Truth goggles sniff out suspicious sentences in news - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/bull-beware-truth-goggles-sniff-out-suspicious-sentences-in-news/ <comment><USER5> Too bad it employs the PolitiFact database, as that itself is suspect to having its own bias. ([http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2011/02/selection...](http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2011/02/selection_bias_politifact_rate.php))

Using a biased fact-checker to check facts doesn't really work well. Constructing a non-biased fact-checker is the real challenge here. I'm not sure it can be done, due to the great amount of spin that can be put on most anything political.

EDIT: BTW, I'm not meaning to take sides on this, just pointing out the very real difficulties in establishing a "fact-checker". It's worth knowing that others have contested PolitiFact's methodologies. If the trustworthiness of the statement is based on a person's judgement, then the fact-checker has bias.

<comment><USER6> have you read that article in detail? i have spent some time on it, and am having trouble following the argument. at the start they say that approximately equal numbers of statements are taken from either side. then later they seem to be saying that a bias exists because the republicans lie more than the democrats. what i'm having a hard time understanding is why that is a bias - perhaps some republicans simply lie more?

again: it's not they are focusing more on one party than on another (they don't: "the number of public officials subjected to PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter lens from each party is fairly even during the period under analysis"), but that they catch more lies from one party (the republicans) than the other. in particular, it appears that palin and bachmann are responsible for raising the average number of lies for the republicans.

so why is this bias? why isn't it simply that palin and bachmann are liars? what am i missing (i am not american, so don't know much of the context - <USER2> just read the article and couldn't follow the logic of the argument)?

one possible alternative is that they are ignoring lies by democrats and instead checking only true statements. but in that case you'd think there would be a smoking gun - notorious statements from democrats that weren't checked. the article doesn't give any evidence for that.

ps also, i take issue with your final disclaimer. you can make judgement calls and still be better than coin flipping. just because it's not an automated, exact science doesn't mean that it cannot edge closer to the truth. almost everything in life is not exact, but we still know some people lie more than others. one way to do this is by looking at what is given (for example, this article) and checking whether it makes sense. maybe i have made a mistake - <USER4> so, hopefully someone will correct me. eventually this thread will lend weight to one conclusion or another...

<comment><USER7> > so why is this bias? why isn't it simply that palin and bachmann are liars?

I hesitate to get into this, but Peter Orszag has only been tagged by Politifact once[1]. Yet at the time he was CBO director, there were many people stating that CBO was distorting long term projections to show that Obama's health care bill saved money. And recently the administration appeared to acknowledge that these projections were (at a minimum) indeed inaccurate[2,3].

      By scrapping the CLASS Act, HHS is losing about 40 percent
      of the savings healthcare reform was supposed to generate.
      The Congressional Budget Office's most recent estimates
      projected $210 billion in total deficit reduction from the
      healthcare law, $86 billion of which would have come from
      CLASS.

      HHS officials emphasized Friday that the healthcare reform
      law is still projected to cut the deficit, since about
      $125 billion of the most recent savings estimates are
      still intact.

Now, you can determine for yourself whether you believe HHS and CBO's other projections given that this program was found to be insolvent before it was even launched. Please also note that there was no shortage of people vociferously opposing[4] the healthcare bill before passage who called out this particular provision as unsustainable due to adverse selection effects.

      The CLASS Act looks like a gift: It brings in $58 billion
      in net tax revenues by 2019, lowering the deficit by an
      equivalent amount because only minor costs will be booked
      during that period. Under the CBO rules, the CLASS Act
      technically covers one-quarter of the $250 billion
      shortfall in funds needed to pay for health-care reform.

      The gimmick lies in looking only at the CBO's ten-year
      budget window. The extra revenues are an illusion because
      of the disaster lurking just beyond that horizon.

      In fact, none of the $58 billion is available to pay for
      the House bill. The CLASS Act is so poorly designed that
      the $58 billion reserve and all future premiums won't come
      close to covering the generous benefits it's promising.

      Here's why the mechanics of the CLASS Act assure its
      eventual collapse.

You may disagree, but this is one relatively cut and dried example in which the critics of the healthcare bill appear to have been proven right. Indeed, evidence-laden, numerical critiques of this particular "CLASS Act" provision were all over the web along with charges of falsehood by Orszag.

Yet at the time when it might have moved the needle, Politifact was silent on this issue. This may be what OP is referring to in terms of a selection issue. They simply did not engage the CBO's projections, even though they were far more amenable to classification as "true" or "false" than standard political statements. They were also inarguably important.

[1] <http://www.politifact.com/personalities/peter-orszag/>

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/health/policy/15health.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/health/policy/15health.html?ref=healthcarereform)

[3] [http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform- implement...](http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform- implementation/187697-hhs-to-suspend-class-program)

[4] [http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/news/economy/health_care_cla...](http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/news/economy/health_care_class_act.fortune/index.htm)

<comment><USER8> Is there a particular statement from Orszag that you feel Politifact should have addressed?

<comment><USER7> Well, this one is interesting.

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/10/03/04/No-Gimmick/>

      Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to a claim that
      this deficit reduction is achieved only through a
      business-as-usual Washington budget gimmick: paying for
      just a few years of costs with many more years of savings.

      This charge is simply false—and let's get the facts
      straight.

      ...

      Third, this is not a budget gimmick.  The purpose the
      tried-and-true gimmick described above is to make a
      proposal that adds to long-term deficits appear fiscally
      responsible. But if that were the course we were taking,
      we would expect to see a large fiscal hole at the end of
      the first decade and larger and larger deficits in the
      second decade. Instead, over the long-term, the savings
      under the President's plan are expected to grow faster
      than the costs.  So, when the Congressional Budget Office
      is done with its scoring, we expect it will find that the
      President's plan reduces deficits by roughly $100 billion
      in the first 10 years and roughly $1 trillion in the
      decade after that.  In other words, health reform should
      reduce the deficit by growing amounts over the long-term.

      Put simply: Health reform will reduce the deficit in this
      decade, and it will reduce the deficit by even more
      thereafter.  There's no gimmick in that.

A program which was supposed to save $86 billion is declared insolvent and discontinued before it was put into production, by the people who were intimately involved in designing it. They pushed hard to pass the bill and made statements like Orszag did above.

In the interest of being nonpartisan, I think that history will look on these kinds of statements in the same way we now look on Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in the context of the runup to Iraq. At best the WMDs/savings just weren't there, and it was an honest mistake. At worst, they lied. Somewhere in the middle one might call them guilty of wishful thinking and exaggeration. But whatever you call it, it's hard to continue to maintain that those who claimed the presence of WMD/savings were empirically correct.

<comment><USER8> So you want PF to retroactively check people's predictions to see if they were correct? That would be interesting to see, but it's clearly not what they do, they address current statements based on current information.

Now was there any reason to believe that something in that statement wasn't correct when he made it? (for example was it not going to be scored by the CBO?) Otherwise I don't see the bias.

<comment><USER7> > Now was there any reason to believe that something in that statement wasn't > correct when he made it?

Yes, at the time Orszag made the statement many commentators (including the CNN link a few posts up) contested the CBO's projections and said they were manipulated, with a particular focus on the CLASS Act. Orszag doubled down just like Powell did before the UN, just like the yellowcake incident.

I happen to think this specific case is fairly cut and dried, but short of Orszag admitting to a "lie" it is impossible to know what was in his mind. (Though it should also be said that Politifact does not precisely distinguish between whether a statement is empirically false and whether the speaker is a 'liar with their pants on fire').

Anyway, this is one example that stuck in my head as a numerical one which was so important beforehand, and so checkable both at the time and today, that even partisans on opposite sides might meet up to compare notes afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are few ideas that I see that have the potential to change the world, but I would say this one may. A lot of people are too busy or to intellectually lazy to research facts. As such they default to non-verbal ques in candidates. The strongest being confidence.

A candidate can be confident while completely fabricating information and more people will believe them than a candidate with no confidence and truth. Having a tool like this to refute the information immediately will be valuable.

The trick will be the credibility of the "truth" provided. We all have biases and keeping them out of our creations can be more tricky than it would appear. No doubt if the product gains wide traction, many will accuse it of bias the author needs to make sure that they have double and triple checked the facts so that it can withstand the onslaught of accusations that will surly come from both sides.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking a lot lately about how technology can provide transparency to the political process. Among these ideas have been "reading aides" like this: tools that will provide verification and context for what you're reading or watching.

Another such tool I've been thinking about would show you the relationship of the writer and quoted sources (people or institutions) to the material being covered.

For example, consider the case where spokesperson for a non-profit organization is quoted defending a particular industry. This tool might tell you that this person was once an executive at a for-profit corporation in that industry or have some other non-obvious relationship.

If anyone knows of anyone working on something like this, I'd love to learn about it.

<comment><USER10> I have been working on Whybase (<http://whybase.com/>), which allows you to connect ideas and analyze statements made by people. You can use it to discover insights into the reasons behind why things are true and how things are interconnected.

<comment><USER11> Can you give some example ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Goggles" "sniff"? Do people even pay attention to their own metaphors anymore?

</comment><comment><USER13> I've dreamed about the possibilities for automated fact-checking to improve online debate, and considered attempting to write it myself (using data sources like Wolfram Alpha and Google Public Data, and parsing natural language with a big dirty pile of regular expressions, which can't be the best approach but it's an approach I could attempt in a weekend).

For example, a program could examine a text for sentences matching "[X country] is [comparison] than [Y country]" and check that against online data sources. So if you're typing a comment into reddit or wherever, it would first check your comment for claims it can parse, and alert you if you are mistaken about something so you can change it. And if you are correct about something, but didn't supply a citation, it could add it automatically.

This could have several awesome effects:

* It would make online debates more accurate, spreading truth and knowledge.

* It might set a standard of factual accuracy; people might come to expect assertions to be backed up with citations, and regard claims as suspicious if no supporting reference is provided.

* Just knowing their facts will be checked (possibly by a future version of the software being re-run on old forum comments and highlighting inaccuracies for all to see) might make people more careful in their assertions.

If voice recognition technology improves, then this might eventually fact- check TV in real-time.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is really awesome, but I think it would be even better if a program could be written such to flag sentences _without_ a third party judge. Using the stylistic tendencies of lying, for example, in rhetoric. This might not be possible or plausible, but if it could be written, I think it would be at least equal to this technology.

<comment><USER15> There are at least two reasons that's impossible. First, liars are smart. Second, not everyone spouting an untruth is a liar. If a person doesn't know he's uttering a falsehood, then the fact is unlikely to influence his style — or his speech spectrum or cadence or direction of gaze, etc.

<comment><USER14> Well, I see a solution around the first reason. Just flag anything that is worded in a suspicious way. The example, "Obama has the worst ratings in modern times" _sounds_ suspicious. You shouldn't need a fact checker to know you need to check that fact. If you could implement the same sorting method common sense has to a fact checker, you might be able to make it work.

However, I admit, you might be faced with the problem that an overwhelming number of statements would be flagged. I'm not sure how you would get rid of false positives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't know why, but the page is completely broken when rendered in Opera. Perhaps the custom font?

<comment><USER17> Looks fine to me in Opera Mac too, fwiw. (I run niemanlab.org, and I confess I don't do any testing in Opera, so I honestly appreciate any bug reports.)

FYI, our browser breakdown: 31% Chrome, 28% Firefox, 15% desktop Safari, 11% IE, 10% iOS Safari, 3% Android browser, 0.74% Opera, 0.26% Opera Mini, 0.23% RockMelt (!).

<comment><USER16> Might be some userscript I have installed, thanks for the feedback.

And as a bonus, browser stats from country I'm from: [http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-SK- monthly-201010-201110-...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-SK- monthly-201010-201110-bar) (You can check more countries from this region, you will see similiar results for Opera (Ukraine stands out though)). The reason for that is that Opera was the best browser without any doubt (think pre- firefox2 age). Only flaw was that it was not free - it was ad-sponsored. But you could get it for free of course, and users in Easterish Europe didn't really care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _"... software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness."_

+1 for use of the word "truthiness". I can't believe the impact people like Stephen Colbert have on our culture and lexicon.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're looking for truth in media, you're looking in wrong place.

<comment><USER19> What? The article is about direct quotes from politicians. There are a lot of things you can blame the media for, but this isn't one of them.

<comment><USER11> The article is about "suspicious sentences in news", and media are news producers.

This is one thing I can blame them for, due to: media needn't be objective - that's not their mission - their mission is to make money, unless they're non- profit (how many of them is ?).

They use deception, to make you believe that news they produced is objective, and you shouldn't look for sources (which often are well hidden or absent), and assuming that news they produce is compatible with your worldview, you won't look for sources - you're their customer.

I'm sure you're able to divide media by political views they support - <USER4> they're objective why it's possible ?

The use of deception, means they're not good source of truth.

The main reason I found HN and stayed here, is its news quality (almost no political bs, and really close to the source).

<comment><USER20> So how do you propose we function as a democracy if any media source that covers political issues is so full of shit that there is no point in even considering it?

Your perspective is extreme, but it is a very important concern. If only someone could try to create additional information layers to help you navigate a medium that is potentially riddled with dubious claims. Maybe that person could call the project "Truth Goggles" or something.

<comment><USER11> _So how do you propose we function as a democracy if any media source that covers political issues is so full of shit that there is no point in even considering it?_

From my perspective, for democracy, it's very important to have independent, non-profit media that provide _raw_ stream of information - e.g. A/V stream from congress, major events etc. - that while being boring would provide unbiased stream of facts. For news - transcripts, photos, videos, documents, all without commentary. That would allow to compare "revelations" served by other media, with facts.

 _If only someone could try to create additional information layers to help you navigate a medium that is potentially riddled with dubious claims. Maybe that person could call the project "Truth Goggles" or something._

It would be great, if I could trust it - its sources (evidence) should be explicit.

<comment><USER20> Sounds like we do, in fact, agree. The full title of the thesis is: "Truth Goggles: Automatic Incorporation of Context and Primary Sources to Enable Critical Media Consumption"

This tool won't tell you what to think; it will merely remind you to think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand how this can be any more effective than just cited sources at the end of a paper...

<comment><USER22> A lack of cited sources in an article doesn't necessarily imply that its false.

<comment><USER23> And cited sources does not automatically make something true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is excellent. There has been a certain class of "debate" sites that gather opposing expert opinions on some controversy but they always had a distribution problem. The people that need this kind of information most and the least likely to go check these sites.

This is a great distribution mechanism of the output of those sites. If there is a trending, controversial statement in the news it would be great to be one click away from seeing smart people discussing both sides.

Now I want other kinds of goggles. Like goggles that spot popular Anachronisms. Or trending memes.</comment>


How Apple killed the Linux desktop - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/27/tech/web/apple-linux-desktop/index.html

<comment><USER2> To be honest, the Linux desktop killed itself (or rather, never really took off), because, well .. it sucks.

It sucks because it is fragmented. If a developper wants to write a nice GUI application that integrates nicely with the desktop, he needs to target 4 or 6 different desktops, and maybe even more variations (taskbars software, menus, whatever). So the developer makes a console application instead, and the Linux desktop suffer.

Of course, some open-source enthusiasts will cobble together some script to integrate the program with their favorite desktop software. It will work one time out of two, and will break with every update of the program or of the desktop environment.

You end up with complex desktop environments nobody understands fully except the core devs and an abysmal user experience.

<comment><USER3> I don't know what Linux you are talking about, but it is not the Linux I know. I started off in Linux with Ubuntu 10.04. About 4 months ago, I switched window managers from Gnome to Awesome. Awesome is nice, but pretty minimal, so I wanted a bunch of the widgets from my old gnome desktop. When I ran the widget program (IE, nm-applet for network manager...), the network manager applet icon appeared in the corner of my screen, and behaved just like it did under gnome. I use Thunderbird for e-mail. When I get a new e-mail, I still get a desktop notification under my widget tray.

One of the things that sets Linux apart is modularity and standards, so if you write a program to work with one envirement, it would almost definitively work in another envirement.

Put another way, what is a form of desktop integration that requires targeting multiple desktops.

Also, developers make console application because they are: 1) Easier to make 2) The norm on Linux 3) More developer/power user friendly 4) More compostable

I find the (mainstream) desktop envirements more understandable than Windows, with a better user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vendors + distributions are all committing suicide by pandering to the app store model, tablet interfaces and walled gardens. Noone is killing anyone.

Linux pissed the power users off (the entire market segment no less) during the gnome2 to gnome3/unity transition.

Apple are pissing power users off with their walled garden growing higher and some shoddy unreliable features.

Microsoft are pissing off power users with the same mind bending crapfest changes i.e. Metro.

It's all gone to shit actually. I really wish I did something else for a living.

I'm sitting here on a T61 with Debian on it, awesome window manager and xterms. It's the last bastion of common sense for the power user.

<comment><USER2> > Linux pissed the power users off (the entire market segment no less) during > the gnome2 to gnome3/unity transition.

I think you meant "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux" here.

<comment><USER4> Nope.

Ubuntu, Redhat (which is pulling gnome3 into RHEL7), Fedora, Mint. Nothing else is of significance.

At least Debian have the balls to pick something different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wrong facts in the article:

"Torvalds switched to Xfce"

Wrong, he didn't switch to Xfce: _"And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse"_ [https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...](https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i)

"GNOME 3.6 is out"

3.6 is not out. 3.5.90 is out, which is a beta version.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the info. Looks like he switched back. I've updated both pieces of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't specifically think Apple has killed Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop, without being horrible, was a pipe dream.

I use Linux everyday for development, I'm a big supporter of the project and would recommend everyone give it a go. However I'd fully expect half the people trying it to get confused and give up, some of the interface metaphors aren't quite there, installing software can be a chore of working out how to get there and what to do, and there's still too much emphasis on command line operations.

These things are all fine (and enjoyable in their own right), but for the majority of people they just need something they can switch on, and get on with. Ubuntu has gotten closer, but it's still just not quite there, so it's not that OS X has trumped it on the desktop for people seeking an alternative but that they've hit what they can currently get. There's lots of room for winning people over, some of Apple's poorer decisions recently might actually push a lot more people into the arms of Linux, we'll have to wait and see.

<comment><USER3> Can you mention specifics of what Ubuntu is missing?

Installing software is easier than on Windows: it automaticly handles dependencies, and if you cannot find the program by searching in synaptic (same concept as an app store except for the lack of money), then Ubuntu is popular enough that the project likely offers their own *.deb.

As a desktop user, I never had to open the command line for normal computer configurations (until I switched to a non-standard window manager).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The web is open when you have standard data exchange formats and control over your information. What happens most times though is that you connect to a black box that happens to use FOSS underneath - not free and not open. What Mozilla is doing is not enough, and recently I have come to think of it a complete waste of time. Web apps are not magiclly open because they're written in JS and HTML.

Finally getting back to Linux, I don't think it has lost. I am pleasantly surprised at how good the latest Ubuntu is as a desktop. If Apple continues to lock down Mac OS people will move to Linux - in my case I am investing in my Linux skills and decided not toinvest in iOS.

</comment><comment><USER9> RHT deserves some blame too.

As a result of Gnome, Linux was doomed to have two half-baked desktops which would make the Linux desktop, at best, the butt of jokes.

One of the biggest problems of Linux in the 1990's was that applications wrote directly to the sound device, so that only one application could play sound at a time.

The obvious userspace answer is to create an "X Windows" for sound, and it would have been OK if there has been an "X Windows" for sound, but there was also a Y, a Z, and some letters from Suess's "Alphabet beyond Z" as well.

This was unfair to app developers, commercial or open source, and it was unfair to users. Things are better now, but there was a long stretch when I just didn't bother to attach speakers to Linux machines because it wasn't worth the bother.

Finally, RHAT's worst problem is that it was so successful -- look at this chart!

[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RHT+Interactive#symbol=rh...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RHT+Interactive#symbol=rht;range=5y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined);

RHT was successful because it sold to the corporate market, but that's a very dangerous market to aim for -- because a product that pleases corporate buyers typically causes endless misery for corporate users. There's just no reason for a company like RHT to do the slow and steady work to gradually improve a UI when it's selling lots of product to people who couldn't care less cause they'll never use it.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Killed" is a pejorative word in my opinion. The article itself clearly explains that Apple was able to _beat_ Linux by being better at the time, not by employing nefariousness tactics. There are better reasons to hate Apple.

</comment><comment><USER11> Apple bridges the gap for fairly technical people who want a OS with the raw power of Linux but more polished.</comment>


Madoff's Victims Are Close to Getting Their $19B Back - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-recovering-madoff-money/ <comment><USER2> The article doesn't mention a _really_ important dynamic here — a LOT of the madoff IOUs were purchased by hedge funds for pennies on the dollar, from Madoff investors who needed liquidity for e.g. retirement and couldn't wait decades to get their money back. Dunno if there still is, but there was an active and liquid market for Madoff receipts for a while. A fund could tell an individual who was wiped out by Madoff "we'll pay you $0.20 on the dollar for your claim against Madoff", and then collect the $0.80+ that's been recovered over the past 10 years. I don't have an estimate of what % of the recovered dollars are going to the original investors...but it's not 100%. A lot of the claims have been traded.

<comment><USER3> That's sort-of how it's supposed to work? The price at the time was the market-determined value considering the uncertainty of recovery. As you mention, there were multiple hedge funds, so they would have been competing to buy up these coupons, making me suspect the price at the time reflected the best knowledge of the fund's situation and the law available at the time.

It sure seems unjust _post-hoc_. But I can't really think of any improvements. The rate of recovery is somewhat extraordinary, as demonstrated by the appearance of it in the press. And it would not have happened without giving organisations with deep pockets the incentives to try to effect it.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I sort of agree. But two things:

1\. The article shares a bunch of anecdotes about individual investors receiving their money back, which is surely true, but not necessarily representative of what's happening overall. 2\. Unfortunately it probably wasn't priced strictly by "odds of recovery" (and also I suspect there was information asymmetry there) but also based on liquidity needs. Large institutions can wait for cash. Retail investors can't necessarily. Yes, yes time value of money blah blah. Still seems asymmetric.

<comment><USER4> This "asymmetry" is one of the reasons why having capital makes you powerful, and living paycheck-to-paycheck (maximum need for liquidity) makes you powerless.

<comment><USER5> More capital allows you to balance risk better (in this case, buying a bunch of IOUs, vs an individual holding one)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Imagine you invest in a hedge fund, and get some amount of returns back. But then, years later, a lawyer comes and tells you to give him the profits because the fund was illegitimate (without you knowing this) and therefore they don't belong to you.

This is exactly what is happening to all these people.

Doesn't this feel unfair to anyone else?

<comment><USER7> It does feel somewhat unfair, but it's long-settled law on stolen goods: if you buy a car and it turns out to be stolen, or a house with an improper title, you don't get to keep it. In both cases the buyer is supposed to check and beware of "too good to be true" offers.

Note that they get to keep the principal, so they're not even out the money they might be if they bought a stolen car.

<comment><USER8> True if you buy a car in a private sale. But if you buy a car from a regulated professional dealer and it turns out to be stolen then things get a little bit more complicated than just you have to give it back. I would expect in that situation that the dealer makes everyone good (and possibly goes to prison).

<comment><USER9> This isn't my understanding of how it works. I thought that if you bought a stolen car from a dealership, the police could still tow the car and give it back to the rightful owner. You would get your money back, and you would sue the seller if necessary. I don't see how buying from a dealership makes this any different, except a dealership is easier to sue and recover damages from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Victim here. Note that Picard's efforts only help direct investors, or investors in feeder funds that reached an agreemnt with him.

The DoJ separate fund help infirect investors, but after the first refund of 25% of the principal invested, they decided to do not refund customers of feeder funds (or at least of _some_ feeder funds) arguing that we may recover something through Picard.

Some of you commented on the follyness of investing in something that sounds too good to be true. At the time, I had diversified my portfolio in 8 funds. Kingate (the Madoff's feeder fund were I invested) had the lowest average return of all the funds. I ran a correlation test of these funds, and they all had an R of 0.7 - 0.95, except for Kingate, it had a correlation of ~0 with all the other funds across the years. I also compared with the major stock indexes, and it was completely uncorrelated. Its volatility was also super low. I plotted the average returns over a 3 month period for as many years as I had data, and it was a straight line at 9.8% annual return.

It was my first investment and I thought it was fantastic: uncorrelated, stable, a bit low on the returns side compared to the other funds.

Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. I had null previous experience and I just didn't knew how ridiculous these results were, and that this fund had SCAM sprayed all over it.

I was advised by "professionals", which turned out to be nothing more than sellers in fancy suits.

<comment><USER11> _I was advised by "professionals", which turned out to be nothing more than sellers in fancy suits._

I wonder how many of those persons faced criminal repercussions for their wilfully damaging behaviour. I suspect I know the answer...

<comment><USER12> At least one professional who put clients' funds in Madoff's scam committed suicide when he learned of what had happened.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal#Suic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal#Suicides)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Be careful about the "victim" label. Lots of Madoff's clients had very quiet discussions with lawyers.

"I had 5 million in invested with Madoff, now it is gone".

"No. You gave him 2 million 20 year ago. He told you that had grown to 5 million. He also paid you 2.5 million over those 20 years."

"So I only lost the original 2 million?"

"No. You were paid that 2 million back, plus an additional 500$ stolen from other people. That 500k was stolen money. You received and spent stolen money. If the FBI or IRS calls SAY NOTHING before talking to me again."

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone who wants to see Madoff now sweeping the floors in Federal Correctional Institution Butner Medium there's a photo out there [0]

[0] [https://blog.hyip.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Bernie- Sche...](https://blog.hyip.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Bernie- Scheme-2.2-4.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Where are the bankers, the regulators, the politicians, the businessmen, the CEOs, who cost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, hundreds of thousands of lives throughout the world after 2008?

<comment><USER16> Whenever I read an article like this one, this question is the one that remains.

<comment><USER17> You realise those people didn't break the law, right? You can't just throw someone in prison because you don't like what they did, their actions actually have to be illegal.

<comment><USER15> Yes and that's what is frustrating with the law, it does no justice. If you're rich and have a good lawyer you get off merely wrist slapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So this has some interesting implications: the SEC has started going after the most fraudulent ICOs, and will no doubt start working their way backwards. Cryptocurrencies provide a permanent record of all transactions, and exchanges are obliged by KYC to map that to real people. This means that people who've already profited from crypto bubbles (and maybe even spent the money) might find themselves the target of recovery actions.

<comment><USER18> I can't see how that compares at all. A bubble is just that, a bubble. It may break. What Madoff did was a Ponzi scheme.

<comment> m-i-l If I were to describe a scheme that disproportionately rewards early adopters[0] and requires a constant addition of new adopters just to sustain the price[1] - would an ordinary reasonable person[2] think "the future of money" or "traditional pyramid scheme"? And then if I were to describe a second scheme extending the first scheme where the main attraction is the supposedly constant pressure for buying into that scheme in order to participate in other new schemes launched with that scheme[3] - would an ordinary reasonable person think "new financial paradigm" or "traditional ponzi scheme"? And then if I was to describe those new schemes based on the second scheme based on the first scheme...

[0] Both via difficulty adjustments every 2 weeks (mostly increasing) and rewards halving every 4 years

[1] To counteract the deflationary nature of new coin generation

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

[3] i.e. buying into the "platform" in order to "invest" in tokens for subschemes issued with the "platform" (no one advertised that the subschemes would eventually have to dump their "shares" of the platform afterwards)

<comment><USER19> Oh come on.

If something like bitcoin was getting exactly enough users to counteract generation, the goal would be something like "eventually we'll triple the userbase!" or "eventually we'll add 25% to the userbase!" which is stupendously far from a pyramid scheme's infinite exponential growth.

Once a coin is mature, the amount of user growth to match or even beat inflation on the dollar is... zero.

So what you're left with is "rewards early adopters" and "makes new subunits" and that... is a pretty ordinary startup.

Bitcoin has a lot of problems but a need for a constant flow of new users isn't one of them.

-

From the other comment thread: "I used the term "at the top" to allude to the original point about what geometric shape a reasonable person would be likely to use to pictorially represent such a scheme."

Nah. You have early adopters, and you have everyone else. The early price is super cheap, and the later price is based on demand. The best analogy is baseball cards.

<comment> m-i-l _> 'what you're left with is "rewards early adopters" and "makes new subunits" and that... is a pretty ordinary startup.'_

While you could argue that a startup and a ponzi scheme can be considered similar because they both benefit earlier investors/members more than later ones, I'd argue that they are fundamentally different due to both the intention and the method - (i) the intention of a startup is extrinsic, i.e. it is to provide a real product or service based on a genuine or perceived customer need, while the intention of a ponzi scheme is intrinsic, i.e. it is solely a money making scheme with no product or service outside of the scheme, and (ii) the method of the startup is such that it will typically try to benefit most or all investors and customers to a greater or lesser degree, while the method of a ponzi scheme is such that it will benefit the earlier members at the expense of the later members (necessarily because nothing exists outside of the scheme).

<comment><USER19> The critical part of a ponzi scheme is using new investment to pay interest on old investors.

Something that you can model as a collectible doesn't do this. No matter how many promises of revolution you attach, it's still a commodity where you can buy and sell units based on supply and demand, and everyone profits or loses based on where the price goes. And they're generally aimed at a perceived customer need, at least.

For an honest believer, the value of their coins remaining stable is fine, they just want to be able to purchase things easily with them and/or do smart contract stuff.

The word 'scam' is appropriate for some coins. The words 'ponzi' or 'pyramid' are very rarely appropriate.

On a side note, the smart contracts set up to do a ponzi were interesting. It turns it into straightforward gambling, without the risk of someone taking the money and running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> On June 29, 2009, Judge Chin sentenced Madoff to the maximum sentence of 150 years in federal prison.

I vaguely remember the economic collapse of 2008, partly because at the time I was just getting out of a rough patch in my life and I'd bought a starter home. Granted, it was a mobile home, but it was 50,000 i'd made sure I could pay off at the bank and start building some equity. Then out of nowhere I lost my job, the machine shop I worked at closed, and after about 3 months I was effectively homeless.

People like me dont have "hedge fund" investment money. I had to give my dog away because i couldnt afford to feed it and sell my car for a deposit on a studio apartment. I guess Bernies bones will bleach for those hundred some odd years of biblical retribution, but for me I never saw any justice.

As far as I can tell, nobody, not one person responsible for crashing the economy and taking everything from me, was arrested or jailed. Im just supposed to imagine that the economy "got better" and everything is OK now. Madoff just seems like 'millionaires getting a few million back' to me.

<comment><USER21> > i'd made sure I could pay off at the bank

> Then out of nowhere I lost my job, ..., and after about 3 months I was > effectively homeless.

You absolutely, positively, need to have _6_ _months_ of buffer when you buy a home. If you're homeless in 3 months, then it means you're overextended.

<comment><USER22> Your comment it out of touch.

The overwhelming majority of first time home buyers do not have enough cash on hand for a down payment and a 6mo long emergency fund. It's just not possible for most first time home buyers to amass that kind of cash in any reasonable timeline while paying for the existing roof over their heads. You save for a down-payment, blow your savings on the down-payment and closing costs then rebuild your savings over the next year or two while putting up with the increased risk as a result of less savings during that time. People buying their 2nd through Nth home can generally roll the money made on the sale of their own home into the down payment and closing costs of the home they're buying without obliterating their savings. Sure, it would be nice if everyone were wealthy enough to have a down payment and emergency fund but so long as renting is the financial equivalent of lighting your money on fire people will stretch themselves as thin as they need to in order to buy.

<comment><USER23> If they're able to save up for a down payment they can wait a little longer and save up a six month reserve.

<comment><USER22> It takes most people a lot more than 6mo to save up a 6mo reserve. Delaying a house purchase by a year or two is not a practical option for most people. You have external things constraining your timeline to buy.

<comment><USER24> Sometimes people do get put into situations where buying earlier than optimal seems like the only option. However, people often use a variety of excuses to buy a house simply because they want to buy a house (even if they don't have the necessary funds for risk management).

-We are having a baby, so we need to move out of our 2 bedroom apartment and get a 3 bedroom house -Our rent is increasing so we need to buy a house (even though the mortgage is often more than rent) -We need a garage for our cars, so let's buy a house -We have money in our savings that isn't earning anything for us, so let's buy a house and put it to work. -We don't like sharing walls with neighbors, so we need a house. -Our parents say we are throwing money away at rent and should buy a house so we can build wealth.

Each excuse has some validity to it, but none of them really mean you need to buy a house RIGHT NOW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it possible to argue that Bernie Madoff did a lot less direct fiscal harm than many (most?) legitimate investment companies that were unwound at that time?

I suggested this at the time and got a lot of flak (from family members).

<comment><USER26> The judicial process focuses on how "purely" what you did was harmful, rather than the overall impact. Otherwise, no one could scale any project: you'd do too much harm right away.

What kills the most people around the world are more likely treatments for common, dangerous disease, cures that have known secondary effects (most likely chemotherapy). Pharmacists who develop those know that and test them against the (considerable) harm that would happen without it; those with a seemingly positive balance are approved, not those that are the least toxic.

Same thing: the bank that does the most terrible decisions is probably the one with the most customers, not the one built with nothing but criminal intent. Otherwise: you are probably right, but it's not relevant to judge banks overall.

If you find clusters of bad behaviour (even in large banks) you probably want to focus on those, but not blame the whole institution right away: people, companies still need banks, and you wouldn't find an honest banker if your criteria is "no harm at all".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > His sons, who worked for him, are dead—one hanged himself and the other died > of cancer.

Well that's fucked. The guy stole 19B, but is now serving a 150 yr prison sentence and his family is dead. Was it worth it?

<comment><USER27> Also in the same paragraph.

> Madoff's wife, Ruth, is living in a rented home in Connecticut. The > government allowed her to keep $2.5 million after Madoff's plea.

That whole paragraph felt so odd when I read it. Very callous mentioning of people hanging themselves and others dieing to cancer, and that the state apparently allowed his wife to keep $2.5 million of the stolen money. The whole thing sounds insane from a justice perspective.

<comment><USER28> Part of the plea, it ended up saving the taxpayer money likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> They way the money is being recovered, seems, from suing the investors whose money did not get stolen, and taking the early profits from them.

That also included funds that invested into Madoff's scheme (knowingly or unknowingly that it was illegitimate at the time).

"...

Picard filed hundreds of lawsuits to "claw back" phony profits from a wide range of customers, including individuals, families and estates that invested with Madoff for years. The trustee also went after offshore "feeder funds" that collected cash from their own customers and funneled it to Madoff to tap his unusually consistent returns.

…"

is anybody else reading this differently?

Because this was a Ponzi scheme, this seems to be the only way to 'make fair' so to speak. Are there other ways?

This seems to be unfair to the investors who did not know the scheme was illegitimate. They lost opportunity to invest into somewhere else, it is not like any other investment was unprofitable at the time.

<comment><USER26> I was shocked reading it — truly horrified: I once hesitated to invest in what proved suspicious companies, and I definitely thought about the possibility of getting out. Experiencing claw-back after that because others were not as considerate… Wow. However, the article names people who definitely should have known better: people who know what are reasonable returns, but also what you need and can do to get unreasonable ones. People who absolutely could have decided this was fishy.

There is a principle in banking around your level of expertise: you can't invest too much if you are not knowledgeable enough. It's a little unfair to the young aspiring investors, but it allows to put strict requirements on large institutions without hurting people who legitimately couldn't have known.

That decision does introduce a precedent and a new level of responsibility: if it is too good to be true, you are liable for it all. This might also introduce interesting trickle-down decisions: you could be on the hook for alerting authorities if you come across one of those because you have to check, and if you found something uninspiring, you can't claim deniability.

It's uncomfortable at first, but as long as that responsibility is carried by reasonably large investors only, it makes sense. Whether it might have negative consequences (typically, gatekeeping the best opportunities) is debatable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Something that has always puzzled me is why anyone would invest without SIPC insurance? Either they didn't understand what SIPC is or they wanted to avoid some kind of SEC scrutiny.

<comment><USER31> From [https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/what-sipc- protects](https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/what-sipc-protects)

"The limit of SIPC protection is $500,000, which includes a $250,000 limit for cash."

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Using square areas as a bar graph feels kind of frustrating. Doesn't feel intuitive? I know I'm being super nit picky.

<comment><USER33> I think they used it because, in that little space in the middle of the article, vertical space is more precious than horizontal space. So they traded off a little of one for a little of the other.

Why does it feel less intuitive than regular bar graphs? I thought the criticism of bar graphs was exactly that people substitute area for height so the visuals are misleading.

<comment><USER34> It could be a horizontal bar graph, no?

<comment><USER33> yes, good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It shows that the crooks which have participated in Bernie Madoff's scam have been getting richer. It seems that crime pays if you can find someone else to take the fall.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice use of a Sankey diagram in that article!

</comment><comment><USER37> I wish I could get all my money back from investments that went bad. These guys were really lucky.

<comment><USER38> If the investment went bad due to crime you might have a chance of getting the courts on your side. That's what they're there for, after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What about Joe Cassano?</comment>


CA Risk/History - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.cacert.org/Risk/History <comment><USER2> This seems to be missing the fundamental vulnerability: there are hundreds of CAs each allowed to make certs for any site.

At the very least, there should be a system where a site can safely declare which CAs are allowed to sign certs for it, once one of them signs for it. Otherwise, every marginal CA added decreases security. Some of the pinning options work for this (cert/ca pinning, vs. key pinning like in Chrome), but then you're exposed to "registrar blackmail risk", or issues when a CA just goes out of business or something.

This is all sort of a problem for https server certs, but really destroys the utility of the system for s/mime or any client certs other than internally issued.</comment>


New Firefox start page invites millions to learn a little code - <AUTHOR> https://blog.webmaker.org/firefox

<comment><AUTHOR> They should share some analytics on this and see if this actually leads to more interest in development. That would be pretty exciting if true. I'd hope maybe others do this too. It would be a great way to reach out and get new people into development.</comment>


The Old Gmail Compose Interface, No Longer Available - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-old-gmail-compose-interface-no.html

<comment><USER2> Keep pushing, Google. We're all waiting. Is the future of Gmail that it will be manipulative corporate bloatware, or a cool hacker innovation that changed email by streamlining it? Looks more like the former today.</comment>


Push Pop Press - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/push_pop_press

<comment><USER2> And for those who wonder what the heck "skeuomorphically" means: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorphism>

<comment><USER3> and pronunciation <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/skeuomorph>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a great product and I'd bet it will be a huge success. Remember when the iPad first came out the top selling paid "app" for the first 2-3 months was the "Elements" ebook. It was a much simpler version of what Gruber described, but it sold like hotcakes. After you buy your $500-800 tablet, you want some software to show off how cool it is and a few well produced nature/cook/science books that have physics based demo features will do that perfectly.

The comment about content being hard to product is right on. My guess is that they will publish just a few books a year, but they will be amazing looking and beautifully produced.

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem with this model is obviously going to be producing the content and I'm surprised Gruber doesn't mention that.

Distributing books this way will add a lot of complexity and cost to an already expensive workflow. If this format succeeds I imagine it will have more in common with "games" than it has with traditional "books". The model for funding and producing these "books" would therefor probably be more similar to how games are produced.

<comment><USER6> After reading your comment I immediately thought of the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books I loved as a preteen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised he would say that there's no joy in the Kindle experience. Perhaps on an iPad the Kindle app isn't stellar for magazines, etc. -- but that's because the iPad is much more suited for consuming media than reading actual books...You can't hold/control it with one hand like a Kindle and the backlight wears you out quickly.

Maybe I'm being hard headed, but for books that aren't related to programming, I don't think I'd want any multimedia being dropped in to the pages... Right now I would say the reading experience on an actual Kindle is unmatched, and the other apps are just there to support the hardware and add convenience.

<comment><USER3> As a kindle user, how do you find textbooks with diagrams in them? I heard they lack the resolution to display diagrams crisply.

<comment><USER7> I generally buy a hardcopy, or do pdf. I use the kindle to read books primarily (not textbooks, news, periodicals, etc), but I definitely agree that some of the conversions with images aren't great and diagrams aren't always crisp.

Does anyone have any input using actual textbooks on a kindle, or kindle dx? The iPad is great for diagrams/textbooks so long as you aren't reading pages upon pages at at time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I foresee a huge number of celebrity chef cooking books…

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Kindle just announced their "Kindle Singles": [http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2486013011](http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2486013011)

</comment><comment><USER10> Downloading an "app" requires effort and more to a degree, commitment. Browsers will get faster or Safari will become the nerd-age IE.

<comment><USER11> It's not primarily about speed or even the mentality of the purchaser: It's about giving the designer of the software (and the books) the power to create a better user experience. If the books are really as good as Gruber claims, then _that_ will lead to sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Push Pop Press is going to rely on people using the iPad with one hand as their home page shows, they may find themselves short on users.

<comment><USER13> Are you advocating using two hands, or none at all?</comment></comment>


Selection and Use of Manganese Dioxide by Neanderthals - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22159 <comment><USER2> Article uses the term _bloc_ 60+ times without ever defining it other than to say it is small and black.

</comment><comment><USER3> tldr: The report suggests they used powdered MnO2 to make fire starting easier.

The Wikipedia entry for MnO2 already references this article :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> More proof that Neanderthals were as smart as, if not smarter than, _Homo sapiens sapiens_.

<comment><USER5> How is this proof of that? They just found something that worked through trial and error.

<comment><USER6> As opposed to... what we do?

<comment><USER7> Build a model, predict a particle and verify its existence?

<comment> norea-armozel That's a relatively recent development in terms of systemizing knowledge discovery. Prior, people literally just mixed stuff together to see what happened.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


We Need an Energy Miracle (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "There are many people working on storage—batteries are a form of storage, and there's a few others, like compressed air, hot metals. But it's not at all clear that we will get grid-scale economic storage."

Grid-scale storage is the key. Duke Energy is one of the leaders in this effort, at least among the major utilities [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307767)

</comment><comment><USER3> And we got it. Wind power works, is cost effective, and scales well. Solar power works, is cost effective, and scales well. Battery storage works, is starting to be cost effective, and scales well. Fracking works, too, until that level of reserves runs out.

Energy has moved down the priority list of problems.

<comment> That-one-thing No, now I have trouble finding English sources and I need to go in a while.

But no wind power does not work in large scale in a electric system. The problem is that you need to have a lot of extra power and power electronics to stabilize the effect of wind power. It disturbs the frequency of the electricity in the network and you have to balance it with other sources you have complete control over to keep the power stable.

When the Swedish energy department made a study they found that we can't have more than 10 TWh of wind power (7%)[0]. There is one study from one group that says that we can have up to 30 TWh (21%)[2], but if we are realistic it's probably in the middle. This is things my professors in wind power told us, and they really like wind power.

Sorry the sources are in Swedish, but I really advice you to look into the subject before calming that it's all perfect.

[0] [http://www.svk.se/siteassets/om- oss/rapporter/20130313-integ...](http://www.svk.se/siteassets/om- oss/rapporter/20130313-integrering-av- vindkraft.pdf?_t_id=1B2M2Y8AsgTpgAmY7PhCfg==&_t_q=vindkraft&_t_tags=language:sv,siteid:40c776fe-7e5c-4838-841c-63d91e5a03c9&_t_ip=22.214.171.124&_t_hit.id=SVK_WebUI_Models_Media_OfficeDocument/_447e998b-e949-43da- bc98-f33334691bb7&_t_hit.pos=2)

[1][http://fof.se/tidning/2012/7/tal-elnatet-mer- vindkraft](http://fof.se/tidning/2012/7/tal-elnatet-mer-vindkraft) Lennart Söders forskargrupp.

<comment><USER4> Sweden has had more than 7% wind for a few years now, so we can safely say it's higher than 7%.

There's actually a single giant windfarm due for completion in 2020 that on its own will provide more than 8%.

There are some reasons to think solar and wind have physical limits and can't provide 100% on their own (or even together) economically just as nuclear on its own doesn't really make economic sense, but there's a long history of groups predicting false limits based on strange assumptions.

<comment> That-one-thing You are correct in that the first estimate my the energy department was wrong. But the idea that it is all solved and that we can just build lots of it without having to worry is not a good strategy for a society in my opinion. Yes sometimes they sometimes make predictions that are wrong, but I still think that we should listen mostly to scientific prediction than anything else.

Yes and that the UK peaked at 28% is irrelevant ( EDIT: I used to harsh wording, yes it's a bit relevant but there are still problems with applying one solution to another place ) because they have different system with different possibilities. You can't implement the same systems everywhere since they have different conditions.

Maybe we can have almost exclusively power by wind in the future. But until then I prefer to listen to scientists and hear what they have to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All this cryptocurrenty craziness doesn't help either.

I don't understand how the HN crowd that is usually so pro-environment, is also happy with the tons of wasted energy from crytptocurrency mining.

<comment><USER6> It's still young technology and the energy efficiency will improve with the lightning network or proof of stake or different concepts like filecoin.

The societal gain from these technologies is potentially very large and will hopefully realign interests in the direction of saving the environment rather than bailing out businesses.. But the most sane definition of money is actually energy imo

Also comparing the energy cost of printing physical money with mining cryptocurrencies is favorable to CC's iirc.

<comment><USER7> Right now a single transaction on the bitcoin network uses as much energy as powering 7 homes for a day.

There's infrastructure costs, but Visa's network doesn't need that much to process a single POST request

<comment><USER8> Do you have a source on that ? It seems impressive !

<comment><USER5> It got shared a bit further down the thread:

[https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy- consumption](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A response: [https://thinkprogress.org/no-bill-gates-we-dont-need- energy-...](https://thinkprogress.org/no-bill-gates-we-dont-need-energy- miracles-to-solve-climate-change-60ac8fbb9e2e/)

> What is particularly unfortunate about Gates' mistaken rhetoric is that it > can disempower people and policymakers and pundits into thinking that > individual or even government action is not the central weapon needed to win > the climate fight and that our only hope is some long-term deus ex machina > strategy to avoid catastrophic warming. Nothing could be worse than leaving > people with the impression that humanity's only hope is future miracles...

> What is particularly ironic about Gates' mistaken energy-miracle-centered > strategy, as I'll discuss at the end, is that it is the exact opposite of > the deployment-driven innovation strategy Gates himself used to make > Microsoft a software giant and to make personal computers the "miracle" that > Gates calls them today.

</comment><comment><USER4> The miracle will be society not being run by vested interests who maintain dirty expensive energy sources for their own narrow benefit.

Personally, I've found Gates's public pronouncements unhelpful as they've promoted this idea that the current tech is of no use when simple things like replacing coal with natural gas can have large impacts.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if storage could be offset with sufficient grid ties. Power could be shared across the day/night side of the planet, from a sufficient number of areas to avoid 100% cloud cover.

<comment><USER11> Yes, these are already being built. Interconnects are a large part of the energy transition. In addition to day/night connections, there is also a plan to connect desert regions of Tunisia to Europe via an undersea link, to take advantage of CSP plants that will be built there.

Interconnections reduce the effects of renewable variability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since we probably won't get an energy miracle, the sad truth is what we "need" is an economic collapse that will set us back decades (centuries even).

</comment><comment><USER13> There are no miracles in tech.

We usually see things coming a long way off. We were burning coal just like wood - and the entire hydrocarbon industry is a big refinement on 'coal fires'.

Nuclear Energy has been vastly understudied in the last 30 years. There are so many opportunities there, and the 'yield' is earth-shaking: 1000 years of electricity.

Yes - I'm aware of the issues, but with the right approach, most of them, possibly all of them can be mitigated.

Just with '1980's tech' \- and some institutional responsibility (A big 'ask', I know) - we could wipe out climate change for a hefty, but not unreasonable price tag. (FYI - a huge new component factored into costs is 'insurance' for these plants, which is crazy expensive and hard to assess - in addition to improvements - we can legislate and plan around these things).

At very least - we should be investing in research both in tech, but also in operating modalities. The upside is too great to ignore.

</comment><comment><USER14> The military has been suppressing advanced energy tech for 70+ years in order to maintain the stability of the global financial (slavery) system.

Decentralized energy production means loss of control.

<comment><USER13> The military, particularly DARPA has been introducing tech into the world that has utterly improved it for the better.

If I could be so bold: every piece of tech in your house depends in some way on military R&D.

Heyzeus - you even owe 'canned food' to Napoleon's supply-chain R&D.

It's a surprisingly long list when you account for actual history, not just the 20th century, which was huge.

<comment><USER14> I never claimed otherwise. They have unlimited R&D budget and the ability to kidnap scientists/inventors and steal their tech. They release tons of goodies all the time. Just not advanced energy tech.

There are two reasons for this:

1\. The stability of the petrodollar global control grid is based on the centralized production of energy. Any tech that would lead to widespread decentralization is a threat. Power is power.

2\. People are too retarded and selfish to be trusted with unlimited energy. They would inevitably split the crust of the earth and kill us all.

So until both of those things change you won't see permanent batteries, cheap hydrogen from water, high efficiency solar, or any of the other energy tech they are sitting on.</comment></comment></comment>


Local Restaurant Discovery – No Ads – No Bias – Just Facts - <AUTHOR>

RestaurantsNearMe.com is focusing on providing consumers with an advertising free restaurant discovery experience. We don't charge restaurants anything either. No bias, no paying your way to good reviews, just honest results. We make money when consumers use our partners for transportation to or from restaurants. Simple and easy and the consumer and the restaurant both win. If you have product suggestions, advice etc, we'd really appreciate it. <comment><USER2> Instead of making me click "more restaurants" can you have it load more as I scroll? Also, the loading seemed to take a long time for each press of the "more restaurants" button.

There was an error in my console, lp is not defined, some variable in your JavaScript.

Get Directions tried to open up an AppleMaps link. Is this a iPhone only website? Or do you want laptop/desktop users to install AppleMaps?

That's my 2 cents</comment>


Writing a game engine in pure C: The Graphic Initialization - <AUTHOR> https://prdeving.wordpress.com/2019/06/05/how-to-write-a-game-engine-in-pure-c-part-2-the-graphic-initialization/ <comment><USER4> As a tutorial series, I think using plain C is a cool approach and will help illuminate what's going on under the hood and what parts of the engine are really essential.

But if you yourself want to write your own game with just you or a small team of like-minded people, I would highly encourage using C++. As long as you don't have too many cooks arguing about which C++ features to throw into the pot, you can pick a subset of C++ that isn't much more complex than C (which is already more complex than most realize) and you'll get a much cleaner, safer language. C++ has saner rules for implicit type conversions, namespaces, overloading, and a cleaner notation for dynamic allocation. Those alone make it a sufficiently "better C" to be worth using in my book.

Going farther, even if you don't like "object-oriented programming", I think classes offer modularity and encapsulation features that make them worth using, even if you never once write the keyword "virtual" or use subclassing. (Fun fact: the first version of C++ did not have virtual methods!)

I like C and enjoy programming in it, which I've done for over 20 years. I've written a successful open source project in it and am writing a book that uses C as one of the implementation languages. Even so, I generally only use straight C if I'm writing a library that I want C users to be able to consume. Otherwise, I think C++ contains any number of "better C"'s within it, and it's mostly a matter of choosing which better C you want.

<comment><USER5> _"...it 's mostly a matter of choosing which better C you want."_

For a beginner that can make things more difficult: in addition to the actual thing you want to learn, you need to first become a capable curator of language features from the past 35 years.

JavaScript today has the same problem: you can't just start writing a web app because two lines into a tutorial you'll be barraged with "So this is actually an ES2017b.71 feature that we're enabling using babel-ts-flooginator, therefore you also need TypeScript and that means you need to..."

C feels clunky today, but writing more code in exchange for not having to curate the language can be helpful for learning.

<comment><USER4> This is such a great observation.

It makes me wonder if this can be solved technically by published curated language subsets. Racket does this by supporting a bunch of different dialects, specifically to make it easier to teach [0].

One good do something similar for other languages. Step one is probably just writing a doc that says "Here's a standard subset of C++ we call Blah. These are the features it uses and these are the ones it doesn't: ..."

Then you could add tooling so that it will warn you if you use a prohibited feature.

Of course, this just pushes the problem up a level: now a new user has to know which curated sublanguage to use. But that's arguably simpler than doing it on a per-feature basis. At least they can just order a combo instead of having to pick a la carte.

[0]: [https://docs.racket- lang.org/drracket/languages.html](https://docs.racket- lang.org/drracket/languages.html)

<comment><USER6> > It makes me wonder if this can be solved technically by published curated > language subsets.

I'm biased, but I generally find the Google C++ Style Guide to be a good curation of C++: [https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html](https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html)

I generally stick to it in all projects I write. The only exception is that in a few cases I'll use features that are disallowed in Google C++ primarily for historical reasons, most notably exceptions: [https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions](https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions)

<comment><USER7> The problem with exception-less C++ is that new, delete, ctors, and dtors become timebombs when they fail in a way that would have generated an exception.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure why you were downvoted. I almost exclusively write exception-less C++ (compiling everything with "-fno-exceptions"), but correctly handling errors in constructors and destructors is absolutely an important concern. It's not hard to do, obviously, but it does require forethought and heavily encourages delegating complex logic to other parts of the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interested people may also be interested in Handmade Hero[0]. The game is being developed — from scratch, engine and all — in real-time and streamed by Casey Muratori. It's cpp technically, but he uses very little and sticks to mostly C if I remember correctly.

[0][https://handmadehero.org/](https://handmadehero.org/)

<comment><USER10> Handmade Hero is an impressive endeavor, but by now it's got over _500_ 1-2h sessions. That's a lot for anyone to catch up on.

Have there been any efforts to write episode summaries/articles on the techniques he demonstrates?

<comment><USER11> Every video on his website has pretty great annotations placed on top of them which describes every section of every video, and all the questions at the end of session QA.

Go to [https://handmadehero.org/watch](https://handmadehero.org/watch) and scroll down the previous episodes section.

Also all the episodes aren't as long as they look, a large chunk of the time is on the QA at the end. That said it is a huge investment at this point, but definitely worth it. Some of his high-level ideas are great, and I've learned a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Starting with state management in the first post is a different approach I wouldn't normally expect.

That being said I don't know what it is but I prefer writing games in C. I experiment with higher level languages and use them for rapid prototyping. However, and maybe its simply nostalgia, I always come back to C.

And it's not even my favorite language by a long shot. For practically everything else, save for systems programming, I prefer languages like Common Lisp and (more recently) Haskell. Imperative programs are notoriously difficult to comprehend and maintain but there is something about game programming specifically that C leverages which makes it a good fit for game engine development; the mix of pointers and machine-sized types perhaps? I'm not sure. But it works really well.

<comment><USER13> I have some recent experience with doing game programming in C and while I think the experience was overall positive, I'm not sure that I would do it again unless my aim was portability.

I found that when my project grew to a certain size, I started running into many cases where I needed many implementations of some base type, the kind of pattern that lends itself well to classes and simple inheritance. This pattern is totally 100% possible to roll yourself in C, but requires a bunch of boilerplate each time and I found that every time the implementation came out slightly differently, or that I had to go back and rewrite a bunch of code because I needed one more layer of flexibility than I anticipated.

I also really wish templates were in the language. Maybe not to the C++ level of flexibility, but at some point, you're going to need a dynamically allocating array or hashmap of a specific type, and your choices are either going to be *void or some macro thing that makes your eyes cross.

Also, build tools in 2019 are still kind of bad. I use CMake and try to do things "the right way", and I still run into trouble occasionally, mostly surrounding external dependencies and generation of files outside the scope of the C compiler. It's a shavable yak, but it's still a yak.

Still, the lack of mental overhead and the much faster compilation times compare favorably to C++. But if portability wasn't a goal, I'd seriously consider an alternative like D, Zig, or Nim next time.

<comment><USER14> _> I needed many implementations of some base type, the kind of pattern that lends itself well to classes and simple inheritance._

Inheritance is an anti-pattern, you can accomplish the same with composition.

 _> you're going to need a dynamically allocating array or hashmap of a specific type, and your choices are either going to be void or some macro thing that makes your eyes cross._

I don't understand, why would you need a *void for a specific type? If you meant heterogeneous types, you can use a typedef union.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading the title my mind immediately went to

      mov ax, 13h
      int 10h

I'm old.

<comment><USER16> Brought a smile to my face. I see this as a shibboleth for the oldschool coders.

For those missing the joke, that's the assembly language commands to switch to VGA mode from DOS. Set AX register to 13 hex and call interrupt 10. That gives us VGA graphics mode 320x200 pixels! Related: In the 1990s Michael Abrash via Dr. Dobbs Magazine, introduced the world to "Mode X" @ 320x240, which had the advantage of square pixels. That series of articles was responsible for my long-standing subscriptions to Dr Dobbs Journal.

<comment><USER15> 320x240 was one of the benefits, but the more important part was that it allowed you to use all the memory, double buffer, use split screens (for HUDs) etc. Addressing became more complicated, though. (And IIRC, Doom ran in 320x200 Mode X, for some design/monitor reasons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Personally, I prefer GLFW over SDL:

[https://www.glfw.org/](https://www.glfw.org/)

GLFW just goes from zero to OpenGL context ASAP, plus input events. With SDL I found that their drawing primitives are too limiting for my needs, and if you want to do any custom drawing at all, you need to abandon their drawing primitives entirely and just write GL codel. At that point, GLFW makes more sense.

SDL does have a few other nice things like audio support and text rendering, which you'd have to figure out separately with GLFW, but to each their own.

<comment><USER18> are there any concrete, tangible advantages of glfw over freeglut? I see the glut api as the paragon of usefulness and simple elegance, and I'm really curious how glfw can be any better than that.

<comment><USER19> I haven't used glfw, but from the docs it leaves you in control of the main loop, whereas glut takes that over and only offers you callbacks. When I used glut (many many years ago) that was sometimes annoying.

glfw doesn't seem to have a function to draw teapots though, which should really rule it out as a serious contender.

<comment><USER18> legacy glut does not allow loop control, but freeglut does

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For more inspiration I'd check out the Quake engine source. It's quite the masterpiece. There's also been some modernization over the years by LordHavoc of the DarkPlaces engine [https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/](https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/) \- I'm constantly impressed how well the HD remaster on DarkPlaces looks on modern 4k hardware.

<comment><USER21> The Wolf3D source is probably an even better start. Much simpler, the bad part is that it's 16-bit Borland C.

Andre Lamoth's DOS game programming books are a good read as well, he used 16-bit Microsoft C. Sprinklings of assembler in both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks like a lot of complexity up front with no foreseeable payoff.

Why are we implementing a whole dynamically allocated stack for states before doing anything domain specific?

How many states could you possibly be expecting to have in a full game? 3? 12? 100? The examples of states were like the menu, action screen, and pause screen. So it sounds like very few. Drop the realloc'ing and free'ing and just statically allocate N states and be done with it. Save this complexity for something that really needs it.

Plus are you going to free the stack any time other than when you quit the app? I doubt it. The OS will free everything for you when you quit so there's no reason to waste time on that either.

The code so far looks like mostly a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Theres also wdk which can give you open gl es/desktop context and and this is separate from window creation so you can also create a context for headless rendering. Supports window and linux.

[https://github.com/ensisoft/wdk/blob/master/sample/triangle....](https://github.com/ensisoft/wdk/blob/master/sample/triangle.cpp)

<comment><AUTHOR> uh, interesting....

C++ tho, but i could port it, i'll give it a glance

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Right now I'm heavy into C++, especially C++17, but mostly due to the current project I'm working on (tools engineer @ gamedev)

20 years ago, my first project was being part of 4 people team porting Metal Gear Solid from PS1 (PSX) to PC. This is when I saw how good written "C" code could be done. Even if it had only japanese comments in the code (understandable).

The pure and simple structure, where most of the functions had TCL-like interface:

int ACT_Work( int argc, sometype* argv ) { // bit of argc/argv parsing Do_Work() }

then above was exposed to a TCL-like scripting language, used for setting up level objects... We are talking about 500-600kb of memory used by the main executable + 300-400kb of 'overlay' memory where "shared, e.g. dll/so-like" code gets replaced depending on what objects needs to be in the game (Mentioned "overlay" as this was very well established practice back in the DOS days).

Things really were plain and simple. API-s too. It was so easy to grasp what's going on.

Then again, since this was running on what looks like really limited machine, it had to do only such and such. No fancy animation controllers, advanced physics, collision, etc. etc.

at some point, especially if it's a content creation tool (think Maya, or any Autodesk product, Houdini, etc.) then you need to be able to handle tons of "nodes", "entities", meta-data, etc. - but when it comes to a game, even nowadays - pre-cooking gets you there, and quick deserializing - <USER2> piecewise, or whole sections, and then pointer fixup.

Point is, is your game, and engine meant to be content creation tool too?

<comment><USER24> e.g. "C" is still valid choice, if your data is well organized, known, and no additional heavy modifications are need - e.g. you don't change much - <USER3> load "pre-cooked " data, play it, keep few (okay dozen, maybe hundreth, even thousand) variables around and that's it.

Once you get to the point of needing various tweaks, modifications, changes, more advanced UI, etc. - you may need better suited language, because malloc/free won't cut it for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is super cool, well done OP! It looks like you've got some pretty in depth and interesting articles around the rest of your site too. Big props to you and everyone else who puts themselves out there and works to create something that helps others.

</comment><comment><USER26> I finished my first game-ish C/SDL project a few months back, and found it to be a very instructive experience. It compiles to WebAsm so you can fiddle with it here:

[https://nematode.farm](https://nematode.farm)

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there a way in modern operating systems to draw pixels directly in software without using any external libraries (Ala SDL or Windows Graphics)?

Like just switch mode of a context and draw pixels as you want?

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems like it is going to take a long time to get to a fully functional game if this is the second article and they're only just calling SDL_CreateWindow.

<comment><USER29> One post a week is about as fast as most people can go if they are into nuts- and-bolts technical topics and they are trying to juggle work and life and other demands on their time. That's about the best I could ever manage when I used to be blogging as I learned DirectX. And that was using C#, so you didn't have to boil the ocean and implement all your own fundamental data structures as you go (see the previous post in this series).

It's four and a half years into Handmade Hero at this point :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just want to explain how things works, i don't know if i'll ever finish this proyect, but if i don't i want the things i did explain crystal clear, i want every concept well presented so every single post in the serie can be a piece by its own and you can learn something. I'm now trying to write two articles a week but it's hard, coding C89 is not fast, there are a lot of cavities and undefined behaivours xD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is moreso "how to start using SDL2".

These tutorials exist and are really well thought out here: [https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/](https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/)

<comment><AUTHOR> this is not about SDL, it's just an easy way to open a window, import assets, handle events and reproduce sound.

Would you like to see a tutorial about how to do that in c89 compatible with windows, mac, Gnu/linux, consoles, etc? it'd take half million lines and 3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is an awful SDL engine example. I've made rendering engines before. You should for example have a second windowless openGL context with its own thread so that you can be sending drawing commands at the same time you are updating GPU ram buffers. Generally the main thread is required to be handling input (due to cross platform requirements) and should only be doing that. Everything else including file loading should be running in async threads. It would require you to be a competent programmer though.

There are better SDL tutorials from the 90's.

<comment><USER32> That crosses into personal attack, which we ban people for, and name-calling, which the site guidelines ask you not to do.

Would you mind reviewing [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? If you know more than others, the thing to do here is not to put others down, but to offer some of what you know, so we all can learn. Or you can ask about why they did X rather than Y. Perhaps they also know quite a bit, and chose X for an interesting reason.</comment></comment>