Lady Wins Fourth Lottery: What Are the Odds? - <AUTHOR> http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2597 <comment><USER2> In an episode of This American Life there was a story of a guy who bought lottery jackpots. ([http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/329/N...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/329/Nice-Work-If-You-Can-Get-It) 20 minutes in)

This was during a time where you could not receive the full amount of the jackpot immediately -- regulation dictated that you had to get it in monthly instalments.

This guy would offer a lump sum here and now in exchange for the monthly instalments.

The winners were overspending because they started 'acting like millionaires' without having enough money from the monthly payments, so he would get them out of trouble and make a profit at the same time.

While signing a deal with one lottery winner, the lottery winner promptly bought 1000 scratch tickets without even bothering reading the contract he signed.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure you have no idea, but maybe someone else will read this: I grabbed the mp3 for that story, and would like to listen to it on my iPod as a podcast - meaning that when I pause, and listen to something else, resuming the podcast will resume from the point where I stopped.

Is there a way of doing this in iTunes? I tried creating an RSS feed, and iTunes added it to my podcast list, but it won't grab the damned file - and of course, doesn't tell me why.

<comment><USER4> Right click on the file in iTunes and go to get info. Then go to options remember playback position. This will work for any audio file that you have in iTunes.

Edit:

Also, just add the file to your library the normal way(No RSS) and do the above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a clear case of Survivor bias: [http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by- surviv...](http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by-survivor- bias.html).

The analysis on the article details goes into the odds and is actually quite good.

<comment><USER6> I have been trying to come up with a concept for this bias for a while for a certain case. The argument is that the earth has the "perfect" conditions for life. Any deviation would result in a planet devoid of life, thus only an intelligent designer could create such conditions. Survivor bias seems to be the exact term I've been looking for to describe this fallacy. Thanks for the link.

<comment><USER5> You are welcome. We could extend your observation about the earth to the universe: the universe is the way it is because had it been any other way, we wouldn't be there to observe it (and to comment on intelligent design or the lack of it!)

The term used in Physics for this is the Anthropic principle <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not suggesting anything.. (Honestly), but lottery tickets and such have been used by druglords to launder money many times. 1\. Buy a winning lotto ticket from a real winner, pay them full price amount 2\. Give ticket to corrupt official in exchange for services 3\. Chief of police/minister/judge wins the lotto! (again!)

Such cases defeat statistical odds, and ruin the numbers.

</comment><comment><USER8> More interesting to me are the odds that this woman is colluding with a lottery insider or a crooked retailer to divert and cash winning tickets.

<comment><USER3> More interesting to me to see what the odds are of nobody in the world ever winning four lotteries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the chance of this lady winning four lotteries?

About 100%, apparently.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this is a perfect example of Bayesian inference in action, where you update the probabilities upon receiving more information.

What's the probability that this lady will win four lotteries?

Before the first lottery, insanely low, say 10^20 to one. (I haven't actually computed this, but you get the point.)

After the first one, it becomes a little more probable; say 10^15 to one.

After the second, 10^10 to one.

After the third, 10^5 to one.

After the fourth, 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The interesting part is after she first win Joan was able to find 3 other opportunities where the PV of playing was less than the cost of the ticket (assuming $1 tickets). 1 in 1,200,000 chance to win $10M? I'd take that.

<comment><USER12> I have seen scratch-off tickets cost as much as $20 a pop. I think it is safe to assume that the lottery commission is smart enough not to give away free money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process>

</comment><comment><USER14> I would say that the (a priori) odds of this happening depend strongly upon how many tickets the lady bought.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh I submitted this last night - too early :]

</comment><comment><USER16> If you plowed each lottery's winnings into more lottery tickets, you'd eventually lose everything, but probably win a few more lotteries on the way down. So it's not that unlikely to see this pattern, if a large number of lottery tickets are purchased.</comment>


Show HN: We're using big data & analytics for fantasy sports - <AUTHOR> http://benchsense.com/

<comment><USER2> I'll probably get down-voted for this but "powerful insights" for fantasy sports? Really?

Amazing that people are putting their collective intelligence and resource into fantasy sports.

Like sports? Get off your ass, grab a ball and some friends and get out on the field/court.

What about pivoting to a site for finding local people to form recreational teams? I'd use that!

<comment><USER3> Depending on the data being analyzed the app could have a use for sports organizations as well. But that's a more difficult market to break in to directly.

A company I helped with on a few apps had a table at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference this spring. One of the apps looks at boxscores to provide custom sports news for fans and identify interesting plays. I'm guessing it is much less involved than this project but a number of club officials found it intriguing because it could surface numbers from across the league.

<comment><USER2> Interesting point and angle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have an NFL fantasy _team_ per se. I pick the players I like most that happen to be playing that weekend. I might also grab a different player depending on the defense he's up against. Hope that helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Match ups are one of the biggest things we're working on, our historical data is showing some very interesting trends on how certain players perform exceptionally well against certain teams...we can't explain it but we can identify it and we're quite certain these types of insights will prove valuable for users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty interesting, I've messed around with aggregating stats on players, matchups, etc for my own fantasy teams and always wondered why someone didn't go and build a product around it.

Excited to see what you guys will be providing!

</comment><comment><USER6> There are websites out there that do this, they're just not that great and usually only one sport specific. I'll definitely sign up for this just to check it out.</comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for ads on videos - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I am looking for contextual ads to be placed on our videos. We have our own flash video player and recorder on a site. We are looking at adding text/ video ads to it. <comment><USER2> I checked out videomailz.com briefly - from what I can gather, you allow users to record their own video message via a webcam and send that (with a storage facility being planned). Now you want to include ads.

I can see two issues - not annoying the user with the type of ad you include, and determining context.

My guess is users don't want a pre-roll ad if they're sending a message (especially if it's a short message). Post roll ads need to be exciting very fast or they'll get ignored.

So your best bet may be a rolling text ad beneath the video message (but formatted so it looks like the CNN ticker, part of the screen without blocking the image, if that makes sense). Other, more subtle advertising means (like product placement) won't work because you don't have control of the recording.

2) Getting the context will be more difficult - unless you have the technology to analyze the video for keywords, you will need the user to give you information, which they may be reluctant to do.

I would suggest making some kind of tag mandatory when they send, and being honest about why you want that information - this is a free service, your vision is to improve the effectiveness of communication, and contextual advertising is the most profitable and least intrusive way to do so. The users who like your service won't mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well.. we are adding a comment feature to the videos which will allow users to enter short text messages. Also, we were going to allow users to customize their videos by adding characters or action related animation which gives us another anchor to extract video context. However, we are not able to find right service to use that information and display a related ad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IMO, broadcast TV for soccer games has had the right idea for advertising that can be co-opted for online video.

Soccer game broadcasts usually play two 45 minute halves with very few breaks for commercials. So, they do a lot of banner advertising along the bottom of the screen. Sometimes it's a text crawl, sometimes it's animation. I've noticed that Google has been experimenting with this on YouTube recently.

As to context sensitive advertising... that's a tough one. Probably your best bet would be tagging. But, if you know that most of your audio is going to be spoken word into a microphone, that makes your job a bit simpler. You could try running a speech recognition program on your audio stream, and then pick up repeated words from that to use as contextual ads.

<comment><USER4> Yes, we are exploring speech recognition programs for contextual ads. I've heard that there is another advertising service that does this on the fly.

Good point on the broadcast TV for soccer games! Thanks for the suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just don't put the ad on top of the video. I hate that. It makes the video skip, and is irritating.

JacobAldridge's suggestion of putting something seamlessly under the ad sounds like the best plan to me.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that is what we are planning to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> check out VideoEgg.com

<comment><USER4> Guess we need to wait till we hit 1000 active daily users before we can use VideoEgg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> look into adsense for video

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, Adsense for video is only available to sites with 1 million video views per month.</comment></comment>


How does bop.fm fetch songs? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on a similar project, any idea about how they started? Do they have a huge database of music which they manually/automatically fetched from soundcloud/Youtube/other services? If yes, then how do they fetch new songs coming in?
I want to create a database similar to Bop.fm's database of songs with just one service, using which I can use in another app.
P.S. They don't have a public API. :/ <comment><USER2> Contact us, we may be able to help firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Stone: Dead-Simple Ruby Data Persistence - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/stone-dead-simple-ruby-data-persistence-866.html <comment><USER2> Stone is a cool idea. I like the no database idea. I remember being at RailsConf 2007 and hearing Avi Bryant talk about SmallTalk and his database less SmallTalk web framework called seaside, <http://www.seaside.st/>.

Later Dave Thomas gave his keynote and asked a similar question of are relational databases the way to go? Why aren't we trying out OO DBs? It would be nice to see some benchmarks on Stone, anyone know what speed for it is like?

<comment><USER3> > anyone know what speed for it is like

I quickly read over the source code, and it looks like the database is backed by a directory of YAML files. That basically means you get O(log n) performance for random lookups (based on the underlying filesystem, of course), but O(n) searches.

I use this approach for Angerwhale (my blog software), and it mostly works fine because O(100) is always going to be fast :) The reason I didn't use an RDBMS is beacuse I wanted all the data to be editable in a text editor (so I wouldn't have to write management tools). I think I might add optional indexing at some point, though, just to make it a bit more scalable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> prevayler?</comment>


Huawei Takes a Step Toward Replacing Google's Phone Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-09/huawei-takes-step-toward-tech-self-reliance-as-u-s-curbs-bite <comment><USER2> Funny Google did that too, it's a new OS called Fuchsia. [https://fuchsia.dev/](https://fuchsia.dev/)

</comment><comment><USER3> they want to do everything chips,os,software,camera tech,battery-tech,own gorilla glass tech...ambitious company but I wouldn't want power concentrated in this way :)</comment>


Show HN: Skylinesort, a new fast sorting algorithm - daniel-cussen http://www.skylinesort.com/animation.html <comment> daniel-cussen OP here. This algo is a reasonable alternative to quicksort in a large variety of use cases.

Explanation: [http://www.skylinesort.com/skylinesort.pdf](http://www.skylinesort.com/skylinesort.pdf)

C code: [http://www.skylinesort.com/skylinesort.c.txt](http://www.skylinesort.com/skylinesort.c.txt)

<comment><AUTHOR> Your site appears to be down?</comment></comment>


Verizon and ATT accused of selling your phone number and location to almost anyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidauthority.com/verizon-att-selling-information-807684/ <comment><USER2> Discussed on HN a few days ago, much upvoted but it seems it remained not too long on the first page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286)

Maybe because of this, April 2017:

[http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/327107-trump- sign...](http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/327107-trump-signs- internet-privacy-repeal)</comment>


Catch: A modern, C++-native, header-only, framework for unit tests - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/philsquared/Catch

<comment><USER2> To be honest, I prefer bandit[1], it uses lambdas instead of macros which I consider more modern and it has a nice syntax to it. Anyone interested in catch should also check out bandit.

[1] [http://banditcpp.org/index.html](http://banditcpp.org/index.html)

<comment><USER3> One advantage of Catch is that you can use native C++ expressions in your assertions, so instead of

      AssertThat(guitar->sound(), Equals(sounds::clean));

you can write

      CHECK(guitar->sound() == sounds::clean);

And you'll still get sensible output when it fails, showing the expression and the result of guitar->sound().

<comment><USER4> This isn't so much an advantage as a preference.

See [https://github.com/joakimkarlsson/snowhouse#assertions](https://github.com/joakimkarlsson/snowhouse#assertions)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really see the advantage of Catch over [http://unittest- cpp.sourceforge.net/](http://unittest-cpp.sourceforge.net/)

UnitTest++ was written by Noel Llopis, is small, tasteful, fast, and supports fixtures (and nested fixtures) via structs and struct inheritance.

Honest question: Why would I use Catch instead?

<comment><USER6> I'm in the same boat (having used UnitTest++ for years) and I wonder the same, though I do see some points already:

\- adding a custom main() to unittest++ was pretty messy

\- unittest++ is not single-header, meaning you have to recompile all flavours everytime you switch toolsets

\- that nested sections stuff looks good and readable, so even though it might be doable with unittest++, this really attracts me more

That being said, I would like to hear from the author or anyone else who can compare them. But likely I'm going to use this for the next project just to check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks hella good, I particularly am intrigued by the nested setup/teardown system. The natural assert syntax is interesting, too, amazing what macros can accomplish.

Appropriately, the first question that came to mind was, "what's the catch?" :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. I found it interesting after a co-worker pointed it out to me because it looks and works kind of like RSpec. We are currently considering using it for a new project and it seems mature enough to give it a go.

I'm currently toying with writing a JSONReporter so we can use that as an additional test result output format and I agree, so far it seems to be a really well done project.

<comment><USER8> FWIW I've been using Catch for a few years now, and I find it mature enough for real world usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks like a nice test framework, but it doesn't appear to help at all with the really hard problems you face with testing C++ -- isolating the unit under test for separate compilation, and the development and inclusion of mocks/stubs.

Anyone know of a really good (preferably simple and pragmatic) C++ mocking/stubbing framework to go with this?

<comment> Ono-Sendai Why do you want to compile the unit test separately?

<comment><USER9> Because that's what makes it a unit test -- you only want the unit, the tests and any stubs/mocks in the executable. Anything more and you have an integration test on your hands.

Pulling a single unit out of a legacy codebase can be difficult, especially when you don't want to actually move, copy, or modify the source-files; stubbing out the dependencies and writing mock objects to verify your expectations of what the code should be doing are also very time-consuming.

Those are the hard parts of unit testing C++, and I wonder if anyone has found a good way of doing it (with a framework, or just a technique).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not to steal your thunder, but TUT (Templated Unit Tests) does this as well, and I've found it works very nicely even in embedded and cross-platform:

[https://mrzechonek.github.io/tut- framework/](https://mrzechonek.github.io/tut-framework/)

It's lightweight, easy to setup for separated tests or built in tests, and simple to use. Doesn't add anything to help with mocking, but you can do that yourself.

EDIT: To followup, I created a C++ template that leverages TUT and binfmtc that I could use to rapidly iterate with. I used it for working out solutions to problems in "Thinking in C++"; it's posted at [http://hardcorehackers.com/~npsimons/Template.hh](http://hardcorehackers.com/~npsimons/Template.hh)

</comment><comment><USER11> I _really_ like the look of the "Sections" for managing setup/teardown of tests. I'm envious and next time I'm hacking on our in-house C# test framework I'm going to try very hard to implement them! Neat!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great work. I love the fact that this encourages writing tests that are readable/documenting.

Definitely gonna give this a try.

Any recommended test runner to go with it?

<comment><USER13> There's a test runner included as a macro that defines main

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A coworker of mine is working on something similar: [https://github.com/Kosta- Github/cute](https://github.com/Kosta-Github/cute)

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks really good. Do you plan to include BeforeEach and AfterEach? I'll try this out and maybe move my projects to this.

I started working on something similar[1] a few days ago just as a proof of concept.

[1] [https://github.com/cEhlen/CUT/blob/master/example.cpp](https://github.com/cEhlen/CUT/blob/master/example.cpp)

</comment><comment><USER16> A similar thing I knocked up a few years ago. Lacking in features and, well, most things - except it does have a pretty Qt based runner: [http://www.rikkus.info/cplusplus-unit-testing- framework](http://www.rikkus.info/cplusplus-unit-testing-framework)

</comment><comment><USER17> Sorry for the off-topicness but I have to say...

I _loved_ the project logo

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a C++ programmer but this looks really neat and tidy. How does it work?

<comment><USER19> Any sufficiently advanced C++ template code is indistinguishable magic.

</comment></comment><comment> X-Istence This looks very intriguing. Right now I am using Google Test for my projects, but a single header file for creating tests is awesome :-)</comment>


Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/909275/draft-paper_1.pdf <comment><USER2> Duplicate, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382975) instead.</comment>


Tell HN: Developers.Google.com Down. Throws 500 Server Error - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not working for me. In Ireland.

</comment><comment><USER3> Works for me.</comment>


How does Monzo keep 1,600 microservices spinning? Go, clean code, strong team - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/monzo_microservices/ <comment><USER2> I hate to rain on the parade, but on the face of it, this sounds utterly ridiculous.

I simply cannot believe that their product really calls for an architecture consisting of 1600 individual microservices.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think one huge monolith is ideal either, but how is this better?

Who at Monzo could possibly understand how a significant portion of their platform works, in detail, and be confident that knowledge isn't going to be outdated in ten minutes from now? Who understands how changes to each of these tiny pieces will impact the others? What are they actually solving by doing things this way?

Would this abomination exist if they didn't feel the need to hire people whose primary objective is to get the words "microservice" and "Kubernetes" stamped onto their resumes?

Am I just out of touch? Is this the new normal?

<comment><USER3> Not to mention that it's a financial service, and doing transactions across microservices is a total nightmare. I wonder how many of those services are allowed to touch actual account data directly.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of back office tech you need to build/buy if you're working in consumer, or financial tech. Monzo is both. Most people in working at a bank aren't finance workers. There are entire domains that will never be touched in the course of a transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I joined Uber in 2016, right around when on every conference you'd hear a talk along the lines on "Lessons learned at Uber on scaling to thousands of microservices" [1].

After a year or two, those talks stopped. Why? Turns out, having thousands of microservices is something to flex about, and make good conference talks. But the cons start to weigh after a while - and when addressing those cons, you take a step back towards fewer, and bigger services. I predict Monzo will see the same cons in a year or two, and move to a more pragmatic, fewer, better- sized services approach that I've seen at Uber.

In 2020, Uber probably has fewer microservices than in 2015. Microservices are fantastic for autonomy. However, that autonomy also comes with the drawbacks. Integration testing becomes hard. The root cause of most outages become parallel deployments of two services, that cause issues. Ownership becomes problematic, when a person leaves who owned a microservice that was on the critical path. And that no one else knew about. Oncall load becomes tough: you literally have people own 4-5 microservices that they launched. Small ones, sure, but when they go down, they still cause issues.

To make many services work at scale, you need to solve all of these problems. You need to introduce tiering: ensuring the most ciritical (micro)services have the right amount of monitoring, alerting, proper oncall and strong ownership. Integration testing needs to be solved for critical services - often meaning merging multiple smaller services that relate to each other. Services need to have oncall owners: and a healthy oncall usually needs at least 5-6 engineers in a rotation, making the case for larger services as well.

Microservices are a great way to give more autonomy for teams. Just beware of the autonomy turning into something that's hard to manage, or something that burns people out. Uber figured this out - other companies are bound to follow.

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/10/12/lessons- learned-f...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/10/12/lessons-learned-from- scaling-uber-to-2000-engineers-1000-ser.html)

<comment><USER6> >And that no one else knew about.

Yeah exactly. Having two people dedicated to the "Account" service that has 10 features sound much better than having 2 people responsible for 5 microservices each. You might end up with a reset credentials service, a register customer service, a delete account service without any coherent overarching design strategy instead of having just having a plain CRUD service with 6 extra operations. I can't blame them for having 160 services because a lot of enterprise tier organizations are truly that complicated (I work at one) but I do blame them for having 1600.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the same newspaper 6 months ago. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/06/monzo_pins_reset/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/06/monzo_pins_reset/)

"[480k] ... of its [Monzo] customers to pick a new PIN – after it discovered it was storing their codes effectively as plain-text in log files."

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not even entirely sure the microservice part is the bit that's ridiculous. I remember interviewing with them a few years back and when I was told the architecture I was like "so you have all these services but you run them off the same database cluster, isn't that like super risky?"

Low and behold pretty much every major outage they've had has been because of their Cassandra cluster. To be fair they have addressed this now, but for it to take N outages and 5 years kind of tells me they could focus a little more attention on properties people value in their banks, like I don't know... uptime.

This is why they have to work pretty hard to make me switch over to it being my primary bank, and 1600 microservices communicating over the most brittle part of your stack doesn't win them any points in this space.

To put it in context I really can't remember the last time HSBC had a major outage... Sure it's boring but it works pretty much all the time.

Monzo seems more of a "60% of the time it works everytime" situation, great to send your mates money but I wouldn't trust it to pay my rent on time. Having 1600 microservices kind of explains this.

If there's anyone at Monzo listening, please focus on not going down as everything else you do is great.

</comment><comment><USER9> Its a weird to flex about how complicated is the system that you created. Creating simple systems is harder.

<comment><USER4> I think that's the point. It's a set of simple services. A microservice is as simple as it gets. I imagine that orchestration can become hellish at a certain point, but every team works on a few simple microservices, rather than one complex system.

<comment><USER10> Maybe the services are simple but their interaction definitely isn't.

<comment><USER4> "Definitely" is a strong word. I'd imagine that it's designed so that you don't need more than a few to interact with each in real time to fulfill a business process.

I think people's anxiety around this comes from thinking that they need to understand every single system in intimate detail, or even a significant number of them. On most days, you probably only need to understand what happens at the boundaries of the ones that your systems need to interact with. Good instrumentation means you have enough visibility into them without needing to understand the implementation details.

<comment><USER11> Let's put this in concrete terms, I have 1600 pieces of cardboard, each one only interacts with 4 other pieces of cardboard. In total, they come together to form a single, fully functional product which shows the full picture.

We literally call this product a puzzle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That visualisation graph is horrific. There's no way someone can look at 1,600 services and say that this is a good idea.

<comment><USER13> It _is_ a good idea when "profit" is way down on your companies' list of objectives but "being hip" and "bragging about complex tech" is at the top.

The more complexity they have, the more people they can justify to hire, the more "growth" they get, the more investment money they can solicit.

This kind of complexity benefits everyone individually. London has a huge bullshit startup scene that enjoys complexity for complexity's sake (for the aforementioned reasons) so it's a good career move for these developers to have "microservices" on their CV. Managers also gain as they have to manage a team 10x the size. The people above the managers can boast about how they're "scaling teams" and battling complex engineering problems (even though these problems are self-inflicted). The company enjoys it because it makes them look hip and is presumably good bait for investors (just like AI and blockchain). As a whole, everyone loses because a simple task is now taking 10x the effort thus money but cares about that as the downside is a long-term cost that is distributed across everyone when the upside is a direct, personal benefit to someone's career.

When you're playing with investor's money it's a very good idea. When you're playing with your own money and doing a cost/benefit analysis it's a terrible idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."

 _— M. Conway (Conway 's Law)_

<comment><USER11> To compare and contrast: [https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/27/engineering- management-at-...](https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/27/engineering-management- at-monzo)

To be fair, the article didn't say what I was expecting which was "Our organisation is entirely flat".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks awfully much like back in the days when OOP really took off and people started to brag about how many thousands of classes they have in their systems. They even drew dependency diagrams awfully similar to those in that presentation. And they thought all that complexity and interconnectedness was a good thing, something to applaud! Of course most of this happened in small presentations, not on HN and giant conferences. But it still happened.

Nowadays, bragging about your thousands of classes in your OO application earns you laughs, or at best pitiful stares - rightfully so.

I'm wondering if history is going to repeat itself...

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd be interested to understand how they manage their "common" library, especially the RPC bit.

I find it very painful to version APIs signatures and protocols: Let's say service S1 has a method "DoSomething(a, b)" and you want to add a new feature that makes is "DoSomething(a, b, c)" how do you handle that ? From what I've seen you would do "DoSomething_v2(a, b, c)" but that seems hardly sustainable: \- you need a new version of the shared library for the new RPC calls \- you need all services to maintain a lot of code to support different signatures

And I don't think rewriting all the callers to use the new signature is really an option. Or maybe they keep previous versions of the services deployed and they have some kind of routing that would find which service supports what signature (+probably some metadata like a minimum version number ?).

People of HN, what would be your advice on approaching this situation ?

<comment><USER4> I'm generally quite against shared libs across services for this very reason. Share patterns, sure. But code? You end up coupling services in ugly ways, because Team X has to think about how Team Y will be impacted if they need to make a change to the shared library. API clients (whatever protocol they may be using to communicate), aren't generally the hardest part of building a service. Trying to build shared ones (in my experience) is more trouble than it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Go with mandatory error handling enforced by a linter is probably one of the best ways I've seen reduce mistakes. Not all aspects of the language are perfect, but I'm confident it is loads better than exceptions-based approaches with catch-all exceptions and generic error handling strewn everywhere. I imagine this is especially useful from a banking perspective where mistakes can wipe out millions.

<comment><USER18> Microservices however remove that. i.e. if a microservices fails to respond you have no indication whether it succeeded or not, which can lead to inconsistent state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Using so many microservices seems like a good use of erlang, googling I found: (1)

(1) [http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2019/10/kubernetes-and- the-...](http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2019/10/kubernetes-and-the-erlang- vm-orchestration-on-the-large-and-the-small/)

</comment><comment><USER20> > We have an RPC filter that can detect you are trying to send a request to a > downstream that isn't currently running, it can compile it, start it, and > then send the request to it.

How does that work? dns not available == service not running & non-prod -> contact deployment operator?

And what if those services need DBs? Or is the single cassandra/etcd instance enough due to standardization?

And how those automatic metrics work is interesting too. Probably a prometheus http handler auto-starting with tie-ins into rpc/DB access code? How automated can it get.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are two ways to make system. One is so simple that there are obviously no issues and the other is so complicated that there are no obvious issues. The former being much harder.

</comment><comment><USER22> Monzo is rapidly growing and has only going for 4-5 years.

The real test will be when they have to retire or alter services or face product/compliance changes that effect many services.</comment>


One of Earth's Most Dangerous Supervolcanoes Is Rumbling - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/12/supervolcano-campi-flegrei-stirs-under-naples-italy/ <comment><USER2> It erupted 200,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, 35,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago, and 500 years ago. We're talking about Campi Flegrei, a volcano in the metropolitan area of Naples (Italy), one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world.</comment>


Physics of the curveball (the Magnus effect) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitted because some folks were complaining that the article with the title "Principles of pitching" wasn't about this.

It never ceases to amaze me how powerful the Magnus effect actually is in practice, that a decent pitcher can put such a noticeable curve on a ball.</comment>


If You Took Top 5 Ideas from Left & Right Would You Have Workable Healthcare? - <AUTHOR> http://www.blindreason.org/2010/02/if-you-took-top-5-ideas-from-left-and.html

<comment><USER2> Those ideas don't address the systematic problems.

This is a much more reasonable approach:

• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.

• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

From: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020425140457434...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html)

<comment><USER3> The point of the article is whether a compromise of 5 ideas each could create a passable bill. Because changes smaller than either side wants would still make a huge difference.

The plan you outline above would be and in fact has been rejected by most of the Democrats in congress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Republican ideas, especially #3, #4 and #5, don't appear to actually represent the Republican consensus. If you showed me those bullets blind, I'd guess they were Democratic or neutral.

<comment><USER3> I think that says more about your partisanship than it does about the plan. Paul Ryan (who authored the plan) is the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee and was considered a front runner for the 2012 nomination until he said he wouldn't run. He's about as mainstream Republican as you can get.

From his Wikipedia page (he's the only member of Congress in the Top 10): [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6990965/The- most-influential-US-conservatives-20-1.html)</comment></comment>


User Analytics as Your Product Grows - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/analytics/posts/user-analytics-as-your-product-grows

<comment><USER2> Serious, analytics is a sensitive topic for me, because I've invested weeks into these tools and many of them have not grown as we've become more intelligent. I'm totally jaded from the Mixpanel API and partially jaded from Segment.io too... I feel like most folks who take their data serious go for their own solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree - here's a quote from our YC Application Summary that we're submitting today...

"Mid-stage product owners that rely on all-in-one user user analytics platforms eventually outgrow the simplicity of those tools. Many choose to build their own user events datawarehouse at this point."

Sounds like I'm describing you personally ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> glad i pasted this here, found a typo :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "We find quite often, however, that your historical data is incompatible with the schema that you want to use going forward."

Can you go into this more? What schema do you find companies are using at scale and how is this different from their initial setup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Once you learn about Snowplow's canonical event model ([https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Canonical-event- mo...](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Canonical-event-model)) or read Keen's data modeling guide ([https://keen.io/docs/event-data- modeling/event-data-intro/](https://keen.io/docs/event-data-modeling/event- data-intro/)) you quickly realize all the stuff that you haven't been recording :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this Ry. It's just making me realize how much more work I have to do to back up any claim about being "data-driven".

<comment><AUTHOR> You and me both :) Ironically, even analytics companies can have cobbler's shoes syndrome. Good analytics is a journey, not a destination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As the CTO of an eCommerce start up, this type of data is extremely important. Thanks for sharing your post!</comment>


AngularJs directives explanation - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/607873/Extending-HTML-with-AngularJS-Directives

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is having some good explanation about directives in AngularJs than in original documentation.</comment>


Toward the next generation of programming tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/toward-the-next-generation-of-programming-tools <comment><USER2> I saw this 25 years ago in Digitalk's Visual Smalltalk Enterprise with the PART Workbench. I've often wondered why this hasn't gone anywhere ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Smalltalk_Enterprise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Smalltalk_Enterprise)). Maybe it's the culture of free development software that started around that time?</comment>


Litho: A declarative UI framework for Android - <AUTHOR> http://fblitho.com/ <comment><USER2> Seems like the Android equivalent of Facebook's existing framework ComponentKit [1]

1: [http://componentkit.org/](http://componentkit.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Another React-like alternative is Anvil - [http://trikita.co/anvil/](http://trikita.co/anvil/)

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 I have a bit of a bone to pick with Facebook here. I just checked the commit dates on this project, and the repo was posted inside of a month after I filed an issue on the draft-js repo linking to a project of mine with the very same name. (In fact it's the name of a larger project who's repo is private, but I named a component developed for the project (using draft-js) to a public repo in order to release it to support the community building around the draft-js framework.)

I'm not saying anything conclusively here except somebody neglected to do any due diligence. A search on Github would have revealed the project name already existed.

edit: The domain name was registered on March 9, 2017 -- four days after my project was posted to one of Facebook's open source repositories.

If anybody has any information on who I can contact about this I would greatly appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER4> So react-native is passé?

<comment><USER5> I would ask, may Litho be used by react-native?

<comment><USER6> Both React Native and Litho use Yoga[0] under the hood for layout, so there are already some shared underlying parts. I'm not familiar enough for RN in practice to say whether you could plug Litho Components into RN apps.

[0] [https://facebook.github.io/yoga/](https://facebook.github.io/yoga/)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Just wanted to nudge you to ask if you would have a look at my above comment on this thread.

Were you by chance on this project, or know of how I can get in touch with somebody who oversees things like this?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Problem with Positive Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/the-problem-with-positive-thinking.html <comment><USER2> I take issue with the title of the article, which seems to equate positive thinking with naivety. It's link bait for exactly the people who don't need it: the despondent and cynical.

<comment><USER3> I know a psychology professor who often says: "The only people who see the world clearly are the clinically depressed."

Reasonable self-deception is actually a very important thing for us to develop, because we're not good at doing things we don't believe ourselves to be capable of doing. It's not about thinking you're superman, or pretending you've accomplished something you haven't. It's about giving yourself the go- ahead to try.

<comment><USER4> There's even a term for it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are many different things that people mean by "positive thinking".

This article seems to confuse prematurely patting yourself on the back with believing it's possible to accomplish your goals.

Consider a less radical interpretation- something more along the lines of optimism vs cynicism. Then you can easily see the benefits of positive thinking.

Imagining that you can make a difference when pursuing your goal leads you into all sorts of events and skills that a negative state of mind would keep you from.

In my mind, it's a question of what tools to apply to different layers of abstraction. Like, you want to overall have a positive, optimistic outlook. Then, use negative thinking when double-checking your work or planning for contingencies.

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually have discovered this about myself recently. I have left my full time job not long ago so I can start a business and initially was very optimistic about the future and I was taking my time in every task and enjoying the moment but when my worries have increased I started envisioning worst case scenarios in my head and that's when I started getting things done much quicker. Looking back I also think I did well in school thanks to my worries but that also made me lose hair due to stress lol, so it's not always good to worry and a good balance is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nobody likes unpleasant feelings. For many people it is even worse than physical pain. Positive thinking and similar strategies offer a seductive way to temporarily suppress negative thoughts and feelings, but deluding yourself will likely bring only disappointment in the end.

<comment><USER8> Is disappointment in the end worse than disappointment in the beginning and middle?

<comment><USER9> 1/3 disappointment < 3/3 disappointment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article links to paywalled studies. Psychology studies are often hard to do. Has anyone read the studies to see if they're reasonable or awful?

<comment><USER11> Non-paywalled links (incidentally, Google Scholar is very good about digging up free PDFs, often uploaded by the authors themselves):

>More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one.

Oettingen, G. (1991). Expectation, Fantasy, and Weight Loss: Is the Impact of Positive Thinking Always Positive?. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 15(2).

[http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/OETTINGEN1991WEIGHT.PDF](http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/OETTINGEN1991WEIGHT.PDF)

>In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we asked two groups of college students to write about what lay in store for the coming week.

Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719-729.

[http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46284/1/__libfile_REPOSITORY_Conten...](http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46284/1/__libfile_REPOSITORY_Content_Kappes,%20H_Positive%20fantasies%20about%20idealized%20futures%20sap%20energy_Positive%20fantasies%20about%20idealized%20futures%20sap%20energy%20\(LSE%20RO\).pdf)

>In a recent study on healthy eating and exercise. we divided participants into two groups.

Stadler, G., Oettingen, G., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2010). Intervention effects of information and self-regulation on eating fruits and vegetables over two years. Health Psychology, 29(3), 274.

[http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/Stadler,%20G.,%20Oettinge...](http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/Stadler,%20G.,%20Oettingen,%20G.,%20%26%20Gollwitzer,%20P.%20M.%20\(2010\).%20Health%20Psychology.pdf)

Stadler, G., Oettingen, G., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2009). Physical activity in women: Effects of a self-regulation intervention. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 36(1), 29-34.

[http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/Stadler,%20G.,%20Oettinge...](http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/Stadler,%20G.,%20Oettingen,%20G.%20%26%20Gollwitzer,%20P.%20\(2009\).%20Physical%20activity%20in%20women.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The key point which is quite valid is that daydreaming about success is not very useful. Contrary to "The Secret" and such self-help books.

People seem to succeed if they a) Have a lot of confidence they will succeed AND b) They are fully aware that there will be setbacks, struggle, difficulties, and moments of doubt.

Good book on the topic with academic references "Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals" by Heidi Grant Halvorson and Carol S. Dweck.

</comment><comment><USER13> I realize it's probably not a popular opinion, but I feel that healthy streak of cynicism has helped me more than it has hurt me in life.

I guess the learning portion has been not to avoid being cynical, but to avoid expressing cynical sentiment to others. Very few like to hear it. But I believe immediately suspecting official explanations from almost any source to be self serving attempts at deception often lands one closer to actionable truth than simply accepting them at face value.

</comment><comment><USER14> The premise of the article reminds me of the metric of "fielding average" in baseball. A player can have a high fielding average by playing it safe and by not aggressively running to the ball in play. So, it is possible that a more aggressive player can have a lower fielding average and yet contribute a lot more value to the team.

</comment><comment><USER15> The author is confusing positive thinking with blind, without-a-plan, plowing ahead. They're not the same.

Optimism and positive thinking are close synonyms. Positive thinking is the a belief that there is a solution to the problem and that you, as a problem solver, should be open to the paths that lead to the solution.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article only mentioned the 'fix' put forth by the author. What is mental contrasting and how does one do it?</comment>


The genius brothers behind Google Wave - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/27/rasmussen.brothers.google.wave/index.html

<comment><USER2> This was a great article - what a deadly combination. The thinker and do-er.</comment>


Ask HN: Why didn't Amazon put a Zxxx hub into echo? - <AUTHOR> Anyone have any thoughts on why Amazon didn't put a Zwave or Zigbee or whatever RX/TX device into the echo.  I suspect the cost would be very minimal for hardware.  SW non-trivial but definitely do-able.  Now I need to go out and buy a full hub for a tiny piece of silicon that Amazon could have included directly in the echo itself. <comment><USER2> I doubt Amazon wants to be the primary point of contact for support whenever cheap Zigbee or ZWave hardware is failing.

And a lot of the hardware _is_ crap and _will_ fail.

Not sure why they didn't include something like an FM radio though. (OK, I do... But still, I'd like one!)</comment>


Lotus Notes Soon To Become Even More LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/lotus-notes-soon-to-become-even-more-linkedin/ <comment><USER2> Btw - the latest Lotus Notes client is Eclipse-based.

Aside from being a little resource hungry - it's a decent improvement on the aging Notes UI.

<comment><USER3> That's hard to imagine. Lotus Notes is already a beast. Every time I start it up at work, I cry a little on the inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fortune 500 employees can use it to find a new job when they get laid off.</comment>


From iPhone to Android - <AUTHOR> http://carpeaqua.com/2010/05/26/from-iphone-to-android/

<comment><USER2> He's not kidding when he says he's sweating the little things:

"Why is the browser called Browser rather than Chrome?"

That's not an _annoyance_ , it's barely an observation.</comment>


My Startup landed Series A Funding - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/16/empire-avenue-raises-1-2-million-to-turn-social-influence-into-a-virtual-stock-market/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations :)</comment>


What if We cured cancer? - <AUTHOR> https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/rcsbull.2016.190 <comment><USER2> The question is, can we teach doctors to say:- "You want fries with that?"</comment>


How to Upgrade from Windows 7 to Ubuntu Linux – Installation - <AUTHOR> https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-upgrade-from-windows-7-to-ubuntu-installation <comment><USER2> I never appreciate about how complicated this must seem to people until I read an article like this (holy schnikeys that's a lot of words!). Although I'm not sure someone who's running win7 in 2020 is the same demo that will engage in changing boot devices, boot order and annihilating partitions.

It's nice that they cover installing Ubuntu on a VM as an alternative to bare metal install, but no mention is made of just upgrading the machine to Windows 10 and installing Ubuntu on WSL.

I know that it's not what the article is about, but for me on a day-to-day basis, WSL covers 98% of what I need on a work computer, especially considering that you can lay different distributions down (Debian + Ubuntu).

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice comprehensive guide.

I don't know how relevant it is for HN users, I'll still post my two cents for the general installation of OS's and boot media.

• B A C K U P S!!!

• make sure you Have the correct bootmode Setup in the UEFI/BIOS and on wherever the image is written on.

• make sure beforehand that the devices (printer, mouse with extra button, etc.) will work as expected. Don't take the support for granted, fell into that trap a few times.</comment>


The Biggest Tech IPO of 2008 Is Coming Out of Russia: Search Engine Yandex to Raise Up To $2 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/the-biggest-tech-ipo-of-2008-is-coming-out-of-russia-search-engine-yandex-to-raise-up-to-2-billion/ <comment><USER2> Any of the Russian folks here care to comment on how useful they feel Yandex is? What is your preference for searching Russian pages? google.ru or yandex.com? Do you use one or the other exclusively? Or is yandex.com better for specific tasks only?

<comment><USER3> Yandex has always had better stemming. In Russian words have very many forms so you really-really need stemming. For that reason Yandex used to be immensely more useful if you have to find something.

Although I make very few searches in Russian these days so my opinion could be outdated. On the rare occasion I just use my default search everywhere - Google and it feels good enough nowadays, but again I use it rarely.

Technical merits alone are not sufficient, however, to evaluate Yandex. Not only the brand recognition is important, the "Russian Internet" (aka RuNet) is a community with its own sub-culture, celebrities etc. and one has to blend in. Both modern and classical cultural references take important part in what is worthy of people's attention and what is not.

Google has offices in Russia these days, and they are dialing up puns and cultural references as well. In one example Google's unit translation feature (e.g. "72 F in C") made a translation from meters to parrots, in reference to a child cartoon (see [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B3...](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%B9#Noun)). This cartoon was popular 30 years ago, when the current generation of movers and shakers were growing up. You have to do that kind of thing to gain credibility in RuNet. Google seems to be on the right track with that, but it's not clear to me they are willingly making this investment or rather a few employees did this on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That would dwarf Quaero's US$306 million investment ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136759> ).

</comment><comment><USER5> Would anyone mind explaining the "Ya" => backwards R dealie?

<comment><USER3> Written Russian language uses Cyrillic alphabet instead of Latin. That alphabet has 33 separate letters and one of them is for sound "Ya", it is spelled like "R" but backwards.

A mix of Russian and English in a brand-name for a Russian company was a popular thing to do, at least in the nineties. English part makes it cool and trendy while Russian part makes it less alien and more domesticated.

Ya is also the word "I" (or "me") in Russian, thus "Yandex" is a pun on "Index" (referring to "indexing" of internet).

<comment><USER5> Clever. I saw the visual pun since the shape of the Я contains the I. Very cool that it's also reflected semantically.</comment></comment></comment>


Readings in Distributed Systems - <AUTHOR> http://bytepawn.com/readings-in-distributed-systems/

<comment><USER2> What's missing here is an overview of randomized protocols. For example, the "Lamport papers" deal to a large extent with how to achieve consensus in the presence of faults.

He never mentions anywhere in those papers the existence of randomized solutions to these. In practice they are often easier to implement and are only randomized in so far as reaching agreement with probability 1. Which I'm happy with :-).

A good survey is www.cs.yale.edu/~aspnes/randomized-consensus-survey.pdf

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice list.

More here: <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html> (some overlap w/Dynamo, Paxos, Frangipani, and Petal).</comment>


Amazon Wants Patent for Paying with a Selfie Photo - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/03/14/amazon-wants-the-patent-for-pay-by-selfie/ <comment><USER2> When I first saw the title, I thought the idea was to let someone have something for free, on the condition that they post a selfie of them using the thing they have just purchased.</comment>


^ NightShow HN: Have you seen this? The Real Real Good Product/Market fit. - <AUTHOR> https://pmfguru.com/superhuman-pmf-engine <comment><USER2> Love this - definitely intend to use it for my next project

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you lovely stranger!</comment></comment>


Sci-Hub tears down academia's "illegal" copyright paywalls - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-tears-down-academias-illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/ <comment><USER2> While I'm pretty sure the legal theory being espoused here has no chance in court, the fact remains that what Sci-Hub is doing is a good thing. Hopefully in a few decades when we finally get sane copyright laws, or open access journals become the standard instead of the exception, we'll be able to look back on this differently.

For those saying "there are open access journals, you aren't forced to publish with Elsevier" you're wrong. If you want a PhD and they require publications, you publish where there is a tradition of publishing or it doesn't count. If you're looking for tenure, they care about the prestige of the journals you publish in. You can make a political statement if you're already tenured, but most don't have that luxury.

<comment><USER3> > If you want a PhD and they require publications, you publish where there is > a tradition of publishing or it doesn't count.

Most PhD programs require a single publication. It's called a _dissertation_. Sometimes individual chapters are formatted with an eye towards publication in a particular journal, but I'm not aware of any program, at least in the biological sciences that requires journal publications to get a degree.

<comment><USER2> It's probably different in different fields. In CS it's common for the dissertation to be a compilation of several published papers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article is incoherent. Also, the quotation of the U.N. declaration of human rights is incomplete:

> Article 27.

> (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the > community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its > benefits. > (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and > material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic > production of which he is the author.

Aside from the fact that the UNDHR doesn't directly bind anyone in the U.S. it explicitly protects the "material interests" in scientific productions. Copyright is a _human right_ under the UNDHR.

Elsevier's business model is built simply on scientists exchanging their material interest in their publications from the publicity that comes from being published in one of its affiliated publications.

<comment><USER5> In many cases, papers from 20 or 50 years ago, which were once the property of small journals run mostly-independently by their editorial boards, are now the property of one of the big journal aggregators, after they bought up all kinds of journals and their archives for relative peanuts.

Dead authors of decades-old basic research originally published their papers where they thought they would be spread widely (and often out-of-band distributed preprints or xeroxes to each-other; it's not like the authors were excessively worried about copyright or decades-later royalties). But now, through factors entirely out of their control and irrelevant to their original preferences, those papers are being locked away in a paywalled archive to support an aggregator's rent-seeking.

Century-long copyright is bad enough for books and songs and films. It's absolutely disastrous for science.

Even today, scientists aren't publishing in big journals for the "publicity" per se. They're doing it because they need to for hiring/tenure.

Elsevier and their ilk have basically managed to insert themselves in the middle of a big game everyone was playing where previously money was only an incidental part of the game so nobody paid much attention or considered what would happen if actors with malicious intent got involved. Once firmly in place, they started demanding ransom, and it caught everyone else off guard. Essentially everyone else (libraries, researchers, government grant agencies, universities, the general public) would be happier if they were gone, but for the moment no one knows how to get rid of them.

The tactics employed by the journal aggregators, such as forcing universities to buy bundles of thousands of irrelevant journals they don't care about in order to have access to the handful with useful stuff in them, are shameless thuggery.

<comment><USER6> i support the view that publishers are getting outright evil just because they can and no one knows how to get rid of them.

in the old time the information exchange was too expensive for individuals living in different mountains. but now we have the internet.

many authors upload their paper on the internet or give out if you request, they are also happy to discuss about it.

<comment><USER7> > i support the view that publishers are getting outright evil just because > they can and no one knows how to get rid of them.

We do know how to get rid of them (cf. [https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt)):

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? "

<comment><USER6> oh when i read your comment i was thinking of Aaron Swartz and then it turned out to be him.

this is what libgen, sci-hub are doing but they are struggling, they change domain name often these days maybe due to legal matters with publishers.

i still think that libgen and sci-hub will prevail, like thepiratebay and kickass. the community supporting and needing them is real and "we dont need permission to do the right thing".

edit: sorry but i dont why my above comment is downvoted, is it too naive or negative in some sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My university blocks access to sci-hub on the claim that it has previously hosted malware. Apparently it attempted to infiltrate the visiting computer and act as a proxy server and/or grab the user's institutional login credentials, in order to access otherwise pay walled literature. At least, that's what I was told when I complained it was blocked.

Fortunately, they left libgen ([http://gen.lib.rus.ec/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/)) unblocked - as they weren't concerned about copyright issues, only malware threats - which has an entire searchable mirror of all papers and books downloaded via sci-hub. It's a fantastic, incredibly useful resource and I hope it continues to operate unscathed.

<comment><USER9> Tor Browser might work for you to circumvent the censorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When reading about accessibility of research papers, I am always reminded of the Die Gedanken Sind Frei talk by Eben Moglen, and later how black slaves were forbidden by law to learn reading and writing.

 _We have associated the struggle for human equality with the struggle for freedom of knowledge and we have associated them rightly: they belong together. Because the recognition of individual possibility, to allow each to be what she and he can be, rests inherently upon the availability of knowledge; the perpetuation of ignorance is the beginning of slavery._

</comment><comment><USER7> Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

[https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt) ([https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto](https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto)).</comment>


Smartwatches have overtaken Swiss watches in global shipments - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/620990/that-didnt-take-long-smartwatches-have-overtaken-swiss-watches-in-global-shipments/ <comment><USER2> I think swiss watch producers should respond by producing dumb phones.

Let me explain: As every bum these days owns a smartphone that keeps him connected day in and out, there is a nascent need to differentiate. Smartphones have brought internet addiction, increased stress levels, and bad body posture. I believe freeing yourselves from these effects, freeing yourselves from being a slave of technologies and virtual social networks will be increasingly sought after as the millenials start aging. At the same time, you don't want to be completely cut off. So today, the only choice you have is to buy one of the remaining shabby feature phones. The watch industry, on the other hand, is extremely good in creating an emotional experience for a commodity. They would be in the best position to turn a simple phone into an experience, into a device that reflects value and status.

The only instance I've seen so far is from the Swiss company Punkt. But when I look at their designs I go "meh". I think there is space for more variety.

Also, I do think that a phone today needs to come with a global phone book, which means basically Google Maps. So, it will probably still be a smartphone under the hood. I could even see reverse pricing applied - a basic version that can do everything, and as you go to a silver, gold, and platinum version, functionalities get locked down.</comment>