Y Combinator Demo Day: The Ultimate Roundup - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/y-combinator-demo-day-the-ultimate-roundup/

<comment><USER2> My Picks for:

\- Most likely to succeed in a big way: Parse

\- Most interesting/clever (want it to succeed): Verbling

\- Most scary (wary of it succeeding): Double Recall

<comment><USER3> Double Recall looks like one of the very few startups that would make the world a worse place if they succeed :(

<comment><USER4> Keep in mind that Double Recall works with news publishers. The number one thing that publishers need is more money to pay for content production. Most publishers are toying with a paywall model right now. I hope they go the Double Recall route. I'd rather type in two words once a day and have an advertiser pay for my content than pull out my credit card to hop over a paywall.

So, here's the alternative. If the Double Recalls have figured out a nice sustainable way to pay for a good chunk of the journalism you enjoy, wouldn't that make the world a better place?

<comment><USER5> "I hope they go the Double Recall route. I'd rather type in two words once a day and have an advertiser pay for my content than pull out my credit card to hop over a paywall."

Well, that depends on the price of the paywall, the quality of the content and how much you value your time, right?

<comment><USER6> Well, what people value more depends on each individual. Some people have more time than money, so DoubleRecall is perfect for them, while others have money and no time.

What DoubleRecall does, is give a chance to everyone to view the article. If you take a look at a DoubleRecall client Finance, where people can still choose to pay monthly fees to get the content without DoubleRecall. Other people, like myself, can now still view the premium content without having to pay anything. I may still later decide to but a subscription and have uninterrupted access, but I probably wont, when someone else might.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No one mentioned Mixrank in the comments, I like the idea. Maybe someday it will be one of those essential marketing tools like SEOmoz. I for one, am lazy and would prefer just mimic my competitors ads instead of making 10 different ads and A/B testing them.

Coverage seems quite narrow at least for .fi domains. They probably need to get some ad-crawler servers with IP addresses(according to GeoIP) from Finland or any other country they want to have coverage in.

<http://www.mixrank.com/a/groupon.com> lol @ "90% off"

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm amazed at how many "Groupon for X" startups have been popping up. In this group there is Munch On Me (restaurants) and Aisle50 (groceries), but if you look through a site like <http://startupli.st/startups> there are a lot of others. Opez also says they want to turn independent professionals into their own Groupons, which doesn't really equate. I presume they really mean giving the independent professionals the ability to publish their own coupons.

With as much criticism as GroupOn has received, and the suspect way they have measured their success it seems there must be a better model of comparison. Saying you want to be the LivingSocial of X would likely give a better impression.

Still, I'm not sure applying that business model to a specific industry like restaurants or groceries will lead to success. For restaurants, LivingSocial and GroupOn already give out a lot of restaurant deals. Google will soon be moving in the market also. It's quickly becoming saturated. How long can restaurants give away meals for half price?

Aisle50 is at least attacking an area that isn't really covered by existing businesses.

</comment><comment><USER9> The S11 demo day writes up are probably one of the best ways to get a sense of what the early stage ecosystem looks like right now. Its not a bad picture either. These are some great startups - mature and refreshingly diverse. It's a good time to be an entrepreneur in the valley.

</comment><comment><USER10> Quite a few of the companies mentioned have traction and that is pretty impressive.

I haven't seen anyone else say it but kicksend looks a lot like getcrate from sahil lavingia with facebook integration added to it.

<comment><USER11> Infact, traction could be one of the key drivers behind some of the companies getting selected into YC.

<comment><USER12> It would be interesting to get an overview on how many of the startups in the current batch had their products out 1) before getting funded by YC, 2) during YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bushido sounds really interesting. I've always liked the Add-Ons for Heroku, and a platform-independent version of that would be a huge help.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd say Codecademy has the potential to create the most value. Lowering the barrier to learning to code will create a lot more coders.

</comment><comment><USER15> MarketBrief sounds like a home run to me. If the product works as described it's a tremendous value proposition.

<comment><USER3> It's basically search engine spam generated from SEC docs. Adds needless verbosity to when people want the info in a concise format. When looking for actionable financial info I hate having to read through sentences when a table or graph will do. Consider why audio podcasts never really caught on for non- entertainment.

<comment><USER16> I don't know how to read an S1, which is why I go to places like CNBC and the sort in the first place. Granted, I'm not a financial services kind of guy, but it's useful to have that info generated in a digestible format. I don't think the podcast analog works quite right... it's more like taking a blog post from tech crunch, and automagically repurposing it for usa today by adding relevant context programmatically. There's definitely value in that, but I don't think it's "Bloomberg" money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Go Snapjoy! I'm looking to them for market validation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder when exactly it was that TechCrunch was like, "wow, all we really need to do is write YC articles all day." They're playing this site like a violin.

</comment><comment><USER19> VidYard isn't really much of an innovation, in fact, Bits on the Run has been doing this - better - for quiet some time. VidYard is caught in between trying to emulate YouTube and being a streaming hosting provider without convincing me of either strengths.

BOTR offers an elegant API, skin-able players, pay-as-you-go usage, statistics and, as an option, a totally configurable ad platform plugin for the player that works with more than one ad platform. FWIW, I know VidYard does a lot of this, too, but what's the YouTube angle doing for them? Other than having a chart comparing them to _community-based_ video platforms?

EDIT: Down-vote if you want, but provide a reason. Otherwise, I'll assume: "he said something about my startup, get him!"</comment>


Transmit data through speakers and microphone from your browser - brian-armstrong https://brian-armstrong.github.io/quiet-js/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to see some real standardized _cross-browser_ interface between the browser and external devices (or applications on the same device). Previously there was NPAPI which did only the latter, and if you only need input to your device you can do that by emulating a USB (or possibly bluetooth) keyboard, which I think is what Yubikey does by the way.

I know that there are people who don't want the browser to be able to communicate with other devices or applications (for security or privacy reasons). But this project shows that it's already possible with the audio transmission, and for output that has been possible for 15(?) or so years with the <bgsound> tag. Or by flashing the screen or showing QR codes on the screen.</comment>


AMD Threadripper 3970X under heavy AVX2 load: Defective by design? - <AUTHOR> https://forum.level1techs.com/t/amd-threadripper-3970x-under-heavy-avx2-load-defective-by-design/153883 <comment><USER2> "Unable to perform AVX2 instructions correctly under heavy load" is also a common "WTF Intel!?"–inducing phenomenon. I'm certain SREs who work at companies with more than 1 million servers have a bunch of hair pulling stories.

Most (all?) Intel server CPUs in fact decrease clock speed when executing AVX2 (and some other) instructions to keep things a bit more sane. Vlad from Cloudflare wrote about this, more specific to AVX-512 back in 2017: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels- frequen...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequency- scaling/)

Then there is PROCHOT signal. Which is supposed to protect the CPU from getting too hot but keeps getting raised in lopsided AVX2 loads not because CPU is too hot but voltage regulation gets whacked.

You may wonder: what is an example of AVX2 heavy load. RSA multiplication is a good candidate. AES constructions or modes (CBC with SHA, GCM) are implemented in AVX2-BMI2 as well.

<comment><USER3> I ran into this issue on one of my builds. Aida64 has a benchmark (floating point photo or something?) that uses AVX instructions. Pressing the "run benchmark" button would instantly black-screen crash my machine with 100% certainty.

I debugged this problem over a number of years... I replaced the RAM, I replaced the motherboard, I eventually replaced the CPU... still happened no matter what I did. Even if I _underclocked_ the machine and kept the voltages the same, instant crash. It was maddening.

Exasperated, I eventually busted out an oscilloscope and looked at the waveform on the 12V supply to the CPU. When starting the AVX benchmark, there was a huge brownout. That basically explained everything; my power supply essentially turned off when the CPU started drawing a ton of power. I replaced the power supply and got lucky -- it handled it fine and I could run the benchmark. I even got some overclock out of it.

After this whole experience, I've never looked at computers the same way again. You can buy high-spec brand-name components, and it's all just a crapshoot. Maybe your computer won't crash in the middle of an important task. Maybe it will. There isn't much you can do but cross your fingers.

<comment><USER4> If there is one thing in a computer you should not cheap out on, it is the power supply. Buy from Seasonic and buy more power supply than you currently need.

<comment><USER5> You say not to cheap out, and then recommend Seasonic. I'd say avoid a brand that was notoriously the cheapest option in recent history.

<comment><USER6> At the very least, Anandtech seems to rate Seasonic very highly: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/11252/the-seasonic-prime- tita...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11252/the-seasonic-prime-titanium- power-supply-review)

<comment><USER7> It's not just Anandtech. All reviewers have nothing but praise for Seasonic. They have the best reputation in the industry at the moment and all their PSUs have a 10 year warranty to back it up.

Jonnyguru's last Seasonic review: [https://www.jonnyguru.com/blog/2018/07/03/seasonic-prime- ult...](https://www.jonnyguru.com/blog/2018/07/03/seasonic-prime- ultra-750-titanium-power-supply/6/)

Literally nothing in the bad & mediocre summary sections, and with nothing but recommendations for the entire series:

> Our look at the PRIME Ultra Titanium series has now at last come to a > conclusion. We can now definitively say there's not a bad performer in the > bunch, and while all do have some very minor drawbacks I can't see any > reason not to recommend any of them.

<comment><USER8> They actually have 12 year warranty at least for the PRIME TX ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most performance motherboards with Intel unlocked K models will downclock the maximum boost when using AVX instructions. The reason is very high power draw and temperatures. For example my i5 9600k runs at 5ghz turbo boost on all cores but 4.7 when using AVX. If I disable that option it crashed with prolonged usage like benchmarks.

Edit: To be clear, the i5 9600k is sold as 3.7ghz with boost up to 4.6 on a single core. So there is a difference with the AMD case in that this doesn't happen on the setting Intel sell it at.

<comment><USER10> AVX offset is a configurable parameter with unlocked (K- or X- series) processors. You can run with 0 offset at all but the highest overclocks.

At some point it does stop being worth it though, because the power/voltage implications of 5 GHz AVX are so severe/potentially damaging to the chip. It is a _lot_ of current and current kills chips. SiliconLottery does all their validation with a 200 MHz offset.

<comment><USER11> there's no real reason to try and hit 0 offset anyways. if you get it stable, it usually implies you could just increase the multiplier and offset by some n>0 for greater overall performance.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that real-world code (including games) often includes _at least some_ AVX instructions, so the AVX number is often more representative of "real" performance. The way AMD does it where it's a smooth transition based on current/thermals is definitely better than Intel's "whoops, AVX instruction, pump the brakes!".

But yes, if you can get higher clocks _at least some of the time_ then you might as well.

The other other downside is that flipping between power states can cause problems/crashes too. It shouldn't but it can.

<comment><USER11> agreed, I was only speaking from an overclocker's perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My 3970X on the ASRock Taichi (with default settings, generally) does not seem to reproduce this issue at this time - the system remains operational despite the FMA3 path being used (I'm assuming this is behind the AVX2 flag? disabling FMA3 leads to a plain AVX path) while running an all-core test with 16K FFTs in Prime95.

Either a slight background workload (Windows seems to be trying to use half a core for an OS update) resolves this, or this board does not have a broken power design?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your experience. What version of Prime95 are you using? Make sure to use the latest one (v29.8 build 6). The only CPU options I see in the torture test settings are: (1) Disable AVX-512 (grayed out since unsupported on this CPU), (2) Disable AVX2, (3) Disable AVX. There's nothing about FMA3.

<comment><USER12> Yeah - I explicitly updated to the latest one; the FMA3 setting is one that existed in prior builds in local.txt so I toggled it off there just to be sure I was hitting an AVX2 code path (in case it didn't mean the UI saying FMA3 in each worker window), but it seems to interpret AVX2 as being synonymous to FMA3 I guess.

<comment><USER13> same here on 1950x, I built from source, when toggled avx2 it shows "using type-1" I dont know what it is:

[https://pastebin.com/tPuYzYC0](https://pastebin.com/tPuYzYC0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He's not alone; I've had similar problems with my 3960X.

It seems to be a power delivery issue, and fortunately fixable if you disable all spread-spectrum and VRM power-saving options, but the Zen series seems a tricky beast.

I've had machine crashes triggered by using the "wrong" CPU scheduler under Linux. It's amazing, in a horrible way.

<comment><USER15> I remember when Buildzoid of AHOC did the mobo breakdowns of the TR4 boards and thinking that while some of the super high end boards were probably good for this sort of beating, the mid and low range might struggle hard with the 64/128 part if it ever came into being (3990X was just a rumor at that time). But it looks like they need more caps to handle the transient response time, and probably also some firmware fixes to slow ramp because I don't think all the SMD caps in the world are going to handle that sort of ramp. It's just not possible to get them close enough to the actual CPU without literally putting them under the IHS.

<comment><USER16> Tangent: is there a reason that CPUs' instruction sets aren't designed with explicit "hint"-ops in them to let a compiler assert "I'm going to execute some instructions that're going to draw a lot of power about 1000 cycles from now, so start ramping up for it now"? That'd basically eliminate what Intel calls "license-switching" costs.

Do they just not believe in compiler authors to be able to emit these kinds of hints? Is there too much legacy code that would come without the hints for it to be worthwhile? Would it just not be worth it given how often OS context switches could drop the CPU directly from regular code in one process to AVX2 code in another process?

<comment><USER17> Probably because the better approach would be to stall the processor (or at least stall on power intensive instructions) until the requisite power has arrived. 1000 instructions is probably too far out (in terms of instructions) for compilers to accurately add the requisite instructions. Also, it requires code change, unlike the stalling approach. The only disadvantage to the stalling approach would be if the workload is constantly switching between low power and high power, but that can be solved by making the switching interval longer/shorter in the firmware.

<comment><USER16> Why is it "better" if the stall results in lower performance-per-watt? That's what people buy these high-end CPU SKUs for, after all. They aren't just concerned with CapEx (the cost of the CPU) but also OpEx (the aggregate cost of electricity for the CPUs, PSUs and cooling in their studio/data center.) You could also "fix" the problem by just allowing the customer to lock the CPU into AVX2 mode and thereby never switching out at all—but of course that'd be dumb; they'd be drawing more power, and _also_ not going as fast as they could, when executing non-AVX2 code.

Another approach I haven't seen from either Intel or AMD yet, is to copy ARM's big.LITTLE architecture: to set up separate "AVX2 cores" that can execute AVX instructions and most basic ALU ops but not e.g. branches, put those on the other side of the die with in-wafer thermal insulation between them and the regular cores; and then throw workloads between regular and AVX2 cores in a way where the AVX2 cores heating up doesn't mean that the non-AVX2 cores are heating up, and the CPU can go back to full Turbo Boost as soon as the workload is thrown back to the regular cores, because the respective regular core is actually quite cool.

(The performance effects of this are possible to loosely estimate, I think, by writing code that synchronously sets up a GPGPU pass on some data, executes it, retrieves the result, and then returns to executing CPU instructions for a while, in a loop; and then executing this code on an Intel CPU using its on- die IGPU as the GPU. The CPU and IGPU form _somewhat_ -separate thermal domains already, though there's no explicit insulation.)

<comment><USER18> Because it doesn't rely on both the user and developers to do some yet to be determined 'right thing' for the CPU to behave in a consistent manner. While you are correct that some people want absolute max performance per watt, I would argue that no one wants a CPU that behaves unpredictably or inconsistently. An option to disable one or more power saving features that result in this issue (assuming that's what the issue is) for those who just need maximum performance could be a desired solution for some. While others, possibly most, would be willing to take a short term performance hit from a stall to maintain the best overall performance per watt characteristics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm are we having another "AMD motherboards are crap" moment?

Or is it simply that delivering 200+W at load through a CPU socket can't be reliably done at consumer prices?

Anyone has had this problem with less high end CPUs? Something at 95-65 W?

<comment><USER20> I have a AMD GPU, a 380X... and to be honest I am just sure AMD power management is crap in general. 380X in particular has bigger demand than 380, but AMD didn't bother raising power limit, causing some weird issues (some games for example get unstable unless I use some overclocking app to reduce voltage and raise power limit... mind you, the normal 380 people already used it with maximum power limit by default, because it was already too low...).

Then we get the R480 melting cables for the same reason... and so on.

<comment><USER19> Hmm whatever is melting cables is drawing more power than the cables are specced for. I doubt increasing the power limit will help with that...

<comment><USER20> You are correct. But what I meant is that the source of the problem was the same.

In this case, AMD wanted to keep using 6pin cable despite it not being approprite, on the 380 it just slowed it down.

On 380X, it is unstable, it still don't draw enough to melt things, but you need hackery to make the GPU useable

The 480 they outright made a GPU that used more power than the cables specs would allow, and insisted in using the same power delivery design the 380 had... Their "fix" to the issue was make patches that would just make the GPU run slow, and make it misbehave like the 380X does.

<comment><USER21> Wow, that's ridiculous...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The original Ryzen (1000 series) shipped plenty units with hardware defects that could be exposed by running parallel compiles. The so-called segfault bug:

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new- ryze...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryzen- fixed&num=1)

<comment><USER23> From your link:

> AMD has confirmed this issue doesn't affect EPYC or Threadripper processor

The CPU Michael was using was a Ryzen 7, not a Threadripper. But I don't know if TRs were later found to have the same problem, which wouldn't surprise me.

<comment><USER10> IMO the likely cause was some kind of cache bug due to manufacturing. Threadripper processors were binned for tighter cache timings (they had the same timings as the 2000 series desktop chips) and thus didn't suffer from it.

EPYC was on a different stepping entirely and didn't share dies with the consumer or HEDT processors. I suspect they likely had the tighter cache timings although I'm not sure on that.

Regardless, it's also possible that they were just binned out, or nobody ever encountered it. EPYC was not a very high-volume product, most people did test installations and said "yeah, we'll wait for Rome". Quad-numa on a package and lower-than-Intel IPC on a pretty poor node was not a winning formula.

Once the problem was realized, desktop Ryzen processors started getting binned for it as well. A few slipped through here and there, so it wasn't a manufacturing change, I think binning is the most likely explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can reproduce this problem on my non-Threadripper Ryzen 5 3600 Zen 2 CPU. I don't think it's specific to TR.

With AVX2 enabled, Prime95's torture test is only stable when I use 3 workers or less. With 4 workers one of them will abort due to an error within 20 seconds. The more workers, the sooner a crash; with 5 workers it happens within 10 seconds, and with 6 workers it happens within 2-3 seconds.

If I play with the tests on and off for a while, seemingly increasing the quiescent temperature of the CPU, the whole experience and testing actually becomes a bit more stable. My motherboard uses the B450M chipset.

<comment><USER25> What motherboard make/model?

<comment><USER24> Gigabyte B450M DS3H. Currently running with latest BIOS (F50).

<comment><USER26> Note that @DerAlbi thinks the CPU is fine, instead he suspects the VRM on his Gigabyte mobo for this issue (based on his oscilloscope readings):

[https://forum.level1techs.com/t/3970x-prime95-stability/1532...](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/3970x-prime95-stability/153206/21)

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do some more investigating. Drop the memory clocks to stock, drop the CPU clocks to, perhaps, 3 GHz, and see if the same issues happen. If they do, there's a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. If the issue disappears, try raising the clock incrementally until the issue reappears. Get a Kill-a- watt and look at power usage for each frequency and graph the results.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Finally, a note on CPU temperatures: At idle the CPU hovers around 39-50 °C > and tops around 72-78 °C under full load. I'm using the best air cooling > setup I could think of and get my hands on, but it's still air cooling, and > my system is installed in a closed case (but with extreme attention to > airflow).

I know air coolers can be competitive, but it says right on the outside of the 2950X box that you should use liquid cooling.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can anyone suggest a different CPU load-testing tool other than prime95, that might catch things prime95 wouldn't?

I have a machine running a 1950X and I get random ffmpeg segfaults anywhere from six to eight hours in to an encoding session with all 16 cores fully loaded, but the machine is prime95 stable for a week+, so I suspect it's an AVX/AVX2 issue.

<comment><USER29> Intel's Linpack benchmark is quite good perf/stability/throttling test for win/linux/mac: [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-mkl- benchmar...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-mkl-benchmarks- suite)

Not the easiest one to configure though.

<comment><USER14> Linpack only runs on Intel CPUs, so it's not useful for Threadripper.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if we're talking about the same Linpack test but I'm able to run it on my AMD TR 3970X without issues.

<comment><USER14> The linpack package in AUR, at any rate. If there are multiple software suites under the same name then I have no idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So, does this mean threadripper is unusable and we shouldn't buy them?

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. This is a legitimate question. Does this bug make the cpu unusable? Does the work around for it slow down the per core performance to the point of unusability?

<comment><USER31> It's a little early to start condemning things. It might be motherboard power delivery, a prime95 bug or something else. If it is the CPU there could be a firmware correctable flaw. This is the bleeding edge; these devices have only been available for 13 weeks and someone is indeed bleeding, it seems.

It could even be an uncorrectable flaw in the device design, in which case AMD will likely do as they did in 2017: replace the parts.

<comment><USER32> > This is the bleeding edge; these devices have only been available for 13 > weeks [...]

Shouldn't these devices have been tested by AMD and motherboard manufacturers for months before they were released? Including on workloads like Prime95 which are well known to uncover system instabilities.

Keep in mind also that this is not the first time in the Zen/Zen2 history that AMD has shipped buggy products: there was the segfault bug, the random number generator instruction bug, and the unbootable Threadripper on recent (at the time of release) Linux kernel. The worst part, to me personally, is that they were all "surface bugs" that could have been detected by AMD with a little bit of testing.

I've been wondering why Supermicro isn't releasing any Threadripper motherboards (while they do for Xeon-W). Maybe this explains it: the consumer CPU business at AMD is a circus and Supermicro wants none of it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Probably the motherboard, or VRM brownout to be more exact. That said, I'm glad I did not pick up a 3970X like I was planning to, yet. AMD is pretty great with its warranty, motherboard manufacturers can be a chore.

</comment><comment><USER34> It appears this could just be a prime95 bug from reading the comments.

<comment><USER35> There is a beautiful oscilloscope shot, that shows it's a power delivery issue - the voltage sharpy drops and no software bug should cause it.

It appears to be a VRM issue, either a design flaw or incorrect setup by the BIOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I ran the same test on my ryzen 3900X with no issues, MSI X570 ACE motherboard, seasonic PSU.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great to see L1T posted here.</comment>


Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/davenet/stories/DocSearlsonSteveJobs.html

<comment><USER2> I think this looks a lot more prescient than it really is.

Searls says that whatever Jobs created at Apple would be: original, innovative, exclusive, expensive, [beautiful], maybe influenced by other software tycoons, and minimally influenced by developers. He's right on all counts. It's a good picture of Steve Jobs.

What's missing? Searls didn't say one word about the likelihood that Steve Jobs would be _successful_ , and that success is what makes him something other than Just Another Malignant Narcissist CEO.

<comment><USER3> Reg: _All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?_

<comment><USER2> I don't think this means what you think it means. Consider the situation in 36 AB (After Brian):

 _By the summer of 70 the Romans had breached the walls of Jerusalem, ransacking and burning nearly the entire city...

The Second Temple (the rennovated Herod's Temple) was destroyed on Tisha B'Av (29 or 30 July 70).

Tacitus... notes that those who were besieged in Jerusalem amounted to no fewer than six hundred thousand, that men and women alike and every age engaged in armed resistance, everyone who could pick up a weapon did, both sexes showed equal determination, preferring death to a life that involved expulsion from their country. All three walls were destroyed and in turn so was the Temple, some of whose overturned stones and their place of impact can still be seen...

The famous Arch of Titus still stands in Rome: it depicts Roman legionaries carrying the Temple of Jerusalem's treasuries, including the Menorah, during Titus's triumphal procession in Rome._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish-Roman_War>

Even after crushing the Judean revolt, the Romans provided sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health. But they also destroyed the symbolic center of the Jewish identity.

<comment><USER4> Dude, that was a Monty Python reference. I like your counter-argument, but still: it was a _Monty_ _Python_ _reference_.

<comment><USER2> I make no apologies. Steve Jobs is Serious Business :-)

<comment><USER5> I await references from other movies, like "The Omen."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "To Steve, clones are the drag of the ordinary on the innovative. All that crap about cloners not sharing the cost of R&D is just rationalization. Steve puts enormous value on the engines of innovation. Killing off the cloners just eliminates a drag on his own R&D,..."

Repace clones with middleware when you read this.

<comment><USER6> As an iPhone developer, who developed the skill through brute-force experience and trial through throwing away lots of code, I wonder why Google doesn't take advantage of this. Currently, the iPhone SDK is better than the Android's SDK. Similar to the high value of Microsoft Visual Studio integrating everything into a true integrated environment, the iPhone SDK is much closer to Microsoft Visual Studio-like than the Android SDK.

Overnight, Google could start to change this underdog status. Why doesn't Google buy Appcelerator's Titanium or Phonegap? By buying a software tool company that makes it much easier to write Android apps, Google could show up in force for the battlefield of developer mindshare and consumer experience, by giving away the tool free and sponsoring conferences, contests, bloggers, heck even venture capital for Android-focus companies.

In the long run, because of their carpet bombing approach with devices, Google will earn the majority share of smart mobile device operating systems. Why not accelerate the process by making it easier for developers to make something? Not everyone is above-average when it comes to software development - why not make the Visual Basic for mobile platforms. I argue that Visual Basic was a key linchpin of Microsoft's Windows dominance. Before Visual Basic, you had to use the Windows API or (yes, a third-party app framework) like Foxpro.

<comment><USER7> Because Google has never genuinely competed on quality, except for search results, and that was only for a blessed golden period. (And not counting Gmail, which was a 20% project, and is only considered high quality because the rest of the state of web-based email interfaces is horrible, open source shit.)

Google doesn't need finesse: They strongarm, using brute force & sheer volume. That's what they do.

Ergo, they don't need to finesse the SDK or truly court developers. (The best way to court developers is to ensure apps sell - and the Android marketplace numbers are dismal.)

They think they will win anyway.

<comment><USER8> , and is only considered high quality because the rest of the state of web- based email interfaces is horrible, open source shit.)

I take issue with this. Google is also better than non-web based email clients as well, including outlook, thunderbird and Apple mail. It searches quicker as well, which is completely unbelievable.

Sure, some things these clients do better, but for most tasks, gmail is much better. Outlook 2010, just released last week, has just started linking email conversations.

<comment><USER9> Getting further OT: I used to agree wholeheartedly with this, but have you noticed how slow Gmail is getting? I recently switched back to Apple mail, after insisting on Gmail as my frontend for years. Can't beat Google on search speed, but Apple does a fine job of that, and every other function is considerably faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        - It will be original.
        - It will be innovative.
        - It will be exclusive.
        - It will be expensive.
        - It's aesthetics will be impeccable.

Innovative? There will usually be a twist that distinguishes it from the mainstream pack, but all of the parts will have been implemented before. The result will have compromises, but they will be compromises fine tuned to the tastes of an actual individual person. Just about everything else will have been decided by committee. Imagine you are competing in a song writing market where most of the other compositions are written by focus groups and committees. That's the kind of advantage Steve enjoys.

(One can also think of this as: development unfettered by fear of failure.)

Expensive? Try "high margin." Read: the most lucrative market segments.

<comment><USER8> The iPhone was truly innovative, same for the iPad. iTunes as well.

There will usually be a twist that distinguishes it from the mainstream pack, but all of the parts will have been implemented before.

You could say that about anything innovative, it always consists of parts of things from before.

<comment><USER5> The iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen phone. It was the first to combine such a good execution, usable mobile browser, and multitouch. Add the App Store into the mix, and you have something unbelievably good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if anyone still thinks killing Mac clones was the wrong move.

<comment><USER11> I'll take the bait, Apple and everyone else lost a massive opportunity to dethrone the Borg, not once, but twice. First with Windows ME and then with Vista Microsoft were caught with their pants way, way down and without an actually usable consumer OS. Apple could have owned that and could have made a massive push for the mainstream.

This being said, had they actually taken on the Borg at their own game they would be a _very_ different company than they are today, and not necessarily a better one.

<comment><USER12> When ME came out, Apple was busy clawing its way out of the grave, and since Vista, Apple has been killing MS in consumer mindshare, revenue and profit growth, and new sector growth. MS is dead in the water in mobile and appliance computing - where do you think the growth over the next 3 years is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Remarkably prescient, though I guess the signs were there for anyone smart enough to see them at the time.

<comment><USER14> IMHO It is not prescient but Doc Searl recognized "the essential Steve P. Jobs". It is funny to see how most of us are blinded by noise in the echo chamber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the only thing he got wrong was the irrelevance of NeXT.

Just about everybody I know instantiates lots and lots of NSObjects every day. ;-)

<comment><USER16> Nice strawman. He never said NeXT was irrelevant. He said, "Regardless of their market impact (which in the cases of Lisa and NeXT were disappointing), all four were remarkable artistic achievements." The key words being "market impact". In other words, they didn't sell much, which is true. It was a hindsight observation of market performance, not a forward looking prediction.

<comment><USER15> Actually, "market impact" does not mean "sales" either. It means more or less "relevance". At that, NeXT failed miserably to influence Unix workstation and personal computer makers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I > want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art._

There's the conflict. Your art's success depends on the ability of others to say the same exact thing, in a symbiosis with your art.

Does it not go against the very spirit of art itself to tell other artists that they must paint your way?

<comment><USER18> > Does it not go against the very spirit of art itself to tell other artists > that they must paint your way?

Not if you're curating a _private_ gallery.

<comment><USER17> I see. The App Store is a private art gallery.

Stop kidding yourself.

<comment><USER19> You might read about the Paris Salon.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The many load averages of Unix - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ManyLoadAveragesOfUnix <comment><USER2> Well that was probably as frustrating to write as it was to read... The author does a nice job of forensics but can't _really_ pin down the meaning on any particular OS.

My preference would be to have a well-defined, even if of-limited-use, load rather than a poorly-defined, but maybe-more-useful?, load. From the article, it sounds as if kernel authors tried to implement the former, found it difficult to do as machines grew and then everyone headed off in different directions only to implement lots of the latter...

<comment><USER3> Best i can tell after some quick glancing on the history of the metric, the value of including IOWait depends more on the hardware than the software.

If your IO actions are performed by CPU rather than DMA, having them in there makes sense (it will slow down anything else). but if it is performed via DMA (or in other ways offloaded from the CPU) it makes less sense.

<comment><USER4> Generally, processes in IOWait are not running, they are sitting around in a queue waiting for their data.

Anyone waiting on the process is feeling pain, but it isn't eating any CPU so it comes down to what you want the metric to mean. Should it reflect user discomfort or consumption of cpu cycles.

<comment><USER3> Yes the process is sleeping, but the system (OS and hardware) is still active doing whatever IO was requested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brendan Gregg has a nice video on how Solaris 10's iowait works. It starts a little slow and may even sound imprecise or inaccurate, but it gets better around 6 minutes in.

[http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/06/24/load-average- vide...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/06/24/load-average-video/)

</comment><comment><USER6> As the article said, NFS has a nasty habit of rocketing your load count when the server fails, and NFS can be very unstable if everything aligns correctly (or badly.)

When the NFS server decides to take a rest I've seen 1000+ loads on production Linux (3.13+) systems

Or kernel panic

Or OOM

Or cats and dogs living together

</comment><comment><USER7> I apprechiate the effort, but that article did not tell me almost anything.

This one from Linuxjournal[0] however.

[0] - [http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001](http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think a good metric is directly related to the amount of progress a single thread with default priority makes on the CPU per unit time.</comment>


Insomnia costs U.S. $63 billion annually - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/01/health/insomnia-cost-productivity/index.html <comment><USER2> How much do stupid articles with made-up numbers cost the US annually?</comment>


Hologram Performance by Chicago Rapper Is Shut Down by Police - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/arts/music/hologram-performance-by-chief-keef-is-shut-down-by-police.html

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of 2live crew (uncle luke, etc) being banned in the 1990s for vulgarity in their music. [1]

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_the_U.S.A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_the_U.S.A). 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Nasty_As_They_Wanna_Be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Nasty_As_They_Wanna_Be)</comment>


InstallMonetizer (YC W12) is officially closed - <AUTHOR> http://www.installmonetizer.com/ <comment><USER2> Can you discuss what happen? Why did you chose to close down?</comment>


Distributions are becoming irrelevant: difference was our strength and liability - <AUTHOR> https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2017/06/distributions-becoming-irrelevant/ <comment><USER2> > I tried getting the Debian Ruby team, who had similar complaints before, to > join me on a mailing list so that we could discuss a common interface > between Gems developers and Linux distributions, but once again, that did > not actually happen.

2-3 years ago debian called out for python developers to help port and all the remaining python2 packages to python3 so that in the future we could drop python2 support. Being pretty familiar with python and somewhat familiar with migrating python2 projects I decided to join the project.

The process of porting mostly involved trying to talk to existing maintainers and seeing if they are already porting the packages and if they are not suggesting that you could help if they needed. I have sent dozens of emails and I got maybe 2 replies. Those were direct emails to the maintainers. Eventually I got so frustrated with how slow and disorganized the process was that I decided to drop it.

When I commented that with other debian contributors they expressed that this was a very old problem and that there is not much that can be done about it since the debian developers are volunteers and likely have other responsibilities other than maintaining their packages.

In retrospect I think debian in particular needs an automatic way to ask maintainers every now and then if they are still willing to maintain their respective packages and if they are not or do not respond in a timely fashion, put them up for adoption.

<comment><USER3> Most Python packages are team-maintained in Debian.

I don't know what you mean by "porting", but if it's just deleting Python 2 packages, that won't help: they are easy to maintain and they are still useful. If you mean porting the actual code of each package to Python 3, it's a work to be done upstream. Packagers have enough to do with packaging.

<comment><USER4> I guess the subject is debians own programmes written in Python 2, not third party code that they packaged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet again the HN crowd ignores that the large majority of software is not deployed by developers.

Most organizations are not facebook; they deploy from distributions and pull security updates and that's it.

Maintaining systems duct-taped together with compilers/pip/npm/$container_tool_of_the_year becomes very expensive in the long run and with tenths of Frankenstein systems around.

Also, hunting and patching vulnerabilities becomes a big effort due to static binaries, vendorized libs, and so on... (hello left-pad!)

<comment><USER6> The large majority of the software isn't deployed by developers, but it is written by them, and it's rather difficult to deploy unwritten software. And if the people who deploy them have to write it in the first place, they by definition become the developers.

The issue can only be solved by catering to the needs of both parties. For example, the currently available distro packaging formats tend to require privileges to deploy, which complicates the development cycle. (Exceptions do exist, of course; for example, Nix doesn't have this particular issue)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a distribution user who is a developer for other things, I can totally relate, here. Nowadays, I use docker for basically every development I make, so that I don't have to rely on whatever state my host system is. This is not just to bypass distributions problems, it has advantages on its own, like easily using different version of interpreter/compiler without even thinking about it, and easily ejecting the whole environment when I don't need it anymore. My server is structured just like that too : a few sysadmin tools installed on host, then plenty of docker images/containers. It's just more convenient.

As an end user browsing web, watching movies and playing on steam, though, things are quite different. I've been a gentoo user for a decade, but I finally migrated to ubuntu (kde neon recently, but it's still ubuntu based) because it _was_ becoming the standard. You can expect most vendors to have at least ubuntu in mind, and it's a big win as an user. And it's not as painful as it was as a developer (my main reason to use gentoo was use flags and fine tuned configuration), because docker covers all my needs there.

<comment><USER8> I'm increasingly using Docker (and to a lesser extent systemd-nspawn and rkt) to containerise things even on my laptop). For very small tools it doesn't make sense, but the time it takes to start a container is low enough that I have an increasing array of things where the only thing installed locally is a wrapper that does "docker run ...".

But in terms of distro, I agree - Ubuntu is painless enough that even though I e.g. use i3wm and otherwise install a bunch of stuff that is non-standard, Ubuntu is sufficiently convenient as a starting point.

<comment><USER9> Does `docker pull` do any form of signing? Because if it does, I've never seen it. I'm just waiting for some adversary to insert some malware in a popular library image (something like nginx:latest or ruby:2.3) and have that deployed on thousands, if not millions of servers. Assuming, of course, that this has not already happened ( _cough_ National Security Letter _cough_ ).

System package managers have protections in place against that: Package signing means that you now have to hack the packager's laptop and obtain their signing key to publish malicious packages, and reproducible builds will close that attack vector as well. (Which is why I'm very disappointed that distributions are not pushing reproducible builds as a top priority. If nothing else, this might make me switch to NixOS soon.)

<comment><USER10> debian is pushing reproducible builds: [https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds](https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds)

<comment><USER9> I'm aware of that but that's only a few guys working on that AFAICS. "Pushing it" would be if the core devs said "all new packages after day X _must_ build reproducibly", and then "on day Y, we will remove all packages that do not build reproducibly".

<comment><USER10> Well, debian is a volunteer effort, it's hard to force stuff on people that will just stop contributing if it doesn't feel fun enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This goes much farther than Linux distros. All of open source suffers from fragmentation and re-implementation of things that already exist rather than to contribute to the existing source base.

There are many causes underlying all this (ego, commerce, abrasive/lazy maintainers, NIH and many others besides) and it is something that I believe only time will solve. It's like music, a decade on you'll be able to determine which ones were the evergreens and had staying power while the rest will wilt and be forgotten.

For now I've bet on Debian/Ubuntu, Python and Erlang, I believe those three will still be with us a decade or more from now.

<comment><USER12> > a decade on you'll be able to determine which ones were the evergreens and > had staying power while the rest will wilt and be forgotten.

If only. A decade from now, many of the existing projects will have died not from code quality but from project maintainer churn.

This because the people that started the project to reimplement the old project has run out of features to implement, and thus is faced with the prospect of slowing down and fixing bugs. This to them is not fun, so they call out for someone to take over.

More often than not, the person taking over is barely interested in the current code, mostly there for the glory, and invariably ends up deciding unilaterally that the current code is unmaintainable and thus a full rewrite is in order.

<comment><USER11> True, code quality is not the right measure but I wasn't really making that argument. Staying power also implies a lively community and one that can take over maintenance and further improvements once the original team stops working on the project. Any project that is still under 'original maintenance' is as far as I'm concerned a large uncertainty.

One of the ones that I'm particularly worried about is the Linux kernel, if and when Linus gives up working on it there will be a period of some uncertainty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think they are. Ideally I think people would use:

\- Flatpaks for one or two applications they deeply care about and use all day (need to have full control)

\- Pypi, npm, etc. for development libraries (again, you need more control and need to be able to use different versions from different projects)

\- Your distro's package manager for the 95% remaining.

You might not care as much about the remaining 95%, but you still need them and want them to be reliable. If anything this will push people towards stabler distros (think debian stable instead of Arch).

Edit: Pypi, not pypy

<comment><USER14> > PyPy

I think you mean pip

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me, my distribution is highly relevant. It's my single point of trust which native software I use.

I never install anything that is not in the repos. All other software I use are web apps.

<comment><USER16> It seems sad to me, living like that in the confines of someone else's choices.

There are loads of good software that just aren't in any repo of any Linux distros.

IMO, one of the advantages of Linux is how easy it is to find and install software from source. Compared to Windows where it's an almost unheard of practice.

<comment><USER17> _> It seems sad to me, living like that in the confines of someone else's choices._

Counterpoint: Sometimes the confines of someone else's choices can be freeing.

Several years ago, I decided to switch to Arch. In the beginning, this was incredibly enlightening: I could set up my system however I wanted! I could make my own packages if the one I wanted wasn't in the repository!

Soon a sort of fatigue began to set in: whenever I wanted to install a piece of software, I had to first decide which software I wanted. Every new little task turned into a large project: I wanted to add up a column of numbers, and now I had to decide between gnumeric, libreoffice-calc, and so on.

I eventually wound up switching back to KUbuntu purely because it had more or less everything I needed pre-installed, so I could focus on actually doing the work I wanted to get done rather than figuring out the optimal way to do the work. Any given task may be slightly less efficient than optimal, but in total the effort spent is a lot less for the same amount of work done.

<comment><USER16> That's a good argument. And I feel that more and more as the years pass.

I'm still loving Arch and all the DIY attitude. But I feel like the next time I'd have to change my computers I could go with something "It Just Works™", currently Fedora seems in a good place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've noticed that I don't care any longer so much about which distributions are available, but more about the preferred packaging system of the distribution + how up-to-date their repositories are.

With many programming languages having their preferred tool for circumventing a distro's packaging system, that too has impacted the importance of a distro's packaging systems a bit.

Still, I think it's excessive to say that "distributions" are becoming irrelevant. There's plenty of opportunity for distros to compete to provide a good out-of-the-box setup, fine-tuning tools, or dumbified interface.

</comment><comment><USER19> What about the end user? The >90% market share of Windows is made up of people who won't be tinkering around their distro, or care about things as package managers or custom desktop environments.

But is it possible to grab a larger piece of the pie? That's millions of users that could benefit from a free, secure, lightweight Operating System.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately that requires a system that they would want to use, which is detrimental to what makes those OS favourable to us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > And setting aside their trust in distributions, sysadmin only care to have a > sane handling of dependencies and ... upgrade them in case of a security > issues

As a sysadmin, default configuration is a key role that distributions have. Do they default to sane (opinionated) defaults, or do they have a hands-off policy with no default and pushes the user to actively configure the program?

Debian for example is not just a package manager. It is also the debian policy. If ones is using hundreds of Docker containers then there could also be an identical number of policies, until a point where a common policy dictate what a container should include and do. At that point you are back to a single distribution where the package manager just happened to be based on Docker.

</comment><comment><USER21> NB: Debian announced it would drop LSB in 2015, and as of stretch, which just released, I understand most library support based on it has been removed.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/658809/](https://lwn.net/Articles/658809/)

[https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/amd64/release- notes/...](https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/amd64/release-notes/ch- information.en.html#reduced-lsb-support)

</comment><comment><USER22> This article is written from the perspective of someone working on creating Linux distribution(s). I agree many distributions lost their appeal because now it seems most people are happy with having two options: Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora/RHEL/CentOS. There's less appeal in creating yet another distribution and I think that's a good thing for developers and users alike.

My initial impression from the title was that the author would be making the point that _no_ Linux distribution is necessary. Although I can understand that, on servers, developers care less and less about where their apps are running because of containers and other tools, people still do have to select a base Docker imagine... and boom, distribution choice again (unless you're shipping a single static binary, of course).

Except for things like Nix and other non-traditional methods of configuration, outside of the main DEB/RPM camps, all other distributions are trying to solve the same problems in slightly different ways... I'd argue the disadvantages of that outweigh the benefits.

</comment><comment><USER23> After being a strong GNU/Linux zealot during the early days, it started to become irrelevant to me the moment I stop caring about POSIX.

As long as my tools of choice offer rich libraries and packaging systems, the actual underlying is no longer relevant unless I require some special use case.

Looking at how Linux distributions turned out, I think GNU/Linux developers failed to learn what happened with the UNIX wars.

<comment><USER22> Could you elaborate on what kind of application you're talking about and what are its requirements?

If your app is insulated enough that it doesn't care about POSIX features, aren't you simply outsourcing those requirements to underlying components (and those will care about POSIX)?

<comment><USER24> Isn't delegating(outsourcing) the whole point? Once you do not need POSIX(and POSIX itself does not require Linux specifically) and your tools take care of underlying system, why would you care about system you're running(or, to be more precise, care about running Linux in particular)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frankly no. The problem is not with distros, but with upstream.

Having tried to self-maintain a distro that allows me to do so, Gobolinux, i have witnessed first hand the kinds of mess upstream makes of dependencies.

All too often even a slight bump in minor versions will cause subtle bugs and breakages in behavior. Update some underlying lib just a few notches and suddenly your file manager's trash can is gone. Downgrade the underlying lib and it returns.

But then some other program you want to upgrade insist on using the latest and "greatest" libs, or have depreciated support for one protocol in favor of another, just because the maintainer likes it better.

Thus even with Gobolinux offering me the ability to stack lib versions and whatsnot, all too often i just simply have to freeze everything in place once i have it reasonably where i want it.

Change anything, and i have to change everything, and thus a full reinstall may well be in order.

<comment><USER25> Windows addresses this by maintaining a "side-by-side" set of library versions, so applications can have several versions of a library available to them. This is what the \Windows\WinSxS\ folder stores.

<comment><USER12> At first glance WinSxS strikes me as a centralized variant of what Windows have done since the early days, search the local sub-folders near a binary first before looking elsewhere for a relevant dll.

Basically this is not much different from what is being suggested with Flatpak, Snap, Docker, etc etc etc.

Never mind that unix already offer something similar with SONAME. This is a naming scheme for lib files that put a interface version of sorts into the name. Then symlinks are used to point general names to more specific version names.

This on paper allows the binary to get the right lib version for the job. But all too often either the lib maintainer do not update the soname properly, or the maintainer of whatever program that use the library is not specific enough regarding the soname.

Frankly the problem is not so much technical is it is managerial.

Of the two major UI libs on Linux, Qt keeps surprising me with its backwards- compatibility. I can apparently get Qt5 compiled againt Xorg versions that sends GTK3 screaming about missing dependencies.

This, i suspect, is because Qt is a for profit project that is dual licensed. Thus there is an incentive to be as broad as possible with support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Obviously, build automation will continue to be a critical part of all distributions, pre-configured defaults will continue to be a subjective matter, and various takes will always exist on the optimum degree of knob- twiddlability for any given user community. This is just technical reality and human nature.

I don't see any real point here.

PS. IIRC this guy used to manage Gentoo's build infrastructure, dropped off the radar owing to some kind of professional burnout / direction change a few years ago. While I have immense respect for anyone who can deal with bureaucracy long enough to actually become a Gentoo developer, personally I don't see this guy's personal rants as representative of much at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nobody is going to use containers for every library of their distro. So distro have, by need, a reason to exist along with their package manager. Having container to run larger applications is an additional way to run software, nothing else and certainly does not make distro any more obsolete than they are now.

<comment><USER12> Watch Freedesktop/Gnome give them no choice in the matter, as they depreciate aggressively anything not using Flatpak...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> \> If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.

UNITY IS DEATH</comment>


Snap framework 0.3 release (web framework in Haskell) - <AUTHOR> http://snapframework.com/blog/2010/12/20/snap-0.3-released

<comment><USER2> This is certainly a framework to watch. Not much to work with yet but the guys are building a solid back-bone before they put in the higher level work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope they'll add cool stuff from functional web (continuations, etc.) programming, like in Arc, Ocsigen, Seaside or Ur/Web.</comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for projects like Etcd, traefik - <AUTHOR> I've always wanted to tackle some systems problems and develop an open source project similar to the likes of etcd, traefik, etc.
My goals are:
- Tackle distributed systems / systems problems, maybe something like a middleware which transparently solves a problem. Something like etcd, traefik, leveldb, redis, memcache, sqlite, etc.
- Grow my large-scale design skills
- Develop a small but thriving community of users who really enjoy the software
I understand there are lots of ideas for direct consumer facing software, but could anyone point me towards an unfulfilled niche in "distributed systems software"? <comment><USER2> Etcd is an implementation of Raft protocol. You can check research papers in distributed computing field.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please point me to any which don't have a turn-key solution like Etcd for Raft (and also have a need like consensus is a need for most distributed applications)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could you imagine contributing to an existing project, one which already has a community? Less glamorous than a greenfield thing but possibly helpful in order to gauge whether maintaining a project and its users would be something you actually enjoy in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've had the opportunity to contribute to some existing projects but I've been limited to making feature contributions. I feel like my "system design" skills don't get exercised as much which is why I wanted to go for a greenfield thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google doc like collaboration over webrtc, but synked with the backend.

Currently have a prototype and a need for this.</comment>


Ask YC:  What's the greatest number of projects you can work on at once, successfully? - <AUTHOR>

Right now I have a coding project I'm doing for work, one for a side for-profit thing, and one I'd like to do just for fun.
I'm trying to decide whether to do them with as little overlap as possible with the goal of total focus, or all at once with the hope of cross pollination of ideas.
What's your threshold and/or ideal?  I realize this will vary a lot by individual, free time, complexity of the projects -- but I'm interested to hear some opinions of HN members on this. <comment><USER2> I see one project as a luxury. It has to be interesting and you have to have ownership for one project to be the right answer. You also need a way to pay the bills. When working for someone else, my magic number is two so you don't end up getting stuck and waiting.

</comment><comment><USER3> If given a choice, I prefer to work on one thing to the exclusion of all other things.

It takes me a day or two to really get into a project. Once I'm there, I find that I naturally cycle my focus between projects every three to four weeks. My biggest challenge to getting things done is the day when I finish off a project cycle and try to figure out what to work on next. If I don't have a clear idea, I flit between a half dozen or so potential projects until I dig my teeth into one.

I also to have 'little projects' on the side burner to work on for a couple hours if I'm feeling the need for a break without full-on switching into another project. These little projects tend to be things like 'learn how to do this in framework X' or 'write up a blog entry for sample code Y'.

It's worth noting that I work predominantly on desktop software, so I'm used to a longer release cycle than a lot of people here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Key word being successfully.

1.

<comment><USER5> Definitely. Any more than one and you're setting yourself up to fall.

How I've managed to put dual focus into two projects for a while (startup and my main company) is to focus solely on one for a certain length of time, then switch to the other and give that one 100%. But even that only works so well because a running business has certain day-to-day activities you need to do and can't neglect.

So if you're starting your own projects or startup, choose one and give it 100%, otherwise you're not giving any of your ideas the full shot they deserve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're talking about coding projects, then I like one at a time. Sometimes I split that to be one at work, one at home.

I find that when I flight a lot of other ideas when I already have a major project in the works, I end up with a lot of sparse git and svn repositories.

That's just my preference. I _can_ handle a handful (5 or 6 maybe and still be effective?) but the context switching saps my productivity pretty fast.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are we talking about coding, or doing the whole thing(marketing etc..)? If the full project, then I'm a fan of going 100% into that one thing you believe most in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question.

I was more talking about just the coding part. I agree if it's the whole 9 yards, it ought to be just one project at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it's just coding (as in a freelance job), I have found 3 to be my magic number. It's just enough I can switch out to another project when I get burned out but I maintain that "new project" burst of activity and the code stays fresh in my head.

A personal project, in which I am doing the design, marketing, monetization, business practices, everything - 1. It's a full-time commitment.

</comment><comment><USER9> The number has always been 2 for me. Maybe my brain is hyperthreaded. Maybe different for you.

<comment><USER10> Here, here. 2 (maybe 3 depending on relatedness) for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just remember that "Total focus" means 100%

You can divvy that up however you see fit.

<comment><USER12> The only issue I see with that is as the number of projects increases, the total focus decreases. The more projects you have on your plate, the more switching you have to do. So you may lose time getting back into gear and focusing.

On the other hand, insights from one project might help out another.

<comment><USER11> That's my point. The most that you can give to any combination of projects is 100% total. If you have two projects, one of them will have to suffer, or you will be forced to give them both 50% focus.

<comment><USER12> I'm saying something different though. If you have 2 projects, you won't be able to split your time as effectively so you may have 40% focus for each, and so on. As you take on more and more projects, the time it takes to get back into the groove increases. You are likely to spend a lot of time moving between projects and this will disrupt your overall focus.

<comment><USER11> Ahhh now I see what you're saying. You make an excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> it depends on your definition of "work on", how you define a "project", and what you need to do to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER14> 17

<comment><USER15> yup yup...

I prefer the shotgun approach. In the last 6 months: 22 releases across 8 projects (with differing levels of inter-relatedness). I've worked on 19 other projects in that period of time (this number might be low as I polled the filesystem, not perforce).

<comment><USER14> Ha, I was just giving a silly answer to what I thought was a really silly question, but I kind of agree with you about the shotgun approach, provided you're trying to build what people here would call a "lifestyle business" rather than a "startup".</comment></comment></comment>


How to Undo an "rm -rf " Command - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/279733/undo-an-rm-rf-command

<comment><USER2> I'll save you reading the post. NFW, but you can try.</comment>


18th century-style painting in pure CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cyanharlow/purecss-francine <comment><USER2> That's absolutely insane. How long did it take?</comment>


New TinCan eLearning Communication Spec Released  - <AUTHOR> http://tincanapi.com/2013/04/26/the-world-just-changed/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome!</comment>


Bezos, Other Corporate Executives Sold Shares Just in Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-other-corporate-executives-sold-shares-just-in-time-11585042204 <comment><USER2> They shouldn't be able to buy those shares back.

<comment><USER3> They should be forced to return the money to people still holding those stocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> De-paywalled: [http://archive.md/mZeA0](http://archive.md/mZeA0)</comment>


Tether's surging supply is the major driver behind Bitcoin's appreciation - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4129543-bitcoin-one-way-go-true <comment><USER2> I clicked to the second page, and it simply refused to scroll. After some debugging it turns out they have some registration thing that gets adblocked, but it breaks the page in the process.

<comment><USER3> Read first page, then saw Page 1/7 and bounced... all about the page views I guess

<comment><USER4> It renders perfectly fine in Reader View, FWIW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shameless clickbait title. Not nice.

<comment><USER4> Is it? It's the first sentence of the article. The title is totally not descriptive.

You want to get mad about anything, get mad about the horrible ad pop up and soft pay wall here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> hyperbole.</comment>


IBM pledges to devote 3500 researchers to Apache Spark - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/15/ibm-pours-researchers-and-resources-into-apache-spark-project

<comment><USER2> "He says conversations led them to commit IBM's machine learning technology after hearing that machine learning was a weakness in the Apache project." Do you agree with that? I actually think MLlib and Graphx provide a suitable level of machine intelligence. Has anyone worked with IBM's ML package? How does it differ?</comment>


Do Nike's New Shoes Give Runners an Unfair Advantage? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/sports/nikes-vivid-shoes-and-the-gray-area-of-performance-enhancement.html <comment> awinter-py TLDR (a) no (b) it costs $250</comment>


The iPod's rise and fall - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/23/the-ipods-rise-and-fall/

<comment><USER2> the iPod is no long a product, it has become a feature.</comment>


Show HN: Boilerplate template manager in Go for your files and projects - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tmrts/boilr/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> I've been dog-fooding the tool for more than a year, and its at a stable point with the new release.

let me know if you encounter any issues or have any suggestions</comment>


Chatroulette.com goes Karaoke :) - <AUTHOR> https://my.doctape.com/s/6t7iBV

<comment><USER2> for a second I thought HN got hijacked by Reddit.. Cats incoming!!!</comment>


Ask HN: Making money as a graduate student - <AUTHOR>

I am sure that many of you have been in this situation before. The short story is this: I am an international graduate student at an American University (a very good one). I have enough financial support to live (ie. the standard graduate student stipend), and have a small fellowship from my home country. However, I am finding myself annoyed by how little it adds up to after taking into account things like rent, the mandatory tuition fee deduction, health insurance, etc. Note that I am definitely not a big spender, and I am very careful with my money.
Due to my status as a foreigner, My options are very limited for pursuing additional funds. I am unable to apply for any US fellowship because they all require at least permanent residency. I am quite dismayed by this, since it seems like there are so many funding opportunities for US residents that they don't even know which ones to pursue. Furthermore, my visa status prohibits me from being employed other than my research assistantship position.
I believe that the underlying issue is that I don't believe that I am being adequately compensated for my skills. I am not being ungrateful - I am very happy to have the opportunity to study here, yet the situation is quite constraining. Perhaps this is the result of the academic philosophy of paying one's dues, and then reaping the rewards afterwords.
Have any of you found (legal) ways around this? For example, working in exchange for equity, finding other funding sources... I am curious to learn about interesting and creative ''hacks''. <comment><USER2> Sure. If you can program, choose to work as a freelancer from your country of origin (money sent to bank account in country of origin). Then move funds back to the US (personal money transfer). However, the difficulty of moving funds from your origin country to the US and the tax situation in your home country will impact things. You'll still make way less money though that if you were directly employed in the US (but possibly better than minimum wage). You don't want any scheme that breaks the US laws governing your study visa since you don't want to jeopardize your investment in your education in the US.

</comment><comment><USER2> And don't worry about being "adequately compensated for my skills"...that's the wrong angle to go from at this point...you'll only feel frustrated whatever you do.</comment>


Ask HN: How many logic gates would it take to implement a small Lisp language? - <AUTHOR>

This question was posted to r/lisp and went unanswered. I am hoping someone from HN might be more knowledgable. <comment><USER2> Unfortunately the question is, strictly speaking, unanswerable. The best one could do is come up with a specific design and estimate the number of gates needed, and then one couldn't be sure exactly how suboptimal the design in question is, regarding gate count. One of the most basic design choices is probably how much and which work to do using dedicated logic, and how much to do using general purpose logic and microcode. One may get an idea of the order of magnitude of gates required by taking a minimal CPU core (say, the j1 core from <http://excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html>), writing a minimal lisp interpreter on that core, and adding the gates needed to store the interpreter to the number of gates used for the core. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER3> I would and have suggested, to take basic logic gates and create a 'simple lisp' (what is that actually?) on top of those. It'll take you 'a while', but it's definitely possible and after that you can simply count the logic gates you used. Strictly speaking the question is wrong ; what is a simple lisp, what features are required etc etc, then it's answerable by actually designing it from scratch with logic gates. Of course it also will depend on how good you are at actually implementing such basic systems; I've seen CPUs built from logic gates in college which had wildly different numbers of gates between the teams. You can do a crap job with anything ;) Still you would have an indication.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that's basically doing the whole thing using specialised "lisp circuitry". Approaching the task from the other extreme, by just implementing the interpreter in microcode, would be much simpler - and I doubt that the end result would differ wildly in the number of gates used. I think this is basically a kind of minimal description length problem. And yes, you can do a crap job with anything ;)

Edit: Btw. LISP 1.5 for the IBM 704 seems to be something like 10k lines of assembly code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To figure that out, you would have to try it.

I guess you Googled and found some interesting things like;

<http://www.frank-buss.de/lispcpu/>

but no answer to your question. So get out your pen & paper and build one :)

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3583> might be a good starting point assuming that an implementation of lambda calculus qualifies as a LISP (it should).</comment>


I just lost 1,400 BTC - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecomment-683356052 <comment><USER2> As far as I can understand

1\. The user had 1,400 BTC in an old wallet using this software

2\. An old version of the software was vulnerable to phishing

3\. The user attempted to use the software, and was phished

4\. Massive payday for the scammers

Really unfortunate - and goes to show with software you manage yourself you need to be diligent about making sure it's updated. For all the shit coinbase gets, it's difficult to lose your coins in this manner.

<comment><USER3> Also, I think it's just the reason that crypto-currency will fail.

If you trick me into an ACH transfer of 16 million, there will

a) Trigger some random human based audits at my bank before the money can leave (likely involve some phone calls)

b) Have actual recourse, like court orders to hold the funds at the other bank

c) Take some amount of time to happen, to allow for A & B

It's not perfect, and it has bugs.. but I would never store actual money of value in crypto anything.

<comment><USER4> unless a bank wouldnt serve you, like for sizable parts of the economy.

<comment><USER5> Sizable, like 2%?

<comment><USER5> I looked it up. 6% of Americans don't have a bank account. Doesn't say whether they could go ahead and get one, or they choose not to.

Sizable?

<comment><USER6> Correct me please if I'm wrong, but I'd say most of those folks not served by a bank wouldn't have the skills to manage bitcoins either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many folks shit on the modern financial system, with its centralization and Government-coupling, but things like this are actually trackable and reversible in that ecosystem. The safeguards have evolved over centuries.

I am curious when crypto will get there. Maybe 10 years or so?

<comment><USER8> It is impossible by design. Adding that 'feature' takes away the core principle of decentralized currency. Allowing government to reverse transactions will also allow them to seize assets. Then it is just a regular currency (for better and worse).

<comment><USER9> Didn't ethereum fork to rollback a hack they didn't like?

<comment><USER10> Do you mean this?

[https://www.bitdegree.org/tutorials/ethereum-vs-ethereum- cla...](https://www.bitdegree.org/tutorials/ethereum-vs-ethereum-classic/)

<comment><USER9> This one:

[https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain- hard-f...](https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-fork- return-dao-investor-funds)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe someone would even allow a system with that balance to even connect to the internet. It's like filling a car with gold bars, driving it around town, and hoping nothing bad happens. He could have created another wallet, preferably a multisig, created the transaction with the software wallet offline, copied the signed transaction off and broadcast it from another system.

What he did was reckless. Some people are going cry that Bitcoin is unsafe because of this. It's not. You must handle large amounts of cash or gold or other valuables with care.

<comment><USER12> Bitcoin is all online. The analogy doesn't work: your gold bars are being driven around town all day and night in public view, already.

In this case, it's just the fact that the access was granted at the application level when the user logged into their wallet, which is like giving someone keys to your car by mistake.

<comment><USER13> No. One can store keys offline. That's what hardware wallets do.

<comment><USER12> In order to do anything with Bitcoin, which appears to be what the author wanted, you would have to be connected to the Internet. Keys being stored in hardware wallet sure, but the gold bars are still in public view.

Hardware wallets aren't without their flaws. With an application-level vulneravility in a hardware wallet, you are still screwed. Here is just one example: [https://www.ledger.com/improving-the-ecosystem-disclosure- of...](https://www.ledger.com/improving-the-ecosystem-disclosure-of-the- trezor-recovery-phrase-extraction-vulnerability)

<comment><USER14> You can sign transactions offline and hand deliver the file if you felt so inclined.

Signed transactions cant be modified.

Someone needs to make sure nodes see it that transaction and add it to the database, eventually.

This user experience has not been refined, but is very possible. A system with fewer nodes, like if the internet was attacked and not available, would still work for this currency.

<comment><USER15> > You can sign transactions offline and hand deliver the file if you felt so > inclined.

How big is that signature/file? Can it be encoded in a QR code or something simpler to bridge the airgap?

<comment><USER11> The specific transaction this post refers to was 1813 bytes. It had 12 inputs that had to be signed for making it larger than average. For $10M I'd be willing to manually type out the 3626 hex digits, or if feeling lazy splurge on a $10 USB stick. Only 3 inputs account for almost all of the balance, so really it could have been moved for under 1000 bytes, which I happily write longhand on paper with a quill in triplicate before I'd even consider exposing the secret key to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks like the relevant transaction: [https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/ef600c380a239d9b929c6c964d...](https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/ef600c380a239d9b929c6c964deaf7060e309750950a516cee65576232b0c53c)

</comment><comment><USER17> If I had that much in an old wallet, no way would I touch that myself or allow it anywhere near the internet. I would hire a team of experts and get the transaction over to my bank insured.

<comment><USER12> Do any big banks offer a BTC account?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Its kind of crazy that the phishing attack people are still operating those servers for all these years! But since they pay for themselves no reason to turn them off.

The knowledge gulf is so wide in cryptocurrency that schemes are resurrectable every bull market

Like, some people will use this to reinforce their juvenile binary argument about why "crypto bad", and then they enter next bull market after someone they respect shows them something they didn't consider. But then they are still a decade late in knowledge while chasing every new shiny thing. If people want to learn its there, permissionless, lucrative.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here [1] is the explanation:

        I had 1,400 BTC in a wallet that I had not accessed since 2017. I foolishly installed the old version of the electrum wallet. My coins propagated. I attempted to transfer about 1 BTC however was unable to proceed. A pop-up displayed stating I was required to update my security prior to being able to transfer funds.

        I installed the update which immediately triggered the transfer of my entire balance to a scammers address.

[1] [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecommen...](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecomment-683374289)

</comment><comment><USER19> With big money comes big responsibility. Storing $16M should be taken very seriously and probably most people have no clue about that.

<comment><USER20> I think the point is that you can store $16M in a bank and take need to take no precautions against casual theft (and often can recover the money via person-to-person interactions, if theft does occur).

<comment><USER21> I completely disagree, only the first $250k is insured. I would never store $16M cash in a bank. You aren't protected against the bank becoming insolvent.

<comment><USER22> Okay... where would you store 16m?

<comment><USER23> In an investment account with a reputable brokerage.

<comment><USER12> What's the difference between that and a bank?

<comment><USER24> Well the fun part is that the way it's different is that there would be a bank account with your money in it, that the brokerage isn't allowed to touch. So, you're protected from the brokerage going bankrupt - your money is still yours if that happens.

But it's still in a bank account, so if the bank goes under you're screwed. See my other comment in this thread though...

<comment><USER12> SIPC isn't unlimited, though:

The Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) was created to protect against the loss of customer assets at brokerage firms. SIPC offers protection of up to $500,000, including a $250,000 limit for cash, if a brokerage firm fails, and covers most types of securities, such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. [0]

[0] [https://www.schwab.com/public/file/P-3042070/Asset_Protectio...](https://www.schwab.com/public/file/P-3042070/Asset_Protection_Brochure_MKT45080-09.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Stuff like this is why you shouldn't use a lightweight wallet and should use the official wallet, or at least host a full node.

Read more here:

Full nodes: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node)

Lightweight nodes: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightweight_node](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightweight_node)

<comment><USER26> What about an hardware wallet like Ledger?

<comment><USER25> I would simply recommend hosting a full node and using the latest release of the official Bitcoin Core wallet.

Hardware wallets are relatively new and uncommon, so not much is known about their security risks. That said, there are no glaring, obvious issues and you _could_ use one if you want.

Read: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardware_wallet#Security_risks](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardware_wallet#Security_risks)

As always, do not take advice from strangers on the internet about storing your crypto without doing extensive research on your own. The Bitcoin wiki is a great starting point: [https://en.bitcoin.it/](https://en.bitcoin.it/)

<comment><USER27> The popular Trezor wallet has a hardware vulnerability, where, if you physically have the hardware it can be exploited. Hardware wallets are a vast improvement but not without issues. Large scale fraud, where the money goes missing is much more common so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not an expert in BTC storage, but as far as I understand such an attack could have been prevented if the owner invested in a hardware wallet for $100-200. As the final step in a transaction would be to sign it on your ledger/trezor device, and would be much harder to phish.

<comment><USER29> This was my first thought too. Hardware wallets show transactions on their own screen so the amount and destination address can be confirmed on-device before the device signs the transaction, which seems like a great tool to avoid this kind of issue. Anyone that owns more cryptocurrency than a hardware wallet costs really needs to have a hardware wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reading these threads I always have to wonder.

Is the report of being scammed a scammer trying to make extra money on a sale? How would anyone know?

<comment><USER31> Bitcoin being a public ledger, it's fairly easy to see if 1,400 BTC was moved recently: [https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/ef600c380a239d9b929c6c964d...](https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/ef600c380a239d9b929c6c964deaf7060e309750950a516cee65576232b0c53c)

I mean they definitely could have seen that transaction and just acted like it was their stolen money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Serious question. Not trolling.

Would it have been possible to exchange that much BTC for US dollars? Ignoring taxes for a few seconds. Would it have actually been possible to get real fiat money for the 1,400 BTC?

I've always heard of complete incompetence trying to get an account set up on any exchange. Getting verified, etc.

<comment><USER33> If he acquired them legal of course he can sell them an get fiat withdrawn to his bank, assuming hes not in a place where bitcoin is illegal. Doing this all at once without informing your bank will probably instantly freeze the funds and trigger some kind of investigation. That doesn't mean you eventually get access to it. Also there are exchanges withdraw limits so its not on your bank account in 1-2 working days. If you want to sell all at once and withdraw you would have to register on different exchanges to circumvent daily limits and do the KCY which that can take days to get verified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why would someone holding 1400 BTC use a software wallet instead of an offline hardware wallet? SMH

<comment><USER35> Yeah this is what blows my mind. I would be paranoid if I had 14 BTC, let alone 1400. When I had (as much as) 19 BTC some while ago I stored them on a Trezor, with the seed on a paper (three copies in different places) in a form that no one would realize it actually was a seed.

<comment><USER12> Be careful... sometimes we end up making things so complicated that we forget how it works. Think why comments are so crucial after looking at your own code from a year ago and having no clue what you meant. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've said this time and time again: 'be your own bank' is a terrible design error, not a feature, for 99.99% of users.

This guy is most likely somewhat technically literate, and this happened to him.

<comment><USER37> There is no mandate in Bitcoin to 'be your own bank' \- its just an option. It is a feature and a very good one for people who are afraid of government intrusion into how they use their money. If you don't care about this "feature" you can turn it off by putting your crypto in Coinbase or other exchanges where it will be insured.

<comment><USER10> > Satoshi Nakamoto stated in his white paper that: "The root problem with > conventional currencies is all the trust that's required to make it work. > The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history > of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."

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

It's clear that the purpose of Bitcoin is to replace existing banking institutions by providing a trust-less alternative. This means that using an exchange to store Bitcoin is essentially useless. If your purpose is to protect your money by handing it over to a trusted institution, then you're better off putting it into a bank that's FDIC insured.

Of course, the real reason that people store their Bitcoin on Coinbase is so that they can easily profit from speculation by exchanging their coin for USD.

<comment><USER38> Bitcoin does not provide a trust-less alternative, at best, it requires you to trust yourself.

The internet is full of people that have lost their wallets due to hardware failures and no backups, scams, phishing, ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you can't hold it in your hot little hand, it does not exist. This also applies to your money and other valuables held by third parties such as Banks or Trusts, or wealth stored as numbers in a computer.

 _Unless you hold and control it personally, it 's not yours at all._

While it's definitely convenient in good times for your wealth storage to be in the hands of others, you're completely dependent on the goodwill of those others. In bad or difficult times, you're not going to keep that wealth for very long.

<comment><USER40> Pointing out that you don't technically own the money in your conventional bank's chequing account is a mere distraction from the fact that in the real world, it's easier to permanently lose access to your cryptocurrency than it is to permanently lose access to your bank account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is fascinating.

Honestly , while I found BlockChain & Immutable Ledger disruptive technology , I have zero trust in cryptos.

The amount of scam in this industry is just obscene, unlike banking , there is no such thing as insurance for your wallet or legal recourse to get back your assets, your pretty much on your own and I'm fairly convinced he won't get back his 1.5M$ Bitcoin .

I feel bad for him , but there is very little surprise playing with unregulated stuff.

<comment><USER14> There is a lot more scamming in those legal recourse systems, they have the benefit of not being masqueraded as international news every time!

The user experience where you personally still have your money might be something you like.

Also it was $16m bitcoin

</comment></comment><comment> ur-whale Reading this, I feel compelled to repost this old but still largely relevant blogpost:

[http://trilema.com/2013/the-story-of-pointless-and- witless/](http://trilema.com/2013/the-story-of-pointless-and-witless/)

</comment><comment><USER42> It's not crypto-currencies and it's not crypto currencies. It's simply cryptocurrencies. At least learn to spell the word correctly before giving your absolutely ignorant opinion on it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Given that the first post in tracker mentions "0,09", I think the comment here may actually be using a Euro standard decimal notation.

So the author may have lost 1.4 BTC, or ~16k. Still a loss, but not 16m.

<comment><USER35> Nope: [https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qcygs9dl4pqw6atc4y...](https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qcygs9dl4pqw6atc4yqudrzd76p3r9cp6xp2kny)

Address mentioned here: [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecommen...](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecomment-683356120)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> That's why getting a hardware wallet is important!!! The guy have 17 million USD and don't even bother to heighten up the security.

</comment><comment><USER45> Fools and their bitcoin are easily parted. Perhaps this man has lost his only chance at possessing millions. What an expensive lesson.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is why we need, order > Community > Society > Government > Banks

We are at the community stage with crypto.

<comment><USER47> This structure is just one form of security implementation and not flawless at that, and I would dare say biased towards the richer parties.

Scams, in and outside of banks happen really frequently, so turning to traditional structures of control just because new ones failed at some point is defeatist. We can have nice things, but they need time to evolve properly.

<comment><USER46> Don't disagree, always happy to see the alternative. Another one that we had earlier in India was Rta (natural order) > Rna (debt on non conformist) > Karma > Gods.

But as we understood the world better, this one went out of fashion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This story is kinda like:

"I got pickpocketed once and lost all my cash. This means that cash is inherently unsafe and should not be used by anyone ever."

<comment><USER49> No, more like "I got pickpocketed of all my life savings, therefore maybe I shouldn't walk around with my life savings in my back pocket".

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The negative comments on HN about crypto give me confidence RE: it's eventual success in dethroning fiat currency.

</comment><comment><USER51> And somebody gained 1400 BTC.

</comment><comment><USER52> Caveat fucking emptor.</comment>