Ballmer's Exit Adds $18 Billion To Microsoft's Value - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/23/ballmers-exit-adds-18-billion-to-microsofts-value-as-investors-cheer-its-impending-leadership-change/ <comment><USER2> Microsoft needs systemic changes. There may some truth in the fact that ballmer is to blame. But a new ceo will face the same challenges. Markets are irrational.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perception is a powerful thing.

<comment><USER4> The market tries to be forward looking. It seems to think the future got brighter (or at least not as dark).

<comment><USER5> Or at least now maybe there is room for change.</comment></comment></comment>


Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1026390/humans-want-equality-researchers-found-as-long-as-the-rich-stay-rich-and-the-poor-stay-poor/ <comment><USER3> I think this article misses a key point about fairness that seems to be ignored (I have not read the underlying paper, so perhaps its bad journalism)

In this scenario:

"In the first scenario, participants had to decide if they wanted to transfer two coins from person A (who already had four coins) to person B (who had one). Researchers note the "transfer would reduce inequality," (as there's less of a gap between them), but person B would end up one coin richer than person A, reversing their status."

"Just 45% accepted the redistribution when it changed the hierarchy."

They have focused on changing the hierarchy, and this is where fairness comes in.

Should people who have "wealth" be forced to a redistribution mechanism, where that person ends up poorer than everyone else? - Its one thing to redistribute for to reduce or eliminate inequality, its another to make them poorer than everyone else (even if the overall equality is reduced)

So I don't think its about maintaining the hierarchy, but a sense of fairness in the redistribution

</comment><comment><USER4> I mean, it's interesting but a bit flawed. When you've got 5 coins total and you're saying someone has to be a loser. Why not do the experiment with 4 coins? I don't think humans want equality "as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor" \- that's a pretty poor summary of the findings.

What the findings DID discover, and shouldn't be surprising to anyone, is that 45% of people think it's unfair for you to take so much away from the person who "has money" that they end up with less than the person who you're supposedly helping.

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised that only 45% of people think this is unfair. That's a disappointingly low number.

<comment><USER4> Well, I think that's because the premise of how they first acquired the money is that it was "completely random".

So ya, if Bill Gates randomly started pulling names out of a hat and handing out money, I think people would tend to feel less bad about that money being redistributed than something that was actually earned.

<comment><USER6> In that circumstance, the money _was_ earned - by Bill Gates. Why should stealing it from him make someone feel less bad than stealing it from someone else?

<comment><USER7> GP is saying the reverse: that people shouldn't feel bad if the money that Bill Gates hands out randomly is redistributed _again_ , since none of the people he gave it to initially had earned it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If the world actually equitably shared wealth, the western would have an absolutely astounding drop in our incomes and quality of life. Few would accept this. The average person in the first world has a massively higher quality of life than developing countries.

This is why the only long term answer is technological development, without which we would all still be subsistence farming (and all poor). It would be nice if we had more social advances coupled with this, but that is predicated on human nature taking a different turn than it has historically acted.

<comment><USER9> While the average quality of life in the western world is still currently higher than the global average, there have been recent data points in the US that globalization has drug certain subsets of the US down to 3rd-world levels of life quality[1][2]. Globalization is desirable on many levels and happening, and it is already beginning to pull down on the bottom end of western society (and similarly, pull upwards on the bottom end of non-western societies).

What we're getting is globalization (which essentially causes equalization across geographic/national boundaries) without wealth redistribution (within national legal boundaries), which means that while the global average scales are slowly equalizing, there will continue to be a vast split between the rich and poor everywhere.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_County,_West_Virginia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_County,_West_Virginia#Life_expectancy) [2] [https://www.sanders.senate.gov/life-in-mcdowell- county](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/life-in-mcdowell-county) \- "Men in McDowell County have the same life expectancy as men in Namibia"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That is an interesting study, but it isn't too surprising to me. I think most people recognize that a certain level of inequality is natural, and is often driven by legitimate differences in personal character and discipline. I think the aspect of inequality in America that irritates most people is the degree of inequality combined with the fact that it's only the rich that is experiencing an improving quality of life. This on top of the fact that inequality is being driven less by differences in personal character and more by differences in the return on capital vs return on labor. There are multimillionaires who aren't any better than the rest of us, but because they have significant stores of capital, they do much better than the rest of us.

<comment><USER11> One thing that's forgotten, I think, is that some degree of income inequality is a natural result of giving people freedom to choose how to live their lives. Person A might say "I want to have lots of cool stuff so I'll work 12 months a year" and earn 100k. Person B might say "I want to stop and smell the roses so I'll work 6 months a year" and live off of 50k.

Sadly, this isn't really possible. By designing a system in which you more or less start life indebted, health care is tied to full time employment, and you will be forcefully removed from land that isn't "yours" (though really it was stolen a few centuries ago from a peasant or a native American for most of the world) the latter option is removed from a lot of people.

We've somehow built the worst of both worlds, I worry, with near-feudal degrees of inequality (though admittedly the baseline is higher), combined with reduced individual freedom and leisure to live the life one chooses with respect to balancing work and life.

Sometimes I wonder if more of the poor, given the choice, would prefer to live a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle like that of people thousands of years ago, if only we hadn't made it illegal via enclosure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's easy to fall into this trap of thinking that we need to hold out our hands and ask (beg?) for wealth distribution. But this mentality of expecting someone else to come to the rescue is why we remain "poorer" than these other people. Especially now that we all have access to the world's information - <USER2> should be easier than ever to take care of ourselves and even coordinate boycotts of useless goods and services that the rich rent-collectors use to reap the harvest of proletarian dollars.

The founders of places like America and Rome were self-sufficient agrarians. The appeal of these places was that they were new and independent of other powers. The people that settled there were escaping the rich city folk in cultures that had already been developed.

But a century of rapid industrialization has yielded less capable, reliant people that have gradually lost their way of providing for themselves. Media has poisoned the minds of economic participants, from a young age, to desire more/bigger things than their neighbor, and that is a primary factor in the simple desire to be "rich".

These days there aren't really any new areas like these aforementioned to "discover" and cultivate (perhaps Alaska, but this place is not for weak people which in turn makes it exclusive to more virtuous citizenry).

Constant growth and expansion at all costs is what cancer cells do.

"You're an entrepreneur, so you're wanting to grow your business. How do you grow?"

"I'll throw you a curve ball - we don't want to grow."

[https://youtu.be/4MdFSbFlksI?t=1118](https://youtu.be/4MdFSbFlksI?t=1118)

</comment><comment><USER13> Not really sure why this is surprising to anyone. In many cases the wealthy become so through "unfair" or non-merit based means such as inheritance, luck, personal connections, etc. But in many cases, wealth is also earned. A doctor probably does "deserve" to have a $500k house more than a cashier. It wouldn't make sense for the cashier to receive more than the doctor just because they were poorer to begin with. Actually justifying such a transfer doesn't even compute for me.

The author interprets this as preserving the hierarchy, but I think that's a bit of a stretch. I think people don't want to live in a system that could result in their own wealth being used to enrich others to their own detriment. Sure, taxes and redistribution schemes do that, and you could argue that that's the whole point of capitalism (in the other direction), but it seems perverse and unfair for people to take so much from the wealthiest that the poor end up richer than the wealthy were to begin with.

<comment><USER14> Why did the cashier not have a medical degree, too? If we consider only the effort of each one, we could think that the cashier was lazy? But he may also have the misfortune of being born with less intelligence or in poor social conditions, and the effort he would have to do to equate himself with the doctor would be impossible to attain. This could be a problem of the meritocracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In my experience people want equality but only among their peers. For example even the poor living in the US are the 1% of the developing world, yet everyone would object to us taxing the poor here to send it to the Philippines.

</comment><comment><USER16> The study says NOTHING about wanting the poor to stay for. What the study says is people are unwilling to make a change. This is a very different idea from wanting that someone else to stay poor.

</comment><comment><USER17> This looks like loss aversion + empathy.

The subjects believe (correctly) that people feel worse about going down in rank than they feel would feel good about going up in rank.

</comment><comment><USER18> In other words, what humans want and what they actually do, are rather different. When made public the wanting is called virtue signalling and often provides benefits at no or minimal cost and thus it's popular. Example: [https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/corbynistas-believe- in-...](https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/corbynistas-believe-in-socialism- until-the-bill-arrives/) ('corbynistas-believe-in-socialism-until-the-bill- arrives').

<comment><USER19> IMHO, better way to think about it is that humans claim they want not something they really want.</comment></comment>


AWS Tips, Tricks, and Techniques - <AUTHOR> https://launchbylunch.com/posts/2014/Jan/29/aws-tips/ <comment><USER2> Here's another one for you: distribute your s3 paths/names

Because of the way s3 is designed, the place files are stored on the physical infrastructure is dependant on the prefix of the key name. I'm not exactly sure how much of the key name is used, but for example if you prefixed all you images with imges/....jpg it's highly likely they will all be stored on the same physical hardware.

I know of at least two companies for whom this has caused large problems for, one of them is netflix. Imagine all the videos in a single bucket with key names "/video/breaking_bad_s1_e1.mp4" (a crude example I know), all requests hit the same physical hardware and under high load the hardware just can't keep up and this exact issue has apparently been the cause of more than one Netflix outage.

The solution is simple, ensure your files have a random prefix ({uuid}.breaking_bad_s1_e1.mp4) and they will be spread around the datacentre :)

<comment><USER3> This is definitely a good tip. Here's a blog post with more info on the topic:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance- tip...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks- seattle-hiring-event.html)

<comment><USER4> This seems a rather odd implementation detail to burden the user with.

Why don't you just use a hash of the filename for the partition key, so all files are distributed randomly regardless of their name?

Is there an advantage for amazon or for the user in having S3 files cluster up by filename by default?

<comment><USER5> most likely so dir listings are a lot faster. (they are sorted by key, and can use delimiters for subdir emulation..)

<comment><USER6> ... but for that they just need to store the _filenames_ sorted somewhere. Content could be located based on a hash of the filename, still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another tip: IAM roles for EC2 instances.

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/iam-roles-for- ec2-instanc...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/iam-roles-for- ec2-instances-simplified-secure-access-to-aws-service-apis-from-ec2.html)

Basically, the apps you run on EC2 often need to access other AWS services. So you need to get AWS credentials onto your EC2 instances somehow, which is a nontrivial problem if you are automatically spinning up servers. IAM roles solve this by providing each EC2 instance with a temporary set of credentials in the instance metadata that gets automatically rotated. Libraries like boto know to transparently fetch, cache, and refresh the temporary credentials before making API calls.

When you create an IAM role, you give it access to only the things it needs, e.g., read/write access to a specific S3 bucket, rather than access to everything.

<comment><USER5> You can also use that temp cred to assumerole() to an external IAM role, for example to access a customers account. It's a lot to think about - my ec2 instance role then assuming another 3rd party account's IAM role - but its quite secure; neither you or the customer have any private secrets or rotation headaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would temper the suggestion to use Glacier with a warning: make sure you thoroughly understand the pricing structure. If you don't read the details about retrieval fees in the FAQ, it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot and run up a bill that's vastly higher than necessary. You get charged based on the _peak_ retrieval rate, not just the total amount you retrieve. Details here: [http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/](http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/)

For example, suppose you have 1TB of data in Glacier, and you need to restore a 100GB backup file. If you have the luxury of spreading out the retrieval in small chunks over a week, you only pay about $4. But if you request it all at once, the charge is more like $175.

In the worst case, you might have a single multi-terabyte archive and ask for it to be retrieved in a single chunk. I've never been foolhardy enough to test this, but according to the docs, Amazon will happily bill you tens of thousands of dollars for that single HTTP request.

<comment><USER9> They explain it _really_ weirdly, but it's not that hard to cap your expenditure if you translate it into bandwidth units rather than storage units, since that's what's really being billed. The footnote on the main Pricing page is the most misleading part of their explanation:

 _If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte._

From this you might think the retrieval fee is some function of the gigabytes retrieved, but isn't really in any direct way: you're charged ((max gigabytes retrieved in any one hour in a month) x (720 hours in the month) x per-GB price), modulo some free quota. So you can really get charged up to "720 gigabytes" for a single gigabyte retrieved, which is a bit silly to think of in terms of per-gigabyte pricing.

It makes more sense to me if you think of it as priced by your peak retrieval bandwidth. Then you can cap your expenditure by just rate-throttling your retrieval. Make sure to throttle the actual requests, using HTTP range queries on very large files if necessary (many Glacier front-ends support this)... throttling just your network or router will not have the desired effect, since pricing doesn't depend on download completion.

Anyway, the retrieval pricing in units of Mbps is ~$3/Mbps, billed at the peak hour-average retrieval rate for the month above the free quota. If you use that as a rule if thumb it's not bad for personal use. For example given my pipe, it's perfectly reasonable for me never to pull down more than 10 Mbps anyway, in which case my max retrieval costs are < $30/month.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's a good summary.

Another way to look at it is that if you retrieve data as fast as possible -- say, to S3 or EC2 -- it costs about $1.80/GB, minus the free quota. So for large objects, it's cheaper to store them in Glacier than S3 if you don't expect to need them in a hurry any time in the next 18 months. The free retrieval quota starts making a difference if your typical "ASAP-retrieval" size is less than 0.1% of your total archived data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Really cool to see people enjoying the write up.

It started off as a list of misc AWS topics that I found myself repeatedly explaining to people. It seemed like a good idea to write them down.

I'm planning on listing out more in follow up posts.

<comment><USER10> Fantastic post with really helpful tips. Thanks a lot for that.

I really want to read the details on the spot instance setup for a web service. Do you have a quick summary for that?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Fantastic post with really helpful tips. Thanks a lot for that.

Thanks!

> I really want to read the details on the spot instance setup for a web > service. Do you have a quick summary for that?

I don't have anything written up to point to but the idea is to have the spot instances dynamically register themselves with an ELB on startup. As long as they stay up ( _ie. spot price is below your bid_ ) you get incredibly cheap scaling for your web service. The ELB will automatically kick out instances that get terminated as they will fail their health checks. Combine this with a couple regular ( _ie. non spot instances_ ) and you get a web service that scales cheaply when spot prices are low and gradually degrades the QOS for your users when it gets more expensive.

I've got a couple other topics in the works first, but I should the write up for that one up pretty soon too. Haven't gotten around to adding an email signup form to my site yet ( _need to do that..._ ) so shoot me a mail if you want to notified when the full post is up. Email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is all good stuff. AWS takes a while to grok but once you do, it offers so many new possibilities.

The Aha! moment for me came when playing with SimianArmy, the wonderful Netflix OSS project and in particular, Chaos Monkey.

Rather than build redundancy into your system, build failure in and force failures early and often. This will surface architectural problems better than any whiteboard.

[https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy](https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy)

Also, check out boto and aws cli.

[http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforpython/](http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforpython/)

[http://aws.amazon.com/cli/](http://aws.amazon.com/cli/)

<comment><USER12> I think I saw a tweet along the lines of "don't think of EC2 instances as you would servers."

The point is, achitecting for the cloud is all about treating your infrastructure as very transient and failure prone.

Hopefully stuff doesn't fail but architecting for that gives you a much better application.

Netflix are my favourite tech company based on their open source distributed system stuff. Check out Hystrix and their circuit breaker implementation. I am going to lean on that heavily in an upcoming project such that entire application tiers can dissapear with graceful degredation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I for one think that S3's server side encryption is amazing for most if not all data. We backup hundreds of gigabytes of data every day to S3 and enabling server side encryption enables us to not worry about generating, rotating, and managing keys and encryption strategies. It also saves us time since we don't have to compute the encryption or the decryption. The best part is that the AWS AES-256 server side Encryption at Rest suffices for compliance.

Of course, the data that we store, while confidential, isn't super-mission- critical-sensitive data. We trust AWS to not peek into it, but nothing will be lost if they do.

<comment><USER2> I suppose it's OK for some use cases but realistically it doesn't provide a whole lot of security.

Doing this only really protects you if someone steals the physical disks from inside AWS, whilst this is a legitimate risk it seems incredibly unlikely and i'm not aware of any such instance.

HOWEVER, it does not protect you from the far more likely scenario of someone gaining access to your AWS account. If someone is able to get your credentials (or otherwise hack your account) then all your data is vulnerable.

<comment><USER14> In a lot of cases your AWS account being compromised is going to open you up to having any encryption keys you use for GPG encryption stolen too anyway. So it seems that there's a decent chance that even GPG encryption is just protecting you from the "disks stolen from the datacenter" risk.

At the end of the day your AWS account is often the "master key", so make sure you use a good password, rotate it, and 2-factor auth.

<comment><USER15> How's that? Say you set up duplicity on your AWS _instances_. They only need access to the public encryption key and private signing key -- the session (actual encryption) keys will be destroyed after a backup is made. Now, to _restore_ you'll need to provide access to the public signing key (this _is_ public, so no problem), and private encryption key. This should only ever be on-line and decrypted in case of a restore.

Of course, if you set things up differently, then, yes. Compromised by design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cloud66 is a good cautionary tale of refusing the temptation to double-dip, when it comes to your AWS tokens:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685406)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669315)

</comment><comment><USER17> I know this is about AWS, but it might be helpful to mention that DreamObjects ([http://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/](http://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/)) is an API-compatible cheaper alternative to S3.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very good article, thanks. I did not know about S3 temporary Urls, might use that in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes they're a _really_ useful feature. You can use them to allow both downloads and uploads. The latter is particularly cool for creating scalable webapps that involve users uploading large content.

Rather than having them tie up your app server resources during what could be a long/slow upload, they upload directly to S3, and then your app downloads the object from S3 for processing. If your app is hosted on EC2 you can even have the entire process be bandwidth free as user-to-S3 uploads are free and S3-to-app-server downloads to EC2 are free. Just delete the object immediately after use or use a short lived object expiration for the entire bucket.

I've made a note to add an example of this to my next post on this topic.

<comment><USER19> Also useful for authenticated downloads - don't tie up an app thread, but have your app redirect to a pre-signed url

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Question about the underlying SaaS product. I'm not understanding how a database client on the cloud can connect to a database server on my own machine?

Or am I misunderstanding what it does?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Question about the underlying SaaS product. I'm not understanding how a > database client on the cloud can connect to a database server on my own > machine?

OP and founder of JackDB[1] ( _the SaaS product referred to_ ) here.

The majority of people using JackDB connect to cloud hosted databases such as Heroku Postgres or Amazon RDS. As they're designed for access across the internet, no special configuration is necessary for them.

To connect to a database on your local machine or local network you would need to set up your firewall to allow inbound connections from our NATed IP. More network details available at [2].

[1]: [http://www.jackdb.com/](http://www.jackdb.com/)

[2]: [http://www.jackdb.com/docs/security/networking.html](http://www.jackdb.com/docs/security/networking.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're running an application that runs on more than one server it's definitely worth checking out AWS OpsWorks. It's a huge time saver and extremely useful in integrating and managing setup, configuration, and deployment across a server/db/cache etc without any loss of control or customization.

</comment><comment><USER22> So, in older reddit threads, I read about how you need to build Raid-1 EBS for all your ec2 servers as well as test your EBS storage, because they could be really bad.

Is anybody doing this for their EC2 deployments and more importantly, automating this?

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone have experience with Reduced Redundancy Storage on S3?

How often do you lose files? Do you run a daily job to check in on them?

<comment><USER24> I've been using S3 RRS for a few hundred thousand files, and have yet to lose one over the course of the year that I've stored them.

You don't run a daily job though, you simply set up an event on SNS to notify you if a file is lost[0].

[0]: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/UG/SettingBucketN...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/UG/SettingBucketNotifications.html)

<comment><USER23> Excellent, thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> thanks for the [http://www.port25.com/](http://www.port25.com/) tip,

</comment><comment><USER26> The first tip should be to use something cheaper and faster.

<comment><USER27> Such as?

<comment><USER26> I was on AWS for over a year. I moved to Digital Ocean. Much cheaper and much faster.

<comment><USER28> Except for the fact Digital Ocean doesn't take security seriously at all. It's good for testing small projects but to run a business on, no thanks. DO has a very small fraction of the features available that AWS does.

<comment><USER29> And DigitalOcean doesn't have ELBs, or S3, or DNS service checks. Need I go on? Digital Ocean is good for small projects, cheap projects, or anything where you only need semi-reliable compute power.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Migrate Your AWS Lambda Functions to Kubernetes with OpenFaaS - <AUTHOR> https://www.openfaas.com/blog/lambda-to-openfaas/ <comment><USER2> So I have been trying to find a way towards this but at the cost of running EKS, which seems the next step to having platform independence and moving to vanilla k8s I like, how do I argue/justify the cost and effort for professional workloads involved when Lambda is so cheap for lower tier usage (in our case way less than 1,000,000 invocations for our collection of DevOps tooling, we're not like game shops with a million calls a day) and EKS will be high cost for AWS bills and devops engineers and limited dev patience I already experience where people bitch with far less effortful Serverless framework and Lambda stuff? It is super convenient; I love when people whine about it even though they had limited skills to debug over SSH session anyway but they miss old habits, like what is the deal? Haha. Sorry, I won't dive into that tangent.

Personally, I definitely intend to explore this anyway because I want control and better understanding of how such platforms like Lambda could work under the hood and make my own choices where I obviously can't in Lambdaland. But most project managers and tech leads I know, professionally, never believe they'll leave AWS, to the point people don't know how to mock much beyond S3 and DDB local and hard code that stuff anyway.

The OpenFaaS is the right thing but not the cheap thing. With all good open source wrappers, moreso Redis and stuff but equally applicable for similar reasons but a not open offering taken in house, AWS has successfully banked on the most powerful target demographic: the indifferent! Lol

<comment><AUTHOR> 150 USD / mo is not a lot of money for most companies, especially for a production-grade, supported Kubernetes cluster, it might actually be a bit too cheap.

If you need that to be cheaper, try something like DigitalOcean Kubernetes from 10 USD / mo, or if AWS is important to your company, then KOPS can provide a self-managed/hosted control-plane.

Spotinst.com offer a great service that uses spot instances to squeeze your costs (I think around 30%)

So whilst I see why you may think K8s could be expensive vs Lambda, I think you might not have had all the information you needed.</comment></comment>


An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130

<comment><USER2> One wonders why there are still comments being posted on that.</comment>


Bad Practice of the Month: First-party pop-ups - <AUTHOR> http://matchstrike.net/strikepad/2009/12/bad-practice-of-the-month-first-party-pop-ups/

<comment><USER2> I have to say, I completely hate this too. You'll be reading through a post and BAM,"lol, WHY DON'T YOU SUBSCRIBE TO MY MAILING LIST". 9 times out of 10, I'm going to hit command+w and move on to whatever is in the next tab rather than trying to close whatever is blocking my view of their content.

I really don't understand how this can be an effective advertising for whatever service they are pushing. Basically, they're saying: My content isn't good enough to get you to subscribe or follow me with a simple link at the end of the article, so don't even bother reading the rest of it because you'll only be disappointed.</comment>


Software bug killed 6 people - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-therac-25/ <comment><USER2> Please use the original title for submissions, especially since the original title is a lot clearer</comment>


A growing number of traders are betting Snap's stock price will fall - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-08/snap-is-most-shorted-tech-ipo-of-2017-as-lockup-expiration-nears <comment><USER2> We are about to get a very insider opinion on just how well SNAP is doing.

I mean if there's a huge deluge of shares coming available for trading on lock up expiry date then that's can be taken as a pretty bearish sign that employee's don't like where the company is going.

Are employee's going to be scrambling to cash out on the first day or are they gong to hold onto their shares because they feel they'll be worth much more in the future?

SNAP did just start having options trading for it so that should help a bit to relieve the short pressure.

> Traders also own more bearish put options than bullish call options, with > put open interest being about 70 percent larger than the number of calls > outstanding Wednesday, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

This actually seems just as important as the short exposure.

 __EDIT __Just so I don 't sound like a heartless ass.... No one is saying employee's should sell stock and diversify, that's just prudent.

But there is a huge difference from employees selling 20% of their holdings vs 50%+ on the very first day/week they are allowed to sell.

<comment><USER3> > if there's a huge deluge of shares coming available for trading on lock up > expiry date then that's can be taken as a pretty bearish sign that > employee's don't like where the company is going.

Is it really? If a large portion of your net worth is in shares of a single company that you also work for, wouldn't it make sense to sell your shares even if you think the company is going to do well?

<comment><USER4> Depends on how you time it and what you think the prospects are. Skittish Facebook employees missed out on a quadrupling of value if they sold in the first six months.

<comment><USER5> Sure, and what about skittish Groupon employees?

<comment><USER6> Well that's kind of the point about watching to see what happens when insiders are allowed to sell...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anecdotally my one Snap user data point has been wooed by Instagram Stories.

Insta seems to be the juggernaut in the media stream space. It's not clear to me how Snap competes since Insta isn't some crufty Suite like Facebook or Microsoft. They can radically change the UI just as easily as Snap to keep up with needs. The underlying tech is all known concepts.

Maybe Snap can differentiate in some kind of AR features, but they're really just scraping by there with a fairly minimal offering. Still, that's where I guess I would focus if I were them: great creator authoring UIs, and advanced psuedo-authoring (filter long tail) for end users.

Hard to argue you're going to beat Insta on filters tho.

Edit: oh yeah, Snap can win a segment on privacy. Although Facebook seems like a more natural place for friends-only stuff. Snap has to fight network effects there.

<comment><USER8> The primary focus of Instagram is achievement broadcasting.

The primary focus of Snapchat is messaging.

Snapchat's messaging platform is also heavily gamified. There are a lot of very clever psychological incentives to continue using the platform on a daily basis, which drives user engagement through the roof.

Instagram's messaging platform feels bolted-on, secondary. I would never consider using Instagram as a primary method of communicating with someone, but I use Snapchat as a primary method of communicating with people on a daily basis.

<comment><USER9> Snap is basically the only social network I use at this point (except IRC, if you count that), mostly because it's fairly trivial and fun (same as IRC :).

Take stupid pictures, draw stupid crap on top, send it to a "chat room", forget about it forever. To me SnapChat is a chat app with some cool multimedia features. I never ever use stories (the feature Instagram has notoriously cloned). Other than marketers, who is using stories? Very few of my friends do.

Instagram seems like douchey lifestyle porn to me. For example, the presence of "likes" is _very_ off-putting to me. I can't be the only person with this brand association.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want a real insider look at Snap, try living in Venice Beach for a few months, and try to get a feel for how Evan specifically spends his time. There are many red flags.

<comment><USER11> what do you mean by that?

<comment><USER12> That Venice Beach is not too happy to have Snap as a resident, I'm guessing? [https://la.curbed.com/2017/3/1/14778860/snapchat-protests- ve...](https://la.curbed.com/2017/3/1/14778860/snapchat-protests-venice-beach)

To me the problems in Venice speaks to their staggering growth so it's probably a good signal of their ambition.

However, I did not like that mostly wasted retail space they had on the Venice boardwalk to show off their new glasses. The workers seemed bored, the security seemed bored, probably because no one was really approaching the displays. Seems like a huge waste of money and completely out of place with the vibe on the beach. If anything it reinforced to the average person walking by the typical perception of tech companies as careless elites bent on displacing the fringe classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lockup expiry is always a scary time. The same stuff happened to Facebook combined with mobile monitization and user growth fears made the stock tank to the 40s.

Though these are two very different companies. Best of luck to owners of Snap stock.

</comment><comment><USER14> How much do headlines like this cause a self-fulfilling prophecy?

<comment><USER15> Trading is an echo chamber full of self-fulfilling prophecies since forever. The fun thing is that there are so many of these prophecies are around that they usually cancel out.

[https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0060/6102/products/book_bu...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0060/6102/products/book_buy_sell_sell_new_1024x1024.jpg?v=1291137799)

<comment><USER16> absolutely, and it should be clear to everyone that the last 12 months has thoroughly dispelled the market's predictive power

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When they crying, I'm buying

</comment><comment><USER18> No free lunch. The EMH means the lock-up expiration is already priced into the stock

<comment><USER19> > _The EMH means the lock-up expiration is already priced into the stock_

There are various forms of the efficient market hypothesis. The weak form holds that all public information is efficiently priced into the market. The insiders selling on lock-up expiration have access to non-public information. Such non-public information could range from firm-level material, _e.g._ state of hiring or product development, to individually material, _e.g._ that an employee is in debt or really wants to go on vacation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Snap is worth a tiny fraction of facebook, just as facebook is worth a tiny fraction of Google when comparing global numbers in users and revenue. It all makes sense.

<comment><USER21> Are you sure? Facebook doesn't seem to be a tiny fraction of Google in any of the comparisons. For profit, FB is looking to get to $1B/month in a few months, while Google has topped $2.5B/mo and is looking to get to $3B/mo. That's just 3x. Sure Google's revenue is more than 3x. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say it's 5x as much. Whether you're talking just Facebook and Google for global users or including their subsidiaries, neither would have FB as a tiny fraction. FB already does 2B monthly users. Google likely isn't even double that just based on the number of internet users outside China.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER20> \- YouTube 1B

\- Gmail billions

\- Android 2B

\- Search billions

and the list goes on Now think about its hardware efforts on developing TPU's for AI.

Here's how billions of people use Google products, in one chart [http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/google-user-numbers- youtube-a...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/google-user-numbers-youtube- android-drive-photos.html)

<comment><USER21> You didn't respond to the comment reply to you so I'll repeat - many users overlap. My original point stands - FB at 2B users monthly means they can't possibly be a tiny fraction because of the current amount of internet users especially when Google doesn't have a dominant share in China.

Plus you brought in other products/subsidiaries so then we have to include:

Messenger - 1B+ users

WhatsApp - 1B+ users

Instagram - 750M users

Of course I know the overlap is huge. Do you recognize you're wrong, is that why you didn't respond? That's fine then of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> no shit! a multibillion dollar valuation on almost no revenue and no growth in the foreseeable future, with competition from Instagram and FB.

<comment><USER23> Haha. A while back I searched HN for the Facebook share price drop posts and those were "No shit!" too. Turns out everyone's really good at predicting the present.

<comment><USER24> > Turns out everyone's really good at predicting the present.

I predict I'm going to steal this quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> you have to have a risk management strategy, you cannot hold the majority of your net worth in one single company, no mater if it is Berkshire Hathaway, Apple or something else...

</comment><comment><USER26> "A growing number of traders IS betting Snap's stock price will fall"

Pointless pedanty on my part, no doubt, but I believe there are lots of people here trying to improve their English. The verb is "is" because the subject of the sentence is "number" (not "traders").

<comment><USER27> "Number of" is a prepositional phrase that qualifies the noun "people." "Number" is not the subject but rather "traders" is and so the verb agrees with traders.

Another example:

"A large number of people are gathering." "A large number" isn't the thing doing the gathering the people are.

Prepositional phrases are easy to spot. This a good quick read:

[http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/prepositionalphrase.htm](http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/prepositionalphrase.htm)

The key point is that "a prepositional phrase will never contain the subject of a sentence."

A simple mnemonic device kids are taught to identify prepositions is the "preposition mountain":

On the mountin, of the mountain, from the mountain, in the mountain, under the mountain, by the mountain, along the mountain. If it's logical in relation to "the mountain" it's probably a preposition.

It's worth nothing that there are many native English speakers that get these wrong :)

<comment><USER28> How would you explain this sentence?

"A growing number of traders is causing better liquidity for SNAP stock"

<comment><USER27> I would explain it as improper English.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forget iPhone X–Apple's Best Product Is Its Privacy Stance - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/4998189/iphone-x-privacy-apple/ <comment><USER2> I work closely with Apple so need to post anonymously.

I believed everything in this until something that happened in late July this past summer.

In China, their fastest-growing market, China demanded all secure messaging and VPN apps be removed from the App Store and Apple complied.[1]

So privacy matters, unless it's in your fastest-growing market.

I intend to discuss with Tim next time I see him.

1: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/29/apple-removes-vpn-apps- fro...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/29/apple-removes-vpn-apps-from-the-app- store-in-china/)

<comment><USER3> I see what you're getting at but that decision has little/nothing to do with Apple's stance on privacy.

* iMessage still uses end-to-end encryption for messages in China.

* iPhones sold in China still utilize Secure Enclave for privacy/encryption.

* Aggregate data still uses differential privacy in China.

The government made a request of them which did not compromise their user's security, and they obliged.

Compare that to when the US government requested backdoor access pass Secure Enclave and they absolutely denied that request.

I agree that it's unfortunate for Chinese users that their government is placing additional limits on the available software in that ecosystem (as well as other ecosystems, I'm sure). But so long as the government is not asking Apple to compromise its users privacy I don't see any strong relation to corroborate the idea: "privacy matters, unless it's in your fastest-growing market".

<comment><USER4> This also shows that if we care about the preservation of privacy, we can't depend on technology to solve the problem on its own. No matter how well- engineered software might be, it's ultimately subordiate to national and international law. A company can refuse to cooperate up to a point, but a government can always force it to either comply or cease doing business.

The Verge's recent technology survey showed that at least its audience believes that Google and Amazon are better protectors of personal privacy than Apple, so their strong stance on encryption and privacy is not yet completely effective in differentiating them from competitors. Hopefully articles like this will enhance the perceived value of privacy, because we need both private and public entities to agree on privacy for it to be effective.

<comment><USER5> _No matter how well-engineered software might be, it 's ultimately subordiate to national and international law._

For now. I argue that there will be a technology corporation more powerful than the reach of any nation-state within 50 years.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. I'd even bet that in 10-20 years, the primary purpose of nation-states will be technology management, if that isn't already the case. Administration by software seems inevitable, with the main problem being ensuring that the software is acting in our interests. We'll likely encode policies into something like Ethereum contracts once we have more reliable infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> Ethereum does not have that broad of an application. You are engaging in rather wishful thinking. Nation states exist because people have different traditions, values, language, history, economic and political systems.

<comment><USER4> Yes, there are important differences, and I don't think Ethereum will fill the various needs, which is why I said "something like Ethereum." With all the differences in nation-states, we have come to a kind of equilibrium today where each one has a convertable fiat currency through historical convergence. Each one has a similar hierarchical government claming authority through popular mandate. That's an amazing consistency considering the different origins.

I'm not wishing for any particular outcome, but considering past convergences and future potential, I'm simply saying it's likely that some kind of smart contracts operating on distributed computing platforms will eventually become standard processes for law enforcement once computation is more ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading about all of this is so surreal for me as a German. I read about these "great" policy and all I can think is ... "so, they do the minimum required" .. what's there to praise? Then I remember how US (companies) tend to think about privacy and get very sad. Stronger penalties for anyone breaking relevant privacy rules cannot come fast enough.

<comment><USER8> In everything that keeps happening in the US with regard to leaks and advertisers watching you and Facebook profiling you... I'm not sure it's fixable.

Until a large chunk of congress, and probably the R chunk due to their privacy law stance, gets a TON of embarrassing stuff leaked to the public or better yet 'shared' when they weren't expecting it... I don't think anything will change. We won't get real laws to protect people.

And a decent sized part of me says not even incidents like that would do it. It would just be blame-the-victim and you-accepted-that-policy and the laws wouldn't really change.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fear that R chunk will only pass legislation to exempt themselves.

Mass surveillance is too enticing to give up so easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Wired recently deployed a team of experts to deconstruct Apple's code and > found its differential privacy practices to be lacking, a characterization > that the company strongly disputes.

If by "deployed" they mean "interviewed about their work". I don't understand Time crediting Wired with the research[0], which does a disservice to their actual sources of funding.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a big fan of this - want to point out that the motivation behind this is as much economic as it is philosophical. Apple's stance on privacy is 100% in their economic interest because it negatively impacts Google, Facebook and Amazon's data-driven business models without Apple looking like a bad actor in the ecosystem. These companies are its biggest threats in software and it puts moats around Apple's hardware business

</comment><comment><USER11> From what I've heard from a friend who works for Apple, it's more than skin- deep, they have a strict internal culture of user privacy. It's difficult to get permission to report any kind of user data or to bypass the sandbox, for example.

<comment><USER12> This is true of all large corps. Accessing user data without a really good reason will get you walked out the door instantly.

<comment><USER11> I don't mean accessing data on their servers, but rather analytics and the like. They don't get shader content in their crash reports because it might have been generated from user data somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This might as well be titled - Forget Iphone X-Apple's Best Product is that they are not out to sell you anything else - ads (Google) or other products (Amazon). If a stance on something is due not having a particular type of business, is it really worth the praise?

<comment><USER14> But it's chicken and egg, right? They don't have that particular business because they made the choice of privacy long ago? Even if they're not in the ads business because of a series of lucky decisions that just happened to steer them this way, there's nothing wrong with touting a selling point.

<comment><USER15> No. Apple has had the same business model always, which is to sell you hardware differentiated by software at a premium. Apple doesn't have an advertising-based business model[1] because such a model is fundamentally incompatible with their existing business model. The reason is that for an advertising based model to be truly successful, you have to reach as many consumers as possible, which ultimately means that your product must be free to use for consumers.

Apple's stance on privacy is making a virtue out of necessity.

[1] Yes, yes, I know: iAd. But how well did that work?

<comment><USER16> I think its more complicated than that.

There are reports that Apple has an internal committee, including a high level executive, dubbed their "privacy czars" which are required to unanimously sign off on any instance of user data collection, and this committee has actively limited products like Siri over concerns [1]

There's also the San Bernadino customer letter, which has become a defining point in their privacy history [2]. They didn't have to publish that letter; they could have fought it privately or not fought it.

There's really no fundamental reason why iAd couldn't have become a more powerful revenue generating part of their platform. They sell enough iPhones to reach a broad market. But, per [1], reports say that the team ran into internal privacy concerns which constantly forced limiting its capabilities.

Apple is fundamentally different, in ways that can't solely be explained by their product history and revenue sources. Companies like HP and Samsung make consumer hardware, but also generate revenue by selling their customers' data to third parties. Its clear to me that Apple does consider Privacy a revenue- generating product that they sell.

Of course, you can argue that maybe they wouldn't take that stance if they weren't so successful in hardware; that Privacy is a privilege afforded to them because of their success, and less successful companies need that advertising revenue. But now we're arguing hypotheticals, and I'm not going to partake in that.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-encryption- privacy-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-encryption-privacy- insight/apple-privacy-czars-grapple-with-internal-conflicts-over-user-data- idUSKCN0WN0BO)

[2] [https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/](https://www.apple.com/customer- letter/)

<comment><USER12> Do you really think other companies don't have internal privacy reviews?

<comment><USER17> My experience leads me to believe that many other companies have privacy reviews only to the level required to keep them out of legal trouble. It is an inconvenience, not a feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would this be a fair assessment: ?

Facebook, Microsoft and Google collect all your private information and share it with themselves, the government and some with the advertisement industry.

Apple collects some of your private information and is forced to share it with themselves, Nuance and the government (subvertly see snowden and interpolate).

Amazon is in a special position.

<comment><USER19> > some with the advertisement industry

I'm always interested when people say this. Say I want to buy some person's data. Is there a way I can do that with Facebook, Microsoft, or Google?

<comment><USER8> No, because it's far too valuable to them. If they sold it it wouldn't be valuable for long.

They do it 'the other way'. You say "I want to buy some eyeballs like X" and they sell you access to the eyeballs.

But they don't give you the person's information.

<comment><USER19> That's what I thought. So my private information isn't really shared with anybody, is it? I mean I guess if I were to place an ad targeted to black men that speak french and you answered it, I would learn that about you.

<comment><USER8> It's shared with anyone _inside facebook_ who want to use it for something. I've never gotten the impression there are strong internal privacy controls.

External companies? Perhaps if they partner with Facebook but not normal ad buyers.

<comment><USER20> > I've never gotten the impression there are strong internal privacy controls

At least my friends that work there claim otherwise, but obviously they are biased. But so are you, I suspect.

<comment><USER8> Yep, I'm very distrustful of FB.

But that's good to hear. That's what I would hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Apple's position on privacy also led me to switch to iCloud recently. I migrated my mail and drive to iCloud (from GMail, Google Drive) for this very reason and while there isn't always a 1-1 feature parity, I prefer to know that my data won't be used to analyze and categorize me for the purpose of advertising.

<comment><USER22> What makes you claim (implicitly) that Google, Dropbox, etc. are selling data from your email or storage accounts?

<comment><USER21> I suppose I should clarify that I'm referring to the data being used to classify me into various (increasingly specific) categories and that resulting output being sold to the highest bidder in the form of a targeted advertisement. Dropbox I'm less familiar with, so I can't speak to their model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The iPhone is unbelievably fragile, _before_ you look at the high price. Apple bends over backwards to deny the existence of design flaws, to the point of blaming users for doing it wrong. Despite this I am seriously considering an iPhone, their stance on privacy is the _only_ reason.

<comment><USER24> The only real reason I haven't switched is because they won't give me control of _my_ phone. At least with Android I can root it, install custom roms, and mess with pretty much any non-google software that I have on there.

Android is _far_ from perfect, and I still hate it, but at least I can still control most of it.

<comment><USER25> > At least with Android I can root it,

and not just you :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It helps when you don't have an ads business branch.

<comment><USER27> Apple did until last year though.

<comment><USER28> ...which failed due to their strict privacy rules making the ads less effective than advertisers wanted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apple itself may well have a pro-privacy stance regarding the data associated with their products & services, but if I can't even install a firewall on one of their phones then that doesn't protect my privacy much against malicious or deceptive third-parties.

I don't much like Android as a system but at least I can strip it of Google services and install a firewall and feel reasonably private. It's not an ideal option but it works.

<comment><USER30> It does have a firewall. The configuration is static: no incoming connections.

You might be thinking about not being able to have an antivirus? In which case, that is certainly a feature - not a bug. Allowing the privileges required to enable an AV to operate on iOS would severely degrade the security of your device. The losses would massively outweigh any potential benefits of having an AV.

<comment><USER31> Blocking incoming connections on a mobile device is less important than blocking outgoing connections given the threat model of a multitude of mobile devices running basically black-box applications which have access to a range of sensors. The main threat here is applications gathering data - of any sort, from positional to audiovisual to network traffic to (financial) transactional - and sending it off to their masters. The threat is, so to say, inside the walls already, not outside. The task it to make sure it does not communicate to the outside world.

iOS does not allow fine-grained control over outgoing network access. The assumption is that the user trusts the application to not do anything untoward, after all it was vetted by Apple before it appeared in the store. There are ways to get this type of control on iOS but since the first step you need to take is to 'jailbreak' the device this is not a real solution.

Android does allow this type of control through a multitude of firewall (i.e. Linux _iptables_ ) configuration applications. Android devices running version 3.x or earlier need to be 'rooted' to gain access to the firewall configuration, later versions (from 4.0) don't require rooting. The 'no-root' firewall works by routing all traffic through an on-device VPN (which can be instantiated without root access as of Android 4.0). This does mean the firewall application gets access to all network traffic, making that type of application a good target for those who wish to subvert Android network security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> fun little incident this morning - with my wifi off, I logged into iCloud.com to change my primary AppleID e-mail address from an .edu to icloud.com address ([https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/31/apple-id-third-party- em...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/31/apple-id-third-party-email- address-update/)

Interesting location identification for the request origination - [https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9rtg1igl73gf67/where.png?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9rtg1igl73gf67/where.png?dl=0)

Now, I've seen 2FA requests a couple hundred miles off, but this is _way_ off. I'm in the suburbs of metropolitan Detroit.

For a lark, I googled 'NSA Texas' \- [https://goo.gl/maps/rb1AhG3EiE62](https://goo.gl/maps/rb1AhG3EiE62)

Hello NSA! You might want to review the process on that one.

<comment><USER33> Or in actuality, it's just sloppy IP geolocation.

<comment><USER34> Indeed, Occam's razor says poor IP geolocation. What are the chances that you are being monitored by NSA from Texas, or that the geolocation database is stale or wrong?

<comment><USER35> Out of curiosity, what are the chances this geolocation error also exists 170 miles away? I had the exact same thing happen a few weeks ago, from just east of Chicago.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


8 start-ups that are changing the world - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/08/19/startups-for-good/

<comment><USER2> I find it typical of the nonprofit mindset that there are no metrics in this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awaaz.de is not a non-profit. It is a for-profit venture and is making money. I think it has more to do with the reporting than the companies.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it's important for start-up to understand that generating wealth is utmost important, a lot of fun and of course a legal fiduciary duty of the founders. However, it is possible to both make a lot of money and make a positive impact in the world.

For many start-ups today the motto isn't just 'Do not evil', it's actually 'Do good in the world.'. I know our motto is definitely that, so I believe is for companies like SwipeGood and the ones on this list. I hope to see more start- ups with a similar double bottom line.

<comment><USER3> Make less money and do more good.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are not inversely related.

<comment><USER3> Prove it.

<comment><USER4> Bill gates made billions and he's donating lots of it to the third-world.

<comment><USER3> I'm sceptical about what he's doing:

a) He's immunising people to stop suffering yet increasing population due to this causes more resource issues. They magically forget that side issue... [1]

b) He's shifting Monsanto GM crops to Africa[2] - not a good thing. That's vendor lock in for food which is incredibly dangerous.

Philanthropy my arse. The guy has spent years making questionable decisions and causing absolute HAVOC around the world, yet the collective ignorance springs into action when people see him "giving money away" which he's not doing.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation>

[2] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty- matters...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty- matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto)

<comment><USER5> You are sceptical that what he is doing good because it leads to overpopulation ? I think you went a little too far in trying to prove your point. I understand that any of the startups in the OP's list are not paradigm changing. And I also admit that I too would have greater appreciation for someone who would 'dig a well' - that is get dirty at the grass root level of any social movement. But this response to Bill Gate's immunization drive is either racist or social darwinism or both and I think thats wrong. Every single child born should be immunized - we as a people have solved a very basic problem of human survival and no one should be denied that. And if you are really skeptical about overpopulation how about we selectively immunize children all over the world from a lottery system ?

<comment><USER3> No I'm not saying "don't immunise". I am only concerned about the fact that the overpopulation and the associated suffering side effects are not considered.

Just the happy joy joy marketing stories and statistics matter to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.sunsaluter.com/> seems like it is the only practical & longlasting thing there.

</comment><comment> dan-k A few of the ideas seem interesting, but I would have hoped for a lot less vague marketing language full of buzzwords from this sort of company...

</comment><comment><USER3> Excuse my cynicism here but I think it is valid. No world is being changed efficiently or in a new fantastic way here.

They ALL appear to be utterly lazy ways of supposedly helping people whilst top slicing cash and creating tech jobs, management jobs and evade a chunk of tax. Generating money is intimately opposed to doing altruistic good.

Fly out, dig a well and work up a fertile soil and dig drainage and septic channels. Teach them practical skills to help themselves and teach them how to teach others. That would make more people's lives better rather than delegating it via a startup or technology outfit.

Technology is a bad solution when there is nothing to sustain it. Knowledge on the other hand is worth more than gold in an investor's pocket...

<comment><USER7> "Generating money is intimately opposed to doing altruistic good."

This might be the stupidest sentence I've ever read on HN.

"They ALL appear to be utterly lazy ways of supposedly helping people whilst top slicing cash and creating tech jobs, management jobs and evade a chunk of tax."

Speaking of utterly lazy, why don't you tell us what you think after watching this clip of the 19 year old girl you just insulted: <http://vimeo.com/26638815>

<http://twitter.com/paulg/status/29256073985>

<comment><USER3> I shall "insult" her more by analysing the worth of her invention. Basically nothing at all other than to inflate the egos of a few investors and university jocks.

She made a solar panel rotation device for $10 to increase the efficiency of solar panels which are not needed to survive (and are very expensive) and are clearly not a priority for most of Africa which is dying of disease and starvation. Farming and sanitation are far more important than optimising solar panels.

Ultimately, should the person spending time assembling these and spending money on them, or should they be working the land and buying seed and grain?

I think that is obvious, unless you want an easy dollar in your pocket...

All of these technology investments are ultimately piggy-backing an invasion of culture. When the technology is in, they become cheap outsourcing puppet in the globalisation race rather than an independent country capable of sustaining its population.

In 10 years time, the African land will be a wasteland still and they will be _exporting_ these $10 solar devices from production lines with no other way of surviving.

Oh and Paul G is not some wonderous sky daddy; he's just another meat popsicle like myself and yourself.

<comment><USER6> Electricity enables a good deal of solutions to help food preservations and more optimal farming. It also enables cell phones, which are becoming one of the primary infrastructure elements in third world companies.

I am not sure if what's-her-face's idea is more than a nifty widget. But I assure you that at least its goal is doing more than making a few people feel happy-floaty about giving money.

<comment><USER3> You don't need electricity to preserve food. You can preserve without it. I've done it for years. If you need a fridge, you don't need electricity:

<http://lionheart.net/fridge/>

50 years ago we had larders full of preserves.

They don't need the infrastructure, commerce and cell phones. They need food, sanitation and a life which doesn't rely on working for another person day in day out. Introducing capitalism to such people is like introducing a cocaine habit so they are easily controlled.

<comment><USER6> Capitalism is fine.

<comment><USER3> If it supports you, but if it abuses you, then it's bad.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LocalWiki: the open effort to share the world's local knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://localwiki.org/

<comment><USER2> I went to UC Davis when this (Davis wiki) was launched. It was invaluable at the time. But I wonder how well it will fare elsewhere these days. You need a decent-sized community to get good content, but most decent-sized communities are already well covered by heavily used services like craigslist and yelp.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've thought about this a lot. There were some unique factors at play in Davis. One big one that we've really tried to fix with localwiki is that you had to be a pretty technical person to contribute to the project. Davis is, second to Cambridge, the most educated city in the US.

So making the most -absurdly- usable software possible was a huge priority. If you look around, there's really no easy to use open-source wiki software, so we had to do a -lot- of gruntwork. We wanted to, at the very least, remove the technically-savvy barrier.

And the standard for online collaboration hsa also risen quite a bit, but open-source wiki software hasn't kept up. Back when DavisWiki started, the very -idea- of web based collaboration was foreign. Nowdays, my mom uses Google Docs!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome to see how this project has grown since the days of DavisWiki.org.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why does it want me to download something?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're gonna refocus the main site later on when there's more communities using the software. For now we're trying to focus attention on the software side of the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER6> rocwiki.org</comment>


Stadium food delivery. This is a great idea. - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefango.com/ "FanGo produces an iPhone app and mobile commerce ordering system that allows fans at stadiums and arenas to order concession food and drinks directly from their iPhone app. Food is then delivered to the fan's seat, allowing fans to avoid long lines at food stands in stadiums. The startup is already in progress of negotiating deals with professional sports stadiums across the country." <comment><USER2> Great idea, terrible landing page. Yes, I'd like to "Enter site."</comment>


The Problem With International Development and a Plan to Fix It - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it <comment><USER2> > The repeated "success, scale, fail" experience of the last 20 years of > development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects > thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which > they're applied. It's not that you test something in one place, then scale > it up to 50. It's that you test it in one place, then test it in another, > then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk.

Perhaps. That model works very well in Silicon Valley. It's just that the expectation is that most projects will fail. Development projects are similar, only with an unrealistic expectation of success early on, and without appropriate processes to fail fast, recover money from failures, etc.

What I'd like to see is fundraising with:

* Big figures * Long-term windows * Milestones

In other words, I raise $10 million as $2 million per year, contingent on meeting specific milestones. Or $200k/$1 million/$4 million. Or whatever. As a fundraiser, I have a strong interest to write realistic plans -- not just grandiose but impractical visions -- since if I fail to execute, I lose funding. I also have a confirmed, steady, long-term source of funding, so I'm not spending 90% of my time selling.

If I do fail, the money is recovered.

<comment><USER3>
      In 2010, "Frontline" returned to the schools where they had filmed children
      laughing on the merry-go-rounds, splashing each other with water. They
      discovered pumps rusting, billboards unsold, women stooping to turn the wheel
      in pairs. Many of the villages hadn't even been asked if they wanted a
      PlayPump, they just got one, sometimes replacing the handpumps they already
      had. In one community, adults were paying children to operate the pump.

      Let's not pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort
      of Mad Libs version of a narrative we're all familiar with by now: Exciting new
      development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick
      expansion, failure.

Frontline Video from 2005 "The Play Pump" :

[http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/watch/player.html?pkg=entr...](http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/watch/player.html?pkg=entrepreneur&seg=13&mod=0)

Frontline Video from 2010 "Troubled Water" :

[http://video.pbs.org/video/1533347949/](http://video.pbs.org/video/1533347949/)

<comment><USER2> And it cost $15 million.

The annual cost of product failures in the US is $100 billion.

Big whoop. PlayPump is 0.1% of that. Your share of the PlayPump (assuming equal cost to everyone in the US)? A nickel. You don't just fund a PlayPump. You fund a thousand PlayPumps. Nine hundred fail, and one hundred have impact.

Someone tried to do good. Perhaps they didn't succeed. What happened as a result? They got ridiculed. That's the failure of PlayPump. Not the folks who did it, but the folks in 2010 mocking them. It brings about a culture which doesn't take risks, and that's a culture which cannot bring about change in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article. Worth reading all the way through.

FTA:

> The repeated "success, scale, fail" experience of the last 20 years of > development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects > thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which > they're applied. It's not that you test something in one place, then scale > it up to 50. It's that you test it in one place, then test it in another, > then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk.

On the contrary, I think this idea would be an excellent topic for a TED talk.

<comment><USER5> I think you missed the journalist's jaded sarcasm embedded in " _No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk._ "

I'm guessing TED has had 50+ presentations on "solutions" for Africa over the last 5 years. We'd expect that some of the ideas have failed to deliver. However, we can't expect TED organizers to give stage time to followup presentations explaining why they failed (or why the ideas at smaller scope didn't scale up to large one like they hoped.)

So yes, _we_ would get more value out of hard-hitting TED talks explaining warts and difficulties but we can't expect TED themselves to highlight it. A similar concept is "publication bias" against negative or non-repeatable research results:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Definition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Definition)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found the most interesting part the gaming of the system by the aid agencies to hide their overheads to hit the required 10% level.

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of the account of NGOs ( Non Governmental Organizations )- key functionaries in the dispensation of foreign aid - in Jim Rogers' book, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip, something I read many many years ago:

      "Even in countries with no roads to speak of, Mercedes service is available – often
      to the exclusion of things like food – thanks to all the US foreign aid, the IMF,
      and World Bank money being shipped in.  It is no secret that this money is aimed at
      nourishing only those corrupt enough to get their hands on it, while at the same
      time fattening the bureaucrats on both sides of the transaction who diligently
      work the trough.  And none of them is driving a Chevy.

      I knew much of this from my last trip.  The upcoming trip, especially as it took
      us through Africa, would be an eye-opening education into the workings of the
      latest foreign aid scam: the nongovernmental organization, or NGO.  As an American
      taxpayer, I would be amazed to discover that a lot of the money we send to these
      countries goes to support Mercedes and BMW dealers and various Swiss bankers."

      "After cocoa, the commodity produced in greatest abundance in the Ivory Coast is to
       be found in the commercial capital, Abidjan, one of the more cosmopolitan cities in
      West Africa: NGO bureaucrats.  They grow here in enormously high concentration, even
      for Africa.  They and their like have been directing Africa's destiny for centuries.
      One might wonder why so many national boundaries in these parts consist of straight
      lines.  In Germany in 1884, at what was called the Congress of Berlin, the European
      powers came together and divided up Africa.  They paid no attention to religious,
      ethnic, linguistic, tribal, national, or historical differences – the Ivory Coast,
      for example, is divided between a majority Muslim population in the north and those
      who hold to indigenous beliefs and Christianity in the south, explaining why peace
      in Africa may be far away.  And why there will always be work for Western
      bureaucrats." [1]

On the other hand, this is what Bill Gates has to say on corruption and why it should not be a deterrent to the continued giving of foreign aid:

      There is a double standard at work here. I've heard people calling on the government
      to shut down some aid program if one dollar of corruption is found. On the other
      hand, four of the past seven governors of Illinois have gone to prison for
      corruption, and to my knowledge no one has demanded that Illinois schools be shut down
      or its highways closed. [2]

Even fully discounting the fact that the man is unimaginably wealthy and can afford the graft and misuse of funds, I am still not quite convinced by this line of reasoning. At this point I'm just hoping that I don't wake up some eight years from now to discover that even things like Kiva loans [3] had been all along a huge waste of effort, time and - yes - money.

[1] Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812967267](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812967267)

[2] 3 MYTHS THAT BLOCK PROGRESS FOR THE POOR

[http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth- two](http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth-two)

[3] Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems

[http://www.cgdev.org/blog/kiva-not-quite-what-it- seems](http://www.cgdev.org/blog/kiva-not-quite-what-it-seems)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice article. I especially like the revolutionary idea that deworming pupils does not affect their school performance. Yes, human development is the thing that has to be fixed. But dreaming smaller is not going to fix that. Working harder - can, but it is not that much attractive.

Disclaimer: I have been involved in development projects feted by JICA.</comment>


5000 Years of Interest Rates - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-5000-years-of-interest-rates-2015-9 <comment><USER2> Interesting thought exercise:

If you took $1 in year zero, and invested it in an interest-bearing instrument which yielded 2% annually, you would have $213,474,546,813,934,272 today. This does not take inflation into account :).

No interest-paying instrument survived that long. It almost makes you think that period devaluations are a must-have.

<comment><USER3> > you would have $213,474,546,813,934,272 today

That's only assuming zero risk. An investment with risk so low to survive two millennia can safely yield 0%.

<comment><USER2> Exactly the point I am aiming for. Gradual inflation and catastrophic devaluations are two things that prevented this from happening.

<comment><USER4> The entity that owes you the money could simply die. Not that catastrophic (for the entity, yes, but I mean no global catastrophe is necessary).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Putting your money in someone else's hands was probably a lot riskier in those days, and that is priced into the interest rate. If there's a real chance a passing army or crooked king might walk in and take your money, you need to be better compensated.

<comment><USER6> Except the risk is relative. What else are you going to do with your money? What government is backing the money?

<comment><USER7> If the money is a precious metal (gold or silver) then there doesn't need any backing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, where can I borrow for 0-0.25%? Shouldn't this be standardized by the entity capable of receiving a loan at the given rate?

</comment><comment><USER9> I translated some of the Amarna texts in College. One of them was a loan with 70% interest. I kept thinking I had mistranslated, but I was correct.

</comment><comment><USER10> from the article one might conclude the rate is "naturally" 20%, and on artificially inflated environments (eg Roman empire, big wars' aftermath) it gets lower than 2%

<comment><USER11> The "natural" interest rate is whatever rational people expect the risk to be, plus whatever profits they can add on top of that without losing too much business to a competitor.

In societies without good statistics and calculators, that could just as well have been 10% risk + 10% profits, or some other combination of round numbers. If you're unsure what the exact numbers are, better err on the side of making more money.

Better information, more efficient markets, and computers can make calculations more precise, so I don't think there's any more need to use round numbers anymore, even without government intervention.

<comment><USER10> i meant to write "normal" in the quotes. as in the normal line thru time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Terrible, terrible arrangement of ads alongside, and hilarious chart in article graphic.

Read this instead.

[[http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The- First-000-Years/dp/1612191290](http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The- First-000-Years/dp/1612191290)]

<comment><USER13> It's a great audiobook too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the generation of americans that were in their earning prime years during the late 70s and the 80s were the lucky ones...and their kids are lucky, too. Those earners in that time frame were able to stash their earnings into nearly risk-free certificates, which over the years increased and doubled and doubled again. And now their children are inheriting that money.

We may never see the like of that financial boon again, at least not here in america.

Economic growth here in america now depends on population growth. And since americans are not having many children, the establishment is looking to bring in people from outside in order to obtain growth. However, some americans don't want this. It is the establishment vs the american majority on whether america will return to growth via population importation or whether we will go the way of japan. This is the new war.

<comment><USER15> That's completely untrue. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we also had crippling inflation to go along with those high interest rates.

<comment><USER16> Yea, the inflation in the 70's really affected my adult life. I remember saving up for a toy, and going to the store and it went up in price. I didn't understand, but later in life I found myself buying stuff I might need just because it was a good price.

I got some money in the 90's and was going to buy a Harley. I was going to ride across the United States. I kept telling myself, the minute I really see inflation kicking in, I'll buy the bike. Well, I never bought the bike, but it wasen't because of inflation.</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Model 3 production has been sabotaged, according to CNC - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/tesla-model-3-production-has-been-sabotaged-according-to-cnc/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17342126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17342126).

</comment><comment><USER3> Blogspam.

Source is [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee- con...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee-conducted- extensive-and-damaging-sabotage.html)

<comment><USER4> This source is much better, can we please get it changed.

[EDIT] or merged with the other discussion - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17342126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17342126)

<comment><USER2> Done. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


The WIRED Guide to Digital Security - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/12/digital-security-guide/ <comment><USER2> I'm really sick and tried of seeing these TOR guides, that are very quite dangerous.

Anonymity on TOR depends on so much more than just using TOR browser and HTTPS only.

<comment><USER3> Could you share some resources you think are a good alternative?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Experience with Protocol Buffers - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone here have experience with protocol buffers?
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/
I need to move some data faster and with less parsing on either side of the transmission, and these seem like a good choice. <comment><USER2> This has just been posted on HN

<http://msgpack.sourceforge.net/>

Make sure you benchmark simple JSON. It might be enough.

<comment><USER3> Here are some benchmarks of PB vs JSON vs Thrift: [http://bouncybouncy.net/ramblings/posts/json_vs_thrift_and_p...](http://bouncybouncy.net/ramblings/posts/json_vs_thrift_and_protocol_buffers_round_2/)

I also have some benchmarks of Python deserialization of JSON, and talk about alternatives here: [http://blog.metaoptimize.com/2009/03/22/fast- deserialization...](http://blog.metaoptimize.com/2009/03/22/fast- deserialization-in-python/)

I encourage you to listen to jokull, and find out if JSON really is too slow for your needs. My advisor taught me that if you keep your data in an easy-to- read format, you're more likely to catch bugs in the output, merely because you have first-class tools for inspecting the file and are more likely to do so.

<comment><USER4> I find protobuf easier to catch bugs, because it can catch if you're missing data or trying to put the wrong type in or leaving out a required field. There is a ascii-version that is more readable than JSON, too.

That said, overall I agree with your overall sentiment, certainly do look at JSON as well. Protobuf is overkill for a lot of things, and JSON keeps things simpler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used this for some projects, with much success. In one case I used it as a data interchange format between a C++ app an some Python utilities. It worked very well for that and the generated API's were easy to work with, albiet a bit bulky.

In another case, more of an experiment, I used them to serialize game data and sent it using enet. This proved very flexible and easy to change/add things, and the packets were extremely compact.

Pros:

* Read/Write access to data from C++ or Python

* Generated API's were easy to work with

* Very compact representation

* Ascii-dump version very useful for debugging

* More error checking than something like json (i.e. it tells you if you leave out a required field)

Cons:

* Adds some build steps, can be more of a headache to maintain (compared to json or something)

* API can't parse ascii version, bad for config data or other stuff that might want to be human readable (vs. xml or json)

* Generally requires copying your data into the protobuf struct, and then packing, rather than going straight from your "native" format into a packed buffer.

* Adds a bit more complexity

* Not as lightweight as json

For what you're doing, I would recommend them.

They're great for "structure" style data, a little weird for array-style. For example, one of the things I was storing was a 4x4 matrix, and I resorted to making a struct with 16 members such as m_00, m_01, etc.. which worked fine and it stored it compactly but was a little weird. I don't think there's a way to have a float[16] or something like that. I could be wrong, maybe there's a better way to do this.

Generally, these days i use one of three formats. I am very happy to have outgrown xml.

protobuf -- for hierarchical, nested data, if it needs to be compact and accessed from different languages

JSON -- for quick and dirty stuff, when format needs to be flexible (or when i need to use javascript)

GTO -- for large sets of structured data. (www.opengto.org)

</comment><comment><USER5> We were using .NET's WCF messaging system, but wanted a faster/smaller format. <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/> let us keep our code the same, while using protobuf for the wire format. Worked quite well.

Another approach to consider is using a text format (XML, JSON), then running it through fast compression like QuickLZ. This has the benefit of not having to change the program much more than a call to compress/decompress.

</comment><comment><USER6> Protocol Buffers will work fine and their documentation is very clear. These are my findings based on my experience -

* Serializing data is ok but parsing takes quite a bit of time especially for large requests. (I am talking in milli seconds) * PBs always require a copy from your internal app data to its structures. Couldn't find a way to avoid that. * They have variable length encoding and it might be a good option if your data comprised of large percent of integers. From our experience don't use it if you are sending within your corp network as packing and parsing takes more time compared to savings in amount of data transfer. They might be a good option if you are sending data across slow networks.

Some of the metrics show that Thrift performs better than PBs. Also Thrift provides options of using different protocols. If Performance is prime criteria JSON + zipping should be a good option. Also they won't have an intermediate step of generating marshaling code.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out Avro, too. With both Protocol Buffers and Thrift, it's really hard to evolve schemas because you won't be able to read data written with an earlier version of the schema. Avro has the speed of binary while being flexible enough to read older data with later versions of the schema.

<comment><USER8> That's a misconception. If you design your schema properly, evolving it isn't a problem. We use protocol buffers (forced to because we're integrating with Google) and in the schema, everything is marked as optional so they can add or remove fields in future versions of the schema. This puts the onus on your code to properly handle missing fields, but that's the same problem you'll face with any schema that can be changed. Google has changed the schema multiple times and we've had periods where our code hasn't been updated yet. It works just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Protos will work fine. Thrift will also work fine. ________ (insert other binary format) will also work fine.

As long as there are libraries for the languages you're using it's not a big deal. I'd recommend solving the problem and moving on - in the serialization format wars the real victim is productivity.

</comment><comment><USER10> If your data layout is fairly static, PBs are good.

What I did for an app was encode a kind of JSON in PBs:

[http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/storing-json-as- protocol-b...](http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/storing-json-as-protocol- buffers.html)</comment>