Benchmark Capital Advises Startups To Conserve Capital, Look For Opportunities  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/09/benchmark-capital-advises-startups-to-conserve-capital/ <comment><USER2> I survived the last economic downturn. I left my first startup which didn't survive the telecom bubble and eventually restart my career in 2003. In the first presidential debate, John McCain uttered the words "this is the end of the beginning" as if the $700B bailout signified the worst of the financial ruin and we should start to work on the recovery. This might be true for the general economy (I doubt it) but it is clearly not true for startups. My advise to startup CEO's is that this is just the "beginning of the beginning". Whatever you do, don't be an optimist. This will get a lot worse for a lot longer. If you don't have enough cash to sustain burnrate for at least two years, you will die. Unfortunately, right now your cash is your most valuable asset, not your employees. Cutting headcount is the only way to conserve cash. Don't rely on the VC's to save your company. They are the wrong people to turn to in a downturn.

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html></comment>


Talk with Rich Hickey: Time is the New Memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html

<comment><USER2> I think the Date class is an unfortunate example to use, its too prone to being confused with the idea of a timeline of mutable state. Maybe a better example to use would be the concept of a document, and that parts of it don't change while you're reading it. On the other hand, his audience will always be familiar with the Date class...

I've been following Rich's work for a while and I felt myself almost slip into confusion.

<comment><USER3> I think he chose it specifically because of the pleasing self-similarity -- it's sort of a joke. After all, what kind of problem is a mutable date? A time problem, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What does this add to the discourse about mutable state? Is there any genuine insight here, other "hey it's kind of like about time"? If so, it ought to give rise to some new construct or technique that helps solve the problem, or even just a simplification of some well-known example.

I guess he's trying to popularize the first principle of functional programming, but he's doing it in a confusing way that will inevitably breed further confusion. Look at the absolute silliness of the title for evidence of that.

<comment><USER5> What's your issue with the title? We did manual memory management in the past and we do manual time management now.

I agree with him completely that managing the timing of parallel processes is the most pressing complexity issue in computing today.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely no one uses the phrase "time management" in this way. "I found a bug in my time management." <\- Huh?

That mutable state has something to do with time is a tautology. Nothing in the recent discussion shows it to add anything significant to what we do or think about the problem. The interview title takes this doodling and amplifies it into some sort of grand theory. I'd be embarrassed.

I'm not criticizing Clojure at all, I'm criticizing this way of drawing attention to it (if that's what it is).

<comment><USER6> Yes, there is a tautology, and I'm glad you understand it, but such understanding is not widespread I assure you.

You are right, no one says "time management". I don't think they said "memory management" as often either, until there was _automatic_ memory management (GC). But one thing is certain, most OO languages don't yet offer automatic _____ management, whatever it is to be called.

People do say they have a "race condition" or a "deadlock", or simply "data corruption" often without connecting it at all to the unmanaged mutation of their objects. And before there was GC there was just "heap corruption", "double deletes" and "memory leaks". Management implies a manager, and there isn't one yet, so why would anyone say it? What I am advocating is that languages provide automatic management of "time". It's not a novel idea, yet it is still missing, and I think it is missing because there is no place to put it in OO strategies which conflate identity with state, with weak or missing notions of object values.

But the phrase "mutable state" is broken, in a way that keeps people from understanding the problem and especially the potential solution. As soon as you consider state the value of something at a point in time, then mutation isn't the correct term, succession is, and the connection to time becomes clearer.

FYI, I neither wrote nor uttered the title. The interview was a recording of a casual, no prep conversation following my keynote. It was not meant to be profound, nor an advertisement.

<comment><USER4> I agree with much of this, but "time management" still seems like a half-baked metaphor for FP immutability and not a clarifying model, at least not yet. It's easy to explain the X to which "memory management" refers: allocating and freeing memory. Surely that was easy to understand even before the advent of GC. It's also easy to explain what memory is and point to where and how it is manipulated in code. I don't see how time is a programming construct in the way that memory or state is.

<comment><USER7> Isn't time a product of memory and state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny that Rich used the number 42 as a recurring example in the interview. After all, 42 is "the answer to life, the universe and everything" (really, just search on google), which basically is what he is trying to find.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if there is an entirely different way to reason about computation, other than mutable state, which coincides with our intuitions based on everyday experience of the physical world; and immutable state, which coincides with the powerful and abstract approach of our mathematics.

Alas, mutable and immutable would appear to cover all the cases.

<comment><USER10> The issue isn't computation, it is modeling. The next order of evolution for computation is quantum computation. What R Hickey is addressing is modeling.

I think the modeling problem could be alternatively addressed by unlearning the notion (conceit?) that every program is a representation/simulation (which is where (domain) state creeps in) and instead embrace a descriptive/measurement approach. Or more precisely, to accept that a program is always orthogonal to the domain model and give up chasing after the holy grail/folly of seeking a paradigm to express "reality" in computer instructions.

One could argue that this is what FP is all about, but suggestion here is that the issue is fundamentally the conceptual view of the programmer and it can apply equally to OO or any other paradigm of programming.

For example, the "Date" case he outlines conceptually works if one is to suspend disbelief and accept the notion that a "Date" type object is really a point in time. "How can September 22, 2009 change?" But at some level this is just semantics. Would calling the "Date" object "DateDatum" cause a similar conceptual problem?

DateDatum lastUpdate = now (); //... doSomething(); lastUpdate = now();

<comment><USER6> > DateDatum lastUpdate = now (); //... doSomething(); lastUpdate = now();

Yes, this highlights the crux of the argument:

MutableDate lastUpdate = now(); doSomething(); lastUpdate.changeInPlace();

versus:

ImmutableDate lastUpdate = now(); doSomething(); lastUpdate = changedVersionOf(lastUpdate);

In the first case, when someone reads lastUpdate they get a chunk of memory that could change right out from under them, with no clear recipe as to how to obtain a consistent value. In the second case, they get a consistent value they can use without worrying or synchronization. The first conflates identity and state, the second separates them.

Now, all is not right with the second case, as there still aren't coordination semantics for putting new values in lastUpdate:

TransactionalRef<ImmutableDate> lastUpdate = now();

or

AtomicRef<ImmutableDate> lastUpdate = now();

or something similar would fix that. It's not a matter of removing mutable memory, but one of using it in a way with clear coordination semantics, other than "good luck with that".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just started reading Norvig's PAIP, and one of the things that surprised me was seeing lisp code written in a non-functional manner. Of course the code in PAIP evolves and the early iterations are "bad" on purpose, but it's amazing how obviously wrong some early patterns seemed just because I was used to Clojure's more functional style.

<comment><USER12> no, they are not 'bad on purpose'. Peter Norvig shows how to get from quick bottom up prototypes to optimized code. The purpose is to quickly and cleanly as possible get a first version going and then improve that.

Common Lisp programs make heavy use of side effects from imperative code, over destructive operations to the CLOS object system.

<comment><USER11> I haven't programmed at all in lisp and less then a year in Clojure so my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I did notice that a) imperative code is harder to read and b) later versions look more functional. So for what's worth I'm happy Clojure considers functional style and immutable data as defaults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure he's a really smart guy, but he sounds like a Computer Science freshman who is just beginning to grasp the problems of concurrency and consistency (could be his way of explaining). We already know these things are hard. No reason to give it a new, vague name like "Time management".

<comment><USER14> A computer science freshman? I'd rather argue the opposite -- that he's one of the few guys in Computer Science who comes up with something original AND builds a language that supports his ideas to see if they work in practice.

Even if you don't think Hickley is on the right track, how can you not like his combination of hands on implementation and search for theoretical soundness?

<comment><USER15> _that he's one of the few guys in Computer Science who comes up with something original AND builds a language that supports his ideas to see if they work in practice._

Not to discount Rich's work, but all of the ideas in Clojure have been well- known forever, and Haskell and ML implemented these ideas many, many years ago. Clojure lets you use these ideas with some Java libraries; that's its innovation.

Also, I don't really get the whole time analogy, but I can't help but think he wants Comonads, which Clojure does not have. (And due to its type system, will never be able to support well.)

<comment><USER6> Yes, Clojure is full of old ideas. I've never claimed otherwise. Unfortunately, they have yet to gain significant traction as currently embodied. Clojure is just an attempt to make them palatable and practical (and fun). I would never argue against someone who preferred Haskell.

As far as comonads, no - monads and comonads are essentially threaded through a single computation. The reference types I'm talking about are like, and for similar situations as, Haskell's MVars and STM TVars, which wouldn't exist if, e.g., state monads were sufficient.

<comment><USER15> OK, now that you mention MVar/TVar, I think I understand I understand your argument better. I think MVars and TVars are mostly a performance hack (like most other uses of state in general and ST or IO in Haskell specifically). Theoretically, many programs written in terms of MVars could be written in terms of spawning a new thread for each read/write pair. This would be easier to reason about, but probably slower.

A common use of MVars:

       f x = pure computation
       g h m = forever $ hGetChar h >>= putMvar m

       do mvar <- newEmptyMVar
          forkIO $ liftM f (takeMVar m)
          forkIO $ g a mvar
          forkIO $ g b mvar
          <wait for exit condition>

All we do is read from two handles, concurrently, and eval f for every byte on either handle. The MVar is a natural way of expressing this, but it does lead to potentially undesirable side effects.

Writing it in a functional way would probably be better:

      f x = pure computation
      g h f = forever $ liftM f (hGetChar h)

      do forkIO $ g a f
         forkIO $ g b f
         ...

There is now no shared state, since the problem doesn't actually require any. (We could use continuation passing style if we needed to keep state.)

Anyway, I am still not sure how Clojure encourages the reference-less style.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jeph Jacques has an idea for a video game - <AUTHOR> http://questionablecontent.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to scroll to the bottom of today's comic and read the news blurb. I would quote part of it if it weren't such a PITA on a tablet.

He's not the loser I am, so someone please shoot him an email.</comment>


Ask HN: Are developers actually bad at self-testing? - <AUTHOR> I've heard this claimed before and even parroted it myself, but I'm curious if there is anything empirical backing this up or if it's just a pseudoaphorism to justify not doing a tedious part of the job. <comment><USER2> I don't doubt that it is true. Same for proof reading your own writing. In your own code, you see the "happy path" (what it is supposed to do) so much clearer than the other paths. Someone else looking at the same code doesn't necessarily know what it th code is "supposed" to do so they see the other paths more easily.</comment>


Old Spice with Matrix like effects using HTML5, video, canvas, js - <AUTHOR> http://www.barbafan.de/html5video

<comment><AUTHOR> ok, how does it work?

three elements * video * temp canvas * output canvas

every 33 milliseconds (30 frames per second) render a video snapshot to the temp canvas, fetch the canvaspixelarray of the temp canvas, perform some calculations on the RGB values of the 230400 pixels, render the changed canvaspixelarray to the output canvas.

why the two canvas-es? better performance.

any issues? yes, you need three different videos, one for google chrome (webm), one for apple (h264), one for firefox (ogv). that's why the effect look slightly different on each plattforms (different encoding == different pixels).

does not work on ipad safari, as the render video snapshot to canvas throws some strange errors and security exceptions, pain to debug.

hope you like it.</comment>


Ask HN: Graphical OSS code editor for Linux? - <AUTHOR>

I have tried to find a good general purpose open-source code editor for Linux, but am having difficulties finding one. Vim and Emacs are out. What graphical editors are there that you would give your vote for?
Features that I seek are:

  * Syntax highlighting, Auto-indent, In-/deindent with tab, Tabs to spaces
  * Code block visualization (and folding), Variable highlighting
  * Changing of eol(crlf/lf/..) and encoding
  * (Column mode editing), (Multiple views)
  * Font selection
 <comment><USER2> Vim does all of these. And it comes with a GUI, gvim, although the job of a text editor is so non-GUI that it seems ridiculous to describe a text editor for source code as a "graphical editor". Before you dismiss Vim, have a look at Cream [http://cream.sourceforge.net/](http://cream.sourceforge.net/) which is just Vim with a better default config. Also look at Vim as Your IDE [http://haridas.in/vim-as-your-ide.html](http://haridas.in/vim-as-your- ide.html)

Most people who want a GUI end up with Eclipse or IntelliJ or Netbeans

<comment><USER3> He specifically says no Vim or Emacs. So what was the point of your post?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some random ideas:

       http://kate-editor.org/
       http://www.jedit.org/
       https://projects.gnome.org/gedit/
       http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
       http://www.kdevelop.org/

Also eclipse and netbeans if you add some plugins?

</comment><comment><USER5>
        http://geany.org/

</comment><comment><USER6> Could you tell us the reason you're not considering neither Vim nor Emacs? Genuinely curious.

</comment><comment><USER7> * komodo edit * geany * jedit * kate

</comment><comment><USER8> Code::Blocks

</comment><comment><USER9> Eclipse.

</comment><comment><USER10> geany</comment>


Full text syslog indexing with Riak - <AUTHOR> http://johnleach.co.uk/words/1063/riak-syslog

<comment><USER2> Pretty interesting. Might take a look at this. Monitoring syslog is a good thing that few do.</comment>


Fifty Shades Generator - Lorem Ipsum Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiftyshadesgenerator.com

<comment><USER2> Cute, but I don`t think I'll ever present a demo to clients that boast the following text:

 _The feeling of his baby gravy frothing down my throat got my fallopian fish stock flowing quicker than a greased weasel shit. Within no time, I could feel the shitty creamy load haemorrhaging from my mavis fritter and all over my panty hamster. Inserting a squash into my hot pocket got me flooding minge mucus faster than snot off a whip. The hammering of my marmite motorway was so vigorous, he soon found his family jewels joining his womb raider deep in my rusty sherif's badge. Hours of fucking like this would leave any girl's sugared almond looking like a hippo's yawn, and I was no different!_

"Lorem Ipsum Alternative" sounds a little far-fetched to me. But I guess the comical relief of seeing this for the first time can hold my attention for about half a minute. Just enough to write this comment...

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it brightened up my day :)</comment></comment>


.puz file format for crossword puzzles - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/puz/wiki/FileFormat <comment><USER2> This is cool, but someone needs to get it off Google Code before Google Code disappears.</comment>


Introducing DataFabric - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/7/9/introducing-data_fabric <comment><USER2> This is fantastically cool. Kudos!

The one question I had, and I haven't had a chance to look at the code yet, is if there is a way to query multiple dbs at once, at least for simple queries. Ideally in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still kind of new to this, would somebody mind explaining to me the pro's and con's of sharding?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228581>

<comment><USER2> I should note that this isn't quite what I was asking for in that thread. This requires me to touch each of my controllers to make changes and (more dangerous) requires each web server to know about all of the DBs in question.

That's a far cry from "make it the database's problem".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be curious how difficult it would be to migrate from a traditional setup to this setup.</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of businesses built on open data? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking at examples of businesses built on open data - such as
1. Selling the data itself - like, take data from the govt, clean it, massage it etc and sell it
2. Services built on top of open data
3. Scraping - data that is not readily available in machine readable format, but can scraped (web pages, PDFs etc), packaged and sold.
Anyone knows examples of such? <comment><USER2> I started a company called EveryBlock ([http://www.everyblock.com/](http://www.everyblock.com/)) that compiled a ton of government data and sliced it by address/neighborhood.

Also check out the O'Reilly pamphlet about how to build companies based on open data. (I got it at a conference a while back and don't recall the exact title...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Do you plan to turn this into a business?

Also, any idea where I can get the pamphlet?

<comment><USER2> Sold the company more than five years ago and have since moved on. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh okay, cool :) Congrats!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You mean something like these?

[http://geocod.io/](http://geocod.io/) [https://smartystreets.com/](https://smartystreets.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, some other example

[http://aggdata.com](http://aggdata.com) (scraping, not open data)

[http://www.zip-codes.com/products.asp](http://www.zip-codes.com/products.asp) (open data)</comment></comment>


Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because of a Liver Failure - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stopped-working-because-a-liver-fluke-tried-to-turn-your-nth-great-grandmother-into-a-zombie/ <comment><USER2> that was a very interesting read, thank you</comment>


The Peltzman Model of Regulation and the Facebook Hearings - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/04/peltzman-model-regulation-facebook-hearings.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the only intelligent pieces I've seen on the FB hearings. I've said variations on this before, but FB will get serious about it when users stop using it.

Until that time, everyone can complain, but the concept of "revealed preferences" is relevant. Do people actually care? If so, they'll change their behavior, FB will likely notice, and changes will happen.

People have been complaining about FB and privacy since practically day 0. Throughout that entire period, FB has only become more popular. "What can we infer from that?" is the key question.</comment>


Have 2 private GitHub repositories for the price of one. Documentation + Coding - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogeek.com.ar/2013/02/07/have-2-private-github-repositories-for-the-price-of-one-for-example-documentation-coding/

<comment><AUTHOR> 2 private repositories are awesome!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> :)</comment>


You MUST close a big client in 3 months or your business dies. How do you do it? - <AUTHOR> We see many epic stories about entrepreneurs that had their back against the wall, they persevered and succeeded.
In the 90s Apple fired Steve Jobs, then it was going down, Jobs made his comeback and miraculously turned Apple into the most valuable company in the world.
We all heard those stories, and we also know that the likelihood of that happening is VERY little, most startups die when they are in that tough spot.
Now I want you to picture yourself in a similar situation. All the odds are against you. You MUST close a big client in 3 months, or you'll have to close your business. How do you do it? <comment><USER2> Based on the fickleness of customers, the tendency of sales cycles to lengthen, and the consumption of resources of businesses...

I'm assuming my hypothetical business would shut its doors in 3 months, or 6 months, or 9 months...

It's hard to live client to client :)

</comment><comment><USER3> get in front of as many people(big clients) as you can and say "yes, we can do that".

<comment><USER3> At what price? yep sure. done.

<comment><USER3> And if you can actually delver than your on your way.</comment></comment></comment>


The Demystification of Venus - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-demystification-of-venus

<comment><USER2> I find the past of Venus probably the most interesting thing in the Solar System. Why this planet is so different? The slow spin, in the wrong direction. Was that from the beginning or something really heavy slammed it hard.</comment>


ZuluCrypt is a simple solution for hard drive encryption - <AUTHOR> https://mhogomchungu.github.io/zuluCrypt/ <comment><AUTHOR> I edited the title to remove the "Show HN". I thought the guidelines allowed to post stuff made by others, but on review it's intended for authors.

Still, a nice piece of software I didn't know before, and wanted to show you folks, sorry about the slip!</comment>


Virtual reality that doesn't suck: "it felt like the future" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/03/virtual-reality-that-doesnt-suck-my-time-inside-half-life-2.ars

<comment><USER2> How did they get Half-Life 2 to put out two views from different angles for each monitor?</comment>


Generator_tools: copying and pickling of generators in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiber-space.de/generator_tools/doc/generator_tools.html <comment><AUTHOR> Someone could implement continuations-capable Python web framework with this. Tried to bolt it on top of Google App Engine, but Python runs in restricted mode there so it does not allow bytecode generation on the fly.</comment>


Autoimmune Diseases and Meat Only Diets - <AUTHOR> https://www.healthline.com/health-news/meat-only-diet-eased-autoimmune-disease-symptoms <comment><USER2> The extent to which people eat in a way poorly aligned to their genetic make up, and that if fixed they feel much, much better, is hard to overstate. If you were genetically tooled to eat nothing but fatty fish in the tundra, this may work great. And eating bread if you aren't from the breadbasket may not be. Even vegetables tend to be regional, and many can be pro inflammatory in certain people (ie. Nightshades), which leads to malabsorption and therefore a lack of nutritional value in practice. Chances are eating to your genetics beats eating any one particular way. People just like the idea of one diet to rule them all. The trade off with meat seems to mostly involve shorter lifespan due to eating more calories and burning through telomeres. If someone offered much better mental health for your entire life and it takes five years off your life expectancy, you might do it, and that's mostly what's at stake here.</comment>


Show HN: Get refund for bad restaurant service - <AUTHOR> http://www.wecarecustomers.us/ <comment><USER2> Please don't take offense, but there is no info on your site but you want my phone number and name. I'm not inclined to give it to you without more info about your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, no offense taken. this is good feedback. for you, some details about how the service works is important not just the end result. i will take that in and iterate it.

<comment><USER2> Yes. As a customer, I would want to have a feeling I can trust you and your service. I.e. Why should a visitor not think this is a scam for telemarketing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there a list of restaurants that you work with available?

<comment><AUTHOR> not yet. i'm reaching out to restaurants in sf bay area right now. there are some locals that are showing interest. i want to launch the page to see if people would be willing to submit receipts and may be prioritize who to talk to based on that.</comment></comment>


Most coral dead in central section of Great Barrier Reef, surveys reveal - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/30/most-coral-dead-in-central-section-of-great-barrier-reef-surveys-reveal <comment><USER2> "A recent study suggested $10bn investment was needed to adequately reduce pollution levels and improve the reef's resilience."

Sorry reef, we need to spend that money on F-35s, a dozen new submarines, and tax deductions for people whose investment properties aren't renting for enough to meet their mortgage payments.

<comment><USER3> I doubt 10 billion will fix it. Unfortunately, AFAIK coral reefs are sensitive to rises in ocean temperature. And so climate change is killing them & will kill most warm water surface coral around the planet. The same thing is playing out in the caribbean, and in Thailand.

Also, judging by our progress on controlling CO2 emissions, and by our not so great understanding about how fast greenland / antarctica will melt, we may need to put particulates into the atmosphere one day. This will help prevent runaway climate change, but will do nothing to stop the buildup of CO2.

This extra CO2 will cause oceans to acidify further. Hopefully we don't reach the point of acidification which will prevent the basic food chain creatures such as krill to stop forming exoskeletons.

<comment><USER4> It is also the rate of sea level rise. If sea level rises faster than the coral platforms can keep up, then they will drown. See the figure here [1] for a summary of reef responses to sea level rise.

Also, if the corals die, then they stop calcifying, and then the platform starts to erode, making life harder for the organisms that are still alive...

Coral reefs are a complex system of feedbacks.

[1] [http://www.sepmstrata.org/page.aspx?pageid=345](http://www.sepmstrata.org/page.aspx?pageid=345)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's ok though, if we just remove all comments about Australia from a UN Climate Change report then that removes the problem, right?

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-27/australia-removed- from...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-27/australia-removed-from-un- climate-change-report/7450898)

</comment><comment><USER6> People need to wake the fuck up. This is not a test. This is not a drill. I feel like a person from the movie Network. I'm mad as hell and want to shout it from my window.

News like this has me gardening, biking, DIYing all sorts, switching to solar and electric, considering the entire lifecycle and systemic effects of the products I buy and choices I make. But an enormous percentage of Americans, who have the same data and news available to them, go vote for Trump. We are so royally fucked.

(I apologize for the language used here, but strongly believe in targeted use of the f-bomb. End-of-world type issues qualify as far as I'm concerned.)

<comment><USER3> come on.. it won't be the end of the world. There will be an aquamuseum where you can take your grandkids & show them... turtles! And bright yellow fish!

And you can mumble about how it used to be! And they'll think... crazy old grandpa (or ma which ever you'll be)

<comment><USER7> This reef and the other reefs are fundamental to marine ecosystems. When the reefs die the oceans die.

<comment><USER3> Don't get me wrong... I was tongue in cheek joking. But you can't get too worked up because this is how it is.

If it makes you feel better, probably the same thing happens on most planets that develop "intelligent" life: Life takes a very long time to develop & it develops through competition & evolution. During this time, natural stores of energy build up -- it is nature's method of keeping a balance - without it there would be no life.

Then finally the "intelligent" life pops out. They discover the stores of energy under the ground. They start burning it -- thinking there is no consequence, and they wind up undoing millions of years of careful balancing.

What happens next, we don't know. Probably nothing good.

Perhaps this is why when we peer into the sky, we do not hear any signs of life. Perhaps these bursts of intelligent life are incredibly short blips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since the reef is dying anyway, we may as well build a port and send coal carrying ships through it, right?

Mining creates more jobs than tourism so the equation is easy to figure out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Great_Barrier_Reef_oil_sp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Great_Barrier_Reef_oil_spill)

[http://theconversation.com/shipping-in-the-great-barrier- ree...](http://theconversation.com/shipping-in-the-great-barrier-reef-the- miners-highway-39251)

<comment><USER9> arguably the biggest and best coral reef, a unique site. we can't replace it.

but we can get coal from a good number of other places around the world.

it's probably worth trying to save the GB reef

jobs are important. that's absolutely true. but, maybe we can find other ways to create some jobs?

<comment><USER10> Aust. Government has been 'betting' on coal too long, the workers that pose to lose their jobs simply asked to be retrained in solar industry, were promptly ignored.

<comment><USER3> Australian Government is shockingly stupid. In a country that is prone to extended droughts, 0 leadership on fixing climate change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "But in good news for tourists and the tourism industry, only 5% of coral has died on reefs south of Cairns."

Great news everyone! We destroyed most of that other reef but this one is 95% ok! Ready you fins!</comment>


The New Scientific Method - <AUTHOR> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oAsHa6xYMTBJWJGX6/the-new-scientific-method <comment><USER2> > There is the old scientific method which was falsifiable, repeatable, > frequentist, and it involved directly observable quantities.

> ...

> There is now the new scientific method which involves models, paradigm > shifts, bayesianism, and it may not require a control variable when > measurements are constructed from multiple, indirect observations.

This doesn't make much sense to me. How can there be a new scientific method?

Shouldn't these somehow boil down to the same thing: hypothesis, experiment, evidence against the null?</comment>


Show HN: EventQL – Open-source distributed SQL analytics database  in C++11 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eventql/eventql <comment><USER2> Is this similar to Apache Drill[0]/Google Dremel[1] (BigQuery[2])? One differences is that it seems to be able to do mutations to data, not simple appends.

[0] [https://drill.apache.org/](https://drill.apache.org/) [1] [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html) [2] [https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is similar to BigQuery with a couple of differences as you pointed out. The big ones being that it's fully open source and self-hostable.

It's less similar to Apache Drill - Drill is "only" a query engine and doesn't handle the actual data storage. EventQL combines a bigtable-like storage engine (optimized for the analytics use case) with a dremel/bigquery/dremel- like query engine.

<comment><USER3> How does it compare to Clickhouse, recently released from Yandex [0]?

[0] [https://clickhouse.yandex/](https://clickhouse.yandex/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks great! I've just gotten a single instance up and running. Really simple to set up. It seems almost exactly what We've been looking for! Some background: We have been evaluating different time series databases for use with sensor readings (We probably need to ingest something on the order of 100,000-200,000 samples/s per cluster). The data is from physical sensors like temperature, level, pressure etc. Where all the data is in the form of tag(string)|datetime(ms)|value(decimal).

Have you done any comparisons to other similar software like influxdb, Cassandra, etc? Especially ingestion rate and disk usage.

What kind of pricing can we expect on Managed Hosting?

We are currently leaning towards Influxdb but the cluster licensing stuff they are doing really made us think twice.

<comment><USER5> If you're looking for recommendations for time series data, this thread still holds up - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8368509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8368509)

I'd consider taking a look at KDB+

<comment><USER4> We threw kdb+ out of consideration pretty early because it's extremely expensive and we prefer open software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why EventQL over other distributed columnar-storage based databases like Redshift, Vertica, Citus, or Hadoop-based ones like Impala and Presto. What does EventQL do better?

<comment><USER7> Good question!

May be useful to add to Show HN guidelines that it is recommended to add a "Why X" section. Or "How X compares to others in this space".

Without that, it is confusing. Are authors unaware of other solutions in the space? If so, they surely did not build competitive product.

Or maybe authors are aware of other solutions, but don't want to get compared?

Either way, not a good sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> looks good [0], thank you

can anyone comment on data disk usage ?

[0] docs - [http://eventql.io/documentation/](http://eventql.io/documentation/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not build a bigtable-cassandra fusion row-store too ? Since updates are async and all nodes are the same (cassandra) while the data model is sorted- by-primary-key (bigtable) and the schema fixed (low cost in storing tuples) and sql available (easier for devs).

</comment><comment><USER10> How can we import CSV dataset? HTTP API for insert returns this error message: expected JSON_OBJECT_BEGIN, got: JSON_OBJECT_BEGIN. The GROUP BY query in homepage scans 1.8B rows and only takes 1.5 seconds which is great but how many nodes used in that setup?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have a csv import util (the API expects JSON) but it's not in the current distribution/release build. I'll add it and update this comment once it's live.

Queries are mostly limited by IO if running on regular hard disks. The number of rows/seconds mainly depends on the number and types of columns that are accessed. For example, if we scan 1.8B rows and only load a single integer column from disk (and the integers are small), we'll only have to load about 1 byte per row from disk (using an idealized model excluding some overheads for illustration purposes). If we want to complete the query in 1.5 seconds that would be a total IO load of 1144MB/s. So (depending on disk speed) around ~15 machines would suffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a maintainer of the projec,t it's cool to see the Fluentd plugin in the repo: [https://github.com/eventql/fluent-plugin- eventql](https://github.com/eventql/fluent-plugin-eventql)</comment>


Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images - <AUTHOR> https://www.apnews.com/f97c24dab4f34bd0b48b36f2988952a4 <comment><USER2> Previously posted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870873)</comment>


Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kill-bittorrent-traffic-120513/ <comment><USER3> There are so many players in this overall story, and so few good guys.

In one corner of the ring we have the content industry which seems to care far more about chasing pirates than with making life nice for the people who will actually pay them. Customers who play by the rules are "rewarded" with region coding, DRM, and lots of arbitrary restrictions.

In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything. When confronted with with the moral/economic questionability of this approach, they have an extensive set of indignant rationalizations prepared; some of these are true but irrelevant to helping content creators get paid ("record companies are dinosaurs"), some of these are wishful thinking ("they can make money in other ways"), all of these are fronts for the fact that they just like getting things for free.

In another corner are governments and law enforcement which are gung-ho about legislating against piracy and prosecuting it, without understanding or properly considering the ramifications (see SOPA).

The good guys are: people who will pay a reasonable fee or watch a small/reasonable amount of advertising to consume the content they like, content creators who release their stuff in a convenient way without requiring an absurd amount of control, tech companies that are providing media services that strike a balance between creators and consumers (DRM-free Amazon, Google Play, Apple iTunes is getting better but is still pretty locked down).

May the good guys eventually win.

<comment><USER4> This is a vast oversimplification of the problem. Sharing is not always piracy. People tend to recognize sharing on a small scale (of movies, books, music, etc.) as on balance a good thing, and overall functionally promotional for the artists and makers who are having their work shared. The truth is that the same mechanism exists even on a larger, less personal scale. Unfortunately, the debate has been so polluted by vitriol and misrepresentation that this gets labelled as "piracy" and "theft".

Yes, there are some people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying for it. But this is not "a corner", it is not the norm for people who "pirate" or "share". The average person who downloads movies off of bit torrent is someone who does so as part of a larger set of media consuming behaviors which includes paying for cable, buying movies on disc, and seeing movies in theaters. Also, current evidence tends to lead toward the conclusion that engaging in "piracy" on balance results in more support for artists, not less.

On the whole I very much agree with Jonathan Coulton's stance on piracy (<http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/>), make good stuff and make it easy to buy it. I've never seen a case where that has failed to reward the artists.

<comment><USER3> > Sharing is not always piracy.

Didn't say it was. Actually I didn't use the word "piracy" at all (except in reference to the content industry and their perception of what "piracy" is). You're preaching the party line without reading what I've written.

For example, I have no problem with someone using BitTorrent to download something they already bought once, but that they can't use on a new device because of unreasonable DRM. I only have a problem with people who are not paying creators at all, or justify a large amount of copying because of a small/moderate amount of legitimate purchases.

I also agree that a limited amount of free sharing between friends is totally reasonable.

<comment><USER4> I read exactly what you wrote. You used a characterization of media sharing as "piracy", as "people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything". As I said, this is an incorrect and vastly oversimplified view of the issue.

It's not just about heavy handed law enforcement, or about the excesses of DRM, it's also about sharing. If we eliminate sharing (of music, movies, books, etc.) from the world in an effort to fight "piracy" we will have made a grave mistake. Indeed, I think the rampant levels of impersonal sharing we see today with things like bittorrent are probably better for content creators than more traditional levels enabled by libraries and friends and restricted by physical media forms.

The important point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that everyone who reads a book, watches a movie, or listens to a song needs to have engaged in some economic transaction prior to doing so (through either direct purchase or subjection to advertising) is a wholly wrong and dangerous notion. We can, and do, live in a world where content creators are rewarded bountifully for the work and yet unregulated sharing runs wild and free.

<comment><USER3> > You used a characterization of media sharing as "piracy", as "people who > feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying > the creators anything".

I meant exactly what I said: I am against "people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything." I didn't say this includes everyone who downloads things over BitTorrent (and I don't believe that it does). I didn't say this includes everyone who sends their friends songs sometimes (and I don't believe that it does). _You_ made this association, not me.

It _does_ include people who say things like "I just discovered BitTorrent, which is great because now I don't have to pay for movies any more." Which as I mentioned in another comment, includes someone I met in real life just yesterday.

> The important point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that everyone > who reads a book, watches a movie, or listens to a song needs to have > engaged in some economic transaction prior to doing so (through either > direct purchase or subjection to advertising) is a wholly wrong and > dangerous notion.

Well if we're talking in extremes, it is an equally wrong and dangerous notion that the compensation of creative people should be solely dependent on charity, with no recourse against freeloaders. What do you think would happen to the movie industry if the ticket booth at theaters were replaced with an offering plate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've built a company a few years ago which competed with these guys in their previous market - bittorrent optimization for ISPs. We've built the product (sort of a bittorrent cache) and achieved some positive results on a few production installs but never hit the real mark. The optimization we provided for ISPs wasn't worth for them the cost of the service we were considering minimally acceptable. The 'long tail' was really longer than we anticipated and this long tail spoiled our cache. But we've developed the 'carrier grade bittorrent client', i.e. hundreds of thousand connections, tens of thousand downloads, millions of files. Erlang + C. Hack value was something to be proud of. The next attempt would be to convert it to this - spoil the downloads and charge the copyright owners. We discussed this many times within the company but finally decided to wind it down. I believe breaking the protocols is beyond the line and we're too old school to cross this line. I wouldn't have been hesitated to, like, chasing individual violators, given the proof of violation, or identifying child porn distributors or something along these lines, but not breaking the internets. I talked to this guy once, btw. They were quite behind us in terms of technology and I don't think they progressed much. Well, I'd like to think :-)

<comment><USER6> Can you share some technical details/details of your conversations with this guy please?

<comment><USER5> Or you're interested in our implementation?

<comment><USER6> Yes, your implementation and the general idea, I've some familiarity with the bittorrent protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm less interested in the politics and more in the technical details. They seem to be keeping their secret sauce a secret. The best I could find in a brief search is this quote from the article:

 _We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every p2p client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real I.P. addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other._

My guess: the software connects to seeds and floods them with peer-exchange messages containing fake peers. (Essentially it's a DoS attack.) If that's the trick, then disabling PEX would leave a seeder immune.

<comment><USER8> How is this possibly legal? Interfering with someone else's computer system without permission is criminal (!) behavior pretty much everywhere.

<comment><USER9> But as the article states, the head of Microsoft Russia likes it! Both Microsoft and Russia are known for probity, respect for the law, and supporting the little guy. And when you combine the two, it should be double the respect for democracy. I'm sure it must be legal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers > realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail._

That's flawed reasoning.

Suppose their technology killed BitTorrent over night. Will it stop piracy? Of course not - we have a myriad of other technologies adept at transferring data from one host to another.

Calling some protocol specific denial of service exploit the 'anti-piracy holy grail' seems out of touch to me.

<comment><USER11> > _That's flawed reasoning._

You don't say.

> _Suppose their technology killed BitTorrent over night. Will it stop piracy? > Of course not - we have a myriad of other technologies adept at transferring > data from one host to another._

Yes, but it would be a very significant setback. Already the raids on DDL sites have had a large impact on the availability and easy access to pirated material. For example, they made 5 years worth of DDL links unreachable in one night.

In the end, you don't have to kill piracy --you just have to make it inconvenient enough, and most of the people will give up.

<comment><USER12> _you just have to make it inconvenient enough, and most of the people will give up._

Let's verify that claim, shall we?

1\. Fact: For the past 10 years the content industry has been doing everything in their power to make file-sharing as inconvenient as possible.

2\. Result: [http://disruptive-music.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/201...](http://disruptive-music.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/usmusicindustryevolution.jpg)

I'll tell you where your (and their) mistake is. Instead of trying to make "illegal" sharing inconvenient, the focus should be on making "legal" consumption convenient.

When the content is available immediately, everywhere, at good quality, for a reasonable price, then most people have no reason to consider other channels.

The content industry has only themselves to blame for not providing that. Case in point: I'd like to watch avengers, on my flatscreen at home, asap. Chances are PirateBay will make that happen before iTunes, even though I _would_ happily pay $10 for it, if they'd let me.

<comment><USER13> You seem to have a confused message. On the one hand you are arguing that it is futile trying to stop file sharing by linking to dropping music sales. But then you argue that they simply need to make legal consumption convenient: Music is superbly convenient to legally purchase online, with instant gratification.

What you're really demonstrating is that a lot of people _simply like things for free_. Hopping on the soap box and pontificating how it is everyone else's fault is a ruse that we've seen since the early days of piracy. It is always someone else's fault, and it's always some natural right to have everything for nothing.

<comment><USER12> _Music is superbly convenient to legally purchase online, with instant gratification._

That is a _very_ recent invention with spotify and the ilk - and even they still have ways to go.

iTunes may seem superficially convenient, but in reality it is only convenient when you already know what you want. Discovery is non-existent, and that's what many people want. And: It is way too expensive. (There, I said it!)

You may be kicking and screaming after reading this paragraph, but: Reality is that people value movies higher than music. $10 for a film is reasonable to most people. $10 for (most) albums is not. $10/month flat for _all_ music is then again in their comfort zone, as demonstrated by spotify et al.

You can now either take the stance of the music industry; i.e. cry, complain and spend all your money on trying to turn back time to the golden 80s - <USER2> consumers had little choice other than pay whatever you asked.

Or you can accept that the era of the middlemen (the "distributors") has ended because consumers don't want to pay for their Yacht's anymore. That the market has decided on two prices (for movies and music respectively), and that you either make do with that, or continue on your path to irrelevancy.

<comment><USER13> _It is way too expensive_

It's hard to compete with $0, which is the price that thieves are willing to pay.

 _You may be kicking and screaming after reading this paragraph_

I'm not in the music industry. I'm not in the movie industry. I would _benefit_ , financially, from piracy by simply engaging in it myself. But, you know, I don't because I can't justify it. I find the arguments that do completely transparent and selfish.

I honestly find these piracy excusing arguments _sad_ for society as a whole: It is the tragedy of the commons, everyone taking a dump in the well simply because they _can_ , making laughable arguments why what they're doing is justified ("If only there was a toilet every 10 feet and someone wiped my arse for me..."). It's hearing a teenager justify why they litter (it's the city's fault and McDonald's fault and their parent's fault and...).

 _Or you can accept that the era of the middlemen (the "distributors") has ended because consumers don't want to pay for their Yacht's anymore. That the market has decided on two prices (for movies and music respectively), and that you either make do with that, or continue on your path to irrelevancy._

Yachts....another adorable excuse for theft.

<comment> guard-of-terra Well, Russia watches Game of Thrones and we couldn't if not for pirates.

This makes me un-sad for society as whole. We become richer from piracy than we could be without.

Martin sells much more books in Russia right now than he would without the TV series, and HBO aren't losing money because they don't want our money anyway.

<comment><USER13> The essentials of life -- life, liberty, the Game of Thrones without delay.

Even if I accepted that argument, it has perilously little validity for the majority of participants in English language piracy discussions.

<comment><USER12> You say that as if there's a godgiven right for distributors to make money from art that others create, and for said distributors to decide when a given market is allowed to have access to it.

You also seem to assume nobody wants to pay for anything that they can get for free.

Neither is true. People _want_ to support their artists, they just want different infrastructure than what is available today.

Personally I have bought multiple physical books on amazon _after_ reading the pirated ebook. I didn't even bother to unbox them after they arrived. It would have been easier for me if the books had been available on amazon as ebooks in first place.

Likewise, when I hear a song that I like (e.g. on youtube or soundcloud) then often I'd spontaneously tip the artist $1, or $5, or just $0.10 - if only I could.

This all may sound foreign to you, but I promise you this is where we are heading. The new platforms emerge as we speak, and slowly replace the old cruft. Evolution at work; your choice is to either adapt or die, it really is as simple as that.

<comment><USER11> > _You say that as if there's a godgiven right for distributors to make money > from art that others create, and for said distributors to decide when a > given market is allowed to have access to it._

No, it's not a god given right. It's a right given to them by the artists. You know, those "other's that create".

<comment><USER12> The majority of artists seems to be very happy with the emerging distribution methods. You know, the 99% that didn't get a major deal in the past or that have been strangled by buy-out contracts and "less than fair" revenue shares.

If you have other data then I'd be curious to see it. My impression is that complaints only ever originate from mainstream artists, major labels or lobby- groups.

I have yet to see a small band or indy speak up against the demise of the major labels.

<comment><USER13> Wow, you really are pulling out all the best for this discussion.

"The majority of artists seems to be very happy with the emerging distribution methods."

So why are we even talking about piracy? Clearly these people are pursuing alternative distribution models, relying upon concerts or whatever, etc. Therefore the torrents are full of legally allowed sharing.

That's right, right? Surely it must be.

Of course that's not reality at all. This bullshit Robin Hood act is yet another adorable piracy defense technique.

<comment><USER12> _So why are we even talking about piracy?_

That's what I asked you. Who is, really? Sources?

I'll give you one from my side: [http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_b...](http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=all)

 _This bullshit Robin Hood_

You know what's bullshit? People who can't even form their simplistic world- view into a coherent argument and try to compensate by charging up each of their comments with random insults.

What is _your_ solution to the piracy issue? Tougher laws? 3 Strikes? What do you propose when this doesn't work (for which we have strong indication)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A Google search for ["Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I'm alive"] returns 13 hits, all about this start-up.

Searching for ["Vysotsky" Thanks to God, I'm alive] returns some more hits about the film, including some Youtube copy-vios.

Searching for ["Vysotsky" amazon] returns a bunch of out-of-stock items.

Sony - I want to pay for this. I want to give you my money. I want to buy this film. I want to buy many films, especially if they're not mindless blockbusters. You need to learn how to make search engines work and you need to make the official site have some kind of link to sales.

<comment><USER15> <http://www.google.ca/search?q=высоцкий.+спасибо+что+живой>

> _I want to buy this film._

No, you don't. It is of a very little interest to anyone outside of a Russian demographic circle.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I do.

You can say that no-one is interested in Japanese horror or Hong Kong crime or etc etc.

<comment><USER15> "You" in a collective sense. There is no enough you/s for Sony to justify adapting the movie to the non-Russian markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "44,845 transfers" were 'successfully stopped', according to this article, at a cost of anywhere between $12-50k.

Assuming $50k, that would put it at a cost of approx $1.10 per 'stopped' transfer. With the caveat that they've no idea if the 'stopped' transfers just resumed later on. That seems like wasted money.

Now, it'd be interesting to see what they could do to get nearly fifty thousand extra sales at a similar or proportionate expense.

<comment><USER17> This is what I don't understand about the anti-piracy interest group. Piracy is simply competition. These prevention tactics tell me, the consumer, that this company believes it cannot compete on any level with the ease and availability of pirating content. If they stop all pirating everywhere, will it force me to buy content through their (less than amazing services)? Maybe a little. Is it possible to stop all pirating everywhere? I doubt it.

In other words, where is the "piracy killer" service that is so awesome, I give someone my money and stop pirating? Hulu? Load of crap. Netflix? It's okay, I guess. Steam? Ok, so there's one.

<comment><USER18> > These prevention tactics tell me, the consumer, that this company believes > it cannot compete on any level with the ease and availability of pirating > content

of course they can't! Piracy has one major value to people that engage in piracy: it allows people to acquire content without abiding by the acquisition policy set out by the content distributors. It's "competition" in the same way that it's "competition" when 1 athlete in an Olympic running event is taking steroids and has jet boots on. You can't treat piracy as fair competition.

Most people don't pirate out of a "It's too difficult for me to buy this song via itunes", they pirate because they don't want to spend money. Content distributors can't compete with that, even with services like Netflix and Hulu people still pirate because they don't like adverts. If they are unwilling to pay and unwilling to view adverts what other options are there besides just giving away content for free? People that pirate (in general) want content without compromising on the way they want it, while piracy exists these people will continue to pirate.

<comment><USER19> 'Fair'? That seems an invalid concept here. What is 'fairness', assuming a strict copyright system? -- it is a race with the qualifying runner, but where no others are allowed to run! That is a strange notion of fairness.

But 'fairness' is just a diversion: these copyright trade monopolies are supposed to _prevent_ competition (of distribution), that is their point. That is how they increase one kind of revenue and so supposedly increase production.

When non rights-holders are copying/distributing it is competition _de facto_ \-- according only to the basic rules of physics. And it can therefore be an important signal: because what is basically physically possible is what the economy should really be aiming for. If people can distribute informational goods themselves better than the authorised channels, those channels are clearly underachieving according to the real baseline measure.

<comment><USER18> Fair is when the people that own content control that content. It's not a difficult concept.

<comment><USER20> How so? I would see it as a lot fairer if we'd all follow a liberal approach:

        I can't force you to give me things.
        But neither can you stop me from sharing them.

I completely reject the illogical, nonsensical crazy idea that you can _own_ virtual, abstract things. It's impossible by their very definition.

 _Die Gedanken sind frei._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I'm reading this correctly the software attacks ordinary peoples PCs to prevent them seeding a specific file (by spoofing other peoples IPs?). Anybody want to guess how many laws they could potentially be breaking in Europe and the US?

<comment><USER5> In Russia they're breaking the laws too.

<comment><USER21> I wasn't suggesting Russia didn't have laws against cyber crime. I'm just not familiar with them. It'll be interesting what the legal ramifications will be be if this service gets more traction and customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interestingly, if this would be widely deployed, it would probably result in adaptations to the BitTorrent protocol being developed to counteract this technique. Just look at the history of Distributed Hash Tables and Magnet links. Ironically, rather than stopping people from pirating content, they are actually spending money to make BitTorrent more resilient. While this will surely come in handy when SkyNet finally takes over, I'm sure the money would indeed be better spent on more competitive products and services.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how would this "wonderful" technology would perform in private torrent networks. Also I think it would be relatively easy to build protection against this kind of an attack also I wonder if doing this is legal in the first place...

These studios should spend their money on competing with torrent networks rather than always trying to destroy them.

Just create a descent media streaming service that makes accessing content easier and faster and most people will probably ditch torrent. To me my time is worth a lot, when I hunt down a movie on the internet it takes my time away and by extension my money(time = money) if the media companies would help me out with this, and offer a service where I could get anything in no time, I would gladly pay them for the time they saved me.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra It is old news, and the technology revolves around extracting extra money from IP holders while disrupting a small number of transfers on selected files.

Consider skipping.

<comment><USER5> Given how Russian internet is structured it may actually work. I mean the small number might become not so small. You can relatively easy (given the appropriate administrative support) break the download for 1M people at once (a whole city) from a single server.

The upside of this is that you can easily get 20-30Mbit for $20-30/mo from 3-4 competing ISPs in a relatively large city.

<comment> guard-of-terra It would not because users will immediately switch to ipv6, vpns, encryption, private trackers, other protocols.

Sites that actually provide competitive service (like ivi.ru) pose much larger threat to piracy.

<comment><USER5> All these sites (like IVI and the likes) share the same, very limited, library of content. It is like 10% of Netflix/Hulu, or even less. But potentially sure, I agree.

<comment> guard-of-terra Of course they would never gather a decent library of rarer, older or foreign content. Just torrent that, nobody cares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hardly the holy grail they're talking about. The fatal flaw is as soon as you close you one door, the pirates are already looking for 10 other ways to get around your technology.

Case in point? Look at how many times they've tried to shut down Pirate Bay. They just keep re-tooling and continue on.

</comment><comment><USER25> How is this not a computer crime?

<comment><USER26> I was thinking the same. How is this not a blatant violation of CFAA 1030(a)(5)?:

(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;

<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Based on the description of the product, it sounds like it performs man in the middle attacks on BitTorrent trackers or an attack on the Peer Exchange feature of some clients. I am willing to bet that either TLS-enabled trackers or disabling PEX would be all that are needed to get around this.

</comment><comment><USER28> Now if only there was an easy way for me to all but kill BT on my own LAN, so my roommates stop using up all my upstream bandwidth, and so I don't start getting nastygrams from my ISP because of them once they start doing that in July. As a network admin, BT sucks!

<comment><USER29> Back a few years ago when I was the net admin for our small company, my boss asked me how to set up his home network so that his daughter could not access games or chat or whatever kids do that parents don't approve of.

My answer to him is the same advice I offer to you: don't try to use technology to solve a social problem. In his case, I know for certain that his daughter has a _lot_ more free time to think of ways to circumvent the restriction, and he has less time to think of, and then implement, new firewalls.

I don't know your situation, but I would be willing to bet a compassionate plea to only torrent during off-peak hours, or to set the upstream throttle on their client would go a lot further than trying to "kill BT".

Of course, having said all of that, controlling bandwidth usage is a slightly different use case than trying to prevent certain content from entering/exiting the network. If you are having a problem with one peer using too many resources, I would think IP throttling would solve that problem (presuming the softer social strategies didn't pan out).

<comment><USER28> The main problem is they can't be bothered to figure out how newsgroups work, or pay a little money for the privilege of using a less network-intensive protocol with better performance. BitTorrent is just a drain on the network, and makes things like gaming impractical no matter how much you throttle it (though it certainly helps a lot). And people often leave it running for long periods out of civic duty.

IP throttling isn't specific enough. I don't need to throttle an HTTP download that's going to be done in a few minutes. I just want BT to die on my network, at least when I want the resources free for other use.

/rant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Even if I couldn't download movies, I wouldn't buy blu-rays and I would continue watching movies in theaters only in some festivals like Berlinale or HIFF. Same losses for the industry. Money well spent.

</comment><comment><USER31> Microsoft "investing" $100,000 is like you giving $1 (insert small denomination currency of your choice) to a beggar. They're not stupid. They know there is a relatively short expiration on this technology, so they probably reason they can make it difficult enough for maybe 500 people to pirate copies of Windows and Office that they'll buy them.

They may not even think that, and this is the old Microsoft strategy of structuring a contract in such a way that they now secretly own all of your technology.

</comment><comment><USER32> If I were trying to break a torrent, I'd put thousands of peers in the swarm and share bad data.

I'm all for the culture spammers getting better at busting p2p, so p2p gets better and subverting the culture spammers.

<comment><USER33> Sending bad data won't prevent anything either, It will merely slow down the peers by wasting bandwidth.

Torrents by nature work against bad data being received by hash checking each chunk of data. (You can't trust anyone on the internet). Most clients would simply block each "bad" peer after several bad chunks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's another whack-a-mole job.

People will just tunnel a new internet through the old one based on peer trust and this is instantly no longer an issue.

<comment><USER35> $100,000 of seed funding. I wonder what share of the company they gave up for this. Heavily funded anti-piracy agencies are almost guaranteed to make this a good investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> smarter mousetrap, smarter mouse. it's pirate pay vs. the internet. man, I would not want to be them.

</comment><comment><USER37> This behaviour will push file sharing further into anonymised and encrypted networks, which will push down the statistics of files shared online as they are based on what can be measured.

So the upshot will be that visible torrents will fall, allowing the company to claim success, even while they are making it harder for the people who are paying them to have any clue about the actual situation on the ground.

If there wasn't a slew of technologies waiting in the wings as drop in replacements, this kind of approach would have some success, but there is, so it probably wont.</comment>


$2 hardware SSH keys storage - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nuclearcat/cedarkey <comment><USER2> When using this awesome piece of software, you probably want to give a miss to the "blue pill" board recommended in the README file, and go instead with ST- Link v.2 clone, which has identical hardware and pricetag, while being considerably more portable:

[https://blog.danman.eu/2-usb-crypto-token-for-use-with- gpg-a...](https://blog.danman.eu/2-usb-crypto-token-for-use-with-gpg-and-ssh/)

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree about that, at least it has enclosure. I will check if i have one, i might port software to this hardware too, it should be trivial. I might try to make 3d printed enclosure for blue pill as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If my private key never leaves the hardware, does this mean I cannot make a backup copy of my private key? What would be a reasonable strategy to overcome my hardware key getting lost or damaged?

<comment><USER3> Key is not generated on dongle, so you will have it generated and stored initially on PC. By the way any key generation in chip might be VERY insecure, especially with RSA, because chip vendors love to use "backdoored" random generators (CVE-2017-15361).

So, as you use PC(preferable airgapped) for generation and initial dongle configuration, use secure erase after generation and configuration, but if you want, before that you might do backup copy as well to another dongle, or USB flash kept in safe place. There is definitely no plans to make key retrievable from dongle over USB protocol, as trojans might do the same. Still device is not absolutely secure, JTAG access have to be blocked (i have code for that, but didn't tested it properly yet) and for very paranoid people better to cut off jtag electrically, i might publish detailed guide how to do that - later.

<comment><USER5> "... for generation and initial dongle configuration, use secure erase after generation and configuration..."

Is there any reason one would want to use secondary storage versus storing these temporary files in memory, (e.g., "memory disk" or tmpfs)?

<comment><USER3> It is up to each person. I fully agree, that keeping keys in memory disk is better. Also, one more paranoia hint - generating and configuring dongle on something without management engine , it might be SBC(Raspberry PI) with enough entropy.

Seems i must write mini-guide how to generate keys securely, based on suggestions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ameelio: The Free Prison Communication Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ameelio/ameelio-app/ <comment><AUTHOR> $8 covers the cost for a family to send one letter a month for a year to their loved one in prison.</comment>


How to Make Waking Up Early a Habit - <AUTHOR> http://justusunlimited.com/2014/11/25/sleep-wars-a-new-hope/

<comment><USER3> How to wake up early; condition yourself to get up when the alarm goes off. Don't try and use _discipline_ , _willpower_ or self-talk. Don't think - <USER2> do it. This means that you have to condition yourself to do this before actually being in the situation of having to get up after a night's sleep.

What sounds more efficient and fool-proof - an elaborate ruse to get yourself to get moving, an elaborate internal motivational speech, an elaborate alarm clock ritual - or to simply to make it a "reflex", side-stepping inefficient and high-maintenance things like motivation, willpower and morning rituals.

[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up- right...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away- when-your-alarm-goes-off/)</comment>


Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002423-38.html

<comment><USER2> I can't help but notice the irony in the current top of the HN current story page.

 _2\. Obama administration wants warrantless access rights to most US email (cnet.com)

3\. Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued (philly.com)_

It's pretty clear to me that even the most well-intentioned government powers eventually wind up being used in the most sinister and disturbing ways.

Edit: for posterity, the other story is at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270579>

<comment><USER3> The webcam story blowing up is probably a good answer to roc's question about "Why is this not enough?". If they find something that sends some rage into the community, then I would expect this to bubble up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the real difference between this and what China was trying to do to gmail? The government wants to get access to private emails of people they don't like without having to demonstrate real evidence that the person has done anything wrong.

The biggest difference to my eyes is that the one targets "human rights activists who would like to bring down the government" while the other targets "terrorists".

Yeah, yeah. There is the whole "we're just going to take the emails". However China only went down that route after Western companies got leery of handing emails over due to the negative publicity that was incurred when Yahoo did so a few years back.

<comment><USER5> The difference is simple. This is being hashed out in a courtroom. And has a high liklihood of not happening. :-)

<comment><USER6> Good point. However, the similarity is also just as simple - the "instincts" of our Federal government is not all that different than the Chinese Communist government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If only the silence meant that people were sharpening their pitchforks. Unfortunately, this is the USA -- we would rather die by a thousand paper-cuts than stand up and say "No!"...

<comment><USER8> Obama selected Joe "I wrote the Patriot Act" Biden as his VP. This is the same Joe Biden who tried to ban Turing machines because they could be used to encrypt files that the government would be unable to crack.

Plenty of people knew this, but voted for Obama anyway.

For many people, "the government is violating privacy rights" is not a genuine policy position. It's just a club to beat their political opponents with.

<comment><USER9> "Plenty of people knew this, but voted for Obama anyway."

In all fairness, given the range of options offered for American voters, I'd also have gone with Obama even if I didn't agree on everything.

<comment><USER10> This is not how US politcs works. If you agree with a side on some points and disagree with others you are ostracized by all groups. It is stupid, but unfortunately the US is a place where (for example) you are pro-death penalty and anti-abortion or pro-abortion and anti-death penalty. If you are pro both or anti both, almost everyone hates you.

<comment><USER11> You almost had a point here, but your unfortunate choice of terms demonstrates a lot of what's wrong with US politics. Rather than referring to the pro- choice movement as such, you've adopted a label, pro-abortion, that is simply misleading. Here we have a debate over women's reproductive health rights, and it gets reduced to misleading soundbites like "pro-abortion."

In the same way, I think much of what is being protested in this thread comes from the false dichotomy between "pro-security" and "anti-security" that ignores how important the ideals of personal rights are to the debate. US politics is well-characterized by a practiced reduction of complex political issues to misleading soundbites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll echo the advice I heard from Phillip Zimmermann back in the early 1990s: If everyone consistently used encryption for all their email (that's 'everyone', and 'all'), then the effectiveness of government access to email would be lowered to a near-moot level. The sheer complexity and resource requirements to decrypt _all_ email traffic would exceed the government's capabilities. I know the NSA has incredible capabilities....but not that incredible.

Yes, I know this creates a new moving target. However, that beats being a sitting duck, though.

<comment><USER2> Only partly. It still leaves header information open, so the government is still able to see who you talk to. Through traffic analysis they can see what groups you're likely to sympathize with, even if they can't see the membership roles. And they're able to tell when those groups are planning something, even if they don't know what.

<comment><USER13> Exactly, this is what the NSA wiretapping case was about. They weren't listening in on all the calls, they were gathering information on who was calling who and for how long. This is the most traditional wiretap because it requires a lot less effort and provides a lot of information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"For its part, the Justice Department has taken a legalistic approach: a 17-page brief it filed last month acknowledges that federal law requires search warrants for messages in "electronic storage" that are less than 181 days old. But, Assistant U.S. Attorney Pegeen Rhyne writes in a government brief, the Yahoo Mail messages don't meet that definition.

"Previously opened e-mail is not in 'electronic storage,'" Rhyne wrote in a motion filed last month"_

Am I missing something here? How is web-based email not in electronic storage? Where is it then?

<comment><USER4> Lawyers who don't understand technology are trying to convince a judge who doesn't understand technology that technology works in impossible ways. News at 11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Update from the bottom of the article: "the Obama administration withdrew its request for warrantless access to the complete contents of the Yahoo Mail accounts under investigation."

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002722-38.html?tag=mncol...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002722-38.html?tag=mncol;txt)

</comment><comment><USER16> First, this title editorializes the article, and summarizes it too aggressively.

Second, while I agree that there's a problem here, the DOJ doesn't simply want "warrantless access rights" to "most US email". What it's claiming is more subtle: that mail that is older than a certain threshold and that has been open requires only a _court order_ , and not a bona fide search warrant.

<comment><USER17> You misread. They are claiming that mail older than 181 days _or_ mail that has been opened falls under the lower standard.

Edit: To your main point, I think your emphasis on the fact there is still a court order is misplaced. Of what practical value is a court order if there is no burden to show _probable cause_ (instead only 'relevance to an ongoing investigation'), and you have no opportunity to challenge (or even know about) the order. How many requests under such a standard do you really think are going to be turned down?

<comment><USER16> You're right. Thanks! But, I wasn't moved to comment by the 181 day standard or the "opened" standard, both of which are, excuse my bluntness, retarded. The real issue I have is the fact that there's still a court order involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait. What do they need for emails older than 181 days? I wasn't actually aware of that limit.

Slightly worrying.

</comment><comment><USER18> We were already taught at uni that the NSA gathers, scans and records (albeit temporarily) all email that passes through US servers.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if it's time we started pushing for encrypted email as a default. Mail/Calendar/Documents hosted in encrypted form online, and can only be decrypted on personal devices owned by users themselves. I really don't trust any machines other than my own when it comes to entering passwords. Do you?

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody seriously doubt that they don't already do this ?

<comment><USER21> I believe this was the reason for the telecom immunity sell-out: [http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-02-27/bay- area/17190307_1_ob...](http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-02-27/bay- area/17190307_1_obama-s-justice-department-wiretap-program-immunity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am extremely disappointed in the Obama Administration and outraged. This is unacceptable and we as a society MUST push back and demand this be stopped.

</comment><comment><USER23> Obama and Bush are the same in so many ways.

</comment><comment><USER24> So it's probably time to pull all my email out of Gmail and onto my own email server. At least the gov't hasn't yet routed around that basic personal liberty and property right. Surely many geeks will be moving away from freemium webmail that's wide open to the gov't, but where will they be going? Does anyone know of a good open-source Gmail front-end clone? If somehow this doesn't exist, open-source developers unite, let's do this!

<comment><USER24> It's also relevant to understand how we got here, a read a little history to avoid repeating it. An oldie but goodie: The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling <http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html>

The book is about the incident where the Feds first raised the legal issue of reading anyone's email without a warrant, and in a way it became the war that launched a thousand Internet legal advocacy organizations; which is where we are right now.</comment></comment>


The beginning of the end of Putin - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21548941?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/ar/thebeginningoftheendofputin

<comment><USER2> I subscribe to the economist, and enjoyed reading this, but it's political comment. Please let's keep it off hacker news.</comment>


AT&T fights to keep your internet as slow as possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/8/1481869/-AT-amp-T-fights-to-keep-your-internet-as-slow-as-possible? <comment><USER2> "[p]olicies that discourage private-sector investment put at risk the world- class broadband infrastructure American consumers deserve and enjoy today"

They do. We should be discouraging both government and private company monopolies because the end result is higher prices and worse technology.</comment>


Storing semi-confidential data - <AUTHOR>

I'm developing a diary/journal web-app - there are many things that make this better over using a diary but the obvious disadvantage is that you can hide your diary under the bed and be pretty sure noone is reading it. While I can say in a privacy policy I'm not going to read any entries you make that's still up to the user to trust me on that. So what I'm looking for is a method to encrypt (and decrypt) the text entries made by the user.
I'm really not very knowledgeable on encryption so I'm looking for some advice on how to do this. My main idea at the moment is to have a key that is never stored and is entered each time they login and used throughout the session to encrypt and decrypt each text entry. Again the user can't necessarily know the key is not being stored but as far as the implementation goes this seems ok. This also has the added benefit of users being able to store entries under different keys so that there isn't a single key to unlock them all.
Is there a better/more common way of doing this? <comment><USER2> User can only login using a salt that he throws at the system. U: ambiate P: pass S: BlueSky --> Server md5(BlueSkypass) and check it, never storing it. Save two passwords, one for general logins (using your own salt) and one resalted password with the user's own passphrase for the hidden data. Maybe just implement an OpenID or Facebook login or something of that nature? This might be misinformation... I haven't looked at encryption in forever!</comment>


Show HN: Roveb, a simple mobile loyalty program for businesses - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
We launched! Checkout our startup, Roveb, a simple mobile loyalty program for small-medium businesses.
Roveb will help businesses easily create a fast, simple and engaging mobile presence with built-in provision for deals, rewards and virality.
Businesses can inventivize mobile visitors who participate with social sharing/recommendations and personal visits; creating brand awareness and new customers for the business.
http://roveb.com (Invitation Code: SHOWHN)
---
I'll really appreciate your feedback (both good and not so good). Your thoughts around these areas would be helpful too:
1. What is your initial impression of our landing page? What improvements would you suggest?
2. How can we improve the mobile loyalty program? Any features or ideas we should focus on more than other things?
3. What type of person or organization do you think would benefit most from Roveb?
4. Any marketing advice or suggestions are most welcome.
5. We'll be grateful if you could kindly spare a few minutes to browse through a Roveb-powered demo mobile site (please visit http://roveb.com) on your smartphone and share some brief feedback about its performance, looks and usability.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> 1\. I think the yellow highlighting is overkill.

2\. I don't know how the mobile loyalty program works. Need some information on the front page describing it.

3\. Small businesses who need a presence on the mobile web.

4\. Pricing is too low, have you experimented with different price points?

5\. Images are fuzzy on retina display (need @2x images).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We'll make the necessary changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I checked out the Curry Ferry demo site on my iPhone. It looked nice and was easy to browse.

In addition to the "Menu > 20% off for group guests" link at the top of the homepage, I would add it to the bottom as well. That will allow visitors who read through the restaurant's description to easily check out the menu without scrolling back up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable - <http://roveb.com> (Invitation Code: SHOWHN)</comment>


The God Box (2004) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.arstechnica.com/guide/system/godbox.html <comment><USER2> The total price is just a hair of $9.7k ($13,290 is 2020 dollars)

It's interesting looking at the breakdown, because in some cases prices are similar, and I think in some other cases, the smart money has changed.

For instance, a really high end motherboard (X570 or threadripper) will still be in the $500 range, but there are now available options going up to $800.

The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars)

256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent.

GPU options, however, will run into $1200 for an RTX 2080 Ti rather than the $800 they spent.

SCSI cards are no longer necessary, as NVME is the smart play, and PCIE 4.0 is the high-end play.

They only spend $600 on the system drive ($827 if you include the controllers), but for a God Box, I'd put in an Optane PCIE card for $1300.

For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives.

Optical drives are out, which just leaves backup and case. I know nothing about tape storage, so I won't comment on that, but in the case world, you now have interesting options like the TureMetal UP10 which allow you to run this system entirely fanless, but for somewhere in the $700-$1000 range.

<comment><USER3> > The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the > $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars).

Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available, appropriately enough, at $3,990 retail. This is 64 cores.

> 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 > spent.

This is not possible as a combination right now. Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs. The largest unbuffered ECC DIMM I have been able to find is 16GB, which maxes out at 128GB with 8 DIMM slots (I haven't seen larger for any TR motherboards).

> For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you > want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives.

If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install into the tower directly, rather than a separate NAS. Especially with Threadripper, the motherboards tend to be large and 3rd gen need massive cooling solutions. There should be room for at least 4-8 3.5" drives in the tower.

Still, the modern god box is a good sight better than the old one.

<comment><USER2> > Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available

It's true that I left that out. It's not entirely clear to me whether the budget is unlimited or not in the God Box. Back in 2004 you could go higher budget than they did with the Opteron 850, but the market wasn't as clearly segmented as it is today.

> Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from > AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs

I hadn't realized that. There are 32GB ECC UDIMM's on the market (e.g. [https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd- samsung-1x-32gb-...](https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd- samsung-1x-32gb-ddr4-2666-ecc-udimm-pc4-21300v-e-dual-rank-x8-module/)), but that raises the price to around $2k.

> If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install > into the tower directly

Yes, but we're talking smart money, At the time, the NAS didn't exist, and with 10Gbe, the bandwidth is high enough to make it not worth keeping in-case.

I personally think the sweet spot is somewhere in the $2k-$3k range. That gets you 16 cores, 128GB ECC, 2TB NVME, 10Gbe, RTX 2070/2080

<comment><USER3> Aw man! That RAM was not available two months ago. I recently built a 3970X machine and was frustrated at the lack of 32GB ECC UDIMMs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was trying to figure out why, if money was no object, they chose 4GB of RAM vs the 16GB they said the board supported. Then I remembered about the 32-bit OS 4GB limit. While XP 64-bit came out in 2001, it was only for Itanium 64-bit processors. It wasn't until 2005 that XP and Server 2003 would have supported 64-bit, and therefore anything over 4GB.

Kind of a difficult time to plan your system build, here 64-bit processors are out, motherboards capable of supporting vast quantities of ram, but unable to utilize that outside of Linux. However, this "God Box" would have been excellent for 2004. Then in 2005, you could upgrade to XP Pro 64-bit, and go ahead and spend your unlimited funds to quadruple your RAM.

<comment><USER5> My 2005 Dell dual Xeon 3.9Ghz box with 8GB RAM is floating around, we used VMware and more memory than that though and the nvidia card has half a gig and my box had four 15k 146GB Fujitsu drives on a LSI R10 with iirc 1GB BBU RAM cache , this was fiscal 04 iirc

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > A floppy drive is still a basic tool for system construction

In 2004! I grew up using Macs, so this is wild to me. In my candy coloured little world the floppy drive was finished in 1998 when Steve Jobs told me it was.

<comment><USER7> IIRC the recommended way to provide possibly missing storage drivers to Windows XP installer was via floppy disk. XP was the go to Windows version in practice until Windows 7 release in 2009!

<comment><USER8> After they got tolerances figured out, 1.44 mb floppies were dependable and just about 100 pct guaranteed on all PC hardware, from whiteboxes to servers, oscilloscopes, routers, even clunky laptops. They made sense for little stuff like sneakernet and drivers for a long time.

<comment><USER9> Just curious, why do you write "pct" instead of using "%"?

<comment><USER10> Why did you write out the entire word why instead of 'y'?

<comment><USER9> You do realize that the entire word would be "percent," don't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Old Ars Nostalgia!

New Ars isn't a patch on what it was. But then the world has changes I guessed. Ars seems to be more about TV show reviews these days :-/

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty timely, LTT has published one of their appropriately-named "Compensator" builds, where they make the most obscene off-the-shelf PC possible.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg- sHwDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo)

</comment><comment><USER12> Would get a single threaded Geekbench score of around 250, similar to that of a 2013 iPhone.

<comment><USER13> are the Geekbench benchmarks equivalent across versions of Geekbench?

<comment><USER12> They are normalized but also they've run this chip on Geekbench 5: [https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708](https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708)

[Technically, that's an Opteron 275 instead of a 250, but they're quite similar. 250 was clocked a bit higher but had slower memory and no SSE3]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh wow ars old site design is making me nostalgic.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, back in the days before their 2007 Conde Nast pivot and they moved towards softer stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> firefox

document.getElementsByTagName("td")[15].width = "85%";</comment>


Fundamental challenges with public blockchains - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/fundamental-challenges-with-public-blockchains-253c800e9428 <comment><USER2> on point 1. although anyone coin has potential throughput issues crypto as an ecosystem doesn't.</comment>


Print Newspaper Advertising Will be Lower This Year Than in 1950 - <AUTHOR> http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/09/freefall-adjusted-for-inflation-print.html

<comment><USER2> That goes along with journalistic quality although it's probably worse than 1930's.</comment>


Why Bitcoin Doesn't Want a Real Satoshi Nakamoto  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/bitcoin_satoshi/

<comment><USER2> I was curious about bitcoin's origin (not so much with a name but in how and why it was developed) and looked into it a bit yesterday. My summary: Satoshi used one or more of the commerical payment systems of the late 90s/early 2000s, wanted something like that that didn't rely on the trust of a particular third party, and realized that hashcash + Haber and Stornetta's public timestamp system could achieve that. Satashi wrote the code first (C++ on Windows), worked out the practical details, then wrote the bitcoin paper to summarize the key ideas and calculate the properties the system had. While there was some ideological basis for the idea, Satoshi was much more interested in writing code and solving a problem then in talking about the ideology. Possibly imitating the commerical systems, Satoshi did have a bit of a marketing spin.

My guess is that Satoshi did not actually know about Nick Szabo's bit gold. There seem to have been several people working on vaguely similar ideas at the time. It looks like Nick got a sense of the bitcoin way of doing things from comments on his blog maybe six months before the bitcoin paper was released (it isn't clear when the comments were made and Satoshi had already been working on code for at least a year at that point), but a couple of years after bitcoin was released Nick still seemed to like the bit gold way better. Bitcoin could be seen as a simplified bit gold, but I think it makes more sense that bitcoin is hashcash + public timestamps without direct influence from bit gold. Nick approches the issue from a much more economic theory perspective (which is really interesting reading IMO): [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what- took-y...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so- long.html) [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold- markets.ht...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html)</comment>


Facebook tells drag queens to use their legal names or lose their profiles - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/facebook-demands-drag-queens-change-names/

<comment><AUTHOR> Is FB really going down the "real names only" road after people spent years educating Google+ on why it is a bad ideas?</comment>


No doesnt mean No to those selling personal info - <AUTHOR> http://blog.safeshepherd.com/post/17588042078/no-doesnt-always-mean-no-to-those-peddling-your

<comment><USER2> Why are there so many laws in Congress protecting Companies, but so few protect People? Or, in today's politico lingo, are the two synonymous in the eyes of the government?

<comment><USER3> they aren't synonymous - its just that 'Companies' have the money, where as the 'People' doesn't.

Have a watch of the movie at <http://www.thecorporation.com/> (its free but donate if you have spare money!). They pointed out that clever people managed to give corporation the rights as a person with strokes of the pen, those very same rights that many have shed blood and lives to grant. And yet, a corporation has none of the checks and balances that a person has - e.g., they can only be punished financially because the concept of freedom doesn't exist for a corporation (you can't improson a corporation!). A corporation doesn't have to be accountable for crimes they commit (ala, limited liability).

I think a corp should not be granted the same rights as a person, unless it is also held to the same regard as a person.</comment></comment>