past, > and that gives people the slack they need to make the future profits happen > at all.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Notepad++ not ported to mac yet? - <AUTHOR> I love Notepad++. It's fast, slick and consistent.
But it does not run on Mac. People suggest Sublime, and it's ok too, but I keep wondering why the free source code from Notepad++ has not been ported. I can't be the first one thinking this, so I imagine that some technical reason.
Any inputs on why Notepad++ is not yet converted to Mac? <comment><USER2> Notepad++ heavily relies on Win32 API, porting it to another platform is like writing new editor. There are a lot of good cross platform text editors, devote some time learning one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> No need to. In particular Mac has TextWrangler and BBEdit, the former of which is free and similar to Notepad++ for basic functionality. (Edit: I should add that I first found Notepad++ while looking for TextWrangler for Windows).

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, Mac has many other text editors of the similar or better quality. I think nobody feels any need to spend time porting Np++ to a new platform and then supporting it.

</comment><comment><USER5> We have Vim installed by default.

<comment><USER6> While I don't think most people (or even many) would agree with you. As someone who uses Vim pretty much exclusively (and has a Mac), I kind of had to smile at this.

For most people though, Notepad++ and Vim are not the same type of animal.

<comment><USER7> Are they really, though? If you've put in the effort to learn Vim's command system (big if there), then they provide mostly the same things:

\- heavily centered around document editing \- encourage plugins over embedded features \- very good regex find/replace \- very good at editing massive files (the main failing of most other editors)

They both have syntax highlighting for most languages. I admit that some features of N++ need plugins in vim, of course, like spellcheck. I generally do use them for pretty interchangable situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once thought of porting it over to run on Ubuntu, but I read over the source, realized that Notepad++ uses the Win32 API quite extensively and quickly abandoned my plans. Ultimately, I would have ended up writing/supporting a totally new editor...then dealing with legions of people who are angry that my first 0.1 didn't provide an exact 1:1 feature match of Notepad++.

<comment><USER9> This is second hand info from 16 years ago, but my understanding is you can compile and link win32 source code against the wine headers/libraries to generate a "native" win32 application. I believe CorelDraw Office or WordPerfect Office or something like that did it for their linux "port".

You might still need to deal with gcc/msvc compatibility issues and the end product would only be slightly more native than running it via wine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Text Wrangler is lot nicer than Notepad++ for random ascii/script stuff. For bigger projects, use Sublime or some other IDE(ish) editor.

In addition to big IDE I have TW running all the time for notes etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Because better options exist: Text Wrangler, bbedit, vim, sublime text, atom, vscode, textmate, coda, brackets, komodo edit, jedit, and chocolat, not to mention all of the Jetbrains IDEs.

<comment><USER12> And Gedit with Kate are ported from GNU/Linux to Mac nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a clone that works on Linux. I assume it would be an easier path to get that working on OSX versus the actual Notepad++, which is rife with Win32 dependencies.

See: [https://github.com/notepadqq/notepadqq](https://github.com/notepadqq/notepadqq)

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know, but it works flawlessly in Wine, in my experience. If you use WineBottler, you get an app bundle with the actual app icon and it displays "natively", without X11. I like notepad++, but I use BBEdit on Mac. I don't like switching to an app with win32 keybinds on OS X

</comment><comment><USER15> Are you aware of Scite? "Notepad++ is SciTE on steroids."[1] It's available on OS X, not that I've ever used it on the platform.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sketchupruby/vt7DpvQNcDY/Vsp...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sketchupruby/vt7DpvQNcDY/Vsp99fNzwZAJ)

</comment><comment><USER16> Visual Studio Code and Atom are way better.

<comment><USER17> Feature-wise yes but Notepad++ is much much faster in my experience, closer to Sublime Text.

<comment><USER18> If speed (editor performance) is key, then VIM ... jump the first learning curve... and feel free to use neovim or the mac gui for neovim ([https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app](https://github.com/rogual/neovim- dot-app))

When it comes to actual editor performance, you dont get much better than VIM or Emacs... either of which perform well enough to load GB size files and not die on their face...

<comment><USER19> Have you ever tried hex fiend? That thing can load 20Gb files and allow you to scroll through it easily...How does it do it and why doesn't everyone copy them?

<comment><USER20> I've never used hex fiend (and have only needed that type of tool a handful of times), but from my understanding the reason this can be so much faster than a text editor is seeking for new lines. If you need to jump 50% through the file, with a hex editor you look at the size of the file and jump to the middle. For a text file you have to count all of the newlines (seek the entire file). Even if the text editor does clever things, many times plugins (like syntax highlighting) do things in naive ways.

Vim is /fairly/ fast even with very large files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the point when you have Vim, Atom, and Sublime Text?

</comment><comment><USER22> Notepad++ search feature is great and what I miss in Sublime. I think there are simply not enough developers to devote their time without some financial incentive.

<comment><USER23> Seriously, I end up using Notepad++'s find-in-files search as a grep, it works so much better than any other Windows grep tool I've found.

<comment><USER24> In my experience, it's a lot slower than Visual Studio's find-in-files and I prefer the VS Regex too.

<comment><USER23> I will grant you that, if I was searching files that are already under a solution that I have open.

But opening VS takes considerably longer than opening Notepad++, even with all the plugins I have added to Notepad++. One of the most common cases for me is searching for some particular message in a directory full of unzipped log files that some customer has sent to us.

<comment><USER24> > I will grant you that, if I was searching files that are already under a > solution that I have open.

Also for general searching on the file system

> But opening VS takes considerably longer than opening Notepad++

I will grant you that. If you have VS open all the time in your workflow its OK.

> One of the most common cases for me is searching for some particular message > in a directory full of unzipped log files that some customer has sent to us.

`Grep` shines if you need to repeat the search query (perhaps you get more logs the next day). You can save to a .sh file and run it again and again. You can also pipe stuff around to do more advanced searches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yep, no need. Lots of better alternatives out there.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am saying this only half jokishly but because Sublime Text meets all the needs?

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://github.com/sdeering/Sublime3-Theme- NotepadPlusPlus](https://github.com/sdeering/Sublime3-Theme-NotepadPlusPlus)

</comment><comment><USER28> Notepad++ is pretty great for Windows.

On the Mac, BBEdit (paid) and TextWrangler (free, more or less a light version of BBEdit) are both fantastic. Some people like TextMate too.

<comment><USER29> This: TextMate is basically the Notepad++ equivalent for macOS. CotEditor[0] isn't bad either, it all depends on what your needs are

[0] [https://coteditor.com/](https://coteditor.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why N++ when there's VSCode? Both free, but VSCode is better in most ways apart from maybe boot time?

<comment><USER31> VSCode chokes on much smaller files than Notepad++. N++ is more comparable to Sublime Text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not ideal - but does it work in Wine ?

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it is just because there are too less developers maintaining the editor on mac os.

</comment><comment><USER34> Emacs would be the first thing I would install if I were to get a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER35> CodeElite?</comment>


The History of 'Easter Eggs' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/technology/easter-eggs-tesla-google.html <comment><USER2> Depressingly every place I've worked has had policies against Easter Eggs.

I guess it is part of becoming a more professional industry. It we did add an Easter Egg it would likely need a spec, docs, owner, and code review.</comment>


In praise of cash - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost <comment><USER2> The core concept to remember I think is that there are two ways to pay for things:

* Ways that involve cash or cash equivalents

* Ways where a purchase requires the permission of someone else

Just think of the word authorization, which is a required element of essentially all non-cash transactions. It has the word authority embedded right in it. If you're OK with that concept, you are necessarily OK with the idea that someone you have never met and don't control has the ability to stop you from using your funds in the way you'd like to at any time.

A cashless society is, at a fundamental level, not free.

<comment><USER3> A cashless society would be an attempt to create a society that lacks basic economic freedom, but it would also fail. People will simply return to barter, and the use of whatever precious metals/stones/etc are hot that year.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, the US Government does not accept tax payments in turnips, emeralds, pirate treasure, moonshine, or Eth. Until that changes, you will need to interface with the USD economy.

The US government also expects your tax payment on an annual basis.

<comment><USER5> But, if you fully trade using any of those examples as money, you're actually invisible to the tax collector...

<comment><USER4> My landlord doesn't accept turnips either. And he needs to pay property taxes regardless of whether or not I'm renting.

<comment><USER3> Do you live in a cashless society?

<comment><USER4> The only time I touch cash is:

1\. When my girlfriend pays me her half for getting groceries.

2\. Which I then use to feed the laundry card refill machine in my apartment.

Mind you, I don't want cash to go away, but yes, I essentially live in a cashless society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing about the cashless surveillance panopticon is that it still can't stop illegal drugs. Every prison is exactly that kind of surveillance society, and in every prison drugs are readily available.

HSBC is one of the principle members of this privatised money system. It was found to be laundering money for international drug dealers, and got off with a slap on the wrist. _Nobody_ working at the bank has been prosecuted.

<comment><USER7> I don't mean to be pedantic, but that statement would definitely be improved with a link to a source

<comment><USER8> Plenty of examples from recent past, the more credible sources linked below, with drawbacks.

HSBA(ad-blocker blocker) [https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.for...](https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc- helped-terrorists-iran-mexican-drug-cartels-launder-money-senate-report- says/&refURL=&referrer=)

Wells Fargo/Wachovia [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-wachovia-laundered- billio...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-wachovia-laundered-billions-in- mexican-drug-money-2011-4)

Bank Of America(Paywall) [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303292204577514...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303292204577514773605576442)

No tin foil hat necessary for this one... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some people might like the idea of all transactions being monitored and controlled. Ensuring that people behave ethically, that they don't avoid tax, etc. The problem is that elitists can't help believing that they know how to run everybody's lives. So it wouldn't stop there and what future regulators claim to be ethical will morph into supporting a tyrannical status quo.

</comment><comment><USER10> After having my card skimmed for the 4th time (at a gas station pump, at checkout at grocery store, etc), I decided to pay for everything with cash. It's not worth the hours it takes to clear up things with the bank and I get a better understanding of where my money is being spent when my wallet gets light.

<comment><USER11> How many hours will you spend at the ATM withdrawing cash?

You get a better understanding of spending by feeling your wallet then by looking at your bank statements? That smells like a false pseudounderstanding.

<comment><USER12> You've clearly never tried to go cash-only. You _feel_ the pain when you buy something; pulling out a credit (or even debit) card does not have nearly the same emotional angst.

Seeing those bills go away with the knowledge that they're not coming back is quite enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A cashless society I will only ever come once human nature fundamentally changes. Say Canada gets rid of physical currency, the very next day people will use American money to buy things like drugs or stuff they don't want on their credit card like sex toys. Make a law against using other currencies and the market will just move underground. Even if every country eliminated paper money there will always be a way of exchanging high priced commodities, at which point the prevailing choice will become cash.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would never support getting rid of cash, it's a basic right to spend money without being tracked.

<comment><USER15> _it 's a basic right to spend money without being tracked._

No it's not. I very much want there to be a way to spend money anonymously, but I can't frame that as a 'basic right'.

<comment><USER16> If you consider money to be a form of speech (I don't but it's been successfully argued in US case law) then I'd argue it is a right as I'd argue availability of anonymity is a prerequisite of free speech.

<comment><USER17> Whenever one makes a purchase, the price structure of the good that was purchased changes, and in the case of goods/assets that have a yield, it also changes its interest rate structure. This is information being propagated from the consumer to the merchant, via the price system, using money. So while the act of exchanging money for goods is not information in and of itself, as speech is, this act results in the propagation of relevant information from consumers to merchants to producers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I agree that cash is extremely convenient and largely anonymous, it is still much more of a hassle to manage than credit or debit cards are. I lived in NYC for a bunch of years and the one thing that I absolutely do not miss is paying for >$100 dinners, entirely in cash, because the restaurant was "too cheap" to handle processing and transaction fees.

<comment><USER19> > because the restaurant was "too cheap" to handle processing and transaction > fees.

I applaud businesses like this. The fact we slowly let a few giant private corporations enact a 1-3% fee against pratically the entire consumer economy would be ludicrous in any other situation.

Plus the privacy concerns just are not worth the convenience. Whenever possible I use cash, simply so I slow the day coming where I can't function in society without having my entire spending history out there for any agency to decide to take a look at.

<comment><USER20> I'm not a big fan of credit cards, but cash isn't free.

<comment><USER21> Money is an information and accounting system. Regardless of how implemented, it has processing costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can already feel the pain in CN. Almost everyone is using WeChat in tier 1 cities. WeChat is like WhatsApp/FB-Chat but with integrated Paypal-clone. It has also an integrated Didi app (Uber/taxi hailing).

You feel the pain if you don't have a local bank account and therefor cannot use the WeChat wallet. So you cannot hail a Taxi with Didi, you have to do it the old way by waving the hand. It's already really a pain, if you don't look like a local but being a visitor from the west. I heard there are restaurants that accept no cash anymore. It's also not so great that bank debit cards now have some regional lock, you have to deactivate it before you travel abroad, otherwise you cannot use ATMs there. Been there, learned it the hard way, good I had 300 USD in cash with me to survive 3 days until the debit card region locked got processed around the globe to enable ATM cash deposit. Let's hope current kind of paper cash stays around and will be a legal and common payment method for a long time to come.

</comment><comment><USER23> Do people remember when companies in the past provide his own currency to control people them own?

Because he have your money, he own you.

<comment><USER24> Well, governments stepped on it, and moved the point of control a notch above.

What is unsettling is that governments could create a digital payments system that didn't depend on any single authority. This would be convenient enough that I can't imagine it not gaining the entire market (even from cash), and making this move much more palatable. This would be a much easier way for govs to get their so desired universal surveillance. Yet none is doing that. Why?

<comment><USER25> Because the government needs to print cash to pay off debt, that's why the Federal Reserve exists.

<comment><USER24> I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm talking about the government issuing digital money.

To make it clear, I don't think it's an entirely good thing, but it would be a much easier path to the kind of surveillance they want to create.

<comment><USER26> Most money is already digital.

<comment><USER24> Most digital money is not government issued...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My biggest concern is the frightening fact that all of these cashless systems are powered by private, for-profit banks. I'd be more fine with a move to cashless if the fundamental system which powered it were operated by the Fed (for free, as a public service), not Visa or Mastercard.

<comment><USER28> I go the other way. If Visa decides they don't like me, Mastercard or American Express may still do business with me. If the Fed decides they don't like me, my only option is to leave the country.

<comment><USER29> If the people who run the Fed decide you shouldn't spend or receive money, they'll make sure it goes that way regardless.

And I'd much rather be taxed by my government than by the shareholders of my bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can this article fail to mention Bitcoin?

<comment><USER30> My thoughts exactly. A blockchain is exactly the solution to a shared, secure, accurate public ledger without the need for a trusted third party like a bank (not that current blockchains are perfect, by any means)

"The cashless society – which more accurately should be called the bank- payments society" Due to this sentence I'm forced to believe the author has literally never heard of bitcoin, which seems impossible

<comment><USER31> Bitcoin is still an intermediary between the buyer and the seller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I want to continue being able to pay by Cash as it's the only to guarantee my privacy. But, because of the miles I get using my credit card, I end up almost never using any cash.

I'll have to think about this, do I value the plane trips so much that I'm willing to compromise on my values regarding privacy?

I'm also going to look into blockchain currencies like Bitcoin to see what potential currencies would guarantee my privacy.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've never used cash regularly in my life. I hate carrying extra stuff around, so just have one of those card holders attached to my phone. I feel like older people are ingrained with cash, but it hasn't come into my life at all. College kids these days even use Venmo to buy drugs.

Of course I know I'm subjecting myself to tracking which is somewhat scary but I guess the convenience has outweighed that for me.

<comment><USER34> You're also sending a 3-5% tithe to the payment processor (credit card company, bank, electronic payment provider) with every transaction instead of giving that money directly to the service provider.

<comment><USER33> Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store. And many of the mom and pop shops around me require a minimum purchase or charge a 50 cent fee for using a card.

<comment><USER35> > _Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the > store._

The store passes the cost right back to you, the consumer, in the form of higher prices. You didn't just think they absorbed the cost out of the goodness of their hearts, did you?

<comment><USER33> Of course not. But some percentage of customers still use cash. So the store might raise prices by 1.5 pct instead of the 3pct that Visa charges them. This essentially means those who use cash are subsidizing the card users. If they raise it the full 3 percent then the cash users are paying extra for a service they don't even use!

<comment><USER35> That doesn't negate either coldpie's or my points; if anything, having people use cash effectively helping to subsidize the "credit card tax" only adds more weight to the argument that it's an unreasonable arrangement that only serves to enrich the credit card companies.

<comment><USER33> yes it does. from a game theoretic perspective, it only would make sense for me to switch to cash if everyone else did so that the store wouldn't incorporate the extra fee into the price of their goods. However, one can't control others, they can only control their own behavior. So in a situation where there goods cost extra, because others are still using their cards and the owner has to markup prices, the only rational thing to do is to use the payment method you prefer. And economically speaking, all the cash users are paying extra for a good they don't use.

<comment><USER36> You forgot a rule of the "game".

You can negotiate price with cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Couldn't a lot of the downsides with the credit card system be at least fixed somewhat by anonymization? E.g a card that generates new numbers for each transaction stops the store from tracking my purchasing habits. Similarly a store that doesn't record any more than the amount to the cc company limits what is recorded.

I'm not saying this is in the interest of either retailers, banks or credit card companies - but it should at least be possible in theory to improve on the status quo e.g by regulation.

The best solution imho would simply be a credit card you can "charge" with plastic cash from your bank account, instead of going to the ATM. The amount stored on the card is then used like cash and then it's re-charged from the account when it's empty.

All the cc company sees is the charging withdrawals and the retailer doesn't see any credit card information as the transaction is made with "cash".

I have seen attempts at this (e.g in Sweden 10-15 years ago) but none successful unfortunately.

<comment><USER38> In a lot of places the public transport cards (that are anonymous and can be recharged with cash) are also accepted for payments at various retailers (see Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong...) and are very popular since everyone already has one to ride the subway, so why not buy a drink at the convenience store with it too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> And then there's companies like Square that decide to tie their political ideology into their terms of service.

[http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/13/technology/square- guns/index...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/13/technology/square- guns/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Also most cash is used for crime, abroad.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/-100-bi...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/-100-bills- make-up-80-of-all-us-currency-but-why/265518/)

</comment><comment><USER41> "Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws." \--Rothschild, 1744

</comment><comment><USER42> In a rare moment of being in favor of centralization, this article has me wanting almost immediate government takeover of credit / banking systems, as they control cash monies.

The only other instance is pharmaceuticals, that industry being "for profit" is nothing but bad news.

</comment><comment><USER40> In the UK, I basically never use cash, it's annoying, having random coins/notes in my pockets, with no pin code to stop them being used, and having to get change.

</comment><comment><USER43> National security. When there's civil unrest, or war, all the permission channels are going to go down. Cash is freedom.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is indeed a fearsome trend we should be on guard against, but there's one thing making me feel it'll never happen in the US: Cash is indeed preferred by criminals, and the government is criminal. There will always be cash for the CIA's drug trade, for example.

</comment><comment><USER45> But cash is an untraceable anonymous currency, used by drug dealers and child pornographers!

<comment><USER46> If you believe the gov't propaganda, yes. But drug dealers and child pornographers will _always_ find alternative methods of payment because their activity is illicit.

The real reason of the move to cashless is taxes and the fact that governments everywhere borrow without intending to ever pay back. When the shit hits the fan, the payment will come out of your and others' bank accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> _> This second mode of money is essentially private, running off an infrastructure collectively controlled by profit-seeking commercial banks and a host of private payment intermediaries – like Visa and Mastercard – that work with them. The data inscriptions in your bank account are not state money._

This raises a question in my mind which probably shows my ignorance of finance more than anything, but here goes:

Why not just have a _public_ system of electronic transactions?

What I mean is, the current system of electronic transactions feels to me a lot like the way things were back in Ye Olden Days with cash. Cash didn't start out as state money, it started out as _private_ money -- notes issued by individual banks, promising to pay the recipient in coin or specie on behalf of the bearer. (Which is why paper money is still referred to in some places as "bank notes.")

Which was fine for a long time, but as commerce got bigger and more widely distributed, it reached a point where it didn't scale anymore. Every note was only as dependable as the bank it was drawn on, and the farther away the transaction was from that bank the harder that reliability was to evaluate -- uncertainty which added risk to transactions. So governments started removing that uncertainty by organizing central banks and issuing their own notes, which became the paper currency we all know today.

Fast forward to now. We have modern cash, which has all the virtues the article cites; and we have a separate system of online payments which lacks those virtues, run by private companies who take a non-trivial piece of every transaction for themselves. Those drawbacks weren't too important when electronic payments were a new thing, because it wasn't clear then that they would ever be more than a niche product for the convenience of rich people. But now they're everywhere, and it seems inevitable that at some point they'll become the universal method of payment.

So why not do like we did with bank notes and cut out the middleman? Why not have electronic payments systems operated by governments, in the same way that they print currency? It seems like it could solve a lot the of problems with a cashless society at a stroke, and help the economy to boot by returning the percentage of each transaction that used to go to the banks back to productive circulation.

(The cynical part of me says that the reason is because the middlemen in this case are banks, and in the modern world banks tell governments what to do rather than the other way around.)

<comment><USER48> You say bank notes were redeemable for "coin or specie," but really that's state money. So state money precedes bank money. This was also a horrible system, because bank notes didn't have guaranteed parity (with each other or with state money) or guaranteed redemption.

Also, the "final" clearing system for electronic transactions is public. In the US, it's called Fedwire, which is operated by the Federal Reserve which, despite various paranoid ramblings, is a public institution. The problem is, only reserve banks are allowed to have accounts with the central bank, which makes the system appear private. It's even trickier with credit cards, where you're basically asking a credit provider for a loan every time you swipe.

So maybe the better question is, why isn't there a national depository bank of the United States? And then you can advance whatever answer you want for that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> _The Death of Cash_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947219) (1.5 yrs ago)

</comment><comment><USER50> In my experience as a college student, it is exceedingly rare to use cash, especially cash in amounts greater than $5, for anything other than crime. While you can argue that one should be able to reasonably break laws and not get caught - anything else is a surveillance state and there is value to discretionary enforcement - I wouldn't characterize criticism of cash as just manipulative.

For example, on my campus, the vast majority of all cash transactions, from what I've experienced, are to buy illegal drugs or to illegally obtain alcohol. The rest of the transactions are with dining services and with clubs. Because dining services has to keep so much cash on hand, they are a major target for crime; they need to hire more expensive managers to count it, they need to have more cameras and security staff to monitor it, and they need to hire armored guards to carry it off to the bank. In the past front line employees have been shot in armed robberies, so yes, the many safety mechanisms are necessary.

What incentive does anyone in this story have to keep using physical cash? It is crazy insecure, dangerous, inconvenient, and used often for illegal things. The criminals (who are more than you'd think; who do you know who hasn't broken at law at least once or twice?) have an incentive to keep cash around. That is legitimate, but as a society, a better approach would be to rewrite our laws to better capture the realities of human behavior and serve the community interest. When people are routinely getting away with things (drinking, smoking, etc.) it is probably time to make them legal and grant those people the full protections of the law and the monetary system - including non-physical value.

<comment><USER51> Have you never paid for admittance to a club? Paid a busker? Gone shopping at a thrift store or pawn shop? Bought something at a garage sale? Paid for dinner and tipped without having to split the check for n different cards?

Your post reeks of inexperience.

<comment><USER52> I've actually wondered what the impact on buskers, clerks that make some money off a tip jar, etc. is of the shift toward plastic. I guess, in the US, a dollar bill is still a relatively small amount. But I know that I basically _never_ have change on me these days unless it's quarters to put in a parking meter.

<comment><USER16> I imagine tip jar employees are doing all right. I used to drop a dollar and whatever coins I got back as change in there, now I push the 20% button on their iPad, which is almost always more.

<comment><USER51> It varies, right? If it hits the iPad or whatever, then the tip goes through management, has to be taxed, may be tipped out to other people, whatever.

Some of that is simplified by just having a jar of cash with limited options for opaque gaming.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trump Hosted Zuckerberg for Undisclosed Dinner at the White House in October - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-hosted-zuckerberg-undisclosed-dinner-white-house-october-n1087986 <comment><USER2> Haven't previous presidents and candidates met and talked with some of these cos about how to use social media to improve their campaigns and outreach. Not that we know what was discussed. But I'm not sure this is news unless I'm missing something

</comment><comment><USER3> Fb is going to have to lobby every government hard, they're rolling out their own centralized currency.

<comment><USER4> Even if you think this is bad, just consider that its a race now between the US and China on a global crytocurrency. I sure do not want China winning that race.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the author:

It's unclear why Facebook and the White House didn't admit Zuckerberg, Trump and Peter Thiel had this dinner until we found out separately and asked Facebook.

It's also unclear what the Facebook CEO, board member and president talked about.

<comment><USER5> The meeting was made public, which is why we're reading about it. I think it's obvious why people wouldn't go out of their way to say they had a meeting with trump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hope he enjoyed the hamberders</comment>


Things they don't tell you about MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.itexto.com.br/devkico/en/?p=44&utm_content=bufferac855&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer <comment><USER2> I hope this site's not built on SQL if you're trying to throw a jab and mongodb. "Error establishing a database connection"

Cached Version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ite...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.itexto.com.br/devkico/en/?p=44)

<comment><USER3> Yes, because everybody knows that, unlike a RDBMS such as MySQL, NoSQL databases like MongoDB can handle _any_ volume of requests on whatever hardware you have available and without any fine-tuning of configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "For the "Lightning Consult" plan it costs US$ 450,00 per hour, and you have to buy at least 2, so it cost at least US$ 900,00 to any company. "

At first I thought they were charging 45 thousand an hour till I clicked through to Mongo's page and realized author is using the Brazilian/European commas instead of periods (price is $450 an hour).

<comment><USER5> Sometimes, free can be very expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't this one of the algorithmically generated headlines?

</comment><comment><USER7> I will second RoboMongo being my go-to frontend. (Half the frontends recommend in the mongo docs are defunct!) It's really quite hard to be PhpMyAdmin as a very useful universal db tool.

I will also unabashedly plug my own budding frontend, which I _strongly encourage_ all of you to take a look at and help flesh out! [https://github.com/classicspecs/Flask- MongoMyAdmin](https://github.com/classicspecs/Flask-MongoMyAdmin)

<comment><USER8> > (Half the frontends recommend[ed] in the mongo docs are defunct!)

That sounds like someone needs to open a pull request on the docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Error establishing a database connection

Lol

<comment><USER6> Seriously, the algorithmically generated headline program, could automatically stage and generate common error connections and drive the HN crowd nuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I didn't expect so much traffic on my blog! :)

Well: I think that things will normalize now. (at least I hope!)

</comment><comment><USER11> MongoDB's limitations have been well publicized over the past few years, but if you need another reason to avoid using it, take a look at which bug tracker they use ([https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3110](https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3110)). JIRA. You simply can't trust code coming from a team that uses JIRA as their bug tracker.

<comment><USER12> JIRA can a great tool, but that has nothing to do with mongodb nor the quality of the code the team produces.

<comment><USER11> I used JIRA for a number of years on a daily basis and it is easily the worst bug tracker I have ever used. I would choose any other bug tracker I have used over JIRA any day, even BugZilla.

The connection to mongodb is that their team chose JIRA and continue to use JIRA. I was implying that by choosing such a horrible bug tracker that you must question their code for mongodb.

In retrospect I probably should have added a smiley face or not made the comment at all, since it's entirely possible they didn't have a choice in the matter and JIRA was chosen for them by a pointy haired boss. After all, I was forced to use JIRA at my previous job and the quality of code I produced and technical decisions I made were not affected by choice of bug tracker. So to any mongodb devs reading this who may have been offended, I am sorry and I feel your pain in having to use JIRA, I hope you can escape it soon :)

<comment><USER8> I think it might be a case of JIRA is the worst, except for all the others (Ever used TFS2010?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please stop posting these. Nothing new in the post. Yes, MongoDB is overrated. Documents store should be capable of doing a whole lot more than MongoDB offers. Sign up to be notified when Amisa server becomes generally available. [http://www.amisalabs.com/](http://www.amisalabs.com/) Thanks in advance for your interest.

<comment><USER13> I really hope you don't actually represent these folks, because you just made yourself look like a real ass.

<comment><USER5> That's your view and maybe a few others and everybody is entitled to their own view(s).</comment></comment></comment>


Linux is not an Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://www.tech-no-media.com/2009/07/linux-is-not-operating-system.html

<comment><USER2> "Linux is not an Operating System?" Come on! That's just pedantic. Honestly, when you hear the word Linux do you automatically think of the kernel by itself or do you think of an entire OS? Personally, I go straight to the latter.

<comment><USER3> _Honestly, when you hear the word Linux do you automatically think of the kernel by itself or do you think of an entire OS?_

The kernel, of course. GNU/Linux is the most popular OS based on Linux, but there are other OSes based on it (usually for embedded systems, where the GNU userspace is too large).

<comment><USER2> The kernel, of course.

Silly of me to have asked the question in the first place then? I'm aware of many differences between distributions. Still, I wouldn't hasten to claim that the kernel is the only similarity between many or even most distros.

<comment><USER3> Most distributions are GNU/Linux -- ie, they use the GNU userland tools (gcc, bash, coreutils, sometimes Gnome) and the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux is the most popular OS based on the Linux kernel, but there are others. Android and Chrome are two examples of non-GNU operating systems based on Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing new: "it's a kernel," and so on.</comment>


Woolly mammoth will be back from extinction within 2 yrs say Harvard scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/02/16/harvard-scientists-pledge-bring-back-woolly-mammoth-extinction/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty cool that they might be able to bring something like a mammoth, or rather mammoth-elephant hybrid to life, but I'd rather see them use this technique to preserve highly endangered species, rather than something for which there is no natural habitat --that is, if released into the wild, the perturbations might lead to unintended consequences in other species as it has not existed in nature for thousands of years.

But if we must, I'd like to see the dodo bird, the passenger pigeon and the Tasmanian tiger.

<comment><USER3> The capability of being able to "respawn" extinct species is rather important, though, since we may be causing a mass extinction event via human-induced climate change. At some distant future date, it may be possible to revert much of the damage we're currently causing to the Earth.

It seems frivolous and silly, but I think this is actually very important research. You can't store species the way you can store seeds the way they're doing in Norway.

<comment><USER4> I agree this is vital and fascinating, but maybe we should get the Elephant out of the danger zone.

I wonder if we'll ever bring back Neanderthals too.

<comment><USER2> >I wonder if we'll ever bring back Neanderthals too.

No, not while we all live on one Earth. We can't even coexist peacefully with our same species, can you imagine having another apex species we'd see as direct competition not only to resources, but to our pre-eminence?

The alternative to bring them to life for scientific research would be an ethical non-starter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Actually,it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits."

Big difference.</comment>


Venture Capital's Sluggish Performance - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/venture-capitals-sluggish-performance/

<comment><USER2> Every financial fund has two purposes: 1) make a return for investors; 2) pay out the employees

Just like hedge funds, only a subset of VC firms make a decent return for their investors. However, nearly all do a pretty good job of ensuring healthy salaries and bonuses for their employees.</comment>