In Silicon Valley, Mergers Must Meet the Toothbrush Test - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/in-silicon-valley-mergers-must-meet-the-toothbrush-test/ <comment><USER2> Good. Bringing the deals in house lowers costs (ever meet an ibanker that didn't take a decent chunk), increases flexibility (no intermediaries) and let's deals move faster.

It's like buying and selling a house without paying for a real estate agent. Both parties save on time and fees.

<comment><USER3> This is actually Google's strategy with strategy. It's big enough that the kind of studies management consulting firms offer can be useful to the company, but instead of hiring McKinsey to do a study, they just hire away their best young talent and have them join their internal strategy arm.

Considering that their associates bill at $1MM/year, hiring them away ends up being much cheaper.

<comment><USER4> Google also has the brand name to do this. Leaving McKinsey to work at Google looks great on a resume, leaving McKinsey to work at a small or midsize company looks much stranger.

<comment><USER3> Thus Google is/was the #1 destination for ex-McKinsey folks. Generally speaking, mgmt consulting attracts more risk averse people than otherwise, so this is somewhat natural (in fact, my risk-seeking friend who joined the firm was surprised that so many people were risk averse).

But there are plenty of people who leave the firm to go to mid sizes places or places with less cache, but at a relatively high position in the corporate chain.

They also leave to join growth phase startups as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question to HN - is one reason tech companies can do this is because a small group close to the founders typically have disproportiately high voting rights? I suspect this would not be easy to do if "traditional" institutional investors have voting rights commensurate with their shareholding in the company.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment- ide...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/google- magna-alibaba-unequal-voting-is-here-to-stay/article18734492/)

<comment><USER6> That depends on what you class as 'disproportionally high' and what was written into the contract governing the investment. As long as the founders have 51% or more and there are no blocking terms in the contracts written prior to an acquisition offer there is nothing that can stop the founders from selling their stock.

Savvy founders will retain control of their company even after an investment, if only because you will never get a 100% alignment of goals between investors and founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Facebook's most recent big deal, the acquisition of Oculus VR, came as a surprise to even seasoned technology watchers. But Marc Andreessen, a Facebook board member, was also on the board of Oculus VR, paving the way for the deal.

Does this not seem like a conflict of interests to anyone? Isn't this the VC's chance to exit quick for financial gain rather than have Occulus continue on its own, which is by definition riskier?

I don't know, maybe this isn't the case but something seems odd here.

<comment><USER8> > But Marc Andreessen, a Facebook board member, was also on the board of > Oculus VR, paving the way for the deal.

exactly. he came under a lot of fire for similar conflicts with they Ebay/Skype deal.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-carl-icahn- eb...](http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-carl-icahn-ebay- skype-2014-2#ixzz2wKwKNBcH)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Old but still relevant article from 1999 about Cisco's king of acquisitions, Mike Volpi (70 companies in 5 years)

>

Volpi is arguably Silicon Valley's shrewdest shopper. He needs to be. With a dearth of engineering talent and shrinking product cycles, Cisco realized that it couldn't build everything it needed inside the company. Says Don Listwin, Cisco's No. 2 executive: "Lucent wants the smartest group of people in Bell Labs. But if we're not good at something, we've got Silicon Valley. It's our lab."

The company looks to startups if it decides it's too far behind competitors to take the time to build a product from scratch. Once that decision is made, Volpi's team consults with business units and customers to find out about their technological needs. Customers have a profound influence on Cisco's strategy. Its executives say that US West, the Denver Baby Bell, was a driving factor behind the decision in March 1998 to acquire NetSpeed, a maker of equipment that turns regular phone lines into high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) data conduits.

With a few targets in mind, Volpi and his team perform an evaluation that's unique in scope. As engineers examine the technology and financiers go over the company's books, Cisco's team also examines the depth of the company's talent, the quality of its management, and its venture funding--all things aimed at making the integration process easier should Cisco buy. Since Cisco will acquire a company as often for its talent as for its technology, it needs to focus on these "softer" issues early.

There's one more test. Volpi's got a knack for identifying a startup at the sweet spot of its development: when it is old enough to have a finished and tested product, yet young enough to be privately held and flexible in its ways. Acquire a business that's too mature, and risk soars. Explains Volpi: "If you buy a company with customers, product flows, and entrenched enterprise resource systems, you have to move very gingerly. Otherwise, you risk customer dissatisfaction. Figuring out how to integrate this type of company could take nine months."

After all this evaluation, Cisco doesn't necessarily leap to purchase. Instead it may pass on a company or may act as a venture firm, making a 10% equity investment to monitor the startup's growth. That's what it did with Monterey last winter. A few months later, after deciding that the Richardson, Texas, startup would give it entree into the $20-billion-a-year optical- internetworking market, it gobbled up the rest. Says Joe Bass, CEO of Monterey: "We had interest from other companies, but they didn't move as fast as Cisco. They were still considering us when the announcement came out that Cisco had bought us."

...

"It's easier to integrate engineers who are rich and happy than ones looking for a way out," says Paul Sagawa, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.

"I don't believe mergers of equals work." \--JOHN CHAMBERS

Turn the conversation to Cisco, and Chambers is equally frank in discussing its acquisition methods. As with any heavily used process, he says, there are bound to be mistakes. For Cisco, they've arisen when the company has deviated from its strategy by forcing a company into Cisco's infrastructure.

("It was my naivete when we acquired software companies and moved them from their own distribution systems into ours. Dumb. Dumb.")

Or when Cisco has mistimed its bid. Valley pundits say the 1996 acquisition of Granite Systems, a maker of so-called gigabit ethernet switches, didn't work because Granite's product wasn't as far along as Cisco had believed.

On the other hand, people close to one of Cisco's largest acquisitions, that of StrataCom in 1996, say it was difficult because StrataCom was too large and its product too developed. Cisco had trouble integrating elements of its operating system into StrataCom's switches.

This particular problem doesn't bode well, say some analysts.

As telecom equipment giants Nortel (revenues: $17.6 billion) and Lucent (revenues: $38 billion) take aim at Cisco's markets, they say, Cisco will need another large acquisition. Chambers, however, is forging ahead with smaller ones, telling attendees at October's Telecom 99 conference in Geneva that he'll make up to 25 this year.

"In a merger you can't blend resources and cultures--only one can survive," he says. So Chambers and his team are busy scouring the world to make sure the survivor is Cisco.

[http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...](http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/11/08/268506/index.htm)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Poor title, but interesting observations about the value of not using investment banks.</comment>


Isn't Twitter Bootstrap making all web apps look the same?  - <AUTHOR> http://builtwithbootstrap.tumblr.com/post/11025738184/topgun-js-intro-site-to-a-basic-real-time

<comment><USER2> Every site I visit uses HTML. It's making all the webapps look the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't all successful SaaS apps have the similar layout and presentation?

If anything I think Bootstrap helps get the minimum of the current best practices in place effortlessly -- beyond that, innovation is always welcome</comment>


How American Politics Went Insane - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Chaos is the inevitable result when _any_ centralized system attempts to bite off more than it can chew. Top-down governance only works for what the central entity can perceive, understand, and control. Thanks to technology expanding the scope of perception and control, our modern society has devolved into totalitarianism. Yet without superintelligence god-king AI, complete understanding cannot be achieved. Nor would we, as sentient humans, ever want it to be.

Unfortunately, it will never be a popular idea to _let go_ of this centralized control. The same technological trends have given us individuals similar perception. The belief that any action of any person is subject to popular judgment is now deeply embedded in our psyche. Everybody fashions themselves a mini dictator, deciding between whether any given activity should be prohibited or mandatory. Occam's razor, "live and let live", and "good fences make good neighbors" have gone out the window.

Sure, we all still long to be left alone _ourselves_. But our desire for freedom is played to by demagogues promising freedom _through_ this top-down structure that they'd like to steer. Our frustrations are then channeled toward the people of the "opposing team" rather than properly on the system that has bound us all in this suicide pact.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just finished reading Hamilton, all 700+ pages, and this article doesn't seem to address the viciousness that has been a documented part of American politics for over 200 years now. Really not all that much has changed? Jefferson was frequently called a "fanatic" who "pandered to the populace" and the age was marred by again, vicious personal slandering.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, this is also like the chaos that accompanied the self-destruction of the american Whig party before the civil war. My guess is that the republicans will become a loud irrelevance by 2020 and cease to exist after that while the democrats (which are not really a party either, simply everyone who is "not republican") will split into a few factions, two of which will be strong enough to be parties (probably one still called "Democrat") by 20204/2028.</comment></comment>


What are the nearest unsolved (technical) problems in AI? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Content addressable memory(CAM). Digital memory as addressable (row/column/etc). CAM is like an army roll call, you shout "Schwartz", and he says "here". If not you would have to inspect every member of the army, one by one. Humans do this a lot, via our extreme parallelism. With huge data sets, CAM is essential.

</comment><comment><USER3> Testing, perhaps.</comment>


How The Higgs Boson Was Found - Just One Year Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-the-Higgs-Boson-Was-Found-213876841.html#Higgs-boson-ATLAS-detector-1.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> We are all operating within a Higgs Field!</comment>


A gentle introduction to elliptic-curve cryptography [video] - <AUTHOR> http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6369_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412272145_-_ecchacks_-_djb_-_tanja_lange.html#video

<comment><USER2> This video is excellent.

Slides: [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachme...](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachments/2502/original/20141227-twopage.pdf)

Sample code: [http://ecchacks.cr.yp.to/](http://ecchacks.cr.yp.to/)

<comment><USER3> The first https uses CAcert. I'd suggest using http instead.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for pointing that out. TIL that my browser trusts the CAcert root, which is not something I remember doing.

Too late to edit my comment. Here is a non-HTTPS link: [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachmen...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachments/2502/original/20141227-twopage.pdf)

<comment><USER4> You may not be trusting the CAcert root, but just the ccc.de cert. I know I added an exception for it, but not CAcert generally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also wrote an introduction to ECC using Python. It's longer, less gentle, more mathematical, and doesn't cover Edwards curves. But it ends with a program allowing you to play EC's over any finite field, and implements and explains some of the major protocols.

[http://jeremykun.com/2014/02/08/introducing-elliptic- curves/](http://jeremykun.com/2014/02/08/introducing-elliptic-curves/)

<comment><USER6> No disrespect to the extensive work you did there-- and this is a general complaint about basically all the "ECC explained" I've seen on the web, but I think that jumping into the mechanics of explaining at the blades-of-grass level how to implement point arithmetic without ever giving an clear intuition as to how a cyclic group with intractable discrete log is cryptographically useful does the reader a disservice.

E.g. after reading one of these tutorials, they might be able to go and _implement_ the cryptosystem, but they won't actually understand it except at a "Chinese Room" level, and as a result it won't actually be safe for them to implement any of it, since they'll be unlikely to ask the right questions. E.g. they'd make the Sony mistake.

Yours goes a little further, and for that I must give it credit: Many just explain the addition law and russian peasants algorithm, throw out an equation for ECDSA and call it a day. But if you do a revision, I'd encourage you to rearrange and explain the cryptographic algorithms abstractly, and in depth, first... before jumping into the mechanics of the machine implementation of a particular group law.

<comment><USER5> In writing them my main goal was to explain elliptic curves to my own satisfaction (i.e. derive things and not shy away from projective space and finite fields). To me they are interesting in their own right, as is realizing them in code. I view the crypto as sort of a bonus. I do see your point that I could have done everything with, say, multiplicative integers modulo a prime and the core algorithms wouldn't change. I think I will redo that when I get around to writing articles on abstract crypto (one-way functions, pseudorandom generators, and the like).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Particularly noteworthy is the part near the end regarding the selection process for curves when standards are written, and the caginess of the presenters in answering the audience question on the topic.

This is a good argument for software authors to really understand for themselves at all levels what is going on with the cryptography/ packages they are using.

<comment><USER8> This has also bugged me in the case of other cryptographic algorithms, for example SHA-1 has several magic input constants, whose choice is not obvious. When casually reading through the original papers I could not find a clear explanation of how those values were chosen. Pretty much everything in the design seems fairly arbitrary and amendable to variation.

In physics there are multiple case where you can do seemingly very hard calculations, if you do it in the wrong coordinate system and neglect symmetries that are present, that collapse to almost nothing (In the case of elliptic curves that was the fact that the curve points chosen by NSA were related by Q = P + e, where e was some point on the curve only known to the NSA)

<comment><USER9> Regarding the SHA-1 constants:

[http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/10829/why- initiali...](http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/10829/why-initialize- sha1-with-specific-buffer)

Your latter example seems to be about the Dual-EC RNG, which is not an ECC encryption algorithm.

<comment><USER8> Ah that is good to know. Yes the latter example was not exactly on point, just meant as a general illustration of possible vulnerabilties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this introductory explanation worth reading. [http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/653/basic- explanat...](http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/653/basic-explanation- of-elliptic-curve-cryptography?rq=1)</comment>


Blackstone, Carlyle Urge Portfolio Companies to Tap Credit - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-11/blackstone-urges-its-companies-hurt-by-virus-to-tap-credit-lines <comment><USER2> > ... A sudden and sustained increase in companies tapping credit lines could > eventually strain banks if conditions become so dire that borrowers won't be > able to meet their obligations

Echoes of 2008. The ensuing chain reaction turns a decline into a catastrophe.</comment>


Setting Up a Software Development Environment on Alpine Linux - <AUTHOR> https://blog.overops.com/my-alpine-desktop-setting-up-a-software-development-environment-on-alpine-linux/ <comment><USER2> > _Ubuntu is 188 MB_

Ubuntu is 88MB:

      ubuntu  bionic  47b19964fb50  5 weeks ago  88.1MB

Definitely not Alpine levels of small, sure, but the size in the article is off by a digit. But not _that_ big, either, and I find a huge number of devs are more familiar with Ubuntu.

I'm also throwing Python into the container, so the base container size is very quickly dwarfed by that. I think if you're using something like golang or Rust, the gains would be a lot more meaningful.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why the obsession with OS size. I don't mind having a 1GB OS that has really good functionality vs a 50MB one that has none. I do want size to be a factor for server based images which is a different beast altogether.

<comment><USER2> Bandwidth; we deploy frequently, and pushing images around is a fairly hefty part of that deploy, and the less the better. OS images don't update _too_ often, thankfully, and Docker will only upload layers if needed, but it's still much easier to push 5MB than 80-200MB, so Alpine does have a distinct advantage there. 1GB is pushing it, a bit. (We also put much of our tooling on the host VM; generally, this can suffice IME.)

While my office has a great connection, my ISP at home is less so, particularly in the up direction. On mobile, pushing 80-200MB _up_ is essentially not going to happen, both because it eats into my data caps quickly, and because mobile latency is such that that's really slow.

<comment><USER3> I agree and that's why I said server based images should be small but for user based OSes, for development work or browsing, size should be the last thing on the feature list. It's the development mindset that is pushing for small OS sizes and we should put that in the backburner in exchange for a good user experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have Alpine+gnome running on my little Dell Inspiron 5000 and I love it. It's super snappy where even Lubuntu was sluggish.

There are some missing luxuries like obconf and Emacs gui, but I mainly use it for browsing and sshing into Debian servers where I can just use vim anyway.

It was actually really straightforward to setup, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat guide, but I really don't understand why you'd even want Alpine as a daily driver, unless you're _really_ limited on performance.

<comment><USER6> Like emulating x86 on iOS[1], for example?

[1]: [https://github.com/tbodt/ish](https://github.com/tbodt/ish)

<comment><USER7> Something about using the words "emulating x86 on iOS" and "daily driver" together doesn't sit right with me...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's quite ironic that the biggest usage of Alpine, a distro whose tagline is "Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.", is Docker, which is an almost completely opposite technology: vastly overcomplicated, insecure, and bloated. I'd be interested to hear what the Alpine maintainers think of their biggest user...

<comment><USER9> out of curiousity, where you say Docker is "insecure" what specific aspects of Docker were you thinking of?

<comment><USER10> The docker daemon runs as a privileged user, so if you're able to break out of the container (which has been shown possible recently) then you can compromise the entire host OS.

<comment><USER11> Could you provide a reference for how to break our?

<comment><USER10> [https://www.twistlock.com/labs-blog/breaking-docker-via- runc...](https://www.twistlock.com/labs-blog/breaking-docker-via-runc- explaining-cve-2019-5736/)

This is from a CVE that was released a little over a month ago.

<comment><USER9> That was a runc vuln, which affected other conatinerization solutions on Linux, not just docker.

Also it didn't really have anything to do with the Docker daemon running as root, it was triggered by the use of root users in containers (blocked if the user didn't do that, had decent SELinux setups or used user namespaces)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a distro comparable to Alpine but based on glibc? I'm aware of various workarounds / hacks for glibc support in Alpine, just curious if there is a distro that doesn't have the issue out of the box.

<comment><USER13> Void (Linux) has glibc and musl flavors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding the Java notes in the article, the announcement of Java 12 today had this:

"The Alpine Linux build previously available on this page was removed as of JDK 12 GA. It's not production-ready because it hasn't been tested thoroughly enough to be considered a GA build. Please use the early-access JDK 13 Alpine Linux build in its place."

</comment><comment><USER15> This is thoroughly good stuff. Thanks to the author for the work they put into this.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like to set up mini dev environments in Alpine Docker containers when I'm testing or trying out a new stack, and for the most part really like this pattern. That said, I run into a lot of issues that I think are musl related. The best part though is that when I finally get things working, everything is documented nice and declaratively between the Dockerfile and the docker- compose file, so I can come back to it later or clone it for a different project and it just works.

<comment><USER17> Pardon my ignorance, but what's the nature of these musl-related issues? Is it because some programs or libraries use glibc specific-features/bugs? Or is it something else? Does glibc have their own non-standard functions?

<comment><USER18> Pre built jvm binaries that are dynamically linked to glibc are an example.

 _" At present, some glibc-linked shared libraries can be loaded with musl, but all but the simplest glibc-linked applications will fail if musl is dropped-in in place of /lib/ld-linux.so.2"_

[https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html](https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html)

Some of the differences are listed here: [https://wiki.musl- libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc...](https://wiki.musl- libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc.html)

<comment><USER19> That reminded me that I noticed from the java 12 link on the front page, that they mention early access builds of java 13 for alpine. [https://jdk.java.net/13/](https://jdk.java.net/13/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-nikolaev Can anyone compare Alpine Linux with Void Linux, their pros and cons?

<comment> evil-olive I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that Alpine is mainly focused on small size, so musl libc, lack of systemd, etc, are means to that end.

Void seems to be more focused on power user experience, in the vein of Gentoo / Arch. So glibc or musl as an option, lack of systemd, and a pacman-like package manager (xbps) are all means to that end.

Alpine gets lots of usage as a Docker base layer due to that small size. Void certainly could be used as a Docker base image, but that's much less common than Alpine because the image sizes are probably roughly comparable to Debian and when running in a container the systemd vs not-systemd choice becomes less relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Alpine is magic. No fluff, no bloat, simple really, really well-designed setup- and package-tools. Including a full OS installation and setup, I can go from blank machine (or vps) to functioning, customized server in less than ten minutes if I absolutely have to. Good repos with everything I could ask for. Oh, and OpenRC, no systemd nonsense. I need _really_ convincing reasons to ever build a server on anything else.

</comment><comment><USER21> What does devops mean? I keep seeing that word.

<comment><USER22> If you're a low-level employee, it means someone who hooks up Jenkins to other crap. If you're a manager, it's a position you're hiring for. If you're upper management or executive, it's a methodology to solve business problems and improve output. If you're C-level, it's a cool buzz word.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a cynical and funny comment, but I see from your profile you have a wiki with a good definition that's probably worth linking to ([https://devops.yoga/overview.html](https://devops.yoga/overview.html)).

<comment><USER23> C-suite porn.

<comment><USER22> They'd never get off, there's no pie charts

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone explain what the deal is with companies who have 1000 general blog posts, and then separately, a product they're selling? Is it just to bring in traffic that will hopefully buy their product?

<comment><USER24> Yes mostly, but it might also be considered a very roundabout evergreen recruiting advertisement, "Oh look they are using X and Y to build Z! I bet that would be a cool place to work if the opportunity arose."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Slightly off-topic question: I use Windows as my OS of choice. If I want to run my browser in a Linux VM via Virtualbox, would Alpine be a good choice?

Or is there something even better/lighter?</comment>


'Real' Programming Is an Elitist Myth - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/databases-coding-real-programming-myth/ <comment><USER2> Damn this was annoying to read. And no, creating data models, or even managing data without programming does not make you a "programmer." The author goes on and on about community and culture or whatever but fails to address the clickbaity title (which got me to click)</comment>


Germany's Pirate Party Looks to Win More Seats - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18017064 <comment> muuh-gnu In other news, former German president Roman Herzog, member of the (for now) largest party, the Christian Democratical Union CDU, suggested that having new parties like the Pirates entering parliaments is bad for overall democracy because it is increasing political diversity, and should be combated by again increasing the election threshold, which is now at 5%. According to the interview he gave recently, increasing political diversity in the parliament decreases support of a goverment and the chancellor, which could destabilize a country, meaning less dissent in the parliament, more stable country.

The two big parties are basically getting threatened by the internet and are obviously ready to go nuclear by threatening to simply team up, get supermajority required for a constitutional change, and "optimize" the political diversity down to 2 or 3, US style, maybe even 1, by simply throwing the annoying emerging competition out of the parliaments.

<comment><USER2> More parties being bad for democracy is extremely funny.

It would be nice to see a total abolition of parties, in fact in most democratic constitutions the word 'party' is never mentioned.

People should vote for other people, not for parties.

<comment> muuh-gnu > It would be nice to see a total abolition of parties

Abolishing the formal definition of parties wouldnt help, because like-minded people would still team up and form de facto parties, so nothing substantial would change.

> People should vote for other people, not for parties.

In Germany, you have both. There are two votes, the first one is for people, the "direct candidates". The second is for the whole party, which again is represented by a list of candidates determined by in-party elections.

<comment><USER3> In the US, party affiliation is listed on ballots. Removing that affiliation might start subconsciously breaking people off from thinking every member of the DNC and RNC are running on some unchanging monolith platform of the party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I voted for the Pirate party here in Berlin, and occasionally it seems their success surprised them more than anyone else.

Right now, both the established political parties and the voters are fascinated by the Pirates. From nowhere to 8 % - that's quite a feat in our slow-moving political landscape. It also means that both the party and those rooting for them are a mix of young people, disappointed voters from both ends of the political spectrum, libertarians and many other factions.

Many Germans are fed up by what is often called a One Party system in disguise, where labeling decisions as "without any alternative" has become Chancellor Merkel's favorite move. There were several large-scale attempts at Internet censorship / filtering (it used to be child pornography yesterday, it's terrorism and copyright violations today, and it'll be something else tomorrow), and more and more people see through the whole theatre.

However, I'm afraid that everyone and their grandmother will project their hopes on a very young and very heterogenous party. There will inevitably be some disappointment.

But then, to quote Groundhog Day: "Something is... different. Anything different is good."

<comment><USER5> > From nowhere to 8 % - that's quite a feat in our slow-moving political > landscape.

I actually feel that the slow-moving days are over. The recent rise and fall of the FDP was spectacularly fast too, without anything happening, or the FDP even changing their opinion _at all_. (The FDP is a libertarian/neocon party with some interest in civil liberties.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 'They call it "Liquid Democracy" and it involves members making suggestions online which then get bounced around through chat rooms, which they call Pirate Pads, before emerging from cyberspace into the real world as policy.'

Liquid Feedback is a server software (implementing LD for an organization) that allows proxy representation. If I think person X can vote for me on topic Y, I can say so by using LF. And I can change my mind from one minute to another not only every 4 years. Here is a longer explanation:

<http://communitywiki.org/LiquidDemocracy>

Pirate pads are not chat rooms but Etherpads to work collaboratively on documents (that happen to have also a chat function).

<comment><USER7> Everyone should check out the source code of Liquid Feedback (LQFB). It's really a mess of pg pl/sql and lua. Zero! tests.

<http://www.public-software-group.org/liquid_feedback_core>

[http://www.public-software- group.org/liquid_feedback_fronten...](http://www.public-software- group.org/liquid_feedback_frontend)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always been intreagued by the notion of democracy and allowing people to choose their leadership. All political systems sound good on paper.

But my point is this. At a psychological level people are driven by emotion rather than logic. Most of the general public do not understand or are interested in politics. They do not have the indepth knowledge required to make a good decision. Rather they rely on the media to tell them who to vote for. Depending on the economic circumstances at the time, the ordinary person will vote for the person who promises to overcome their short-term pain, while ignoring the consequences for the long term. The most recent example is Greece, where the people have voted for a government that is threatening to wreck all progress to date on solving their financials issues for the sake of easing austerity.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER9> Yes, democracy is the worst system of governance we have, except for all the others.

In Greece, voters punished the two main parties who colluded to fuck them over so badly, by voting for other parties. In fact, almost 20% of the parliament is now composed of members of brand new parties - brand new because many voters don't feel their interests are being represented by the older parties. Isn't this result exactly what we would want and hope for in a system of governance?

> is threatening to wreck all progress to date on solving their financials > issues for the sake of easing austerity.

Oh my.

<comment><USER2> I think the Greek situation is rather more complex than that it can be summed up by two parties fucking over the voters.

Greece (and a whole bunch of other European countries) has a system of governance and a corruption level that is very different from other EU countries, and as such probably should not have been part of the EU to begin with.

Now that they're in Greece is in a position to reap the benefits of that fact but the countries that have for many years (Germany foremost) kept the weaker countries afloat are now themselves getting into trouble. This upset a lot of apple-carts and now we are at a very difficult moment for the union and for Greece.

As it is there are no real good solutions. Greece leaving the euro zone or being forced out will have big consequences for all parties involved and likely the end result of that route would be _much_ worse for the general Greek population than any level of austerity that is currently in effect.

Greece staying in the eurozone will require a lot of very unpopular sacrifices in many places, the end result of which will be a much weaker euro.

There are no winners in any of these scenarios, only losers and it will take a long time (decades?) to fix this problem properly.

What you are seeing here is the result of the EU growing too fast in order to win the pissing match about which economic block is the largest on the world stage. If the forging of the monetary union would have been done in a more restrained fashion a lot of this misery could have been avoided.

Cowboy politics a decade ago are what caused this, emotional reactions to the problem at hand certainly won't repair it overnight. It will get worse before it can begin to get better.

<comment><USER10> >the end result of which will be a much weaker euro. There are no winners in any of these scenarios, only losers

Germany is the winner in this scenario. Having the Euro as a currency is a great boon to their national economy. They were at a trade deficit when they used the DM, but ever since the inception of the Euro, they have been cleaning-up export wise.

Germany benefits from the Eurozone as consumers from EU nation-members can buy German products with no trade impediments. Germany benefits even more from a weak Euro as it makes their products very attractive for purchase from non- Euro countries.

<comment><USER11> > They were at a trade deficit when they used the DM

Not in the last ... 30 years. <http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade>

<comment><USER12> It's true that they didn't have significant trade deficits, but the current trend of trade surplus date pretty much from the Euro - look at the full trend of data from the source you link to, from 1971 to today. It stands out quite clearly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The reason for their quick growth is that they are new and that's enough at the moment. But not in the long run." Gero Neugebauer Political scientist, Free University Berlin

So what? To paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead.

I really dislike such dismissal without some sort of context such as whether a short term gain might or might not have any effect and why. But then again the journalist only wanted a contrary quote for 'balance'.

<comment><USER11> The fun thing is that "they are new" now lasts for almost 6 years. How long will we have to wait for the "long run" now, considering that exactly the same thing was said 6 years ago? :-)

<comment><USER14> They ride the "we are new" horse themselves, to explain their lack of expertise and knowledge in many pressing political issues. They are a new party, so people will look over some gaps, but this cannot last forever (maybe not even until the federal election next year).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a new California Pirate Party springing up too: <http://www.calpirateparty.org/>

</comment><comment><USER16> I love this so much. I am an American. I wish the American Republic was the same as the German Democracy. Such an idea will only take time to take shape.

I salute Germany and the Pirate Party for taking a such aggressive stance towards true democracy.

</comment><comment><USER2> The pirate party will continue to win seats until the larger and more traditional parties will need them for a swing vote.

The election after that one the pirate party main points will be part and parcel of the established parties' programmes.

<comment><USER17> > The election after that one the pirate party main points will be part and > parcel of the established parties' programmes.

I doubt that. One of the main points of the pirate party is to take power away from the politicians and give it back to the people (via direct democracy and member votes). The existing politicians would need to change things massively to their own disadvantage.

<comment><USER18> Or they could just use buzzwords and meaningless gestures to mislead the public, like they do now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> pirate parties are simple revelations of the internet revolution. ultimately knowledge society needs its own political forces and conflicts.

</comment><comment><USER20> The power of the people shall be heard.</comment>


Ron Conway email to SF CEOs: Tell your employees to vote this way election day - <AUTHOR> https://pando.com/2015/10/26/conway/3b82a298ddb79dd6571d98a317269127212d6b73/ <comment><USER2> I think it would be offensive for employers to tell their employees how to vote. Employees are adults, and are perfectly capable of voting in their own best interests (which might not coincide with their employer's best interests).

I imagine that most CEOs would have the good sense to ignore Conway's advice.

For those, like me, who had never even heard of Conway, here's some info on him:

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know Ron Conway, have never heard anything but good things about him. I was expecting the published email to be more about what he thought people should vote, a plea to certain sensibilities which he believes in.

Note: I also don't live in the US (and therefore, clearly not in the bay area) and therefore have no horse in this election race.

It's a bit disheartening to see a simple list of the items/people to be voted for, and how someone should vote. No explanation, not an "I'm voting this way and hope you do to", but rather what reads as more of a command of the way the reader should vote.

Having never met Ron Conway, I'm not going to hold this against him, like I said, I've heard great things, and am saddened to see Pando/Paul gloriously defaming him in the intro. I guess that's what I expect of Paull Carr, I haven't read anything of his in ages, and I guess I remember why now.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't read at all like a command to vote a certain way to me. He first urges people to get out and vote (that's the only part I read as command- like).

He then later provides a list of recommendations.

The secret ballot process in the US precludes any repercussions for voting/not voting in any particular way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently the author has never heard of labor unions and how they talk to their members about voting. Just to pick one obvious example among many, many other groups both private and public that do exactly this: suggest how others should vote in order that they be like-minded, right-minded, or benefitting from the same self interest.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you protect an idea? - <AUTHOR> Ideas are a dime a dozen - right? Is it a meaningless endeavor to protect your startup idea? Let's just say it is amazing. Did the WhatsApp and Instagrams of the world protect their IP or just launch as quickly as possible to gain traction and validate themselves in the market?
I am working on something (aren't we all) but my business partner is strongly suggesting we file something to protect the intellectual property. It's not a physical product, it's just a way of doing things differently.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I am in the same boat (when I close my eyes), so I would like to hear correct answer too.

As I see it now, you should at least research existing trademarks and patents then file for a trademark and maybe a provisional patent, which should be relatively affordable ($1k-$5k).

Once your app gets good traction and you can demonstrate sustainable growth, you should be able to get seed round enough for robust IP protection and further development.</comment>


Quick doesn't have to mean dirty - <AUTHOR> http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/07/28/quick-doesnt-mean-dirty/

<comment><USER2> I also thought this argument was obvious, even though people clearly didn't think so, but I'm glad you did such a good job explaining the point.

> when did learning become bad?

This is when you hit on what I think people mean when they use the "just get stuff done" argument. What they mean is they can get stuff done _now_ , without having to learn anything along the way or think too hard.

Sometimes that's defensible, deadlines and real life and all. Most of the time it's defensiveness because they know they are getting less stuff done and that stuff is lower quality because they didn't take the time to learn better tools and stuck with the training wheels.

> hip guys in class who write cool code in Ruby or Python

How out of touch do you have to be to think that people are using Ruby or Python because they are hip unknown languages? I have literally gotten this same statement thrown at me (to be fair, he had two young kids so he really was out of touch and had good reason to be).

</comment><comment><USER3> Author's anger is misdirected here. The core thesis of the TechCrunch article -- _shipping some working PHP code is approximately a million times better than designing something mindblowing in Haskell that never actually ships_ \-- is true. If your team can get a Python project out the door faster than one written in PHP, go with Python. And vice versa. Users don't care what language it's written in, so why should you?

<comment><USER4> That thesis reflects a common false dichotomy that many programmers (who often have only used PHP!) seem to actually believe: that anything written in a non- scruffy language _won't_ ever ship because the authors will be too busy sipping lattes and debating type polymorphism. That persistent belief is what I (the author) find annoying.

The underlying point here is that you can get something out the door quickly _and_ have it not be a Jenga tower held up by duct tape. I'm sure there are plenty of people who can do that with PHP and I don't mean to imply otherwise; I'm only asserting that it can also be done with Python.

<comment><USER5> Hi, nice article of yours, thanks.

I think you could even go further: doing things The Right Way is not slower than doing them "dirty", it is actually faster.

Those "quick and dirty" guys always throw some "god machine" thing that never worked as an example of The Right Thing. It is wrong. The Right Thing is just the correct amount of forethought and architecture for the problem at hands. The Right Thing leads to no overengineering, because overengineering is wrong. Doing The Right Thing leads to things like Vim, Git, Python, Postgres, coreutils, etc. Note that none of these is perfect. But they have 1) sane basic assumptions 2) some level of internal coherency that allow them to be reliable tools one can build upon.

<comment><USER4> Hey, thanks. :)

The problem with evangelizing the Right Way is that the benefits tend to come later; if you haven't experienced the pain of dealing with the Wrong Way's fallout once it hits critical mass, it seems easy to brush off. "SQL injection? Pfft, no one cares enough to attack my site." "Transactions? I only write one or two rows at a time anyway." "Templates? What's wrong with string formatting?"

Our profession is a bit lacking in context. Nobody believes the lessons of others. (Granted, we're so crazy that half the time we learn the wrong lessons.)

Still a young discipline, though. Maybe we'll grow out of it.

<comment><USER5> Not only true for web dev, true for all software related stuff. I listened to a podcast of a bunch of conferences held in the 90s about software. The most clever guy of the bunch did say something that stroke me as very true and very important, but so big and so scary that no one seem to see it: the simple fact that we have absolutely no idea about what the object "software" really is.

We know what are cars pretty well, and spaceships too. We know how they work, how to build them so they don't break easy, how to check for their health, etc.

But we have no firm grasp on software, we have no (economically sustainable) way to build them rationally and safely. Bugs are piling and the more we remove the more they are. No widely accepted method allow us to build software that has a quantifiable guarantee to work as planned under a fixed approximation interval. Etc. We programmers know that. Software development is at alchemy (magic) stage.

Funilly, this guy did specially point at OOP, saying that this was adding even more uncertainty to the mess. All that is well explained in SICP, and FP might be one of the strings we should pull to us out of the dark ages of software engineering. IMO.

<comment><USER4> Cars and spaceships built on existing engineering and physics principles. We've never had anything like programming. We can't even decide if it's a math, a science, or some kind of engineering.

We have languages with built-in async support (and some that fake it decently), languages with syntax for safe and unsafe pointer use, languages that bundle impurity away from everything else.

It's a slow process, since any new language has a massive uphill battle to gain any traction. But I think we're getting there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > most of PHP's trade immediacy for the slightest hint of reliability.

This article is a list of best (or at least the author's favorite) practices for Python.

I'm so tired of reading a person banging on PHP and then hyping up best practices for another language. As if nobody can be productive with PHP or would choose it for a new project. Or that PHP doesn't have better practices than what the authors have experienced.

If you like Python, that's great. So do I. Just get over it, these threads are so lame.

<comment><USER4> You're quoting from a paragraph about tradeoffs in core language design. That's not the same as best practices, though the latter often exist to avoid pitfalls in the former.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I use Python because it balances getting stuff done with having that stuff > not fall over as soon as I turn my back.

Uhh... Heard of automated testing?

It makes absolutely no difference what language you write your code in, whether it's PHP, Python or Brainfuck - reliability is dictated by your testing strategy, not the language. In the PHP applications I write, the only things that break are the things I didn't test.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried automated testing on a large complex web application? It's an insanely monumental task.

I actually mentioned Haskell in the post because coworkers have lamented not having its type system, which would immediately find problems at compile-time that we otherwise have a very very hard time thoroughly covering with tests.

<comment><USER8> Hi, Can you elaborate a little more on some use-cases or some examples from your troubles?. Am writing a web application(moderately complex) in python and find myself annoyed by the amount of unit test cases needed. My reaction so far has been to write them whenever i seem to test more than a couple of times. But, have a feeling dynamic typing is actually creating problems by enlarging the number of test cases. Don't know enough haskell to comment on it's type system, but curious to learn. P.S: Feel free to mail me, if you don't want it to be blog post.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of cases where a _data_ type doesn't sufficiently capture semantics, and without static typing, Python isn't very well built for checking that values have the right semantic type. A float could mean money or time or a percentage; a string could be plain text or HTML or JavaScript or a filename.

The really really hard part is still checking that a given page "isn't broken"—something that's easy for a human to spot but hard for a computer—for all possible combinations of state. But very strict typing would at least make the output less likely to break.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Prime doesn't release a show's view numbers to its creators - <AUTHOR> http://pages.citebite.com/m2d6w2h0j7vhc

<comment><USER2> This article is about a show that's owned by Amazon. For other shows I imagine that they have to report numbers to the owner for licensing purposes.</comment>