Trump announces plans to privatize US air traffic control system - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-06-05/trump-endorses-controversial-u-s-air-traffic-spinoff-proposal <comment><USER2> A monolithic private institution doesn't inspire confidence in me any more than a monolithic public one. I don't see the purpose in switching one for the other, and would probably rather see it run by the government.

If it was replacing the current system with one where you had 12 different companies competing with one another, maybe so but I don't really see the benefit in what I'm reading. But I don't feel strongly about it.

What worries me the most about this in some ways is how it seems to be focused on the large airlines and not on passengers and private pilots. This is the current trend that disturbs me the most about Trump and the GOP: they seem pretty blatantly to be representing large corporations and their own party rather than the public at large. The assumption seems to be that what benefits the fat cats is what benefits everyone.

I'm not anti-large-corporation per se, but a big part of the reason for democracy is to protect the average person.

I don't really see any arguments here other than "it makes the airlines happy." As if they needed more latitude.

<comment><USER3> > A monolithic private institution doesn't inspire confidence in me any more > than a monolithic public one. I don't see the purpose in switching one for > the other, and would probably rather see it run by the government.

Indeed; this is why almost all "let's privatize _X_ " initiatives are ultimately pointless (or perhaps even counterproductive). They merely shift the monopoly-holder from public-sector to private-sector, without alleviating the "there is a monopoly" status. Indeed, the private sector's legendary efficiency advantage specifically occurs when there is _competition_ , and is not some magical thing that is endowed to the private sector and forbidden from the public sector.

<comment><USER4> In some circumstances

> the private sector's legendary efficiency advantage

is in fact:

      the private sector's _mythical_ efficiency advantage

<comment><USER3> Right; my point is that your "some" circumstances are _precisely_ those under which there is no competitive pressure.

<comment><USER3> (Which is to say, the private sector very much _does_ have an efficiency advantage when there is a competitive market. Because only then is everyone in that market personally motivated, by the "vice" of greed, to be virtuously efficient. The only exception is what some people call a "monopoly par excellence"; a firm without competitors which nevertheless acts as though it has them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My guess is that he has some personal vendetta against them for something that happened causing him to be delayed 5 minutes on his private jet.

<comment><USER6> The personal vendetta, while probably true on some level, seems too easy of an answer. This is one of many privatization initiatives this administration is going to take.

The focus initially will be to find government run agencies that can be profitable in the private sector. Think in terms of toll roads/bridges for infrastructure, air traffic control and student loans to name a few. Whether or not if privatization is the right answer is debateable but it is probably going to happen in one form or another.

The question is: Who will benefit by owning these companies? Look to the privatization of the USSR as a worst possible outcome. Large former government run industries given to private ownership that instantly created a strong oligarchy class.

How well has democracy worked in Russia since that happened?

<comment><USER7> > How well has democracy worked in Russia since that happened?

It's worked great for the oligarchs! I honestly think the Republican party sees that as the ideal outcome: create a strong kleptocratic class that can use their wealth to perpetuate Republican control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't a lot of the expense of government run programs come from the retirement benefits? The government assumes the risk (pension) instead of the employee (401K).

As an aside, according to a controller I know, a lot of FAA employees are retiring soon and at about the same time. A large cohort of controllers were hired about the same time to replace the fired striking PATCO [1] controllers in the early 80's.

[1] PATCO Professional Air Traffic Controllers

<comment><USER9> Yep, lots of the current controllers are retiring right now, and even more have their 20 years and could retire before the mandatory retirement age of 56 if things change in a way that makes it not in their best interest to keep working.

I'm currently part of a hiring wave meant to replace those controllers. Around 1400 people are being hired in my bid alone. ATC has been my get-out-of- software plan, but depending how things shake out, if the compensation doesn't stay the same for newcomers, I expect I'll have to run back to software. I'm a little concerned that this new private entity will compensate the old timers to keep them on and keep the union on board, and throw newcomers under the bus for the sake of 'efficiency', which would keep things running short-term, and leave them with a sudden lack of talent in five or ten years. But I'm not an expert on how these things turn out, just highly cynical about a private corp's ability to think long-term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Why_. I don't get this at all. Why privatize? What is the benefit? All I see this doing is decreasing safety.

<comment><USER11> Private organizations are more efficient than governmental ones. Ideally the way they are managed/regulated will remain the same. It would be really neat to see some innovation here as well, with governmental agencies there really isn't an incentive to break the status quo.

edit: If you're downvoting at least comment with why you think this isn't the case

<comment><USER12> There is a reason that air traffic is tightly controlled, primarily there is massive public risk for minimal errors.

There is a saying that the FARs are written in blood, as in regulations aren't passed willy-nilly, but passed after there has been a serious incident.

Air traffic is one place where "Iterate quickly and break shit" doesn't work. What happens when in the name of "efficiency", one tower reduces current safety limits because "99% of the time these are unnecessary", then the one time it actually was necessary, you've got two jets about to make a head-on collision, or one quickly changes course, loses control, and crash-lands into a town.

There are absolutely improvments that can be made with the FAA, but privatizing ATC is definitely not one of them.

<comment><USER13> I find the proposal suspect, but this seems like fear-mongering. Planes are already built and operated by private companies, yet I don't see them "iterating quickly and breaking shit". Of course the FARs have much to do with that, but it's not like they'll stop existing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Donald Trump on Monday unveiled his proposal to hand over control of the > U.S. air-traffic control system to a non-profit corporation, calling the > current system an antiquated mess that doesn't work and wastes money.

Did someone point out to this idiot that we are having a string of years where there are no deaths in domestic commercial travel. Whatever is happening in the US Traffic System appears to be working really well.

I also think that president holds a person vendetta against the FAA because it told him he could not land his plane somewhere or an air traffic controller delayed him by a couple of minutes.

<comment><USER15> These people are not being fired, just being transferred to a new company. I believe they will continue to perform at the same level. And with a non-gov entity we also get the benefit of optimal resource allocation. A win-win for everyone. Only reason of opposing this would be personal vendetta against Trump.

<comment><USER13> _with a non-gov entity we also get the benefit of optimal resource allocation_

How do you figure?

<comment><USER15> Not referencing a whole field dedicated to this. Just sharing an anecdote. My father works for a government mining company. His job is that of a translator. Now no one use the language he was supposed to translate from. So he goes to office does some stuff and come backs home. We get govt housing and energy, medical (children till 25 and employees parent till death, two paid yearly holidays for the whole family.

<comment><USER13> And it pains you that the mine isn't privatized so that the new CEO can fire your father and buy himself an extra yacht?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I would have liked to find a source other than the Cato institute for it ([https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-pursues-air-traffic- control-...](https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-pursues-air-traffic-control- reform)):

 _The airlines are for it, the key labor union is for it, aviation experts are for it, and the second-largest nation on earth did it. Canada privatized its system in 1996, and today the nonprofit Nav Canada is on the leading edge of ATC efficiency and innovation._

<comment><USER17> Ah, yes, Cato Institute, that paragon of unbiased, reality-based thought.

/s

<comment><USER16> Indeed . . . that is why I would have preferred another source. I have read very similar things from better sources, but I was not able to find them, today.

EDIT: Here is one from the Economist from last year describing NAV Canada in favourable terms as compared to the FAA.: [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2170347...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21703477-americas-antiquated-air-traffic-control-system-hindering- safety-sky-navigating)

And the Wall Street Journal (paywalled): [https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s- canadian-air-traffic-contro...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-canadian-air- traffic-control-compared-1467219369)

And the Financial Post (part of Canada's National Post): [http://business.financialpost.com/news/transportation/u-s- lo...](http://business.financialpost.com/news/transportation/u-s-looks-to- canadian-model-as-it-debates-air-traffic-control-privatization)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are already ATC towers that are operated by private companies, so in a way, this is just accelerating the existing trend.

That said, if it ain't broke, why bother trying to "fix" it? US air is the safest in the world, it's rules are literally written in blood. This is one area, where I'd like to see less, not more, privatization.

Safety, and not profit (or cost-reduction), should be the driving incentive for something so critical, and so fault-sensitive.

</comment><comment><USER19> I caught a snippet of his comments, complaining about managing "thousands of flights" using "slips of paper".

It's been a few years, but I recall reading at least one article wherein was described how those slips of paper actually made a lot of sense. (It may have been one of the articles that made the rounds, describing the surprising endurance and resilience of paper-based work.)

The slips of paper supported both regular and immediate, ad hoc workflows as they were needed. Also, paper is immune to systems failures. Your electronic board goes down -- you still have all your flights at hand. Start spacing them and shoving incoming traffic into wider holding patterns.

</comment><comment><USER20> Judging by how the privatization of rail traffic in the UK worked out - terrible idea!

<comment><USER21> The UK's privatised air-traffic system is a model studied Worldwide; the stakeholders include a group of seven airlines, yet it remains non-partisan and is amongst the most efficient globally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Outside of NavCanada, does anyone know if there are any other private entities that manage ATC?

<comment><USER16> From the Economist ([http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2170347...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21703477-americas-antiquated-air-traffic-control-system-hindering- safety-sky-navigating)):

 _Over the past couple of decades more than 50 countries, including Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, have privatised (or at least "commercialised") their ATC services, . . ._

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm cautious to say this is a good idea, but I'm also optimistic the private sector would be more efficient than the public sector.

<comment><USER24> When did we decide efficiency was the goal of air traffic control? I want the thing to be effective and reliable, efficiency is way down the list here.

<comment><USER11> Right, but part of efficiency improvements would probably include some level of automation, which would be more safe in the end.

<comment><USER25> lot of hedging there.

What you're referring to is a _research_ project, not a deployable one.

I agree it's worth researching. Common industrial research grants with a mixture of government and private funding can perform the research and develop it.

And those improvements may be deployed to the sector whether it's private or not. There's no need to pre-emptively privatize the industry to perform R & D.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CircleCI security incident - <AUTHOR> http://status.circleci.com/ <comment><USER3> Is there any evidence there has been a breach of CircleCI directly, or just that MongoHQ suspended all access to their database(s) and so the service went down?

At this point it doesn't seem like they were 'hacked'[0], but simply involved in a larger security incident.

[EDIT] seems the linked page doesn't mention 'hacked' anywhere (literally - <USER2> searched for it!) Seems like the title[0] is a classic case of editorialising

[EDIT 2] As per below, would be very interested to see if their database being 'compromised' means that data was actually accessed by the attackers, or if they are just fall out from the bigger attack

[0] original submitted title was "CircleCI has been hacked"

<comment><USER4> >We are contacting you to inform you of an ongoing security incident affecting CircleCI customers, as a result of the compromise of our database ([http://security.mongohq.com/notice](http://security.mongohq.com/notice)).

Seems like a 'security incident' is code for 'hacked'.

<comment><USER3> I think I agree with you, however there is a big difference between having your service stopped as a precaution and having data lost/accessed by a 3rd party.

From that line it does seem more likely that they might be one of MongoHQ's clients who MongoHQ noticed had had their data accessed as part of the bigger breach.

In that context, saying they have been hacked is probably fair. Would love more details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Up next: CircleCI customer announces data breach due to tokens accessed via the CircleCI breach (via the MongoHQ breach).

<comment><USER6> This is very likely. I'd guess that the likely target was a MongoHQ customer, and that MongoHQ getting hacked was collateral damage as part of an attempt on one of their users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why I'm so mindful about using third-party services that require access to our code to perform their service. It's not that I don't trust the third-parties not to abuse their power, but by trusting them with my code, I also have to trust their security measures.

As such, I always very carefully weigh the benefits such a service can provide against how much work it would be to do it myself (which will likely produce a shittier result, but which will be fully under my control).

It's not even that I think I can do security better than $SERVICE, but I'm a much smaller target. I'm not as afraid of a targeted attack than I'm afraid of somebody compromising one of these focal points and then just lifting everything.

</comment><comment><USER8> Quick theoretical senario...

User signs up to try circleci for a private project of theirs. Grants read access to their private repos via github oauth

User also has many other private repos (company they work for, open source projects, forks, etc)

Could they have used the stored github credentials from circleci to clone every private repo in full the user had access to?

<comment><USER9> Github has a feature to allow access to a singular repository via a key. It would be logical for CircleCI to use that feature, although I'm not sure they actually did.

[https://help.github.com/articles/managing-deploy- keys#deploy...](https://help.github.com/articles/managing-deploy-keys#deploy- keys)

<comment><USER10> They did not.

<comment><USER11> They did, Circle-CI client here.

Info have a Circle-CI deploy key per private repository (which I will revoke).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am contemplating whether MongoHQ should just post their customer list, so their customers' customers know what to expect?

I know that's not exactly proper but... at this point, the hackers are way ahead of the users of sites that happen to depend on MongoHQ.

<comment><USER13> That could be irresponsible as a company which uses MongoDB for non-sensitive data (say data in publicly available pages) would be shamed when they didn't have a data breach of sensitive data. Or worse, a company that has signed-up but only played around with MongoHQ without using it in production. Each company should announce its own breach (and the scope of the data exploited) to its customers.

<comment><USER12> I understand all the implications you mention, and that's why I phrased it the way I did.

Though, the assumption I'm making right now is that the hackers know exactly what sites they've compromised. The longer they have this information in advance of MongoHQ's customers' customers, they more damage they can do. That sucks terribly for those people (potentially)

All this said, a serious lesson about PaaS/SaaS/DBaaS--whatever you want to call it--has been learned today.

[edit] - I'm reminded here of the Epsilon breach. Epsilon is magnitudes larger than MongoHQ and they apparently did decide to announce the names of affected companies. I am not sure how they handled that internally. [1]

[1] - [http://mashable.com/2011/04/03/epsilon- hacked/](http://mashable.com/2011/04/03/epsilon-hacked/)

<comment><USER14> In Epsilon's case those end users had direct consequences - their names and emails were compromised.

The end users of sites/apps/services using MongoHQ are probably unaffected in many cases since "a database" doesn't imply credit cards or even credentials or emails. The average database is probably just holding content for a site or app.

In probably close to all cases the end users would have no clue how they may be affected since they won't know what's in the databases, or what a database is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of the reasons why we have shutdown our own CI solution. We didn't have enough manpower to develop the product, audit the whole stack and monitor against attacks.

CircleCI's response to the incident appear adequate. In the best case, their system was shutdown before any keys were compromised. If so, that level of monitoring is certainly better than what the average business would be able to roll on their own.

</comment><comment><USER4> from the page:

Identified - We have notified all users and recommended appropriate action:

"We are contacting you to inform you of an ongoing security incident affecting CircleCI customers, as a result of the compromise of our database ([http://security.mongohq.com/notice](http://security.mongohq.com/notice)).

We are taking aggressive action to protect your data and systems. At this time, we have suspended all CircleCI account access, and all builds & workers have been suspended. In addition we have revoked all access to Heroku and GitHub OAuth tokens and API keys uploaded to CircleCI.

We do not yet know the scope and impact of the intrusion and are therefore treating this event as if all data has been compromised. While we have no evidence that these credentials have been compromised, we urge you to revoke the following:

SSH keys that were uploaded to CircleCI API tokens added to CircleCI as environment variables secrets stored in GitHub repositories We will be keeping you informed at [http://status.circleci.com](http://status.circleci.com) and will update you at regular intervals as the situation progresses.

We deeply regret that this has happened and are working around the clock to resolve this incident and protect your data and systems." 22:25 PDT Update - We are still investigating the issue. The full team is engaged and we are working with upstream providers to diagnose and respond to the issue, and protect all of our users. We will keep you informed. 21:17 PDT Update - We are currently investigating an ongoing issue with our database service. At this time, we have suspended all account access to our service. All builds & workers have been suspended. We will have another update in the next 30 minutes. 20:20 PDT Investigating - "CircleCI is experiencing technical problems. We're investigating and should have an update within 30 minutes." 19:30 PDT

<comment><USER16> I'm curious why they mention uploaded SSH keys. I presume they mean cases where SSH keypairs have been uploaded? The public key is _public_ , and in fact anyone can use the github API to pull the verified public keys for any user in the system, [http://developer.github.com/v3/users/keys/](http://developer.github.com/v3/users/keys/). If there is code uploaded with private keys in it, then it's likely there are other security problems in the organization.

<comment><USER17> Because CircleCI stores private keys for the sake of deploying to your servers when your build passes.

It's separate from your actual codebase having any private keys, which I agree would be a Really Bad Thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it's more like MongoHQ is compromised and consequently, circleci is affected than 'circle has been hacked'.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://security.mongohq.com/notice](http://security.mongohq.com/notice) So this really is mongohq's fault... Demonstrates the dangerous domino effect if you think of all the code/keys/secrets...

nightmares will be had.

</comment><comment><USER20> Since circleCI users upload the private heroku SSH keys to automate deploys, how hard would it be for the intruders to get access to the environment variables stored in heroku?

</comment><comment><USER21> Cache to their homepage: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1oo0VIR...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1oo0VIRO6iAJ:https://circleci.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER22> Customers: stripe, Red Bull, Kickstarter.. and MongoHQ. How meta. This hack could get a lot more interesting depending on how much code they could have obtained from those companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I started testing out CircleCI a bit ago and this really doesn't help seal the deal for me. What am I supposed to do now? CircleCI was connected to my github account...are my SSH keys not safe now? If so, not clear on what I'm supposed to do.

<comment><USER24> Revoke the CircleCI key that you added to your repo on Github. In the worst case scenario, that key has been compromised and could be used to access your source code.

<comment><USER23> I didn't create a new SSH key...I just used my public rsa one. I should just delete that key and create a new one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there any general sense of the techniques being used in these cracks? Just from a defensive coding perspective, I'd like to know if there are programming errors, weak links in frameworks, or what.

<comment><USER3> If you read MongoHQ's extremely detailed report[0], you'll see that the original intrusion was based on shared credentials (that were cracked on another system). This was then exploited in a number of ways to compromise various clients of MongoHQ.

Lots more discussion over at [1].

The main takeaway is to take security seriously, and employ multiple levels of security. The MongoHQ team are doing things like 2 factor auth, and restricting customer service tools to a vpn. As far as I can see, no framework or coding bugs.

[0] [http://security.mongohq.com/notice](http://security.mongohq.com/notice)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637426)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh boy, another MongoHQ casualty. I wonder where the fallout will end...

<comment><USER27> You think this was a casualty, or the whole reason?

<comment><USER26> Well they also used Buffer's data for spamming, so it's hard to say whether one or the other was targeted or opportunistically attacked.

CircleCI is certainly the more interesting target as they have access to numerous companies' source code.

<comment><USER28> >access to...source code

How much do you think that is worth on the black market?

<comment><USER29> Honestly, not much.

You might be able to find a few vulnerabilities... maybe some good ones, maybe some hard coded keys, but about that's all.

Having a companies code doesn't mean you can make a successful business out of it. Especially if they are already established as a major player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> any suspicions on who might be behind these attacks?

was the buffer spamming incident just a way to deflect attention of something more sophisticated?

I wonder if anyone used the keys stored in circleci to get to the code of some service and if we'll see even bigger hacking news in the near future

</conspiracy>

</comment><comment><USER31> if you're using stripe, make sure to recycle those keys if you have them checked into your repo

<comment><USER32> Better yet, if they are checked in, rotate them and _don 't_ check in the new keys. Make them an environment variable instead.</comment></comment>


Case against Microsoft, Yahoo spam filters chucked from court - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/08/25/case-against-microsoft-yahoo-spam-filters-chucked-from-court/

<comment><USER2> This is a case of the legal system working the way it should. Had the decision gone the other way and been upheld, it probably would have meant that ISPs could not do spam filtering. Most people would then be getting thousands of pieces of spam a day.</comment>


Set Bing's photo of the day as your desktop's wallpaper, Automatically – Windows - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/guptarohit/bing-wallpaper/ <comment><USER2> I myself have wanted this, but there's no way that I would run an exe like this without knowing what's in it!

<comment><USER3> there are apps on the windows store that do the same. Why'd you want to use an exe?

<comment><AUTHOR> is windows store available on windows 7?</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Merry Christmas - <AUTHOR> I wish you all a Merry Christmas! <comment><USER2> And to you giosch!

Wow 2016 has been an interesting year! Especially for us Brits/Europeans and Americans. Looks like 2017 will be a big year also.

I just wanted to thank everyone who has made valued contributions to Hacker News this year. I love to read the comments as I almost always learn something. I hope you have a fun and safe end to 2016 and a happy and healthy 2017.

<comment><USER3> Which makes me wonder if the year wasn't just as interesting for (example) our Chinese friends, but that we just don't focus on their news?

But yeah, European me feels like we've had quite the spectacle this year.

Merry christmas to all my fellow tech-enthousiasts, here's to pushing the world to an even crazier ride in 2017!

<comment><USER4> As a South African I would like to tip my hat to both America and Brit, you surprised even us this year. Welcome to the club.

<comment><USER5> Hey from a fellow saffer

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Merry Christmas! My holiday message of hope (repost from [http://www.generalstore.co/hope.html](http://www.generalstore.co/hope.html)).

As I look around my little Bay Area town, and especially my Facebook and Instashrams, I am struck by how fortunate we all are.

We do live and 'like' in our own snow globe of good tidings ~where everyone is warm, everyone is well fed, and the love of friends and family flows as easily as the wine. So today, my wish and message of hope, is for all of us to pause. ... While we celebrate, let's pause to reflect, to consider and to act. Let's all extend an extra hand this Christmas, Hanukkah and into the New Year.

Whether it's a hand, a dollar, an ear or a smile, what you are truly giving is hope~ a star in the east to follow. Wishing you and yours every happiness and good fortune. Peace and peace of mind and God's blessing..

Feliz Navidad Prospero Año y Felicidad Happy Hanukkah Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays,

-sthommes Founder & CEO at Rainbow

"More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization- is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." -Einstein

</comment><comment><USER7> Merry Christmas HN. This is my first Christmas here, and hopefully not my last. Right now I'm in London, celebrating my birthday as well as Christmas.

Have a brilliant day guys.

</comment><comment><USER8> Best wishes for Christmas!

And one question to reflect on: why can we build compilers, operating systems, and distributed databases, while we can't find the basic rules of an economy that is well-performing, yet fair to every participant, now and in the future?

<comment><USER9> Requirements issue: Because everyone's definition of "fair" is different.

Implementation issue: Designing for wildly complex system of systems with thousands of interdependent and independent variables, with known unknowns, and unknown unknowns is effectively impossible. We can't even parse HTML with 100% accuracy.

Debugging issue: When there are issues, who do you trust to have "root" to debug and fix it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Merry Christmas from Africa. It is 15:07hrs as I type this. Family napping and I am on HN :-).

</comment><comment><USER11> Merry Christmas everyone. I hope that 2017 will be a happier year!

</comment><comment><USER12> Merry Christmas from a Muslim here. Hope 2k17 is gonna be a better year for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER13> Merry Christmas! (Are we allowed to say that? Jk

<comment><USER14> Hey, the word holiday still means "holy day." Always useful to bring up whenever someone is in a tiff over "Merry/Happy Christmas!" versus "Happy Holidays!".

<comment><USER15> I never knew that, thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Merry christmas to all celebrating today :-)

</comment><comment><USER17> Merry Christmas to all!

[http://bit.ly/2hebBbl](http://bit.ly/2hebBbl)

</comment><comment><USER18> Merry Christmas to all of you!

Have an amazing day ahead, everyone.

To those not celebrating Christmas, happy holidays to you. The wish is applicable to you too :-)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm offended. ;)

Seriously though, may God grant us all wisdom, grace, and compassion -- this holiday season and beyond.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes, merry christmas!

</comment><comment><USER21> Merry Christmas everyone! Been a great year personally.

</comment><comment><USER22> Came for the tech news, stayed for the feels.

Merry Christmas!

</comment><comment><USER23> Merry Christmas to the HN community :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Merry Christmas!

<comment><USER24> From Venezuela

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

</comment><comment><USER26> Merry Christmas everybody. :)

</comment><comment><USER27> A Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah and general good holidays to everybody.

</comment><comment><USER28> Merry Christmas, everyone!

</comment><comment><USER29> Merry Christmas everyone!

</comment><comment><USER30> Merry Christmas :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Merry Christmas!

</comment><comment><USER32> Merry Christmas to all.

</comment><comment><USER33> happy holidays and a better 2017

</comment><comment><USER34> Merry Christmas :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Merry Techno-Christmas, mah ninja geeks!

</comment><comment><USER33> happy holidays

</comment><comment><USER36> And an happy Saturnalia!

</comment><comment><USER37> Merry Christmas!

</comment><comment><USER38> Hacky Holidays!

</comment><comment><USER39> Happy Festivus (a tad late, I know).

</comment><comment><USER40> Merry Christmas וחג חנוכה שמח.

</comment><comment><USER41> merry mutherfucking xmas from s to the weden. Stay G (enerous)

</comment><comment><USER42> Merry Tiffmas!

</comment><comment><USER43> Merry Christmas bros</comment>


Ask HN: Which mail server would you choose to develop your product on top of it? - <AUTHOR>

I am willing to build an email application which runs on the server side.
Not being familiar with any particular server I wonder if I can get some recommendations based on experience.
I have seen many great startups which built some neat apps on the email platform (for instance, friendfeed's notification mechanism, or surely posterous which mail is at the heart of their business logic), and wonder about which mail server have they found easy to learn and integrate with.
thanks in advance,
Tzury <comment><USER2> Postfix has a simple configuration syntax and supports SQL backends.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about programming on top of it, such as triggering incoming/outgoing messages and manipulating them externally?

Does it provide an easy to use API?

<comment><USER2> Have you never done anything mail related on UNIX at all?

Outgoing -> Submit mail via SMTP or call local sendmail binary.

Incoming -> Create account programmatically and handle delivery however you want</comment></comment></comment>


NASA Sending a Rocket to The Sun - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120702210231.htm

<comment><USER2> The title is plain wrong - they are launching a sounding rocket to observe the sun - observation time ~7 mins.</comment>


Big Julie - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/04/big-julie <comment><USER2> Caesar destroyed the republic by persuading the populares that his interests would be their salvation.

<comment><USER3> Sounds eerily familiar

<comment><USER4> It's the Democratic party line, and that of others too, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hero worship at its greatest.</comment>


Indragie Karunaratne - Blog - 1, 2, Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://blog.indragie.com/post/1-2-open-source <comment><AUTHOR> Two opposite thoughts reading this article (I was Sonora user since its 1.0 beta version till current 2.0 beta):

1) Their decision gives another cool project open source as TextMate 2. On the other side iTunes 11 seems to take a lot from Sonora application and all iTunes users win from it. 2) Corporations copy key ideas of small developer groups and such developers aren't protected from losing their revenue.</comment>


If Waffle House Is Closed, It's Time to Panic - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/if-waffle-house-is-closed-its-time-to-panic/ <comment><USER2> Nate Silver just called breakfast for scattered, smothered, and covered.

<comment><USER3> Nit: post is by Maryn McKenna. Nate has built up quite a team for 538.</comment></comment>


Intel x86s hide another CPU that can take over your machine - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2016/06/15/intel-x86-processors-ship-with.html <comment><USER2> > Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control > mechanism...

Recent is overflowingly unhelpful, considering AMT (a part of IME) popped up in ICH7 back in mid-2005 [0]. It is unfortunate that Doctorow is associated with this rubbish journalism.

For what its worth, anything that has DMA can takeover a CPU that is reading instructions from RAM. AMT/IME are just explicitly intended to do that.

For those concerned, and probably rightly so, about AMT/IME, the simplest solution is to use a non-Intel NIC [1]

[0] = [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Controller_Hub#ICH7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Controller_Hub#ICH7)

[1] = [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-vpro- technol...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-vpro-technology- faq) ["Intel Active Management Technology communicates only through the onboard network interface of Intel vPro technology. Additional wired network interface cards are not supported and are ignored by Intel AMT."]

</comment><comment><USER3> many computers these days have lojack. which can do any of this stuff without a dedicated cpu. i have a dell that somehow magically had lojack turned on and you could call lojack and they could not turn it off. so... we're already owned. everything is owned. most of your time is owned. most of your money is owned. and so on. and that's how it is and will be for the foreseeable future.</comment>


Manager of $242.7 billion fund calls Facebook a bubble - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/PIMCO/status/203502027718918144 <comment><USER2> We'll see how the rest of the day goes, but in a bubble environment, if my memory serves me well, stocks shoot up on IPO, bringing related stocks along with it.

At least as of 13:02 EST, casino-type speculation seems pretty muted. For these first few hours, the market has seemed level-headed.</comment>


Dutch spy agency investigating alleged Huawei 'backdoor' - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netherlands-huawei-tech/dutch-spy-agency-investigating-alleged-huawei-backdoor-volkskrant-idUSKCN1SM0UY <comment><USER2> Like the Italian Vodaphone backdoor reported by Bloomberg? [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/30/huawei_enterprise_r...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/30/huawei_enterprise_router_backdoor_is_telnet/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, like the Chinese spy chips in Apple and Amazon's computers? [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the- big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how- china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies)

Sensing a pattern?</comment></comment>


Blind mavericks; Why Apple will be the next Sony - <AUTHOR> http://www.joopdorresteijn.com/Archive/blind-mavericks-why-apple-will-be-the-next-sony/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a little complicated, but worth the read!</comment>


An Easy Mode Has Never Ruined a Game - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/an-easy-mode-has-never-ruined-a-game-1833757865 <comment><USER3> Easy mode has ruined games for me.

For example, Metal Slug 3. My steam stats show I used to play it for 100+ hours. Before they added easy mode via infinite continues, I was really enjoying the game. I had to learn how every enemy behaves, where the powerups would drop and plan strategies to beat bosses. Every day I would get a couple steps further into the game and I could have played it for years. There's a great satisfaction and getting better at something and seeing the results.

Then the change came and I completed the game in one afternoon. I didn't care about all the cool enemy setups on later levels, because I could just bomb them, die when I ran out of bombs and then bomb them again after I revive. There was no real challenge.

I never turned that game on after that. Easy mode has ruined it for me.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I follow. I'm assuming the easy mode is something you have to explicitly select or at least have to the option to change to and from. Could you not have simply ignored the option of the easy mode and continued playing the way you had done before?

<comment><USER3> Once the option is there, it's hard to ignore it.

<comment><USER5> That is not a given. Plenty of people ignore easy modes by choice, either because they prefer harder games, or because they sneer at the "plebs" playing "their" games

<comment><USER3> Of course.

The thing is, once the option showed up, I turned it on once to try it. A couple hours later and I beat the whole game. At that moment, I didn't even know the game was ruined for me. It felt nice being able to see all the levels and content.

But a couple days later, when I thought about turning it on, I figured there's no point because I have seen it all.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of playing easy mode.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if part of the problem is the attitude that games are there to be "beaten". That the aim is to beat it, and then you're done.

If games were seen as something to be played and explored rather than beaten, perhaps people would approach them differently and get a lot more out of them, even if they'd already completed a playthrough.

<comment><USER7> I read an opinion piece[0] recently that suggested one of the (many) reasons that No Man's Sky was so poorly received at launch was due to the fact games have commonly been boiled down to constant action and "gotta beat the game" mentality, and that players don't know how to just explore and enjoy games as an open-ended single player experience.

As someone who plays almost exclusively single player games across a vast numbers of genres, I enjoyed No Man's Sky's "exploring and discovering the unknown" game play at launch and have ever since, as they add more and more content.

0: [http://www.thegeeklygrind.com/opinion-no-mans-sky-doesnt- mul...](http://www.thegeeklygrind.com/opinion-no-mans-sky-doesnt-multiplayer- problem-gamers-solitude-problem/)

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure the bigger issue was that it was a very weak simulation, with relatively little interaction. Exploring a simulation/procedural generation is not about getting to view the infinite permutations that randomness gives us — it's to explore the _rules_ that create the simulation, and then to _manipulate_ those rules.

The reason sim city and dwarf fortress are intersting, and NMS and Spore were not, is because the simulation is sufficiently expanded as to be _worth manipulating_ (while of course not being so expanded to hinder understanding your manipulations; this is the craft); whereas NMS and Spore had very trivial rules: they didn't really have any. Which is also why when Dwarf Fortress breaks down, its interesting, while in NMS, it's pathetic.

Note that I'm only referring to NMS on release; though I doubt the simulation has been developed since (I'd bet that the game has since gotten _prettier_ worlds, but not more interesting ones)

Tldr; it was poor simulation/generation game, regardless of whether the current market has ADD

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you consider interaction a core component of a game, affecting all other aspects of the "experience", then _reducing_ that interaction, and level of awareness, time, practice, etc that builds into the experience clearly alters the experience.

Consider the extreme -- play through any given game with a mario super star.. it's difficult to imagine the game experience isn't radically changed.

These kinds of defenses for "easy" modes (that is, easier than the game was designed for) seem to be fundamentally based on the idea that an optimal game is simply a movie with some (perhaps optional) QTE's to keep you from getting bored. But they're not. Clearly not all games get any benefit out of increasing difficulty (most game's difficulty increase amounts to turning everything into bullet sponges -- this rarely alters the experience in any notable fashion), but that hardly means difficulty has no purpose or place.

An easy mode might not ruin the game.. but it may be a worthless mode to have, and one that ruins the player's experience. The souls series would be generally uninteresting if you weren't pushed towards playing careful and meticulously. The DMC series would be generally uninteresting if you weren't pushed towards better and faster (and more stylish) combo'ing. Shadow of the Colossus, BioShock would have absolutely no impact/weight (incidentally, an easy mode has been added I guess to latest remasters). Super Meat Boy wouldn't even be a game anymore.

Imagine never experiencing 100 to 0 pikmin loss! Without that threat, is it even the same class of game?

If you couldn't play them properly, it would probably be a waste of time. Their stories aren't that interesting. They ain't books.

Of course, for many games it doesn't matter. Uncharted series really is just a movie with some QTE events (and QTE events in the fashion of a cover shooter), and difficulty isn't a factor. CRPGs/JRPGs generally have such uninteresting encounters that you could rip out most of the non-roleplaying combat mechanics and still have much the same thing (but you lose that sweet, sweet timesink).

Mass Effect 1 and Star Control 2 barely justify the existence of combat in the first place (reduce the fuel needs in SC2 and you'll radically change its early game however, probably much worse). They can be made easy... but it hardly applies generally. And these are all examples where they can be made easier, because they failed to make any use of their difficulty in the first place.

<comment><USER9> Also adding easy mode retroactively cheapens the experience for those who have invested genuine effort into playing the game so far.

Also there is satisfaction in knowing you beat something that not everyone who bought the game has.

<comment><USER8> I'm of the opinion that these are somewhat pathetic reasons to maintain any kind of design; let them be there, but they're pretty minor. It's not even clear they're emotions worth keeping around.

Anyways, take it away from them, and they'll just find something else to latch their identity to (eg speedrun). Or find it elsewhere. Not a big loss. A small group (actually by definition), a shallow reason, a weak design motivator.

Games are _designed_ , with a particular experience, setting, balance, pacing in mind; if difficulty is part of that design.. then its a part of the design. That's it.

Caveat:

Not all game features are actually part of a design.

Not all games have an intelligible design in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really don't understand the drive to make everything easier. I've never beaten a *souls game because I don't have the skill or patience to do so, and I'm fine with accepting that. Why can't everyone else?

I do wonder if the trend towards casual and mobile gaming has stunted a generation of gamers into being unable to cope when a real challenge of skill or wit appears.

<comment><USER11> Why lock away content that someone purchased just because they aren't talented enough to beat your arbitrary tests? If you wanna play normal mode just do that, I don't see why options are ever a bad thing.

<comment><USER12> Completing a sudoku on software which gives instant correct/incorrect feedback on digits isn't as fun as puzzling it out together. Part of the fun of sudoku is going through the mechanics, fairly.

I've heard the Souls/Bourne games described as "tough but fair". For some games, the idea is that the fun comes from beating challenges from the design of the game mechanics.

Similarly, there's fun to be had from Role Playing Games by not having magical foreknowledge about consequences. Saving, and loading to see how each choice plays out means the dynamic is "how can I get the best?" rather than "what would this person do?".

<comment><USER11> OK you've given me some opinions about why you personally wouldn't use easy mode. What if someone else wants to? Why can't you just push the down arrow and go to normal mode and let the people who want easy mode have an option? Why the gatekeeping?

<comment><USER10> 1) As mentioned in other comments, it would result in significant work to add an easy mode, and the testing required to ensure the game is still balanced on easy would cost (hourly wage of a tester * 40 hours or however long it takes to beat the game * however many test playthroughs to get reasonable coverage) - you could easily get to six figures in cost to add the easy mode.

2) The artistic vision of the games is to be difficult. Why should the developers compromise that for people who are explicitly not in their target audience anyway?

3) As the article says, beating one of these games is somewhat of an exclusive club - difficulty gatekeeping is necessary to preserve that.

I haven't yet seen a valid argument for adding easy mode - they all are based around the assumption that easy should be there, and has been taken away.

I don't buy disability as a reason to add it, considering a quadriplegic man has beaten Sekiro, and the other arguments I've seen are things like "I don't have the time anymore to beat games on full difficulty" which I don't find compelling - the market is full of titles which cater for that.

<comment><USER11> You're saying this like someone's holding the game company at gunpoint and demanding an easy mode. This has always only been about it being ok for a dev to add it if they want. Why are you fighting their choice to do that?

And... You don't think disability is a valid reason to add an easy mode? I hope you see some of the raw shit life has to offer then because that's a message that can only come from a place of very privileged contempt.

<comment><USER9> You can't climb Everest if you are disabled also. So what? Should that mountain be flattened to accommodate everyone.

From software games are hard and it's not like they cheated someone into buying the game, who is not in the target audience.

Disability options that don't affect the design vision are not a problem. But the developer should have the option to choose their market and audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me, it really depends on the kind of game, and why I'm playing it. Some games really are about the challenge. They're meant to be hard, because the game _is_ the challenge. Remove the challenge, and there's no game.

Other games are about the content, the story, and the challenge is preventing you from accessing it.

For example, I play The Witcher on easy mode, but strategy games on hard. I've used save-scumming with some roguelikes, and that tends to ruin them a bit. It's a core feature of roguelikes that you're not supposed to play like that. I'm currently playing CK2 on Iron Man mode (no reloading old saves), which means I'm forced to stick with bad decisions and bad luck, and that makes the game different than I planned, but a lot more interesting; I'm no longer automatically the most successful ruler in the world.

Although in the case of CK2, it does add value that I can also play without Iron Man mode; it allows me to explore alternative histories where I'm more successful than I deserve. But should a game like Pac-Man have an easy mode to allow everybody to finish all levels? I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER14> The entire movie/captioning analogy is off. Language spoken in movies isn't meant to be adversarial but gameplay is. It's just not an accessibility issue. I hate this argument because it feels manipulative. If it's about accessibility and if you still say no, you're a monster.

<comment><USER15> This is a typical strategy of far left media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cheat Engine exists and it's a valid way of "correcting" the difficulty in games. I enjoyed Resident Evil 2 hardcore difficulty but I found the saving limitations weren't up to my tastes so I removed them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh come on. I have only played Dark Souls 1 but it's not even a particularly difficult game. Just look up guides and summon and you can breeze through it.

There's a certain amount of "artistic vision" to a game like Dark Souls and I see no need to compromise that to pander to people not willing to put the effort in (and make no mistake, effort is the only factor at play here). The difficulty is part of the game; if you don't like it, you just don't like the game. Don't play it, don't demand it to pander to you.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just please make clear what mode/difficulty level the creators intended me to play.

</comment><comment><USER19> I find that every few weeks a new game that is going to require an entire year of my life comes out. I have carved out about 1 hour 2-3 days a weeknight in which to play and every few weeks I get a Saturday or Sunday. I like to have the option of easy mode during the week and normal mode at the weekends - <USER2> mode gives me the advantage of not spending 50% of my playing time remembering how to play!

Games should be accessible to all and you should never be made to feel less of a gamer because you changed the difficulty setting.

</comment><comment><USER20> Game authors are welcome to do as they please, of course. But as someone who both likes video games and is quite bad at them, I've pretty much stopped buying them. Oh well...

</comment><comment><USER21> They say the customer is always right. In game dev users will ask for extra lives and powerful starting items in a multiplayer rougelikelike.

I don't think it can always be as simple as giving them everything. Users should be catered to and given the best support, but at a certain point the developer knows best.

The biggest players aren't always the most vocal. It is better to observe how the fanatics are playing and help the newbies grow into that level of game play.

</comment><comment><USER22> Batman Arkham City was, in my second playthrough, becoming rather boring.

Then I changed the difficulty to the highest setting and it was much more interesting. I had to plan everything and take a lot of care to not to die.

In contrast, Alien Isolation is an unforgiving frustrating game in most difficulties. I hope it gets better on a second playthrough.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yes, it does. If you have to play a long time before any meaningful challenge appears, this makes the game not fun to play. People loved Flappy Bird because it was so hard to avoid dying. Imagine Flappy Bird Easy Mode. Nobody would play that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Easy mode doesnt ruin a game. Lack of options does. E.g. GTA is easy mode and you can't even change it. And e.g. Max payne 3 has difficulty settings but even on hard it's still easy.</comment>


Improving DataView performance in V8 - <AUTHOR> https://v8project.blogspot.com/2018/09/dataview.html <comment><USER2> I'm one of the Google Maps developers that worked on the typed-array version of the loading code - hooray for DataView finally being a viable alternative. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great. Let's hope they plan to also update TypedArray support in general.

NativeArrays are still like 2x faster than Float32Arrays for matrix math. Probably has to be that way ATM as the math has to be promoted to double and back?

Still, v8 seems to be about 2x slower than SpiderMonkey in this area

[http://greggman.github.io/webgl-matrix- benchmarks/matrix_ben...](http://greggman.github.io/webgl-matrix- benchmarks/matrix_benchmark.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems from the code snippets that DataViews are strongly typed. So what happens when you load data with the wrong type? Does JavaScript have "undefined behavior"?

<comment><USER2> It's just a blob of bytes. If you write a 32-bit float and then read an int from the same location, you get whatever int those 32 bits form.

<comment><USER5> That generally tells me that this tool is meant for developers smarter than me to make the appropriate abstractions for me to use. Not for me to consider this a core part of my web app development toolkit. :)

<comment><USER6> Very much in keeping with the [Extensible Web Manifesto][1].

[1]: [https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/](https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great article. I didn't know DataView was much slower than TypedArrays. I always prefer DataView over TypedArrays when writing protocols and file formats, because TypedArrays follows system endianness so you cannot set endianness manually. (It is true that big-endian CPU is very rare but I cannot stop worrying about endianness.)

</comment><comment><USER8> > we also removed support for indices or offsets that are too large (outside > of Smi range) inside the TurboFan-optimized code

What exactly is Smi range? I have a feeling it is something obvious that I'm overlooking.

<comment><USER9> In V8, small machine integers are signed 31bit integers on 32bit architectures and signed 32bit integers on 64bit architectures.</comment></comment>


US Threatens ICC Staff Families With Consequences in response to war crime probe - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/18/bashing-probe-us-war-crimes-pompeo-threatens-family-icc-staff-consequences <comment><USER2> |"It has recently come to my attention that the chef de cabinet to the prosecutor, Sam Shoamanesh, and the head of jurisdiction, complementarity, and cooperation division, Phakiso Mochochoko, are helping drive ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's effort to use this court to investigate Americans," the secretary of state said. "I'm examining this information now and considering what the United States' next steps ought to be with respect to these individuals and all those who are putting Americans at risk."

|"We want to identify those responsible for this partisan investigation and their family members who may want to travel to the United States or engage in activity that's inconsistent with making sure we protect Americans," he continued.

That whole administration is being run like it binged watch a bunch of Mafia themed movies and decided it was a good way to run a country...

<comment><USER3> Dear GOP: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

(also please stop persecuting our media for publishing reports of atrocities in Afghanistan — if you don't want to be punished for war crimes, don't commit war crimes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Leave families out of it, period.

You don't target people's children out of spite, it's unethical and frankly, wrong. Why should family members of the ICC be held at the airport to be interrogated like suspected criminals? What possible explanation is there?

How is this a partisan investigation?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is outrages

</comment><comment><USER6> hot take: If the ICC doesn't have jurisdiction in the US, and the ICC is basically a foreign entity, why shouldn't they be treated the same as if the MPS[1] was "investigating" DoD officials? Should they get a free pass because most of the other western countries are part of it?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Public_Security_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Public_Security_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China)

<comment><USER7> Maybe it depends on what activities the ICC engages in within the US. Le Monde doesn't have "jurisdiction" in the US (or anywhere) to arrest anyone, but they still do investigations, which are presumably still legal for foreign journalists in the US.</comment></comment>


VMware says it's in talks to acquire Pivotal Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/14/vmware-says-it-is-in-talks-to-acquire-pivotal-software.html <comment><USER2> Dell owns Pivotal. Dell owns VMware. Dell has debt. Pivotal goes public at $15/share. Pivotal stock tanks. VMWare buys Pivotal at $15/share. Dell has less debt. The difference between Pivotal's internal share price, prior to going public, and their IPO price is pure profit for Dell. This was entirely a tactical move to reduce debt for Dell. Thanks for footing the bill shareholders!</comment>


What web framework would you suggest for a band? - <AUTHOR>

I have some definitively non-tech savvy friends with a band who tour constantly.  I would like to make a simple website for them.  Not something I would update full-time, but something that would let them enter tour dates that dynamically expire, email their fans tour dates and host links to their facebook page and cafepress for T-Shirts and let me write some basic code once in a while to expand it.  Is there a Wordpress theme that would help with this?  Or some other framework?  Thank you. <comment><USER2> For simple websites i usually end up purchasing a bootstrap based theme from [https://wrapbootstrap.com/](https://wrapbootstrap.com/) and then use HTML5/CSS/Javascript to complete

I used it recently to build the socialability web site for my wife ([http://socialability.com.au](http://socialability.com.au))</comment>


Digital Ocean + Dokku = 10$ Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://beletsky.net/2013/08/digitalocean-plus-dokku-equals-10-heroku.html

<comment><USER2> I can understand not wanting to put all of one's eggs in the Heroku basket, but Heroku's pricing is very reasonable for what they offer. I probably overvalue my time, but if Heroku saves me a handful of hours in deploying my project, it is absolutely worth the expense.

Granted, I'm not yet at "major" scale with Heroku, but not having to bumble around with more complicated deployment systems seems like a no-brainer.</comment>


Facebook Investor Sues Nasdaq Over IPO Delays - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-22/facebook-investor-sues-nasdaq-over-ipo-delays

<comment><USER2> This was absolutely expected. The Nasdaq delays probably had about zero impact on the IPO results but you know how it goes...someone lost money on Facebook paper and they're bound to make it back speculating on the courts...

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe NASDAQ is at fault for the errors last Friday, but Facebook's stock price has slid nearly 20% in the last two days of trading.</comment>


It's 2020. noBlockchain is the new database hype - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/inconvergent/status/1003524962592985090 <comment><USER2> Hehe I've been speaking about #noblockchain since 2014 [https://twitter.com/jchris/status/482383615569825793](https://twitter.com/jchris/status/482383615569825793)

</comment><comment><USER3> Best one:

2042: given the AWSOrbitV incident, a total ban on neural networks trained on cat pics is put in effect. (as a result the dark net market for catnets flourishes.)</comment>


Buy billboards like Google AdWords - <AUTHOR> https://www.adquick.com/programmatic <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN'ers,

We just launched this new product today, AdQuick Programmatic.

You can find and buy digital billboards in real-time.

Let me know if you have any questions!</comment>


Ask HN: Know of any good web-based email alternatives [to gmail]? - <AUTHOR>

New gmail hurts my eyes [I know that you may use the old version, but my conception is that they will force everyone to the new one eventually], and google+ circles are creeping their way into my inbox.
Gmail is still the best web-based email I know of. Does anyone know of better or alternative options?
Factors that are particularly important to me are a clean/functional interface and not having a nasty privacy policy. <comment><USER2> Gmail seems to be the only (advanced) email web client out there that comes closer to mutt/pine than Outlook. Every other Javascripty mail web app _really_ tries to look like it's a traditional desktop application, including heavy mouse use.

Having said that, the international United Internet versions do look quite ok for that segment. mail.com / gmx.com

</comment><comment><USER3> My google apps account is already on new gmail with no option to revert. I really don't like it.

I've tried fastmail and it doesn't really offer a user experience that compares to the gmail I used to love.

</comment><comment><USER4> +1 to Fastmail.fm (acquired by Opera a bit ago). Been happy with their IMAP/SMTP services as well as their web UX which keeps getting better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hotmail has become much improved lately, you might wanna check it out to see if you like it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Opera mail is about to launch.

</comment><comment><USER7> zoho apps (including mail) are quite cool.

</comment><comment><USER8> fastmail.fm</comment>


A good statistics for machine learning textbook? - <AUTHOR>

I keep running up against terms like "Dirchlet distribution", "conjugate prior", etc. in the Bayes Net papers I'm reading.  I've been looking stuff up on wikipedia, but an organized approach would be useful to me.  Any help? <comment><USER2> Mackay has an excellent (and very readable) book on-line which, despite its title, contains quite a lot of Bayesian statistics: <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html>

If that doesn't go deep enough into the statistical aspects I found the Gelman book hard going but very good: [http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis- Second-Statistical-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis-Second- Statistical-Science/dp/158488388X)

</comment><comment><USER3> Elements of Statistical Learning Theory covers most of that, I think, and some more.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious what you use ml for.</comment>


Bull City Startup Stampede: 60 days of free space, free advice for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupstampede.com/

<comment><USER3> As someone who works for one of the bootstrapped startups in the area, I wanted to let you know that your company would be missing a huge opportunity if you passed this up. That is if you live in the area. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm tempted to apply, but I don't _need_ the office space part, and I can't be there all day anyway because of my $DAYJOB. But the advice from successful founders part could be beneficial. But then again, successful people are - <USER2> my experience - surprisingly willing to meet and talk with you one on one if you ask nicely, excepting "celebrity" types who just don't have time to deal with all the people wanting access to them.

Plus my "team" is still just me at the moment, which isn't very impressive. But if the right things were to happen by March 11, I might just give it a shot anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot of cool stuff going on here in the RTP area... I really have a feeling that you're going to see some kickass startups emerging from this area over the next little while. We may be somewhat unknown at the moment, but a startup culture is slowly starting to take shape. I foresee good things for RTP area startup founders in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the things that isn't mentioned well on the website is the Internet connection in the space. It's 50mb down by 5mb up. This service hasn't even been rolled out to cable customers in NC yet, pretty cool. I might move my office to Main Street in Durham for a few weeks to get work done a little bit faster.</comment>


Kim Dotcom shares his *secret* to living a good life - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDiili2Gs-0&ab_channel=MrKimDotcom <comment><USER2> How does he have time for making these videos when this is happening? [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9f0d30b6-a927-11e5-843e-6269289097...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9f0d30b6-a927-11e5-843e-626928909745.html#axzz3xlwz7hMc)

<comment><USER3> I'd say at this point it's best to enjoy. Looks like he's having fun.</comment></comment>


Visualizing Music - <AUTHOR> http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2009/05/visualizing-music.html <comment><USER2> Another approach: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=ipzR9bhei...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=ipzR9bhei_o)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is _Hacker_ News, we want to know _how_, not _what_ ;-)

<comment><USER4> I'd have to guess he used some kind of fourier analysis.

<comment><USER5> Yep...actually a pretty trivial example of Fourier analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well I guess I have to post the one I did a while back: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nkqqOZKpY>

I recorded the music on a midi keyboard then wrote some perl scripts to read the midi file and generate POV-Ray scene files to go along with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two YouTube videos, and nothing else?</comment>


Abusing linear regression to make a point - <AUTHOR> http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2020/07/06/abusing-linear-regression-to-make-a-point/ <comment><USER2> This article does not capture what is actually wrong with the regression.

First, it's not necessarily wrong to fit a linear regression to data that might not be from a linear model, or that you know to be nonlinear. The data could be linear enough in the region of interest for the line to nonetheless be useful, for example. Sure, you need an underlying linear process if you want certain theorems and guarantees to apply. But with any data set, linear or not, regression still gives the best linear approximation to the conditional expectation function.

Second, the following paragraph seems to imply that small correlations are the same as no correlation, and the reason the regression is problematic is that the correlation is small:

> How does that fit look to you? I don't have access to the original dataset, > so I can't check it, but I'm guessing that the correlation there is > somewhere around 0.1 or 0.2 – also known as "no correlation".

But small correlations, if they actually exist, can sometimes be of great practical relevance. So that's not it either.

The actual problem is that the correlation isn't statistically significant – there isn't enough evidence to conclude that the observed (small) correlation actually exists, as opposed to being the result of random noise in the data. And indeed, as some other comments here point out, you can get similar graphs by fitting lines to randomly simulated fake data.

(If you prefer a Bayesian gloss: the data isn't informative enough to move you off any reasonable prior with most of its mass around zero. Same principle.)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I was curious enough to run the model myself so I used a tool to extract the data. The slope estimate (b=17.24) is not significantly different from zero, p=.437.

The data are here: [https://pastebin.com/HhWTKZRb](https://pastebin.com/HhWTKZRb)

<comment><USER4> The problem is that the author is essentially claiming that running the regression for data not passing his eyeball test is, in itself, a misuse of regression...which is nonsense.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand your point. Did you actually look at the regression line through the data? It looks crazy off. I'm not a statistician but that line looks like it doesn't represent that data very well at all. People area also saying nuanced comments above but the underlying fact seems to be that this is not a good use of linear regression, and there is no strong correlation between the two axes.

<comment><USER4> Without access to the residuals, I'd still venture to guess that the assumptions of the regression are not severely violated in this data set.

When this regression is conducted, the null hypothesis is not rejected (regression slope not significantly different than zero). If someone is somehow arguing this regression rejects the null hypothesis, then they would be incorrect. But there is nothing wrong with using regression here. Its kind of the whole point. This is basic regression statistics 101.

Error bands on the regression slope would help people understand the uncertainty of the apparent slope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Taleb was recently steaming on Twitter about a similar thing done to supposedly show a correlation between physician salary and covid mortality: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1279954325087891464](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1279954325087891464)

He follows it with a few examples of spurious regressions from random data: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1280090844113100801](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1280090844113100801)

<comment><USER7> The chart referenced in this article was by the same author.

[https://twitter.com/AmihaiGlazer/status/1277769775855235072/...](https://twitter.com/AmihaiGlazer/status/1277769775855235072/photo/1)

[https://twitter.com/AmihaiGlazer/status/1279210404602712064/...](https://twitter.com/AmihaiGlazer/status/1279210404602712064/photo/1)

My favourite part is the discussion about what a vertical line of regression means.

[https://twitter.com/AmihaiGlazer/status/1279905458812149760](https://twitter.com/AmihaiGlazer/status/1279905458812149760)

Discovering a vertical regression line sounds like a beautiful prompt for a hard sci-fi short story.

<comment><USER6> > The chart referenced in this article was by the same author.

Didn't realize. This guy is an embarrassment.

> Discovering a vertical regression line sounds like a beautiful prompt for a > hard sci-fi short story.

:)) the tale of the quantum dependent variable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can't mention spurious linear regression without predicting the S&P500 with Leinweiber's price of butter in Bangladesh indicator.

[https://nerdsonwallstreet.typepad.com/my_weblog/files/datami...](https://nerdsonwallstreet.typepad.com/my_weblog/files/dataminejune_2000.pdf)

<comment><USER9> In a similar vein:

[https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

I'm not convinced all of these are spurious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, this article should parade the p-value to make its point and for some reason it doesn't.

On p-values and linear regression in general, though: when you're new to inferential statistics applied to really complex data, such as anything that relates to human behavior, you go through this "clearly that's not a linear relationship" phase. But that's not really the point. You can choose any sort of function you want to maximize r, the options are endless [0]. But linear regression has a distinct advantage in that you can interpret the model coefficients as meaningful numbers. You can say things like "for every 5% increase in the proportion of binge drinkers in your state you can expect an X% increase in the proportion of the population that will get Covid" ...if the model satisfies some significance parameter threshold, like p<0.05, and, you know, correlation equals causation. Everyone knows that. Anyway, with your great 4th order polynomial, all you can say is "see, it fits!"

About significance thresholds. Yes, they are totally arbitrary, another realization in one's journey with frequentist statistics that is quite deflating. Still, we need a rule of thumb so we use things like p<0.05 and have a bunch of fancy ways to account for things like multiple comparisons, which increase the likelihood that some spurious correlation would have appeared to be significant without such adjustments.

This stuff is all super-useful when used appropriately. That's why, when you need to create a model (outside the Bayesian/ML anything goes world) and you need to get it right, the first thing you do is reach out to your trusty PhD statistician friend. At least, that's what I do. They spend countless hours to get to a place where they can say "in this situation, I would suggest..." I'm glad some people are into it that much.

[0] [https://lmfit.github.io/lmfit- py/builtin_models.html](https://lmfit.github.io/lmfit-py/builtin_models.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> > I said that if you had reason to believe in a linear relationship, then you > could try to find it. That's the huge catch to linear regression: no matter > what data you put in, you'll always get a "best match" line out.

This challenge generalizes to all model fitting. Incorrectly assuming a distribution is Gaussian is a big one.

<comment><USER12> Another one is handwaving that a distribution is normal when _n > 30_ because "central limit theorem!"

Amateur statistics is full of magical numbers and thresholds where everything "just works" :)

<comment><USER13> When I applied to my MSDA program, I had to interview with the lady who would become my first year mentor. "Now, do it over again... on paper." That's what she'd say to anyone too confident in their outputs. She has a reputation for weeding out people who can pass the entrance testing and qualifications, but can't adapt. And what we do requires thick skin. You're wrong until you just _happen_ to be right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This person has no idea what they're writing about.

Edited because my post was flagged (I'm not sure why). The definition of correlation coefficient is incorrect, which could have been attributed to a typo, except the author goes on to say "The bottom is, essentially, just stripping the signs away.", suggesting the square root of a sum of squared differences would be the same as the sum of differences, were it not for the signs. That's not how norms work.

The whole paragraph on interpreting a correlation coefficient is particularly painful to read: "... if the correlation is perfect – that is, if the dependent variable increases linearly with the independent, then the correlation will be 1. If the dependency variable decreases linearly in opposition to the dependent, then the correlation will be -1. If there's no relationship, then the correlation will be 0."

For all its good intentions, I feel like this post hurts more than it helps.

<comment><USER15> What's the correct definition? (Aside from the "dependency" typo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could someone link to original article? Didn't see in post. Notice that they don't cite what the authors' computed R^2 was but conjectured it was low (and I agree that it is likely low). Thus, doesn't appear to be a case of blind p-hacking off the bat.

Could just be really bad. However could be that:

\- The conclusion of the paper was that no relationship exists.

\- Later specifications include covariates. For example, including travel flows here could help to disentangle cultural mores regarding drinking and probability that ANY virus was transmitted to place.

\- some sort of weighting was done. Although in that case I would expect to see a steeper slope to account for New York. Usual practice here would be to display the univariate relationship with circles that are sized to match weights.

\- Graphs like this can play tricks on your eyes. There might be a lot of dots clustered along the fit line that are overlapping etc.

<comment><USER17> the beauty of this post is that it is truly evergreen: there is, and always will be, bad statistics to grimace at

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ultimately, the author rejected the use of regression by using an eyeball test.

Eyeball tests are not rigorous, and can be misleading. Further, the purpose of regression is not just to obtain the slope via least squares in the case of obvious relationships, but to provide a test of the null hypothesis (slope = 0) of weaker, but theoretically interesting relationships.

This type of amateur (and wrong) statistics article shouldn't be making it to the top of HN.

</comment><comment><USER18> Next time I have to interview someone for an analyst position I will pick this article and say "find 5 mistakes within 5 minutes"...

<comment><USER19> I will remember this. Not the exact article, but the general spirit of knowing how to incorporate those endless statistics books/ articles/ resources into a tool I can use to detect errors. Maybe I'll even graduate to judging them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I saw that chart on Twitter and thought it was a joke :-/

You don't need to know anything about maths to see that that is farcical.

<comment><USER13> "Hold my America," said the beer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> AKA "Not including enough terms in a Taylor expansion leads to a worse approximation"

</comment><comment><USER22> Telling every time someone posts a bad regression they never post the R^2.

<comment><USER23> If only. Sometimes they smooth or bin the data points and _then_ post r2!

<comment><USER22> Reminds me about the classic regression excel joke saying that to get a better regression, one should sort the points to be in order first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This physically hurts.

</comment><comment><USER25> The article has:

> For trace failure, the probability of failure is linear in the size of the > radiation dose that the chip is exposed to.

No it's not. Impossible. Wrong.

Does anyone not see why it's wrong?

<comment><USER26> Yes. If you have enough radiation dose you'd need more than 100% chance of failure.

A much better model is that the number of spots where the chip was destroyed by radiation is a Poisson distribution with lambda linear in the size of the radiation dose. For low probabilities of failure, the probability of failure is approximately lambda, which is linear. For large lambda, the probability of at least one failure approaches one.

However this more accurate model, in the case of interest (low probability of failure), linear is the appropriate approximation. And a small child should get the simpler version and not the complexities of Poisson.</comment></comment>


How I Found the Best Programming Language in the World [Part 2] - <AUTHOR> https://kukuruku.co/post/how-i-found-the-best-programming-language-in-the-world-part-2/ <comment><USER2> Two [very long] posts in and you've still not really got to the dénouement!

Still. It's an interesting read, nonetheless.

TL;DR: It's Nim[0]

[0]: [https://nim-lang.org/](https://nim-lang.org/)</comment>


Goldman's Blankfein on Skipping School Work, Wishing to Be Chinese - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/06/10/goldmans-blankfein-on-skipping-school-work-wishing-to-be-chinese/ <comment><USER2> It's sad to see how much of society's time and resources goes towards investment banking and the mindset that comes from it...

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate? Are you talking about the number of people? I feel like some other low-tech jobs, like truck driving or cleaning people, are more wasteful. Say, for example, that the 3.5 million truck drivers become automated out of a job then they work in finance, technology, etc., wouldn't society be better off?

Consider, for instance, that a company like Renaissance Technologies has over 100 PhD's in physics and math.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies)

<comment><USER4> _Say, for example, that the 3.5 million truck drivers become automated out of a job then they work in finance, technology, etc., wouldn 't society be better off?_

Is this even attainable? Is a high-tech driven economy even a mass employer?

The primary (agrarian), secondary(industrial), ternary (services) sectors and economies served well the humanity over the past centuries esp accommodating and absorbing the exponential growth in population during the 20th century and onward but will the nascent knowledge based (quaternary) economy be able to keep it going or more than 6 bln humans have to suffer greatly to earn just to survive and have a sustenance level of income?

I have my deep doubts about this prospect and I believe that at least that having a knowledge based economy doesn't need all this amount of people on Earth to advance and that the transition from a consumerist led mass market to a non consumerist small one is going to be very painful if we haven't addressed the structural problems in the global economy esp. income inequality and wealth hoarding by the 1%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm at Goldman this summer and come from a pure mathematics background (in an area that's not very quant-focused, by choice). The first part of the article is unequivocally true. Most in my area are incredibly interesting, diverse individuals with non-finance backgrounds.

I think it's somewhat fitting that these comments are made at the best university in China, however. It's emblematic of one of Goldman's recruiting challenges: those who have done interesting things prior to college, often continuing through college, may be less likely to get into top schools and if you aren't from a top college it's demonstrably harder to get your foot in the door with these summer internships.

<comment><USER6> This is one of the recruiting challenges to solve and companies have not that much of a incentive to alter it. As most of us agree, colleges has simply become filters and kind of a costly filter from the students perceptive for most of the cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This graph is a couple years old but it shows China's incredible economic growth.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China#/media/File...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China#/media/File:Graph_of_Major_Developing_Economies_by_Real_GDP_per_capita_at_PPP_1990-2013.png)

By one measure (PPP) China has already passed the U.S.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30483762](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30483762)

<comment><USER7> The PPP reference is about as worthless of a concept as you could get in measuring economic scale.

If I make $80,000 and my cup of coffee costs $4, and the person in China makes $4,000 but their equivalent cup of coffee costs $0.10 - they'd have you believe that person has a meaningful purchasing power advantage.

Right up until that person earning $4,000 tries to buy a BMW, take a vacation to Paris, or save more than $400 per year.

The last five years of China's growth has been entirely fake. Their return on invested capital has plunged, and it now takes an extreme amount of debt to generate each dollar of GDP growth. Their economy stopped growing normally with the end of the global consumer boom in 2009. They've spent the years since accumulating one of the greatest piles of debt in world history. Within two to three years, they'll be the most indebted nation, with their total debt to GDP ratio already exceeding that of the US.

It now takes $4 to $5 trillion in new debt per year, just to stay near their 6%-7% GDP growth target. Put another way, they have to take on $7+ of new debt for every $1 of GDP growth.

Their PMI, electricity usage, imports, exports, and real estate market are all signaling imminent disaster. Up next their record-shattering stock market bubble is going to go bust, causing trillions of dollars in damage.

The next 20 years are going to be extraordinarily painful for China. They're making the same mistakes Japan did, except they're doing it at warp speed, and with a billion very poor people to deal with.

<comment><USER8> If you make 80k and your "average life package" costs 40k/year, and a Chinese makes 4k but the same package costs 1k/year, we'd all say that the Chinese is way better off than you. PPP is not the "cup of coffee index", nor the Big Mac Index.

Currency exchanges are meaningless when you're talking about quality of life and purchasing power, and PPP is meaningless when you're talking about total production.

On the other hand, you did the remarkable feat of using an example of when PPP is being used CORRECTLY (comparing purchasing power and quality of life per person) to argue against using it.

[Edit] Besides the PPP issue, I agree with the rest of your post, China is desperately looking for a way out of the demographic and political trap it dug itself into.

<comment><USER9> I'll disagree strongly here if the $80K and $4K are after tax. $40K in savings with an average life is highly preferable to $3K in savings with an average life. Yes there are smaller impacts to immediate choices, but I'd bet on the $40K to have a higher impact in the future. PPP is very sensitive to things like rapid economic growth, changes in immigration, changes in popularity of location, etc. You could very quickly find $3k/year of savings obliterated if that $1K goes to $4K. It's a lot harder for a $40K cost of living to go to $60K or $80K.

<comment><USER8> Make the 80k and 4k after tax :)

"$40K in savings with an average life is highly preferable to $3K in savings with an average life."

Your comparison is meaningless, unless they are in the same country with the same cost of living.

"You could very quickly find $3k/year of savings obliterated if that $1K goes to $4K. It's a lot harder for a $40K cost of living to go to $60K or $80K."

Again, meaningless, unless they are in the same country with the same cost of living.

That's what PPP is for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> anti-shill I wanna be black

<comment><USER10> Lucky for you and Mr. Blankfein, being "transracial" is now a thing: [http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/12/us/rachel-dolezal- social-m...](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/12/us/rachel-dolezal-social- media/)</comment></comment>


Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/technology/lawsuit-may-determine-who-owns-a-twitter-account.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto <comment><USER2> It's interesting because the best company-related Twitter accounts are the ones that are transparently owned by people who voice their own opinions. The ones that are wholly corporate, where you don't know the name of the person (or people) you are dealing with, are the ones least likely to be worth following, and frequently the least likely to have a substantial following.

I don't think companies can have it both ways: a person who posts in their own voice, at work but also in their own time, that builds up a substantial following, but that must also be a creature of the corporation. Either let people be themselves and take their social media accounts with them, or be a faceless corporation that owns everything, even the voices and opinions of its employees.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's still a great many legal issues to resolve in regards to online accounts and assets.

You can spend many thousands of dollars accumulating legally purchased iTunes media for your devices but can you will that collection to a friend or a child if you die?

There's no such issue with a vinyl collection or other physically tangible assets.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't see why every new thing that comes along has to have its own set of laws. We already have ways of deciding who owns things. In this case, it sounds like there was an agreement in place about who owned the Twitter account and the company is trying to break that agreement. I don't see any novel principle for which a precedent should be set.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly what's happening here. No new laws are being proposed; a lawsuit will be adjudicated on the basis of exactly the existing precedent you are referencing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called "the means of production." capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul._ \-- humdog

</comment><comment><USER7> Spoiler: Twitter owns it.

</comment><comment><USER8> $2.50 per follower, per month? Does anyone know how they came to this estimate? I imagine any motivated HN reader could game Twitter in an attempt to generate a comparable number of followers.

I took up a similar challenge for myself in an attempt to prank a few of my friends and ended up with over 13,000 followers. It'd be relatively trivial to scale it up to a few dozen accounts as well.

<comment><USER9> What's the handle?

<comment><USER8> twitter.com/#!/ThisIsJoshVarty</comment></comment></comment>