Coup or Death for the Bitcoin Foundation? - <AUTHOR> http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post/78868284696/coup-or-death-for-the-bitcoin-foundation

<comment><USER2> This guy has an horrible writing style for somebody who is meant to be releasing ground breaking information.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with it? It's a bit colorful for my taste, but the writing seems precise and clear enough.

<comment><USER2> Grammatical nitpicks aside, it's just not what you'd expect from somebody who is playing the good-hearted blogger with a lot of sensitive information under their belt.

> _Not a happy Friday, Idiots. War._

> _To the chagrin of the less confrontational, I plan to attack. And in > putting my personal and professional reputation on the line, I will attack > ruthlessly, from the front, and (figuratively) shoot to kill._

If you were to go down this particular path, the article just needed to be a clear statement of the information he has and the outcome he expects before he releases it. Instead it's more schoolyard nonsense from people pretending to be better than it all, painting himself as an outspoken martyr and a savior of the community.

> _This egregious behavior and negligence may not be the worst of the > information to come._

> _If I get hit by a bus this weekend, my lawyers will release it._

At best it reads like a blackmailer, extortionist or market manipulator. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> jaw dropping how this so called "industry" behaves. scam here, blackmail there etc.

it's like you give a bunch of kids one new shiny toy and boom, there is war.

<comment><USER5> You're terribly right. I've never seen immature behavior come from anyone involved in any "grown up" sector of the economy.

<comment><USER3> After all, there definitely has never been scams, blackmail, or war (literal or figurative) related to traditional currencies.

<comment><USER6> Point taken.

However, by positioning Bitcoin as a alternative to what most think are corrupt financial institutions, the Bitcoin community is automatically held to a higher standard. So far it's failing miserably to meet that standard.

<comment><USER7> I've mostly seen claims praising bitcoin as anonymous, distributed, and unregulated currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This guy sounds like he lost some bitcoins in mtgox collapse.

</comment><comment><USER8> another example of the bitcoin community slowly learning why financial regulation and oversight exists...

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=98](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=98)

Hiding $12 million from a federal bankruptcy judge in a sham bankruptcy is a bad idea. But maybe there's more than that even.

</comment><comment><USER10> This guy must not have been involved with bitcoin for long if any of this rustles his jimmies...

<comment><USER3> Does he indicate that he is surprised? He sounds disappointed and angry, and highly motivated to change things, but I caught no implication of surprise.

<comment><USER10> fixed

<comment><USER3> But that doesn't make much sense to me. Like, if I got mugged on the street, my jimmies would be rustled, despite the fact that thousands of muggings occur and have occurred for centuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't help but think that a scorched earth strategy might backfire...

<comment><USER12> I'd rather have all the facts open and on the table. For better or worse the amount of information asymmetry in the bitcoin market is staggering.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I would too... but whatever happens, it's not going to be pretty or look good for Bitcoin.

I'm not sure if that's an overall good thing or bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whistleblower Threatens to Expose Corruption at Bitcoin Foundation

[http://valleywag.gawker.com/whistleblower-threatens-to- expos...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/whistleblower-threatens-to-expose- corruption-at-bitcoin-1538965958)

</comment><comment><USER13> Definite chip on his shoulder. View a persistent legacy of angry blog posts:

[http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/archive](http://two-bit- idiot.tumblr.com/archive)

Back story? Anyone know?</comment>


Show HN: Ryeboard- A free virtual whiteboard - <AUTHOR> http://ryeboard.com/ <comment><USER2> Dragging as the only option for placing an image requires the user to have two applications open (and practically speaking both windows visible). Maybe copy/paste too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny how I never thought of this rather obvious solution to a problem that I also had! I will add it on the list at: [https://github.com/tyherox/ryeboard/projects/3](https://github.com/tyherox/ryeboard/projects/3). Thanks for your feedback!</comment></comment>


StackMob is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/B6RiEqev <comment><USER2> We saw this coming when they announced that they were acquired by PayPal a couple of months ago, and read this line:

"When asked if StackMob will continue to operate as normal, he said it was too early to tell since the acquisition just closed today." [http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/17/paypal-acquires- stackmob-t...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/17/paypal-acquires-stackmob-to- build-a-better-platform-especially-for-mobile/)

That was dead giveaway that they'd shut it down. We instead chose Parse for a project we were just starting, and it's worked out pretty well (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us to create new columns or deploy).

<comment><USER3> > (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us > to create new columns or deploy)

thanks for reminding me why i'll never outsource my app's primary datastore. 'tis a bridge too far.

<comment><USER4> If you want data sync capability and you prefer to run your own databases, Couchbase Lite is an open-source iOS and Android JSON database that syncs with Couchbase running on your servers.

[http://mobile.couchbase.com](http://mobile.couchbase.com)

It's not a full app platform like Parse and StackMob, we are focussed on the data layer challenge.

<comment><USER3> I'm all about the Couch/Pouch ecosystem. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's StackMob recommending people switch from Parse after FB acquired them.

[https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/04/27011/](https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/04/27011/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Thank you, our customers, for believing in us." is such an obnoxious and insincere statement. If anything, their customers only went with them because StackMob gave assurances (or at least the impression) of stability. I wish they were just upfront, sincere, and a bit apologetic.

</comment><comment><USER7> Question:

Do the kind of people who work at places like stackmob, once their product has been killed, really want to work in other departments at paypal upgrading ancient systems?

(According to the article rradu posted this was why they were aquihired)

It seems like they would run away as soon as possible since they worked at a place like stackmob over paypal in the first place. (I assume there are some sort of retention bonuses etc to try and keep them.)

<comment><USER8> I worked at a PayPal acqui-hire. For a while, it was pretty good! We suddenly had EBAY RSU's instead of maybe-someday-money and the work didn't change (as the mothership decided what exactly to do with us). That lasted about three months, after which our product got spiked and we were tossed in on very PayPal-y projects.

To answer your question: not really. Some of us found a niche at a place like PayPal, but a lot of us tried and weren't cut out for it.

My heart goes out to StackMob and its employees. Get paid.

<comment><USER9> Same happened to me somewhere else. My advice for these situations is ASAP or GTFO the acquired unit. ASAP, lateral into the larger company if that's the kind of place you think you want to work, or GTFO the whole place whenever you feel like it. Regardless, get away from the acquired company so you don't become deadwood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ouch, so any product that relies on StackMob will need to reimplement and deploy its entire backend by May 11th?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like an opportunity for some of the other backend providers to create a migration guide and import tools!

<comment><USER11> Sounds more like one should not use this kind of solution unless it's very temporary or one is building a quick prototype. What about businesses that relied on stackmob? welcome to the Baas area.

<comment><USER12> I get all my Baas needs from local retail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might as well wait for something more official than a message on pastebin?

<comment><USER14> I got an email from Pastebin about it.

<comment><USER15> Wow, what a service.

<comment><USER14> :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I did my study on the BaaS providers last year, most of them were venture funded and not profit making and almost all of them were in the business for only a few short years. The only profit making / long term businesses that were into this space were Kii and Apigee App Services. The rest appeared to be candidates for acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Thank you, our customers, for believing in us. It's because of you that > we're able to move on, to rise to a new challenge, and to make a real > difference.

I'm always happy when a company does well. But when a company's success isn't in the best interest of their customers, there's a fundamental disconnect. It is, after all, possible to advocate for existing customers during M&A negotiations.

In this case, their believing customers are now rewarded by having their software assets freshly encumbered by technical debt. What was sold as a solution is now a problem. So maybe it's just me, but it seems that the proper disposition should be one of apology, not celebration.

</comment><comment><USER18> As context, StackMob was acquired less than two months ago (December 17th) by PayPal.

</comment><comment><USER19> The announcement was good enough for pastebin but not their own homepage?

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot of folks are writing that this is bad for employees. Is it worse for employees (who may have been sold a bill of goods joining) or worse for customers (who may have been sold a bill of goods signing up)?

My sense is there is a little bit of "Let the buyer beware" on both because both employees and customers know what they're getting into with a startup. That said, the employees should at least get some stock out of it. Should early customers ask for stock too?

</comment><comment><USER21> From the perspective of a non-paying customer who was testing out the service although not seriously considering it I am kind of shocked even though I know I should not be. This will damage all their competitors in BaaS. No way anyone with any sense would want to risk this sort of thing again, this confirms the worst fears of using service like this. Amazon may well be the winner as usual when custom solutions become more favourable again.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hi, I work at apiOmat ([http://www.apiomat.com](http://www.apiomat.com)).

We will provide a migration script for former Stackmob users later this day, so getting apps back running should be a minimum pain. Also, to compensate for your lost time, you can get one month free medium plan with the voucher "stackmobOmat" :-)

</comment><comment><USER23> This was my fear for Parse after FB acquired them. Are there any other interesting competitors to Parse out there?

<comment><USER24> You could just use Parse. We're not going anywhere.

<comment><USER25> Or, you could learn from this, and not use Parse.

<comment><USER26> I don't get why anyone in their right mind would invest in a Backend as a service. Ok, maybe things like image uploading, or what not, but not the entire back-end.

<comment><USER27> I am creating an app as a side project and this makes it a lot more manageable. It is my first time messing with web dev and would rather focus my time developing it instead of having to learn a lot of back-end as well. I understand where you are coming from though. I would like to learn back-end but I already have a lot to learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can a team of 24 people fix PayPal? No.

</comment><comment><USER29> I am also considering to use Parse but I am still tempted to use StrongLoop ([http://strongloop.com/mobile-application- development/loopbac...](http://strongloop.com/mobile-application- development/loopback/))

</comment><comment><USER30> "To ease the transition, we are launching a data exporter to help you get all your data out of StackMob in CSV format."

Ouch, that's probably the bare minimum they could've possibly done.

</comment><comment><USER31> Poor developers who thought they can rely on them!

</comment><comment><USER32> From their home page...

Partners and Customers who Trust StackMob

</comment><comment><USER33> Shouldn't they be able to find someone to take over the service? I realize that's not a big priority but still.

<comment><USER34> They couldn't turn a profit from their business, why do you think someone else would want it?

<comment><USER35> Or they could open source it - if there's any big customers they could put some of their own developers onto it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Congratulations on failing fast. Onwards and upwards.

<comment><USER37> Does Poe's Law apply here?

(Picture Fry meme:)

Can't tell if sarcasm, or sincerity.

<comment><USER38> Wow thats a bit too soon. Thats why vendor viability is equally, if not more important than product features: [http://blog.kii.com/?p=2204](http://blog.kii.com/?p=2204)

<comment><USER37> Or as an old boss of mine used to say: "Never outsource something hard to replace".

<comment><USER6> How about, "Pick your battles"? I agree that it's ideal to own something vital to your business or a product, but if you're trying to validate an idea and get something to market ASAP then outsourcing and/or using 3rd-party services can make a big difference. Trying to do everything yourself is a slippery slope. Related: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)

<comment><USER37> I always took his statement to mean that if something is essential to your business, you should think very carefully about the risks inherent in outsourcing it. The two major exceptions to this are

1\. Things which aren't essential to your business. (e.g.: things that could be replaced by nothing (even if just temporarily))

2\. Things which meet the definition of a commodity, in the formal 'fungible goods' sense of the word.

Many .?aaS offerings fail both of these tests in that they're an essential component of a service, and also fail the commodity test in that there is qualitative differentiation between offerings. The features of EC2 (used to their fullest) are wildly different than those of Rackspace, and the two are only really fungible with one another across a small subset of their feature sets.

Examples of offerings that pass this commodity test include:

\- Most mailers (sendgrid, mailgun, postmark, &c) _when used simply_. Switching from one backend to another isn't a huge endeavour, as they are all cut from conceptually similar cloth.

\- VPS offerings _when used simply_ (notice a pattern here?). A basic Ubuntu box in the cloud is a basic Ubuntu box in the cloud.

In contrast, Stackmob, Parse, et al. all fail this commodity test _hard_. Switching costs are very high (especially with Stackmob, whose iOS SDK bleeds anti-patterns all over your app), data migration is a nightmare, and major architectural assumptions can vanish in an instant

Part of the bargain of leaning on non-commoditized offerings to back essential services is accepting the risk that they may one day leave you in the lurch. In the metaphor of technical debt, outsourced services are extending you credit to finance your technical debt. Having one of your outsourced dependencies close up shop is really just them calling in their debts.

Of course, there's no right answer. I agree completely that the point is moot unless you ship; the GP wasn't really intended to be imperative; it was meant (or at least it was always how I understood it) as more as a heuristic to assess the risk associated with outsourcing a core dependency that can't be easily hedged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> curious to know how you can use [http://baasbox.com](http://baasbox.com) and deploy it on EC2. It's open source and free, but I guess mobile developers don't like backend work.

<comment><USER40> baasbox looks interesting except for the fact that they apparently created their own custom database system. Why? Even if they wanted to stay within the Java ecosystem, there are so many good databases already available in Java.

Just seems like a waste of effort just because someone wanted to write his own database software.

But deploying it looks like a snap. They have documentation on how to do this on their site.

<comment><USER41> Baasbox DB is orientdb, which is open source: [https://github.com/orientechnologies/orientdb](https://github.com/orientechnologies/orientdb)

<comment><USER40> Oh wow, apologies for the misstatement. I glanced at the docs, features, and github, and didn't see any sign or mention of a DB dependency, so I assumed they had written their own.

Sorry to the baasbox db team for the incorrect assumption. But it might be a good idea to make the underlying db a bit clearer, assuming I didn't miss any obvious mention of it (which is quite possible).

orientdb is a fine db, indeed it's one I was thinking of when I was wondering (incorrectly) why they wrote their own.

Thanks for your correction.

<comment><USER41> Our stance is that, as an app developer, you should not care too much about the technology behind a backend. You should rather stay focused on the front end.

<comment><USER39> so my question is why don't most mobile app developers use something like Baasbox, or spin up any REST api on their servers?

What is the benefit of using proprietary platforms like Parse and Stackmob?

<comment><USER41> My guess is just one: BaasBox is born 6mo ago :) But we are spreading the voice ...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing - <AUTHOR> https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86649455475-f933fe63 <comment><USER2> A verifiable, immutable, distributable, durable, performant data store is the solution for almost nothing? Only if you have no imagination, in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> _"A verifiable, immutable, distributable, durable, performant data store"_

Anything digital with checksums is verifiable.

Nothing digital is immutable, but checksums can be used to verify that what you have know is the same as what you had before.

Anything digital is distributable and, if you make enough copies, durable.

FTA: "sometimes a transaction takes nine minutes, sometimes nine days!". If that's true, I wouldn't use "performant" to describe this technology, if used as a ledger.

Finally, git is as verifiable, immutable, distributable and durable as you can get in the digital space, and, used as a ledger, more performant than blockchain (and highly likely not the only example of software that has those properties)

<comment><USER4> It is effectively immutable, that's how Bitcoin continues to exist.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you come up with a startup idea? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=startup%20ideas&sort=byPopular...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=startup%20ideas&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER3> Look for a problem which is a pain in the ass for you (if you're not too weird, this may apply to others) and tackle it.</comment>


Facebook is banning all ads promoting cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/1/30/16950926/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-bans-crypto-advertising-bitcoin-james-altucher <comment><USER2> Finally.

I've been intentionally clicking ICO ads so that I get targeted for more ICO ads. It's been interesting.

\- Many of them have the most buttery smooth introduction video that was just so compelling to stare at.

\- Many has business lines like, "The total market for car loans / social media advertisement / game currency is N trillion...

\- The "team" page for them are mostly Russian / Eastern European. Some of them have links to LinkedIn. I looked at their (I believe fake) profiles too. (I don't know why would anybody use their real identity to pull such a thing).

\- Some ads are in Korean (understandable, I speak Korean and cryptocurrency is hot over there), some ads are in Chinese including their landing page. Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything?

<comment><USER3> I love your idea of clicking on facebook ads just to see what would happen for a person that did happen to be in that cohort. Other things I have thought of that would be interesting to do this experiment with is multi-level-marketing BS, political ads catering to the opposite side of the isle, and "Preppers". I would find that much more interesting than my current facebook feed that just feeds me more of what I am already into.

Tangentially related, I recently spent a week in Hawaii and listened exclusively to a local radio station the whole time. It occurred to me that my view of what people did for fun, or where they grocery shopped, or what issues were important to them, and generally "what the locals do" were largely determined by who happened to be paying that radio station to play their ads. And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is.

<comment><USER4> Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grasshoppers#Quotes](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grasshoppers#Quotes)

<comment><USER5> what?

<comment><USER6> The few "squeaky wheels" making the most noise - determining the very face and presentation of a context (in this case a field full of cattle, in GP's case a handful of advertisers on radio) - is an old idea that even has prose to describe it.

<comment><USER5> So, comparatively, a few bad screaming apples spoil the whole bunch? (should clarify, I'm not disagreeing, just trying to relate)

<comment><USER7> It's more that the apparent signal, whatever it is, is not the whole of reality. And often gives quite the mis-placed view of same.

And if the name Edmund Burke means nothing to you, you've a whole universe of enlightenment to attend to.

<comment><USER5> Ah ha, Ok, so the ones who are most vocal and/or visible are, more often than not, not accurately representative of the <subject> as a whole.

I think the Olde-English-y sound of the original quote threw me for a loop. In any case, I agree - that makes total sense.

<comment><USER7> Quite often not.

Attention is the ultimately rivalrous commodity, and it's _very_ easily consumed. Where true significance is carried by what's hidden or indirect, this can be especially pernicious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first ad I saw for Crypto was an ad for Bitmain -- it flashed through my ad blocker enough for me to turn off the blocker to see it. It was Bitmain, advertising a miner back in stock. Clicked it, saw it in stock, then thankfully went back to the fb comments to see someone mention it was a Punycode domain -- was a complete phishing site. There was an 'a' that was actually some other glyph that had a small, nearly pixel-sized dot that made it something other than an 'a'.

I am flabbergasted at why fb would allow punycode domains (especially when the domain listed under the ad was the 'real' domain).

<comment><USER9> Learning dvorak and playing around with its compose key, I was amazed by the vast characters that there actually exists.

For a, you also have: äāȧą

I would fall for a domain like that.

Sadly, you can't blacklist all punycode domains as some are legits in languages where accents are used

<comment><USER10> So allow those for the TLDs where it makes sense. Keeping them out of .com seems like a reasonable trade off.

<comment><USER11> .com is supposed to be international. US-only content belongs in .us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am guessing it has something to do with the fake ICO's taking advantage of uneducated users (see Vyral for a great example).

But Facebook has made their entire fortune taking advantage of uneducated users. So maybe they don't want competition?

<comment><USER13> I think that's close. Scam artists slaughter the sheep, while Facebook would rather keep shearing them.

<comment><USER14> As a sheep, I would prefer being shorn rather than slaughtered, so I'm with Facebook on that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is just one of many things Facebook bans, including dating ads from sites that aren't preapproved, payday loans, sketchy supplement ads, and the list goes on. They even banned fantasy sports betting sites for a while (until the legality got cleared up in NY somewhat).

</comment><comment><USER16> I am sure real, legitimate ICOs must exist, but I have yet to find one. Can anyone point to one that they strongly believe is legitimate?

<comment><USER17> Basic Attention Token

[https://basicattentiontoken.org/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/)

<comment><USER18> The Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits" has something like this as its premise.

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

Some thoughts after going through the whitepaper,

> The BAT will, in early stages, be specifically tied to Brave browsers and > Brave servers, along with verified publishers

Before this, they mention that other browsers are free to adopt BAT. However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data reported is legitimate. Presumably then only the Brave browser will be able to use this token. A novel, trustless/decentralised way to verify user attention would be of a paper on its own.

> Ad fraud will be prevented or reduced by publication of source code and > cryptographically secure transactions. Ads served to individual > browser/users will also be rate-limited and tied to active windows and tabs.

How will this be ensured without some kind of centralised whitelist of signatures/keys?

If the system is going to be centralised anyway, why use a blockchain? Blockchains are terribly inefficient append only DBs, and are only useful when there is not even a single server on the internet that you can trust. There is no point to using a blockchain if everything that can go on the blockchain is going to be mediated by a company/government/organisation.

> A 300 million endowment is for early adopters of Brave and the BAT at up to > 5 BAT/user

followed by

> BATs are meant only for experts in cryptographic tokens and blockchain-based > software systems

So they expect to get up to 60 million "experts in cryptographic tokens" to switch to their browser?

<comment><USER19> > However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data > reported is legitimate.

Exactly. Looks like a race problem, again. Just looking at the diagram on their site (user gets tokens for attention), I immediately thought "Write and deploy attention signaling bots" ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I haven't seen these ads, but this is probably the right move. The irony is that Facebook has built its perceived value to advertisers, investors, businesses, and audience alike on its ability to use deep learning to process all these posts and images and ads and understand what they mean. But here they are explicitly admitting they are unable to do that. It's a healthy thing to do. But it's interesting that it's financial fraud for which they might be directly liable, and not political propaganda, mental health, or explicit racism that brings them to admit their limitations and draw a hard line.

<comment><USER21> There is a difference between understanding the content (e.g. ICO) and understanding what happens a few weeks after the content is interacted with (e.g. someone runs off with the money). The first is doable, the second requires prescience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just like google banning rehab centers, if an industry is getting destroyed in the news or by government regulators its generally not a good move to allow people to advertise it on your platform.

</comment><comment><USER23> They are about to launch their own coin[0]

"For example, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people's hands. (The first four words of Facebook's mission have always been "give people the power".) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force.

But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.

There are important counter-trends to this --like encryption and cryptocurrency -- that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services."

[0] [https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571)

<comment><USER24> > There are important counter-trends to this -- like encryption and > cryptocurrency ...

How does this translate to "they are about to launch their own coin"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> these news sent the bitcoin charts below the magical $10000, a second time after the "crash that wasn't", two weeks ago

will we finally see a real dramatic crash, or will it just fade away?

as much as I feel sorry for those that were duped, some part of me is urging for the drama.

<comment><USER26> > will we finally see a real dramatic crash, or will it just fade away?

Aside from global prohibition there's not much that would destroy the value that's created by this novel tool. Even then it would still have some residual value.

<comment><USER14> I think that a global carbon emissons tax would do the trick.

<comment><USER27> It would just make the giant mining farms in China powered by hydro-electric generators that much more profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Someone should make a cryptocurrency social platform that rewards it's users for sharing content and attention. Like the steemit of facebook. Anyone know of any projects like this?

<comment><USER29> > _rewards it 's users for sharing content and attention_

You mean spamming content?

<comment><USER30> It's possible to tell the difference between genuine, authentic sharing, and automation. Rewarding the right behavior will make spam go away.

<comment><USER31> You're right! It's absolutely possible to tell the difference. And when it's known, bad behavior can be punished and good behavior rewarded.

What do you think it takes to tell this difference with a high degree of reliability (>4 nines) at scale (>1000/s)? How about in an environment where people are strongly incentivized to find and exploit the weaknesses of your approach? Is it just maybe possible that this might not quite be handwave-it- away trivial? Facebook has had a shocking level of success in cutting down spam with their investments in punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behaviour.

Thank you for your thoughts. You're completely correct! It's possible to tell the difference, and rewarding good behavior will drive out bad actors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> ...but they're totally OK with political ads paid in rubles. Fuck Facebook.

<comment><USER33> Are those worse than political ads paid in dollars?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If only hacker news would follow suit

</comment><comment><USER35> Thank god. My neighborhood has a forum run by the HOA. It's flooded with posts about neighbors running their own "crypto-businesses" trying to get other people in on it. Based on a quick read, I'm pretty sure none of them are in tech (not that that's prerequisite to understanding the technology) and most seem to think BTC is magic internet money. If/when BTC tanks, the ensuing bloodbath is going to be nasty.

</comment><comment><USER36> Assuming rumours FB is developing their own cryptocurrency, along with Amazon and Google, as has been suggested on various forums, isn't there a risk here for them?

Banning potential competitors in what you could generously describe as the dawn of the next internet (in many ways the crypto wild west is v similar to early dot com days, complete with all the shysters and con artists) seems unethical and may bring up anti trust issues eventually?

<comment><USER30> You are correct, that would be a risk for them (especially for FB) because of how big they've become.

Anecdote: in 2014, I registered an account on Twitter called "tweetcoin". I felt social networks would start developing their own currencies. I posted one comment, "exciting things in the works". I was promptly locked out of the account, and a new tweet appeared there (dated 2012!), stating "this is not your account."

You can see it here:

[https://twitter.com/tweetcoin](https://twitter.com/tweetcoin)

<comment><USER37> Assuming you're being truthful, that is pretty weird actually. I'm going through explanations for this in my mind and none of them make much sense.

<comment><USER36> very interesting...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> When I clicked the link I was served an ad promoting cyptocurrencies haha

</comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't "misleading or deceptive promotional practices" generally apply to the entire business model of an advertisement platform disguised as a social network?

</comment><comment><USER40> Finally! The most annoying ones were James Altucher's... I found them particularly fishy. (don't know him so not sure what's behind them).

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm going to miss the "crypto genius" ads.

<comment><USER42> You'll like this [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-behind-bitcoin- geniu...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-behind-bitcoin-genius-ads- internet-134441715.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I am not a fan of 'the city' and I am not a Facebook user. However, today Facebook have earned a small bit of respect from me. As for 'the city', regulation now seems a very good idea, sure we have all been ripped off by the fat cats of 'the city', however, the toxicity of traditional investments is along the levels of 'sweets laced with sugar' instead of 'heroin laced with fentanyl' which seems to be what the ico-scam-coin-nonsense is peddling.

I would like to see a crypto-addict brain under a MRI scan to see if those graphs in tiddlywink prices light up the same bits of the brain that physical addiction to a chemical makes.

In some way this story reminds me of when Lance Armstrong was discovered to be cheating. Some people wouldn't believe it until he came on Oprah and spoke about a few things. The evidence was overwhelming and yet there were some devoted fans that held out. They didn't even have skin in the game (taking PED's) but still they wanted to believe the comeback from cancer fairytale. It did not matter to them that all of his team mates thought him to be toxic, dedicated fans held out.

I don't think it is time to tease crypto-obsessed-people but once they have lost all their monopoly money and tiddlywinks then I am sure they will start to get the story. Fear and greed gets the better of people, so I am looking forward to on-going 'so where is your lambo then, did you leave it on the moon'? comments. Shame I didn't quit my job and spend all day investing in tiddlywinks tethered to monopoly money. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is worrisome, mainly for one reason. Maybe one of the many ICOs might turn out to derail Facebook's centralised + ads approach. With this Facebook is basically attempting to prevent competition - or am I totally off?

<comment><USER45> IMO you're totally off. ICOs and the ad market are pretty tangential.

<comment><USER44> I'm more referring to Mark Zuckerberg's new year post about investing in decentatizlized tech and the power it provides. Will be interesting to see if FB will do an ICO themselves or at least built there own blockchain to address some of the data centralization concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> People are shilling ICOs like they're selling a discounted big mac. The SEC doesn't like it. Surely Facebook recognizes this and is protecting themselves.

</comment><comment><USER47> Thank god, this has been SO annoying to see all the time. I mark them as spam/report them for being a scam.

</comment><comment><USER48> When will they block all political ads?

</comment><comment><USER49> "Because they are mostly scam ads", haven't seen many non scam ads or highly incorrect/false usage of material on facebook for years. This is more of a thing for them to properly fix. They might as well ban most ads I was seeing at least.

</comment><comment><USER50> = Facebook cryptocurrency to be announced within a year?

</comment><comment><USER51> up next: Facebook is starting it's own currency...

</comment><comment><USER52> I for one say, hurrah.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sounds like fb is planning to dive into the blockchain world.

</comment><comment><USER54> Twitter, What about you?

</comment><comment><USER55> People should look at FB for what it is. A big shopping mall where everyone goes to walk around and hang out. Don't like what goes on in FB. Stop using it.

<comment><USER56> What a weirdly tangential thing to point out given the content of the article. Is it possible to write a post on HN that isn't pointlessly critical of Facebook, or have we dropped the facade of "intelligent discussion" when it comes to things that the hivemind doesn't like?

<comment><USER57> > Is it possible to write a post on HN that isn't pointlessly critical of > Facebook, or have we dropped the facade of "intelligent discussion" when it > comes to things that the hivemind doesn't like?

I don't represent or consult any hivemind when I look at corporations, especially the winky-smiley "let's connect the world!" with jaded cynicism – but my conscience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is good for Bitcoin because...

<comment><USER59> Realistically...because it will remain the biggest one to breach the general public consciousness and by getting rid of such ease of access to promoting scams and the like it will prevent (at least in the short term) the public perception of cryptocurrencies from being tainted by a sea of scams that are difficult for novices to navigate through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Ironic that such an influence on the price of BTC can be so centralized, between this and news of tether. I'm sure FB announcing this alone could have sparked a similar or smaller crash.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is weird to me. Does Facebook currently ban advertisements for commodities like gold? If no, then what's the difference between advertising for bitcoin and advertising for gold?

<comment><USER62> Well one difference is that bitcoin has no intrinsic value, ie, it's online gambling in disguise. I believe that Facebook currently bans ads for online gambling.

Don't agree? Ask yourself, why don't you see ads for other commodities, like rice or iron? Because there's no money in that. So how come there's money in ads for bitcoin? Could it be because bitcoin is not actually a commodity?

<comment><USER63> I hear what you're saying, but am compelled to ask: what intrinsic value does gold have?

<comment><USER64> I forget who said it, but I once heard something along the lines of, "if we get into a situation where the value of gold goes through the roof, it'll be because things have gotten really bad. And if they're that bad people are going to realize pretty quick that they don't want gold. They want water bottles and gasoline."

<comment><USER65> I don't get it. If people realize they don't want gold why would the price go up?

<comment><USER66> I think the implication is that the price will spike quickly, then collapse through the floor when people realise the true situation.

<comment><USER64> yeah sorry if that wasn't clear</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Crunchgate - <AUTHOR> http://www.1938media.com/crunchgate/

<comment><USER2> _Maybe Daniel's possibly paid-for-posts of meaningless companies like ipodrip and divvyshot aren't the issue here._

Has that been disclosed? divvyshot, at least, seems like it would merit coverage--after all, they've covered it before:

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site:techcrunch.com+divvyshot)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you read code? - <AUTHOR> Given a new project or an unfamiliar codebase, how do you go about reading and understanding the code? <comment><USER2> If you have access to a whiteboard...

List all of the directories (or classes, for a smaller project), and draw them as boxes on the board.

Draw arrows between the boxes based on dependencies in the codebase (helps if you have someone already familiar).

... Now start at the bottom of the dependency graph, and browse the code at a medium level.

If you are going to be working in this codebase, go back through and browse the code at deeper level, as if you were doing a code review. You can pretty much assume that, every couple lines, there is always something you would change about the code. Make a note of it.

At this point, you should have a fairly decent idea of how the code works, and how you would change it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer! It sounds like you're taking a bottom-up approach when reading code. Do you think we can use software to build this dependency graph and make it easier to read code?

<comment><USER2> Yes, technically it is possible. Some languages (and build tools) are a lot easier than others.

For purposes of learning the code, it may not be worth automating the dependency graph. You will probably learn more from tracking it down than you would if it was pre-generated for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well you should always ask someone who has worked with it but lately I had to come up quickly with a phone formatter class. I didn't have a clue how it worked, no comments. So I start to rewrite some of it, run it see what happens. Then when I learned what the stuff did I renamed it so it made sense to me. Used real long variable names which were meaningfull not just tmp and temp. Can really recommend it and it was very fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer! Your approach sounds like it works well if you have to write a new component from scratch. What if you had to jump into an existing codebase? How would you go about understanding the code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I look at what it does, do a quick architecture in my head, then compare it to what I see. This helps me because before I even look at it I have an understanding of how I think it should work rather than an absolutely clean slate.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean when you say compare it to what you see? How do you take the files and lines of code you read and model it into a working architecture? Where do you start? Do you think we could write a program that can make this process easier? (also, thanks for your answer!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> if you have a good debugger then start at the beginning and run it line by line. if a section looks understandable skip it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer sharemywin! What if you were looking at a large project that doesn't have a well-defined "beginning?" How would you pick what code to run through the debugger first?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From left-to-right</comment>


The Evolution of a Freelancer - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/the-evolution-of-a-freelancer-lessons-from-the-hallway-track-at-dyfconf/swizec/6734 <comment><USER2> Freelancing is great. Really. However, like a coin has two sides, freelancing benefits are a dilemma as well. To be a successful freelancer you've got be well-organized and motivated for such kind of work. You must know how to schedule your performance and always look for new orders so as to receive some stable income. Thus, such activity will not do for those who tend to be late everywhere and can hardly wake up in the morning.</comment>


Google Optimize: Google's New A/B Testing Product - <AUTHOR> http://blog.convert.com/google-optimize-googles-new-ab-testing-product.html <comment><USER2> Engineers I know who I've worked with on GTM implementations are not big fans. It offers the ability to execute arbitrary JS on your site, does not live in our main repo (unless we export a container and store its JSON there), and there doesn't seem to be any good way to run integration tests on code within GTM itself (obviously you can run tests that observe the output of GTM).

As a marketer, it has indeed enabled me to launch tags and such without an engineer, but in many cases I'd actually prefer to have this live in our code base so it isn't broken by accident by someone who had no idea that some of what they were working on touched a container they had no visibility into.

All of this to say that I get worried when looking at more involved A/B tests that touch pieces of ones product. Sure it might be fine for superficial front-end design tweaks, but testing anything deeper scares me.

Also, random aside, but the author might wish to get some proofing of their article. There's a ton of typos and indicators of a non-native English speaker writing this and made for a more difficult reading experience.

<comment><USER3> If you want to integrate GTM with your internal source control system, they have a programmatic API that you can tie into your build process:

[https://developers.google.com/tag- manager/api/v1/](https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/api/v1/)

And if you want to lock down what kinds tags can run on your site, they have a nice whitelisting/blacklisting system that lets you block capabilities (e.g. customScripts to block arbitrary JS):

[https://developers.google.com/tag- manager/devguide?hl=en#res...](https://developers.google.com/tag- manager/devguide?hl=en#restricting-tag-deployment)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for those links. Am I missing something in them or would using managing GTM programmatically via their API kind of defeat the entire purpose of giving business users like myself the ability to add/manage tags?

Seems like a case where there's no good way to have our cake and eat it too in terms of usability for business users and testing/security for our engineers.</comment></comment></comment>


Anyone using segment.io here for their analytics? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently using Mixpanel at Curofy.com but a lot of time I feel constrained. Is it a better idea to have all the data points in a single location with segment.io and use multiple 3rd party analytics? <comment><USER2> I like the idea of it - we looked at them, but ultimately used a system we had built out with BigQuery as a backend -- and Tableau for visualization on top of that...</comment>


Tumblr's First Year Without Porn - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/12/tumblr-year-review-2019-nsfw-ban-memes/602911 <comment><USER2> As a user of tumblr since something like 2008 (oh no has it been that long) it wasn't the removal of porn that ruined it for me, it was the collateral damage that came with it. For the month before it happened my feed was a list of all the interesting people announcing that they were leaving for alternative platforms. It was the impetus to just abandon the place, not helped by the fact it seemingly hadn't changed at all under yahoo's neglect and the spam was omnipresent.

I had used it as a scrap book, there was genuinely interesting art and design content on the site, from illustrators portfolios to photographers work to architecture blogs.

Maybe it's found it's place with hyper specific fandoms around tv shows as seems to be what's suggested logging in again but part of me is sad that something that was genuinely great was squandered.

</comment><comment><USER3> >While porn creators belonged to tightly connected subgroups, they were linked to the rest of Tumblr's network "with a very high number of ties," and their productions "spread widely across the whole social graph." In other words, they weren't quarantined off in some illicit corner of the site—they were woven into its basic fabric: The average Tumblr user in the sample followed 51 blogs, two or three of which tended to be specifically porn, and another two of which tended to be "bridge" blogs, run by users who were particularly likely to reblog porn.

Pron not seen as an "other" in a medium that didn't go out of it's way to make it othered?

This is exactly the kind of insight that only takes a study when a society is simultaneously marinated in censorship and unwilling to admit any instance of it deserves the label "censorship." It's not like censorship is anything new, or that the mechanisms and ramifications are poorly understood.

</comment><comment><USER4> Has Automattic made any changes to Tumblr since that acquisition? ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20679387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20679387))

<comment><USER5> There are mysterious Group Chats (only available on mobile apparently so I never used them) that is a play against Discord and its ilk.

</comment></comment><comment> _-_T_-_ Are we pretending there is no longer porn on Tumblr?

<comment><USER6> It is pretty funny because what Tumblr is now missing is high quality edgy stuff, including content curated by photographers while bot- generated/resposted porn shows up again as fast as Tumblr's systems kill it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, nice marketing spin and an attempt to downplay the wasteland nature of Tumblr as of today.

As others mentioned, it wasn't the ban of porn that made Tumblr lose a lot of users. It was the heavy-handed nature of the ban plus the fact that the flagging algorithm was -- and still is -- extremely buggy and unreliable. The amount of injustice that many honest content creators suffered there lost Tumblr a user goodwill that spanned back a decade. Tumblr will _never_ regain that.

And I seriously doubt the "20% lost users" number is realistic. I enjoyed the erotic and pornographic content of Tumblr but didn't leave after the hammer hit; however, my engagement with it heavily dropped.

I doubt they included that in their imaginary 20% lost users. Sure, _technically_ maybe only 20% left but I am pretty sure that many like myself just didn't bother uninstalling the app or deleting their account. How convenient that user activity wasn't mentioned in detail in this post.

They can say whatever they like. Of course they will downplay any negatives, it's their job. But Tumblr is pretty much dead in the water (read: irrelevant).

Which is a shame because Twitter and Reddit definitely don't deserve the extra active users they gained from the exodus.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's sad when social networks and messaging platforms die. Every major one I've gotten invested in has gone belly up: AIM, Xanga, Yahoo Messanger, MSN, Myspace, and now Facebook is hemmoraging users. And Whatsapp isn't too far behind with a lot of its functionality duplicated by RCS or iMessage. The point is, don't get too invested in a messaging platform or social network because they don't last forever.

<comment><USER9> > Facebook is hemmoraging users.

Source?

Last I checked, they were serving 2.37 BILLION M.A.U.s.

...That's literally like 30% of the world population. If you exclude babies and under 5, the number is probably more like 40 to 45% of world population.

> Facebook now serves 2.37 billion monthly active users, an increase of 55 > million on the previous quarter.

Source: Q1 2019 Earnings Report [https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/Q1...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/Q1/Q1-2019-Earnings- Presentation.pdf)

<comment><USER10> From the "Limitations of Key Metrics and Other Data" page of the linked PDF:

"Duplicate and false accounts are very difficult to measure at our scale, and it is possible that the actual number of duplicate and false accounts may vary significantly from our estimates."</comment></comment></comment>


If you overlay all atomic spectra, you get a Planck distribution - <AUTHOR> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/andp.202000033 <comment><USER2> I've seen this blow up in several places now, but there seriously is nothing to this paper.

Essentially all they're pointing out is that the set of atomic transition energies (1) is positive, (2) has a smooth distribution, (3) goes to zero at zero and infinity, (4) has a maximum somewhere in between, (5) is skewed right. All of these things are completely mundane and well-understood, and not at all unique to the "Planck distribution". Statisticians probably know of tens of other distributions with these properties, which would fit their curve about as well.

Their claim is like saying that _any_ function that goes from -1 to 1 smoothly must be a logistic function, or _any_ function that goes to 0 at infinity but slowly must be a power law. That's not a paper, that's a hunch. If the researchers wanted to be serious, they could have run a statistical test to quantify how well the data fit the Planck distribution (just like tests of normality are routinely done in statistics). But they didn't, and the reason probably is because the test would fail.

<comment><USER3> Posting this verbatim from my reddit comment, but I ran a few quick fits and the (arbitrarily scaled) Planck distribution looks better than standard fits of some other distributions. Of course I ran absolutely no statistics on these or tried any sort of real analysis that should have been included in the paper in the first place, so take it with multiple grains of salt:

I fit a few distributions to the data and actually the Planck distribution at 9000K seems to be noticeably better. I did no further statistics and haven't even looked at the fitted parameters for this. Note: I am an earth scientist, not a physicist. [https://imgur.com/Qg4ixF2](https://imgur.com/Qg4ixF2)

Edit: More distributions: [https://imgur.com/IrF6lsV](https://imgur.com/IrF6lsV)

Edit: Filtering out sodium and potassium to try to account for some of the low-wavelength counts doesn't seem to help fitting the distributions either: [https://imgur.com/dHDUS9Z](https://imgur.com/dHDUS9Z)

You can get the data here: [https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/ASD/lines_form.html](https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/ASD/lines_form.html)

And here's the (garbage) code to reproduce my plots:

        %pylab inline
        import pandas as pd
        import scipy
        import scipy.stats

        mpl.style.use('seaborn-muted')
        mpl.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (18, 12)
        mpl.rcParams['font.size'] = 16
        df = pd.read_csv('nist.csv')

        def filter_string(x):
            x = str(x).replace('=', '').replace('"', '').replace('*', '').replace('+', '').replace('(', '').replace(')', '')
            if len(x) == 0:
                x = 'NaN'
            return x

        asl_comp = df['ritz_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
        asl_ver  = df['obs_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
        sp_num = df['sp_num'].astype(float)

        df_neutral = df[sp_num == 1]
        asl_comp = df_neutral['ritz_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
        asl_ver  = df_neutral['obs_wl_vac(nm)'].apply(filter_string).astype(float)
        sp_num = df_neutral['sp_num'].astype(float)

        asl_ver = asl_ver[~asl_ver.isna()]

        def planck(wav, T=9000.0):
            h = 6.626e-34
            c = 3.0e+8
            k = 1.38e-23
            a = 2.0*h*c**2
            b = h*c/(wav*k*T)
            intensity = (a / ( (wav**5)) * (1 / (np.exp(b) - 1.0) ))
            return intensity

        dist_names = ['beta', 'lognorm', 'pearson3', 'gumbel_r']
        x = np.arange(0, 1500, 5)
        intensity = planck(x / 1e9)
        size = len(asl_ver)

        yvals, xvals = np.histogram(asl_ver, bins=300, normed=True)

        for dist_name in dist_names:
            dist = getattr(scipy.stats, dist_name)
            param = dist.fit(asl_ver)
            pdf_fitted = dist.pdf(x, *param[:-2], loc=param[-2], scale=param[-1])
            plt.plot(x, pdf_fitted, label=dist_name, linewidth=4,)

        plt.hist(asl_ver, bins=300, density=True, color='grey');
        plt.plot(x, intensity / 1.1e17, linewidth=4, color='red', linestyle='--', label='scaled planck (9000k)')
        plt.legend()
        plt.xlabel(r'$\lambda (nm)$')
        plt.ylabel('Density')

<comment><USER4> Can you link the discussion on Reddit?

<comment><USER5> [https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/gf1kbd/if_you_over...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/gf1kbd/if_you_overlay_all_atomic_spectra_you_get_a/)

<comment><USER4> Seemingly multiple people downvoted this. Why??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The correlation between global distribution of all experimentally known atomic spectral lines to the Planckian spectral distribution associated with black body radiation at a temperature of 𝑇≈9000K is indeed "funny". The match seems close enough to be worth investigation.

On the other hand the observation that "This value coincides with the critical temperature of equilibrium between the respective densities of radiation and matter in the early universe" seems spurious and is unsupported by anything in the paper.

I would expect rather there is some quirky statistics that happen with the quantum mechanics of orbitals that gives a similar shaped distribution of frequency of occurrence of spectral lines to the Boltzman distribution.

There is probably an interesting statistical story to tell, but I don't see the connection to the early universe as a supported thing here.

<comment><USER7> Part of explaining this "funny" coincidence is going to be how one motivates their selection cuts, like the choice to use only one database instead of crossmatching several for better robustness [1]. The choice to ignore higher ionisations, the choice to ignore any systematic effects from the fact that the heavier elements, with their shorter wavelengths, are just downright harder to work with experimentally.

Finally, what do our current best atomic models _predict_ that this distribution should be? These authors seem to think nobody models atomic spectra...

[1] See here for one such effort of comparing various databases: [https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2018/04/aa31933-...](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2018/04/aa31933-17/aa31933-17.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thinking out loud:

When the universe was at 9000K, the vast majority of these elements did not exist or only existed at negligible concentration. Look up "Big Bang nucleosynthesis". It would be interesting to see if the result is reproduced at all when looking at only light elements.

Of course the bin width makes little difference. Bigger bins would just smooth the curve.

There is probably a huge bias in that this looks at transitions that are interesting to the NIST database. As the authors allude, there are huge numbers of transitions that almost, but don't quite, ionize at atom. Similarly, there are huge numbers of X-ray transitions in which inner electrons are kicked to very high levels or removed entirely. I don't know to what extent the latter is well represented in the database.

For that matter, there are transitions between bound states and unbound states. Imagine that you light up Hydrogen at 13.6 eV plus a little bit. I think you can still eject elections — the excess energy can be carried away as kinetic energy. (There can be issues with simultaneously conserving energy and momentum.). The unbound states are genuinely continuous.

I didn't look for real, but the NIST data has too many entries to represent just the spectra of cold atoms. I have a sneaking suspicion that researchers are measuring emissions from hot gasses or plasmas, perhaps heated near 9000K.

<comment><USER7> Certainly for the ions lines (hugely important modelling stars for instance) you are talking about trying to measure on very hot gasses, and I've been told the problem is that it's hard to make a gas very hot while also dense enough you get detectable radiation out of it.

<comment><USER8> That makes sense.

Part of my point is that the authors found a temperature scale in the NIST data. One plausible source is experimental considerations: if enough of the experiments are conducted at similar temperatures, you might expect to see something related to those temperatures in the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The authors have a look at the spectral line database of the NIST and make the surprising finding, that all atomic spectral lines together approximate very well a black body spectrum at a temperature of 9000K.

The authors not yet have an explanation for this conundrum, but also note, that this temperature plays a role in the formation theory of the universe.

<comment><USER9> Don't know why you have been down-voted - thanks for the TL;DR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the same paper, I'm not sure this passage helps its case. It seems off- topic, and rather breathless in it's speculation, although I respect their positive imagination:

 _An entirely different yet equally fascinating possibility would be that, in an abstract sense, the scientific community itself can be interpreted as a thermodynamic ensemble. In this line of thinking, the individual members would be subject to a Boltzmann distribution in "curiosity" associated with a "temperature" determining how likely each researcher is to carry out research more or less closely tethered to a specific area of interest. In turn, a type of entropy could be associated with the amount of information contained in this ensemble, or exchanged between sufficiently large subsets of it. If correct, the implications would be truly profound, and could reshape the future direction of science in ways never before imagined. Understanding the mechanisms with which to influence the "curiosity temperature" would allow wise policy makers to implement suitable conditions that foster scientific progress, and usher in a new era of discovery...[goes on at length]_

</comment><comment><USER4> +1 Full text of the article is available for free.

Challenge to HN community: Let's make a serious effort to understand exactly what the paper says before either throwing rocks or talking about how awesome it is.

<comment><USER10> Further challenge - if someone does understand exactly what the paper says, would you mind adding an ELI5 for those of us who don't?

<comment><USER11> A spectral line is a special key frequency that can unlock and electron in an atom and cause it to move to a higher energy level. Several thousands of these lines are known. The authors made a bar chart that showed how many spectral lines were known for each frequency. They found that the shape of the bar chart looked like the shape of the spectrum of the light that would be emitted by a glowing stove element at 9000K (admittedly this would vaporize the stove element but just imagine the red-orange-yellow-white thing extended a bit further). The "spectrum" of the light means a chart of how bright each color of the rainbow would be if you made a rainbow out of the light by diffracting it through a prism. (For example, if I made a rainbow out of an Edison lightbulb's light, the blue and purple part of that rainbow would be much dimmer than if I made a rainbow out of sunlight.)

There is no particular relationship known between these two things. The authors are curious about why the charts look the same. The authors forgot to pull the old trick where you publish your speculation separately from your experimental results[0], so HN is complaining about their speculation.

[0] The trick works because physicists are mainly interested in remembering right answers, so if your speculations are wrong they will remember only the experiment, and if your speculations are right they will remember both.

<comment><USER12> Could this be used to hypothesize about the existence or characteristics of new elements?

<comment><USER11> Whether or not an element is stable is determined by what goes on in the nucleus - the electrons are like little flies that show up and hang around something thousands of times heavier. Now, there are such things as nuclear spectral lines, which tell us important things about what goes on in the nucleus. One idea the authors might want to pursue would be checking whether or not their chart similarity also happened for nuclear lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Years ago, i read a paper that looked at a database of all known organic molecules, and found that a disproportionate number of them had an even number of carbon atoms. I can't find it now, of course.

The paper was a similar "that's funny, i wonder why" sort of piece. The tentative explanation i remember is that a lot of those organic molecules are natural products, and the nature of biosynthetic pathways is that they tend to add carbons two by two. Which i don't think is even true - terpenoids are built five carbons at a time.

</comment><comment><USER14> The authors describe an observation of similarity between two plots of completely different things. That could be an interesting paper, if they investigated this similarity with some skepticism and the similarity was shown to be robust, independent of the particular choices they made (bin width, choice of the subset of all spectral lines).

But they apparently did not do their job. Instead, they indulge in speculations about even crazier connections with a past state of the universe or with behaviour and biases of scientific community.

This kind of half-baked observation and speculation is an interesting discussion topic for a lunchtime that can potentially lead to something substantial, but really should not be published as scientific paper.

Also this paper is a good example of what is wrong with physics academia (and perhaps other academic workers as well). 4 authors, 18 references to other people work, and a statement of conflict of interest.

Sad state of physics, year 2020.

<comment><USER15> Do you think there should be more, or less authors? And more, or less references? I don't get your objection.

<comment><USER16> Also, is it bad that the conflict of interest was disclosed?

<comment><USER14> It's a meaningless section.

<comment><USER16> Are you saying that conflict of interest disclosures in general are meaningless? Or this one is just poorly implemented? I'm having a hard time interpreting your meaning here.

<comment><USER14> I do not know in general, but in case of paper on theoretical physics, I have trouble seeing how such a statement provides anything to the reader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Worth keeping in mind that the blackbody emission curve is generated by some pretty simple equations, multiplying the higher density of states at higher energies with the lower probability of states being occupied at higher energies. Not surprising that something similar (exponential suppression of X via the pontryagin dual of X) would show up in other contexts, so I think "coincidence" is actually pretty likely.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A couple of days ago, there also has been a disussion on reddit on this topic.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/gf1kbd/if_you_over...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/gf1kbd/if_you_overlay_all_atomic_spectra_you_get_a/?sort=new)

</comment><comment><USER18> Very cool finding that IMHO goes beyond coincidence. Some are saying the authors compared "two completely different plots" \- this is a strange thing to say. Both plots have an X axis of wavelength, that's obviously the same. There's some ambiguity of the units on the Y axis, since the BB is in W/m^3 while histogram is unitless.

However it's really not a stretch to consider the BB as some relative intensity. So it's totally reasonable to overlay these plots.

A possible way to reconcile this would be to model some gas mixture composition and determine the aggregate spectra of that, and that would be in W/m^3.

E: downvote(s), do you have a rebuttal, or just think I'm wrong?

</comment><comment><USER19> Jesus, physics has gotten REALLY BAD indeed. This is clown car tier.

If you overlay all atomic spectra, you expect the result to be something like Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (aka eigenvalues of a random matrix), which looks much like the Planck distribution. Nothing to do with matter in the early universe; most atoms didn't exist in the early universe. TLDR; contemporary physicists fail at elementary statistical distributions, and, like, common sense.

<comment><USER20> Thanks, I remembered GUE and was wondering if it is related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's hard to come up with a thought-experiment where this radiation would manifest.</comment>