Feds Seized Hip-Hop Site for a Year, Waiting for Proof of Infringement - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/weak-evidence-seizure <comment><USER2> The RIAA labels should be required to pay the owner of the site for any lost advertising revenue, lawyer fees for the defendant, and any other costs associated with this case that wasn't paid for by the RIAA labels (the fed seizure, the prosecutor, etc... was paid for by tax payers). They wasted everyones time and money.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. We have a great exemplar of a private interest abusing their connection with the government to damage someone else. And I don't care if its the RIAA randomly taking down web sites, or Zero Halliburton manipulating where the Army goes to protect Oil Well infrastructure that activity should open up the manipulator to large civil penalties.

I think I'll include that in my discussions with Congressional candidates this election season.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "ICE, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, has the power to seize web domains engaged in infringing activity under the same forfeiture laws used to seize property like houses, cars and boats allegedly tied to illegal activity such as drug running or gambling. But seizing a domain name raises First Amendment concerns — though nothing in the court records show that the government or the court was concerned about the prolonged seizure of the site that is akin to an online printing press."

Yeah, who cares about property rights? Wired seems to think that's unimportant. Freedom of speech is more worthy.

The fact is that "innocent til proven guilty" is being violated when seizures are allowed before a case is proven. And the police go shopping under these forfeiture laws.

[http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/local_news/investigations/exclu...](http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/local_news/investigations/exclusive%3A-state- police-caught-on-tape-during-drug-raid)

<comment><USER5> As the editor of the piece, I'll completely agree with your assessment. Free speech rights are more important than property rights. The founders thought so too. But the implication that property rights don't matter at all to Wired because free speech rights are more important than them is logically flawed.

<comment><USER4> Does the article state any concern about property rights?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sort of happened to me. I was running an emulated version of a popular MMO and the feds raided my home, took all my computers and seized my bank accounts.

This happened years ago, I was never charged with copyright infringement or money laundering for the donations I collected... but I also never got any of my stuff back.

Question is, if I was never legally charged with a crime, does it still give them the right to seize my things and never give it back?

<comment><USER7> Yep, cops can seize property or enter property before they charge or convict someone. Usually they need some sort of court approval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ugh.

> "Here you have ICE making a seizure, based on the say-so of the record > company guys, and getting secret extensions as they wait for their masters, > the record companies, for evidence to prosecute," Cohn [the EFF's legal > director] said in a telephone interview. "This is the RIAA controlling a > government investigation and holding it up for a year."

I don't like these seizures either, nor that the RIAA has and uses its influence to tie up somebody's property this way without consequence. But the EFF seems to insist on going that one step too far when they make public comments. The wording ("secret extensions as they wait for their masters", "RIAA controlling a government investigation") turns me right off and makes them sound like cranks.

<comment><USER9> > "RIAA controlling a government investigation"

Several ex RIAA lawyers hold top Justice Department posts, as was pointed out by Ray Beckerman back when they were appointed.

> "secret extensions as they wait for their masters"

The case was delayed for about a year because they were waiting on the RIAA for proof of infringement after seizing the site based on an RIAA complaint.

But I can see your point about the way they phrased it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've posted about my disdain of the practices by the RIAA before and this is only just a digital example of what they have been doing for years. I've spoke about this before on this site so I will not be detailed as I have been in the past.

In the past, record companies would send promotional materials to the DJ's. Their objective was for you to play the material on your radio show, at parties, and on your mixtape. They would explicitly say mixtape because for a long time that was how hip hop was promoted. They would do this through a third party who would cover a region of the country, meeting all of the DJ's.

Every few months, the RIAA would send government agents to arrest people who were selling these same mixtapes. So even though you were getting the wink and the nod to put the music on your mixtape, they would then turn around and use the fact that their music was on your mixtape to try & sue or arrest you.

I was never arrested or sued but I refuse to help promote people who would pull shady practices like this. A big reason why I'm a programmer and not a DJ now.

Its no surprise to see them up to their same antics. I just hate how entrenched they are in both parties of government.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is akin to saying "Well, I think there is something wrong with the tax code so I'm not going to pay till I figure out what it is". Some time passes, I decide that "Oops, my bad", here's a payment but no penalty payment provided.

It is alarming and frustrating that the land grab for power is seemingly endless and yet we seem to be unable to do anything about it since the cards have been systemically stacked against corrective action (we need a President & Congress that are willing to fix things and that is about as likely to happen while getting struck by lightning).

<comment><USER12> _"Well, I think there is something wrong with the tax code so I'm not going to pay till I figure out what it is"_

As an aside, Goldman Sachs and Vodafone have taken almost exactly that tack in the UK recently. In the Vodafone case, they dodged tax illegally for a few years, fought it in court for as long as they could (a few more years), then only had to cough up the original amount, with no interest or fines -- basically because they were pally with David Hartnett, the head of HMRC. Hence swindling the taxpayer out of billions of GBP.

<comment><USER13> That's not really accurate - they merely interpreted ambiguities in the tax law in the most favourable way for themselves (and paid all the tax that was due... In Luxembourg, another EU country). Google do this (in Ireland). Hell, _The Guardian_ , the most left-wing paper in the UK, does all its financial affairs offshore (really: [http://order-order.com/2009/02/02/guardians-tax- hypocrisy-is...](http://order-order.com/2009/02/02/guardians-tax-hypocrisy-is- ridiculous/)). They pay 0.3% of their profits in tax. 0.3%.

A similar case is ongoing now (Gregg's the bakers) but bizarrely public opinion seems to have come down on the opposite side this time.

<comment><USER12> As far as I understand it, the British tax code has clauses to the effect of "business structures created for the sole purpose of evading tax don't count". In that regard, they didn't follow the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am beginning to wonder if this is a sign of things where a startup/product dev has to start thinking of the following:

\- Go to a p2p model where the app/service is distributed without a need to depend on a domain?

\- Really start looking at countries/places to partner with someone to register to get away from a cancer that FBI is becoming?

Seriously, this kind of thing is what puts a muddy cloud on USA as a viable option. I know asian countries aren't a walk in the park (I am an India btw, so know the bureaucracy in India), but maybe a country in Europe can become a shinning beacon for internet liberties?? I almost feel the intelligentsia of USA want a place established with modern principles :)

<comment><USER15> It's all about the vps services now. I have a decent one, in a country with almost no threat of being taken down :)

<comment><USER16> Which service and where is it located?

<comment><USER15> I'm using bytesized hosting here: <https://bytesized-hosting.com/>

My server is located in Luxembourg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think its time to start taking a stand against these types of seizures.

Is there any thing that can be done for websites against seizures like this?

Serious Question.

<comment><USER18> Repeal the Pro IP Act passed in 2008.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe I'm being a bit glib here, but what's to stop the folks behind Dajaz1.com from registering, say, Dajaz2.com and picking up right where they left off? It's not like that domain name was primo real estate, and if they truly weren't breaking the law there isn't any reason they couldn't continue running their site, right?

<comment><USER20> Well it would be trivial to then seize Dajza2.com as well, but they could easily get Daj.za or something else and use that-- which would be much harder to seize.

However the kim dotcom issue shows that even being located in another country, and the claim that you're "breaking the law" being very flimsy, is not sufficient protection in many cases.

It will be interesting to see if foreign domain names start getting seized by US officials.

<comment><USER19> You're absolutely right, but after so long some interesting issues start to pop up. If "dajza1.com" was able to be seized on the premise that they had released a specific set of songs, on what grounds could a new domain be seized? "ICE, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, has the power to seize web domains engaged in infringing activity under the same forfeiture laws used to seize property like houses, cars and boats allegedly tied to illegal activity such as drug running or gambling." If I own and operate prettycatcalendars.com and blackmarketorgans.org, the feds might have grounds to seize one, but certainly not every site I operate? What about a Facebook or Twitter account that is not connected to the infringing site?

(Most of these are rhetorical, and probably don't have very pleasant answers.)

[Edit] Come to think of it, I'm kind of pissed the site owners didn't just laugh at the seizure and immediately start up a new site, purely on principle. URLs are basically irrelevant these days, and ICE seizing them on the grounds that they're "tied to illegal activity" that adds up to copyright infringement at best sounds like a lot of dick-swinging by ridiculous executives in an industry well past its expiration date. They should be treated with appropriate insolence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 47 points and no comments? How can this be such an important story if nobody has anything to say about it?

<comment><USER22> It has been on hacker news some months ago..

<comment><USER23> The linked article was posted yesterday, so it hasn't been on HN for several months. Perhaps the topic of the article?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They shouldn't be able to seize a domain like that without hearing the ruling first.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's no provision in the constitution for stealing property that you think is involved in a crime (only for taking evidence of a crime. They could collect evidence without taking the domain, that is completely unnecessary.) Actually, there's no provision in the constitution for a federal police force of any kind, and for this very reason[1]. (Check the enumerated powers clause specifically. If you disagree, please give me which enumerated power enumerates a federal police force.)

I don't know what will bring the US federal government into compliance with the law, but it seems to me, over the 40 years I've been alive, they've just gotten further and further away from it, and more and more unaccountable as a result.

So, since most of HN seems to be liberals, and I know there are many such crimes that many liberals disagree with: such as the patriot act, the kim dotcom fiasco, airport porno scanners, domestic spying of all kinds, the drug war, even in states that have legalized it, etc. how do you propose to fix this?

Pick the crime the federal government is doing and continuing to do under Obama, and tell me, how do you propose to change things so that the federal government can no longer operate outside the law?

The argument for electing Obama to end the wars and close guantanimo, etc, made some sense if you believed these were Republican initiatives. But we have not seen them undone. In my life this has been consistently the case- Bush didn't undo the "you must lend to people who can't repay" regulations of Clinton with the unsurprising result. Bush didn't undo the prohibitions on firearms clinton put in place, in fact, he banned even more guns than clinton did (something many republicans refuse to admit.) Clinton didn't undo the damage of the Bush years, Bush didn't undo the damage of the Reagan years, Reagan did undo a little of the damage of the Carter years but did more damage himself. Carter- I give him credit- did try to undo a lot of damage and made some progress, but he and reagan are the exceptions... before and after them it hasn't really which "party" (or wing of the one party from my perspective) was in charge.

So, those of you who are younger. The Obama-Bush period is a perfect example. It is _always_ like this. You can re-elect Obama because you think Mittens would be worse (he might be, I can't say, I think he would be just as bad.) But it isn't really going to change anything.

The game is rigged until something asymmetrical comes to change it. That might be a period of severe economic pain (say when the dollar bubble collapses.)

Whatever, if you want things like these domain thefts to end, and you're in your 20s, start working on how you're join to turn back federal authority.

The hippies of the 60s may have been socialist, but they were right about opposing the concentration of power.

The problem is, if google pisses enough people off, their fortunes will start to decline. Government is able to prosecute a drug war for 50+ years, one that pisses huge numbers of people off, but there's no seeming way to stop it.

I'm using the drug war as an example here because it has more history than these domain thefts or the copyright craziness we've seen lately.... and I believe these thefts are a direct result of the drug war's Asset forfeiture "laws".

[1] It would be very hard for the feds to ignore state law and raid drug dispensaries in california if there were no federal police agencies. Further, this is also why the federal government has no enumerated power to criminalize drugs, but states do based on their state constitutions. Desire to control the economy (via regulations) has caused many to defend the "regulate commerce between the states" as if it gave the power to regulate to the feds. (it doesn't, it gives the government the power to prevent states from charging tariffs on the goods of other states... "Regulate" at the time didn't mean what it is commonly used to mean now- at the time it meant "functional" or "keep functional" as in "well regulated militia". If you think about it "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means the militia is not to be regulated (in the modern meaning of the term) because it needs to be "regulated" (in the "keeping function" meaning of the term)

<comment><USER24> There's this pattern I've noticed, where whenever a constitutional issue comes up on HN, nirvana makes this post that starts with a complete constitutional misunderstanding followed by a Randist rant. And it's always top-voted. Yuck.

For starters, the Constitution clearly states that Congress may make laws necessary and proper for _all_ powers vested in the government of the United States, not just those in the enumerated powers of article I. Specifically, the executive branch of the government has the power to enforce laws. It's not really one of those things that's a matter of judicial interpretation--it's in plain text, black and white. The idea that the Constitution does not authorize a "federal police force", as the OP states, is so strange I can't really fathom how someone who's read the Constitution could come up with it.

Anyway, since we were talking about asset forfeiture, I'll add that it has withheld a number of constitutional challenges as well. I'm not an expert on this but I'd be shocked if the OP was.

<comment><USER20> There's this pattern I've noticed, whenever I make an argument on HN and cite the constitution, people respond by characterizing me, rather than responding to my arguments. And its always the top voted response. Yuck.

>the Constitution clearly states... it's in plain text, black and white.

Sure sounds like something you'd be able to quote... and why didn't you? What possible reason could you have for choosing not to quote something that is "in plain text, black and white"? This makes me think that the purpose of those assertions is to pretend like you're making an argument, when your real purpose is ad hominem. You could have dropped the ad hominem and just given us the quote and an argument.

After all, its not like I didn't explicitly ask for such a quote in my post! (but ignoring that is necessary to pretend like I've said something I haven't your response is predicated on.)

I really think its a shame that you feel comfortable making ad hominem attacks like this on Hacker News, because by doing so you have derailed any possible discussion about the topic and made me the topic. I think this is anti- intellectual.

I think your down vote brigade is shameful as well. This response is being down voted for pointing out the ad hominem while the ad hominem is up voted. My original post has dropped 5 points in only a few minutes....

The sad thing is my crime is trying to find common ground with liberals. Which means it is nothing that I actually said that you object to, but the very existence of a different way of thinking.

<comment><USER24> Article 1, section 8: "The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, _and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof._ "

Article 2, section 3: "He [The President] must... take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Article 2 also expresses that the President has power to head executive departments and delegate powers thereunto.

While you're at it, you might also want to read <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem> . 'Ad hominem' is a particular type of invalid deduction. It's not a fancy Latin name for when you feel persecuted.

<comment><USER20> >you might also want to read <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem>

Did you read that page?

 _"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.[1] Ad hominem reasoning is normally described as a logical fallacy.[2][3][4]"_

You do it again here: "In particular, something doesn't become ad hominen because you feel insulted by it. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your persecution complex."

Neither of your two posts contain any argument, only a (still unsupported) assertion about what the constitution says, and assertions of negative characteristics about me.

Your citation of Article 1, section 8, is an evasion on your part, as it shows that the constitution only authorizes laws to execute "the foregoing Powers". Or in short, Article 1, section 8 proves my claim that the government only has the legal power in the constitution as enumerated by the enumerated powers. You haven't shown the existence of this power either in the enumerated powers clause or elsewhere (in the amendments), and thus you haven't actually addressed my claim at all.

Article 2, section 3, merely requires the president to adhere to the requirements of these enumerated powers. Which is actually further support for my claim, not an undermining of it.

The fact is that these enumerated powers are very specific: "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;" shows that they are not so broad as to fit anything not mentioned in between the cracks. You can't say the government has the power to establish an Airline and Airports and Air Routes based on that enumeration, for instance.

You blithely quote the word "powers" but ignore that until you show where the constitution grants the power to maintain a standing police force, you haven't even addressed my argument.

You can't make an argument on the points. You have twice pretended like there's an argument to be made, and in the second time, effectively evaded the point and quoted irrelevancies as if it were an argument. I must conclude that you have no argument to make, which explains why you choose personal attack instead. Well, I'm done. You can post whatever you want to try and make me look bad. I don't are. Your doing so only serves to prove my point. Even if you managed to find an actual quote in the constitution that rebuts me completely, your twice choosing to engage in ad hominem rather than debate still means you lost.

So, I'm done. The sad thing is, this is typical of the intolerance for differing perspectives that is exhibited on Hacker News. I was making point where we had common ground-- but you don't care about that. You simply cannot tolerate the existence of someone who can articulate a different perspective. And so you attacked me.

I suspect people like you and the down vote brigade are a large reason why hacker news has become somewhat of a monoculture.

<comment><USER25> This is 10 paragraphs of text that imply that air traffic control is unconstitutional, along with mine safety, FDA standards for meat, child labor laws, oh, and _any_ privacy protection for electronic communications. It is, to give it a vivid name, a Wesley Snipesian take on the Constitution.

It's obvious why it's catnip to many HN readers; it suggests that the Constitution is a very simple computer program, and that anything the government does that you don't like is a bug in the interpretation of that program.

Unfortunately for this argument, you cannot look at any federal government action and match it up to the black-letter US Constitution while ignoring the two centuries of jurisprudence that put those actions in context. We are not, no matter what 'nirvana thinks, going to reset the federal government around his interpretation of the Constitution.

<comment><USER26> _We are not, no matter what 'nirvana thinks..._

Nirvana never claimed the government would obey the constitution as written - in fact, he claimed it wouldn't. Your post completely ducks nirvana's question while mocking him and misrepresenting his views.

His question, again: _"there are many such crimes that many liberals disagree with: such as the patriot act, the kim dotcom fiasco, airport porno scanners, domestic spying of all kinds, the drug war, even in states that have legalized it, etc. how do you propose to fix this?"_

<comment><USER25> I'm sorry that I've come across as pointlessly mocking him, but this question doesn't make sense to me.

Take for instance the drug war. I don't agree with the drug war. I think criminalization of marijuana is terrible policy. _But is it unconstitutional?_ The Constitution provided a framework within which the citizens of the US were able to elect representatives who passed laws that outlawed marijuana.

"Even in States that have legalized it"? That's an objection the Constitution _explicitly_ presages: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby".

I re-re-read 'nirvana's point, and I think my interpretation is valid and that I haven't misrepresented him.

'nirvana has adopted the idea that much of what the government is doing is illegal because it isn't spelled out in the Constitution (in this one case, because the power to establish a federal police force isn't one of the Enumerated Powers of Congress). That's not how the Constitution works.

Could you be more specific, then, about what you're asking me? How do I propose to fix what? The drug war?

<comment><USER26> The question, as I'd ask more specifically: what philosophical/legal principle can/do "liberals" [1] use to determine what is or is not a legitimate function of the government?

For example, many liberals believe that Jim Crow laws or laws giving special privileges to straight married couples (but not gay married couples) should not be permitted even with popular electoral support. I.e., liberals often consider "the citizens of the US were able to elect representatives who X" to be an invalid justification for policy X.

The question is, what principle are liberals using to come up with views like this? Another question in the same line of thinking is: is there a principle beyond "I like/dislike this policy" which the courts can use to invalidate laws? (Note that appealing to court precedents and reinterpretations of the constitution doesn't really answer this, since the court can always re- reinterpret or make a new precedent.)

[1] I hate phrasing it this way, since the feelings it generates ("I {love/hate} liberals SOOOO MUCH") reduce everyone's IQ by about 15 pts.

<comment><USER25> I don't understand. Isn't "Jim Crow laws are unconstitutional" what _Brown v. Board of Education_ decided? The Constitution doesn't provide a black-letter guarantee of education for anyone, and yet the 14th Amendment allowed SCOTUS to hold:

 _Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms._

I just don't see where you're going. I'm interested, but I'm not following.

<comment><USER26> The issue is not what the court decided, unless you believe the court is always correct and what is constitutional changes w.r.t what the court believes. For example, do you believe that in the period from 1896 (Plessy v Fergusen) until 1954 (Brown v Board of Ed), Jim Crow laws were constitutional?

If not, you must have some underlying principle that tells you Plessy was incorrect. Or, somewhat tangential to constitutionality, you might have an underlying belief as to what constitutes a legitimate function of the government (e.g., perhaps you believe that regulating same-sex acts is not such a function).

The question is, what is that underlying principle (or set of principles)?

This is what Nirvana attempted to ask, while unfortunately getting bogged down in other far more boring matters.

<comment><USER25> But it's not just "the Supreme Court decided it and thus it is so" (although when push comes to shove...). It's also that the SCOTUS decisions are a hint book to arguments like this.

So, I don't have to reason from first principles to arrive at the conclusion that the 14th Amendment makes "separate but equal" unconstitutional. Brown v. Board lays out the argument that it does. I can't best the argument here in a message board post.

Do you think Brown v. Board is one of the cases SCOTUS got wrong? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER26> I think the outcome of Brown v. Board was correct, but I think the reasoning was wrong.

In particular, I dispute the "disparate impact" theory underlying the court's reasoning, namely that segregation does not qualify as equal protection because it is is disproportionately harmful to blacks.

I don't think disproportionate harm is required or relevant. My first principle is that equal protection is violated when gov_decision(circumstances, race1) != gov_decision(circumstances, race2).

Because of this, it would be relevant for me to cite Clarence Thomas in Missouri v Jenkins: <http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/515/70/case.html> But since Brown v. Board doesn't take this same first principle, citing them wouldn't help you understand my views (even if I agree with the outcome).

Presumably, if I knew your first principles (and if we are both completely rational, and you are intellectually consistent), I could predict your opinion on any given case. And that's the question Nirvana was asking - what are your first principles?

<comment><USER25> First, thanks for making me read _Missouri v. Jenkins_.

I'm not sure I see where you're going. Thomas' reading of _Brown v. Board of Ed_ seems identical to mine:

 _Public school systems that separated blacks and provided them with superior educational resources--making blacks "feel" superior to whites sent to lesser schools--would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, whether or not the white students felt stigmatized [...]_

[...]

 _Regardless of the relative quality of the schools, segregation violated the Constitution because the State classified students based on their race._

But further: the circumstances of these cases are wildly different. _Brown v. Board of Ed_ was about active, de jure segregation of black people and white people. _Missouri v. Jenkins_ was about a school district that became majority-black as a result of white flight.

Kennedy's concurrence was illuminating: it seems to allege that the plaintiff and defendant in this case (the students and the KCMO school district) were _colluding_ : an accident of venue was the only reason KCMO's school district was named defendant, and the actual, unnammed, shadow defendant was the state of Missouri, which was being coerced into funding an otherwise wildly unfundable mandate to create extravagant inner city schools by judicial fiat.

Thomas, Kennedy, and Rehnquist all put heavy attention on the circumstances of this case, that the federal judiciary (a) probably can't impose state taxes by fiat as a backdoor to legislation, and (b) clearly can't do so under the auspices that demographic "segregation" was equivalent to legal segregation. That all makes sense to me.

The FBI, air traffic control, copyright extensions: these are all well supported by legislation. They were not imposed as a backdoor by fiat by an activist court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh, man! I thought they seized the PHP virtual machine named Hip-Hop. No seriously - at least for few seconds... This must be News Ycombinatorism that I'm suffering...</comment>


"The SCP Foundation locates and contains objects that violate natural law" - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation <comment><USER2> tons of fun reads on the site.</comment>


The Missing Native/Web App Link: Google Says Native Client Almost Ready To Go - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/native-client/ <comment><USER2> Soon your browser will be synonymous with your computer. There is a bunch of projects that work towards that same goal

\- Chrome OS + NaCl (another part of their framework is called pepper) \- WebOS \- Various JavaScript SDKs (specialized like Game Closure or heavyweight like Sproutcore or small like backbone)

I always found it inefficient to 'install' software in multiple locations. It gives you a lot of headaches wrt updates, piracy etc.. I'm excited to see where this goes!

Notably not participating in the development is Apple, but I have a feeling they may be working on something like this as well (remember how the iPhone initially launched with just a JS SDK)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious if anyone in the HN community has messed with this, or sees a ton of potential. My first take is "eww browser plugins v2.0" but I'm not certain that's an informed opinion.

<comment><USER4> _My first take is "eww browser plugins v2.0" but I'm not certain that's an informed opinion._

Same here on both counts. But I'm apparently far less enthusiastic then the average HNer on the concept of the web being the One True Way for computing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To me the appeal of native code is the ability to load custom drivers for, surprise, custom hardware. It doesn't seem like this can do that, for "security" reasons. Can it even talk to hardware APIs (aka open a device handle and go to town?)

<comment><USER6> last i checked, you couldn't talk to custom hardware with it. you could do a html5/webkit/nacl installer-based app with appcelerator titanium and then modify things to talk to hardware.

I think that's the way forward, but for stuff that pays money I have to ship so I'm still kinda going with qt/swing/wx for cross-platform or wpf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would it be possible to port something like auto cad to chrome with this?

<comment><USER8> Yes. I think that's the entire point. Things like games and autocad have enormous codebases that will never be ported to javascript.

It's still not clear how much an advantage that is though. You can already share assets via the network while still using a local native application.

<comment><USER7> Pretty sure this is part of their ChromeOS strategy. It would be impressive and a big differentiator for a tablet (presumably an x86 tablet will exist at some point) to be able to run srs bzn programs.</comment></comment></comment>


Frank Ramsey – The Man Who Thought Too Fast - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/the-man-who-thought-too-fast <comment><USER2> >>Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is "ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.

Climate change, the federal debt, increasing shareholder value over anything else, I wonder what Ramsey would have to say about the current state of the world.

<comment><USER3> Would he be working at a FAANG trying to get more clicks for advertiser dollars?

<comment><USER4> Increasing economic growth is the most reliable method we know of to help future generations.

<comment><USER5> I think that increasing breadth and depth of human knowledge is far more reliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Ramsey number R(m,n) is the minimum size of a fully connected graph with edges colored red or blue such that there is either an m-sized blue clique or an n-sized red clique. R(3,3) is 6, which is stated as every group of 6 having 3 mutual friends or 3 mutual strangers. Ramsey showed that these exist for every m and n, I think.

But they grow very rapidly. Ramsey theory has usually the biggest constants found in mathematical papers.[1] There is a famous quote by Erdos:

"Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack."

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number)

<comment><USER7> What always gets me about Graham's Number is that you can't even write down how many digits it has using the entire observable universe ... but "the last 12 digits are ...262464195387".

I swear mathematicians are witches.

<comment><USER8> It's so big that going from the number itself to the number of digits (i.e. taking its logarithm) is not even something worth talking about. It's like blowing a kiss to an exploding nuclear bomb.

You just get dizzy even thinking about it. The observable universe is just not really that big when talking about this stuff, there are not even 100 orders of magnitude in the universe from smallest to biggest. Anything that you can have a conception of (even stuff like the number of possible lottery tickets or possible books that could ever be written etc) is just indistinguishable from mundane everyday sizes when dealing with googology. You're trying to roar but it comes out as a whisper. You have to explicitly design these. Most of the time if you think "but wouldn't it be comparable if we counted the XYZ) the answer is no.

It's like an adult equivalent of a kid saying "I get that galaxies are big, but are they also bigger than really big houses? How about a house with its own swimming pool? Really really big mansion of a big movie star?"

Edit: Tone is difficult in writing, I don't mean to be condescending, I'm getting dizzy myself when thinking of this and remember my frustration and amazement when first hearing about these.

<comment><USER4> >going from the number itself to the number of digits (i.e. taking its logarithm)

Why did nobody ever tell me to think of logs like this before!!?

<comment><USER9> Another fun property of this is that you can use it across bases. For example, how many bits would I need to represent 34812923 in binary? log2(34812923) = 25.05 -> round up to 26 bits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Makes me think of Ramunjan. It's quite tragic to think about how much more knowledge humanity would have if these two lived a little longer.

<comment><USER11> Curious if there are any young people with established once in a century kind of talent alive today ?

<comment><USER12> Terence Tao - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao)

<comment><USER13> I'm so curious what it must be like to have that kind of mind. Just did a quick Google and his IQ is around 230. I mean, it's hard enough to really understand what anyone else's subjective experience is like, but I think it's literally impossible to get a true sense of what it would be like to be that intelligent (for those of us who are nowhere close). With that great a difference it's got to really be a difference in kind, not just degree.

<comment><USER14> Owing to the way IQ is defined, _nobody_ has an IQ over 200.

IQ doesn't measure absolute intelligence, but rather assumes it is a normal curve and maps that to human friendly numbers: mean 100, standard deviation 15 or 16 depending who you ask.

The same thing has the curious side effect that if the number of people in comas at any given time is greater than 1, then coma patients must have an IQ > 0.

<comment><USER13> OK, so if all IQs could be mapped accurately onto a normal curve with a SD of 15-16 you wouldn't expect anyone over 200. But standardized IQ _tests_ can most definitely give results over 200, and do. And presumably someone who scores 250 on an IQ test is likely to be more intelligent^ than someone who scores 200 on the same test.

^in the sense that it measured by IQ tests, anyway. Point being it shows a real difference; deltas over 200 aren't meaningless.

<comment><USER15> Terence Tao's intelligence is not predicted by IQ. Plenty have higher IQ and achieve less. Some lower and achieve more.

IQ is total pseudoscience nonsense of zero value to anyone or anything.

It's one genuine use is as a fig leaf for the very worst kind of racism. Treat it and anyone touting IQ an indicator of anything with extreme suspicion. Nazis love IQ. Goodwin's. /Thread

<comment><USER16> Why do you consider IQ to be pseudoscience? It's the bedrock of psychometrics. Just because some people use some IQ data to justify racism doesn't mean the measure is unscientific. Nazis loved nuclear physics too, it doesn't mean the field is pseudoscience.

<comment><USER14> I know this isn't your main point, and I might just be remembering British wartime propaganda (my parents told me several things that later turned out to have been that), but…

Wasn't the Nazi nuclear program severely delayed by their race-based hatred of Einstein for being Jewish?

<comment><USER17> This is an argument against doing physics the way the Nazis did (ie deriding certain theoretical paths as "Jewish physics"), not an argument against doing nuclear physics at all because the Nazis did.

The latter is what this thread is talking about: it's obvious that we shouldn't be studying psychometrics the way the Nazis did, but it's not obvious that we shouldn't be doing it at all because they did (as with nuclear physics).

Hilariously, even harry8's complaint that the Nazis loved IQ is precisely backwards: Hitler banned IQ testing for being "Jewish" too.

EDIT: I actually was curious about this last claim, so I checked the source that the Wikipedia article points to. While this text was written by one of the most-cited psychologists in history, there's little else out there to concretely corroborate or refute that IQ testing was _banned_ by the Nazis. The evidence indicates that their attitude was somewhere between apathy and hostility towards the tests.

<comment><USER15> No you're a bit too literal. Nazis sadly are not dead and gone, not limited to 1930-45 Germany.

IQ is loved by Nazis as proof of master race bullshit. Really.

Treat IQ with contempt. It's an indicator of idiocy in a discussion. (All of us are capable of idiocy in discussions, including me, don't fall for the IQ trap. You're above it. We all are).

<comment><USER17> Environmentalism is an important part of neo-Nazism (and other strains of fascism) too. Do you think that automatically tars anybody who thinks we should pollute less? I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but you're letting labels do the thinking for you (or as I've heard it put recently, "engaging in idiocy").

I don't personally believe that racial IQ differences are significant or salient to differences in population outcomes, nor am I convinced that claims are well-founded that IQ determines individual outcomes to a significant degree. But I don't advise treating it like a magic word that shuts off the thought centers of your brain. If you think it's a useless concept, you should be able to articulate why by pointing to the science (or lack thereof), not by letting Nazis tell you what you're allowed to think critically about.

<comment><USER15> Support for Nazism is the only use of IQ. It's magic bs pixiedust nonsense that needs to be called out loudly as such.

It's not only that it is used by Nazis. It's that it is used for literally nothing else of positive value to anyone. It's a disgrace.

Sorry for dancing around it not not starting it as plainly as possible.

"Anyone quoting IQ scores as justification for anything at all is talking bullshit. The end."

And they are using a technique of bullshit argument support favoured by goddamn Nazis.

The jury is back. IQ is guilty. Put it right there next to lobotomy as a gift from psychology to the world. Stamp it out. NOW!

<comment><USER17> This is getting closer to making a reasonable claim, but unfortunately, an unsupported assertion is the _beginning_ of making an argument, not the end.

Most of the relevant scientific community disagrees with your assertion that IQ is purely pseudoscience. From Wikipedia:

> Clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient > statistical validity for many clinical purposes.[25][68][69] ... "On the > whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and > intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most > important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be > measured with some degree of accuracy." Almost all respondents picked out > abstract reasoning, ability to solve problems and ability to acquire > knowledge as the most important elements.

There's plenty more on the topic, and as always, Wikipedia is a great place to start your search for sources.

In what way is your blanket dismissal of the scientific consensus different from anti-vaxxers ("the only use of vaccines is support for Illuminati mind- control!!) or flat-earthers ("the only use for a round earth theory is support for, uh, the globe industry!")? Or for that matter, what makes you different from IQ essentialists like neo-Nazis, that take a nuanced scientific concept and flatten it into an all-or-nothing perfect predictor of outcomes? Hell, at least they're _directionally_ in agreement with the scientific establishment about the validity of the concept.

<comment><USER15> The onus is on those making the claim to provide the evidence. A claim without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

There is no evidence. Dig into anything that is claimed as evidence and it's clearly invalid, at best. As a statement of the overwhelimingly obvious: the field of Psychology has issues. It knows this. You've heard of the "replication crisis." There are those trying to right it and treat it like it is actually science and rip out all the pseudo-bs that psych is redolent with. Good luck to them. Maybe they'll even remove the utterly discredited stanford prison experiment from every single first year psych textbook? Or keep it as yet another example of collective delusion in the discpline caused by faked research? Yet another one. But in every textbook. Credibility?

"On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy." \- Anyone who disagrees and asks for the evidence is defined as lacking expertise. It's frigging comical. But it does screw up lives and justify racism so, there's that. Get told you're stupid as a child, there's a good chance that's self-fulfilling.

There is ovewhelming evidence that vaccines work. Seen a polio case, well, ever? There is none that IQ is a useful scientific metric. See Egas Moniz's Nobel prize for how psychology can move as a discipline on mass without evidence. Or maybe butchering brains and getting nobel prizes for it isn't clear enough evidence that you can't take anything in psychology "on trust" anymore than you can physics.

IQ is a disgrace. It is already and will continue to be increasingly sighted as how bad the discpiline of psychology has been for the past 100 years. May they own their shame and do better. Your IQ score being higher than mine means absolutely nothing. My IQ score being higher than yours means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zero. But yeah, you can convince people it's has meaning and use it mess up lives - even if you don't intend to do that. Like the altruistic motives behind lobotomy and the success they had with the Nobel committee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Euler is really the master in terms of sheer volume and mathematical scope. You supposedly could get a theorem named after you if you discovered it in Euler's notebooks (though probably well picked over by now).

<comment> dan-robertson Not that well picked over. After about 100 years of work and several volumes being published, the work on producing the complete collected works of Euler is not done.

<comment><USER18> Wow!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not the point, but I love this bit:

> Lydia made the mistake of remarking, "What a beautiful tree," presumably too > casually, whereupon Wittgenstein glared and demanded, "What do you mean?" > and she burst into tears.

</comment><comment> dan-robertson There's lots of great stuff in Ramsey theory. In some sense it feels quite different to a lot of other mathematics. It also has the great property that it is typically very hard to look at a statement in Ramsey theory and know if it is likely true or not, or even if it will likely be easy to prove or not.

For example consider a recently disproven long-standing problem of Ramsey theory:

Is it possible to colour the natural numbers with two colours such that no Pythagorean triple is all one colour?

This question was asked by Ron Graham many years ago with a $100 prize for the answer, assuming it would be reasonably easy to prove. It was recently solved with an absolutely enormous multi-terabyte computer proof. It turns out you can colour everything up to 7824 fine but no choice for 7825 is sufficient.

</comment><comment> ur-whale [http://archive.is/zLLj5](http://archive.is/zLLj5)

</comment><comment><USER20> If anyone from the New Yorker sees this, here is what your user interface looks like to the average reader of your online newspaper: [https://imgur.com/a/kCoxLHR](https://imgur.com/a/kCoxLHR)

Notice the % that is content.

<comment><USER21> Given the media industry's history, I'm sure if anyone relevant does see your post, that white space is simply going to be used as display ad real estate.

</comment></comment><comment> rv-de > "There was something of Newton about him," Strachey continued. "The ease and > majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament."

Wasn't he a pretty ruthless and competitive guy?

</comment><comment><USER22> > (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory > tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will > always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are > friends.)

What is the sensible/true version of this? Clearly it's not correct as stated. You could have three pairs of two mutuals. You could have five mutuals and a singlet. Or six mutuals. Is it more a statement about probabilities?

<comment><USER23> Three pairs of two mutuals: take one from each pair, that's a trio with no friendships. Five mutuals: take any three and there's a trio of mutuals.

<comment><USER22> Thanks. I still think the wording of the original description isn't great. If I point at a group of six people sitting at a table and say "three of them are friends", the natural assumption is that three and only three of them are friends, not that all of them are friends and therefor three of them are friends.

But I suppose I will choose not to die on the hill of slightly misleading language and admit I was just wrong.

<comment><USER24> This is a classical joke among new students to Mathematics to break the habit of the English language description being translated to the Mathematical problem statement.

It goes in a question and answer format something like: "You knew a girl in high-school. In situation A, you find out years later that she is a stage actor and a dancer. In situation B, you find out years later that she is a stage actor. Compare how likely the second one is to the first one" In plain English there's an implied meaning of "she is a stage actor and not a dancer" in situation B. But that is not the statement. Situation B is as likely or more than Situation A but not if you use the English language description which suddenly is under-specified without real-world information.

Obviously you pick the things to play to the priors of the person you're asking so that if they think actors frequently dance you put that in there. That leads them down the false rabbit hole of whether it's "stage actor and dancer" vs. "stage actor and not dancer" that you're comparing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python's Original Sin - <AUTHOR> http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/543270419/pythons-original-sin <comment><USER2> This is interesting, but I don't know that reality matches the author's theory. After all perl 6 is hardly a shining example of how a language should be upgraded. It's been in the works for at least a decade. Say what you will about python 3, but at least it exists and has been released.

<comment><USER3> > _Say what you will about python 3, but at least it exists and has been > released._

Yeah, and nobody is upgrading because it doesn't give you much incentive unless you enjoy breaking backwards compatibility. It has also been in development for at least 5 years.

I don't get why people get version numbers so literally. Perl6 is a new language inspired by Perl5. Python 3 is just a minor enhancement that happens to break backwards-compatibility. The two are not comparable.

<comment><USER4> Yea Perl 6 is a new language, but Perl 1-5 were the same language just like Python 1-3 are. What should have been Perl 6 or even 7 just got released as Perl 5.12. Perl 5 isn't going anywhere, I can imagine in 10 years we'll be seeing Perl 5.27. It doesn't really make sense, if they wanted to write a new language but they wanted to use the Perl moniker for marketing purposes they should have called it Perl++

<comment><USER5>
         they should have called it Perl++

or Perl Forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Python _does_ have a machine readable grammar. The reason Jython isn't at 2.6 is not because of syntax changes, those would probably take less than a day to do, it's all the semantic changes that take time.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I should have addressed that: there's more to syntax than grammar.

All of the semantic changes I can think of in Python could easily be implemented as syntax transformations in a way portable across implementations. Decorators, the with statement, print-as-a-function, etc... There might be some I'm missing that would be non-trivial as macros, but I'd benefit significantly just from having the ones that _are_ plain syntax sugar without having to convince my team to use a py3-to-2 compiler.

<comment><USER6> I suggest you take a look at the 2.6 release notes (<http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html>), the number of items on here that constitute simple syntax transformations is dwarfed by the number that require active work in the VM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, that _would_ requre a ton of work to upgrade. Looking through that page is precisely what convinced me the moratorium is a practical thing for the language. But most changes there aren't semantic, either. I'm talking about changes to the _language_ , not the _implementation_ , changes like the "with" statement, like new packages, not changes like how site-packages works.

Maybe my point was a little on the subtle side: being able to implement changes to a language's syntax and semantics without doing it again for each and every implementation is a better solution to one problem the moratorium is solving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure I buy this argument. The author seems to be arguing that it's a fatal design flaw for a language not to be implemented in itself. But as near as I can tell not that many languages _are_ implemented in themselves. I'm pretty sure Java and C# (as examples) are implemented in C.

Also, his argument that the compatibility issues between JPython and CPython are _because_ python isn't implemented in itself also don't hold water. One very simple counterexample would be Ruby and JRuby. Ruby isn't implemented in itself, and like JPython and CPython, JRuby and MRI are two different code bases written in two different base languages. Despite this, JRuby has kept _very_ close syntax compatibility with the standard Ruby 1.8.x interpreter. The secret in their case isn't self hosting, but rather a very comprehensive unit testing suite for the language. (interestingly enough, developed initially by yet a third implementation of Ruby).

<comment><AUTHOR> _the compatibility issues between JPython and CPython are because python isn't implemented in itself_

Didn't say that. Said that self-hosting is _one_ solution (one Perl 6 uses), not the only one.

 _[Ruby's secret] isn't self hosting, but rather a very comprehensive unit testing suite for the language_

No, Python also has a comprehensive test suite. The difference between Jython and Ruby is that Jython isn't as well maintained as the Ruby branches. Self- hosting the syntax is an architectural solution which requires zero additional effort to implement syntax upgrades.

<comment><USER7> Ahh.. Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot more sense to me now. I thought you were arguing a slightly different point. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In Smalltalk, this is a non-issue because the language is so small. A good programmer can hand-code a parser for most of Smalltalk in under a day. I know, because I've done it a couple of times. (2 hours is my fastest time.)

<comment><USER9> To relate this back to the blog post, the original sin is that Python has too much syntax. Every time somebody wants to add a "language" feature, it has to be implemented with some kind of syntactic change, and support for the semantics of the feature has to be added to the interpreter. That's a lot of work, and it means that alternate implementations like Jython can't keep up.

A good example of this is generators. Via PEP 255 they were introduced in Python 2.2, and required the addition of the "yield" statement to the syntax. Recently Squeak (an open-source Smalltalk implementation) added generators to the standard library, with no syntax changes required. It was a _much_ smaller project, and the change can easily be ported to other Smalltalk implementations without participation from the maintainers of the core libraries or virtual machine.

So languages with very simple syntax, like Smalltalk and Lisp just don't suffer from the high level of language evolution friction that Python does. In practice, the diversity of dialects and the ease with which the language can change creates the kind of market system of language features that andreyf mentioned here on HN.

The neat thing about Perl6 is that it takes a different approach. Perl doesn't have a simple syntax like Smalltalk or Lisp. Instead it has a very powerful system for text manipulation that can handle the complexity of Perl's syntax. In theory, that's even more powerful than Lisp macros or Smalltalk's implemented-in-Smalltalk compiler. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays out in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And this affects me as a Python user how, exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> To down-voters: this is a valid question, and something I cut from the original post (trying to keep to meta-discussion).

I'm hitting one related issue right now at work: we want to switch to Jython to take advantage some JVM features, but need to weigh the risk that it might never move past Python 2.5 syntax [1]. That's not a deal-breaker, but I'm an enormous fan of where Python syntax has gone since then, so it pains me especially. With a self-hosting syntax interpreter, even a minimally maintained project like Jython could keep up with most changes.

Another less-practical issue is that of syntax evolution: like Apple, Python has taken the route of benevolent-overlord to make design decisions. Thanks to the good taste of Steve and GvR, I think that's worked out really well. But neither is perfect, and especially in the case of programming language design, I'd wager the end product could benefit from having a market system of minor syntax features competing in user-space, not just in Guido's head. Just as "from __future__ import print_function" changes the syntax of a file, so could "from __macros__ import anaphoric_if".

1\. The Jython project lead is no longer working on it full-time: [http://fwierzbicki.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-new-job-at- sauce-...](http://fwierzbicki.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-new-job-at-sauce- labs.html)

<comment><USER11> I think the vital quote from Frank's notice is "I fully expect that this new job will deepen my understanding of real world Python coding and make my Jython work more productive."

With this in mind, wouldn't his move away from Jython full time actually make it better (ie infuse new ideas) so we might get 2.6 comparability sometime down the line?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "band-aids like the moratorium become necessary solutions, alleviating the symptoms of a more fundamental design flaw: syntax and semantics which require human implementation instead being portable from one implementation to another."

Would it be easier to for alternative implementations (non-CPython ala Jython, IronPython, etc) to keep up if the syntax was portable between them? Yes, of course. Is this a "Design Flaw"? Not in any way.

Portable syntax between implementations is not a primary goal of Python (the language) so I don't see any merits for criticizing it for not taking a feature never previously desired (most of the alternative runtimes are relatively young) into account in the underlying design.

If you need to alter/extend the syntax to python at some point I'd advising looking at the python magazine article on implementing DSL's w/pyparsing noted here: <http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/Publications>

If are in frequent need to alter/extend the syntax of the language you are using, and it is a non-trivial task, then you are using the wrong language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can agree to this. I think the entire struggle I've gone through with Python is realizing at it isn't the language PG promised me :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As I recall, Perl didn't start with a machine-readable syntax description, either. But they've got one now, and Python doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER14> You mean a parser like this: [https://codespeak.net/viewvc/pypy/trunk/pypy/interpreter/pyp...](https://codespeak.net/viewvc/pypy/trunk/pypy/interpreter/pyparser/)

PyPy is taking precisely this approach, and GvR in an interview or two, has blessed it as the way forward.

So I think OP is a little late to the game.

</comment><comment><USER15> You're still a few layers above the truly fundamental issue.

Python's sin is that it has statements at all.

<comment><USER16> Can you explain what you mean by this please?

<comment><USER17> There's no reason why there should be two kinds of things code can be made up of. (statements vs expressions) In a well-designed language, everything that is a statement in Python would just be implemented as an expression that returns nil.

<comment><USER18> Interesting.

I was under the impression that def x(a):... was only a pretty way to say x = function(a)...

I have to agree print is a weird thing, but what other statements bother you so much?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Andrey, your blog is just like text anonymously posted. Please a bio or something? It feels minimalism has gone too far.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is implementation really the bottleneck when it comes to language syntax changes? My observation of Python's and also Java's progression makes me think that design issues, compatibility issues or political issues have been much more difficult than actually implementing what has been decided.

The benefit of self hosting is that all libraries are instantly available on every implementation. That's important because the libraries comprise hugely more code than the language itself I would think.

</comment><comment><USER21> So write a Python implementation which includes a machine-executable copy of the standard grammar, and see if it catches on.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't understand python is dead or hurting because jython isn't keeping up with the latest branches?

Edit: Only in a language group like rubyists do you see quick adoption and change and for many applications this isn't always great I'll take stable libraries over ever changing applications any day.

<comment><USER23> Re-read the post. It seems like he _used_ to think Python was dead because he thought the Moratorium was implemented for different reasons than the actual rationale.

Now, I'm not sure if he still thinks Python is dead or not, but that's not what his post is about. He was just stating his opinion that Python has a "[...] fundamental design flaw: a syntax which requires human compilation."

<comment><USER22> I did re-read the post and it just seems like perl 6 has reassured him that python is dying but I have to disagree, maybe jython is dead for what he wants but python is not dead and from the looks of it jython is not dead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Err, I guess this teaches me to not to even mention simplistic emotional responses like "Python is dead". Let me try to be as clear is possible:

Python is not dead. Python is hurting from a bad design decision that doesn't let multiple interpreter implementations share components that they could have. This makes it impossible for minimally maintained branches (like Jython) to keep up with the language, and so hard for better-maintained branches (like IronPython or pypy) that it necessitates a moratorium on the syntax as a whole.

<comment><USER22> I can understand where you are coming from and even though IronPython and other such things are interesting but from experience python is a much slower moving language, I still interact with systems using python 2.5 and I think the moratorium is a good thing for creating libraries and implementations and overall will make adoption quicker.

I still think python's focus is in a slower world and as a python user I am okay with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think it's very credible to hold Perl 6 up as the standard for how to encourage and enable complete implementations, considering that ten years in, it still has _only_ partial implementations.

<comment><USER25> I would also put C and C++ in that box then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like the fact that the language syntax evolves at a slower pace than the library space. I think that's the right proportion. If you want to add new functionality to the Python ecosystem you don't need to add new syntax, instead it is often very easy to just go write a new function, class or module and make it available to the rest of the world. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing that today. Also nothing is stopping you from using a mix of languages, with some parts of a system written in Python, some in C, some in Lisp, some in Java, etc. Mix and match and pick the best tool for the role.

</comment><comment><USER27> uh?</comment>


WSJ interview with Paul Graham [video] - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/video/paul-graham-y-combinator-startups-graduate/D4CAE29C-7FA5-4213-9C3D-5B2EA86B4016.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_videomodule_1

<comment><USER2> I like this interview because I was in a really good mood when Peter shot it. The startups had just finished the second (of three) demo day sessions, and they had all just nailed their presentations. I was so relieved. You can see from their body language in the background that they're all happy too.

</comment><comment><USER3> And to think Paul Graham initially resisted investing. He seems to know this stuff so well it seems natural.

<comment><USER2> Well, I've been doing it full-time for 5 years now. And at the scale we operate on, 5 years is a lot of data. 172 startups is several times the number a VC partner would deal with in his career.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting. I just finished a biography a friend of mine wrote about his life as an accidental cheese-seller, and he mentions that he became an expert in just a few years, simply because he tried everything every vendor had to offer. Pretty soon he was at least as expert as any vendor, and often more knowledgeable.

It's funny how much of life is just about putting in the hours. Maybe we'd like to think it's about talent or brainpower, but data wins pretty much every time.

<comment><USER3> My point is more about being good at something naturally. For example, I think Michael Arrington was always a natural to write Techcrunch, even if he never started it. Tiger Woods seems to be natural at golf (not that he didn't work hard, but many people work hard). I believe Paul Graham is a natural at Y Combinator in the same way.

<comment><USER4> > Many people work hard.

I don't think that's quite true.

Often one finds that the top performers in a field have some practice regime that stuns even other professionals.

I don't know how to evaluate the question of whether Paul Graham is somehow naturally better at this than others. There's clearly something about him that's different, or he wouldn't be doing what he's doing. But to guess at what those qualities are -- that endeavour is so vulnerable to confirmation bias it's practically void of meaning.

Or you could just shrug and say that by now he's seen hundreds of proto- startups. For whatever reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does the "no soup" provision work in legal terms? How do you (pg and co) ensure you don't get diluted in future rounds?

<comment><USER2> We have protections against arbitrary dilution, by e.g. issuing extra stock or doing a new round that values the company at $1. We've never needed them. What I meant by the "no soup" remark was that we don't care that much about legal protections; it is a more powerful deterrent that we would blacklist any VC who screwed us over-- or who screwed over any of the startups.

<comment><USER6> In general, is maintaining a good reputation an adequate incentive for VC firms to avoid abusing founders or angel investors?

<comment><USER2> Empirically, very much so. Stories of investors maltreating founders are not uncommon in the startup world generally, but they are extremely rare among the YC alumni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heh, "no soup for you!"

</comment><comment><USER8> Awesome: "Judging by the reactions of the investors, the recession seems to be over."

</comment><comment><USER9> That was nice. Although, the interviewer just talked too much. A good journalist knows how to get out of the way.

I have a question for pg, if he is reading this. You said that about 70% of the companies exit YC with funding or do not need further funding because they are already bringing in money. Do you usually return your investment at this point, or do you wait until a later VC round, or do you generally wait to the point where the founders cash out to return your investment?

<comment><USER2> Like most investors, we wouldn't normally get any return till what in the business is called a "liquidity event," meaning either an acquisition or an IPO.

<comment><USER10> Dividends? Or a clear preference for 100% reinvestment in growth and a bigger liquidity event?

<comment><USER2> Technology startups have never paid dividends. There are probably multiple reasons why not. There might be some way to tweak dividends to make them work for startups, but I know so little about that sort of thing that I wouldn't want to speculate.

<comment><USER10> On revision, thanks for deciphering my terse question.

As an aside, I did invest in one web startup which took the unusual step of returning the entire first round investment by way of dividends prior to an IPO. Very peculiar and not US based, so I figure your assertion holds.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Say Woof? AI in Animal Language Translation - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I suppose this is intended to be a link to [https://medium.com/syncedreview/say-woof-ai-in-animal- langua...](https://medium.com/syncedreview/say-woof-ai-in-animal-language- translation-35b431ab187f) ?</comment>


Mystery photos from CERN's history - <AUTHOR> http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2014/43/News%20Articles/1955523

<comment><USER2> It's kind of confusing, but I take it many of these have already been solved? For example, one picture is subtitled, "We have no sense of scale for this - Is it some kind of pipe?", and clicking on it leads you to a precise description of the pipe's role and a gallery containing an actual scale photo:

[https://cds.cern.ch/record/1765880/files/70-3-376.jpg?subfor...](https://cds.cern.ch/record/1765880/files/70-3-376.jpg?subformat=icon-1440)

(" _The grooves allowed circulation of the cooling fluid, in this case helium_ " \- that's some pretty serious cooling)

<comment><USER3> The BEBC was a giant cryostat, full of liquid hydrogen:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_European_Bubble_Chamber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_European_Bubble_Chamber)

My guess is that the cooling wasn't for heat related to the power itself (though perhaps), but to act as a sort of "temperature lock" for the entry point of an outside line. If heat can get in through the openings in the cryostat, you risk boiling off the contents. So you surround the line with something colder than liquid hydrogen, and ensure that the line inside the cryostat isn't warmer than the contents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just identified [https://cds.cern.ch/record/1764794](https://cds.cern.ch/record/1764794) , let's see if the description gets updated.

<comment><USER5> What is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really not sure what to be more impressed with, the precision engineering, (which really should not be possible with the technologies of the day - I'm thinking specifically of the non-continuous structure on the mystery pipe that neither casting nor latework could achieve); or the quality of the photography overall.

Evern if some of the mysteries of what is on view are not solved, it's a fascinating collection.

<comment><USER7> That pipe is almost certainly fabricated out of multiple parts. It isn't a turned piece of solid bar. I'd guess it's a (relatively) thin pipe with a thick flange on the end and rings that slide and lock on to the thinner part of the pipe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The second last photo seems like something from the rolling tapes era? Something to do with old-room size mainframes?</comment>


Linus Torvalds: Debugging hell - <AUTHOR> http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/12/debugging-hell.html <comment><USER2> Despite the risk of being voted down by the fanboys, I have to ask: how could this receive 12 votes within 40 minutes?

What's so newsworthy about Linus being frustrated about debugging?

<comment><USER3> I found it somewhat interesting to learn that on a modern architecture you can isolate the cpu from its peripherals to the extent that debugging is impossible.

<comment><USER2> There are some aspects that might be worth voting this article up. Like the one you noted, or the mere fact that even a genius like Linus gets frustrated about debugging.

Still, I can't help suspecting that many voters wouldn't care if some John Doe had written this story.

<comment><USER4> True. But the name Linus Torvalds helps the article pass through our "crap- filter". We invest more effort in looking for value because we have a reasonable assurance that value is there.

<comment><USER5> sounds.. bayesian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does it unnerve anybody else that there are "Linus or nobody" sections of code, when GNU/Linux is often linked with the "open source / many eyes" security defense?

<comment><USER4> Good point. When code is too hard to understand, open source is an illusion.

<comment><USER7> Open Source is an 'illusion' most of the time. What open source gives you, is the possibility that someone could understand and take over the source if it's needed badly enough.

<comment><USER8> Open source is like open laws, so bloody vast it takes people who you have to pay vast sums of money to spend the time to interpret and advise you on it. So you don't have to spend the vast amount of time to use it.

<comment><USER7> Interesting analogy. And still better than closed laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hardware (driver- or OS-level) debug sucks.

Commodity hardware debug sucks more.

When working at this level, access to hardware probes and external monitoring and manufacturing taps can be invaluable.

Boundary and edge conditions and timing races and part steppings and errata rule. For those cases where the errata was written down, or where the vendor deigned to describe what changed between the steppings.

There are a number of device-level drivers and operating systems in use where only a very few folks really know the code sufficient to debug this level, too.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've always wondered why linux has a hard time with suspend and hibernate, while on windows (and osx) there usually isn't any problems at all.

<comment><USER10> Because hardware vendors work directly with windows to make suspend / hibernate work correctly.

Because for a long time, apple only had one architecture to worry about.

Because linux has only gotten "big enough to pay attention to" in the last few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Linus once said that debuggers are for sissies. I knew he would regret saying that sometime.

Here is another of his rants against debuggers. Just substitute 'kernel debugger' by 'simple chipset debugging facilities' (whatever that means) in that email and basically he has his response for why Intel isn't adding it. [http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard- speech.h...](http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard-speech.html)

Intel engineers are saying, 'simple chipset debugging facilities' are for sissies!

<comment><USER12> Well I know he said real men use printf, but it sounds like he's putting the system in a state where it can't print to anything.

<comment><USER11> Therefore, he is putting himself in a state where he is not a real man.

This is his logic, not mine.

<comment><USER12> He put himself in a state where the only options were more difficult than printf. Therefore he exceeded his own standard for real manliness, and remains a real man.

It seems like a simple transitive relation to me; are you saying his logic neglects transitivity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See update: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388251>

</comment><comment><USER14> this is what you get for going macro kernel. in a micro kernel you'd just hook the debugger to the driver process.

<comment><USER15> That's not true at all, have you ever actually done kernel development, especially dealing with bad hardware? A kernel panic is what it is no matter how many boxes there are in your flowchart.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and yes, and you're wrong about that. Anything else :) ?

To elaborate: Yes, I've actually written an os, yes, bad hardware was my 'standard' in those days (a simple lack of money), imagine a pc built out of parts bolted to an old print-file trolley, more flakey than I care to remember.

A kernel panic in a microkernel presumes a memory or a cpu error, anything else the kernel simply does not deal with so that would lead to driver process issues, not kernel panics.

A faulty memory controller or cpu would lead to a kernel panic because of (apparent) datastructure inconsistencies.

One of the hardest drivers to write (even in a microkernel environment) was an X.25 board that a friend of mine had designed around some comm chip, for one the X.25 spec is pretty convoluted and there were a lot of layers of the protocol to be implemented in a single driver. That thing was an absolute nightmare to debug, other than that most drivers (harddisk controller, network cards, graphic boards) were a walk in the park compared to doing the same under a macro kernel.

Simply telnet in to the machine, start up the vga driver process and run it (under the debugger) until you manage to crash it. Most of the times a simple 'where' and close inspection of the source would be enough to solve the problem, recompile and run for the next iteration. No kernel panics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, there's an enormous ego on that guy. Well deserved, but still...

<comment><USER17> Ego? Sounds like a simple statement of fact. If someone else _can_ debug the issue, can he say what he did and not get called out?

Also, it is funny that people who succeed in the first place due to what you call as ego, are expected to magically lose it and become "nice" once they are above a certain level of success.

[edit: +1. Downvote is not from me.]

<comment><USER16> So it's seriously a statement of fact that he's the only person in the entire community who could possibly debug that problem? I find that incredibly hard to believe.

<comment><USER18> If there were someone else, it sure sounds like he would be happy to have sloughed off the work. It doesn't sound glamourous. It sounds like it sucks. So everyone else would rather work on something they think is cool, and Linus is stuck with the crap work that in the end nobody is willing to do. That is why he's the guy in charge. That is why he deserves the credit for Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting that OSX is basically FreeBSD with bells on, and it can suspend/resume without too much difficulty. _That_ is what needs to be fixed at the source (haha), not one-off hacks.

<comment><USER20> How many hardware platforms does OSX do suspend/resume on without too much difficulty?

<comment><USER20> (We used to sort of have a tradition of not voting people down that much for comments that were just "wrong", rather than actively offensive or something)</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Is Down - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com <comment><USER2> Thought I was the only one. All videos are being met with a 'Video unavailable" warning.

I highly doubt this was a scheduled outage. Really looking forward to see what caused this.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I can play videos if I have their link but it won't pop up the video selection grid. I don't get the video unavailable message, at least not yet.

<comment><USER2> I tried pasting a direct video link on an alternate browser just to check if something was wrong with firefox. That didn't do it for me either. I dunno if the geographical location matters in this case but I'm on the east coast of the United States. This must be a nightmare for youtube engineers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/](https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Edit: it seems to be working now.

Trying to watch a video gives me a blank page plus the video player which either plays the video or says that the video is unavailable. Comments, Recommendations, and Related videos are all gone for me. Embeds seem to work, although I haven't tested them too much.

I looked around and can't find an official status page unless it is nested under one of the Google Cloud Services[1] or G Suite[2]. Down detector is reporting it though[3].

[1]: [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)

[2]: [https://www.google.com/appsstatus](https://www.google.com/appsstatus)

[3]: [https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/](https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/)

<comment><USER6> > it seems to be working now.

Which is why to not post this sort of thing on HN. Not interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's back up.</comment>


O.J. Simpson defender, F. Lee Bailey, is broke and disbarred - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/20/o-j-s-last-defender-f-lee-bailey-is-broke-disbarred-and-working-above-a-hair-salon/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_3_na <comment><USER3> Is that it? if so, what a terrible reporting work.

Apart from a single mention of O.J. being frightened not to talk to him in prison there is no mention of what kind of retaliation he received. There is no attempt to get remarks or opinions from those who apparently retaliated.

It makes no mentions of the reasons why he was disbarred, or why, since he was 60 years old during the O.J. trial and implied to have had a lot of money did he not have enough money left to retire.

<comment><USER4> Saw in the article a mention of mishandling client's funds, a common reason for disbarment. It is real curious that he is broke tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read the Town and Country feature. While I'm dubious about the financial shenanigans that got him disbarred, and it seems they are addressed only in passing, if it's true that he's being _kept_ disbarred purely for having fought this case, unlike anyone else who would be in this situation, then that's a disgusting travesty.

The American compact is that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that all criminals get defence lawyers. It is because you _cannot trust_ the justice system to accuse only innocent men; the state cannot be allowed the power to point at a person and send him to jail for life. It would be one thing to use your right of free association to avoid this man in one's day to day life, and eminently defensible, but for him to be subject to _systematic retaliation_ that destroys his career for doing a good job defending someone controversial and unpopular?

That's not really something I want the state bar association to do. The justice system is already over-incentivized to over-prosecute, over-convict and run roughshod over defendant's rights whenever it can. If they can find an excuse to deprive you of a job for defending OJ, they can find a similar one for (say) defending someone from Black Lives Matter in a court in Alabama.

<comment><USER6> It is made quite clear in the Town and Country article that he continues to be denied entry to the Maine bar because of his complete lack of remorse or willingness to admit guilt for "mishandling" the client funds. A perfect example of someone who cannot stand to lose an argument even winning imposes a higher cost than losing.

Even if he had not been OJ's lawyer he would have remained disbarred and in fact the only reason anyone knows or cares about him is because of his role in defending that particular murderer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the link should be changed to the original article? The WaPo version is just a recap of this Town and Country feature: [http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/a10284185/f-lee- bai...](http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/a10284185/f-lee-bailey-oj- lawyer-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems to me painfully obvious that he isn't being punished for being on the Simpson team, but because he refuses to give disciplinary authorities any reason to believe he recognizes, has learned from, and would not repeat the errors for which he was disbarred.

Even acknowledging the fairly obvious error (if one accepts his account of events) of _not having a substantial revision to the documented, signed fee arrangement itself documented and signed_ would probably go a long way.

If you can't acknowledge that you did the wrong thing (only that you were found the have done so), at least acknowledge the giant slip-up as a lawyer that _resulted_ in you being judged to have done the wrong thing and show you've learned from it, since it's the kind of slip-up that could get your _client_ nailed for wrongdoing that they are innocent of, were you readmitted to practice.

</comment><comment><USER9> What a shame. An end to a great legal career. I can't pass judgement on his faults, crimes, real or accused, but he did leave a very interesting life, and had a fascinating legal career.

<comment> 90s-socal-kid A moment for us to all reflect. He defended someone judged harshly by history, to the limits of his abilities.

Then again, the recent multi-part documentary on the trial (I watched on apple's music service) didn't reflect kindly on the defense. They were presented as willing to do nearly anything to get their client off.

On the gripping hand, is this kind of behavior the extremum moment of the adversarial judicial system? Even if we disagree, should we respect F Lee and Johnny because they are the primary exemplars of this adversarial system?

That moment captured in the photo is one of the best captures of that trial I've ever seen.

<comment><USER4> Looking at that photo with at least two decades more experience dealing with people than I had back then, I now think he demonstrates a bit too much joy if one is to assume that he has just been given what is rightfully his - <USER2> acquittal because of actual innocence. If I were just acquitted of anything I didn't do I would be pissed the fuck off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope OP is not expecting us to gloat about his misfortune.

</comment><comment><USER11> betya anyone that tries to defend Trump acquires the same problem...</comment>


Show HN: Storyline 2.0 – Integrates with Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/storyline-by-arcivr/id945808100?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Storyline 1.0 was great, but only let you grab photos from your iOS device. V2.0 lets you create and narrate slideshows with images from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Arcivr. Posting has changed as well. Instead of posting an mp4, Storyline now hosts a unique URL for every slideshow so you can post to Twitter, etc. Mp4s are still saved to Dropbox, Arcivr or your device. Android version coming in late spring. I'd love to hear what you think.</comment>