Plan for New Stock Exchange Stirs Debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/business/dealbook/plan-for-new-stock-exchange-stirs-furious-debate.html <comment><USER2> Forget adding speed bumps, frequent batch auctions are the way to go. Group orders every second and match trades (and maybe give priority based on volume). There is no reason any company or trader cannot commit to price for 1s and it completely eliminates high frequency shenanigans.

<comment><USER3> It shifts the problem so that every bot is waiting for the end of each second to gather as much information as possible from external sources before placing its orders. So when a human trader places a market order, they will have a disadvantage equal to the volatility over 1 second. By contrast, in a real- time market, the HFT bots make your market orders very close to the current price everywhere else.

It's not clear to me that batching actually solves all our problems. It might be better, but it doesn't seem 100% clear cut.

<comment><USER4> Maybe randomly pick an auction length from like 0.5 to 1.5 seconds each time, so you don't know what batch you're in?

<comment><USER2> There is currently a dark pool using a similar method:

"The London Stock Exchange's Turquoise Midpoint Dark Pool has a service known as Uncross, which matches orders at the midpoint of the bid and offer with auctions held randomly every 5 to 10 seconds."

[https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/marketintegrity/2014/11/10/ar...](https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/marketintegrity/2014/11/10/are- frequent-batch-auctions-a-solution-to-hft-latency-arbitrage/)

<comment><USER5> Which is kind of the point. If people think that rolling auctions are better than a CLOB, they are free to set up exchanges that use auctions and see if anybody trades on them.

Spoiler: No one will.

Or are they arguing that the government should step in and tell people how to trade?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The EU is imposing a tax on financial transactions effective January 1, 2016.[1] The tax is tiny (0.1% on most transactions, 0.01% on derivatives) but enough to discourage high frequency trading. It's going to be interesting to see how that works out.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_financial_trans...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_financial_transaction_tax)

<comment><USER7> _The EU is imposing a tax on financial transactions_

The devil is in the details, but at first glance that looks like an absolute disaster in terms of stock trading. For example, if a mutual fund bought a stock twice in a year, and then sold that stock twice in a year, that's 0.4% being gifted to the government right there? From just that mutual fund. And another 0.4% from whoever is on the other side? Wow!

Am I reading that right?

Also it says "financial institutions" but looks like it will also apply to individuals. The Wiki page says _" If acting on behalf of a client, e.g., when acting as a broker, it would be able to pass on the tax to the client."_

I think that could dry up trading volumes by about 95% in the affected countries. For example, when I sell stock now, a market maker takes the other side. But he won't want to if he has to pay 0.1% for the privilege. So now I can't sell a stock to an intermediary? I need to wait for another investor or a mutual fund to take the other side of my trade?

What am I missing? That can't be right?

Edit: one immediate thing that sticks out is that "derivatives" will be created to replace stocks, since the tax savings is about 90% by doing that. For example, let's say a stock costs $10.00. Why not create an "American style" call option on that stock, strike price $0.01, expiration date 2099. The value of that option is $9.99. But the tax rate is 0.01% on the derivative, vs 0.1% on the stock itself. Someone hasn't thought things through here.

<comment><USER8> > if a mutual fund bought a stock twice in a year, and then sold that stock > twice in a year

I think the idea is that such moves contribute to the instability of the market as a whole, and hence should pay a small penalty for it.

> I think that could dry up trading volumes by about 95% in the affected > countries.

Yes, it is not entirely clear that large trading volumes contribute anything positive to the economy as a whole. There are real people _somewhere_ in the picture who are trying to buy/sell shares in regular and are getting shafted in terms of either buying price or trading fees by high-frequency bots. The tax should even out things a little bit for the average person.

<comment><USER9> Buying and selling don't contribute to market instability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Citadel letter mentioned in the article ([http://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-16.pdf](http://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-16.pdf)) is a very good read. I work in the industry and they hit all the main problems with IEX's approach.

<comment><USER11> > This damage to market quality would be further magnified by the "fast pass" > that IEX proposes to give its affiliated routing broker-dealer (the "IEX > Router") and its pegged order types. It is ironic that IEX—a company > supposedly founded to protect investors from various types of latency > arbitrage—now proposes to offer pegged orders and IEX Router services that > can and will be used by sophisticated trading firms to arbitrage the latency > that IEX itself would create.

Could you explain this in more general terms? Especially,

1) Does IEX propose to exempt some traders from the delay? Isn't that obviously worse than no delay at all?

2) What are "pegged orders"?

Also, if you don't mind being spokesperson for an entire industry, is there a sense that when we are debating 350 microseconds, things are a bit absurd?

<comment><USER12> I just finished reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, it was an incredibly enlightening read. To answer your questions:

1) I think it's 350mcs across the board except in the case of firms which conduct suspect activity (canceling orders frequently for example). Adding the delay institutes a level playing field across anyone trading on the exchange. The basis of HFT is leveraging faster connection speeds to gain insight into other's trading strategies and exploiting those strategies, all before the other firm's trade reach the exchange. This is a HIGHLY simplistic explanation dealing with one form of arbitrage and given for brevity on the subject.

2) EDIT: the other guy explained this better!

To your point about 350mcs being absurd to argue over, HFT firms manage regular trading speeds in NANOSECONDS. Look at 350mcs in those terms (350,000 nanoseconds) and it's not such a small number anymore.

<comment><USER13> If you thought Flash Boys was enlightening then you didn't read carefully. He makes shit up.

Take the one example of a trader that claims the market jumps just by he entering a symbol and quantity- not submitting the order. That's _huge_! It means espionage in a major trader's office! But since Lewis knows it's just bullshit coincidence, he just says "oooo spooky HFTs".

Flash Boys: Not So Fast is a far better book. And even better, it's actually acurate.

Lewis's book is just an ad for IEX, hoping to scare ignorant people into worrying about perfectly fine stuff. The star, Brad, in his first scene, is _shocked_ , just _shocked_ , that his 50,000 order could cause price impact.

(Think: the customer paid 5 cents (2500$) to get Brad to sneakily sell the shares - obviously price impact is to be expected.)

There are plenty of cross markets, and nothing stops anyone from running a 5-second auction (with simple pro rata or complicated rules like POSIT). But IEXs investors just think coiling 38mi of fiber is neater. At least it makes a cool display for data center visits.)

<comment><USER14> > Flash Boys: Not So Fast is a far better book. And even better, it's actually > accurate.

I just read it on a recommendation from HN. Entertained me on a longhaul flight. Boy, does the author take apart Flash Boys. Alas, approximately no one will ever read this deconstruction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm pretty naive on this topic, but wouldn't adding an artificial delay only create more opportunities for arbitrage vs other exchanges?

</comment><comment><USER16> > Those companies have all said that IEX will introduce one more complex > wrinkle that will end up benefiting one set of market participants over > another, rather than leveling the playing field.

Is there a notion of fairness that is both canonical and pins down one market structure as fairest?

<comment><USER17> I don't think there's any such notion of fairness. But if there is...

There's a saying to the effect that "anything is difficult to explain to someone whose income depends on not understanding it". The hypothetical perfect notion of fairness will face many people giving fine-sounding but self-serving explanations of why it is not actually fair.

<comment><USER16> I agree. There's also that fairness can be applied to the social structure that generates the rules for the market. Suppose that there is a fairest market structure. We may even call it the "free market". It may be the case that you can enforce the structure of the free market on everyone else, but a lot of people would be rather angry with you if you did it like a violent dictator.

So it may be the case that a system that tries to enforce free market conditions must be allowed to deviate from that ideal in order to be itself fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In case anyone initially overlooks it, as I did: The proposed delay is 350 _micro_ -seconds, or millionths of a second, not the _milli_ -seconds that ping measures for me.

If the question is whether a 350 microsecond delay is acceptable and whether it's fair to small investors, we're asking the wrong questions. For example, should HN introduce a 350 microsecond delay to posting comments? Would that be fair?

(In the correction at the bottom, you can see the NY Times made the same mistake I did.)

<comment><USER18> If I'm not mistaken, this is all people who will make less money because of this change claiming that "some other people" will make less money because of this change. It would be considered "FUD" if it was a Silicon Valley company saying this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't believe so much is written about 350 usec in delay. I mean, that must be the least controversial change you would ever make.

If someone wants to make an exchange with static added latency, that's not the same as making everyone's latency the same, which the article conflates. The change is nearly pointless, and they argue it to death.

There are much more interesting things going on with exchanges than this.

</comment><comment><USER20> What if you just accept algorithmic trading, and allow companies to upload an "agent" that handles trades for them?

Each agent, running on a standardized VM, can be given the same amount of CPU cycles, the same standardized data feed, and logically run in the same time slice. Companies can add real time data to the feed, but it is also available to everyone else. Private data is delayed by a second or so, as are new agent uploads.</comment>


Show HN: "Keep Calm and Python" t-shirts to support PSF - <AUTHOR> http://teespring.com/keep-calm-python

<comment><USER2> Reserved.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would have loved to buy this tee if not for that _Crown_ /insignia! (Nth wrong with it, my personal preference :-) )

Just asking, are you British?

<comment><USER4> Probably just a reference to the original source: <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keep-calm-and-carry-on></comment></comment>


Request: simple story promotion algorithm - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I recently added a karma-like voting system to posts in a phpBB forum that was having some problems with spam (we have an point incentive system that users use to bid for real items - now instead of rewarding points for posts, they're now awarded for votes).
My question is; does anyone know a simple algorithm that can get a list of the "best-recent" posts based on votes. So simply if an item has a certain number of positive and negative points with each vote point made at a certain time, how can I combine that to get a list of highly voted, recent posts.
I could obviously research and come up with something myself, but there's probably quite a few people here who have experience in this area, so I thought it was worth a post!
Thanks, James <comment><USER2> PG recently posted the algorithm that news.yc uses:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704>

</comment><comment><USER3> I use an algorithm where recent votes and posts has more weight:

(votes from the last two hours times 1) + (votes from the next two hours times 0.75)... and so on. Do the same for posts. Because it's expensive to calulate these values, I have a cron job that updates the scores every fifteen minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds perfect - thanks.

Presumably after several hours you could discount the votes altogether since they would have such a little influence on the final result. That would stop the system getting bogged down over time.

Out of interest, what is your "and so on". Do you go to 0.5 for the next 2 hours?

<comment><USER3> Yes, the so on means go to 0.5 for the next 2 hours. Of course you have to tweak the parameters to get the desired results for your site. It how all depends on how much you value recent posts and votes, versus overall votes. I also subtract a value depending on how old the post is. The site I use this for doesn't have any users, but it seems to work well in my limited testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rank = ( ( current_time - post_time ) / number_of_votes )

Simple enough!

<comment><USER2> That would make everything start out at #1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Presumably the "best" post would be the one with the lowest rank.

<comment><USER2> Yes. By the above formula, everything would have a rank of zero when it was first posted.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you exclude everything with 0 votes, since you can't divide by 0 anyway, it might work.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quicksilver: Configuration Distribution at Internet Scale - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-quicksilver-configuration-distribution-at-internet-scale/ <comment><USER2> As I was reading about the problems this system needs to solve and the issues with Kyoto Tycoon, I thought that LMDB might be a good foundation for a solution. So I was gratified to find out that Quicksilver indeed uses LMDB. I gather Cloudflare has found that LMDB is indeed as reliable as it's advertised to be.

Looking forward to the eventual open-source release of Quicksilver.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was working on something similar one year ago for a personal project.

I simply persisted the config in Mysql and synced the data to redis. Then each server had a redis replica locally to allow fast reads from OpenResty (nginx+lua scripts).

The project never took off, it was just an MVP. But why would someone pick Kyoto Tycoon instead?

</comment><comment><USER4> The story of how they picked a storage engine ill-suited for their needs and then used ridiculous and unsustainable workarounds to deal with its shortcomings (including unsafe practices like relying on rebuilding the databases, assuming it's safe to turn off synchronous writes for KV storage writes, etc) just confirms how shoddy engineering is at CloudFlare. That is peak technical debt.

(It's one thing to make a wrong choice, it's another to think you can paper over those mistakes and they'll go away.)

<comment><USER5> This is an extremely unconstructive comment. It's easy to be critical with 20/20 hindsight.

More constructively: what would you have picked back in _2011_ when Cloudflare was getting off the ground? Ideally, it needs to have a memcached like interface (for easy gets/puts from Lua + NGINX), still operate when disconnected from upstreams (CDN POPs can have unreliable upstream conns), be cheap/free in terms of CAPEX/licensing, and be optimized for (extremely) read- heavy workloads. Strong consistency is less useful here.

"Technical debt" only debt after the fact. Most of the time, it's the result of a series of (likely rational) trade-offs you've made given the current state of your business.

<comment><USER4> You're right, my comment would have been more valuable if I'd included some alternate technologies they could have used instead, but I believe that the criticisms still stand regardless, because the approach itself is in question. You don't find out _once you 've reached scale_ that the underpinnings for your distributed KV platform are not actually free of global locks for writes! That's something you verify and test for yourself before building your empire upon it. If an alternative exists, you use it. If not, you need to build it.

To answer your question:

> what would you have picked back in _2011_ when Cloudflare was getting off > the ground?

Not only "would have" but did pick and use (well before 2011) an abstraction around SQLite because our team first evaluated our read vs write requirements and found it to be an adequate option rather than going crazy trying to find a nosql solution worthy of including on our resumes.

The Cloudflare article is somewhat skimpy on the details of their benchmark, so these numbers are not an exact equivalent but, here, I just threw this together: [https://github.com/mqudsi/sqlite-readers- writers](https://github.com/mqudsi/sqlite-readers-writers)

P99.9 for reads with two writers is 2ms as compared to their 1215ms, and this is with full ACID compliance and write synchronization.

You don't need to be an expert in _creating_ these systems, you just have to be able to test and validate your architectural decisions before building upon them. It takes only an hour or three to pick a library and write a similar benchmark for any KV store you're interested in (although the exact benchmark would have to be tweaked to match your expected needs).

(That said, lmdb is a great choice and I've recommended it here on HN before... except they ended up replicating on top of it a lot of what SQLite provides for free. Their transaction logs are almost like SQLite's WAL which I used in my benchmark, except going with SQLite would have skipped the entire second half of their Quicksilver solution since it they wouldn't need to manually handle transaction logs, split payloads, and manually reassemble to avoid fragmentation.)</comment></comment></comment>


Pi-Hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole <comment><USER2> I absolutely love the DNS based solution for ad-blocking and preventing tracking. I use AdGuard DNS on my PC (DNSCrypt) [0] and phone (DoTLS) [1], and it has improved performance of apps (not just websites), 'cause I guess there's a lot less going on under the hood now (trackers like new-relic and segment might be consuming a good percentage of resources which they wouldn't now since their domains are NX'ing?).

What am I worried about is DNS based black-holing is trivial to workaround against (as an ad-provider, one could simply force use a custom DNS client and pin to a DNS resolver of choice) [2][3][4]. What's next for pi-hole and solutions like AdGuard DNS short of re-writing packets going through UDP/53? Not sure how one would intercept the DoTLS / DoHTTPS connections, to rewrite those.

I'd like to hear if anyone has some thoughts on this, or if this has been discussed elsewhere.

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

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788410)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106023)

[4] Firefox 64 for PC, by default, was configured to ignore OS/Network Interface provided DNS resolver and used CloudFlare's over HTTPS.

<comment><USER3> Re #4: really?! I missed that news. Sounds horrible. So instead of using my ISP, that I chose and trust, all my DNS queries now go to some foreign megacorp?!

<comment><USER4> This is also the first time I heard about it, but my immediate reaction was "sounds amazing".

\- Removes all DNS leak privacy issues, for all Firefox users, automatically

\- Removes all possibility for a MitM to view or corrupt DNS queries or responses, for all Firefox users, automatically

And Cloudflare claims to delete all DNS-related logs of Firefox users within 24 hours: [https://developers.cloudflare.com/188.8.131.52/commitment-to- priv...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/18.104.22.168/commitment-to- privacy/privacy-policy/firefox/)

Even if you distrust Cloudflare or think they're not secure against breaches, it's still a massive security and privacy upgrade over using your ISP's DNS servers, which will pretty much always leak sensitive information about your connection (potentially leading to deanonymization while using an anonymizing service) _and_ send/receive everything in unauthenticated plaintext.

And in addition, your ISP likely is less trustworthy and less secure against breaches (even if you aren't using Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T) than Cloudflare. But again, even if you don't trust them, this would still be the best move for security.

Plus it's a big latency decrease and performance boost for most or all users.

<comment><USER3> Sure it has some advantages, but it has disadvantages too. It really erodes my trust in Mozilla that they did this without notification upon upgrade, and as opt-out instead of opt-in.

My ISP is trustworthy and is in my own city/country. Today I've discovered that all my DNS queries now go to a foreign company that I know nothing about, and did not consent to communicate with.

I'm all for encrypted DNS, but I'm not for my DNS server choice being silently overridden.

<comment><USER5> How do you feel that even with your isp your data still passes through servers in multiple countries before it gets to you? When you request to view a site it's not a single hope from you to the server the site is hosted on.

<comment><USER6> Is that not the point of SSL?

<comment><USER7> DNS is in the clear by default.

<comment><USER6> I thought that once DNS is resolved the DNS request doesn't go any further and the actual request is sent to the IP address...

<comment><USER7> Yes, but the parent comment you replied to was, I believe, referring to data leakage via DNS, not data leakage over HTTP requests. Two different things. What they were getting at is your ISP's DNS servers--and every DNS server hit along the path of resolution--know something about every request made by one of your devices when your devices route DNS through them. Assuming every request to _domain.com_ is encrypted, your ISP may not know _what you 're sending to domain.com_, but they do know _you are sending data to domain.com_ because DNS is in the clear by default. This has led a number of ISPs to capture this information and use it for purposes a customer often does not know about, understand, or may object to--such as selling that information, using it for injecting advertising or hijacking requests, and other actions. What's worse is that many ISPs (in the US, at least) ensure this behavior can occur by requiring customers to use gateways/routers that are locked down to ISP DNS servers, and many of these devices _prevent_ users from modifying the DNS servers used.

Encrypted DNS and devices like the Pi-hole provide end users a means of bypassing this behavior by avoiding ISP DNS servers entirely so even _where you 're trying to go_ isn't known by them.

<comment><USER4> This is one of the many concerns, yes.

Another big concern is privacy from the other side: if you're using Tor or an anonymizing VPN while visiting a website looking to deanonymize users, and the website owners see a DNS query to their nameserver from a Comcast DNS server somewhere in a midwestern state timed perfectly before your HTTP request coming from a Tor exit node or anonymizing VPN, they can potentially infer your broad location and ISP, and potentially narrow your identity down from there (especially if you ever visited that site, or an affiliated site or site that shares data with them, in the past without using an anonymizer), negating the purpose of the anonymizer.

If all they see is a query from 188.8.131.52 or 22.214.171.124, you could be anywhere in the world, using any ISP.

And your ISP can do this in an even more precise way. Customer makes DNS query for siteispsdontlike.com and then immediately sends a lot of traffic to a server registered to an anonymizing VPN company. That tells the ISP "this customer is visiting this 'suspicious' website, and also covering it up by using this specific anonymizer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to test pihole you can just run it in a docker container to see what it's like. You don't need to buy a Raspberry Pi!

[https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/](https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/)

<comment><USER9> I'm running the Docker image for my home network, it is really convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Right now I use AdBlock plus. Occasionally, to get a webpage to work, I have to disable it.

How does Pi-hole mitigate this issue for non-expert users? My main concern is that if I set this up at home, my wife will get annoyed when her web pages don't work and won't have the patience to learn how to add to the whitelist.

<comment><USER11> I am using pfsense with pfblockerng for ad/tracking protection. My wife spents a good amount of time on a mobile fashion game. In addition to the forced in app purchases once a month, it makes her watch plenty of video ads every day. She has to watch those ads to get virtual currency that can be used to purchase things that is a must for playing the game. With the protection enabled, the ads won't show and she can't play. So I had to whiteliste her mobile in pfblockerng. She still complains that it doesn't work. So she uses mobile data to play the game. I am not sure what else in pfsense is breaking it for her, I haven't looked further into it. One good thing is it helps me save bandwidth. My home internet has 500gb limit after which it drops to 1/10th of the speed. She seems to be using up close to her 1.5gb daily limit almost always, just from this game and facebook. So I get more bandwidth to download stuff!

<comment><USER12> Jesus that game sounds like a big trap

<comment><USER11> It is. I have been trying to get her to stop playing it by introducing to other games. But no. She spents a good chunk of her free time on this. Since she is a teacher, she gets a lot of free time at work too. It hasn't affected either of us negatively that I know off, so I sometimes think let her do what she enjoys. I hope it is not indicative of her being unsatisfied with something in our life.

The game's name is Covet Fashion. They have a huge following in Facebook. The main theme of the game is to dress up models and others vote on it. Whoever gets the "top look" wins (winner gets virtual currency to buy more dress I think). I think they even form teams through Facebook. Sometimes people get kicked out for not helping the team and so on, so I guess there is some drama like reality TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are some good discussions on Pi-Hole over on this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159)

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, didn't realize it was already on 5 months ago

<comment><USER14> No problem, since people upvote it you're apparently not the only one who thought the content is useful to the site. Reposts are fine (heck, posts that are decades old come up from time to time), though it's somewhat customary to link previous discussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder why there is no public official dns-server with the pi-hole blockings included. This would allow me to just insert the dns-ip into my fritzbox without having to setup and run a raspberry.

<comment><USER16> You're probably going to want to whitelist a domain here and there relative to the default blacklist. And the pi-hole has a few blacklists that aren't enabled by default, since they are much more strict.

So pi-hole-as-a-service doesn't make too much sense.

<comment><USER15> Ok thats a good argument. But the few pihole-users i know do not have a single whitelisted domain and likely will never have one. Also I could still whitelist most domains by adding the ip to my etc/hosts

<comment><USER17> I'm a long time pi-hole user and follow the subreddit and discourse regularly. You'll find many a pi-hole user with whitelists. The following are pretty common.

* [https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/commonly-whitelisted-domains...](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/commonly-whitelisted-domains/212)

* [https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist](https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist)

I have ~2.2M domains blocked. There's just no way that I wouldn't have false positives in that big of a list.

<comment><USER18> 1 million here - nothing whitelisted or knowingly broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Should the URL be [https://pi-hole.net](https://pi-hole.net) instead of one of their GitHub repos?

<comment><AUTHOR> I find the Github readme easier to parse (often the case with open source projects actually)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you're interested in Pi-hole you might want to check out AdGuard Home:

[https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome](https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome)

Pi-hole isn't difficult to setup but AdGuard Home is much easier. Just download the binary and run it. If you want it to start on boot run it with the `--install` flag. Works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

<comment><USER21> Pi-hole replaces your DNS on the local network so one device is protecting all your other devices without you having to do anthing else. Yes, even that Wii or whatever :-)

<comment><USER20> Same with AdGuard Home. :)

<comment><USER21> Except it stops running the second I turn off my computer :-)

<comment><USER20> Then don't install it on your computer? :P

You can install it on a Pi just like Pi-hole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been running an instance of this on a DigitalOcean VM for a couple of years now. Keeping my instance external is nice so I can use it from home, work, and for friends and family, with all of my devices. Fantastic project, highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> How do you stop the general public from finding it and using it? Strict firewall rules?

I have a pihole at home (not a Rasperry Pi, gosh I wish they'd ditch the marrying of the two) but to access it I establish a VPN.

<comment><USER23> I set up a simple python server that listens on a specific (highly unlikely to be guessed) url and when visited runs a shell script to add the visiting ip to iptables dns whitelist. So I can visit a relatives house, go to that page then add my dns ip to their router (if they want me to). Also helps for when traveling or when isp renews dhcp lease.

<comment><USER8> This is a beautiful solution. I love it, bravo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I recently talked about Pi-Hole in another thread[0]: I'm using Wireguard in combination with Pi-Hole on a cheap VPS as a VPN on my iPhone, it's blazingly fast and super stable. Will be trying this on my Mac as well now. I only allow access to the console from a fixed IP-address to add whitelists when needed. Everything loads much faster, websites, even apps I feel, though it might just be wishful thinking that last one.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186795)

<comment><USER25> What VPS and how much is it costing you?

<comment><USER24> About 3 Euro per month using a CX11 over at Hetzner[0]

[0][https://www.hetzner.com/cloud](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How pi-hole works and what is FTLDNS, if anyone is interested: [https://pi- hole.net/2018/06/09/ftldns-and-unbound-combined-f...](https://pi- hole.net/2018/06/09/ftldns-and-unbound-combined-for-your-own-all-around-dns- solution/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I came across this article last month: [https://ifelse.io/2019/01/12/secure- ad-free-internet-anywher...](https://ifelse.io/2019/01/12/secure-ad-free- internet-anywhere-with-streisand-and-pi-hole/)

It was surprisingly very easy and straightforward to setup, and working very well! It's most useful on Android/iOS.

One small change I've done is to set the Pi-hole DNS server only on a specific set of VPN connections (using specific ports) in order to have a full, unfiltered VPN if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER28> Forgive my ignorance on the matter, but:

1) Are the DNS request sent to oblivion or a fake address is returned instead? If the former, wouldn't a failed DNS request generate some sort of timeout?

2) Would a failed DNS request generate multiple retries to load a resource that is not available? (I can imagine this for application other than browsers).

3) How long until pages with ads will start solving addresses through some sort of script? Like in the section of the page responsible for showing an ad, manually crafting and sending a DNS request to 22.214.171.124 or whatever.

edit: for clarity

<comment><USER29> It runs a local DNS server and a local http host.

You make a DNS query to badsite.com, your local DNS responds with your local http host and you load a pixel image instead of whatever it should have been.

<comment><USER30> So in that regard, what does a page look like with Pi-Hole running? As 'aesthetic' as uBlock? Or does it still show the ad's dimensions - just not the ad?

<comment><USER31> In my experience I don't notice things being different when I'm using the Pi- Hole. It just seems like regular functional internet. When I'm not connected is when I'm surprised by how many ads there are and where and when they appear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I run it at home and have use the dhcp server, too. All the numerous family PCs, Kindles, phone, etc, use it and it works great. For a family of four with two teen-age kids, it blocks about 20% of the DNS traffic we create.

Love it.

</comment><comment><USER33> As much as I like the Pi, I think a better solution would be to use OpenWRT on a regular router.

<comment><USER8> Well, I disagree. OpenWRT is great at being a router, let it be that. pihole is great at being an adblocker, let it be that.

I think you're better off to fire up a Docker instance!

[https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/](https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/)

But why do you think OpenWRT is better? Because it has a (somewhat clunky and not as feature rich) adblock solution built it?

So does pfSense with pfBlocker-NG which is also another common adblock solution people use.

But for a basic user to just augment their home network with ad-filtering, way better off to just have add a pihole, than to totally replace their router.

<comment><USER33> Yes, OpenWRT does have an adblock solution. It might not be as shiny as the PiHole but it works. Also, you can buy a decent router for less than you would pay for Pi+Cables+Case+Power Source.

I use a tp-link wr842nd. I even have a Telegram bot on it to interact with it. A Pi would be more powerful, sure, but the router serves my needs.

<comment><USER8> Right, I was more curious why you thought OpenWRT was a better solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A friend and I just launched an MVP a couple of weeks ago so people in New Zealand (and kiwis abroad) could have a VPN with PiHole hosted here in NZ: [https://expatvpn.co.nz](https://expatvpn.co.nz) \- however from the early users it seems everyone's just been using it for their phone mainly. I'm thinking I might rebrand it to be more for secure mobile browsing or something...

<comment><USER24> I use it also on my iPhone with WireGuard VPN, it's super easy with the app from WireGuard and it's blazingly fast, so I can definitely recommend this. Would be interested to know how you'd approach this and provide some insights if needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If any contributors are reading this: please consider adding separate blocklists per IP range. The use case is very simple: adults in the house get to see things kids don't get to see (and get their Youtube and games shut off if homework is not done), yet ads and tracking are still blocked for everybody.

<comment><USER17> This will almost certainly never get implemented because the community has a more or less accepted workaround. Run more than 1 pi-hole.

It's a common-ish practice in the community to have a restrictive pi-hole running in your guest/kids network and a more permissive pi-hole running in the trusted/adults network. Pi-holes require so few resources and maintenance that it's not much burden to run more than one.

It would be a pretty large feature to support separate blocklists per IP range.

<comment><USER35> That's what I do, but it's a maintenance burden to run several instances. I run three PiHole VMs: one for parents (banning ads only), one for little kids (banning ads and mature content), and one for teenagers (banning ads and temporarily banning "time drain" sites until homework is done). I'd like to further customize the one for teenagers based on whether or not they have missing homework in school, but not quite to the level of spinning up (and maintaining) yet another instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My concern is that this kind of solutions, while neat, may push advertisers to start requiring content owners to host the advertisement content and/or directly communicate with advertiser api. In other words, Pi-Hole will only work while not terribly popular.

<comment><USER37> > may push advertisers to start requiring content owners to host the > advertisement content

Good luck with that. There is a reason they want you to load directly from their ad-network. It's the surest way they have to accurately track valid clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I tried this out over a weekend but decided to abandon it due to some of the sites I frequent being blocked. Whitelisting isn't a viable solution here as I would then need to teach my girlfriend how to do it and any family members who decide to visit.

<comment><USER39> PiHole has the option to have blackholed domains show a "This was blocked by PiHole, click here to whitelist this domain". It doesnt work perfectly (ex. Hulu just craps out for me with PiHole because of some domain under the hood being blocked), but it is something.

And for guests you can disable PiHole for any time period with a click of the button on its web page.

Or kick your guests/roomates/gf onto a different subnet.

That said though, it is clearly not perfect and could use some work and TLC to take care of. But in case you (or the nest person reading this) wanted some ideas, I thought I'd offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am starting to be concerned that the ability to use DNS to block tracking, malware, and advertisements is only going to prove temporary.

There appears to be more effort generally to secure and encrypt the entire DNS system. This is really good and should be applauded and supported. But it will come with a downside... once we reach a future in which DNS records are encrypted end to end, and DNS records are only valid when signed by certain keys, and authenticated NXDOMAIN records... then things like Pi-Hole start to become more difficult as for security of DNS we'll have lost the convenience of changing the answers.

<comment><USER41> There would be a market for a DNS provider to provide a PKEY setup for the user to blacklist ad domains or whatnot similar to what the pi-hole does.

There is always a technical solution, that's the beauty of it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have been running a pi-hole server in my home for almost a year now, and I love it. We usually have around 30 devices (including IoT devices), and have never had any issues. Adding/removing sites, disabling (when necessary), updating...its all there and very easy to operate. The logs are just ok, and the blacklist/whitelist is handy.

It was quick and easy to setup on an existing Ubuntu server install.

<comment><USER43> All the issues I've had were related to the DHCP server that ships with pihole. Once I replaced that with a different DHCP server - smooth sailing.

<comment><USER42> ahhhhhh...ok. I have never used pi-hole for DHCP. I already had some static routes and firewall rules setup when I added the pi-hole. So I left the builtin DHCP server disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can any of the DNS wizards here explain the potential performance implications of using this? I have been meaning to install this and begin using it but the latency of a Cloudflare DNS request is so low (and reliable) that I don't know if I want to risk introducing this into my network stack.

I have an R720 and a few old RPi's... so either major overkill hardware or major weaksauce hardware.

<comment><USER14> DNS wizard checking in. This stuff was designed in the 80s and I ran BIND on the kind of potato that has a quarter of the RAM that a raspberry pi has, together with apache, mysql, php, vnc, utorrent, and some other stuff, and it still performed great. I don't know by heart which dns server pihole uses, but no, the latency added by a server on your LAN is negligible. Case in point, most (all?) routers do dns forwarding by default (is that not common in the USA? Since you mention cloudflare, which got to be slower than the default option unless you have some really cheapo isp).

<comment><USER45> "and I ran BIND on the kind of potato that has a quarter of the RAM that a raspberry pi has"

256MB RAM? - bloody luxury!

A very quick and a bit rubbish experiment:

      $ ping 18.104.22.168
       5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 10ms
      rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 9.982/10.838/12.531/0.888 ms

      $ dig @188.8.131.52 www.google.com A
       ;; Query time: 13 msec

DNS is pretty quick. Note how I mistakenly use ICMP and a UDP service response time to imply _something_. If I'd tried to claim that DNS adds about 5ms overhead, I would have been first to put the boot in. The basic result stands though - DNS is quick. The above results are from: my laptop -> wifi -> switch -> switch -> APU2c based pfSense box with quite a lot going on -> modem (FTTC in UK - PPPoE/A) -> ISP .... etc.

<comment><USER14> > 256MB RAM?

Oh, an eighth then, I didn't know the raspi had that much RAM.

And this was on a ~2002 laptop in 2011 or so, I'm not old enough to have run it in the 80s on a real potato :(

<comment><USER46> only the first revision (and the A/A+ until the 3A+ came out) had 256Mb. It was soon upgraded to 512 as one of the first design changes (before moving to the "plus" form factor with 40 pin GPIO header) the early A's even had 128Mb but they are a rare thing as the original A was not promoted much before the first upgrade cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have a Pi-hole running on a Raspberry Pi Zero. The Pi is connected to my home router using the USB Ethernet gadget features. The home router handles local DNS requests from those forwarded by Pi-hole, but the rest of my DNS just flows through the Pi.

It's pretty nice. Never had an issue with the router's DNS, but OpenWRT also doesn't have the ease of Pi-hole.

</comment><comment><USER48> I love this project. I also donated to it. I've been using it now for about 6 months and it blocks about 15% of my traffic.

<comment><USER49> Me too, i've been using it in combination with CloudFlareD (DNS over HTTPS daemon) and it works like a charm. Except when my ISP changes my public IP and CloudFlareD hangs so i have to restart the service. There is a bug for it, but the Pi-Hole itself works really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I setup a Pi hole about 6 months ago and I love it. It has never caused me grief and it has never gone down.

One of my favorite parts is being able to show people who come over to visit all the queries their cell phones make to ad networks while we're just carrying on a typical conversation.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is there an option to buy a raspberry pi with this pre-installed? Asking for a non-technical friend.

<comment><USER52> A user linked in this thread the shop [https://pi-hole.net/shop/](https://pi- hole.net/shop/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I bought a Raspberry Pi specifically for this, then I realized the obvious, it's useless outside of the house :) It was good for the old Wi-Fi-only iPad the little one was using, but pointless for my needs. I like having the Pi to play with though.

<comment><USER17> Setup a VPN tunnel for your DNS traffic and benefit from your Pi-hole wherever you go. I use Tasker on Android to automatically detect when I'm not on home wifi and then trigger OpenVPN to connect to my home VPN for Pihole and local network access.

<comment><USER53> On my phone I use Firefox and uBlock Origin and I don't install ad funded apps, or any closed source apps I'm not forced to have, so I haven't really felt the need to go that route. The only ad supported app my kids use on their devices is YouTube but, last I checked, Pi-Hole isn't able to block those ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone know any alternative projects (that are still dns based)? I don't need all the web interface parts. I think I just want a good, recent dnsmasq config. If it does new crypto dns stuff, that'd be cool too. I'm not up to date.

<comment><USER55> I use Unbound[1] for DNS caching and local DNS. I have Unbound configured to forward queries to a local Stubby[2] instance that does DNS over TLS to CloudFlare.

Stubby does keep-alives and not restricted to a single thread and opening a new connection per query like Unbound which is why I used it as a forwarder as a few more features than Unbound.

In my Unbound config I have an include to a blocklist generated from [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts), essentially I pipe the data from that repo through awk [3]

I have an Android TV box so also have a firewall rule to redirect all queries to 22.214.171.124 and 126.96.36.199 port 53 to my local DNS server.

No GUI's, solid and stable. Only thing missing is I need to write a cron job to fetch the latest block list, validate, convert to Unbound format and reload the daemon. It's only a 10 minutes job just something I haven't got round to yet.

OpenBSD is really good for running this stuff.

[1] [https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/](https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/) [2] [https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Daemon+-+...](https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Daemon+-+Stubby) [3] [https://deadc0de.re/articles/unbound-blocking- ads.html](https://deadc0de.re/articles/unbound-blocking-ads.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts) works well too.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does it make sense to make it run on a small virtual server box?

<comment><USER58> If you're already running one, absolutely.

RPis are popular and the namesake because they're relatively cheap, low power consumption, but powerful enough - so a good choice for people that don't already have some always-on hardware to run it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Great project, but unfortunately doesn't block YouTube ads.

</comment><comment><USER60> I use Windscribe VPN. In the online settings menu you can alter the DNS to block Malware & Phishing, Ads & Trackers and even Social Networks.

</comment><comment><USER61> Are there any technologies that can reinforce ads on a site?

I know a site owner can track visitors with ad-blockers and show them warnings, but that is not it.

</comment><comment><USER62> How many of you would pay for a paid adblocker? Where the funds go to content owners?

<comment><USER63> Like Brave? [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

<comment><USER62> Ish. Not exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> How is it any better or more efficient than host blocking à la [1], if at all? I'm a brainlet, use baby language if you're going to explain.

[1]: [http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm](http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm)

<comment><USER8> It's network wide. Anyone joining your network and being given the PiHole as its DNS server means it gets the ad blocking benefits.

It also updates the hosts files itself on a regular basis, you don't have to remember to do it as a manual task.

It gives you a nice webgui to show you what devices are accessing what hosts, how often they try to access them (at least, how often they request their DNS name) and has different modes of blocking (vs a hosts file has to return 127.0.0.1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Also comes in docker form for those so inclined. Useful for home servers

</comment><comment><USER66> What is the advantages of using pi-hole vs uBlock origin?

<comment><USER67> pi-hole covers all of the machines on your network, not just the browser. That said, I didn't uninstall uBlock Origin. They can be complimentary.

</comment></comment><comment> otter-in-a-suit pi-hole is amazing. It blocks ~20% of my network traffic, based on ~1M domains.

I'm still amazed that they recommend piping curl to bash though...

</comment><comment><USER68> Also consider obfuscation like AdNauseam.

</comment><comment><USER69> What makes this better than Adguard DNS?

</comment><comment><USER61> What if it is a scam to get the free content of the site without watching its ads?

</comment><comment><USER70> does it work on a gigabit network yet?

<comment><USER71> Yes, easily. What problem did you have using it on a gigabit network?

I'm using it for two years now on my gigabit FTTH connection, running in a LXC container on my router. No problems to report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Here is a Unicorn idea for a successful startup!

Develop a technology that protects ad-supported web sites from ad-blocking scammers ;)

<comment><USER72> There are a lot of people, myself included, who just want to be able to use websites. I am trying to avoid two major things when I block advertisements online:

1\. Dangerous ads - Cryptominers, viruses/whatever, and the like.

2\. Wasteful resource usage - I also block most scripts and unneeded fonts because the value to me of downloading all these add-ons is very low compared to the cost to me through network congestion and possible vulnerabilities.

I pay to support content creators I get value from, and if more creators followed a reasonable, proportional, fee I would support more.</comment></comment>


Ruby, C, and Java are pass-by-value, Perl is pass-by-reference - <AUTHOR> http://advogato.org/person/fxn/diary/534.html <comment><USER2> The interesting bit with Perl is that so many people don't realize it's pass- by-reference because the standard idioms for starting a function copy the aliased "references" by value, which then act just like in any of the other languages.

      $var = shift; // Take the first value passed to the function, copy into $var

or

      ($var1, $var2, $var3) = @_ // Copy the first three into $var1, $var2, and $var3

Using the aliased variables directly and with the intentional goal of altering the originals is almost unheard of in my experience (excluding some clever bits of magic in a few modules). Even if you want to pass a reference: you'd pass an explicit reference, copy that, then dereference the copy.</comment>


What is Happening in Turkey - <AUTHOR> http://visual.ly/what-happening-turkey

<comment><AUTHOR> Police brutality:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dksWliwLbvs>

See how they point the tear gas gun directly at the cameraman. As a result of good marksmanship some people lost their eyes.

(NSFW) <http://twitpic.com/cv3noq></comment>


Sundar Pichai: 'Technology Doesn't Solve Humanity's Problems' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/business/sundar-pichai-google-corner-office.html <comment><USER2> To put the title into context:

"Do you still feel like Silicon Valley has retained that idealism that struck you when you arrived here?"

"There's still that optimism. But the optimism is tempered by a sense of deliberation. Things have changed quite a bit. You know, we deliberate about things a lot more, and we are more thoughtful about what we do. But there's a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. It was always naïve to think so. Technology is an enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity's problems. I think we're both over-reliant on technology as a way to solve things and probably, at this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of all problems, too."

<comment><USER3> <<But there's a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. It was always naïve to think so. Technology is an enabler>>

Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people and China to be more oppressive until its workers protested. So he's right about humanity having to solve its problems but he's forgetting that Google, the corporation, is opting to make it harder for humanity to solve its problems by enabling those who do not have humanity's best interest in their heart.

<comment><USER4> > Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people

The world is complicated, and things are never as simple as that.

Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing?

It is always too easy to ignore the world as it is and focus on a utopian case. War will happen, with whatever tools are available.

<comment><USER5> > Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet > bombing?

No one was ever going to carpet bomb a wedding.

<comment><USER4> > No one was ever going to carpet bomb a wedding.

Not a wedding, indeed, an entire town, with possibly dozens of weddings happening at the same time. Plus hospitals, schools, etc.

If you had to pick between carpet bombing and smart bombs, which one would you pick? (And consider you don't have a choice, like the trolley problem, you NEED to pick one).

<comment><USER6> >And consider you don't have a choice

How do we not have a choice to NOT bomb a desert on the other side of the world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Technology absolutely solves humanity's problems. There's pretty much no problem that given a large thoughtful effort, technology has not solved. The problem is that humanity is bad at choosing where to invest in technology. Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is not the problem.

People act like somehow the technology has a mind and it wants us to be free or some bs. Silicon Valley isn't special. It's part of the same system to maximize short-term profit and the whimsical wants of billionaires. Technology would absolutely solve humanity's problems. That is if we put our money where our mouth's are.

<comment><USER8> You're certainly correct that the major problem is social, economic, and structural, but I do think there are some technologies that are inherently tricky to justify regardless of the economic structures they arise in.

The atomic bomb is one obvious example of a technology that seems to be inherently bad not only for humanity, but for biological life itself.

You could argue that the problem of the bomb is more-so a problem of finding a bad technical solution to the problem of war, but it's quite difficult to think of a beneficial application of the atomic bomb, and thus, very difficult to justify its invention from a moral/valued standpoint.

I think it's also a problem that we seem to treat technological progress as a glorified end for humanity—we find it very difficult, for whatever reason (perhaps economic as you point out) to have the courage to admit when something _shouldn 't_ be invented, even if it presumably _can_ be. I think part of this stems from the co-opting of science by technology, and science's silly claim to be "value-free" and neutral—which has had some disastrous consequences. If I'm engaged in a value-free enterprise, I have no reason to stop and wonder what devastation or havoc my creation might one day wreak, I'm doing it, after all, in the name of science, or progress, of unreflective pursuit of an end I can't forsee.

<comment><USER9> Arguably, the dropping of the atomic bombs saved more lives in the long run by forcing the Japanese to surrender and end the war, full-stop.

And arguably, nuclear weapons are keeping the world at peace. Sure, everyone has them pointed at each other, but it's that threat that keeps us honest and peaceful. Just like how drivers in Chicago are courteous and never honk their horn - you'll get shot if you drive like a dick.

<comment><USER10> > Arguably, the dropping of the atomic bombs saved more lives in the long run > by forcing the Japanese to surrender and end the war, full-stop.

This was a popular myth that Truman started. In fact, if we'd told the Japanese we would let them keep their emperor, they almost certainly would have surrendered. The Soviets had just entered the war in the Pacific and we wanted to end it before they captured much territory. Ironic since the Japanese had no intention to risk a Soviet occupation either.

<comment><USER11> > In fact, if we'd told the Japanese we would let them keep their emperor, > they almost certainly would have surrendered. The Soviets had just entered > the war in the Pacific

Er, no.

The nuclear bombs were dropped on August 6 and August 9. The USSR announced it's declaration of war at 11pm Trans-Baikal time August 8, and began invasion at 12:01am August 9. So, at the commencement of the atomic bombing, the Soviets had not just entered the war.

> and we wanted to end it before they captured much territory.

So, what you are saying is that he Soviet entry into the war, absent the nuclear bombings, would put pressure on the US to grant Japan more lenient peace terms. Maybe that's true, but I'm not sure how that's an argument against the bombings.

<comment><USER10> What I'm saying is the Soviet entry into the war by itself was enough to push Japan into an (almost) unconditional surrender to the US, so the bombings were unnecessary. The timing was not coincidental, they had agreed on a Soviet entry within three months of V-day in Europe at Yalta. While Stalin probably didn't know about the bombing, Truman almost certainly knew the specific date of the invasion of Manchuria in advance and it likely established the timetable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree. Technology is the very solution to our problems, the driver of social change.

Why? Because our social instincts don't change terribly fast, being coded in DNA. Our hardware/OS is more or less what it was when the last ice age ended. Nobody has extra arms or hearts. People still use "look each other in the eye" and other old school tropes to decide if they are comfortable with a new person.

The only thing that changes us is when some guy figures out you can melt certain ores and turn them into sharp tools. Or when some lady finds out the seeds she harvested from a certain grass can be nurtured into new plants.

Innovations like this change the economy and allow us to organize society differently. People no longer need to spend a large part of the day washing clothes. These days you don't even need to know how to farm or hunt. That means you can do other stuff while still having your needs met.

The only way to solve our social problems is to try to think of better ways use the planet. That's technology.

<comment><USER13> "the only way to solve our social problems to think of "better" ways to use the planet?"

I am skeptical. What if instead of designing new tools and new ways of exploiting natural resources, we also shifted our cultural mores and practices to encourage more efficiency and less waste? New shiny tools are great, but there's something to be said for maintaining what's already laid down and properly utilizing what's already available.

There is a book on this dichotomy of environmentalists vs technologists, and how one group advocates efficiency/conservation and the other advocates innovation/change. I think both schools of thought are needed to move forward to the best outcome, wouldn't you agree?

<comment><USER12> > encourage more efficiency and less waste

That's exactly what we can do with technology. How are we going to clean up all the plastic? How do we build a house that doesn't leak heat? How do we avoid putting all that carbon in the air?

The answer is always going to be this: someone thinks of a new way to arrange things in order to achieve these goals, in a way where we get more goodness (utility, health, happiness, etc) out of the same blue sphere.

> There is a book on this dichotomy of environmentalists vs technologists, and > how one group advocates efficiency/conservation and the other advocates > innovation/change. I think both schools of thought are needed to move > forward to the best outcome, wouldn't you agree?

Yes, they are two sides of the same coin. When the tech exists, society (ie environmentalists in this case) can plausibly push for new behaviours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Marketing led design processes don't solve humanity's problems particularly well.

For anyone who would like ideas on how to get technology to do a better job of following needs, I'd strongly recommend the book 'Design For The Real World' by Victor Papeneck - [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/190560.Design_for_the_Re...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/190560.Design_for_the_Real_World)

</comment><comment><USER15> He's right. Humanity's problems are solved by humans solving themselves. Each one of us is a puzzle that gets solved in the same way--doing the inner work to quiet our mind and open our hearts. When enough of us are solved, humanity's problems will automatically solve themselves.

Sundar seems to have done the inner work and understands this Truth. His "Cockroach Theory" is enlightening:

 _I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but it 's my inability to handle the disturbances caused by their shouting that disturbs me.

It's not the traffic jams on the road that disturbs me, but my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it's my reaction to the problem that creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story:

I understood, I should not react in life. I should always respond.

The women reacted, whereas the waiter responded.

Reactions are always instinctive whereas responses are always well thought of.

A beautiful way to understand............LIFE.

Person who is HAPPY is not because Everything is RIGHT in his Life..

He is HAPPY because his Attitude towards Everything in his Life is Right..!!_

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cockroach-theory-beautiful- sp...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cockroach-theory-beautiful-speech- sundar-pichai-brahmbhatt-cswe-/)

<comment><USER16> What's the source of this text? I've looked it up and couldn't find one reliable source that shows that Pichai actually told this story once.

<comment><USER15> You're right, I can't find that he actually said this. Guess I'll have to pretend that he did. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think I disagree here. Technology is very much a key part to solving most of humanity's problems. It always has been. Technology is what drives humanity forward. You can look at every empire in history and you will find that at their peak they had some kind of technical advantage over others. Conversely, their fall tends to be correlated with losing that edge.

Silicon Valley thrives on startups spending money on all sorts of crazy stuff that accidentally succeeds once in a while, courtesy of plenty of investor cash to keep that going long enough to find out. The successes are wildly lucrative. There are probably more than a few future billion $ unicorns being nurtured to success in the valley.

However, as soon as unicorns succeed they turn corporate. I think Google is a great example of this. IMHO there's a clear difference between what Google accomplished technically before and after their IPO. At this point it seems they are mostly milking tech that they built/acquired around or before 2005 (search/maps/youtube/android/ads/etc.). It's not that they are getting nothing done but they are accomplishing far less at far greater cost since they probably spend more than ever on R&D while having increasingly less to show for it. They take less risk with their projects and their comfort zone has shrunk to the point that they felt a need to park their more wacky initiatives under the alphabet umbrella, outside of Google. Of course, this may end up being a clever move if some of those efforts succeed. But I would look outside of Alphabet for likely unicorns.

This CEO was employed to look after the cash cow while the Google founders focus on the more exciting stuff in Alphabet. He's not there to build the next Google, merely to keep the existing one going. Stagnation is not unique to Google. Many companies suffer from technical stagnation. Very few companies actually survive more than a few decades. In the tech world, things are trending down not up in terms of longevity.

</comment><comment><USER18> The accurate thing to say is that technology magnifies people's will. People use technology to spread both good and bad messages, to entice people to do better or worse things, to help others or to put them down. The spread of technology means more people have more power to do either good things or bad things. Therefore, it's on all of us to use technology for good and build technologies that help good work flourish.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a _dramatic_ shift from the mid-90s viewpoint, which held an incredibly youthful optimism that has long fed into Google's culture. I want to bring that to one's attention.

That said, this also reads like a _thoughtful_ and _mature_ viewpoint; nuanced and understanding the reality of humans colliding with sophisticated technology.

Historians and philosophers have a lot to contribute to this world; I think there's an increasing awareness of that reality.

<comment><USER20> If you're at the top of Google, one of the most well-financed entities in the world and you _actually understand_ all of its "high end" technologies to a reasonable degree, I think that's going to bring you back down to earth. Plus, coming from another culture brings in some perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> He's basically saying "guns don't kill people. People kill people".

Replace "guns" with "technology".

</comment><comment><USER22> Is code truly amoral? Technology is not morally neutral. It embodies a set of values, a framework and an ideology. For instance, Google search engines have intrinsic properties that make them inherently and irredeemably flawed, because they attempt to infer intellectual properties, such as the meaningful content of a web site, from physical properties. Search engines rely primarily on query term location and query term frequency, sometimes boosted by other computable factors, such as link popularity. These pseudo-intellectual technologies such as search engines and metasearchers, are not morally neutral they fundamentally alter exosomatic conditions of our being as sensemaking entities. We now have new intellectual technologies coming to ascendancy: information architecture, knowledge management and intelligent infrastructure. Now is the time to raise questions about their non neutrality instead of abdicating such responsibility - for if anyone has agency it's the firm that designs these algorithms.

<comment><USER23> Is a hammer amoral? You can bonk someone on the head with it or build a house. So the answer is yes.

<comment><USER24> You can't convincingly ransom a hospital on the other side of the Earth by swinging a hammer in your basement.

You can't remotely exploit life-critical systems by studying which hammers were used to assemble them.

You can't send streams of hammers through web browsers and persuade the user to mint coins in their spare time.

You can't hammer a nail in a copper wire outside your beach house and catch a printer on fire in the midwest.

I have no opinion on the question about the morality of code. But no answer to that question has anything to do with a hammer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone explain if "right to be forgotten" laws and processes are equivalent to China's "wall" of censorship and processes?

<comment><USER26> I will try to give an objective answer.

They have a different underlying value system. Europe believes in individualism and privacy. China believes in collectivism and harmony.

Right to be forgotten protects the individual. China's wall protects the government.

<comment><USER27> No matter the values and principles, no matter whether you agree with them or not, at the end of the day both positions are the law in the respective territories. You don't get to pick and choose which laws should be enforced. But you can choose which countries to do business in, of course.

<comment><USER28> 'You don't get to pick and choose which laws should be enforced. But you can choose which countries to do business in, of course.'

That's - if you'll excuse me - a very amoral and commercial way of looking at things: you don't belong to any society, and don't wish to exercise any control in any society, and the only way in which you can or should exercise your rights is in where you do business.

It is precisely the rationale of democracy that you DO 'get to pick and choose which laws should be enforced' (to some extent).

<comment><USER27> I thought this whole conversation was in the context of companies like Google? I don't think companies are people. They definitely don't get to flout the laws as they see fit, but they have the right to operate in the markets they choose. Even lobbying makes me uneasy.

As to the laws, yes, it's up to the citizens to shape and evolve them, through a referendum, elected official, regime change or whatever other way. But once they're signed, they're the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Technology can solve humanity's problems, we simply choose to wield it in a manner where it does not."

</comment><comment><USER30> > But there's a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn't solve > humanity's problems. It was always naïve to think so. Technology is an > enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity's problems. I think we're > both over-reliant on technology as a way to solve things and probably, at > this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of all problems, too.

The headline sounds so much like a copout, and to a degree, I think even the completed statement is. However, when you read the overall interview, I think I share a similar perspective:

Right now, technology has clearly amplified everyone's voice to vaguely the same level, and as a result has exponentially amplified the voices of fringe groups. And as a society, we have to confront that. But it's a relatively recent problem, and our earliest attempts at solutions have been entirely based on technology, instead of a better mixture of people and technology.

In other words, we need technology to enable people to better learn, then curate their world, and get involved in ways that show support and organization better than a Like/Retweet button.

I think we're not far from tools like this being widely available, but we're just at the beginning of such a concept, and the overall reticence society now has to technology thanks to the irresponsible stewardship of its leaders will inhibit technology's ability to fix the problem, too.

</comment><comment><USER31> What is the difference between today and 20,000 years ago? What's the difference between today and 20,000 years from now? There are of course social and political changes but the key thing that invariably is behind all progress and improvement in society is technology. For instance throughout our entire history as a species we not only had slavery but it often played a key role in day to day life. Then, as we hit the industrial revolution it suddenly began to be rapidly phased out of existence, world wide. By the time it was ended slavery had long since gone from a necessity to a luxury and was well on its way from a luxury to a burden. Technology obsoleted it and society followed. In areas where technology has not completely obsoleted slavery, it still exists to this day.

Amusingly even Socrates predicted as much thousands of years ago, _" For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus.. If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves._" Technology is, practically by definition, exactly what solves humanity's problems.

Though to be fair, this headline is somewhat clickbaity. The article is not really suggesting that technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. But rather than Google, and to some degree the entirety of Silicon Valley, has entered its twilight phase. And as Google has surprisingly rapidly metamorphosized into the next e.g. Microsoft, it's not an unreasonable suggestion.

</comment><comment><USER32> he's right tho. It facilitates humanity's problems by giving those in the power to abuse with impunity, steroids.

An entire generation of Chinese kids grew up thinking the Tianmen Square was a god damn festival singing "Wo Ai Beijing Tianmen"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IVg_mpzIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IVg_mpzIQ)

</comment><comment><USER33> A bit orthogonal to the point of this interview but:

> When we follow "right to be forgotten" laws, we are censoring search results > because we're complying with the law. I'm committed to serving users in > China. Whatever form it takes, I actually don't know the answer.

This is an important point: Google has a lot to offer Chinese users. From providing a trusted search engine in a context where people still trust foreign products over Chinese ones, to simple access to its services which, let's be honest, are pretty solid for the average user. It's fair to criticize the company for trying to find a way to access an environment that will almost inevitably demand some degree of censorship, but it overlooks the real good that that such a presence would deliver.

Much of the criticism I hear of Google in this case centers on their presumed willingness to tolerate censorship. Pichai makes a good point here: complying with some degree of censorship imposed by a regime is just the cost of doing business in an international setting. No one is howling for Google to pull out of Europe after the ridiculous "right to be forgotten" censorship ruling. You can quibble about where to draw the line; censorship out of a misplaced desire to protect privacy and censorship to prop up a repressive, authoritarian regime are far from equivalent, but in either case it's a cost-benefit analysis with principles on one side and the potential gains for users on the other. This quote suggests Pichai hasn't yet found the best way to do that, or even that he ever will.

And to those cynics out there who will throw out thirst for profits, I say: if money were as strong a motivation for Google as y'all seem to think it is, Google would have never left China to begin with. They (full disclosure, we) lost _tremendous_ leverage in that market when it became obvious that operating in China was not sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER34> I knee-jerk want to say this guy is bad for censorship, surveillance and so on, but I think he is sort of like Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, he is there to take the unpopular choices so owners can get wealthier without responsibilty.

</comment><comment><USER35> Technology when in hands of Google certainly won't solve any sort of problems, they may pretend to you that they are solving problems but they will be carving you inside out from the other end.. So one or other way, truth came out ;)

</comment><comment><USER36> What are humanity's problem exactly? Every era of humans had different list of problems. Problems today (climate change, nuclear weapons, etc) are very different than say 1000-1500 years ago.

Technology definitely solves lot of problems and some tech enables to scale the solutions (e.g. discovery of antibiotics and tech to mass produce them). But then it gives rise to new set of problems which are much harder to solve. The harder the problems get more collaboration and working together is needed at global scale, which itself is very hard. In this sense, tech can only go so far.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." -Melvin Kranzberg

What _is_ bad are the neutral to bad actors who propagate technology, without planning or caring for its unintended consequences.

Technology is an amplifier, and like other amplifiers humans build, it is far easier boost some existing signal when you abdicate yourself from the goal of also maintaining the integrity of the signal: sure, you can get more power if you don't care about noise. In fact, building a perfect amplifier of arbitrary power is probably impossible.

</comment><comment><USER38> Not to be cynical, but there's enormous PR pressure on Google and Sunday Pichai specifically to make this their opinion. Widespread public opinion is turning against silicon valley, and even technological advancement more generally, like a kind of mini-second-postmodernism.

For sure silicon valley has some serious problems, but humanity is a lot better off generally than it was a few centuries ago, and the reason isn't because we all became nicer people. Discounting technology as a driver of human flourishing is a grave mistake.

<comment><USER39> _...and the reason isn 't because we all became nicer people._

We did become better governed. Not unrelated to technology but not directly a result of it, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think technology is all about giving us more degrees of freedom. For a familiar example, video games can provide vastly more experiences as processing power marches on. But this is far from limited to computer-adjacent things.

Facebook gives a lot more degrees of freedom in relationships with other people, YouTube and blogs and reddit give content creators the most meritocratic markets to have ever existed, the camera on your phone is better and more portable than 99% of old cameras.

<comment><USER28> You are confusing 'freedom' and 'power'.

On the most popular analysis, to be free is to be deprived of a personal power which one has, e.g. for some force to interfere and stop you from exercising your capacity for speech.

We cannot have been unfree to use facebook before the invention of facebook because we never had that power, and because it is not a personal power, but an instrumental power outside of our person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I agree with the quote from the article. Think of technology as a tool. If you take email, for example, you can use it for pretty much anything - it solves the problem of communication. But it doesn't inherently solve poverty, racism, inequality or any social problem - it could be used to do that, or it could be used to make them worse. The growth of social media has brought people together for better or for worse.

</comment><comment><USER42> Technology is a natural extension of humans, so of course, it doesn't solve our problems it's part of our problems and our solutions.

</comment><comment><USER43> That is only because technology is build upon science, which captures the belief in a rational God of Christianity that it sprung out of and doesn't capture the ethical aspects. It is a somewhat problematic aspect that anything non-ethical has increased leverage arguably at a much quicker rate than our ability to manipulate the material aspects of our world.

</comment><comment><USER44> The last thing I want is a un-elected, for profit technology company that is more powerful than many small countries moralizing to the world....especially by banning/silencing those it deems to not be "pure enough" for it's platform. On the plus side success tends to breed failure and I think it is beginning to head in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER45> So technology is turning into a social/philosophical amplifier now; historically any disputes from large or even small philosophical differences were resolved through wars/murders (and it's all going to be about philosophy in an "abundance society" with its surrounding politics), so I can't wait to see what future holds...

<comment><USER46> It's becoming the new cultural infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you define "Technology" by having better means to alter the world, you can't be further from the truth.

</comment><comment><USER46> Good to hear. Now we can do real work

</comment><comment><USER48> I think he means tech companies perversely hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars even while they avoid tax obligations all over the world doesn't solve humanity's problems.

But as Bill Gates shows, a lot of money clearly can solve many of humanity's problems.

</comment><comment><USER49> It creates a lot of them

\- microplastics

\- co2/global warming

\- an increase in cancer from use of various radiation/chemical pollutants

\- rapid transmission of disease via air travel and automobile travel

\- all sorts of negative consequences from the rise and widespread adoption of social media (addiction, depression, bullying, terrorist recruitment, easier avenues for committing fraud, etc)

Technology is a tool like any other, can be a benefit and a curse. A gun can provide recreation, can put food on the table but at the same time can be used to murder. Dynamite allowed much more efficient (and safer) mining but it also showed that there was the possibility of far more stable explosives than black powder and nitroglycerin which almost certainly directly resulted in many other explosives, like TNT, being developed and used to wage war.

</comment><comment><USER50> Maybe Google's failure to not make the world worse is being spun into an argument on how all technology has its benefits and evils, but the social benefits from Google's tech appear to be outweighed by its social malefices.

</comment><comment><USER51> ... but it does solves our shareholder's ones.

</comment><comment><USER52> But it can be used for that. It's just a tool.

</comment><comment><USER53> > Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems.

But it does. Vaccinations, for example, have solved humanity's smallpox problems. Technology has solved all kinds of medical problems, it has solved the famine problem, and on and on.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think the next phrase is more interesting:

> we are probably, at this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of > all problems, too

A lot of the real changes in the world (immigration, cultural fragmentation, overreaching governmental power) have been masked by the continuous media infatuation with "social media". While they help people deal with these changes, these media are not the source of good and bad things, people are. From the euphimistically-called arab spring to Trump, social media have been fingerpointed, while ignoring the actual background forces which cause these changes.

</comment><comment><USER55> 'Technology' is kinda definitionally something that humans created to solve a problem. I suspect 'big business capitalism' is driving us to solve the wrong problems sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER56> Just for fun, here are the top 10 problems I deal with every day. Are there technologies that solve these? If not, why?

1\. Getting up in the morning earlier than my body wants to. I think I need to go to bed earlier but find myself watching TV or surfing social media/news.

2\. Much of my work consists of repairing technical debt from stuff done 3-5 years ago with the best of intentions. There appears to be more money in this than architecting new software.

3\. For lunch I go home and make a sandwich. This may very well be the highlight of my day. Is there a sandwich making machine?

4\. I go back to work and work later than expected, usually leaving around 7 PM. The timer says I got 6 billable hours in, but I spent a day to do it. Is there technology that makes billable hours work better or is my efficiency really 50% or whatever. I don't know.

5\. I go to the gym 5 days a week for 1.5 to 2 hours which includes 0.5 hours of cardio. I'm getting stronger but generally always look the same, and so does everybody else. I've been doing this for 20 years.

6\. I go to the store on the way home and always get the same things. I could maybe set up some kind of delivery service. I worry that automation will put grocery stores out of business someday but am sick of going to the store constantly.

7\. I drink a beer and watch Netflix all night. This is awesome. But is this the pinnacle of civilization? I don't know.

8\. I see members of my family roughly once per week or less. They all live within 50 miles. Time becomes an inexorable march of lost days, each lost day growing more pressing in my mind as I fall asleep each night. The future implications of this are too painful to contemplate, so thoughts are troubled and fleeting.

9\. I started a TODO list of inventions, projects I'd like to work on, etc. I stopped when it reached roughly 200 items. That was a decade ago, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of items have been crossed off. Is there some kind of a machine that can lower my obligations each day to perhaps 2-4 hours so I can work on the things that might actually help the world? Or is this vanity, is it better to wait for them to spring themselves into existence within 2 weeks or 2 years, sometimes by just mentioning them on the internet?

10\. Weekends are the hardest. The yawning mouth of obligation to family, friends and home maintenance stretches like a tunnel to infinity from which no light can be seen brimming from its depths. Holidays become a 2-3 month marathon of reactionary mode optimizing of the things that must be done like last year. A point is reached at which the distraction of daily minutia frees the mind from worrying about the things that will never be. As if all the technology in the world led to a place of maximum distraction, dilution and ineffectualism, each layer cementing the exhaustion beneath the one before. Where is the technology that gives me the time, that pays me the money so that I don't have to run the rat race anymore? If that doesn't exist, then is what we have now really technology?

</comment><comment><USER8> Technology solves some problems. It also creates some problems. The fundamental issue lies in the fact that we've lost sight of the _ends_ technology is supposed to be in service of, and the development of technology for technology's sake (or more often, for economy's sake) has become the unconscious, inarticulate end of the world's major players.

As Sundar states, it is not that technology in itself is, in its essence, problematic, nor has it become the source of _all_ humanitarian issues. The issue is an apparent incapacity or unwillingness on the part of most of the participants in the technological sphere to question the ideologies that underlie the development and deployment of particular technologies. Compound this with technology's tight coupling to the prevailing global economic structure and you're dealing with an aspect of human life that is as thorny and difficult to comprehend as it is constitutive of modern existence.

Here's a question: to what extent do algorithms mirror human reasoning and to what extent does human reasoning (at the macro level of social patterns) begin to mirror the predominant algorithms in use today? One's exposure to particular phenomena in a systems context is more or less dictated by the algorithms and structures the system employs (its rules and ontology). This is why an overly technified approach to social problems, such as politics etc., reduces the depth of social understanding and interaction. Because technical systems ultimately have to serve _economic_ ends, whatever _moral or social_ ends they might serve are eclipsed.

Social technologies are geared toward keeping users happy or blasting them with advertisements because doing so serves the economic ends necessary to keep said technologies functioning. Unfortunately, keeping users happy is often counteractive to other ends which we might reasonably say rest on morally and socially superior ground. Individual experience becomes systematic and "algorithmic" to the extent that the only inputs that remain in a grossly technological society are filtered through fixed patterns of technological interaction.

Twitter's character limitations, for instance, not only affect the system of twitter itself but conspire with its popularity as a means of _social_ interaction to place strictures and limits on the very _nature_ of modern social interaction. Thought, so often subject to truncated expression through mediums like Twitter, itself becomes truncated. Dialogue, which is given no space on social media platforms where people "comment" and "react" but never discuss begins to disappear as a meaningful, commonplace social practice. Thoughts and opinions are radicalized and tribalized. We participate in fixed echo chambers comprised of fellow individuals whose membership was not determined through a complex social process, but rather through an algorithmic process, which dumbs down the quality, depth, and sophistication of group formation and interaction.

Systems originate as expedients to serve _some_ historical end and soon, by extension and unreflective adoption, dictate behavior, and dictate the ends.

</comment><comment><USER57> Well, but at least technology makes these problems less annoying.

<comment><USER58> Specially when your bedroom light fail because of bad wifi or when your roomba's AI doesn't recognize your cute dog's poop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm likely to get some downvotes for posting this, but the title reminds me of this talk [1] by the well known man called Billy Graham. The three problems technology cannot solve:

\- Human evil

\- Human suffering

\- Death

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90mj79GqWhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90mj79GqWhc)

<comment><USER60> It was a good talk worth sharing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> (Please try to respect the netiquette when voting.)

Empty words by Sundar Pichai employed to achieve a desired effect in Google's benefit.

The airplane is an example of a technology that has brought us closer together and helped advance the ideal of an interconnected global "village" and which I'm contrasting with the promise made for Google's products -- but don't get hung up on my example, because my argument is directed at Google.

Maybe it's just Google's tech that has failed to deliver on its promise for a better world.

<comment><USER62> These might be empty words in Sundar Pichai's mouth, but the underlying idea is not: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_\(philosophy\))

It's time for Silicon Valley (I actually mean supporter's of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism) actually) to learn what Classical Greeks discovered a long time ago.

<comment><USER63> Could you elaborate on the Pharmakon in this context or point me at any resources to get a better understanding of it?

<comment><USER62> What makes a remedy a _good_ thing isn't the thing itself but the way it is used. That's therapeutics. A badly used remedy can easily become poisonous. It's the same with _any_ technology, e.g the Internet, smartphones, IA…

I'd recommend reading Bernard Stiegler, a French philosopher whose work has yet to been translated to English though (as I just discovered). I think this English interview might be a good introduction: [http://krisis.eu/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/krisis-2011-1-05...](http://krisis.eu/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/krisis-2011-1-05-lemmens.pdf).

Note that he often gets political but it's really worth it though if you're interested in the way technology is being designed and adopted by mankind (he's also focused on the Anthropocene but that's another topic). His annual conferences at Pompidou Centre / IRI (specially the ones about IA – [https://enmi-conf.org/wp/enmi18/](https://enmi-conf.org/wp/enmi18/), in French unfortunately). I'd recommend his seminaries on philosophy (via his School of philosophy [http://pharmakon.fr/wordpress/le-projet/the-school-of- philos...](http://pharmakon.fr/wordpress/le-projet/the-school-of-philosophy- of-epineuil-le-fleuriel/) and via the Ars Industrialis non-profit) but they aren't yet translated. Again, sorry for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drug-delivery pioneer wins £1m engineering prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31111835

<comment><USER2> Woa. When I read his current MIT department affiliations, I smelled a rat and I was right.

In 1988 some professors in the School of Science who were also administrators managed a totally ... irregular coup and killed off the Department of Applied Biological Sciences (formerly Food and Nutrition, Course 20), claiming the department including its professors were not of MIT quality. That's something that Visiting Committees judge ([http://web.mit.edu/corporation/visiting.html](http://web.mit.edu/corporation/visiting.html)), not self-interested professors who got envious that another department was getting way "too much" money all of a sudden, 10s of millions, that's when biotechnology was really taking off.

In essence, as part of this scam they tried to _destroy_ Professor Langer ... but it turned out the Institute was in no position to slander and libel these professors, those remarks were quickly withdrawn, and homes were found for the tenured professors. Although as I heard just about everyone else was left in the lurch, e.g. a new professor, and the new grad students, one of whom was a roommate, were out of their positions, of course having turned down other offers. I wonder if Langer was able to keep his grad students ... that would have been tricky in many many ways, e.g. science and engineering graduate departments (and I hope others) have very tough qualification systems that are independent of research.

Anyway, he at least has the last laugh, has even been made one of the 11 current Institute Professors, who are essentially the very best of the very best.

And the professors who engineered that coup? I was told at the time they would never be given a position of trust in MIT Administration, and one notably went on to become the head of the CIA (I am not making this up), where he was both awful (this includes contemporary reports I heard from people under him at the time) and grossly violated Sensitive Compartmented Information ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Information)), something that should have sent him to prison but of course resulted in nothing but a last day in office Presidential pardon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Although his work is impressive, this: "and he has more than 1,000 patents granted or pending for his inventions" makes me really sad.

His work will became part of some company (if not yet) and will benefit only those with deep pockets...

</comment><comment><USER4> Bob Langer is much more than just a drug delivery pioneer. He is the one that helped kick off the field of biomaterials. He helped discover novel materials for things like stents, skin implants, materials to grow cardiovascular cells on, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one that first glanced this as: "Drug-dealing pioneer wins £1m engineering prize"?

<comment><USER6> I read it correctly but after all of the Ross Ulbricht news lately, my first thought was along similar lines.</comment></comment>


Unique brain "fingerprint" can predict drug effectiveness - <AUTHOR> https://mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/unique-brain-fingerprint-can-predict-drug-effectiveness-287964 <comment><USER2> I actually once bought this book "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life", written by a certain Dr. Amen. I think his claims went not far beyond the emphasis on how diagnostic tools, most prominently MRI are useful for attuning treatment to the patient - including finding the right medication.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about a genotyping fingerprint as offered in the $150 dollar range by e.g. 23andme?

<comment><USER4> This was the dream of genetics, but unfortunately it's not everything, just one piece of the puzzle.....especially as far as the brain is concerned. Kind of like trying to troubleshoot application layer problems with physical layer intuition (sort of)

<comment><USER5> I bet dietary, microbial, and even life choice factors exist. It'll be a long time before we nail all those down (if ever, with all the marketing in those factors).</comment></comment></comment>