LG abandoning the modular smartphone idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/4/14172070/lg-next-flagship-g6-smartphone-friends-modules-ces-2017 <comment><AUTHOR> I can see why hackers (especially at Google) liked this idea, but who in their right mind would think the average consumer would ever want a modular phone?

<comment><USER2> All other things being equal, why wouldn't an average consumer want a modular smart phone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? Because they don't want to spend a microsecond of their time thinking about whether they could save a few bucks upgrading a part of their phone vs getting a whole new shiny new phone.

You could argue all day long that it makes more sense for consumers to have modular phones but you would be arguing against human nature.

As an aside I also suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reality of modular phones would not live up to its promise.

<comment><USER2> _Why? Because they don 't want to spend a microsecond of their time thinking about whether they could save a few bucks upgrading a part of their phone vs getting a whole new shiny new phone._

Given carrier subsidization of phone costs, I guess I could buy that. IF consumers were actually routinely paying full retail costs for their phones, I expect it would be a different story.

But even so, given how a large segment of consumers (although clearly not all) are interested in piece-meal upgrades to everything else in their lives - computers, stereos, cars, blah, blah, blah, one wonders why they would treat phones so particularly differently.

I wonder if the problem with LG's initiative wasn't more along the lines of "all other things _weren 't_ actually equal". If the "modular" phone is much (bigger|heavier|more expensive|whatever) then it's easier to see how the benefits might fail to offset the downside.

<comment><USER3> > given how a large segment of consumers (although clearly not all) are > interested in piece-meal upgrades to everything else in their lives - > computers, stereos, cars,

Two things: first I'd question how popular modularity really is in those categories -- do most people buy modular stereo's today or just bluetooth speakers for their phones (or just headphones for their phones)? Consoles and laptops with glued in components seem pretty popular too. And while people update certain things about their cars are that many people really messing around with the embedded electronics that run their Camry? This leads to the second point: smartphones are already modular in a sense, just at a different level. There are a zillion cases you can buy, third party chargers, battery packs, camera lenses, a whole array of bluetooth widgets and of course all those apps and cloud services.

<comment><USER2> _And while people update certain things about their cars are that many people really messing around with the embedded electronics that run their Camry?_

Well, I doubt the majority of people do that. But there's definitely a real market for after-market mods of that nature. But I don't know that anybody markets a car specifically on the basis of its "tinkerability". Historically cars were fairly open to modding by default. It's only been recently, with DMCA shit, etc. that cars have really started getting locked down.

 _This leads to the second point: smartphones are already modular in a sense, just at a different level. There are a zillion cases you can buy, third party chargers, battery packs, camera lenses, a whole array of bluetooth widgets and of course all those apps and cloud services._

Fair enough. That may actually be the more salient point.

I guess my thinking is this: a "modular" phone probably wouldn't ever be the "iPhone killer", but if it's done right, I would expect there would be enough people who would want it, to make it a profitable niche item. At least, that would be my naive assessment. Obviously phones are a complicated market due to carrier subsidies and exclusive offers, etc., etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i think the idea itself is not essentially bad, the fatal flaw is battery life, ive mentioned this before but ill take the example of the audio add on. as a bit of an audio nerd the idea of good sound from a phone was appealing in a way, but back when i had my note 2 which ran a wolfson dac and didnt sound half bad i had a habit of draining my battery pretty quickly and that was with lower end headphones and mp3s.

now if you were going to shell out and buy the modular add on then chances are youre the sort of person who is also into your music and listens to a reasonable amount on decent headphones with lossless files eating your battery alive. as far as im aware the add on comes with some level of extended battery but the DAC in the modular add on is of higher quality than the wolfson that was in the note i mentioned earlier, for that i have a few extra comparisons.

before i moved to using a stand alone player i did something not that dissimilar to what the LG audio mod does, i connected a good quality portable USB DAC to my phone via OTG, the results were excellent, the sound quality was impeccable but at a hefty price, even the short 45 min bus ride to work could eat over 30% of my battery.

but that was an old phone and not really designed to be running external accessories, so for further comparison ill move on to my separate player, a FiiO X5ii, a device made for one purpose, playing music. while not as tall it is thicker and heavier than just about any smartphone out there and has no touch screen, this (incredible) device will pump out around 10 continuous hours of music, just enough to get through a full working day including commute, so to put it simply pumping out decent quality audio sucks quite a lot of juice. (another more "smartphoney" comparison is my old ibasso DX90, an android based audiophile player with a small touchscreen which used the galaxy S3 battery, even with a 3rd party mugenpower extended battery it only ran for around 7 hours)

so even with any extended battery offered by the add on using it is going to seriously drain your devices life and few of us want to be without our beloved devices meaning youll end up rationing your use of it eventually forgetting about it altogether.

this doesnt just apply to the audio mod either, if you are the kind of person willing to drop a decent chunk of extra cash on upgraded functionality then youre probably the kind of person who uses that feature enough to make using the module a problem for battery life, meaning youre probably better off spending the money on a dedicated device for the job.

once battery tech finally evolves to the point that we can have high level tech from other devices integrated into a single one ill probably be all for the idea but right now my phone can barely handle a day doing what it does already, once that is a little better then we can start thinking of bringing in really high grade tech.

CPU and other component refinements etc are one thing but they can only go so far and were getting pretty near that limit now, we NEED some sort of power breakthrough, whether that comes in the form of a better battery or a better wireless power system is yet to be seen but it needs to happen before truly convergent devices can really progress much further.</comment>


The tragic physics of the deadly explosion in Beirut - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/tragic-physics-deadly-explosion-beirut/ <comment><USER2> For all the horror, at least this happened at the quayside and half the explosive force radiated away almost harmlessly over the sea. That basically halved the actual destruction at the outset. If it had been in the middle of the city, there would have been twice the damage. This much is fairly obvious.

What isn't quite so obvious is that roughly half the energy was also wasted _upwards_ , and that a startlingly worse case would have been if the explosives had been slightly interred, coupling the blast more closely to the ground and enhancing amplitude of the p-waves and providing plenty of really substantial debris raining down after basically 'earth-quaking' the buildings.

Roughly combining the two 50% 'wastages' leaves you with about only one quarter of the energy was actually _really_ channeled into destruction, which I'm going to be charitable and call a third. In 'ideal' conditions you might've had three times as much devastation, and that's a pretty shocking thing to consider, given the actual carnage.

NOTE: I had appended these considerations in a more inchoate form to the tail- end of another comment, but I figured I'd make them an item of their own and tidy them up a bit. Apologies for the duplication.

<comment><USER3> The grain store probably shielded a lot of other infrastructure and people too.

However it seems very irresponsible to keep 85% of the country's grain in a single spot. It's scary how so many single points of failure exist.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I've been thinking about that too... harsh as it may sound, big concrete cylinders fillded with loose grain is pretty much the best pillow to cushion the blow you could think of.

EDIT: As for the grain silos being "single points of failure", that depends on the scope of the system you're considering. Nationally, yeah... but internationally, there's plenty and it's being shipped in. So there's actually more redundancy than the narrow-scope analysis would suggest. The 85% figure is just a figment of where one draws the borders, and national borders probably don't have much valence in the given context (fortunately). Now, if we were speaking about 85% of the world's ability to _ship_ grain... now that would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

<comment><USER4> I did consider that the dust present in a grain silo could make made a 'flour bomb' and compounded the explosion. Maybe not

<comment><USER2> To be perfectly honest, that was my very first reaction when I first watched the video: it looked like the fuming aftermath of Something Really Bad, and then BOOM! _Something Really Bad_ unfolded on-screen. I figured that it must've been some kind of aerosol/powder combustion triggered by the fireworks' conflagration, but then more learned analyses of cloud hue and knowledge of what was actually stored _in situ_ (correctly) overrode my initial reaction and the fertilizer was identified as the main culprit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Just after 9 am on December 6, 1917, in Halifax, mustachioed 45-year-old > train dispatcher Vincent Coleman knew the lazy plume of smoke coming from > the explosive-laden vessel in Halifax harbor was a terrifying portent of > worse to come. But as the other dispatchers ran for their lives, Coleman > realized the number of train passengers set to arrive at Halifax any moment, > and so he stayed long enough to send one final telegram: "Hold up the train. > Munitions ship on fire and making for Pier 6 ... Goodbye boys." Coleman died > in the blast at 9:05, but his final message saved thousands, not just the > passengers on the trains that were able to stop before entering the zone of > destruction, but also the citizens already in Halifax: The telegram signal > reached every operator in the surrounding region, and because of Coleman's > quick thinking, every doctor who felt the earth rumble, up to 160 km away, > had almost immediate access to news about what had happened. They rushed in > to help._

This particular tit-bit at the end of the article is a gem. Times like these tend to also bring the best in some of us.

<comment><USER6> I had trouble understanding exactly how this scenario played out. Interestingly, Wikipedia gave some more color on the timing and distance involved [1]:

      The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 750 feet (230 m) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." Coleman's message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately.

Also the Wikipedia about Vince Coleman [2] is missing the details from [1]. I guess this is part of the Wikipedia Wormhole people go through...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion) [2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Coleman_(train_dispatc...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Coleman_\(train_dispatcher\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Within that radius, the injuries from such a massive blast in a downtown > location can be as varied as the victims who experience them, but a number > of them are likely from glass and other flying projectiles. Flat, delicate, > frangible, and installed in large sheets, glass is the perfect target for a > blast wave of even minuscule magnitude; it shatters and flies easier than > any other substance.

The glass damage must be horrible. Your entire home covered in tiny pieces of glass.

I hate when glass breaks at home because no matter how much you clean, it gets everywhere and months later you discover small shards in some distant place.

Once I tripped on my way home after grocery shopping, almost at the destination. It wasn't even a big fall, but some glass bottles broke. They were next to plastic bags filled with oats. In the "recovery operations" I conducted afterwards, I threw away the remainders of the bottles and cleaned the oats bags under flowing water, to get rid of the glass bottle's contains on the bags. As I did this, I noticed the oats themselves getting wet, below the transparent plastic. I wondered, how can this happen, it's supposed to be water-proof. Then I found a tiny, almost invisible cut where a glass shard has entered the plastic bag. It was a big shard and I don't know what had happened had someone not noticed it and ate it.

Horrified, I threw away the entire bag of oats, the risk of more, possibly smaller shards remaining was too big. Other bags which passed the "water test" I kept and I ended up eating their contents.

I hope the people of Beirut are doing similar checks for their stored food, for their own safety. I read that many folks already have glass shards in their bodies due to the explosion but that's past damage that can only be managed. The future damage is preventable.

<comment><USER8> > The glass damage must be horrible. Your entire home covered in tiny pieces > of glass.

Watch this video at .25x to really see how glass reacts in the pressure wave. You can see the look on the bride's face as the initial vibrations/sound reaches her. Then, you can actually see the window pane bow like a wind sail.

[https://youtu.be/PUQ-QvCqDjA](https://youtu.be/PUQ-QvCqDjA)

<comment><USER9> Why does the camera lens not shatter in this case?

And in the same vein, what happens to peoples' eyeglasses?

Does anyone know?

<comment><USER10> The ratio of the thickness of the glass compared to the unsupported span of material makes them relatively much more rigid than a big, floppy pane of glass. A glass window is not only much less rigid, but also maximizes the surface area that pressure from the blast wave can push against.

<comment><USER11> This and the fact that eyeglasses are usually not firmly attached to a huge chunk of reinforced concrete.

<comment><USER12> usually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> here is an amazing view of the explosion. [https://youtu.be/hp-n- ghagok](https://youtu.be/hp-n-ghagok)

<comment><USER14> I'd imagine this is approximately what Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have looked like, but the direction of the pressure wave would be different as they were both air bursts.

<comment><USER15> This is absolutely nothing like a nuclear detonation. The energy released was less than 10% of Hiroshima, but besides that, the detonation velocity of ammonium nitrate can't even hold a candle to the near instantaneous energy release of a nuclear weapon. It's the difference between a pile of gunpowder and a block of TNT, and even that comparison doesn't do it justice.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for writing this.

There's been some strange tendency of late to conflate the weapons effects of nuclear or thermonuclear explosions with those of "really big amounts of conventional high explosive". While that may even hold true at a sufficiently great radius, the proximate effects due to the near-instantaneous radiated energy is something that has no comparable analogue in the conventional world.

These effects are not really militarily useful, which is why even in the realm of small tactical nuclear weapons there has been a tendency towards minimising or not emphasising them, but...

The _power_ of a nuclear weapon, intended properly as energy released per unit time, is in a league of it's own.

Aside: for all the horror, at least this happened at the quayside and half the explosive force radiated away almost harmlessly over the sea. That basically halved the actual destruction at the outset. If it had been in the middle of the city, there would have been twice the damage.

EDIT: A startlingly worse case would have been if the explosives had been slightly interred, coupling the blast more closely to the ground and enhancing amplitude of the p-waves and providing plenty of really substantial debris raining down after basically 'earth-quaking' the buildings.

NOTE: Took the last paragraphs and placed them into their own comment, with logical conclusion. Apologies for the duplication.

<comment><USER16> _> There's been some strange tendency of late to conflate the weapons effects of nuclear or thermonuclear explosions with those of "really big amounts of conventional high explosive"._

Haven't people been using kilotons and megatons of TNT equivalent as a measure of nuclear bomb energy since the 1950s?

<comment><USER17> Yes, but that doesn't mean that X tonnes of a random substance blowing up will be as destructive as the instantaneous release of equivalent energy that a nuke delivers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This blast was reminiscent of what happened in Halifax long ago:

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

To this date Halifax has a medical specialty: eye damage. People were looking at the fire on board the boat and ended up with plate glass shards in their eyes.

</comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for posting this - I wasn't previously aware of the delineation between a shock wave and a pressure wave that the author explained clearly.

I'm curious, is there something specific about "high explosives" vs "low explosives", beyond just the magnitude of energy released, that explains why some generate shock waves and others pressure waves?

<comment><USER20> In a nutshell, high explosives detonate, low explosives combust. The two processes are distinctly different in how they operate at the molecular level. Basically, detonation is when a shock wave goes through the material, causing it to "blow up" on a molecular level as it passes (the molecules split as the shock passes through). Combustion happens much slower and is usually a chemical reaction involving some sort of fuel and oxidizer that is mixed and burned. I'm not an expert, but you can see the difference in a gasoline engine. As you crank up the compression ratio the air/fuel mix in the cylinder will eventually undergo a change from combusting to detonating, producing engine "knock" and rapidly destroying your engine if you let it continue. On a gas motor, around 13:1 is a good spot to see this happen. Someone will have more for you, but I think this is the basic concept seperating the two.

<comment><USER14> Am I right in my understanding then that diesel engines work entirely on the principle of detonation, and that's why they're heavier as everything is designed to cope with what would make a petrol engine _ping_?

Does that make any sense?

Or is diesel injected in to the cylinder in a way that more or less produces a controlled combustion?

<comment><USER20> Diesel engines have a very high compression ratio, like 20:1 or more, but diesel fuel has a very high octane rating in comparison with gasoline, so it still combusts, not detonates, at these high ratios. What makes a diesel different than a gas engine is that the heat generated from the compression of the air/fuel mix is what actually causes the mix to start burning in the cylinder. So, for this reason you don't see any ignition system on a diesel usually, it doesn't need it (though maybe glow plugs or a block heater in cold areas, but not an actual ignition system). But the mixture still combusts in a diesel. Detonation is incredibly destructive to any engine, even a big beefy diesel. It can destroy any engine very quickly.

<comment><USER21> Diesel has a _low_ octane number. Though octane isn't used for diesel fuel, it can be determined and is around 15-25.

Diesel engines avoid pre-ignition knocking by compressing only air. There is no compression of air/fuel mix. The fuel is injected into the hot, compressed air at the top of the compression stroke (at something like 3000+ PSI, IIRC).

The fuel does not have to be particularly volatile because of the high compression and the injector's atomization.

In theory, diesel engines can run on "anything". Diesel engines have been run on crude oil taken directly from the ground (of good purity), and on vegetable oil.

<comment><USER22> You can do that with old diesel engines but new ones are too sensitive and destroy themselves if you try to run them on anything but diesel.

It mostly because the high pressure pump use the Diesel for lubrication so if you use something else the pump destroy itself sending tiny metal shards down the pipe and into the injectors.

That's why accidentally running a diesel car on gas turn expensive fast. The contrary is much cheaper as just have to flush the fuel lines and you're good to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > In an explosion, however, the devilish little instigator that is oxygen > shoves the process into overdrive.

It's a great article, and I know that I'm being pedantic, but chemical explosions need not involve oxygen. For example, consider acetylene and silver acetylide, with a carbon-carbon triple bond. Or lead azide, with a nitrogen- nitrogen triple bond.

<comment><USER24> > chemical explosions need not involve oxygen

They do need an oxidiser though. Which may or may not involve oxygen. You're right of course, but redox itself has some poorly chosen jargon.

<comment><USER14> _In chemistry, an oxidising agent (oxidant, oxidizer) is a substance that has the ability to oxidize other substances — in other words to accept their electrons. Common oxidizing agents are oxygen, hydrogen peroxide and the halogens._

The jargon being that an _oxidiser_ is an substance that can accept electrons, and doesn't have to by _oxygen_.

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

<comment><USER2> Just take _oxidizer_ to me an " _something that accepts electrons, like oxygen would_ ". Of course, there's some oxidizers that can accept electrons from things that oxygen can't (think of fluorine, for example) but... it's just a term.

There's also an enormous continuum of timescales, all the way from the detonation of high explosives, to deflagration of low explosives, combustion of fuels, to... sedate rusting, which is just oxidation of iron or steel. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't the white cloud a _de_ -pressurization front? The actual pressure wave is ahead of it and his speed estimate is probably low.

<comment><USER26> I'm starting to wondering how accurate this article is...

 _" High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually."_

But a shock wave is an area of high pressure, so it's a "pressure wave" too.

And at least according to this Los Alamos article [1], "low explosives" versus "high explosives" is basically the difference between deflagration (rapid burning, e.g. black powder) versus detonation (chemical conversion happens faster than the speed of sound through the material, e.g. TNT).

By that definition, ammonium nitrate, is a high explosive. That's why they use it as the main blasting agent in mining operations.

[1][https://www.lanl.gov/museum/news/newsletter/2017/2017-04/hig...](https://www.lanl.gov/museum/news/newsletter/2017/2017-04/high- explosives.php)

<comment><USER27> as the article explains the difference between a pressure wave and shock wave is in their speed of propagation,

pressure waves travel below speed of sound, shock waves travel faster than the speed of sound.

<comment><USER28> How can a shock wave travel faster than the speed of sound? I thought the maximum speed a disturbance could travel in a material was exactly the speed of sound in that material, since that's what sound is.

<comment><USER29> The shock wave travels faster than the speed of sound in the medium at rest, but not faster than the speed of sound in the moving medium around the wave. Longer and better explanation:

[https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/193323](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/193323)

<comment><USER28> I see, thank you. Both your explanation and the link were illuminating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this to be a well researched and very relatable piece of journalism with respect to the explosion in Beirut.

</comment><comment><USER30> Seconds before the final explosion, you can see some flashes in the base of the smoke, like firecrackers going off. Anyone knows what these are?

<comment><USER31> I think it was reported of fireworks explosion in the vicinity that lead to this event.

<comment><USER32> The whole "let's store fireworks next to several tons of explosives -- oh wait there's a fire" thing would sound incredibly contrived if it was in a story. It's almost like something out of a Road Runner cartoon, not real life.

<comment><USER33> Supposedly someone may have been carrying out welding on the building too, which makes the whole thing even more unbelievable.

<comment><USER32> According to this story, the welding was specifically as a result of the ammonium nitrate:

> _In January 2020, a judge launched an official investigation after it was > discovered that Hangar 12 was unguarded, had a hole in its southern wall and > one of its doors dislodged, meaning the hazardous material was at risk of > being stolen.

> In his final report following the investigation, Prosecutor General Oweidat > "gave orders immediately" to ensure hangar doors and holes were repaired and > security provided, a second high-ranking security official who also > requested anonymity said.

> ...During the work, sparks from welding took hold and fire started to > spread, the official said._

It's really mind-boggling.

[https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lebanon-security-blast- doc...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lebanon-security-blast-documents- excl/exclusive-lebanons-leaders-warned-in-july-about-explosives-at-port- documents-idUKKCN2562L3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> From a scientific point of view it was unfortunate that no Rapatronic camera was installed in Beirut:

[https://interestingengineering.com/filming-the-first- millise...](https://interestingengineering.com/filming-the-first-milliseconds- of-a-nuclear-explosion-with-the-rapatronic-a-1950-engineering-marvel)

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

</comment><comment><USER35> Contrary to the article, I think amonium nitrate is a _high_ explosive. That means it can explode via a supersonic shock or detonation wave. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_velocities) says it's detonation velocity is 2.7 km/sec.

<comment><USER36> Actually it is often not even considered an explosive, it is an oxydizer, the type actually used in mining is called ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil) and the oil (mormal diesel fuel) is added on-site:

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

and has a much faster speed, around 4,200 m/s and only used in mining because it is extremely cheap and relatively more secure when compared to other (more powerful) explosives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Separate from contemplating the physics, and hopefully not macabre rubbernecking of heartbreaking images of human suffering... what is being done for humanitarian aid for Beirut, and how can HN help?

<comment><USER38> Loads of countries have sent search & rescue teams (the Dutch one returned after two days already because there was plenty of help on-site), hundreds of millions in relief funds have been gathered by countries across the world ([https://www.al- monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/08/lebanon-a...](https://www.al- monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/08/lebanon-aid-conference-donors-pledge- beirut-france-macron.html)), charities all over are collecting, celebrities, companies and nations are donating tons ([https://www.popsugar.co.uk/celebrity/george-and-amal- clooney...](https://www.popsugar.co.uk/celebrity/george-and-amal-clooney- donation-after-beirut-explosion-47674696)), and local charities and donation numbers are being set up worldwide.

HN can help by getting their super wealthy excessively profitable FAANG & co employers to donate money. Apple alone has $193 billion in cash on hand, more than twice as much as Lebanon's total GDP ([https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/apple-q2-2020-cash-hoard- her...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/apple-q2-2020-cash-hoard-heres-how- much-apple-has-on-hand.html\);) they could rebuild Beirut three times over and still have money left. Amazon has in the range of $70 billion cash on hand.

Don't feel like you have to donate when it's corporations that hold (and hoard) all the wealth. Call them out on it if they offer a pittance.

Apple / Tim Cook has indicated they will be donating, but no mention of how much: [https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1291746412779069440](https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1291746412779069440) Couldn't find anything from the other big companies.

<comment><USER39> from what i've heard (informally) google is matching donations.

edit: dug up the fb post a friend had about it, it appears to be an internal programme

<comment><USER40> Google is matching donations as usual, but they sent an extra email out specifically to ask for donations for helping Beirut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How hard is it to not put nearly 3,000 tons of explosives in a city?

<comment><USER42> Well, not putting explosives in a city is not hard; not putting substances that have some industry uses and happen to be explosive (eg fertilizer) near industry is hard.

After all, it needs to be shipped, stored and used.

If there's shipping, there will be some port city not far.

And if there is industrial use, there will be workers, and some city as well to house the workers.

See:

\- Halifax explosion (how hard is it to not make explosive-carrying ships go to ports?)

\- AZF explosion (how hard is it to not locate factories far away from cities?)

\- Texas City Refinery explosion (how hard is it to not let refinery workers inside the refinery?)

\- Tianjin explosions (how hard is it to not locate a port city near its port?)

And so forth

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why was so much NH4 stored in one place? Did a shipment of that size just arrive or has it been building up a stockpile? It is end of summer here in America, not sure what season is approaching outdoor Lebanese fertilizer schedules. Abundance of summertime high energy (summer solstice increased photovoltaic potential) could be the reason so much was purchased cheaply (infinite shelf life?)

<comment><USER32> _The road to last week's tragedy began seven years ago, when the Rhosus, a Russian-chartered, Moldovan-flagged vessel carrying ammonium nitrate from Georgia to Mozambique, docked in Beirut to try to take on extra cargo to cover the fees for passage through the Suez Canal, according to the ship's captain.

Port authorities impounded the Rhosus in December 2013 by judicial order 2013/1031 due to outstanding debts owed to two companies that filed claims in Beirut courts, the state security report showed.

In May 2014, the ship was deemed unseaworthy and its cargo was unloaded in October 2014 and warehoused in what was known as Hangar 12.

In February 2015, Nadim Zwain, a judge from the Summary Affairs Court, which deals with urgent issues, appointed an expert to inspect the cargo, according to the security report.

The report said the expert concluded that the material was hazardous and, through the port authorities, requested it be transferred to the army. Reuters could not independently confirm the expert's account.

Lebanese army command rejected the request and recommended the chemicals be transferred or sold to the privately owned Lebanese Explosives Company, the state security report said.

The report did not say why the army had refused to accept the cargo. A security official told Reuters it was because they didn't need it. The army declined to comment.

The explosives company's management told Reuters it had not been interested in purchasing confiscated material and the firm had its own suppliers and government import licences.

From then on, customs and security officials wrote to judges roughly every six months asking for the removal of the material, according to the requests seen by Reuters._

[https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lebanon-security-blast- doc...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lebanon-security-blast-documents- excl/exclusive-lebanons-leaders-warned-in-july-about-explosives-at-port- documents-idUKKCN2562L3)

It's not clear to me why, if they knew it was dangerous and had been asking for it to be removed for years, they decided to store fireworks in the same building.

<comment><USER44> Probably because "they" is a group of people/teams and knowledge is not evenly distributed, nor is responsibility concentrated in the right places.

This is a classic example of "normal failure" and I am sure will join other similar incidents in the literature.

<comment><USER45> Storing the ammonium nitrate in a single location was bad enough.

Storing fireworks in the same warehouse complex was - I honestly can't think of a word that fits.

<comment><USER44> It's pretty easy - the fireworks were probably a pretty small shipment, and were loaded along with a bunch of other shipments into an anjoining warehouse.

I realise this seems weird to people living in a country which has all sorts of extremely restrictive and impressive safety protocols, but in poorer countries, this kind of mistake happens __all the time__.

It just doesn't normally result in much more than a small fire.

<comment><USER39> The (more local) news I'm reading, it was apparently known to be dangerous immediately, and regularly reported (~twice a year), just never actioned to remove it. To me that's where the criminal responsibility lies. The beating- around-the-bush has begun though.

Port authorities (who were the ones reporting the danger) were arrested.

skimmed, since I'm on the clock, but holds the key info: [https://www.mtv.com.lb/en/News/Local/1088201/Lebanons- leader...](https://www.mtv.com.lb/en/News/Local/1088201/Lebanons-leaders- warned-in-July-about-explosives-at-port---Reuters)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I didn't read all the way through but quickly got the impression that the author got the physics wrong. Combustion and detonation are very different processes. It's actually not easy to make ammonium nitrate detonate on purpose, and just heating it is certainly not a reliable way of making it do so.</comment>


Rich Hickey: extensible data notation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/richhickey/edn <comment><USER2> Nice advantages over JSON: more compact, easier to pretty print, includes an integer type, non-string map keys, has a nice built-in extension mechanism (which is much more elegant than any ad-hoc thing that JSON can support).

Things that probably make sense coming from Clojure, but seem somewhat unnecessary for a general purpose data interchange format: explicit character type (as compared to length 1 strings (which could optionally use the extension mechanism if necessary)), separate types for vectors and lists (seems like the extension mechanism could handle this if it's ever necessary; to some extent this criticism holds for sets too, but those are also more independently useful).

One type not included that I find useful: some kind of "raw" string wherein backslashes are interpreted literally, and double escapes aren't required all over the place.

Possible point of confusion that should be spelled out more explicitly: by the grammar provided, a floating point number requires an explicit leading digit. That is, '0.5' cannot be spelled '.5'. (Should an implementation accept '.5' as a number, or reject it as badly formed?)

Also, does _"a floating-point number may have the suffix M to indicate that exact precision is desired"_ mean that it should be interpreted as a decimal number? Might be worth saying that directly.

It would be nice to see a bit more guidance about _"Symbols are used to represent identifiers, and should map to something other than strings, if possible."_ Perhaps this could include examples of what Rich Hickey & al. think would be useful interpretations in JavaScript and Python (to pick two obvious popular examples).

Most of all, it would be nice to see a clear explicit treatment of Unicode for strings/symbols (I'd recommend utf-8 here), including possible ways of escaping code points in strings. Confusions about Unicode are one of the main points of incompatibility between JSON implementations, and the JSON spec has more to say about the subject than this current spec does.

One nice built-in tag to add: base64 raw data, using one of the typical base64 encodings, which should be described in the spec to avoid any confusion.

Question: if a tagged element is considered a unit, can another tag be put in front of one? That is, something along the lines of '#outer_tag #inner_tag "built-in element"', where in the code which interprets the file, whatever object is produced by the inner_tag's extension is sent as input to the outer_tag's? It's worth clarifying this so that implementors make sure to add the case to their test suites.

<comment><USER3> .5 cannot be a symbol, so it would make sense to add it to the grammar.

<comment><USER4> Actually, .5 does not parse as a number in Clojure, and does parse as a symbol.

      user> .5
      CompilerException java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to resolve symbol: .5 in this context, compiling:(NO_SOURCE_PATH:1)
      user> (type '.5)
      clojure.lang.Symbol

<comment><USER3> Interesting, it's not a symbol according to EDN.

<comment><USER4> Oh yes, there's a few differences. For example, Clojure also has a radix notation for integers (as in 16rFF = 255) that doesn't seem to be a part of EDN. I had assumed that Clojure would cast the deciding vote in these sorts of things, but now that I think about it, maybe not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, XML, YAML, JSON, and the dozen plus other markup notations were not suitable because they used C style delimiters instead of Lisp style delimiters?

Snark aside, what does this buy us that these existing markup languages don't?

I appreciate all that Rich Hickey does for programmers, but aside from his name, this just adds to the noise that already exists in this domain.

<comment><USER6> I suspect it's just a tool, and the Datomic folks thought they'd make it available. No one said it was going to change the world, right?

What does it buy "us"? Well, it doesn't buy "us" anything. They needed a data interchange format and I assume it made more sense to use Clojure's primitives than parsing up JSON. Why would a project written using a homoiconic language use anything but that language to exchange data between its components?

edit: Said best by this tweet by fogus:

"Clojure devs have been using #Clojure data as an interchange format all along. ..."

<https://twitter.com/fogus/status/243913831242399744>

<comment><USER7> > They needed a data interchange format and I assume it made more sense to use > Clojure's primitives than parsing up JSON.

Even in JavaScript it's better to parse JSON instead of eval'ing, because you don't want to execute stuff that would "happen" to be contained in the _data_ interchange format.

<comment> Tuna-Fish The word REPL comes from lisp and means Read Eval Print Loop. The significance is that unlike in, say, python, Read and Eval are separate. Read reads a string and turns it into an in-memory data structure, Eval takes a data structure (not a string!) and evaluates it.

Using Read in a lisp is typically safe, so long as you turn off reader macros and the like.

<comment><USER7> > _The significance is that unlike in, say, python, Read and Eval are > separate._

They are separate:

        * http://docs.python.org/library/ast.html#ast.parse
        * http://docs.python.org/library/ast.html#ast.literal_eval

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I added a spot on the wiki for links to implementations:

<https://github.com/richhickey/edn/wiki/Implementations>

A few months ago, I started doing an implementation of a Clojure reader in C and a Ruby extension, but I ran out of time to work on it. If anyone wants to use my code as a starting point, please do! I'd love to see more usage of Clojure forms... errr... "EDN" in the wild!

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4506>

That is 'XDR' (eXtensible Data Representation) which has similar goals and is reasonably mature. Of course JSON (<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt>) does this as well but using character code points. Not to mention XML and ASN.1. In perl there is YaML (<http://search.cpan.org/dist/YAML/>) too.

I'm wondering what this one brings to the table. The readme file doesn't say.

<comment><USER10> Your link says "external", not "extensible", and in fact seems to make no mention of extensibility.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely correct, brain fart. The description language was designed to represent any data structure you could represent in C, in XDR but more importantly insure that moving those structures across a network between disparate architectures would return them the natively 'correct' format when received.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems one immediate application is in Datomic's new REST API:

 _Datomic gets a REST API_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487467>

I'm developing with Clojure on a daily basis at present, and it's cool to see such a slick data notation take on new life outside of my REPLs and .clj files.

Now, what would be really interesting is if _edn_ (or an official superset of it) could be formalized with "hypermedia controls".

See: _Hypermedia-Oriented Design_

<http://amundsen.com/articles/hypermedia-oriented-design/>

One of the shortcomings of JSON is that as a standardized hypermedia type, it doesn't offer any hypermedia controls. There are efforts to standardize JSON- derived types which do provide such controls:

 _HAL_

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kelly-json-hal-03>

 _JSON-LD_

<http://json-ld.org/>

 _Collection+JSON_

<http://www.amundsen.com/media-types/collection/>

It would be great to see _edn_ take on that challenge in its early days as an extra-clojure, general purpose data notation. I'm convinced that Fielding is right about REST implying HATEOAS (others argue for "practical REST"), but you can't robustly implement REST/HATEOAS APIs with a media type that outright lacks hypermedia controls.

<comment><USER2> Would you mind suggesting some possible formats for this, and explaining a bit what's necessary for "hypermedia controls"? Or is there a link somewhere that defines this more clearly? The hypermedia-oriented design link was kind of abstract.

<comment><USER12> Michael can correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I read from Fielding it's essentially having links and information about the relationship between "this" and the linked resource as first-class types in the data format.

A concrete example would be the <link> tag in HTML, which with the 'rel' and 'href' attributes can make explicit a relationship between that HTML page and e.g. the page of its author.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's the basic idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i think that one of the reasons why JSON got so popular is that it was artificially restricted to a smaller language than the actual object notation in JavaScript. This meant that it was easy to write a parser for which, in turn, happened a lot.

I see lots of optional extras here that might make humans a little happier but may increase the chance that different implementations are incompatible.

YAML had this problem, too.

</comment><comment><USER14> As with JSON, no support for algebraic data types (so tagged unions or recursive data types)?

<comment><USER15> edn is a mechanism for the conveyance of values. It is not a system for defining their semantics, types nor schemas.

That said, there should be no problem using edn to convey the values of types whose definitions are algebraic or recursive.

In particular:

"A tag may specify more than one format for the tagged element, e.g. both a string and a vector representation."

admits unions.

And the system itself nests arbitrarily, i.e. a tagged element can be defined in terms of others.

Values of this type:

        data Tree = Empty
                  | Leaf Int
                  | Node Tree Tree

could be conveyed like this:

        #tree/Tree Empty
        #tree/Tree [Leaf 42]
        #tree/Tree [Node #tree/Tree Empty, #tree/Tree [Leaf 42]]

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the info. Having written wire serialization from typed to untyped formats many times over the years, the limited expressivness of such formats has been an ongoing source of annoyance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Extreme expressiveness makes a data-format harder to understand at a glance; and data is generally dumb enough not to need it.

Examples are helpful. An example of an example: <http://www.sinatrarb.com/>

<comment><USER17> _Extreme expressiveness makes a data-format harder to understand_

I would argue that extreme expressiveness through the most simplistic rules makes a data-format easier to understand than some data-format which is only mediocre-ly expressive through more complex and inconsistent rules.

For instance, Lisp/S-expressions typically has a much simpler _data-format_ than C and is much easier to learn from end to end.

The complexities associated with Lisp-code can not and should not be attributed to it's syntax, but rather that most Lisp-code is written to be purely functional and non-procedural.

While procedural and/or stateful C/C++/Java/C#-code might be easier to understand for a C/C++/Java/C#-programmer, I don't think you would find any of those programmers arguing that S-expression _syntax_ is harder to grasp and master than the complex syntax of C-based languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I get that it's a richer format than JSON, with the introduction of sets, dicts and so on, but what I felt wasn't explained was the "extensible" part. Can someone give an example of this?

<comment><USER19> I think it refers to the use of tags, which allow you to register tag handlers to add custom semantics to whatever data structure follows the tag.

<comment><USER18> Ok, as a trigger. But isn't it backwards to have the generator suggest where to put trigger points instead of the consumer?

<comment><USER15> > But isn't it backwards to have the generator suggest where to put trigger > points instead of the consumer?

No. edn is self-describing, and all descriptions bottom out on built-in types. Having each date/instant or extended type proclaim it is an #inst or #whatever means a single handler will ensure they all become proper types on the consumer side, with no knowledge of the application or document structure at all. And if no specific handler is installed, a generic handler can at least ensure that the value returned keeps track that the tagged element was tagged, and how, rather than just silently yielding a string with some encoded cruft in it.

The world you are describing is that 'context-sensitive' world mentioned in the edn rationale, where the consuming app must know that the cruft inside the dob: string inside a particular map in a particular context is actually a date or :id is a uuid or whatever, and also know how they represented. Ditto the lastEdited: field, startDate: and foo: fields etc. Are they all the same? Handling any particular document means having complete knowledge of such details.

Context-sensitivity greatly complicates applications and thwarts generic processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> <https://github.com/shaunxcode/jsedn>

This is my attempt at a js version. parse is working - now working on encode.

There is really nothing stopping it from working in browser other than I am currently working on it as an npm/node js package.

I can successfully load datomic schemas and .dtm files which I think is a pretty good test.

Need a lot more tests around int/float wrt the arbitrary precision. I would love to have some pull requests if anyone wants to write valid tests which break it.

</comment><comment><USER21> <redacted>

I'll stick with JSON for one simple reason: you can have _anything_ as a key (as long as it's escaped). The fact that this can't means you either a) can't use it if you have more-complex keys for some reason, or b) you have to use some non-standardized packing format to encode your illegal keys.

</redacted>

edit: thanks repliers, I missed part of the spec. Ignore!

<comment><USER22> False. You can use anything as a key.

> _Note that keys and values can be elements of any type._

The sample code also uses a vector as a key.

<comment><USER21> Ah, I missed that part. I was going off the keyword == symbol rules, which are waaaaay more restrictive. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I kind of like the tagging syntax. It almost seems like they should really be lists with the first tag in function position, but I don't know think that would interop with real Clojure. I tried to come up with something similar, but somehow couldn't generalize to tagging any random object. When in doubt, generalize...

PS: I'm just learning Clojure.

<comment><USER23> If you mean something like this, it would interoperate just fine:

        (list 1 2 3)
        (vector 1 2 3)
        (hash-set :a :b :c)
        (hash-map :a 1 :b 2)

I suspect that typing hash-map all over the place might get old fast, though.

<comment><USER10> I mean `(#myapp/person {:first "Fred" :last "Mertz"})' or `(#seconds 330)'. In this case it's probably the extra parentheses that get old fast. Even so, having semantically connected items not be stuck together makes me a bit queasy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> <https://bitbucket.org/dpwiz/hedn>

My stab at haskell parser/encoder and type converter. Would be glad for a friendly hug^W code review and packaging suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could the blessed days of the s-expression interchange format finally be here?</comment>


"What if when your mind wanders, an implant prods you back to the task at hand?" - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/opinion/brain-machine-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> I feel like the opposite is true and already here. No need for a real implant when all my phone has to do is ding.

</comment><comment><USER3> productive zombies here we go XD

don't fuck yourself up over productivity pls... or if you want to, do, idc...

</comment><comment><USER4> Then you also don't discover what you would have discovered by your mind wandering.

</comment><comment><USER5> A Mindfulness bell seems better. Reminds me of the book: "The Island" (except for the implant part).

</comment><comment><USER6> I could imagine this resulting in some serious anxiety disorders.</comment>


Oligodynamic Effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect <comment><USER2> It would be interesting if this outbreak led to a resurgence in the use of brass fixtures for things like doorknobs and handrails.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately viruses are not microorganisms.

<comment><USER4> The Wikipedia page focused specifically on antimicrobial effects of copper calls out that it has some effect on viruses. I don't know enough to say if this is the same as the oligodynamic effect or just something similar.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_copper#Mechanisms_of_antimicrobial_action)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At least some N95 respirators have small amounts of zinc and copper for this reason.

[https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf12/K122702.pdf](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf12/K122702.pdf)</comment>


I Thought the Web Would Stop Hate, Not Spread It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/opinion/cesar-sayoc-robert-bowers-social-media.html <comment><USER2> "Technology is exciting, but people are awful, and they keep finding the worst ways to apply it." (the way the verge introduced the third series of black mirror.)

i think applies to this scenario as well.

personally i think the internet has outgrown it's "flower power" stage so we either should adjust our sentiment or do something about it

<comment> core-questions Consider a world where the speech that you believe in is being censored by governments and corporate powers. Would you not want there to be some protection for your ability to speak truth to power?

You may disagree with the people who are doing this now, but that doesn't mean that censorship is the correct way to solve the problem. It's not going to make any of them change their minds.

> we either should adjust our sentiment or do something about it

What are you implying?

<comment><USER2> that already is the world we live in: i think every law that constitutes the right to free speech comes with limitations, so regardless there are certain rules you're expected to abide to.

i'm not saying i disagree with anyone or that we should censor everything on the internet, i'm just saying that the internet is no longer that obscure thing where everything is rainbows and unicorns and has become of big corporate and political interest.

so we _should_ excpect it to be like the newspaper, the television, the pamflets in your mailbox, etc. (re: "I cannot tell you how sad that is to write, because when I first saw the internet way back when, I hoped that it would help eliminate the attitudes that had fueled those horrible letters to me. I naïvely thought a lone man sending a reporter a missive of malevolence could not find such refuge on the wide-open internet, where his hate would be seen for what it was and denounced and exorcised"): lies and ways to steer you have become part of the game and it's up to you to see through that.

at this point "do something about it", i think, has boiled down to "delete the internet".

<comment> core-questions > so we _should_ excpect it to be like the newspaper, the television, the > pamflets in your mailbox, etc

You want the internet to degrade to a centrally-controlled, one-way medium rather than enabling the kind of dialogue you and I are having right now?

> lies and ways to steer you have become part of the game and it's up to you > to see through that.

This is arguably how it has always been. Never before have we had such great resources to see through things. Sometimes, what we end up seeing makes us uncomfortable, because the world isn't as nice as we would like for it to be. We can either accept truths and work to change them to be better, or accept pleasant fictions and outright lies to spare ourselves.

Deleting the internet won't solve any of these issues. Well, it might help teen bullying some....

<comment><USER2> > You want the internet to degrade to a centrally-controlled, one-way medium > rather than enabling the kind of dialogue you and I are having right now? > quite the opposite actually. i think we should be skeptic about the things > we read on the internet and steer away from the "it must be true if it's on > wikipedia" mentality. so _do_ your research if it's concerning a sbject you > feel passionate about and _do_ engage in discussions and stay open minded.

most of us consume content rather than generating it and as the internet has become of such great interest to big companies and governments, parts of the (news) information we consume is biased and sometimes plain false, just like it is in the offline world.

> Never before have we had such great resources to see through things > absolutely true, but people have to be willing to see through things / be > skeptic. i think (assumption) the largest part of the people using the > internet do not question what they read and are not likely to do so in the > future, hence my suggestion to "delete the internet"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> She buys into an assumption that the hate speech is grassroots, meaning that it is from ordinary citizens.

There is a lot of evidence that much comes from powerful parties such as governments and political actors, who seek to promote conflict, division, and/or the far right (EDIT: and others too, but the far right seems especially prominent). For example, one report I read said that the Russia government's Facebook activity for the 2016 U.S. election focused "overwhelmingly" on race,[0] and recently I read that Russian government Twitter bots sent thousands of tweets criticizing NFL anthem protestors.[1] I'm going to try to find the links and add them. (None of this is surprising: During the Cold War the Soviets tried to aggravate U.S. racial division; for example, a former officer said that they would send racist hate mail to African-American leaders, then 'leak' to the press that the leaders had received hate mail.)

The real question is how powerful the technology is. How effectively can you manipulate public opinion? I hardly see that issue discussed.

[0] [https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we- found-...](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we-found- facebook-ads-russians-accused-election-meddling/602319002/) More coverage: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/30/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/30/facebook- russia-fake-accounts-126-million)

[1] [https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/10/22/russian-twitter-trolls- nfl...](https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/10/22/russian-twitter-trolls-nfl-national- anthem-protests-bots) which links to [https://www.wsj.com/articles/how- russian-trolls-inflamed-nfl...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-russian- trolls-inflamed-nfls-anthem-controversy-1540233979)

EDIT: Minor edits to make my comments more consistent with the citations.

<comment> core-questions Something tells me you haven't spent any time in the gutters of the Internet if you really think all controversial speech is funded. Plenty of people hold opinions that you might want to censor.

The "they're all russian bots!" meme is getting old, and doesn't actually bear scrutiny in reality. If you don't believe me, then go and spend some time in the darker parts of the internet to see what the discourse is like. Engage with the people there if you're feeling brave.

<comment><USER3> > if you really think all controversial speech is funded

Not what I said at all. That Russian grassroots propaganda campaigns exist certainly does bear up to scrutiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always believed the web would stop control over the narrative from single centralized powers, not spread it.

<comment><USER3> When corporations and governments run social media campaigns, isn't that a single centralized power influencing the narrative?

<comment><USER5> > When corporations and governments run social media campaigns, isn't that a > single centralized power influencing the narrative?

No, "corporations and governments" are not "a single centralized power".

<comment><USER3> Well, they are centralized powers, but I agree they are not the only powers. Who are you thinking of?

<comment><USER5> A government may be a single centralized power in some context.

A corporation might be in another context.

Multiple of each, however, attempting through similar media to influence the same narrative are, however, not.

<comment><USER3> OK, so who are you referring to as the "single centralized power"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> the new york times saying that the internet is a bad thing is like the catholic church saying that the printing press is a problem

</comment><comment><USER7> What a shame Swisher appears to have joined the censorship and anti free speech police

</comment><comment> core-questions What is this dreck?

Somehow it's the fault of a Saudi prince's exploratory investments that people in the USA want to use their constitutionally-protected right to free speech on the Internet? How absolute dare they!

There is no such thing as hate speech. There is free speech, and there is censorship. Kara Swisher seems to be mad that there is not yet enough censorship for her tastes, which I think would extend to domain registrar or even ARIN deplatforming of any site or network that dares host the comments of someone who says something she is uncomfortable with.

I find it reprehensible that anyone can even consider curtailing speech as a kneejerk reaction to violence. It's crystal clear to me that further censorship is actually going to add fuel to the fire, as those with evil opinions will have no outlet, no chance of counterargument or of being convinced toward nonviolent action, no support from other people in their emotional struggle. As though censorship will be successful this time at enabling the security of the establishment, even though it didn't work in China or Russia.

We'll painfully rediscover the lessons of the past, probably with more death and mayhem. Just as much of it will be on the hands of the censors as is on the hands of those who facilitate speech; it's up to you to decide if that's a nonzero amount.

<comment><USER8>
        I find it reprehensible that anyone can even consider curtailing speech as a kneejerk reaction to violence.

Can we still curtail the yelling of "fire" in a crowded theatre?

<comment> core-questions This tired, tired meme. It's a few hundred years old by now, isn't it? Does anyone who has a reasonable outlook on life really think that issuing a command that instantiates an instant tribal mob mentality on a cloistered group of people is the same as political speech?

False equivocations that you don't even really believe yourself aren't exactly good counter-arguments.

<comment><USER8> I have no enthusiasm for our exchange, to be honest. We won't have enough common ground. So I'll just bow out, and wish you a lovely evening.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN/YC: Do any/many YC companies employ remote engineers?  - <AUTHOR>

I frequent /jobs where YC companies post their openings. Yet, I rarely see posts that mention allowing remote employees. Why is this? If one is looking for work but not interested in relocating to SV/SF, is it still worth contacting them?
(for the record, I'm not actively seeking employment but I may be later this year) <comment><USER2> Usually YC companies are newborn (duh). That said, new companies can't afford the hassle of hiring a remote worker mainly because the work schedule is chaotic at first and people need to meet face-to-face in order to achieve the bigger picture. Also, from a VC standpoint, I rarely trust companies that don't wanna go through the hassle of relocating their people (especially, engineers).</comment>


Stephen Wolfram demonstrating the power of Wolfram language - <AUTHOR> https://www.livecoding.tv/video/live-with-stephen-wolfram/ <comment><USER2> The deal breaker here is vendor lock-in. With that elephant in the room, it's not even worth going into the other problems like allowing code that refers to earlier code by line number.</comment>


IBM scientists achieve storage memory breakthrough - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-05-ibm-scientists-storage-memory-breakthrough.html <comment><USER2> What ever happened to HP's memresistors? Did that ever get commercialized?

<comment><USER3> "HP has abruptly changed course on its 'Machine,' a new type of memory-driven computer it thinks will radically alter large-scale data processing. When the company first launched it last year, the plan was to use a new kind of memory chip called the "memristor," which is as fast as DRAM but can permanently store data. The problem is that the tech, which HP expected to commercialize with Hynix in 2013, still isn't ready. Rather than giving up, though, HP has decided to take it in another direction by using both conventional RAM and phase change memory."[1]

[1][http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/hp-the-machine-no- memrist...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/hp-the-machine-no-memristors/)

<comment><USER4> Anybody who thought the Machine, or HP's ability to deploy memristors, was reality, I think is sadly mistaken.

<comment><USER5> Care to elaborate?

<comment> zupa-hu To translate the article, "the tech [..] still isn't ready" means management thought it would be cool to build memristors but they have no clue how. Some engineers will be fired. They came up with a new idea, the Machine instead. They will probably get a bonus.

Surprisingly, promises to invent never seem to materialize. See thegrid.io.

<comment><USER6> What are you talking about? The Grid is on-schedule and doing fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am guessing the write cycle numbers are pr bit, as unless the USB stick has crap all wear leveling it can survive way more than 3000 cycles.

Frankly the only documented case i recall is of someone killing a USB stick was back during the early MB days, when someone mounted it with the sync option under Linux. This, in combo with it being FAT formated, resulted in the bits holding the allocation table getting a whole lot of writes.

Without the sync option, the stick would probably have survived for quite some time as the table would get updated less frequently.

These days you are unlikely to see such a problem unless you are scraping the bottom of Ebay listings.

<comment><USER8> An endurance of 1 million write cycles is not a lot when you can do millions of writes per second.

<comment><USER9> It depends on what you're writing and where you're putting those writes. Flash drives survive this level of activity because they intelligently queue up the writes and don't aggressively re-write cells unless it's necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> PCM -- coming soon next year since last 7 years.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> imagine if ssds didn't actually exist as a consumer product but was just constantly brought up by large companies as the "next big thing!" that never actually came out.

i mean intel, and hp all have their own versions and they've been working on them for years and we've yet to see anything come of it. i'm not holding my breath for this to actually get released.

<comment><USER13> I've seen a lot of 'looks promising... can't make work or can't make economic' technologies over the years. Just the nature of the business. I'd hate for companies to stop trying tho. Technologies that seek to displace another older technology often have a long road ahead. Because no green field, the economics and performance has to beat the established technology before anything sees anything but niche applications.

I think it took ten years for NAND flash to start seriously chewing into the mass storage market

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> IBM is spinning the news a lot lately: here they claim to made a breakthrough in antiviral protection [http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss](http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss) (humans, not computers viruses)

<comment><USER15> because they are completely irrelevant in the tech world now they have to release PR stuff like this that sounds cool to the layman investors

<comment><USER14> Typical strategy for old dinosaurs. French post office is now trying to enter tons of unrelated market. Even Apple watch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is a paper from 2011 where they claim 7 or 8 bits/cell [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=587322...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5873227)

This research seems to take program/erase cycles into greater account.

</comment><comment><USER17> This kind of technology could have been great for telcos 10 years ago before virtualization went mainstream.

Sadly today servers take a long time to boot (up to 6 minutes) making this ineffective for a baremetal server in that must give five nines uptimes.

</comment><comment><USER18> That looks very similar to Intel's Optane technology which is supposedly getting released to consumer this year.

</comment><comment><USER15> they haven't been laid off yet?</comment>


Android super smartphones: Too much of a good thing? - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20122716-94/android-super-smartphones-too-much-of-a-good-thing/

<comment><USER2> Man, hate to rip on MG Seigler again, but he made this argument (repeatedly) last year with respect to Android phones. I don't understand it.

More models with newer and better technology, coming out more often is a positive. Period. Yes, it might make purchasing one phone amongst many more difficult, but that's not up to the manufacturers. They're competing, after all. If you walk out of the store satisfied with your purchase, that's all you can ask for. The fact that there is soon "the next best thing" has no bearing on the price you agreed to pay for a product you're satisfied with.

The Apple way is one model, this is another. I'm glad both exist.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, and I really don't think most people even care. Once they walk out of the store, they stop paying attention to what else is coming, if they ever paid attention at all.

It's only nerds (like me) that even follow this stuff, and I personally find it exciting.</comment></comment>


The Mandelbrot Monk - <AUTHOR> http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/mandelset/mandelmonk/mandelmonk.html

<comment><USER2> Sadly fake: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen>

</comment><comment><USER3> It was an interesting read until I found the publishing date in the footer...

<comment><USER4> Also from Wikipedia: <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tools exist to do live video manipulation for streaming/recording? - <AUTHOR> I am considering doing online piano instruction, and am wondering how I can combine different video sources on the fly, and either broadcast or save the output.
An example of what I am talking about would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obNAgImLMSI, about 15 seconds in, where an overhead shot of the keyboard appears at the bottom of the screen.  A different type of effect would be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stsBqdo9Svc, in which a 2nd keyboard appears showing which keys are being played as well as the note names (which can be difficult to otherwise determine in fast passages).
I'm a good programmer (MS in CS), and don't mind getting my hands dirty in a bit of custom coding, but I don't even know where to start.  (Don't worry, I'm competent to teach piano, too... I also have a BM in Piano Performance.)  I specialize in teaching the integration of music reading and improvisation, and have had many requests to teach long distance, but I have never done so because I do not feel as though I have the proper tools to do it justice.
I would love to find an Open Source solution that I could contribute back to, if possible.
Does anyone have any ideas/recommendations? <comment><USER2> [http://www.telestream.net/wirecast/](http://www.telestream.net/wirecast/)

This is the most popular commercial solution - you can demo it for 30 days I think.

Not super cheap, but a very versatile and solid product in my experience.

I'd also love to hear about open source alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I was afraid that nobody had seen my question (I posted on the weekend, and it got buried quickly).

The most important thing I needed was a product name, because I didn't even know where to start or what keywords to look for. From the name "Wirecast", I was able to find a list of potentially similar (OSS) here ([http://alternativeto.net/software/wirecast/?license=free](http://alternativeto.net/software/wirecast/?license=free))

Thank you again!

<comment><USER2> i will check out that list as well - I have to tell you, though, wirecast on a modern MacBook Pro works really well - we have done live streams w/ several cameras, separate audio sources and multiple layers of graphic overlays and it has been rock solid.</comment></comment></comment>


9 Month Old Critical Java Vuln. Still Not Patched in Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/21522/9_Month_Old_Critical_Java_Vuln_Still_Not_Patched_in_Mac_OS_X

<comment><AUTHOR> Proof of concept: [http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/2009/05/19#CVE-2008-5353.20090...](http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/2009/05/19#CVE-2008-5353.20090519)

It definitely works. I just disabled the Java plugin in Firefox.

<comment><USER2> Yup, same here. I disabled Java in Safari months ago. Haven't noticed a single website stop working because of it…</comment></comment>


Users report losing Bitcoin in clever hack of Electrum wallets - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/users-report-losing-bitcoin-in-clever-hack-of-electrum-wallets/ <comment><USER2> This is actually super-clever, let me try to explain. Electrum is unique in that it's not a "real" bitcoin wallet. To save time and computer resources, it doesn't download the entire blockchain but rather connects to an Electrum Server which will do the blockchain stuff on your behalf.

The Electrum Servers (anyone can run one) can check your balance and send bitcoin on your behalf. Thanks to the magic of cryptography, this is all perfectly safe. If you send bitcoin through them, they couldn't redirect it to themselves. The worst they could do is refuse to send it.

Turns out Electrum Servers are allowed to return custom error messages to the client, though. So this guy set up a bunch of these servers and had them always return a message saying "Please update your electrum here: [http://github.com/my-hostile-electrum/steal-yo- coins.git"](http://github.com/my-hostile-electrum/steal-yo-coins.git"). What's worse, because Electrum is using the QT QMessageBox, these errors are displayed with full HTML rendering, making them look even more convincing.

So, crap. Bitcoin is, as they say, a bug bounty on the entire world.

<comment><USER3> Even better, the fake link looks more legit than the legit link.

FAKE link: hxxxs://github.com/electrum-wallet

LEGIT link: [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum)

<comment><USER4> A redditor reported that the source posted contained the malware. Ie: compiling from source would not have saved you (unless you did the diff yourself and inspected the changes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I decided to stay far away from Electrum after Tavis from Project Zero reported a big time bug in Electrum's JSON-RPC back in January.

I remember him claiming his dealings with the team were frustrating as well (gist: they didn't understand the problem).

Source: [https://blockexplorer.com/news/electrum-releases-update- goog...](https://blockexplorer.com/news/electrum-releases-update-google- project-zero-researcher-discovers-2-year-old-vulnerability-wallet-client/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968)

This bug is absolutely atrocious: who decided that displaying error messages (with rendered HTML!) from untrusted third-party servers was a good idea?

It's a shame since SPV wallets are a great solution for most users, and Electrum has a relatively nice UI, but after this bug and the JSON-RPC one who will keep using this software?

</comment><comment><USER7> Incredible to read how dismissive people in the thread are about the shortcomings of decentralization, up to the point where it feels like people are just praising gospel without ever having given it a critical thought.

There is still quite a valley between feasibility of crypto currencies in real world settings, and the current state of affairs.

<comment><USER8> Yes, there is a gap, but that will be closing quickly. What I hate to see is people using this gap as a reason against crypto/ blockchain as if every new technology is ideally perfect and meets every demand. This is the type of mindset that would have prevented us from having computers, laptops, and cell phones because computers the size of record courts don't make sense, computers take too much energy to be portable, and nobody wants to carry around a suitcase all day to make a phone call.

It's all part of technological maturation.

<comment><USER9> > Yes, there is a gap, but that will be closing quickly.

Bitcoin is more than 10 years old. That is almost as old as 1st generation iPhones. How much longer do we have to wait to fix these deeply fundamental flaws in the stack?

> It's all part of technological maturation.

An alternative interpretation might be that Bitcoin is fundamentally broken and isn't a useable technology.

<comment><USER8> Bitcoin is 10 years old and may or may not be broken depending on the end use case, but that isn't the only crypto/ blockchain project. For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not very informed on the topic.

A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or take).

<comment><USER9> > For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not > very informed on the topic.

I've been following Bitcoin for almost its entire life and am probably vastly more informed than most of the shysters who show up on sites like HN to shill their coin.

> A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, > tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or > take).

I've heard this line forever. Lightning network, for example, has been "just around around the corner" since forever. So far, it is still just as "just around the corner" as it was 5 or 6 years ago and ranks among the top all-time vaporware software projects out there.

The attempt to refocus on "The Blockchain" is only done to distract from the fact that Bitcoin, poster child of "The Blockchain" has no lawful use. It doesn't scale, it isn't free, it isn't trustless, it isn't censorship resistant, it isn't a good store of value, it isn't instant and it isn't anonymous. It isn't even deflationary (as if that is a good thing) because it has been forked and cloned thousands of times. Oh yeah, it also requires more energy than small nations to secure. (And don't feed me the line about it being "green energy" or "less than conventional banking"–we both know that is a laugably horseshit argument)

The whole space is a joke. Aside from self-driving cars, Bitcoin will be the biggest overhyped pile of complete nonsense this decade.

<comment><USER10> > So far, it is still just as "just around the corner" as it was 5 or 6 years > ago and ranks among the top all-time vaporware software projects out there.

The paper was released April 2015. Progress is definitely slower than I'd like, but wanted to correct this claim.

[ Disclaimer: lightning developer and specification guide ]

<comment><USER11> Lightning was talked about before the release of the whitepaper, along with a number of other side-chains, off-chains, etc. None of have really been the magic bullet they claimed to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I understand this correctly, this is quite a flaw in the design of the client. The message is shown in the client, but is simply the response of an essentially random server in the network. That response is displayed with full formatting in the client as if it were an error message by the client itself.

I never used any of this, but it really doesn't look to me like it is unreasonable to assume that error messages like this are created by the client, not an untrusted server. Untrusted servers should not be able to inject content like this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looking at the commit, I am wondering if there is still a vulnerability in sending error messages. What if the malicious server DOS'd the client by sending an extremely long error message crashing the client when it tries to render it. This also doesn't stop a simple plaintext message that has a phishing message like "Your machine has been hacked and your keys have been compromised, please transfer x BTC to y address within 5 minutes to prevent your private keys from being immediately drained".

<comment><USER14> Yea, only allowing servers to send a naked error code matched against a list of preloaded human-readable strings on the clients seems to be the only option that's actually social-engineering proof.

If custom error messages are really needed, you could allow them as a special option while making it obvious through the client UI that this is sent from an untrusted source (field hidden by default, warning displayed when full error message is expanded).

The safest option now is just to consider Electrum as insecure by default. Same with Ethereum's Parity desktop and Metamask. They're convenient for day to day use but don't trust them with big amounts.

EDIT: Seems that's already been discussed in the issue: [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968#issuecommen...](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968#issuecomment-450169512)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The related GitHub issue: [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968)

</comment><comment><USER16> Just by looking at the screenshot I already knew the "Electrum" client was written using Qt. :P

QMessageBox displays text as HTML (formatting, links and all) by default, which I've always thought is a terrible choice.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow the mod comment on the reddit thread is golden:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/a9yji3/elec...](https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/a9yji3/electrum_wallet_hacked_200_btc_stolen_so_far/)

> Just to clarify the "hacked" part of the title:

> Technically speaking, even though the term 'hacked' is broad, what happened > was an attacker utilized the server response/messaging capability to phish > users (it was more convincing because rich text was allowed to display in > the electrum client). The message provided a link to "upgrade electrum", but > was actually installing a malicious clone.

> The attacker amplified their reach by spinning up more malicious servers > which could loosely be considered a sybil attack.

> People using the correct wallet software and not clicking any links are > unaffected. Electrum was no more "hacked" than gmail is hacked every time > one of their users is sent a phishing email

<comment><USER18> People expect to be phished when opening emails in Gmail, they don't expect to have to distrust native app dialogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is another reminder of why people should be using hardware wallets.

It is relatively super cheap compared to the value of 1 BTC.

<comment><USER20> It all depends what you calculate to be the biggest risks that you're protecting against. If it's collapse of world civilization, or at least your own country's institutions, then storing your own coins makes sense, and yeah a hardware wallet is a better way to store it than on your computer.

On the other hand, if you're more worried about getting hacked or simply losing your private keys, having your house broken into and the wallet stolen, etc. you're probably better off putting it in Coinbase with a strong password and 2FA enabled. The same way you protect other things you care about like your bank account and 401k.

It's odd to me that this is so highly frowned upon in the cryptocurrency communities though. People with very little knowledge about computers or infosec are constantly pressured into storing their own coins, which is fundamentally pretty user-unfriendly just due to the irreversible nature of it where you can't make a single mistake.

<comment><USER21> Cryptocurrencies are the worst possible store of value against the collapse of civilization. Did you forget that you need a functioning internet and electrical grid to use cryptocurrencies? This type of thinking does not reflect a realistic perspective of how the world works.

<comment><USER22> They're a hedge against a particular _kind_ of collapse of society - one in which the currency collapses (hyperinflation) or the nation-state backing the currency collapses (revolution/coup/regime change/tyranny, followed by asset seizures). If everybody is shooting each other and there's no food in the stores, you're fucked regardless of how many Bitcoin you own. If there's a nuclear attack and the electrical grid is knocked out, your Bitcoin isn't going to be accessible. But if the hard assets & businesses are mostly functional but just don't know how much they're going to get paid tomorrow because the value of a dollar is 1/4 what it was today, Bitcoin is pretty handy. And if the government decrees that the bank accounts of certain persons who are politically opposed to it are now property of the government, Bitcoin is pretty handy.

While I think a number of Bitcoin maximalists have the former couple scenarios in mind, and agree that their beliefs are illogical, the latter two scenarios are actually much, much more common in recent history. Think of Zimbabwe or Venezuela in the present day, Greece in the financial crisis, Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America seemingly every decade since the 1950s, or China during the Cultural Revolution. Bitcoin could've saved lives and fortunes for many of the people affected by these. Indeed, it's held up fairly well for people in Venezuela and Zimbabwe, the two countries to face major currency crises since Bitcoin's invention.

<comment><USER21> > _They 're a hedge against a particular kind of collapse of society_

I'm sorry, but do you not see how absurd that sounds? It's a hedge against a particular kind of societal collapse? This is just totally impractical. The reality is that bitcoin traffic in Zimbabwe and Venezuela is extremely miniscule; that's because you can't actually buy much of anything with cryptocurrencies, especially useful goods like food, water, medicine and guns, and trying to convert cryptocurrency into real money is fraught with obstacles and risks (i.e. if you try to do an in-person conversion). Cryptocurrency is not a realistic hedge against any kind of societal disruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of the countless malicious TeamSpeak servers who send out fake "TeamSpeak needs an update: [evil-url]" messages with the server message or poke feature. (The second one displays an arbitrary text in a simple message box, e.g. sent by a bot when joining the server).

</comment><comment><USER24> if this was a bank, he wouldve gotten it all back.

decentralize for the sake of it is foolish.

<comment><USER25> Yes, and we would all pay for this persons mistakes through increased insurance premiums. What if I don't want to have to pay for someone elses mistakes? What if there was a world in which one had to take responsibility for their money? No do overs. This is cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER26> Okay, but you realize that most people _want_ insurance, right? In this case, it wasn't even the guy's fault that Electrum displayed the hacker's message as something official. Do you really want a society where some other person's stupid mistakes can destroy your life?

<comment><USER27> > most people

I'm pretty sure GP isn't trying to say that _everyone_ should use Bitcoin. The thing that gets annoying is that there _is_ a crowd that campaigns this, and then other people (particularly in this comment section) fight back saying _nobody_ should use Bitcoin.

The obvious fact which I feel is somehow being overlooked here is that different people have different needs and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to banking today.

<comment><USER28> And those people will be perfectly happy until it affects them.

As a society, we tend to protect people from themselves because the other option is to let them die on the streets when they lose it all. Making people have insurance and using banks and payment systems that have built-in protection, is far cheaper than providing welfare for those that would otherwise be scammed out of every penny, irreversibly.

You can be a self-serving ubermensch the same day you opt out of all social help.

<comment><USER29> Opting out of all social help usually doesn't exist as an option at all.

<comment><USER28> Indeed, and for good reason.

<comment><USER29> Is it? It sounds like an unnecessary application of force. It also seems disingenuous to phrase it as a choice but then admit there is no choice at all.

<comment><USER28> The point is that in this area people are terrible at making financial choices, and only ever think in the short term. This is why we have (for instance) laws about withdrawing funds from pension accounts etc. Because otherwise people raid their own retirement funds and end up reliant on the state.

There absolutely is a choice - you can politically campaign for the right to opt out, or you can go and live in a country that doesn't have the protections you don't want. Most of them are pretty damn awful because they don't look after their citizens at all.

What you don't get to do is live in a society with such protections and social measures and then not play by its rules.

<comment><USER29> > The point is that in this area people are terrible at making financial > choices, and only ever think in the short term.

It is hard for me to fully internalize this point when I have a counterexample readily available, albeit one that will do nothing to convince you. I consider myself capable of making sound financial decisions for myself and would never raid my own pension account, unless faced with immediate existential danger (in which case "raiding" it would be a rational decision).

I disagree that the solution to that is to centralize funds in order to let a centralized body inefficiently misallocate (or sometimes outright steal) them and would appreciate the freedom to do this myself. I think the state has too much power and this is detrimental in the long run, as it is detrimental when any single entity has too much power.

> There absolutely is a choice - you can politically campaign for the right to > opt out, or you can go and live in a country that doesn't have the > protections you don't want.

> What you don't get to do is live in a society with such protections and > social measures and then not play by its rules.

I can certainly campaign politically, but that also includes respectfully disagreeing with your conclusion above. This does not make your position right and mine automatically wrong (nor vice versa).

The rest of the quoted part of your post sounds like another non-choice (in that the it is highly impractical), followed by a moral judgement.

<comment><USER28> > It is hard for me to fully internalize this point when I have a > counterexample readily available, albeit one that will do nothing to > convince you. I consider myself capable of making sound financial decisions

Many people do, many of these very same people are not actually competent when it comes down to it, just overconfident, or just have a run of bad luck.

> I disagree that the solution to that is to centralize funds...

Who said anything about centralising or the state? You can invest in pension funds all over the place, with many financial bodies, but you'll find access to these funds restricted in various ways.

> The rest of the quoted part of your post sounds like another non-choice (in > that the it is highly impractical)

It's perfectly practical, you can move to all sorts of other nations, take your pick. It's a massive coincidence that the ones that are worth living in have restrictions and protections like these, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how long it will take until people understand why nobody is "their own bank" with their cash.

Getting hacked is one worry, I would worry even more about someone with a wrench in my apartment.

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems to me at least using Electrum for cold wallets as you should would not have been susceptible to the attack.

</comment><comment><USER31> This justify my paranoia about choosing 'random server'

</comment><comment><USER32> Well-explained ZDNet article about it: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/users- report-losing-bitcoin-in...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/users-report- losing-bitcoin-in-clever-hack-of-electrum-wallets/)

You should have shared this link instead of that Reddit thread.

<comment><USER33> Ok, we've changed to that from [https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/a9yji3/elec...](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/a9yji3/electrum_wallet_hacked_200_btc_stolen_so_far/). Thanks!

Please don't break the site guidelines by calling names or being personally rude though: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It's enough to offer a better link.

<comment><USER32> Thanks. Will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Another reminder to run your own full node.

If you use SPV wallets, you have to trust the nodes you connect to. Electrum lets you connect to your own node.

<comment><USER35> This has nothing to do with SPV wallets. A full node client could suffer from the same vulnerability.

<comment><USER34> No. The malicious links were from malicious nodes. You can run your own node, and connect only to your node.

[https://github.com/chris-belcher/electrum-personal- server](https://github.com/chris-belcher/electrum-personal-server)</comment></comment></comment>