Regulatory Hacks - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/10/10/regulatory-hacks/ <comment><USER3> The usual term for this is "regulatory arbitrage."

I do want to take exception to one point though:

> Of course regulations that truly protect the public interest are necessary. > But many regulations are created by incumbents to protect their market > position. To try new things, entrepreneurs need to find a back door. And > when they succeed, it will all look obvious in retrospect. Today's > regulatory hack is tomorrow's mainstream industry.

It's really a lot more complex than this. A lot of the regulations that seem obviously protectionist now really weren't at the time they were implemented.

The FCC is rife with examples of seemingly protectionist regulations because one of the core parts of its mission is to ensure universal coverage. It exists to ensure that every little town in the US gets access to the new communications technologies within a reasonable time.

Things like local monopolies/duopolies are the tool that the FCC uses to get companies to serve areas that the free market would leave unserved. The FCC says: "okay, you get a duopoly in Chicago, but you have to build out service to Belleville, IL."

The taxi regulations operate much in the same way. If taxi companies were left to their own devices, they just wouldn't operate in the sketchier parts of town. They'd refuse to drive you to the Bronx. Protectionist regulations are the concession that municipalities give to taxi companies in return for forcing them to provide certain services and maintain certain rates.

You'll also see a lot of this in the utility industry. Local monopolies with guaranteed rates of return are an incentive municipalities use to get companies to provide power/water/gas to everyone, instead of just the places where it's profitable.

Municipal regulation is a very complex topic, both legally and in terms of economic theory. You can't consider the regulations standing alone, when you're talking about industries that in some way form the infrastructure of the city or relate to urban planning. You have to consider them in the context of being alternatives to the cities building out certain infrastructure themselves as part of their mandate to provide service to each one of their citizens.

<comment><USER4> Taxi regulation also serves the purpose of creating consequences for harming the community. A taxi medallion is valuable. A profile on a dating site isn't. There is no cost-effective way for us to police every vehicle on the street; you'll learn this quickly if you get your license suspended when you realize that basically nothing happens as a result as long as you're a reasonable driver).

So instead, we create a different class of vehicles, require that only vehicles from that class can carry passengers for hire, and when those vehicles are driven unsafely we can revoke their licenses. It's hard to see how you can reliably revoke someone's online car dating license.

<comment><USER5> These modern rideservices can expel drivers (from the dispatch-and-payment system) far more effectively than traditional regulations could suppress gypsy cabs.

Policies should be driven by real results and demonstrated harm... not by assuming that the risks/regulatory-tools of decades ago still apply.

<comment><USER4> Exactly how does Uber reliably "expel" a driver?

<comment><USER5> Ban their DL. Ban their device. Ban their car tags. Include a photo of their approved drivers.

It's then at least as hard and probably harder to masquerade to Uber as someone completely different than it is to masquerade to traditional regulatory authorities.

Entering an Uber car, my own trusted device can supply me with car and driver info, including photograph. In traditional systems, I'd have to trust unauthenticated documents (including car markings) provided by the car/driver. Such forged traditional documentation can even fool local law enforcement, in some gypsy cab situations.

And even if someone can occasionally slip into the role/reputation of another driver in good standing, with that other driver's cooperation, there is still a chain-of-control/motivation incenting good behavior and allowing punishment of transgressions (through the accomplice who loans out their valuable identity).

We would need to empirically study whether this system offers better results, overall, than the traditional system. I suspect it does: even if you can contrive a few exploits, they could still be less prevalent/practical than the weaknesses of the traditional system.

<comment><USER4> Ok, now imagine there are 10 competing Ubers.

<comment><USER5> Straining one's imagination is a bad way to inform policy. Observe, don't imagine.

There won't be 10 Ubers: the reputation angle and network effects strongly favor a few large recognizable operators. And maybe just one!

But even if there were 10: accident, citation, and criminal records are easy to check. Consumers will prefer the branded/authenticated services which self- police most effectively.

Traditionally, this may have been a problem needing regulation: at the moment of flagging a streetcab, the fare was at the mercy of the provider, with minimal authentication/reputation information available.

Now with the modern mobile-dispatched services, this problem is obsolete... like the problem of needing to buy a paper street map when arriving in a new city.

<comment><USER4> You have to strain your imagination to see 10 competing companies? This is another bias routinely evident on HN: we think of public policy for new business models solely in terms of the best-known operator of that model; it's not about regulating livery, it's about regulating _Uber_. No.

<comment><USER5> You don't have to change the subject to be about _my_ capacity for imagination, or some bias you perceive in _other_ HN conversations.

There aren't 10 such companies now. There might never be. Nor is there yet any evidence of consumer harm.

Imagining the worst when it might never materialize is a bad basis for policy. Especially with all the new factors which provide stronger, more-immediate checks on bad-actors: many of which apply to one operator or 100 equally well.

Why not give them a chance to work before constraining new operators to an ancient system which (a) disappointed customers with scarcity; and (b) got captured by incumbents?

<comment><USER4> You don't design public policy based on the interests and controls of one single private company.

<comment><USER5> This thread began with me describing the general case, "these modern rideservices".

I happen to think there will be few of these modern rideservices, rather than many, because the matching/reputation market has natural monopoly characteristics. But that's just an aside.

The tech/market/reputation checks I've been describing don't depend on Uber or any particular company. They are inherent to the category. I am making a case for the modern mobile-dispatched-and-billed rideservices category, not Uber specifically.

(My guess would also be that the average customer is more likely to someday face economic 'harm' from an eventual dispatcher monopoly, than from the sort of dangerous/abusive/unaccountable car/driver issues that you've been mentioning. But those sorts of antitrust concerns also need to be handled in retrospect, after observing how they develop, and not based on anticipatory paranoia about what might someday happen.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Airbnb and Uber are running up against regs problems. Is Aereo? Aereo is being sued by rightsholders, who argue that as the parties that fund the creation of content, it should be up to them how to commercialize it. Copyright isn't regulation. Copyright infringement is a tort.

The regulatory hurdle Nextel faced is also different from the ones Airbnb and Uber face. If you took Airbnb out of the picture, it's unlikely that HN would be so friendly towards the idea that giant hotel corporations should be able to operate with zero regulations.

But if Marriott must be regulated, it's reasonable (though not dispositive) for them to note that it's unfair for them to be structurally disadvantaged by competing with businesses that effectively arbitrage regulations (and, more importantly, regulatory enforcement).

<comment><USER3> AirBnB is classic regulatory arbitrage.

Basically you have a type of business, a hotel, that creates a negative externality in an area. You have regulations and zoning that attempt to minimize that negative externality, or at least isolate it to commercial areas. Then you have AirBnB arbitraging those regulations to profit.

<comment><USER4> There is a fraction of Airbnb's client base that is purely regulatory arbitrage --- the people who buy buildings and rent out all the rooms on Airbnb.

But there's also a large fraction of Airbnb's business that is generating value. The 4-bedroom 2-storey townhouse in W'burg that Airbnb has isn't available on the hotel market at any price, and the owner of that very valuable property has lots of incentive to keep it up, but because he's at Cornell for the next several years, the house is a cash-flow drag to him. Everybody wins when he carefully rents it out on Airbnb.

The challenge is to come up with a system of regulations that works for both circumstances.

<comment><USER6> I'd say that both are generating value.

The people who buy building and rent out all the rooms or Airbnb provide a liquidity the market needs - they are doing something "of value"

If they do that for profit, odds are they are making money and the next best use of these buildings would bring less money.

<comment><USER4> Mob hotels generate value in the hotel market the way an illegal tire fire generates value in the waste management market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of the companies mentioned Aereo is clearly the biggest hack.

The regulation that having a single antenna for multiple subscribers is not ok seems to inevitably lead to Aereo's one antenna for each subscriber - <USER2> ultimately antenna farms.

Having (someday) millions of redundant antennas in rows to avoid copying signals to meet an outdated regulatory requirement is so hilarious, I'm tempted to call it entrepreneurship as social commentary.

<comment><USER8> Aereo is not a regulatory hack, at least not in the context that the other companies are regulatory hacks. It is a business model designed according to what courts have said is legitimate commercial activity involving visual media. It's not trying to bypass existing rules or regulations; rather, it is very carefully modeled to work within what the courts have stated is appropriate. (It is an open question as to whether courts will deem its business model to run afoul of IP laws.)

AirBNB, Uber, etc., are/were regulatory hacks because they are/were attempting to flout or "bypass" existing rules and regulations in their various markets. In AirBNB's case, rules against hoteling; in Uber's case, rules against unlicensed cab and livery services. The difference from Aero: there are no enabling laws or interpretations of existing laws that actually state that what AirBnB or Uber does is (legally) acceptable, but there are plenty of existing laws and regulations that state what they are doing is not acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It always struck me that a legal hack was Microsoft's real, core innovation -- the whole OEM installation agreement, more than anything to do with the superior quality of its operating system. It took decades for the regulators to catch on.</comment>


Be Suspicious of Online Movie Ratings, Especially Fandango's - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fandango-movies-ratings/?ex_cid=538twitter <comment><USER2> I miss the days of shows like Siskel & Ebert. I don't want a simplistic star rating, I want to see excerpts, accompanied by a spirited discussion.</comment>


How I fell in love with–and invested $250k in–the BETTER App - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jason/how-i-fell-in-love-with-and-invested-250k-in-the-better-app-bc22b2ba818d

<comment><USER2> I think the app is a great idea, but why limit to just this? Deeper integration of intelligent personal assistant features would be useful.</comment>


HSBC IT staff at risk as bank announces 30,000 job cuts - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/careers/3294543/hsbc-it-staff-at-risk-as-bank-announces-30000-job-cuts/

<comment><USER2> Noting that the IT staff might get cut seems like a desperate attempt to make the news relevant to tech sites.</comment>


Global pollution kills 9M a year, according to new study - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/19/global-pollution-kills-millions-threatens-survival-human-societies?CMP=share_btn_tw <comment><USER2> STOP trying to ascribe an arbitrary death toll!!!

Pollution kills everyone by shortening or reducing quality of life, it's near impossible to quantify, but what makes no sense at all is picking some arbitrary threshold, everyone is affected not 9M not 1B, but 7B.

<comment><USER3> It says premature deaths. I'm not sure it makes no sense at all, but it is an unfortunate thing to focus on. DALYs seem better, and are discussed throughout the article (which I've only skimmed so far), eg:

> The GBD study also estimates that disease caused by all forms of pollution > was responsible for 268 million DALYs—254 million years of life lost and 14 > million years lived with disability. This information is available by > country and region and is presented in the appendix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For comparison ~55.3 million people die each year so ~16% of deaths are linked to pollution.

<comment><USER5> I didn't know this, guess I'd never thought to look it up.

If 16% of deaths can be attributed to pollution, and some percentage are vehicle related, accidents in general, preventable disease / infections, etc etc...

How many deaths per year should we expect if all of those things could be reduced / minimised / eliminated?

<comment><USER6> We might find other causes increase. For example, decreasing violent deaths increases mortality from heart disease. After some lag time, of course.

<comment><USER7> We surely would. But the gains may be more (or less) than you think.

I remember a gerontologist showing some math where if you prevented all heart disease you'd only gain about 4 years of human lifespan (since most of those people would soon get cancer); similarly if you prevented all cancer you'd only get about 4 years as well (since most of those people would get heart disease).

But if you prevented both, you'd get something north of 10 years of average lifespan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This would be far more useful if it's measured in life years, than lives. There is big difference between pollution killing an healthy infant then killing a 86 year old suffering from a terminal illness.

</comment><comment><USER9> No, sorry - this isn't science.

> air pollution was the biggest killer, leading to heart disease, stroke, lung > cancer and other illnesses

There's absolutely no way you can definitively link deaths from heart disease to air pollution with any substantial degree of confidence, at least not in 99.99% of the cases.

I guarantee that within a short amount of time, this whole "study" will be invalidated as baseless political-motivated pseudoscience.

<comment><USER10> There's a full text available here:

[http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and- health](http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and-health)

Is the lancet politically motivated? I haven't heard about it before, but I am not yet really well versed in the climate science field.

It says in the abstract: Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence.

That's a pretty heavy claim to make, and it says it without any doubt. Perhaps they can rule out all other causes of heart disease statistically? I don't know what sort of things cause heart disease that they might not know about in a population.

<comment><USER11> It's a leading medical journal that has been publishing since the 1800s.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet)</comment></comment></comment>


Is it time we put more effort into Linux / OSS? - <AUTHOR>

Microsoft has had some image problem. I thought with the new move they're making towards OSS, they are changing for good. However, reading
	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978039 and
	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 It makes me feel sick. Is it time that we put more effort into Linux to target general users ? It seems like Microsoft and Co. are on the way to be the dictators of the internet. <comment><USER2> I just tried installing openbsd for the first time. Was pleasantly surprised to get xfce working with no issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe put some effort in cross-platform software.</comment>


Azolla Event - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event <comment><USER3> And it was estimated to last 800,000 years. Drawing down CO2, reducing it to other forms and burying it, with solar power is bound to take some time.

Going in the other, exothermic direction is going naturally much faster.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could we grow this thing artificially in a suitably stratified sea or lake to cause a meaningful drop in the atmospheric CO2 level?

If growth is only limited by the availability of phosphorus, well, we already know how to supply phosphorus on an industrial scale.

<comment><USER5> I would caution a easy solution as frankly we are but cavemen in the understanding of a complex ecosystem like earths. Attempting what amounts to a terraforming experiment would be a extremely high risk endevour with possibly catastrophic ends.

<comment><USER6> What's the alternative to deliberately trying to change the environment in order to combat the effects of global warming or even reversing that process entirely?

We've effectively, though inadvertently and not to our benefit, already been modifying our environment for quite some time now. Simply limiting CO2 output might just not be enough to avoid a catastrophic outcome in the future. Even if it were, that 'simply' in 'simply limiting' might not be so simple after all. Even if all relevant political bodies in the world agreed on this - <USER2> they currently and unfortunately sometimes emphatically don't - the exact means of how do so in any meaningful way isn't entirely clear. You can't just order industry and traffic to produce less CO2 overnight.

It certainly won't be an easy solution but such approaches need to be discussed and not ruled out entirely beforehand.

<comment><USER7> > not to our benefit

That remains to be seen, IMHO because it would be very lucky that the current global climate is the optimum for human activities.

For example, with a bit more CO2 in the atmosphere plants grow bigger. Warming might also open more land to agriculture than is lost. Etc.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, possibly, or more likely it's incredibly dangerous making rapid changes to the chaotic but balanced system that we live within.

The plants might grow bigger - until a voracious pest migrates into the newly available area and destroys them, or wildfires raging in the newly warmed area burn them to the ground.

The current global climate is probably _not_ the optimum for human activities - perhaps that was some time ago, before the extreme weather events that we are ushering in started wreaking havoc. There's no reason to believe that fucking up the planet is somehow leading us towards a better, more optimum situation.

<comment><USER7> My point is that a warmer climate does not imply a worse climate for human activities overall.

Currently the narrative is change = bad.

<comment><USER9> What narrative? There are extensive models! More climate chaos = bad!

<comment><USER7> Using the term "climate chaos" in a discussion about changing climate is indeed pushing a narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A certain amount of irony in that the Azolla blooms were deposited on the sea floor, and people are now looking to see if they've become large deposits of oil and gas.

How long do we have to wait before people give up on fossil fuels?

<comment><USER11> Somehow I thought that a significant proportion of oil ended up in non-fuel products (plastics, lubricants etc). So I was going to comment on how difficult it would be to give it up. But after a bit of digging I found this[0] and it seems the vast majority of it is used for fuel.

Question from someone who knows nothing about refining, if we did move away from oil/gas as fuel, would we still have to extract as much to gain the same amount of non-feul petroleum products?

[0] [https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/In_a_barrel_of_oil](https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/In_a_barrel_of_oil)

<comment><USER12> If we keep the current levels of consumption, then yes, we won't need that much oil. However, if oil will stop being used as fuel, petroleum products are expected to become much cheaper, which could raise the demand.

<comment><USER13> But first demand would drop, making a lot of extraction less profitable than it is now. Wouldn't a lot of the oil suppliers go out of business (forever) before we could "rescue" them by buying even more plastic crap we don't need? Also, even if we started building our houses out of plastic or something, I can't imagine that covering as much use of oil as we are currently burning.

<comment><USER14> Saudi oil is still quite cheap to extract, so Canadian oil sands producers going bankrupt wouldn't stop all production.

Also, a producer going bankrupt means their assets are sold for pennies on the dollar which would enable a low cost producer to take over without the huge sunk costs of the original producer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yes, so over {checks notes} 800,000 years, the growth of plant life may sequester enough CO2 to bring Earth's climate back into what we call reasonable.

{sets Android timer}

Shouldn't be long now!

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a risk that with the present Artic heathing a significant percent of that carbon gets released?

</comment><comment><USER17> I have found that exactly this story is the strongest argument against the AGW narrative: Humanity is merely returning the state of the atmosphere back to a earlier state.

<comment><USER18> To a time when there was no humans and no animals and plants we depend on. Sure.

Planet will be fine, we won't.

<comment><USER19> We'll be fine as a species. There will be a lot more sob stories about this or that village in some less developed nation starving because they can no longer farm their land, there will be wars over resources, etc. Humanity will be just fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> a million villages will try to move away from the equatorial zone and the tropics at the same time. this ends in war, famine and every other humanitarian crisis you can think of.

<comment><USER19> I didn't say it was going to be fun. Humanity will be fine though.

<comment><USER18> For vast majority of people climate change as currently predicted (not even the pessimistic scenario) will mean suffering, lowering of living standards and risk of premature death jumping a few orders of magnitude.

And no - it won't just be people in 3rd world countries. If that's fine for you then sure. We will be fine.

EU just had a so called "immigration crisis" because a few million refuges came and people disagreed how to deal with them, to the point of populist governments being elected and some countries considering leaving the EU.

Now imagine not 3 millions but 500 millions of refuges. How will the world deal with that? All of this while food is becoming much more expansive, and there is a need for many infrastructural projects to save coastal cities. The likely answer is - political turmoil, mass crimes against humanity, wars, failing states.

The biggest problem with global warming is that people reject solutions because of well-estimated costs, but they don't even try to estimate the cost of not doing anything, and when it's estimated for them they just ignore it like it's not there.

<comment><USER19> JFC. I'm not endorsing it or saying we should do nothing and the tone and content of your comments seems to imply you think I am. Yes it will suck but humans will keep on existing, just probably not 7.5 billion of them. Furthermore, it will happen over generations so from the perspective of the people who have to live it it will be a steep decline where things get worse and worse, it won't be a cataclysmic event like a war (expect for those unlucky enough to live in times and places that will see war as a result of this).

Yes we should do things to make it suck less but to imply that the end result will be a planet with no humans on it is hyperbolic and farcical.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Designing Moments - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/facebook-design/designing-moments-2b5362430125 <comment><USER2> 1/3 the lines of code that go into fb's ios & android apps is shared C++.</comment>


Is Docker Ready for Production? Feedbacks of a 2 Weeks Hands On - <AUTHOR> http://t37.net/is-docker-ready-for-production-feedbacks-of-a-2-weeks-hands-on.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for comments on this from someone with enough experience. I can't believe there aren't simple solutions to most of his problems?

<comment><USER2> Application virtualization is not easy. Docker has done an amazing job of marketing the benefits, but the long-term solution is that OS and application developers (not sysadmins) will design minimal OS+app bundles. See recent discussion on Microsoft research, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8257250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8257250)

Docker+CoreOS mimics Google infrastructure - CoreOS is probably a better "minimal server OS" choice for Docker than Ubuntu.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree about both statements. My next hands on and post on that topic will be about moving from Ubuntu to CoreOS and what it implies for our existing infrastructure (I'm the article author)

<comment><USER2> Unikernels ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7053638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7053638), [https://galois.com/project/halvm/](https://galois.com/project/halvm/)) are working on related research issues, from the bottom up.

We need a cross-distro dependency manager that can generate app-liance images for baremetal, lxc, kvm, aws/xen, vmware, azure/hyperv, illumos/bsd/zones, etc. Such a dependency manager could encode management-related policy (e.g. networking) into an image manifest that could be parsed by deployment tools. As an image format, OVF was ratified by DMTF and may have useful concepts, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Leaked audio: Uber board member makes sexist joke as female member is announced - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inside-ubers-hands-meeting-travis-194232221.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw <comment><USER2> David Bonderman interrupted Ariana Huffington early in the meeting to make a wise crack about women talking to much based on a leaked recording of the meeting.

Exchange

Huffington: "There's a lot of data that shows when there's one woman on the board, it's much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board,"

Bonderman: "Actually what it shows is it's much likely to be more talking,"

Huffington: "Oh. Come on, David,"

</comment><comment><USER3> These guys just don't get it. It's pretty astonishing.</comment>


Rent-to-Own Laptops Secretly Photographed Users Having Sex, FTC Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/laptop-rental-spyware-scandal/ <comment><USER2> Society really need to stop treating illegal activities different just because it's an company and not an individual who performed them.

If an individual, say the boyfriend of someone lent his computer to his girlfriend with those programs, he would be prosecuted in almost every modern country in the world. If he would use that information for monetary gain (like selling the pictures), he would likely end up in jail.

If an individual would apply the exact same program on an open proxy or on usb-keys dropped at a parking lot, he would be prosecuted under hacking laws and likely end up in jail for several years, especially if he earned money from it.

I guess the problem crackers and blackhats have with the law today is that they aren't companies. They should really form a company front for their activities, and hide any stealing of private information as "data mining for advertising" which they just happen to sell at highest price in auctions to "email-advertising" companies in China/Russia/Nigeria. Any images could be sold too, like to magazines/porn studios as any user "uploaded" files are company property as by the EULA. If they ever get caught, they can just say "oops, sorry", close down, create a new a new company, and go on with business as usual.

<comment><USER3> _mens rea_ is probably missing. It's pretty clear at this point that a number of people get the bright idea of turning on the webcam to some degree on the laptops they still own while sending them home with other people.

While it's always skeevy, it's worth pointing out that it probably isn't _malicious_. It's actually a simple manifestation of a standard form of human irrationality, the availability heuristic [1]. The people making these decisions sit there and fear what may be done to their property, and while they are sitting there imagining all the things that may be done, that ends up swamping all the other possibilities in their head. They imagine they're just going to catch two sorts of images: People normally using the laptop, and people stealing or hurting it. (And I am sure that if you asked them to guess how many images of abuse they'd catch that they would overestimate by at least two orders of magnitude.) The availability heuristic has crowded out all the other sorts of images they will capture in what is very nearly a random sampling of the full range of home life.

So the people end up as surprised as can be that they end up with what is legally child porn on their hands. I really don't think that these companies are setting out to collect that on purpose. They're just taking doing something skeevy, but seemingly safe, under the guidance of a normal human irrationality we all have, and end up bitten by it. _Even if_ they do in fact have somewhat malicious purposes and want to catch some sort of other image they shouldn't want, they will still end up over-imagining how much of that they will catch, and not realize how much other stuff they will catch.

Your examples are not comparable, in that they all include clear intent.

And if you are really inclined to argue "But they should have known!"... well... are you so sure you're completely conversant in all possible legal issues arising in fields completely outside of your experience? I'd certainly like word to get out this is a very bad idea, but I'm not sure I'm willing to destroy lives over this mistake. That's not a standard _I_ want to live under! It's really damned easy to tell _other_ people they shouldn't suffer from standard human irrationalities. It's much harder to see them in yourself when they happen.

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

<comment><USER2> Intent is always tricky, but the answer from the company is always the same, ie, they wanted to make money. Malicious Actions and morally objectionable actions is not synonymous. Many companies has acted illegal and morally wrong (one might even say evil), but their intent is always the same. Even when they do illegal acts like Enron did, the answer would be the same: They too only wanted to earn money.

Thus there is no malicious companies, only companies who's acts are morally wrong. Thus when judging companies, intent can not be assessed in the same way as when judging people.

What would I do if I worked there? Apologize and compensate the customer for the wrongful actions that has been performed. Actions, not intent is the available defense for a company. If an company perform illegal acts and do not take responsibility for it, then the leaders of said company should face legal penalty like jail and fines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hopefully some of this turns out to be illegal:

        The software, known as Detective Mode, didn't just
        secretly turn on webcams. It "can log the keystrokes
        of the computer user, take screen shots of the
        computer user's activities on the computer, and
        photograph anyone within view of the computer's
        webcam. Detective Mode secretly gathers this
        information and transmits it to DesignerWare, who then
        transmits it to the rent-to-own store from which the
        computer was rented, unbeknownst to the individual
        using the computer," according to the complaint.

and

        The software installed on the laptops also enables the
        companies to automatically disable computers of renters
        behind on monthly payments and to secretly track the
        computers' whereabouts.

and

        the rental stores would force a fake popup for software
        registration on computers they rented. The window would
        not go away, the FTC said, until the computer user typed
        their contact information, including address, phone
        number and e-mail. The rent-to-own store would use that
        information "to try to collect money" from renters in
        arrears, the FTC said.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I too read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> More like, rent to be owned... That's pathetic, shame there can't be a bigger penalty. Sad thing is this scam is clearly going after a group that likely doesn't get tech. Wonder how much it costs to rent a PC nowadays.

<comment><USER7> It's incredibly difficult to figure out how much it costs, because none of the rent-to-own websites will give you a price. Instead, it's all bespoke, so that they can rip you off for the largest possible amount.

Example: "Aaron's shopping cart is a little different than other web sites. You will of course get a guaranteed low price on everything you choose, but you won't see pricing or payment info here on Aarons.com. So, you will only begin the process of purchasing or starting a new lease with our shopping cart. If you take 5 minutes now with the easy, 4 step shopping cart process, your local Aaron's store will contact you ASAP and provide you local pricing and availability and help you take delivery in as little as one day."

Based on the one advertised price I was easily able to find [1], they're charging about a 400% markup, over _retail_. This would be equivalent to a loan at about 157% APR.

[1]: <http://www6.rentacenter.com/Rent-A-Center-Home.html> \- the $24.99 _a week_ "RAC Pack" - for 126 weeks, total payments $3148.74 for a Samsung PN51E450 and a Samsung HW-E450, total retail price on amazon: $737.94 ($547.99 for TV + $189.95 for soundbar)

<comment><USER8> >It's incredibly difficult to figure out how much it costs, because none of the rent-to-own websites will give you a price.

Pricing is different per-location too.

Depending on what you're using these outfits for, it can work out (he that's well paid is will satisfied and all that..), but for the most part, you're paying a _lot_ of extra money for the privilege of getting a pretty decent replacement plan (both Aarons and RAC to my knowledge will replace broken appliances/electronics/furniture while on lease) and spreading the total payments due across a large period.

Whether that's worth it or not to you will depend on the person, really. I'd hardly classify them as predatory, or skeevy, or even really a rip off, just very, _very_ expensive.

Actually looking through the article, all of the companies involved in this clusterf*ck are companies I've never heard of. None of the big names, at least.

<comment><USER9> Very expensive and only purchased by people who cannot afford it == skeevy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of the Lower Merion School District fiasco.

</comment><comment><USER11> Watching people surreptitiously in the privacy of their homes, definitely in the wrong.

Tracking the computers' whereabouts- I don't see why this couldn't have just been made known, e.g. "We'll be tracking the location of the machine so that when you fail to pay, we can recover our property."

Disabling the computer when renters get behind- where is the problem here? If you don't make your mortgage or rent payments, you don't get to stay for free. There are automobile finance companies for a similar demographic that will disable the car when payment isn't made. It's not like the car stops working when you're a day late. The computer warns the driver long before disabling the car. Kinda makes sense to give your 'customer' a warning and maintain her ability to drive to you to make payments.

And what's this "force a fake popup"? What's a fake popup versus a real one? Perhaps the store's systems should know who has rented which machines. But I suspect this is more about tracking the computer's location for recovery when payments are behind.

So here's my take: invasion of _privacy_ is a big problem and should be prosecuted. Disabling service and recovering property that hasn't been paid for just makes sense. Certainly this particular company could have been more scrupulous about locating their property when payments were not made.

<comment><USER12> Ignoring all the screen capture and webcam nonsense and focuses strictly on the location tracking: should it be expected for a company that will by its definition attract deadbeats and scammers be required to detail its security measures?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was a similar case with such "security/spy software" installed on high school student laptops, back in 2010: <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/webcamscanda/>

<comment><USER14> Yes. And in other countries the public prosecution would have brought a case and the school administrator who ordered the picture taking and the system administrator who followed orders would have gone to prison, where they belong.

<comment><USER15> That's the downside of all that pesky "reasonable doubt" and "innocent until proven guilty" nonsense.

<comment><USER14> Huh? There is no doubt that someone took pictures. That's sufficient to bring charges. The court decides if the defendant is guilty, but the matter is serious enough to bring it in front of a judge.

<comment><USER15> The prosecution decided that the evidence they had was not sufficient to meet the required standard.

<comment><USER14> The poor guy must have gone through some serious mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion. I'd be interested how he arrived there.

Seriously. We are righly afraid of out-of-control police, and that's why these are on a tight leash (at least in theory and before the Patriot Act) and need a warrant before they can gather evidence that is admissible in court. But private entities seem to be allowed to play by looser rules, and that's how we end up in Lower Meirion.

<comment><USER15> Well, for starters, wiretapping without sound isn't wiretapping. Then there's probably some verbiage about the difference between being unaware of the camera's _presence_ and the camera's _operation_. I don't know, read the follow ups. There were Senate hearings to fix the law with a new Protect the Children Act or somesuch, which was no doubt roundly booed on reddit and HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So users who rent computers have sex! I must look into this.

But this whole issue of spyware on rental/lease/borrowed computers keeps on cropping up time and time again and yet it is still legal to have spayware installed in the first place, its how its used.

As for tracking the users location, site usage etc, don't mobile phone companies already do that by definition of how they work! Mobile phones are computers after all and with that in mind this whole area of privacy and expectations of privacy needs to be cleared up as it is a mindfeild for everybody in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can I ask a question about the potential size of the pool of victims? Do a lot of people still rent to own laptops/computers? What about electronics like tv's, stereos?

I know this used be be way popular in the mid 90's and nobody read the fine print to realie you could have bought the device 4 times over by time your rental period expired.

<comment><USER18> FTA: _which has been employed on as many as 420,000 rentals_

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone else caught doing this would be facing felony charges. But I suppose business is held to other standards.

</comment><comment><USER20> I sent an email to Aspen Way (aspenwayenterprises.com), aka <http://www.aarons.com/storelocator.aspx> . It was childish and not very nice.

"Please delete this email address from your address book and add the following: email@example.com

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call me at 406-294-9432.

Thank you,

Jesse Feragen"

The owner of Aspen Way goes by the name Rohnn Lampi <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rohnn-lampi/8/779/a6>

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow, that's a very link-baity title

<comment><USER22> Seems fair to me. I mean, it also photographed the users _not_ having sex, but that's really not much comfort.</comment></comment>


Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ <comment><USER2> Ethereum was supposed to have every feature under the sun from the start, proof-of-stake perhaps being the second most hyped. (Turing completeness being the clear first, which is problematic given the halting theorem and all that, so it's now rich statefullness instead.) And PoS is one of those ideas that most people looking at cryptocurrencies end up trying some variant of. PoW is obviously wasteful and it would be nice to improve on that. The problem is that it doesn't have the same properties as PoW have, and that are hard to do without.

The problems are the basic ones, how to avoid colluding stakers, how to neuter the market for consumed stakes, how to deter chain splits. There is a constant flow of new coins that try various approaches, but the ones that have survived have all had to resort to some variant of checkpoints where a trusted third party decides on regular intervals which chain is valid. This has obvious implications for a supposedly trustless digital currency, where you don't really need that complicated blockchain anymore.

This Ethereum PoS FAQ is much like other documentation from the Ethereum Foundation quite dense where most paragraphs introduce terms not seen elsewhere (economic finality? slashing? weak subjectivity?). If you want the interesting bit, the TL;DR, then skip to the part about weak subjectivity. Read it, and then read it again and bear in mind how other coins solved this problem.

Tell me I'm wrong, but I think this bit with the key part being that the node "authenticate out of band", involve a certain third party with a Very Important Key. In which case the rest of the theory in the document doesn't matter much, does it?

<comment><USER3> The assumption that PoW is wasteful is one with an ideological basis that comes from a lack of understanding of the purpose PoW serves, and I suggest you read the Satoshi white paper.

Ethereum uses a lot of handwaving to justify what is ultimately a pump program to make insiders and large ETH holders richer.

<comment><USER4> > The assumption that PoW is wasteful is one with an ideological basis that > comes from a lack of understanding of the purpose PoW serves

I agree with this, but I think the real problem with PoW is the mining pools centralizing. People seem to think the recent swift soft fork is something to be celebrated, but I think it's kind of scary how swift it was. It just means that the mining pools are so centralized that the transition was so easy.

Then again, this is something even PoS will probably suffer from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just for an other-side perspective, people that enjoy this might enjoy my technical deep dive into PoSv3: [http://earlz.net/view/2017/07/27/1904/the- missing-explanatio...](http://earlz.net/view/2017/07/27/1904/the-missing- explanation-of-proof-of-stake-version)

It is a much older implementation that works on Bitcoin's UTXO model (rather than the account model in Ethereum) and without smart contracts. It doesn't have a solution to the nothing at stake long-term attack, but it thwarts all known short-term attacks. Personally, CASPER's solution to the nothing at stake problem is concerning. In an ideal world, it is ideal, but in a more practical world, I can definitely foresee someone doing something wrong or making a mistake (either developer bugs, or consumer running two wallets, etc), unintentionally making a block on another chain, and losing their $1M worth of ETH as a result. It only takes that happening once, maybe twice, to get people to think twice about staking, and when less people are staking with less coins, the network is much easier to attack

(disclaimer: I work on a blockchain project that is somewhat a competitor to Ethereum)

<comment><USER6> In every interaction with a blockchain, users have the chance to lose all of their funds. User error in with regular transactions is a far more likely issue than anything else (though there is no denying the importance of the validator code being written).

Also, running two wallets would not cause one to lose money. Running two instances of the validator code might - but why anyone would do that is unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am curious why people don't talk much about the "rich get richer" aspect of proof of stake. Most say "proof of work also is rich get richer scheme" to justify this, but in my opinion they are completely different because proof of work involves efforts that exist in the atom world (need to buy all the mining pools) whereas proof of stake involves purely digital efforts therefore the scale can be completely different.

Am I missing something? Or is this people just being optimistic?

<comment><USER7> I don't see this as a problem, because proof of stake must compete with other mechanisms to convert time*capital into more capital, and it has diminishing returns. If PoS has higher risk-adjusted returns than other investments, it will become more crowded until this is no longer the case.

PoS provides real value - the maintenance of a blockchain - so it makes sense to reward the capital required for such maintenance accordingly.

<comment><USER8> If the coin supply is inflated at some % of current account balance, or old coins decay then large PoS holders are incentivized to reinvest into the economy.

Only online nodes provide value to blockchains. In a PoS blockchain an online node with 100,000 credits is generating equal value to a node with .03 credits.

<comment><USER7> I don't buy the idea that all votes in PoS should be considered with equal weight. Otherwise it seems pretty easy to DOS the network with a ton of low- weight votes, get 51% of the network, and do whatever you want.

The capital-weighted PoS system prevents this because if you want 51% to the network to be able to do abusive things, you have to risk devaluing your enormous PoS investment by destroying trust in the Ethereum network.

I don't understand your first point, could you clarify?

<comment><USER4> > if you want 51% to the network to be able to do abusive things, you have to > risk devaluing your enormous PoS investment by destroying trust in the > Ethereum network.

I have a hypothetical scenario I'm curious about. Let's say the Bitcoin network becomes so valuable that a huge chunk of the world economy depends on it, believing that it can't be manipulated. Most people would rather play nice with this than sabotage the network, but since the whole point of this consensus mechanism is assuming the worst case, let's say there's an entity (it could be a terrorist group or a nation) whose interest is to mess this up regardless of how much money they lose as a consequence.

This is an unlikely event but I think it's possible in some special cases that we can't foresee at the moment (just like nobody could predict that people will come up with ASICS for mining, or like people would form a pool to mine things) The only condition required is:

1\. Get a hold of enough money to terrorize the network

2\. Be at a position where you indirectly can gain more by losing all your money that's worth 51% of the network.

In this case, this entity can decide to attack the network without any consequences due to the pseudonymous nature of the blockchain. People will see this happen in daylight but won't be able to easily figure out who this was if this was based on proof of stake, because all you need to do this is to secure your fund in the bitcoin network.

However if Bitcoin was using proof of work, you will have to buy whole bunch of mining rigs (or build them yourself in some secret bunker) which is much more traceable than if you simply used money for this terrorism.

I'm not making up some convoluted scenario just to troll, I'm genuinely curious how this will work out and hope to be proven wrong because I also want to live in a world where proof of stake works.

<comment><USER9> I think what would happen in your scenario is this:

1\. The terrorists use their 51% stake to interfere with the network.

2\. People begin to notice that their transactions aren't going through as expected.

3\. Some panic and try to pull out.

4\. The price drops due to the rising supply.

5\. The resulting feedback loop causes a crash.

6\. The uncooperative nodes are identified.

7\. The blockchain is forked to revoke the stake of those nodes.

8\. Business continues as usual.

The only way I see the terrorists cause any long term damage is if they buy when the price is lowest and then repeat their attack. (Assuming balances aren't reset to pre-crash levels.) If it happens often enough, that would certainly erode the trust people place in the currency. On the other hand, if balances _aren 't_ reset, the second crash would be much less severe, since nobody will want to lose money selling when the price is down.

Essentially, no proof-of-X scheme can ensure that malicious interference doesn't happen, but it can make it costly enough that it happens only rarely. Then the occasional event can be handled manually (see also the DAO hack).

<comment><USER4> Interesting, as no technology is perfect, and people come up with clever hacking schemes for desktop computers till this day, I think the more valuable the network becomes, the more frequent this type of attack will be.

Do you think they will keep forking whenever major events like this happen? I worry that a couple of these attacks will be enough to drain all the trust from the network. Ethereum may have saved itself once by forking but a lot of people think this is not sustainable and think a couple more of these and people will leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Proof of Stake is a mechanism by which people who own a lot of ethereum (notably the foundation and insiders) can get the mining rewards instead of the miners.

It also means locking up the supply of ethereum draining liquidity and thus pumping the price.

Technologically it is not good for security: [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow- cheapest/](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/)

But as a pump and dump, it's an excellent thing to do.

<comment><USER4> I am also wary of proof of stake, but this is not something you can say with such a certainty, like you're doing.

If someone asked "how safe is proof of work?" ten years ago, everyone would have laughed and thought you're joking.

I'm only saying this because you're making a snarky comment while pretending to know exactly how it will play out. Nobody knows how it will work. Who knows? Maybe some unexpected human behavior like mining pools will happen in proof of stake approaches and it may end up going in a completely unexpected direction.

<comment><USER10> > If someone asked "how safe is proof of work?" ten years ago, everyone would > have laughed and thought you're joking

I see PoW and PoS as nearly analogous in this regard - the rich can dominate both and so on - except that PoS is far less wasteful.

I'm excited to see where this goes.

<comment><USER11> I agree. The article the GP posted posits that they are equally wasteful, but ignores the fact that:

\- The thing that they are wasting, capital, was created out of thin air by the act of switching to PoS

\- There are large negative externalities to burning power by mining with hashes, which increase the cost to society of using PoW vs. PoS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Proof of stake incentivizes low velocity of money - you have to stake to not have your funds diluted. This seems like the opposite of what the digital aspect of cryptocurrency should be bringing to the table.

<comment><USER13> Under proof of work you essentially end up "staking" money by buying ASICs/GPUs that take 9-12 months to break even. In general, miners are going to spend almost as much as the block reward, whether that's in hardware and electricity or in opportunity cost. [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow- cheapest/](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/)

And many people are "hodling" cryptocurrency as a long-term store of value anyway so presumably they aren't concerned with the velocity of money.

<comment> surrey-fringe Ethereum's block hash algorithm is more memory intensive than bitcoin's and benefits less from ASIC work -- please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that it faces the same problems.

<comment><USER3> You're right and it's proven pretty robust at that. This is a good proof of work, because it means that anyone with commodity hardware can set up a miner, and the playing field is pretty level.

<comment><USER8> Assuming everyone has existing funds to acquire mining hardware.

Large existing expendable cash has a greater advantage to mine and mint. Mining pool operators are also in a position to manipulate minting and transactions in the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> another treatment [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Thank-you

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So now the 1% (who own about 35% of wealth as far as I know) would get to write the rules however they like? Sounds fun.

<comment><USER17> No, because the economic majority can simply make a new chain. Just like the DAO hard fork. Ethereum Classic still exists, it just doesn't have (relatively) as much economic weight.

<comment><USER10> Likely because it's pretty obviously run and held by shysters looking to profit rather than write a line of code, but that's a whole other can of worms.

I agree with you in theory, but the BTC/BCH split would be a better example of the majority splitting off of profiteers rather than the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Method-X If you're interested in proof of stake, it's definitely worth reading about delegated proof of stake [1]. The gist of it is that token holders vote for the nodes (miners). So far as I've seen, it's the best way to address the issue of governance on a blackchain.

1\. [https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake- co...](https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus/)

<comment><USER18> Delegated proof-of-stake suffers from the same problem that all consensus algorithms suffer from: people will always be willing to spend, at most, _n_ coins on producing _n_ coins. The only way to avoid it is by giving particular nodes the special privilege of producing coins, otherwise the free market will push up the price until there is no profit left[1].

[1] [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow- cheapest/](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> PoS will turn into a stealth PoW if it is possible _in any way_ to influence the outcome with money. The history of all economic activity shows people being willing to spend $49.99 to make $50. Though spending $49.99 of bank balance probably beats $49.99 of carbon.

Have they got a proof of concept as yet, or is this all still vaporware that nobody on this thread should be talking about in the present tense?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, they have a proof of concept code up on their github, only started on it in the past few weeks though. Up till now it's all been math and research.

<comment><USER21> The first casper PoC was in 2015, and PoC2 was in early 2016.[1] However, there was a pivot from the early "consensus-by-bet" to the current version, which is based on "prepare and commit" messages. I think the current one is PoC4. [2,3]

1\. [https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/03/05/serenity- poc2/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/03/05/serenity-poc2/) 2\. [https://github.com/ethereum/casper](https://github.com/ethereum/casper) 3\. [https://github.com/ethereum/pyethereum/pull/791](https://github.com/ethereum/pyethereum/pull/791)

<comment><USER20> Thanks, that's a lot more than I thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The cryptocurrency mining industry is worth about 3 billion dollars per year. About sixty percent of that is from Ethereum mining.

Ethereum switching to proof of stake is a threat to billions of dollars in annual revenue. Miners should be rallying against this, and the budget they have for lobbying and pr could reasonably be nine figures.

Ethereum miners are not the only ones affected. If two million gpus suddenly flood the market, either the resale value of hardware will nosedive, or the difficulty of all other coins will skyrocket. Miners who do not even mine ethereum should still be actively opposed to ethereum switching to proof of stake.

<comment><USER23> I've felt like writing a "Money is not a real thing" article for a while, and this would be a prime example of why you don't optimize for revenue but rather e.g. physical goods.

The generalization of your argument is that rapidly increasing productivity of any good is bad, because it decreases the relative power of existing capital holders.

If all the miners on all proof-of-work currencies lost all their revenue and the currency was equally secure, I would consider this a good thing since the electricity could be allocated elsewhere.

<comment><USER24> I guess schumpeters point with creative destruction was the rupture required to replace one paradigm with another (Incidentally, he got this straight from marx). Technology, and markets, move in fits and starts as conservative tendencies meet with more efficient, or qualitatively different, competion. For both schumpeter and marx this view was seen as opposed to equilibrium models of economics on which much of mainstream economics and game theory still relies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What happens in case of a hard fork? How will they ensure that no one will validate blocks in the wrong fork? With PoW the miners much choose one fork or at lest split the hash power. With PoS the miners can validate blocks in both hard forks without too much effort.

Moreover, if the 51% dislike the one fork, or the version before the fork, it's too easy to validate correctly in the part of the fork they like and launch a 51% attack to the other fork. This would have killed ETC and BCC instantly. (I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature.)

<comment><USER26> No: If they validate blocks in both chains, their entire staking deposit is immediately destroyed (in both chains)

This is one of the main innovations in modern POS algorithms.

<comment><USER27> That is only true for coins that are recognized on both chains. In the event of a hard fork, all you need to do is send your hardforked coins to a new address, and then start staking from that address. You can then vote on both chains with your coins, and no penalty algorithms will punish you.

<comment><USER28> If there is a hardfork and you're staking then I'd imagine you'll also be automatically staking on both chains, nothing to do. Hardfork only matter if you're transacting at the time of the fork, your transaction could be replayed on the other chain or if a reorganisation happens, in that case you may want to wait until the fork gets resolved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> PoS has done a great job at attracting a loyal following e.g. [http://reddit.com/r/ethtrader](http://reddit.com/r/ethtrader) and it only looks like it's gaining in momentum.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a lovely faq and quite informative, however I'd feel a lot better if there were peer-reviewed papers by researchers with some prior work on Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

<comment><USER27> It's worth pointing out that Byzantine fault tolerance has been around for almost 40 years, and yet it wasn't until bitcoin that you could build a decentralized currency that people felt confident in.

Academic Byzantine fault tolerance is insufficient, because you cannot naively assume that most participants will behave honestly. They have to have an incentive to behave honestly, and there can be no room for dishonest behavior that would be more rewarding.

There's a reason that it took so long to get a working digital cash - a new breakthrough was needed and that breakthrough ended up being Proof of Work.

To trust a new system for decentralized money, I would want to see peer review not just from academics, but also from the leading bitcoin experts, who in my opinion are the only ones that really understand cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER30> It's true, it's an old field that remains (I think) in progress. I just fear that the confidence in decentralized currency you cite may be overly influenced by the profit early proponents have earned.

Perhaps a few academic collaborations could generate peer-reviewed papers that leverage those decades of research alongside the practical experience of bitcoin experts.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is java technology not suited for web based applications? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I am java developer and I have noticed that most of the jobs posted either in HN or angel.co  concerns mainly Python, Node.js or Ruby. Most of the jobs offers are startup's ones so the technologies seeked by the recruiters are web and/or mobile oriented. I understand that technologies like Javascript/ python/ Ruby are more convenient because they are web oriented.
My question : is there a place for java technology in the landscape of modern/future web developement?
PS: I have used Play framework and Dropwizard and other java web based frameworks and I think they are comparable to other Frameworks like ROR, Django, Node.js (every technology/stack has it's own pros and cons) but it seems they are far behind python, javascript and Ruby based frameworks for web application/site developement when using the jobs offers as a metric. <comment><USER2> Java is less popular among startups because:

1) It's not "cool" 2) It's still saddled with performance FUD, although people are finally realizing it's really fast 3) The ecosystem is _huge_ 4) It isn't suitable for everything, e.g., it often just makes more sense to use something else for the front end (client-side) and use Java tools for infrastructure (search, messaging, etc.) 5) Java's "true" home is the enterprise, and it's pretty well-suited for that: it's well-known, ubiquitous, performant, and can interface to anything

You're looking at self-selected jobs, which skews your perception of what people are looking for. As a counter-example, I probably get 2-4x Java emails compared to other ecosystems combined. To be fair, most of those emails are for boring jobs, but a lot center around big data.

With the switch to client-side frameworks Java web apps are a dying breed outside of the enterprise, but the back-end API can be anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree except for the jobs offers for java :)

<comment><USER2> Sure wish I got less of them; there's almost no chance I'll return to Java in a meaningful way. JVM, yes. Java, not so much :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, I'd understand your concerns if you asked about Haskell or Erlang for web-development. I suppose there are not so many companies who develop their web apps in those languages and it may be just not that easy to find an appropriate position. But Java? Open [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/) (list of YC companies). There are enough of those who uses Java.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you will find Java less often among startups because initial development can take longer, and startups are often strapped for cash. Some companies eventually switch to the JVM (Java, Scala, etc.) for performance reasons, and many don't. I personally have never worked as a Java developer, so take this with many grains of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you. I think may be the time to market using other technologies than java may be lower. But is there a substantial difference in productivity using Python/Node.js / ROR over Java?

<comment><USER2> That totally depends on a number of factors. I'm more productive in RoR than in Java because I don't have to type as much--but I'm not that familiar with the newer Java web technologies, so I'm biased.

 _Hugely_ more productive? Probably not; modern Java web development is pretty speedy, and the tooling (primarily IDEs) are better for Java because of its relatively static nature.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Deep Insight into User Interface Design (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.warplife.com/mdc/essays/jump-the-shark.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who have been following the progress of my computer employer index, I added some Portland companies late last night, fixed up the navigation bar on the left for the cities I've covered so far in Oregon and Washington State, and have observed from my log file analysis that, of my city pages that have no real content, London is the most popular, followed by Berlin, and of the pages that do, my telecommuting and remote page is the most popular.

So what I'm going to do next is to post the companies I've already collected for London and Berlin, then the remote employers - and clients - for countries other than the ones I presently list. Yes I know the work is remote but sometimes one has to go onsite for meetings, integration of deliverables and so on.

After that, I'm going to focus on out of the way places, like Costa Rica, which has quite a lot of software, as well as cities that have serious economic troubles, like Detroit.

[http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/)

As always, I am happy to take specific requests. If you're looking for a job, email me at firstname.lastname@example.com to let me know where you'd like to work and I'll focus my efforts there for a little while. I've collected many more links than I have actually posted; perhaps all I would have to do is to actually post links I've already got.</comment>


Patent Reformers O'Reilly, Bezos Mum on 1-Click [2007] - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/10/27/1144222/patent-reformers-oreilly-bezos-mum-on-1-click

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what was exactly happening at Amazon here.</comment>


Bedrock Linux 1.0beta2 Nyla Major Features - <AUTHOR> http://bedrocklinux.org/1.0beta2/features.html <comment><USER2> About Bedrock Linux: [http://bedrocklinux.org/introduction.html](http://bedrocklinux.org/introduction.html)

Curious about when 1.0 will be out of beta.</comment>


Chat Instantly with Sellers Who Have Anything You Want, Wherever You Are - <AUTHOR> http://sellow.me

<comment><USER2> "The One And Only Reason Is Worth to Pay $ 5 USD for 50 Leads"

What does this even mean

<comment><AUTHOR> Why it is confusing for you? and how do you would understand it better?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gulp Bro – Gulp, Browserify and Incremental Build - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ngryman/gulp-bro <comment><USER2> I see you're using browserify-incremental[1].

For people who, like me, don't like these "modern" build systems and prefer to run simple scripts, I suggest using browserify-incremental[1] with something like entr[2] to trigger faster rebuilds without having to support all this boilerplate.

[1] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify- incremental](https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify-incremental)

[2] [http://entrproject.org/](http://entrproject.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it just avoids all the boilerplate needed with watchify.

On a side note I generally agree with you on "modern" build systems. However when a project becomes complex, with lots tasks and multiple environments, custom logic is needed. Only executing simple command line tools is not enough. Being able to both run tasks and logic at the same place (gulpfile) becomes handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just FYI, the "Bro" in the logo looks a lot more like "Bra" to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, I'm going to fix it. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Male and Female Brains Are Different. Should It Matter? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/meghan-daum/male-and-female-brains-are-different-should-it-matter-6db82ead5e20 <comment><USER2> Two things:

Should it matter is not the right question. The science will tell us, and understanding differences among people is never a bad thing. We are all different.

Celebrate that, work to mutual respect and understanding and equality in terms of gender role freedom. In my view, that is the outcome of successful feminism.

Do the brains of trans people change over time once they transition? If so, we have an opportunity to get otherwise hard to get data. They will go through experiments, of a sort ethics would very clearly bar (and should), as they seek harmony between mind and body.</comment>


100 Solutions to Climate Change [Ranked] - <AUTHOR> https://globalowls.com/100-solutions-climate-change/ <comment><AUTHOR> The scientists at Drawdown has measured 100 solutions and modeled them to determine its carbon impact through the year 2050, the total and net cost to society, and the total lifetime savings (or cost).</comment>


Twitter Filing Opens Books on High-Flier - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/twitter-discloses-its-i-p-o-plans/?smid=tw-bna&bna=3267&_r=0

<comment><USER2> Any thoughts here?

I think they're picking the near perfect time to do this (and that they probably didn't have much other choice due their investors). \- FB's Instagram announced that they will start monetizing \- "Tech" is in again; TSLA, FB performing esp. with Mobile focus

Valuation is decent and fair in my opinion. The caveats: a huge chunk of the IPO cash is going to pay out existing shareholders rather than reinvest in the company. Beyond ads, it isn't super taboo for Twitter to sell data so that quants can do better trades. This part of their business is very immature currently.

International worries... I wouldn't look too far into the Asian market. The only thing protecting these Chinese tech biz in my opinion is the Chinese gov't frees up (if they ever do) but that's a topic for later.

Big question: how many people are leaving Twitter after the IPO?

<comment><USER3> The consistently losing money part kinda screams 'bubble' to me, but I agree that the pressure to go public from having too many investors and/or not enough runway left.

I get Twitter as a communication feed, sure all the tweets about the Oscar nominees is much richer than watching the coverage on Good Morning America but on GMA the model is you pay them $20,000 for 30 seconds of eyeball time when they break for commercial, that doesn't exactly fly with Twitter, not only are they "just the messenger" since the tweets are made up by their users, they have not been able to connect the dots for advertisers like Google or Facebook can with analytics.

That leaves them in a tough spot in terms of their value proposition. Contrasted with say, App.net.

I think they run a real risk of having a 'facebook moment' on their IPO day.

<comment><USER4> I disagree, in terms of analytics/targeting twitter is better or as good as Facebook. Have you used the platform?

You can literally target ads at a specific set of users, their followers, etc.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree that they are able to do better targeting, what I don't see is that the ad revenue is able to pay for their costs.

The golden standard, search advertising, can tie buying intent to demographics to vendor and track conversions. The old standard, television advertising, can tie viewers to demographics but struggles with tracking conversions and understanding buying intent.

To try to get my head around the scope of this I did a bit of searching around for data on Television advertising. CBS got advertising commitments of $2.7B [1] for placement on its prime time shows. Prime time is 3 hours a night (7-10 or 8-11 depending on your time zone). Assuming 41 advertisements per hour [2] that is 123 Adds per day, 7 days a week is 861 ads, 52 weeks is 44,772 ads per year. If they sold them for $2.7B in commitments that is $60,305 per single advertising placement, one day, one show, one advertisement. I expect it is much more complicated than that but order of magnitude it meshes with numbers people throw around. So if you agree with the reasoning there ...

How does Twitter get to the point where someone will pay even $50,000 to send out a single 'sponsored tweet' or some other chunk of information to an equivalent demographic?

That is the challenge I see for them going forward.

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230376810457746...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303768104577462944014974960.html)

[2] [http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/primetime-tv- ho...](http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/primetime-tv-hour- includes-41-commercials-9434/)

<comment><USER4> My genuine question: how many people watched the tv ad and didnt ignore it?

If I wanted 5$ CPMs, at 60k per ad, I'd expect 12,000,000 people to see it -- not unreasonable by prime time TV standards

From there, I'd argue that for brand advertising TV is more powerful because TV watchers will prefer to continue doing the same thing (stare at TV) vs ignoring the commercial or pressing mute.

Arguably the big difference is the entry requirements, you can't do anything on TV for less than 4 figures, whereas you can get started on twitter for single digit ad spends

<comment><USER3> Its a good question on impact, but my point was to the pricing authority that Television has, which it got through a historical and perhaps no longer relevant understanding. My point is if Twitter is competing with web search which is both cheaper and more effective than TV. When people follow Ashton or Miley they care what _they_ say, not some random ad that comes through from them following them.

Anyway, the feeling of "its really big" but not a lot of specificity about the bigness was, for me, one of the hallmarks of the dot com bubble. I remember Eric Schmidt (which I was at Sun) remarking that if anything he felt the Internet was under hyped. And while he was ultimately correct, the people who were hyping were actually quite mistaken about "how" it was under hyped. (That is so to illustrate my comment about a 'sense' of bigness without specificity).

As I watch Twitter's evolution I am on the look out for either new value they create or captured value they take from other sources. One candidate for losing value is 'nightly news' which already took a huge hit to 24hr news channels. It may not survive another :-). But the 21st century newscast is a very different thing. Exciting times.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TrailDB – An Efficient Library for Storing and Processing Event Data - <AUTHOR> http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2016/05/24/traildb-open-sourced.html <comment><USER2> It looks like this must be the successor to Deliroll, which was described in an absolutely _fantastic_ talk from 2013[0]. I've been hoping this would be open sourced for years. Really glad to see this!

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXj5nayS7Yg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXj5nayS7Yg)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just watching this[0] excellent talk from one of the Heap Analytics engineers on their use of CitusDB + Postgres to do event processing.

What use-case would TrailDB be the obvious, hands-down way to go (vs maybe Postgres + Citus)?

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVl9_6J1G60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVl9_6J1G60)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm so glad AdRoll finally open-sourced this. TrailDB is by far the easiest way to process trillions of events on a single machine. Can't wait for them to start publishing their internal ecosystem around it too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I hope we can open-source the rest of the stack now that the core libraries are out.

Btw, I am happy to answer any questions about the project here.

<comment><USER5> It looks like TrailDB solves a particular problem (which is actually quite common btw) the right way. However the language barrier makes it hard to use it as DB. I believe that Python binding is nice for development environment but in production we would probably want to use a low level language for performance reasons because we'll be dealing with billions of events in a single machine. Do you plan to implement a query language which compiles to native code such as SQL?

How do you handle continuous data with TrailDB? It seems that you store raw events Kinesis, buffer events and periodically write TrailDB files to S3. When you want to process events for a specific user, normally the events might be in a random TrailDB file so the timeline would be mixed up. Do you merge TrailDB files in a single instance when processing the data or have a sharding mechanism?

<comment><USER6> We have an internal framework that compiles a state machine DSL into lower level code to execute queries on TrailDBs. However the binding in Python is fairly thin, and the same can be said for the other ones like the golang one. So before optimizing with a lower level language or a special DSL I would verify that Python or any other of the supported languages doesn't satisfy your requirements.

And continuous data is handled by sharding TrailDBs across some fields in our log lines, this way all the related events for a cookie in a given day belong in the same shard, each day the shard mapping is the same and we can just download the same shard ids from S3 and process the files sequentially using our DSL language. With a bit of code you can make this whole process of downloading from S3 and processing completely automated, this is in fact what we do with our data pipeline[0][1].

[0]: [http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2015/09/22/data- pipelines-d...](http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2015/09/22/data-pipelines- docker.html) [1]: [http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2015/10/15/luigi.html](http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2015/10/15/luigi.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An easily embeddable C lib. Fantastic choice. If only more projects in this space did this. So much stuff in this area is java.

<comment><USER8> Could not agree more, biokoda. A C lib with all the bindings offered with TrailDB is absolutely a winner. C, Python, and Go. A happy day for sure.

Thank you so much Ville and AdRoll for sharing this with the world! Your talk on the Trillion Row Data Warehouse in Python was an inspiration for much work I have done since. This library will carry that even further.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. Adroll seems to be one of those few places not totally blinded by JVM. Strong presence of D and Python on their stack seems hard to resist. Sadly, they are not in India (yet?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are SQL window functions really so bad? Setting up a completely separate system for a particular kind of query seems like the wrong approach.

<comment><USER6> The approach here is very different. It's not that window functions are bad, but that the traditional SQL database, or even column oriented database, doesn't have a disk format that is versed to this type of analysis for the high volumes that AdRoll has. TrailDB can filter through 10s of millions of events per second on a Macbook, just storing billions of events in a more traditional DB or warehouse would use far more than the space that TrailDBs use. On top of that it's relatively easy to build visualisations on top of these databases with an interactive UI to do exploration. So the window function being complicated was perhaps just the spark but there are real advantages in speed, efficiency and expressiveness in this type of database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare to PipelineDB? I'm pretty sure the cofounders of Pipeline are ex-AdRollers, so there should be a lot of overlap since it was made with the same problem in mind.

<comment><USER6> It's not quite the same thing, PipelineDB is a database to execute streaming queries at massive volumes. That is definitely one of the challenges at AdRoll.

TrailDB is more about a different way of grouping and events, and granularly querying and analysing each trail of data. TrailDBs are materialized and stored in S3 typically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm assuming this is primarily used for analytics ? Metamarkets another ad company open sourced Druid for a similar purpose. I'm curious as to the differences in these solutions.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK Druid is for time series and it's a columnar database. Their format has dimensions and then pre-aggregated fields on those dimensions. Afterwards you can run SQL queries on that data format to get full aggregations in return.

This is a library to read and write a data format that is optimized to give access to granular events and actors within an event stream. For example this could be used to trail all of the events generated by one entity (credit card, cookie, email, account and so on) over a dataset. At that point you can choose what you want to do with it: extract features for ML, train ML directly on raw data, run arbitrary queries for outliers and anomaly detection and what have you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might have to check these out. I'd be interested the match of storing data like this.

Also, another event DB project: [https://github.com/benbjohnson/skydb.io/blob/master/source/b...](https://github.com/benbjohnson/skydb.io/blob/master/source/blog/2012-04-30-introduction- to-behavioral-databases.html.markdown)

<comment><USER14> Interesting, but the open source SkyDB seems to be dead:

[https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/590626780173721601](https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/590626780173721601)

<comment><USER13> Actually, just reading:

> So I understand, by "pure go" you mean you've thrown out the lua, julia and > ruby bits?

wow, that was quite the polyglot codebase...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting. I wonder how this compares to writing events to a Parquet ([http://parquet.io/](http://parquet.io/)) or Avro (or both) file - this way all manners of distributed tools like Hive or Spark could already read it.

<comment><AUTHOR> TrailDB is optimized for a very specific data model ([http://traildb.io/docs/technical_overview/#data- model](http://traildb.io/docs/technical_overview/#data-model)) which allows it to do compression that you couldn't do with other data layouts.

TrailDB is a C library, Parquet and Avro are not. Depending on your use case this might be a pro or a con.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> At which point in the curve of users-in-your-app it becomes better to use aggregate queries like this instead of just looking at each user individually?

<comment><USER6> This is a tool to look at each user individually actually, not aggregated.

<comment><USER16> [http://traildb.io/docs/images/wikipedia- sessions.png](http://traildb.io/docs/images/wikipedia-sessions.png)

<comment><USER6> That's just what the example script does. In the database all the data is stored granularly so you can, and we (AdRoll) do, use TrailDB to examine individual trails one by one after you select the subset that you are interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This shows incredible promise for being used as the basis for an Event Store type database system.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks very promising. Someone really should build a distributed server on top of this.

</comment><comment><USER19> How does this compare to something like InfluxDB and other time-series databases?

<comment><AUTHOR> TrailDB is designed for discrete events (think JSON objects) rather than continuous metrics (like CPU utilization).

Most time-series databases manage to store a large number of data points by aggregating data over time. Discrete events can't be aggregated. Instead, TrailDB leverages predictability of events to compress data over time.

<comment><USER19> I've not yet used any of these, but I think InfluxDB stores discrete events. In fact, your description sounds very similar to this comparison of Prometheus and InfluxDB[0]:

> _InfluxDB is better geared towards the following use cases: Storing all > individual events, not just time series of values. E.g. storing every HTTP > request with full metadata vs. storing the cumulative count of HTTP requests > for certain dimensions._

[0] [https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/#promethe...](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/#prometheus- vs.-influxdb)

<comment><USER20> Yes, schema wise that's pretty close.

However, last time I looked that didn't seem like a use case InfluxDB invested a ton of effort optimizing for, especially if you tried to store a lot of separate "event histories" either as separate measurements or by using tags. By "a lot" I mean 100K-100M histories. It may have improved since.

Besides, there is somewhat fundamental tradeoff between allowing efficient realtime granular writes, which I believe a priority for InfluxDB, and building efficient indexed store for millions of histories/event trails, which is more of a TrailDB use case. Kind of OLAP vs OLTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any plans for NodeJS client?

<comment><USER22> Played around with it today. Made some progress here: [https://github.com/poynt/traildb-node](https://github.com/poynt/traildb-node)

Let me know if you have any use cases that are in the API but not covered yet by this library :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How important is Judy in achieving the level of performance you reached?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. Judy arrays tend to be really efficient for low-level mappings like the 128-bit -> 64-bit map ([https://github.com/traildb/traildb/blob/master/src/judy_128_...](https://github.com/traildb/traildb/blob/master/src/judy_128_map.h)) that we use to keep track of UUIDs.

It would be interesting to benchmark Judy against another similar well- optimized data structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> if you are considering this I'd check out druid.io

</comment><comment><USER25> Nicely Done!

</comment><comment><USER26> traildb-r link to gihub is 404. Checked the account. No repo for R :(

<comment><AUTHOR> It is coming soon, sorry for the delay!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find the R bindings now at [https://github.com/traildb/traildb-r](https://github.com/traildb/traildb-r)

<comment><USER26> Oh you really meant soon. Great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What other use cases are suitable with this setup than obnoxious ad-tech?

<comment><USER8> Well let's see. Perhaps, processing social media data, analysis of stock market data, looking at weather or other observational data, working with log events, handling IoT data streams, ... and on, and on. If you look at the world, an amazing amount of data use cases reduce to events by time by some other dimension.</comment></comment>