Why European Startups Fail to Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.arkley.vc/blog-quotes/why-european-startups-fail-scale <comment><USER2> The author has some very good points, but I think he's trying to find a simple explanation to a complicated problem. Of course there's no single reason for this scale difference. If anything, Europeans appreciate cultural differences more than people from the US.

What I think plays a big role is aggression. Startup founders in the US would do whatever it takes to succeed. Sometimes this leads to hard work (80+ hour weeks), other times to unfair play (Uber licensing and traditional taxis come to mind). Generally, in the US there's a "win by all means necessary" attitude, while Europeans prefer their work-life balance and don't "break the rules" too much. All this is based on personal experience and I have no data to back it up.

That said, I see the same difference between northern and southern European nations. Southern ones are more carefree and want to relax. They even have words and concepts around this (think the Spanish siesta). It's part of culture which translates to work behavior.

I think this difference in founders and employees might contribute more to the scale of startups than what the article talks about. I see value in both approaches.

<comment><USER3> The Spanish siesta is a break in the middle of the day because of the high heat. Spanish workers are the ones who, in average, work the longest hours in Europe (38 hours/week) after the Greek (42 h/w) and the Portuguese (39.3 h/w). Please stop the prejudice.

<comment><USER4> I have something to say about that. I live in Portugal as a foreigner and the working hours mean nothing. People are making coffee breaks all day long and the amount of sloppiness and incompetence can often be mind-boggling. As an example, my German girlfriend works in a dental laboratory and her Portuguese colleague would not possibly understand why it's not common practice in a German laboratory to watch Youtube videos on your cell phone while working. He really, honestly didn't believe it when she told him that German bosses don't appreciate that.

To be fair, salaries in Portugal are ridiculous, I have no idea how people get along with 600 Euro/m, 800 Euro/m tops, when at least in Lisbon rents are high. Some hard working people seem to literally live off toasted bread and coffee. This is disguised by the average salary of 1000 Euro/m after taxes, because the gap between rich and poor is very high.

I myself work at university, and I can attest that what takes 1 day at maximum anywhere in Northern Europe is projected to take 1-3 weeks here. I have a colleague who surfs on the Net the whole day and gets paid for it -- again, extremely bad payment, though.

So no, mere presence does not count and work hours don't count either. For Portugal, I blame the bosses, though, who seem to be universally incompetent assholes and reliably manage to create a catastrophic working atmosphere.

Sorry if I've offended some Portuguese, but that's my impression of the work ethics here after nearly a decade of living here. It has its advantages but productivity is not one of them.

<comment><USER5> You have not offended this Portuguese. However, if one was to go exclusively by your account, one would come out with the understanding that is a country of incompetent slackers, and I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. I do however concede that most of management in here is fairly amateurish and incompetent.

<comment><USER4> I agree, it wasn't meant to be generalized and is only a relative thing. If the horror stories I've heard are right, Portugal is a shining beacon of diligence in comparison to Angola. My point was just that if your boss is an asshole and you only earn 600 Euro/month, this can hamper your motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > European startups fail to recognize that they have to confirm to the rules > and expectations of the new market they are entering.

While i agree the article makes it a bit sound that this is the delta to US startups. US startups don't recognize this neither and still grow insanely big.

> The United States is far from a homogenous market.

Consumer media and consumer market is cross continental in the US. And that's the big difference.

If you launch in boston there is a good chance people in portland will hear about it. If you launch somewhere in new jersey there is a good chance that somebody in LA will hear about it (worstcase via NYC media)

If you launch in portugal nobody in poland will notice. If you launch in serbia poeple in finland will never know.

That kind of launch acceleration startups in the US have enables them to "fall forward" while doing mistakes.

TL;DR: EU VS USA - Same downside (fail) - completely different upside (succeeding) [especially in form of early stage market pull] leads to different scaling patterns ("rocketships"), risk awareness (investments) and companies that are (need to be?) build

</comment><comment><USER7> Or in other words, diversity in cultures and languages that isn't as prominent in the US. The US has 350 million people with one language and a general shared culture, Europe has 740 million people with tons of languages and very different cultures between them.

But I think the article misses an important point. Namely access to venture capital money.

Put it simply, it's much easier to raise a lot of money for a startup (especially an early stage one) in the US than in Europe. So European companies often operate on a shoestring budget in comparison to the US counterparts. Heck, many of investments I've seen for UK companies wouldn't pay for a single engineer in the valley. Or at best, they leave a lot less cash available for marketing later.

Just seems like there's less access to money or a support network in Europe. So as a result, US startups can operate on a much larger scale.

<comment><USER8> Fully agreed. I work with several startups both US and EU side. I see 3 hurdles, all solvable:

1\. No unified capital market and banking union, hence funding is restricted to per country Capital accumulation.

2\. Still no unified digital products, payments, and IP market. The cost of selling any sort of IP in the EU is orders of magnitude higher than in the US.

3\. Most countries have some sort of ridiculous immigration and work permit regulation, hindering startups to hire people easily and from anywhere.

At this point it is easier for somebody from the EU to incorporate remotely in Delaware, setup a bank account through Atlas Stripe, do fundraising in the US through Angellist, hire globally through any number of online platforms, and close deals with ready made YCombinator SAFE notes, and travel with a visa waiver every quarter cheaply to the US, than to even try incorporation in the EU.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> At this point it is easier for somebody from the EU to incorporate remotely in Delaware, setup a bank account through Atlas Stripe, do fundraising in the US through Angellist, hire globally through any number of online platforms, and close deals with ready made YCombinator SAFE notes, and travel with a visa waiver every quarter cheaply to the US, than to even try incorporation in the EU.

Maybe you can go into this in more detail because my understanding below seems pretty simple:

1\. Register an LTD company in the UK online, in minutes, for £20 through the government website.

2\. Hire anyone that lives in the EU with very little restrictions or paperwork. I don't see why most companies would need to hire from outside the EU and that is a huge talent pool.

<comment><USER9> _Hire anyone that lives in the EU with very little restrictions or paperwork._

Hiring anyone at all is a significant hurdle in much of the EU, whether it's from your home nation or another member state. If we're talking about startups just starting to grow beyond the founders here, you're not going to have anyone on board yet who is dedicated to dealing with HR, legal and payroll issues. Those won't necessarily be a full-time job with employee #1 either, but they're already a significant overhead the moment you start looking to hire that person, and if anything unusual or adversarial happens it can quickly become an actual full-time job.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "HR, legal and payroll issues"

These aren't issues for US based companies?

<comment><USER9> I'm sure they are, but as I understand it, the amount of regulation involved in most of Europe compared to the US is on an entirely different level.

For example, in much of the US, employment is typically at-will. Make a bad hire, or simply change direction so an early hire is no longer a good fit, and you have minimal obligations.

In much of Europe, employment immediately or almost immediately involves things like not being able to fire someone without being able to show they are either genuinely redundant or not just really bad at their job but also not capable of improvement to the point they could be useful.

Obviously there are issues of employee protection and fair employment contracts to consider as well, but it's hardly surprising that given the very different employment relationships either side of the Atlantic, small US businesses thinking about taking on their first employees can be much more liberal in hiring new staff because they have much less commitment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The reason could be that in Europe investors are more conservative, too. I can't imagine that a startup gets half a million dollar here in Europe because they let send you a friendly Yo to your buddies. (If I'm wrong here, tell me, I got some code laying around doing stuff like that). And with Uber and AirBNB don't tell me about embracing local laws and taxing.

<comment><USER11> I cannot give this comment enough points so that is the top one.

But this is actually the single concern I have: conservative VC. It is sooo bad, you guys in US cannot even imagine.

If, let's say, 5-6 years ago you could get away with a broken demo and a nice paper describing the idea , plus a business plan, now unless you are having 3-4 customers and everything already works they don't even look at you. And don't get me started on the accelerators. Biggest BS ever.

All in all, above even connections, money matters. You can build your stuff in 50 languages, perform 1000s of studies how to market, etc, if you have the capital for this. This should not be expensive, but this is the stuff you need _before_ you can expand or even reach a customer. But at this stage, you are left on your own, or give away a big chunk of shares for some little change from an accelerator.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady This seems completely wrong to me. I'm guessing that the assumption 'European startups fail to scale' is in comparison to US startups. I haven't seen any US startups change branding colours or change UI for European markets. They succeed in spite of this.

We're also assuming that 'scaling' is the goal and considering the writer is a 'growth hacker' it's good for business to pretend it is. But if we're talking about cultural differences it's important to consider differences in the overall goal. Profit seems to be a much bigger driver in Europe - scaling to billions of users and then trying to squeeze some money out of them isn't as appealing. I don't think you can say one approach (scale vs. smaller but cash flow positive) is better than the other.

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh, thats rich. If i have ever seen companies less interested in adopting to local laws and regulations, its the US ones...

</comment><comment><USER13> Its similar to why East-Coast companies Fail to Scale? Perhaps scaling isn't great. I think its largely that investors don't throw money at companies with a dream and little else.

I'm not convinced the Valley in 2016 will turn out successful as the previous few decades. Maybe the East Coast & Europe are the smart ones.

</comment><comment><USER14> > _Whereas Europeans are lenient to typo's or faulty grammar, Americans are > not (...)_

> _the main reason they don't succeed to scale is because European startups > fail to recognize that they have to confirm to the rules..._

I have been punished for this before, but I can't help notice when someone starts lecturing about typos, and can't proofread their own prose.

<comment><USER15> Is it about Europeans being lenient to typos or faulty grammar in another language than their native tongue (i.e. English)? That's for sure.

But for instance, French people are not lenient at all with typos or faulty grammar in French...

<comment><USER16> Well, now we are forced to be lenient, because half of engineers and other highly educated individuals who come out of school nowadays cannot write a single sentence without at least one fault :-(

Yeah, it sounds like I worship the _good old days_ , you have to see it to believe it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Two words: language barrier.

In the U.S., you can launch a startup in NY, SF, or Texas. It doesn't matter. You can still reach everyone in the U.S. with a web service in a single language from the same location.

It's very different if you launch a site in Germany, Estonia, or Spain. You just won't have the same reach by default, especially if you only offer the service in English.

If you want to reach all of Europe and most people, then you'll have to offer the service, the ads for it, and the support, in 20+ languages.

Alternatively, you can stick to English...but you'll reach far fewer people. Search for a certain type of product or service on Google Adwords in say Estonia or Poland in English, and then in the native language, and you'll see at least an order of magnitude more potential traffic/clicks for the native keyword.

It may be easier to scale physical products than services in all European countries, but it still won't be as easy as such expansion would be in the United States. You may still need to deal with locals in their native language, so you may have to hire some people in those countries that speak that language.

Hopefully, Google or someone will solve this issue through technology, so that in 10 years it won't matter if your service is offered in English only. Because otherwise, it will probably take another 50 years before 80% of the European population speaks English well by default and _prefers_ to search for everything they want to buy online in English.

<comment><USER18> Are you the founder of MtGox Bitcoin exchange?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 'The Flamish are earlier adopters, are more experienced, and access English language websites or apps. Whereas some Walloon users might still hope for a Minitel comeback and tend to believe clickbait links.'

Without citations this reads like the author is bigoted. Chose to stop reading at that point.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it is culture with a pinch of geopolitics.

You can't replicate a Silicon Valley without grokking SV culture. I have yet to meet a fellow Irish in the flesh who understood it, any of it, except perhaps at a Hackerspace one time in a different European country.

Europeans should do as the Japanese did with the English/Dutch before they made the foreign technologies their own.

Synchronize with the hive. Places like SSC, LW, HN. Read their books. Think their thoughts. That's part of why I spend some time here. Perhaps, like the Japanese, we would pick up things we do not quite need, like umbrellas and Victorian pocket doors, but also something less tangible, less capable of being denoted on a PowerPoint presentation.

Silicon Roundabout and other government led projects are Cargo Cults.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Growth Hacker" LOL

<comment><USER22> Best comment right here

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _American consumers behave as if they have already seen and done everything._

In recent months, chatting with a foreign friend has made it uncomfortably clear to me that Americans are bad about thinking all white people who speak English and are successful are American. America is kind of narcissistic (such as when so many of us assume you must be American when you post to a predominantly American forum). I suspect one thing that helps foreign countries succeed here is "passing" for American, which many foreign countries likely make no effort to do.

<comment><USER24> > uncomfortably clear to me that Americans are bad about thinking all white > people who speak English and are successful are American.

Don't worry, if you're black you're African-American too.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, my sons and I recently discussed some of the problems with calling people African-American or even Hispanic-American. I noted that we don't call whites "European-American" \-- a term I am tempted to start using ironically, in part because I increasingly object to surveys that ask if I am white or some long list of other labels, none of which is really accurate. There is never an option that really fits me or a means to write in "German-Irish- French-Cherokee ethnicity and American citizen by birth" or something.

Signed: European-American with a dash of Cherokee who finds the entire system offensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Today the distinction between an European and US company is blurred, as it is easy to register business abroad or in multiple countries. Many European startups incorporate in the US from the beginning, but operate from EU, many open sister US companies at some point. Should these companies be counted as successful EU or US companies?

</comment><comment><USER9> While there certainly is more cultural diversity across Europe than within the US, this article overlooks some other fundamental problems faced by new businesses in Europe as they try to scale out to different markets.

For one thing, you have to figure out how customers can pay you. This is not a trivial problem, particularly for B2C companies, because there is nothing even resembling a universal method of payment. Credit cards are near universal in some countries but hardly used in others. Direct bank charging via SEPA or other Direct Debit schemes is popular in some countries but not others. There are national schemes that are widely used but only in one country.

Then there are the tax rules. The EU is absurdly bad at this, as anyone affected by the VAT rules can tell you. I've talked with local businesses here in Cambridge UK that are considerably larger than any of mine, and some of them still say that with hindsight they would have simply dropped all of their customers from within the EU but outside the UK when the rules changed last year, because the compliance costs simply aren't justified.

There are also very different legal environments in fields like consumer protection and intellectual property, which can have a big impact depending on your line of business.

And finally, there are the overheads of starting and running a business at all, which obviously is a prerequisite to scaling. The UK is regarded as relatively business-friendly compared to some of our European neighbours, yet the current government has already hurt small business owners with not one but two major tax hits since taking office last year. Those apply even for small all-director businesses, which might be the case for the stereotype three- guys-in-a-garage kind of startup, but as soon as you take on any employees at all you're in for a whole new world of joyous regulations, form-filling, cash- grabbing and statutory obligations. It's a crazy situation that makes setting up a real company that can grow and create jobs a significantly worse proposition both financially and in terms of regulatory overheads than just going it alone or in a small group and all being self-employed. And as I said, this is in the UK, which is paradise for entrepreneurs compared to some other European nations.

Ultimately, the factors that give startups the best chances to become established and then scale up are mostly about flexibility and moving money around easily. You can go too far -- I wouldn't want to give up reasonable protections for employees to exploit them in the way that US companies routinely do, for example -- but in general, most of Europe has a lot to learn from our friends in other developed economies about those two key areas.

</comment><comment><USER26> > The Flemish are earlier adopters, are more experienced, and access English > language websites or apps. Whereas some Walloon users might still hope for a > Minitel comeback and tend to believe clickbait links.

I doubt that's an uncontroversial statement in Belgium.

<comment><USER27> It's uncontroversial because only Flemish people can read it. Zing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One of the things that the article misses is that Americans are constantly assaulted by marketing. This is why advertising is so expensive, and why Americans are only interested in novel products.

</comment><comment><USER29> And not enough money in general...

</comment><comment><USER30> The subject is interesting, but I don't think the article author gets into the real issues. I'm thinking something broader - it seems like there's virtually no business/tech innovation in Europe at all. How many innovative American tech companies are big in Europe? Apple, Google, Uber, AirBnB, Facebook, Amazon, etc, just off the top of my head. Can you name an innovative European company that's big in the US? I can't think of any that I could call innovative with a straight face.

What's behind this, though? Excessive business regulation? Investment regulation? Culture of entrepreneurship? All of the above? Something else?

<comment><USER27> > Can you name an innovative European company that's big in the US? I can't > think of any that I could call innovative with a straight face.

BMW is innovative and big in the US. I'm sure you can keep a straight face. Also, Audi.

There have been plenty of companies in the past like Skype, Nokia, ARM, Mojang, CCP. But many of them get bought.

In any event, it's obviously more lob sided towards the US. There are many of factors. If I were a researcher I would probably begin by investigating how many Europeans move to the US to start or join companies (lots) and if there is any 'patriotism effect'. For example, I've only seen the severe distinction of "domestic" vs. "import" (e.g. cars, beers, etc) in the US.</comment></comment>


Prosthesis That Replicates "Bullet Time" - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665479/mr-miyagi-meets-the-matrix-with-a-prosthesis-that-replicates-bullet-time

<comment><USER2> Holy shit that might actually work for some abilities.</comment>


Ask HN: E-mail providers in 2019 - <AUTHOR> This year I'm moving away from all things Google.<p>First step is e-mail. Whom do you all recommend? I'm happy to pay, no need for a free service. IOS and Android apps would be nice to have. <comment><USER2> I assume you mean personal email?

I like FastMail. Just as much as Google Apps ($5 / mo), privacy-focused and the way they handle multiple domains on the same account is better than Google.

My one annoyance with Google was if I want to send something from "hn@<mydomain>.com", I would have to prove I could send from that address by clicking a link... that went to the same inbox.

FastMail allows you to edit the "From" field freely when you have one of your domain fields selected.

They don't have an iOS app but they do make it very easy to add your account by downloading a profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> We recently switched our company to [https://runbox.com/](https://runbox.com/) ([https://runbox.com/about/company-values/](https://runbox.com/about/company- values/)) Our previous hoster kept trying to upsell us webhosting, SEO services, kept adding us to more and more newsletters, so one reason was to choose a company that does only one thing (email).

</comment><comment><USER4> Self, on a $9/mo VPS . I use Vultr but DO and others can do the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain more about your setup? How do you avoid being black listed and other common mail sending issues?

<comment><USER4> Sure! I run qmail, dovecot, djbdns on one of their stock FreeBSD 11-RELEASE images on their cheapest static-IPV4 level. Blacklisting hasn't been an issue (knock wood) anywhere except for Yahoo and they were impossible mail recipients when I had a real business static CIDR space so screw em. The VSP is great about maintaining the inverse address mapping. I have the SPF records, not sure that they do anything.

Edited for copy and expletive deletion

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Any kind of setup guide you can point me to? I've got some familiarity with this from about 10 years ago when I used to host my own mail.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, nothing for the whole kit and kaboodle. But there are good individual stand-alone guides:

For the underlying guts, the FreeBSD handbook [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/index.html](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/index.html)

Freebie book online for qmail is at [http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html](http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html) .

lwq.html or the OS's port collection will point you to DJB's (mandatory) djbdns config instructions. Do you remember how to manually edit DNS zone records? He uses a unique format but you'll still need to remember which resource records to use. By now there must be great online DNS resources? I don't know them. O'Reilly's dead tree books weigh on my bookshelf.

dovecot comes with excellent documentation and man pages and worked out box of the FreeBSD port collection.

I left out one other use. I subscribe to about 30 mail lists, all but NANOG o/s related. I have those emailed to the VSP instance and use a really simple mail2news.py script to pipe it to rnews for forwarding to a private INN server that sits behind a dynamic IP to preserve and read mail lists with a newsreader as $DIETY intended. With a static presence and a cheap VSP it's so much easier to make things work the way you like them. I hope you try it and get into it as much as I do.

More copyediting...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Outlook now has labels and a chat that works and you can sort by sender and what not. Spam filter sucks

</comment><comment><USER6> I love FastMail. Multiple domain support, unlimited aliases and a fast mobile website. It's just really great.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was looking at Zoho Mail yesterday, not sure how it stacks up against FastMail though. Slightly cheaper

</comment><comment><USER8> Fastmail. Cheap and reliable. I've been a customer for a good number of years now and love it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have a domain and my ISP hosts my email. I connect with POP3, send via SMTP, and use the mail client of my choice.

Not sure why anyone would do anything else.</comment>


Marketing Tools and Resources - <AUTHOR> https://marketingdeck.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

I work as a marketing consultant and whilst always keeping my eye out for new tools which speed up my workflow I find it hard to keep track of the ones that I find useful or may use in the future.

I also wanted somewhere which had access to a tutorial for when I do decide to use it. This is why I created Marketing Deck.

Please let me know any products or resources you think will be worth adding to the list. You can also submit them on the website.</comment>


The 4000 Year Old Story That Explains How to Live Life - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/this-ancient-story-explains-how-to-live-life-199503d785a6 <comment><USER2> well written, to me at least. I've lost my friends at new years eve 2018 and have been obsessed and sad ever since. I've known these people all my life, and the thought of new friendships seems pointless to me. If ppl can do this after 20 years, there's no point in making new ones, my mind reasons.

</comment><comment><USER3> The epic of Gilgamesh</comment>


Open Table files for an IPO and reveals its finances - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/opentable-files-for-ipo-and-reveals-its-finances/

<comment><USER2> Raising $40M sounds more like a VC round than an IPO. Not any more, I guess.

The article makes it sound like they totally dominate this industry ... but they only show 59 restaurants in my state of Oregon. They may be the market leader, but it seems like either there's a lot of untapped market or its just not that big.

<comment><USER3> For me, opentable pretty much dominates as the one stop for restaurant reservations and makes my dinner date planning go much faster when used together with yelp for those nights we want to go somewhere nice and impossible to get seated reasonably without a reservation. But I'm in Los Angeles (and a quick glance shows 300+ restaurants on opentable within a half hour driving distance, and around 700 in the general LA/OC area).

However, most restaurants out there are probably not large or popular enough that you'll want or need to make a reservation, and you can just walk right in and get seated. Among the ones interested in doing reservations for more than just special occasions and large groups, even less would have to be interested in the hardware, software, training and more that they need to work with opentable. And then customers have to be interested in making reservations there in the first place.

Obviously there are a lot more than 59 restaurants in Oregon and 700 in Los Angeles, but the number isn't as small as it seems at first glance when considering the number of restaurants that benefit from such a service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The obvious discussion question: who will be buying, who will be shorting?</comment>


What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? - <AUTHOR> http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/pre-1976 <comment><USER2> Also still under copyright:

"I Have a Dream" until 2038[1]. This is particularly frustrating because the copyright holders include the estate of the person who delivered the speech, but not the estate of the two other people who wrote it (and likely most of it) - not to mention the fact that, by any web-era definition, it was a public performance and also a 'general publication'.

"Happy Birthday" (certainly in the EU until 2016, and potentially in the US too until 2030 though this is disputed[2]).

There is also one movie - whose name escapes me now - which entered the public domain and was then _put back under copyright protection_ subsequently.

In the case of "I Have a Dream", think of the societal cost of raising _two generations_ of students without a complete copy of the speech in their textbooks (as is generally the case).

Alternatively, think of how a 2012 version of "I Have a Dream" would happen today. If hundreds of cell phone recordings of the speech were distributed halfway around the world within mere minutes after the speech, of what relevance would copyright protection be?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream#Copyright_disput...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream#Copyright_dispute) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You>

<comment><USER3> _"In the case of "I Have a Dream", think of the societal cost of raising two generations of students without a complete copy of the speech in their textbooks (as is generally the case)."_

While I completely agree that it is a shame that Dr. King's speeches are protected by copyright I really do not think that there is a great societal cost due to textbooks without a verbatim transcript. With the exception of the Gettysburg Address I can not think of any speeches that should be included verbatim in a high school social studies textbook. Textbooks have a lot of material to cover and summarize.

<comment><USER4> Not an American but why should the Gettysburg Address be in full while other ones aren't?

<comment><USER5> I'd assume it is because it is so short rather than because it is any more significant than other historical works.

268 words total.

 _Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The sad thing is that the abuse of copyright law by Disney was entirely unnecessary. All along they had a much more appropriate way to defend Mickey Mouse - trademark law.

Really. The maintenance of iconic symbols with commercial value is exactly what trademarks are for.

But no, instead they destroyed copyright. Then went to put criminal penalties on it. And ridiculous statutory penalties. Then they tried scaring the whole country with their BS. Multiple countries in fact.

If the public was given a choice, they'd lose immediately. Which is why they were so desperate to kill the trial balloon that the Republicans recently floated.

</comment><comment><USER7> Really makes you hate good, old Walt Disney, doesn't it?

<comment><USER8> No, I like long copyright terms. They ensure that there is a very good chance that I will never be subjected to advertisements featuring Calvin and Hobbes promoting breakfast cereal and toys.

I'd be OK with giving different terms to the different rights that compose the bundle of copyright rights. Make the derivative work right term for literary and artistic works very very long, but make the reproduction right term short. That would give the public the benefit of wide, affordable (or free) availability of literary and artistic works, without making them available for advertisers to use to rape the memory of my youth.

<comment><USER9> What about fan fiction and mashups? I think that things like _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ and maybe _Pride and Prejudice and Zombies_ should be permitted sooner than unlicensed advertising.

<comment><USER10> Legally there's no distinction between the two (and how could you draw a line? HPMoR is in many ways one big advert for the centre for modern rationality).

But yeah, I think the good of unlicensed reuse of characters is worth putting up with the bad.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you'd have to provide a separate right to the characters in a fictional work, so that characters can be reused in other fictional works, but not in a way that implies that the original character/author supports some other entity or product, such as the aforementioned Calvin and Hobbes promoting cereal and toys.

<comment><USER10> Like I said, I'm pretty sure that would rule out HPMoR (Harry might not explicitly join a rationality organization, but the story exists to promote them).

<comment><USER9> HPMoR has significant value as a standalone work of fiction. There's a lot of new creative work. It's possible to read HPMoR on fanfic.net without ever knowing that the author, "Lesswrong," is Eliezer Yudkowsky, or what his affiliation is with the Center for Applied Rationality. I'd say that's a far cry from Harry appearing in a breakfast cereal commercial.

Of course, I probably agree with you that it would be much easier to avoid making the distinction at all. I'm just trying to point out that, if someone insists on making the distinction, it's possible to draw the line exactly where I want it ;-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And here I am, still waiting for the old Kurosawa films to enter the public domain... for more (in English) see the brief summary here: [http://akirakurosawa.info/2008/08/01/intellectual- property-h...](http://akirakurosawa.info/2008/08/01/intellectual-property- high-court-rules-kurosawa-still-under-copyright/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This initially seemed like a really good argument.

Then I realized that you could make an even better sounding argument like this: "Imagine if copyright was only 10 years. Look at all the works that would now be public domain: Seinfeld, Friends, The Batman Movies, etc. etc.". This argument will probably be even more persuasive for the people who liked the original argument, since works from 10 years ago are even more recognizable.

In other words, this argument isn't actually saying anything interesting - it's simply an emotional appeal. Why should or shouldn't copyright be 10, 20, or 70 years? Why is the 1978 law wrong? Why was it created in the first place? I don't know from this article.

<comment><USER13> > Why is the 1978 law wrong? Why was it created in the first place? I don't > know from this article.

It's not as wrong (i'm still against it) to extend copyright for new works, but this horrible law extended copyright retroactively for previously created works. There was no compelling reason for extending old works. It breaks all measures of fairness no matter how you approach it.

It's equivalent to having the banks extend your home loan by 30 years and saying you owe additional payments. You get nothing out of it. There is no trade. You get nothing and existing copyright owners get given additional years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the current length of copyright is 70 years, does that mean Casablanca should be public domain this year? It was made in 1942.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_%28film%29>

<comment><USER15> The basic rule is 70 years after the author's death, not after creation or publication. In addition, works by corporations have different terms, but it's always going to be more than 70 years about publication, at least according to current law.

To calculate when Casablanca specifically would enter the public domain would mean cross-referencing several laws, which I'll leave to someone else since it's all too likely there's an easy online tool that I don't know about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is even worse. There were some publications which already entered public domain, but High Court extended copyright period retroactively. So stuff which was already under PD got copyrighted again. (I dont have link, please add it)

<comment><USER17> It's A Wonderful Life entered the public domain and was taken back from us. The rights holder forgot to apply for an extension. After it lapsed they argued that done they held the rights to the story it was based on, the rights to derive from that story, the score, etc., they should have the film too.

I can not, with humor, get across how dumb that sounds to me. So I'll state it plainly. That's amazingly stupid. And it worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh noes, we have to pay a few dollars for these things.

<comment><USER19> I suspect you are going to be downvoted into oblivion - So, on the faith that you aren't trolling, the issue isn't paying copyright holders for the intellectual property that they've created, and thereby incentivizing content creators to create more intellectual property. Nor, is the issue, that these people have a half-century government supported monopoly on their work.

The issues are (A) that the expiration for copyrights (government supported monopolies) keeps getting moved further and further into the future, far beyond any date required to incent content creators, and (B) perhaps even worse, content that is completely orphaned, and is serving no commercial value to anyone, also can't be distributed because it's locked up on copyrights that nobody is interested in any more.

<comment><USER18> I'm not trolling.

What makes you think that you should _ever_ be able to take for free, something that someone else created?

I think a content creator should be able to place _any_ copyright terms on their work.

<comment><USER7> And then they die, and the estate doesn't know what the F they want to do with the IP and doesn't want to bother sorting it out, and it (legally) never sees the light of day thereafter. Copyrights _EXPIRE_ for a reason. There isn't anyone (not in Hollywood, not in Congress, nowhere) that says copyrights should never, ever expire. It's a question of when.

<comment><USER18> Fine, make it so they have to be renewed every year, but can be renewed ad infinitum.

But that's not the actual debate about copyright that is taking place in society. In other words, the problem you're talking about is not the actual issue.

<comment><USER20> So someone should be rewarded just for being born into a family that happens to own the rights to a certain popular piece of content? Even if they themselves never did anything either creatively or in terms of hard work in their lives?

Aren't you just suggesting a tax free way of passing money between generations of a family (as current inheritance is subject to taxation)?

Also doesn't this kind of thing just discourage the creation of new artistic works? If there are tons of big popular individuals and companies, then how is the little guy meant to make a splash?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11724-6 <comment><USER2> This is a sensitive subject, but I am interested in the potential genetic and social impacts it may have had so I'm going to go ahead and post it. Allow me to preface the question by stating that I do not intend this to be a racial, religious, or cultural aspersion - I'm genuinely curious.

I have heard (from unreliable sources) that consanguineous marriage is very common in parts of the Middle East, to the point that a male suitor must ask for and be granted permission by a woman's father's brother's sons before being allowed to marry her. This is known as "bint 'amm marriage"

This sort of arrangement - first cousins - has a relationship coefficient of 0.125 and is therefore under the threshold studied in TFA, and a quick search leads me to believe that it roughly doubles the chance of a serious birth defect. That said, given the strong cultural forces at work here I suspect that many of these unions are in fact between people who are multiply first cousins, which would magnify the effect.

Is anyone here familiar with any studies done on the genetic impact on communities where bint 'amm marriage is practiced?

For reference, here's the Wikipedia article on the practice: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middle_East

</comment><comment><USER3> Paper claims an conservatively estimated prevalence of 1/3652 for extreme inbreeding which equates to about 18k people, assuming a UK population size of 66 million.

Not great, but nothing world-ending.

<comment><USER4> And defines this to mean double-first-cousins and closer (perhaps this is standard). Also, as far as I could skim, this is the prevalence today, rather than an estimate of long-run prevalence.

They must surely have data on simple first cousins, but it didn't jump out at me.

<comment><USER5> For traits, the effect on non-double first cousins can be linearly approximated, which (as far as I know) is a good approximation for inbreeding depression.

For example, taking Fluid Intelligence Score (basically how smart you are), in Table 3, its extrapolated effect size is -3.43, so:

First cousin (relationship coefficient 0.125, inbreeding coefficient 0.0625) would give -0.214 to FIS. To put that in context, for medication, that would be considered a small effect size. So inbreeding at that level is a bit like taking a stupid pill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In this study, we estimated a prevalence of EI of ~1/3652 in individuals of > European ancestry born in the UK between 1938 and 1967.

This is enough to explain the contents of Arndale Centres, but even adjusted for the reasons they gave to believe it's too conservative, not enough to explain the Daily Express.

</comment><comment><USER7> Which region in the UK? I couldn't spot in in the article but I would guess Norfolk.

<comment><USER8> For the rest of the world: this is a British running joke about Norfolk (similar to American jokes about the deep South?)

<comment><USER9> It even has its own Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_for_Norfolk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_for_Norfolk)

<comment><USER10> That TV show was awesome. And I'm an American.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given the news, Brexit does not seem like a great idea for the future genetic diversity of the kingdom.

<comment><USER12> " _Eschew flamebait. Don 't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER11> ok well, I suppose it was a trite comment and wasn't much use but on the other hand I sort of think it really is pertinent. Lack of Genetic diversity is a problem, I think it's quite easy to understand how Brexit is not likely to improve it, and given the most likely negative outcomes likely to worsen it.

<comment><USER13> I think many will assume the comment is flame-bait because lack of genetic diversity isn't really a problem. The entire human species had a population less than the current UK for the the majority of its 350,000 yr existence. Most of this time it operated in small related communities where diversity was much lower. Some have hypothesized that the global human population was as low as 2000 individuals for as long as 100,000 yrs. [1]

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2427203/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2427203/)

<comment><USER11> yes you're right, my inherent prejudice for more genetic diversity did the thinking for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps I'm missing it here but I don't see the issue of lack of mobility as the reason. These were not terribly mobile societies, only the wealthiest could afford to travel long distances.

<comment><USER4> These are people born in 1950-1980 or so, I believe.

<comment><USER15> In my small Canadian island province there are small towns in the countryside where people never leave. Work, church, Saturday nights at the legion then repeat.

I recall a story of a person who was refused gas at a rural gas station because they were not from the area. In a another town a motel refused Coast Guard workers a room because they weren't from the town.

Small towns can be weird.

<comment><USER16> > In a another town a motel refused Coast Guard workers a room because they > weren't from the town.

Why would people who lived in the town want a hotel room in the same town? How did they ever get any customers?

<comment><USER15> Coast Guard workers who were going home when their shift was over (28 days on and 28 off). The ship docked at the wharf in the small seaside town when patrolling in the area. The ship was leaving and they were waiting for a drive home but had to stay overnight. My dad worked on the same ship and they told him the story later.

<comment><USER16> No that's just re-stating who they _didn 't_ rent to. I mean who _did_ the motel rent rooms to? Only people in the town? Why would they be renting rooms? It doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER15> Yes it's weird. I think everyone involved had those same questions.

I got the story directly from my father who worked with the guys. It could have been bigotry maybe the men refused service were denied due to their appearance, accent, job (fishermen upset with Coast Guard workers).

My aunt was refused a hotel room in Quebec City because she is English. Her French husband asked and was told sure no problem but the clerk said to him in French "let me get rid of this English pig fisrt". My aunt spoke French ( awkward!). That was a story often told at family reunions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/know-your-playing-field-the-real-top-100-domains

<comment><USER2> Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see the domains listed anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Directly under the first graph it says "Download the complete spreadsheet here:". I can see how if you were skimming that would be confusing.</comment></comment>


Agonia: A text-based adventure/fighting RPG - <AUTHOR> https://agonialands.com/ <comment><USER2> Is it possible to play in coop mode with one or more geographically dispersed friends?

I am currently playing Original Sin (on Steam) with a friend who lives 6-700 km away, and I might involve more people if this is supported.

<comment><USER3> We love playing Original Sin with my SO. We are both rpg players and we are currently waiting for Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Studio (studio behind DOS). Is there any other modern crpg we could play in coop? Any recommendations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hello all, I am one of the devs of the game. Thanks to Hackertux for promoting the game here. I am happy to answer any question. We also have a very active community on Discord where all players are happy to answer questions or help new players. Belouch

<comment><USER4> [https://discordapp.com/invite/6qAqyRp](https://discordapp.com/invite/6qAqyRp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I liked web/browser-based games (not text-games). I was playing Cafysteria, Shilla, and Fallensword. Out of the three only FS keeps going strong (just rejoined the game a few days ago).

I wish though Shilla would come back, that was a much more fun game!

<comment><USER6> You just reminded me of a browser-based game called Omerta. Was really into it back in the day. The multiplayer aspect of it took place on IRC. Nostalgic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi Guys, I am one of the leaders of a group dedicated to welcoming and equipping newcomers to our faction. Should you wish to try the game and join the Forsaken faction, send me a message ingame! :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm working on a new game. I usually develop my games using javascript and gamas cause its very easy to port it to various systems / platforms. This game I'm intending to release as a comercial product, so I was thinking in selling it on xbox on steam. I guess I could publish on the web,, like you are doing, but how you monetize your game?

<comment><USER9> A game like this is almost impossible to really monetize. It's hard enough to compete being 100% free. It's basically limited to a labor of love.

<comment><USER10> Donations won't offset the dev time, but can be significant with a few thousand players. I briefly tried two PBBGs recently (idlescape.com + avabur.com) and could see from the chat that both were bringing in at least thousands a month. The former hasn't been around very long, though, and the latter had microtransactions and somewhat cheap dopamine mechanics.

<comment><USER8> nice, I'll visit those links

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is this different than a MUD?

<comment><USER12> Despite the HN headline, from the screenshots it looks graphical.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you intercept server-side HTTPS traffic for debugging? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you have a firewall appliance it probably has "TLS Inspection" (sometimes incorrectly referred to as "SSL Inspection"). You could setup PFSense [1] locally on the server to accomplish the same goals.

Note that this is universally agreed upon to be a bad idea. [2] [3] [4] [5]

[1] [https://www.pfsense.org/](https://www.pfsense.org/) [2][https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/11/the_nsa_warns...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/11/the_nsa_warns_o.html) [3] [https://media.defense.gov/2019/Nov/18/2002212783/-1/-1/0/MAN...](https://media.defense.gov/2019/Nov/18/2002212783/-1/-1/0/MANAGING%20RISK%20FROM%20TLS%20INSPECTION_20191106.PDF) [4] [https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/cert/2015/03/the-risks-of- ssl-i...](https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/cert/2015/03/the-risks-of-ssl- inspection.html) [5] [https://www.us- cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA17-075A](https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA17-075A)

</comment><comment><USER3> I attach a debugger to the server</comment>


Why Linus Torvalds was wrong about C++ - <AUTHOR> http://news.dice.com/2015/03/10/linus-torvalds-was-sorta-wrong-about-c/

<comment><USER2> C++ sux.

You have all the BS that comes with a low language like C and you also have an object-oriented system that was made by people who had never written object- oriented programs.

Back in the late 80's and early 90's C++ books would show OO examples like "here is how to implement a stack"; a few years later, Java books had examples of objects used to implement business objects instead of just basic data structures.

STL and Boost did come along, but after decades of legacy code was written. The latest release of C++ is a big improvement but the horrible reality is that for every "green field" development effort there are 10x the number of jobs doing maintenance work, so you will have to deal with the awful legacy of C++ for decades.</comment>


Neural Networks for newbies (3blue1brown) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi <comment><AUTHOR> Key source material behind the video:

[http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/index.html](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/index.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Which sites are using websocket in 2020? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Overleaf.com uses websockets for collaborative LaTeX editing. I personally think making a nice git workflow for non-technical academic types who are stuck using LaTeX might have been better.

Slack and probably any other chat app.

A certain hardware vendor for networking equipment uses websockets to tell device's when a user wants to establish a connection to that device. Websockets are used to broker webrtc/p2p connections in that case.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically all crypto exchanges.

<comment><USER4> I vouch for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any site that does ad blocker detection

</comment><comment><USER6> figma.com, for multiplayer</comment>


Einstein's Defense of  Socialism - <AUTHOR> http://luxemburgist.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/einsteins-defense-of-socialism/

<comment><USER2> I feel like you are all somehow far from the truth.

I live in Moldova, a state that appeared as a consequence of the Ribbentrop- Molotov pact (also known as the Stalin-Hitler pact). We had the Communist Party ruling our country until 2 years ago.

I've been talking to both Romanian (Fascist) and Russian (Soviet) soldiers, and they all agree, both Nazism and Communism are socialistic regimes. I strongly recommend "The Soviet Story", watching it might clear your views.

<comment><USER3> [http://ia700107.us.archive.org/17/items/TheSovietStory/THE_S...](http://ia700107.us.archive.org/17/items/TheSovietStory/THE_SOVIET_STORY_512kb.mp4)

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way." ... "They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust." - Karl Marx

Everyone should watch this movie - especially people that think that socialism is a benign idea.

<comment><USER4> `maxharris` is either a moron or a liar, or more probably both. The first fragment of this sentence is genuine Marx, writing for the New York Daily Tribune, as a one-second search would have shown him. The second I cannot find; it is certainly not in the same article, as the ellipsis fraudulently suggests. If it exists the chances that it refers to a transition to socialism, communism, or whatever Marx is supposed to have favored, are certainly zero.

In the Daily Tribune article, Marx is discussing emigration (mostly to America) from England, Ireland and Scotland, in the years around 1850, and the gruesome commentary of English writers of the period.

The Economist, for example, he quotes as writing:

"The departure of the redundant part of the population of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement. The revenue of Ireland has not suffered in any degree from the famine of 1846-47, or from the emigration that has since taken place. On the contrary, her net revenue amounted in 1851 to £4,281,999, being about £184,000 greater than in 1843"

I.e. they "regard 'Net-Revenue' as the Moloch to whom entire populations must be sacrificed..." as Marx puts the view of the Ricardians.

The context can be found here on a website for true believers: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/03/04.htm>

I don't see any easy way of search for ancient Economist articles, but I notice that in the same year the American writer Carey quoted the same passage as from "Economist, (London,) Feb. 12, 1853." in his book on the slave trade <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8000/pg8000.txt>

<comment><USER3> So how do you deal with the following quote?

"The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward." - Friedrich Engels

A quick google search shows that this one is NOT hard to find:

<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm>

[http://books.google.com/books?id=Mdj3AXU2YEEC&pg=PA167&#...
Engels was the co-founder of Marxism, and there is a great deal of evidence that the Soviet Union murdered tens of millions of its own citizens. Given these facts, any reasonable person will conclude that Marxism is an ideology that leads to mass murder.

<comment><USER4> The quote from Engels (1820-1895) dates from 1849. But whatever the text may mean, it would be absurd to claim that it is an expression of 'Marxism', whatever in turn _that_ may mean. (I would have thought that Engels invented "Marxism" -- about 30 years after writing this newspaper article.)

I don't care to defend Engels early middle or late, but this text doesn't have the murder-favoring aspect you are pretending it does. It is a commentary on ultra-complicated post-1848 politics; there is little here that wouldn't have been accepted by an American observer of the time.

Interpretation is again helped by the preceding sentence (at a bare minimum) which might be thought just as creepy: "The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names."

The disappearance of a 'reactionary class' evidently means: the coming to a social order in which that is not one of the classes. The disappearance of a 'dynasty' doesn't mean murder of the ruling family. The disappearance of 'nations' (Nationen) and 'peoples' (Voelker) is the same: not the destruction of individuals, but the formation of some wider social unity, in which those distinctions of Volk don't arise. It is like the disappearance of the Confederacy.

The language Engels is employing is indeed ugly. But it is impossible to believe that he or anyone in the mid 19th c. would be arguing for something in the nature of genocide. They were simply too naive to envisage such a thing.

That the Soviet Union was a death machine that murdered millions is obvious. It has nothing to do with the materials quoted, from Marx or Engels. The question why you continue to fabricate connections is still open.

<comment><USER3> <quote>The disappearance of a 'reactionary class' evidently means: the coming to a social order in which that is not one of the classes. The disappearance of a 'dynasty' doesn't mean murder of the ruling family. The disappearance of 'nations' (Nationen) and 'peoples' (Voelker) is the same: not the destruction of individuals, but the formation of some wider social unity, in which those distinctions of Volk don't arise. It is like the disappearance of the Confederacy.</quote>

The only way to make people really disappear is to kill them or throw them into a gulag. Why would a ruler go on supporting people that he wants to see disappear? Marx and Engels spent their lives undermining _individual_ rights ("you have the right to be left alone, as long as you don't steal from, kill or defraud other people"), which is the only thing that would have kept these genocides from occuring.

I don't believe that this was some unforseeable connection. The bloody language in Engels' writing makes more sense in this context.

Historical context does matter, but if you do it to the point where you can't even judge anything in history as good or bad for people, you're just following the current academic fad rather than thinking sensibly. This is especially important when the ideas you're judging are still present in the world around you, and when some aspect of history is still not properly understood in most people's minds, as is the case with the history of Communism.

<comment><USER4> "The only way to make people really disappear is to kill them or throw them into a gulag."

But no one was suggesting making anyone disappear, least of all Engels. All the myriad principalities and duchies of the German world are now gone, except Liechtenstein & Co -- this is an example of what Engels is anticipating and saying would be an 'advance' (he is thinking in this case of those of the southern parts of the Austrian Empire) Those who wanted the unification of Germany didn't want to kill off the people of Schleswig-Holstein! The suggestion is an outrage! Every rational person in the period thought that (1) a world full of petty duchies ruled by the church keeping peasants in darkness, etc etc. was fated to go away and that (2) this would be good; Americans, who were familiar with something better, would have been even more emphatic than Engels. In claiming that the ideas here propounded are the source of all evil, you are claiming that e.g. America is an example of this evil.

The claim that Marx and Engels 'spent their lives undermining' individual rights does not come with any evidence. Marx spent his life trying to write a book about the inner nature of the so-called 'capitalistic mode of production', of which he managed to finish one volume. It's a good read, you should try it sometime. Incredibly funny for one thing. That it is somehow all an argument against individual rights is a complete inversion of the actual text. You are as usual employing Russian barbarism as an argument against Marx.

You are in fact representing Stalinist propaganda. The idea the the Soviet Union somehow realized something in Marx is pure Stalinism. Marx did nothing appreciable except attempt an analysis -- true or false it matters not -- of the present, specifically capitalistic form of life, without offering the least suggestion for a possible replacement: "I am not writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future". Every attempt to imagine a possible better future society he sneers at as utopianism, Fourierism, Saint Simonism etc etc. The only formula he has for the imagined replacement is "communism", i.e. people living together and making their life together on the basis of thinking out together how to live together and make their lives together -- an ancient expression, another word for democracy -- and one admitting as many interpretations, many of course corrupt.

<comment><USER3> > The claim that Marx and Engels 'spent their lives undermining' individual > rights does not come with any evidence.

From <http://faculty.washington.edu/wtalbott/phil332/trmarxII.htm>

"Note how much the early Marx is influenced by Hegel: (1) Individualism is a problem to be overcome. (2) Emancipation is the goal, but of a species-being not as an individual. Freedom is identified with the universal (844)."

"Private property "is the product of alienated labor, and ... it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.""

The right to private property is an individual right. If someone is totally deprived of the right to their property, they can't survive: take away someone's food, clothes, home, bed, etc., and they're dead before long. This happened _millions_ of times in the Soviet Union and in China, among other places. You really can't go on pretending that Marx had nothing to do with it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironic that Einstein, writing in America after fleeing the horrors of national socialism in Germany, still entertained notions of subjugating the individual to the state.

<comment><USER6> Uhh, you know that the National Socialist Worker's Party didn't really have anything to do with socialism?

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry but that just isn't correct. I'm absolutely not saying all socialists are Nazis but the Nazi party was an extreme example of the socialist philosophy. That philosophy being that the Government should use its power to socially engineer a better world (the opposite of which being the libertarian philosophy that the Government should exist to protect people against social engineering by allowing them to do what they want even if those actions are detrimental).

Obviously it's all a sliding scale but to say OstiaAntica is flat out wrong is not accurate.

<comment><USER8> The Nazis were facists, which is to say that there was "private property", but the state could tell you what you had to do with "your" property. In socialism, the state owns the property. It's a distinction without much of a difference, the main one being that socialism is a little more honest.

<comment><USER9> Spoken like a true 5 minute dabbler with an extremely cursory knowledge of the topic at hand. Bravo!

Actually, the "state owning the property" is not a core idea of socialism --it was only a "feature" of "really existing socialism", and even USSR had things like the NEP. Except for the backward places where "really existing socialism" developed, extremely few europeans (or american for that matter) socialists believed that it was a proper socialism at all.

As in, there are several types of socialism. Things americans complain about and deny as "socialism" (universal health care, for one), are proposed by even right-wing parties in Europe.

I'm sorry, but a cursory glance at one book or a documentary, or something heard from a friend of a friend, won't do. In order to intelligently discuss matters of world politics one has to do a little research. And it would be better if that research was impartial. Buy some books from both sides of the argument, and from both sides of the atlantic (and even the pacific).

The average opinion even on this matters, even on a site like "Hacker News" is often little better than what creationists know about evolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, even though i'm not suprised knowing Einstein's affinity for Spinoza : he must have carefully read Marx and other materialist philosophers.

</comment><comment><USER11> The taboo is extremely strong here on Hacker News.

<comment><USER12> it is ironic that this site is dedicated to entrepreneurship, but is full of people who are anti-capitalist and promote socialism.</comment></comment>


The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet - <AUTHOR> https://blog.haschek.at/2018/the-curious-case-of-the-RasPi-in-our-network.html <comment><USER3> That's an amateur job. Resin explains it - you try to do some exfiltration via an external commercial service? Come on.

If the author had setup an encrypted partition where all the "real stuff" was found, and the key for such partition was in-memory only, possibly going alone one of the small rpi UPS/batteries to prevent minor electrical hiccups to make the whole operation fail.... it would have been almost impossible to get back at the author.

Also, using a nice "black box" that looked like a sort of electronic device, instead of some randomly put together rpi+pieces, would have made the device mostly invisible.

So: an amateurish hacking job.

<comment><USER4> > Also, using a nice "black box" that looked like a sort of electronic device

Disguised as one of those generic thermostat boxes on a wall it'd go unnoticed by 99.999% of people. Bonus points for a twiddly wheel.

<comment><USER5> Or even better: find an old ethernet switch, gut it (but keep the connectors) and put Raspberry PI inside. You will need to solder 6 wires for ethernet and power, but the pins are fairly large so this should be easy.

Even if discovered, most people would not bother taking it apart --- they'll just assume it is broken and throw it away.

<comment><USER6> This is exactly what I was thinking. Even the network admin would probably be like, "well, I don't think so but I'd better not mess with it, just in case it's how the CEO is getting internet". Unless of course they engineered the network originally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hadn't realised that the wifi->address mapping was so publicly available. That means a list of wifi addresses that you've connected your phone to is also a location history. :(

<comment><USER8> I hadn't either. Also what is the deal of random people contributing to the database at [https://wigle.net/](https://wigle.net/), why don't you mind your own business? There is a big difference between broadcasting the SSID in a 20-50m radius and effectively broadcasting it world-wide.

<comment><USER9> Google and other entities already have that data. Building open databases like wigle.net or [https://location.services.mozilla.com/](https://location.services.mozilla.com/) seems good to me because:

1) It allows building alternative location providers that make it possible to have an Android device that doesn't rely on Google maps.

2) Publicizing the existences of these databases might make the general public more conscious of privacy and data protection issues involved.

<comment><USER8> 1) I don't find such location-providers a good addition to society.

2) That is like saying you go around kicking people in the crotch to make them more conscious about the benefits of learning self-defence.

Update:

> Google and other entities already have that data.

How is this an argument FOR gathering sensitive information about the people around you? Should you also look to their trash and digitise any documents they throw away and make a website that allows you to search through these documents? You could argue that Google or some other entity already has that information anyway.

You could also argue that this would increase consciousness with regards to the privacy concerns of your trash.

<comment><USER9> Re: #1 I think they are a good addition to society because otherwise every device has to rely on satellite positioning, which is slower, generally less accurate, and prone to failure indoors or around tall buildings.

<comment><USER8> I prefer privacy over location data to be honest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have two questions after reading the article

1) What are DNS logs?

2) What are RADIUS logs?

Would someone be so good as to answer?

Thanks in advance for help you could provide.

Edit :- This got downvoted. Don't know why should anyone asking an honest question be marked down. Am I not allowed to ask technical questions in comments section?

<comment><USER11> You probably got downvoted because you can just use Google to answer those questions.

<comment><USER12> I appreciate having the question asked and answered right here in the comments.

won't someone please think of the lurkers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of the people getting paid to install rogue devices like this, e.g. [https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9ixdh9/fou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9ixdh9/found_hooked_up_to_my_router/e6nh61r/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The attacker's setup is really, really bad. But it's very interesting to see a drop device being used in the wild. I assume that if amateur solo actors are doing this, then organized crime rings are for sure.

<comment><USER15> Yes, very much. Not only are they doing it but they're peddling it to the unwary. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18919906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18919906)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is possible that there is a second device that does a sniffing part. This device may be a relay for the second device. They could be connected via Bluetooth, hence the Bluetooth dongle.

<comment><USER17> I agree. Like a keylogger on a wired keyboard which exfiltrates via the bluetooth dongle. That dongle was there for a reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This person's wiring closet needs to have all Ethernet switch ports in a default 'shut' state and assigned to a quarantine vlan.

It's amateur hour if you can just plug in any random rpi, it gets a DHCP lease, access to the company lan, and a route to the outside internet.

<comment><USER19> That would be best practice.

However I don't mind being able to get LAN internet at a hotel that wants me to pay $24 per day for wifi when they have VoiP phones that have internet access...

<comment><USER18> I often find that tethering to T-Mobile LTE is better than whatever misconfigured, screwed up NAT/gateway a hotel has.

<comment><USER20> Agreed.

Every single hotel I've been to in the last year or so has pitiful bandwidth, which is completely saturated after dark once everyone fires up Netflix and lets it run all night long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It didn't really talk about what it "logged", that would have been interesting to know what data was being stolen.

Great article though, very interesting read.

<comment><USER22> As the article concludes with "Legal has taken over, I did my part and the rest is over my pay grade.", I think the author is not allowed to disclose this publicly.

<comment><USER23> I think the author just doesn't know what it does. From his Reddit post [1]:

>Still no idea what it actually does except for the program being called "logger", the bluetooth dongle and it being only feet away from secretary / ceo office

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9xveq5/rogue_rasp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9xveq5/rogue_raspberrypi_found_in_network_closet_need/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> the article makes the massive assumption that the 'gifted person' whose name and home address were exposed is also the person who wanted it in the closet.

Either that person has phenomenally bad tradecraft, or they are actually innocent.

There are so many plausible ways in which the 'gifted person' is not in on the plot; for example, they may have sold the pi to the disgruntled employee before the employee was disgruntled or with no idea of the use that the disgruntled employee would put it too.

Have to kind of hope thats how it all ends up.

When I was young I often set up computers and stuff for others. These days I try and get slopy shoulders when people ask me for tech support, and if there were a young gifted wizkid nearby I'd be sending a lot of innocent business their way....

<comment><USER25> I didn't see that assumption anywhere in the article. He just followed the leads, collected the evidence and connected the dots. The device was set up in the gifted kid's home, and used a webservice paid for by the gifted kid's company. The device clearly comes from the gifted kid. Was he also the one who wanted the device in the closet? That's the one thing we don't know. That, and the relationship between the gifted kid and the ex-employee.

Further legal investigation will no doubt follow. Maybe gifted kid is involved in something illegal, maybe not. Hopefully we'll hear more about this in the future.

<comment><USER24> Yeah the link title here on HN is "How I got the home address of the person that put a RasPi in our network closet"

Which is interesting, because I double-checked and the article is actually more circumspect: "The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet how we found, analyzed (with the help of Reddit) and in the end caught the culprit of a malicious device in our network"

They find the home address and name of the person who prepared the pi (although we don't know it was the person who installed the 'logger', whatever that is etc). And they have identified the disgruntled employee who seems to have installed it. Two separate things.

<comment><USER25> Good point. The original HN title did indeed imply the "gifted person" was the one who put it there. I notice the the title has now been changed to the article title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bit of a Agatha Christie style who dun it.

Fixed number of people it could be ... and it turns out to be the ex employee ... who would have thought.

<comment><USER27> The butler ... ahem ... ex-employee always does it.

I'm pretty shocked at how obvious they left this. Surely they knew it would be found one day?

<comment><USER26> Perhaps it's more like "Who framed Roger Rabbit"?

Always suspected that Agatha was a bit simplistic. Maybe the real bad guy always gets away!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Plugging out is kinda bad idea, I would start with cold boot attack just in case sd card would be encrypted.

<comment><USER29> What would that involve? I'm guessing making a bookable SD card that dumps memory, unplugging and quickly replugging the power cable, and then booting that card? Or do you need something more specialized?

<comment><USER30> I don't think that you can, manually, swap SD cards (on a running system! That alone would trigger all sorts of quirks, unless you're running off initramfs, tmpfs or an external storage device.) and toggle power so quickly that the RPi reboots but doesn't erase RAM. I mean, you might get very lucky, but the boot process is heavily stacked against you - the bootloader on your SD card gets executed fairly late in the boot sequence: [https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10442/what-i...](https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10442/what- is-the-boot-sequence)

<comment><USER29> I meant you'd swap the card when the system was off, not when it was on.

<comment><USER30> Power off, swap cards, power on? That's a multi-second task, even if SDRAM didn't reset during boot stages.

<comment><USER30> I mean, you _could_ swap the cards live, but I'd be worried about the electrical end, not the debounced and processed signals coming from the OS - although if I were writing a malicious package, device tree changes would also trigger all sorts of alarms. (Had a bad contact on an SD card once - <USER2> effect of disconnect-reconnect on the running OS was...spectacular, but in a bad way. In the better case, it fluctuated the board voltage enough to reboot.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> On the Reddit post this originated from [0], it says that the motivation from the ex-employee was "help us identifying wifi problems and tracking users in the area around the Managers office". Makes me wonder if it was malicious or just stupidity.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9xveq5/rogue_rasp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9xveq5/rogue_raspberrypi_found_in_network_closet_need/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm shocked they used a commercial service to store their entire codebase. That could be easily subpeonad and if its a paid plan they will be dead in the water.

</comment><comment><USER33> Well, Co-founder of Makerdiary is here :)

I love this article, and I wanna promote our works in this thread :)

We are build some little Nordic nRF52-based widgets for maker with a lot of documents, you can find more wiki at here[1][2]. And we are try to use MESH network technology to protect our IoT data, here is some tutorial for BLE MESH[3] and OpenThread MESH[4].

BTW, if you are intersted in FIDO U2F security key, please check here[5], an open source FIDO U2F implementation on nRF52 SoC.

[1]: [https://wiki.makerdiary.com](https://wiki.makerdiary.com)

[2]: [https://blog.makerdiary.com](https://blog.makerdiary.com)

[3]: [https://blog.makerdiary.com/getting-started-with- bluetooth-m...](https://blog.makerdiary.com/getting-started-with-bluetooth- mesh-development/)

[4]: [https://blog.makerdiary.com/build-a-thread-network-with- nrf5...](https://blog.makerdiary.com/build-a-thread-network-with- nrf52840-mdk/)

[5]: [https://github.com/makerdiary/nrf52-u2f](https://github.com/makerdiary/nrf52-u2f)

</comment><comment><USER34> You guys just killed wigle.net :(

</comment><comment> cm-t Intereseting, at every hint found in the blogpost, i was trying to guess the next steps, fun !

</comment><comment><USER35> It might have been better to call the FBI as soon as nobody could identify the device. However, the conclusion was quite satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a textbook case where of amateur sleuthing is a bad idea. We're not all Tsutomu Shimomura.

If there is a criminal (or civil) case, there has been no chain of custody. If you find something like this, don't even touch it, get someone qualified.

Secondly, it seems highly likely the person who created the image is not the person who emplaced it. The use of a VPN is hardly an indicator of evil intent. At least the author did not put any names in their publication.

<comment><USER36> [https://www.sans.org/course/advanced-incident-response- threa...](https://www.sans.org/course/advanced-incident-response-threat- hunting-training)

[https://brettshavers.com/brett-s-blog/entry/digital- forensic...](https://brettshavers.com/brett-s-blog/entry/digital-forensics-is- really-easy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Mr Robot, this 'gifted' kid is not.

</comment><comment><USER38> CSI: Cyber :)

</comment><comment><USER39> nice detective work :D cool

<comment><USER40> Yeah, and a big F for that "gifted person".

<comment><USER41> To the ex-employee.

There was no conclusion drawn as to the involvement of the gifted kid other than the pi initially being set up by them.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, but it was the setup that included all that information about him. That's why I said "F". An OPSEC fail. For the ex-employee, it was failure in judgment. And also OPSEC failure, for not checking the device for compromising information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Legal has taken over, I did my part and the rest is over my pay grade.

Wow, I never wanted to work in a company where I had to say this. Really, if the pay grade decides which human you are, I better get no money but can do whatever I want, like go to that person, ring on its door and ask it about its plans.

<comment><USER43> "beyond my pay grade" is just an expression, it doesn't really refer to pay exactly, it just means it's someone else's responsibility

<comment><USER44> though if I remember correctly, it comes from the military where seniority (and thus decision-making capability) and pay grade are explicitly linked.</comment></comment></comment>