Shorebirds, the World's Greatest Travelers, Face Extinction - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/27/opinion/shorebirds-extinction-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> Also check out an excellent podcast series on the topic by the BBC and ABC RN a while back.

(2016) Flying for your life: The journey begins [http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/offtrack/flying...](http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/offtrack/flying- for-your-life-1/7461802)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://archive.is/djPEu](http://archive.is/djPEu)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to sound glib or cynical, but if the incredibly limited scale of human development in Northwest Australia is a crucial break in the migration chain of these birds, it seems pretty hard to imagine enough tenderness and care could be exercised to save them.

Furthermore, aside from Australia, where along this path will you find anyone who will care enough about this cause to do something?

<comment><USER5> You do sound glib and cynical.

<comment><USER4> I noted specifically that that was not the purpose of the statements.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I don't mean to pick on you.

It freaks me out that we seem to be facing a massive global ecological decline (not to say collapse), and I'm not sure what to do about it.

<comment><USER6> > what to do about it

Have a beer, relax, and don't have kids. If there's no next generation to worry about, the ethics of ignoring the coming disaster is much easier.

> collapse

Yes, there's a possibility. I'd give it about 1 in 100 cumulative over the century. In comparison, if I had those odds for an airplane crash, I would never fly.

<comment><USER5> > Have a beer, relax, and don't have kids. If there's no next generation to > worry about, the ethics of ignoring the coming disaster is much easier.

I don't have kids and don't intend to, in large measure because of the ecological destruction and the obvious impending doom if we don't change our ways. But I can't ignore it. To me it seems like learning to live in harmony with Nature is one of the most important things we can do right now.

<comment><USER4> > _I don 't have kids and don't intend to, in large measure because of the > ecological destruction and the obvious impending doom if we don't change our > ways. But I can't ignore it. To me it seems like learning to live in harmony > with Nature is one of the most important things we can do right now._

I hope you realize that this attitude can not survive a generation. The next generation will descend almost entirely from people who thought it was still worth having kids.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Emscripten, an LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kripken/emscripten

<comment><USER2> Previous discussions: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644192> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428723> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2600890>

</comment><comment><USER3> GHC 7 can use LLVM as a backend. That might allow generation of JavaScript code from Haskell. There's already ghcjs (<https://github.com/sviperll/ghcjs>), but the output from that is quite verbose from what I've seen so far.

Update: For OS X you need GHC 7.2 to use the LLVM backend. Otherwise GHC just ignores the -fllvm flag. The Haskell Platform only uses version 7.0.4.

</comment><comment><USER4> Description of how LLVM works from The Architecture of Open Source Applications: <http://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a tracing JIT that has been compiled on top of this? It would be interesting if inherent problems with Javascript as a target language could be partially avoided by implementing a tracing Javascript JIT on top of Javascript.

For instance, the simplest source-to-source transformation for operator overloading is to use function calls for all operators. But this degrades performance for the Number type. Presumably a tracing JIT could switch to native Javascript operators after observing hotspots that only use Numbers.

<comment><USER6> Are you talking about C++ overloading? That's static, so tracing won't buy you anything.

<comment><USER5> I'm talking about dynamic languages. This performance penalty is a reason why CoffeeScript has rejected adding an operator overloading mechanism:

<https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/846>

But the question is whether a tracing JIT could largely eliminate this bottleneck by noticing if inner loops are really Numeric types. I was wondering if there were any LLVM examples that show potential performance of a JIT on a JIT.

<comment><USER7> I am not aware of any work of JITs on JITs. But I agree there is a lot of potential there.

One thing I would like to see done is to take PyPy or LuaJIT, and get their tracing JITs to generate JS, either directly or more likely indirectly by emitting LLVM which Emscripten then compiles to JS. In theory that could let PyPy and LuaJIT run on the web with speed similar to what they have natively.

If anyone familiar with PyPy or LuaJIT wants to work on this with me (I wrote Emscripten), let me know! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If emscripten could run in the browser, we'd have a js-only alternative to PNaCl.

</comment><comment><USER9> is this what the repl.it uses?

<comment><USER10> yes, I believe so. curious now about whether they could compile clang/llvm itself using emscripten and then pull the whole compilation stack for C into the browser...</comment></comment>


Apple is propping up a fundamentally broken payments industry - <AUTHOR> http://tomblomfield.com/post/97304410500/apple-is-propping-up-a-fundamentally-broken-payments <comment><USER2> The article is not compelling. Visa and Mastercard only take a very small cut of txns (15-30 BPs). The bulk of fees go to the card issuers with the bulk of that revenue supporting loyalty/rewards programs. You could try to get rid of V/MC but they have provided quite valuable organization.

The only argument that you can really make is that the issuer cut needs to be trimmed in which case rewards/loyalty cards would mostly go away. Good for merchants, bad for issuers and terrible for cardholders.

A payments network on the scale of V/MC that has worked near perfectly for over 50 years is far from "fundamentally broken".

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily terrible for cardholders, in competitive markets. Comcast won't lower their rates to account for the lower credit card fees but all the grocery store chains probably will, since they have to compete with each other.

I've thought the ideal (from a fairness point of view, not "let's keep the banks' profit intact" point of view) model would be to have cut fees significantly (in the 0.5% area), eliminate rewards (again, merchants in competitive markets will lower prices accordingly), and eliminate the grace period on credit cards. This will mean debit cards would be used day-to-day by most people, and credit cards only when the financing is actually required (not as it is now where many, including myself, use credit cards for everything due to the rewards and pay in full). I prefer this to the current system of merchants paying inflated fees, which are passed onto us in higher prices, and rebated back to us by credit card companies (after taking their cut of course).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think tom is advocating for DD, in this instance. Particularly since direct debit isn't really suitable for POS transactions.

Credit cards are fundamentally a 1970s business model, based on tech that paid off their sunk costs decades ago, but the barriers to entry are so high they're impossible to overcome right now.

Given you can check balances and make payments in (near)real time, at least in Europe, there's no reason to continue to use Visa/MC, other than barriers to entry. You could check balance at POS over the internet and pay from your merchant account, recovering payment within an hour or so via faster payment. Frictionless credit isn't the same as unrestricted or unregulated credit - it's about removing the tether between one bank and one cRd - disintermediation of the bank. Why can't I have a credit card linked to zopa? Or someone else, or even, within an overall limit agreed by an umbrella provider, a number of different providers. That'd be cool, and would drive channel providers to compete on costs of service delivery (the 2-3% per transaction), as well as on cost of credit. Visa and MasterCard are an absolute racket, and one of my biggest grumps is that PayPal became just like them, if not more expensive.

<comment><USER5> You've missed another big advantage of credit cards in most places — they almost always come with more legal protection. If they're stolen, there are limits as to how much the card owner is liable.

<comment><USER4> That wouldn't particularly change under the system that I'm proposing, idt. (on the back of a fag packet admittedly)- legal protection and the payments mechanism aren't intrinsically linked - most of the consumer protection with cc came long after the cards had been introduced. If you had an overall limit then the thief couldn't go over that, and a similar mechanism could/would exist - it'd probably be a product differentiation, in fact.

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that the protections that come with credit cards are a natural result of contract law. When you buy something with a credit card Visa pays for it and you agree to pay them back. When someone buys something with your stolen card Visa pays for it but you did not agree to pay them back, so there is no contract and no debt. Someone stole Visa's money, not yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't one incentive for using a credit card that it has better protections from fraud, etc? If my credit card # is stolen, I have a 30 day window to report fraud instead of paying, whereas with a debit card, the money is gone straight from my account.

<comment><USER8> No reason a competitor couldn't offer the same level of protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article makes very little sense.

First, not every payment requires credit cards or a need for financing.

Second, advocating the idea of cheap and frictionless credit is dubious at best; subprime loans didn't exactly end well.

Last but not least, it's unclear what you're advocating for instead of what Apple did.

Paypal, which you mention towards the end, does everything through cards and bank accounts, with the additional twist of you carrying a balance with Paypal. But they're a bank for all intents and purposes. And regulated as such, at least in Europe. Apple isn't in that business, and that's a good thing. Remember how GE or US car businesses ended up in the wake of the subprime crisis.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear - I'm arguing for frictionless payments, without the Visa or Mastercard tax.

I'm separately arguing for a competitive credit market, freed from the banks.

People are confusing the issue of multiple "virtualised credit cards" leading to more competition in the consumer credit product markets. It seems like a backwards way of thinking.

<comment><USER10> If you think about this in minimal terms, you have a merchant(pos), a purchaser/consumer, and an intermediary (though this would not be necessary for direct non-credit payments, like non-escrowed bitcoin for example). In an ideal world, a pos could publish a message like "transaction #N initiated for $X" to some "payment bus". Then the consumer would have to then publish a message like "User $Me agrees to pay $X for transaction #N".

If this were something like bitcoin, the payment could be wallet to wallet. If it were credit, some processor would have to know that they process transaction for "$Me" and find transaction #N to settle it back with the POS.

So the question really comes down to how you would implement this "payment bus". It seems like it could theoretically be something like the stock market. In fact, credit companies could be market makers and offering to settle transactions for consumers at different rates. This would have to be fast enough to be usable, but it seems like that issue is solvable with HFT solutions. But how would you get existing companies who make their own custom and profitable buses to all agree to use one generic bus and move the money making to the credit side?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't use of Apple Pay give banks the option of routing the money/debt thru other means? Chase just announced Pay support, and has been pushing "direct pay" (Chase account to Chase account) for a few years - might they observe that an Apple Pay event is in fact going from (say) Chase account to Chase account via debit "card", so just make the transaction internally and manage to cut Visa et al out of the transaction entirely? And, as such, increasingly avoid the "fundamentally broken payments system"?

<comment><USER12> I'm not aware of this, but if I were to guess - Chase has a Chase card which they use on a Chase terminal? The terminal would be able to acknowledge this and make the payment without going through any payment network. Most likely, on credit cards, visa/mc/amex would not agree to this on new smart cards. They could be doign it automatically on the terminals without any real interact with the card (mag stripe only?), but with a contactless EMV transaction, I believe it wouldn't be possible since the terminal needs to interact with an app on the virtual card.

Think about a smart card like a phone - you can install multiple apps on it. Credit Card companies most likely won't allow a financial institute to have their own app which will supersede the credit card app when used at the financial institutes terminals. It's possible, in Canada we have Interac and Visa on one card, but not quite the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I doubt Apple will make any money off of transactions, can someone prove me wrong? They aren't part of the exchange, so they wouldn't have any way to collect fees. I don't know where the author thinks there would be "extra costs" \- payment technology has always been something the financial institutes absorbed. In this case, I imagine Apple incurred the cost of developing the app and the payment networks will have an ongoing cost to maintain their Token Service Provider.

Apple Pay is really just an implementation of the contactless schemes (I say schemes because mastercard, visa and amex have their own flavours which preceded EMV's specs) using EMV tokenization, as the author mentions.

I agree that the payment system and requiring a third and fourth party can eventually be eliminated, but how can we expect the financial institutes to replace credit cards when they have no control over the payment networks?

Edit: I know a few years ago there was a new group created by merchants to develop a "payment card" which would be free of charges. Seeing how big merchants are, it would only make sense that they collaborate to develop a free payment technology which works with the financial institutes.

<comment><USER13> > I doubt Apple will make any money off of transactions, can someone prove me > wrong?

It was reported by Bloomberg: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-10/apple- said-to-reap-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-10/apple-said-to-reap- fees-from-banks-in-new-payment-system.html) (basically, in exchange for assuming some of the fraud risk).

<comment><USER12> Very interesting! I wonder how they will record a transaction - they said they weren't going to keep any information, but they'll need to keep a ledger somewhere of all transactions that occur on their phones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just Apple. Not anybody else trying to integrate with payments companies. Apple only is responsible for this.

<comment><USER12> Apple is responsible for this entire solution, is that what you're saying?

If so, that is a straight up lie. Apple worked with Clover/First Data to develop their payment app. The rest of the back-end technology has been years in progress, especially with the likes of Google and other failed attempts of mobile payment endeavors, mainly due to the lack of a secure element that they could freely open to customers to facilitate the EMV transaction. However, Google developed HCE to get over this hurdle and keep the telecommunications companies out of it completely. Apple has some impeccable timing with the release of Apple Pay, but also should be given some credit to tie all the loose ends and bring it to fruition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

Step one requires working with the industry.

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought that the big issue with the current system is that every transaction uses the whole set of identifiable info (name, cc number, exp date, etc). Credit cards with chips solve the issue, but in US it would take costly upgrades across the whole ecosystem.

Apple Pay comes as a layer on top the existing system, bringing primarily the same level of security as the chip-based cards.

Of course, it is a solution that assumes you have an iPhone 6, which is not a cheap and accessible thing for everybody, and that the merchant has the reader. The large/high-end merchants will have no issues moving to NFC payments and it will make Apple Pay a viable solution.

<comment><USER17> > and that the merchant has the reader.

Starting next October (2015), the liability of fraud will shift from the issuing bank to the merchant/card issuer. So Apple is ripe to take advantage of this because most (I assume) merchants will want customers to use Credit+chip or Mobile NFC because they will lessen the risk of someone committing fraud with a stolen CC. This will mean upgrades across the nation. Even card issuers like Walmart will want all its stores to upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "merchants are paying around 2-3% of every transaction as a tax levied by those incumbents, who add little value in return."

How about fraud protection (on both ends)? I'm old enough to remember people being afraid to use credit cards online. It would be great if things like Dwolla were more ubiquitous, but until then...

<comment><USER19> This is the key issue. I often hear people outside of the payments industry suggesting that interchange is broken, and I explain time and again that the amount of money they think is in play is not correct. Take a look at [http://www.cardfellow.com/blog/credit-card-processing- fees/](http://www.cardfellow.com/blog/credit-card-processing-fees/)

If you look through that, you'll see that the typical fees assessed by Visa and Mastercard are on the order of 25 basis points (a quarter of a percent). The rest of that 2-3% is going to price transaction risk (in both directions). No matter what you do in technology, if you're not talking about a better risk management system, the most you're going to be able to reduce interchange is about a quarter of a percent. It may not be obvious if you don't understand finances, but Apple is actually targeting the risk issue.

<comment><USER2> You're correct that Visa/MC take a very small portion but wrong that most of the rest goes to txn risk. In fact, much of it goes to support loyalty/rewards programs (which can easily cost issuers more than 1%).

<comment><USER19> I didn't go into rewards programs because that's an entirely more complex issue. In fact, rewards programs are a business hack upon the risk model.

At some point, someone noticed that they were accepting all of this risk money per transaction, and that they could make a tidy profit if they took only the low risk users, so that they could make profit on the risk model. Well, how do you attract the low risk users? You offer them a cut of the transaction.

Over time, as you pull more and more low risk users into the rewards pool [edit for clarity: there are only high risk users in the default pool], the cost of doing business as usual goes up, and you have to start raising your risk charges. Well, higher risk charges means more money available for rewards... and so on and so forth. Durbin should help to restore balance, but it will take some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think another perspective is that credit card support is a good back compatible solution. If people are using their devices to store payment information then it's not very far fetched to imagine other types of wallets/credit replacing visa/mastercard/etc.

</comment><comment><USER21> Using an iPhone makes me pay for apps that are free in the android ecosystem.. What's the inventive for me to start paying using an known expensive ecosystem?

</comment><comment><USER22> At some point the credit card industry is going to get disrupted. It's so broken + they take on so little risk that it's just a matter of time.

My belief is that bitcoin coupled with the right payment experience will disrupt the industry at some point. I would highly suggest reading Marc Andreessen view on the subject: [http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why- bitcoin-matters/](http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-matters/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Speaking of which, is there still any doubt in anyone's mind that Apple Pay is the reason Apple started banning Bitcoin apps? At the time I don't think the Apple payments rumor existed, at least not in the "almost-official" sense, and I think many were skeptical that was the reason Apple was banning those apps.

<comment><USER24> > _Speaking of which, is there still any doubt in anyone 's mind that Apple > Pay is the reason Apple started banning Bitcoin apps?_

Yeah, I totally have a doubt.

For one, Apple Pay will transport more money in its first 1-2 weeks than the whole international BitCoin system will all year.

Just consider that BitCoin's total estimated market cap is 6 billion usd -- something Apple (a single company) makes in revenues in about 8 days.

BitCoin, at the moment at least, is insignificant and fringe, size wise. The 99.9% of the 800 million users Apple has credit cards of don't use BitCoin. And all those companies Apple wants to work with, and users want to buy stuff from, don't accept it anyway.

Second, Apple rejects all kinds of apps from time to time, and given the immaturity and lack of regulation and quality control of most BitCoin exchanges (think MtGox and co), it's something they would consider kicking out of the store, or at least watching very carefully which apps they allow.

And here's the kicker. Apple has allowed those BitCoin apps back in the App Store, a few months ago:

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/16/apple-begins- allow...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/16/apple-begins-allowing- bitcoin-currency-apps-back-into-the-app-store)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I do not understand what this article is actually advocating for.

<comment><USER26> Direct Debit, he's one of the founders of: [https://gocardless.com/](https://gocardless.com/)

<comment><USER27> Is he forgetting that these are _credit_ cards? People need/want credit.

<comment><USER26> You can do Direct Debit transfers from credit/overdraft accounts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Developments around Microservices, API Gateways, Kubernetes and Service Mesh - <AUTHOR> https://glasnostic.com/blog/2018-review-predictions-microservices-api-gateways-kubernetes-service-mesh <comment><USER2> In case you're wondering what a service mesh is, this seems to be one explainer: [https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is- istio/](https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/)

Things that this seems to do are application level end-to-end authorization / authentication, load balancing, monitoring, etc.

Not sure if it does service discovery or you'll still need something else for that.

<comment><USER3> Full disclosure: I work for Glasnostic.

Service mesh encapsulates the complexities of distributed service-to-service communication so you don't have to deal with them. There are a few options (not just Istio) and all approach the problem in a different way.

I have written about this here: [https://glasnostic.com/blog/what-is-a- service-mesh-istio-lin...](https://glasnostic.com/blog/what-is-a-service-mesh- istio-linkerd-envoy-consul) and here: [https://glasnostic.com/blog/should-i- use-a-service-mesh](https://glasnostic.com/blog/should-i-use-a-service-mesh)

<comment><USER4> What advantages does Istio give you over orchestrating the services using k8s "Service" resources? To me it seems that k8s already provides mechanisms to proxy requests to the correct backends (pods). Why would I use Istio?

<comment><USER5> The short answer is layering. For example, to support mutual TLS, you need a system that distributes and rotates TLS certs to different nodes. If we don't want to add to many features to Kubernetes, then we need another layer. That becomes Istio or something like Istio. That is roughly how Istio came to exist in the first place, as it models after several Google internal systems that are on top of Borg instead of being part of Borg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apart from the specific technology used, it's important to change the way applications are designed and implemented. I saw many projects in trouble because they merely split a monolithic application into small pieces, without applying a new model of design and thinking. If you approach micro-services development without changing your mind first, you will fail.

<comment><USER7> Amen!

My last three companies were moving from a monolith to microservices. In every case, the rationale for the move was little more than "monolith development is slow, therefore microservices".

Unfortunately for all of them, the true reasons for the slow development was poor separation of concerns, insufficient and brittle tests, and years of accumulated hacky shortcuts to ship new features "faster".

The folks pushing the microservice panacea were "proven right" in that development was much faster... initially. Without years of cruft in their way, devs were able to churn out new stuff (after a significant time spent ramping up on infrastructure code).

Eventually, and in every case, the fundamental flaws resurfaced, this time increasing in severity now that changing the system often required multiple service changes. As well, a host of new kinds of problems emerged: distributed transactions, network failures, client/server versioning, debugging across services, etc.

I'm now a microservice skeptic. Whatever your solution, it should be at the same "level" as the problem. A massive change in technical architecture will not solve the accumulated cost of your poor engineering quality choices.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I agree. That's why I said that it's necessary to change the way application are designed. And, of course, there's no silver bullet. Sometimes micro-services architecture is not the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sadly Kubernetes is still vendor locked in - although you have a selection of them. Average Joe cannot install Kubernetes on their pool of commodity dedicated servers or VPS servers because there is no ingress that works with already assigned IP addresses. If you buy a dedicated server you get a block if IPs and there is no way to assign them to ingress. If such thing was developed, people could ditch expensive cloud providers in favour of order of magnitude cheaper dedicated servers.

<comment><USER9> What? This makes no sense.

You absolutely can bootstrap your own cluster of servers running K8s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel that service mesh integration in k8s is still very immature. Be aware that running any sidecar model service mesh requires setting elevated permissions on the entire pod. Your pod security policy will need to allow NET_ADMIN at the very least, since service meshes mostly operate by manipulating iptables rules in the pod. Often there are other elevated permissions required. Usually this means people are setting elevated permissions globally on the default svc account, which is scary.

</comment><comment><USER11> It will be amazing if someone knowledgeable here can share their experience with Linked 2.0, Istio and Envoy.

<comment><USER12> Envoy, if I'm not mistaken, is a sidecar proxy that is used by Istio.

The equivalent for Linkerd 2 is Conduit (that was its own app before and now is entirely part of Linkerd 2).

From what I've seen, Linkerd 2 doesn't feature as much features as Istio or Linkerd 1 for now (no circuit breaker for example). From the few issues I've seen on Github, it seems a bit immature to be used in a production environment.

Between the fact that I've just started looking into that last month and that it changes at a rate that is really hard to follow, I'm might be wrong...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've never read an article with as many words (brands / technologies) that I have not heard of..

I must be losing touch with tech!

<comment><USER14> Javascript Community: "Angular, React, Vue, TS, webpack, PWAs, yarn, NPM... nobody can keep up with all this change!"

DevOps Community: "Hold my beer."

<comment><USER15> DevOps, SecOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, GitOps...</comment></comment></comment>


Big Tablets Are Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanmiller.org/big-tablets-are-coming.html <comment><USER2> A big tablet imply (imo) to be standing and looking down (even if you sit you have to look down). This posture will get tiring very fast. Most people can stand all day but their necks won't forgive them this unnatural position.

Also the author seems to forget that "The Forgotten Man" usually write a lot of stuff (reports, emails, code etc) and a stylus doesn't solve anything here.

Even with perfect OCR you'll type faster on a keyboard than writing with a stylus.

So yes, big tablets are probably coming but "The Forgotten Man on The Forgotten Desktop" will still be a thing.</comment>


LinkedIn: Download your data - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/member-data <comment><AUTHOR> Takes up to 24 hours to prepare the archive, then you can choose whether or not to keep the network.

Other interesting privacy settings include sharing your work experience with a resume feature in Word, default-on collection of usage behaviour for ad targeting. I don't recall explicitly opting in to this, only perhaps by continuing to use the site after new terms were created.

I'll most likely leave LinkedIn after backing up my archive of contacts and messages as the value never materialised, despite years of use. The only reason I might stay one more month is to use the free trial for the Premium account, just to check it out. Even then I'm not convinced I'm not wasting my time.

<comment><AUTHOR> First part of full archive (contacts, connections, messages and profile) done in 10 minutes.

Second part due within 24 hours - may be same day at this rate though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review our redesigned Landing Page - <AUTHOR>

Hi, my team and I have been working on an employment solutions start-up.
Recently we've redesigned the landing page to give more information about what we are doing without revealing too much.
Link: http://eFolio.me
Any feedback would be much appreciated. <comment><USER2> Aren't there a whole bunch of sites like this already ? What's different about yours ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly, most portfolio sites are well, just portfolio sites. We provide a recruiter aspect to it, that allows direct interaction with employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://eFolio.me>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the random Capitalizations are Awkward.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why don't you want to reveal too much?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's more like we don't want to reveal too much on the Employer side of things because:

1) The are more likely to contact us for information.

2) We're releasing more information as the product reaches completion, as we want to make sure we deliver what we promise.</comment></comment>


Apple Watch – A Wearable Startup's Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://spire.io/blog/2014/09/09/apple-watch-a-wearable-startups-perspective/

<comment><USER2> It's a good time to be a wearable whose core functionality is complemented rather than cannibalized by the Apple Watch. Fitbit, Pebble, Jawbone, etc are in trouble though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah I was going to post asking why Android Wear doesn't do all the things the article mentions; then I noticed it seems they only have an iOS app at the moment.</comment>


The time it takes to run a paid newsletter - <AUTHOR> https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-exact-time-commitment-it-takes <comment><USER2> I've been writing about the world of gaming via Substack for the last year or so ([https://pausebutton.substack.com/](https://pausebutton.substack.com/)) for somewhat sizable audience, and this is a particularly accurate breakdown.

Links/Round-ups = retention. They make sure your brand stays top of mind for folks, but very rarely are they the thing that makes new subscribers come in. The tradeoff is that this is way more time-efficient that writing your own long-form.

New Long-form Content = Growth. The long-form stuff takes us 10x the time to write, but is consistently responsible for the increase in audience size. If you're going full-time, this is the place to invest. Particularly because Substack is so bad at reader Discovery, you need to invest in getting people onto your publication in your own way (original content), because Substack only really helps the biggest creators drive traffic.

It's why the I think the idea of bundling is going to be so big with newsletters, akin to how traditional newspapers started through a bunch of independent writers coming together. Eventually producing new long-form stuff wont be able to drive sustained growth and there's a cap on how much content a single person can put out.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're better off with "self-hosted" Ghost.

[https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

I don't understand the obsession with substack.

Get on Ghost, run it on your own domain, own the entire asset, and stop paying the substack tax.

<comment><USER4> You need a mailing address in the footer of emails in the US and any country with a CAN-SPAM-like law. Substack lets you use their PO box. It's even auto- filled. That adds cost for a self-hosted option unless you want your home address dangling out there or already have a business address.

<comment><USER5> Small USPS PO boxes are ~$10/mo. Is the convenience of Substack's PO box worth $10/mo?

<comment><USER4> You can ask that question up and down the yak shaving continuum and get an infinite number of answers. Is it worth it to me? No. How many people would answer yes? That's the 50 billion dollar question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article, however I'm surprised the author only went into the time it takes them to create content.

I run a bootstrapped product called [SparkLoop]([https://sparkloop.app](https://sparkloop.app)) which makes it easy for creators to add a referral program to their newsletter, and by far the biggest (and most annoying) time investment we hear newsletter creators complaining about is marketing, not content creation.

For most newsletter creators, marketing takes as much (if not more) time as content creation does!

<comment><USER7> Can confirm. Have an okay sized mailing list and writing is the fun part. Getting new readers is a slog that I hate doing.

<comment><USER8> Not only that, marketing is hard - even for marketers. Even so, if you commit (read: regular schedule) some time to it you'll likely be less overwhelmed / intimidated / discouraged.

Set a couple reasonable goals. Work towards those, and only those. There's no magic potion. No magic bullet. No magic nuttin'. That's marketing :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is fascinating because while tools like Substack lower the technical barrier to entry for starting a newsletter, they don't make it easier to create good content. That part is still a grind.

On a few occasions I've thought about creating a newsletter on a whim, only to think better of it when I consider how long it would take to create great content.

<comment><USER10> The grind will always be there, but can be offloaded to ghost writers. The focus then lies on building the theme of each issue. Which itself is another grind.

People dont realize that running a newsltetter is akin to publishing a magazine. They tend to see it more as publishing a blog, but are super wrong. Blogs are suspended in time. Newsletters expire (most do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I understand why journalists are starting newsletters en masse, but I think most people in tech are going about newsletters the wrong way.

Instead of trying to start a media business (which is by nature, a low margin slog, save for a few B2B markets), why not use the newsletter as lead gen for a much more lucrative business like Saas or Courses or high end consulting?

In which case substack is not a great platform for you, given they provide zero SEO value for your domain. Like with Medium, when you write on substack and share your content, you're growing substack's backlinks and authority. Not your own.

The newsletter being the product itself is only going to work for a very tiny group of writers in the end. If you're not writing about a niche business topic, or don't already have a massive audience, forget about it.

Remember, Bloomberg created the media company as a distribution channel for selling their terminal (one of the most profitable SaaS businesses on earth). Not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's frustrating about discovering Substack content is I would have no idea Simon Owens wrote about why Patreon's business model is under threat if I didn't see this post on HN. I'm unable to come for the topic, and then stay for the author.

If I search "Patreon" on Substack I get a bunch of people who moved there from Patreon:

[https://imgur.com/a/L0qYrUQ](https://imgur.com/a/L0qYrUQ)

What gives? How do I search by topic?

<comment><USER2> From the Substack-related interviews/content I've consumed, it seems like the company is more concerned with tools/support [0] [1] for its creators, before it worries about consumer growth.

The idea is that once you have an excess of supply (writers), who are all bringing in their own readers, it's easier to connect the dots for readers to other publications. Whereas if your reader demand outweighs supply, people will not see any value from sticking around.

As a writer on the platform[2] itself, I think the general tools/support for the non-Top 20 creators leaves a ton to be desired, so would love to see them step it up in a number of ways if they're really trying to get behind the average writer.

[0] [https://on.substack.com/p/announcing-the-next-substack- fello...](https://on.substack.com/p/announcing-the-next-substack-fellowship) [1][https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack- writers](https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers) [2][https://pausebutton.substack.com/](https://pausebutton.substack.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Glad to see more writers & content creators starting small businesses like this! I've been working on a set of podcast and vlog pre&post-production toolkits as well as an invite-only virtual event/work space creation & live- streaming platform ([http://lo.fish](http://lo.fish)) for independent creatives/writers/publishers/etc to organize online events & interviews ads- free, in a highly-customizable 2d setting and with a more friendly price point vs services like Zoom. We are going public beta next week! For any hn reader who would like to grab an early-access sign-up code just drop me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com =)

</comment><comment><USER14> If Substack is getting meta it's not a good sign.

The top stories on Steemit were constantly meta.

That said, I met a digital nomad who wrote for Steemit, he figured out the cheapest place to work was in a sauna/spa. Steemit sure created interesting people and I'm sure he just pivoted. Assuming Steemit has collapsed, maybe it's still going strong.

</comment><comment><USER15> Substack is amazing, it's like Tumblr meets Medium for newsletters. The UI is quite bare, the publishing tools are quite primitive, but it works so well. The ease of use inspired me to start my own newsletter where I talk about ideas and trends, I called it The Ideas Digest ([https://theideasdigest.substack.com/](https://theideasdigest.substack.com/)).

Admittedly, I've been going for barely a week now, but I've got a months worth of content already in the pipeline that I am working on and I am hopeful in the future that I can grow it into something I can make a little side income from. Not having to manage my own infrastructure is highly motivating, to be honest.

The thing is, I am a developer and more than capable of getting something like Wordpress setup and self-hosting my own Substack type newsletter, but it just seemed like a waste of time, especially for an idea I wasn't even sure I could pull off or people would be interested in. But, I am surprising myself and although I didn't have a preexisting mailing list, I've got a few subscribers now with almost zero marketing.

I see the value in no-code solutions like Substack that cater to specific niches like newsletters.

The struggle for me is long-form content writing usually comes natural to me, but given Substack is newsletter-focused, I feel like I need to not go too overboard with the word count. I know long-form content gets social shares and whatnot, but I feel like Substack is more of a private network type of thing where people are emailed content. I would be interested in knowing if any research has found what the ideal content length should be for Substack specifically.

</comment><comment><USER16> What are examples of the biggest Substack newsletters? I don't think I've ever encountered one, although I keep hearing more and more about Substack.

<comment><USER17> There are over 20 newsletters making over 100K according to [https://digiday.com/media/how-substack-has-spawned-a-new- cla...](https://digiday.com/media/how-substack-has-spawned-a-new-class-of- newsletter-entrepreneurs/)

The article also has a list of about 5-10 of them including a) Hell World, b) the Dispatch, c) Superorganizers (Part of Everything bundle), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > The time it takes to run a paid newsletter

Isn't that about 40-60hrs/wk, like everything we do for a living? †

† Except for Elon Musk.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been running Tales From The Dork Web ([https://thedorkweb.substack.com/](https://thedorkweb.substack.com/)) since January on Substack. In some respects TFTDW is a bit like Tedium.

So far it's been a pretty good experience, but I keep expecting the day to come when it turns into Medium.</comment>


How appropriate is this add on a Kids Maths web site? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/photos/104285159956540589387/albums/5741939797225795777

<comment><USER2> The ads are tailored to you, or whomever uses the same computer the you're are using. Google thinks you need those pills. The kids will get different ads based on what google detects as their interests.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quite. I know a lot of 15-18 year old students who study maths at this level. This is, unfortunately, very relevant.</comment>


Why you'll likely have your DNA sequenced in 5 years - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/03/22/dnanexus-structure-data-2012/ <comment><USER2> We may be capable of sequencing DNA cheaply enough for the average consumer, but what's the point? Issues like the missing heritability problem and an incomplete understanding of protein folding show we lack a full comprehension of the information DNA tells us. Cancer-killing bacteriophages are still years from being relevant as a treatment for the general public.

The Human Genome Project has yet to provide substantial medical advances. Genetic sequencing only seems useful to look for diseases with an explicit genetic link like Huntington's, and many people aren't going to want to know they have diseases like that. Otherwise genetic sequencing seems as useful as a full-body scan.

<comment><USER3> Although everything you say is true, there _is_ a very clear benefit of genetic testing that exists today. Many drug interactions have a strong genetic link. Take the common blood thinning drug warfarin for example. It's considered a medical best practice to prescribe this drug to patient's with a variety of heart problems (irregular heartbeat, history of heart attack, etc). A single dosage has wildly different effects on different patients however. The same dosage can cause fatal bleeding in one patient, while in another patient have no effect at all. Without genetics, the proper dosage is a crap shoot. With genetics, it's an exact science (as it should be).

And this is just one single example. Research is revealing more genetic-drug links all the time with relatively small sample sizes. Genetic sequencing may not cure every disease like we were promised ~10 years ago, but it is saving lives and is essential to the advancement of medicine.

<comment><USER4> This really is the key point. In graduate school I worked along side many individuals with close ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and many had very similar stories to tell...

Getting a drug approved is an interesting process. Not only do you have to prove your drug is not harmful, not only do you have to prove that it does what it's supposed to, you also have to prove that it works better than all the available alternatives. I heard numerous stories where a drug would go to trial, and for some subset of the trial population it would be a miracle cure. However, the way the current approval process runs, those miracles have to be averaged out with the rest of the population, and often the end result would be "it's not better than existing drugs: denied!"

Of course, scientists being the curious type quickly figured out that what they were seeing was the consequence of genetics. Have a certain variant of gene X? Then this is a miracle cure. But only 10% of the population has gene X, so on the whole this drug doesn't _appear_ to be better than the alternatives.

The problem is, the FDA doesn't know how to approve drugs that only work for people with a specific variant of gene X. Mostly, it's a chicken and egg problem: most drug trials don't include genetic profiling, because it would be wasted money since the FDA doesn't consider genetic profiling, because most drug trials don't include genetic profiling.

If sequencing becomes cheap enough that it can be included as part of the standard drug trial process, this could all change. Personalized medicine is the future.

 _Edit_ : Interestingly, though the name escapes me at the moment, I _did_ hear of one drug that was approved for a specific gene variant. However, this was only because that gene variant was particularly prevalent in African American men, and demographic data _is_ collected during the trial process. I recall there were a lot of upset scientists regarding this outcome, though, because conflating race with genetics is dangerous and irresponsible. There might be an 80% correlation (and even that might be on the high side), but that implies that there are non-African American males who could benefit but won't get the drug, and African American males that will get the drug even though it has no beneficial effect...

 _Edit, post-Google_ : Well, that was rather easy to find -- <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/health/24drugs.html>

<comment><USER5> BiDil actually is not a great example, because... "The trial, however, was conducted only in African American patients, and the results, therefore, give the impression that BiDil works only in African Americans. This is not the case. The trial investigators themselves concede that BiDil will work in people regardless of race." The drug company just pitched it that way to get it approved by the FDA.

Source: Kahn J (2005) From disparity to difference: How race-specific medicines may undermine policies to address inequalities in health care. South Calif Interdiscip Law J 15: 105–130.

[http://220.127.116.11/why/students/orgs/ilj/assets/docs/15-1%...](http://184.108.40.206/why/students/orgs/ilj/assets/docs/15-1%20Kahn.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This might change our standard of living by giving us new insights into our bodies. In less than a decade, living a healthy life will be about respecting your particular genetics as opposed to just following a set of formulaic guidelines.

After big data makes individual DNA sequencing possible, we'll be able to start clustering results and then reverse engineer illnesses to find even more risk factors and correlations between illness and ethnography. These are potentially important achievements for the Pharma industry and governments alike.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sequencing your DNA is of limited use since your phenotype is the expression of your genetic code. And your phenotype may be the direct opposite of what you are genetically predisposed to. Without knowledge of your phenotype the mapping of your genome is less useful, and possibly counter productive. (Better to eat methyl donors that toggle your genes, than to take DNA-tailored drugs...)

A not-quite-layman's look at epigenetics can be gotten from the book, Pottenger's Prophecy[1]. It has quite a lot of information and shouldn't be skimmed (as much to myself, as to any with leanings toward skimming everything). Those wanting more detail should check out the studies referenced by the book.

      [1]:http://www.amazon.com/Pottengers-Prophecy-Resets-Wellness-Illness/dp/1935052330

</comment><comment><USER7> bioinformatics grinder here. sequencing dna is getting cheap enough, and there are mutations that are known to be associated with specific disease and cancer. these mutations can be found with sequencing, and a lot of them can be treated with existing drugs/methods.

that said there's still quite a bit to learn about dna.</comment>


Take my idea: tiny shopping centres - <AUTHOR> The shopping centre isn't tiny, the shops are.<p>Entire shopping centres composed of tiny closet sized shops lets individual trader businesses thrive. <comment><USER2> Like an indoor market?

[http://londonwithchildren.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/c...](http://londonwithchildren.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/camden-market-shops.jpg)

[https://wcmu.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/indoor- stal...](https://wcmu.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/indoor-stalls.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Like Grand Central Market in downtown L.A., going on 100 years old.

[http://www.grandcentralmarket.com](http://www.grandcentralmarket.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mall_kiosk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mall_kiosk)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little curious what your life-experience has been that this is a new-to- you idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Haquiangbei (HQB) electronics market in Shenzhen...

</comment><comment><USER7> This is called Flea Market.</comment>


Uber's Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602662/ubers-ad-toting-drones-are-heckling-drivers-stuck-in-traffic/? <comment><USER2> One imagines Uber's seasoned leadership mulling over the pros and cons of such a provocative campaign thusly:

"Sure it's obnoxious, and more to the point, endangers the safety of motorists. But the lawyers said there's nothing on the books against flying drones over public freeways during rush hour. So I say let's go for it!"</comment>


Android Becomes Top Mobile Operating System in U.S., No. 2 Worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_becomes_top_mobile_operating_system_in_us_number_two_worldwide.php

<comment><USER2> I think it's important to note this report only covers "smartphones", not all mobile devices.

But a bigger question is: So what?

Wouldn't you say that in the age of the App Store, "revenue per user" seems a much more important statistic than "units shipped"?

Even with Android, it doesn't seem the carriers are evolving their business model much. Apple's the only one seriously carving out new territory in its customers' wallets (and raking in cash because of it).

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know where that would place it in terms of all operating systems? It seems like the number of mobile and non-mobile devices should be converging pretty quickly (for consumers, at least).

<comment><USER4> The article says there were 20 million Android devices sold in the US in Q3.

This article: [http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple- iPad-T...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-iPad-Tablet- Promises-Slowed-Q3-PC-Sales-Analysts-699136/) says that in Q3 Apple sold 2 million computers in the US which was 10.6% of the total. So that means there were about 16 million Windows computers sold.

However, that PC number is just "consumer" sales and businesses buy more computers than consumers. Still though, Android is getting close already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And this is why it is critically important for there to be a way to have an X server on Android so that we can use Android devices to serve up remote display/input sessions, i.e., access client applications running on virtually any OS and any hardware.

<comment><USER6> At least we have vnc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It will be interesting to see if the same thing holds this time next year with an iPhone on Verizon.

<comment><USER8> It will be interesting to see if the same thing holds this time next year with Windows Phone 7 on the same phones as Android.</comment></comment>


'A different dimension of loss': inside the great insect die-off - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/14/a-different-dimension-of-loss-great-insect-die-off-sixth-extinction <comment><USER2> Like one of those ants in the article, this solitary submission lives unobserved in an environment filled with tech news.

</comment><comment><USER3> > he has identified more than 1,000 new species of ant, including some whose > adults feed exclusively on the blood of their own young

Interesting... I'll refrain from making any inane political observations though.</comment>


The Central Limit Theorem Visualized with D3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vctr.me/posts/central-limit-theorem.html <comment><USER2> This isn't the central limit theorem. This is a binomial distribution. Nice animation though.

<comment><USER3> It is the distribution of the average of n binomial distributions (taking on values x±1)†, which according to the CLT converges to a Gaussian as n→∞.

[†] x is where it is centered.

<comment><USER4> You only get the Gaussian if you take the limit correctly.

In the visualization as you increase the number of bins, the Gaussian approximation becomes more and more squeezed, and by the weak law of large numbers the limit is a Dirac delta.

In order to get the Gaussian you'd need to be looking at a window whose width is proportional to the square root of the number of bins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A great example of convergence in the natural world I once saw was drops of water falling off a gutter from about 10 feet in the air. There was very little wind, and the drops fell on a line right under the gutter. It was immediately clear that the drops landed in a roughly normal distribution with their random fall through the air, and the pattern of wet pavement they produced was a perfect little compressed bell curve. It was quite beautiful.

<comment><USER6> Well, it wasn't perfectly normal. But it was close. The Central Limit Theorem is about closeness, not perfection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Video of a binomial distribution [1] physically visualized using a Galton box [2] Pachinko [3]: <http://youtu.be/AjI_LcQOOs4>

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine>

[3]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko>

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a galton box. (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSKTk9ENzg>)

It's a meatspace demonstration of the CLT.

<comment><USER9> This was one of the most "a-ha moment" videos I ever watched back in the day. Anyone with even a functional knowledge of statistics should watch this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I liked this but as other commenters have pointed out it's purely _binomial_ at this stage. The great thing about the central limit theorem is that it is _more general_ than just the limiting Binomial case.

So, there's this thing called the cumulant-generating function. It's pretty much defined for any random variable X. If you want to get technical it is the logarithm of the Fourier transform of a probability density function f(x). You're on HN so you probably know the first two jargon words, "logarithm" and "Fourier transform". A "probability density" just means that f(x) dx is the probability for X to be in the interval (x, x + dx). The Fourier transform puts us into a "frequency space" indexed by some variable k, so we can write the CGF as some function c(k), or in other words:

        c(k) = ln[ ∫ dx f(x) exp(i k x) ]

So for the "step left/right" variable which is -1 with probability 1/2 and +1 with probability 1/2, c(k) = ln[cos(k)]. (It can get a little messy when you ask what happens when cos(k) crosses 0 etc, but this function is infinitely- often differentiable on a disc centered at 0 which is all that we need.)

It also turns out that since the sum of all the probability ∫ dx f(x) = 1, you can just evaluate this for k=0 as c(0) = ln[ 1 ] = 0. The cumulants are derivatives evaluated at k=0:

        c'(0) = i E[X] = i μ               (where μ is the "expectation")
        c''(0) = - (E[X²] - E[X]²) = -σ²   (where σ² is the "variance")
        c'''(0) = -i E[(x - μ)³] = -i σ³ γ (where γ is the "skewness")

It is not very hard to prove that if I have a sum of two random variables X + Y = Z, then their CGFs add like cz(k) = cx(k) + cy(k). This is the Fundamental Awesomeness of Cumulants: cumulants are pseudo-linear; they're linear in _independent_ random variables.

It is also not hard to prove that if I have a scalar multiplication U = X / n, then cu(k) = cx(k / n). Combining these together, the mean M = (X1 + X2 + ... + Xn) / n of n identical and independent random variables looks like:

        cm(k) = n c(k / n)

Now if you know calculus, you know the rest. Taylor-expand around k = 0 to find:

        cm(k) = i μ k − k²/2 * (σ²/n) − i k³/6 (σ³ γ / n²) + ...

We see a _geometric attenuation_ in this series, we keep dividing new terms by n. If we drop terms from c'' on we get a constant, M = μ. That's boring, so we keep one more term, to find:

       cm(k) ~= i E[X] − (Var[X] / n) k² / 2

This is extra-good if f(x) is symmetric about the mean (so that the skewness vanishes), but it is also pretty good even if the distribution is skewed.

We can now invert all of the steps to return back to a probability density: you exponentiate, so you get exp(i μ k) exp(- k² σ²/ 2 n), then you inverse- Fourier-transform, which transforms the exp(i μ x) into a frequency offset x → x − μ and which transforms the Gaussian into another Gaussian, so you get a Gaussian centered at x = μ.

In other words you get approximately a normal distribution with mean E[X] and variance Var[X] / n, with the error given by convolutions of higher-order terms, and the first correction disappearing when the distribution is symmetric about μ (or otherwise non-skew).

<comment><USER11> Some of the explanatory power of the graphical demo seems to have been lost.

<comment><USER10> Maybe. But the proof also gives a lot of cute ideas for how to go further with this sort of demo. Since adding random variables amounts to doing convolutions with their distribution functions, if you had a Fourier transform package in JS you could probably show people some nice visualizations of adding together various random variables, and what it does to their probability distributions. This might give more insight into the generality of the CLT: you take a strange curve, convolve it with itself a bunch of times, and in the convolutions and rescaling it becomes first a skewed distribution, then a normal one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In probability theory, the central limit theorem (CLT) states that, given > certain conditions, the mean of a sufficiently large number of independent > random variables, each with a well-defined mean and well-defined variance, > will be approximately normally distributed (i.i.d.).

No, that's just wrong. The context is some positive integer n and values of some n real valued random variables independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.).

If for some n do what the quote says, then are not guaranteed to get a Gaussian.

Moreover, if do what the quote says and take the limit as n goes to positive infinity, then, say, in the case the random variables have expectation that is finite and finite variance, will get just the common expectation of those random variables -- this is the law of large numbers, not the central limit theorem. That the distribution of the mean converges to the point with the expectation is the 'weak' law of large numbers. That the mean converges to the expectation with probability 1 is the strong law of large numbers.

For the central limit theorem, add up the n i.i.d. values and divide by the square root of n. Then under meager assumptions (e.g., i.i.d. and, for likely the strongest conditions known, the Lindeberg-Feller conditions), as n goes to infinity, the distribution of the result will converge to a Gaussian ('normal') distribution. Authors with the details include J. Neveu, L. Breiman, M. Loeve, and K. Chung.

It's essential to divide by the square root of n, not just n.

</comment><comment><USER13> Kind of a misleading animation, since n is the number of switches (4) and not the number of balls (which diverges to infinity).

Setting the bins to 500 froze the browser, unfortunately.

The physical machines that do this are undeniably cool, but especially when they have the curve painted on beforehand; this is the best I could find right now, but I remember seeing a pretty big one as part of a traveling mathematics museum exhibition:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSKTk9ENzg>

<comment><AUTHOR> what browser are you using? the bins <input> tag has a max value set to 25

<comment><USER14> I'm using Firefox 22.0 and I have no problem setting it higher than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have to learn this Theorem for my exams (which are in a week). All I know is that

(X1+X2+ ... + Xn - n * mean)/sqrt(n * variance) --> N(0,1)

I don't see how that is visualization of this theorem.

<comment><USER6> X1, X2, ..., XN are Bernoulli(0.5) variables. You can increase N to show that the distribution approaches a Gaussian distribution, as long as you normalize the variance correctly (otherwise you get either no distribution at all, or you get a delta distribution).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Plinko!

([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Price_Is_Right_pric...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Price_Is_Right_pricing_games#Plinko))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The Bean Machine, also known as the quincunx or Galton box, is a device invented by Sir Francis Galton[1] to demonstrate the central limit theorem, in particular that the normal distribution is approximate to the binomial distribution." - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine>

<comment><USER17> I don't understand, they take a distribution known to look like a normal distribution, then... yep it looks like a normal distribution, central limit theorem proved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is pretty great. I've just started using D3 and it's pretty powerful stuff.

For those interested in data visualization - also take a look at Vega (<http://trifacta.github.io/vega/>) - it makes creating the simpler charts easier than using D3.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's what's going on, what will illustrate the central limit theorem (CLT) and what will not:

For positive integer n and for i = 1, 2, ..., n, let real valued random variable X(i) be so that

P(X(i) = -1 = P(X(i) = 1 ) = 1/2

Assume that {X(1), ..., X(n)} is an independent set of random variables.

Easily the expectation E[X(i)] = 0.

Let real valued random variable

S(n) = X(1) + X(2) + ... + X(n)

Easily E[S(n)] = 0.

For n = 4, S(n) can take on values -4, -3, ..., 0, 1, ..., 4.

The animation in the OP should converge to the density of S(n) where n = 4.

By the CLT, as n approaches infinity, the density of

( 1/sqrt(n) ) S(n)

will be Gaussian with expectation 0.

By the strong law of large numbers, as n approaches infinity, the probability random variable

(1/n) S(n)

converges to 0 is 1.

For increasing n, S(n) is a martingale and is a discrete approximation to Brownian motion. As n approaches infinity, the density of S(n) approaches 0 everywhere on the real line and in its limit is not a density.

<comment><USER12> Errata:

Change

P(X(i) = -1 = P(X(i) = 1 ) = 1/2

to

P(X(i) = -1 ) = P(X(i) = 1 ) = 1/2

For more, let v(i) be the variance of X(i). Then since E[X(i)] = 0

      v(i) = E[ (X(i) - E[X(i)])^2 ]

           =  E[ (X(i))^2 ]

           = (1/2) 1 + (1/2) 1

           = 1

Since in the i.i.d. case the variance of a sum is the sum of the variances, the variance of S(n) is n. Then the standard deviation of S(n) is sqrt(n) so that the standard deviation of

(1/sqrt(n)) S(n)

is 1.

So, for large n, the density of

(1/sqrt(n)) S(n)

converges to Gaussian with expectation 0 and standard deviation 1 and variance 1.

<comment><USER12> Errata:

Change

Since in the i.i.d. case the variance of a sum is the sum of the variances,

to

Since in the independent case, and, hence, also the i.i.d., case, the variance of a sum is the sum of the variances,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool. Could I suggest that you display the total balls dropped somewhere as well?

Edit: just two niggles - (a) 13 bins would be better numbered 0-12 or 1-13. (b) I would round the percentages to nearest value (not down).

<comment><AUTHOR> good idea! i'll try and add this when have time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had to finish the number examples on that page to prove this to myself:

000 -> 0 001 -> 1 010 -> 1 011 -> 2 100 -> 1 101 -> 2 110 -> 2 111 -> 3

0 -> 1: 12.5% 1 -> 3: 37.5% 2 -> 3: 37.5% 3 -> 1: 12.5%

0000 -> 0 0001 -> 1 0010 -> 1 0011 -> 2 0100 -> 1 0101 -> 2 0110 -> 2 0111 -> 3 1000 -> 1 1001 -> 2 1010 -> 2 1011 -> 3 1100 -> 2 1101 -> 3 1110 -> 3 1111 -> 4

0 -> 1: 6.25% 1 -> 4: 25% 2 -> 6: 37.5% 3 -> 4: 25% 4 -> 1: 6.25%

<comment><USER20> Sorry hn killed the formatting :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You may want to do a bit of proofreading. It's difficult for me to take the content of this article seriously with so many spelling mistakes; especially since you misspelled "probability", which is the focus of the entire thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for pointing this point. I updated the document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great -- I love math visualized. It's fun to set the settings to no delay and just watch the bar graph normalize really quickly

<http://i.imgur.com/E8yppGG.png>

</comment><comment><USER23> Turn that into something I can gamble on and I'd play it all day.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> while i have the attention of HN, does anyone have suggestions on any other types of statistic visualizations?

<comment><USER4> Brownian motion remains Brownian motion at all scales if you scale correctly.

More specifically, if you take a rectangle of width 1/nth of your visualization box, height 1/sqrt(n)th of your visualization box, centered on the point of the walk in the middle of the box then zoom in, you get another random walk with the same statistical properties as the original.

<comment><USER11> There is a gif of this at

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_process#Self-similarity>

which is rather nice.

If you get some infrastructure for making Brownian motion sample paths, another good one is that it crosses zero infinitely often in the neighborhood of the origin. Keep zooming in, and see more and more crossings. This is another instance of the scaling rule you mention, but it is neat to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It does get a lot more visually interesting with a very high # of bins, and very small delay.

</comment><comment><USER25> Also known as Plinko Theorem

</comment><comment><USER26> This is not the Central Limit Theorem.

<comment><USER6> Really? I see a collection X1, X2, ..., XN of Bernoulli(0.5) variables and the demonstration that the distribution of their sum, normalized for variance, approaches the Gaussian distribution as N increases. Is that not a direct consequence of the CLT?

<comment><USER27> > the distribution of their sum

Exactly. But the page defines the CLT as referring to:

"the _mean_ of a sufficiently large number of independent random variables ..."

So it talks about the _mean_ and then illustrates the _sum_ , just as you are, which is confusing. I spent several minutes puzzling about how the mean of variables between zero and 1 could be 5, for example.

Now, I suppose you will say, the distribution of the mean is just the distribution of the sum, normalized, and this ought to be obvious to anybody with half a brain, but if this page is meant to help people trying to learn this stuff understand it, it would be better if it was accurate and not directly confusing with its language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you!</comment></comment>


A brief history of mathematical symbols - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2014/may/21/notation-history-mathematical-symbols-joseph-mazur

<comment><USER2> Amazing how the difference in the time of submission affects the voting so radically. Amazing. It's a "feature" of HN in so far as it's documented, but is it something that can be improved? The fact that something gets lots of votes at some stage shows that it's relevant and interesting. The fact that it didn't get votes first time around shows that it was missed.

How many relevant and interesting articles get missed because they are submitted once and sink without being noticed?

Is this a problem?

If so, can it be fixed?

<comment><USER3> It's a problem, but I'm not sure that it can be fixed.

One possible idea is to weight each vote using it's time, instead of using the original time of the submission.

For example, if a submission was made 5 hous ago, and got 1 vote 2 hours ago and 3 votes 1 hour ago, then

Actual:

      Value = (1+1+3)/(5+1)^1.4

Alternative:

      Value = 1/(5+1)^1.4 + 1/(2+1)^1.4 + 3/(1+1)^1.4

This way an upvote of a old submission is not wasted.

The problem is that we may see Norvig's spellchecker in the frontpage forever (It's a good article, I upvoted it perhaps in a few repost, but it's resubmitted every few months.)</comment></comment>


Fangle - reactive text generation from markdown - <AUTHOR> http://jotux.github.com/fangle/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't this miss the point of Markdown? I thought the main selling point of Markdown was that for plain text reading i.e. the markdown was clear and understandable as plain text. This introduces a bunch of additional features that can ONLY be represented accurately once parsed to HTML.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I didn't think Markdown was invented because the world needed yet another markup language.

<comment><USER3> It's just using Markdown as the base for an alternative language to Tangle's HTML+JS. The point is simplifying the writing of interactive documents.

Tangle: <http://worrydream.com/Tangle/>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is correct and I guess when I titled the article "reactive text generation from markdown" I implied it should be some kind of new markdown language, which is not what I want.

>The point is simplifying the writing of interactive documents

Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jeff Atwood suggested to upgrade Markdown in this blog post [1]([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of- markd...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of- markdown.html)). Does anyone know where this stands ?

Maybe this system could be suggested as an addition to _the new_ Markdown if this is in progress somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd recommend pre-populating it with some examples. I didn't really know what to expect or what to do when I got there, I thought it was just live generating formatted markdown.

<comment><USER6> There is an example, see the Examples dropdown above the textarea.

<comment><USER3> It would be great if the first example used something more real world than 'power levels'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some weird stuff going on with the if clauses:

Switch His power level is 9000. It's almost 9000?!"

This should probably be:

#### Switch His power level is [p6=5000[5000..20000,1000]]. It's [warning_2[(p6 < 8000),(p6 < 9000),(p6 == 9000),(p6 > 9000)]low.,almost 9000?!,9000!,OVER 9000!!!]

Anyways, I think this makes for completely unreadable Markdown, which is the totally opposite direction of what it ought to be.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not a JS/Programming Pro here so please pardon my ignorance. One major problem faced by me in JavaScript is the weird handling of floats. This kind of application will end up dealing with floats. How should I avoid errors? or does Tangle itself handle the conversions?

<comment><USER9> You can get decent float parsing by doing Number() casting / regex cleanup, instead of parseFloat(). I don't know how tangle does it though

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using this js sprintf library: [http://www.diveintojavascript.com/projects/javascript- sprint...](http://www.diveintojavascript.com/projects/javascript-sprintf)

<comment><USER9> Right, yeah I use this one too for anywhere I need printf a-like formatting in JS.

But isn't this the other side of the coin? Formatting numbers as strings, not parsing strings to floats? (forgive me if I'm off base on this, I'm only looking sideways at this right now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great! I tweeted this but couldn't add you because I didn't find your twitter name or contact address ...? <https://twitter.com/dirkk/status/294333906902196224>

</comment><comment><USER11> This is the future of Hyper Text. We really need to innovate on the connotation of Hyper Text besides Hyper Links.

Can we see native browsers support this kind of markdown in the next decade?

</comment><comment><USER12> Jotux, would you please provide us with an example use case?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a dropdown box called "examples" at the top where you can select an example.

<comment><USER12> No, a "use case" is what we can do with it, not what it does.

So far, I am clueless as to where and how I can utilise this technology.

<comment><USER13> Explaining fixed income investments to new investors.

<comment><AUTHOR> My initial idea was to have reactive-text enabled forum posts or chat input. So in, say, a hacker news comment you could embed equations in the markdown formatting that explain a specific calculation. The recent posts about how much you need to save to retire with a decent income would be a good example.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Close to 735k Fraudulently Obtained IP Addresses Uncovered and Revoked - <AUTHOR> http://www.circleid.com/posts/20190514_735k_fraudulently_obtained_ip_addresses_have_been_revoked/ <comment><USER2> I once applied for a position at what I found out to be a spam marketing company. In order to send their spam they worked with a local hosting company that would take unused legacy ip addresses and put them in their router so the spam could be sent over them. They would just burn the ip's and move on to the next set. My job would be to update their firewall with the new ips, update their mailing software with the current set of ip's each day. They made their own mailing software it had an interface like a stoplight where red meant the mail wasn't going out, yellow a lot of it was getting blocked (so move to the next ip's) and green is things are good. I didn't end up taking the position. This was around 12 years ago.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if governments could somehow vouch for emails addresses being a little like verified twitter accounts, so that we can have a good whitelist of legit email addresses.

Right now it seems gmail is benefiting from the chaos because they have the training data that allows them to know if a mail is spam. I just wish that the internet could adopt more security standards and processes. You can't trust only google now.

<comment><USER4> No thank you. I don't want to need a government sanctioned e-mail address to send an anonymous (whistleblower) e-mail for example.

<comment><USER5> Whistleblowing is the last of my concerns. I live in Italy and PEC is a thing, it's a government certified email with legal value.

Technical rules for the formation, transmission and validation are mandatory: read receipts are automatic.

To use the service you must have a PEC box with one of the authorized managers. The publication of the list of authorized operators, the supervision and coordination is entrusted to the "Agency for digital Italy" (AgID).

This means that every citizen with a pec is paying to obtain an email from a bunch of friends of friends of the government, in a market with virtually no competition, and that your mail box is heavily surveilled but left unsecured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always wondered if someone had created a biz for the purpose of hoarding IPv4 with intent to "sell them". We talked about this kind of abuse back in the 90s when I worked for a hosting company. Part of my job was filling out ARIN templates and SWIP and all that nonsense. Justification was easy, but it occurred to me how easy it would be to fake requests and just pay the trivial fees. There were already some businesses buying up smaller companies for access to their old legacy allocations. Then the massive cloud build ours started and IP consumption became a real concern.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of a conversation I had with the AC repairman last year.

Backstory: we have an old AC unit that uses freon.

The repairman mentioned that freon is no longer available for new AC units. I asked if you could still buy freon and he said yes, existing supplies were grandfathered in.

I then commented that the price of freon must have sky-rocketed and he said: "yes, it did for a while but then it became cheaper to just get a new unit rather than fill up an old unit with freon."

I would imagine that as the price of IPv4 addresses crosses some threshold, people will just start going to IPv6.

As Michael Crichton once said in one of his books: "There was no subsidy that caused people to switch from horses to cars". They were just cheaper and easier to operate.

<comment><USER8> This is how I feel climate change will be tackled (whether too late or not). It will just become cheaper to go green and being green is just a side effect.

<comment><USER9> Yet initiatives like Carbon tax have been shot down (Australia) by big money, putting dangerous delays into the schedule.

<comment><USER10> I think carbon taxes are the opposite of what the OP is talking about. Carbon taxes are artificial barriers to using fossil fuels.

On the other hand, when technology improves so that electric cars cost less per mile than gasoline cars, people won't necessarily buy them to be green, they'll buy them because they're a cheaper form of transportation that happens to be greener.

Same with wind and solar power. When a solar farm on 10 acres of land can produce more energy than a coal plant on the same 10 acres, then power companies will build them instead of coal - not to be "green", but to make more money.

<comment><USER11> Carbon taxes aren't artificial barriers. There are real costs to emitting carbon. Putting a price on negative externalities helps align incentives properly so the people making the coal plant have to consider the full costs of their actions.

<comment><USER12> Why not talk to the coal plant owner directly? Or how about the other 100(!) private citizens living around the world who control the companies that are responsible 70% of the greenhouse emissions of the entire Earth?

<comment><USER13> > Why not talk to the coal plant owner directly?

Well, merely talking to them isn't going to achieve any change, so the plan is to tax them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I dealt with this guy / company Micfo LLC at my previous employer a few years back. He had our DC announce a range and all his documents checked out. Some other dude reached out to our ipadmin address saying we were announcing his range. The Micfo guys had forged the documents or something shady and we removed the announcement for his range. He was very upset and claimed the other party was sour over some deal. He ended up leaving when we pushed back on him announcing new ranges. He provided more excuses on why he didn't have things then actual documentation. He tried to come back a couple years later but we told him to kick rocks.

<comment><USER15> Micfo provides infrastructure to anonymizing VPNs (among other things). Their network is one of the more prolific sources of fraud I've ever dealt with.

It got so bad we would preemptively block all of their BGP prefixes.

I'm not surprised in the least that they would resort to owning IP spaces they didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 20 years seems a little too much for the crime that doesn't involve violence. 2 or 3 years and a solid fine should be fair punishment in my opinion.

<comment><USER17> US prison sentences are ridiculously long in general.

In principle the key word is supposed to be "up to", the judge is supposed to use their discretion.

In _practice_ , it's used as a lever to force plea deals. If you waste the government's time and money with a trial, you probably still won't win, but now you will be doing up to 20 years. Sign here and spare us the trial and you'll get 5 years.

Of course then you have the people who are truly innocent but are forced to plea out anyway at threat of spending a significant chunk of their lives in jail...

There is also the view that extreme prison sentences are supposed to be a deterrent and thus are unfair by nature. If know you are at risk of spending 20 years in jail, you won't do the crime. Of course in many cases criminals do not really consider the risk of getting caught, and likely wouldn't know the exact penalties for a given crime anyway...

<comment><USER18> > There is also the view that extreme prison sentences are supposed to be a > deterrent and thus are unfair by nature. If know you are at risk of spending > 20 years in jail, you won't do the crime. Of course in many cases criminals > do not really consider the risk of getting caught, and likely wouldn't know > the exact penalties for a given crime anyway...

I'm pretty sure it has been proven multiple times over that harsher sentences don't reduce crime. They serve just as retribution.

<comment><USER19> The prison industry is huge. The prison guard union even lobbied against decriminalization, it is nuts. Most every jail releases inmates right after midnight so they can charge the state for a full extra day. It is a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link Updated May 15, 2019: "Charleston Man and Business Indicted in Federal Court in Over $9M Fraud" — The indictment charges that, through this scheme, defendant obtained the rights to approximately 757,760 IP addresses, with a market value between $9,850,880.00 and $14,397,440.00."

</comment><comment><USER20> I love that they desperately tried to file for a restraining order the day before Christmas.

Why do grifters like this always get so defensive? If he'd just played it cool he would absolutely have had time to wind down his operation and move the money somewhere safe. Now he's just going to go to jail.

<comment><USER21> They're greedy enough to be defrauding people they're greedy enough to want to try to keep their shady business rolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One thing that is annoying is that ARIN recently raised the amount of money it costs to maintain a /24\. I was unexpectedly hit with a $500 bill when previous prices were $100. Was quite annoying considering is very little cost in providing these allocations (they really beef up their headcount). Been thinking about trying to get on the board but it is near impossible.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've often wondered how much of the IPv4 address space is legacy allocations that are not at all being fully utilized. Perhaps the market for IPv4 addresses has worked this out, and anyone that has such an allocation has cashed in.

<comment><USER24> For enough dollars you can sample 100k address at random and have a decent guess?

Not everyone responds to a ping but I suspect most do

<comment><USER25> ICMP is blocked by default now in many firewall setups, so unless the admin specifically allows ICMP the packets will likely be dropped.

Also, be careful as "host discovery" can be viewed as a type of "hacking" depending on who you are and who is watching/judging you.

<comment><USER26> Your first point is definitely correct.

Your second point though... really? Do you have any sources for anyone, anywhere being charged for using ping?

<comment><USER27> With regards to the second point, definitely.

Quite a few years ago the security team of the organisation I worked at didn't have our internal vulnerability scanning services automated. It relied on them capturing the IPv4 addresses (specifically the /32's, not the subnets) and manually entering them into the engine.

Our security team mistyped a handful of these addresses and instead of the scan running across our internal infrastructure, we scanned WalMarts external facing infrastructure in the US from Australia.

These scans were happening semi-regularly for a period of a few weeks before we received a cease and desist and the sec. team realised their error. I'm still rather surprised more didn't come of it.

<comment><USER26> Scanning for known vulnerabilities isn't the same as a simple ICMP ping though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure if it's related or not but I was receiving spammy e-mails for a while from "Admiral Hosting":

"Mike Watson here, from Admiral Hosting. I'm touching base regarding a business opportunity. Have you ever thought about turning your IP's into profit on a monthly basis? Admiral Hosting handles dozens of such B2B projects and its dedicated technical team oversees each project's implementation."

</comment><comment><USER29> What is interesting to me is that you can't really "revoke" an IP. ARIN's authority really only comes from ISPs that listen to their recommendations in creating prefix filters.

ARIN doesn't give you any rights to an IP, because there is no such thing.

<comment><USER30> ARIN controls WHOIS which is relevant since this fraudster was selling the IPs. If I was buying some IP space I would certainly check WHOIS to see if the seller owns what they are selling.

Also, it seems like the Microsoft/Nortel case established that there is some such thing as ownership rights over IPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think my next Halloween costume will be that generic hoodied-hacker-with- numbers-background image

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know the address ranges that are affected?

<comment><USER33> Converted (OCR) from PDF:

        IP Block            Entity              Number of IP addresses
        </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
        188.8.131.52/19     OppoBox             8,192
        188.8.131.52/19     OppoBox             8,192
        184.108.40.206/19    OppoBox             8,192
        126.96.36.199/18       Telentia            16,384
        18.104.22.168/18    Telentia            16,384
        22.214.171.124/18        OppoBox             16,384
        188.8.131.52/18      OppoBox             16,384
        22.214.171.124/18      OppoBox             16,384
        188.8.131.52/18    OppoBox             16,384
        188.8.131.52/18      OppoBox             16,384
        184.108.40.206/18    OppoBox             16,384
        22.214.171.124/18    OppoBox             16,384
        188.8.131.52/18    OppoBox             16,384
        220.127.116.11/18      OppoBox             16,384
        220.127.116.11/18    Border Technology   16,384
        22.214.171.124/18       Border Technology   16,384
        126.96.36.199/20     Contina             4,096
        184.108.40.206/19     Contina             8,192
        188.8.131.52/20     Telentia            4,096
        188.8.131.52/20     Telentia            4,096
        220.127.116.11/19    Telentia            8,192
        188.8.131.52/19    Telentia            8,192
        126.96.36.199/19      Telentia            8,192
        22.214.171.124/20    OppoBox             4,096
        22.214.171.124/20    OppoBox             4,096
        184.108.40.206/19     OppoBox             8,192
        18.104.22.168/19     OppoBox             8,192
        188.8.131.52/20      Virtuzo             4,096
        188.8.131.52/20    Virtuzo             4,096
        22.214.171.124/19    Virtuzo             8,192
        184.108.40.206/19    Virtuzo             8,192
        22.214.171.124/20     Roya                4,096
        22.214.171.124/20     Univera Network     4,096
        18.104.22.168/19       Univera Network     8,192
        126.96.36.199/20       Border Technology   4,096
        188.8.131.52/19       Border Technology   8,192
        184.108.40.206/20      Fiber Galaxy        4,096
        188.8.131.52/19    Fiber Galaxy        8,192
        126.96.36.199/20    Queen Systems       4,096
        184.108.40.206/19    Queen Systems       8,192
        220.127.116.11/20    Fairway Network     4,096
        18.104.22.168/19      Fairway Network     8,192

<comment><USER32> Thank you gregmac21 for doing some uncompensated labor :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For anyone interested, this a pretty good write up on "Bogons": [http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2004-04/2004-04-isp.htm](http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2004-04/2004-04-isp.htm)

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I the only person who gets an HTTPS error when trying to open the link to circleid.com?

<comment><USER36> The link is http, so you're using something (perhaps HTTPS Everywhere?) which is converting it to an https link.

According to the Qualys SSL tester ([https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.circleid....](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.circleid.com)), the IPv6 server for www.circleid.com has "Certificate not valid for domain name" (and the IPv4 server gets an F grade), so you're probably either using IPv6, or using IPv4 with a browser which no longer accepts the obsolete TLS 1.0 version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My firefox 66.0.4 doesn't trust the certificate for the website you posted.

Edit: Oh wait the link doesnt work for me even!

</comment><comment><USER38> UPDATE May 15, 2019: "Charleston Man and Business Indicted in Federal Court in Over $9M Fraud" – United States Department of Justice issues a statement annoucing Amir Golestan, 36, of Charleston, and Micfo, LLC, were charged in federal court in a twenty-count indictment. The indictment charges twenty counts of wire fraud, with each count punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone here know a good place to buy or lease ipv4?

Is this going to lower the prices?

<comment><USER30> [https://www.arin.net/resources/registry/transfers/stls/regis...](https://www.arin.net/resources/registry/transfers/stls/registered_facilitators/)

This looks like a blip compared to demand so I wouldn't expect prices to drop.

<comment><USER39> This seems like a huge amount of addresses to me, the price should drop if supply goes up. I don't expect it to tank though.

Is there a recommended broker or website? I googled a few of those "transfer facilitators" and they looked sketchy to me with many of them asking you to contact them for a price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> lol they don't even have https

</comment><comment><USER41> Is ARIN going to assign these to people who are waiting? I certainly haven't seen 2960 /24s being released. They have NOT announced anything like this. Maybe they will "transfer" them for $13 to $19 per IP with a third party facilitator?

<comment><USER42> I would imagine it would be prudent to wait a bit before reassigning these, in case of appeal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If we could recover all IP addresses that are not in use now (especially from those who got a /8) we would breath some air, given that ipv6 is basically not happening.

<comment><USER44> How is IPv6 not happening? Google shows pretty good growth: [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

<comment><USER25> I've been seeing more and more pressure to support IPv6 in the various SaaS companies I've worked at. I do think it's happening.

That said I tend to think LANs and VPCs will continue to use IPv4 internally for decades even if the load balancer does IPv6.

<comment><USER45> I'm at a home connection from a normal provider on brasil (third world country) and my router assigns a public ipv6 for each connection. I think all big providers have ipv6 enabled by default over here.

<comment><USER25> Do they also provide an IPv4 address? If not, have you run into any problems with sites that don't yet support IPv6?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> IPv4 lives!</comment>