Are spies more trouble than they're worth? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more-trouble-than-theyre-worth <comment><USER2> Adam Curtis has a great post on this.

"BUGGER: Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know very much about the world"

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460)

<comment><USER3> I've always been stunned that the CIA is permitted to continue operation after their many catastrophic failures. I mean, failures on a scale that are just mind-blowing and show their intense ineffectiveness. A couple weeks before the USSR collapsed, for instance, the CIA wrote a paper describing the USSR as a threat continuing to grow and the largest threat on the global stage. This isn't so much because they were incapable of seeing that the USSR was on the brink of collapse.... well, sort of I guess it was. What I mean is that they had the intelligence to know, but the concept was so dangerous for them to fathom organizationally that they couldn't admit it. The USSR was their bread and butter. They had more spies in Moscow than the KGB. We already knew the USSR wasn't doing great when Reagan was around. When he took office, the CIA was asked to do the standard thing and put together a bunch of briefings for the incoming president. The head of the USSR division at the time was Aldritch Aimes. He put together a paper saying the USSR was a paper tiger and running out of money. The director of the CIA threw the report away and told Aimes 'the president wants an enemy and we're going to give him one'. (that was one of the major things Aimes claimed made him jaded and led to him becoming a double agent for the KGB because he no longer viewed the CIA as doing serious work for good but just a group of opportunistic lackeys)

So they missed the USSR collapsing... and the fall of the Berlin wall... and the Arab Spring... basically every gigantic sociopolitical change for the past 70 years has caught the CIA by surprised and that not being the case is literally their only job.

<comment><USER4> Actually, that story shows how the CIA did their job well...but politicians and President Reagan didn't want to hear it and used their oversight role to force their intelligence experts to fit their narrative. For the last 40+ years, political forces in the US are increasingly trying to distort facts to fit narratives instead of accepting facts and then spinning / competing over what to do about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First, you have to distinguish between intelligence gathering, which includes "spies", and covert action, which actively tries to do something to the enemy. There's an argument for keeping those separate, best articulated by Gen. Reinhard Gelhen in his memoirs.

In the US, only the CIA really does both. DIA, DNI, NSA, NGA, and the intelligence services of the military branches are mostly pure intel gathering.

On the active side are also the various special forces units, which the US has gathered up under the JSOC. They sometimes do intel gathering, but long-term covert is rare. Anybody in the field on the active side will probably become known to the enemy sooner or later.

There are historic successes in both areas, but not a huge number of them. The US put a huge amount of effort into assessing USSR military capabilities, and mostly got it wrong. Poor intel led to the "bomber gap" and "missile gap", and missed the USSR's A-bomb and H-bomb, as well as the breakup of the USSR. The USSR put a lot of effort into spying on atomic weapons, with some success (succeeded with A-bomb, failed with H-bomb), got spies into the State Department (useless, according to KGB archives released at the end of the cold war) and struggled to find out how the US made reliable jet engines, without much success.

There's a history of special operations, written for that community, for which I don't have a reference right now. They go over the major special operations of the 20th century. This was written pre-9/11\. For each they ask "Was it a success" and "was it worth it"? The only operations for which both answers are "yes" were Eben-Emael[1] and Entebbe.[2] Only Eben-Emael changed the course of a war.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Eben- Emael](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Eben-Emael)

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

<comment><USER6> > The US put a huge amount of effort into assessing USSR military > capabilities, and mostly got it wrong.

An impression I was left with after reading Daniel Ellsberg's last book was this wasn't entirely an intelligence failure so much as it was a deliberate ignoring of intelligence and making up of a fiction so the air force could build lots of bombers and missiles.

I think we've all experienced this in our workplaces, the higher ups really only want to hear what they want to hear, and intelligence that doesn't fit that very often is ignored.

<comment><USER7> There's also the problem that we didn't want the USSR to know that we knew that they didn't have very many ICBMS[1]. So Eisenhower and Kennedy felt they had to pretend in public that there was a missile gap, and spent most of their days pretending hard that there was a missile gap. And if you spend most of the day pretending something is true there's no way that doesn't warp your gut level understanding of the world. So was our knowledge of the USSR's actual capabilities useful if we didn't let it affect our policy making?

[1] They had more than enough shorter range missiles to take out ~everyone in western Europe though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The repeated destruction of US humanint networks over the past 50 years is probably one of the single largest threats it faces. Between the dismantling of the CIA hint networks by ourselves and complete destruction of our Chinese hint network by the Chinese, the US is blind in a huge number of situations.

This is not about the quality of any one channel, it is about needing multiple channels with distinct provenance that can be used to cross-reference each other. The fact that this article even frames the question as it does means that they have completely missed the point -- there is no such thing as bad intel, only intel that you are too blind to know is inconsistent.

<comment><USER9> >>> complete destruction of our Chinese hint network by the Chinese,

huh? what where when?

I don't disbelief you but what was this complete destruction, when did it happen? (related to OPM at all?)

<comment><USER10> Probably a reference to this: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia- spie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies- espionage.html)

<comment><USER11> AFAIK that is basically what has happened in Iran, China, Lebanon and a lot of Russia in the past 10 years.

<comment><USER12> It happened because the CIA used shitty encryption. Someone warned them before it happened and again while it happened, and they fired him for it.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/iran_cracked_cia_go...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/iran_cracked_cia_google/)

<comment><USER11> It's not just about encryption. That is the case for Iran and some of China. For the rest it was terrible tradecraft and counterintelligence issues.

<comment><USER12> The piece about Iran mentions them sharing it with friendly nations, which likely included Lebanon. I haven't heard of events like that in Russia recently, an arrest or two but nothing major. And the encryption seems responsible for most of the Chinese events, the "mole" seemed like an attempt to push the blame elsewhere.

Most of the public incidents in the past ten years seems related to that CIA failure, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good intel is no substitute for good judgement. But no or bad intel seriously impairs the ability to exercise good judgement. Pointing out stories (the same handful that have been repeated over and over before -- MK Ultra, Cambridge 5, Ames, etc.) of leaders with poor judgement failing to exploit good intel does not change the value of good intel in the hands of more capable leaders.

<comment><USER14> A mass of bad intel would drown out the good intel, making it much more difficult to make correct decisions.

It's why trolling on social media and fake news works and why keeping a good signal-to-noise ratio is important.

<comment><USER15> That's literally true but it's also why we need spies and HUMINT more generally rather than relying on mass surveillance and remote exfiltration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You could probably pose the same question about journalists, and come up with a similar disinterested admonishment, if you cherry picked as needed to fit the narrative.

<comment><USER17> You don't need to cherry pick, you just need to read an article about something you're an expert in to see how inaccurate and surface level most articles are.

<comment><USER18> [https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann- amnesia/](https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What has struck me from reading history, US history at least, is how often intelligence reports prepared by the CIA, State Department, et al are accurate and predict more or less accurately what the outcome of a given situation will be. But time and time again, presidents will ignore their own agencies in favor of what they deem most politically or personally attractive. Makes me think that the whole idea of elected representatives is flawed. I think I'd rather be governed by people who got where they are because of expertise and experience in their field.

<comment><USER20> Curious if you have links to intelligence reports that turned out to be totally accurate? The ones I can think of (both in the news media and through personal connections to people who have worked in government) have been stunningly inaccurate.

<comment><USER21> How did you verify they were stunningly inaccurate?

<comment><USER22> The Iraq war comes to mind.

<comment><USER20> That was one of the media-related ones that came to mind. Also, I had an International Relations professor who was a consultant for the State Department and had just finished giving the briefing for the next 5-year strategic plan on August 19, 1991. He said that nobody in the Pentagon ever considered the possibility that the Soviet Union _might not exist_ within 5 years, let alone days. Some other experience is fairly obvious just growing up in a bicultural household with an immigrant parent who had firsthand experience living in other parts of the world, eg. the U.S. consistently underestimates the degree of corruption in many other countries and the degree to which the "state" that is ostensibly our ally is actually a fiction, with the majority of actual daily life ruled by family, ethnic, or business ties.

A lot you can verify just by looking at our strategic decisions in the moment vs. how things turn out later and internal communications get declassified. We didn't understand that the Sino-Soviet split had happened until decades later, and still thought that China and Russia formed a united communist bloc well into the 80s. A number of people still think of China as communist, which isn't true at all.

I'm actually seeking out information contrary to my experience here - I would love to see stories where U.S. intelligence agencies were completely on the mark but were ignored. But my knowledge base so far is that intelligence agencies are as vulnerable to human cognitive biases as the general public, and frequently get basic facts wrong.

<comment><USER23> We (the west) are just starting to understand that China seems to be a mafia state in a similar way that Russia is. I was watching an ABC (the Australian one) report about the rampant corporate misconduct of the Crown Casino, and how they helped launder Triad money in Melbourne. It turns out that a major player in the racket was President Xi's cousin and a high ranking member of the CCP. Additionally, we've seen Triads deployed in Hong Kong recently to attack protestors.

<comment><USER20> I think that's both true-and-not-true, depending on what level you zoom in. Generalizing very heavily (I have some personal experience in Chinese culture, but virtually none with Russian culture, and basically consider myself American despite partial ethnic heritage)...

I think that Chinese corruption is very different in character from Russian corruption. Russian corruption stems from a sort of hyper-individualism and a belief that you need to take what you can get while you can get it, because somebody else will if you don't. Chinese corruption, however, often starts from the belief that the family is the fundamental unit of social organization, over the self, country, and God. Nepotism ("filial piety") is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, and isn't really considered a bad thing. Beyond the family, there's the web of social relationships and obligations ("guanxi") through which business is conducted, but Chinese people usually don't buy appeals to higher organizing principles like patriotism or salvation. There's an odd relationship to the concept of nationhood, as well: here, you're American if you have a piece of paper proving American citizenship, while for a Chinese person you are Chinese if you are ethnically Chinese, regardless of where you're located or which passport you carry. (This is a source of occasional tension for Chinese-Americans: when interacting with another Chinese person, their immediate assumption is that you are Chinese too - "You're Chinese, why don't you X?" \- while most of us are more likely to say "Actually, I'm American.")

One thing that both China and Russia share is a weak rule of law, though. Laws are routinely bent in both of these countries if it suits the interest of a powerful person or furthers a relationship. America is headed in the wrong direction in this regard - and IMHO the words of the current president don't help here - but there's still a default assumption here that the law is _the law_ , and that we're all equal before it. This is a fiction, but it's a powerful fiction that has led to a lot of prosperity for America, and would probably lead to much suffering if people stopped believing it.

<comment><USER24> Generalising also, there definitely seems to be a strain of "Take what you can while you can" in mainland China too. One story I've heard a few times is of restaurants that had to stop putting out free breath mints or other items because while we know that social convention is that you take one if you need it, a Chinese customer will just tip the whole bowl into their handbag because it's free to take and you'd be a fool to leave it there.

I've known a lot of Singaporeans and their concept of 'kiasu' ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiasu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiasu)) is very similar, though I'm not sure if the origin of the behaviour is from China.

<comment><USER20> I feel like that's also subtly different in character between Chinese and Russian culture. In Chinese culture that impulse is primarily economic, related to stuff & money - I'd describe it as an inability to resist free stuff. My dad, wife, and mother-in-law all have this habit of taking _anything_ that's free, whether they need it or not, because it's free. Come to think of it, that's my dinner tonight, because my wife's workplace has leftover hamburgers. Growing up my dad would have all sorts of miscellaneous snacks in the freezer and breadbox because the supermarket was handing out free stuff...most of the time we wouldn't eat them, but it was the principle of the thing.

I get the sense that the Russian impulse also extends toward _power_ , though. Chinese people generally do not have an urge to tell other people what to do. Even when they're at the top of a hierarchy, commands are usually couched in language of it being for the greater good, or to ensure social harmony, or that it's simply right and natural. And this is different from the strategic form of dissembling that is common among powerful Americans, where they tell a broad populace that it's for their own good while secretly admitting to themselves that it's mostly for their personal benefit. Chinese people _really don 't make the distinction_ \- it just never occurs to them that others' interests might not be aligned with their own. And I feel like that's very different from the Russian impulse to seize power when they have a chance - Russians are _keenly_ aware of when there are powerful people whose interests do not align with their own, and then try to act quickly to ensure that they get what they need before someone else does.

Come to think of it, a lot of Cold War (and present) foreign policy could be explained by these cultural differences. The U.S. impulse to shore up potential strategic options _if_ there is a challenge (but not make aggressive moves themselves) is interpreted as a threat by Russians who assume that American defensive moves must be a prelude to seizing power/territory/wealth. Meanwhile, the Chinese are off in East Asia milking every bit of free stuff out of their newly capitalist economy, which is interpreted as a threat by both Americans and Russians but is actually just them grabbing free stuff while possible, and they don't understand why this could possibly be construed as offensive. The U.S. response of containment (through Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan, etc.) is perceived as promoting disharmony among largely ethnic Chinese people, though, which is an affront to their culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reading through the ~60 comments in this thread, I'm surprised that such a large number of HN readers appear so eager to dispute Gopnik's assertion that spying is probably not all it's cracked up to be. (Which is only half of his entire take: that, while spying isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's still probably somewhat necessary.) Not only is it not clear how many HN people are intelligence professionals, making a lot of the judgment here pretty speculative -- it points to a weird lack of civic, uh, maybe spirit is the right word: presented with some evidence indicating that the cloak-and-dagger people we permit to run wild in the shadows may not be all that competent, the response isn't "well how could we verify this?" but an odd faith that a hole into which we as a country throw piles upon piles of money without getting anything in return is actually running really smoothly, it's just that we the public aren't allowed to know about it because we haven't been given the access. It sorta bugs me: _we_ allowed spies to run around in the first place; who's giving who access here?

A common response to the article is a sort of "publication bias" argument, that "well, we only seem to hear about espionage _failures_ because the successes are likely to be kept under wraps." But I think this gives these people (intelligence professionals) a bit too much credit -- and looks weirdly obsequious for a such a garrulous, contrarian, and high-IQ group of people as HN. The intelligence community knows the arguments Gopnik's making (well, reviewing and making) well; they've been around for ages, as he states in the article. If there truly were reams of intelligence successes for every failure behind the curtain, you'd think the Caseys and Angletons of the world would be into some kind of decades post-facto program evaluation. Why not take the CIA's every move in, say, the decade 1946-1956 and tally the wins and losses? Surely this stuff could be declassified, right?

 _" No one will ever know all the times we've done our job well.. but every mistake will get us f_d up the ass."* This may have been told to the poster sincerely, but man, I can't for the life of me come up with a better cover story for incompetence or sloth. I _wish_ I could tell my higher-ups and funding sources something like that when they come asking if I've done anything well with their money lately. "Sorry, ma'am, that's classified." What a world.

<comment><USER25> Edit: mostly unrelated: we're all taking issue with a _book review_. Gopnik's forming his own opinions here, sure, and we can take issue with them, but, like, has anyone actually evaluated the claims the _authors_ are making? I'm guessing the Cambridge historian has more to back up his arguments than Gopnik (or any of us, for that matter) has, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I feel like this was a clear yes 50, even 60 years ago, but no government doesn't want to have spies if others do.

</comment><comment><USER27> I suspect it is the type of situation where 99% are a complete waste of resources.

But that 1% that turn out to be important are very important.

And you can't tell before that time which will be which.

<comment><USER13> There's also a strong bias to remember/talk about the cases that turned out poorly, not the ones that turn out well.

"CIA bungles [thing]" is a splashy headline and memorable story. "US does 10% better in trade negotiation because it was reading the other side's emails" is not. But one happens much more often than the other.

<comment><USER28> > _But one happens much more often than the other._

Probably, but we have no legitimate way of knowing which one it is.

<comment><USER13> There's lots of stuff where we trust that expert communities are being honest. Medical research is impossible to verify unless you get access to the raw data (get into a PhD program and get a grant and then get a DUA... all in all, possibly harder than getting an intelligence community job and an SCI clearance) but we all basically trust that medicine works the vast majority of the time.

<comment><USER28> The information required to evaluate our spy agencies is unavailable to the public no matter what school you go to. Doctors took revealed the oxy crisis after taking merely a very long time, but revealing the CIA equivalent would be illegal.

<comment><USER13> There's plenty you can say if you have a clearance that won't get you sent to jail -- pretty much anything that doesn't state a classified fact or allow one to be inferred. "Every mission I worked on got people killed needlessly" is kosher for most people to say.

Anyway, generally speaking, the really juicy secrets (from a lay person's standpoint) are not highly classified. The most secret stuff -- sources and methods -- is generally pretty boring unless you're really deep in the weeds.

<comment><USER28> Let's look at Snowden as an example. What would have happened if he had expressed a vauge, unsupported sentiment about the NSA "not being very nice," or "doing too much spying?" Nothing, probably. The larger public debate needs facts that it can verify and specifics that it can pick over.

(Also, "highly classified" and "slightly classified" are the same as far as CNN is concerned.)

<comment><USER29> I argue that the larger public doesn't need to know. Who, in the general public, is actually qualified to determine the effectiveness of these types of operations?

On top of that, vast swaths of the public are amazingly incompetent. Why waste time debating with them? Flat earthers and anti-vaxxers are easy targets for this argument. But, do you want national security operations to be influenced by the opinion of someone who "cures" people with essential oils? It's like asking for military tactics from a barista. Don't forget, a lot of people fall for over the phone scams of all kinds. Not just old people. It's a wide gamut of the population. I didn't even get into the real hardcore conspiracy nutjobs that have the loudest voice because they have nothing better to do.

Part two, the public does a terrible job of verifying facts or ever understanding them. That's been the public discourse for... oh... I don't know... forever?

<comment><USER28> It is widely known that the public is (individually) bad at making decisions, but they are the only group that can consistently be trusted to hold the interests of the public at heart. It doesn't matter how smart policymakers are if they direct their intelligence to their own benefit.

Let's say that you and someone ten times smarter than you had to decide on what's for dinner. Even though they are smarter than you, you would still want a say, because no matter how dumb you are you still have preferences.

It's kind of an "inverse conspiracy" to think that a group of skilled people will conspire in secret to help you when they could be serving themselves: without evidence, it's no more rational than negative paranoia.

(By the way, who administered IQ tests to everyone in the CIA? They're drawn from the American population and they aren't paid millions. They could easily have the same brains per capita as the people who believe what they hear on cable news.)

<comment><USER29> Theres a huge assumption about the wisdom of crowds. That the individuals have reliable info on said subject. I'd also say, are competent to use said info. The idea came from a dude back in the early 1900s who surveyed everyone at a county fair who was guessing on the weight of a cow or bull. The average was off by one pound, easily to be considered a successful test of that idea. However, let's get the same number of folks, but not farmers, instead... let's say silicon valley app engineers. Same rules as the old school, all you can do is look at the bovine and make a guess. Do you honestly believe they're going to have the same crowd accuracy? Especially without tech.

At the end too, averaging and voting doesn't change reality. If a group of people vote if an animal is a rabbit or a crow, but 75% vote rabbit, is it a rabbit even though it's a crow? Wisdom of crowds needs to be taken with a fistful of salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If MOO2 has taught me anything, a good spy network is excellent at giving your opponent an advantage unless you waste resources trying to cover your ass, in which case you have wasted resources and the opponent still makes you suffer.

</comment><comment><USER31> One book on the subject said that during the Cold War, Soviet surveillance was so good the West couldn't recruit anyone in the USSR to be a spy. The only successes the West had during that time were when a high level Soviet officer or politician literally walked through the door and said "Hi I'd like to defect and I have lots of useful information."

<comment><USER11> That's not true. Though not very successful, there was many significant people. One of the seemingly more interesting ones was the Head of KGB Counterintelligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of this photo of an office at the old site of the German BND in Pullach, photographed by Martin Schlüter[1]:

[https://www.detail.de/fileadmin/uploads/bnd-pullach- teaser.j...](https://www.detail.de/fileadmin/uploads/bnd-pullach-teaser.jpg)

Although it also have been some kind of joke, who knows.

[1] [https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/bnd-bildband-ueber- zentra...](https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/bnd-bildband-ueber-zentrale-des- geheimdienstes-in-pullach-fotostrecke-116732.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's ironic that this was posted on the same day as the NYT reports a US intel success that has substantively advanced American foreign policy objectives and possibly saved lives:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/us-iran- cyber...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/us-iran-cyber- attack.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the key issues here is also about how policy makers engage with the Intel. For example, no matter how much good information GCHQ is gathering about Brexit, the UK politicians recieving haven't turned it into a workable policy. Compare that to the complete penetration of the IRA and pushing them towards peace in the late 80s and early 90s.

</comment><comment><USER33> Spies got the Soviet Union the atom bomb, the negotiator of Brandon Woods agreement was a soviet spy and there are many many more examples. Then again, the Soviet Union had the advantage of leading a global communist network and had a truly transnational universal movement to draw from.

However that said, intelligence agencies and spies can do much harm as well and are a necessary foreign element to democracy and even republicanism.

Any state should be really careful and think hard with how and what kind of intelligence service you build for your country.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

P.S: Interesting story, Stalin had the best spy network in history and systematically perched his foreign intelligence networks (and diplomatic core) and basically received basically no foreign intelligence for weeks.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Richard Sorge, a Russian spy in Germany's Embassy in Japan, gained detailed > knowledge about the approaching German invasion of Russia in 1941, and > passed it on. Stalin not only ignored information about the coming invasion > but threatened anyone who took it seriously, since he knew that his ally > Hitler wouldn't betray him

I know there's an entire controversy around this subject that merits even its own wikipedia entry [1], but the fact is that Germany's intention to do something against the Soviets was clear for anyone who wanted to see it.

I live in Bucharest, Romania, and I frequently visit an antique bookstore close to me which right at this moment sells some photos of Hitler's German troops who are shown as preparing/training with the Romanian troops on Romanian ground in the spring of 1941 (in April, to be more precise), at least according to the date written on the back of those photos. Presumably these were not secret military maneuvers, presumably the German soldiers who had entered Romania as allies were there for everybody to see, even to people sympathetic to the Soviets who might have let the Soviets know about said German troops, so not everything depended on a Russian spy's message being ignored or not, the Germans were right at the Soviets' door and preparing to break it.

I also don't believe for one second that Stalin would think of other people as having the chance to "betray" him or not, as far as I've read about the guy he didn't give anyone the chance to betray him, especially not to the head of State of a foreign power and potential enemy. You could say that Hitler was naive enough to let July 20th 1944 happen, but during all of Stalin's bloody reign nothing of the sorts happened because he was ruthless, and being ruthless first of all means not trusting other people, especially not a guy like Hitler.

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

<comment><USER35> "They" say that Stalin believed Germany was not ready for war yet and would only attack the next year, so he didn't want to tip his hand by visibly preparing for war too early.

In a way he was right on the first point - Germany wasn't ready for a protracted winter-time conflict. However they attacked anyway, brazenly confident they would be finished before the winter cold sets in, and also maybe desperate to strike before Stalin has a chance to strike first.

Nothing to do with friends and betrayals, just a series of miscalculations on all sides.

Or so "they" say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seems the author wants to discredit the intelligence service, but then backtracks at the end to indict Trump's collusion with Russia b/c "it's obvious that Trump is colluding and the intelligence is not telling us anything we don't already know."

<comment><USER37> Eh, the author's heart doesn't seem to be in that paragraph. It might have been added at an editor's insistence? Besides, whether you support Trump or not, he is proof that the president doesn't really need intelligence agencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> <Humming the Jame Bond theme song> Yes, they are!

</comment><comment><USER39> Great read.

</comment><comment><USER40> (Apologies for the mega-long comment.)

Intelligence done poorly is probably worse than no intelligence (which I think is partly what this article is saying, and of course intelligence is indeed often done poorly), but the tone of the article feels very "here are a bunch of cases of US intelligence gone awry; your tax dollars at work! MKULTRA!" A paragraph does actually start with "Your tax dollars at work." Yes, we know the CIA did unethical and awful things that provided no intelligence value, such as dosing people with LSD, unbeknownst to them, in MKULTRA.

The only non-US critiques are Stalin ignoring or not believing intelligence about the German attack, and the KGB concerned fake defectors (double agents) would fly the coop and defect for real, but I don't think Stalin is exactly a good example of a typical analyst of intelligence or that the situation with the USSR and defection to America implies an inherent folly in intelligence gathering. It's lacking nuance; though I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising for an editorial that begins with a question which it weaselly wants you to answer in the affirmative.

I have never worked in intelligence or for the government or military or anything, but, to me, it sounds like the article is just describing common fallacies and biases and internal politicking and status-jockeying that shitty and narrow-minded intelligence collectors/analysts/managers would be guilty of. It kind of has a tone suggesting as if barely anyone in any intelligence position possesses the capacity for self-reflection and higher-level thinking.

For example:

>The rule that having more intelligence doesn't lead to smarter decisions persists, it seems, for two basic reasons. First, if you have any secret information at all, you often have too much to know what matters. Second, having found a way to collect intelligence yourself, you become convinced that the other side must be doing the same to you, and is therefore feeding you fake information in order to guide you to the wrong decisions.

Yes, sure. Too much information can make things difficult. Myopic paranoia (rather than healthy skepticism) about your intelligence and sources is bad. And the US, and I'm sure every country, is guilty of these mistakes. But the article is speaking in a kind of authoritative, almost absolute way, as if it's impossible to extricate the good and valuable from the bad and counter- productive. As if none of these people are highly aware of all of this and are constantly questioning their assumptions and trying to falsify their own hypotheses.

The article also says this:

>It's remarkably hard to find cases where a single stolen piece of information changed the course of a key battle.

For one, they didn't mention that there may be cases we don't know about because the details are still highly classified. But it also just seems like they're kind of missing the whole point. This is all part of a very complex system with a lot of moving parts. It affects decision-making and events in complex ways. It often can't be reduced to "and it's what made us win this tactical battle", or something. (And also, even if you theoretically had perfect intelligence about an enemy before a battle, there are a lot more factors going into a military engagement. Your intelligence isn't necessarily going to prevent them from killing all of you with a bunch of RPGs and grenades, even if you know where they are, know how many there are, and know that they're armed with RPGs and grenades.)

And they didn't really touch much on how it's helped win entire wars or shape major world events, even if (ostensibly) not battles, beyond a bit of lip service to the famous and undeniably successful WWII D-Day ruse.

For example, ISIS and their larger plans and goals were architected by a mostly secular and particularly ambitious Iraqi intelligence colonel. He likely received KGB/Stasi training, as did many other people in Iraq's intelligence agencies under Saddam Hussein. He likely directly modeled much of ISIS's governing style based on his training and experience in intelligence, with documents containing meticulous detail concerning how to take over Syria, how to operate an omnipresent Stasi-esque intelligence apparatus to secure the group's power, how to most effectively do propaganda, etc. This intelligence "state within a state" (the Stasi to ISIS's East Germany) - I guess you could say it's a "deep state" \- was called Emni, and may have been more responsible for ISIS's success than their military forces and actions.

Given a few different hypothetical dice rolls of history in the past decade, one intelligence officer may have been very close to establishing a vast empire. Without his background, and without building a carefully-crafted intelligence apparatus deeply into the foundation of ISIS - one that may have rivaled the Stasi and KGB in many respects and was developed based on their models - they may not have experienced nearly as much success as they did.

Putin probably became prime minister / president / dictator-for-life in large part through his experience in intelligence.

Intelligence killed Osama bin Laden and many of his officers.

Intelligence revealed the USSR's true capabilities (after bad intelligence misled the US about their capabilities) and found the nuclear missiles in Cuba before much more were about to be shipped over.

Intelligence helped the US win naval engagements in the Pacific theatre by knowing where the enemy fleet was and what it planned to do.

Intelligence turned an entire state (East Germany) into a surveillance dystopia despite no modern surveillance technology.

Austria's government was just toppled a few months ago in what was most likely an intelligence operation.

Intelligence campaigns likely helped and are helping foment a lot of discord in the US and around the world as we speak.

Spies were and are very much worth the trouble for those states and people.

This was kind of a confusing read until I got to the end and reached the possible apex of the piece, and now I'm wondering if the entire piece was possibly just a setup to reassure liberals about Trump's complicity in a Russian conspiracy, or something like that, and that a most of the rest was pretty much just filler to lead up to that conclusion.

>Where we may go wrong is in valuing stealthily obtained information over unglamorous, commonly shared knowledge. And so the disappointment that liberals, newly sympathetic to our intelligence services, found in the Mueller report lay simply in the fact that what was most shocking in it was already well known. The Russian conspiracy went on largely in the open, with most of the clandestine bits hidden under a diaphanous cover. Donald Trump's genius was, as it so often is, his inability to dissemble: no one can quite believe what he gets away with because we assume that a public act is unlikely to be incriminating. We interpret as strut and boasting what is actually a confession. Richard Nixon, a genuinely Shakespearean villain, had full knowledge of his wrongdoing and a bad conscience about it, if not enough of one. Trump is a figure right out of the Theatre of Cruelty; he just acts out, without any mental inner workings, aside from narcissist necessity. Had his "Russia, if you're listening . . ." been encrypted in a text, it would have had the force of a revelation. Made openly, it seemed merely braggadocio.

I do think the article does paint a good, comprehensive picture of just how much trouble can be caused when this process goes awry, with examples, and that is absolutely extremely important to talk about. But taken as a whole, its tone and angle is kind of noxious to me.

If there are any people with experience in intelligence, do you agree with this assessment? What do you think of the article?

<comment><USER33> > The only non-US critique is Stalin ignoring or not believing intelligence > about the German attack, but I don't think Stalin is exactly a good example > of a typical analyst of intelligence.

One should also not, that we now know more about this thanks to Steven Kotkin work. Stalin had a lot of evidence that the German might attack, but he also had a lot that they might not as the Germans both ran a major counter intelligence campaign and native disbelieve that such an operation would not be smart.

The evidence he had was not as bullet prove as the histories often write it, if you look in real time at the information Stalin had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What country volunteers to be the first to disband its intelligence services?

</comment><comment><USER41> most spies are highly efficient and useful to our governments goals / protecting people from bad things. the hand-full of derps we see in the news are unfortunate but shouldn't be taken as the general state of spying / intelligence work.

people like to make an elephant out of a mosquito, but in reality, without spies crime / terrorism and other things generally bad for our society (which we do all cherish and want to keep, admit it. you want your house, tv and job safety, and to go to work without having too much worries if you will be able to go home at end of the day safely) would be able to cause much more disruption.

i'd agree that in recent times, especially in the cyber / internet domain there have been grave mistakes / misjudgements made on all sides of the fences, but the evilness / incompetence etc. etc. is by far overestimated by the public.

this is the same idea as that 'all banks are bad' just because some bankers misbehave or make bad calls. you still want banks and use them, so perhaps try to see that people arent inherently bad or incompetent, and are trying their best to avoid such calamities.

be sure that for any 'incompetence' which comes to light, internally these agencies are much much more critical and taking action than what you 'see' them doing.

most of this work (99.99999999%) is still not in the public eye and will never be. saying spying is inherently bad due to some mistakes is grosly underestimating what good they do, and overestimating the incompetence / bad intentions of these actors and agencies.

you never hear it if a spy does a good job, he'll just submit some intelligence, or prevent some calamity, and remain anonymous. these people should be praised, not shot down due to some of their colleagues missing the mark.

remember you are observing MEDIA, not actual reality. if the media speaks about most topics, you will take their words with a bucket of salt, but if they speak about corporate or goverment mishaps, suddenly their word is absolute truth? get real.

<comment><USER42> "most spies are highly efficient and useful to our governments goals / protecting people from bad things. the hand-full of derps we see in the news are unfortunate but shouldn't be taken as the general state of spying / intelligence work."

Sources?

Because there is this other theory, that the "handful of derps" we see in the media are just the tip of the iceberg, because most failures can and do get shoved easily under the carpet, with a "top secret" stamp.

<comment><USER41> you want me to send some nytime linkes for u there :')... sure they are reliable sources. :')...

offering counter-point as most views are highly negative and paranoid. but i suppose in my country, there's not really much negative media about these sort of things, guess intelligence agency quality and media coverage varies by country, feeding this paranoia of you guys (guessing most will be basing their well founded and very knowlegable opinions on US media posts.)

in my country, the coverage for our intelligence services looks much more positive... [https://nos.nl/artikel/2253313-mivd-we-hebben-russische- hack...](https://nos.nl/artikel/2253313-mivd-we-hebben-russische-hack-van- opcw-in-den-haag-voorkomen.html) (sorry, sure you can figure out google translate.. - and yes, tis is also public media, highly reliable source as always. :')... but i guess at least it's public enough for u...)

<comment><USER12> Media coverage of the intelligence agencies is disgustingly positive in the US. Most of the press will report anything they say and cable news is overrun with their representatives. Hell, the New York Times has delayed or cancelled stories that would be embarrassing to them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CUPS Local Privilege Escalation and Sandbox Escapes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gdssecurity.com/labs/2018/7/11/cups-local-privilege-escalation-and-sandbox-escapes.html <comment><USER2> Ouch, these are pretty bad exploits for the amount of work it would take to exploit them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Purging cups is one of the first things I do with a new Linux system. Who the hell even prints anymore from a personal computer?

edit:

also, lol, remember when Linus "vented" about unprivileged users and printing?

[https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5](https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5)

<comment><USER4> Yet another example of - "I haven't owned a TV in 15 years, do people still watch TV?"

<comment><USER3> Overlap of Linux users and people who need printers is probably at an all time low.

<comment><USER4> Seeing that not only does MacOS use CUPS but that Apple owns the source code to CUPS, I think that a security vulnerability in it may be a big deal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Report: Amazon plans to expand grocery delivery service - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/01/amazon-plans-to-expand-grocery.html <comment><USER2> Should be quite interesting; here in NYC my wife and I do about 75% of our grocery shopping through FreshDirect which nets us fresher, more local, and all-around better produce & meat than we can get here in Astoria without taking a trip into Manhattan. FreshDirect also has continued to improve their user experience and buying process -- so much so that we trust the site enough to buy new veggies and fruits that we've never tried before just based on their staff ratings.

I'm not saying that Amazon won't be able to get traction here, but rather that I'm curious to see how what different approach they'd bring to solving the problems that FreshDirect has already solved. I should also mention that I love Amazon thanks to Prime, so it should be interesting competition if they expand this way...

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I wondered if this was the inevitable conclusion once I saw the "Amazon Tote" announcement a while back: <https://tote.amazon.com/AmazonToteLearnMore?refId=></comment></comment>


Link to SBA's Coronavirus Relief Options - <AUTHOR> https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options <comment><USER2> This loan is capped at 1k/employee and disqualifies you from getting the PPP loan...</comment>


How They Sent Photos Across the Ocean Back in 1926 - <AUTHOR> http://petapixel.com/2013/07/01/how-they-sent-photos-across-the-ocean-back-in-1926/

<comment><USER2> I think the illustration is beautiful. It makes me appreciate technology, but also reminds of the process when beepers existed, and pay phones were prevalent (before 2way pagers, and alphanumeric paging).</comment>


Self repairing software blocks shellshock in under 4 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/self-repairing-software-tackles-bugs/

<comment><USER2> That works until they write viruses specifically designed to fool this software (maybe they could also test against it to check if it works).</comment>


The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind' - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life/63937/

<comment><USER2> Previously submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117715>

(and that wasn't the only previous submission)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The reader comments are very interesting.</comment>


Show HN: Easily create Windows Installers - <AUTHOR> http://www.breakneckinstall.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I got tired of the bad experience with Windows Installation software so decided to make my own. It is built off of NSIS and I'm not going to hide that fact. I just did an early release launch so features are getting updated relatively quickly.

I would love to hear what you all think of the product as well as the marketing site.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Part of commercial sales is simply educating potential customers. Given the target audience for the project, there is a lack of technical detail relevant to developers.

Being based of NSIS, I'd go further and say that there ought to be an honest use case analysis so that developers know when it is better to use NSIS instead of Breakneck. People using your product unsuccessfully is likely to be worse over the long run than not using it at all.

Tell people what the tradeoffs are so that they can determine if Breakneck is right for them.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response. I'll make updates today.</comment></comment></comment>


Helicopter Money: Way Out of Crisis or Fallacy of Traditional Economics? - <AUTHOR> https://forklog.media/helicopter-money-way-out-of-crisis-or-fallacy-of-traditional-economics/ <comment><USER2> Over the last 10 years, the FED has more then doubled the amount of money they have out in the market. Other central banks have done the same.

Despite popular belief, the value of money decreased by about 50% during this time. It is not easy to say if this is a coincidence. But it looks a lot like there is causality at play.

The reason why inflation "officially" is lower then what one would expect given the amount of money printed lies in the way it is calculated.

The calculation includes mostly goods and services bought by people who live from hand to mouth. Not the goods and services bought by people with savings and high income.

Rent and real estate in desireable areas, gold, bitcoin, equities - all of these now require significantly more money to buy then they did in 2010. People who saved money lost about 50% of their buying power to inflation.

<comment><USER3> Gold value ([https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold- prices](https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-prices))

      Apr 2000: $274/oz
      Apr 2005: $425/oz (+55%)
      Apr 2010: $1132/oz (+166% in 5 years, +313% in 10 years)
      Apr 2015: $1175/oz (+3% in 5 years, +176% in 10 years)
      Apr 2020: $1647/oz (+40% in 5 years, +45% in 10 years)

So we can see that Gold was massively inflating until 2010, when you say the fed started printing money, since then it's stabilised, even with the current panic

House prices in the US ([https://dqydj.com/historical-home- prices/](https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/))

      Apr 2000: $134k
      Apr 2005: $199k
      Apr 2010: $183k
      Apr 2015: $210k
      Apr 2019: $269k

So 2010-2019 is a 46% increase, or 4.5% per year, so about 50% for 10 years. 2000 to 2010 is 36%, but the charts indicate we're nearing the top of another house price bubble (1998-2007 was an 80% increase over 9 years, or 7.5% increase per year)

So I'm not sure your assertions that the increase of these values are due to quantitive easing over the last 10 years holds.

<comment><USER4> You're quoting figures that a lump of rock has doubled and doubled in value since 2000 (plus a little bit). The BLS inflation calculator [0] tells me that inflation would have gotten the price to $420 by now (heh) which is not a doubling in anyone's book.

The trend is persistent, the rock is much the same as it has ever been. Do you have an alternate thesis to QE for why this is happening or are you happy to write it off as a mystery?

[0] [https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)

<comment><USER3> Gold started increasing in value in 2001

QE didn't start until November 2008 (gold = $814) That stopped by Nobember 2014 (gold = $1232). 51% increase in gold over 6 years, or 7% per year.

That is far lower than the increase in gold in other 6 year periods which didn't have QE.

<comment><USER4> A very fair point with which I can only agree. Care to hazard a guess as to why gold is rising though? The rock isn't changing.

<comment><USER5> Gold gets used in electronics, so real world demand is up, and it's actually fairly hard to extract. This is being made harder by environmental protections that are making it illegal in many places to do things that are more efficient but come at a high environmental cost.

I wish we would actively foster panning for gold. It's environmentally friendly. It's "blue collar" work that doesn't require a college degree, spiffy resume and do forth and it doesn't take much gold per year to potentially support someone who otherwise might be homeless or flipping burgers (or both).

<comment><USER6> Panning is very location-specific, though. How does access for panning relate to land ownership / public management of rivers?

<comment><USER5> I don't know the answer to the land management piece. I do know that we live in a world that increasingly makes it hard for people just do a thing and make a living, without a college degree, a raft load of student loans and on and on.

I do know we have too little well-paid manual labor and too much of a divide between the have and have nots. I know you don't need much more than a gold pan to get started, which can be had for under ten dollars from places like Walmart.

I didn't research the land owenership/public management of rivers angle very much. I do know that it's not illegal in some places to dredge rivers on public land, which is extremely disruptive of the ecosystem.

This is more of less the summary of the research I did into the subject:

[https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2016/11/h...](https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2016/11/half- baked-idea-panning-for-gold.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The usual knee-jerk reaction to money printing is "omg inflation is coming". But it is not that simple - inflation is just the trend in average prices of things/services/whatevers (and there's a great deal of disagreement about what should those things be; the US has 6 measures of inflation none of which agree with any other).

All of those things are ultimately subject to the supply/demand pricing mechanism, so if you want to proclaim inflation you should be able to answer this question: why will demand outstrip supply? I'm not saying this cannot happen, it can, but most people just forget to even consider this basic supply/mechanism framework.

Instead of trying to judge the reality of production and consumption people often rely on some "magic" properties of accounting numbers of large institutions (central banks or governments). It is so much simpler to just eyeball some trillions and say "it's too much, the currency is dead!" rather than deal with the complexities of reality.

<comment><USER4> I disagree but I'm going to make my counterpoint a little indirectly:

I can name a couple of states in my lifetime where the government has collapsed in an inflationary manner and the people have suffered and starved. They are generally places people flee in large numbers.

There are no counters that I'm aware of that have suffered a deflationary collapse. If I look up the Wikipedia page for deflation I'm given hellholes like Hong Kong and Japa... no, wait, those are some of the places I'd actually prefer to live than where I am now. Pity I don't speak any Asian languages. Pretty civilised places, really. Advanced is the word I'd actually use to describe them.

There is literally one example of a deflationary collapse in the 1930s US Great Recession. Even then, that was the precursor to the modern US rather than, say, the Zimbabwe collapse through hyperinflation.

I can fathom why governments call deflation the big enemy. I can't fathom why people believe that. Even in the worst case suffering and deflation seem like a pretty good foundation for long term success. People really should stop flirting with inflation and try encouraging deflation as a response for once. Who knows, it might work. Governments keep encouraging inflation and we keep having mysterious debt-fueled collapses.

<comment><USER6> The usual ones that people name are Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and in those the hyperinflation isn't just a monetary phenomenon that the states decided to self-destruct with; it's a _symptom_ of a whole cascade of failures, including economic sanctions on the country!

Hyperinflation in those cases is effectively a forex phenomenon. The country stops producing any useful export goods (or is banned from exporting, or in the case of Weimar Germany forced to export gold at gunpoint), so the value of its currency collapses. Because the country still requires imports, especially oil, the value of those goods shoots up - but you can't save the economy from this by printing local currency.

(Can someone name a 20th century country with hyperinflation that wasn't under sanctions or involved in a war?)

<comment><USER4> > (Can someone name a 20th century country with hyperinflation that wasn't > under sanctions or involved in a war?)

But in contrast, can anyone name a 20th century country with deflationary policy who broke under sanctions or came off badly when involved in a war?

Flirting with deflation is much safer policy than flirting with inflation. Although a fair point that hyperinflation is associated with cascades of failures that still suggests that flirting with high inflation is more destabilising than flirting with very low credit levels. If anyone responded to cascades of failures by highly deflationary policy they don't seem to have made it into the well-known-failed-states pile.

Japan is a pretty classic tried-deflation example and they ended up a really stable, well organised society that honestly looks like a pretty nice place to live. Well educated. Modern. One of the leading countries on the Asian continent in fact. People complain that the rich aren't getting rich fast enough in Japan which I don't think is a great complaint.

<comment><USER6> > Japan is a pretty classic tried-deflation example

Er, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_\(Japan\)) ? It wasn't so much "tried" as "was unable to avoid" deflation.

(The relation of particular economic conditions on paper to how nice a country is to actually live in is a different and much more complicated subject!)

I don't think there have been countries which have tried deflation in response to dysfunctionality, because part of dysfunctionality is being unable to pick good policy options and make them stick; but there have been quite a few who've responded to currency trouble by giving up their own currency and either dollarising or joining the Euro. The consequence of that in Greece was deflation: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-greece-economy- inflation/...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-greece-economy- inflation/greek-deflation-persists-in-july-as-prices-fall-for-29th-month- idUSKCN0QC1F220150807) ... and the "austerity" that went along with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even though the consequences are going to be economic, I suspect that the helicopter money being offered by the various governments of the world has more to do with stopping a domino effect that would lead to social collapse. A decimated economy with it's institutions more-or-less intact may be a low price to pay.

As for all of these economic predictions whirling about: they are speculation based upon people's pet theories. Quite frankly, there isn't enough data to go on. There are very few economic crises that have progressed on this scale and at this pace. When there has been a crisis of similar magnitude, the initial conditions are vastly different. Go ahead and present your predictions, but also take the time to realize that its validity is more likely to be based upon luck than data.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Helicopter money is irreversible since it increases the monetary base of the > end-users.

This is inaccurate. If the government pumps $x into the economy today, tomorrow it can take $x out by levying a tax.

> He also suggested that blockchain technology and digital currency > opportunities allow central banks to transfer money directly to citizens' > accounts. In this case, the regulator will be technically able to limit the > time during which the money can be spent.

Can anyone explain what "blockchain" brings to the table here compared to traditional banking? If you want to distribute money to everyone, you want to verify real-world identities, which seems like the exact opposite of the typical use case blockchain is paraded around for.

<comment><USER10> > Can anyone explain what "blockchain" brings to the table here compared to > traditional banking? If you want to distribute money to everyone, you want > to verify real-world identities, which seems like the exact opposite of the > typical use case blockchain is paraded around for.

Private, permissioned "blockchain"-like technologies (the kind being discussed in the enterprise market) would give you exactly the type of identity solution you need.

A shared inter-bank ledger that individuals could register accounts with, which also incotporates the appropriate level of privacy and authorization, would enable seamless verification and transfer activities at scale.

<comment><USER9> Why the complexity of a "private, permissioned blockchain" compared to the traditional databases subject to periodic audits that the world already runs on, are proven to work and are conceptually much simpler? It seems like a solution in search of a problem.

<comment><USER10> It's a fair question. The answer is that systems like this - that are real in their offering and not a pipe dream - are not promoting to replace traditional databases. Blockchain is a terrible term with tons of baggage so let me describe what I mean in more detail.

These solutions in my mind are better described as distributed systems that allow independent verification and audit of data and transactions from within the system itself.

This is useful when the data being shared involved spans multiple entities in terms of responsibility, ownership, value, and other impacts. Rather than having to rely on other mechanisms of verification the system itself is able to provide that verifiability at scale.

Essentially you're using a technology layer, which is a collection of existing concepts put together in a somewhat novel use, to disintermediate more expensive verification solutions.

I think it makes a lot of sense if you examine the value chain of securities lending (from creation of the instrument, custody, to lending, custody transfer, and finally audit and compliance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > In this piece, we take a look at the helicopter money model, its role in the > economy, and the related shortcomings that may emerge in the long-run.

> What's Helicopter Money?

> The concept of helicopter money first appeared in 1969 in The Optimum > Quantity of Money by a famous monetary theorist and Nobel laureate Milton > Friedman. It implies transferring money to individuals or cutting taxes for > households.

This section tells me everything I need to know: the person who wrote this article has _no idea what they are writing about._

The "helicopter money" phrase was used satirically, and every economist at the time and through, apparently, until today, knew this because of how absurd the term is. I haven't read the piece sited, but I'm going to go out on a limb and state that Milton Friedman would not have stated that the term was even equivalent to "cutting taxes" and definitely stated the term as _creating_ money and giving it to households (via a helicopter).

Please ignore this article. It is absolutely awful and is probably effective at tricking people who have never read about these things before.

</comment><comment><USER12> ah yes, a nice discussion of the central bank toolkit when policy rates are at their effective lower bound

wait, what's this? Bitcoin and ethereum tickers at the top of the page? A section titled 'Helicopter Money on Blockchain'? hold on a minute...

In fairness, the article did avoid a few of the 'not even wrong' pitfalls you might expect to see written about QE and other sovereign currency monetary operations

</comment><comment><USER13> Here is a succinct case by a smart economist about why we didn't get inflation after the GFC, but will get it this time:

[https://voxeu.org/article/future-imperfect-after- coronavirus](https://voxeu.org/article/future-imperfect-after-coronavirus)

<comment><USER14> This sounds like to going to the neighborhood psychic to know whether you'll find true love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Printing money is not the same thing as creating resources. Resources are the backbone of wealth! No resources, no wealth. All resources begin with human activity. No activity, no resources. Reduced activity, reduced resources, reduced wealth. Even hunter gathers had to hunt and had to gather.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find this a pretty poorly written piece. It seems to have forgotten about the headline question after the first few paragraphs, and doesn't make any other clear point in the end.

Here's a very traditional economist answer.

Helicopter money is neither a way of of the current crisis, nor a fallacy. It is good to do it now, but it won't "solve" the crisis. It's still much better to do it than not.

Macro-economic recessions/crises, defined as a temporary drop in aggregate income/production (= GDP = GDI), are caused by a drop of (some combination of) aggregate demand (how much people will buy at a given price level) or aggregate supply (how much people produce at a given price level) [1], in economic parlance, negative supply- or demand shocks. If we have a pure supply shock, demand side measures such as lowering interest rates, helicopter money, government stimulus, will mostly just increase prices. OTOH, with a pure demand shock, most of such measures will probably help[2]. With demand shocks, the productive capacity is still there ("potential output"), but the demand needs to increase to "close the output gap".

Most post-WW2 recessions in advanced economies are negative demand-shock recessions (we haven't been able to identify short-term economy-wide drops in production capacity), so demand side stimulus is by and large helpful (except when they really overdid it in the 1970, when it did cause high inflation).

The current crisis is a combination of both a big demand shock and a big supply shock. This means that demand side measures such as helicopter money will help (in the sense that things will be much worse if we did't do it). But things will also become more expensive (either nominally in sticker prices if the demand stimulus is large enough, or just in real terms compared to people's incomes) due to the supply shock. The supply side shock can only be remedied by really controlling the pandemic.

All of this is very moderate traditional undergraduate level economics, and will explain most of the upcoming economic upheavals perfectly fine. Keep this in mind when you read stories cherry picked to make some point about current/upcoming economic or monetary policy.

[1] A drop in aggregate supply could be cause by e.g. a big natural disaster, war, pandemic. What might cause a drop in aggregate demand is still somewhat of a mystery.

[2] Most of the economic debate is which form of stimulus is more effective, and about more esoteric second order effects. But there might still a minority of hard core "Real Business Cycle" economists who doubt the existence of demand-side shortfalls.

</comment><comment><USER17> Related, Frances Coppola is an advocate of Helicopter money and UBI, but doesn't think it's the right medicine for these current circumstances: [http://www.coppolacomment.com/2020/03/when-is-right-time- for...](http://www.coppolacomment.com/2020/03/when-is-right-time-for-ubi- and.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> * If citizens approve money printing to citizens, then it helps them out.

* Money printing to the privilege class (investors), creates permanent theft to citizens going forward, for these two reasons: 1) Salaries don't go up with inflation for low income and middle class. Only Gold-color workers.

       2) That money going to privilege class has them bid up equities/stocks (and other) asset classes.  Workers with 401k get far smaller percent of the stock market.  Instead of 10% YoY return from the stock market for their retirement, they get a lower percentage.

2008 had US Dollars at $800b (monetary base). 5 years later, it was $3.6 trillion. That is 450% as many USDollars as before. That money printed $2.8 trillion went to the privilege class. Workers adding to their 401ks get robbed for the rest of their life, on lower growth.</comment>


Twitter Declines to Explain Taking $1M from Hate Group - <AUTHOR> https://readsludge.com/2019/10/04/twitter-declines-to-explain-taking-1-million-from-anti-immigrant-hate-group-fair/ <comment><USER2> I just have one question... who determines what a hate group is and how is it determined.</comment>


Hey Millennials: You Got a Raw Deal. Get Over It. - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-18/hey-millennials-you-got-a-raw-deal-get-over-it-.html

<comment><USER2> Hey Boomers: You raised an entitled, crappy generation. Get Over It.</comment>


The ultimate guide to proposals: Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://nusii.com/blog/guide-to-proposals/

<comment><USER2> As a guy trying to figure out how to propose to his gf, this title was very misleading!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you calm down? - <AUTHOR>

I find myself always feeling the need to be doing something, occupying my mind with some sort of productive thinking, reading, etc incessantly.
But I feel like this has left me an anxious and slightly impatient person where any "blank" time I can't enjoy because I feel the need to get back to doing something, anything. I have trouble finding joy in small talk even with my significant other. My parents have always been this way as well, we can never just sit and relax, it's always about getting things done. In fact, I am writing this post while waiting on fast food.
How much down time do you find is necessary daily or weekly just to relax? How do you do it? It seems there are endless articles on HN about being more productive but we often don't think about the opposite end of the spectrum. Does anyone have similar experiences and what advice do you have if so? <comment><USER2> A long time ago, my yoga instructor suggested this:

Light a candle in a dark room, sit a few feet away from it and focus your eyes on it. Do not blink. After a while, your eyes might start welling up but fight hard not to blink. On the mental level, do not think about anything. Just concentrate on your breathing and the light in front of you.

Something like 5-10 mins should be fine in the initial stages. I haven't tried beyond that. Also, make sure you are decently hydrated throughout the day before starting on this exercise.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll give it a shot. Couldn't hurt. What is the intended result? Clarity/peace of mind?

<comment><USER2> Something like that. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My mom is a workaholic and cannot stand to sit still. The minute she quit work to take care of my elderly father full time she promptly began painting and wallpapering the house. I am wired much the same but a medical condition has forced me to learn to deal constructively with downtime.

A few thoughts:

I think this is driven in part by high IQ and is rooted in boredom. Finding a means to adequately feed/challenge your mind seems to help.

Deal with any underlying personal issues you have. I do not think keeping busy is a problem per se but it can turn into one if it winds up being an avoidance thing.

Try different environments and see if that makes a difference. It does for some people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I agree 100% about the IQ and boredom thing. Sometimes I envy people who can sit around and do nothing and be completely satisfied. But that's never been me.

I too have a medical condition (epilepsy) which has pretty dire consequences if I don't get an adequate amount of down time and sleep. So this has become quite a problem at times.

Thanks again though, I think I'll give the different environment approach a try.</comment></comment>


Embarrassing Server Meltdowns that Cost Companies Millions - <AUTHOR> http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/features/server-meltdowns-millions-020309/

<comment><USER2> I swear I've seen this exact post from HN awhile ago. But it must have been stolen from somewhere if so, because the date is new. looking ...

</comment><comment><USER3> The forgot about Encyclopedia Britannica.</comment>


Closing in on high-temperature superconductivity - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160919132603.htm <comment><USER3> Three groups published essentially the same results in the same issue of _Science_ :

Greiner group: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02704.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02704.pdf)

Zwierlein group: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.04089v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.04089v1.pdf)

Bloch group: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.05661v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.05661v1.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing. I'm pretty familiar with the area, and it was fun to see the different approaches and styles of the three groups in the papers.

Zwierlein = "we're doing solid state physics" (disclaimer: with ultracold atoms)

Bloch: optical lattices and ultracold atoms are cool. You can do anything.

Greiner: quantum gas MICROSCOPES!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's probably a serious error in the cover image caption, or the image itself is seriously misleading. I'm quoting verbatim:

> _" This composite image contains an equation in the foreground related to > theory research in high-temperature superconductivity, and images in the > background resulting from high-temperature superconductivity experiments. > Credit: Image courtesy of Penn State University"_

At least one of the images in the background is not 'resulting from high- temperature superconductivity experiments', it's just a plain rendering of the default preset of a Filter Forge filter 'Electricity': [https://www.filterforge.com/filters/237.html](https://www.filterforge.com/filters/237.html)

(I am the author of this particular filter, and the founder of Filter Forge. The 'electric' image looks a bit different on our page because we force seamless tiling to on when rendering images for the web).

<comment><USER6> It saddens me that the top comment is a technical note about the eye-catcher image, not the substance of the article.

<comment><USER7> The article doesn't have a lot of substance though. It spends a lot of time on what the goals are and buries the few snippets of what they actually did and measured. They have a physical simulator and a computational simulator? Maybe? It's a mess.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, basically. From what I can tell given some work I've done in a related field, what's happened is that they found a new way to do the math in a theoretical model some long time ago, and it revealed some cool new predictions within a certain temperature range, as well as some equivalent of high-T superconductivity at some other temperature range.

Now they went to test it, which they did by supercooling potassium atoms while using lasers to force them into one place. (Conveniently you can also use lasers for refrigeration though I'm not sure if they did.) Then they switched the lasers to describe a big 2D standing wave which the potassium atoms spread out into, forming a square grid. These are called "optical lattices"; they're difficult to work with because you don't have anything small enough to really poke at individual atoms and even if you did you'd have to deal with how the lasers are blasting your poker left and right... so, you just have to kind of throw your hands up, "I am not going to care about any of these individual atoms." However, you get some nice bulk properties: for an easy example, if you just turn off the lasers and let stuff drift and then image it, they all basically started from the same place and drifted according to their velocity which is proportional to their momentum, so you can get an image of |ψ[p]|², the momentum-space distribution of the wavefunctions of the individual atoms. So that's cool. But basically you have this tiny little dot of well-arranged well-controlled particles, but you can only do bulk operations on them (including e.g. bulk entanglements by bringing pairs of rows closer together by messing with the lattice and cool stuff like that).

While I'm not clear what the theoretical predictions were, exactly, apparently when they pushed the system into the first temperature regime described above they discovered whatever their theoretical model predicted. Hooray! This has given them some small confidence that maybe their theoretical model is a plausible step forward for understanding high-T superconductivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> By "high-temperature" superconductivity, physicists mean liquid nitrogen temperature, not room temperature. It's progress, but cheap maglev is still a ways off.

<comment><USER10> Liquid nitrogen is much easier and cheaper to work with than liquid helium (probably most US high schools see freeze and break a banana or similar experiments regularly; it costs very little).

IMO it would still be a major real world breakthrough when this is ready for engineering use. But while this research may be a big step to that goal, it does not yet move the problem from science to engineering.

<comment><USER11> I used to do a lot of cryogenics work during my PhD.

The statistic one of the professors often quoted was that "LN2 is cheaper than milk".

Although LN2 is cheaper and more abundant, it's also 20 times warmer than LHe. That matters a lot for applications.

To get an idea of ability to restrict thermal excitations, LN2 at 77K is _only_ 4x 'colder' than room temperature. But LHe (4.2K) is 18x 'colder' than LN2, or 72x 'colder' than room temperature!

<comment><USER12> The 4x 'colder' here really threw me. Took me a minute to realize you meant 1/4 the temperature. Strikes me as an odd phrasing, like saying "airplanes fly 23x 'lower' than LEO".

<comment><USER13> It's odd but correct because temperature has a minimum.

We're just used to Celsius/Fahrenheit temperatures where you can't say that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is closer, high temperature superconductors, or fusion power plants?

<comment><USER15> Fusion's 20 years away. Just like it's always been since ZETA in the late 50s.

<comment><USER16> I always thought that was a funding thing. It seems like there are a few small improvements every few years, because, I think people who work on that work pretty hard.

It's that they want to build a multi billion dollar thing "to answer questions". Since there's no immediate payoff, it follows the superconducting supercollider path.

Also, it's nuclear power, so that's another nail in the coffin.

<comment><USER17> I don't really think it's funding. There has - over the last 50 years - <USER2> considerable funding from all industrialized countries. The physics of containing a large volume of plasma and injecting cryogenic fuel and turning the resulting energy into something usable (eg. steam) all next to each other is simply not trivial.

Let's see how Wendelstein 7x or the announced micro-fusion devices turn out in operation - maybe they are finally the breakthrough. I am not holding my breath for ITER, though.

<comment><USER18> Funding: [http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg)

Wendelstein 7X is impressive, but it doesn't have the facilities for actual fusion. The best they can do is "theoretical breakeven", which has already been achieved with tokamaks (JT-60 in Japan).

As for "micro-fusion" devices: if you're thinking of Lockheed, as far as I can tell they're full of shit. It's an approach that was tried 50 years ago and failed.

<comment><USER19> You seem to imply that failure 50 years ago implies failure 10 years from now, which, with all the advances in supporting technologies, is nonsensical. Do you have any solid evidence that Lockheed is full of shit?

<comment><USER18> No I don't, which is why it was a qualified statement. They've released very little information about their design, and it's up to them to convince the taxpaying public it's anything more than a mirror machine. How do they keep the plasma from squirting out of the sides? That'd be the real innovation, but they're silent on this point. Almost as if they're not worried about it.

Oh, and now it's 10 years from now? I thought they said it'd be ready in five? Wait, three, because they said that two years ago.

<comment><USER19> The other reason to keep quiet about confinement is that it's their secret sauce. The 10 year number is a deliberately pessimistic one I pulled out of my hat, not meant to be precise. I'm just saying, it's possible that things have changed enough to make possible in the near future what was impossible/impractical in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is really important. If you can improve conduction efficiency by a percent or two (let alone lossless) you can put solar panels on the other side of the planet and solve global warming in a pinch by piping power to the dark side. Right now it's about 3% at 100kV iirc which translates to ~40% losses best case which, while almost financially feasible, would also cook the planet in a toaster oven. :P

<comment><USER21> might be a pretty long wire. Is that going to be cheaper than the solar energy microwaved from space?

<comment><USER22> What's the difference between space-based directed energy transmission and building-vaporizing laser space weapons?

<comment><USER23> "solar level" power density, even ten times solar level power density, is still maybe a factor of a million too low to vaporize buildings.

Note that a 2x solar energy flux beam would still be an interesting tactical or strategic weapon. It wouldn't melt or burn anything directly but you could make winter streets very comfortable for protestors, or make summer streets intolerably hot for protestors. Or you could boil off water quicker than letting the sun do it itself, which is nice after a snow storm and not so nice during a drought.

There are a variety of interesting optical resolution limits such that its physically impossible to accidentally turn a "warms up a couple square miles" mirror into a death ray of doom.

Note that like 50 years ago people were pimping 90+% effective microwave antennas... the ground station work was done decades ago and its cheap. Now how you get a multi-megawatt continuous microwave magnetron in orbit and powered is the hard part.

<comment><USER22> super interesting thx! I didn't think of larger-area, lower intensity beam as an option. Now it's got me thinking of other ideas like adding a few months of growing season to northern & southern farms, which sounds like a cover story of Popular Science magazine from the 70s :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TLDR: The main finding is: They built a simulation and super cold 2D experimental setup that verified that the "Hubbard" superconducting model is validated to a high degree (for a certain temperature range), and that electrons start forming pairs that "bunch" with empty spaces in the lattice.

<comment><USER25> Man, I wish the title didn't suggest that high temperature superconductivity experiments were performed.

<comment><USER24> I know, total clickbait for engineers and nerds.. A similar one would be like, "Woz has THIS to say about new Star Wars movie..." omg, gotta click that...

<comment><USER26> "You won't believe what Linus just said"

"11 programs Stallman doesn't want you to install"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Link to the article (paywall) [0].

0\. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6305/1257](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6305/1257)</comment>


Ask YC:  Are people interested in hanging out the weekend of startup school? - <AUTHOR>

I don't know if anything formal had been planned by the Startup School, so if there is something formal already planned, please let me know.  I was just thinking that it would be cool if we could give people flying in a chance to hang out a bit more and talk.  Also, if people live in the area but didn't get accepted, it would be nice to still be able to get together with other people from Hacker News.
My wife used to do event planning, and has some spare time.  We also live in the area, so we'd be happy to put something together if people are interested.  But before we did something, we wanted to gauge people's  interest, to see if people want to hang out, what size place we'd need, etc...
I know the application deadline is still a month away, but if there's a large enough group of people that want to get together, we should start doing some leg work now.
I'd be interested in hearing from people who went last year.  What did people do to get together?  How did that work?  Any thoughts on something different you'd like? <comment><USER2> Last year, Sam Odio set up a wiki for the event and someone also set up a Facebook group. People wrote down their contact info on the wiki, and then a bunch of us got together and ate some tacos and chatted. Then a group of us went to have drinks at some of the bars. It was pretty fun, so I think this should be done again. I'd be interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> How many people showed up?

<comment><USER3> There were about 20 at the dinner on Friday night.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm interested in attending. Last year my cofounder and I went, and then left right after - we didn't know anyone then.

</comment><comment><USER5> I too would be interested (pending acceptance of course); I think the most effective technique would be to provide some kind of networking ahead of time (not sure how that would work, but a wiki is always a good first step).

</comment><comment><USER6> If you guys want, I could try to reserve a room in Old Union for an hour or so after the event so people can get together and mingle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know how many people fit in Old Union? I'm a bit unfamiliar with the place. I'm assuming that it's a place on campus.

I was thinking of doing something the night before Startup School. That way people could get together the night before if they're coming in to town for the weekend.

Just a thought. Ping me at iamelgringo(Pants)gmail.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interested here, as well; although my attendance is highly dependent on being accepted, as well as other factors.

</comment><comment><USER8> Definitely interested, would be great i think...ofcourse, i got to be allowed to be there :-D

</comment><comment><USER9> Count me in as well. I'm in LA but always looking for an excuse to go up north.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a great idea. I would be in.

</comment><comment><USER11> im probably interested. i always like to shoot the breeze.

</comment><comment><USER12> let's all get pho

</comment><comment><USER13> i'd be game</comment>


Simple Geometry Puzzles You Can't Solve - <AUTHOR> http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/MathFun/Triangle.htm

<comment><USER2> I just solved the first one. Not that difficult. You draw two parallel lines to line AB that intersect E and D. This creates a regular trapezoid. The diagonals are congruent. I don't feel like writing out the rest of the steps, but here is a link to the scanned image of it.

<http://www.hivgene.com/triangle1.png>

The answer is 10 btw.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. I got 20 (you can check it with a protractor if the figure is drawn to scale). Triangle ADE is not isosceles. The diagonals within the trapezoids are not parallel. The lower diagonal (BD) makes an angle of 60 degrees with AB; the upper diagonal (DE) is at 50 degrees from a line running through D, parallel to AB.

<comment><USER2> Look at my work before you mod me down. The lines I drew were not drawn with a ruler. If x is 10, then DE is 60 degrees from the line running through D (not 50), parallel to AB, just like the angle DBA.

If a protractor says one thing, and the math using known values says another, I'm going to trust the math.

I see where according to the figure, triangle ADE must be isosceles, but I don't trust that the figure is actually drawn to scale. All the measurements of angles I got by calculations. Can you find a flaw in one of those?

<comment><USER3> Check again. The figure is to scale. I worked it out first and then checked with a protractor. Your assumption that the diagonals within the trapezoids are parallel is incorrect. As a result, angles that you have assigned to the triangles in the upper trapezoid are also incorrect. The fact that triangle ADE is not isosceles makes it impossible for x to be 10.

<comment><USER4> > Your assumption that the diagonals within the trapezoids are parallel is > incorrect.

Do you mean his assumption that the diagonals within the trapezoids are _congruent_ is incorrect? I'd be curious to see your diagram or proof to see where you differ. Obviously, it makes a lot more sense that the diagram is drawn to scale.

<comment><USER3> Here is my solution: <http://fernlabs.com/Problem1Solution.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://mathcircle.berkeley.edu/BMC4/Handouts/geoprob.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER6> answer is 42. I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahha... you managed to squeeze in two famous 'answers.'

<comment><USER7> Three, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> answer is 20. parallel line to line AB in D point gives us F point, after some work we get EF=FD and angle FED=50, but angle AEB=30. So, here is the result angle DEA = FEB - AEB = 20 : )

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Damn hard.

</comment><comment><USER9> The first one isn't actually solvable; you get a system of equations with infinite solutions. The second hint for it implies by looking at a drawing to scale and putting in a few extra lines you'll get it, but it sounds more like you're eyeballing angles. You might as well just pull out the protractor.</comment>


Samsung joins Mozilla's quest for Rust - old-gregg http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3514_7-57577639/samsung-joins-mozillas-quest-for-rust/ <comment><AUTHOR> The actual announcement isn't linked until the third paragraph: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and- samsung...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung- collaborate-on-next-generation-web-browser-engine/)

Which was discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5486495>

</comment><comment><USER2> I can't help but think that there's some connection between this announcement and Firefox OS. Purely speculation but I suspect that Samsung will be selling cheaper phones running Firefox OS and over time move towards it for more and more phones.

<comment><USER3> Allegedly, Samsung is pursuing tizen as a browser based os for their devices[1]. This seems accelerated after the Motorola mobile acquisition. I'm guessing they are looking at that as a technology to incorporate or a hedge.

[1] [http://m.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-release-high-end-tizen- sma...](http://m.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-release-high-end-tizen-smartphone- in-august/57574498)

<comment><USER4> I can imagine that If Samsung continues to develop a browser based OS they will likely do it in a way that inter-operates with the Firefox OS ecosystem. By the time this would come to market there will likely be more apps in the Firefox OS marketplace. It would solve the problem of new platforms having a limited selection of apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Samsung have actually been contributing (well, people employed by Samsung) for a few months now: <http://ruststat.youknowone.org/#group- Samsung%20Electronics>

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this the same Samsung who is responsible for a series of extremely badly designed and buggy software?

<http://amplicate.com/hate/kiosk>

<comment><USER7> Yes my wife threw her galaxy ace out of the car window on the M1 the other day because of a persistent lock up bug.

However I've got a Samsung 840 Pro SSD and I'm rather happy with it.

you win some, you lose some.

<comment><USER8> Don't you have a garbage can at home?

That's pretty irresponsible.

<comment><USER7> Yes but:

a) we're not allowed to put phones in it due to the lithium content.

b) I doubt in the moment of anger at the piece of shit, taking it home and politely disposing of it would have the same mental satisfaction as smashing the bastard thing to bits on the motorway.

Irresponsible or not, humans aren't perfect unless they make condescending remarks on the internet.

<comment><USER9> It's easy to criticize from the couch, but throwing a phone from a car window is VERY irresponsible. I doubt that in the moment of anger she looked first to see if there was someone else on the road.

Being hit by a phone while riding a motorbike doesn't seem fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rust and and <http://nimrod-code.org/> are my favorite new languages. Exciting times :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been following Rust for a bit, though not for anything serious as it seems very nichey. I do hope it picks up some momentum, though.

I have to say, I've tried several times to move to Go and I've never fully embraced Go's syntax. For some reason I'm able to wrap my head around Rust much easier. I don't know the reason, but I can.

I wonder what the future holds for Rust. In a world with Go, C, C++11, Scala and Obj C (among others), there is no shortage of languages it seems to directly compete with and b/c of that, you have to wonder where it will be in a year or 18 months.

<comment><USER12> Golang and Rust aren't made to solve the same problems. Go competes with Java and Python, Rust with C++. (Not with C, not really.)

I don't really know why people keep comparing the two.

Go - networked services, cmd-line utilities (writing unixy tools in Go is a joy), scalable scripts.

Rust - fast (bleeding edge) client software, anything that needs stricter control of memory allocation semantics than most GC'd languages without going whole-hog. I'd be curious to see a write-up on what making a game engine in Rust would be like.

Another key aspect of Go that Rust wasn't made for, is that Go is MUCH more focused on "developer experience" and project scalability. Everything is standardized, compiles damn near instantly, etc.

Go solves Google problems (maintaining and developing on slow-compiling C++/Java projects just to make a network service when Python is insufficient)

Rust solves Mozilla problems (complexity/performance/concurrency ramp up in large C++ projects, usually client software that has to be maximally performant)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know it's irrelevant, but I really can't get past the terrible name "Rust", meaning corrosion. Why not call it "Ruined", "Broken", "Stupid" or "Bug- ridden"? It's almost as bad as naming it for emasculated slaves.

<comment><USER14> WTF are you talking about? Rust is a very nice name.

Short, nicely googlable in a programming context, and quite cool.

Not to mention "Corrosion" is also nice.

You seem to see it from the perspective of the corroded material, but try seeing it from the perspective of the corrosive agent.

Then it's like naming a language "Acid" or "Explosion". Not to mention that "Fire" is also an example of corrosion (oxidation).

Fire, Acid, ... Doesn't Rust sound cooler already in this company?

Plus, Rust, the language, like corrosion, is "close to the metal" (pun intended).

<comment><USER10> Yeah Rust is a really clever name imo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "C++ is unsafe by design," he said. "It gets you down to the metal," a term > that means that the code runs very fast because it can be read directly by > the hardware, "but it is unsafe."

Hmm...

<comment><USER16> Ya I read that too. Unsafe just sounds like a word used by marketing fools to sell sell sell. And C++ can be directly read by the hardware? I'm not even sure what that means. Additionally, C++ has tons of abstractions. It's tons of templates and OOP don't scream down to the metal and i also guess you can't use threads in C++ and that's why it sucks so bad for multi cores. You learn something new everyday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They explained why C++ is bad. What is wrong with CLR and JVM and all the languages for those virtual machines? What makes Rust _much_ better then C#/F#/Nemerle for example?

<comment><USER12> Limited performance and control over memory semantics/management (predictability is critical).

You can only take CLR and JVM so far for latency sensitive, low-overhead client software.

Try writing a web browser in C#. We'll wait.

<comment><USER17> Oh, so it is a language for writing browsers.

<comment><USER12> It's a systems language that happens to be designed around the performance and memory constraints of writing browsers but with greater consideration given to concurrency and memory safety than C/C++.

What do you think Mozilla does anyway?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My theory is that every mature technological company with a widely deployed generic client (OS/browser) will have an ambition to build their own language :).

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this like a competence for Go?</comment>


The Internet Bubble Is Real - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/88582/doerr-vs-wilson-the-internet-bubble-is-real-that's-where-the-agreement-ends/ <comment><USER2> I've heard that VCs and angels still don't have enough good startups to invest in. I don't think they are over-invested.</comment>