Ask HN: Do you still purchase physical books? - <AUTHOR> I ask this because I really enjoy reading content from a physical book. I can read ebooks perfectly fine and don't see a problem with them but I feel like I understand more when I have a physical book, which might be a bad thing depending on how you look at it. <comment><USER2> Absolutely. The main reason is the abysmal typesetting of e-books, I don't think there is a solution yet for having beautifully set type in a responsive electronic document. The library on my iPad is getting larger then my physical one though. Lots of scans of books that are not available anymore. And the amount of media we are able to carry around in electronic form still amazes me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer audio books: you can listen while traveling, cleaning, or doing other otherwise dull chores.

If there is no audio book, an ebook is the most convenient. I usually upload the text to my server and make it a big font on a dark background so I can read on any device anywhere (since it's only text, even 2G internet suffices). Any laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone or even a feature phone with GPRS internet works. And I can then link it to friends also if I want to show them something.

But of course a real book is a real book. I like holding it as much as anyone, but like a superb meal that takes 3 hours to prepare, it's just too much of a hassle most of the time.

I should mention that I don't really read non-fiction. It's not in the question but most people here probably read a lot of technical stuff. I've never really worked that way (following tutorials or reading learning books when not required by school); instead I google what I want to know and learn the ins and outs by experimenting, taking from tutorials only the parts and pieces I need. Not sure how common this is, but it works for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, I do. I enjoy the feeling of physical books and I like the fact that I can easily pass them to another human without trying to circumvent DRM or use some service that allows me to 'lend' books.

Also, I like to give people books I've read as gifts. One night at SFO flying to the UK I was with a colleague and I had a battered copy of "Antifragile" which I was able to hand to him so he could read it on the flight. No messing with technology; no thinking about what lending restrictions there were; no thinking about whether his technology was compatible with mine.

I've also written two books and there's nothing like being able to give signed copies to people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like paper books more than e-books, but which one I read depends on the type of content.

I prefer digital version for technical stuff, because it's often hard to get hardcopied version (e.g. for documentation) and the content will most probably expire in a year or two. The only technical books I buy in paper are those that don't expire, like "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation" (Hopcroft, Ullman).

On the other hand, I read novels almost exclusively on paper.

It all boils down to this: I only have so much spare place to keep paper, so I keep in paper only those that I will want to keep for ten years.

</comment><comment><USER6> I live in Pakistan, which is woefully underserved by the big ebook providers (no Amazon Kindle editions, no Google Play Books, and iBooks has mainly public domain ebooks only). I tend to buy technical ebooks from O'Reilly and The Pragmatic Programmers, and such.

(I do have another option for technical books -- the Asian editions. They're cheap, but the coverage is spotty: I bought the C Tiger book a couple of years ago, but all because I couldn't find the ML one.)

There are no libraries I can visit in this city. There's a nice readers club in Karachi (sort of like Netflix for DVDs, except it's for books), but I don't live in Karachi. So, I hoard non-technical books. There are a few good bookstores where I live, and I tend to buy a lot faster than I read -- all because I'm afraid the next time I visit the store I won't find a copy of what I want. I've raided a lot of used bookstores, and bought books I'd never have imagined finding again, like the old CYOA series.

Shipping from Amazon is expensive -- $6.99 per shipment + $6.99 per book. Amazon.co.uk is slightly cheaper for larger shipments: £5.49 per shipment + £2.99 per book. Amazon.in, right next door to me, doesn't ship internationally. Powell's is about the same as Amazon.

I funded the Singularity & Co Kickstarter earlier this year, and that gives me access to a bunch of older stuff, as ebooks. I haven't ordered from baenebooks.com yet; their catalog doesn't have a lot of Tor books I want.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes. But a lot fewer than I used to. Mostly because of space issues (I have about 40 years worth of books hanging around. Last time I moved I bottomed out the suspension of the moving van with the weight ;-).

These days I tend to get physical books when:

* They're significantly better "things". I have some lovely books that are lovely objects in of themselves. Well typeset, bound well, quality paper, folios, etc. For example my hardcover of "The Timeless Way Of Building" is a beautiful object — as well as a wonderful book. I like having beautiful objects around me.

* When the format doesn't work as an e-book. For example Stephen Cole's "The Geometry of Type" would be completely useless to me as an ebook. As would most of my books on photography art and architecture. They're not just lumps of text that can be trivially reflowed. This is something that might change if we get some really high-quality A3 portable ebook reader type things in the future.

* When I can't get them as an ebook. There is still a stupid about of immensely useful content out there that you cannot get in ebook format. For example I'm currently finishing up a re-read of Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World". Which you cannot get as an ebook.

That said — my default for fiction/reference purchases tends to be ebooks now. With occasional upgrades to paper books if they're something I really liked and I can get a "nice" physical edition.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes I do. The reason is moral/aesthetical: to have books on my bookshelfs and organize them makes them always visible in my flat and allows me to easy glimpse over them and have an idea of what I did, what I planned and what I'll deferred. From functional point of view eBooks are more convenient, so if I got a chance I buy both ebook and paper versions, or if I download the eBook for free somewhere I make sure if the book is good to buy the paper version later.

</comment><comment><USER9> I do enjoy reading a physical book more than an ebook but only by a little. It's interesting to me that people here so far seem to prefer technical books to be ebooks due to their short useful shelf life. I've reached the opposite conclusion - that I prefer technical books be paper only and novels/non- technical books may be either. This is because, in my experience, technical books tend to have diagrams or tables that don't render well on the Kindle and similar devices.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes. I buy books with formulas, code (like physics, engineering, programming) in physical form, because the Kindle edition tends to look awful.

I only buy the Kindle edition of books that are purely text and/or throwaway (= I won't open it ever again), typically management, self-help books.

Also, I buy physical versions of fun books that I read before going to sleep, because I don't want anything digital (= capable of displaying notifications) in my hand when I'm preparing to go to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not if I can help it. Physical books are too inconvenient for me, plus I move around a lot and it's hard to carry a bunch of books with me.

I've gotten into photography recently, and those books are very hard to translate to a digital format, due to the layout. Those are the only ones I buy physical, the experience is good, but it's frustrating enough that I prefer digital.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, of course. Rule of thumb: What's been around a long time, will stay around for a long time.

The longer something is used, the longer it will take for it to be displaced.

Paper-books been round for thousands of years. ;)

Besides, as good as digital reader devices are, they have serious drawbacks. For example quick browsing, retarded DRM restrictions (why can't I give my book to someone else, ffs?!), and they still aren't as nice on the eyes as paper books.

Not to mention that they need electricity and each book I read is another data-point in my profile on some nebulous company's (or gov-agency's) server.

That said, they have advantages when it comes to search. But often we kind of memorise the "shape" of the text, so this advantage isn't as great. (Just like source-code editors sometimes show a miniature version of the text for quicker navigation.)

And they also weigh less. But they don't look as good on the shelves..

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't like paper. I have never liked it. Worse of all, I cannot never read at night, not paper. Never could, don't know why, eyes get red, tired, can't focus. Digital format, yes! When the story is good I almost go until dawn reading. With paper, I would read a couple of books a year. With digital, I've been able to read dozens of books a year.

I cannot read paper anymore. I'm buying the digital versions of the few ones I have in paper I haven't read yet.

Besides, nothing like cleaning my living room, all books, music and movies on a device that fits in my pocket!

Equally important is the highlight (yeah, can be done on paper too) and search functionality. Once I basically had to read the book again looking for a passage. I knew the contents of the passage, but I did not knew where in the book it was.

Some categories, like photography, design, art, etc. still don't go well in digital format, though.

DRM sucks. Not the paying part, but just how it makes our lives miserable. Also, don't understand when digital copies cost more than hard-copies (especially for text-only books).

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes. In fact, strictly speaking, we can only purchase physical books. We cannot really own ebooks. Even if an ebook doesn't have DRM it's usually watermarked with my name and the editor threatens to sue me if I lend it, loose it or if it gets stolen. We can purchase physical books but in a sense we can only rent ebooks, even if we pay only once for a lifetime lease.

</comment><comment><USER15> As someone who currently has his physical books stored away in a locker a third of a world away, I'm souring to my former preference for physical books.

It's definitely not perfect but I wish more books went the DVD model where if you buy the physical disk version, you can also get a digital license. Without really having to buy both separately.

I'd love to have to have access to the contents of my books regardless where they are, while still enjoying them physically when I can.

Unfortunately the current electronic versions are buried in DRM and sold merely as limited licenses to the content.

<comment><USER14> FWIW, Manning follows that model: you can buy the physical book from anywhere and it contains a coupon that you can use to get the ebook from their site. That's the only tech editor I know of that does this. No Starch also offers free ebook with any print book bought from their site, but the shipping cost to where I live is too high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Always. No ebook can beat a paper book. Browsing and comparing a phisical book is orders of magnitude easier. Anyway, ebooks are good for casual reading.

</comment><comment><USER13> "To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts have worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as close to reading on paper as possible."

The approach is wrong. Most of us have not left the physical objects behind. It's still too soon. It's like wanting to use an iPad with keyboards, it's "wrong".

I don't use page turning, or page by page, taping left or right. I use scroll. And despite what I read, to me it's the best. I don't have to move my eye or my head. It's the text that moves. I also chose the font (Verdana or similar whenever possible, I don't like serif fonts).

Because of the problem with the lights coming from the device, I use the sepia mode (white on black is also not good). That's is also one of the reasons I don't like the bigger iPad. The iPad mini is the ideal size, as the kindle, I suppose. I don't like to have or carry many things, so now I only use an iPhone plus.

</comment><comment><USER17> I stopped buying paper books a few years ago.

To this day, I much prefer the look, feel and smell of printed paper, but storing books became a major headache for me, as I had so many, tended to live in small dwellibng, and was moving quite frequently. Ebooks solve this problem completely. Moreover I mostly read books to do something with their content, to transform it, to think about it. Searching paper books, even when they have a good index (a rare occurence), is incomparably slower than 'grepping' through my electronic texts. The ability easily to cut-and-paste is also helpful. As others have pointed out, Ebooks, at least on the devices I use to consume them, have one disadvantage: the infinite amount of discraction that internet connectivity brings. But there are work-arounds.

For these reasons, I won't be going back to paper.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes. I don't like the idea of someone being able to take[1] a book from me that I've bought, I don't like the idea of someone being able to track[2] what I'm reading, I don't like the idea of only being able to read it on one device or one subsection of devices through their service.

I have rather dark pictures of a world where inconvenient knowledge is deleted, and the agencies involved know who's had a copy and if they've read it.

Some of these are fixable by stripping the DRM out of the things. But I don't see why I'd give my money to support people doing things I don't like that much for the privilege of trying to undo what they've done.

If I bought an ebook and the file was delivered in a reasonable plain-text format, and was _mine_ in the same sense that a book was... If I was ensured that the device wasn't a massive backdoor... yeah, I'd probably buy myself an ereader and consume most of my books that way. But, as things are at the moment? I wouldn't use the things even if I was paid to.

I view it as little different to inviting someone with a camera and an incinerator to sit beside me as a I read.

\----

1\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)

2\. [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/2010-e-book-buyers- gui...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/2010-e-book-buyers-guide-e-book- privacy)

</comment><comment><USER19> I love my Kindle, and would like to switch completely, but there are two problems:

(1) My physical bookshelves function as a kind of spatial/visual memory for me, with different ideas associated to different locations on the shelves. Switching to Kindle only seems like it would destroy much of that memory.

(2) When having friends around, the shelves are a great way of starting conversation, and discovering new shared interests. This is possible also with things like Goodreads, but the connections made lose some intimacy.

Does anyone have any ways of addressing these problems?

<comment><USER20> Yes. Find a service that exports your kindle library and prints them on a large bookshelf sized poster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nope. Well, yes, but only as gifts for other people. I got a Kindle a few years ago as a way to have a lot of reading material in a small space (and weight) for long trips. It has served that purpose admirably. Even at home, being able to change the type size as my eyes tire in the evening is pretty nice. I can read any time and any place on my phone, including times and places where I probably wouldn't have bought a book (e.g. at lunch alone), and my reading progress is even synced with the Kindle back home. The reading experience itself doesn't seem much better or worse, but the various convenience factors add up.

</comment><comment><USER22> I strongly prefer ebooks. Occasionally I'll buy a physical book, for example if it is cheaper (used) than the ebook or I think my spouse might be interested in the book, too.

And children's books, I buy all of them in print.

</comment><comment><USER23> I prefer a physical book over an ebook every time. I use my kindle only when I have to (travel).

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to only buy physical books, until I moved to London, where space is scarce and I couldn't afford to keep hundreds of books around.

Although I still buy some physical books, I have switched to ebooks for all of my "disposable" reading. If I expect to read a book only once and won't use it for reference later, I'll get an ebook.

After a few months with a Kindle, I did notice an interesting change in my own behaviour. Because I always have the kindle with me, I can read any book anywhere and any time, without having to plan ahead. As a result, I have started reading books at times where I would otherwise have browsed HN or blogs.

Perhaps books are a bit like cameras that way: the best one is the one you have with you.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't always read book but when I do, I always prefer e-book. Because It's low cost, eco-friendly, easy to take notes and search them, easy to carry etc.

</comment><comment> chestnut-tree Yes, I still buy book physical books. Consider that physical books come in so many shapes and sizes, while e-readers mostly come in just one size. For this reason, I feel an e-reader is mostly only suitable for paperback-sized books. They can't accomodate the huge variety of book sizes or the variety of layouts (e.g. something as simple as a double-page spread).

Perhaps things might change if we get larger, colour e-readers. I don't find reading books on a tablet comfortable for long periods.

</comment><comment><USER26> I prefer a physical book and haven't used my kindle in some years now. I used the kindle when at the gym on an elliptical and even then, it wasn't nearly convenient enough yet. That said, as I find myself reading more lately and lugging some stuff with me to work, the kindle might be a good way to get rid of some of the burden.

</comment><comment><USER27> As little as I can get away with. I read too much (probably around 100 books/year) to be able to accumulate the physical volume and electronic formats are just much more convenient.

Usually, it's long tail (specialist), older books. Sometimes, surprising ones: Lee Kuan Yew's arguably most famous book, "From Third World to First" is only available in paperback or hardback (some of his later writings are available for Kindle).

</comment><comment><USER28> I [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper- scre...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/)

As much as I'd love all media to become digital, physical books map what you are reading to physical stimuli which seems to help anchor the communication into your brain.

</comment><comment><USER29> Another reason is in the Indian sub continent many books (assuming you don't purchase illegally) the "Indian Sub-continent" edition physical copy is cheaper since Kindle books are almost always on the global price (though often cheaper than global print editions). This is especially true for many technical books.

</comment><comment><USER30> I just bought "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.

Apart from the debate raging on about grabbing/absorbing more from a physical book than an ebook, I feel that I'm simply more attached to the physical aspect of the reading experience.

I've read ebooks when I've been unable to find the hard copies, but I almost always revert to the hard copies.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes, but only non-technical ones or those that are meant for recreational reading. Somehow still enjoy a physical book more than one on kindle. For technical books, that I know will need updates soon enough, it's strictly e-books. Though the exception would be some timeless ones like those on algorithms or other similar concepts.

</comment><comment><USER32> Generally. It's so easy to get overloading on the phones and laptops these days that it makes it much easier for me to stay focused on the task at hand when the book is physical. Other reasons I enjoy having physical books is I love sharing them with friends, they make my bookcases look nice, they're much more prescient than e-books, carrying them in a backpack with a computer and notebooks can be a small but nice addition to the moderate exercise that is walking, they don't die on me, paper doesn't bother me like backlit screens especially at night, and finally I don't particularly mind if I spill or damage one (I can bring them poolside, or to the beach, etc). Obviously to each his own but I can only read one book at a time and I usually have a backpack or big coat pocket so carrying them doesn't bother me.

<comment><USER33> >carrying them in a backpack with a computer and notebooks can be a small but nice addition to the moderate exercise that is walking

to me, heavy books aren't 'nice additions' but 'more strain to my back and neck'

I actively did NOT enjoy slugging around my calculus books or actuarial mathematics books with me ...

My kindle has made me read more. It also has reached it's 'break even' point in terms of value bought (10+ books read).

<comment><USER22> Iirc 10 books is also the break even point with respect to impact on the environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yeah, and I put mostly physical books on my amazon wish list which makes it easy for people to gift me things... After moving recently though I'm looking to digitize some, physical books are annoying to move. I don't have a preference for physical books over digital books, apart from I can't stand "ebooks" that aren't plain PDFs or web pages. I don't like e-ink. I have a collection of PDFs that I read on my tablet, phone, or usually my desktop setup.

I also must say I got some mirror glasses last year ([http://ecx.images- amazon.com/images/I/61HShDnJT6L._SL1200_.j...](http://ecx.images- amazon.com/images/I/61HShDnJT6L._SL1200_.jpg)) and while ridiculous, they're damn convenient sometimes.

<comment><USER35> They certainly look ridiculous - how easy on your eyes are they to use for long periods of time?

<comment><USER34> I wear them over my normal glasses and I'm fine for hours, my only problem is if my head's inclined too much they'll occasionally slide down and pinch my nose a bit. Maybe some padding would solve that. But I don't know how representative I am since I play a lot of video games for hours, too... I'm sure some people will notice strain.

<comment><USER35> Thanks for the feedback. I was reading through all the reviews of these and poor fit and alignment seems to be the major problem with these type of glasses. They seemed to be all very cheaply made - maybe someone should create a start-up selling customised versions just like corrective optical glasses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The way I think about it as a college student is that if it's a book I seriously enjoy and wouldn't mind having for the foreseeable future, then I would rather have a physical copy that I can stick in a shelf, pull out as needed, and just browse whenever I would like.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't think I understand more when I read a physical book, but unfortunately not all books are available on the Kindle. Plus I can't lent anyone my non- physical books.

That said if I could I would go 100% digital because the books are both cheaper and you can carry an entire library with you.

</comment><comment><USER38> I do. Also:[http://m.mic.com/articles/99408/science-has-great-news- for-p...](http://m.mic.com/articles/99408/science-has-great-news-for-people- who-read-actual-books)

</comment><comment><USER39> I have been reading all ebooks for a couple of years but recently switched back to physical books.

The main reasons for my switch is: easier to see what I have read or not, the tactile feeling, the thrill of getting the book (when ordering online :), my old eyes _sigh_ has it easier with books.

</comment><comment><USER40> For technical and business books, absolutely not. They often go out of date (especially in the case of technical books) by the time they get to print. I stick with digital versions in these categories, consistently.

If it is a "timeless" book, like one of the Great Books, then maybe.

</comment><comment><USER13> Despite what I have said, I have actually been acquiring some "old" books (pre-Internet era, i.e., 1990 or older), even paying more on delivery fee than the book itself. lest to avoid history being rewritten, as someone, scarily, but truly, mentioned in one of the comments.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes, I don't care for DRM content.

</comment><comment><USER42> I used to never buy physical because I could always find them online for free but I am slowing starting to buy books again because reading on a computer a book like "Programming Pearl's" just does not work out for me

</comment><comment><USER43> Side note: The Art of Electronics and Computer systems : a programmer's perspective either had no eBook edition or were eye wateringly expensive. I think my limit for eBook prices would be 50% of the physical copy, at most.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes. I find it a pretty practical format; for what I read it's cheap, light, and reliable. Not to mention that there's a lot of quality content available only in paper books.

</comment><comment><USER45> Yes.

I recently bought "A Game Of Thrones" (book one in the series) by George R. R Martin.

It's just something different.

</comment><comment><USER46> I buy physical childrens books. I buy big coffee table non fiction physical books.

Have you tested your learning from physical vs ebooks?

</comment><comment><USER47> For Thought provoking books/philosophy books etc I prefer physical books.

For Technical books I prefer digital books since I would love to try out examples almost immediately as they appear in the book.

</comment><comment><USER48> Theres 2 things that are always on my desk. A wooden buddha and Code Complete 2 (the bible).

</comment><comment><USER49> Yes, I still prefer paper book than e-books, though I own a kindle, but still I like to read a real book, old scool way. I just bought the latest 'Becoming Steve Jobs' biography & I love it!

</comment><comment><USER50> Yes, I prefer physical books.

</comment><comment><USER51> For my own pleasure: Paper books.

For faculty and reference: Easily searchable digital media.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yes, absolutely. Roughly two every month. =)

</comment><comment><USER43> eBooks / Safari Books Online all the way, except in cases of particularly silly DRM or absurd prices (looking at you, Pearson)

AbeBooks is now my go to for physical books.

</comment><comment><USER53> yes just bought one today (Andrew Gelman's Bayesian Data Analysis). I still buy paper copies of math and classic programming books. I prefer ebooks for fiction

</comment><comment><USER54> Oh yes.

The fonts, layout, smell, texture, random access, color, heft, everything!

</comment><comment><USER55> I tend to buy a bunch of used books

</comment><comment><USER56> If it's cheaper than ebook.

<comment><USER57> Same. And I'm still surprised to see how often this is the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> yes

</comment><comment><USER59> Paper books for academic / scienctific ones, ebooks for fiction.

<comment><USER60> I do the exact opposite actually!

I prefer to read a good story in my bed, covered with blankets, and enjoy the paper under my fingers. However, when I read something scientific, or work related, I prefer eBooks; I'll be at my computer anyway, and this allows me to research the subject I'm reading about in more depth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I buy books only in the case I can't get an e-book version (first choice: kindle. second choice: piracy. third choice: other book markets).

I'd probably cut them all apart and digitize them (there's a 100 books for $100 scanning deal).

<comment><USER62> Apart from the "second choice: piracy" which is very interesting, in a good way I think, can you share how exactly you scan and digitize your books?

<comment><USER61> [http://1dollarscan.com/](http://1dollarscan.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Notes from the Intelpocalypse - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/742702/e23889188fce9f7f/ <comment><USER2> _For the owners of vast numbers of systems that cannot be updated, the consequences will be worse: they will remain vulnerable to a set of vulnerabilities with known exploits._

Fortunately, chances are that those systems are stable, isolated environments which won't be running any new and untrusted code either. That means they will just remain vulnerable in the same way that everyone knows their houses can always be broken into by a determined-enough attacker; to try to achieve 100% security, to close all the side-channels, may be impossible and have plenty of other negative effects.

Sometimes, just knowing is enough because it leads to more informed risk analysis and decisions. That saying about "known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns" comes to mind.

<comment><USER3> But if a system had known exploits that let you execute arbitrary code in user space, now there's a path to do way worse damage.

It's like it's a multiplicative effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if it would be possible to peg the kernel to one processor core (or a subset of the cores) and userspace to the remainder of the cores. As I understand it, all of the memory caches that are being exploited to leak information are per-core, so that would give a blanket guard against kernel->userspace leaks via cache timing.

<comment><USER5> This is the first time I've seen this suggestion; it is something that could be done relatively easily for systems that otherwise have no updates/mitigations.

If performance is better some variant of this (auto-scaling dedicated cores) may even become the default solution rather than all the other workarounds! Bare metal hypervisors should get their own core(s) too.

Is anyone already doing this? (Qubes, etc.)

<comment><USER6> I remember seeing this suggestion earlier. If I'm not mistaken a commentor stated that a) this would come with a huge performance penalty b) there would be synchronization problems in multithreaded scenarios.

Don't take my word for it though, I might have understood it wrong. I imagine concurrent/parallel execution involving system calls could maybe suffer from synchronization issues if processes/threads run on different physical cores with separate caches?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the best succinct explanation of the vulnerabilities I have seen to date.

<comment><USER8> It is. I encourage everyone to buy a subscription to LWN (it's cheap) to support this kind of high-quality technical reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great writeup.

This article is labelled as subscriber-only content, yet I am not a subscriber and can see it fine by following this link. Is it as simple as having the right URL to get to LWN subscriber-only content, or is there some other reason it can be accessed by non-subscribers?

<comment><USER10> As subscriber you can get a link to share an article, and the posted link is one of those. Also, subscriber-only content is made public after 7 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This post seems to indicate that there is no kernel-level workaround for variant 1, that contradicts AMD's statement: [https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative- execution](https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution)

LWN seems right on this one, that makes me question AMD's honesty and knowledge of the issue.

<comment><USER12> I'm not 100% sure here, but I believe this is the specific kernel level fix that also addresses variant 1 [https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2](https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2)

<comment><USER11> No KPTI does not address variant 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So is this article implying that only code executed on branch predictions is readable? What about normally executed code? What are the exact differences? How is normally executed code protected and how is branch predicted code not protected? Any experts care to chime in?

<comment><USER14> Not sure what you mean by normally executed code. Speculative execution happens in normal everyday conditional code such as if/switch statements, and most loops unless the compiler unrolls them.

<comment><USER13> By normal I mean code that wasn't predicted. Predicted code execution is "abnormal" because it might not contribute to the final result.

My question is why is predicted code exploitable and why is unpredicted code not exploitable? Both are executed, both have values written to registers, what's going on?

Apologies for the noobness of this question.

<comment><USER15> To use a really stupid analogy, imagine a cook in an Mafia-involved restaurant, and you're a cop (you're the adversary). There's a whiteboard in the boss' office with a number you want to know.

So you come there every day and say, "Hey, if the lights at (some address) are on, I want a cheese pizza, otherwise I want pasta.". In the beginning he sends his boy to check the light at that address, and the boy takes 20 minutes to go and check, and all that time he has to wait before he can make you the pizza. After a while the boy always says "The lights are on", so after a while the cook would still send the boy, but he would anticipate the answer "the lights are on" and he would start a making pizza. Once in a while (maybe once every 6 months) the boy would return saying the lights are off, so after 20 minutes of making the pizza, he would throw away the pizza and make you pasta.

After doing this a lot, you say, "Hey, if the lights at (some address) are on, I want a pizza with the topping from the box numbered according to the number written on your boss' whiteboard. Otherwise, I want pasta.". You know the lights will be off, but he starts making pizza with some topping you can't tell, but you notice he got a box from the fridge to put it next to his pizza- making table. The boy returns, he throws away the pizza and makes you pasta. Then you ask him, "Hey, I have another order, can I get a pizza with a topping from box 1?". If he goes to the fridge to get that box, then you know the box he picked up earlier (while he was guessing that the boy would say the lights are on) was not box 1, so you ask for another pizza with topping from box 2, etc. But if he doesn't go the fridge, you know he picked up that box previously (because he predicted the boy will tell him the lights will be on), and that's how you figure out what number is written on the boss' whiteboard: when the cook doesn't go to the fridge, it's because the box with that number is already on his table.

The whiteboard is the secret memory area, taking the box from the fridge is reading from some RAM address to cache (if it's already in cache, no need to read from RAM), and I hope the speculative execution is clear.

This analogy describes (very roughly) one of the exploits in Spectre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IIRC, the GCE security white paper mentioned alarms triggered by ROWHAMMER, another hardware design defect. Is it possible to reliably detect any of this year's new attacks?

</comment><comment><USER16> See the comments. FSMark with mitigation showed a 50% performance loss. So that immediately makes me wonder about any file system intensive operation, like databases, getting hit far worse than the 5-30% hit that's been floated thus far.</comment>


MightyDash – Collect, track and prioritize user feedback across channels - <AUTHOR> https://mightydash.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello all! We're opening up MightyDash to beta testing to help founders, PMs and UXR collect user feedback from customer support, your sales CRM, in-app surveys, FAQ center and social media. We automatically aggregate related feedback into a single item for you to track and help you prioritize features with the rest of your team. Let me know if you have any feedback, requests or questions!</comment>


New services bypass Apple DRM to allow pirated installs without jailbreaking - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/low-down-dirty-iphone-app-pirates/?fromcat=all <comment><USER2> I think it should be made very clear, in the context of Hacker News, that one of the primary reasons that these sites have been operating as long as they have is because of support from Stripe, who handled their payment processing.

The developer of this program keeps opening PayPal accounts, and PayPal keeps shutting them down. In just December, this developer got two PayPal accounts shut down; the latest one was only used for four days before it was whacked.

Dec 24: "PayPal is back online for <http://zeusmos.com> and <http://uhelios.com> – Happy Holidays everybody!" -- <https://twitter.com/uhelios/status/283260362919395328>

Dec 28: "I'm absolutely done with PayPal. This is ridiculous." -- <https://twitter.com/uhelios/status/284654128339243009>

However, despite careful and detailed explanations to Stripe--and despite them saying they would look into the matter--this website has been operating and taking payments using their payment processing system for months.

Also, while the developer of Zeusmos claims in the "update" to the article that his application was never supposed to encourage piracy, it came by default with its search results coming from a website called AppTrackr, a large repository of cracked applications.

In the last few months, the developer decided he wanted to "stray away from AppTrackr", but the result was not to move further from piracy: it was to become less reliant on that one piracy site and instead use another one called AppCake.

Meanwhile, the developer has often compared his service to Installous, saying on his Twitter account that "its somewhat like Installous, but better"[1] and that it "has many features that Installous does not excel at very well"[2].

[1]: <https://twitter.com/uhelios/status/274859392812318720>

[2]: <https://twitter.com/uhelios/status/239863143793324032>

<comment><USER3> With your rather unique experience of running the Cydia Store on jailbroken iOS devices can you provide more information on the process loopholes these approaches (Zeusmos and Kuaiyong) are exploiting?

<comment><USER2> In order to deploy code (without jailbreaking), you need to have it signed by a certificate that is valid for the device you are using. With a normal developer account, you can provision certificates for up to 100 devices. Signing an application is fairly simple (I implement most of the intricate pieces in an open-source program called ldid, but do not do the official signature parts).

Putting this together: you simply get paid developer accounts from Apple (you will need to keep getting more of these, as you will run up against the 100 device limit), ignore the part of the contract you sign that states that you are not allowed to redistribute the certificates they give you, and instead automate a process to log in to Apple's portal, add a UDID to your account, and download an updated provisioning certificate.

Connect this up with a payment processor that is willing to look the other way and an app that is capable of doing the signature process for apps locally for the user, and you are done. The device is already capable of installing certificates and applications that are signed by them from websites (see Test Flight for a commonly-used legitimate example), so the final steps are easy.

(With an Enterprise account, you don't have to worry about the number of devices; however, the contract terms are much stricter, the system has more mechanisms for Apple to turn you off, and Apple will probably care more if you attempt to abuse it. In essence, an app signed by an Enterprise certificate can be installed on any device, anywhere, at any time until the certificate's three-year expiration date hits.)

<comment><USER4> Given that developer accounts cost money, and paying requires giving personally identifiable information, what keeps Apple from seeing that you are buying multiple accounts?

<comment><USER2> So, first off: I really do not believe that this service (Zeusmos) was _that_ popular; I mean, when you hear about the number of people who were using Installous (omg too many ;P), the number of people using Zeusmos would be this tiny _tiny_ speck in comparison.

Once you are only talking about hundreds or even in the low thousands of devices (as opposed to tens of millions), you can satisfy the demand by getting a bunch of friends from your high-school class (the developer of Zeusmos was 15) to register for individual developer accounts and then contribute their Apple ID and passwords to a pool.

Based on what it says in the article ( _edit_ : which a friend of mine is telling me might be wrong, so maybe these people are doing something more complex), the other product (Kuaiyong) was using a single Apple Enterprise certificate: you only need one of these to satisfy an infinite number of devices, and they probably were signing the stuff on their server rather than on the client (so not redistributing the certificate).

That said, the rules on how you can use an enterprise distribution certificate are quite strict: you can sign applications used only by 1) employees of your company; 2) customers of your company who are physically present at your company's place of business; or 3) customers of your company who are being physically supervised by an employee of your company while at another location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It makes me sad that these get used for piracy. They could be extremely useful by allowing widespread installation of apps that Apple won't accept in their store, but instead we get another lame piracy service that people will point to as evidence that Apple's walled garden approach is a good thing.

<comment><USER6> But piracy is a _feature_. It's good thing. Paying for stuff sucks. From a user's point of view, if Apple's walled garden approach prevents piracy, then that's just another reason their walled garden approach is bad.

Edit: I'm not even playing devil's advocate here, this is just honestly what I think, and I think what most people honestly think. Stuff is better when you don't have to pay for it.

<comment><USER7> Stuff sucks when you don't have to pay for it. That's why Android apps have never really held a candle to their iOS counterparts; piracy has been easier on Android. As an Android user, I'm just hoping this causes developers to not automatically develop for iOS first and then Android as an afterthought, if at all.

<comment><USER8> >That's why Android apps have never really held a candle to their iOS counterparts; piracy has been easier on Android.

Bullshit. Both on Android apps "not holding a candle to iOS counterparts" and your assertion that this has anything to do with piracy.

<comment><USER7> Even if piracy isn't easier, there is the perception that it is, and that's all you need to keep people off the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like they haven't really broken apple's DRM - Zeusmos relies on getting a developer profile for your phone's UDID and re-signing the apps under that dev profile, which means the apps will expire in a year or so. And Kuaiyong relies on an enterprise profile by the looks of it, and i believe apple can remotely nuke enterprise profiles.

<comment><USER10> > Sounds like they haven't really broken apple's DRM

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that they are abusing the pay-for Apple developer services in order to get the software pushed to non-jailbroken devices. As such, they are still playing within the DRM system.

But in the case of Zeusmos, yes, Apple's DRM (FairPlay) is broken in that "re- signing" involves signing a copy of the (App Store published) commercial app that had its original DRM removed.

See here: <https://github.com/stefanesser/dumpdecrypted>

These techniques were how tools like Crackulous worked, which allowed for the stealing of iOS App Store apps in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Background: 1\. Loads of people have iDevices in China. 2\. It's hard to get a credit card in China.

<comment><USER12> > It's hard to get a credit card in China.

Are you sure? A lot of "credit cards" in China are actually debit cards, where you must deposit money in your account up-front before you can spend. I don't see any reason why banks would make it hard for people to get these, since there's virtually no risk of bad debt.

<comment><USER11> It's probably largely just historical inertia.

However, there are also potentially strong reasons to avoid it.

1\. China dissuades capital exodus. (They actually have a whole government bureau for this, the Foreign Exchange Management Bureau or 'waihuiguanliju') 2\. My recent travels about Southeast Asia suggest that the government-run centralized interbank settlement network 'China Union Pay', is being supported by the government as a regional alternative to the de-facto global defaults Cirrus/Maestro (Mastercard) and Visa (Bank of America).

Anyway, the why doesn't matter. It's really the situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, but am I the only one who dislikes the picture they used for the post. The flag of the pirate party has nothing to do with iPhone software piracy websites ...

<comment><USER14> Random stock image for an article that calls piracy stealing. They do know how to lower the expections for their article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> DRM is such an utter and absolute waste of effort and money. Think of the millions of man-hours that have so far been misallocated on trying to "secure" digital content. It's just sad.

<comment><USER16> It's pretty hard to argue that DRM doesn't reduce piracy. The overwhelming evidence from the last several decades (everything from the piracy rate on Commodore Amigas vs DRM'd consoles to modern ebook DRM) is that DRM has a significant impact on reducing the amount of piracy that occurs.

Most of the arguments against DRM aren't about it's ineffectiveness in reducing piracy, but rather its implication for privacy and ownership rights.

<comment><USER5> The trouble is that piracy reduction is the wrong end of the stick. What content creators benefit from is _increased purchases_ , which does not necessarily follow from reduced piracy. I would agree that it's fairly clear that DRM reduces piracy, but it's not at all clear that this then results in increased sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As predicted, the Hackulo.us shutdown simply spurred the adoption of more effective software piracy tools. Between Aptoide on Android, which somehow is available via the official app store and also doesn't require rooting/jailbreaking [1], and these new iPhone piracy services, I wonder if we'll start to see changes in the way we approach software monetization. Requiring in-app purchases, for example, is quite effective.

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bazaar.ins...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bazaar.installer)

<comment><USER18> Zeusmos has been around before the shutdown, but articles like this are just giving them publicity and pushing them into the light. Zeusmos runs on the apptrackr API, which has also been shutdown, so the shutdown also hurts them.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the clarity, I'll update my post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For the most part, it seems to be people going to a lot of trouble to save a dollar or 2 on app purchases, the type of people that were unlikely to buy anyway.

People still aren't able to make arbitrary in app purchases for free? If that is the case piracy might end up making the developer more in the long run.

<comment><USER20> >the type of people that were unlikely to buy anyway.

As someone whose Android app has wound up on some pirate sites, it's not so much the lost revenue I'm worried about. It's the possibility that the version of my app on some Chinese pirate site has been repacked with malware.

<comment><USER21> Is it time to go back to the early-'90s-shareware model of annoy screens? Release two versions of your app to the app store, one free with a ten second long "you're a bad person" loading screen, and one that costs a bit.

<comment><USER22> As a consumer, I prefer this style of monetization to in-app purchasing. At least I know what I'm getting and what the reviews mean. Oddly, though, the market doesn't seem to agree with me. Demo/shareware apps just don't seem to do well.

Obviously the average consumer and I just don't see eye to eye about something. I have no idea what, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe its time Apple and Google start providing receipts that devs can validate themselves. Apple already provides this on OSX and it makes it hard to mass pirate all apps.

</comment><comment><USER24> The Zeusmos site is "currently undergoing some maintenance".

Looks like someone is getting shut down.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, it's certainly interesting to see how the consensus on Piracy changes on HackerNews when it's iOS apps and not music/media that's being downloaded. The article even goes so far as to call it stealing and not one person has piped up to point out that they're merely copying bytes, not removing utility from anyone else.

The PirateBay receives a lot of support when it's mentioned here. I imagine if I opened a "PirateBayForApps" on which I carried both legitimately free apps and pirated apps, I might not receive the same support.

</comment><comment><USER26> On one hand this could be a great alternative distribution channel, on the other hand developers get nothing and another risk is Apple can shut their accounts down at any time.</comment>


Learning Depth-Three Neural Networks in Polynomial Time - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.06010 <comment><USER2> I will try to provide an intuition for the uninitiated to get started with understanding the results in this paper.

In Supervised Machine Learning, our only goal is to predict the underlying "unknown" distribution given a set of data instances from the same. Let us say, I gave you set of images of cats and dogs to be classified. As a machine learning engineer, you would probably build me a Binary Classifier on top of an SVM and all done. But, how would you justify it to me that how well your algorithm generalizes? Or, in other words, how would you provide me a guarantee that your model will work "well" on images that you haven't seen yet. What would a model working "well" mean? If you recall SVM basics, one tries to build a max-margin hyperplane in some high-dimensional space. We will call the set of all such hyperplanes as our "concept class" and this is what you are trying to learn to be technical (hold that thought). When you finally give me your SVM model with some parameters, we will call it the target concept. Now, coming back to the point of "well"-ness of SVM, what guarantees can you provide me when I provide you images outside your training set but from the same underlying distribution (to be fair to you). We call the error you make during your training as the "empirical risk" and the error you make outside your training set on unseen data as the "risk". Our aim is to minimize "risk", or in words to "generalize" well.

In Learning Theory, we are concerned with defining the "well"-ness of a learning algorithm. More generally, we are interested in answering the question "what is learnable and how well?". The fundamental answer to that question is a theory known as the PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) Theory [1].

Paraphrasing in plain English (I'd recommend you to take a look at the formal definition affirmatively right after this), it states that learning is tractable if and only if we are able to provide a polynomial time algorithm such that for any possible set of samples from an unknown underlying distribution, we can provide an upper bound for the generalized error/risk with a confidence measure. This also has to happen so that we are able to provide a polynomial lower bound for the number of samples we use to run the algorithm.

Skipping a few other details, PAC theory is powerful because it provides a statistical framework to quantify the "wellness" in a probabilistic setting. On top of this, it makes absolutely no assumption about the underlying distribution and hence is "distribution-free". This means that whatever learning algorithm you provide, it should work on any distribution possible (with added technicality of the number of training samples needed being polynomial in terms of the error and confidence measure).

To get a more intuitive understanding, consider the prediction to the series of numbers "1,2,4,8,16,_". Your first guess most likely will be "32" because it seems like a GP with ratio 2. But I say that the next number is actually "12345". Am I wrong? No. Were you wrong? No. The take away is that true learning is intractable when the underlying distribution is truly "unknown" (like in this case). Instead, I will quantify the correctness and tell you that I am 99% confident that the the generalization error for unseen points of my predictions will be at most 10%. Note that those numbers are arbitrary to get a point across.

Now that we have PAC-theory in place, many times it is hard to use this tool because it is very strict, instead we rely on distribution-dependent bounds which might be more easily computable in some scenarios like the Rademacher complexity, Growth Function or VC Dimension.

Coming back to the paper, Neural Networks have been a hard nut to crack in terms of such theoretical bounds because sometimes these bounds tend to be trivial and useless (e,g, Probability <= 10). First the paper introduces lots of probabilistic tools on the basis of which it claims to have found an "efficient" (because polynomial time) PAC algorithm for learning intersections of polynomially many halfspaces.

[1] A Theory of the Learnable ([http://web.mit.edu/6.435/www/Valiant84.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/6.435/www/Valiant84.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER3> I applied a few things in that field but my knowledge may be a bit rusty.

Still, learning 3 layer NN in polynomial time is a big step forward because this entails we don't get stuck at an error (or at least we now know that we got stuck) which entails a probably non-random weight initialization. This is a big advantage for using and testing simple NN.

It might also finally lend a concrete interpretation to any NN, removing its black-box nature and increasing their adoption.

That said, I haven't read the article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Question about "We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning neural networks with one hidden layer of sigmoids feeding into any smooth, monotone activation function (e.g., sigmoid or ReLU)":

ReLU is piecewise linear, I always thought that was non-smooth. Did I get that wrong?

<comment><USER5> I think the discontinuity in the first derivative is smoothed or interpolated somehow, and that this also happens in existing nn approaches where a gradient must be computed...

I could be wrong though

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In conjunction with the universal approximation theorem, does this mean that this algorithm can learn all p-concepts in polynomial time?

<comment><USER7> Polynomial in the number of hidden units you need to express the network, which may very well be exponential in the input dimension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This paper seems somewhat suspect.

For one, "depth-three" implies three layers, and in the standard terminology of the field what they really mean is "depth one".

And another major red flag:

 _We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning neural networks with one hidden layer of sigmoids feeding into any smooth, monotone activation function (e.g., sigmoid or ReLU)_

How is ReLU smooth?

<comment><USER7> They cite [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09887](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09887) for their definition of network depth, which defines it in such a way that e.g. a ReLU network of depth 2 is of the form linear2(ReLu(linear1(input))). That means, depth is the number of linear layers.

The "depth-three" model in this paper is a bit strange in that their second layer has only one output, so the third linear layer doesn't have any effect. I would have called this "depth two"; but it _is_ internally consistent with their definition of depth.

> How is ReLU smooth?

It is 1-Lipschitz, which is smooth enough for them.

<comment><USER9> > The "depth-three" model in this paper is a bit strange in that their second > layer has only one output, so the third linear layer doesn't have any > effect. I would have called this "depth two"; but it is internally > consistent with their definition of depth.

No, it does have an effect: It takes a linear combination of the outputs of the previous layer, and then applies a non-linearity $\sigma'$. If $\sigma'$ is the logistic function, then the output of the last layer is a probability.

<comment><USER7> No, the last layer is just a linear layer, there's no non-linearity. That's what's strange about their definition. The depth-three network only applies a non-linearity twice, which would conventionally be labeled as depth two.

<comment><USER9> You're wrong. See section 5.1. I've drawn a graph of it that shows it to be a classical NN with a single output node.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it is a classical NN with a single output node. I'm not disputing that, I just think their calculation of depth is strange. The network only applies the sigmoid function twice, and would ordinarily be regarded as having a depth of two. The third linear layer is fixed to multiplying by 1, which is what I meant by "has no effect". (Did you miss that I was talking about the _third_ layer?)

<comment><USER9> Here's a diagram [1] of a one-hidden-layer NN. It has 2 activation functions. Their NN is of the same type.

[1] - [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qingkaikong/blog/master/40...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qingkaikong/blog/master/40_ANN_part3_step_by_step_MLP/figures/figure4_hidden_perceptron.jpg)

<comment><USER7> The question is, how deep is that network?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's a loaded sentence with 2 terms i have not Idea what they are. Depth 3 and polynomial time

<comment><USER11> The abstract says depth-3 means a NN with 1 hidden layer. So I guess the 3 refers to one input layer, one hidden layer, and one output layer.

Polynomial time roughly means "fast enough that it could be practical at large scale if you have enough computing power". It's in contrast to exponential time which means "no amount of money can ever buy enough computers to do it at scale".

My question is what's the existing learning time for such a network? Maybe it's already just as good but these guys have a proof that it works in general instead of just hoping and finding that it usually seems to be fast enough?

<comment><USER12> My question is more of how many shallow neural networks are still in use. The deep in deep learning is typically much greater than three.

<comment><USER13> You're absolutely right. But this is still a _huge_ step forward. There has been work on the VC dimension of neural networks for a long time (and it's been shown to be finite), which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for _efficient_ PAC learnability.

If it can be done for 3 layers, then maybe it can be done for more. And I happen to really like it when my problems have polynomial time guarantees.

[VC dimension is a quantitative measure related to the complexity that a model's parameters allow it to express. I think of it as analogous to entropy for physical systems.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That is a classical problem with hacker rank. Nobody get it but its still trending high :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Holy cow. I don't get it.

<comment><USER16> See m3kw9's comment. Responses include explanations for some of the terminology.

<comment><USER15> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


School credit, job training and a paycheck? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/wagovernor/high-schoolers-gain-aerospace-apprenticeship-training-and-its-paid-8a72ab796d9c <comment><USER2> I'd love to see more of this. One hurdle is to find industries that would benefit from such young trainees.

In general for program like these, How do the corporate partners get value out of this? Is it just a tax right off or are there other incentives?

My state provides small subsedies to companies that hire interns from local colleges and universities. This has been a great program for my company _and_ the student. But it doesn't start until college level. And I suspect it is ripe for abuse.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the few apprenticeship programs that's actually live in the US:

> High school sophomore Sam Yost arrives at Stadium High School in Tacoma > early every morning for his zero-hour jazz band class at 6:30 a.m. But when > most students are wrapping up their school day at 2:05 p.m., he still has > another four hours to go.

A total of 2,000 hours of paid apprenticeship, obtained concurrently with high school.</comment>


Using an optimizing decompiler to reverse engineer an obfuscated program - <AUTHOR> http://zneak.github.io/fcd/2016/02/21/csaw-wyvern.html <comment><USER2> Once the technology is sufficiently advanced, it would be interesting to repeatedly decompile and recompile (using an optimising compiler) the same code, to see if it reaches a fixed point or perhaps oscillates around one.

<comment><USER3> it does, you can do this with mcsema today, with some restrictions. i.e. if there are stack variables, it won't reach a fixed point because loads and stores will blow up the size due to a stupid architectural decision. but if everything is in registers, you'll reach a fixed point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting, but it's not clear that this tricky is more generally useful - certainly, obfuscation that is actually integrated with the "real" logic won't just disappear under optimization!</comment>


Fermilab 'closing in' on the God particle - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16618-fermilab-closing-in-on-the-god-particle.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=tech <comment><USER2> The idea that there is a single fundamental particle blows my mind more than a model of matter being made of an infinite series of smaller and smaller components.

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that Fermilab may not have high enough baseline statistics right now to be "convincing", even if they do find good candidate events.

The LHC should be able to produce _much_ higher statistics and thus have a better chance of finding the Higgs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I must say I don't like the name of this particle.

</comment><comment><USER5> Saw a recent documentary "Independent Lens" that was about the Fermi Lab. Said it had lost funding a while ago. Good to hear it didn't completely shut down.

<comment><USER6> There was a last minute, partial rescue of funding, which had as at least one focus a personal contribution in the millions of dollars (5MM, I seem to recall?).

Compared to the Federal budget, the amounts involved weren't even the husk on a discarded peanut. Penny wise, pound foolish.

<comment><USER7> I remember when the funding for the SSC got pulled. Had actually been to Waxahachie shortly after they started digging and was doing a summer internship at Fermilab.

Everyone was fighting to get it funded and built in their backyard but as soon an actual site was decided, it suddenly became a boondoggle, pork, or what have you by those very same people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> more info - <http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/atomsmashers/>

</comment><comment><USER8> So Fermilab's chances of being first (maybe in next year) in what they claim "is not a race with" CERN's LHC are improved by the LHC's injuries...

The fact that we must... keep... waiting... isn't news.

Now let's get back to the office pool: Will the Higg boson "God particle" show...

? She's female ? ? He's black ? ? Just like Michelangelo showed us ?</comment>


Ask HN: How important is domain expertise for programmers? - <AUTHOR> Lately I've been finding myself doing a lot of reading about my company's vertical/domain, healthcare. In fact I'm reading more about healthcare than software development/programming. How important do you think domain expertise is for you career? Am I making good use of my reading time(professionally, I obviously enjoy it)? How do you go about developing domain expertise? <comment><USER2> I'd say it's crucially important, especially if you want to advance over time. Technical knowledge alone can only get you so far. Especially in highly specialized domains like health-care (and I saw this as somebody whose dayjob is in healthcare analytics). Of course you have to strike a balance between leveling up on hard-core technical skills AND domain knowledge. Unfortunately I don't know any strictly deterministic and universally optimal way to decide where that balance is. :-(

 _How do you go about developing domain expertise?_

Other than working "in the business" so to speak, of that domain, I can only thinking of the regular stuff: read books, read articles, watch videos, interview people, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you describe how domain knowledge has given you an edge? Are there other doors it opens?

Do you ever do online courses? I've been working through one on FutureLearn about antibiotic resistant bacteria, and rather enjoying it.

<comment><USER2> _Can you describe how domain knowledge has given you an edge?_

It's somewhat subtle and kind of hard to articulate. And I'm still working on developing that domain knowledge myself. But from looking at what's going on here, it's clear that the people who truly understand this system at the highest levels, are the people who understand how it's actually used by customers, and what this stuff means to them. As opposed to the folks who know 'just enough' to write code, but are operating in a bit of a vacuum.

 _Are there other doors it opens?_

Based on my experience here, I'd say that the people who become tech leads, architects, offering managers, etc., are expected to have strong domain knowledge.

 _Do you ever do online courses?_

I do, but most of the ones I've done have been more on the technology side (a lot of data science, math, and machine learning stuff).

 _I 've been working through one on FutureLearn about antibiotic resistant bacteria, and rather enjoying it._

That sounds pretty interesting. I may just check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have worked on software projects across multiple verticles over many years and I have found pre-existing domain knowledge (or lack thereof) to be utterly immaterial.</comment>


Ask HN: Will IDN domains ever get browser support? - <AUTHOR> Is anyone spearheading acceptance anymore?  FF used to do something really vague but that seems dead. What are the reasons why it is still stagnant? <comment><USER2> It doesn't seem like it. I tried for awhile to move the needle on emoji domains, got nowhere....

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean? As far as I know, all current browsers do support them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Without converting to punycode?

<comment><USER3> There are no IDN domains "without punycode". If you mean the display, both Firefox and Chrome do show them as-is at least in some cases - but as far as I know do have policies show the punycode form in others to avoid phishing attacks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright yeah that was what I was referring to. Are phishing attacks the only real thing holding back full support? I'm wondering if maybe a notification that the domain is an IDN similar to how they notify about bad https for anything they don't already fully show would do the trick. Seeing as how phishing is not currently a solved problem, would it really be that much worse if all IDN's displayed properly?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Scenery – Beautiful and quick mockups - <AUTHOR> https://www.getscenery.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

We just launched Scenery! I'm one of the developers, and happy to answer any questions. BTW, we wrote all of Scenery in Swift, and couldn't be happier about that.

</comment><comment><USER2> Maybe you should show the same thing on every device? Like Your App here blabla. These triangular patterns caught my attention and I though you were selling wallpapers or something for a second haha :D Actually they would make pretty nice wallpapers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The website looks a bit odd. As if it were designed for mobile only, and then not fully converted for a full sized browser.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like it - I think your pricing is about right for the time saved. I'll probably use it myself in a few weeks!

<comment><USER4> ...although I don't run Yosemite, so I can't. Any plans for a purely online service?

<comment><USER5> We'll see... currently we feel that having this as a native app is a major advantage, because it's much faster and integrates much more seamlessly into your workflows.

Yosemite only is a trade-off we made for now. We'll re-evaluate this going forward.

<comment><USER3> With, for example, "placeit.com" you can drag and drop a picture into the browser and have it update. What exactly do you mean with integrating? I just tried it and for me it could just as well have been a web app.

Then again my laptop is a bit slow so maybe I didn't get the "full" experience.

<comment><USER5> With the native app we don't have the image uploading step and you can preview your screenshot in all available templates immediately. Browsing through the images is also much faster. Also, you're not uploading your unreleased private work to 3rd party servers.

<comment><USER3> I see. Although I know for sure that it is possible to add images without having to upload them within a browser, I did 2+ years ago. Might have been some experimental feature though so your point might be still valid. And as a "trust issue" I guess it it valid nontheless.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A loose rant on motivation and evaluation - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3466-a-loose-rant-on-motivation-and-evaluation

<comment><USER2> I would bet someone has tried this, but I've thought that it would be interesting to create a website that simply gives out money, and to see whether the amount of poor design a user would put up with is quantifiable in any useful way.</comment>


The 2% Catastrophe: How One Number Explains the Miserable Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/the-2-catastrophe-how-one-number-explains-the-miserable-economy/256382/

<comment><USER2> Wow,

The article kind of ignores the massive overhang of bad debt that is essentially being kicked down the road.

In normal times, the argument that we need more stimulus is legitimate. These are not normal times.

The Japanese Zombie economy was visible for all the world to see after the collapse of their bubble.</comment>


Firefox 67: Dark Mode CSS, WebRender, and More - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/firefox-67-dark-mode-css-webrender/ <comment><USER2> I use Firefox Developer Edition as my dev browser these days (as part of degooglification) and the latest version - 68.0b2 - is excellent. The UI seems to finally be as fast, if not faster, than Safari.

<comment><USER3> How's the battery impact feel? That's the reason I've always come back to Safari on Mac.

That and syncing with iOS's default-Safari lock in.

<comment><USER4> Another Firefox Dev Edition user here; it's my daily driver. Battery life still takes a hit when compared to Safari. It's not a big deal for me because I'm usually close to a power source. If I'm out and I have to conserve energy then I'll just use Safari until I arrive home.

You can use multiple browsers. I regularly use a mix of Chromium, Firefox Dev Edition, and Safari for varying purposes.

<comment><USER3> I do use Firefox regularly on my computer at work and on my Wintendo where I'm not that concerned about bookmark syncing. Tree Style Tabs is a favorite feature (especially at work where I end up with a lot of tabs open), although I wish it didn't require poking around at Firefox's internal CSS to get rid of the window's normal tab bar.

EDIT: Just installed 67 on my Mac. Initial impression - it's snappy, but the main reason I don't like it is down to the trackpad response. The rest of my OS has bouncy overscroll, and Firefox doesn't.

This probably bugs me more than it reasonably should, but what can I say? I'm a consistency snob.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there enough content in the link to justify the duplication of currently adjacent front-page story [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969489) ?

</comment><comment><USER6> What version of OpenGL (assuming that's what it uses on Windows) does WebRender require?

<comment><USER7> GL 3. There's an investigation going on as to how to support GLES 2, I believe.

The sad reality of browser development is that there is about a 10-year delay between the introduction of a graphics feature and when we can actually use it everywhere...

<comment><USER6> Indeed, some GPU vendors are pretty terrible at supporting new APIs even if their hardware is capable. I have a DX11 Intel GPU but it only supports OpenGL 2.1 on Windows for some reason.

<comment><USER7> Note that we use ANGLE on Windows to work around that specific problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps this isn't the time or place, but has anyone been able to successfully run a Firefox sync server in totality?

The state of affairs last year when I looked into this again didn't inspire a lot of hope. [1]

And to this day, the documentation for doing so seems subpar. [2]

[1] [https://lobste.rs/s/q5zwlf/i_failed_install_firefox_accounts...](https://lobste.rs/s/q5zwlf/i_failed_install_firefox_accounts_server)

[2] [https://mozilla- services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...](https://mozilla- services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run-fxa.html)

<comment><USER9> Apparently somebody put together a Docker image: [https://github.com/michielbdejong/fxa-self- hosting](https://github.com/michielbdejong/fxa-self-hosting)

<comment><USER10> That is over 4 years old. The fact that Mozilla obfuscates this process so much says a lot about how "trusthworthy" they actually are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firefox still considers Linux as a second-class citizen. Chromium has true hardware acceleration enabled by default for Arch. No reason to use something that blocks hardware acceleration like Firefox.

<comment><USER11> Hardware acceleration in Arch is due to Arch patching it on. That's not Chromium's decision.

Thread on the issue [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440)

Edit: Arch [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1830639](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1830639)

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration)

<comment><USER10> This was reverted in the default package:

[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244031&p=3](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244031&p=3)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple History: The "Mac" was almost renamed "Bicycle"  - <AUTHOR> http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Bicycle.txt

<comment><USER2> It's impossible to look at naming objectively, and now hindsight and habit make it doubly impossible - how could "Macintosh" have a different name than "Macintosh"? That's crazy talk!

But here's my hypothesis for why "Bicycle" is a terrible name, which it is: can you name another successful, novel consumer product that was introduced with the same name as a _large existing general category of popular consumer products_?

It seems both pretentious and confusing to call a project "Bicycle". "Did you take your bicycle to work today?" "Um, no, I drove." "But doesn't your bicycle work more efficiently?" "No, this new Rollerskate gets twice the battery life." "Third base!"

Of course, the excuse was that it was "only a code name". To which a good response is that lousy code names are like Lorem Ipsum text: They screw up your design by encouraging you to ignore things which are actually important, like the thematic unity of your work or the need to convey a specific actual meaning with the words you are typesetting.

<comment><USER3> Windows?

"I just upgraded my Windows!" "Oh nice, switched to three-pane? How much did you save in heating costs?"</comment></comment>


Microsoft has created a website that tells you how old you aren't - chris-at http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/30/8522649/microsoft-how-old-do-i-look <comment><AUTHOR> There's already some discussion of this[0] although this submission is clearly different.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9466298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9466298)</comment>


Rust Jobs: There are no open rust jobs anywhere in the world - <AUTHOR> https://rustjobs.rs/ <comment><USER2> This site isn't very well known, even to Rust people. Here's an open Rust job right now: [https://facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LCTYYUA5/](https://facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LCTYYUA5/)

There's even a Rust job open on the front page of HN right now: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16767515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16767515) (specifically this one [https://onesignal.com/careers#senior_backend](https://onesignal.com/careers#senior_backend))

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually the reason why I posted this. There is a lot of interest from programmers in rust right now, but the jobs in it aren't well known at all. Companies that have difficulty hiring now could benefit by switching some of their engineering to rust.</comment></comment>


An Amoeba-Based Computer Found Solutions to 8-City Traveling Salesman Problem - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy7994/an-amoeba-based-computer-calculated-approximate-solutions-to-a-very-hard-math-problem <comment><USER2> Nice for the amoeba, but slime molds have first mover advantage. They solved the travelling salesman problem in 2013, and they managed 20 cities [0].

[edit: my bad: the two reports referred to amoeba and slime molds but are actually discussing the same species (Physarum polycephalum)]

[edit 2: it's been pointed out that the 2013 creature I referenced wasn't even real, just a sim. However, _real_ slime molds can model Canadian transport networks [1] and can use slime trails to navigate around obstacles [2]]

[Edit 3. The Vice article says 'Amoeba' but references a Royal Society [3] story that says 'slime mold'. Wikipedia [4] says that slime molds comprise the mycetozoan group of the amoebozoa. So slime molds are in fact amoeba, but not all amoeba are slime molds.]

[0] [https://phys.org/news/2013-03-blob- salesman.html](https://phys.org/news/2013-03-blob-salesman.html)

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2012-03-slime-mold-mimics-canadian- hig...](https://phys.org/news/2012-03-slime-mold-mimics-canadian- highway.html#nRlv)

[2] [https://phys.org/news/2012-10-slime-molds-spatial- memory.htm...](https://phys.org/news/2012-10-slime-molds-spatial- memory.html#nRlv)

[3] [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180396](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180396)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold)

<comment><USER3> The work in 2013 appears to have been a _simulation_ of slime mold/amoeba behavior, not an actual living organism.

<comment><USER4> One slime mold to another: It just might be that these artifacts of quantization we see are proof we are living in a simulation. In fact, there is this argument to be made that the chances that we live in a simulation are bigger than that we do not. Here, let me show you...

<comment><USER5> > _It just might be that these artifacts of quantization we see_

The artifacts of quantization that we see are of the kind that come from continuous differential equations, not the kind that come from a lattice. Even the qbits in a quantum computer are found on a continuous Bloch sphere, instead of a discrete zero or one state space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So if I understood well the concept, this type of amoeba is like an ASIC for traveling salesman problem. Interesting concept, to find bio-organisms that can be used very efficentlly to "solve" a certain type of problem.

<comment><USER7> No, if I understood right, this thing is a quantum computer solving NP- complete problems in linear time. And the article claims to have a simulation doing the same, but they are not sure whether this is actually only a special case scenario.

<comment><USER8> It found a solution. Not an _optimal_ solution.

<comment><USER9> Similar to the way my NN (brain) can solve the TS problem by just guessing the best route. Sure that's <i>a</i> solution. edit:typo

<comment><USER5> On Hackernews you can use asterisks to produce italics, like in markdown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a non story, at least insofar as it concerns complexity. The result would be no more or less interesting if the amoebas sorted an array or did some other polynomial time task. Here's why:

1\. Finding approximate or near-optimal solutions for hard optimization problems is almost always easy. So in this case, an amoeba did something that is also easy to do with a classical computer.

2\. 8 is a small number. There are 8! possible paths, which is about 40,000, which means you could find the optimal solution to this problem in a millisecond or two with a classical computer. To be remotely interesting, you'd need to solve a TSP for a number like, say, 50 or 100.

3\. Even if you had an amoeba that somehow could find solutions for large numbers of cities, how would you know? You can't solve the problem instance yourself, so you don't know how close it is to the optimum. This is because TSP is not in NP, which are the set of problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time. Rather, its NP-hard, meaning its at least as hard as any NP problem, but its solutions can't be verified in polynomial time. So if amoebas had some magic TSP solving algorithm, we probably wouldn't be able to tell that they did unless we had our own magic algorithm to test it against.

4\. Also, even if the amoeba could solve this _optimally_ for large instances, _most_ instances of hard problems are actually easy. Therefore, simply showing that the amoebas can do this for some finite number of instances is not sufficient. An efficient algorithm for TSP or some other hard problem has to be able to solve _any possible instance_ efficiently, in order for this to have any implications for questions like P=NP. So if you wanted to show that amoebas had a magic TSP algorithm, you'd have to formally prove that their algorithm works on all instances. Since amoebas themselves are not easily formalizable, I don't see how you'd do this.

<comment><USER11> >> This is because TSP is not in NP

Um, the decision version of TSP (does there exist a Hamilton path of length at most x?) is definitely in NP. It is also NP-hard (your definition of NP- hardness is wrong).

I guess what you're trying to say is that the optimization version of TSP (find the shortest Hamilton path) cannot be verified in polynomial time, as this would require answering the decision version of TSP in the negative for some length x, and this is hard to verify since TSP is _not_ in co-NP.

In spirit, your comment is absolutely spot on. But as we all know, technically correct is the best kind of correct :)

<comment><USER10> But the article isn't talking about the decision TSP, is it, so your objection doesn't apply?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A couple of questions (some of them might be stupid :))

\- It says they used a neural network to control illumination in different channels, so the total time complexity should consider neural network + amoeba system for calculations.

\- When you put the amoeba in a environment with a vastly large number of channels, does it still behave the same? I mean, does it scale? Maybe amoeba becomes less averse to illumination with increase in number of channels and you get progressively worse solutions to TSP.

<comment><USER13> The neural network is like the plate itself, fixed at least for any configuration of N cities. Interpret that as you will. The plate itself has N^2 channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Multiple reposts from the last 2 days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18726441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18726441)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18729284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18729284)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725828)

</comment><comment><USER15> So does this mean that there is a polynomial solution to the Traveling Salesman problem (and by extension, every other NP-complete problem)? Or does this mean that the amoeba is just really good at approximating a solution to it, so it's either not a complete solution, or just solves the exponential problem really quickly?

<comment><USER16> I would caution against equating the computational capacity of a physical entity like this with what a single Turing machine or equivalent can do. The classic example is that I can sort a bunch of arbitrary-precision real numbers in O(n) time using spaghetti: cut a piece to length for each number, then push the ends flat against a table and sweep your hand down along them while you repeatedly remove the first piece to touch your hand [0]. The pieces of spaghetti are able to do this because they're acting like a parallel computer; the thousands or millions of chemical reactions taking place inside the amoeba are probably doing the same thing.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort)

<comment><USER17> Rather idiosyncratically, this algorithm is prone to breaking the items being sorted.

<comment><USER18> Often a problem for spaghetti code techniques.

<comment><USER19> Are we still talking pasta, or badly written OO code!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When it comes to biocomputing nothing beats humans challenged with "impossible" problems and decent amount of time.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, I bet 4chan could solve this faster than amoeba.

<comment><USER22> Lower collective IQ though.

<comment><USER23> Really doesn't seem like it when stuff like The Haruhi Problem pops up: [https://mobile.twitter.com/robinhouston/status/1054637891085...](https://mobile.twitter.com/robinhouston/status/1054637891085918209?s=21)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good analogy for human to be computing organisms developed unnoticer self awareness to a higher level beings. Maybe they are now debating if the things they created really are self-conscious ...

<comment><USER25> We are computing the answer to the ultimate question.

<comment><USER26> I thought we were computing the _question_ , since the answer is known to be 42.

<comment><USER15> The real question is can the _question_ be solved, or is it undecidable? If undecidable, how to reduce the Halting Problem to it? ;)

<comment><USER24> Now I know why human have a thing called emotions, that must be the randomness injected by the system!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If this interests you, Springer just published an encyclopaedia on 'Unconventional Computing', which includes a chapter from Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman

[https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007%2F978-1-4939...](https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007%2F978-1-4939-6883-1)

<comment><USER28> Interesting, I never knew there was a conference series on "Unconventional Computing"[1] until just now.

Sadly they publish their proceedings through Springer, instead of PMLR. That said, at least some of the older proceedings can be found using the usual pirate sites if one is so inclined.

[1]: [https://ucnc2018.lacl.fr](https://ucnc2018.lacl.fr)

[2]: [http://proceedings.mlr.press/index.html](http://proceedings.mlr.press/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The amoeba will be given H1b status.

</comment><comment><USER30> Spoiler, this is not [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_\(operating_system\))

<comment><USER31> why would it be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What am I missing here? The amoeba reacted predictably to lights turning on and off. In what way does that constitute problem solving?

</comment><comment><USER33> Search "evolutionary dynamics" and "complex adaptive system".

</comment><comment><USER34> So ... this is a Turing complete bio-organism? I wonder if we can get them to solve the towers of Hanoi problem ...

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't this what quantum computing wanted to achieve?

What's next? Amoeba-resistant encryption algorithms?

<comment><USER36> Not really: NP-hard problems are a set of a decision problems "does a route shorter than x exist?" while in quantum computing, we know an answer exists but the question is obtaining it. E.g. the factors of a number always exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Leonard Adleman did lots of research about that 25 years ago. It's now known as "DNA Computing"</comment>


Peter Schiff: "In many ways, it's going to be worse than the Depression." - <AUTHOR> http://www.myprops.org/content/US-News-and-World-Report-Interviews-Peter-Schiff-In-many-ways-its-going-to-be-worse-than-the-Depression/ <comment><USER2> OK, I'm getting pretty bored of the Everybody Panic articles. Who keeps voting them up?

I always pick up some books every time someone is giving them away for free. One of my favourites (which I unfortunately left in my old office) is called something like "The Great Depression of the 1990s" (publication date: 1989) and warns us all how terrible the 1990s are going to be.

<comment><USER3> > Who keeps voting them up?

Perhaps economically literate people who agree with the arguments? Schiff is a little on the alarmist side, but it takes a megaphone to be heard over the geyser of bull-tard propaganda that dominates popular business discussion. You get ahead in America by joining the rah-rah chorus and people just don't want to hear bad news.

> Everybody Panic articles.

Schiff is very positive and bullish on certain countries and certain sectors. "Everybody panic" is not his theme; it's "US citizens should panic." If you paid attention to him six years ago and panicked, and moved out of USD denominated assets you're something like 50% richer than your neighbors. So who's being irrational?

> "The Great Depression of the 1990s"

What's your point? Various idiots make bad predictions all the time? So what? Might as well mention "Dow 30000". Schiff isn't an idiot. His arguments are sound.

<comment><USER4> > Perhaps economically literate people who agree with the arguments

... for some odd values of "economically literate", and who haven't caught on that this site is not for the discussion of one's pet economic and political theories.

<comment><USER3> If this post is off topic then so are almost all of pg's essays.

<comment><USER4> _Most_ of PG's essays are about startups, hacking, and the like, although perhaps fewer have been lately. The other ones are generally interesting looks at something or another, but very rarely wacky rants about politics or economics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I upvoted for this. I take Peter Schiff very seriously. He has been right on housing, right on gold/commodities, and he is coming from a very fundamental point of view. I have been a fan of the "Austrian School" of Economics (Mises/Hayek/Rothbard) also known as the libertarian school, which is where people like Schiff come from.

Do yourself a favor, and read up about it before you dismiss all of that as pointless doom and gloom. Ultimately it all comes down to the mindset change that has happened in America (and many other countries) over the past 15-20 years. Debt has become very fashionable, and large segments of the population have unwittingly become debt slaves. The ultimate root cause is Federal Reserve monetary policy (find out why).

Credit bubbles do not end well.

<comment><USER6> The problem is the people who don't see this guy is dead on right.

The Fed is trying to get more money out into the economy but debt is eating it up before it can do any good. Now they are going to try raising interest rates to get more outside investment but were messed up by the EU also announcing there own interest rates may rise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who keeps on submitting links to sites that steal original content and don't even link back to the original? [http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/your- money/2008/05/3...](http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/your- money/2008/05/30/permabear-peter-schiffs-worst-case-scenario.html?PageNr=2)

</comment><comment><USER8> Whenever I worry about working at a startup during an economic downturn, I remember reading about HP, which was founded during the depression.

<comment><USER9> A lot of great opportunities appear during difficult times. For smart people under 30, the coming "next Great Depression" is a boon. For as long as we've been alive, social connections have mattered a lot more than hard work and talent. That is going to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Internet says disaster looms just over the horizon? No way!

<comment><USER11> Seriously... The Great Depression doesn't seem all that bad compared to what history says if this is worse...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How seriously do you take someone who advocates for the dissolution of the Federal Reserve? Pronouncements like this are kind of this guy's schtick.

<comment><USER13> I advocate for the dissolution of the Federal Reserve. The world had very stable interest rates and inflation rates before the institution of fiat monopoly money (monopoly as in the sense of only one legal producer, but the other connotation works as well). If you knew that the interest rate on 10-yr AAA bonds was going to be within +/- 0.5% a year from now, don't you think that would make it easier to do business? Instead, we have a system where next year is +/- ~4.0%.

People point out other drawbacks of the free banking and classical gold standard eras, and I agree that the systems had their problems. However, they were also working with a much smaller and less technological economy. In addition, they were hampered with idiotic anti-banking laws (such as unitary branching), most of which have been repealed today.

I don't think we need a price-setter on the short term credit markets, and I don't think we need legal monopoly money. I don't think the arguments for the market break down in the monetary sphere.

Anti-Fed people might not always state their case well, but that doesn't mean there is not a good case. There are a few Nobel's among the gold bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The History Of Oil by Robert Newman ( <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159> ) also mentions the possibility of a US only depression.

</comment><comment><USER15> Typical bullshit from a guy who can't conceive of an economy that isn't based on the production of physical goods.

Stop posting this crap, please. :-)</comment>