Understanding Certificate Pinning - <AUTHOR> https://littlemaninmyhead.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/understanding-certificate-pinning/ <comment><USER2> Cert pinning is an anti-pattern. No need for the CA infrastructure if you're going to bypass the CA infrastructure. If you control the software on both sides, which is required for cert pinning, then you can use self-issued certs. Also: roll your certs frequently.

Shameless plug for [https://smallstep.com/cli](https://smallstep.com/cli) which makes the process of issuing and rolling certs (incl. client certs for mutual TLS) easy enough to be workable in a modern application.

<comment><USER3> How does using a self-issued cert address the concern of mitm proxying? (specifically, a user intercepting their own traffic to reverse engineer the api/protocol)

<comment><USER4> You create a Root Self Signed Certificate, and then deploy leaf certs signed by that root to your API.

Then deploy your client apps with the certificate of your self signed root.

Assuming that your root is safe, no attacker will be able to generate a cert that will be accepted by your client.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't make sense to me, sorry. Got an article or something?

<comment><USER5> The confusion here might be around the term "self-signed". Technically, _all_ roots are self-signed—that's the definition of a root CA!—but in this case the user just means "self-signed" as in "signed by me, not signed by some commercial third party". "Self-signed certificates", though, usually refer to certificates with no PKI chain: the device created a single certificate, signed it with its own key, and then just distributes it to create trust without the usual hierarchy of a PKI.

The attack on that latter system is that you as the client have no basis on which to trust that cert when its first presented. So an attacker who can intercept that first presentation of the certificate and replace it can MITM the traffic flow without you knowing. Worse, most devs "fix" that initial trust problem by telling the client not to validate the cert when its presented (because they wouldn't have any basis for doing that anyway), so an attacker is free to inject their own cert into the traffic _at any time_.

Using an actual private PKI hierarchy helps fix this: you create a root, and get your clients to trust only that root. Now you can issue your own certs, and an attacker can't MITM the traffic unless they can get their own cert from your CA. That's the same model as is used with commercial CAs: you're just operating the root of the chain yourself instead of paying someone else to do it.

<comment><USER3> But isn't this exactly why certificate pinning is needed... Sure I can roll my own PKI and install the Root CA on the client devices, but they can still intercept their own traffic by installing their own trusted Root CA.

<comment><USER5> I missed the parenthetical on your comment, my apologies. You're right: if you can monkey around with things enough to SSL-proxy the traffic, then rolling your own PKI will not help prevent that. What will help prevent that, yes, is pinning, but my argument above was that pinning to any single CA (or worse, any single leaf certificate) without a mechanism for replacement is what gets people into trouble. Selecting a small set of trusted CAs is a much stronger pattern, and would preserve the inability of clients to swap out their own certs or proxy their own traffic (although it may also break things—Google had to bend on that one a bit to allow for enterprise SSL decryption, e.g.).

<comment><USER2> Not entirely accurate. Your client software builds a TLS client with your sole private trusted root. Nobody can MITM with a self signed cert unless they can reverse your client (or system) enough to hook the TLS stack, which there are numerous tools out there to do which is also why (but also irrespective of the fact) IMHO the "zomg we must prevent the user from seeing _their_ traffic" is a totally bogus pursuit. However, if you're dead set on thwarting some subset of the script kiddies, then mTLS is your friend because it's a real solution to the "I want to authenticate my client (perhaps because only it should see the traffic)" problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >It must be emphasised that if any single CA is breached, then all of TLS breaks. It doesn't matter what CA you used for your website, it only matters what CA your attacker uses.

How is that possible? If a CA is breached, doesn't that just mean it can create certs impersonating other sites? How does that break all of TLS?

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's not really helpful for the site to say this breaks "all of TLS" which doesn't itself have any opinion about why you'd trust this or that certificate. TLS per se is unaffected.

But if a CA which is trusted in the Web PKI is "breached" then the nature of that breach determines the consequences for anybody who trusts the Web PKI (which means popular web browsers and a good deal of other software)

* If the breach results in bad guys having the root private key (typically realised as a physical device in a safe) then they can issue any certificate or certificate hierarchy using that key and it would (until you update things not to trust it) work. But this is extremely unlikely, it has probably never happened (it's unclear for Diginotar but appears the root was not actually taken by bad guys, they broke into a bunch of servers they didn't conduct a physical robbery)

* If the bad guys get one or more Intermediate private keys - which are online because they're used in the actual process of minting you a certificate although they're supposed to be protected inside hardware that shouldn't give anybody the keys - they can make any certificates under that intermediate, including further sub-CAs. Unlike a root the intermediate can "just" be revoked, and mechanisms to make that stick in practice exist for all major browsers.

* If the bad guys just break into servers that are responsible for issuance it's trickier. They might be able to cause the Intermediates to sign some certificates but not others depending on what they broke into exactly. For example they may be unable to falsify the date as there's no reason the server they broke into would be allowed to choose the date on a certificate, or they might be obliged to obey rules like CAA checking even if they don't want to because it's done by some other system they can't override. If the owners realise what's happening and turn off the power, the access goes away, the bad guys don't have the keys so they can't make more certificates.

* If the bad guys just broke into some subsidiary system they may only be able to cause issuance / re-issuance of certain specific certificates that system was allowed to cause. e.g. suppose Big Corp contracts with some CA to issue many certificates like springfield.bigcorp.example and smallville.bigcorp.example - there may be authority on file to issue any such certificate until say 2020-08-04, and if bad guys guess that Big Corp's password is "letmein123" they can use that existing authority to make themselves a certificate for fart.bigcorp.example no problem - but that doesn't get them a certificate for news.ycombinator.com or google.com without some other attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Years ago I read a blog that taught the series of steps needed to perform GNUTLS certificate pinning for Emacs use. At the time, it seemed like a convenient way to boost security. After all, services were only renewing their certificates every 2–3 years, so once you set up your configuration, you wouldn't have to change it for a long time.

But then Lets Encrypt came along and was widely adopted. LE thinks that it is best that certificates expire after only a few weeks. So, if you have pinned a lot of certificates, you start to feel that it is too much work to manage that configuration, you constantly have to update it.

<comment><USER9> You shouldn't be pinning to your leaf certs, which is the only reason LE certs would be a problem here.

<comment><USER10> Possibly stupid question here (this is not my domain), but what is the alternative to pinning the client to use your leaf certs? If it's pinning to your root cert, then isn't that much more of a pain if/when you need to revoke what the client is using? Or is the correct alternative to pin "to one or multiple rsa public keys" as mentioned in the sibling comment?

<comment><USER9> Late reply, but: if you really must pin (and you probably shouldn't), pin to public keys, not the certs in the chain.

<comment><USER10> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Online Tool for Young Bankers Raises $1M in Funding - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/online-tool-for-young-bankers-raises-1-million-in-funding/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

<comment><USER2> How do the banks feel about their junior analysts carelessly tossing around revenue models with their college buddies at other banks? This reminds me of a story last summer about the popularity of snapchat amongst Wall Street interns, and the dangers of accidentally sharing sensitive financial data.

<comment><USER3> founder @thinknum here. worked at a GS for 4 years and saw analysts email spreadsheets ('carelessly tossing around revenue models') by email. with @thinknum banks are better able to track their content.

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use case. The dealbook article makes it sound like this is a time saving utility for junior analysts, many of whom have to do the same work, but at different banks. Did I understand that correctly?

If so, I'm still unclear as to why banks would be okay with institutionalizing what seems like a pretty sketchy process. As a junior analyst, sending internal spreadsheets to your friends at other firms, just so you can save time, does not seem like the most policy-compliant approach to reducing your workload. I fail to see why banks would be okay with their junior analysts sharing spreadsheets with their counterparts at competing banks, especially when sent through a third party.

Obviously you know more about this than me, so hopefully you can clarify.

EDIT: after checking out your site instead of just the (poorly explained) article, your business makes far more sense. However my question still stands in regards to collaboration. Won't companies want to protect internal modeling strategies?

<comment><USER4> i think one advantage could be instead of accidentally sharing the entire model it would allow you to look at one or two variables that will be worked on say you want to add a geolocation component to an existing model, the young banker could work and share that piece publicly and getting their former classmates to help confirm their work.

i want to make a reference to write code and sharing it but it is a really poor ref. i think it is more like getting help making sure you are getting the proper area of a circle before putting it into the companies formula for the volume of the sphere, helping ensure a smaller problem is solved correctly before being added

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does thinknum have any plans for utilizing the models tracked by users to find larger trends? Wouldn't that be the largest concern after not actually having this info on company servers?

<comment><USER3> Yes we do. More interestingly we plan to let third party developers do as well. However, clients can pay a monthly fee to keep their models private. Our business model is similar to Github. Free for users who wish to contribute their models to the public. monthly fee for private repos.</comment></comment>


Atari Star Raiders Source Code (1979) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/AtariStarRaidersSourceCode <comment><AUTHOR> Transcription effort (seeking volunteers) from scanned printed copies here: [https://github.com/XioNYC/StarRaiders](https://github.com/XioNYC/StarRaiders)

<comment><USER2> Can't you just disassemble the binary opcodes and diff with the OCR to place the comments in the right places?

<comment><USER3> The "Distributed Proofreaders" project uses a similar technique to crowd- source OCR transcription of old public domain books in the browsers using side-by-side comparisons:

[http://www.pgdp.net/c/](http://www.pgdp.net/c/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Video footage of that code executing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VDM8nC9sM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VDM8nC9sM)

<comment><USER5> Wow, the silent hyperspace mode followed by the red alert alarm sequence is pretty cinematic! Had to watch that a few times.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Playing this back in the day, with a stereo, larger TV, etc... delivered a pretty serious impact. There was nothing else like it.

IMHO, that game sold a lot of Atari computers. Was written by the guy who designed the sound chip, and it was kind of a side project that turned out great enough to showcase the computers.

The particle calculations are not well optimized. While this is seen as a bug, and there is an effort to make the game run faster, many players appreciate the slowdown in battle. There is a feel associated with that which adds a lot to the overall impression of the game. It's oddly gratifying to feel it slow down as the enemy and their shots explode...

<comment><USER7> It's like the "wasted" in GTA going to slow-mo to accent the kill. Only it's serendipitous slow-mo.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's how I feel about it. Somewhere, I read some comments by the author on all of that. He just did fairly straight up, simple, cheater type 3D on the 6502. Those slowdowns were an artifact of all that.

They add a lot to the game, though the author didn't intend for it to go that way.

Funny, for that time period, there are a lot of "effects" that were resource limits, or bugs that ended up making for a better experience. Little things, like getting an extra color to work with were a very big deal.

We have come so damn far...

This did cause me to pull my old 400 out of the closet. It has this cartridge in it. Turned it on, and it plays fine. My HDTV is a bit cranky about it all though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice straightforward assembly language program (not too much data, no meta- programming).

I have to mention Yoomp! Same machine, new game 30 years later:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNxICcU3bPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNxICcU3bPo)

Another video implies you can buy a physical version of the game (I mean cassette and diskette media).

<comment><USER9> I love the music for that game.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately you only get stereo on an emulator with simulated dual-pokey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where did this source code come from? There must be an interesting story about were this print-out came from, why it was preserved, and now published 36 years later.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure there is, I like the story behind the code on this page:

[http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/7800/games/](http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/7800/games/)

 _these games were rescued from Atari ST format diskettes that were thrown out behind 1196 Borregas when Atari closed up in 1996._

<comment><USER11> I think the footer is worthy of being quoted too

> Note: If you are going to Mirror these sources or place them onto your own > site, please have the respect and courtesy to include with them - Source: > www.atarimuseum.com as these wouldn't exist if I hadn't of climbed into a > filthy dumpster at 3am in the morning behind the old Atari building in > Sunnyvale and salvaged them and restored them from their diskettes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure I've missed out on plenty of games that reproduced the feelings I had playing Star Raiders but ... That game felt so awesome at the time.

If you don't know the game you need to destroy every enemy on the map. The enemies need to destroy you or all your star bases. On the map the enemies move sector to sector every few seconds (30? 60? 120?) probably depended on the difficulty level. If some enemies made it to one of your Star Base sectors you had just a few seconds to get over there and kill them all before you lost a base.

To move from sector to sector you'd go to the map, pick a sector, then press H for hyperspace. The ship could accelerate, then warp to the next sector decelerating

Add to that your ship could take damage. Normally you had 0-9 thrust levels. With damaged engines the thrust would be erratic. With broken engines you couldn't go anywhere. Normally you could fire 2 shots at from the bottom left and bottom right. Damaged then only 1 short. Broken 0 shots. Then you had shields. Damaged they'd flicker on and off. Broken no shields. One hit with shields down and you're dead! Hit a meteor with shields down you're dead.

So, if you're playing on hard you have to target the ships closest to your bases and get rid of them quick. They fire like crazy! If your shields go down or get damage you have to warp instantly or you'll be dead. No time to look at the map. Just press H now. When you warp there's a targeting reticle, on hard it move erratically. If it's in the center when you warp you'll arrive at the destination you picked on the map. If it's off by 1 inch you'll warp 1 inch off in the same direction on the map. That meant if you were good you could warp to your base without using the map. It felt so awesome to get it right.

You'd beam in. Then you have to find the base in 3d. Sensors help. Once there you have to wait for some guy to come out and repair your ship. So nerve racking when you know in a few moments some other base will be gone. Then you need to warp out back into the battles ASAP.

It all added up to some of the most intense space battles I've ever personally played in a video game.

<comment><USER6> You played a lot! I agree with most of your comments and want to add all of that gets just a bit better, more easy, and fun with a second player.

A friend and I would take turns piloting and engineering. The trick was to make good decisions as the "engineer" player, like taking that warp when destruction was imminent, or being able to vary speed while watching the pilot deal with the baddies.

Of course, it was great fun to yell, "shields!", "map", "4", etc... too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Loved that game (and its variants). The ship took damage and became less effective, so you had to take time out to find a base to repair. So few games of that era carried any interesting state.

<comment><USER14> Loved it! Spent many hours on that cartridge. I remember trying to follow the "supply ship" that came out of the base, squirrely MOFO never went anywhere!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Played this game for hours on my Atari 400. It reminded me of the first arcade game I ever played, which was Starship 1.

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

The local driving range had pinball machines, and I used to hang out among them while my dad played a round of golf, then one day this big ol' cabinet showed up. Pinball machines just didn't do it for me after that.

<comment><USER16> I can still remember my first exposure to video games.

It was during my dad's (second) wedding. My grandfather told me he had something to show me. He brought me into the bar at the reception hall, and sat me down in front of a Space Invaders machine with a stack of quarters. The rest is history.

Just thinking about this now, I'm re-experiencing the darkened environment of video arcade, with weird electronic noises from every direction. I had a few quarters in my pocket, and I was trying to decide which machine to spend them on. The movies _War Games_ and _Tron_ may be iconic, but their portrayals of video arcades really didn't match my own experiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's something about the moving starfield in that game...

<comment><USER6> I like that it's near field, drawn with particles that zoom through the player space. They aren't "far" away, yet have a nice feel.

The end result is a really great sense of motion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, star riders was actually the reason why I wrote my space simulator, I also wanted to keep the pixelated look but html canvas (via imageSmoothingEnabled) only support pixelation for images, not for lines so I eventually gave up on that old-style look.

</comment><comment><USER19> Viewing this sort of reminds me of looking at the autograph score of the Bach B Minor Mass.

</comment><comment><USER20> talking about software engineering:

"Negative sides include, above all, that the field is so terribly new and undeveloped... time tables seem to be far to optimistic"

That problem has not been solved over the last 40 years! :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Is the source to Defender available anywhere online?

</comment><comment><USER22> Might be worth converting that nice PDF to indirect DjVu format to get the size down.</comment>


Cyber expert who stopped 'WannaCry' attack arrested in U.S. on hacking charges - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-arrest-idUSKBN1AJ2IC <comment><USER2> In this case it seems like they're after him for creating and distributing something that was tailored for criminal use. Do we have any examples where the same laws were used to prosecute people who made multi-purpose tools like debuggers, packet sniffers, key loggers, etc?

</comment><comment><USER3> If he actually hacked people with his code, then then they have a case. If not, then he's in a similar boat to gun manufacturers in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> I am interested in the legalities of this. There are other areas where legality of a sale is dependent upon the seller's knowledge or beliefs about the buyer's intent. For example, drug paraphernalia… if you sell someone a pipe in Mississippi, and they don't say anything or they mention tobacco, that is fine. However if they said they wanted to use it to smoke cannabis, completing the sale would be distribution of drug paraphernalia, even though it's the same item.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is probably a better example..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> what exactly does 'cyber expert' mean? is that a polite way of saying 'computer nerd'? odd title.

<comment><USER6> and what exactly does 'computer nerd' mean?

<comment><USER7> A nerd is a single-minded enthusiast. A computer nerd is a single-minded computer enthusiast.

<comment><USER8> I might get downvoted for this, but most of the time "nerd" also implies social awkwardness and uncoolness, and not getting laid a lot.

What I'm trying to say is, I don't like being called a nerd. Let's stop acting like we don't know it's unpleasant to call/be called a nerd.

<comment><USER9> Those used to be the connotations with the word 'nerd', but they really aren't anymore. Being a 'nerd' is cool these days, and nerd has become a term of endearment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Slik Prospector – Find Anyone's Email - <AUTHOR> https://slik.ai/#/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! We're excited to be sharing what we've been working on today. Slik lets you to easily find anyone's email when you visit their LinkedIn profile. You can then save it to our dashboard, and export it to a CSV. We have one of the highest deliverability rates at 90%+, and are looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Feel free to comment here, or email me email@example.com, if you have any questions or comments.

<comment><USER2> Nice work! Congrats on the launch. Do you have an API? would be great to here more on potential integration options.

<comment><AUTHOR> We certainly do! Drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.com or chat with us on Intercom on our site and I can set you up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought that there would be some information on how it _finds_ anyone's email address, especially at "How It Works" [0].

BTW, if one has signed up on LinkedIn using their non-work address, e.g. gmail, do you manage to _find_ their personal address or the work one? I guess that it'd be latter, right?

[0] [https://slik.ai/#/#how](https://slik.ai/#/#how)

<comment><AUTHOR> We only find work email addresses, and to find emails we use a variety of methods - Some include checking the mail server, using various APIs, using social verification to see if the email is signed up somewhere, crawling the web, scraping domains, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SellHack used to do this exact thing a couple years ago but had to remove the on-page button after Linkedin went after them. Do you think you'll face similar difficulties?

</comment><comment><USER5> How does this compare with Hunter.io (formerly Email Hunter) in terms of pricing and accuracy?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is super cool.

What flavor of black magic do you use to make your button show up on the LinkedIn website?</comment>


Apple's Cyclone Microarchitecture Detailed - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchitecture-detailed <comment><USER2> Apple almost certainly have a MacBook Air based on one of these chips at prototype stage.

There are many reasons in favour, including keeping negotiations with Intel over price interesting, but probably the main thing preventing them running with it would be an inability to manufacture the chips fast enough, which is a major concern in mobile land. This is why lots of Android devices exist in variations based on different chips as hedges by the device manufacturer on long term availability.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that Apple will completely get away from x86 for a long time. Attempting to emulate the x86 on an Arm would be terribly slow.

I do however, think that they will eventually include both arm and x86 processors in the Macbook Air. That way, backwards compatibility is preserved and low power apps can run on the arm. In the current Macbook Pros they have dynamic switching of GPUs, there's no reason they couldn't use the arm as a coprocessor or even run the full OS.

Here a few technical points:

* LLVM - You can compile once for both both architecture and then the JIT will take over compiling for the specific architecture (Take a look at llvm for the OpenGL pipe line in OSX)

 _Full screen app- When an app is full screen (if it 's a low power app) then the x86 could sleep and the arm could switch to running the app.

_App nap - If all x86 apps are a sleep, switch over the running the arm processor exclusively

*Saving State - It's possible to save the state of apps in OSX, a similar mechanism could be used to seamlessly migrated between processors.

This is pure speculation, but it is feasible. There would be many technical challenges that Apple would have to solve but the a capable. The advantage Apple has is that they have absolute control over both platforms.

<comment><USER4> I'm skeptical about moving existing apps seamlessly between x86 and ARM processors, because you'd need guarantees about process memory layout that I don't think any current compiler makes. Imagine the memory image of a process running on the ARM chip. It has some instructions and some data:

        |        Data          |         ARM insructions        |

You could certainly remove the ARM instructions and replace them with x86 instructions. However, the ARM instructions will have hard-coded certain offsets in the data buffer, like where to look for global variables. You would have to be sure that the x86 instructions had exactly the same offsets. For another issue, if the data buffer contains any function pointers, then the x86 and ARM functions had better start at exactly the same offsets. And if there are any alignment requirements that differ between x86 and ARM (I don't know if there are), then the data had better be aligned to the less permissive standard on both chips.

None of these problems are impossible to solve. They could be solved easily by adding a layer of indirection, at the cost of some speed, and then Apple could go back and do the real difficult-but-fast implementation later.

However, why would it? When its ARM cores are essentially desktop-class, there's no need to have an x86 chip other than compatibility with legacy code. Looking at Apple's history, it seems pretty clear that it likes to have full control of its own destiny, and designing its own chips is a logical part of that, so having its own architecture could be considered a strategic move too.

So given the difficulty of implementing it well, and assuming that Apple eventually wants to have exclusively Apple-designed ARM chips in all of its products, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn't bother to make switching work. I might have a product with both kinds of chips, but I would just have the x86 chip turn on for x86 apps, and off when there were no x86 apps running, and know that eventually those apps would go away. (And because I'm Apple, I have no problem pushing vendors to switch to ARM faster than they want to, so this won't be a long transition.)

However, an even cooler move would be to make LLVM IR the official binary representation of OS X, and compile it as part of the install step of a new program. That gives Apple several neat capabilities:

1) They can optimize code for the specific microarchitecture of your computer. Maybe not a huge deal, but nice

2) They can iterate on their microarchitecture without having to care about the ISA, because the ISA is an implementation detail. This is the technically correct thing that everyone should have done years ago (yes, I'm annoyed).

3) They can keep more secrets about their chips. It's obnoxious, but Apple would probably care about that.

So, there's my transition plan for Apple to move to its own chips. It probably has many holes, but the biggest one is still the question of what Apple gains from this. Intel still has the best fabs, and as long as that's true, there will be some advantage in sticking with them. Whether the advantage is big enough, I don't know. (And when it ends in a few years, then who knows?)

<comment><USER5> Older enough programmers will remember the DEC Vax to Alpha binary translators. When DEC produced the Alpha you could take existing Vax binaries, run them through a tool, and have a shiny new Alpha binary ready to go.¹

Given such a tool, which existed in 1992, it seems simple enough to do the recompile once on the first launch and cache it. Executable code is a vanishingly small bit of the disk use of an OS X machine.

Going forward, Apple has a long experience with fat binaries for architecture changes. 68k→PPC, PPC→IA32, IA32→x86-64. I don't think x86-64→ARM8 is anything more than a small bump in the road.

As far as shipping LLVM and letting the machines do the last step, that should make software developers uncomfortable. Recall that one of the reasons OpenBSD needs so much money² for their build farm is because they keep a lot of architectures going because bugs show up in the different backends. I know I want to have tested the exact stream of opcodes my customer is going to get.

␄

¹ I think there was also a MIPS to Alpha tool for people coming from that side.

² In the sense that some people think $20k/yr for electricity is a lot.

<comment><USER6> Yep, and Apple has already done dynamic binary translation once before, during the PPC to x86 switch.

<comment><USER7> And 68k to PPC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is the LLVM Commit the article refers to.

[https://github.com/llvm- mirror/llvm/blob/7b837d8c75f78fe55c9...](https://github.com/llvm- mirror/llvm/blob/7b837d8c75f78fe55c9b348b9ec2281169a48d2a/lib/Target/ARM64/ARM64SchedCyclone.td)

<comment><USER9> And for those interested the whole commit and corresponding discussion thread on the LLVM-dev mailing list:

[http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-March/thread...](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-March/thread.html#71574)

[https://github.com/llvm- mirror/llvm/commit/7b837d8c75f78fe55...](https://github.com/llvm- mirror/llvm/commit/7b837d8c75f78fe55c9b348b9ec2281169a48d2a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Cyclone is a wide machine. It can decode, issue, execute and retire up to 6 instructions/micro-ops per clock."

This is truly amazing. In comparison, Cortex-A15 can issue 3 instructions per cycle, for example.

<comment><USER11> Nvidia's Denver is said to have 7. It's also rumored to have 2x the performance of Cortex A15. If it's true it could reach Sandy Bridge performance level either at first or 2nd gen (on FinFET 16nm) and Haswell/Broadwell level by 3rd gen (most people don't realize the performance between Haswell/Broadwell compared to Sandy Bridge is only like 15-20 percent, since Intel stopped focusing on performance). I also think in 2nd gen Denver SoC (2 process nodes from Tegra K1), Nvidia will have at least a 1 Tflops, possibly 1.2 Tflops GPU (Xbox One level).

<comment><USER12> It is interesting that in the 'chip wars' everyone went to Intel for their chips (or Motorola) and that allowed a lot of R&D to be re-couped. But as Apple is baking their own chips, what is the market for Nvidia's Denver? It has to compete with Broadcom, Samsung, and others for a fraction of the Android device pool? Challenging to justify the levels of R&D that Apple is applying without a predictable return.

That said, I'm going to be watching for the Denver chip, it will be an interesting counter point to the A7.

<comment><USER8> By the time Denver based devices are on market, Apple will be releasing A8 based devices, so it will probably be competing with A8 rather than A7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anand also taught us that an iPad draws about as much power as an 11-inch MacBook Air.

Configure an ARM platform with 8 GB of DDR3 DRAM and a PCIe-based SSD, and you may well blow the power budget versus the current Intel platform design.

Intel has turned its attention to total platform power: moving the VRMs on- die, and also identifying third-party motherboard components which draw silly amounts of power.

I think that Intel is on track here. Apple will of course push their design talent in order to deliver the best mobile devices they possibly can. But this does not necessarily mean a move away from Intel for a laptop or desktop.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool analysis of the new chip. If I were Intel I would be more than a little concerned about what Apple is up to here. Would be very interesting to see what Cyclone can do in a proper laptop/desktop with more RAM.

<comment><USER15> I'm impressed with Apple's work and it reaches all the way down to the user experience (I can play GTA San Andreas on my 5s), but the pace of Intel's research over the last 10 years has been absolutely demonic. I think for Apple to compete on that front would require an extreme investment.

For example see the second chart here: [http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look- back-at-single-threaded-...](http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at- single-threaded-cpu-performance/)

<comment><USER10> I guess Apple is plucking low hanging fruits, but speedup from Apple A6 to Apple A7 (spaced almost exactly a year) is about 50% in average, which corresponds to _more than 2 years_ of speedup in recent Intel cores. I also note that this speedup was achieved _without increasing clock_ , which is not the case for Intel.

<comment><USER15> Intel released a P4 @ 3.73GHz in 2004, and the i7-4771 is "only" 3.9GHz in single core mode (i.e. turbo), so that's only a slight increase in clock in the last decade.

Sooner or later mobile processors are going to hit the power wall. I haven't looked into this lately but one thing that could provide a fixed and permanent benefit to mobile processors is the more modern instruction set.

<comment><USER10> Well, P4's clock was achieved with 31-stage pipeline, which was a bad idea. If you compare with what came after P4, there was more than slight increase in clock.

<comment><USER16> Willamette and Northwood (ie the original P4s) cores had 20 stage pipeline, compared to Nehalem with 24 stages and Sandy, Ivy and Haswell having 19 stages.

And those Northwood cores reached 3.4GHz, compared to 3.8GHz of the infamous Prescott with it's 31 stages. That is fairly meager clockspeed increase, and based on that I'd argue that the extreme pipeline depth was not the major contributing factor in pushing the clockspeed of P4 higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It really seems like Apple is ahead of the curve on mobile R&D. I wonder if they'll ever consider reselling some of these chips. It's unlikely Steve Jobs would've ever done it, but I'm not so sure about Tim Cook.

<comment><USER18> People mightn't want to buy them if they did. These chips are _big_, which means that they're expensive to make. Apple can get away with it because their only costs are manufacture and licensing, and because they have high margins which can absorb a bit of a hit. If they were selling them, though, they'd presumably want to make a profit, and that profit would make the end product almost certainly the most expensive mobile chip on the market.

From a marketing point of view, too, it'd be a hard sell in Android-land. Apple has been very careful to steer clear of spec-oriented marketing, but can you imagine the less-sophisticated enthusiast market's response to, say, the Galaxy S6 using a dual-core 1.3GHz chip instead of a quad-core 2GHz?

<comment><USER17> What about something for the server market? I know some companies have been switching to ARM chips as a low-power alternative in large server farms. It seems a 64-bit chip might be a good fit in that market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pretty impressive that Apple is capable of such CPU disruption with just a few small acquisitions. Is PA Semi the main reason for this, or could Apple have been building up a CPU design team for years before that acquisition?

<comment><USER20> Is a $270 million acquisition a small acquisition these days? Not to mention the fact that they acquired a team responsible for two large CPU disruptions: DEC Alpha and StrongARM. A third disruption is perhaps not so surprising.

<comment><USER19> Just seems like _billion_ is the new million when acquisitions are concerned, but yes, I guess it wasn't that small overall. Did not realize PA Semi was founded by a lead designer at DEC. Thanks for the info, and Wikipedia filled in the rest for me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _There 's little benefit in going substantially wider than Cyclone, but there's still a ton of room to improve performance._

Didn't AMD, and Intel more or less say the same thing about 3 wide? No real benefit from going wider. Is that because of the differences in micro architecture or is it more about getting a little more performance without having to ramp the clock speed? What makes 6 wide good for ARM but not x86 or x64?

<comment><USER22> This is probably completely and utterly wrong as it's just a guess, but potentially the Thumb [1] instructions (small, limited subset of shorter instructions in ARM) might allow for a wider setup. Thumb instructions make a bunch of simplifying assumptions that might remove some of the issues with going wider. Not that I have any idea if Cyclone even supports them in the first place.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb)

<comment><USER23> The biggest wart on the ARM instruction set was the predicate attached to basically every instruction. That's gone in the 64-bit ARM ISA, so there's no need for a 64-bit Thumb (and there isn't one).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On balance, I think that Apple would use most of the energy savings from reducing to 20nm for other things: longer life and lower weight for the battery, improvements in the camera, wireless, increased RAM.

<comment><USER25> In the iPhone definitely. For the iPad, it already has more than adequate battery life (most people get several days use out of one before needing to recharge), so the extra clock speed could be used to handle multiple apps on- screen simultaneously (for example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good on Apple! That's the best that can happen to us customers. Even for an Android / Windows guy like me :-).

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if Nvidia Denver could match with this chip.

</comment><comment><USER28> Congrats Apple for all your achievements. It is amazing what can be accomplished when you employ Chinese Engineers and manufacturers who's tech espionage (they steal trade secrets) is one of their best known traits/assets.

<comment><USER29> Proof? Even informed speculation?

Apple have made several aquisitions in the last few years to give them the technology they need to make these sorts of developments. Even if some of the tech had been stolen, it would require a lot of work to put it into practice.

I know I'm feeding the troll, but I couldn't help it; this is just too ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What is a tock?

<comment><USER31> LMGTFY: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick- Tock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock) =)

<comment><USER32> Apple also uses a similar strategy with the iPhone. The iPhone 4 and 5 both made major form changes (retina display and screen shape) whereas the 4S and 5S were focussed on refinement (faster CPU, 64-bit CPU respectively). It has also been noted (possibly on the Accidental Tech Podcast, or somewhere similar) that a 'tick' year for the phone tends to be a 'tock' year for iOS and vice versa; iOS 5 and iOS 7 (released with the 4S and 5S respectively) were bigger changes than iOS 4 and 6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am thinking that this is looking up to be what the G5 aimed to be.

Unfortunately the ARM architecture, even with those optimizations is probably slower "clock by clock" compared with x86/PPC

But yes, I think this is something Apple is probably testing (Desktop Mac OSX on ARM)</comment>


New Gecko image (down)scaling algorithm (Before/After pics) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paulrouget/status/253469601315319808 <comment><AUTHOR> Related bug: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486918>

See comment 192 (code is from Chromium).

</comment><comment><USER2> What was changed under the hood to make this possible? Are we simply using a better scaling algorithm?</comment>


Tumblr - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2019/08/tumblr-2/ <comment><USER2> I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take the deduction and stop the losses.

Still, considering the fact that Tumblr still does over 2.5 billion page views per month [1], not even counting their mobile usage, I can't help but gawk at what a steal Automattic got. Really drives home what their CEO Matt Mullenweg said on here the other day about adopting a "Berkshire model"—although he was referring to independent management, what he's really talking about is buying companies grossly undervalued for dirt-cheap. Just monetizing the web traffic 2.5 billions monthly hits at a $1 CPM alone would generate $2.5 million a month in revenue, $30 million annually.

What kind of business, let alone web business, sells for 1/10th annual revenue? For reference, Reddit does 6x the page views, but is valued at $3 billion. Reddit's prospects are obviously better, but are they 1000/6 = 166x times better per current page view? Mind-boggling.

[1] [https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com)

<comment><USER3> IMHO Wordpress itself is grossly undervalued. I've done some whole-web analysis and they (including both the open-source project and the hosted service) account for roughly 18% of the web. The volume of content produced on them (in terms of # of words, not # of messages) is greater than on Twitter. If you look at comparables - with Twitter valued at $30B, Reddit at $3B, and Wordpress valued at $1.16B - it's pretty hard to justify those valuation disparities. Sure, it's open-source and non-hosted-by-them Wordpress installs don't really make much money for the company, but you could argue that they actually have more control over the greater Wordpress ecosystem than Reddit does over famously revolt-prone subreddits.

Unfortunately, they're private, profitable, and to my knowledge not seeking investment, otherwise I'd buy a slice of them in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER4> > IMHO Wordpress itself is grossly undervalued.

It's kind of hard to put a monetary value on a product that is free

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tumblr is an hidden secret and totally underrated.

I run two niche blogs on tumblr since 2011 with full control of themes and content, https, social sharing, without compulsory ads and using my own domain. SEO was a negative point but nowadays is good enough. All of this for free. Wordpress offer, AFAIK, is not nearly as good.

Thank you Tumblr.

<comment><USER6> I agree, I use it to look at paintings and to blog about painters I am researching and it's wonderful the depth and breadth of content available on so many subjects. My feed is overflowing and I've only skimmed the surface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a long time Tumblr user, it's sad to see it's downfall.

I had hope that Automattic would change the content policies that brought the site down, but it seems that won't be the case.

But the fun isn't over just yet. I've launched Libr ([https://librapp.com](https://librapp.com)) to replace Tumblr. It's an installable Progressive Web App, getting around app store rules (recall when the Apple app store banned Tumblr).

There's a few hundred users on there that have given me good feedback on improving Libr and it's starting to slowly take off, although I'm not in any hurry and I'm taking my time to make it awesome before turning on the floodgates.

<comment><USER8> Please fix your site- it breaks the back button. This looked interesting, but I immediately hate any site that breaks back-button functionality; and once I notice that I instantly assume either malicious intent or incompetence.

I get that it's a PWA, but can't the welcome page just be a regular page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Tumblr was an example of how to do social media right and we can learn a lot from it." I mean... maybe. Tumblr was also an example of maybe not pivoting the product to cater to the community properly, as there was a lot of other usage of Tumblr besides a strictly 'social media' use case. There was a lot of conversation around deeper feelings, and a community around self-discovery and self-awareness. I'm not 100% sure if Tumblr was able to properly capture that market and position itself there.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm still using it since 2009 everyday. For design inspiration. As a moodboard. And still works as in the good old days.

Tumblr made me a better designer. By catching up with the latest in print and graphic design and porting thse trends to web I had a work featured very early in Brutalist Websites.

I use no other social network. It's simply too much. And yes a heart is good enough.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mr. Wilson's understanding of Tumblr is flawed [0]. There's a simple objective test (now irrelevant) to tell if a platform is largely about porn or not:

[required ingredients: 1 searchable user-content platform, 1 keyboard, 1 daughter (optional)]

0\. Go to thing

1\. Open search bar

2\. Open your hand

3\. Hit keyboard with an open flat hand

4\. Enter

5\. Browse results - count how many you feel comfortable with your daughter being portrayed in

6\. 50% is your thresh.

Tumblr was a successful porn platform. Take that off the equation and you're left with nothing.

[0] [https://avc.com/2016/07/trashing- tumblr/](https://avc.com/2016/07/trashing-tumblr/)

<comment><USER12> > 5\. Browse results - count how many you feel comfortable with your daughter > being portrayed in

My daughter can do whatever she wants. Why are you shaming sex workers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tumblr was one of the first platforms I felt had actively _hostile_ UI/UX The ephemeral nature of the reblog, the dashboard awfulness, the impossibility of navigating thousands of likes/"comments"/... under a popular post. No way to, e.g. sort followed blogs by latest post time. I felt these things could have been easily fixed but deliberately weren't.

</comment><comment><USER14> _The news hit yesterday that WordPress has purchased Tumblr_

WordPress != Automattic.

More context here: [https://poststatus.com/resources/wordpress-versus- automattic...](https://poststatus.com/resources/wordpress-versus-automattic/)

</comment><comment><USER15> > But it is also true that Tumblr was bypassed by native mobile applications > like Instagram and Snapchat where it was even easier to post about your > life.

This. It's understated how much Tumblr's clunky composing hurt it as a platform. I know people connected to Tumblr, and from what I hear there was a lot of ideas but little direction.

There was a time when Tumblr was bigger than Instagram— Tumblr could've focused more on making it an amazing photo-sharing service. Snapchat was/is loved by its anonymity and ephemerality, but Tumblr was already an anonymous social network well before it. They could've added features for ephemerality and explored that market.

I used tumblr for consuming a lot of content, and it was great for that, but I always thought it had potential to be better for sharing too.

<comment><USER16> I think you are talking about current developments, but it is worth mentioning that when Twitter launched it was just as flip phones started to be replaced by smartphones. Most people were interacting with the service through SMS.

To me, it felt like the progress with further developing tumblr slowed after Marco Arment moved onto other projects.

From a historic perspective, this may an interesting article to some people.

[https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person- product?utm_source=f...](https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person- product?utm_source=feedly)

<comment><USER17> _Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that's exactly what I plan to do._

Rumors are that he made $5-$7 million. But he definitely made enough to have f%%#-you money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why did they even buy it? It's been on life support for years:

[https://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed- tumblr/](https://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/)

<comment><USER19> Yahoo bought tumblr. Verizon bought Yahoo - they weren't likely specifically after tumblr, it just game as part of the package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > It is absolutely true that Yahoo! never figured out how to turn Tumblr into > a business and ending up losing its shirt on the investment.

Given that Yahoo never figured out how to turn _search_ into a business, that speaks volumes of their ability to connect dots.

</comment><comment><USER21> I saw the headline about the sale without the buyer in it and was _sure_ that it had to be pinboard. That would have been something.

<comment><USER22> That's not what Maciej does. He is laser focused on bookmarking. That's why his company thrives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Tumblr was an example of how to do social media right and we can learn a lot from it."

Except it lost, so by definition it can't be right.

Update: there are clearly many definitions of right. Here I'm using right in the sense that it gets mass adoption (right in that people prefer it), and right in the sense that it also simultaneously does net positive for the world. Achieving both is difficult.

<comment><USER24> "Lost". It did not lose in term of being a better social experience. People after pale fame and instant gratification left to chase the "i wanna be famous", Total Drama Island style, but this has nothing to do with socially or morally better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In 2017, Tumblr had ~400 employees. If each employee had a modest $50k retention bonus, that's at least an additional $20M. So I'm not sure the total cost for the purchase as $3M- maybe that was just for the corporate assets.

</comment><comment><USER26> Should we start entertaining the admittedly simple-minded notion that it is not tumblr that is under-valued, but everything else is over-valued?

<comment><USER27> I think this is very likely. The only way I can see companies like Twitter being worth as much as they are is their potential political power. A company like Twitter has a lot of influence over that, but I don't think they create such an enormous amount of value.

<comment><USER28> It's still pretty cool everyone can engage with the United States president or with an Elon Musk. Every user is aware of that reach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's easy to be sentimental about Tumblr now, but as we grow increasingly aware of the ability for social media to create echo chambers that radicalize people, it shouldn't be forgotten that Tumblr is in many ways one of the worst examples of this phenomenon. And this was no more abundantly clear than during its porn heyday. I don't regret the downfall of Tumblr one bit.

</comment><comment><USER30> Their next place is 404.

</comment><comment><USER31> We DDOS'd Fred.

<comment><USER32> if he still hosted his blog on tumblr he wouldn't have this problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >Tumblr was a happy place and using it made people feel good about themselves.

Uh, what? Just off the top of my head I can think of people who've been bullied on Tumblr into attempted suicide.

</comment><comment><USER34> Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut.

There's only Twitter now. And Twitter kind of sucks.

<comment><USER35> Twitter, IMO, is _wonderful_ when you stop following journalists, politicians, and A list celebrities. What that leaves is mostly meme makers and minor influencers who generally wrap all the bad stuff inside of funny jokes and hot takes.

<comment><USER36> Twitter is also excellent for following journalists, but i keep them sectioned off into their own list and try my best to limit the attention i pay to that.

I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good.

<comment><USER37> It's too bad that Twitter itself doesn't make this into a real abstraction. I'd love to treat my feed as mixed activity from a set of isolated communities, where one community can retweet something from another community _into_ their own community, but where this retweet acts as its own object that doesn't inform anyone from the origin community about the activity on it in the destination community. Sort of like Slack, if there were teams but no channels, only threads, and your view was a unified all-threads-in-all-teams activity stream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Diversity of decision making would still help Tumblr.

You know in which ways.

<comment><USER39> I actually have no idea what you're alluding to here; can you be a bit more explicit for us oblivious readers?

<comment><USER38> Sure,

The CEO of Tumblr David Karp made unilateral decisions which stifled its growth and utility. _Any_ additional decision making input would have helped here, but qualified women, minorities and people accompanying David, Fred (the author of this article) and Marco (1st engineer) would have greatly helped so the winds here. Be more in tune with the audience that grew.

After the second sale to Verizon, after David left, different leadership could have understood how the erotic content community was flourishing on Tumblr in ways that the erotic industry has failed to attract. Many women liked tumblr for porn sharing, browsing, and curating because other porn-specific sites have unclean interfaces and distracting ads. There were people that could have told them that in the decision making process, and helped navigate the issues encountered since that is what was driving engagement.

Automattic also seems to fail to understand this, with CEO Matt Mullenweg's explanation seeming to complete miss the point, and looks more like a pet project than any interest in engagement.</comment></comment></comment>


Faster Fractals with Multi-Threaded WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scottlogic.com/2019/07/15/multithreaded-webassembly.html <comment><USER2> Is there any word on when this will be on other broswers?

<comment><USER3> There are still 14 issues blocking the MVP version of enabling Shared Array Buffers in Firefox by default. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477743](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477743) And two of those are "design" tasks that don't even count the implementation work yet.

You can enable the feature manually by toggling javascript.options.shared_memory in about:config.

<comment><USER4> Summary:. Shared Array buffers, used by multithreaded webassembly, can be used in combination with a spectre attack to read the memory of the Firefox renderer process.

If that renderer has also loaded your Google/Facebook cookies, that's a really big problem, since the attacker can now read all your email or post rude things on your mum's wall.

Chrome has solved this with site isolation - every domain gets its own renderer process.

It's a lot of work to do the same in Firefox. And the performance and memory impact of site isolation is pretty big.</comment></comment></comment>


NSA malware infected over 50,000 computer networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/nsa-malware-infected-over-50000-computer-networks-worldwide-7000023537/

<comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786128)</comment>


WriteRoom for vim, emacs - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/termroom/

<comment><USER2> Wait, isn't WriteRoom ripped off from Vim and Emacs, making it sort of absurd to have an Emacs with a writeroom mode? What benefit does this have?

<comment><USER3> Some people can't find the full screen option on their terminal application. This really shouldn't be open source, they could make at least $20 an installation off of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> there was also some plugin for vi just a while ago: <http://projects.mikewest.org/vimroom/></comment>


This is what happens in a country without net neutrality – Indosat, Indonesia - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/DhL4vKq.jpg <comment><USER2> This is different from Net Neutrality though, this is tied more to applications instead of sites

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Translations :

Jam = Hour

Hari = Day</comment>


Cinema's greatest scene: 'Casablanca' and 'La Marseillaise' - <AUTHOR> http://seveninchesofyourtime.com/cinemas-greatest-scene-casablanca-and-la-marseillaise/ <comment><USER2> I cry at this scene, every time. I start to cry thinking about it.

From the wiki, which contextualizes what I was told by my parents (who were young adults in London during the war)

 _Much of the emotional impact of the film has been attributed to the large proportion of European exiles and refugees who were extras or played minor roles (in addition to leading actors Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre): such as Louis V. Arco, Trude Berliner, Ilka Grünig, Lotte Palfi, Richard Ryen, Ludwig Stössel, Hans Twardowski, and Wolfgang Zilzer. A witness to the filming of the "duel of the anthems" sequence said he saw many of the actors crying and "realized that they were all real refugees".[25] Harmetz argues that they "brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting".[26] They were frequently cast as Nazis in war films, even though many were Jewish._

<comment><USER3> Oh my gosh, I cried again, just watching the clip. The battered pride and defiance are so palpable. I think everyone knows that feeling of when you're getting shat upon for no real reason, and all you want is a little dignity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the scene which sets up the Marseillaise scene, Yvonne comes into the bar with the German officer and he orders the only drink mentioned by name in a movie with a whole lot of drinking, the _French 75_ , named after the French WWI 75mm field gun.

       gin, Champagne, lemon juice and sugar

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_75_(cocktail)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_75_\(cocktail\))

Yvonne finds her moral core when they play the Marseillaise just as Rick later finds his when he has to make a choice.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure the reason but this is the third time that I have seen the French 75 (something I had never previously heard of) come up in either conversation or as a bar special within literally the past two days. One of those times I can write off as awareness but still...

<comment><USER6> The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

<comment><USER7> Also known as frequency illusion [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And do not forget the power of the music. Nice read below:

Why La Marseillaise is the only song that matters right now

The French national anthem is the greatest anthem there is, and its history will likely only increase your admiration for it, writes Alex Marshall.

[http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151117-why-la- marseillais...](http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151117-why-la-marseillaise- is-the-only-song-that-matters-right-now)

<comment><USER9> I think that one of the reasons that La Marseillaise is so rousing is because of its tempo.

Most national anthems have a comparatively glacial tempo, whereas La Marseillaise is generally played at ~120 BPM, a marching tempo.

Il Canto degli Italiani, the Italian national anthem, is similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've found that a lot of "this is the best X ever" is often just hype, but when I watched Casablanca for the first time I was super happy to find out that wasn't the case for this movie.

All these years later it's still powerful, relatable, and timeless.

Great break down of this scene. It's made me want to watch it again.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. It's interesting to me how some cultural products are completely dated and "of their time" when you experience them decades later, whereas others remain timeless. I'm reasonably sure that Casablanca will still be receiving praising like this in the 2210s. Part of what makes it so compelling for me is exactly what the author identifies toward the end -- a lot of the actors in this movie _really are_ WW2 refugees, and you can see it in their performances. It's impossible for me not to cry when I watch the scene in question.

<comment><USER12> I don't see why movies should be any less "classic" than books. _A Tale of Two Cities_ was published in 1859 and is still a classic - why not _Casablanca_ many years after its creation?

<comment><USER13> Because books are a more or less mature art (we've been writing for millennia).

Movies, on the other hand, can date because of technological changes (silent vs spoken vs color etc), ways of acting (we don't expect modern actors to act in the theatrical way of those in early cinema), different editing techniques (a 70s series like Kojak looks unbearably slow compared to a modern police series), and even what they were allowed to say (movies being more heavily censored than books can look way more quaint the older you go).

An overuse of special effects and fast editing since the 80s has also done much to alter the tolerance of modern audiences for subtler movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those of you in SF, it's playing at the Castro Theatre on December 17 ([http://www.castrotheatre.com/p-list.html#dec17](http://www.castrotheatre.com/p-list.html#dec17)).

<comment><USER15> Awesome.

My only and excellent experience of the Castro theatre is watching Hitchcock's Vertigo there, just days after my brother-in-law had given me the tour of city, of which I was a visitor. Suddenly you realize how central to the movie the city is. There's what's now a good joke about the Mission, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My grandfather was a real Czechoslovak resistance leader, like the fictional Victor, which adds extra poignancy to "Casablanca" for me.

Unfortunately the reality was such that the Germans were unlikely to release such people. My grandfather was tortured and executed as "an enemy of the Reich".

</comment><comment><USER17> Given that Casablanca was filmed in 1942, one might argue that the actors' emotions in that scene are more timely than one might first guess.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but how ironic that the sinister Nazi officer was played by a German actor who opposed the Nazis and fled his country for fear of persecution of himself and his Jewish wife (Conrad Veidt, also the inspiration for the _Joker_ character in the Batman franchise).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I cry every time I see this scene. Great unpacking of a powerful few minutes of cinema. I could hear the song thundering in my ear just from reading the article.

</comment><comment><USER20> Before a scene is shot, who figures out where the camera will focus? Is that primarily the director's job -- or the cinematographer's?

In this scene, I'm struck that there are so many crucial close-ups: of Renault, Ilsa, Rick, Yvonne, and Laszlo. I'm assuming that someone planned that. Maybe with storyboards?

<comment><USER21> I don't have an answer to your question, but I remember watching some commentary by a person involved in the making of the film. This is about the final pivotal scene where Captain Renault must quickly decide whether to implicate Rick as the killer of Strasser.

The first version of the scene had the police arrive just as Renault shouts to "round up the usual suspects." Whoever was in charge of the film (I assume the director) said this was all wrong, and told the editor to instead add a dramatic sequence of short cuts back and forth between Rick and Louis, showing that Rick was desperately wondering what Louis would do -- praying he wouldn't turn him in -- and Louis was thinking basically the same thing, realizing he had the option to switch sides in the moment.

As with the Marseillaise scene, this is minutes and minutes of incredible storytelling condensed into just a few frames of dialogue-free film. And apparently (finally getting to your point), it wasn't originally filmed that way; they probably had a bunch of shots of each actor glaring in various directions, and they used them in the editing room to powerful effect.

If anyone has a link to the interview I'm describing, I'd appreciate watching it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a great analysis to add even more depth to this great movie.

</comment><comment><USER23> Love this scene and the movie. It's my most favorite movie. I have seen it about 40 times right now, many times in Theater.

Stanford theater in Palo Alto screens this frequently and have made many friends there at Casablanca screenings.

Another great scene is "The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kiNJcDG4E0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kiNJcDG4E0)

</comment><comment><USER24> On top of that, the background music right after that are the first notes of the German national anthem - in minor.

</comment><comment><USER25> I will name one movie and let your infer what the cinema's greatest scene is: MI-SE-RY.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a typo in the HN title: it's 'La Marseillaise', not 'Le Marseillaise'.

<comment><USER27> Thanks! Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Casablanca is widely remembered as one of the greatest films of all time, > coming in at #2 on the AFI's top 100 list ...

      1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
      2. CASABLANCA (1942)
      3. THE GODFATHER (1972)
      4. GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
      5. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

I just don't enjoy _CITIZEN KANE_ anymore. It's like a film school movie. I watched it maybe 10-15 times when I was younger and I just don't _enjoy_ it anymore. Like so what? _GONE WITH THE WIND_ is the pinnacle of Lost Cause propaganda. I enjoyed when I didn't understand it. (I'm sure glad I didn't watch _Triumph of the Will_ when I didn't understand it.) I damn sure don't enjoy _GONE WITH THE WIND_ now that I understand it.

But I can watch _CASABLANCA_ , _THE GODFATHER_ and _LAWRENCE OF ARABIA_ over and over. And this was a good article telling me things I didn't appreciate and still I can go back and watch _CASABLANCA_ again.

<comment><USER28> You're looking at a list from one perspective: AFI's. It's going to be different from the Director's Guild of America's perspective, or BET Television's perspective, Roger Ebert's perspective, or IMDB commenter's perspective, or Teen Vogue's perspective.

I personally think 4 of those 5 movies are way overrated, including Godfather. And I'm sure "But I'm a Cheerleader, Too" is going to be near the top of Teen Vogue's list, but is going to be nowhere near anyone else's list.

We really need to not think of these lists as authoritative. It's just another data point.

<comment><USER4> Yes, lists are lists. However, the DGA's list is not so different:

      1. The Godfather
      2. Citizen Kane
      3. Lawrence of Arabia
      4. 2001: A Space Odyssey
      5. Casablanca

_2001_ falls apart with that impenetrable ending and I rather like _2001_. However, I can't watch it nearly as often as any of the other movies on that list. Once a decade maybe.

<comment><USER29> Don't you feel like the "impenetrable ending" is one of the _best_ things about _2001_?

For me the outlier on that list is _Lawrence of Arabia_ , which I'm sure is a very fine film but I have yet to stay awake for the entirety of it.

<comment><USER4> No. I really don't get anything out of it.

My favorite part is the battle of the apes over the watering hole which morphs into the polite but tense clash between Cold War rivals at the bar.

I also like that it was written to be boring. _I'm sorry Dave_ wasn't intended to be funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> *La

<comment><USER30> The francophones are out in full force today!

<comment><USER15> Oui monsieur!

<comment><USER30> et ils n'aiment pas la mauvaise orthographe ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nothing like some good old black and white, two sided European nationalism to bring tears to the eyes, is there?

<comment><USER27> We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. Tossing this sort of flamebait into an HN thread is vandalism, let alone going full Hitler once people take the bait. We're trying for an entirely different kind of site here.

I appreciate that you also post the occasional substantive comment, but your balance is negative and it isn't worth it. If you don't want to be banned on HN, though, you're welcome to email us at email@example.com and commit to using the site as intended from now on.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15857292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15857292) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER31> Hmm, interesting. A shadow ban. I agree that my first comment was too without substance. However, I feel that the entire thread was rather without substance.

I don't really see the problem with the second comment though, or how it is going "full Hitler". Godwin's law doesn't apply to discussions that are literally about WWII. Yes, it may be negative, but is negativity wrong in of itself it if my negativity is backed up by rational discussion?

<comment><USER27> It's hardly a "shadow ban" when we explain it to you at length!

The issue is that your comment history has frequently violated the site guidelines. That's not just about negativity—it's possible to say critical things in civil, substantive ways. But you've been doing it in a way that damages thoughtful conversation, and that's a net negative here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Pftt! This scene is nothing. The best scene of all times is the bank robbery scene in the movie Heat and what happens after. Al Pacino and Robert Deniro were lethal. It makes me cry every time when Deniro leaves her behind:

"Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."

<comment><USER33> OMG That movie just went on and on...

Also got to say Al Pacino is so insufferable. De Niro was excellent though. My favorite scene is the end in stand up guys (also Pacino is far more mellow and tolerable in that one)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is the greatest scene, and not the scene where Arnold rips off Richter's arms in the elevator in Total Recall and Richter falls to his death and Arnold throws him back his arms and yells "See you at the party Richter"?

<comment><USER25> "Consider this as a divorce."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rziE39JWfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rziE39JWfs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Qu'un sang impure abreuve nos sillons" translated by "let's water the fields with impure blood." is often a very misunderstood line.

A lot of people claim this song is racist because they think the "impure blood" mentioned belongs to the enemy. This is both wrong and an anachronism since there was no racial theories at the time when this song was written.

"Impure blood" is in opposition to the pure blood of the nobility, that is the blood of simple peasants and poor people fighting to defend the Revolution. This is the blood of the French revolutionaries that is "impure". This is in the same spirit by which they called themselves "sans-culotte" in opposition to the nobility.

<comment><USER35> No, please stop spreading revisionist interpretation of the Marseillaise.

Here's a book extract back from 1848 that clearly shows that everyone, even back then, understood "sang impur" as the blood of the enemy. That was just 50 years or so after the Marseillaise was created.

> Cinq mois sont à peine écoulés et dans la fièvre de civilisation des esprits > chagrins disent de dissolution qui nous travaille nous avons tout usé > république sociale démocratique bourgeoise gouvernements d avocats de > savants dïgnoranls de poëles de utilitaires et au milieu de ce tohu bohu de > recherches de tortues gouvernementales l art musical s est tu comme OII le > pense bien car il n y avait rien de bien harmonieux dans la rlIarsei laise > provoquant à verser le sang impur des soldats étrangers qui ne sont guère > plus féroces que nous et ne songent nullement ù venir mugir dans nos > canzpagnes Même avant que la guerre civile vint rugir dans la cité chants > avaient cesse Il faut espérer qu ils vont reprendre c un des meilleurs > moyens de persuader à l Europe pour la France Paris surtout est un objet > Œanæieuse curiosité notre capitale peut redevenir le centre des arts et de > la civilisation

[https://books.google.co.jp/books/content?id=OILsHAshyJ8C&hl=...](https://books.google.co.jp/books/content?id=OILsHAshyJ8C&hl=ja&pg=PT228&img=1&zoom=3&sig=ACfU3U3kF0iud102auknNjYOMFB9KZmBzw&ci=524%2C199%2C439%2C292&edge=0)

It's also painfully obvious that your "sang impur" interpretation is wrong when you read all the other verses of the Marseillaise (not just the chorus), since so many other parts of the song refer to killing the (foreign) invaders.

> Quoi ! Des cohortes étrangères Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !

> Tremblez, tyrans et vous, perfides, L'opprobre de tous les partis ! Tremblez > ! Vos projets parricides Vont enfin recevoir leur prix.

> Que tes ennemis expirants Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire !

And to your point, the Marseillaise is not a racist song anyway, but it's a nationalistic one. It fits extremely well in its era of emerging nations in Europe (spreading the idea that you belong to something bigger than your direct community/village/town/city). France was on the brink of being annihilated at the time of the Revolution by foreign kingdoms trying to take power and restore the monarchy, and it was a song to gather popular support.

<comment><USER36> Your quote is very poorly transcribed (I assume machine-transcribed) and has all the punctuation stripped, making it unreadable. Here my hand transcription:

> Cinq mois à peine écoulés, et, dans la fièvre de civilisation, --- des > esprits chagrins disent de dissolution --- qui nous travaille, nous avons > tout usé, république sociale, démocratique, bourgeoise, gouvernements > d'avocats, de savants, d'ignorants, de poêtes, de militaires; et au milieu > de ce tohu-bohu de recherche de formes gouvernementales, l'art musical s'est > tu, comme on le pense bien; car il n'y avait rien de bien harmonique dans > _la Marseillaise_ provoquant à verser le _sang impur_ des soldats étangers > qui ne sont guères plus _féroces_ que nous, et ne songent nullement à venir > _mugir dans nos campagnes_. Même avant que la guerre civile vint rugir dans > la cité _les chants avaient cessé_. Il faut espérer qu'ils vont reprendre: > c'est un des meilleurs moyens de persuader à l'Europe pour laquelle la > France, Paris surtout, est, est un objet d' _anxieuse_ curiosité, que notre > capitale peut redevenir le centre des arts et de la civilisation.</comment></comment></comment>


An Analysis of Motivations for Income Redistribution [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/dbjerk/Behindtheveil7.pdf <comment><USER2> Of course desire for redistribution is motivated by self-interest! Why should laypeople starve while an ever tinier class of people continues to own and profit from the world? The irony of the "they just want free shit" people is the sad truth that the wealthy are constantly acting out of political self- interest as well, just that their interests are lessening the government's interference with their finances.

The irony I always see in these scenarios is affluent people's short term memory about history - the invading barbarians, the destruction of the aristocrats' temples, the brutal dictatorships that gained hold from popular outrage about the bourgeois. There's an easy way to prevent this kind of thing, and it's by fostering a society where people can't get angry enough (or powerful enough) to do something totally stupid. A second American revolution seems unlikely as of today, but our current political landscape is telling about how royally broken the world is soon to become.

<comment><USER3> I have a decent income (s.t. it would be measurably reduced in an income redistribution situation) and I want it for self-interest reasons as well. I would be taxed more, sure, but I wouldn't have to worry about someone robbing me because they are starving. If we could improve the stability of society by giving the less fortunate a little off the top, that is really in line with my interests.

<comment><USER4> Voluntary charity is always an option for you. Don't most people mean _mandatory_ , state-controlled taking from you to give to someone else when discussing this subject? Would you support "measurably reducing" _my_ income so you don't get robbed? So _I_ don't get robbed?

<comment><USER5> Yes I (and probably the parent) mean mandatory state-controlled taxation. Yes we support measurably reducing _both_ of our incomes so _neither_ of us get robbed. And yes I support doing so against your wishes if a majority of society votes for it.

If you object to that, please make that argument instead of just asking rhetorical questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some people have pride in needing less. I have always been paranoid that I overstay my welcome, or that I'm too needy. I obsess over efficiency, and strive to require less to function than the others around me. I seek to be a provider, not a consumer - that sort of reputation is an ideal (especially here in the South) and proves that I am stronger. It is a constant competition that ultimately enable my species (specifically the environment in which it dwells) to have more resources to work with.

Do not fall victim to envy and anger at the "one-percent". They have great responsibility, and there will exist a balance if they do not properly manage their resources (not necessarily in the form of redistribution). Just find the humor in the silly things money buys that only offer the utility of announcing wealth.

</comment><comment><USER7> "People like free shit."

How hard is that?

The abstract says it in a bit more formal academic tones: " The findings suggest that for most people, the motivation for redistribution is financial self-interest".

But put it to a vote to pretty much any group of people, at any time, in any place, and they'd prefer to steal from their neighbors than they would to work themselves.

The trick of civilization is curb this impulse, thus allowing the generation of positive sum games.

As Milton Friedman once said (and apologies for butchering this; it's from memory): the wonder of capitalism is that it's the only system that restrains the capitalists.

...by which he means that every society has rapacious take-no-prisoners people.

The trick is to channel that into METAPHORIC rape and take-no-prisoners, and away from the literal implementation.

<comment><USER8> Your comment seems to imply that the people in favor of income redistribution are the ones that think that way.

But so do those who are against redistribution. I've yet to meet a person who was against redistribution, _as well as_ against certain benefits they get from tax money (police force, etc).

Taxpayer provided services is income redistribution. Some people's incomes are being used to provide other people services.

 _Everyone_ wants free shit. That's why your comment is a bit of a non- statement. It's similar to saying "Everyone likes food". Or "Everyone likes money." It doesn't explain anything.

<comment><USER9> > I've yet to meet a person who was against redistribution, as well as against > certain benefits they get from tax money (police force, etc).

I've met plenty. There are those who relish the opportunity for free market alternatives to public police forces.

<comment><USER8> >I've met plenty. There are those who relish the opportunity for free market alternatives to public police forces.

You've met them for police forces. But have you met any that are against _all_ taxpayer supported services?

The big one being: No military?

Other than that: No transportation services (road maintenance, etc). I've met people who quickly say they want that privatized and voluntarily paid for, but when I really make them think about it, they change their mind quickly. There are always places they want to drive to that they do not want to pay for.

And even if you have met such a person, they really are a minority of people in the group who are against wealth redistribution.

<comment><USER10> "No military" was an actual thing in the United States prior to WWII. See any good bio. of Eisenhower for details

<comment><USER11> We've had a navy since 1775.

<comment><USER12> > We've had a navy since 1775.

That's the tradition, but its not entirely true; the Continental Navy was formed in 1775, but disbanded 10 years later in 1785, and it was nearly another decade before the US Navy was formed in 1794.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the fact correction (seriously).

In any case, anything in the 18th century is well before Eisenhower... ;)

<comment><USER10> I hope my explanations to the others helps to clarify what I mean. I omitted needful words :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it's an interesting theory, but I don't find myself very convinced.

Competing hypothesis: People's motivations are less driven by self-interest when the discussion is an abstract one and more driven by self-interest when there are real losses and gains to be had. It still has a self-interest component, but now the claim is that it is those who do not want redistribution acting out of self interest. Self-interest is clearly a component here, but singling it out as a motivation for wanting redistribution makes for certain specific arguments.

I'm also not sure how transferable the results around distribution in a game are for questions with societal implications; I know these sorts of experiments are common in psychology, but I wonder if the limited scope of this game means people are more willing to take everything they've earned since many of the reasons to support redistribution do not exist in a game setting, e.g. real suffering, not wanting violent revolution, etc.

</comment><comment> n-exploit I'd be interested in seeing a study on the distribution of philanthropic efforts among the wealthy between domestic and international causes.

I fall on the side of wanting the government "out of my pockets" because I question the overall effectiveness of domestic programmes in helping "the poor". I may be ignorant, but like to think that international causes do a better job of decreasing wealth inequality by supporting those at the very lowest end of the spectrum in third world countries. Call me an asshole, but understanding that no system is perfect, because America has one of the better social/government systems in favor of economic mobility, government use of taxpayer dollars for domestic programs targeting income redistribution should be limited. While I do think that there are worthwhile programmes that support the poor domestically, my position on income redistribution can be more easily understood when looking at wealth inequality at a global scale.

<comment><USER14> Here's in interesting ted talk on an international aid issue that not talked about alot:

[https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-hidden- reaso...](https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-hidden-reason-for- poverty-the-world-needs-to-address-now-mark-haugen-ted-talk-krsdl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The current economic system is heavily redistributive. It works very strongly to redistribute wealth and income from those who have little to those who have a lot. The main function of two whole branches of government is maintaining the wealth of people who have a lot.

What people are advocating for is _less_ income redistribution to the top.

It is worth noting that if you ask the public how wealth is distributed currently, and how it should be, the U.S. public desires a sort of socialist utopia, more equal than Sweden: [http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely.pdf](http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely.pdf)

Note that people prefer that socialist utopia regardless of their personal wealth and regardless of their political orientation. EVERYONE prefers that. There is complete Democrat-Republican rich-poor consensus that the United States would be better off if it were much more equal.

In the U.S. at least, and probably elsewhere, most of the opposition to social welfare policies is rooted in racism. The best way to derail any proposed social welfare idea is to talk about all the black people that will be helped by it. This opposition has nothing do with how the individual will be affected by the proposed policies in a monetary sense.

</comment><comment><USER16> Needs a follow up where people are playing for their whole families and the ones making less for some reason have more kids. In other words, trying to extrapolate from this to larger societal class conflicts misses a whole slew of other issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> So in earnings known and earnings unknown, both groups predominately looked after their own self interests. Thats always the predominate factor in groups.

</comment><comment><USER4> If I get a check for X and my cardiologist gets a check for X as well why would anyone put in the work to become a cardiologist? For his love of mankind? For social status? Serious question. Didn't the 20th-century Marxists try this?

<comment><USER18> You get a check for X. The cardiologist gets a check for X, and _also_ gets the income from working as a cardiologist. He/she then pays taxes on that income, which leaves him/her on net probably at least somewhat worse off than today, but still better off than you, who only get a check for X. It's that "better off" part that motivates the cardiologist.

<comment><USER4> Do you think he would vote for that? Or, like similar systems in the last century, would some, let's say state encouragement, be required?

<comment><USER5> No he wouldn't vote for that, but what does that have to do with your original question?

And I feel like you're being very disingenuous by implying that him not getting what he voted for is equivalent to communism.

<comment><USER18> It isn't the original question, but I thought it was a legitimate one.

The cardiologists and their like can be outvoted. That's how it goes in a democracy. But the number of people who lose on net may be greater than the number of people who win on net. So the only way it gets implemented may be through... let's say "undemocratic" means.

Note well: I'm not advocating this. I'm just pointing out that this may be the way the politics works out.

<comment><USER5> Sure, I can imagine the points grb423 may have been implying, but by presenting them as a series of vague rhetorical questions it makes it hard to respond directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is this "Majority of calls" you refer to in the title? Why not use the title of the paper?

If anything, they found that calls against redistribution of income are most likely motivated by self interest.

<comment><USER20> We updated the title from "Majority of calls for income redistribution are motivated by self-interest", which was editorialized.</comment></comment>


Implement a programming language from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/implementing-a-programming-language/

<comment><USER2> In my experience, many people will miss the significance of this, or will simply fail to grasp how this is implementing a programming language at all. After all, you're taking advantage of the host language for every single aspect of the new language, even tokenizing/parsing.

More interesting for beginners (in my opinion) are examples implementing a simple tokenizer, parser, and compiler to another source language. This seems to be what closes the gap between programming languages as mystical constructs and programming languages as programs themselves.

This point of view does tend to displease the traditional SICP crowd though :-).

<comment><USER3> Here is a prolog in interpreter in c++.

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~am21/research/funnel/prolog.c](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~am21/research/funnel/prolog.c)

A list of tiny, powerful interpreters would be good.

<comment><USER4> The (binary) lambda calculus interpreter at [http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c](http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c), documented in [http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html](http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html) is as tiny (and incomprehensible) as it gets, but does all of input, recursive descent parsing, translation to bytecode, lazy evaluation (call-by-need to be precise), garbage collection, and output.

<comment><USER3> Would it be possible to simply a have a normally formatted version of the code?

<comment><USER4> A slightly less obfuscated and somewhat more normally formatted version:

      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <stdlib.h>
      #include <assert.h>
      enum {I,O,V,A,L};
      int n=44,i,c,T[M]={L,A,8,A,2,  V,0,L,L,V,
          A,30,L,A,2,V,0,L,A,5,A,7,L,V,0,O,
          A,14,L,A,2,V,0,L,A,5,A,2,  V,0,O,O,A},b,s;
      typedef struct _{int t,r; struct _*e,*n;} C;C*e,*f,*l,*S[M];
      void x(int l,int u){for(;l<=u;T[n++]=T[l++]);}
      int g(){i--||(i=b,c=getchar());return c>>i&1;}
      void d(C*l){!l||--l->r||(d(l->e),d(l->n),l->n=f,f=l);}
      int p(int m){if(g()){for(T[n++]=V;g();T[n]++);n++;}else
                T[m]=n++&&g()?(T[m+1]=p(++n),A):L,p(n);return n-m;}
      int main(int t){char o;
       b=t>1?0:7;T[43]=p(n);i=0;
       for(t=b?10:26;;)switch(T[t]){
        case I: g();i++;assert(n<M-99);if(~c&&b){x(0,6);for(T[n-5]=96;i;T[n++]=!g())
                 x(0,9);}x(c<0?7:b,9);T[n++]=!b&&!g();break;
        case O: t=b+t>42?(o=2*o|t&1,28):(putchar
                    (b?o:t+8),fflush(stdout),b?12:28);break;
        case V: l=e;for(t=T[t+1];t--;e=e->n);
                         t=e->t;(e=e->e)&&e->r++;d(l);break;
        case A: t+=2;f||(f=calloc(1,sizeof(C)));assert(f&&  s<M);S[s++]=l=f;f=l->n;
                l->r=1;l->t=t+T[t-1];(l->e=e)&&e->r++;break;
        case L: if(!s--)return 0;S[s]->n=e;e=S[s];t++;break;
       }
       return T[t+2];
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> C'mon, why stop there? Implement Scheme in your toy lambda. Then implement another toy lambda in your Scheme, and a Scheme in that. Continue until it takes several minutes to do (fib 5). Then, write JIT compiler for that Scheme. See what it takes to get down to pre-Inception levels of performance.

Now, you've actually learned something: Abstractions are costly.

<comment><USER6> Too late, someone already did that and measured the overhead of up to five interpretations layers: "Scheme benchmarking with a meta-circular" interpreter [http://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/scheme- benchmarking...](http://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/scheme- benchmarking/) Archive: [http://web.archive.org/web/20140105145428/https://yinwang0.w...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140105145428/https://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/scheme- benchmarking/) HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7045734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7045734) (25 points, 443 days ago, 9 comments) (The main critic is that it should compare more scheme implementations.)

Many modern schemes (and similar languages like Racket and Clojure) have many optimization, use bytecode and jit compiling, so the abstraction overhead is not as big as in the naive versions. And you get nice code and powerful macros in exchange.

IIRC Stalin is faster than C in some benchmarks, but the compiling time is very big. "Stalin: a global optimizing compiler for Scheme" [https://github.com/barak/stalin](https://github.com/barak/stalin) HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214343) (85 points, 220 days ago, 70 comments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is something from my todo list, build lisp in C: [http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/](http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Scared me for a second, thought he as going to make a programming language in the MIT gui language "Scratch"

</comment><comment><USER9> Just add garbage collection!</comment>


MongoDB Monitoring Service - <AUTHOR> https://mms.10gen.com/

<comment><USER2> For all the bashing I do on MongoDB, MMS is actually fairly useful.

The biggest advantage is when you submit JIRA tickets for Mongo issues and they have data to work with already.

<comment><USER3> I never like when the people who make my products are also the ones telling me if everything is ok. While the integration with 10gen is nice. I would rather a third party kept an eye on my infrastructure and told me when things were awry

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't worry about signing up guys, they will only send you a random 10% of the promotional emails they send out. Or was it 90%? Who knows.

<comment><USER5> Even if you uncheck the promotional emails checkbox?

<comment><USER3> I think its a joke based on the story a while back about them dropping 90% of error messages randomly ( by design )

<comment><USER6> And getting it wrong by dropping 10% of error messages randomly.

<comment><USER7> the code was convoluted but correct. A lot of people got it wrong. The code was still shit, but correct shit.

<comment><USER8> No, it was incorrect. It was supposed to log 10% of the messages, instead it logged 90%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This isn't new but I've used it successfully. They're a bit aggressive in their sales but hey, they _are_ a database company after all :).</comment>