Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 <comment><USER2> Some big banks are gearing up to use a blockchain to track interbank settlements.[1] But this isn't a coin, nor is there mining. It's simply a shared ledger that can't be altered without cooperation between a majority of the parties. All alterations are clearly visible to all parties, which is good for auditing. Only big banks who have signed up for this have active nodes, and they are not anonymous.

This is an alternative to setting up a neutral party for the purpose, such as the Bank for International Settlements or Depository Trust Corporation. Those organizations are expensive to run. It's a real shared ledger, but it's no more than that.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-banks/six- big-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-banks/six-big-banks- join-blockchain-digital-cash-settlement-project-idUSKCN1BB0UA)

<comment><USER3> Since only the trustworthy bodies can join the party, they can do the job more efficiently by not using any of the trendy blockchain which may technically prevent the fraud but otherwise inefficient.

And since there are only banks can join the network, I doubt it can technically prevent the fraud among banks because unlike public cryptocurrencies, it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network. So any banks allowed to join can put enough computation power than other banks combined and succeed the attack.

<comment><USER4> This seems easy to solve though. Couldn't they just modify the transaction acceptance logic to require 100% agreement across the network?

<comment><USER5> At risk of breaking NDAs, this is exactly what is being done in deployments I've worked on. Regulators also have nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better.

The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.

There is however plenty of usages for blockchain just off the top of my head.

Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market, digital art certification, tracking of how money for NGO's are being spent and of course as a gold standard for important deals done between large organization and of course as a truly international wiretransfer system.

All these things will happen with new generations growing up and finding natural uses for them.

<comment><USER7> So 10-15 more years? In the meantime we can use blockchain/bitcoin to scam money from grandmas, retired folks, and millenials. So they can hate us technologists even more.

Oh, and cause global warming and destroy the planet. That way humans will _have_ to come up with a non-government backed currency.

<comment><USER8> I'm worth 13 million dollars because of crypto and I've diversified half... tell me more about how Bitcoin is a scam. :)

<comment><USER9> Im worth 16m because if the tulip bulbs I own.

Did you diversify into other crypto currencies? You are only worth anything once you actually cash out into USD

<comment><USER8> I diversified 6mm into index funds and bond funds on Vanguard :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully this thread will be different than all the others. Someone is likely to appear here with a counterargument, which I'm looking forward to reading.

However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.

<comment><USER11> I know this isn't an answer that you will like....but blockchain allows me to invest in high risk investments that would typically only be allowed for accredited investors. Having the shares/coins in a blockchain provides for transparency and authenticity and makes legit companies act in a way that is generally favorable for the small time investor

<comment><USER12> but isn't that just taking advantage of a (temporary) loop hole? The real problem there imho is that for some reason the government has decided that oh we need to step in and protect the unwise. Strangely this is by the same people that say government shouldn't be involved in the financial markets. There is no guarantee that having an ICO makes the investment any more bullet proof.

<comment><USER11> Entire industries can be built on regulatory loopholes, Uber and Lyft come to mind.

Cryptocurrencies are forcing govts to reexamine regulations that I argue are generally favorable to massive institutions/ high net worth individuals and unfavorable to the small timers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maersk is using blockchain to validate container ownership claims. Revolutionary tech in a world where crime meant the confirmation papers cost more than the container to ship.

Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.

Banks have moved to cryptocurrencies for transfers. Sure it's not the unregulated ones, but it's still block chain.

In government in Scandinavia we're doing various proofs of concepts on blockchain. Because it cuts out the need for a legal "middle man" it has huge potential even in less corrupt parts of the world. Everything from simple paperwork to lock/key systems in elder apartments (don't know the English word sorry) is being tested.

Blockchain is certainly full of scams, but it actually offers tremendous value in enterprise, especially when you do any form of bureaucracy. The thing is though, in this world 10 years is nothing. Just look at RPA, it's a tech from before the internet and it's only now beginning to be applied in real world situations that isn't cheating in a video game.

<comment><USER14> > Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land > ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.

Do you have a source for this? I can't imagine how it might work.

<comment><USER15> Why not? Blockchain is a document timestamping system, which means its whole purpose is to tell which of the two connected documents was issued earlier. As such, it doesn't care if the document was subtracting a number from one account and adding the same number to another account or if it was some text telling who gets the ownership of a described plot.

In fact, this particular use is one of the few that blockchain is actually good for (because it was designed as document timestamping), unlike stuff like voting or databases.

<comment><USER14> This is a particular use for a public database. The public database must be writable (only) by the corrupt authorities. What _exactly_ does a blockchain do to make the authorities non-corrupt here?

<comment><USER16> The data is stored on a decentralized database (many nodes). I buy my house and am send the rights to that land on a blockchain. Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else. The scale of the network should make it impossible for the database to be corrupted.

The whole idea here is distributed trust

<comment><USER14> > Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send > that house to someone else.

And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. The authorities must be able to transfer your house to your heirs if you die. The authorities must be able to take away your deed in certain cases. The authorities must be able to correct entries in the database. They must be able to override things.

Land titles are worthless if they are not enforced by courts, and courts will not enforce land titles in a database that has illegal entries.

<comment><USER13> > And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is.

It's exactly what it is where I live. When you purchase property both parties log in with their state issued digital id to sign the transfer of ownership.

This isn't done by blockchain in Denmark, which means the nationstate owns and operates the system with little openness. NOT a problem in one of the least corrupt countries in the World, but it might as well have been done through blockchain and in 20 years I imagine that it will.

<comment><USER14> > It's exactly what it is where I live.

No. Yes, you can do it online, great. And yes, no other private person can fraudulently do it in your name, also great. But it does not follow that it's impossible to do it without your key; it _is_ possible, and it _must be_ possible, for the authorities.

Should the database be public for reading? Yes, absolutely. But you don't need a blockchain for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article reminds me of Clifford Stolls 1995 article [http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be- nirva...](http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be- nirvana-185306) In which he says how the promises of the internet have been inflated.

Progress is generally on the exponential (or sigmoid) curve, so it's slow at first, but explosive later.

<comment><USER18> Similarly, during the late 1990s, people tried to make an internet version of EVERYTHING, even when it made zero sense. That's where we are with blockchain today.

<comment><USER17> Right. That's how technology works.

But internet right now is undeniable. Block chain will be the same.

<comment><USER19> The internet was undeniable back then, too, which is a huge difference. Millions of people used it for a ton of different purposes, so even though a bunch of businesses were pricing below cost the customer demand was clear. In contrast, nobody has come up for a legal use for bitcoin which many people need and is better than the alternatives. Some of the other blockchain ideas are more useful but again struggle to beat traditional PKI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unsuitable parallels are the bread and butter of hypers and shills.

 _Just imagine it 's 1893 and no one can see how big cars are going to be. Well this gizmo XYZ is just like cars were then! You'll wanna get in on this now!_ And so this gets internalized and repeated to friends and family regardless of objective merit. Because it sounds "truthy".

The parallels between blockchain and the Internet are similarly contrived. They are different phenomenon and the line "X is like Y thus what happened to X will happen to Y" doesn't have objective merit in this case near as I can tell. (Apologies to the half a dozen or more posters who have probably posted something to this effect on the thread).

The _potential_ uses for blockchain are much more limited than potential uses for the Internet for instance. (And there are a number of other differences).

That being said I have no doubt there are uses for blockchain technology. Making people rich with cryptocurrency for one. And hey, I'm all in favor. Let's just don't get carried away with the parallels.

</comment><comment><USER21> The folks at [https://sweetbridge.com/](https://sweetbridge.com/) make a case for supply chain being a natural fit. Some of the low hanging fruit here is international trade between less developed countries, where settlement has to be done in dollars, and independent truckers.

The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or mined -- all the way to the end consumer.) Settling invoices on the blockchain would eliminate a huge amount of friction and open the possibility of immediate low interest (or even no interest) loans on a substantial amount of outstanding invoices.

<comment><USER22> What about a blockchain/distributed ledger improves supply chains in ways that a standard centralized database could not? Explain like I'm five.

<comment><USER23> I've been asking this exact question of blockchain enthusiasts and evangelists for over a year now, and have never received a clear response.

I understand the difference between a distributed ledger and a database, but in all use cases I've heard mentioned as ripe for blockchain derived innovation, not once has a blockchain really been necessary or even an improvement over a traditional database based solution.

To give you an idea of how buzzwordy this all is, my friend works in venture capital and was trying to explain to me how blockchain was going to change the world after he got back from a blockchain conference, saying that it would "revolutionize VR/AR, AI, etc...", technologies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I just laughed.

<comment><USER24> Nothing to do with each other, in the way that internet protocols would have nothing to do with how we purchase goods. Crypto creates a validated economy in a VR/AR world. Digital goods have a certain tangibility with crypto inside of a VR/AR environment, that creates true ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A solidity developer I spoke to a couple of times told me much the same as this article. He believed in the blockchain as a concept; but its current overall benefit to human society is meagre (and some might argue destructive). This represents a first awkward phase for everyone.

We'll definitely see blockchain become dominant in a some or multiple fields of business. When? Perhaps not for 20 years. Internet as we know it took decades for it to fully develop and take off. We could get a crash before this succes happens, the word "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" might become toxic for a while. Thinking of the 2000 IT bubble, so much money poured into any crazy business proposal with "web" in it; and suddenly the music stopped. Billions evaporated.

All the while I'll just be grabbing popcorn and hoping to sell my coins on time ;-)

<comment><USER26> agree. I seen the same comparison between the internet and AI/Data science/ML. a big bubble, everyone is 'doing it' but most are doing it wrong, and then a big collapse. When the smoke clears, the ones that 'got it right' are the big future titans, and the whole sector grows again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of the reporter that asks Jeff Bezos in a sarcastic tone "So your telling me Amazon will be bigger than Sears??" [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTjhzSgdwE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTjhzSgdwE)

<comment><USER28> Doubly amusing because Sears was the Amazon of the 1900's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is one obvious use case where it's already in use: illegal trade. The article mentions it as an aside but it's definitely not small business; if half the world's drug, weapon and human trafficking trade were to happen in bitcoin, it would justify the current exchange rate and then some. Of course, that would force governments to outlaw the exchange services, which would make bitcoin way less attractive to criminals and law-abiders alike. To me that seems like the most plausible outcome of all this.

<comment><USER6> So basically like cash?

<comment><USER30> Cash at least requires a pretty large effort to securely and secretively move large amounts.

<comment><USER6> Why would you need to move a large amount?

There are coke traces on something like 90% of US cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Github and the linux git repo are merkle trees with a variety of governance controls.

I will die on this hill if I have to.

<comment><USER32> That is actually fascinating. You could build a ledger on top of github, transactions are push requests,there'd be a centralized party approving valid push requests and merging forks, but following a standardized formula that anyone can check and audit. Token ingress and egress are potentially hard to do, but it would be a fun idea to develop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Blockchain" the data structure probably will have some persistent uses. "Proof of waste" on the other hand is like leaded petrol or cloroflurocarbons: it certainly works, but the environmental downsides are going to have to result in it being banned.

</comment><comment><USER34> Has anyone thought about this in terms of a hype cycle [1]? Basically, the theory says that any new technology will be hyped at first and then falls into a state of disillusionment, where all the hopes of the first phase are shattered. Finally, when integration barriers etc are resolved the technology picks up.

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

</comment><comment><USER35> Personally I believe in blockchain, but not current blockchain.

Like anything it will take multiple steps and failing several times before it works.

The perfect example is the internet, it was so wrong at the start, so ugly, and so naive. But it was free and open. Everybody said "internet is the future", and that created the dotcom bubble when everybody agreed and wanted to profit from it.

I had friends at the time that got rich in the process, and I have friends today that have gotten rich with bitcoins(they have already sold all of them).

At the end of course Internet was the future, but not "that Internet", it has evolved a lot and will continue evolving.

With blockchain the same is happening: we have a tremendous bubble right now that will be painful when it pops. But it will continue evolving into something extremely useful in my opinion.

It will be no bitcoin, it will something else be easier to mine, with more transactions, and so on...it will evolve over time learning from its errors, like anything in the History of mankind.

<comment><USER36> I think you haven't been following the scene very closely.

There's already multiple solutions to these problems. Take a look at RaiBlocks (raiblocks.net) for example, which has instantaneous zero-fee transactions with very high throughput (hardware limited) without losing decentralization or other security properties (not proven atm). RaiBlocks uses delegated proof- of-stake with a block-lattice architecture.

Another example would be Cardano, which has the first provably secure proof- of-stake protocol with same security guarantees as Bitcoin, and is also secure in a scalable setting with blockchain sharding (as is planned in Ethereum too). Proof-of-stake doesn't require energy to mine blocks and can be scalable but is very hard to secure.

There's multiple other solutions as well, such as IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares and others which might be more centralized and less secure to achieve scalability. Then there is Bitcoin Lightning Network almost ready, and also MimbleWimble coming out soon ([http://grin-tech.org/](http://grin- tech.org/)). Lots of things are certainly happening faster than you can anticipate.

Additionally, there's projects like Enigma and Aion, which add scalability, privacy and interoperability on top of existing blockchains. This territory starts to get a bit complex for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It has at least one psychological use. For many it is a vehicle of self- deception, wherein they persuade themselves they are in the purportedly honourable class of investors, connoting productive use of wealth. They must understand somewhere underneath the fakery that they are speculators/gamblers.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here's a vague idea... How about a reputation ledger? My reputation will accumulate over time, and people will trust me, simplifying some transactions. For example I could rent a short-term stay at a lower rate because I am such a nice fellow and will never mess anything up.

Because my reputation has direct monetary value I would be hesitant to mess it up by being a dick, unless for a very big gain. The counter-parties will know the value of my reputation as well as the total value of outstanding liabilities against my reputation, so they will not give me any resources worth more than my current reputation capacity.

This has nothing to do with mining or coins, just an immutable public ledger. For all I care every notary public will be given a right to sign a block in the ledger, and collectively they will establish consensus.

Yelp on steroids, basically.

<comment><USER39> sounds like a dystopia.

<comment><USER38> Well, worse case you shed your identity and start from zero, which is where you are now.

<comment><USER40> If the hash function were based on your DNA (proof-of-life), that would make shedding your identity significantly more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 1\. Blockchain technology could be theoretically used to secure elections.

Some example usage: When people register to vote, assist them with setting a key pair and allow them to enter their public key with their registration. They could then verify how their vote was counted after the election.

Not sure if it would be superior to paper voting still as it could then be used to buy votes, but maybe there are some narrow applications, or a multi- sig approach where someone could know, but not prove it is their vote without the help of a third party. It is still better than current electronic-voting in this scenario.

As a side note, there is definitely a use for public key registration associated with government identification as it would solve ID theft for good.

2\. It could also be used for public records and secure/lower cost for chain of custody applications.

<comment><USER42> For 1: Do you need blockchain at all? Or do you need public/private key signing?

<comment><USER41> Where would you register all the votes and verify the counts? The blockchain would help secure that database from an actor targeting votes of people not likely to verify their votes.

<comment><USER43> Being able to (trivially) verify votes sounds like a recipe for buying votes and/or intimidating voters to me.

Inefficiency in voting technology is a feature, not a bug. Pencil on paper is the best system we have for precisely this reason.

<comment><USER41> Yes, I agree with all that and pointed it out in my first answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have a product built on blockchain, it has real, paying customers. It was not funded through an ICO and we do not have our own coin.

Https://hydrachain.io/

<comment><USER12> a tl;dr on what it is might be helpful? I'm afraid I don't quite understand what your product is after looking at the web site.

<comment><USER44> I know it's not very good explanation, the site was put up quickly before we pitched to a large government contract and it was aimed at them and not a casual reader.

New site coming soon with examples and a demo.

It's a generic asset management platform - so one current use case is tracking the movement of goods through a supply chain, and also recording transactional history in an industry that is currently full of corruption and tax avoiders. Having an immutable transaction record that's publicly visible is the correct usage of blockchain and it solves this problem very well. We are talking about amounts that are so large, this system will likely be regulated by the government.

Another current use case is tracking physical (and very valuable) assets - again the use case is an immutable pubic record.

The immutability is key - sure you could Store this data in a database, but the problems we are solving are the fact that when you have a single entity running a database then at a certain level of wealth you're practically guaranteed corruption or unethical behaviour. This is the reason we use blockchain - blockchain has a good use case for avoiding the corruption that massive centralised systems are often plagued with

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I used to work for these guys [https://guardtime.com](https://guardtime.com) . They do keyless digital signatures/timestamps based on block chain way before bitcoin and are quite useful.

<comment><USER46> I think you are in a position to add something to this discussion: have they found added value in the distributed ledger ecosystem?

<comment><USER45> Well they issue timestamps/signatures at a rate up to 2^64/second without PKI to provide tamper evident guarantees for data integrity. Their ledger is public and based on universally accepted proofs/primitives. Is it distributed, I suppose no, is it a good use for blockchain I'd say yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Talking about distributed ledgers, blockchains is kind of misleading.

Fundamentally, this technology implements distributed trust. You can put some information there and it will remain, forever. Everyone can see that this data (and hence, some event in the world) is there, was created at particular time by a particular person. You can tell someone: "Hey, I did X and you can see it here".

Sure, it's slow as hell now, but look forward 10 years.

What if people in year e.g. 1000CE suddenly got telepathy (internet) and ability to persist each other's thoughts? How would that change their society?

</comment><comment><USER48> There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date than 10 years.

Even the Internet was criticized by some after 10 years for failing to live up to "change everything" hype, and it's true it hadn't really close to doing so at the time. Some companies like Blockbuster Video weren't a bit concerned for quite a while.

To me the current state of blockchain applications doesn't tell us much about what it's ultimate utility will end up being.

<comment><USER49> > There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a > seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date > than 10 years.

While that might be true, that doesn't mean that a lack of success actually indicates success. That'd be a useless tautology.

More importantly, earlier innovations that took their time usually at least had a clear proposition of value. When electricity was introduced it took decades before businesses had adjusted their manufacturing and supply lines to the new technology, but everybody could trivially see that powering things remotely and sending information over long distances is pretty darn useful.

There is no such hypothetical justification for blockchain technology, or at least there isn't in many cases were people rabidly keep advocating for it.

As the author points out, in many fields the blockhain technology is less energy efficient, slower, and provides the opposite of what most customers want.

That is

<comment><USER48> Of course I agree it doesn't indicate success, I assume you understand I was only making the weaker claim, that lack of success at 10 years doesn't set any ceiling on ultimate success.

Just saying it's not unprecedented as other concepts have, however unlikely, eventually found success, and there are maybe a few parallels with basic research. Some computer science has come out of all of this already, some of which might be pieces to a puzzle we can't entirely see yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As much as everyone hates ICO's. They make equity funding rediculously easy.

<comment><USER51> That's ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> IBM has a blockchain platform [1] and BlueMix APIs [2] available.

[1] [https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/](https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/) [2] [https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/services/blockchain](https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/services/blockchain)

</comment><comment><USER53> As a serious question, is there a service (other than the blockchain) that provides a public, timestamped, immutable database? For applications such as putting supply chain data on the blockchain, I assume there's an easier service to use, but I couldn't think offhand of what would be a replacement.

<comment><USER54> Something close enough is perhaps proofofexistence.com

Pretty simple idea, you hash a any document and you get a blockchained stamp of that hash.

Now you can prove to anyone that the document (eg contract) existed at that time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It seems useful as way to keep records in poor or very corrupt countries without stable institutions. For example, if you don't have a very stable government, it seems like it is a good solution for keeping property records or storing voting records. It also seems like an alternative for creating universal financial records without requiring the same level of regulation. Fundamentally, the technology is disrupting the way government functions. However, if we live in countries with stable, existing governmental institutions it may be hard to fully understand the disruptive potential.

</comment><comment><USER56> Recently I saw a question asking if there were any social impact projects going on that were using blockchain technologies.

I have no idea how blockchain technologies can apply to social impact projects; all I could come up with was verifying that my donated can of soup made it into the hands of Homeless Joe via a verifiable route, but I don't know how much I'd need that. I trust that the soup kitchen [or whatever] directly feeds people, and if I didn't I'd be volunteering up front as well or not even bother at all.

Perhaps again I just haven't applied my imagination to it.

</comment><comment><USER57> Don't forget that lasers were a solution in search of a problem for ages. Blockchain's potential uses are great, but they have to overcome the deficit of (maybe) lack of privacy and (usually) big and busy ledgers - traffic you'd probably rather not have going constantly, but if you outsource it to a local specialist you're defeating the purpose.What blockchain needs is an application where privacy doesn't matter but depth and resolution do. I wonder if it secretly longs to be united with mapping applications.

</comment><comment><USER58> Distributed Ledgers have real application, blockchains are one way of solving them. DLT 2.0 like hash graphs and DAGs are interesting, but Blockchain is the whats in "production" thus far.

</comment><comment><USER23> Blockchain may have some legitimate uses in which it's an improvement over a traditional centralized database, but they are very few and niche. It would be silly to say blockchain has no use, but I can't help but laugh at people who talk about it being "the next Internet"

</comment><comment><USER59> This reminds me of the naysayers from the early internet, and I think we can look at each stage of the internet's growth with these same glasses.

1) email: it will never replace the post-office. You can only send text. Oh, ok, they've added images now, well, its' too slow for most people to download them, and now I've got all this spam. We use it in our company, but it isn't really for consumers. Oh, then hotmail...

2) You're not going to buy things online. The shipping costs will be too high. The logistics are all wrong. Will you trust an online shop with your credit card?? No way! This e-commerce thing is dead in the water. Sure, you point to the 'growth', but it's equal to "the proportion of US GDP comprised by toothpick sales"

3) Blogs?? Seriously. We're a news agency. We pay professional journalists to research and write compelling stories. Can you trust some random person in their basement writing a blog? Sorry, no contest. Blogs can't compete with major media companies.

4) Music downloads? Why would you spend 20 minutes downloading a song ILLEGALLY?? Where are you going to get it from. We'll stop all of this. CDs are the way forward. Oh, this internet thing has just destroyed our business model, iTunes to the rescue. But now people want to stream music. No they don't internet speed isn't fast enough to stream, and people want to own music, this music streaming thing isn't going anywhere!

5) Video? You've got to be kidding. Oh, that youtube thing is fine for weirdo's who want to make video's for their friends, but people will keep going to movies and paying for cable. The quality isn't good enough, and they don't have the great content. This internet thing isn't going anyway.

6) Rent someone's apartment online? Are you nuts! I'm not going to let some crazy person stay in my place, and I'm not going to stay in somebody else's. These internet people are crazy. Our hotel business is just fine. In fact, I think we should increase prices and start charging people hidden fees like "resort charges"...

7) Get in a stranger's car? A stranger that I found online!!??? Look, when I was a kid, my parents had two rules. Don't talk to strangers, and never get in a strangers car. Now you're telling me to go online, find a stranger and get in their car! This is madness. Just get in a cab! They'll take you where you want to go and you can trust them!

Please add your own "this is going nowhere" stories, I'm keen to see what else is out there, there are TONS.

The blockchain may use the internet as an underlying protocol, but it is as disruptive to the finance industry as Napster was to music, AirBnB to hotels, Uber/Lyft (please come to Australia Lyft) was to cabs, Amazon to retail, etc. etc.

The difference being, that blockchain is an open technology that is enabling this disruption, rather than a single company.

<comment><USER60> This whole crypto thing is a bubble. You will see it fall and never recover. No, not like the other 7000 times it crashed by more than 40%, no this time it will be impossible to recover, because people can't inherently value something that doesn't exist. Here use this paper I got from a place I pay to keep my money for me instead.

<comment><USER60> Just try to get your money out of crypto! You will see, one day one of the big guys is going to sell all his coins and cause a market crash from which it won't recover. Then you are going to be glad to have this gold-backed paper (Oh wait, don't try and test that last part).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 The blockchain is not just a support for currency, it is a decentralized ledger. A bit like git, but more secure.

A use case that doesn't involve currency is product tracking.

</comment><comment><USER61> I would love to re read this post and Comments in 2-5 years and see which large corporations have been replaced or have adopted blockchain/tangle technology

</comment><comment><USER62> Is it ok if I reply without reading the article if the title is able to be proven patently false? That is... unless we're bending word definitions... :-P

<comment><USER63> Probably, because you'd miss the author's point: other than currency speculation and buying illegal goods there is no compelling use case for the Blockchain. Crowing about BTC appreciation like Bitcoin lovers like to do doesn't disprove the thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> "Sixty years in, nobody has come up with a use for linked lists."

</comment><comment><USER65> Wikileaks is possible because of the blockchain. No question that the world has been changed by this kind of organization.

I'm happy that the cartel of financial institutions can no longer shut folks out arbitrarily, looking forward to seeing what else is made possible by the blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think the author is right with the current state of the affairs and the insane pumped hype but he misses the core issues serious engineers and researchers want to solve.

First, private blockchains is a misleading term since they don't share the core innovation behind Bitcoin: solving (under certain assumptions) the double spend/transaction problem in a decentralized way. This is the start of a series of computer science innovations playing with game theory, cryptography, politics, and finances. The nature of public blockchains makes it difficult, if not impossible, to significantly scale and speed up them (without losing some of its original features).

Second, the core ideas behind private blockchains predates Bitcoin. Nick Szabo's smart contracts concept is from 1994 [1] and if we go back in time we can find the AMIX project in 1988 [2][3]. The focus of these ideas is having a way to specify and plug contracts between different entities. Ad-hoc APIs are the natural solution for this problem but in the future there can be ways to quickly specify interactions and agreements with smart contracts.

Also ideas of log immutability can be traced back to a 1995 Spanish article titled "VCR y PEO, dos protocolos criptográficos simples" [4]. Bruce Schneier also published similar works in 1997 with Automatic Event-Stream Notorization Using Digital Signatures and in 1998 as "Cryptographic Support for Secure Logs on Untrusted Machines" [5].

Regarding private blockchains/distributed ledgers performance, the top achievement is 80000 tps using BFT-SMaRt consensus with an security tolerance of <50% crash faults and <33% malicious [6].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract#History)

[2] [http://erights.org/smart-contracts/index.html](http://erights.org/smart- contracts/index.html)

[3] [http://erights.org/smart- contracts/history/index.html](http://erights.org/smart- contracts/history/index.html)

[4] [https://www.coresecurity.com/system/files/publications/2016/...](https://www.coresecurity.com/system/files/publications/2016/05/2Protocolos.pdf)

[5] [https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-secure- lo...](https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-secure-logs.pdf)

[6] [https://github.com/bft-smart/library](https://github.com/bft- smart/library)

</comment><comment><USER66> This article is generally why I'm optimistic about Bitcoin and blockchain in general. A reasonably well-informed person can have all the facts and yet still not get it.

</comment><comment> etr-strike Sure, if you don't consider a decentralized and trustless currency a use. If you don't consider a store of value a use. If you don't consider a public ledger of transactions a use. If you don't consider programmable money a use. If you don't consider permissionless payments a use. If you don't consider a financial system wich never close a use. If you don't consider instant payments a use. Then sure, no use has been found.

</comment><comment><USER67> land claims

<comment><USER67> seriously what's wrong with this community?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> amazing how wrong this article is

</comment><comment><USER69> [https://namecoin.org/](https://namecoin.org/)

<comment><USER60> I was just wondering why blockchain doesn't get used to manage government data on citizens. One immutable record of a person with all the metadata stored in sidechains.

<comment><USER70> Yeah, government is sure first to get on a hyper new tech. In the US alone you got like XYZ ways to count votes on elections in different counties, most of which are decades or more old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> What a crock. This is why Medium, as a news source _sucks_. Literally anyone can say literally anything.

Im no bitcoin fanboy either. Bail out, leave the bankers with the bill as revenge for 2008.

It was the wrong application of a brilliant idea - a democratically- distributed, obifuscated DNS replacement for secured communications like TOR seems more applicable than the whims of an unregulated currency.

But this author doesnt see food-sourcing happening. This author doesn't see banks adapting the blockchain for their own internal uses to protect sensitive info. Or anything else you might find in google.

<comment><USER72> > This is why Medium, as a news source sucks.

Medium isn't a news source, any more than, say, blogspot or LiveJournal is.</comment></comment>


Thanks for the memory: How cheap RAM changes computing - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/10/how-cheap-ram-changes-computing/ <comment><USER2> Commodore 64 RAM Disk. I remember having 64k of RAM soldered on a generic bread board with a 9V battery as backup. It made the computer ridiculously fast when you had slow floppy drives for I/O. I also made it work for the Amega but the payoff was much lower and I stopped using it because the floppy drive and hard drives were faster and the bottle neck was at the CPU.

Video Production - If I could store my video projects in a RAM Disk it really would be pretty amazing. The issue is SSD have really been able to speed up the input so much that the benefit would be much smaller. In video your write to disk is actually very small and usually only happens while you import, preview or render (Which is faster on GPU RAM). There is a lot of work to get a production RAM Disk up and being ready with a low benefit. It still would be nice to have all my clips just reside in Ram and able to "real time" render with less stutters on previews.

Data "Science" \- I most use R and that is 100% in memory so it certainly has been a boom for that in my own usage. 64 GB of RAM is pretty cheap and then I can also use Spark if it isn't enough. My current biggest time restraint for big data sets is getting the sets more then anything else. Having large data sets reside in a RAM Disk would really speed things up but we now have Spark for the actual big data sets.

<comment><USER3> _" Commodore 64 RAM Disk"_

Oh man.

I manually stuffed 1.5mb (three 512mb RAM cards) for an image capture system. My thumbs got blisters. The PC was an over clocked Tandy 80286 (8 mhz!). I forget the name of the goofy Lotus/Intel/Microsoft memory expander contraption. That Tandy was a tank.

We were doing large format image capture for document archival. Totally not worth it. Results were unusable. But we had investers, so...

Before that, I thought I was pretty cool pimping my Apple //e with an 80 column character display and 128kb RAM. True word processing, WYSIWYG.

<comment><USER4> EMS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Used server RAM has been ridiculously cheap. You can get 256GB for $383:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/256GB-64x4GB- PC3-10600R-DDR3-1333-EC...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/256GB-64x4GB- PC3-10600R-DDR3-1333-ECC-Reg-Server-Memory-RAM-Upgrade-Kit-/222094055013)

128GB for $144:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/128GB-32x4GB- DDR3-PC3-10600R-Server-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/128GB-32x4GB- DDR3-PC3-10600R-Server-Memory-RAM-Upgrade- IBM-X3690-X5-Type-7148-/201590917423)

<comment><USER6> Server grade everything is ridiculously cheap. Unfortunately, the motherboards seem to still be expensive.

I bought a botherboard with two LGA2011 sockets for £35 and built a system around it for only about £100, which included 32GB of RAM and 2 8-core xeons. Unfortunately, the motherboard was faulty, and I have been unable to find a repacement for a reasonable price.

<comment><USER5> Here's one for $200:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Genuine-Dell- Precision-T7610-Ser...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Genuine-Dell- Precision-T7610-Server-Motherboard-Dual-LGA2011-Sockets-NK70N-/262308901765)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, although I'm looing for <£40 ideally. They do come up around that price occasionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You'll see people complaining about memory usage for editors and IDE's. A few years ago it was Emacs, "the memory hog". Today it's Atom.

The usual complaint is often "you shouldn't need a modern computer to use an editor".

What people fail to realize is that Moore's Law and memory eventually make the problem go away. Spend a little extra on memory today and don't make memory requirements a deciding factor.

<comment><USER8> If you need _an_ editor, use notepad.exe, nano, or an equivalent.

You run emacs / vim / sublime / atom exactly because it's _much more_ than a simple text editor, it's a development environment of sorts.

<comment><USER7> Why wouldn't use simply use the editor you leave open on your desktop for the "small editor" tasks?

What kind of person says "this is a job for nano, while this is a job for emacs?"

<comment><USER9> I have a very specific example of jobs for nano vs vim. When I need to copy paste some code into a server and I don't have clipboard access over ssh, nano is better for that than vim, because vim tends to keep tabs indented, so I'll use nano to paste the file into, and then go into vim to edit it. I'm sure there are other examples.

<comment><USER10> Use ":set paste" before you paste. (Disable with ":set nopaste".)

See also: [http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Toggle_auto- indenting_for_code_pas...](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Toggle_auto- indenting_for_code_paste#Paste_toggle)

Or, if your terminal emulator supports "bracketed paste", use something like this: [https://github.com/ConradIrwin/vim-bracketed- paste](https://github.com/ConradIrwin/vim-bracketed-paste)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen consoles that store the entire game in RAM yet. Load times for consoles are absolutely insane.

<comment><USER12> O tempora, O mores: consoles used to store the entire game in ROM. Up to about 64Mb.

The modern need for patches and DLC makes that impossible now, in addition to the other reasons. But I think it would still be possible to greatly improve load times with a bit of optimisation - it's just not commercially important. Maybe if the console QA system imposed maximum load times it would be different - but then you'd see compromises made elsewhere, such as in level size.

(I play Cities:Skylines, where one of the more popular mods is simply called "Don't Crash", which lazy-loads other mod data to improve performance and reliability)

<comment><USER13> Remember that the 3DS is still very successful, and runs just off carts (well, also downloadable titles). It seems to run very smoothly.

In practice, there have been a few games that have had patches released -- in almost all modern games a tiny fraction of the game is code, which can be easily replaced, leaving all the art and music which (hopefully) don't need as much patching.

<comment><USER14> Games on the 3DS aren't typically renowned for their over-the-top graphism quality in the overall videogame scene; if you expected the same quality with the same resolution on the desktop, then you'd be doing what pjc50 said: compromises

<comment><USER15> Frankly the focus on graphics have long since reached the point of wankery.

<comment><USER14> That's your opinion. Graphics is also not the thing I'm most interested in, but let's not think that we are a realistic view of the overall market.

<comment><USER16> Sad but true. Too many beautifully rendered games that aren't terribly engaging because amazing graphics are what the mainstream market demands. (I've avoided buying the latest gen consoles partly because of this, but mostly because I just don't get the time to play games that much these days.)

That being said there are also many beautiful games that are amazingly fun, and the graphics do add to the experience, but they're more like the icing on the cake. That's not quite the metaphor I'm groping for, but you get the idea: the gameplay is a fundamental that has to be right, and then the graphics can really add something; without the gameplay the experience is always destined to be flat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Presented by SAP"

"SAP HANA is the in-memory computing platform that enables you to accelerate business processes, deliver more intelligence, and simplify your IT environment"

<comment><USER18> Completely useless article. Random publicity shots of data centers/super computers, no content...

<comment><USER15> I really miss the days of Hannibal.

<comment><USER19> For anyone confused, digi_owl is referring to Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, the co- founder of Ars Technica who left the site in 2011. He wrote the sort of deeply-technical content that this article, well, isn't.

[http://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/](http://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/)

<comment><USER20> How about John Siracusa?

<comment><USER15> Article after article of Apple wankery, thanks but no thanks...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately RAM is not cheap, prices are at the same level for years now with no visible end to this trend.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love getting ram on the cheap. I don't really use it, but just having an insane amount of it is so satisfying.

Star Citizen will probably get its own ram disk, if priced keep on dropping</comment>


YC Interview Prep Tool - <AUTHOR> http://ycinterview.com/

<comment><USER2> for convenience here is the list of the questions (from the original app):

What are you working on?

How does it work?

Someone else just showed us this idea, do you have anything else?

How far along are you?

Who are your users and why are they using this?

What do people do to solve this today and why are you better?

How are you going to get demand?

What are your backgrounds?

How did your team meet?

How big could this business be?

How much could you make in 1 year?

What is your biggest objection from users?

Why now?

How did you start working on this idea?

Do you have any domain expertise?

Why are you the right team?

What are the economics of the business?

When do you become ramen profitable?

How will you achieve a monopoly?

If I gave you 120k right now, what would you spend it on?

What is the equity split? If uneven, tell me why.

Where will you be by the end of YC?

If you fail, what will the reason be?

What is your burn rate?

Why aren't you growing faster?

Who are you most afraid of?

What is your CAC and LTV?

What is your biggest weakness as a team?

Why aren't you hiring to fill that weakness now?

6 months from now, what will be your biggest problem?

What has the feedback been from users so far?

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool! I made a little tool like this a while ago. It has sound bites from previous yc office hours. [http://www.zindlerb.com/officeHours/index.html](http://www.zindlerb.com/officeHours/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's another one I found for those who are interested: [http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/](http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This isn't just for YC interviews. It's actually for anyone that is starting any business venture.

<comment><USER6> I was talking with someone who's applying for YC just recently and thought how the questions I was hitting with (many almost verbatim from this list) are essentially a checklist for gut checking most companies. YC interviews seem like a really good place to create a really solid foundation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We built this tool while prepping for the YC interview, hope it helps other startups too! Best of luck everyone!

<comment><USER8> Very nice, clean tool, Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It'd be very useful to have at the end of the questions a list of all of them showing the response time and sorted by it. That way you get an idea of which ones took too long or too short and improve them.

Here more questions (it's not mine, I just found it a while ago): [https://www.aptible.com/blog/y_combinator.html](https://www.aptible.com/blog/y_combinator.html)

Good luck to everyone for the interview! We're still waiting a reply for our late application

</comment><comment><USER10> Really useful tool. I would also take a look at this article, which has a prioritization of the different questions out there, and therefore which to focus on: [https://www.aptible.com/blog/y_combinator.html](https://www.aptible.com/blog/y_combinator.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> In five years, we will have a successful startup called Combinator'd: The Leading Startup Incubators Should Be Applying to Fund You! 10 Minutes Could Get You 10 Term Sheets.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very reminiscent of [https://jamescun.github.io/iPG/](https://jamescun.github.io/iPG/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Love the clean, functional deisgn. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER14> Good interface, although I would make it more visual and specific

</comment><comment><USER15> cool product!</comment>


Run Your Own Piece of Heroku with Foreman - <AUTHOR> http://icelab.com.au/articles/run-your-own-piece-of-heroku-with-foreman/

<comment><USER2> As someone running 5 server processes in development for one project, this hugely simplifies all the terminal juggling on my local box, and centralizes the associated commands as part of the codebase. It's a little like a "bundler for processes!"

There appear to be a few kinks to be worked out; for example Foreman fails to kill off Redis (for me) as described in this closed bug report:

<https://github.com/ddollar/foreman/issues/15>

Not a huge deal though. I'm happy to be using it for development.

<comment><USER3> If you try the latest foreman it should be a lot better about killing things off now. See other comments in this thread about the SIGTERM-pause-SIGKILL approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Foreman is especially fantastic for development environments. In past projects our different services and daemons have always either been started ad-hoc, or by some awful bash script. This lets new team members get up and running really quickly.

I'd also like to try using it to generate server configs, but I still don't like what Monit makes you do in order to run a non-daemonized process. I'm not sure why it can't just daemonize the process for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you kill foreman, will it kill all the processes that that foreman instance spawned? If so, how does it do this - with process groups?

<comment><USER3> Yes. If you kill foreman with Ctrl-C (or killing its pid externally) it will send SIGTERM to all of the child processes, followed 3 seconds later by SIGKILL to any that haven't terminated yet.

<comment><USER5> OK. But if those processes have spawned further children, then I expect they'll get isolated and keep running, now with PPID 0 (on linux, anyway).

I have need for a tool that has the ability to kill not just one level of child processes, but the tree. I've built something similar to foreman recently and came up with a hacky way to do this tree kill.

Every now and then my tool runs ps and parses the output. It uses PID and PPID to build a hierarchy of processes that are descended from it. I have a signal handler in the foreman-like tool that does the SIGTERM then SIGKILL like you describe. It's ugly and not portable but it is working in my setting.

Since then I've heard about process groups and have been meaning to try that as an alternate mechanism.

Something foreman has that my python tool doesn't have and that I want is the ability to bounce processes within the tree.

I'd like to be able to throw away my code and replace it with something polished. Interested in any further thoughts you have.

Update: hey - you're the author! Thanks. Another feature I'd like is the ability to query the foreman process running in the background and have it tell me what stuff it's currently running. The approach I've used in my tool was to use python-twisted to host a command line, and then I'd telnet to that and poke it. But - as I say above - it's still missing key features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't seem to figure out if this is ruby-centric (like Rake) or ruby-only.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know you can run anything with it, not just ruby apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is absolutely right. The commands in your Procfile don't have to be rake tasks, they can be any executable system command.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How would I tie this in with monit? Would I no longer need monit?

<comment><AUTHOR> The configs that Foreman generates for upstart or standard init system include the 'respawn' keyword, which makes sure that these processes are restarted if they crash for any reason. In this way, it can replace monit's basic functionality. What's not there at the moment is a way of restarting the processes when they, for example, use too much memory or CPU. Ideally you'd have something check for this as well.

<comment><USER3> You could also check out something like <http://upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Stanzas#limit> for use in your upstart scripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that's very useful! Thanks for the heads up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Man charged with abusing inside knowledge to damage old employer's network - mkr-hn http://www.fbi.gov/newark/press-releases/2011/former-shionogi-employee-arrested-charged-with-hack-attack-on-company-servers

<comment> mkr-hn How do HN readers account for the risks of firing people who carry sensitive information?

<comment><AUTHOR> The solution starts before you even hire the person. People shouldn't be able to access things that aren't in their job description.

Shared passwords should be non-existent. When sharing a password is required, there should be steps in place to change that password with minimal interruption in service and at a moment's notice.

The person should be locked out of all systems (including the shared password ones) the moment that a termination decision is reached.

The rest is pretty much up to the lawyers.

It should be noted that the only difference for when a person quits is when to lock them out. Some companies have the person work until their notice (and then follow the above), others terminate them immediately (and follow the above), and others pay them a severance, but don't have them touch any machines (and follow the above.)

Anecdote: Multiple companies have called me weeks or months after I quit and asked me for passwords to their most sensitive systems. I still had the passwords in my brain, and they still worked.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What fragrance do you use? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For deodorant, I've been loyal to Old Spice since I was 16.

The stuff I love for a cologne used to cost around $40 - $50 but then they stopped producing it for years. All of a sudden, it is back on the market, and the price went up.

It is called Joop! What About Adam.

[https://www.amazon.com/About-Joop-Toilette-Spray- Ounces/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/About-Joop-Toilette-Spray- Ounces/dp/B000CNKC6M/ref=sr_1_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1496359990&sr=8-1&keywords=joop%21+what+about+adam)

If I were to explain the fragrance, it is definitely a very overpowering manly smell with hints of wood, tomato leaf, lavender, mint, oakmoss, labdanum, cedar, and sandalwood, and sweet grapefruit--which is usually the most notable result. It definitely teases the nose. I've worn it on a date or two along with a few interviews. I remember I had a college class before my date and I wasn't going to have time to stop home, so I sprayed a bunch of it on myself beforehand, and all the girls were going crazy over it, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from.

I think I've got one bottle left.. its not cheap, but the arrogance in pricing comes with complete confidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lots of them! Too many to count :(

Depends on what you going for, the non expensive stuff is usually not that great and doesn't last long or smell very crass.

Good resources to get more info - fragrantica and basenotes.

If you want to get into fragrances and try a few things, highly recommend r/fragsplits, where you can sample a lot of stuff for not much.

Personal favorites are from Dior Privee, Creed, Bond No. 9, Frederic Malle, Montale

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for recommending places where I can get more info about fragrances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't wear any cologne or anything very often, but when I do it's usually Burberry _Brit_.

</comment><comment><USER5> Calvin Klein's _Desperation_

</comment><comment><USER6> Terre D'Hermes

</comment><comment><USER7> concentrated Ylang Ylang; strawberry shampoo.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funk

<comment><AUTHOR> What is it?</comment></comment>


I Am Pressing the Space Bar and Nothing Is Happening - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdS3tjEIqUA <comment><USER2> Love it.

On a related note... The keyboard in my 15" 2016 MBP is definitely the most "persnickety" electromechanical device I've ever owned. While still fully functional, it has developed a broad range of individual key feel and sounds. Without precise measurements, id say its developed a variance of 2x. Some keys are normal others range to twice as hard to press and they are commensurately louder. In particular the damn bottom right arrow key.

This song very accurately conveys my frustrations with this keyboard. I have tried to clean out the crud that is obviously affecting my keys, to no avail. Apple's instructions for cleaning the keyboard are laughable.</comment>


The Cost of Being a Female Consumer in NYC [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/partners/Study-of-Gender-Pricing-in-NYC.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Some methodological weaknesses:

\- "The prices recorded for the study data were always the full price, regardless of any sale or discount the retailer offered."

\- " In some cases, men's products were clearly marked as intended for men, while products included in this study as women's products could be considered "unisex," because the label did not specifically indicate a gender."

\- Only looked at retail products, not online.

So there isn't actually much reason to believe that women pay more than men for products, let alone significantly more, but it's still interesting to see the differences in marketing.</comment>


Stuart, The Same-Hour Delivery Startup Raises €22M Pre-Launch - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/stuart-stealth/ <comment><USER2> Venture backed delivery businesses have jumped the shark. EUR 2.99 for a delivery? For city-wide point to point? Within an hour?

Pizza delivery companies have been doing this for decades, but they've been surviving off of a product that has >$20 sales prices and >90% margins pre- delivery, paying below-subsistence wages, aggregating deliveries due to meal time peak behavior, consolidating pickup areas to single restaurant locations, and constraining delivery areas to something more akin to a neighborhood than an entire city.

Amazon has tried for years to get low margin grocery delivery to work with sophisticated state of the art logistics software and the cash flow muscle of Amazon to push for market penetration and subsequent delivery density, and the _only_ strategy that worked for them was raising prices. There is no way this business goes anywhere without changing their pricing model or the laws of physics.

<comment><USER3> How about the delivery mechanism?

When drone delivery takes off, shipping will be turned on its head once the maximum carry weight and flight duration improve. Then <1hr delivery will be the norm for much of this stuff, you'll have a fraction of the human capital costs, and many other benefits.

<comment><USER4> _When drone delivery takes off, shipping will be turned on its head_

Sure. Then launch a startup doing drone delivery when it is viable. These guys will burn through their funding _long_ before that happens.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree that they will. Personally, I'm curious to see what happens to all these delivery/food delivery startups when the economy slows and people have less disposable income for urgent delivery of non-essential items.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video Games Killed the Video-Game Star - <AUTHOR> http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6963024/video-games-killed-video-game-star <comment><USER2> Really interesting look at games, and while I'm one of those players who loves crunching the numbers, the whole thing is still telling.

Part of me feels the fighting game scene has it right, they release the #s so the players can access them, but in the game itself it's all about pounding the other guy without that information being beaten into your head as actual #s.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to tell if there's a real legitimate complaint here, because the overall thrust of the article seems to be "I thought this game was going to be like Left 4 Dead but instead it was like Borderlands." The other main theme, that games use numbers and bars to manipulate you, is almost universally true, and has been since _Pong_.

<comment><USER4> My takeaway was that the attempt to be like other popular video games is ruining potentially great video games.</comment></comment>


R beats Python, R beats Julia, Anyone else wanna challenge R? (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://matloff.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/r-beats-python-r-beats-julia-anyone-else-wanna-challenge-r/ <comment><USER2> "In their trial run, Julia was much faster than R. But I objected, because random walk is a sum. Thus one can generate the entire process in R as vector calls, one to generate the steps and then a call to cumsum(), e.g."

You missed the point. Everything is fast when you export what you're doing to a library. Julia is fast when you do, and when you DON'T.

<comment><USER3> But not using the language's idioms is not a fair comparison.

In modern times, vector based thinking like that that's present in R or numpy is the only sane way to program. Because these are not "library calls," they are the primitives of modern architectures.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that you may have to stray outside that vectorized bubble, and at that point you enter into a two-language situation if you are using R (e.g. RCpp) or Python (Cython?) - which was one of the motivations for the whole Julia language, to avoid needing to do that.

<comment><USER3> But that's no excuse for a bad benchmark. If it actually were necessary to stray out of vectorization, then the Julia benchmark would have a point. But those cases are few and far between in what I have experienced, and apparently in what the benchmark authors have experienced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author seems to have a very narrow view of "data science". In the comments he criticizes all of machine learning as simply unprincipled revival of nonparametric curve estimation. While there's much truth to the "unprincipled revival" accusation, some aspects of machine learning arose for good practicality-beats-purity software engineering rather than simple ignorance.

My interpretation of the term "data science" is much more in line with practicality of engineering rather than the purity of traditional statistics. To that end, Python is leagues ahead.

<comment><USER6> > he criticizes all of machine learning as simply unprincipled revival of > nonparametric curve estimation

He's right. 'Machine learning' is just statistics with better, cleaner names for things. The underlying theory is the same.

(The commenter below says that 'statistics explains, ML predicts', but this isn't really true. Both statistics and ML build models, whether you use these models for prediction or explanation is up to you.)

One problem is that the 'statistics' as usually taught in a college course or explained in a textbook comes from a much earlier age, before supercomputers were available to the average man; in essence, it's like a kind of machine learning as done by paper-and-pencil. In contrast, 'ML' assumes from the start that computing resources will be available.

<comment><USER5> > In contrast, 'ML' assumes from the start that computing resources will be > available.

Right, but I'm not sure that "better, cleaner names for things" actually follows. Instead, I find that the ML folks just hacked their way to similar results as traditional statistics, but in many cases were comfortable with the algorithms as "black boxes" rather than having a clear understanding of _why_ the algorithms worked. In that sense, the author's "unprincipled" criticism is valid. This is less true today, but the new research in convolutional neural nets shows how ML starts from hacking things until they produce practical results then backing into the theory of why. This habit has resulted in much duplication of effort and naming schemes. My ML prof at Georgia Tech (Isbell was awesome! [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~isbell/](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~isbell/)) constantly trashed "genetic algorithms" for being a silly form of randomized hill-climbing.

The beneficial side of these less-principled techniques is that they happen to work on larger scale datasets. It turns out approximate results are more scalable than exact results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (NB: the article was written in May 2014. There are many comments at the bottom of the page.)

"This has been the subject of huge controversy over the years, so Guido Van Rossum, inventor of the language, added a multiprocessing module."

I think that assigns too much agency to van Rossum. PEP 371 describes the justification for bringing pyProcessing into the standard library. The primary developer was Richard Oudkerk, who along with Jesse Noller volunteered to maintain it in the standard library.

While it's true that van Rossum accepted the PEP (on Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 1:22 PM according to the mailing list), that's not quite the same thing as adding it.

For that matter, the version control logs point out who originally added the code, in its most literal sense:

        user:        Benjamin Peterson <email@example.com>
        date:        Wed Jun 11 02:40:25 2008 +0000
        summary:     add the multiprocessing package to fulfill PEP 371

</comment><comment><USER8> "First, R is written by statisticians, for statisticians." To see the fallacy of this statement substitute "statistician" with any other profession, e.g. farmer, philosopher, doctor. Good software is written by _programmers_.

<comment><USER9> Have you used R?

As both a heavy R user and a software engineer, I can promise you that one of the quintessential aspects of R is it's actually "written by statisticians, for statisticians."

You can't accuse R of having great code and language design. Or good code and language design. Or even mediocre code and language design.

Imagine what you would get if you got a million monkeys drunk, put them on a roller coaster with laptops, and had them bang keys while they were upside down on loops. And then the result suddenly, miraculously runs and produces output. Now you understand R's software design.

<comment><USER10> Yep. The idea that I should have to code defensively to make sure that __the matrices I 'm multiplying are of the correct size __[1] is complete bullshit.

        cat(paste("That", "and", "string", "manipulation", "in", "R", "is", "a", "pain", "in", "the", "ass", sep=" "))

[1]: If A is n by m and B is p by q, and m is a multiple of p, then R will SILENTLY concatenate copies of B to itself to form an m by q matrix, and then do the multiplication.

<comment><USER11> R seems to have taken Perl's "there's more than one way to do it" as a credo, all of the official documentation I've seen seems to be an exercise in trying to say as little as possible with as many words as can be managed, all of the syntax seems to be deliberately designed to make no sense whatsoever and I can give it a task that JMP (no speed demon it) can finish in under an hour and not get results back after letting it churn for nearly a day. Everything about R makes me wonder what I've done with my life to end up using it.

<comment><USER12> > and I can give it a task that JMP (no speed demon it) can finish in under an > hour and not get results back after letting it churn for nearly a day

Example, please. I'd really like to see what you are talking about here.

And btw, good luck treating any kind of Big Data with JMP.

<comment><USER11> > And btw, good luck treating any kind of Big Data with JMP.

Oh I'm definitely not intending to. (To the commenter below, it really doesn't matter how you define Big Data for that statement.) That much I had already figured out, which was why I was evaluating R with an eye towards pitching my boss on it.

The test case I'm referring to here was a pretty simple neural net to my mind -- roughly 350,000 rows of data, six predictor variables, one hidden layer with 30 nodes. I can verify that the neural net code ran because if I truncated the data set down to 1,000 rows I got a result back. But the full dataset just chugged for hours and hours without stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > This vectorized R code turned out to be much faster than the Julia code–more > than 1000 times faster, in fact, in the case of simulation 1000000 steps. > For 100000000 steps, Julia actually is much faster than R, but the point is > that the claims made about Julia's speed advantage are really overblown.

What are we supposed to glean from this paragraph?

<comment><USER14> R beats Julia if you ignore all the cases where Julia beats R!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Actually the GIL is not necessarily an issue for NumPy since C extensions can break the GIL. I don't see why this needs to be a winner take all competition between languages for statistics. It's worthwhile to have different approaches and just because in the author's opinion R is better than Python and Julia doesn't mean that it is always the better option no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find python's multiprocessing module to be simple to use. I would be interested in hearing the author elaborate on why he feels it is clunky and has not had a good experience with it.

</comment><comment><USER17> These days I use both R and Python regularly. I don't have a strong opinion about one being better than the other, and I feel pretty good about that.

</comment><comment><USER18> " My impression of Julia's parallel computation facilities so far, admittedly limited, is similar."

1\. Not good to make assertions that you immediately undermine by admitting you don't know what you are talking about 2\. I find @spawn and @fetch quite nice, in fact I think that Julia was built from the ground up around notions of parallelism (ie. multiple dispatch)

</comment><comment><USER19> I've tried to learn R several time, but its index started with 1 always stop me from learning.

<comment><USER20> I've always wondered why Julia went this route too. They more or less said "because matlab does it"

<comment><USER4> Source? One of the best arguments, that is personally relevant to the work I do, is that indexing in math often starts at 1 (e.g. the indexing of rows and columns of a matrix). Translating this to code results in a mental overhead of mapping the math-index to the code-index, a cost I don't pay in Julia.

<comment><USER20> [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/558](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/558)

      > There is a huge discussion about this on the mailing list; please see that. If 0 is mathematically "better", then why does the field of mathematics itself start indexes at 1? We have chosen 1 to be more similar to existing math software.

A post above also appeals to mathematica. It's been a while since I've had to internalize the "cost" of zero indexing, so this never felt very compelling.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google apparently scrubs military partner listing, after report - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/03/29/google-apparently-scrubs-military-contractor-partner-listing-after-pando-report/

<comment><USER2> I like to think that Google staff would be able to remove a couple of bullet points without trashing the data on one of their product sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Appears the site was parsing a google spreadsheet in json form for part of the content. This is the likely reason for the change of content. Might it be quota issues from an HN/Slashdot effect? Probably not but just pointing out there could be many reasons for the content change.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yasha Levine, nuff said</comment>


ZeroTier One 1.0.0: Better, Faster, Cheaper - <AUTHOR> https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=277 <comment><USER2> This is why I'm glad I read [https://news.ycombinator.com/classic](https://news.ycombinator.com/classic) [1][2].

Just another recommendation for anyone who stumbles across this article later - it currently seems unlikely to reach the front page :(

P.S. This is hugely useful - I have an immediate use for it in connecting many disparate daemons of the project I'm currently working on (I'd played with Hamachi, Docker/Weave and full custom on OpenVPN until now). :)

[1]: even if I'm not amongst its voters. :P

[2]: this is on the third page of /news at the time of writing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

May I ask: given the freemium model here, what features or services would make you more likely to sign up for a paid account? I'm looking for ways to add more value to the professional side of things.

<comment><USER2> Replied by e-mail. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congrats. Is there a writeup of the old and new multicast algorithms? It sounds like the old one was building a spanning tree and the new one does sender-side replication; is that close?

<comment><AUTHOR> (I'm the author/founder.)

Old one did distributed breadth-first graph exploration: [https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/wiki/OLD- Multicast-A...](https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/wiki/OLD-Multicast- Algorithm-Notes)

It was nifty and cool and worked pretty well for small to mid tier stuff, but biggest disadvantages in practice were:

(1) Peers seem to drop the potato more often than I predicted when I simulated it, leading to a lot of truncated propagations. It also has no geo-awareness, so if your propagation graph goes through sub-Saharan Africa you're likely to see a lot of packet loss. I think my simulations implicitly assumed all high- end first-world broadband links, when reality includes the whole world and a lot of slow/crummy cellular.

(2) High latency, which caused problems for people who wanted low-latency multicast for SDN-type applications (enterprise stuff). In the beginning I never considered those applications, but they're emerging as a major user base.

(3) Imposed a high CPU cost, since to prevent flooding every packet had to be cryptographically signed by its originating node. That's a lot of ECC256 signatures and verifications.

(4) Mobile-unfriendly, since mobile devices really want to be able to enter long-term hibernation and not have to wake to help others propagate their multicasts. Mobile might even want to turn off most multicast, only allowing ARP and NDP or even emulating these for no multicast at all. (Currently working on iOS and Android ZT1 ports.) This also applies to tiny low power embedded devices, and I've had some interest from Internet-of-things experimenters.

There's no write-up on the new algorithm yet, but it's basically sender-side replication with lazy but deterministic gathering. It gathers recipients up to the limit from supernodes and from peers. (In reality supernodes _are_ peers-- they're merely peers designated as such.)

I remember initially passing on that idea since I was afraid it would be too heavy on the sender, but observing real traffic flows shows that _in aggregate_ the multicast traffic load ends up close to the same. Sender-side replication is also inherently fair -- sender pays the price -- so you don't need such heavy signature/verification checks to ensure that somebody can't flood the network. This way it's no easier to flood with multicast than with unicast. (Obviously anyone can DDOS but that's another matter.)

In the longer term I plan to add some support for merging of multicasts going to the same local network or site, but I'm not sure how yet... it's probably going to intersect with R&D work I'm doing right now on enterprise supernode federation for SDN applications and similar stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi,

Basic (newbie) questions:

1\. Once on the network, does one have a conventional IPv4 address ?

2\. What IP address range should one best choose for a small network?

3\. How does this compare (technically and/or practically) to the use of 25.x.x.x addresses by Hamachi ?

Thanks!</comment>


Jaron Lanier: We're Being Enslaved by Free Information - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/networks/jaron-lanier-were-being-enslaved-by-free-information/#.UegFeUa69HU.google_plusone_share <comment><USER2> Never much love for Jaron on threads like this. Personally, I find his argument makes sense and he is consistent with himself - at least since he switched sides. Let me try to contextualise his main thesis. As technologists, we are Cultural Revolutionaries - elsewhere he decries digital Maoism. As such we tend to be blind to the effects of the technological changes we champion. We see the positive side, because for us, it is positive. Yet there is a negative aspect which is greater. This is insidious and universal. In much the same way as pollution which, given the pace of development, was barely even acknowledged as a problem until the 1960s. The damage is done not at point of dispersion, rather toxicity is increasing in the general environment. He says the nature of the toxicity this time is the erosion of a traditional economy in which most people used to come out ahead. The cause of this is the centralisation of economic power as a necessary consequence of current information architectures. Next, he hypothesises a solution. He wants to make it market-based and since this is an information management problem, the hypothetical solution is architectural changes. He does not go into how this might work technically, but he provides a high level specification of sorts. If this were another thread on HN, some of us might begin to start filling in possible design solutions. Unfortunately, I don't see it happening here. Hope to be proven wrong though.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you came to the comments to check whether this is worth your time: it isn't. Incoherent vaguely malthusian rambling dressed up with technobabble.

<comment><USER4> I wish I read this before I read the whole article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure Jaron's ideas are coherent, but as usual, there's enough coherence here to provide some hefty food for thought. Some interesting ideas, which may or not be things Jaron is trying to say:

* Externalizing risk is a killer strategy for limited-liability corporations, since they can privatize their gains and socialize their bankruptcies, and really for whoever can get away with it; and many more people can get away with it with sufficient compute power. (He uses Maxwell's Demon and the Landau limit as a simile for this, but I'm not convinced that's productive either for producing new insights that are likely to be true or for helping people understand his point.)

* Contributions to social networks and commons-based peer production (Linux, Wikipedia, Facebook) are distributed in a sort of crudely Gaussian way, but value extraction from them is instead distributed in a fat-tailed winner-take-all distribution, which will destroy the middle class.

* We are moving our core engines of value production out of the economy. Jaron thinks this is bad, while I think it's way overdue.

* Jaron seems to be arguing that universal computers, which can trivially copy information and keep the fact that you have a copy of it secret from other people, are incompatible with any semblance of democracy. This is an interesting proposition, but it seems dubious to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> He is basically arguing that information cannot be free in the future because of the need for an information economy to replace the economy of goods and services that will soon be produced by AI/ML and automatons.

He argues that AI/ML create successful business (e.g. insurance providers which can use algorithms to ensure they only provide their service to those least likely to need it) that essentially radiate the risk out to society and, ultimately, society cannot absorb the risk.

I found this part about democracy and spying interesting:

        And so you can't have democracy in a highly evolved
        information society if information is free. You just
        can't. I mean, because you'll be giving the government
        an infinite spying license. And it might sound like an
        odd idea, but I hope once you roll it over in your
        brain, you'll start to see that it's just a very simple
        and sensible idea.

While the ideas he presents are interesting, that may be all they are. It is difficult to imagine them being played out in real life.

<comment><USER7> And he is saying that you have a society where leaders are misusing that information for personal gain rather than an alternative where with an abundance of information you have systems that make decisions for us and we skip "elected leaders"?

I am not naive, it is just early in the morning and I am asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Jaron Lanier needs to take an Econ class.

</comment><comment><USER9> Some remarks about the article:

1\. you can't make information always for pay - why? - because it costs nothing to copy it and it's cheap to store terabytes of it

2\. it is impossible to monitor all copying and make payments for everything - imagine how intrusive this kind of monitoring would be and how much overhead

3\. the idea that everyone should have an unique online identity for tracking and payments is stupid - we'd lose all privacy, even as little as we have left; we don't want to be like China where you need to show your ID at the internet cafe

4\. Yes, there is a problem with "power law distributions" of content like Google and App Store, but that needs to be changed by allowing customization, making of lists, and aggregation - I appreciate this insight

My rant on the subject:

I think he is fighting the future. Instead of total tracking and micropayments for everything, why don't we make a flat copyright tax and distribute it by popularity of content? It would be so much less overhead - we only need to track the number of views and divide.

Instead of trying to maintain monetization as it was in the past, into the future, why not embrace free culture and go ahead with basic human income? People create for love a creation too, not just for money. I'd say the best creations are works of love, not just works for money.

His power-law vs bell-curve insight is great but I think I got one that is even better (contains his insight and goes deeper still): we need to apply two criteria for improving society

1\. differentiation - we need to maximize it by empowering creativity; why should we all see the same news? that would make for a monoculture. Instead, we should to pick and choose our feeds, each one of us differently. Similarly, we're better off with unique skills, unique perspectives on life and technology, and so on. We should encourage the variety.

2\. integration - this is complementary to the 1st. The idea is that people need to be brought together to communicate, travel, make commerce and so on. As long as we are integrated, the system self regulates and can better cope with problems.

An anecdote: what is the difference between Facebook and Reddit? I'd say that the main difference is network topology; FB works by keeping you in your bubble of "friends" while reddit always exposes you to new people, on every page - that makes for better integration. The ability to subscribe/unsubscribe from subreddis improves personalization. Also, the comment history makes each user differentiated because the user will reply to different people. That's why we have such a higher level of creativity and participation in reddit compared to FB, that's why people get involved in deeper, more thoughtful discussions on reddit - it has more differentiation and integration.

Disclosure: I didn't invent this integration-differentiation idea. It comes from Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness (I reused the concepts on society instead of the brain). This is a video presenting the theory: [http://vimeo.com/53787308](http://vimeo.com/53787308)

<comment><USER2> >> 1\. you can't make information always for pay - why? - because it costs nothing to copy it and it's cheap to store terabytes of it.

If you changed the word information to data, I'd agree with you. We cannot hope to build an economy on top of charging money for the following: "I am going to the pub with Dave tonight". That data string, once released is never coming back. But, assuming we are not yet living in a panopticon, you don't know which pub nor which Dave. If you really want that information my authoritative interpretation will cost you. This seemingly minor nitpick helps us towards designing a solution to Jaron's problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this bit very interesting, and it _seems_ insightful to me; if I'm mistaken, and this is utter horseshit for some reason, I'd love to hear why.

 _So what I'm proposing is that finance, and indeed consumer Internet companies and all kinds of other people using giant computers, are trying to become Maxwell's demons in an information network. The easiest way to understand it is to think about an insurance company. So an American health insurance company, before big computing came along, would hire actuaries to set rates. But the idea of, on a person-by-person basis, attempting to decide who should be in the plan so that you could only insure the people who need it the least on an individual basis, that wasn't really viable. But with big computing and the ability to compute huge correlations with big data, it becomes irresistible. And so what you do is you start to say, "I'm going to..." — you're like Maxwell's demon with the little door — "I'm going to let the people who are cheap to insure through the door, and the people who are expensive to insure have to go the other way until I've created this perfect system that's statistically guaranteed to be highly profitable."

And so what's wrong with that is that you can't ever really get ahead. What you're really doing then is you're radiating waste heat. I mean, for yourself you've created this perfect little business, but you've radiated all the risk, basically, to the society at large. And if the society was infinitely large and could absorb it, it would work. There's nothing intrinsically faulty about your scheme except for the assumption that the society can absorb the risk. And so what we've seen with big computing in finance is a repeated occurrence of people using a big computer to radiate risk away from themselves until the society can't absorb it. And then there's some giant bailout and some huge breakage. And so it happened with Long-Term Capital [Management] in the '90s. It happened with Enron, and we saw a repeat of it in the events leading to the Great Recession in the late aughts. And we'll just see it happening again and again until it's recognized that this pattern is just not sustainable._

Ignore all that stuff about "information" for a second, and focus on "outsourcing risk" \-- I'm not saying that's a new thing to say, but how is it not true, and how is it not, uhh, vaguely important?

</comment><comment><USER11> " _So, yes, they [government] must pay. And the reason that'll be enforced is because lawyers and accountants will be on their ass. And just to answer some obvious things, yeah, if they have a specific criminal investigation, they don't have to tell the people in advance that they're getting paid, because that would reveal it. Yeah, that would be under court order; that should be an exception, as it always has to be in a democracy. They will not be able to do omni spying anymore. They won't be able to spy in advance without people knowing they're being spied on, because the people will get money, and that's proper. It is actually a totally reasonable solution._ "

So government will _have_ to pay us for the data that they are getting for free from companies that are getting it for free? What would that even look like and how would we get there from where we are now (Gov threatens companies to fork over information they get for free from users)? And there's no mention of free encryption services that are starting to emerge…

Idk, he starts out talking about current issues, then tries to put perspective on it by referencing 19th and 20th century issues, ideas and their implementations (at this point I'm thinking "hmm, maybe there is a pattern he is going to point out that could give us insight on how we could at least be in the frame of mind to approach the issues"), and then tries to connect that to what is going on now by vaguely identifying one issue, placing it in a vacuum separated from the issues hes brought up before, and then makes the claim above. I'm lost, but maybe there's something in this direction…</comment>