Hey Hadopi, You're Breaking The Law. - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/hey-hadopi-youre-breaking-the-law-we-made-three-strikes-illegal-across-all-europe-130616/

<comment><USER3> I'm not necessarily pro or anti sharing, but calling piracy "the good deed of sharing culture and knowledge" is a good way for me to never take you seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Piracy" is pretty anti-sharing language IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how me not being allowed to make and distribute an unlimited number complete copies of, say, "Iron Man 3", somehow limits my fundamental right to freedom of expression.

<comment><AUTHOR> How can I reason and speak about something I can't look at but for second hand testimony? Why should anyone limit his or herself to the second-hand testimony of people who could afford to look at the facts when the only obstacles are social? Why are facts, cultural or otherwise, even behind a gate? Why should I be a second-class human because I can't afford to license the means to think?

To put it differently: reduce, reuse, recycle. Once a work is made, why should anyone pay for it again beyond the cost of transcription? If investors can't cope with the product being the dividend, maybe the effort wasn't worth it...

(Of course, these are just my own thoughts.)

<comment><USER5> Wow, amongst other things, that makes a good case for giving law enforcement agencies direct access to our private information. You're right: why have "second hand testimony" if you can get it firsthand? After all, the NSA is only making copies of all our information, so we are not deprived of anything either.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the contrary, privacy has nothing to do with copyright, or rather: they are at entirely opposite ends of a spectrum.

Privacy is an extension of one's right to be secure in one's body, and free in one's thoughts. It is non-transferrable. Disclosure is boolean: it was either voluntary, in which case it does not impose any obligations on those who would reason about it (and copy it, and...), or it was involuntary, in which case it is damage (as in the case of NSA spying). Money doesn't enter into it.

Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it is typically transferable, and it typically imposes obligations even when licensed. It is about monetizing copies at the expense of free expression and thought, and that expense can be bought, sold, in any measure, at the discretion of the holder. It is intended to be a tool to meter out copies for as much remuneration as possible, not to keep them to one's self forever with no intention of ever monetizing them.

<comment><USER5> My point (that is admittedly not really clear) is that privacy and copyright are just restrictions on what you can do with information. But allow me to address your points in a wall of text nobody will read:

> Privacy is an extension of one's right to be secure in one's body, and free > in one's thoughts.

Copyright is an extension of one's right to be paid for the value provided by their labor. Only, in this case, the labor is of an intellectual nature that can be infinitely replicated without recompense. Significantly, each copy of that labor provides substantially the same amount of value regardless of the number of copies, so N copies provides almost N times the value. I don't understand the argument that the remuneration for that value should be anything other than a function of the value provided; anything less than a linear relation looks dangerously, to me, like communism. Not to mention that "Once a work is made, why should anyone pay for it again beyond the cost of transcription?" is a direct corollary to the "you should get an A for effort!" fallacy.

> It is non-transferrable. Disclosure is boolean: it was either voluntary, in > which case it does not impose any obligations on those who would reason > about it (and copy it, and...), or it was involuntary, in which case it is > damage (as in the case of NSA spying). Money doesn't enter into it.

Two things: 1\. Copyright has to be transferable else its economic value would be severely restricted.

2\. Privacy may not be "transferrable" (the term does not really make sense for "privacy"), but it absolutely is _tradeable_ , and it's hardly as boolean as you make it out to be. As Google and Facebook show us so clearly, people will gladly trade their privacy in exchange for services that would otherwise have a monetary cost. So it definitely is tradeable. But is that really "voluntary"? Well, if anyone dug into Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, it was inspired by a survey where the surprising finding was that a large fraction of users _did not know_ that their private information was being mined by Google, and a significant portion of them said _did not like_ it. (I'd like to say the numbers were 45% and 70% respectively, but I can't be sure.) Now: Is that voluntary? What if they didn't know, but did not mind; is that voluntary? What if they knew and didn't mind, but hadn't considered the implications; would you call uninformed decisions like that voluntary?

3\. And that's also a clear example that privacy is, in fact, monetizable, so money certainly enters into it.

> Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it is typically transferable, > and it typically imposes obligations even when licensed.

Just like money is a government-granted monopoly on a unique serial number. It's not licensed, but it does impose obligations on whoever owns a hard copy at the moment (no copies).

> It is about monetizing copies at the expense of free expression and thought, > and that expense can be bought, sold, in any measure, at the discretion of > the holder. It is intended to be a tool to meter out copies for as much > remuneration as possible, not to keep them to one's self forever with no > intention of ever monetizing them.

Yes it is about monetizing copies; or to put it in Psuedo-economical terms, it is about ensuring economic compensation for the value provided by each copy to the consumer. "As much remuneration as possible" would ideally be econ-speak for "what the market will bear", but this does not apply well to copyright because of the severe market distortion that widespread piracy introduces. What you have instead is some portion of honest (or technically unsavvy) consumers paying more to compensate for large number of pirates who derive value without paying for it.

But, no it is _not_ at the expense of free expression and thought.

1\. Free thought is not affected _at all_. Copyright does not stop you from thinking anything. It only stops you from profiting from copies of _other people 's expression_, which is in no way related to restricting what goes on in your head.

2\. It only restricts your "free expression" to the extent that your "free expression" exactly matches somebody's copyrighted expression, or aspects thereof. Unlike patents, it is almost impossible that two independently created works will match _exactly_ in any significant aspect.

3\. True, some derivative expression is unfairly caught in the copyright web, especially when there is no clear way to extricate the creative aspect from the original work. The one example that I personally lament are Anime Music Videos; there used to be a ton of awesome work with very original and meticulous synchronization of music to completely unrelated videos that suddenly had their audio stripped on Youtube. However, if you look at the bigger picture, almost all copyright infringements are simply copying original works to avoid paying for it, either with money or patience.

4\. Even then, tons of derivative work gets through just fine, simply because it makes no economical sense to stamp it out. Literary fanfic is one example.

5\. The petabytes of torrents exchanged daily (yes, petabytes in the _US alone_ ; look up the numbers) is hardly "free expression and thought". Ponder how many movies/songs/games that is, even if you assume a ridiculously generous 50% of the torrent traffic to be legit. It's just the "expression" of the "thought" that somebody else's work should be had for "free".

The image you seem to have of copyright restricting "free expression and thought" is based on a focus on a secondary effect of copyright laws that is actually a very small edge case in reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Copyright is an extension of one's right to be paid for the value provided > by their labor.

No - labour is the work, effort, and time - and charging twice is fraud.

> anything less than a linear relation looks dangerously, to me, like > communism.

McCarthyism and FUD. Also, when you watch pornography, the terroists win.

>> Copyright is a government-granted monopoly...

> Just like money...

OK, this is part of a larger tangent, but this is worth setting apart and responding to. No, money is not a government-granted monopoly. Money is whatever I accept as payment and that does not need a government (a government of one is hardly a government). (As for more conventional forms of money, we all together gave our respective _governments_ monopolies on that - only in a different sense than you mean - not the other way around.)

> "As much remuneration as possible" would ideally be econ-speak for "what the > market will bear", but this does not apply well to copyright because of the > severe market distortion that widespread piracy introduces.

That works both ways: charging for ideas has distorted access to knowledge via the Internet. You might claim that without copyright there would be less "stuff" on the Internet, but there is nothing supporting that. Humans are creative by nature whereas humans would not naturally clean toilets - and thus should be paid for it.

> What you have instead is some portion of honest (or technically unsavvy) > consumers paying more to compensate for large number of pirates who derive > value without paying for it.

Remove the part where you call people who share their access to information freely "dishonest," and you have simply repeated the childhood moral "knowledge is power" (and "sharing is caring").

> 1\. Copyright does not stop you from thinking anything. It only stops you > from profiting from copies of other people's expression, which is in no way > related to restricting what goes on in your head.

Profiting implies selling, which is not the case with simple/private copying - unless you mean profiting abstractly, as in increased capacity for thought, then yes - and in which case you have paraphrased me well.

> 5\. The petabytes of torrents exchanged daily (yes, petabytes in the US > alone; look up the numbers) is hardly "free expression and thought". Ponder > how many movies/songs/games that is, even if you assume a ridiculously > generous 50% of the torrent traffic to be legit.

It's almost as though the only reason people pay their ISP is for the ability to make copies.

<comment><USER5> Well, somebody read my wall of text after all! Here's another!

> No - labour is the work, effort, and time - and charging twice is fraud.

I don't understand. How are you charging twice if you ask two people to compensate you for the value you provided? Value is everything. Or do you think people should be paid for their "work, effort, and time" for just digging holes up and filling them up again?

> McCarthyism and FUD. Also, when you watch pornography, the terroists win.

I'm guessing you haven't lived in a communist regime, but know anyone who did? I know some from ex-communist countries like Romania, old USSR, some current day states in India, etc. They all have a deep horror of communism. There is a reason it fails hard.

> Money is whatever I accept as payment and that does not need a government (a > government of one is hardly a government).

The point was, information has value of varying, contextually-dependent amounts, either inherently or artificially through monopolies, and uncontrolled duplication can have very bad economic effects. Money is just one example. Copying information is not just copying bits. Ask yourself why printing money is restricted. Ask yourself why bitcoin works the way it does.

> That works both ways: charging for ideas has distorted access to knowledge > via the Internet.

Distorted, how? If something gives you value, be it physical or intellectual, charging for it is in no way "market distortion". There are various distortions that _can_ come into play, but they are exactly the same as with physical goods.

> You might claim that without copyright there would be less "stuff" on the > Internet, but there is nothing supporting that.

You really should talk to some musicians. For many, to make a living, they have to work a day job and/or do live shows (which is not an option for many), which takes time that they could instead used to create new stuff. If you searched for threads on this topic on HN, you'll hear this lament frequently from people who actually are musicians. So yes, there is support for that.

> Humans are creative by nature whereas humans would not naturally clean > toilets - and thus should be paid for it.

No, humans are not creative by nature, _some_ are. And of those, vanishingly few are good at it. For every billion of amateur artist videos on YouTube, you only get one phenomenon like Bieber(!!)

What humans _are_ , however, is greedy and willing to take advantage of others the moment they think they can get away with it. Ask yourself why we have so many laws.

BTW, do you like coding? In that case, I'd guess your a coder by nature. I know a few MBAs who'd love to get their world changing ideas implemented for free.

> Remove the part where you call people who share their access to information > freely "dishonest," and you have simply repeated the childhood moral > "knowledge is power" (and "sharing is caring").

I don't really get this point... Are you saying people paying for content are stupid?

And if sharing is caring, why don't you share your bank account details? Just information after all.

> Profiting implies selling, which is not the case with simple/private copying > - unless you mean profiting abstractly, as in increased capacity for > thought, then yes - and in which case you have paraphrased me well.

I meant selling. Copyright law specifically applies to distribution, not downloading. So you agree "increased capacity of thought" is "profiting"! Wow, that sure sounds like you're deriving value from something, and should maybe, you know, kinda, like, sorta want to pay for that benefit if remuneration was asked for? No? Not the least bit? You just want people to put in labor to create new information so that you can benefit from it without paying? Simply because you can get away with it?

Hmm, I can guess why communism failed.

And going back to tzs' point, pirating Iron Man 3 increases "capacity of thought"? Really?

> It's almost as though the only reason people pay their ISP is for the > ability to make copies.

It's almost as if you're deliberately trying to avoid addressing my point that information is more than just bits and making copies can have economic consequences.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" if sharing is caring, why don't you share your bank account details?"_

(Repeating myself) Privacy != copyright.

 _" And going back to tzs' point, pirating Iron Man 3 increases "capacity of thought"? Really?"_

Sure, why not? A specific case like Iron Man 3, is frankly irrelevant when trying to formulate a general rule though - unless it provides a contradiction. The case of Iron Man 3 does not contradict my general rule - namely, that restricting copying for the sake of copyright is immoral (and my mom's rule: "sharing is caring"). Iron Man 3 is not worth copying IMHO, but just because I don't want it doesn't mean I care if someone else does. _I cannot know how watching Iron Man 3 might help someone, and I 'm not about to guess._ But, it would be immoral IMHO to prevent them from copying it, since they are the ones paying for the process (ISP, HD, PC... It's all on their dime), and since copies are not held exclusively.

The work that went into making Iron Man 3 _is done_. The copies should have nothing to do with the economics: if the product of the process was not viable - without basing that viability on artificially impeding others' private computing and thinking actions - it should not have been done. I have no obligation to subsidize any wasteful endeavor.

Similarly, I do not keep Justin Bieber from charging for his time, in advance (like kickstarter) or afterwards (like most jobs), or accepting gratuities at any point. However, I do _not_ support forcing gratuities with copyright. Copies are as good as thoughts to me, and IMHO it is simply too far past the line of reasonable for a society that claims to value knowledge to willfully prevent access to it. Paying for copies should be optional IMHO. Not everyone tips the same, and I am not breaking the law if I walk out without leaving anything.

 _" How are you charging twice if you ask two people to compensate you for the value you provided?"_

It is paying more than once to pay more than the time and resources that go into a thing. Don't get me wrong - I am often willing to pay a premium (more than once) for physical goods rather than go without, or roll my own, but my good will only goes so far and I will generally not buy something terribly overpriced. In the case of physical objects, it _is immoral_ to keep/take something without paying. In the case of copies, it is _immoral_ to restrict copying _for lack of paying_. The difference _is_ stark, and has _everything_ to do with their respective natures and respective exclusivities. A physical book can only be in one place at a time - holding it deprives everyone else. Copies, quite to the contrary, can be made freely and each new copy does exactly zero damage to anyone. Again, do not confuse copyright for privacy. I will defend privacy. I will not defend copyright.

Your use of "value" is revealing. How "valuable" an idea/copy is to me is known only to me, and dies with me - you can have _no_ insight into my mind other than what I reveal to you, nor should you (privacy!) - that's precisely why gratuities are optional, and why the copyright is pure fantasy (copyright and privacy contradict). Your economic rationalization of copyright is based on an insight you have no access to, and which there is no exclusivity to leverage me or anyone into revealing, since obligation is proportional to exclusivity. Since copies are not exclusive at all, obligation is negligible and payment ("should be"; de facto "is") 100% optional.

People share things they have with people they like. It makes sense that in the case of digital copies, without the exclusivity property, people will share liberally and anyone arguing against it will go blue in the face. Fighting that is fighting human nature...

 _" I know a few MBAs who'd love to get their world changing ideas implemented for free."_

I do not work for free and do not expect anyone to, however: if I have already made something digital, anyone is free to use it.

 _" Ask yourself why printing money is restricted."_

Money is not simply a copy, money is a unit of obligation embodied uniquely in an object or number. It retains exclusivity. A new unauthorized bill is a lie about an obligation, and an obligation that can be used for real goods, amounting to theft. Someone listening to Justin Bieber is not claiming to _be_ Justin Bieber, and in no way harms Justin Bieber and is in no way "theft" since you cannot "trade" a copy as you would trade money because of the lack of exclusivity (even though copyright proponents really wish they could). Saying a copy reduces Justin Bieber's income because it represents lost income is like saying "because I said so." It's circular. Copyright is the only reason people expect payment for copies, and forcing payment is the reason people keep promoting copyright. (Fallacies 101) People _were_ able to get away with it with books and CDs other other physical things, and now they expect to keep getting away with it, even though the physical bottom dropped out and it's 100% digital without any of the exclusivity, and there is no logic left.

 _" making copies can have economic consequences."_

Correct, since making copies can empower someone, regardless of his or her economic background. You may call that communism but it has nothing to do with economics. In fact, I _strongly_ value physical property _and_ ideas, but I'm only willing to pay to _own_ the former since ownership doesn't apply to a copy. You cannot own a sunrise. You can own a _photograph_ or a _painting_ of a sunrise, but you cannot own the meaning, aka: the information. I own my computer, but I do not own copies. Privacy _is_ the line in the sand, and copyright exists beyond the need for privacy - at great expense. Why would I feel obligated to pay for a copy - something I cannot own? If I can't recognize any obligation to pay for copies - why are there laws enforcing payment (monopolies)? It _is_ possible to wash off this muck and move forward.

To say it differently: copies are _not_ worthless... Copies are _priceless_. A sunset is a thing of beauty. Charging for that is immoral. Charging for the creation and upkeep of a lookout area may be necessary for a popular spot, but the sunset itself is priceless and not the subject of ownership. Do governments charge for pictures of the landscape on copyright grounds? (Similarly, I would not privatize roads, even if that makes me a communist.) Copyright doesn't enter into it. People need privacy, not copyright.

Back to Communism - since it always comes back to that. Communism is simply the largest monopoly possible - a total government monopoly - <USER2> capitalism and communism are identical in the extreme, unless lines are drawn where necessary (and monopolies broken). (The price of liberty is eternal vigilance... Or something.) Promoting copyright (a monopoly on thoughts) seems to me to be advancing that end (going beyond a reasonable limit in order to inflict a monopoly), and I seem to recall you saying you were against communism (pardon my FUD).

 _" Are you saying people paying for content are stupid?"_

Why does it have to be about insults? People who know how to do a thing should simply be free to, and not be held back for fictional reasons like copyright. Copies do not cause harm or deprivation. 1+1=2. Nothing is lost besides the malice associated with watching someone starve to death. Similarly, people who have a surplus and the desire to give, should be free to. People who leave tips are _not_ stupid.

 _" I know some from ex-communist countries like Romania, old USSR, some current day states in India, etc. They all have a deep horror of communism. There is a reason it fails hard."_

I'm _not promoting_ communism (you brought it up), I'm saying the very comparison is a tangential emotional appeal, as it was with most of McCarthy's accusations. (Also, FWIW, my friends tend to agree with me too.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hadopi needs to be familiar to the reader it seems.

Quite an opinion piece by Falkvinge. Hadopi is scheduled to be abolished, correct?

<comment><USER7> Not exactly. More like phased out slowly.</comment></comment>


Jeff Jarvis on AT&T's iPad Bait-and-Switch - <AUTHOR> http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandtech/2010/06/02/atts-ipad-bait-and-switch/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes Jeff Jarvis gets a little high and mighty. Realistically, the idea of an "unlimited data" plan that actually was capped is more evil than a completely up-front "YOU HAVE 5GBs!" plan. However, that's not what's happening here.

Can you imagine if a carrier said you have unlimited calling, but that really meant 1000 minutes? People would FLIP OUT. Primarily because of decades of minute-by-minute charging from landline carriers had trained us that the way to measure value of a phone company was a per minute charge.

Internet access was never presented to us that way. Online services were (ZOMG 100 hours of AOL!?!?!?!?) but since we switched to HTTP, we're just used to unlimited internet. Wireless carriers have adapted by offering seemingly unlimited plans, but realistically, they hope you don't go over about 5gb of bandwidth.

In this specific case, I actually applaud AT&T for adopting a more consumer up-front nature, and making it clear how much overages will cost. Before, if you went over, it might have cost you dearly. I hope other so-called "unlimited plans" follow suit and explain exactly how much data you can use before hitting a cap.

Jarvis doesn't ever note that "unlimited" plans on any carrier aren't ever unlimited. Ever.

While in principle, I might agree that AT&T needs to upgrade its networks, I don't agree that this move is patently evil. I think it's basically the opposite: Refreshingly straightforward.

<comment><USER3> Comparing this to the "unlimited but not" are two different things, because at one point at&t specifically said the iPad got REAL uncapped data, not the fake 5 Gig unlimited that smart phones get. But the fact that that goes away for new customers and the like is rather lame.

<comment><USER2> I can't speak for AT&T, but this might be a situation where they realized that real "unlimited" wouldn't actually work because demand outstripped their predictions. I think the real annoying part is the tethering charge, since it doesn't actually do anything extra.

I can live with charges that are up front, especially when the network is one as fraile as AT&Ts. If a competitor were to step forward with a way to use unlimited (truly) data, ie 4g or the sort, more people would go to them, and AT&T would look foolish. I think it's just the current state of wireless, and an indictment of its broken-ness. Massive infrastructure startup, anyone? :)

<comment><USER4> Clearwire seems to be trying. But massive infrastructure costs a lot of money, and Sprint, one of their primary sources of money, doesn't have it. Their other partners are dipping their toes in. We shall see what happens.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Things we learned about sums - <AUTHOR> https://questdb.io/blog/2020/05/12/interesting-things-we-learned-about-sums <comment><USER2> Pet peeve alert: not distinguishing between "IEEE-754 type" and "real number".

> System.out.println(5.1+9.2);

> We ask to add 5.1 to 9.2. The result should be 14.3, but we get the > following instead: 14.299999999999999

That's misleading. You put the characters "5.1" in a Java source file, which in Java (like many languages) means "the IEEE-754 64-bit binary floating point value closest to the decimal number 5.1". It's not equal to the real number 5.1. 9.2 and 14.3 can't be represented exactly in binary floating point, either.

The number 5.1 + the number 9.2 should be the number 14.3.

The Java double 5.1 + the Java double 9.2 should not be the Java double represented by 14.3.

The addition isn't really what's hurting you. The representation is. You're confusing the matter by changing type systems in the middle of a sentence.

> It is a small difference (only 0.000000000000001), but it is still wrong.

The answer is "wrong" in large part because the question was wrong. The error in IEEE-754 "14.3" is only slightly smaller than the error in "5.1+9.2".

The sum _looks_ more wrong than the literal "14.3" because Java's Double toString() truncates its output according to some specific rules [1] designed to guess how those 64 bits got there.

> CPUs are poor at dealing with floating-point values. Arithmetics are almost > always wrong

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say they're "wrong" at addition 50% of the time? You picked two numbers whose IEEE-754 representation are both just below their actual value, and whose sum is just above its IEEE-754 representation. Had you added "5.1+5.2" (which happen to be just below and just above their actual values, respectively), the representation errors would have cancelled, and you'd have gotten "10.3" as you expect.

[1]: [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Double.h...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Double.html#toString\(double\))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking time to elaborate on the subject. This is both informative and enjoyable to read! We knew that all real numbers cannot be represented using IEEE-754. It wasn't all clear though because toString() appears to be perfectly transitive for double 5.1 yet "sum" is non- associative.

I guess it would be more accurate to say that arithmetic is wrong at some probability value. I just feel that in this instance it is appropriate to call "wrong" what is not 100% right :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

About a month ago, I posted about using SIMD instructions to make aggregation calculations faster. I am very thankful for the feedback so far, this post is the result of the comments we received last time.

Many comments suggested that we implement compensated summation (aka Kahan) as the naive method could produce inaccurate and unreliable results. This is why we spent some time integrating kahan and Neumaier summation algorithms. This post summarises a few things we learned along this journey.

We thought Kahan would badly affect the performance since it uses 4x as many operations as the naive approach. However, some comments also suggested we could use prefetch and co-routines to pull the data from RAM to cache in parallel with other CPU instructions. We got phenomenal results thanks to these suggestions, with Kahan sums nearly as fast as the naive approach.

A lot of you also asked if we could compare this with Clickhouse. As they implement Kahan summation, we ran a quick comparison. Here's what we got for summing 1bn doubles with nulls with Kahan algo. The details of how this was done are in the post.

QuestDB: 68ms Clickhouse: 139ms

Thanks for all the feedback so far and keep it going so we can continue to improve. Vlad

<comment><USER3> Thanks for you work on this and making it FOSS. This is the first I've heard of QuestDB. Is it production ready? Whats the scaling story? Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! QuestDB is in production. Scaling is a part of commercial product, built using QuestDB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> radford-neal While Kahan summation is more accurate than naive summation, it still does not produce the precise result (the true sum rounded to the final precision).

It is not too costly to do the summation exactly. Several algorithms for this have been developed. You can read about mine at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05571](https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05571) and get the code for them at [https://gitlab.com/radfordneal/xsum](https://gitlab.com/radfordneal/xsum)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Radford! This is a long piece and it would take me a while to absorb properly. Does your algorithm lend itself to vectorised implementation?

<comment> radford-neal It doesn't vectorize in an obvious fashion.

But it has occurred to me that one could accumulate the sum in several "superaccumulators", rather than just one as in the present code. (For instance, by adding even terms to one superaccumulator and odd terms to another superaccumulator.) One could then add the superaccumulators at the end. This would allow for vectorization, or for other forms of instruction- level-parallelism.

I haven't tried this, however. My guess is that it would be advantageous for summing a very large number of terms, but maybe not for less than at least hundreds of terms.

One could also use multiple cores, again with multiple superaccumulators. One advantage of computing the exact sum is that the answer then doesn't depend on what order you add things in (any order gives the same exact result), simplifying the use of multiple cores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> super interesting. love it.</comment>


Chomsky on Haiti - b-man http://chomsky.info/interviews/20100309.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> It's sublime to read about Chomsky (in his) Normal Form ;-)</comment>


GNU Ring 1.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://ring.cx/en/news <comment><AUTHOR> I've been testing it out, and it does not seem like an 1.0 release by any stretch of imagination.

\- On a mac, the client crashes regularly. I've been able to register an account and make a video call, but there are several GUI issues (cut labels, missing text fields, etc.) and the name registration didn't seem to work.

\- On android, the client acted really weirdly in the beginning. After a while it seems to have stabilized a bit, and I've been able to make a video call (to a mac). The video quality was fine, but the client did not handle screen orientation changes well (my own video feed ended up distorted).

\- On linux I haven't been able to make a call, even though text chat worked. It may have been because I don't have a webcam...

All in all, the experience was far from what you would expect from an 1.0 release nowadays. It had major warts on all platforms I tested.

Also, if anyone is curious, you can login with the same account from several devices at the same time. Calls ring on all devices, but text messages are less reliable (they don't always reach all devices). Also, off line devices do _not_ get the messages they missed when you fire the client later on.

I would love and push hard to replace skype/xmpp with a solution of this kind, but I just cannot in the current state of affairs :(

<comment><USER2> It's made by French! /joking

This has been my experience with most of the GNU/Free projects. They suffer from terrible UI/UX although they solve the core problem (P2P for example).

Imo, this is why private startups can out compete those free projects. The private startups focus on delivering a great UI/UX and this matters most to customers/users. Most users don't care privacy anyway. Usability comes first.

<comment><USER3> > It's made by French! /joking

I did not understand the joke. I suppose it goes with the view that outside the USA there are no good software developers, well, because these are all second-class countries.

My friends (most of them are French) and I often joke about French people, how they dislike law and order, how they think their country is the best and the worst at the same time, etc. They're often boastful or xenophobic, but I can't see how they are different on programming, computer science or technology. BTW, the usual "joke" portrait of an American is a fat, uneducated and religious guns-lover. Please don't feel offended if you are from the USA; of course, this is far from the individual reality, but each feature is (statistically) over represented in this country, so joking about it make sense.

<comment><USER4> You shouldn't assume everyone online is American. csomar is from Tunisia [0]—a country which was, for what it's worth, colonized and exploited by the French until 1956. I imagine that might color perceptions.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160626074252/https://omarabid....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160626074252/https://omarabid.com/)

<comment><USER2> Oh my site is down :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every time I see "GNU" I fear that it'll be more about "freedom" than actual functionality. Is the product actually any good (or at least on par with Skype, Hangouts, etc) or is this just something for free software fans to brag about with no productive use-case?

<comment><USER6> You've been downvoted but what you've said isn't wrong. For example

> Each RingID has 40 characters

picture an md5 string but with 40chrs to imagine what your userid looks like. Yes, you need to supply this userid to others for them to contact you.

> We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) > to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage

Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to save your contacts.

> The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to > discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine.

It can take _minutes_ to set up a call. Long distance phonecalls in the 80s were faster

> Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked > the Allow UPnP setting

So no corporate use then.

<comment><USER5> The long user ID is a side effect of how (I assume) the protocol works - essentially the user ID is a public key.

However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server.

For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more important than UX so screw it.

<comment><USER7> Skype didn't have unbreakable privacy as a main concern, this comment is not very fair

<comment><USER5> The problem is, there's little market for "unbreakable privacy" and that market is already taken by Signal, Threema, etc.. - however since Skype turned to shit there's been a huge market for an easy to use and ubiquitous chat solution. For now the only thing that comes close to that is iMessage but it's Mac-only.

<comment><USER8> Facebook has video chat and lots of nontechnical people get how to use it. Google has had one for a while but the name keeps changing and they'll likely kill off whatever the latest one is in a year (and it probably works better on android somehow)

Sucks that we can't just revive the design of classic Skype (but open source) before MS ruined it (not that it didn't have wiretapping capabilities before as well: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security) ). I guess the linked project is the closest thing to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the brainchild of one the the founders of Savoir-Faire Linux. I was an employee of theirs and had to use this software for internal communications. It rarely works, crashes a lot and employees would crack jokes everytime we were told to use it. The idea is good. The current state of the app is barely useable. They just fired around a third of their employees (after promising to double in size).

<comment><USER10> I was an employee there too. They have really low salary standard and say that "you get to do open source so it's fine". The best programmers get out of there quick and that's why you don't get high quality software from them.

Their business model is based on using people with temporary work permit (coming from out of Canada, mostly France) who are stuck with them if they don't want to go through the process of obtaining another work permit and have to go back to their country in the meantime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Disclaimer: ex Skype employee.

Looks like a Skype clone from 10 years ago to me. I cannot see this working in the long run. Many people naively think that Skype switched from full p2p to partially p2p to server centric because of some evil plot designed by Microsoft. This is all wrong. Skype abandonned full peer to peer because it does not work if you want something fast, reliable, and feature rich.

1\. Asking users to enable upnp is a joke. I would never do that, and anyone doing so should consider the security implications of doing so. Unfortunately, since they want to stay pure p2p they have no other possibility to solve the "both clients behind a NAT router" problem. This is why Skype relies on STUN like protocols => not possible in pure p2p.

2\. Peer discovery in pure p2p is SLOW. Skype understood that and switched to hosted "supernodes" with their IPs hard-coded in the client. It's the only way to have reliable peers to introduce you to the network.

3\. You WANT dedicated peers with good connection and 100% uptime.

4\. You cannot efficiently have shared states in pure p2p without an identity server. That would require the clients to bring their keys with them on every device, not very practical.

5\. In case the network collapses, there is no way for it to go up again without supernodes.

<comment><USER12> You can automatically promote real servers with good uplink and public IPs to be supernodes. This eliminates the whole NAT penetration brain damage (going IPv6 is a possible workaround).

<comment><USER11> Skype did that, Windows (lol) nodes with good up times and bandwidth were autopromoted as supernodes. This makes the network unfair tho, and encourages these users to use alternatives clients to prevent being a supernode (wasted bandwidth and cpu: who wants this?)

<comment><USER5> You could refrain from becoming a supernode by disabling "Allow direct IP connections" in the Skype settings - but personally I didn't mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unlike so many communication platforms created in this day and age, Ring provides something more than reinventing the wheel and following the latest trends. It is peer-to-peer, which XMPP and Matrix aren't. This is a step forward.

Edit: As some comments note, I previously wrote _decentralized_ while meaning _peer-to-peer_.

<comment><USER14> You mean Ring is distributed. Matrix and XMPP are decentralized.

<comment><USER15> An image illustrating the different concepts: [https://a.doko.moe/ubvuak.png](https://a.doko.moe/ubvuak.png)

<comment><USER16> That link is giving me problems.

> Secure Connection Failed

> The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

> The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of > the received data could not be verified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From [https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...](https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview) I see the following under "Ring archive (export.gz)"

> Contains private account data.

> It's a JSON compressed and encrypted file.

> The JSON byte-stream is compressed using _gzip_ algorithm.

> Then the gzip-stream is encrypted using AES-GCM-256 symmetric cipher with a > 256-bits key.

Does this compress-then-encrypt combination introduce a security weakness? It's certainly a problem on the Web, since attackers can learn what's in an encrypted response by getting the server to insert their own strings; e.g. trying the same request many times with different query strings, and seeing which ones result in smaller responses, indicating that the given query string matches somewhere in the document.

It would require the attacker to be able to get their own strings in the payload, but since this JSON contains things like contact info that might be possible.

<comment><USER18> I'm not completely sure, since "Contact Request" is currently listed as _TBD_ on the wiki, but since the JSON data is apparently limited to _trusted_ user contacts, I assume that they have to be manually confirmed, which would limit the bandwidth of an attack. If the export also requires manual initiation (as the part about manually copying the PIN seems to suggest), this is likely not an issue.

<comment><USER19> There might not be enough to get e.g. one of the private keys, but you could probably use it to check for someone else in the contact list.

The CRL also seems like it might be possible to at least pivot off of, at least if the signing wasn't checked when _writing_ the archive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does someone have that running and would share its current state? I tested ring at the beginning of this year and it was a disaster. Does it work now?

<comment><USER21> First, make sure that you have enabled upnp and nat-pmp on your router and that your machine firewall allows both. The distributed design of ring makes finding peers slow, from 1 to 20 min. Regarding the issues, this is what I've encountered:

1) Text chat works unreliably. Sometimes messages are not delivered even if the other peer was found.

2) Even if upnp and nat-pmp are both working, sometimes you need to open all tcp and udp ports to get ring working.

3) Migration of accounts to ring beta 2 on linux was a total dissaster. It always failed so I had to create a new account.

4) On some computers during a videocall ring makes pulseaudio crash and freeze the system.

Ring has a lot of potential but it's still not ready to replace skype. It works better than qtox though.

EDIT: It was ring beta 2, not ring 2

<comment><USER20> Hey, thanks for the response. Upnp is no problem, but my router has no settings for nat-pmp. It does not matter, unreliable chat messages are a dealbreaker, and the same goes for not getting messages sent while the client was offline, as described in a comment above.

I also do not run pulseaudio, if that is a requirement (and it looked like it back then when I looked at it) the linux-client is useless to me.

<comment><USER21> > I also do not run pulseaudio

Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer.

> but my router has no settings for nat-pmp

Maybe I exagerated a bit. Ring comes by default configured to use TURN and you can also setup STUN. The problem with this is that they are not distributed.

If you want true P2P, you have to use upnp or nat-pmp, Ring can use any of the two. I don't know if it is because I get impatient, but it takes forever to connect. Just upnp should suffice but I get paranoid and think, maybe it's upnp that is not working. Then I enable nat-pmp in the router and open the nat-pmp port in the laptop. Sometimes I get so impatient that I also open (temporarily) every port in the laptop just in case.

<comment><USER20> > _Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer._

That's great to know :)

I'll keep an eye on Ring. Something like this in a working state would be great, But it should not take forever to connect and should be stable (more or less). According to this thread the project still has a lot to do, and it might be that the p2p approach is just not a good one for the problem at hand. Riot/Matrix looked more promising in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there somewhere we can dump bug reports, this feels so unready for 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER23> from the tutorial:

> Please note that you shouldn't forget your password as long as you are using > the current account. If your forget it, you won't be able to change it or > get another one.

I can already see it being mass-adopted by non-tech users. /s

<comment><USER17> Is "mass adoption by non-tech users" the goal? There are plenty of FOSS projects out there, like Apache, GCC, etc. which are presumably unusable for non-tech users (by definition: if you can use Apache and GCC, you probably count as technical). It doesn't hinder those projects at all, and there are also a bunch of "user friendly" projects which rely on those as key pieces of infrastructure (e.g. many Web sites, and many native executables like games).

Also, as always, the nice thing about FOSS is that anyone is Free to contribute or fork/contribute their own improvements and services, either within the project or alongside, either to scratch an itch or to commercially exploit a niche.

<comment><USER24> For a social network, anything less than mass adoption renders it mostly useless. So if that isn't already a goal, then someone isn't doing their job.

<comment><USER25> I don't see it as a social network at all. It is a tool allowing you to communicate and collaborate with people you already know.

<comment><USER26> If you communicate and collaborate with people you already know, you have formed a social network...

It's hard enough to get people in your network to switch to a _polished_ platform (like Telegram), let alone a mess like this one.

<comment><USER25> Sure, definition of "social network" is vague enough to allow for semantic massaging into any form anyone wants. The point is that this is not a necessarily a tool to keep up with your social network, but rather a work/collaboration tool. And there is very little competition among those.

I don't need to keep up with my "friends" and their statuses/photos/events/feeds, or "IM" back and forth with someone using cutesy emojis. I need to be able to hold conference calls with presentations displayed to all participants, or shared whiteboard to discuss some design. Stuff like that. And I want to be able to host all this outside of dirty paws of third party corporations and governments.

I'm of course disregarding the abysmal quality and stability of Ring, so all this is just academic anyway. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems extremely ideal in a scenario where everyone has switched to IPv6 and punching through the NAT's is no longer a problem.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know how to install this on Linux Mint 18.2? It seems to depend on packages that are not available. As there were no instructions for Mint I tried the instructions for Ubuntu 17.10 but it fails:

Reading state information... Done

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

ring : Depends: libebook-1.2-19 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable

            Depends: libedataserver-1.2-22 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable

            Depends: libqt5core5a (>= 5.7.0) but 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.2 is to be installed

            Depends: ring-daemon (= 20170724.1.2088f8e~dfsg1-1) but it is not going to be installed

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you're trying to check this out and don't have anyone to talk to, like me, here's my contact info:

Contact me using 'gilani' on the Ring distributed communication platform: [https://ring.cx](https://ring.cx)

BTW, on Android, I had to setup my username after creating my account.

<comment><USER30> I've sent you a message, still shows as "Sending …". I guess offline messages aren't supported?

<comment><USER29> Hmmm, I see no indication of an incoming message or contact request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is it just me or does anyone else think this will be a lame project just because it of GNU stewardship?

<comment><USER32> Or does it have GNU stewardship because it's a lame project?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Savoir-faire Linux

Love these guys! They're based in Montreal, definitely the biggest Linux-only player I know around here.

> Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

That's a really bad name for a release. I speak French natively but... Nah.

The criticisms about missing features seem pretty reasonable as well, BUT I'm not afraid of this project being more ideological than practical. For one thing, SFL is in the money business, they are not a charity. For another, sometimes it takes someone to take the extreme "free" approach for someone else to approach the middle ground of "maybe not that free but still distributed".

</comment><comment><USER34> I am unable to create a public account. I get a spinning wheel when I input a public name, and it doesn't do anything else. The create button is disabled until (seemingly) I get a response back telling me my chosen name is okay or not.

Unfortunately, their Web site didn't seem to have any clear way to register an account.

Another point is that searching for contacts only works if you type in their last name. If you try searching for a contact by first name, then they won't show up.

</comment><comment><USER35> For those in the dark who don't want to do the digging I just did, Ring is "some sort of Skype or Hangout," to quote one of the project leaders.

<comment><USER25> Digging? Just reading the linked announcement is enough to figure that out.

<comment><USER35> Ah, thanks I know what happened: I was using an iPhone app to read HN and accessed the link through its built-in browser. I checked again on desktop and you are indeed right, there is info available at the top of the page that I didn't see at first. No digging required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Could anybody point me to docs? Can't find any explanation how it works exactly, the only explanation i can find is <list of buzzwords>

<comment><USER37> I don't know about it, but I speak a little VOIP Buzzword, so I'll do my best to explain.

Essentially it's a SIP phone. SIP is a protocol that is used to initiate sessions. So if I want to talk to you (usually using Voice Over Internet Protocol), I can use the Signal Initiation Protocol to send a message saying that I want to talk to you. You respond by saying that you would like to talk to. SIP then sends some configuration information about how we're going to talk than then hands everything over to another protocol (usually something called RTP).

Now, one of the problems with SIP is that while it is peer to peer, you have no real way of discovering your peers. Enter Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). I don't really know how this works, apart from it's how bittorrent clients discover each other without a centralised tracker. But essentially, I think you ping out to the internet saying "I want to talk to X". Someone near to you sees it and says, "I'm not X, but I can get you one step closer to X. Talk to my friend Y". And so you repeat that process until your discover where X is.

Another problem with SIP lies in the peer to peer nature. Normally we don't put out computers right on the internet. For one thing it's really hard to get IPV4 addresses any more. So nobody can actually talk directly to you. Instead we are behind routers that have an external address on the internet and map requests to an internal address on your local network. This is called Network Address Translation (NAT).

So, when we are trying to discover where our friend is, not only do we need to use DHT to inch our way towards them, but we have to traverse NAT as well (what the person thinks their address is, is not the address we see because of NAT). Not only that, but we usually add firewalls on our routers because we don't want just anybody to send traffic on our local area networks.

ICE, STUN, and TURN are ways for a client to discover their external address on the internet as well as the port you need to use to talk to them (the port is the most difficult part to figure out). Once they do that, when they send a request to you, they can tell you what address and port to reply to. In many cases this won't work (and I'm informed by very reputable people that this is because router manufacturers fail to follow the specs... I believe this). So instead of jumping through hoops to discover the port that you need to talk to, there are some standards in place that allow a client to talk to the router and say "I'm expecting my buddy to talk to me on this port. Would you please open a big gaping hole and let the traffic through. I promise I know what I'm doing." Now, sensible people do not allow their routers to do this kind of crazy thing because malware is really good at sending requests to routers and promising to be good. So basically, if you know what you are doing, and have control of your router, you can poke holes in it and make this work. If not, then there is a good chance that you won't be able to communicate to people. This is why all the VOIP services out there use a centralised server (because if you carry all the traffic with a centralised server, both ends can contact the server and it can act as a mediator... the downside is that the server has to physically move all the traffic to ensure that it works).

Now what they are saying is that they have hacked the SIP protocol to discover the other peer using DHT. This is possible because SIP is the most under- defined protocol in the world, except for perhaps HTTP (on which is is based). So you can add whatever the heck extensions you like, and nobody cares. Then they use their NAT traversal techniques (which will work most of the time if you know what you are doing and have control of your equipment) to get to the other side.

I am imagining that for messaging they are simply using one of the many SIP messaging extensions (or they have made their own ... which is cool, because SIP is a free-for-all, like I said).

Not sure what else. It seems that they are probably using RTP for the VOIP protocol because they don't say. They are using pretty standard libraries for the codecs for audio and video. This stuff works exceptionally well these days. If you get connected and the ports are all aligned so that you have 2 way audio, chances are you will have extremely good audio/video. The codecs they are using are standard for SIP phones, but if you haven't experienced it before, I think you will be surprised by the quality.

Anyway, even though I probably sound quite negative, I'm actually a pretty big SIP fan (I've written an implementation from scratch before). It's just that I'm not sure that the slowness of DHT combined with the witchcraft that is NAT traversal is going to meet the needs of the average person. One day if we all go IPV6, then we can get rid of NAT and open a single, well defined port so that we can forget all this nonsense. But before that happens, I don't think we'll see a p2p application that will challenge the big services.

<comment><USER38> You have it pretty much sorted out, the only part missing is that the messaging transits through the DHT directly, when you are not passing a call

<comment><USER37> Yeah, also I realised that I didn't talk about encryption and TLS. I suppose I can say that it sets up a secure connection in the same way that HTTPS does ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's a bit unexpected not to post the binaries signatures along with the downloads, given the motivation of the project..

</comment><comment><USER40> Seeing this makes me really want to add video support to my Firestr ([http://firestr.com](http://firestr.com)) project. Also a DHT so I can store public keys and have shorter payloads to share. Alas I am only one man.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this similar to bitmessage? [https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment><comment><USER42> I've been reading the site and can't figure out what differentiates it from tox.

</comment><comment><USER43> Apparently there is no release for Debian 8 Jessie. Is everyone on 9 already?

</comment><comment><USER44> For something that's free and not foisted upon anyone, there seems to be a lot of negativity here. Okay, so it's not as good as you want it to be. Roll up your sleeves and make it happen.

<comment><USER45> This idea that open source is somehow immune from criticism is old and tired. If they want to pretend like they're targeting normal people, they need to act like it. This means putting work into things like UX.

<comment><USER46> This site isn't called "normal people news".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Will this be available in Pidgin?

</comment><comment><USER48> Its not there yet, but seeing that skype is repositioning itself as a shitty wanabe snapchat/instagram, instead of the conferencing and telephony app, I hope it will mature and become a thing. (Hey microsoft, what will the office365 customers do with skype minutes, when you finish the repositioning?)

They could sell SIP minutes and make it simple to set up, and that could provide a revenue for them.

</comment><comment><USER49> A friend told me that if you use the Ring then 7 days later all your files will be deleted.

</comment><comment><USER50> The Mac version warns me that I won't be able to run Ring because of my security settings and directs me to the Mac App Store to look for a newer version. Quite literally rolling on the floor laughing! (No, not literally)

In the Finder, locate the app you want to open. Press the Control key and click the app icon, then choose Open from the shortcut menu. Click Open. I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this. Apple thinks it should warn me that I might have downloaded malware.

Does this mean that GNU did not pay the Apple tax?

<comment><USER51> > I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this.

Really? Everyone I know with a Mac (even the non technical people who don't code/do any professional work on their Mac) know how to do this.

I may do it more than weekly, even.

<comment><USER50> What other apps? I have only been using a mac for about a year, but I have literally never seen this.

<comment><USER52> It's pretty common with lots of free software applications.

<comment><USER50> Ok but why does nobody want to name any other specific one app that does this?

I feel like I was justified in calling this out, because nobody will actually name an app that does this.

It looks wholly unprofessional to release a 1.0 with this identity warning, unless you're GNU! Then it's fashionable and people will come to your defense, for sticking to free software and libre as in freedom only, like the great St. Ignucius intended. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> There is a GNU cryptocurrency project that aims to give the State the power to tax the users of the currency. How can you trust anything with the GNU label after that?

<comment><USER54> ? What does that have to do with anything? The idea behind Taler is that unlike bitcoin, it doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities. That makes it a lot more palatable for regular people and greatly curtails the amount of undesirable elements using it that are associated with Bitcoin.

Most people don't go out of their way to be tax cheats.

<comment><USER55> Bitcoin doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities - it just doesn't give backdoors for authorities.

Building currency taxable-first is like building messenger invigilation-first or building social-media censorship-first. Do you imagine Skype selling their software with main feature being that every conversation you have is being sent to authorities "for your protection" or "to fight terrorists"?

<comment><USER54> That's a massive false equivalence since taxation is an accepted law of the land and is a price you pay for government services.

There's no good way to tax bitcoin given how it works.

<comment><USER53> Mass surveillance is also the accepted law of the land.

I know you haven't accepted it, but the government you appear to endorse has, and apparently that's all that matters, because I haven't accepted taxation in any form, nor have I accepted the form of law making that creates the power to tax, but I'm taxed anyway.

<comment><USER54> I'd really rather not relitigate the legitimacy of taxes on HN, but the reason why the currency was created in the way it was has been explained. If it truly bothers you that badly, there are many others.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


All of Worlds Languages May Share A Common Ancestor - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html?mod=e2tw

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try to post the original article in science once I get to work.</comment>


US agency offers legal immunity to Ebola vaccine makers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/09/us-health-ebola-vaccine-idUSKBN0JN1S920141209

<comment><USER2> So this is how the Zombie apocalypse begins...

</comment><comment><USER3> experimental vaccine == theoretical solution

pretty sure my project and QA mgrs would not go for that on any given Sunday.

<comment><USER4> Well, by definition all vaccines start out as experimental ones.

This action is designed to protect companies in their initial Phase 1 safety testings, which for obvious reasons is done with 1st World volunteers before they move to Africa.

Vaccine engineering is also a fairly well understood technology by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is beyond scary... Tuskegee experiment, anyone? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment)

<comment><USER4> So on the _slight_ chance the people involved are seriously unethical, you're willing to dice with a disease that could well kill billions prior to discovery/proof of effectiveness, mass production, and mass distribution of a vaccine, all together which will take years at best?</comment></comment>


"If your whole business relies on us, you might want to pick a different one" - <AUTHOR> For anyone considering building a business as an integration provider on top of Embed.ly (the only way to get embedded on Medium), you may want to follow the advice from the founder, Sean Creeley, who just sent me this:
"If your whole business relies on us, you might want to pick a different one.".
TIMELINE:
1) I ask Embed.ly if the novelty factor (existing competitor) would be an issue before building an integration for them
2) They say it'd be ok, as long as the other guidelines are met
3) I spend a month building the initial MVP and send it for approval
4) The founder replies and instead of providing guidance on what should I change to get approved, accuses me of "copying someone else's work" and that "We aren't going to argue with you on this".
Screenshots of all conversions (newest at the top):
http://imgur.com/a/7nfPC
Make your own judgment. <comment><USER2> Why should he tell you what you should change to get approved? You already said that you had new ideas about how to differentiate your service against Upscribe - why not list these out into a roadmap? You've not offered anything that is different to one of their providers already offers.

At the moment, you're claiming that 'novelty' is the choice of consumers to choose a different product. That's not novelty, that's competition.

Their comments are entirely reasonable - submit it when it has something new to offer. You say that you have these ideas - and if you truly believed in what you were doing, then you would put this time in upfront on the product on the speculation that it would be so good, they could not turn you down.

<comment><USER3> > Why should he tell you what you should change to get approved? You already > said that you had new ideas about how to differentiate your service against > Upscribe - why not list these out into a roadmap?

The roadmap suggestion seems like a good idea, but Embedly should tell OP what they'd like to see different because they're the ones who, contrary to previous communications, suddenly have a problem with it, and they should have more respect for the time OP has put into their work. They dismiss it and say they "won't argue" when OP wasn't being remotely argumentative. They say "please submit when you are out of MVP stage" \-- what does that even mean, please come back to sell your product, which is tailored to our platform, after you've left the stage that requires making sales?

> At the moment, you're claiming that 'novelty' is the choice of consumers to > choose a different product. That's not novelty, that's competition.

They do not make this claim. I think if you read it again carefully, you'll see that they don't.

> ...if you truly believed in what you were doing, then you would put this > time in upfront on the product on the speculation that it would be so good, > they could not turn you down.

A.) Should every product and company be a grand vision that you "really believe in?" What's wrong with making something that you think is useful and that people will buy and that you'd enjoy building, but which is certainly not going to change the world? What if you can't build your grand vision right now because you lack the skills, funding, and experience -- tough luck, you don't get to try and fail to launch a lemonade stand, you have to mangle an idea you actually care about instead?

B.) Of course they could still turn him down. That is the point. OP wasn't willing to gamble more than an MVP on the whims and wishes of this company.

And clearly, OP had good reason to be conservative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to hear that. Pretty ridiculous behavior on their end given their own product isn't even that novel and innovative.

Plenty of products start out as a copy of something else, and build out from there.

Also, "We aren't going to argue with you on this point.". How old are we, 12?

<comment><USER5> i'm not convinced the OP is without blame and just tries to shove it onto them.

"Also, "We aren't going to argue with you on this point.". How old are we, 12?"

i could argue that a 12 year old loves to argue about how unfair things are and how his demands have to be met.

I'm with whoever wrote this part. He saves everyone time by outright saying that there is no point in it. That's a more mature thing to do, actually.

Arguing around is, in absolutely most cases, a collosal waste of time, because people usually aren't interested in learning or understanding something, but in "being right".

What i find bad, though, is that they wasted OPs time. That being said, we actually know pretty much nothing about the whole situation and there is reason to assume that the OP just wants them to look bad.

<comment><USER4> If I bothered asking you whether X would be accepted onto your platform, and you said yes, I would find it pretty amateuristic to then come back (once an integration has been made) and ask "why exactly should we let you onto our platform"?

Yes, you're always at the mercy of the platform holder and in the end they can do with it whatever they want, and maybe I'm old school on this, but giving your word on something still means something to me.

If someone tells me they will do X (in business) and they don't end up honoring said deal due to unreasonable behavior then I will refuse to do business with them in the future. And I will let people know who ask me about it.

Maybe it's something cultural since I'm not American, but I've noticed US companies to often act like this in various situations. Many, frankly, do not care about relationships.

I find this whole thing as appaling as the recent interaction that I've had with a company where we integrated their complete free API, and once the app we integrated it in started getting proper traction, they wanted us to pay for it ("collaborate more closely"). In this example they clearly advertise it as a free API but will threaten to shut access off if you don't pay.

Obviously we're promptly removing everything from our app + they're losing DAUs (which are also important to them) because of it.

<comment><USER6> > If I bothered asking you whether X would be accepted onto your platform, and > you said yes, I would find it pretty amateuristic to then come back (once an > integration has been made) and ask "why exactly should we let you onto our > platform"?

The difference between this and what actually happened is that the Company has no way of knowing if something is novel or not before it exists. When asked if someone could start building something they said sure. When asked if what he/she built was good enough they said no. These are not inconsistent.

It's such a weird sense of entitlement that because OP spent time on something he/she deserves to be rewarded. The company very obviously expected something that wasn't exactly the same as the thing that already exists. When that was not what they got, they responded understandably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am glad I never used medium and I go out of my way not to read anything on it.

How are they different from many other blog systems before them?

The correspondence between op and the guy from medium just put me off even more. Like someone else before me already said...pretty ridiculous saying to someone 'your product is nothing new'...coming from medium

To me it just looks like another case of all words for openness but in reality my hand washes your hand.

<comment><USER8> _> How are they different from many other blog systems before them?_

There is one key difference: Medium's popular posts recommendation algorithm is not based on pageviews, but on the time that people spend reading them. It was an attempt to solve the issue of clickbait. From Business Insider:

 _With Medium, Williams was on a mission to clean up the mess that blogging had become, the misinformation and drivel it attracted. He hoped to cure professional journalism of these ills, too.

"The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It's utter crap," he told Bloomberg's Brad Stone in 2013. "They create a culture that is superficial and fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are self- destructive and unsustainable." And he said he was "pessimistic about the state of media, and that's why I want to work on this problem."

His idea back then was an algorithm that recommended high-quality stories not based on clicks, but on how much time people spent reading them._

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-meltdown-of- evan-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-meltdown-of-evan- williams-startup-medium-2017-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://imgur.com/a/7nfPC](http://imgur.com/a/7nfPC)

Clickable link

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there any reason medium has outsourced it's embedding UX? It's one of their key integrations/differentiation UX wise.

<comment><USER11> No longer outsourced, Medium acquired Embedly last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Take his advice

</comment><comment><USER13> So how are you different from Upscribe, as Sean asks?</comment>


Ask HN: Best Format for a Developer Job Post Headline? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a developer and I recently saw a developer job posting with a headline I thought was fairly meaningless. I wrote a quick post recommending using a "job title, primary tech" format for headlines. A friend, who has been a professor of computing, disagreed and said that presenting the problem the job needs to solve rather than the tech used to solve it would make the headline more clickable for him. I understand that, but think it's really hard to describe many tech problems succinctly enough for a headline. Is the title and tech approach too boring? Is the "state the problem in 15 words or less" approach too difficult? What is the best way to write a headline for a job posting that will inspire devs to read it? <comment><USER2> I told a recruiter recently that I responded to her specific post because I saw "C++" in the subject line. It was complete news to her, that naming the programming language would help.

A particular problem I see is that when I go looking for C++ jobs, the search form turns up javascript jobs that name C++ as a qualification.

The job title is not so important to me as the problem to be solved. Like "GUI, C++" would be good.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, this is the post: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-weird-rule-job- post-headl...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-weird-rule-job-post- headlines-greg-bulmash)</comment>


Ireland becomes the first country in the world to ban the incandescent lightbulb - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.ie/national-news/gormley-lights-the-way-with-ban-on-bulbs-1240074.html

<comment><USER2> I have said it before, I will say it again: You can have my lightbulbs when I can have your cars, trucks, ships and airplanes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course, this ignores the mercury that is present in fluorescent bulbs, as well as the use cases for incandescent bulbs e.g. as heat lamps and in areas where lights are frequently turned on for short periods before being turned immediately off again (like in a stairwell). I agree with another comment that taxing is a better solution than outright banning, but I'm just not sure where I stand at all, because banning something that is clearly better in some scenarios just seems stupid.

As for the mercury issue, fluorescent light bulbs are much more difficult to dispose of safely. I was reading an article by the Sierra Club (an environmental group) which was arguing that if fluorescent light bulbs use 1/3 the energy of incandescents, and all of that energy is produced by burning coal, then the amount of mercury in the bulbs is approximately equal to the amount of coal saved over 5 years (I'm estimating here, but this was the general idea). Not exactly the most flattering numbers if you ask me.

<comment><USER3> I just hunted down the link to the article I was talking about:

<http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200707/mrgreen_mailbag.asp>

Note the required cleanup procedures. I think they really need to advertise these types of things a little better. My roommate broke one earlier this year and cleaned it up the same way someone would clean up an incandescent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the energy saving light bulbs are so much better, why don't people use them voluntarily? Something doesn't add up?

<comment><USER5> They cost more. Also, fluorescent light is unpleasantly cold, and some fluorescent bulbs take a few moments to start up when the power is turned on.

I disagree with these regulations. The kind of lighting you use in your house greatly effects what it feels like. It's a very personal thing for the government to interfere with-- like banning certain styles of clothing because they're wasteful. Why not just tax incandescent bulbs till they cost more than fluorescents?

<comment><USER6> On the right track, but it might be even better to do a carbon tax rather than a tax targeting one product that is wasteful: it's CO2 that is associated with negative externalities, so the most direct approach is to internalize those externalities by levying a tax on carbon, rather than attacking wasteful users of electricity piecemeal through taxes or bans.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigou_Club>

<comment><USER7> Why do so many people talk about "negative externalities" when they don't even understand basic economics? Its like some liberal ideological center picked up a phrase, told people some vague idea of what it meant, and then got people to advocate it as a justification for ideas whose economic underpinnings having nothing to do with what they think they do.

The bottom line is, your attempt to internalize externalities is proof that you don't know what you're talking about because externalities by definition cannot be internalized.

All this liberal economics is just like that last wave of liberal economics that resulted in 100 million deaths over the period from 1900-2000, only it isn't united under a common term like "socialism" or "communism" but it amounts to the same-- totalitarianism sold as being "good for you".

<comment><USER6> I understand the economics just fine, thanks, and one of the big proponents of the carbon tax is republican economist Greg Mankiw (see Pigou Club link).

If I were to respond in kind, I would say that libertarianism seems to be a willful ignorance of the very concept of a market externality, as understood by mainstream economics. Certainly, reasonable people can agree to disagree on what specific things constitute externalities in which cases, how bad they are, and what measures, if any, should be taken to correct them - and indeed if those corrective measures are worse than the problem they cure.

However, denying the very existence of factors that are not taken into consideration by a free market seems to be letting your beliefs get the better of reason. And comparing any government intervention with communism is a bit beyond the pale, really.

<comment><USER7> No, you don't understand economics, and you concede this point when you use the phrase "mainstream economics"... this is a common tactic of socialists to try and cover the fact that they are substituting political ideology for economics.

Economics is a science. ITs not uncommon for those who will not make a scientific argument to instead knock down strawmen, as you just have.

Of course, you threw out enough buzzwords that those who don't look too close will believe you made a counter argument.

<comment><USER6> What you might consider doing, if you don't agree with the economics, is point out the errors in my logic rather than continue to attack my understanding of economics (which is an awfully broad conclusion to reach from a few comments in any case, I might add). And included in that, for the sake of discussing the economics, is that CO2 emissions are in some way harmful, even if you don't happen to believe that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The ironic thing is, the entity that causes the most pollution (in every country) is that countries government... and the entity causing the most energy waste is generally the government as well.

It never ceases to amaze me how people are so willing to put guns and violence behind their political ideologies. This is probably because they don't realize that is what they are doing-- but every law is backed up by a guy holding a gun and pointing it at someone who breaks it.

ARe you willing to go to someone's house, and take his incandescent light bulbs and shoot him if he resists? You think that's Moral?

Cause that's what this law does, and it is no more moral if you advocate someone else doing it even if you are unwilling to do it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone wants to learn more about how energy use can be cut drastically in a profitable way, listen to these presentations at Stanford by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Insitute. He is basically the foremost expert in the world on this kind of stuff. Best few hours I've spent in the last while:

<http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/series/si-energy.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/world_first_aus.php>

<comment><AUTHOR> Australia passed a law first but Ireland is putting it into practice much faster. They're not for sale in Ireland by 2009 and gone in Australia by 2012.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Typical, government will stick a gun in people's face just to make them be "politically correct". Nevermind the consequences (or the chicks who will no longer hatch because the heat source that powers the incubators is no longer around... or the farmer who goes out of business because he can't afford to buy thousands of new incubators... etc.)

Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure where incandescent bulbs are necessary allowances will be made.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, cause bureaucracies are so caring. I notice that I've been modded down... I guess anyone not goosestepping along will not be tolerated.</comment></comment></comment>


Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/beto-orourkes-secret-membership-in-americas-oldest-hacking-group.html <comment><USER2> O'Rourke has a broken mind that money cannot fix:

"Buff My Balls": Beto O'Rourke Wrote Creepy Poems; Joined Old School "Slaughterhouse" Hacker Group

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-15/buff-my-balls- beto...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-15/buff-my-balls-beto-orourke- wrote-creepy-poems-joined-old-school-slaughterhouse)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for giving me more reasons to vote for him, I find creative writing to be an interesting form of art.</comment></comment>


Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2010/10/windows-phone-7-the-ars-review.ars <comment><AUTHOR> Found the second half of this paragraph quite amusing (from page 16)

 _When the phone is locked, the camera button still works. This is by design: it's so you can take a quick snapshot of something that's exciting without having to unlock the phone. It's certainly a sound idea—after all, I don't have to unlock my DSLR if I want to take a photo. Unfortunately, it also resulted in me taking a bunch of pictures of the inside of my pocket and some random dude on the bus, as I happened to sit in such a way as to trigger camera mode. And because I configured the phone to upload pictures automatically, they got sent to Facebook. It's like a whole new kind of pocket dialling; pocket photographing_

<comment><USER2> This sounds like a nightmare feature: you're having a nice quiet night home alone with your girl... You accidentally press the shutter button on your phone as you are plugging it into your nightstand charger... you've just invited everyone you've ever met into your bedroom.

Keep in mind that there's no way to permanently delete images on facebook:

[http://www.techspot.com/news/40662-facebook-keeps-photos- aft...](http://www.techspot.com/news/40662-facebook-keeps-photos-after- deletion-wont-clear-chat-history.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The design aesthetic in the WP7 OS is probably the single coolest thing I've seen from microsoft. It makes me seriously reevaluate my opinion of the company to see that they let it emerge unscathed (bing was a huge step in the right direction, too).

</comment><comment><USER4> Developers, the future of mobile computing is in your hands. Code across platforms, sell across platforms, and don't let anybody corner you into supporting just their platform.

Plurality, my friends.

Support WP7, Android, iOS _and_ Symbian. And if you still have time, others as well.

Screw the segregationists.

<comment><USER5> Actually, the situation is pretty bad for developers. Making a client for all major platforms (iOS, Android, blackberry and now wp7) is difficult. Every client must be built from ground up. Different languages, different tools. Not bad in the sense of plurality and choice, of course, and I love learning new stuff. But _it is_ difficult and time-consuming.

<comment><USER6> Well too bad MS once again is lacking on the browser side. Devs cannot even target WP7 on the browser, I will not develop non-HTML5 mobile sites. Fuck that, WP7 phone users will not be able to use my sites.

<comment><USER7> "Take care of the customer, or someone else will!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Summary for those not in the mood to read 18 pages:

"Microsoft doesn't often get version one releases right, but this time, it has got the release very right indeed."

He loves the interface, says SMS is the only feature MSFT screwed up, dev tools are good but could create sloppy UI in apps if MSFT doesn't address.

His major complaint is missing features, says the features that are there are executed brilliantly.

Play by Play:

\- "The styling is uncompromising. I love it." Smoothness major cool factor.

\- "Hubs" feature is major differentiator, applications can data share - example facebook data / photos imported into contact list.

\- Built in apps are solid, email client is "very, very good".

\- "correction and completion mechanism is good" better than iphone, maybe not as good as android.

\- Browser is good, HTML5 support is lacking.

\- Music is just like ZUNE.

\- Maps is a "solid, well thought-out application" but lacking turn-by-turn GPS.

\- Camera itself will change by OEM but the interface " works well, and it's particularly pleasing when you've taken a picture"

\- Office itself not much of an update from 6, nothing exciting to see there.

\- Games integration is lost on the author (not a gamer), the avatar integration was the only thing on the phone that felt "sluggish"

\- "The SMS application is the one area where I think the platform really falls short" - he says SMS functions are lacking inbox style sorting, no message counter, etc.

\- Marketplace is easy and straightforward to get new apps. Not a lot of apps, but apps there work and have integrated into the design style.

\- Syncing is done over the air, even for small firmware updates.

\- Mac syncing gets a "alpha-quality sync client"

\- Windows Live support lets you do fun things like lock the phone, wipe it, geo-locate it, etc. but no SMS backup.

\- Before launching into complaints he says ""I have grown to like Windows Phone 7 a hell of a lot, and I'm certainly going to be using it from here on out."

\- Complaints: Can't take screenshots on the phone itself, no copy-paste until early 2011, no multi-task, no manage files, no connect to VPN, no transfer files over bluetooth, no sharing 3G over Wifi etc, no ability to act as mass USB storage.

\- He counters his complaints with "I would imagine that. . . Microsoft has serious plans for multitasking, tethering, VPNs, and corporate security policies, etc"

\- Microsoft's communication on missing features is making early purchasing decisions difficult, they could stand to improve communication.

\- Some interface issues he doesn't like, in particular BING search doesn't search phone in its entirety.

\- "The integration of Facebook and Windows Live is fantastic".

\- Media management isn't awesome, highlights major problem with the integrated HUB is that MSFT must choose to support apps and standards which means most apps wont work, notably twitter not integrated yet.

\- Curious that there's no native windows chat client.

\- Windows 7 Mobile dev tools are good, but not great. Notably lacking ability to access camera, and compass, bigger concern is that the cool Windows 7 interface cues are missing forcing devs to recreate, making some apps look clunky and could cause repeat of Windows app clunkiness.

\- He thinks the naming strategy is stupid, should have gone with ZunePhone, too tied to single release but clearly piggy backing on Windows 7 desktop success.

\- Major complaint is missing features, features there executed brilliantly.

\- "Windows Phone 7 looks great, works well, and is a treat to use."

Phew.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disagree strongly with ZunePhone as a name. People who've actually owned a Zune seem to quite like them, but the general buzz is pretty negative (a bit like Vista?)

WP7 isn't great, but it doesn't have the negative connotations 'Zune' has. It may remind people of Windows Mobile 6 however, but I think so many years have passed that most of us have been able to repress those memories

<comment><USER9> I don't remember why Zune has a bad name, but I suppose the early models weren't as good. The 2nd gen Zune that I owned was a great mp3-player, definitely up to par to the iPod. And if WP7 has a Zune-player built in then that is a selling point.

<comment><USER10> Zune has a bad name because it sold poorly. Even from day 1 it was a good MP3 player. But it got a name as being an MS device that sold poorly compared to the iPod. It was a market failure, but for people that used it was/is a great device.

It's the Amiga (in the 80s) of MP3 players.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Zune's a fine device, but in the end it's just another mp3 player. The Amiga was something special

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm quite glad WP7 is looking like a real contender. Viable competition raises the bar for all phone companies, and consumers ultimately win.

This is a really fun time to be a a gadget lover -- Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nokia, etc. are bending over backwards to give us the coolest toys ever invented.

I'll wager that in a year from now, all of these phones will be nearly perfect experiences in their own way.

</comment><comment><USER12> I believe it's still the case that you can only install apps from the marketplace.

Which is a deal-killer for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> _it's arguably good for consumers, as it means that they can buy a Windows Phone 7 phone with confidence—if you know your way around one Windows Phone 7 phone, you know your way around them all.

It may, however, be bad for the OEMs, who may find themselves with little ability to differentiate and distinguish themselves from each other._

How about the carriers distinguish themselves by providing good network service and good customer service instead of loading up the phone with crap hardly anyone ever wants? (Manufacturers can distinguish themselves on price/quality as they see fit.)</comment>