Agriculture may have been humanity's greatest blunder (1987) - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race <comment><USER2> Did not expect to see this story in a mainstream publication, and from --twenty-- er, thirty years ago!

For more details, and options for the future, I recommend "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture"

[http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save- hum...](http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-humanity-and- the-planet-but-not-civilization/)

[http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization- with...](http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with- permaculture/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Makes me think of "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. This book interprets the "Garden of Eden" as a metaphor for the hunter/gather phase. The "tree of knowledge of good and evil" is symbolic of the choice of a population to settle down on one spot and develop agriculture instead of staying on the move.

The amount of controlled agriculturally productive land correlates to more food to raise a larger army which in turn can be used to forcefully acquire more land.

I specifically remember a sentence from the book, to paraphrase: "The hungry lion does not kill the entire herd of antelope, but rather takes what it needs and the herd replenishes."

To quote Ayn Rand (channeled through her character Dominique): "Religion is class exploitation."

From the article: "Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses."

</comment><comment><USER4> But the article does point out that agriculture was a response - folks didn't farm until they had to.

So maybeagriculture wasn't the blunder. The blunder was hunting and gathering so hard that you had no choice but to farm. Agriculture itself was probably the best thing our ancestors could have done given the scarcity they created for themselves.

But I don't know anything about this, I'm just a computer programmer.

<comment><USER5> > hunting and gathering so hard that you had no choice but to farm

That's not really how it worked. No one culture made a decision to stop hunting. Even ignoring the costs in leisure time, agriculture allows for much (MUCH) higher population densities and a life in a fixed location that allows for development technologies using equipment that can't easily be carried with you (like walls, long term food storage, arsenals full of spears, etc...).

Eventually someone learned how to do it, and discovered after a generation or two that they outnumbered their competitors, who were either pushed aside or borrowed the same techniques to survive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> " _In one study, the Bushmen 's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size._"

"during a month when food was plentiful"

Don't know if the article discusses the other 11 months, since the next page button doesn't seem to work on Firefox Android.

Oh, and what was that early childhood mortality rate?

<comment><USER2> In re: the San†, it's not exactly an anthropological study but the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy"‡ shows a life of relative happiness despite what seems like abject poverty. They don't know they are poor, and so it doesn't bother them. They have problems, but in their world all their problems are people- sized, if that makes sense. In contrast, our modern civilization seems Brutalist (as in the architectural style.)

Their way of life is _stable_ , "A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BCE was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012."†

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

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

<comment><USER6> Discernment of mortality risk associated with childbirth in archaeologically derived forager skeletons±:

" _This research explores the idea that if excess mortality is associated with first pregnancy, females will outnumber males among young adult skeletons. The sample is of 246 skeletons (119 males, 127 females) representing Later Stone Age (LSA) foragers of the South African Cape. Young adults are distinguished through incomplete maturation of the medial clavicle, iliac crest and vertebral bodies. With 26 women and 14 men in the young category, a higher mortality risk for women is suggested, particularly in the Southern Cape region. Body size does not distinguish mortality groups; there is evidence of a dietary protein difference between young and older women from the Southern Cape. Possible increased mortality associated with first parturition may have been linked to morphological or energetic challenges, or a combination of both._ "

± [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187998171...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879981714000643)

" _During times of deprivation, infanticide was permitted to preserve resources._ "

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people?wprov=sfla...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people?wprov=sfla1)

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I can't access the science article and the abstract doesn't exactly spell out any conclusions from what I can tell.

As for infanticide "during times of deprivation" that is not unique to the Juǀ'hoansi people. Nor death in childbirth.

FWIW famine has been a feature of agricultural societies to within living memory.

In any event, if the movie is anything to go by, they are happy. Like, really happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since author is so preoccupied with class, sexism and progressive issues, I wonder how consent culture was in hunter gatherer communities. If a women said no to big-muscle-abe, did it mean no?

Good thing author doesn't need to worry about their next meal, and has time to write such bullshit.

<comment><USER8> Betcha that women tend to be protein deprived in hunter-gatherer groups, at least the ones where they don't get to run a bunch of buffalo off of a cliff. I should look around for a study based on dental remains.

I've always been amused by the concept of egalitarianism in tribal societies. Prison (or high school) should teach you otherwise

<comment><USER9> Those women were all nursing the children they had with the men, so the men had a strong motivation to keep them well fed.

Besides that, the gathering side of the equation, which the women were in charge with, is generally a lot more reliable on a daily basis than hunting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The book Sapiens explored some of this. I can see how agriculture has shaped us and the planet negatively. Not sure what the alternative would have been, other than remaining foragers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anarchism.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article successfully supports an intriguing assertion that hunter- gathering societies existed on a fitness plateau, and for humanity to achieve improvements upon that quality of life it was necessary to cross a deep valley. To extend this to making the claim that human beings were and are universally better off as hunter-gatherers than they are today is absurd.

Publishing this article in a magazine, with later distribution online, is a very special kind of irony given that hunter-gatherer societies rarely if ever developed writing systems.

<comment><USER8> It seems to me that it would be difficult to separate those valleys from the valleys you see from long term cycles in mass human behavior...under/over population of labor for example (or under/over supply of prey animals and food plants).</comment></comment>


Amazon's New Cloud Prices Show That Google Is Now a Threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-aws-cloud/ <comment><USER2> If this is Amazon trying to compete with Google's pricing scheme, they missed. Google's sustained use discounts just happen, and give you a discount on whatever time you used. With Amazon's new pricing for reserved instances, any reserved instance you buy (upfront fee or not) commits you to pay an hourly fee regardless of whether the instance is running now.

They removed the light/medium reserved instance options where you paid a discounted usage rate, and now just have 3 ways of purchasing a heavy reserved instance.

This is going to raise prices for us on AWS because we won't be able to use reservations for the instances we autoscale so the current medium reservations we have are going to be on-demand now.

<comment><USER3> Yes exactly.

The author of that article (and their strange quotes) doesn't understand what Amazon just changed or doesn't understand Google's sustained usage discounts.

If anything Amazon just moved in the opposite direction of what Google is doing, not to copy it as the article implies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well for now AWS still charges a large premium over discounted hosting companies such as Hetzner. Over the past years it doesn't seem like anybody is catching up though. AWS is still by far the most advanced cloud hosting solution. Some great features: \- ELB \- Cloudformation \- RDS \- ElastiCache \- The BOTO api client \- Snapshots (Also see snaptastic btw, [https://github.com/tschellenbach/snaptastic](https://github.com/tschellenbach/snaptastic))

</comment><comment><USER5> The price-wars between amazon, ms, and google are constant. They always tweak pricing to match the tweaks the other two make. Given this is no change to the norm, i don't see this as a referendum on google's position in the market. If revenue is changing, that may be an indication. But price changing by itself has little meaning at this point.

<comment><USER6> i'm absolutely in the aws camp. in my opinion (having tried both), aws is far superior to google. but the biggest difference in pricing, which no one has mentioned, is that AWS offers a free 1 year trial for developers, while google only offers 60 days. That's a big difference for indie developers prototyping a MVP.

<comment><USER7> Good point, but to counter it: Google has a fairly generous AppEngine free tier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with AWS reserved instances is their limitations on modification later [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri- modify...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri- modifying.html#ri-modification-limits) \-- if you grow and need more capacity, you're kinda stuck unless you have Amazon Linux AMI. It would be nice if you could upgrade RDS instance, for example -- but I don't think that is possible.

<comment><USER9> If you have a US bank account you can sell it and buy another that fit your needs.

<comment><USER10> Annoyingly, you can't resell RDS reserved instances. Just EC2. We're stuck paying for a m3.large heavy and our newly upgraded m3.xlarge on-demand.

<comment><USER9> Oh, sorry, I did not know about that! It need some extra planning before buying it.

<comment><USER11> Cept it can be hard to plan for smaller companies. If your startup is a fail, you don't need anything. If it is bootstrapping, you might need a medium or large for a DB. If you are hitting it huge, you need all you can get.

The pricing system with reserved instances is fine for a stable business with 10% yearly growth, not good for a startup.

As a user I would totally just prefer a discount for using more, but I can also see why amazon doesn't want to have a bunch of hardware that is 1 year old and no one wants to use it (but couldn't they just adjust the price to make it valuable still? )

<comment><USER9> You can choose on-demand instances till calibrate your growth. You can also use load balancing, starting new servers as need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading the article, I can't help but think of this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html).

Reads too much like a Google marketing response to an Amazon announcement.

<comment><USER13> I honestly hate this type of response, there must now be one in any thread where any company is discussed in anything that could be construed as a positive light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article read like a paid Google App engine advert.

They point to the announcement about RI pricing simplification as proof that "Google has finally arrived." No justification at all, and it isn't obvious how one relates to the other (in particular as the RI changes weren't a direct price reduction).

> "Google is making a dent and AWS is starting to feel the pain from a pricing > perspective,"

But they didn't announce a price reduction this week!

> says one ex-Amazon employee who asked not to be identified because his > current employer works with the cloud company.

Because they work for Google. Because this is a paid Google advert.

> But this spring, Google introduced a product called Sustained Use Discounts, > and this made things much simpler.

I'd argue that the sustained use model makes it harder to calculate your ultimate bill, not easier. It has the same issues Amazon's now retired Light and Medium usage tiers had, how do you track if you're at 25%, 50%, 75%, etc utilisation? Keeping track of that is annoying and harder than you'd think in a real production environment with dynamic instances responding to load.

Amazon's new pricing model actually just scrapped something akin to sustained use billing because it was unpopular. You wouldn't know that reading the article.

> Maybe they didn't want to draw attention to what's obviously a reaction to > Google

Maybe it was a reaction to customer feedback? I see no evidence that Google caused this change, and the fact that Amazon moved AWAY from Google's model is very telling. Light and medium utilisation RI are effectively Google's model, they just do it dynamically. Amazon hasn't added that or indicated that they will.

Do these people even understand Amazon's RI pricing structure, or Google's sustained usage, or anything at all?

> Byrne says that until Amazon changed its pricing, his company was toying > with the idea of switching to Google, a move that would have saved Copper.io > hundreds of thousands of dollars—until Monday, at least.

That literally makes zero sense. Heavy utilisation RIs have been available since forever, and are extremely price competitive with every other major competitor in the cloud infrastructure space (namely Google, and Azure).

If it would have saved you "hundreds of thousands" legitimately then you are mismanaging your account heavily.

> "When I saw the Amazon announcement, I said: 'Great. We don't have to > consider moving.'"

Because, why? I don't understand what it is they think Amazon changed. Because that statement makes no sense. If you were mismanaging your account before, you'd still be mismanaging it now. Amazon moving payments will save you a little money (due to the interest on that money sitting in your accounts) but nothing like what is described here.

> When Google first got into the cloud business back in 2008, the company bet > that people would want to run cloud applications on its infrastructure in > highly specialized ways and not mess around with operating systems and > virtual machines. That proved to be a bad bet.

That is an under-statement. Google thought that people wanted to be locked into their cloud APIs and initially at least have to completely re-write all of their software for Google's app engine. It was supremely arrogant on Google's part.

App engine now supports more standardised APIs and databases, but it remains more expensive to do than it should be. Azure's "web-sites" product is what Google App Engine should have been when it first got released, and even today I find "web-sites" more compelling as a bottled solution than Google App Engine (although VMs trump both).

> And now the company is fast catching up.

Is that a fact? Because both Google and Azure topped $1B in 2013, and from what I've been seeing Azure, not Google, has been growing to compete with Amazon in 2014. Microsoft has been leveraging many pre-existing channels (education, MSDN, et al) to give out Azure trials and it seems to be working for them.

> Byrne says that while Google doesn't offer the wide range of products, it > beats out Amazon in many respects. Google's compute speed and network "is > faster than Amazon's," he says. "They're probably the only people where you > can say that their infrastructure is really world-leading."

If you weren't certain this was a paid product advert, now you should be.

Compute speed is relative to cost, and dollar per dollar that statement seems untrue. Network speed on Amazon and Google is great, Google might be better but I wouldn't migrate to them because neither Amazon or Azure have let me down in that department.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure you went into this article looking for excuses to call it a paid Google placement. If I were reading your comment through a similar lens, I would call you an Amazon shill but I don't think either of these posts were paid for by Amazon or Google.

>> "Google is making a dent and AWS is starting to feel the pain from a pricing perspective,"

>But they didn't announce a price reduction this week!

Uh, they announced a change related to pricing, not a reduction: [http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-reserved- instance...](http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-reserved-instances/)

>> says one ex-Amazon employee who asked not to be identified because his current employer works with the cloud company.

>Because they work for Google. Because this is a paid Google advert.

They don't work for Google. They work for a company that works with Google. That could be one of thousands (?) that are hosted on Compute Engine.

<comment><USER15> My biggest issue with the article is no mention of MSFT or Azure. MSFT is a public company and by all accounts their hosted business appears to be growing very rapidly. So to not even mention what they're doing and how AMZN would also be concerned about them as competition makes the article kind of weak.

<comment><USER16> Azure is growing like mad, and in most corporations it's listed as 'AWS', 'Azure' and 'everyone else' when discussing the cloud. I've had multiple meetings where I was the only person who'd even heard that Google had an option...RackSpace comes up more often than Google. This article is pretty clearly paid for by Google, in a battle that they are _really_ late in arriving to.

And given Google's reputation for support (fully warranted in my experience), it's going to take a lot for corporations to shift away from AWS. It's actually astounding how much market share Azure has gotten already in spite of AWS.

<comment><USER17> Your experience is not universal. Every single person I've talked to their company is deciding between amazon and google. Neither MS nor rackspace even come up.

<comment><USER16> I didn't say my experience was universal.

 _In my experience_ the only times I've heard Google mentioned by companies as an option are small start ups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the longer term, I would expect both of rthem to be afraid of the many smaller local players in each country when they start to up their game in terms of hosting. People are starting to become wary of putting all your data in one cloud - whether it is a Google or amazon shaped one.

</comment><comment><USER14> So Amazon has "simplified" billing by removing a number of complicated options, but simultaneously adding a bunch of new options.

I _much_ prefer Google's approach where the discounts "just happen". Planning for reserved instances, even before AWS added the crazy light/medium/heavy workloads, was always stressful (do I take 3 years? do I take 1?).

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm a bit curious, as to whether AWS has a open DNS like the Google DNS?

<comment><USER20> Amazon DNS is done via their Route 53 service I believe.

<comment><USER21> OP is asking whether Amazon offers public addresses that will respond to DNS requests for end users, such as 126.96.36.199 and 126.96.36.199 (OpenDNS).

To my knowledge, they do not - Route 53 is made for domain administrators to use as their nameservers instead of their domain registrar's.

<comment><USER19> Indeed that was my question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My decision on which provider to use is based on trust. How can any developer trust that Google won't pull the rug out from under them. This can happen with AWS too but Google has a history of doing this. No matter how cheap I'll stick with AWS and the safer bet for my business, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER23> What's it cost to run a website with a MySQL database on app engine? Starting with a free App Engine instance and a data store always had a propriety lockin.

<comment><USER24> Just go get a VPS or small dedi. Cloud services aren't really ideal for dedicated site hosting, they're really for people growing their own services. The main killer for anyone wanting to host infrastructure is that bandwidth is something like 20x dearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great article to read with the CloudToButt chrome extension

</comment><comment><USER26> Both are going to compete fiercely on prices, so my money goes to whoever doesn't make it easier for CIA and NSA to assassinate people, much like how IBM made it easier for the Nazi to gas people.

<comment><USER27> So you run workloads on clusters of Commodore-64's?</comment></comment>


Thinking About Smart Contract Security - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/ <comment><USER3> > The reason for this fundamental conclusion is as follows. All instances of > smart contract theft or loss – in fact, the very definition of smart > contract theft or loss, is fundamentally about differences between > implementation and intent.

This is, I think, to its core the fundamental problem with any kind of rigid language in contracts. It's nice to see an acknowledgement of its existence, but disappointing to see __no __acknowledgement of its severity. We see this all the time, not just in code, but in law and policy as well: an overly- prescriptive law can be just as problematic as an overly-vague one. And imperatively written smart contracts are about as prescriptive as you can get.

This is of course in addition to another critical shortcoming for smart contracts: they are capable only of interacting with informational assets (of which "money" is a subset). You can't possibly create a smart contract to purchase a house, because at the end of the day the person that physically occupies the house is in the position of power. Any smart contract enforcement mechanism would necessarily rely upon some outside system, which defeats the whole purpose of the thing in the first place.

I have high hopes for cryptocurrencies, in no small part because they inherently deal with only information (again, money is a subset thereof). But I'll be honest: I remain extremely skeptical that smart contracts _as we currently understand them_ will ever see general adoption. It strikes me as an emotionally understandable, but rationally ill-advised, radical departure from hundreds of years of political philosophy and sociology... not in a way that inspires the term "disruption", but rather in a way that evokes "out of the frying pan, and into a boiling pot of lava". I'm all for "a better contracts system", but given that a contract (even one with a non-human entity) is by its very definition a social instrument, I just fail to see a reasonable way forward for what is essentially contractual bytecode.

<comment><USER4> I agree broadly - and the current DAO was a terrible idea on many fronts, but I'll discuss one quibble in case it starts a broader discussion.

> You can't possibly create a smart contract to purchase a house, because at > the end of the day the person that physically occupies the house is in the > position of power.

It's likely that if something like this ever succeeded, there'd be many parties that would provide bridges between real world assets (dollars, a house, entry to an electronic lock) + real world contracts that might bridge to crypto contracts (so a trustee may hold a house under US law for a crypto title owned by others - similar to how a custodial bank holds financial assets on your behalf). You're right that the enforcement mechanism might be decoupled, but that doesn't make it worthless, as the trustee could still use the enforcement mechanism on the real world side. On the cryptocontract side, parts could be enforced like payments.

So why might crypto contracts be interesting in this case:

\- There are too many parties involved and coordination costs are high (crypto contracts that millions of people collectively negotiate together)

\- The adherents are international, and may prefer a standardized form of law accessible cheaply and easily to all

There are clearly an infinite number of risks - but this is just an example of how it might still be beneficial.

One other point. Everyone in this recent DAO hack discusses cryptocontracts as set in stone - and the be all, end all once published. Still, you could always inject in a party that adjudicates, but only in extreme scenarios (technically, they might have root access when a few parties with conflicting incentives agreed).

You might ask, doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of crypto contracts if third parties are involved - but there still may be value if the third party role is substantially diminished, or if previous forms of negotiation that never happened due to coordination cost now occur.

(the canonical Bitcoin example is escrow, where the two parties can verifiably escrow money which in the real world always required a third party actively involved, and a third party in the cryptocurrency world steps in only if there are issues that the two parties can't resolve and cannot take the money itself - 2 of 3 multisig).

<comment><USER5> _\- The adherents are international, and may prefer a standardized form of law accessible cheaply and easily to all_

I think this is undervalued, and probably going to become even more important in the future. Largely because it's something that the current legal framework simply doesn't provide.

We have tenuous legal agreements between nation-states (largely of the "we choose to obey now because it's in our best interest" variety). And we have legal systems that apply in a single country. But we really don't have an ironclad anything in the ether (ha!) between those.

<comment><USER6> More than you think. One of the selling points for why some organizations, especially financial or legal, advertise they are in specific countries is a strong, consistent enforcement of specific things like banking integrity, contract law, I.P. law, whatever. It's important enough to business sector that it's on the international ratings for what countries are best to do business in. Also, Switzerland makes a killing in the financial sector using this approach.

So, picking the best jurisdiction for something like this plus getting all parties to agree to settle disputes according to its laws would be a positive step for such organizations. Knocks out a whole category of risk. These decentralized schemes often pretend they won't need lawyers but they exist in real world for good reasons. Best to know what they can or can't do in at least all the common, criminal situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything.

Interesting change of attitude! I was just watching a talk[1] from a couple of years ago where Vitalik says "there are a substantial number of applications where you can actually say yes 'I am 99.9 percent certain this is bug free'". Amazing how much a few years of industry practice can humble a young software engineer.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/cahj4WJtp20?t=43m45s](https://youtu.be/cahj4WJtp20?t=43m45s)

<comment><USER8> True at NASA and in many other places that spend 100x as much per line of code, albeit it's more like 95% surety.

<comment><USER7> They also spend a lot of time building robust systems that can recover from errors (e.g. the famous story about the guidance computer on the Apollo 11 recovering from cycle stealing and overflows).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ethereum/DAO would be much less of a tire fire embarassment if the management had taken some time to learn anything about the basics of contracts and law, instead of making it up as they go and assuming the entirety of centuries of civilization has no clue what they were doing.

<comment><USER10> They were indeed very naive. In the history of law, there has always been a divide between those who believe that the letter of law should be applied no matter what, and those who believe that social justice should be ensured. Whatever the terms of theDAO, there WILL be judges to find that what just happened to it is theft. That is why instead of damaging trust in Ether by forking it, the ethereum/DAO management should turn to the law to get its money back.

Smart contracts are a very good thing, but they won't become perfectly safe any time soon (if ever), so the community should recognize that civil and criminal law are a safety net, likely to help smart contract get wider use, because of they create increased trust.

<comment><USER11> > Whatever the terms of theDAO, there WILL be judges to find that what just > happened to it is theft.

I am not completely sure if it went to court and it was litigated fully it would be found that the theDAO smart contracts that were buggy could be rolled back to what was "intended" as there was language that specifically denied that form of reasoning. theDAO clearly fucked up but that doesn't invalidate a contract. The intent in the contract was actually clearly declared, the smart contract was binding in its form. The smart contract's intent was its code. It's code was buggy. Thus one will have to litigate in court whether intent can inferred from buggy code and whether a software bug can be rules as outside of intent. Rolling back transactions like that are really exceptional.

I think it is quite interesting. A lot of people in the stock market have lost money because of software bugs, although everyone didn't agree beforehand that that software was the intent. I think it could go either way with theDAO's software contract if it was litigated.

That said you could possibly sue the implementers of the smart contract for negligence to try to recover the loss, or those that advertized theDAO as a viable investment vehicle for false advertizing or misleading one about safety, both of those are much more straight forward legal avenues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Help?

I have no idea WTF is going on here. I've tried to search around for a clue but the more I read the more confusing it gets.

At first it seemed that Ethereum was a kind of cryptocurrency like bitcoin (something that people could "mine" and exchange), then something about "contracts" that don't require trust, then something about it being effectively "a computer" that never stops, an investment system investing in something no one ever actually names, some story about a hack that drains ether out of the system.

And now this story which has words like... "Governmental", "Rock-paper- scissors", "Casino", fees "stolen" because of constructor bug, "ponzi".

Even forgetting all the confusing jargon, I can't come up with a mental model that makes any sense at all. Is this just an elaborate puzzle game for geniuses? Or are people making and losing real money with this? By "money" I mean something that can be converted into actual US dollars right now and stored in a bank.

<comment><USER4> A few quick answers:

\- Ethereum is a contracting language combined with a crypto currency; to run the contracting language requires miners to not only determine the solution to a puzzle (as in Bitcoin), but also to run code written by contract writers in a virtual machine[1]; the blockchain stores the results of these computations

There's a lot written on the DAO (just search HN), but a quick summary:

\- A DAO is an autonomous organization that is self governing, with its by laws written into code - and often the potential to fork off if you disagreed with the majority decisions

\- "The DAO" which caused the recent blow up was the first public iteration of this and was an investment fund meant to encourage apps on the blockchain, by letting others fund it and then vote on proposals to receive money

\- "The DAO"had substantial flaws in how it was written, tested, and released

\- This was very successful by funding metrics, but that is based on a highly speculative currency that had appreciated 30-40X in a few months (otherwise, it might have just been a few million dollar experiment)

\- The flaws were pretty egregious (e.g., naming two functions essentially the same - and calling the wrong one, not putting in place proper mutexes) - <USER2> many on HN who worked on any mission critical code (e.g., finance, embedded systems) would be surprised at how quickly it was released without testing, community discussion, or a thoughtful rollout plan

\- Yes, people are losing money in two ways 1) in "The DAO" itself, if the funds can't be recovered fully, 2) due to the price of Ethereum to Dollars/Euros which people own and trade (which has fallen 50% since "The DAO" issues, but that is still 10-15X up since late last year)

[1] Technically, Bitcoin miners also interpret contract code, but the language is more complex and limited - with the most popular Bitcoin contract to simply lock and unlock bitcoins

<comment><USER13> DAO also has connotations in software architecture which makes this more confusing. What does DAO stand for in this context?

<comment><USER4> Decentralized Autonomous Organization: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a complete aberration that the Ethereum Foundation is even considering pushing a fork (hard or soft). There will be a fork, that is people leaving "Ethereum" for its new shiny successor.

If you want the protection of a big brother, why not invest in the regular stock market? Lots of neophytes trying to get rich quick are now crying for help after realizing they made a mistake. It's really touching.

<comment><USER11> Any time there is a bug in a smart contract, do we get roll back in Ethereum? There will be more smart contract bugs or operations against intent. I think this is going to become a joke.

Ethereum is not trustable if there is rollback when a contract didn't operate as intended. Can you imagine the stock market operating this way?

BTW has bitcoin ever had a rollback in its existence?

<comment><USER14> Well if there is a bug in the Ethereum software itself, it would be different. In the sense that miners could decide which branch they want. To be honest they _could_ do this with the current proposed forks as well.

The huuuge problem I see here is that it is the Ethereum Foundation, and Vitalik Buterin himself, who are proposing the fork as a remedy. They should simply say "well duh, fire burns."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IRL, contract law and courts take precedence over schemes like Ethereum and the DAO, just like arrest warrants do, money laundering regs, etc. Whether this is good or bad, it just is.

In real contract law, there are three elements of a contract.

1\. a meeting of the minds: the parties must agree on what is being exchanged

2\. an actual exchange, in both directions, it's called "consideration"

3\. at least one of the parties must behave as if they are relying on the contract, a party must "make a move" and begin to deliver on the contract.

There may be all sorts of guarantees written into contracts to enhance the security of the either of the two sides. So, these mathematical smart contracts are completely OK under contract law; however, the smart contracts _and the surrounding activity_ must still meet the requirements of a contract.

It is not "a meeting of the minds" for one side to drain the other side of their total balances, and it violates "consideration" as well since nothing is being exchanged for the extra money. So there is ample reason to claim that these were not valid contracts and should be rolled back.

Cuz that's how contracts work, it's the only way they work.

<comment><USER16> > It is not "a meeting of the minds" for one side to drain the other side of > their total balances, and it violates "consideration" as well since nothing > is being exchanged for the extra money. So there is ample reason to claim > that these were not valid contracts and should be rolled back.

I disagree. From the Explanation of Terms and Disclaimer[1] on the DAOhub site:

"The terms of The DAO Creation are set forth in the smart contract code existing on the Ethereum blockchain at 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413. Nothing in this explanation of terms or in any other document or communication may modify or add any additional obligations or guarantees beyond those set forth in The DAO's code. Any and all explanatory terms or descriptions are merely offered for educational purposes and do not supercede or modify the express terms of The DAO's code set forth on the blockchain; to the extent you believe there to be any conflict or discrepancy between the descriptions offered here and the functionality of The DAO's code at 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413, The DAO's code controls and sets forth all terms of The DAO Creation."

The Code is Law. All parties knew, and accepted this before 'investing'. The contract performed exactly as designed.

[1] [https://daohub.org/explainer.html](https://daohub.org/explainer.html)

<comment><USER15> | _I disagree._

Excellent! and I disagree with you, so we disagree. Where does that leave us? Simply as two proponents of free speech... unless... unless we have a smart contract between us, one under which you just drained my Ethereum account of ether. Beyond being a proponent of free speech, that gives me "standing" to become a "litigant", a "plaintiff" against you as "defendant". You would get to tell your side to the judge, just like me.

Here are some exaggerated hypothetical examples where you will agree with me; then hopefully you can see how a judge would look at the present situation with the DAO:

If, buried in TheCodeThatIsLaw that AllPartiesKnewAndAccepted, there is encoded an agreement to deliver narcotics to children, or sell children into slavery, or to provide funding to a terror training cell for children, then it wouldn't matter what TheCodeThatIsLaw says, a court would declare it invalid, NotAContract, NotBinding. Even if we encoded it in language that says "this is the funding part, being non-specific about the activities". That's simply how it works. Period. And you can't write a binding contract to give money away, there's no consideration.

TheCodeThatPurportsToBeLaw must meet standards of its own in order to provide additional binding law, the standards I outlined above, a meeting of the minds, consideration, and reliance. So when it comes to challenging the results of TheCodeThatPurportsToBeLaw, courts will look inside, and they will look for AMeetingOfTheMinds, and they will look at what actually happened, how people behaved, and the court will decide if TheCodeThatPurportsToBeLaw fulfills the requirements that all contracts must fulfill in order to be binding.

My point is not that these contracts are invalid; my point is that these contracts are not free from interpretation by courts, and they are not free from meeting the standards of contracts _as seen and interpreted by the courts_ , and not _as seen by one party to the agreement who got what they wanted_.

And, by the way, contracts can't contain ponzis. No matter how many signatures, lawyers, notaries, and PhDs in economics are involved in forging the agreement, TheCodeThatIsLaw is not the law if the code contains a ponzi. That's how the law works. I'm talking about US law (we are talking .com here) but other countries of laws use similar methods of determination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IANAL, but I think what might turn out most problematic for TheDAO in the end is not the soft fork/hard fork proposal or even the loss of trust, but their - often quoted - own terms of service[1]:

> _The terms of The DAO Creation are set forth in the smart contract code > existing on the Ethereum blockchain at > 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413. Nothing in this explanation of > terms or in any other document or communication may modify or add any > additional obligations or guarantees beyond those set forth in The DAO's > code._

That document is the single link that connects the Ethereum toy world with the world of real, legally enforceable contracts. If any court actually takes that clause seriously and treats the DAO code as legally binding terms of service, I think that could have two consequences:

1) Intent: The terms written on the website don't say anything about crowdfunding, voting processes or the supposed purpose of the DAO. They do however say very clearly "the code is the law" and even point out that this will cause risks for the investors, should the code contain bugs.

That writing IMO makes the current argument that the attacker violated the "intent" of the contract very hard to argue.

2) Contract amendmends: As far as I know (as a layman), legal contracts may only changed of all affected parties agree to the change. Therefore, if the DAO code should be treated as a legal contract, you could interpret the soft fork as an amendment - even though not all of the DAO token holders were asked for agreement. In the most extreme case, the attacker could sue and demand that his "theft" is cashed out, even if the soft/hard fork proposal is accepted.

[1] [https://daohub.org/explainer.html](https://daohub.org/explainer.html)

<comment><USER18> _> ..you could interpret the soft fork as an amendment - even though not all of the DAO token holders were asked for agreement._

DAO token holders can express their agreement or disagreement by choosing which fork they want to attach to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If the intent of the DAO was to create a decentralized system that people could buy into so that they can vote/participate in investment opportunities presented by other members, then the big question I have is why was the system implemented in such a way as to hold all investment funds up front?

Wouldn't a more secure implementation have allowed members to buy in for a nominal fee and keep their investment funds outside of the DAO until they voted/participated in a specific contract/investment opportunity?

<comment><USER4> It's a bit of a chicken and egg, where you don't know how much to request from the DAO, if it isn't funded. It's hard to have people softly commit (unless it is a guaranteed commitment), as they could always renege on their promise when it came time to provide money. Also, the vision seemed to be to create many VC funds to consider projects, which required an aggregation of capital.

An alternate way is having each investment opportunity publicize it, but that is a marketing challenge for each project, and may not raise the requisite amount (there may also be greater legal risks to soliciting capital from retail investors directly).

There are a lot of issues with the DAO (long before the hack), so I don't mean that as a justification for launching the current DAO, but rather a potential reasoning for that one aspect. (the bigger question is why didn't they do many proof of concepts + then restrict the amount of money collected with the first production version).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The next generation of geniuses is growing up understanding why Friendly AI is hard. That's actually pretty damned encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER20> _Formal verification can be layered on top. One simple use case is as a way of proving termination, greatly mitigating gas-related issues. Another use case is proving specific properties – for example, "if all participants collude, they can get their money out in all cases", or "if you send your tokens A to this contract, you are guaranteed to either get the amount of token B that you want or be able to fully refund yourself". Or "this contract fits into a restricted subset of Solidity that makes re-entrancy, gas issues and call stack issues impossible"._

Why not restrict the entire language instead of trying to verify that a program fits into a safe subset? What practical uses are there for general recursion and unbounded gas usage in the context of smart contracts (not to mention multiple inheritance, inline bytecode assembly, and the many other complex features of Solidity)?

<comment><USER21> Because:

1\. It's very hard to create a language that is both restrictive yet useful enough, without it being just as hard to verify (e.g. total-functional languages are not nearly restrictive enough to make some global properties easily provable; the only languages that make this somewhat feasible are finite state machines, and their expressiveness is questionable).

2\. Even if that were somehow possible, it wouldn't solve the real problem, which is defining the right safety properties. However you verify safety, the hard problem remains what safety means.

<comment><USER22> 1\. Starting from a declarative language (think XML), you might not be as expressive, but you would still have a lot of value and mitigate a lot of the potential problems.

2\. Safety properties that fall back on current law could be added in case of dispute.

This scenario would still have great value as a smart contract.

<comment><USER21> 1\. XML is just a notation, and being declarative is not in itself a guarantee of easy verification: Prolog is declarative and yet Turing complete (though it's important to note that you don't need to be Turing complete to be hard to verify!). So while declarative is an excellent idea, it doesn't help with the problem of deciding what exactly the language can do to be both useful and relatively easily verifiable.

2\. Absolutely, but I think the whole motivation behind projects like Ethereum is to replace the law with algorithms. I think that any computer scientist with a basic understanding of complexity would see why this is impossible, but the idea persists. Eventually, someone who's less ideologically pure would find a way to reconcile the utility of cryptocurrencies with the necessity for human law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fact that people are making Ponzi schemes and _calling them Ponzi schemes_ tells you everything you need to know about the gullibility of the cryptocurrency community.

<comment><USER24> If you know you're giving money to a ponzi scheme and see all the rules of it, is it really a ponzi scheme/gullibility? It sounds just as interesting as betting on sports / stockmarket / ...

People still play roulette or blackjack, even though they know they're guaranteed to lose in a long run / on average.

<comment><USER25> A ponzi scheme that calls itself a ponzi scheme is still illegal.

<comment><USER26> In which jurisdiction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem of codifying reality with words and rules is an old one, as old as the law, and no one has come up with a good solution yet. The edge cases seem to be infinite.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ethereum already seems to be kind of a complex system and all the suggestions in the article sound awfully like trying to put a few layers of patches over the known weak spots. Especially attempts to prove properties of contracts will likely soon make contact with Rice's theorem [1] or require giving up a lot of the expressibility of the used language. The article also points out that there are unsolved hard problems at the very foundation of smart contracts but then kind of ignores that. To me it seems that what is really needed is thinking again about the core ideas, not patching some code issues.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem)

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't help but think about the way that Nick Bostrom outlines the AI control problem when I read "differences between implementation and intent." Maybe smart contracts (and automated mediation) is a good place to start cutting our teeth on how to specify machine motivation.

</comment><comment><USER6> He's still calling the DAO risk "theoretical" after all that's happened? A situation that rarely if ever happens to the legal instruments and methods Ethereum intends to replace. One that has them considering forks. One that has investors wondering if they'll loose it all. That... "theoretical"... risk.

Specific vulnerabilities aside, I think any reader should stop trusting the judgment or effectiveness of Ethereum-backed projects at this point. Probably better doing the DAO as a well-managee, centralized non-profit to test crowd- funding scheme while Ethereum continues baby steps toward a distributed scheme that works.

<comment><USER30> Quite the clown act, innit?

I'm rigorously trying to assess whether my complete inability to find any there there in blockchain-based applications (Bitcoin, Smart Contracts) is a bug on my part or feature.

I'm leaning strongly to feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The fundamental problem is that Vitalik (and rest of eth devs) knows the answer, but can't face it. If a tx gets revoked, ethereum turns into nothing more than a private-chain/bank-chain. What about the crypto-law, state revolution everyone in that crew have promised the users :(

</comment><comment><USER32> What I think might be useful is something like the Rust borrow checker but it would be a currency ownership checker which would check for currency ownership at compile time.

<comment><USER24> That doesn't really apply here. The code and runtime is correct as in: no coins were generated or disappeared, nobody directly reassigned coins, etc. This was simply a logic error - the code followed the legal/known path all the time. Rust can be great for many things, but it can't tell you "this code does not do what you think you wanted".

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > If, in a given case, implementation and intent are the same thing, then any > instance of "theft" is in fact a donation, and any instance of "loss" is > voluntary money-burning, economically equivalent to a proportional donation > to the ETH token holder community by means of deflation.

Don't forget about contributions to the aesthetic as well. Some of the things that are occurring with these technologies will be literally mind blowing.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there one, solid as in time tested example of a smart contract working? Sorry in advance for my total naivete

<comment><USER35> Any spend to a Bitcoin address. It's a small program that other computers can execute and validate the results of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > There have been many solutions proposed to smart contract safety, ranging > from better development environments to better programming languages to > formal verification and symbolic execution . . .

Why is 'human arbitration as a last resort' not on this list?

<comment><USER36> I thought one of the goals was for the currency to be outside the influence of humans. Unless this arbitration is somehow built into the network and depends on the majority. Which still isn't a great solution.

<comment><USER29> A lot of projects have ambitions that they can't accomplish on day 1. It would be a safety net. If everything goes right, then it won't get used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> One funny comment about the subject: [https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/744421708371623937](https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/744421708371623937)

</comment><comment><USER38> 1/2 OT: How do you pronounce DAO? As a word like Dao or as an abbreviation like D A O?</comment>


Ask HN: Which usernames do you recognise? - <AUTHOR> In the light of the current experiment of not showing comment ratings there's been a lot of (good) discussion about what criteria people use to vote. One thing that came up was giving a positive bias to usernames you recognize for their previous insightful comments or their expertise on a certain subject.<p>So the question is: Which usernames do you recognise, and why? <comment><USER2> The question is inaccurate, because you're really asking which usernames we can _recall_. ;-) That's often an order of magnitude smaller than the ones we can recognize. The only way to test who we recognize is to MRI us, show us a bunch of usernames, see if the recognition centers of our brain light up.

That said, here's who I can recall off the top of my head:

YCombinator principals: pg, rtm, jl, tlb

Famous people: joshu, pmarca, paul, jeresig

Semi-famous people: aboodman, tptacek, cperciva, lisper, jrockway, ojbyrne, epi0Bauqu

YCombinator founders: sama, dhouston, ivankirigin, tipjoy, spez, aaronsw, mattmaroon, AlexS, SwellJoe, brezina, fallentimes, brett (at least, I think it's that Brett...the SlinkSet founder)

YCombinator company employees I've hung out with or otherwise interacted with: aston, dfranke, gaborcsalle

Folks I've met in person since moving to the Bay Area: lacker, litewulf, iamelgringo, abossy, timcederman, gaius

Prolific posters: nickb, rms, wheels, davidw, mechanical_fish, DanielBMarkham, edw519, swombat, patio11, raganwald, pchristensen, staunch, byrneseyeview, llimllib, ryanwaggoner, Alex3917, menloparkbum, DaniFong, dcurtis, unalone, masklinn, apotheon, plinkplonk, mynameishere.

(Yeah, I cheated and looked at the leaderboard and a few comment threads for that last one. The original question was recognition, not recall though.)

<comment><USER3> gaborcselle and wheels are also founders.

<comment><USER4> Wow, I thought wheels was just an active user. Didn't know he was a part of the YC crew.

<comment><USER5> He was an active users before his startup (Direct Edge) joined YC this summer I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _One thing that came up was giving a positive bias to usernames you recognize for their previous insightful comments_

Interesting question.

I have a great deal of respect for many people here (too many to mention), but oddly, I don't think that has much influence on how I feel about new posts. Every thread is fresh and every day we start over. So no matter how insightful you've been in the past, you just gotta keep doing it. I suppose that's the way it should be.

<comment><USER7> Elegantly stated.

I, too, recognize and respect many people here. I would not dare to list them all, just as I would not dare to try and publicly list all my friends. That way lies nothing but inadvertent slights and endless apologies.

And I think knowing a bit about a writer's background is almost always of value to _me_.

But that doesn't mean I upvote posts on that basis. Upvoting is an editorial function. You don't do it for yourself. You do it for other people. And so the quality of each piece of writing must stand and fall on its own.

You have to learn to think like this to write effectively. You have to try to look dispassionately at the writing of people you like and admire. Because, alas, there is nothing more dear to you than your _own_ prose. William Faulkner said: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings." You will write a lot of stuff that looks good to you, but that just doesn't fit. You will write stuff that starts out sensible and then turns on itself. You will write things that are just too delicate to say on the web. And you will make boneheaded mistakes. The art of writing is not so much to avoid doing these things, but to catch yourself in the act and edit them, as consistently as you can, and hopefully without hurting your own feelings too much.

<comment><USER8> I think that might have been Arthur Quiller-Couch advising to "murder all your darlings", according to the book _Writing Tools_ I was reading last night.

<comment><USER7> Are you implying that random Google results might be wrong? ;)

Next time I'll try to remember to use Wikiquote, to obtain the _definitive_ wrong attribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Almost none. I've been reading HN for about one year, and Something about the minimalism of the layout and lack of signatures makes me just read the comments and not think about who wrote them.

<comment><USER10> Same here. But I think that is the idea - to let the comments speak for themselves and let the comments sink or swim on their own merits.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I recognise quite a few. Off the top of my head is tpcatek, cperciva and dfranke because of their expertise, mechanical_fish, nostrademons, jacquesm, jasonlbaptiste, mattmaroon and tokenadult because they often have something intersting to say, markbao because he's a great entrepreneur at a young age, and danielbmarkham because he has life experience.

</comment><comment><USER11> I completely ignore names other than pg, a personal friend or two, and names on my confirmation-biased list of obnoxious karma whores. I don't make a mental note of "X must be a smart character" when I upvote X's comments.

<comment><USER12> As psychological effects go, it is rather questionable whether it is possible to 'ignore names'. This question does not concern a fully conscious process. Once you've noticed a name (and it's hard not to), all kinds of things go _click_ inside your head. You cannot undo the associations that were made; the mere fact that you attempt to 'ignore' names already indicates that there is something to ignore.

The unavoidable state of mind with which I will read a comment from 'cperciva' or 'tptacek' (whom I recognize, along with pg, edw512, jacquesm and a few others) is: 'this is likely to be a comment from a security point of view and I'm likely to consider it a high quality answer'. I don't understand in what way that would pose a problem, unless you suppose that causes one to immediately lose the capacity to critically evaluate the content of the comment and conclude 'hmmm, a disappointing comment'. I think that risk is larger when I would assume that I could ignore the name and would hence be influenced by subconscious processes whose existence I tried to deny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the viewpoint of a HN lurker:

-pg - Because he's PG

-edw517, mechanical_fish - Due to frequent sighting of their comments

-tokenadult - You'll always find him in threads that contain discussions about human intelligence/alternative education

-potatolicious - U.S. immigration discussions + Canada vs. USA issues

-markbao - Entrepreneur, 16 years old

-mahmud - A technology nomad (originally from the Washington DC Metro, now in Australia)

These are the ones I can recall from top of my head. I do recognize many other usernames, of course. Also, I would like to point out I have no inclination to upvote the individuals mentioned above. I think it's more about frequency, since most of them tend to partake in discussions that cover a wide range of topics.

Just because they're experts in one area doesn't mean I'll find their opinions insightful no matter what. Each posting/comment is taken into consideration.

</comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps if/when the hidden-scores experiment concludes, PG can try a hidden- _usernames_ experiment. Namely:

For each submission's threads, a user would be assigned a new temporary (but stable) handle. Only later -- a few days, or when the article has dropped out of the top ~60 -- would these revert to the permanent names.

Variants: let a submitter opt a submission's threads into this system -- perhaps permanently for that item, or for the period of initial discussion/rating. Or, let a member in good standing adopt such a 'mask' for the duration of one item's discussion.

<comment><USER15> I've suggested making usernames invisible unless you mouse-over a field. That way you can still see a name if you mean to, but you're mainly judging by content.

Making some kind of temporary "masks" is too much PIA IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recognize quite a few. Especially the people who hang out on #startups - swombat, axod (well, hung out, no thanks to freenode...), wheels, daleharvey, etc... Indeed, it'd be interesting to meet more of you in person. I wonder who matches what I think of them and who doesn't. I know pg's accent didn't quite square with the one I had in my head for the essays.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am guessing that the only change made here was removal of the comment point value, no sorting changes?

I ask only because if this experiment becomes permanent its good public knowledge.

EDIT: I meant to include my thoughts on the change. If this change was made with the mindset that "friends" will automatically vote eachother up I think its probably a mistake. My reasoning here is that the voting up will still occur regardless of the value shown or not, if anything it might promote people to vote someone they like up just to contribute to the magical score thats hidden away. If they were to see that the person already has 10 votes its possible they might feel that was enough value already assigned to the comment.

</comment><comment><USER18> This list is far from exhaustive:

People who joined much earlier than I whose comments I think about away from the computer (my heuristic for "recognize") include mechanical_fish, robg, pg (of course), and DanielBMarkham. I read a lot more of the "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" posts than of the "hacking and startups" posts.

Some people on board more recently whose usernames catch my attention include cwan, and there is a fairly large group of users, including quite a few from the leader list

<http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

that I recognize as interesting posters but can't identify as recent users or as long-time users.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, I've not met any HN participant in person.

</comment><comment><USER3> patio11 and mechanical_fish tend to be consistently insightful, and rarely mean.

<comment><USER19> concur for patio11 - in fact, upon reflection, his is really the only username that ever pops out at me.

I tend comment on HN without consideration for usernames.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the viewpoint of someone pretty new:

pg, of course

mechanical_fish, unalone, patio11, jacquesm, edw519, riderofgiraffes (too memorable), abyssknight. I haven't read enough to easily recognize consistently insightful commenters yet. The names I currently have in memory are there probably due to frequency, insightful comments, activity in the same threads as me, replying to me, or their name struck me as interesting/memorable.

</comment><comment><USER21> I remember a few usernames of famous people, people that I know in some way, directly or indirectly, 99% of usernames are new to me every time I read one. This means that basically I (and IMHO most of the HN guys) tend to vote comments mainly by comment quality. Still I believe that it is very hard to avoid to be biased in some way by the ability to read the current comment score.

</comment><comment><USER22> Someone came up to me at a London startup event and said they recognized my name from hacker news. Made my night.

<comment><USER23> I've had a couple people come up in one of my classes that I recognized the names from HN. Any of you who have talked at Def-Con/Black Hat/similar conferences, you've probably come up in some classes, and its weird to have that happen with someone you've talked to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For every username I recognise for previous insightful comments, I also recognise one for something 'bad'. Although I don't vote according to this, it does at least show me that positive bias is not the only potential 'worry' in a points-based rating system like HN.

<comment><USER25> Why does a 'bad' post have anything to do with the ratings though? Even with no rating whatsoever you will still find people with 'good' and 'bad' posts and recognize them by their username. The only way to to get rid of this would be to make all users anonymous.

<comment><USER24> I wasn't necessarily referring to posts when referring to "bad" - I've seen/experienced behaviour from HN members outside of here that negatively impacts my opinion of them.

Nonetheless, I was just making the point that it's not just about positive bias, which is what many people seem to dwell on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is top of the head so no promises on spelling. I remember cpercevia because he had a really great proof from a post your proofs challenge I did a while ago. edw519's comments seem to stick out for me about technical stuff. Byrneseyeview has delightfully provacative stuff, a little edgy but generally sensible and well thought out. RMS only for the whole getting kicked out thing, it was big enough at the time to stick with me. Nostrademons because I was interested in how his game-clay thing was going to work out. And logicholeflaw because we're old friends irl.

So on the whole it seems like I notice on part expertise part random. I don't vote much though so I don't think name alone gets me to click that up arrow.

</comment><comment><USER27> There a a few I know from blogs and irc (raganwald, knowtheory, for example). More, I suspect, but I have to see them to recognize them :)

Oddly, though, I don't think I'd recall a name because that person had made good points in previous posts. Not sure why that is.

I read stuff, think, Oh, that's a good point, maybe reply, most likely up- vote, but don't seem to stash the user name any place in memory. Perhaps that's a good thing, as I don't start assuming anything about a post because of name recognition.

Yet on most mailing lists I do tend, over time, to make note of who is offering useful content. Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you mean as individuals outside of HN, or as people particularly worth reading here? If the latter, there's maybe 20 or 30 people whose name will make me stop and read something I might otherwise skip. But I tend to see the comment first and afterwards note 'oh, xxxxx again, of course' My favorites are those with whom I have constructive disagreements, or who'll take time to tell me why I'm wrong about something.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm having some problems on giving attention to usernames. Most of the things written over the Internet is anonymous for me. Until I really want to give attention to what is written and if it's a credible resource and check sources. If something is anonymous than it's not credible default. So this leads me to not recall usernames. I'm a bit sorry about this. Avatars would really help me.

<comment><USER30> Interesting observation regarding avatars, I was planning to include them in a current project... but having less recognizable user accounts might help with getting users to focus on the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> pg. I regularly visit his threads page. I wonder if he thinks that's weird.

<comment><USER32> It's the PG microblog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Relatively new here. I don't really recognize a lot of names and tend to pay less attention to names here than in other environments. This is in part for reasons others have mentioned: There are no avatars and there are no signature blocks. The design here is more minimalist than anything else I have participated in. I am still getting used to it and not really in a position to make a judgment call about whether the orange dot (lack of visible scores) is a "good" change or a "bad" one. My general impression is that pecking order matters less here than on most discussion sites. My general feeling is that is a good thing. I hate the Lord of the Flies stuff that is so common in online groups.

</comment><comment><USER34> Mine are mostly topical, e.g. tptacek and cperciva for security, ice799 for systems stuff, etc.

I subscribe to a few comment feeds via searchyc so that I can read most of the comments from my favorites around here.

<comment><USER35> I had no idea I could subscribe to just the edw comments. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> \-- You mean experiment of not showing comment _ratings_?

I remember a few name Gruesome, mechanical_fish ... but I'd recognize more if saw them in context.

But I don't a moderate in the basis of names I know anyway...

It seems like this experiment will make people in general less likely to moderate. I used to moderate highly rated posts on opinion and less highly rated posts on quality. I now moderate everything on opinion but I suspect others are more self-censored - my guess comes because I haven't had any up or down moderations recently...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. Typo. fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> PG, 'cos he's PG.

tdavis, because he was memorable on IRC.

patio11, because Jesus that guy posts like an inferno.

jrockway, who I think I've argued with more than anybody save amichail, who I also recognize.

edw519, because duh.

Probably some other people.

</comment><comment> tptacek<USER7>
(edw, patio, cperciva, mattmaroon, 100 others, but if you asked me for one name that typified the whole place, to free associate, I'd say mechanical_fish).

</comment><comment><USER37> edw, dcurtis, patio, pg, dhouston, sama, dfranke, rms, nickb, ryanwaggoner, tptacek, cperciva, jacquesm, pclark, jgrahamc, jasonlbaptiste, wheels.

all of these people have at one point posted a comment that made me go hmm... that was thoughtful and well written. who is this person? prolific posters had a higher chance to be on this list because they had more posts (duh).

and nostrademons because i loved reading the diffle blog

<comment><USER22> can't believe you said my name. really? thanks alot. means tons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Another thought:

The way that racist comments and other trolls generally get a minus -4 is useful. Having an indication that the community in general abhors a particular unfortunate comment is very useful in this case (though over -4's have seemed completely mean and unjustified).

I hope such comments still are going to get some 'deprecated' indicator...

<comment><USER38> I'm relatively new to HN, and I am not in favor of the hiding of points on comments. One of the reasons I am here is because of the trust that was created in seeing that the community as a whole actually values (and devalues) the same things I do. If I were to discover HN now, that kind of information about the community is no longer available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> pg and nickb are the only ones that I can _remember_ that I recognize without taking a look at other posts.

</comment><comment><USER40> Right now, only PG.

But there were times I remember some people by name when certain discussions were going on.

I can remember some usernames when I see. and mixmax I can remember you :) for some reason.

PS: And If we had avatars on HN, things will be far different. But anyway HN is better this way IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER41> jacquesm has been pretty on the ball lately. rokhayakebe seems like a good guy. paul (Buchheit) offers a lot of karma per word. Initally, I liked PG's style of writing: really good style for business plans.

</comment><comment><USER42> PG. Not sure why :-)

</comment><comment> grandalf<USER7>
</comment><comment><USER44> Pretty much just the other's people have mentioned. Maybe it would be alright to include a one or two line signature now to help differentiate everyone and to promote their work.

<comment><USER32> I don't like that idea. Part of what makes Hacker News great is the forced absence of comment self-promotion/signatures and a extremely high focus on what's being said rather than who says it.

Anecdotally, if I find myself particularly interested in what someone says I'll visit their profile to learn more about them.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some non-FAANG companies with great engineering culture? Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon.

<comment><USER3> I know they did some cool stuff a long long time ago, but how do they manage to pull that off? From my experience government contractors make even the coolest job/project a miserable, bureaucratic nightmare destined for the bottom tier of mediocrity. If they don't their government handlers usually do.

Also, Lockheed Martin is responsible for one of the most infamously incompetent IT projects in the history of the world. The FBI's digital case management system. They weren't responsible for the project from the very beginning, but their involvement wasn't blameless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071051)

<comment><AUTHOR> And it wasn't very productive, which is why I added the "why?" at the end.

<comment><USER5> appears that you need to work more on re-wording it. the current question presumes that FAANG companies already have "great engineering culture," but that probably doesn't help the reader/respondent much.

maybe more anecdotal answers will help? a question along the lines of, "what makes the engineering culture at your workplace great?" may solicit the answers you seek.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Thanks for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you could add why you think so, that'd be awesome!

</comment><comment><USER6> Stripe, Twilio, Mercari

</comment><comment><USER7> Tesla? The Boring Company? SpaceX? Blue Origin? Virgin Galactic?</comment>