Climate threats now dominate long-term risks, survey of global leaders finds - <AUTHOR> http://news.trust.org/item/20200115150054-km9of/ <comment><USER2> Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels? It seems that every attempt to limit the consumption of fossil fuels is going to have a limited effect if we don't reduce the supply, since a reduction in consumption will lead to an oversupply, which will in turn make burning fossil fuels for other purposes cheaper.

If the leading producers committed to a 10% reduction each year, then we would have some (big!) problems to solve, but we would at least be making progress.

I know that the economies of the leading producers is deeply tied to the production of fossil fuels, but at the current rate of global warming, no investment in fossil fuel production is going to be a viable long-term strategy anyway: if the sector continues to grow, then your money from the profits will be worthless for other obvious reasons anyway.

<comment><USER3> 10 years ago when I still lived in CA (where i grew up), I was the liberal rebel in my family of CA Republicans, I argued with my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) about the issue of Global Warming but rather than trying to take him on head on about the ethical nature of supporting it, I tried to take the approach of talking about Electric Cars and how Elon Musk was paving the way towards a future where nobody would need to use fossil fuels anymore. (this was back when Tesla was still pretty much a pitch)

He asked me how much would a new Tesla cost? I said well right now they are $120k, but eventually Elon Musk plans to get that price all the way down to $40k.

My grandfather said, he can go right now and buy a 4 cylinder truck for $2000 dollars that gets 25 miles to the gallon and with gas at $3 a gallon he could literally get 360,000 miles out of a vehicle, and then guess what buy another truck for $2000 dollars for the same amount of money it took to buy a 40k electric car...

His argument was very simple, and having moved to Oklahoma after the economy crashed in 2007, I understand now more than ever why his conservative pov was correct.

The reality is that you can't make the world conform to your utopia when it first conforms to its budget.

You think this issue can be solved with simply a 10% reduction each year, when you need to realize people don't buy gas because they are going on family trips all the time they can choose to do the right thing and cut back on.

People are buying gas to go to work and back everyday. Literally the only way we could cut back on our current fossil fuel usage is if Andrew Yang's worst nightmare came to fruition and the robots did take all the jobs, that way we didn't have to commute to work everyday.

<comment><USER2> You need to think about _why_ people need gas to go to work and back every day. They do this because their work is located far away from their home. And why is that? Because it was economically viable to set it up like that, because of the low price of gas.

Increase the price of gas, and you will get an economic recession in the short term, for sure. But after that, people will adjust, and you will see a reversal of the current trend of centralizing all jobs in the big cities. Towns would get more local businesses, people doing business would invest more in high-quality video conferencing instead of traveling to meetings by plane all the time, and so on. Some things that are possible today would not be possible anymore, and we would have to deal with that.

I think it is a fallacy to see the current way society works as a constant. Everything is holistically connected, and if you change one variable (price of fossil fuels), then the rest of society will have to shape itself around that.

<comment><USER4> You would get lynched by taxi drivers within the first month of implementing such a ridiculous policy.

<comment><USER2> You would get lynched by everybody! But we have to realize that anything we do to solve climate change is going to make our living conditions worse _here and now_ , because we have spent the last century making every aspect of society dependent on fossil fuels.

I think it is also ridiculous to not do something, because we know what the outcome is going to be, and it is almost certainly going to be more unpleasant than an economic recession and a bunch of pissed off taxi drivers.

Edit: Also, note that I do not want to increase the price of gas through a policy affecting only gas for cars, e.g. via taxation. That will never work, because it is a local policy that will be a short-term loss for the first country to implement it. I want to limit the extraction of fossil fuels _globally_ , causing the short-term losses to be distributed to every nation in the world which depends on fossil fuels. This will, as a consequence, cause gas prices to increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is an outline of the actual report [1] which draws on feedback from around 800 global experts and decision-makers.

Environmental threats dominate the survey's 10-year outlook. The top five long term risks by likelihood and three of the top five spots by impact.

[1] [https://www.oliverwyman.com/our- expertise/insights/2020/jan/...](https://www.oliverwyman.com/our- expertise/insights/2020/jan/globalrisks2020.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> > He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, > including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of > climate change and other pressures.

Hmm. Do those other pressures involve massive use of insecticides? Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects; little blighters are resilient as an evolutionary approach. I'm sure wiping out a species is possible but a new one would pop up in no time to fill the gap if they aren't being actively exterminated.

Water and food crisises are not new risks. They are inevitable outcomes of population growth and variance in the supply chain. The evidence is that we are much better at dealing with such threats now than we were in the past because we have all this cheap energy we can use to recover.

<comment><USER7> _" Hmm. Do those other pressures involve massive use of insecticides? Climate becoming warmer isn't about to stop insects; little blighters are resilient as an evolutionary approach."_

Insects on the whole are resilient. Specific pollinators aren't. Climate change is causing massive problems for insect life. Neonic pesticides are also devestating. Both are bad, and are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, more pesticides are used as climate change stresses crops more and weakens them.

<comment><USER8> Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures, so I don't think more pesticides will be used because of climate-change induced crop stress

<comment><USER9> > _Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be > produced than with colder temperatures_

This is not true.

"each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%." [https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326)

<comment><USER10> Right - It's very rare that the availability of carbon is the limiting function in plant growth. You can force more greening by providing a higher- carbon environment but it's almost always other combinations of nutrients, sunlight, or water that limit plant growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to do something about climate change, consider working at a company fighting some aspect of it, whether it be wind energy, carbon removal, electric vehicles or something else.

We started Dolphin ([http://withdolphin.com/](http://withdolphin.com/)) to create an easy way for people to find impactful jobs tackling climate change. Hope it's helpful to anyone considering a career shift.

<comment><USER12> I don't mind installing an app and I don't really understand why people object to it. Apps uninstall even easier than they install, at least on an iPhone.

That said...

\- You don't need to know the name of my college to serve me some job listings.

\- I double majored in STEM and humanities, but your app will only let me specify one or the other area of concentration.

\- You also don't need to know what year I graduated college. In fact it may not be legal to ask as it can be used as a proxy for age, which is protected under equal employment regs.

<comment><USER13> \- Apps uninstall harder than closing a web site.

\- Apps have access to way more permissions, abilities and data than web sites (at least on Android).

\- Apps tend to be pushed by entities that are trying to exploit the two above-mentioned things for their own benefit and the detriment of the user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To be clear, this measures the issue global leaders think is biggest, not necessarily what issue is actually biggest.

This is probably mostly a proxy for "climate threats are the most top of mind issue for global leaders" due to the recent rise in coverage.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but necessarily, any informed person understands that it is by the largest existential risk of humanity.

<comment> radford-neal No. Informed people realize that there is no possibility that climate change will lead to human extinction (except possibly by some indirect means, such as leading to a war in which bioweapons are used, but then, drastic action to curtail climate change could also lead to war...).

Saying "existential risk" again and again does not make it true. Hearing it again and again does not make a rational person believe it.

<comment><USER16> >No. Informed people realize that there is no possibility that climate change will lead to human extinction

Avoiding human extinction from climate change is very easy but with this attitude you're not doing a good job at avoiding that fate. Right now I don't have much faith that humanity won't try to burn every single last drop of oil or chunk of coal. Although it should be very difficult to reach insane targets like 9°C warming it is definitively possible with enough ignorance and dedication and as humanity has shown we have an unlimited supply of these two qualities.

<comment><USER17> How would a 9°C warming cause human extinction? There is plenty of currently cold land that would benefit from warming temperatures for farming and humans are massively adaptable in that we live in large populations in pretty much every climate. Even if things continue the way they are, it'll happen over such a long time that time that the rate of change won't be a real issue either.

I'm all for zero carbon emissions but the ridiculous "everyone is going to die due to climate change" is pure FUD.

<comment><USER15> A 9 degree difference will wipe out almost all phytoplankton biomass responsible for generating most of the oxygen in our planet. You will see a raise in multiple meters of sea level, causing mass migrations involving over 20% of the world population, will make most of the planet uninhabitable, and will reduce the oxygen levels of the oceans to the point that they will be mostly anoxic.

That is an extinction level event greater than the Permian mass extinction.

<comment><USER17> So what specifically in your list do you think will cause humans to go extinct?

<comment><USER18> Phytoplankton are also responsible for 50-80% of atmospheric oxygen, so in the parent poster's scenario I think the loss of a breathable atmosphere is the most likely nail in our species' coffin.

Probably won't happen, probably not a great idea to push things to see how far we can let things go before it's catastrophic, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a gripe with long commuters... Or I think they're kinda dumb. I don't think the government should get involved, but it's not a social taboo to have a long commute, it's almost celebrated and romanticized. France has shown gas taxes have bad side effects, but how about just make people feel stupid for driving too much habitually. I just think they're stupid for spending a higher percentage of their lives in traffic, which is hellish.

<comment><USER20> Ah yes, how dare poor people exist. They must clearly be inferior and stupid for choosing to live somewhere they can afford.

<comment><USER19> Poor people? I'm poor. But I integrate my life. My work meshes with my home life. I would move my house or get a new job. Fighting traffic creates rage and environmental problems. It's stupid.

<comment><USER21> Wow. Do you seriously imagine that people who spend a huge portion of their life on a miserable commute have never considered the solutions of "move somewhere closer" or "get a new job closer to home"?

<comment><USER19> That makes it better? I'm sure Bernie Madoff thought about quitting his pyramid scheme. Everyone thinks about quitting smoking. It doesn't matter unless you actually do it. If you just think about it, you still get lung cancer.

<comment><USER21> Wow, you just keep digging deeper. Let me spell it out for you:

Most people make those choices because they don't have better ones available. They would love to live closer to work, but it's not viable for many reasons. I'm sure you consider them invalid or of less importance than whatever you prioritize in your life, but suggesting that the solution to other people's problems is just to do something they can't easily do is quite arrogant and out of touch.

<comment><USER19> It's either their destiny in a sadistic universe, or it's their own unresourcefulness in making bad decisions.

Making bad decisions over and over is a definition of stupidity.

If you continue to ignore obvious operations of the universe, you, yourself might fall into the stupid category, but at least you can give yourself prestige, thinking you're fight for someone, when really you are holding them back, like a consumptive mother, chaining her babies down, lest they fledge.

And your offense seems rooted in my calling out stupidity, as if the word does not deserve to exist, itself. It does exist, and you can't take away my right to describe what I see, you nincompoop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Governments of this planet are not moving quickly enough on climate change with small incremental changes over time. However, people and organizations who champion these efforts can pressure governments to drive faster change.

Climate Pledge

To protect all of humanity globally now and for the future of our posterity I am committing to the following.

I pledge to limit eating red meat. I will restrict intake of cows and lambs etc. If I choose to have children, I will have 2 or less. I will try to use cycling or mass transit options whenever possible and to participate in efforts to expand transit. I will restrict flying to only when necessary and try to limit flying to only when no other choice is available. If I do fly I will try to offset all emissions. I will try my utmost to conserve energy and minimize use of heating and cooling appliances. I will try my best to limit energy use to renewable sources when I have the choice. When I cannot choose I will fight for the ability to have this choice. I will try to help those close to me understand these choices and the need for those able, to also join the pledge. I will only consume what I need. I will not perpetuate extravagance and will only support companies who champion sustainable efforts. I will do my best to strive for and support sustainable and minimalist technology. I will stay involved in the public discourse on environmental issues and stay engaged on efforts to mitigate climate change.

<comment><USER23> I think the idea that red meat will always be far worse for the environment then other food is a bit of a red herring and conflated with ethics of animal eating. There are many factors not considered in those statistics such as nutrient absorption and protein quality.

While it is true that carbon emissions are worse for grain fed animals (most of the red meat you see) it doesn't have to be this way. "Regenerative agriculture" claims to you raise carbon neutral (or negative) beef farms by restoring the native plant life and replenishing the soil. This won't feed the entire earth, but I try to support grass fed farms and obtain most of my red meat from them. Chriss Kresser offers some interesting points on this topic.

<comment><USER24> Oxford and CSIRO already proved grass fed cattle emit more greenhouse gases then CAFO grain fed, and that's after taking into account sequestration

<comment><USER23> Thanks for this I'm reading about it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How does one prevent themselves from being consumed by existentialist thoughts caused by climate news?

I really have had a lot of trouble concentrating lately because things just don't feel important to me anymore...

<comment><USER26> Stop paying attention to the hysteria. It's great for views and clicks. It's terrible for viewers and clickers.

"We have been told that climate change is an 'existential crisis.' However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations."

[https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/14/the-toxic-rhetoric-of- cli...](https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/14/the-toxic-rhetoric-of-climate- change/#more-25488)

<comment><USER27> For context: Between 2014 and February 2019, Curry testified before at least six Republican-led House committees, expressing the idea that the dangers of global warming are overstated and difficult to predict. These testimonies include statements criticizing President Obama's climate plan, the UN climate action plan, and other policy proposals aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

<comment><USER28> > expressing the idea that the dangers of global warming are overstated and > difficult to predict

She actually _expressed the idea_ that the effects of global warming are difficult to predict? What is she, some kind of denier? Why hasn't she been canceled yet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tech skills are high in demand; if the majority of techies only worked for companies that are actively trying to mitigate their climate impact and help their employees, customers and suppliers do the same, I believe the impact could be considerable. If 50 other professions did the same, imagine the impact.

</comment><comment><USER30> Climate is a global issue requiring global solutions. So we won't solve it because we're just not capable of globalism as a species. So all anyone can do is protect their investments.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately you may be right. I could forgo flight, eke out a sustainable but subsistence living and do the right thing for the planet, while others are flying their asses off and stock piling their treasure.

But then when the shit hits the fan, they will be the ones with the money to protect their families, not me.

A sad indictment of us as a species.

<comment><USER32> Do it anyway.

<comment><USER33> \- treasure stockpiling guy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Avocado politics will become the norm in North America and Europe.

[https://www.berggruen.org/the-worldpost/articles/beware- the-...](https://www.berggruen.org/the-worldpost/articles/beware-the-rise-of- far-right-environmentalism/)

<comment><USER35> Yawn...

I'm frankly tired of the assumption that anything right of Obama is driven by nefarious motives such as "antagonistic to African development".

<comment><USER34> I agree. It is similar to the trope that if you want reduced immigration into a developed country where you live you are inherently racist. It shuts down productive conversations on said issues.

That said, Nils Gilman raises some substantive issues surrounding possible future policy discussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> pdf report [http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf](http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER37> Does this mean I can leave my day job and start working on carbon capture technology now?

<comment><USER38> If you can find someone to pay for you to work on it.

<comment><USER39> So, basically just need to find someone with a lot of extra money and convince them of an impending crisis. Sounds easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So basically they took a poll. People and their polls smh. It may be true or it may be false, either way it's an opinion/feeling instead of something actionable and concrete

</comment><comment><USER41> > He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, > including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of > climate change and other pressures.

We're barely starting to understand bee colony collapse, and that's probably one of the more pressing and therefore better explored issues to date. I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. It's really turning into a social and institutional catch all. Insects in particular - I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.

Weather patterns are constantly changing even in the absence of climate forcing. Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.

<comment><USER42> Phytoplankton populations are collapsing due to increased ocean acidity and warming.

Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine food chain.

<comment><USER43> The ocean is not acid, it's alkaline (about pH 8.1) so you mean lessened alkalinity. Even seawater near active volcanic CO2 vents in the Mediterranean where the CO2 is nearly 6,000 ppm is still alkaline. Between 1751 and 1996, surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14.

<comment><USER44> > The ocean is not acid, it's alkaline

> increased ocean acidity

It's generally phrased that a decrease in alkaline is due to acidification (an increase in acid) and vice versa. The average ph is not specifically relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Surveys are very scientific.

</comment><comment><USER46> Won't we run out of fossil fuels soon, making this a non issue?</comment>


Why Apple did what they did - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexandretestu.com/post/510585558/why-apple-did-what-they-did <comment><USER2> Why Apple did what they did: to hurt Adobe, to hurt Android.

Why they're not concerned about the collateral damage: because they really don't care whether small developers have access to the platform or not, they're more interested in having more AAA titles.

I'm pretty sure everyone who thinks it was arrogant, hostile, and stupid of them to do such a thing understands _why_ Apple did it. Everyone also understood _why_ Microsoft spent a great deal of time forcing OEMs to offer only their software.

<comment><USER3> I get the point about Adobe, but Android?

<comment><USER4> Flash could have made it easy to target iPhone and Android with very similar code bases.

Now, developing for one, doesn't making porting to the other so simple.

It forces small developers to ask: bigger market or open market?

<comment><USER5> I really hope the open market (Android) wins this. I'm not looking forward to Steve Job's (similar to Bill Gates') vision of the marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author hints that apps built on third-party compilers are of lower quality, without explaining how/why.

This blog is a commentary on the high number of apps in the app store and Apple's desire to try to maintain quality, with a few opening sentences about the current TOS changes as link-bait.

<comment><USER7> This little flash game has very high production values for artwork, music, and sound. In fact, I think its quality is on a par with anything Apple ever did. The interface would be a natural for a touch interface like the iPad.

Little Wheel: <http://www.kongregate.com/games/fastgames/little-wheel>

There are many Flash games of comparable quality. It is a shame that such excellence will never be allowed on the iPad under the current policy.

 _How to kill off Flash using Market Forces_

If I were Apple, I would develop a toolset to convert flash apps to an iPad compatible target along with an outreach program to _encourage_ the migration of such apps to the iPad and the Apple App Store. If HTML5 is not robust enough, then Apple should develop a target based on Javascript or other advanced VM, taking care to ensure that a subset of the target is nearly isomorphic to Flash/Actionscript. This could be done defensibly by drawing on prior art in programming languages, and a near 1 to 1 correspondence would make most of the conversion work possible through automated translation. As a standard, HTML5 is in a better position to be the target, however.

License such an SDK stipulating that the app and its derivative works can only be published on web sites in a manner which is compatible with Mobile Safari.

The effect of such a program would be to harness a _profit motive_ towards killing off Flash! Using such a carrot is going to work better than the stick of legal action. The latter has the side effect of making many developers like Apple and the App Store less. The former would be an opportunity to reach more users and make more money.

You can catch more flies using honey than vinegar. You can kill more of them that way as well.

<comment><USER8> And Little Wheel, good as it is, is nothing compared to the likes of Machinarium (which is $20 for PC, and worth every penny). Guess what Machinarium is written in? _Flash_.

<comment><USER7> I was also going to mention Machinarium. Like Little Wheel, the game interface would make for an _ideal_ multitouch game. Solving puzzles involves tapping and dragging things in your environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple risks driving away anyone who was considering iPhone development as their primary source of income; it's pretty risky to put all your eggs in one basket when the owner of that basket has a habit of spilling a large portion of its contents.

What I think I'd do if I was Apple is to provide a two-tier app store. Tier 2 apps would be only be checked to see that they're not malicious or destructively buggy. Tier-1 apps would be strictly reviewed for quality and performance, and would presented to the user as such. There would be a submission fee to get an app verified as Tier-1.

</comment><comment><USER10> It would be a better post if you explained how each piece of your advice would help the situation for apple.

For example - the $100 per year fee means that a lot of the most useless apps will disappear from the store if their authors don't want to keep paying for them to exist.

</comment><comment><USER11> Author's points would have been valid if Apple didnt charge developers for App approval process.

But there is a developer fee, which obviously go towards approval/rejection of submitted apps. Apple's existing app approval process is more than enough to not let in crappy apps.The fee will cover extra cost arising from influx of new developers.

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing I do not understand. The graphic design crowd is the biggest force behind Mac popularity. And "graphic design software" and "Adobe creative suite" are synonims. So Adobe has the power to inflict huge damage to the OS X platform if it wants. Isn't Apple even slightly scared of this?

</comment><comment><USER13> When you submit an iPhone app for approval, do Apple techs look at the code? Because this restriction would make their job much easier.

I wonder if someone submits obfuscated C code, will they reject it?

</comment><comment><USER14> I would actually like to know if there is a real difference in performance between the apps compiled from flash and those written in objective-C ?

</comment><comment><USER15> If it was about quality, why allowing C++ ? Why disabling GC ?

</comment><comment><USER5> Apple's approval process makes the apps worse because they circumvent the iteration cycle. Companies cannot change their product to their customers' wishes without approval from Apple.

Besides, there are other solutions to the quantity/quality problem. For example, user feedback seems to work very well, and it scales!!!

</comment><comment><USER16> Unlike the raging Adobe employee and his blog post we all debated two days ago, this guy has his head straight on, managing to see farther than his own nose and managing to keep a perspective covering more than just his own interests.

<comment><USER17> How does he know this? It seems like a MAJOR stretch to me. If they only want to increase quality of apps why aren't they more strict in the review process? Why have they allowed 60+ fart apps? To say all Flash/Unity/Appcelerator apps are of lower quality is silly. There will be low quality and high quality Flash apps submitted but that's the whole point of the review process.

From Apple's perspective

* (+) Hurts Flash and reduces Adobe CS CS5 sales

* (+) Requires devs to purchase Apple hardware

* (+) Requires devs to develop specifically for iPhone - no ports and no develop once, deploy anywhere

* (+/-) Reduces apps submitted (includes good and bad apps)

* (-) Hurts projects like Unity3D, Appcelerator, etc

* (-) Overall negative press from software developers (my opinion)

You can pick any one of these from above and write an entire blog article. I think the main reason for this decision is that it will hurt Adobe much more than it hurts Apple. Who cares if they lose a small number of developers?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you access journals outside of academia? - <AUTHOR> Journal subscriptions seem outrageously expensive if you have a broad range of interests. Outside of illegal access, what are some cost-effective ways of accessing a broad collection of journals outside of academia? <comment><USER2> If you're in the UK, your local library can be a good start: [http://www.accesstoresearch.org.uk/](http://www.accesstoresearch.org.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have studied at a University in the past, look into whether your library has a past-student's membership. I know mine does (~$20/year for e-journal access only, $130 for full borrowing rights).

</comment><comment><USER4> Inter-library loan?

Really, I don't think there's an easy/cheap way. That's why scihub/libgen exist.</comment>


The Productivity Advantage of Serial Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nber.org/papers/w23320 <comment><AUTHOR> Actually this is probably behind a paywall for most people. Here is a brief summary: [http://www.livemint.com/Politics/bDNftOxyufek9X8mjFSYLP/Are-...](http://www.livemint.com/Politics/bDNftOxyufek9X8mjFSYLP/Are- serial-entrepreneurs-really-more-successful-than-starter.html)</comment>


Hackers cannot be mass-produced (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/01/thoughts-on-shaping-the-information-age-military-hackers-cannot-be-mass-produced/ <comment><USER2> I explain the abundance of hackers in Eastern Europe this way. The government supports black hats implicitly by giving them special treatment in criminal court. They are raised in the black market and gain their skills there. When they become prominent enough to gain the notice of the authorities they are given a plea bargain. They can either rot in prison for a decade or join the government and hack for the state. Young hackers can act with impunity knowing that the worst that can happen is they receive a cushy office job. The USA doesn't have this system.</comment>


Where is George? (A money tracking system.) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wheresgeorge.com/

<comment><USER2> The perpetual problem with wheresgeorge.com is the small userbase. Most actively logged bill has only been entered 15 times and the last entry was five years ago.

Bigger userbase + graphs/charts = more fun.</comment>


Is Earth Getting Bigger over Time? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/science/earth-size-mass.html <comment><USER2> It would be theoretically possible to gain volume while losing mass.</comment>


Ask HN: Banned from both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads - What to do? - <AUTHOR>

I'm still flabbergasted as to how this could possibly happen. As far as I can tell, the only thing I did wrong was to login from different IPs within a short time frame.
About two weeks ago, I signed up for a Facebook business account. Then, I opened an ads account, and set up my first campaign. Within minutes, my account got suspended. I filled out a form trying to explain that I'm traveling and that my current location, the location I sign in from, and my billing address all may differ from each other. I also attached a copy of my passport as requested. All to no avail. A few hours later, they sent me an email to the effect that my account was permanently suspended, this decision being final.
Then it got even worse. Just 24 hours later, my Google AdWords account also gets suspended. It had been previously been put under review, but there was a message that said that this was done periodically, so I thought there was no reason to worry. But apparently I was wrong. At least, they gave me a reason. Apparently, the system thinks that my billing information is incorrect. But my billing info did not change at all. I'm just traveling.
So, I'm totally at loss over this. I already gave up the hope of ever being able to run Facebook ads. But as for Google, I had run several campaigns in the past, and, I still believe that it should somehow be possible for me to get my account reinstated. Though, I don't know how to go about it. I already filed an appeal, but I guess it can take ages for them to make a decision. I just don't understand what I did wrong. If I violated any ToS, then please someone tell me what exactly it is that I did wrong. Thus far, I'm totally in the dark. I can't possible be the only person signing in from different locations?
If anyone can help me or give me some pointers, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> As for the ad content of my campaign, the target was a dating site. The ads were pretty standard, I based all texts on ads run by other dating sites. Something like:

Date Successful Men Successful men all over the world are looking for [insert country] women. Sign up - it's all free to use!

Is there anything wrong with this?

</comment><comment><USER2> Of course it depends rather a lot on how deep your pockets are and what sort of return you were getting on your Fb and Google ads, but these are not the only sources for advertisers. There are plenty of other types of advertising, affiliate companies, remarketing and the like.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try setting up a second account and running your ads. Also make sure that you understand their terms of use.</comment>


Show HN: We got fed up with Airbrake, so we built Coalmine - <AUTHOR> https://www.getcoalmine.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys! This started out as a personal side project to create our own alternative to Airbrake because that would just go silent for a week at a time. We got frustrated because we couldn't rely on it, and it was hard to search, etc.

Along the way we decided to open it up to other people who thought it sounded useful, so my friend and I started turning it from a prototype into a product earlier this summer.

I'm really interested in hearing feedback about it. How we could improve the website or the app--anything, really.

</comment><comment><USER2> One recommendation I have is to open up the number of events/minute. You should have at least 1 plan where that number is unlimited.

<comment><USER3> Hmm... can you explain your use case a bit more? Even things that are 'unlimited' have an upper bound (e.g., data plans, etc). From Coalmine's perspective, having upper limits ensures that all users on the system are guaranteed some kind of quality by avoiding some application spiraling out of control and sending tons and tons of errors to the service.

From a developer's perspective, if I believe my application will need to be able to send unlimited amounts of error reports, I should probably revisit my design. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the minimum version of PHP your app supports? The company I work for insists on running the horrifically outdated 5.1.6, and that's been a limiting factor with some packages we've tried to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, unfortunately we cut it off at 5.2. I suppose it's _possible_ to get it to work if you install the json extension (I don't think there's anything that would actively preclude it from working), but I can't make any promises because I can't get an isolated PHP 5.1 install to build in my dev environment (believe me, I tried, but it wasn't worth it). Let us know if you give it a shot and can get it to work, though!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the quick response. I'll try setting it up and let you know.</comment></comment></comment>


Study: Two spaces better than one - <AUTHOR> https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 <comment><USER2> It is easier for me to read with 2 spaces after a full stop rather than one. But maybe I am too old (over 30) and set in my ways.</comment>


Face opera - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/05/face_opera.html

<comment><USER2> The battle of the giants is really beginning: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon will be trying to define the future of the internet and they will have to attack each others core businesses to grow further.

On several levels of the internet they all try to get a foot in:

1\. Cloud: AWS, iCloud, Azure, Gdrive & App engine - Facebook hasn't got a storage or computation sollution

2\. Social: Google+, Windows Live, Facebook - Amazon and Apple don't have real social networks

3\. App stores: Apple app store, Play, Market Place, Amazon Appstore - Facebook doesn't have a real app store.

4\. Operating system: OS X and iOS, Android, Windows - Facebook and Amazon don't have a OS yet.

5\. Browser: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Amazon Silk - Facebook doesn't have a browser yet.

I really think that all companies will battle each other on all the levels because loosing one level will cause the collapse of the others.

So, Facebook definitely needs a browser.

<comment><USER3> > So, Facebook definitely needs a browser.

Why?

<comment><USER2> This is off course a legitimate question. I tried to really summarize it by saying: "loosing one level will cause the collapse of the others".

The browser is for the end user an important base because that is where they get directed to surf and target ad spending etc. By inserting functionality like a start page or search engine, the behavior is influenced a lot. You can also push own services and products directly.

The current status of the browser is also that it can replace the OS. (See Google Chrome OS)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still don't see the value in it. It made sense when Google did it. Chrome came and shook things up introducing features no existing browsers had and placing an emphasis on JavaScript speed. This was critical for Google as a number of its apps make heavy use of it.

I don't use Chrome anymore, I switched back to Firefox but its undeniable that it had a massive impact on the speed of browser development and probably the progress of web standards.

Now.. if Facebook bagged Opera what would it add to Facebook or what benefit would Facebook get? A bigger say in web standards. Does this matter much to Facebook? They would have a mobile browser.. this still doesn't help them make a mobile app which doesn't suck.

I just don't see the point. The most likely result of this would be alienating existing Opera users. I would also expect Google to switch Opera to web-kit to reduce development costs. I don't see how a company like Facebook will see a return of investment by buying out Opera.

<comment><USER5> > introducing features no existing browsers had

Please, elaborate. The only feature I know is exclusive to Chrome is full page translation (since they own Google Translate it makes sense).

What else?

<comment><USER4> I thought that they introduced.

Sandboxing for individual tabs

Ability to drag tabs between windows

Isn't each tab a process or something so when you close it memory is freed?

I am sure there are some other things. This is all I can think of off the top my head.

<comment><USER5> One process per tab is not a feature. It is (or should be) invisible for me, the user, and from my experience it creates more problems than it's worth (first time I tried Chrome it simply stopped my computer dead by running 10 heavy processes on a single-core CPU - so much for performance). It's a bad design decision that will only pay off when I have a 20-core CPU. Sandboxing for individual tabs? Just about the same.

My point is that saying "Chrome came and shook things up introducing features no existing browsers had" is a bit of a stretch. When it came out Chrome was basically not very different from Internet Explorer 6 (feature-wise), and it seems to have stayed that way (I like full page translation but that's it).

We should be fair and say that Google Chrome has a large market share because it has Google behind it. It doesn't have much else going for it.

<comment><USER6> Back when I switched from Firefox to Chrome, FF was a very heavy browser that took up a lot of memory. Chrome was very light-weight and nimble. Clearly, that has changed since then but it was a big competitive advantage.

One process per tab is a feature. If a tab crashed in FF, typically the whole browser would need to restart whereas in Chrome the tab could be closed and re-opened without affecting the other tabs. I think that's a pretty significant feature.

Auto-updating every 6 weeks is another feature. As a developer, I don't have to worry when an update comes out since I know 90%+ will be on the new version.

While I think part of the reason Chrome has a large market share is clearly because of Google, I don't think it's the main reason. There are many other factors.

<comment><USER5> > I think that's a pretty significant feature.

The problem here is that you trade a lot of performance for stability that you should have to begin with, so in the end you have worse overall performance just so that a fringe case is covered. What's the worse that can happen if Chrome crashed? You could lose all your tabs because the default setting is "open homepage" instead of "reopen the pages that were open last", but that's your fault.

But let's investigate this more deeply - browser crashes have two major causes - internal bugs and plugins. What used to happen was that Flash (or Acrobat Reader, or whatever) would crash and it would bring down the whole browser. The solution is (of course) one separate process for the plugins. Problem solved. Going beyond that and fitting every tab with its own process to account for the fact that your business isn't really building browsers is of little comfort to me; you shouldn't be dereferencing that NULL pointer to begin with.

Opera has auto-update as well. I guess we'll have to disagree on the reason Chrome has its market share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article also left out another major benefit to Facebook. If they buy Opera they will get massive exposure in the CIS region where the browser products are the strongest. This can give them a hand overtaking vKontate and could be worth much to Facebook alone. Yandex / vKontate will know this and may want to defend by a counter offer so it could be interesting.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#social_media-RU- monthly-201104-20...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#social_media-RU- monthly-201104-201204)

Also worth noting is if the co-founder Jon and Geir's (the other co-founder) widow don't want to sell their stakes, it will make things difficult for anyone to take over and all this speculation is just academic.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll stop using Opera (currently my default browser) if facebook acquires it. Such is the level of trust I have over facebook.

<comment><USER9> What makes you trust Opera any more already? They're already quite capable of logging every domain you visit, via the fraud prevention mechanism (Enabled by default). Whether Opera are recording this I don't know, but you can probably be quite certain that Facebook will, if they acquire it.

<comment><USER10> At least they say that they don't log it. Google's Chrome does send and log every website you visit.

<comment><USER11> Citation?

<comment><USER12> <http://www.google.com/history>

<comment><USER13> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a Google Search thing, not a Chrome thing? The Google toolbar in Firefox had the option to upload your browser's entire history to the Search History site, but that's not built into Chrome, afaik.

Chrome does have a sync service, but it requires user action to activate, allows the user to pick what they want synced, and allows syncing omnibox history, not the complete browser history.

<comment><USER12> you're not wrong

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really baffled by all those people saying that they will stop using Opera if FB acquires them.

I mean - okay, If they start modifying it to send your data to Facebook without way to opt-out - sure, do that.

If they start showing ads in fastmail and reading your mails - sure, that's reasonable.

But I really think that doing that the moment FB acquires Opera would be quite an overreaction.

<comment><USER15> I don't know. I'm quite worried that the whole technology space is turning into a big brand feud war arena.

We are begining to see the subverting of unrelated products into business strategies. No, I don't want my browser/car/glasses/phone with any strings attached. What are we looking forward to a decade from now? iBank? FB insurence? G+ real state?

I for one will make efforts to avoid those products like the plague. If we do not strenghten small brands, we accept the rule of the big ones.

Overreaction is okay for matters of principle.

<comment><USER16> If I could up-vote this a hundred times, I would. Welcome to the Internet: sponsored (filtered!) by Apple/Google/Facebook/[take your pick].

Reinforces my belief that open standards and open source really, _really_ matter when it comes to a free and open Internet.

<comment><USER17> This is what RMS and others have been saying for decades. Free software, data ownership and privacy aren't "nice" things to have or tinker with, they are absolutely crucial freedoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason Opera users don't like the idea of Facebook buying their browser is twofold.

1) Association - Facebook has a really bad image among many people, and I believe Opera has a hugely better reputation than their potential buyer.

2) Fear that Opera will stray from it's declared course of supporting the open web and creating the best browsing experience (which it currently delivers, by far).

I will not be uninstalling Opera if the acquisition takes place but will keep a very close eye on any developments.

Unfortunately Opera is the only choice for me in the current browser market - other browser can't accommodate my browsing habits, so I would be very bitter if anything were to go wrong. I think a lot of Opera users feel the same way.

</comment><comment><USER18> >Trident is not for sale, Gecko is irrelevant and possibly too heavy for mobile use, and WebKit is interesting but rather crowded. Presto, Opera's engine, is the only one that's available.

Why is Gecko irrelevant? It still has a good chunk of marketshare.

<comment><USER19> Not on mobile, which is where Facebook wants a browser.

<comment><USER20> I use Firefox on my Android. It's a little heavy but it's OK. I like it a lot because I'm a desktop Firefox user and it knows how to sync my bookmarks and my saved forms data and my history back and forth. The UI is also much better than Android's built-in browser and it's been making a lot of progress.

I think people are not seeing the forest from the trees here. Firefox has a lot of potential on mobile phones, because Firefox has a lot of desktop users that would want the Firefox on their mobile devices, at least for the Sync functionality.

Also, on mobile WebKit may be the most popular, but there are so many incompatibilities and performance differences between Android's browser, Blackberry's browser, the webkit-powered S60 browser, Chrome, Safari and Mobile Safari that you might as well count those as different engines.

<comment><USER21> Gecko will NEVER render on a feature phone. The Mozilla team has repeated this statement again and again.

<comment><USER22> A year ago feature phones were being released with 1GHz processors [1]. I wouldn't say never.

[1] [http://www.gsmarena.com/1ghz_s40based_nokia_c3015_pictures_s...](http://www.gsmarena.com/1ghz_s40based_nokia_c3015_pictures_surface_is_the_first_of_many- news-2902.php)

<comment><USER11> What OS do they run? It's hard to imagine porting to another OS with insanely tiny marketshare and weird APIs. What is the app publishing ecosystem on these phones?

<comment><USER22> This phone runs Nokia's Series 40, which is running 1.5 billion phones - supposedly the largest mobile operating system. Perhaps this is a bad example though as S40 only runs Java ME & HTML5 apps. Still, I can easily see these feature phones running Firefox within a year. Firefox is, after all, open source.

<comment><USER23> Firefox on mobile is the new Linux on desktop... It's open source and you can see it being big next year, every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Installable web apps".

The author doesn't seem to be up to speed. Opera has announced widget support will be dropped, along with Unite applications.

[http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/04/24/increased- fo...](http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/04/24/increased-focus-on- opera-extensions-and-ending-support-for-unite-widgets-voice)

I guess this decision could be reversed if Facebook buys Opera.

<comment><USER24> Unite was awesome. The problem is hardly anyone used Opera. A company like Facebook could actually do something with it. Imagine the possibilities for apps and games if a big chunk of Facebook users had it.

<comment><USER5> Unite is really awesome and I'm sorry to see it go, I used it for quick sharing with friends. Much more convenient than Dropbox when you just want something right there and then.

<comment><USER9> I think Unite suffered from not being open enough. You required an Opera account to use it, and there's no open specification for building compatible tools and services. What you could build into the browser itself was quite limited. (Plus you had to leave the browser open all the time, which can be a pain.)

There's some recent proposals for p2p web standards ([http://www.infotales.com/peer-to-peer-web-standards-by- world...](http://www.infotales.com/peer-to-peer-web-standards-by-world-wide- web-consortium/)) which may provide an alternative system to Unite with some of the same goals. Opera appear to be involved in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Opera really could set any price they want. The browser itself is worth far more than some crap like instagram - and Facebook really need it quite badly. I'll be disappointed if they don't get at least $2bn for it. :p

<comment><USER25> Why do they need it "quite badly"?

<comment><USER12> Facebook probably wants to do things with the web that are not currently possible. Without their own browser they are dependant on other companies to make those things happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've spent seven years of my life at Opera, quitting just a few months ago. I've reached the exact same conclusions as ppk.

Owning both a browser and the applications running in it is an immensely powerful combination, as demonstrated by Google. It makes perfect sense for Facebook to want to do the same.

And as much as I dislike Facebook, I believe a buyout like this is the only way for Opera to survive long-term. They have a brilliant engineering team, but it's dwarfed by its competitors. The Presto engine is maintained by a team of just ~60 developers and ~30 testers. They're doing amazing work, but can't keep up with the faster pace of Webkit or Trident development. Combine that with the current level of mismanagement, and you're in trouble.

Without backing from a bigger player, Opera will dwindle to irrelevance as the use of its proxy browser fades away.

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate on the mismanagement part?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Re Opera Mini and them having no competition in proxying browsers: Nokia's S40 Browser actually does proxying these days. This was released as a beta in late 2010, and is now the default in all S40 phones. ([http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/nokia-browser-for- series-40-b...](http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/nokia-browser-for- series-40-beta))

It's not a proper competitor of course, as one cannot install it to phones by other manufacturers, but it does still cover a pretty big chunk of the low-end devices.

<comment><USER5> There's a large quality gap between's Nokia browser and Opera Mini. Nokia isn't famous for their browser, after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> You guys are really making a big deal here. You guys are hackers / engineers yourself. Companies need to make money. Almost every company "uses" your data and make money/ How do you think Gmail has "relevant" ads next to your email browser? No matter what fancy mechanism they put there, they are still using your information. If you really hate people using your data, just build your own mail service. Even small brands use your data. To what level do they use? Who knows. I am pretty sure people would lie about how their products use your information (oh yeah we don't store this and that...) BS. lol It's business. Your credit card and bank information all has to reported to credit companies. These companies make money off your information. So are you saying we should stop using credit cards? Even as "trivial" as college admission - you receive numerous stupid admission invitations, wtf is that? Apparently, College Board or somehow someone decides that information are "shared" to colleges as partnership....

</comment><comment><USER29> Add to Chrome mouse gestures, and i will change browser.

<comment><USER30> And single key shortcuts!

<comment><USER5> And vertical multi-column tabs! And good performance for 100+ tabs on single core CPU-s! And speed dial! And integrated email/RSS client! And trash can! And notes! And so many more.

Then I might switch.

<comment><USER31> You can get very very close to Opera features with Firefox extensions. For mouse gestures there's an extensions called FireGestures. It's actually more configurable than Opera's. Speed dial is in Aurora, but it's very basic right now.

The rest I didn't use/care, but I can recall there being an extension for every one of those things.

Not saying Firefox is better than Opera necessarily, it's just that Firefox is quite powerful as well.

<comment><USER32> The problem is that by the time you reached the functionality of Opera with extensions, your browser is bloated and takes ages to load, and a large chunk of RAM.

<comment><USER31> I'd have agreed with you just a year ago, but not anymore. Firefox made TONS of performance improvements and Opera actually got significantly worse at memory consumption.

At the end of the day, Aurora (with several addons) is usually below or around 300MB with my normal daily use, whereas Opera Next can easily go beyond 1GB of virtual memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm wondering what would happen to fastmail as this is currently owned by opera.

<comment><USER34> Then FastMail would instantly lose me as regular user. I'd just use it for junk mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1\. Opera is really not useful. On mobile phone it uses more memory does my built-in android browser, and it doesn't even run many of the websites smoothly... damn 2\. Acquiring Opera doesn't really help Facebook. It generates some revenues, but doesn't help FB to maintain its large operation cost, and doesn't help its ads moving either.

</comment><comment><USER35> What people are looking at is the obvious= browser.

I surmise the real reason for Facebook to buy Opera is not that. Opera owns the #1 mobile ad mediation platform : AdMarvel and has augmented it with Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising.

THAT IS THE KEY. MOBILE MONETIZATION VIA ANALYTICS OF FB DATA AND ADMARVEL.

</comment><comment><USER36> This post might just be to push people to leave Opera probably. Opens up a huge market for the other not-so-good browsers to prep up their marketing on app stores!</comment>


esolafast a C++ header based time-stretching library using KFR - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/viig99/esolafast <comment><AUTHOR> Fast C++ implementation of ESOLA using KFRLib, can be used for online time- stretch augmentation during SpeechToText training.</comment>


OONI Explorer: Censorship and Other Network Anomalies Around the World - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ooni-explorer-censorship-and-other-network-anomalies-around-world <comment><USER2> _Open Observatory of Network Interference A free software, global observation network for detecting censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation on the internet_

[https://ooni.torproject.org/](https://ooni.torproject.org/)</comment>


How to Avoid the Top 5 Scale-Out Pitfalls - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/scaleout/scaleout_pitfalls.html

<comment><USER2> See: [http://www.mysql.com/why- mysql/scaleout/scaleout_pitfalls.ht...](http://www.mysql.com/why- mysql/scaleout/scaleout_pitfalls.html)

<comment><USER3> _2\. Don't Think Vertically_

 _It's a mistake to think that a system can be grown by scaling vertically, that is, by buying bigger machines with more CPUs. Throwing more power at an existing implementation -- which is probably synchronous and most likely already suffering from lock waits -- is only going to make it 'wait faster'. By planning for horizontal scale-out, almost from the start, a business is already planning in the direction of distributed, asynchronous systems, which will make it easier to add more capacity later on._

Therein lies what I consider to be MySQL's greatest "scale out" failing: locking implementation. It also hints at its second-greatest failing in this context, being parallelism implementation, leading to CPU being a limiting factor.

Scaling "horizontally" is extremely expensive, if vertical scaling is still possible. For example, a $1k server might hold 6 spindles, while a $1k storage array holds 24. The situation with CPU and memory isn't quite as extreme, but it still tends to hold. It also limits one to network (rather than internal bus) latencies and bandwidth.</comment></comment>


CoreBGP – Plugging in to BGP - <AUTHOR> https://www.jordanwhited.com/posts/corebgp-plugging-in-to-bgp/ <comment><USER2> I love this.

I tried using GoBGP to write a simple golang-based alternative to ExaBGP (which is great and missing from this article) and was discouraged because GoBGP simply did too much, which I didn't need (routing tables) and making it not do those things was extremely time-consuming, so much so that I started writing my own BGP implementation in Go, but, pretty quickly realized it was a larger project than I wanted to take on at that moment, so it got shelved. Exabgp was "good enough".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Adam :)

I'm happy to hear someone else will find this useful. Let me know if you have any feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's fun implementing a BGP speaker from scratch. I implemented one about 15 years ago in Java which was designed much like this library. It was proprietary code which we used to advertise programmatically-determined routes to our edge routers. Connecting to a router, walking through the state machine changes, and debugging unexpected behavior (from both misunderstanding the RFC and from finding bugs in vendor implementations) was a great learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, reminds me a tiny bit of the BGP listener in Java that was written back at Smallworks [https://github.com/pjz/java- bgp](https://github.com/pjz/java-bgp)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm using rpc calls to GoBGP to get routes for my evpn project. Using CoreBGP as a library and talk directly to other peers might be a better idea.

<comment><USER6> Consider embedding gobgp directly if the issue is performance of grpc.

CoreBGP isn't for you if you want something to do the work of evpn parsing for you. This framework gives you hooks to the very low level bgp state machine. There is a lot on top to do yourself to support the exotic address families.

<comment><USER5> Actually I'm quite satisfied with the performance.

The main reason I'm considering using CoreBGP directly is that in order to use the evpn project I'm building, the user has to setup a GoBGP instance which might cause problems.

Embedding GoBGP just like kube-router[0] did might be a good idea too. Thank you for the advice.

[0]: [https://github.com/cloudnativelabs/kube- router](https://github.com/cloudnativelabs/kube-router)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quite interesting, both the project and the ideas behind it and in the referenced paper. I really need to dust off that BGP lab setup...</comment>


Introducing Druid: Real-Time Analytics at a Billion Rows Per Second - <AUTHOR> http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/druid-part-i-real-time-analytics-at-a-billion-rows-per-second/ <comment><USER3> The architecture boils down to:

      - A framework for running a query across a lot of machines (a pretty much solved problem)
      - Throw a metric fuckton of hardware at the problem

1b rows/sec isn't all that impressive when you find out they have 1.3 Tb of RAM and a $30,000 a month EC2 bill [1].

1\. "Our 40-instance (m2.2xlarge) cluster can scan, filter, and aggregate 1 billion rows in 950 milliseconds."

<comment><USER4> For comparison, tineye.com (a reverse image search engine that I worked on a few years ago) queries well over 1 billion images (and thus rows of metadata) in under 0.5s (our goal was sub-250ms).

I also know that the size of the cluster is a fraction of 40 instances (especially if you don't include the subcluster of web crawlers).

By comparison, it doesn't seem super impressive. Tineye's metadata is stored in a sharded PostgreSQL database, the image index itself is a separate proprietary engine (also sharded).

Then again, we probably dealt with a smaller set of query types so we could optimize those scenarios much more heavily. Nonetheless, from my experience it feels like they could do better with any of the options they've tried. It's important to be aware where the bottleneck is. In our case, the IO of the EC2 storage disks was a bottleneck (which we mitigated by sharding). Once we moved the cluster off of AWS and shoved some nice SSD drives into the machines, the performance increase was dramatic (half the shards for twice the speed, pretty much).

<comment><USER5> The difference is that you're scanning, they're aggregating. Scanning is O(logn), aggregating is O(n).

<comment><USER6> It depends on the commutitvity and associativity of your aggregation operator. With sufficient parallelism, aggregation may also be logarithmic.

<comment><USER5> Are you saying you can somehow sum numbers without reading all of them?

<comment><USER6> I'm saying that in terms of real time, if you have enough parallelism, you don't have to wait for n units, but rather log n units. As a function of CPU time, sure it's linear, but ignoring what parallelism gives you is just not being realistic, IMHO.

As to the sibling comment, that's another good point. You say it's because it knows about the queries ahead of time, but you don't get excellent real-world performance without what an academic might consider cheating. Special-case your data structures to expected queries, where those queries are either empirically discovered and adjusted for manually, or learned automatically over time. A closed-minded approach that simply shuts down creative thinking by parroting out "linear time, no can do better, sorry" is poor form.

<comment><USER5> This doesn't change the fact that searching is at least as fast as aggregating, no matter how much you cheat. Besides, how is precomputing relevant to the discussion here? By that reasoning, I can convert any algorithm to O(1) time and O(1) space.

The topic is about how search was faster than aggregation, and I'm saying that searching is faster than aggregation _generally_. You can parallelize all you want, it's still going to be faster to search than to aggregate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's always tempting to build it yourself. Initially we built our own data store too, partly because it was a great geek challenge, and then went back to InnoDB and NoSQL solutions once we figured we can't compete with 1000's of open source devs and battle hardened products.

Our hardware bill for our entire server cluster, which we own, is only slightly more than Druid's monthly cloud bill. [My company is the largest real-time analytics provider on the web]

Few people realize that Redis was created by Salvatore to provide a real-time analytics product - and then it grew into so much more. Also InnoDB's clustered indexes are spectacular when it comes to answering questions like the one's the OP has posed.

<comment><USER8> chartbeat?

<comment><USER7> On their home page CB currently claim 1,977,762 visitors across all sites. We see the following across our network:

397,727,080 visits per month.

1,002,792,862 impressions per month.

209,727,427 absolute uniques per month.

We use a third party to report this data to ensure objectivity when we're doing reports for outsiders. This is from the period March 30 to April 29 2011.

<comment><USER9> ChartBeat's numbers are _concurrent_ users. No idea how that translates on web but I'd expect it's more than 200m uniques - we do 120ish off 100k - <USER2> concurrents.

<comment><USER7> Absolute uniques per month is probably a good objective measure of size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Disclaimer: I work at Endeca, which just launched Latitdue, a mostly in-memory OLAP product. I work in the performance and scale group, and I've been experimenting with the speed of these things lately.

As an experiment, I wrote a simple, stand alone program that takes a compressed database column and a list of which rows you care about, and does a group by with count. (We're a column store, so every column is stored separately.) For 1 billion records, it took about 250 ms.

This is on a 4-socket Nehalem, so I had 32 cores and used 32 threads. If they're using Nehalems as well, and have 1 socket per box, they're using 320 cores. So they're about a factor of 40 slower than my simple experiment.

To be sure, theirs was a general system that presumably runs on their actual data, whereas mine was just an experiment. Still, it seems quite possible to get the same result with significantly less hardware.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't that what VoltDB is for? <http://voltdb.com/>

Edit: Also, I see no mention of whether Druid is going to be open sourced or not.

<comment><USER12> Actually, I think this is what Vertica is for (VoltDB was a Vertica spin-off). Volt is intended for OLTP workloads whereas Vertica is designed for OLAP, especially giant star-schema workloads like the post described.

<comment><USER8> Vertica is legit, we tested it against a billion rows on a single server and it didn't blink and eye. It reads compressed data, and optimizes compression based on the column's data type for that ec2 price you could get a few years of vertica licenses

<comment><USER13> Vertica has EC2 instances available, i am trying to figure out pricing. They are a distributed DB, but not all in RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> SAP's analytic appliance HANA (formerly called Business Warehouse Accelerator) has been doing this for at least 5 years now. And people think SAP is old- fashioned...

</comment><comment><USER15> It took them 40 servers to run 1B aggregations per second? Great --- Citrusleaf recently did 250M aggregations per second with one amazon large. And, oh, we're fully clustered and reliable, so you can snap in new servers with no maintenance.

<comment><USER9> How does pricing based on database size work? It doesn't look like you're a hosted service which makes it feel like a really odd method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Or we can use modern statistics and/or randomized/sublinear/approximation algorithms...

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd love to see a demo. Ever since I saw hummingbird's demo of real time traffic analysis I've wanted to write real time analytics.

I'd love to see this one rolling (even a video)

I'll be looking forward to their "part two" where they go on about architecture. They're really managing 1B hits/s ? Or they have a historical data of a billion hits and can parse it in a second ?

(for anyone who hasn't seen hummingbird <http://demo.hummingbirdstats.com/> and it's on github <https://github.com/mnutt/hummingbird>)

<comment><USER9> I think they're just _reading_ 1b rows/second in their db, not writing or receiving. Can't wait for part 2 though.

<comment><USER17> Oh yes! I bet you're excited to compare to playtomic

<comment><USER9> And play with, maybe even use... although I don't know if they're actually _releasing_ the software either.

Definitely a lot of interesting stuff missing from part 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lost after "Over the last twelve months, we tried and failed to achieve scale and speed with relational databases (Greenplum, InfoBright, MySQL) and NoSQL offerings (HBase)."

I know for a fact that Greenplum can easily cover this load. Did they actually try running all these things on the same size cluster with the same amount of RAM? Were they all tuned properly?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why couldn't you use other distributed in-memory stores like Redis or Memcached?

<comment><USER20> Because they don't support complex queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They should have just used QlikView - its proprietary but blazing fast..

<comment><USER22> This is distributed though, which I think makes it quite interesting.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't make it interesting for me; OLAP queries are very easy to distribute.

Also, kdb+ achieves a "billion rows per second" scan on a similar dataset with just one or two instances (rather than 40), if you know what you are doing.

Color me unimpressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm more impressed by those UK click through rates on bieberfever.com

</comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like a job for Vertica, but of course that's not cheap.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favourite programming podcasts? - <AUTHOR>

I love listening to podcasts centered around programming, programming interviews, startups etc  Here are my favourite ones at the moment:
1. Stack Overflow - http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/
2. Venture Voice - http://www.venturevoice.com/
3. Mixergy - http://mixergy.com/
I have listened to Hansel minutes but it's focus on Windows programming doesn't suit my taste.
Any PHP focused ones would be great! <comment><USER2> Here are several good ones: IT conversations - <http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/> Churchill Club - <http://www.churchillclub.org> CF Conversations - <http://www.cfconversations.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Mac developer Roundtable and Late Night Cocoa (<http://www.mac-developer- network.com/>) - thanks to Scotty.</comment>


A quick way to make someone you love happy today - <AUTHOR> https://makesomeonehappytoday.net <comment><USER2> Is this your project?

How do you prevent abuse? Like someone sending a bunch of unwanted semi- anonymous messages.

How do you prevent card fraud? I remember someone that had a small site that was used by fraudster to test if the cards had been blocked.</comment>


Yet Another JavaScript Testing Framework - <AUTHOR> http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/05/yet-another-javascript-testing.html <comment><USER2> looks interesting.

A lot of competition though. Will have to give it a try before making a switch.</comment>


Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~popl-interviews/peytonjones.html <comment><USER2> I'm always curious what people are using the more exotic type system functionality of e.g. Haskell or Idris for in practice. It was interesting to hear that even Simon didn't expect such things to be used in industry quite yet.

Still, I wish I could see more info on this. At what point does the additional cognitive burden of advanced type system features become a worthwhile tradeoff for program correctness? It seems to me that this depends wholly on the complexity of the program.

Further to that point, the most complex programs I can think of (perhaps you may be able to offer other opinions, which I welcome) are AAA game engines. What are the reasons why the big engines out there are not using higher-kinded types, dependent types and the like? Is this just because of pragmatic issues such as the languages the developers learned in school not supporting these features, or because here-to-date functional languages supporting these features lacked the appropriate throughput of C/C++, where one can layout data for cache-efficiency?

<comment><USER3> > Still, I wish I could see more info on this. At what point does the > additional cognitive burden of advanced type system features become a > worthwhile tradeoff for program correctness?

As a professional Haskell programmer, I find the cognitive burden to be lower in Haskell than in, say, Java, where I have to do a lot more bookkeeping about design patterns and how they're glued together than in standardish Haskell where compositional forms fall into a compact set of powerful concepts amenable to reasoning.

I say standardish Haskell because the sweet spot in my experience is a few lightweight GHC extensions but mostly shunning some of the seriously experimental stuff in the language. For example, i agree with your doubt when it comes to dependent types and in particular singletons, a halfway house implementation that can be used in Haskell today.

Some of my coworkers had unsuccessfully attempted to write mobile games in Haskell. That was 10 or so years ago and many of the technical hurdles that impeded them then are no longer there.

The only major one I know of at the moment that prevents Haskell from being used in a AAA game engine is a guaranteed low latency garbage collector. I expect someone to implement such a thing for Haskell in the next 10 years.

The space is moving fast, our understanding of how to write _big_ Haskell apps has advanced drastically since when I first started using the language! I expect big things to come in the next couple of years.

This is not to say that the space is getting _rewritten_ all the time, it's just that more useful concepts are being discovered and matured. For example, Applicative only 11 years ago and scalable FRP like 4 years ago or so.

I should say what type concepts compose my compact tool set:

* higher order functions with syntax optimized for using them.

* algebraic data types (sparingly generalized algebraic data types)

* type classes + higher kinds (The synergy is far greater than the individual features)

* monad transformers (the promise of aspect oriented programming actually realized)

<comment><USER4> > monad transformers (the promise of aspect oriented programming actually > realized)

I hardly see any overlap between these two concepts.

AOP is about cross cutting concerns and being able easily insert similar functionalities in unrelated areas of the code.

Monad transformers are the hack you need to use to make monads compose.

<comment><USER5> How are monad transformers a hack? They have a solid theory behind them.

i'm not sure where you got the idea that they 'make monads compose'. Monads don't compose. It's nonsensical to talk about monad composition in general, because there is nothing about the structure of a monad that allows it to compose (quite the opposite, really). Some things which may form some monads do compose with certain other things that form monads, but this is like saying 'Abelian groups' are the 'hack' you need to make groups commutative -- it's a meaningless statement.

<comment><USER6> Agree that monads don't compose.

I am not the OP, and not a Haskell programer, but my understanding is that Monad Transformers exist _because_ Monads don't compose, and when you want monadic effects to compose, you use Monad Transformers (the other option is a go crazy writing every combination and ordering of effects you want by hand).

I got this impression from the papers I have read, particularly this one [1]

        Monad transformers offer an additional benefit to monadic
        programming: by providing a library of different monads and
        types and functions for combining these monads, it is possible
        to create custom monads simply by composing the necessary monad
        transformers. For example, if you need a monad with state and
        error handling, just take the StateT and ErrorT monad transformers
        and combine them.

Notice the last line of the snippet I posted above. What am I missing?

[1]: Monad Transformers Step by Step [https://page.mi.fu- berlin.de/scravy/realworldhaskell/materia...](https://page.mi.fu- berlin.de/scravy/realworldhaskell/materialien/monad-transformers-step-by- step.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Monad transformers exist independent of the fact that monads don't compose. Can you explain what you mean by 'monad transformers exist because monads don't compose'? Are you saying the concept of a monad transformer wouldn't exist if monads did compose? This makes no sense, as there are applicative transformers despite the fact that you can compose applicatives freely.

<comment><USER6> > Monad transformers exist independent of the fact that monads don't compose. > Can you explain what you mean by 'monad transformers exist because monads > don't compose'?

I see what you mean.

You are right - the concept of Monad Transformers exist independent of the fact that monads don't compose.

What I meant was that MTs exist _in Haskell programs_ because Monads don't compose. Of course, there probably exists a Haskell program where this is not the case, but I am certain MTs are largely used in Haskell because Monads don't compose.

BTW, the grandparent is not the first to coin "MTs are .. use(d) to make monads compose" usage. The late Paul Hudak et al writes in [1] that:

         A ground-breaking attempt to better solve the overall
         problem began with Moggi's proposal to use monads to
         structure denotational semantics. Wadler popularized
         Moggi's ideas in the functional programming community
         by showing that many type constructors (such as List) were
         monads and how monads could be used in a variety of
         settings, many with an "imperative" feel (such as in Peyton
         Jones & Wadler). Wadler's interpreter design, however,
         treats the interpreter monad as a monolithic structure which
         has to be reconstructed every time a new feature is added.
         More recently, Steele proposed pseudomonads as a way
         to compose monads and thus build up an interpreter from
         smaller parts, but he failed to properly incorporate important
         features such as an environment and store, and struggled
         with restrictions in the Haskell type system when trying
         to implement his ideas. In fact, pseudomonads are really
         just a special kind of monad transformer, first suggested by
         Moggi as a potential way to leave a "hole" in a monad
         for further extension.

Notice the usage _Steele proposed pseudomonads as a way to compose monads_. So this usage has been established in the Haskell community at least from 1995. Why are you, presumably a Haskell programmer, surprised when someone repeated that usage in 2018 on an internet forum?

[1]: Monad Transformers and Modular Interpreters ([http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/POPL96...](http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/POPL96-Modular-interpreters.pdf))

<comment><USER5> > Why are you, presumably a Haskell programmer, surprised when someone > repeated that usage in 2018 on an internet forum?

I hate the way monads in general are talked about in the Haskell community (I also do not like the language for other algebraic terms). In particular, it is common to say 'data type X is a monad'. This statement is completely nonsensical. A monad is a thing along with some operations. Haskell data is a concrete description of how to store a thing. By itself, a piece of data has no operations associated with it. There is no way a particular data type could be a monad, since a data type is just a thing.

The proper terminology is 'X forms a monad along with these functions' or 'X has an instance for the Monad type class' (this is different, because the monad type class allows for a subset of monads, not general monads). I am on a personal mission to rid the Haskell world of sloppy language because it confuses beginners, in my opinion. For a long time, I thought monads were a thing. Then I realized they're just an algebraic structure, like groups or rings.

When we say things like 'monads don't compose' it makes it seem like there is some deficiency in the idea of a monad that makes them not compose, rather than a realization that monad composition results in zero or more ways to combine two arbitrary monads. Thinking just the former makes you wonder if monads ought to be fixed. Realizing the latter means you realize that the lack of a fix indicates that putting two monads together can accomplish a variety of tasks, only one of which is likely suited to your use case.

<comment><USER7> > …it is common to say 'data type X is a monad'. This statement is completely > nonsensical…

I think the reason for this is that in Haskell we model algebraic structures using typeclasses, which are dispatched by type. So we say "X is a monoid, with mempty and mappend defined as follows":

        instance Monoid X where
          mempty = …
          mappend = …

Instead of "X, emptyX, and appendX form a monoid":

        instance Monoid X emptyX appendX
        emptyX = …
        appendX = …

This leads to what I call the "newtype hack" for distinguishing different monoids (resp. monads, &c.) on the same underlying type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "So, my friend Thomas Clarke (he's now at Imperial College) and I spent a lot of time hacking on this"

Interesting, never released Tom Clarke was childhood friends with Simon Peyton-Jones. He mentioned on a few occasions that we should all go learn Haskell.

<comment><USER9> Neither did I! Thomas Clarke, Duncan Maclean, Arthur Norman and I built the SKIM (S,K,I Machine) at Cambridge in around 1980. This directly executed a whole set of combinators -- it was built out of TTL and it had 32k 16-bit words of memory and the microcode lived in 4k words of eprom -- it was maybe 100 ICs in all one two cards. I wonder where it is....

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well I never! I used that Elliott 803 at Swindon Technical College in 1973. Before that (back to 1969) we used their terminal room in the evenings to dial up to the Leasco service in London. We had written a time table program in Leasco Basic (still have the quick reference card somewhere) for Park Senior High School that did in one evening what a teacher used to spend a week doing. It worked out the time table for 750 pupils, trying to satisfy the demand for courses, class rooms, teachers, and laboratories. Telephone time to London was so expensive then that we couldn't afford to print the results (300 baud acoustic modem and teletype) so we had the results printed out on the line printer in London and posted back to us.

</comment><comment><USER11> I haven't read the link yet, but I'm curious if anyone here knows of any research comparing Three-Valued Logic or SQL NULL to Category Theory and Haskell's Maybe monad? They seem very similar to me: like mapping Nothing, the SQL NULL is "contagious". It doesn't crash your program. I'd love to find a paper comparing the two, but maybe they are just two untouching worlds of research. Any thoughts?

Sometimes I think, "It'd be cool to define some custom types for Postgres that are Maybe<Text>, Maybe<Integer>, etc." But then I think, "Actually, that's how the built-in types work already!"

<comment><USER12> Then you may find the discussion of NULL vs DEFAULT and Maybe's in [https://ren.zone/articles/opaleye-sot](https://ren.zone/articles/opaleye-sot) interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> wrong thread.

<comment><USER14> Did you post this to the wrong thread?

<comment><USER13> Hey! How did this happen!? Mods move entire threads for folks?

That's pretty cool, I'm used to things being like the archaic TechDirt commenting system...</comment></comment></comment>


SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society. - <AUTHOR> http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-society/ <comment><USER2> This post turned out to be much more interesting than I initially thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be another post-mortem on why a particular startup failed, but this was in fact much more interesting.

The idea that this community bootstrapped itself, and self-evolved to the point of including things like trolls and "white knights" to me is extremely fascinating.

The other thing interesting is the idea that it was able to get 10k users without any effort. There was definitely a market for this particular app, but only because it's free. I'm curious how much a monetization attempt would have hurt the bootstrapping effort, and whether or not it would be translatable to things like Instagram or Pinterest, which has zero monetization but a lot of users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Burak is a world-class hacker.

I am one of the friends whom he mentions "make fun of me because I write software entirely from scratch". It's true, I bust his chops about it (for example: he once wrote a search engine with PHP / MongoDB so he could learn about tokenization techniques / inverted indexes; luckily he threw it away for ElasticSearch eventually).

But, that's what makes him an awesome programmer: he hacks things to learn, then builds thing to last. And he has fun doing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I have _too_ much fun doing it. Isn't work supposed to be boring, or something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post epitomizes the fun of being a hacker

<comment><USER5> Building and observing virtual communities is the most fun I've ever had in my life (dabbling self-proclaimed psychologists could write dozens of blog posts on the matter :) ).

For almost 7 years now, I've been a moderator of a once very active (several thousand daily active users) and still somewhat active forum; and the mythologies, unspoken norms, cliques, memes, etc. that emerge are just fascinating. It's really a miniature world in itself.

What's even more interesting is adding arbitrary game mechanics on top of it. I've built a couple PHP webgames when I was in college, and while none of them became quite big, fascinating patterns emerged. In most of them, I would, by design, let as many elements as possible be up to the players; and you end up with micro-societies that tend to show the same basic behavioral patterns as our own, just on a smaller scale.

For example in one of them instead of just collecting resources and spending them to build weapons like most games of the genre do, the game would force you to join a coalition where a player-elected leader would decide how to spend resources collected by the players. Players could plot to overthrow the leader, or re-elect him if they felt he was fair, but also smuggle resources to enemy coalitions, etc. In some coalitions, the leader tried to be fair and just, but that would ultimately lead to his demise; in some others, leaders would be dictators that the other players actually appreciated and supported; and in some others, the leaders would plot like crazy with some players while pretending to be honest publicly.

Yeah, these experiments are fun and humans are fascinating :)

<comment><USER6> Sounds fun. Any links to material on making Php games? Did you just link spam forums for users? What stops people playing?

<comment><USER5> There's not that much literature, surprisingly. You can find some basic tutorials on how to create scripts to do basic things, but to my knowledge there are no complete compendium walking through the creation of a complex game like OGame or Travian (two of the most well known) from A to Z.

As far as users, I publicized the games to my friends and on forums where I was an active member, and it was pretty much all word of mouth from there. I never went past 4 digits though.

As for what stops people playing, it's a good question with varied answers. Some people have naturally a short attention span, and move on to other things. Some people just slowly fade away after a few weeks/months because they find another newer game they like better. Some stay for a long time even if they get bored by the game because they like the community. It's very varied.

Ultimately, if you want to keep your players, you need to be active in the community you created: organizing events, communicating with players to solve their problems/questions, adding new features (and publicizing upcoming features they can get excited about); and all of that is very time consuming and hard to do if you're not full time on that project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story reminds me of [http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That- Cannot-Possibl...](http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot- Possibly-Go-Wrong#3435145)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting post. This is exactly the same kind of thing that happens on smaller IRC networks. Power groups come and go. Sometimes servers (with their own regular users) join the network and stay for a few months. Political compromises are made (you can enforce your crazy rule if you bring X number of users). Fascinating to watch, but a colossal time drain.

<comment><AUTHOR> A good friend of mine, pixelmonkey, likes to say that SiteChat was just me rebuilding IRC as a Chrome Extension. I agree with that assessment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember Pud let mobog go even when it had many thousands of users some years ago when mobiles could start taking photos and sending emails. Probably a mistake, ask him. But, why not get webmasters interested in it, give them a widget and a different color username for their site and watch what happens.

\- also put in a bitcoin address for donations - both for you and the webmaster.

</comment><comment><USER10> Burak hocam sen paylaşırsında ben vote etmem mi yahu :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Anlamadim.. cok az Turkce biliyorum!

<comment><USER11> > Anlamadim.. cok az Turkce biliyorum!

This, on the other hand, is translated quite well:

> I beg your pardon .. I know very little Turkish!

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally, Google translate accurately translated something! Though I meant "anlamadim" as "I didn't understand you".. which is close enough to "I beg your pardon", I guess.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In defence of Neoliberalism - <AUTHOR> https://capx.co/in-defence-of-neoliberalism/ <comment><USER2> 1\. Competition implies some kind of fair game. Theirs no game where kindergartner's play against NFL players(what's the point). As wealth inequality gets more and more out of hand, more and more people will just give up. Why play a game you can never win?

2\. Addiction is a real problem. Also, addiction effects people differently so what that your brain chemistry allows you to not be addicted. A lot of people aren't that lucky.

3\. We don't come out rational humans. That takes years of education/guidance at best, it never happens at worst case.

As we argue about size of government and how much the poor and unskilled workers deserve of the pie, giant corporations and super high net worth individuals are running away with the game.

And what happens to humanity when the peasants aren't needed anymore for the armies to keep the super rich's wealth secure?</comment>