Google Found Guilty of 'Abusing Dominant Market Position' in Russia - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-found-guilty-of-abusing-dominant-market-position-in-russia-1442250025 <comment><USER2> GNU Emacs also abuses its dominant position in the editor market by shipping all this bundled Lisp code.

Over twenty years ago I was a making killing, hand over fist, selling a Usenet news reading add-on for Emacs. Then those anti-trust bastards included some Lisp code which does that, and I went down the tubes.

I mean, what gave them the _right_ , you know?

It's as if not only did they disrespect my sense of entitlement, but it's like they didn't even _see_ it, in spite of its monstrous size.

<comment><USER3> I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post.

It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software.

If Linux grew big enough could it attract antitrust lawsuits despite not being the product of any single company?

My first impression was to draw the line at organizations that make money, but that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress, which isn't necessarily beneficial for the community either.

Discuss(?)

<comment><USER2> > _I 'm assuming this is a sarcastic post._

More like satirical.

I just returned to this tab 56 minutes after the fact, and wanted to delete the comment, but when I clicked the delete link, "1 point" flipped to "13 points". :)

My point is, why is something like GNU Emacs or GNU/Linux above anti-trust with regard to bundling? Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular that it was on 99% of the world's desktops. There wouldn't be any anti-trust hoopla regarding that distribution having a preferred web browser, no matter how deeply integrated.

Morally, the users of this platform would be just as locked in as users of Windows and IE. (Or Google Android and some Google Service app or what have you).

Anti-trust somehow only picks targets from which it can squeeze money. That's what it's about, not any morality of the situation or what is good for consumers. Those are just pretexts.

(The very fact that _Russia_ is eagerly aping this concept speaks _volumes_ ).

Auntie Ayn on anti-trust laws: [http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html)

<comment><USER4> > _Suppose that GNU /Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular > that it was on 99% of the world's desktops. There wouldn't be any anti-trust > hoopla regarding that distribution having a preferred web browser, no matter > how deeply integrated._

Assuming that in this alternate world GNU/Linux wasn't malleable (either because its not open source or for some other reason I am not able to think of). I think there would be anti-trust "hoopla".

For example... Think of the negative response everyone had back when ubuntu started sending amazon data... I changed distros. I don't think just because a system is based in GNU/Linux means that it is automatically sainted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The crux of the article:

       Google said in February that device makers "are free to install the apps
       they choose, and consumers always have complete control over the apps on
       their devices."

       Several device manufacturers that pre-install Yandex apps notified the
       company in 2014 that they were "no longer able to pre-install Yandex
       services," such as Yandex's search and map apps on Google's Android devices,
       prompting Yandex to make a complaint to the antitrust authorities. [1]

From an earlier article:

       In order to install Google Play on their devices, device manufacturers are
       required to preinstall the entire suite of Google GMS services, and set
       Google as the default search.  In addition to that, device manufacturers are
       increasingly prohibited from installing any services from Google's
       competitors on their devices… The openness of Android is now in a thing of
       the past." [Yandex' claim] [2]

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-found-guilty-of- abusing-d...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-found-guilty-of-abusing- dominant-market-position-in-russia-1442250025)

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/yandex-google-russia- antitr...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/yandex-google-russia-antitrust/)

<comment><USER6> Sounds like some monopolization to me. Google can't be trusted to tell the truth here anymore than the US govt can be trusted to tell the truth about spying. There is absolutely zero incentive to admit to wrongdoing. My only question is why can't we go after Microsoft for locking down hardware in the same way.

<comment><USER7> > My only question is why can't we go after Microsoft for locking down > hardware in the same way.

Microsoft's hardware (e.g. Surface Pro) is less locked down than the competition's version of the same (e.g. iPad). Why must ever topic devolve into Microsoft bashing?

<comment><USER6> I should clarify that here I'm not talking about Microsoft's hardware like the Surface. I'm talking about being able to buy a computer from a manufacturer without having to pay $99 for an installation of Microsoft Windows that I explicitly _do not want_. Some effort was made to stop this practice (of MS paying manufacturers not to offer machines without Windows), but it clearly didn't go very far in solving the problem. Either you're going to pay for a copy of MS Windows, or you're going to build your own machine (or pay about as much as Apple hardware costs from "specialty" hardware retailers). And to answer your question, I bring this up because I find it difficult to point fingers at Google for the same behavior without bringing up an example of a company that is flatly getting away with murder.

<comment><USER8> > I'm talking about being able to buy a computer from a manufacturer without > having to pay $99 for an installation of Microsoft Windows that I explicitly > do not want.

You can. You are not limited to specialty outfits as well, nor are you required to pay a lot for it, or any of the other numerous criteria you try to add on as well. Being able to buy a PC without paying for Windows or paying for an Apple product is incredibly easy for the average person today.

<comment><USER6> No, you are shoehorned into buying a very specific model. It _should_ be no problem whatsoever to choose _any_ model on that site, and select "Ubuntu" for the OS, but you can't. If you go and look (and here I mean actually go and look[0]), the vast majority of machines that you can buy do not have the option to _not_ pay for a Windows license. The choice you get is "Windows 8.1 or Windows 10".

[0] [http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops/xps- laptops](http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops/xps-laptops)

<comment><USER9> that is a choice Dell has made based of customer demand, sales and is no longer forced by MS to do so. MS tried this in 90s and it was major issue in the antitrust investigation

<comment><USER6> ... And clearly today, as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But really, it's 'Abusing Dominant Market Position without Permission.'

<comment><USER6> Absolutely this. In Russia especially, it's all about getting permission for this kind of behavior.

<comment><USER11> I think it's a bit more than that. I suspect it's about not having uncontrolled (by Russia) sources of information for the Russian people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google seems to be singled out and especially targeted by these antitrust allegation and investigations, I mean in the larger sense not just here where it's mostly a protectionist outcome as the fact that they technically don't have a "dominant market position" at ~50% market share is the least of it.

I'm curious How a ruling like that gels with the fact that on an iPhone (the other half of the market) all services and apps are dictated by Apple and can not be altered, while on Android not only they can be but the whole OS is free, Yandex could have commissioned their own hardware like many others do and they curiously haven't complained about Apple.

Same goes for the search allegation,the argument there is that Google should feature results from other search engines on _their own site_! Which is mind Boggling, no one is convinced Facebook or twitter or anyone should include content from other website but somehow Google is different. Google isn't the network layer that one must go through it to interact with the web, they are no "gatekeeper" not technically or metaphorically yet somehow politicians are convinced they are.

This seems like field distortion to me that somehow regulator were sold on to (even excluding this Russian example).

<comment><USER13> It's about dominant position. Having the sort of stifling monopoly that Google has opens it up to additional regulation, just like Microsoft was before it. Apple is a niche market still, to this day, and isn't under as much scrutiny.

<comment><USER12> First the term "stifling monopoly" is loaded, and they definitely don't have it in Russia. 2nd they can't have a "stifling monopoly" since they are just another node on the graph, you don't need them to "internet", there is always another site, another app.

<comment><USER13> See my response to other commenter on parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion, from when the probe began: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068334)

</comment><comment><USER14> The jurisdiction bias aside, Google has been indeed busy deploying an array of devices to disguise the AdWords monopoly behind an alphabetical soup of projects and products. The more your hear about self-driving cars, the less attention you're paying to Paid Clicks market share.

</comment><comment><USER15> Should we take what the Russian goverment says at face value, or is this part of a trend in Russian policy to turn away from the West? These are the same guys trying to ban Reddit and Wikipedia.

<comment><USER16> Yes, and the White House are the same guys running planting spyware in the American *ware products used around the world at unprecedented scale. Savvy?

<comment><USER15> USA government spying, therefore USA software bad is not an informed argument. Choose between Russian or US hegemony and society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's see Yandex can indeed fork Android and deliver a device in Russia without Google apps..what anitrust issue here? Maybe Yandex anticompetitive desires?

<comment> guard-of-terra Google makes it impossible for a single manufacturer to ship both google services android and yandex flavor adroid.

Or any other custom android; just ask Samsung, Google pressurized them to drop their own ecosystem.

This is anticompetitive if you ask me.

<comment><USER18> Really? Last time I checked my Samsung tablet I could still go to the Samsung app store to install apps. Where is this pressure you speak of that made the Samsung store app go away?

<comment> guard-of-terra [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068334)

"It's not just pressure. They outright cut you off. You cannot ship Google Androids and non-Google Androids. It's part of the MARA."

I think just having your own store is okay as long as you don't bundle their competitors and don't exclude google play and you are big enough to put some weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone post a non-paywall link?

<comment><USER20> [https://archive.is/wGWho](https://archive.is/wGWho)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> People acting like this is a "Russia against the West" thing are ignoring the fact that the EU, India, Brazil, and others are all conducting similar investigations, which are likely to have the same result.

And the US even found merit to investigate Google, before quietly burying the case.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ten to one that this is a backdoor geopolitical jab at the US.

The Russians are always trying to create and solidify a US-free sphere of influence. That goes for US companies, US NGOs, you name it.

</comment><comment><USER22> And how much has 'Yandex', whatever that is, contributed to Android? Android exists and is relatively free (as in beer and speech) because it drives traffic to Google. If you don't like it, write your own mobile operating system from scratch (good luck).

Edit: actually, they'd only need their own app store if I understand the terms correctly.

<comment><USER23> Despite being open source, Google does not really accept submissions of code from third parties. Yandex does in fact have their own app store, but many apps are only published on the Google Play Store.

<comment><USER18> This is untrue. Android has has many contributions from third parties. Samsung, Sony, LG, etc have all contributed to the AOSP project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Google is not even the most popular search engine in Russia. This is why Russian courts are commonly considered a running joke.

<comment><USER9> or your reading comprehension is very poor, it is about Android monopoly(86%) being abused to promote search.

<comment><USER24> Well, I wasn't able to read the entire article since it's behind the paywall, but I'd be surprised if Android market share is this high in Russia. iPhones are quite popular here as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Whatever suspicions I have about the process by which this decision was made, it seems in principle like a sane ruling that'll improve the openness of the Android platform.

</comment><comment><USER26> Filled in February 2015 and ruled in September 2015? Russian justice is very fast, and the results are really shocking and surprising

<comment><USER27> the main theme in Russia today is "replacing of imported goods and services with domestic ones". The strategy consists of 3 stages:

1\. prohibit, bash, etc... foreign goods and services

2\. ...

3\. enjoy quality replacement by domestic manufacturers and providers.

right now the stage 1 is at full swing.

<comment><USER22> 2\. should read ??? because 3. will never happen (see China).

<comment><USER28> This seems like a non sequitur. Care to elaborate more on China's current state and how it's analogous to Russia's future?

<comment><USER22> China has plenty of replacements but they are nowhere near western equivalents in quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's time for Google to close Android and quit dealing with this bullshit. If you want Android, buy a Google phone with Google Apps and Services and get all your updates directly from Google in a timely manner.

<comment><USER9> monopoly abuse law will still apply, unless this move substantially remove the marketshare of Android.</comment></comment>


Richest 1% to own more than rest of world - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30875633

<comment><AUTHOR> Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-sum without [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

<comment><USER2> Unlike Interdependence, Capitalism has externalities.</comment></comment>


Web performance: a pragmatic approach - <AUTHOR> https://payhip.com/b/gwpb

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use code FASTWEB for a 30% discount :)</comment>


Goodbye GitHub, Hello AWS - <AUTHOR> http://www.lostdecadegames.com/goodbye-github-hello-aws/

<comment><USER2> * These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date.

You'll need to compare pricing to demonstrate the real value.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources to learn Cyber Security? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN, I realize this can be satisfied through a google search ( which I have done and found resources ) but, I'm just curious the resources HN would suggest. I've mostly looked into PluralSight.<p>I'll graduate with a bachelor's in CIS this December and I'd like to be more specialized in this area. Perhaps this question is too general but still curious to the replies. I appreciate it! <comment><USER2> From my HN bookmarks [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15986100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15986100) which links to specific resources by those already in the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link! Definitely checking it out</comment></comment>


What's the big deal about railroad tracks? - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1177631604186996737.html <comment><USER2> Here's pretty much the same text dating back from 2000:

[http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html](http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html)

Snopes wrote about it:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge- chariots/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/)

It was also discussed at length here on HN 3 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20239682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20239682)

And another debunking:

[https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2538/was- standard-...](https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2538/was-standard- railroad-gauge-48-determined-by-roman-chariot-ruts/)

So, nice story. Not true.

<comment><AUTHOR> whoah, nice find, thanks</comment></comment>


Montezuma's Revenge Solved by Go-Explore - <AUTHOR> http://eng.uber.com/go-explore/ <comment><USER2> For those of you who are confused like I was, this is referencing a video game, not stomach issues from travel [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montezuma's_Revenge_(video_g...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montezuma's_Revenge_\(video_game\))

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very cool work. Well done to team!

"Mapping" the state space has seemed like a really exciting direction to me and I've been puzzled to see so little work in this vein (I'd be interested if anyone knows of other examples).

Just to add, Kenneth if you are reading: we met at GECCO 2017, hi again, and really nice work! (I remember first learning about map-elites there, a simple yet beautiful idea from another of the co-authors. Satisfying to see it play a role in RL!)

</comment><comment><USER4> The reddit discussion is

[https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/a0nnp7/r_m...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/a0nnp7/r_montezumas_revenge_solved_by_goexplore_a_new/)

Some skepticism in the comments, since the algorithm assumes you can "return to a previous state" (e.g. with a simulator). So could be interesting for robotics, games..

<comment><USER3> State reset is the kind of unique thing computers can do that we should be exploring and developing, rather than shying away from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From what I'm reading, their initial algorithm doesn't use neural networks at all. It's something that resembles MCTS.

I don't understand from the article, does their "robust" version just run on policy network alone, or does it still run the resetting "world simulation"?

<comment><USER6> Correct. For the results presented here, we do not use a neural network during the exploration phase of the algorithm.

However, we train a neural network during the robustification phase, and it is this trained network that actually plays the game in the end. This final policy is much more robust than the deterministic trajectories collected earlier, and it is able to deal with slight changes in the environment.

Note, while not tested yet, you can also run this algorithm by immediately training a policy to reach different states. This variant would be slower (as you now need to train a network during the exploration phase), but this variant would be directly applicable to non-deterministic environments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will the forthcoming paper clarify details like this? Thanks for sharing this exciting result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very impressive!</comment>


Show HN: Cue an AI which helps you quit smoking, get points towards Starbucks $ - <AUTHOR> http://cue.kiwi.ai <comment><AUTHOR> It's World No Tobacco Day today and we developed a smartwatch app which helps people quit smoking, on Android Wear 2.0 (atm), here is how it works:

-> we automatically detect when a person smokes (motion recognition) -> from here you are suggested a best time to smoke next (we slowly increase their time to their next cigarette) -> when you wait until after the suggested time you receive points which can be converted into Starbucks credits

Here are a couple quotes from our initial testers; looking to get 1000 user market study to confirm our results!

"Cue helped me reduce smoking by 50% in the first week. It's magical" - Ali N.

"After 24 years of smoking, this has been the only thing to help thus far" - Darrell

"This app is great, puts you on the road to quitting easily and effectively. I would share this with anyone needing help to quit for good" \- Jasmine

"Cue is a helpful app because it provides positive reinforcement that rewards delaying my next cigarette." \- Adrian</comment>


An Insider's Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/an-insiders-account-of-the-yahoo-alibaba-deal/

<comment><USER2> Good to have an insider's viewpoint that credits learning and failing fast. Could benefit from more details on the cultural fit, or operational decisions made by the local unit which were privately questioned by Yahoo, but later turned out to be correct.

 _".. Charlie Munger, a legendary business leader with an abundance of wisdom. He says he has constantly seen people rise who are not the smartest but who are "learning machines." "They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up," he says. He also has a broader view, which I really love: "If civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning."

... Yahoo is the only example of meaningful value creation by a U.S. internet company in China.

Yahoo had failed at first too, of course. The difference was that it kept going back, building on knowledge from prior attempts. In the early days, we invested a lot of energy in analyzing which businesses would fit best with Yahoo. But I can see in hindsight that what mattered most was finding the right team, including a leader who was a good cultural fit with the company and whom we trusted, and structuring the deal so that the local unit was free to make operational decisions."_

</comment><comment><USER3> >We insisted that the local team follow Yahoo reporting, systems, and governance requirements.

they could have just shoot them, it would be more merciful.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yahoo and Alibaba aren't a good fit. Yahoo is a bottom-feeder online entertainment company (nobody still uses their search, do they?) and Alibaba is a global marketplace for manufacturers. This union doesn't make sense from a brand identity standpoint.

<comment><USER5> But it makes sense from money standpoint :) A lot of companies like Yahoo need cash cows to support various initiatives that do not have a return for quite some time.</comment></comment>


Counting in the wrong language - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191121-why-you-might-be-counting-in-the-wrong-language <comment><USER2> I thank the French for the metric system. But their numbers between 70 and 100 are bonkers.

70 is pronunced "60 10". 71 is "60 11". And so on until 80, which is pronounced, obviously, "4 20". 81 is "4 20 1". It goes up to 90, which is "4 20 10". 91 is "4 20 11". The craziness continues until 100, which is, thankfully, a different word ("cent", instead of "4 20 20", or, dear lord, "60 40"). But in 170 it all comes back.

I think the French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Canada did the right thing when they replaced all that complexity by dedicated words for 70, 80 and 90.

<comment><USER3> Canada uses the same numbers as France. Only Belgium and Switzerland use other words for 70 and 90, and just a few parts of French-speaking Switzerland use _huitante_ for 80, but most say _quatre-vingt_ like in France.

<comment><USER4> That's funny. I learned French from a Belgian woman and I called 80 "octante" until I was formally taught French and switched to quatre-vingt to avoid sounding like a hick.

Did I somehow come up with "octante"? Is it not used in Belgium, or anywhere else? It's true that it sounds a lot more Greek (my native language) than "huitante".

<comment><USER3> Octante was taught for a while in France at the beginning of the 20th century, but it never really caught on. Old people in Brittany used to use it sometimes as well, but it has completely disappeared everywhere now. It does sound nicer and more natural to me than huitante.

Many French people believe that it is used in Belgium and Switzerland though, for some reason, but as far as I know that's not true (I live in Belgium, although not in a French speaking region).

<comment><USER4> Thanks. At least I know I didn't imagine it.

I make a disservice to Pascale, the first lady who taught me French, and who was, herself French, by saying it was a Belgian woman who taught me French. The Belgian lady, Catherine, taught me _most_ of my French but I first started speaking French with Pascale.

Which is to say, it's possible I learned "octante" from Pascale, although she was far from old enough to have learned it in the early 20th century.

So I'm guessing "octante" is still used in some French-speaking places, although not that widely.

And I'll probably sound rather quaint if I use it myself :)

[For the record, I'm Greek but I learned French very early on because my dad had cousins in the Greek diplomatic corps and he wanted me to get a job there and he thought French is the language of diplomacy. I was not interested in that, of course. But at least, thanks to my dad's silly ambitions, I grew up practically billingual.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A simpler problem is months. The English system uses arbitrary names, while Japanese/Chinese/Korean just call them "1-month", "2-month", etc.

Even though I grew up with it, I find the English system impenetrable. Quick, what's 3 months before November? I have to count it out every time. (In mod 12, -3 is the same as +9, so I just count forward 9 months.)

The names of the months are a nice nod to our Roman history but they are a pain in the rear to use. It's high time to relegate them to second-class status, like Roman numerals.

<comment><USER6> I just saw this on social media the other day:

Person A: "Isn't it just awful that SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember and DECember aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months?"

Person B: "They should stab whomever changed that."

(For those who may not know, that is a reference to Julius Caesar who inserted July, and if you didn't know that you may be interested to know that Augustus inserted August. Hence we are off by 2 months.)

Edit: Apparently, I -- and the very funny person B -- were misinformed. Jan and Feb were inserted, and different months were renamed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure this is correct; July and August were renamed, yes, but not inserted. They did steal days from February, which was originally the last month of the Roman calendar.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, you are correct: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar)

So Jan and Feb were inserted.

I have to leave the original up as it is because the joke is too good, but I will leave this note as a correction.

<comment><USER7> It's not so much "inserted", as they just changed which month they considered the first. The roman first month was March, but it still took place in the spring.

<comment><USER8> They were inserted. Previously the months ran from March to December and the remaining time didn't belong to any month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who went to school in spain but at home always spoke german and now lives in Germany, the number inversion is the bain of my existance (hyperbole). I can't tell you how many times I have made mistakes because of it when communicating with people, and how often I have written down number incorrectly because of it.

At some point I just want to train myself to say it the "right" way, even if it sounds wrong in german and people will look at me weirdly. But somebody has to start the trend, right?

<comment><USER10> Fellow German here. I find it extremely annoying when people read out numbers for me to write down and announce pairs as numbers instead of digits.

If you mean 42 and read out "zwei und vierzig" I will pause and have to figure out if you meant 240 and you know it. This kind of thing just seems almost intentionally inconsiderate because of the unnecessary ambiguity.

<comment><USER11> I'm slightly confused as a native English speaker here.

zwei und vierzig versus zwei hundert vierzig are radically different to my ears.

The counting thing is annoying but not as annoying as French numbers in my not so humble opinion. Though I guess English had it at one point with things like 4 score and 7 years ago (a score being 20 years, so 87 years ago)

Guess maybe I'm weird but outside of the "flip last two numbers around in your brain in German" it never struck me as much more than: Well that's weird, least its not french numbers under 100 where I have to add mentally so no big deal.

<comment><USER12> French numbers are actually quite easy though if you learn even a little bit of French.

You don't think of quatre-vingt dix as four-twenties ten, you just think of it as ninety just like in English.

I suspect the same is true even for native speakers, your brain is going to pretty quickly map to the actual number it represents rather than the arithmetic statement.

<comment><USER13> I'm thirty eight years old. I've been using standard units my entire life. They just make sense. Eight cups? Oh that's half a gallon, or two quarts. Eight ounces of melted butter? Oh that's one cup. Probably two sticks unless it's that bullshit imported European butter, ugh. My indoctrinated brain can't imagine it any other way. "You want me to add _what_ grams.. _what_? Who measures sugar by weight?!"

French numbers are the same way. If the only system you've ever used is a shitty system, the shitty system is the only logical way of doing things. Human brains are smart, but also dumb. That's actually the point of this article.

I am slowly training myself to intuit SI units, especially at work. It's better, and I know that, but it's fucking hard. I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to be able to replace it for cooking. It's just too deep. Probably the same as a Frenchman who learned to count in French. Learning to cook with standard units was coincident with learning to speak. You simply can't renovate those memories.

They're still bad systems though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect the effect of this, in practice, is almost negligible.

What's more interesting is why being good at maths/physics is considered very uncool in English-speaking countries (not sure about other European ones), but is actually seen as cool in, say, Russia or Bulgaria or Singapore [citation needed]. It is not seen as strange or unusual for girls to be better at science than boys either, possibly because it is not uncool [another citation needed].

I would say that has a much, much greater impact on outcomes than how numbers are represented in the different languages.

<comment><USER15> This is a very interesting observation if its real. I am from Bulgaria and I am a PhD candidate in physics. Whenever I tell someone that, they always say that its sounds cool and difficult and the next question is: What are you going to work after that? I guess that physics, at least in Bulgaria is not considered as a field that you could work in, more as in something you learn for the sake of knowledge.

Why do you think that in English speaking countries is different than others? I temporarily currently living in France and I do not have many contacts with non scientists, but the ones that asked me what I do all found it cool sounding.

<comment><USER14> I meant more on the secondary/high school level. From what I read, it seems almost everyone good at maths/physics that grew up in the US had a miserable experience in school. The whole "nerd/geek" thing and being near the bottom of the school hierarchy.

In my experience in Russia, "nerds" were rather those that were extremely diligent but did not really have passions or interests; being good at science was actually seen as kinda cool. Sports achievements were not really emphasized at all.

But it is all anecdotal, and I would like to see some actual studies on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Depending on what you are counting, sometimes "wrong" can be historically "right":

 _In Swaledale, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, sheep farmers used to, and some still do; count their sheep in a very curious fashion. Instead of One, Two, Three, Four... they go, thus: (1)Yan, (2)Tan, (3)Tether, (4)Mether, (5)Pip; (6)Ezar, (7)Sezar, (8)Acker, (9)Conter, (10)Dick; (11)Yan-a-Dick, (12)Tan-a-Dick, (13)Tether-a-Dick, (14)Mether-a-Dick, (15)Bumfit; (16)Yan-a- Bum, (17)Tan-a-Bum, (18)Tether-a-Bum, (19)Mether-a-Bum, (20)Jigget. Having reached Twenty, they then take a stone [or make a mark upon the ground or a piece of wood, thus the term 'a score' or 'twenty'] representing the Twenty sheep that they have counted; and if they possess more than Twenty sheep, they go for another twenty:_

 _Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Another Twenty, another stone. Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip... Again,Twenty, again another stone._

Jake Thackray 'Molly Metcalfe' 1971

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXINuf5nbI)

</comment><comment><USER17> As a native Polish speaker it was very strange to me when English speakers say things like "twelve hundreds" for numbers between 1000 and 2000. Nobody in Poland ever says that because we don't separate 200 into 2 words "two hundred" we say "dwieście" (which comes from two hundreds, but is significantly changed and considered separate word not 2 words joined). It sounds to us like "4 twenties" would sound to English people instead of "eighty".

So because of language it's not natural to think of 1300 as 13*100, it's much more natural to think of it as 1000+300.

But it's still better in Polish than in German ;) At least we don't do mixed endian like "hundred two and twenty" :)

<comment><USER18> > As a native Polish speaker it was very strange to me when English speakers > say things like "twelve hundreds" for numbers between 1000 and 2000

Minor nitpick but people will say, "twelve hundred" not "twelve hundreds" (at least in all of my experience growing up in the US). The reason being, you have eight hundred, nine hundred, (we don't talk about ten hundred), eleven hundred, twelve hundred, and so on. It's kind of like a continuance of how the hundreds below 1000 are named.

Interestingly you will hear sometimes "ten hundred" when talking about address systems where each block increases the address by 100. Such as, "the ten hundred block of Example street." But I've never heard it anywhere else.

<comment><USER19> Minor nitpick nitpick: except for years, e.g., I don't remember exactly when the Magna Carta was signed, but it was somewhere in the twelve-hundreds.

<comment><USER18> I'm talking only about the numbers, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, etc. That is, counting by hundreds on the hundred.

So your point does not contradict mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That point about Dutch children and little-endian names for numbers is a fun little nugget. The complaint is that they're forced to read the numbers backwards, when the numerals in question are Arabic numerals, invented by a culture that reads from right-to-left and has little-endian names for numbers. I would assume that kids who grow up speaking and learning math in Arabic have no such problems.

<comment><USER21> The fact that so-called Arabic numerals are written left-to-right is perhaps evidence that the Arabic numerals were invented in India and are called Arabic in Europe only because Europeans learnt about them from the Arabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a kid, I _still_ remember the day that my dad was helping me with my Maths homework.

On one tricky problem, he unconsciously started muttering the numbers out loud, and I was surprised to hear him saying them in Tamil (he is from Sri Lanka, but we spoke only English at home as far as I've known).

I asked him about it later, and he said that in his head, he always translated the numbers or problems into Tamil, solved them, then translated back to English to present the solution - because he was taught maths as a kid in Tamil.

He could still do all that faster than I could in all English!

</comment><comment><USER23> What an absurd Sapir-Whorfian argument. The English ten words are the same as the Chinese (e.g. "forty" is clearly "four-tens" with the corners knocked off). If summing two-digit numbers is slower for some cohort of kids it's more likely the school system than language. For example german-speaking kids have a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but learn their multiplication tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12 as is customary in English, so can do more smaller multiplications in their head than folks raised in English.

<comment><USER24> > german-speaking kids have a similar number system to Dutch-speaking kids but > learn their multiplication tables to 20x20 rather than 12x12 as is customary > in English

I was charmed to learn that the word for a times table in Chinese is 九九乘法表, literally "nine-nine-multiplication-method-table".

One assumes the table goes up to 9x9.

<comment><USER23> In German they are called "one times one"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm Dutch, and I've effectively made this change. Our number system sucks (though not as bad as the Danish one - which is my wife's language so I'm regularly forced to decipher that mess), whenever someone says a number like 47 out loud, I have to think hard about whether it's 47 or 74.

So I've decided to generally stop doing maths in Dutch. Our company is international so we all work in English anyway so when I do stuff in eg Excel, calc.exe etc, I just count in English. When I speak in Dutch, I generally simply avoid the last digit in large-ish numbers. Eg I don't care what language I say "250" in, but when I'm speaking Dutch I'd round "252" to "about 250", which is fine enough in most contexts.

FYI fun trivia: Norway fixed this about their language. They used to do what the Danes do but now it's like in English etc. They not only made up normal proper words for eg "50" or "90", but also reversed 2-digit numbers, eg "42" in Danish is "to-og-fyrre" and in modern Norwegian it's "førti-to". That's a pretty ballsy way to change a language and I'm jealous.

<comment><USER26> Congratulations on switching your number language. In general, this is quite hard to do. Even when reading English, which is almost a second native language to me by now, I still find that I automatically read numbers in the text as my native Dutch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > In other languages, the tens and units of numbers are inverted. For example, > in Dutch, 94 is written vierënnegentig (or "four and ninety"), and other > research suggests this may make it harder to do certain mathematical > processes.

>For example, Dutch kindergarten children performed worse than English children on a task that required them to roughly add together two-digit numbers. This was despite the fact they were slightly older and had better working memory, because Dutch kindergarten starts later than in the UK. But on nearly every other metric, including counting ability, roughly adding and comparing quantities of dots, and simple addition of single-digit numbers, the two groups performed at the same level.

This is rather surprising. I would have guessed that adding numbers verbalized in little endian order would be easier because it makes carryover much more natural.

<comment><USER28> I think the key is "roughly".. They could probably catch errors in the ones place better (i.e. verify this summation) and that is potentially distracting in rounding.

Though another issue is that carry right is an exception for the 10s place.

<comment><USER27> Oh good catch. I missed that it was asking for rough rather than exact addition. That is the whole point of big endian - that you lead with the most impactful part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > in English, words like "twelve" or "eleven" don't give many clues as to the > structure of the number itself... Contrast this with Mandarin Chinese, where > the relationship between the tens and the units is very clear. Here, 92 is > written jiǔ shí èr, which translates as "nine ten two"... Psychologists call > systems like these "transparent", where there is an obvious and consistent > link between numbers and their names.

Relatedly, I've been thinking a lot lately about programming style conventions, and how some people prefer very explicit code while others prefer implicit. For example, something as "simple" as leaving out the return keyword where it can be omitted at the end of a function versus leaving it in. The latter can be called "transparent", whereas the former requires a little deeper knowledge of the system.

</comment><comment><USER30> This brings up a point that has always eerily intrigued me: _Can_ you even count _at all -without-_ a language?

Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a clump of 5 trees and knowing it's 5 without having to "say" "five" in your head.

But try tapping on the desk or clapping your hands and counting how many times you did it _without_ saying/thinking "1, 2, 3, 4..."

I wonder if associating a transient stream of inputs with a count may be impossible without mapping it to some other sequence in your head, like linguistic numbers/letters.

<comment><USER31> My evopsych class in college touched on this.

Brains can track a number of discrete objects (from 3 to ~7, depending on species and maturity). Once we get past this number, brains tends to interpret it as 'many'. From the studies we looked at, it appears that the brain can innately count within this number, but reverts to 'many' representation after it.

Ex. crows can count three people going into an obscured area with food, and know that once three people have left, it's safe to get the food, as there aren't any people left.

<comment><USER30> Wow, so language lets us get past that limit.

And numbers are a computed property, so we don't have to know all the possible numbers, just the rules:

        let firstIndex = 0

        var nextIndex: Number { return nextNumberBasedOnSomeRules() }

And so it's helpful to have a language with a sensible numeric system, after all. :)

<comment><USER31> A similarly interesting study: ability to create sentences using prepositional phrases, like "left of the red wall", predicts performance on a disoriented search task.

[https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePos...](https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePosters_Public/Nav_SRCD2011_FINAL.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think one good test of the counting-friendliness of a language is reciting the digits of pi (the limitation is obvious: only single digits are considered).

Among the few languages I know, I can easily recite the first twenty digits after the decimal point in Mandarin within three seconds. In English it's just painful, at least for me.

<comment><USER33> Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious - do you have a way of remembering them? Otherwise they're all just single digits regardless of language.

<comment><USER3> I never made a special effort for that and I only remember 12 of those digits, so maybe I'm just using an inefficient way, but I remember them as two-digit numbers, not single digits.

I don't think I'm alone, the basic value of pi one learns in France is "3 14 16" \- "trois quatorze seize" (historically it was "trois quatorze-cent-seize" so "3 1416" but it's less used today).

<comment><USER32> I believe the basic number taught in Mandarin is 3.1415926, which fits in one second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This makes me feel better for thinking that the way we write (standard Western) music impedes understanding of the way modern chromatic music sounds.

And for the same reasons, really. Putting together things like "Four Twenties" makes sense when you only count to a hundred, and less sense when you need to, say, express the speed of light or the size of an electron. I'm sure the musical system made a lot more sense with diatonic sounds, but once you add in accidentals, you're just retaining backwards compatibility because it used to work and the then-living people were familiar with it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Improper representations are frowned upon in school, but they have their place. Once, a niece of mine in kindergarten told me she knew what 3 times 11 was: 33.

I asked "Well then, what's 7 times 11?"

"It's seventy-seven."

"Okay, I bet you don't know what 12 times 11 is."

"Twelvety-twelve", she gleefully replied.

We agreed that twelvety-twelve is a perfectly good number, we know what it is, but if we were talking to other people we would tell them one hundred and thirty two – for us, twelvety-twelve is just fine.

– Bill Thurston, _Groups, Tilings and Finite State Automata_

</comment><comment><USER36> My wife learned Cantonese as her first launguage and English as her second. I learned Cantonese in college. It's way easier to count in Cantonese because it is so regular.

As a bonus, a native asian language speaker effectively has to learn place value at a very young age to learn how to count.

My wife learned all of her math skills in English, but she still sometimes counts in Cantonese. When we play blackjack, if I'm taking too long she'll tell me the value of my cards in Cantonese, because she's adding them in her head in Cantonese.

It's just quicker.

</comment><comment><USER37> In Czech they often say "triadvacet" which literally translated means "threeandtwenty" and I can't help to not think they said 32 every time I hear it.

<comment><USER38> Interestingly dvacettri is also acceptable :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This doesn't surprise me at all.

Obviously not a direct correlation, but I've been surprised at how critical my internal vocalization of words is to my ability to solve a word puzzle game I've been playing recently.

In short, my ability to find a word that matches a pattern of blank letters is almost entirely dependent on my ability to pronounce those that might fit. If the word that matches has a pronunciation that doesn't quite fit the usual patterns, I'll have a very hard time recognizing it.

</comment><comment><USER40> My favourite illogical system is archaic Finnish, where it goes (roughly translated)

One, two, three, ... Second-one (11), second-two (12), second-three (13), ... Third-one (21), third-two (22), third-three (23), ...

ie you have an off-by-one error in the tens digit as you are counting.

Modern Finnish retains this for 11-19, but mercifully sanity returns for numbers above that.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Of course, there are many other reasons why children from different > countries might have different mathematical abilities, including how maths > is taught and attitudes towards education. It's normally hard to control for > these factors when studying people from different cultures – but one > language offers a fascinating solution.

I read that as: of course, we know there are other possible explanations but we won't dive in the research literature and we'll instead indulge ourselves in this Sapir-Whorf based article because it's good click bait.

The only interesting fact presented is that there is a slightly performance penalty in execution (not result) on some arithmetical tasks that never happen in real life based on the way to express numbers in subject's native language.

</comment><comment><USER42> Tom Scott and Why Klingon is Simpler Than Danish.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bmZ1gRqCc)

</comment><comment><USER43> Similar things have been said about Chinese numbering.

</comment><comment><USER44> one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten one, ten two, ten three… ten nine, two ten, two ten one, two ten two,… three ten,… nine ten,… hundred one, hundred two,… hundred ten one, … two hundred, … two million three hundred four ten five thousand six hundred seven ten eight

</comment><comment><USER45> "might" is the word of the day</comment>


Feinstein Publicly Accuses C.I.A. of Spying on Congress - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/us/cia-accused-of-illegally-searching-computers-used-by-senate-committee.html?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER2> This hypocrisy makes me physically sick.

Feinstein has been one of the biggest apologists[0] for violations of civil liberties, government surveillance, and (both) executive _and_ judicial overreach. Suddenly, the tables are turned on her (however briefly) and she's not so happy with the way it feels.

Call me a cynic, but I'll wait to feel sorry for her until she actually backtracks on all of these despicable practices.

[0] Actually, I don't think it's even fair to say that - she's been a downright _advocate_ of a whole number of nasty practices.

<comment><USER3> My father mentioned that Sigfried & Roy were attacked by the very tigers they trained. Sometimes the dangerous animal you need in order to do the show, turns on you.

That said, even among politicians there is a sense of borders. And that the Senator has found that they are interpreted differently by others isn't a huge surprise. I still hope to get her out of the Senate at her next election cycle.

<comment><USER4> Who did you have in mind to replace her?

<comment><USER5> i've been considering running against her. would there be interest in a young guy with startup cred but no political background? i think i have a pretty good ability to express myself and see multiple sides of an issue.

edit: i grew up as a republican, but i hate where the party is now. i'm not sure which party would make the most sense, because i like some of the republican rhetoric - limited govt, lower taxes - but their implementation of it is terrible. in my experiences both parties support huge companies with different reasons.

i worked at microsoft and google, twilio and uber. i did electronic trading for two years before joining the startup scene, and was cto of a small gaming startup that was acquired.

i think my personal story is compelling, and i'd campaign on a platform of honesty. if you look me up online, you'd find all this "incriminating" shit on me, and i'd just say "yes that's because i'm human". i went from serious student with no social skills, to struggling drug addict with serious mental health issues, to solidly turning my life around after learning people skills, as a result of an obsession with P vs NP.

i think it's extremely unlikely that anyone will be electable in 50 years if there _aren't_ pictures of them doing ridiculous things online. nobody will trust you otherwise. i'm hoping to get that party started now.

<comment><USER3> So I was briefly a candidate for Congress in 2012 :-) There is an interesting set of things here. Setting aside the money issue (its really a _visibility_ issue rather than a money issue) there is a certain amount of support that is needed by voter influencing groups. Well known vote influencers are Unions, Churches, and Civic groups such as the Rotary club. Additionally if you're running as a member of a party, that party should nominally know you exist (they will be asked questions).

The idea that you can get elected just by direct influence of the citizens is not well founded. :-). So when I was doing this and got more serious (I had permission from Google for a 2 year leave of absence if elected) I talked with some political consultants, and their input was that like jobs, politicians have a resume and a 'trail' which is to say they do simpler, smaller, roles and the people around them develop a notion of what it is like to work with them. It is _that_ credibility that allows people to believe you can serve them if you are elected. So if you want to run for congress, you should ideally get a job that exposes you to the politicos in your area so they are at least somewhat aware of your existence. That also shows that you can do the scut work of being a politician, and for any job above a certain level of influence (city supervisor, county supervisor) it will inform on how you can be influenced.

Easier to launch a run for the Senate as the former Mayor of San Francisco for example, than it is to launch it as "Oh hey, I can do this! Vote for me." guy with no name recognition. Not that the latter is impossible, but Meg Whitman shows that someone with a ton of money can be beat by a better political record.

<comment><USER6> _" Meg Whitman shows that someone with a ton of money can be beat by a better political record."_

Heh, for me the defining moment of that campaign was Whitman waxing rhapsodic about how she wanted to bring California back to how wonderful it was when she first got here. And someone pointed out that, when she first got here, her opponent was Governor.

<comment><USER7> I'd actually say that that counts against her opponent - things got worse as her opponent was in power. (And the effects of policies often only start being felt years later).

<comment><USER6> Yeah... no. He had already been in power for years when she got here, and there were _decades_ between then and the campaign in question. The evidence under discussion doesn't _rule out_ that interpretation, but it doesn't actually make it particularly likely.

<comment><USER7> Ah ok, fair, I'm not familiar with the particulars of CA politics. I was mostly commenting on the how people arguing in politics frequently try to blame things on people whose fault it couldn't possibly be and take credit for things they couldn't have caused.

<comment><USER6> A valid concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the same women who said "It's called protecting America" when defending the NSA's gathering of phone call records. [0] So surveillance is good, but not when you're the person being surveilled?

[0] [http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/dianne-feinstein-on- ns...](http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/dianne-feinstein-on-nsa-its- called-protecting-america-92340.html)

<comment><USER9> This is an overly simplistic argument. It is not inconsistent to believe that it is a far greater danger for the executive to spy on a co-equal branch of government, in a way that acquires content, than when the executive spys on the public generally in a way that acquires only metadata. It's glib to say "oh, so Congressmen are more important than regular people?" but in at least certain ways, it's true. The dangers created in the two situations are quite different. You might have a different evaluation of the relative gravity of the dangers, you have to concede that they're different.

<comment><USER10> ...assuming you believe the "metadata" bullshit.

<comment><USER9> For better or worse, the distinction between data and metadata is deeply ingrained in 4th amendment law, specifically Smith v. Maryland. And technology hasn't changed the rationale underlying that distinction either. Back in the day, addressing on the outside of an envelope was considered "metadata" and unprotected because you had to reveal that information to the third party for the mail to get routed, so had no expectation of privacy. This same reasoning applies perfectly well to the phone calls in the 1970's in Smith, or for that matter a cell phone call, and arguably TCP/IP headers, today.

<comment><USER11> My understanding is that the "Subject" line of emails are also considered metadata for the purpose of surveillance and warrantless information demands by police.

Subject lines are clearly not needed for routing.

There's feature creep (a.k.a. slippery slope) at work even for metadata.

<comment><USER12> They're headers, which categorically tend to be viewed as metadata even by technologists. You're right that they aren't necessary for routing, but this is not exactly the government being slippery. Even where encryption is used, metadata — including the subject — tends to be sent in the clear.

<comment><USER13> They're MUA headers, not MTA headers. That's an important distinction; those headers are generated directly by the end-users' systems, rather than by the systems responsible for routing the mail around.

<comment><USER12> Even that isn't a clear bright line. For example, the To: header also comes from the MUA, and it's crucial to the message's transit. (In fact, the To: header is very much analogous to the stuff written on the outside of an envelope.)

<comment><USER14> To: actually isn't used in routing. MTAs and MDAs route messages based on the target address that's communicated in the 'RCPT TO' command, ignoring whatever may be in the To/CC[/BCC] lines, should the MUA happen to generate those headers.

The set of metadata used in routing, aka the 'envelope', also contains a return path, which is (normally) used for things like submitting delivery failure reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The backstory on this seems to be: in the process of compiling the Panetta report, staffers for the Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed a huge number of top-secret cables; the only place they were allowed to do that was in a CIA office building, on equipment provided by CIA. Somehow (another NYT story alludes), CIA came to believe that Senate Intelligence had gained access to more documents than intended, so they rifled through the computers they'd provided.

(Even if this is what happened, it's still very bad; I don't understand how CIA gets to mess with its oversight committee in any way.)

<comment><USER16> The _Times_ reported that the CIA created a special network share with the cables that the staffers were supposed to review, and that the staffers "had penetrated a firewall inside the C.I.A. computer system that had been set up to separate the committee's work area from other agency digital files".

That sounds overblown to me. The SSCI committee hires from the same general pool as the rest of the Hill -- ambitious PoliSci grads, lawyers, and the like. They pay the same crappy wages too. They aren't getting Kevin Mitnick.

My guess is that some incompetent windows admin didn't set the permissions right and they were able to click on network neighborhood and access the files in question.

<comment><USER17> Maybe - but remember, we're talking about the CIA. My encounters with anyone potentially related to the agency has been that they're quite competent, to say the least. When considering an agency such as the CIA, it's safe to say that incompetence only occurs in areas where competence is not a priority, incompetence is on purpose, or where the situation is beyond the competence of anyone.

So my guess is they applied little care to the _oversight committee_ and handed them a sheet of what not to do, such as attempt to browse external web sites. The staffers did so anyway, and now are "penetrating" the firewall that didn't even exist except on paper. The agency now has a reason to restrain activities of oversight staffers that they didn't have before (for violating policy).

<comment><USER18> _it 's safe to say that incompetence only occurs in areas where competence is not a priority, incompetence is on purpose, or where the situation is beyond the competence of anyone._

Such as setting up file-access auditing on sensitive files, like what they (or Booz Allen Hamilton, their contractor) didn't do? Hard to believe basic Microsoft sysadmin training concepts evade their competency filter.

<comment><USER18> Oh duh, the Booz comment was intended to include Edward Snowden's name.

<comment><USER17> You're confusing the NSA and the CIA. They are, actually, different entities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the searching of Congressional computers supposedly happened in 2010. She's speaking about it now because she feels the CIA is threatening her committee by turning over the investigation to the Justice department (another Executive branch department).

I know I should be outraged but really all I have is WTF. The head of the Senate oversight committee knew that the CIA had violated multiple laws and did absolutely nothing about it for 4 years. This is oversight? This is what we're all depending on to protect us from an out of control set of military / intelligence / industrial dicks?

</comment><comment><USER20> Spy on Others (Regular People) - it makes us safer.

Spy on me (Rich Senator who is becoming richer) - it is an OUTRAGE!

These congress critters really need to be a bit more nuanced in their double standards. This is the same person that publicly accused Ed Snowden of Treason [1].

So when we got to know about Large scale spying on the entire American Public for NO Reason - the person who told us about it is a traitor. When they learned about a SPECIFIC case of spying on their staffers there is sudden (manufactured) outrage?

I think she senses the public mood & is trying to use this issue to slink back into "of the people by the people" mode. Real Slimy.

[1] [http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and- strategy/304...](http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and- strategy/304573-sen-feinstein-snowdens-leaks-are-treason)

<comment><USER21> I agree with the sentiment but I also recognize that there is a difference between the CIA/NSA spying on citizens and doing the same to congress in a possible effort to directly influence the laws and regulations that govern their behaviour. I do not think that the outrage is "manufactured" because I think it is genuine, the smarter among the Senate that support the surveillance state at least understand the principles involved here.

<comment><USER22> What rights do our legislators have that the citizenry does not?

<comment><USER23> Here is one:

Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 of the Constitution of the United States of America:

 _" The Senators and Representatives...shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same...."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of The Scorpion and the Frog:

A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"

Replies the scorpion: "It's my nature..."

</comment><comment><USER25> The technical details for this brouhaha, if I'm interpreting them correctly, sound like they might approach Dilbert levels of managerial incompetence.

From Saturday's NYT article:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/us/politics/behind- clash-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/us/politics/behind-clash- between-cia-and-congress-a-secret-report-on-interrogations.html)

      The room designated for the staff, called the "electronic
      reading room," was a spartan office with tables and
      computers set against the walls and a large conference
      table in the middle.

      ...

      According to a recent court filing in a Freedom of
      Information Act lawsuit, the C.I.A. created a "network
      share drive" segregated from the main agency network, a
      provision intended to allow the committee to work in
      private.

      ...

      It is unclear how or when committee investigators
      obtained parts of the Panetta review. One official said
      that they had penetrated a firewall inside the C.I.A.
      computer system that had been set up to separate the
      committee's work area from other agency digital files,
      but exactly what happened will not be known until the
      Justice Department completes its inquiry.

      ...

      By then, C.I.A. officials had come to suspect that
      committee investigators working at the Virginia facility
      had seen at least a version of the internal review.
      Senior officials at the agency ordered a search of
      several years' worth of digital audit logs that the
      C.I.A. uses to monitor its computer systems.

So, based on that very vague description, I'm imagining someone set up an ad- hoc SharePoint server, dumped a bunch of PDFs and MS Office docs on a file system, and absent-mindedly left the C$ share open, and then _maybe_ someone accessed the server as an SMB share, and it showed up in the event logs, and now it's snowballed into "ZOMG u 1337 h4ck3rz, u pwnt mai FIREWALLZ!!!1one"

But never let a good disaster go to waste, right?

<comment><USER26> >The technical details for this brouhaha, if I'm interpreting them correctly, sound like they might approach Dilbert levels of managerial incompetence.

One wonders what "Dilbert" would have been like if Scott Adams had worked for the government instead of a private company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This whole story is so Kafkaesque.

The Intelligence committee is just doing a review of the CIA's torture practices, no big deal, largely for purposes of whitewashing the whole thing and sweeping it under the rug.

But then the CIA did something _unconscionable_ and lashed out at the committee, threatening them with being reported to the Justice Department. _That 's_ when a red line was crossed and they had no choice but to bring the CIA's horriffic moral crime (not torture, but fucking with the Senate) public.

<comment><USER9> That's not what Kafkaesque means. Kafkaesque is something like Chicago's treatment of sex offenders: state law requires them to register yearly within a short window at the threat of violating probation, but the police close the registration office early because they're lazy. Its about lack of coordination and internal inconsistency, not malintent.

<comment><USER28> This is the same Robert Eatinger who engineered the CIA torture cover up. It is exceedingly kind of you not to ascribe malintent in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >> Ms. Feinstein said she had sought an apology and an acknowledgment that the C.I.A.'s conduct was improper.

This is on par with what a child would get disciplined with for cutting in the lunch line. If a civilian would have done this they would have been prosecuted with a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and sentenced to 30 years in jail.

</comment><comment><USER30> The CIA starts pulling Nixon level shenanigans and the general response is ZOMG Feinstein is such a hypocrite?

The way this works is:

1) The CIA violated the law under Bush II by torturing, but was allowed to get away with it because, politics.

2) The people in Congress who want to nail them on this spend the next 5-10 years searching through 5 million records while the CIA spends as much time as they can stalling them.

3) They finally hit the mother load in a document that shows the people running the CIA know about these legal issues 5 years ahead of the committee.

4) People in the CIA freak, try to hide the documents, and then try and get to the DOJ ahead of the committee. Because, as soon as the DOJ is involved, the game is over since they either have to plead the 5th or get caught up in Obstruction of Justice charges.

This is all separate from the NSA spying stuff, which Feinstein is wrong on. But it's not even hypocritical for her to say "spying is okay, but torture is bad news for Democracy." Given a choice between the two, I'd still rather be spied on for no reason, than tortured for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER31> Gambling? At Rick's? I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on!

For those missing the reference, this is from the movie "Casablanca" It's an English idiom used when an official becomes conveniently outraged or overly surprised at something they had known was going on all along. The outrage expressed is a pro forma statement meant for public consumption -- it doesn't necessarily make sense if you examine it closely, and in fact can be quite funny given the context.

There is a generic problem here: the legislature in the United States has decided that instead of overseeing the government, it was going to grant huge swaths of power to various agencies, then swoop in for various high-profile investigations when anything went wrong. That way they get to play the hero without actually having to do a lot of work.

Well, the problem with this theory of separation of powers is that pretty soon you have dozens or hundreds of agencies, all without much adult supervision, all wanting to do more and more to "help". Without oversight, they turn to the next best thing: in-house legal advice, which tells them what is legal or not.

So now we have multiple intelligence agencies doing things their lawyers say are legal, but the majority of the American people are pretty pissed about (or getting that way).

The way to fix this is NOT to single out CIA or NSA or become outraged or not at any one incident. Geesh, there are dozens of agencies just like them that could be doing the same thing, and it's playing whack-a-mole. We need a reform of Congressional oversight, along with clear criminal laws about what can be gathered or not gathered. These agencies need guidance and oversight, not political posturing and outrage. (Although I'm never one to turn down politicians bloviating on issues I care about).

</comment><comment><USER32> They don't have anything to hide, right? Why should they worry about being surveilled? We need to fight terrorism wherever it is, even in Congress.

Right?

</comment><comment><USER33> > _The C.I.A. has referred the matter to the Justice Department to investigate > possible wrongdoing, a move that Ms. Feinstein called "a potential effort to > intimidate this staff."_

What could the Justice Department do in the event that they found wrongdoing on the part of the Senate staff? Don't members of the Senate had immunity from this type of prosecution exactly to prevent this type of interference and intimidation?

</comment><comment><USER11> Shouldn't a Congressional oversight committee have access to _everything_ at the CIA? Therefore it should be impossible to accuse the committee of improper access since it's their right.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, they should, except for that pesky 4th amendment, where the committee fucked up what not getting the FISA court to rubber stamp it.

Though the committee could counter that because the information _could_ cross outside of the USA that it's really foreign information anyway and thus doesn't require a warrant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I knew someone who had a vicious dog. Over the years, that dog attacked, sometimes seriously injuring, dozens of people and other animals.

One day, the dog bit off the tip of the owner's finger, unprovoked. He was put down shortly thereafter.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wait wait - I thought she _likes_ the CIA/NSA?

<comment><USER37> She likes it when they spy on _other people_.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's crazy to consider targeted surveillance of their oversight body as being more of a problem than dragnet surveillance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What happened, did she finally realize the political winds were against her so speaking out against CIA was a good move? She's been one of NSA's staunchest supporters to date.

Is there a big split between CIA and NSA in her mind? There really isn't in reality -- one of the biggest post-9/11 changes is that the "intelligence community" actually acts like a community; even the FBI CT guys aren't viewed too badly by NSA/CIA/JSOC IME.

</comment><comment><USER39> The video of the whole speech of Sen. Feinstein about CIA:

[http://youtu.be/GNhDDAhCXXE](http://youtu.be/GNhDDAhCXXE)

The transcript:

[http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press- relea...](http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press- releases?ID=db84e844-01bb-4eb6-b318-31486374a895)

Very good written, worth reading or watching.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is she really this daft? I mean, really, why does she think they can provide oversight of agencies whose purpose is to secretly collect intelligence, intercept communications, etc.? And, she relies on them to provide the information for their own oversight, yet sees nothing wrong with that?

So, she's shocked that some files were moved. Did it occur to her that she wouldn't have known something was being withheld if the CIA had never provided them in the first place? For that matter, does she ever wonder if perhaps massive amounts of information are routinely withheld?

Strong whistleblower laws are quite possibly the only true means of effective oversight. Yet, she seems to be too busy calling Snowden a traitor to consider that salient point.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Feinstein "accused the Central Intelligence Agency of improperly removing > documents from computers that committee staff members had been using to > complete a report on the agency's detention program, saying the move was > part of an effort to intimidate the committee."

This sounds like an elderly person that does not understand computers. A staffer probably misplaced a file and cried "CIA". Although I revel in the fact that ubiquitous spying bothers her when _she_ is the target I'm not convinced she knows what she is talking about.

Also note this happened in 2010 so it just sounds like an excuse for her to make a political about face in the face of pressure about the NSA.

</comment><comment><USER42> Solution: retroactively legalize the spying, create a legal framework to continue doing so. They need to accept that less privacy is the cost of legislating in a free country. It's called keeping America safe.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is anyone surprised by this?

<comment><USER44> I'm shocked this is coming from Feinstein. She's been a big proponent of the CIA/NSA.

<comment><USER45> +1 I found both an odd irony and irked by the implication of "its ok to snoop on random citizens, but not on me"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Holy shit there's a lot of character attacks in this thread. She may be a scumbag, but what she's saying is right. If the CIA is spying domestically and intimidating/hacking its oversight body, then it should be put down in favor of something else.

</comment><comment><USER47> NSA/FBI have an ongoing rivalry with the CIA.

There is no incongruity in attacking CIA while protecting NSA.

</comment><comment><USER48> See higher-ranked report at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379236)

</comment><comment><USER49> And... cue the 'accidental death' or 'heart attack out of the blue.

Movie land of course, not 'real' life.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's like Merkel all over again. "what? you're spying on me too? well, that's wrong."

</comment><comment><USER51> Loves power when wielding it, hates its being wielded against. It's not hypocrisy. It's human.

</comment><comment><USER52> Kewl. So it's ok to spy on The People, but Congress!?! Omfg you Nazis! How dare you!?!?!?!!?!!??

</comment><comment><USER53> Why did they change the title? Are they trying to promote Feinstein or something?

</comment><comment><USER54> The person I hate the most living today or ever: Feinstein.

</comment><comment><USER55> But really who cares. Nothing is going to change

<comment><USER4> No point in anything: no point in oversight, no point in the government, no point in waking up in the morning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Feinstein... Yet another corporatist appeasing political hack that has as much self-awareness as she does ethics.</comment>


Show HN: Pairwhen - A Simple and Fast Pair Programming Scheduling Tool - <AUTHOR> https://pairwhen.com <comment><AUTHOR> I built this mainly to solve a problem I run into often: finding a time that works for me and a stranger (usually on a different timezone) to pair program. Usually it involves me walking someone through a problem that they posted online and the logistics of trying to find a common time is usually painful.

It's a pretty specific problem so it's possible that few of you will have interest in using this, but any feedback is welcome nonetheless.

<comment><USER2> What's the price you have in mind down the road?

<comment><AUTHOR> To be frank, I'm not sure. I'll probably always keep a basic features free and have a price for integrations. What do you think about that?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What habit you've added recently changed your life? - <AUTHOR> What habit(s) changed your life? <comment><USER2> Getting off transit a few stops early and walking a mile and a half to work; doing the inverse in the evening. It helps that most of that last mile is through a lovely park.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wake up early in the morning</comment>


When Small Numbers Lead to Big Errors  - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-small-numbers-lead-to-big-errors

<comment><USER2> Is that the whole article, or do I have to be a subscriber?</comment>


DNA may not be life's instruction book - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-04-dna-life-bookjust-jumbled-ingredients.html <comment><USER2> It makes sense to me that DNA is like a config file, while the molecules mentioned in the article are source code, the 'sensors' are like a makefile, and the cellular machinery that does the work of reproduction is like the compiler.

You need all of the pieces to get a working compiled copy of the program. You can change a lot about the end program by modifying the config file, but you can't necessarily change the structures themselves. Likewise, you can infer a lot about the end product by examining the config file, but you cannot reproduce it without a compiler, source code, and a makefile.

Maybe you can even use a compiler from a distant fork together with source code from another, if enough of the language spec is compatible. Or you could cleverly copy pieces of config files from an unrelated project to create a similar change in your project.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about.</comment>


Sketching with a Sharpie - (37signals) - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie <comment><USER2> All the animation storyboard artists I work with use sharpies at first too, for the same reasons. It helps you focus on the story instead of design details, which are better resolved later in the process (when you know you aren't going to change the broad strokes).</comment>


Are you a Web designer or from a web studio? Need you help - <AUTHOR> Hi there,
I've got a question to web designers/web studios.
Do you often face a situation that you have to decline the potential clients reaching out to you? For instance, their budget is too low or you won't be able to make a project within the needed term? If so, please share more reasons for that.
I would really appreciate your feedback on this! <comment> barry-cotter Thank you for reaching out to me I really appreciate it. Unfortunately that's not a contract I can take on at the moment. If you would like I could do [project with lower scope for their budget] or [project for their scope with higher budget]. I'm happy to have lunch or talk over Skype for 30 minutes if you'd like. If not I can recommend a reliable friend who is not as far along in their career as I am.

You should sign up for double your freelancing from Brennan Dunn or listen to Kai Davis and Nick Disaboto's podcast Make Money Online or read Alan Weiss's books on consulting.

If you have other similar questions my email is in my profile and you should look at patio11's comment history.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter You should charge more. If you have low availability and people are asking you to do work that's not paying enough you should try doubling your rates for new customers. If you're worried about it tell your old customers that they have six months to lock in any work they want done at the old rate and then they'll get charged the new higher rate too.

You're busy. You can afford to be less busy and make more money. If it doesn't work you can reduce your rates a bit.

You should have an accountant.</comment>


Cell service outage spike in US - <AUTHOR> https://downdetector.com/ <comment><USER2> Does the cell network have a single point of failure which could explain these concurrent outages across carriers? I have a (somewhat crude) mental model of how the internet works, so if this were a nationwide internet outage I would at least have an inkling of whether it was an accidental misconfiguration, bad actor launching an attack, etc. I have no such model for the cell network!

</comment><comment><USER3> Tinfoil hat theory: government trying to disrupt protests by breaking down communications and disrupting live streams

<comment><USER4> I think that's definitely not impossible

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its a fiber cut on zayo, fuckin heyyyy-yo: [https://tranzact.zayo.com/#!/networkStatus](https://tranzact.zayo.com/#!/networkStatus)

</comment><comment><USER6> The DDOS on the Anonymous twitter might be relevant given timing. All happened around an hour ago.

[https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/12726345485771653...](https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/1272634548577165315)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23533311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23533311)

</comment><comment><USER7> It appears to be only T-Mobile that is down presently ([https://twitter.com/NevilleRay/status/1272624569707184128](https://twitter.com/NevilleRay/status/1272624569707184128)), likely that those making calls to T-Mobile phones are representing outages on their networks.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah this is something. They all seem to have started at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just got one of those annoying alerts on my phone. Saying "Loccal cell phone carriers are experiencing outages" and an alternative number for 9-1-1 calls.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As of right now looks like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and many others.</comment>


Colout: Color Up Arbitrary Command Output - <AUTHOR> http://nojhan.github.io/colout/ <comment><USER2> Oh I was looking for something like this! I always wanted something like `grep --color` but without the `grep` functionality, and with multi color support!

Thanks!</comment>


Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/mashable-reportedly-selling-to-ziff-davis-for-about-50-million/ <comment><USER2> Comparisons:

Mashable: $46M raised[0], 15M MAU[1] and $35-40M p.a in revenue[2] (sold for $50M)

Business Insider: $55M raised, 76M MAU, $50M+ rev (sold at $442M[5])

Refinery29: $125M raised, 27M MAU, $100M+ rev

Vox: $307M raised[4], 170M MAU, $100M+ rev

Buzzfeed: $496M raised, 200M+ MAU, $280-300M rev (was $350M - updated thanks)

HuffPo: $37M raised, 126M MAU, $30M+ rev (sold for $316M)

TechCrunch: $0 raised, 5M+ MAU, ? rev (sold for $25-30M)

Medium: $132M raised, 60M+ MAU, ? rev

Cracked: $0 raised, 10M+ MAU, $12M+ rev (sold for $39M[6])

Margins and growth are the diff between selling for 1.5x revenue and 10x revenue[7] - clearly a few models, where you either raise a little and do well with low headcount and organic audience, or raise $40M+ and set an expectation of getting near 100M MAU with $40M+ p.a revenue with high margins (~50%) and growth

[0] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mashable](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mashable)

[1] [https://admin.mashable.com/wp- content/MashableMediaKit.pdf](https://admin.mashable.com/wp- content/MashableMediaKit.pdf)

[2] [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mashable-could-be-for- sal...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mashable-could-be-for-sale-for-as- much-as-300-million-2015-12?r=US&IR=T)

[3] [http://adage.com/article/media/private-equity-plowing- money-...](http://adage.com/article/media/private-equity-plowing-money- buzzfeed-vox/297034/)

[4] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vox- media](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vox-media)

[5] [http://fortune.com/2015/09/29/business-insider-axel- springer...](http://fortune.com/2015/09/29/business-insider-axel-springer/)

[6] [https://www.recode.net/2016/4/12/11586060/cracked-demand- med...](https://www.recode.net/2016/4/12/11586060/cracked-demand-media- scripps)

[7] [https://www.poynter.org/news/how-much-digital-media- company-...](https://www.poynter.org/news/how-much-digital-media-company- really-worth-guide)

<comment><USER3> The Wall Street Journal is reporting [1] that BuzzFeed is set to fall short of their $350m 2017 sales target by 15% to 20%. So a better number on that might be $280m to $300m.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzzfeed-set-to-miss-revenue- ta...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzzfeed-set-to-miss-revenue-target- signaling-turbulence-in-media-1510861771)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back in the day mashable seemed like a competitor to TechCrunch, with a focus on tech news and trends. Then they pivoted toward viral content, and were personally never a destination again.

It seemed a weird move even at the time. Why would you want to build a business that's contingent upon catching the zeitgeist in a bottle? That's so incredibly hard.

<comment><USER5> If you look at raw traffic numbers Mashable is far bigger than Techcrunch and far more profitable.

What you are feeling and seeing is that the media is turned into a hyper- partisan machine where any issue discussed is in the context of extremes. It drives emotion, creates and drives viral content, and drives revenue. However, it doesn't produce substantive content one would find meaningful. It doesn't pay.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure? I know there are better sources than alexa, but its usually fairly accurate for top 1000 sites.

Techcrunch is 281 US, 632 world, Mashable is 364 US, 855 world.

[https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/techcrunch.com](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/techcrunch.com) [https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mashable.com](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mashable.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mashable, notably, is often credited with kicking off the much-derided "pivot to video" trend: [https://www.recode.net/2016/4/7/11585950/mashable-fires- news...](https://www.recode.net/2016/4/7/11585950/mashable-fires-news-staff- executives)

But the buyout is sad to me because, if you break it down, it was a really great example of technology blog getting launched by a guy in his bedroom and that guy finding major success with it. There was a time that Mashable was so prominent in the social sphere that a new article of theirs could trend on Twitter just because of the source.

Certainly, the company's never gone away (and it's produced some pretty amazing alums in the journalism world, it should be said—Christina Warren and Alex Fitzpatrick come to mind immediately), but the site's original model—which was effectively a pitch to the masses of "Web 2.0 is awesome, don't you agree?"—had a certain charm to it that got lost when it decided its competition was BuzzFeed.

Certainly Mashable is no longer that kind of blog anymore, but this is sort of the death knell of the big Web 2.0 blog—a list that includes sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Barring The Next Web (which I believe is still owned by its original team), the ones that are still with us (like TechCrunch and now Mashable) are largely conglomerate-owned.

Unfortunate that Cashmore put all that work into the site only to basically break even.

<comment><USER8> How about Pando?

<comment><USER7> It was founded after that era. (Though it's part of that lineage simply because it features a lot of former TechCrunchers.) All the sites I listed launched around 2005-2007, during the Web 2.0 years.

Sites like Pando and The Information really fit in a different category—they're built less around aggregation like Mashable and company were upon launch, and more on original reporting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ex-Ziff'er here. That company seems to exist to be sold. Back in late 1990's it was split and sold: Things like Gamespot and TechTV came out of it. Now, what's being sold is a husk of the old media empire. Kinda like Atari: mostly name, and a few remaining properties.

<comment><AUTHOR> TechTV! That goes way back and now I miss G4

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Years ago (mid-late `90s) I used to buy "MacWorld" magazine every month, which I enjoyed. Not long after the internet became a thing they did a "Best Web Browser" feature and gushed about "Netscape Navigator" to the point where I got suspicious because on the Mac it was truly awful. Not that there was anything better, but it was still crap.

That inspired me to comment on their AOL page that I thought they gushed too much and I mentioned that after reading it I had to wonder if they owned stock in Netscape. One their representatives came on and trashed me for insinuating such a thing and then their fan club piled on me and just reamed me over my comments but the very next month they had yet another article about it and this one began with a disclaimer saying they did own stock in Netscape.

That was it for me. I never bought another issue of it or anything else they published.

</comment><comment><USER11> I owe a lot to mashable.

A friend of mine and I did this [http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/pinview- facebook-pinterest-ap...](http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/pinview-facebook- pinterest-app/#7zLe5tuCDZqx)

and they picked it up which then started a whole slew of other magazine picking it up.

It was one of the reasons I could get an O visa as it gave me exposure in a lot of international magainze.

Anway sad to see them sell for a while it was one of my favorite online blogs.

</comment><comment><USER12> Same parent company that recently bought Humble Bundle.</comment>


Learn EBPF Tracing: Tutorial and Examples - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-01-01/learn-ebpf-tracing.html <comment><USER2> I want to try out eBPF tracing in Linux. I really do.

Last three times I tried to install bcc/bpftrace on my Debian boxes, I failed to do so. The situation has not changed for over a year. I'm not the only one:

[https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/678](https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/678)

[https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/1434](https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/1434)

[https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/1985](https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/1985)

<comment><USER3> I have ran ebpf on ubuntu, so not sure what the difference is with Debian. I will note that clang 3.7 is fairly old at this point, I have started building a more recent llvm+clang (7.0.0 stable) myself instead of relying on the installed package, then building bcc against that. You might try that route, although llvm takes an eternity to build.

<comment><USER4> > You might try that route, although llvm takes an eternity to build.

You don't need to build it from source yourself. The LLVM people build and host packages for Debian and Ubuntu in package repos that anyone can install from.

Instructions here: [https://apt.llvm.org/](https://apt.llvm.org/)

<comment><USER3> Ah, true. I should note I build a statically linked llvm so I can deploy my project on different versions. The pre-built llvm should work for most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the bpftrace tutorial, I would have expected the one-liner

        bpftrace -e 'tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_open { printf("%d %s\n", pid, str(args->filename)); }'

to show me all open calls as they happen. I would have expected to see an open when I cat a file, for example. But trying the one-liner, I only see a few opens of files in /proc.

Can anyone explain what's happening?

<comment><USER6> It actually turns out most of the calls are `openat(2)`. I had the same question initially.

<comment><USER7> (don't have access to a linux box I can test this on at the moment, so sorry for the stupid question)

In DTrace, you can specify a probe like

      syscall::*open*:entry / / { }

to grab open(2), openat(2), etc. Does eBPF allow wildcards in probe specifications?

<comment><USER5> You can do

        bpftrace -e 'tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_open* { printf("%d\n", pid); }'

but then you can't access the arguments of the different probes uniformly, i.e.

        bpftrace -e 'tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_open* { printf("%d %s\n", pid, str(args->filename)); }'

does not work.

You can do it like this:

        bpftrace -e 'tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_open { printf("%d %s\n", pid, str(args->filename)); } tracepoint:syscalls:sys_enter_openat { printf("%d %s\n", pid, str(args->filename)); }'

This is a bit awkward, but it seems that this will be fixed: [https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/issues/132](https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/issues/132)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was this talk[0] at 35c3 introducing eBPF tracing. I still have it on my towatch list as I could not attend it.

[0] [https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9532-kernel_tracing_with_ebpf](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9532-kernel_tracing_with_ebpf)

</comment><comment><USER9> I use HTTPS Everywhere plugin for firefox... it's pretty surprising in 2019 how many network-related blogs and articles are on http links and the https equivalent is broken.

You can use Let's Encrypt, it's free. It makes me not want to listen to what's supposed to be their wisdom on networking matters if they can't even get that right.

<comment><USER10> Gregg isn't a bad engineer. In fact, quite the opposite. Do yourself a favor and overlook the TLS on his read only blog.

<comment><USER9> Maybe he should do himself a favor and fix his broken :443, or disable it.</comment></comment></comment>


Money Creation in the Modern Economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy <comment><USER2> Nice to have this explained simply. Most people don't believe it so to have a BoE link with the info is invaluable.</comment>