The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation? - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/07/the-cryptocurrency-bubble-is-strangling-innovation/ <comment><USER2> Reading the original Satoshi paper, the point of Bitcoin is to be decentralized/trustless and to enable microtransactions by lowering transaction fees.

Both these goals seem to have failed in practice, the latter spectacularly (although other cryptocurrencies have done better in this regard).

To truly be trustless, you can't generate keys/addresses on some website like bitaddress or use some other online wallet, as you're clearly trusting bitaddress to not be copying your key (and/or have the ability to fully and carefully audit their code... few people have this capability and even fewer have the patience to do so). You have to do something like this: generate them offline using a computer which can never communicate with the Internet after you use it. And you need to do it at least twice with two completely different implementations to ensure your public and private key truly match.

In practicality, I have to send a picture of my ID to some third party exchange in order to use it. REALLY? Why don't I just use PayPal?

In practicality, Bitcoin is only /ritually/ trustless and decentralized. And it's worthless for microtransactions. (Etherium is better, but not perfect.)

I really do think the whole industry has become too enamored with the cloud and with centralization, but these steps toward decentralization seem self- defeating as they rely on (centralized!) apps from a centralized appstore in practice. Might as well trust PayPal or Apple or whoever. Or even just a regular bank. Or even better, a credit union that you, as an account holder, have voting power over.

If I'm using Windows, I trust Microsoft. If I'm using Ubuntu, I trust Canonical. If I use Android or Chrome, I trust Google. If I use iOS, I trust Apple. On some level, I also trust Intel and/or AMD and/or NVidia and my chipset provider, too. Trustlessness only exists in theory (and even then, only with certain assumptions--like a distributed mining pool or stake that hasn't become centralized), and you can make a good case that in practicality cryptocurrencies actually INCREASE your trust attack surface area.

It all starts looking like a lot of overhead for transactions.

<comment><USER3> This is a great analysis. The lack of trust as a feature in cryptocurrency is really a bug in society.

Bitcoin rose out of the previous financial collapse by appealing to people who have lost trust in institutions. The problem with building a trustless answer to that problem is that (assertions ahead) life isn't compatible with an absence of trust.

Trying to build a trustless financial system is a quixotic undertaking at best. It really smacks of a utopian dream where fundamental aspects of human nature are blithely ignored.

Of course, as you point out, no one is really trying to do it. Most people will have to trust Coinbase or whichever exchange they choose.

<comment><USER4> Our current financial system does require end-users like you and me to trust each other either.

It only requires us to trust the legal system

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Look at the dot-com boom. A lot of people lost a whole lot of paper money, > but it brought us a cheap worldwide fiber backbone and companies like Amazon > and Google.

If the point the author is trying to make is that Amazon and Google were made possible by the dotcom boom, and that the collapse of the dotcom bubble was part of the price we as a society had to pay to have the services provided these companies, that's a really really bad argument.

Amazon was founded in 1995 and IPO'ed in 1997, before the IPO market got crazy. Google was founded in 1997 and IPO'ed in 2004 when tech stocks were still a punchline. Neither of these companies is an example of any kind of silver lining for your Uncle Bob losing thousand of bucks after buying into a rapidly appreciating security (or currency) whose underlying value he does not understand whatsoever.

<comment><USER6> Google bought a ton of dark fiber for cents on the dollar. So the bust did enable Google to develop much more rapidly and with much smaller $ investment.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and the boom times of 1998-2000 inspired a bunch of young people to spend more time learning about tech, and some of them grew up to be programmers who added significant value at Google and Amazon. There are lots of these kinds of secondary effects and many of them were significant, such as your fiber example, which is a good one.

The point though, is that both Google and Amazon were able to get themselves off of the ground without taking advantage of all the stupid money that flooded the Valley in the 1998-2000 time period, quite to the contrary of the argument I quoted in the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think people will come up with good sharding and safe off chain solutions to mitigate transaction speed latency. I think the bubble actually incentivizes that.

<comment><USER8> We have this with our "Hybrid nodes" they are doing exactly that - compensating for the chain weaknesses until the technology catches up, and we have systems in place to easily migrate this functionality on-chain so that we're ready ahead of time

<comment><USER9> Are there specific projects that are using hybrid nodes? I'm curious to read more about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More than anything, the cost to transact with Bitcoin or Etherium (which this article weirdly focuses on), stagnates mainstream adoption.

Sure, I could create my own coin to use as an in-app currency for my project, but _why_? A coin is only worth what you can buy with it, and nobody is going to sell anything worthwhile with some random, in-app coin.

Even Bitcoin was just abandoned by Microsoft, because it's so overpriced you'd have to be insane to trade anything for it other than high-risk investment cash.

Until this bonkers hype cycle gets to the peak of productivity, the blockchain has no real world purpose other than as a shared database.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's weird to focus on Ethereum as, as the article correctly states, most new currencies are not a separate chain themselves but are simply tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is also the only blockchain with a real developer community, and the article focuses on building applications.

Microsoft didn't abandon Bitcoin because it was overpriced, they abandoned it because it was volatile.

One could argue that a blockchain's _only_ real world purpose is as a shared database, just as http's only real world purpose is the transfer of data between computers.

<comment><USER10> > Microsoft didn't abandon Bitcoin because it was overpriced, they abandoned > it because it was volatile.

It was "volatile" when they adopted it. It's now volatile and overpriced. If MS thought that Bitcoin was a good investment, volatile or not, they would have stuck with it. "Volatile" is acting as an excuse for their real sentiment, that it's time to short Bitcoin.

<comment><USER11> You don't generally hold onto Bitcoin when you take it as payment, you sell it immediately, so no, Microsoft was not "investing" in Bitcoin by taking it as a payment for their products and they're not shorting Bitcoin either.

The volatility is what makes it untenable as payment, as you can't sell it fast enough to ensure that you get the same exchange rate you gave to the customer.

<comment><USER10> > The volatility is what makes it untenable as payment, as you can't sell it > fast enough to ensure that you get the same exchange rate you gave to the > customer.

Absolutely false. Speculation has driven the value of bitcoin so high that the average transaction fee, at the time of writing this, is about $31. Buying a $59.99 game for Xbox One will cost you $90 in Bitcoin. That is an individual hash, that _must be consolidated into a larger wallet for MS to sell off_. Consolidating that hash will cost a transaction fee, meaning that, on a $60 game, MS will lose over 50% of the gross profit in a transaction fee.

That alone makes it not worth it. The only thing that would allow them to retain a higher percentage of the transaction would be for the Bitcoin bubble to burst, making that whole $60 worthless.

Bitcoin could be wholly volatile within it's 2016 prices and MS would be just fine. It is directly because of it's exploded, _overpriced_ value that it's untenable as an actual currency.

<comment><USER12> I have a question as a relatively uninformed spectator: where do these transaction fees go and why do they have to be so high?

<comment><USER13> A miner that successfully mines a block collects all the transaction fees for transactions in the block. They are high right now because many people want to send transactions, but blocks are capped at 1 MB, limiting the number of transactions that can fit into one block. Blocks are produced approximately once every ten minutes, so a transaction that contains a fee that's too low will constantly get passed over in favor of higher-fee transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He claims the gas price mechanism doesn't help Ethereum because the fee market is driven by supply and demand. Of course it is, but that supply and demand is independent of the ETH price; it will govern the _real_ cost of fees and that will be translated into some amount of ETH depending on the ETH price.

We can see this when network usage drops, or the gas limit increases. Fees drop to low levels in dollar terms, even if the ETH price stays up.

There is one way that the ETH price sets a minimum on gas costs: miners race each other to make blocks, processing transactions causes delay. The more valuable the block reward, the higher the expected cost of that delay, and miners demand compensation for that. But this doesn't seem to be a large effect since gas prices are sometimes quite low. (Full proof of stake would eliminate this race dynamic.)

</comment><comment><USER15> There's another issue that I don't see mentioned much here. I was contemplating writing a blog post about it.

Over the past year I've seen a serious decline in early stage angel investment. I've talked to a lot of people who have said similar things. What I've heard and in some cases observed is that it's all going to crypto. All the people who would be making speculative angel investments are now buying into cryptocurrency coins and ICOs in the hopes of riding the bubble.

This is really awful for two reasons:

(1) Few if any of these ICO systems have any utility at all, while many early stage startups end up creating things of actual value. It represents a shift in investment from value creation to pure speculation.

(2) When -- not if, but when -- this bubble pops, a lot of that wealth that _could_ have been used to fund angel investment will be vaporized. Yes most startups fail but at least angel funding tends to support attempts at value creation. In this case we're losing tons of money to support nothing but the burning of coal to heat the atmosphere.

Everything else this article says is spot on-- any value that could be present in cryptocurrency is being harmed by its relentless appreciation. Hyper- deflation is not a desirable characteristic in a currency.

I lived through the dot.com bubble and that one was much less vapid. Even though many startups were over-funded and speculation ran the stock market into crazy land, a lot of actual value did get created. In this case I see almost none.

This whole thing feel like a _reductio ad absurdium_ of financial capitalism, which ironically is the system Bitcoin was created to replace.

<comment><USER16> Furthermore, we're starting to see that all those crypto startups have made so much money from their ICOs that they're starting to distort the job market as well.

The kind of engineers who'd be naturally drawn to smaller startups and didn't want to work for Google or Facebook, are now being attracted to the crypto space in ever greater numbers. For that reason, it will become even harder to start a non-crypto startup in the near future.

I think this will become more and more obvious throught 2018 and 2019.

<comment><USER15> Yet what have any of these startups delivered other than tools for the crypto world? The whole thing seems almost 100% self-referential. It's like a financial MMORPG.

Does the crypto world have anything to offer the real world?

Personally I've only seen one common use case: currency and wire transfer. As the OA correctly points out this use case is being harmed by currency hyper- deflation and fee inflation. Even the black market use case is faltering for these reasons.

Few ICO projects are even _usable_. Most don't even _exist_. Of those that are usable I can off the top of my head think of only one that seems to have any utility that doesn't recurse into crypto: Siacoin. Siacoin apparently works but it's not a compelling alternative to Amazon S3 or Backblaze, so its utility is minimal at best.

<comment><USER16> I am not saying these crypto startups are doing anything useful ! 90% + of them aren't. Which is why their increasing hiring power is getting to be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No? Because before cryptocurrency, dumb money was in dumb apps like "Yo".

The problem isn't cryptocurrency or fads. Its stupid investors spending money on stupid things. I mean, its fine, its their money and all. But obviously, if investors spent the money on more useful things, it'd be better innovation for everyone (and those investors would surely get better returns).

At the moment, we're in an "everything bubble" and people just don't know what to put their money into. Bonds have low yields, the stock market has a dangerously high P/E ratio, and everything in venture capitalism has the word blockchain in it (even Hooters and Long Island Ice Tea). I'm sure there are some smart investors out there who have figured out what is truly useful, but like the old rule says: 90% of everything is crap. And that includes investments...

<comment><USER18> People aren't investing in cryptocurrency, I don't care what /r/bitcoin has to say about it. People are speculating in hopes of making a lot of money off of a bigger fool.

<comment><USER17> > People aren't investing in cryptocurrency

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/investing/long-island- iced-t...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/investing/long-island-iced-tea- bitcoin-blockchain/index.html)

Erm, yes they are. And they're doing it in roughly the stupided manner possible. There's a ton of people who literally hear the word "blockchain" and then just throw money at it.

That's why these no-name penny stocks go up 200%+ when they change their Facebook page to include the words "blockchain", even if it makes no freaking sense.

<comment><USER18> None of those people are going long term, which is what I consider investing. They are looking for quick money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dapps can be awesome when you want to avoid counter-party risk. Ether Delta is a great example; however, it's super expensive to use ED (every interaction costs $0.80-$1.60) and unless you're playing with a lot of money it's cost prohibitive to use.

Even though they had the dns hijacking a while ago, you can still access the market via direct calls to the contract. When it's time to liquidate a large alt holding back into ETH, ED is the only place I trust because I don't have to trust anyone.

<comment><USER20> You may want to have a look on Etherdelta Guard Chrome Extension (FYI: I built it). I open sourced it [https://github.com/paxpelus/etherdelta- guard](https://github.com/paxpelus/etherdelta-guard) and you can download the plugin here [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/etherdelta/beeeoaa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/etherdelta/beeeoaadbehhmejefhdbhgmhgfnogiij)

When etherdelta deploys - they call a script of mine that calculates the md5 of their files in github and creates automatically a new version in Chrome Web Store.

I use my plugin whenever I visit etherdelta so I can be sure that their deployed version matches the one on github.com

<comment><USER21> Is there an alternative frontend for etherdelta when the website is once again overloaded? Also are open orders only stored on the website?

<comment><USER20> Open orders are actually transactions that have been made to the smart contract. It is possible to monitor the smart contract and get informed on all the open orders.

You may want to have a look on Etherdelta API if you don't want to use directly the smart contract. [https://github.com/etherdelta/etherdelta.github.io/blob/mast...](https://github.com/etherdelta/etherdelta.github.io/blob/master/docs/API.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I have seen is a lot of people in my space have dropped what they are doing to focus on blockchain/crypto.

They are chasing novelty, they do not seem dedicated to their craft. I think this is a bit of a problem.

<comment><USER23> I have a friend who just quit his job on Friday to join a company that just laid off 2/3 of their staff to do a blockchain project. The company currently does nothing related to the blockchain and they do not have an idea for a product yet. It seems like such a weird thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The incentives for building a crypto product with real intentions of bringing a product to people vs. writing a whitepaper for fundraising are alarming.

Besides the rising fees (which can be mitigated with added protocol layers like lightning) the real problem is people understanding cryptocurrencies as investment. "Crypto investors" and people hoping to get rich quick who don't understand the fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin/Crypto are strangling innovation by adding "noise" attention to whatever developers like us "signal" are making.

Personally, I hope the bubble bursts, everyone lose their money and we go back to the original community of people building stuff, who see cryptocurrency as a technology, not an "investment". If Bitcoin drops to $1, I will still write software for it and won't miss the 'craze' factor.

</comment><comment><USER25> > It remains an open question whether even much, much lower fees would be > viable in the long run.

The problem is not fees rather usability. If today I speak to a layman about bitcoin he is confused. It doesn't help that people start talking about hardware wallets, multisigs, Segwit etc. Most of those guys find that using cryptocurrency is a pain and want to stick to real money. Yes, it doesn't stop them from speculating by putting some money in these coins.

One thing has to be noted, while there is a constant parallel drawn with dot com people forget that there was at least 7-8 years head start for a layman to understand "internet". There has been no run up here, things have just exploded.

<comment><USER26> > One thing has to be noted, while there is a constant parallel drawn with dot > com people forget that there was at least 7-8 years head start for a layman > to understand "internet".

Bitcoin has been around for 8 years so it's not like there hasn't been enough time. The difference is that the internet was easy to explain to people because it had a number of immediately useful applications: you could almost immediately send email, read the news or stream audio content (by 1995), lookup stock information and place trades, download software, buy things, chat, find a date or adult content, etc. — in most cases things people had been able to do starting at some point in the late 1970s using online services like CompuServ or bulletin boards, only easier and cheaper. Most of these were also easy to explain because they had familiar analogues: buying a book or CD online in the early 90s was immediately familiar — it's like buying from a catalog except that you don't have the delays receiving the catalog and mailing or phoning in your order.

The difference is that Bitcoin doesn't solve a problem which the average person has. To the average person it sounds like using a credit card except that most places don't take it, the fees are orders of magnitude higher, and there's no fraud protection. How many people have a legal reason to prefer it other than paying ransomware or speculating on its price?

<comment><USER27> Doesn't solve a problem that average _american_ has right _now_.

The key feature of crypto currency (to me) has always been that it can't be easily manipulated by a government. Specifically with bitcoin, were it not so expensive and have such high fees, it could be of real use in countries with hyperinflation and black markets (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc). Hopefully bitcoin and the myriad of alt-coins can fill the gap.

Once it takes a foothold in a failed state, I can only imagine it spreading.

I hope that hyperinflation and/or economic collapse don't come to America/Western Europe. But i'm not so naive to think that it can't.

<comment><USER15> But it can absolutely be easily manipulated by a government. Governments have the resources to pump/dump coins, buy huge amounts of mining hardware, etc. Even a smaller nation state could, if it wanted to waste the money, launch a 51% attack against Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency by just buying enough mining hardware. Beyond direct manipulation you have the ability of competent intelligence agencies to execute mass cyber attacks. "Code as law" is pretty dangerous when code is so vulnerable.

Other well-heeled organizations can do these things as well: corporations, hedge funds, organized crime, ...

People seem to think that currency manipulation and other financial games were invented in the 20th century with modern fiat currency. The price of gold absolutely was manipulated in the past in a variety of ways: secret hoarding, spoofing reserves, false transactions, etc. Every currency or medium of exchange has been manipulated.

In many ways central banking and fiat currency was invented to _defend_ against many types of market manipulation by non-state or foreign state actors (as well as against undesirable emergent behaviors in markets). I once read someone talking about US vs. China trade and Chinese currency manipulation state that for the US to abolish the Fed would amount to "unilateral disarmament." We would suddenly have no coherent way to defend ourselves against other nations armed with the ability to manipulate their own currencies (and ours!).

<comment><USER28> Actually, no.

Current estimates rate the cost of a 51% attack at approximatly 4.656.671.184$ for hardware only which is not a sum which even large countries will have easy (and certainly not unnoticed) access to.

This estimate is based on the current hash rate at 14.975.580.960 GHash/s and the fastest mining hardware available which is the AntMiner S5+ at ~2300$ with a hashrate of 7.722 GHash/s. That means you'll need about ~1.939.340 AntMiners which will consume 3436W each. At an electricty cost of 0.05ct/kwh (this is china, US is at about ~0.20ct/kwh) this gives you an additional cost of ~7.996.185$ per day not factoring in any labor/location costs and most notably no cooling costs which will be high with this kind of high performance asic.

This estimate only holds true though if you buy every bit of hardware yourself, in reality its probably more practical to simple coerce big mining pool owners to work for you, but thats another problem :)

edit: relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Isn't this driven by the fact that crypto clients use a default transaction fee rather than dynamically negotiating a good fee on the market?

E.g. if your client's default fee is .001 bitcoins or whatever, back in the day that was super cheap but now it's $15. But the intrinsic cost of carrying out that transaction has in real-world terms probably gone down rather than up. So you'd expect the market to arrive at roughly the same USD-valued equilibrium regardless of the BTC-USD conversion rate, but this clearly hasn't happened.

So in practice there is no market for crypto transactions because everybody just uses some default transaction fee. Yeah?

<comment><USER30> I believe the real-world costs of transactions are actually going up, not down. As more miners are added to a network, the difficulty rating goes up and more CPU cycles are required to compute the next block.

</comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 I fail to see the article's point. Yes, you can spin your own token on top of the Ethereum chain, but with transaction prices so high, as the article notes, what would be the point? If anything, this would incentivize a company serious about deploying an altcoin to form their own chain unbound from anyone else, or give some long and hard thought about whether a centralized server-side DB would suffice.

The people most discouraged by high fees of cookie-cutter coins are the exact sort of low-effort attempts that are trying to capitalize on blockchain mania, instead of leveraging the technology for its specialized merits. This isn't strangling innovation: it's a first-layer filter that separates the wheat from the chaff.

</comment><comment><USER31> Virtually the entire article is about Ethereum. Ok, sure, a poorly and intentionally differently designed system is choking at scale. But Ethereum != cryptocurrencies. In fact I would stay very much away from calling it a currency at all since it's not fungible. So I am struggling to see how this article is not just a big false equivalence.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's a lot of infrastructure out there to come up with a solution to these problems. Someone will and get very very rich off it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how many Bitcoin transactions these days are people arbitraging with the futures market. Tail starting to wag the dog?

</comment><comment><USER34> what if it is not a bubble? what a conviction of authority from "experts"

</comment><comment><USER35> Alternative perspective: maybe cryptocurrencies are valuable and represent real innovation?

<comment><USER36> Counterpoint: "Dogecoin, a parody cryptocurrency, just broke $2B for its market cap" although development stopped two years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16096119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16096119)

<comment><USER37> Goatse cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER38> If you visit the original goatse domain, you will find exactly that. "Meme creation on the blockchain", it says.

<comment><USER37> Right, I wasn't making a joke, I was saying that Dogecoin isn't the most ridiculous example

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Quite the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER40> Depends on what kind of innovation you're talking about. If we're talking about blatant internet-based scams and cash grabs, for example, ICOs have fueled _lots_ of innovation in that sector.

<comment><USER15> That's yet another nasty thing about this-- namely the amount of money scammers, con artists, and the mob are making off this bubble. That money is going to go to fund a lot of not-so-good things in coming years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's a bit odd that the articles focuses entirely on Etherium. You can just build your Dapp on a different blockchain with smart contract support, that hopefully addresses the issues Etherium currently suffers from.

And, blockchain innovation isn't just Dapps. There are likely many markets that would benefit from several aspects of blockchain technologies that we've yet to come up with.</comment>


Apple patent could remotely disable protesters' phone cameras - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/apple-patent-could-remotely-disable-protesters-phone-cameras-7000003640/

<comment><USER2> Ten minutes after the first use of this, someone'll be selling faraday cage iPhone cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Already exists [http://briangreen.net/2010/11/diy-ultralight-faraday-cage- po...](http://briangreen.net/2010/11/diy-ultralight-faraday-cage-pouch.html) lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Didn't we discuss this 9 months ago, when it was new information?</comment>


Hong Kong Protesters Find New Momentum with Largest Rally in Weeks - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/peaceful-protesters-crowd-hong-kong-park-where-summer-of-dissent-began-11566114415?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> As a Chinese American (whose family is from the mainland), trying to combat misinformation amongst my relatives feels like talking to a brick wall. There's already no love lost between HKers and mainlanders, even before all this went down. It's especially difficult when Chinese identity is seen as intertwined with the CCP, and any criticism of the government is considered criticism of the Chinese people.

I naively hope for the eventual freedom of all 华人 from the CCP, but people in the mainland are extremely complacent due to their rise in economic status under the current government. The only thing that would cause true mainland revolt and revolution would be if the Chinese economy collapsed.

<comment><USER3> > people in the mainland are extremely complacent due to their rise in > economic status under the current government

Is this accurate? Western strategy, as I understand it, from when China opened up in the 70s until now has been to hope that democracy emerges in China from an empowered populace that has the means to demand it for themselves, and who has grown to expect the better conditions that come with wealth.

It seems too soon to call this strategy a failure. Perhaps an economic failure is coming, and people will know what they've lost when they've lost it, but this would hurt the whole world, not just China.

I don't think China can brainwash the whole world to love the CCP. And even if they do, that will make the eventual overthrow of single-party China that much more glorious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really hope they're successful. This feels like the most important thing in the world in a while. I wish there was something I could do to help, but I don't know how.

</comment><comment><USER3> The ad from Chinese media reads:

> Two months on, the escalating violence in Hong Kong has taken a heavy toll > on the social order. All walks of life in Hong Kong called for a brake to be > put on the blatant violence and for order to be restored

Before I read this, I was ready to call on Twitter to nix the ad, but personally I would not draw the line here. I'd like to see more examples before starting a Twitter protest.

Like, if China ran an ad saying, "Hong Kong protesters are attacking police for no reason" then I would say Twitter needs to remove that crap b/c all I see is paid triads attacking innocent people who help triads pick up their phone [1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/l31w5BR3qEw?t=42](https://youtu.be/l31w5BR3qEw?t=42)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is rather remarkable. After the incidents at the airport last weekend, including viral videos of protesters battering individual policemen and Chinese journalists, I would have expected the Hong Kong public would become more divided on support for the protests. The 2014 protests had fizzled out partly due to disagreements on the direction of the causes.

<comment><USER6> The follow up revealed that Chinese journalist is also a policeman. He used a different name on his bank accounts & ID card which is impossible in China. He stated himself tourism. A working visa is required to work as a journalist in HK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This definitely counts as mainstream news.

</comment><comment><USER8> seems to me these keep getting buried on hn, lots of upvotes on reddit though, always something about it on the front page.</comment>


Texas Inmate with a Wool Allergy Has Spent 10 Years Trying to Get a New Blanket - <AUTHOR> https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Inmate-with-wool-allergy-moves-forward-with-suit-13739724.php <comment><USER2> Depends on what he's in for. If he's in for something heinous, like rape, murder, or paedophila, then too bad. White collar crime, maybe reconsider. I know the liberals will come out in favor of helping this guy, but it really depends. Here in Texas, prisons don't have AC, and nor should they. Why should I pay taxes for your to be comfortable when you've raped or killed someone or sold drugs to a minor. IMO, the biggies like rape, murder, drug sales to minors, paedophilia -- (if proven BaSoaD) should all be death penalties anyway.

<comment> crooked-v The purpose of prison should be to rehabilitate or, if necessary, to remove unrehabilitatable people from society. Treating the purpose of prison as punishment gets you higher recidivism and more overall crime. Compare the 83% recidivism rate in the US [1] to the 20% recidivism rate in Scandinavian countries [2].

[1]: [https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6266](https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6266)

[2]: [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/not-the-worst-but-not- norway-...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/not-the-worst-but-not-norway-us- prisons-vs-other_b_59b0772ae4b0c50640cd646d)</comment></comment>


Report on FBI's Use of Patriot Act Highlights Need for Intelligence Reform - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/oversight-report-fbis-use-patriot-act-highlights-need-intelligence-reform-crucial <comment><USER2> I wrote most of the Wikipedia article on the USA Patriot Act many years ago when I was deeply involved in Wikipedia. I read the entire Act and chased down every regulation, part of the U.S. Code that was modified and tried to write a balanced explanation of the controversies surrounding it.

I wrote so much material that I wrote seperate articles on each of the sections of the Act. I recommend reading the bit on section 215 to understand what it entails:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_summary_of_the_Patriot_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_summary_of_the_Patriot_Act,_Title_II#Section_215:_Access_to_records_and_other_items_under_FISA)

</comment><comment><USER3> The talking points that keep coming up in discussions about reform center on metadata and phone records. This is only a small part of the story and I wish groups like EFF would do a better job publicizing the rest of what Snowden disclosed. And the pro-liberty talking heads feel the need to tell us everyday that metadata matters and surveillance is bad which hampers their ability to ever get any other message into the discussion.

Also regarding metadata, if we don't even have a definition of what it is, that's quite worrying. For instance, you could take my comment, run it through an NLP summarizer, AI sentiment analysis, etc (along with cross-referencing back to everything else I've ever written and analyzing that). I.e., they could be generating their own metadata which is basically the data, but more useful.

I wouldn't be surprised if metadata is construed to mean that it's the actual text/content since it's metadata to other data (just depends on your frame of reference).

<comment><USER4> Do you realize in your own comment, you focused the entire thing on metadata and phone records, without saying what the other (implied) larger part to the story is?

If it's not just all about metadata and phone records, then what is it?

<comment><USER3> The irony is not lost on me, but at least my voice in the debate doesn't really matter (I'm more concerned about people on the Senate floor, TV, radio, etc). For what it's worth, I replied elsewhere in this thread with a summary of the bigger problem as I see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be ok with us throwing out every bit of law enacted Sept 2001 and after.

Then closely re-examining these one by one and put back in, I'd bet not 10% of it makes sense to do in a non-fear induced populace.

But the problem is, once you give up freedom easily, it is very difficult to get back if ever.

To help fix this we could do a few things:

\- There should at least be a 2 year window for any terrorism law where there is no possibility of renewal after the event. A new bill covering the same would need to be in review for 2 years.

\- If we want law that sticks without horrible details, we need to remove fast tracking. Bills about freedoms should be public and in discussion for years.

\- Bills should also only be named SB[number] and HB[number] and no marketing / 'freedom' propagandized bill titles.

The real patriot act would be repealing the Patriot Act. Then writing a new one with a numeric code, that has to be discussed on the details of that bill, not the name. The bill would have an automatic 2 year expiration with no chance of renewal, and then this debate is brought up every 2 years. This needs to be an issue in every election.

<comment><USER6> These are just short term hacks. The problems we are dealing with are third or fourth order consequences of the size of the defense budget. These issues will disappear if budgets shrink or get reallocated towards "peace" goals rather than "defense" goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't like the word reform. I think the correct word is Repeal.

"Reforming" by bandaging over is not sufficient.

These "reform" bills can also be very long and end up containing things that make things works.

A repeal bill could be extremely short and succinct, sufficient for everyone to read it.

The PATRIOT ACT should never have been passed, and that it has persisted for so long, as far as I'm concerned, is proof positive that our government is a criminal enterprise. (IT's not following the constitution.)

Many liberals and conservatives over the years have told me that government works, that democracy works.

Well, the PATRIOT act is my refutation of that claim. IF you believe that democracy works, then it's time for you to work to really change things.

Excuse me for the "get off of my lawn" bit here- but when I was a kid the country really was different, it really was a lot more free. It's hard for people in their 20s to see it now because of the perspective of age, but if things continue in 20 years you'll be able to see it.

<comment><USER2> If you want to repeal it, fine. But what precisely do you want to repeal?

You really want to repeal section 215 of the Act. The Patriot Act covers a lot of uncontroversial ground - if you repeal the entire Act it will cause utter chaos and there will be side effects most people don't want or expect.

The problem IMO is not the Act. That had flaws which have been remedied by the courts over the years. The issue is how agencies like the NSA are interpreting the laws and making up secretive (!!) legal fictions to justify the way they do things... in secret. And the FISC is too secretive and willing to rubber stamp the secret requests of the government, leaving little or no opportunity for public scrutiny.

But you see, that's a problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (aka FISA), which was enacted after the Church Commission found egregious violations of civil liberties in the 60s and 70s. The Patriot Act amended this law, but the structural problems exist even without the USA Patriot Act's amendments, and where even reasonable measures made by the Act have, ironically, been deliberately misinterpreted by government agencies.

<comment><USER7> You're correct that the FISA needs to be repealed as well, and it's continued existence shows the PATRIOT ACT is not an anomaly. Those egregious violations of human rights need to be prosecuted, not "reformed".

I don't think there's any part of the PATRIOT ACT that is "uncontroversial" the entire thing should god. The claim that it will cause "utter chaos" is kinda silly. We didn't have utter chaos before it was law. IF you think there are bad side effects people don't want, then name them.

Too many people think that government is a good thing and that most of what they do isn't evil, and thus they just give the benefit of the doubt time and time again. Well, you may not be doing that, and that might even be true for the government as a whole, but the PATRIOT ACT does not deserve the benefit of the doubt-- the provisions that are clearly abusive and extremely offensive to the constitution show that none of it deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I looked at the section titles of your wikipedia article on it, and all of them are either criminal acts for government to do or administrative enabling of criminal acts.

What the Church Commission confirmed is what the founders knew, which was that a federal "law enforcement" agency would become the secret police, and that's why they forbade it in the constitution:

The only enumerated power for such enforcement is here: "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;"

Everything else, and including everyone involved in propagating these crimes, should be prosecuted. Their crimes are felonies if committed while armed, under USC 18-242.

So yes, repealing the PATRIOT ACT doesn't go far enough, the government has been abusing its powers since nearly the late 1700s.

<comment><USER2> If you looked at my link and got through it, I congratulate you :-) but we're still talking about only title II of the Patriot Act!

FWIW, I personally don't find anything particularly controversial about title III which deals with money laundering. I don't think concentration accounts should ever be allowed, tightening the rules around identifying foreign beneficial owners and a whole raft of measures were actually very effective and fair.

Title IV had problematic aspects around modifications to the INA, particularly around disallowing the entry of family of designated terrorists from entering the U.S. as I feel that's overly broad and discriminatory. I'm particularly cautious about the mandatory detention provisions, even with the safeguards in place.

Title V was the one that introduced NSLs, but that was deemed unconstitutional do it's a moot point now.

Title VI provided for victims of terrorism, public safety officers and their families. Rolling back these provisions would be pretty bad.

I gotta dash, so can't comment on the other titles, from memory there were some issues, but by and large many of the changes were benign.

That's the problem with the Act - firstly, the name causes suspicion ("Patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel"), it was pushed through far too quickly and I doubt any members of Congress read it which is why it has large holes in it, and parts as it was enacted were later deemed unconstitutional.

The good citizens of the United States should really insist on smaller, more focussed bills passed separately in future. And those pushing the bills would be better off skipping cute backronyms like the "USA PATRIOT Act".

<comment><USER8> just to clarify, NSLs are not moot, not unconstitutional and are still a 'thing'.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter#Histo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter#History)

there's more cute backronyms on the way:

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

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry you got downvoted - you are correct.

<comment><USER8> don't be sorry, it merely reflects on the wisdom of the crowds :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The FBI employs a "classified directive" to define the term "U.S. Person" > and that the agency cannot definitively say what information counts as > "metadata."

If you agree this is bullshit, tell your representatives. And vote.

These people work for us.</comment>


Using 'Free' to Turn a Profit  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/business/30ping.html <comment><USER2> Clearly freemium has success cases. But I honestly am hesitant to commit to this advice myself.

The kind of people one attracts with "free" are people that want stuff for free. Are these customers really the best use of your resources?

My friend constantly tells me to open-source my project, "free attracts, free attracts" he says.

Attracts what? People that are willing to spend vast amounts of time and effort to get out of paying a company like 37 signals to just "get it done".

Obviously there are profitable fremium models, but don't you think its an uphill battle? Do I really want to process 1million customers, so that 1,000 actually pay?

As you might expect, I am a DHH fan. I just thought I'd open the discussion on the side of being wary to committing to free.

<comment><USER3> I suppose I'm now the moral equivalent of a freemium service. There is a _free trial_ available. I never disparage the goal of, ultimately, making my _customers_ happy and in return _accepting their money_. There is a price staring you in the face from the moment you arrive at the front page.

I think a lot of people sort of fall into freemium because they are hesitant about charging people money. Don't be. Don't chase after customers who don't pay money for stuff -- if you don't pay money for stuff, _don't chase after yourself_ , find a niche which does pay money for stuff. Solve their problems. Get paid for it, like everyone else who solves their problems.

Incidentally, I sort of like OSS for being a friend catcher in the support of a paid-for project. (Note that this is very different from the usual "We'll OSS it and then create a premium version of the same thing, then viciously compete against ourselves for customers and mindshare" strategy.)

[Edited to add: Incidentally, to get to ~2,000 paying customers I had to attract substantially in excess of 100k free trials, although the web version now converts much better (2.07% or so). Since they cost me essentially no marginal effort no marginal cost beyond advertising, I'm totally OK with that. If they were paying monthly I'd be sitting pretty!]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lure in with FREE, and make functional with standard features that already beat the competition. And charge for additional services innovative, fun, and attractive services.

<comment><USER5> It is an insane amount of work to create a product better then the paid versions, then add in extras that go above and beyond for a fee. Once you start bringing on people, you have to start working to keep them happy, while also trying to build those extra features. In a perfect world a person would have funding to do that but for most startups funding is not available. I have yet to see a funded startup pull something like that off either.

<comment><USER6> Ummm, can you say dropbox?

<comment><USER5> Looking at DropBox, paid users get more megabytes, from my understanding the original commenter was suggesting free features, then additional paid features that compliment the free ones or extend upon them, in a freemium fashion.

<comment><USER4> Here's a great example of this: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10314283-16.html?tag=mncol...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10314283-16.html?tag=mncol;title)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sampa? They really had to dig that deep to find a "free" startup that folded?

<comment><USER2> FWIW I reason there are many more unprofitable freemium startups than profitable; just have not been around long enough to exhaust all their funding. They likely picked Sampa because its cooler to say "ex Microsoft employees tried and failed", and because they don't read HN.

</comment></comment><comment> onreact-com Also check out "Understandiung Freemium":

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788490></comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle secure communication at your company? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In person.

</comment><comment><USER3> define secure? we use slack and email.</comment>


Goodbye to Digg Reader - <AUTHOR> https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000678608 <comment><USER2> and welcome Aktu ([http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)) :-) ok, shameless plug :-) but i just finished working on the first version and would love some feedback :-)</comment>


The Monopolies of the Future Will Be Chinese – and State-Owned - <AUTHOR> https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-monopolies-of-the-future-will-be-chinese-and-state-owned/94781 <comment><USER2> Trump's commercial war on China (how clueless as it might be and having totally different motives) is at least finally contesting China's autocratic government power grabbing in all the Western world that has been unchecked since the 90's.

As a side effect, it's also curbing the world greatest polluter production and that will surely have a positive effect on global CO2 emissions.

I have no illusions that Trump's motives are all but ecological or progressive, but what matters is that the end result seems to be quite positive for the free world.

<comment><USER3> I don't know whether to up or down vote your comment.</comment></comment>


Fileformats are holding back DNA research: The Pan-Genome - <AUTHOR> https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/on-the-pan-genome/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate the sentiment, but this is a field which will not adopt the new formats any time in the next decade or longer. Bioinformatics/computational biology is stuck in a local minimum and there is little or no incentive (or resources) to make a change like this.</comment>


Tesla on Autopilot collides with police vehicle in Arizona - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Arizona_DPS/status/1283120851399798784 <comment><USER2> Where is the proof that Autopilot was involved?

<comment><AUTHOR> The third reply in the tweet chain

<comment><USER3> Driver is being investigated for DUI, so I'm less inclined to believe his/her word — seems like an easy scapegoat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d-sc Non autopilot cars crash into parked police vehicles too. It's common enough that officers are trained a prepared for such an event.

Is this maybe a reflection on the inherent safety risk of parking on the side of the road?</comment>


X86 assembly encounter - <AUTHOR> http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/12/4/x86-assembly-encounter.html

<comment><USER2> As I posted in a comment on the article, he seems to have unrealistic expectations for an x86 assembler. TI's DSPs have a nice assembly because of their architecture. The x86 architecture is too complicated and the implementations too diverse to have an assembler like he wants.

<comment><USER3> Not so much: <http://cr.yp.to/qhasm.html>

The version of our Ruby x86 assembler on my desk does register allocation as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! This is exactly what I had in mind. I didn't know about this project.

Unfortunately, it seems to have been abandoned...

<comment><USER3> It's not abandoned; DJB continues to use it in his crypto papers. But it's not really a standalone project yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> With regard to PSRLB, PSRLW, PMADDUBSW, and PMOVMSKB, I must say I loved assembly much more in the times when each instruction mnemonic was only 2-3 characters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, the real fun begins with SSE4.2 and things like PCMPISTRM (the whole PCMPxSTRx family), where you not only have the mnemonics, but also an 8-bit immediate with each bit specifying a different aspect of operation for the string comparison engine.</comment></comment>


[pdf] Understanding the detection of fake view fraud in Video Content Portals - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.08874 <comment><AUTHOR> From the paper: "YouTube is consistently more permissive in the counts for monetized views, when compared to the public view counters. Specifically, fake views are penalized and not counted by the public view counter, but are monetized, i.e., have paid-for ads delivered in them, and counted in the the video owner's monetized views."</comment>


Correlation does not even imply correlation - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/04/correlation-even-imply-correlation/ <comment><USER2> I wrote "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" ([http://www.correlated.org](http://www.correlated.org)), and one of the things I run into a lot when promoting the book is the "correlation doesn't imply causation" line.

Obviously, the statistics I present in the book and on the website are tongue- in-cheek, but I like to take issue with that line, because typically, people don't fully understand what it means. I use a variation of the line in the OP's post -- that "nothing other than correlation implies causation."

<comment><USER3> You're joking right? Uncorrelated things can easily be causal.

<comment><USER4> The right way to disprove "Nothing other than correlation implies causation." would be to find one causation whose existance we know from something other than causation.

But you won't find it. Think about any causation. Now ask yourself why we now that it exists. The answer will always be correlation.

<comment><USER3> Causal calculus, mutual information, random forest importance scores, various hypothesis tests and other methods can all imply causation as well or better (especially in the case of non-linear or multivariate association) then correlation. All these methods and more are widely used in literature.

<comment><USER4> Those methods still rely on correlation. To be clear: We are not only talking about linear correlation here, which is only one of several kinds of correlations.

<comment><USER3> No they don't. They work directly with underlying estimates of probability distributions, entropy or impurity decrease in machine learning models.

Another example: mendelian inheritance patterns in a pedigree study.

If you know of a good measure of non linear correlation please let me know. And publish a paper in science or nature like the MIC/MINE people did (a measure that has issues in practice).

<comment><USER4> To estimate probability distributions, you need data that is non-random. Non- random means there's a pattern. That's another word for correlation.

In using those methods you may never calculate correlation as a number, but when those methods find something you still rely on the fact that there is a correlation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/10/correlation_does_not_imply_causation_how_the_internet_fell_in_love_with_a_stats_class_clich_.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't this statement taking it too far? As far as I understand, the word "imply X" means that there is a chance >0% that X might be true. Therefore "not imply X" would mean that the chance is <=0%. But when you have an unknown dataset showing X (with X being "A correlates with B", for instance), then the chance for X being true is in fact bigger than 0%. It might be dismissably more likely than 0%, so little more that you might conclude it is basically 0%, but it still is >0% in the mathematical sense. Therefore seeing correlation should imply correlation.

<comment><USER7> "Imply X" means "one can logically _prove_ X follows as a consequence." When you say correlation does not imply causation you're saying "there are examples of things which correlate but have no casual relationship." Proving such a claim (by finding an example) is a logical dis _proof_ of the claim that correlation implies causation. Logical implication has nothing to do with probabilities in this sense.

The point of the article is that correlation (of observed data) does not logically imply correlation (of the underlying phenomena, usually in a more general setting than the data allows).

<comment><USER6> I see, then I misunderstood the definition of "imply X". Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The key point is that there is more to science than statistics. To reword: statistics alone are not sufficient to create scientific knowledge.

To create scientific knowledge you need to make a prediction (aka a hypothesis) and test it. To make an hypothesis you need some notion of a causal mechanism; to run the experiment you observe an interference in that mechanism to see what happens.

If all you have is a statistical correlation, and you haven't identified or altered a mechanism...you really don't have much. That is what this author is getting at.

</comment><comment><USER9> Statistical correlation (revealed by some statsistical test) is one thing.

The common meaning of correlation is close relationship embedding some causation in it (A implied B or B implied A or the same thing is the root for A and B).

You can find that two series have high correlation (statistically), whereas this happens just by chance.

OK.

</comment><comment><USER10> I may be thick but I don't get the tagline at all. How can A not imply A for any value of A? (A = correlation in this case.)

Or maybe this is one of those clickbait titles that state something logically contradictory so that you'll get miffed and read the rest.

<comment><USER11> Correlation (in sample) != Correlation (in population)

Also, apophenia. E.g. consider constellations. Stars are distributed randomly, but that doesn't stop us from making patterns out of them anyways.

<comment><USER12> In other words, it equivocates: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation) Wikipedia concentrates on the fallacy angle... in this case it isn't a fallacy, it's sloganeering, since the point is to encourage the viewer to be confused and dig into the two different meanings being used. I think it's not likely to work too well, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Non-correlation is so correlated with non-causation that it requires it. And that forms the basis of a lot of "you accept the data you're dealt" science.

<comment><USER3> Not true. It is easy to find/construct a causal non linear relationship that won't show up in correlation tests. Correlation really isn't that great of a measure.

<comment><USER13> You are correct if what you're implying is that correlation isn't a robust measure. Whereas non-correlation can be quite robust if your test isn't constructed badly (or as you imply 'constructed' badly) It's important to consider the meaning of such measures without regard to quality of the test; which can always be faulty.

<comment><USER3> That is my point exactly though I am extremely skeptical of any test for non- correlation. Gelman actually has some other articles worth reading on how dangerous it can be to make policy decisions based on such tests with real world examples including traffic laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, for all the critics out there quick to point out that correlation is not equal to causation, nobody ever seems to explain what needs to be in place to actually show causation.

To establish causation you need 3 things:

1) Correlation

2) Temporal precedence. That is, you have to show that the cause occurs in time before the effect

3) A lack of other plausible explanations

If more people knew the above the world would be a better place. Even the Udacity statistics course failed to mention the above, even though they hammered home that correlation does not imply causation.

<comment><USER15> When I get a cold I pray to Zeus. It always clears up in a few days. Can't think of any other reason for it getting better, therefore by your 3 criteria I'm justified in thinking Zeus cures my colds.

Actually, to establish causation, in as much as this is possible at all [1], you need a predictive model and controlled experiments.

[1] following Hume, you can never definitively show causation.

<comment><USER16> What's Hume's objection to proving causality? (Not that I intend to challenge it, I would just like to hear it characterized).

<comment><USER8> You can never rule out hidden variables.

Edit to add: because they are hidden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wouldn't this make political polling pointless?

<comment><USER18> No. Model-building relies on a given set of assumptions that may or may not be true. Once you've agreed to a set of assumptions, the data becomes meaningful within the framework. The framework can be bent and shaped as the assumptions evolve.

If we can assume that on average, a random set of people who are randomly asked about a political topic is a reflection of the population of a whole, we can start to draw meaningful conclusions about the political topic.

The OP article points to the concept of spurious correlation [1] which is a danger if you have very little domain expertise in the data that you're working with. e.g. If your regression shows US GDP is statistically significantly affected by Bangladesh butter production, you may want to discuss the results with domain experts about why the result may or may not be spurious.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Assuming:

1) every variable you calculate with follows the law of large numbers (also known as the central limit theorem) (this means amongst other things, that if you find correlation, you can't tell anyone involved in the variables, even yourself, because you'll act on it and change it, at which point the correlation won't hold. Also it won't work for chaotic variables, like pretty much anything involving human actions)

2) the correlation remains intact over longer time periods. The variables must be sampled without bias. You have properly separated your concepts, and made sure they actually represent what you want to be looking at. Etc. Etc. Etc. (this is essentially stating : don't fuck up the math before you calculate correlation) (obviously don't fuck up the math afterwards either, in other words : correctly check for statistical significance)

3) You have to check with every time offset, and even with variable time offsets. This is too complex to go into.

Then correlation implies a "causal relationship". Meaning corr(A, B) > 0 IFF

1) A causes B

2) B causes A

3) there is some external factor C that causes both A and B

Now keep in mind that there is no such thing as a root cause. There is simply a chain of events, and if the next event wouldn't have happened without the previous, the first event is said to be the cause of the second. "I shot him because his bees annoyed me", this "algorithm" would find the bees as guilty as the perpetrator, they are both causes of the death.

Also keep in mind that this only works AS LONG AS YOU LEAVE THE CAUSAL CHAIN ALONE. If you calculate correlation, and find, say "BAC" always goes up 2 days before "JPM" goes up, and then you proceed to buy JPM when BAC goes up, you've just invalidated your conclusion (translation : this works better the smaller an investor you are).

There is also absolutely no guarantee that killing of one chain of events won't simply lead to another. Say you have a harbor with 2 entrances, and because one is wider, every ship uses it. Therefore "getting to that harbor" correlates perfectly with "going through entrance A". Obviously blocking entrance A won't lead to no more ships in the harbor.

So this DOES NOT match the human/legal idea of "cause", and can never yield useful actions to take. It is nevertheless a useful metric.</comment>


Show HN: Chardin.js - <AUTHOR> http://heelhook.github.com/chardin.js?tour

<comment><USER2> Looks awesome - thanks! Is there a way to display a message when the instructions are opened, so the user knows to click to close?

<comment><AUTHOR> There isn't one (yet), but submit an issue request or patch, its definitely a very valid use case.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great!</comment>


Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills - <AUTHOR> http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/48791551517/picking-up-our-own-tab <comment><USER3> Impressive move by Spark, who have now put other VCs in the awkward position of explaining why they don't do the same.

<comment><USER4> Not that a traditional VC will ever hand me a term sheet (I wouldn't approach one), but if one did and it specified that I had to pay their legal expenses, I would reject it on principle. It's rather underhanded, and I would immediately begin scouring the paperwork to see what other sleazy tactics they were employing.

<comment><USER5> If you were in a position to read / sign such a terms sheet then you may want to ask why it specifies that before you reject it out of hand.

And you should scour all the paperwork regardless of whether or not that clause was present, even better, have a lawyer that _you_ pay (preferably a competent one) help with the scouring.

<comment><USER4> Of course anyone would use a lawyer in such a situation. I'm just saying that it is indicative of a hair-splitting, underhanded mentality that would raise immediate red flags about doing business with them in the first place.

<comment><USER5> > indicative of a hair-splitting, underhanded mentality

I believe you may be wrong about that. But it appears you've now found a good match in Spark! On the down side, it may then be the only game in town for you, there are good reasons for the 'company pays fees' rule, see elsewhere in this thread for one possible reason.

<comment><USER4> As previously stated, I have never and would never approach a traditional VC in the first place for a host of reasons, this being one of them. There is no VC game in town for me, and I am perfectly content with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One simple reason why most VCs don't do this is because they are sales tax exempt and so end up losing up to 21% of the bills to a bookkeeping quirk. So it's easier to pay a bit more out of the fund and end up with a deductible on the side of the company invested in than with a freebie to the tax collectors.

In numbers: if a complete process costs $100K and the investment is 2M the fund is out 2.1M. If they pay the bills from the fund directly they're out 2.1M without a sales tax return, if they pay 2.1 to the company and the company pays the bills the company gets back the sales tax so effectively this saves 20K or in this example about 1%. Not much but also not nothing, and if a fund does a lot of smaller deals this sort of thing adds up.

Not all funds suffer from this (likely Spark isn't one of them) so the ability of other funds to match this is dependent on whether or not they have classed themselves in such a way that they are sales tax exempt.

I'd imagine Spark to be able to offer exactly the legal fees less for the same amount of stock in company 'x' compared to some competitor that does it the usual way so effectively this shouldn't matter but it is excellent publicity for Spark.

<comment><USER6> US sales tax and VAT are not the same type of tax, main difference is that sales tax is paid only at the retail level (by the consumer) while VAT is paid at every stage: a company would pay VAT to acquire raw materials, retailers VAT to acquire the packaged goods and consumers VAT on the final purchase. As far as I know no US state applies sales tax on legal bills so for US VCs there is no tax issue on this

<comment><USER7> Regarding VAT, what you write is misleading in that VAT is also reclaimed at every step (or more usually, offset against VAT due).

The net effect is pretty much the same as a sales tax, except the tax revenue becomes due proportionally at the step in the chain where the value is added rather than all at once at the retail level.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. The effect is the same in the end if the sales tax is paid and not avoided (e.g., no receipt). With VAT at least the taxes on the intermediate steps of production will have been paid even if the retailer and consumer are cheating at the final step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is going to be one of those wonderful games of iterated group prisoner's dilemma, in which one member of a formerly functioning cartel has just publicly announced an intention to always play Defect.

<comment><USER9> Could also be that the tea leaves (or winds) were reading (blowing) in this direction anyway and they decided to draw first blood in order to make the biggest splash.

<comment><USER10> True, but that also fits within the prisoners dilemma. The way the rewards are set up, you generally should defect if you think your opponent might defect. If it is an iterated prisoners dilemma and you think they will start defecting, you come out ahead if you beat them to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The number and types of bills we got after closing an A-round was ... illuminating. Background checks on founders, in particular, was not something I would have guessed we'd be billed for.

<comment><USER5> But did you expect them to do such background checks in the first place?

<comment><USER11> Yes, those weren't a surprise.

<comment><USER5> Good. Incidentally, the number of things popping up during such background checks that scuttle a possible deal is quite substantial.

It's not so much that there is stuff that was eye-brow raising, it is mostly a breach of trust in terms of disclosure. Sometimes founders are not honest with each other from the get-go, it wouldn't hurt for founders that feel they are in a position to hit one out of the park to have a 'full disclosure' session with each other so they know at least what if any skeletons there are in the various cupboards rather than to have a surprise late stage rejection. Those are generally bad for business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I've never raised money from traditional VCs, I have raised millions of dollars from angels. Out of more than a dozen angels I've worked with, never once has anyone even contemplated having the company pay the legal fees of the investor. If this is the norm, I'm glad I dislike VCs enough never to have approached them.

<comment><USER12> Yup, angels and VCs operate quite differently. Same experience here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't this just mean Spark will have a little less money to actually invest, thus will need to invest at slightly lower valuations to get the same returns, and companies will accept those lower valuations because they no longer have to pay the legal bills?

Of course that's a huge simplification, and I'm in favor of reducing sneaky terms that can take entrepreneurs by surprise, so I'm not complaining.

<comment><USER14> I think it's also likely to reduce total legal expenditures. The investors previously did not see the legal bill and so their lawyers had less incentive to minimize fees.

<comment><USER5> You are essentially saying that a VC has no problem saddling up one of their portfolio companies with unnecessary costs, in other words that they are hurting their _own_ interests.

<comment><USER14> Clearly the VCs have an interest in keeping legal expenditures down. But the extra layer of indirection does not help that goal. E.g. employers, individuals, and insurance companies all have an interest in lowering health costs, but the structure of the market makes it a difficult goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Heard at an event last night that for one company, the legal cost to include UPS as a strategic investor actually exceeded the amount they invested but the company chose to do so in order to access UPS data.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wander if they are paying the $25k from management fees or from the fund.

The justification for why VCs don't pay their lawyer bill has always been that they don't want to take the money from their management fees, if Spark has figured out how to take it from their fund and their LPs are okay with that that is good.

If not then they are footing $25k from their pocket. But I guess if they only do 10 deals a year their max liability is $250k which isn't bad for a $450m fund.

</comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't paying the legal bills for the other party create some conflicts of interest or other weirdnesses for the lawyers?

And why do VCs expect people to pay the legal bills? Who buys the coffee when they go for drinks?

\---

Also, I'm using Chrome on Win Vista. Here's a screen shot. (<http://imgur.com/5DP7C0e>)

If that's how they wanted it to look, well, fair enough. But I don't think it is. I wonder how much time and effort is spent building style sheets that end up rendering as nasty as the results I got?

<comment><USER9> "Doesn't paying the legal bills for the other party create some conflicts of interest or other weirdnesses for the lawyers?"

This happens quite frequently in insurance defense situations. Say a Physician is hit with malpractice and the insurance company is paying all legal costs. (Or even auto insurance as maybe a better example).

The important thing to remember, is that you are the client ("the insured") and even though the person paying the bills will attempt to get you to use an attorney that they have already worked out rates with it is within your right (going along the lines of the point you raised) to get another attorney, within reason, price etc. (The price doesn't have to necessarily be the same either.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Being entrepreneur friendly is so central to VC marketing that this effort will likely pay itself as a PR expense.

Also, transaction fees are typically presented as being deducted from the capital being moved, as opposed to just charging the company. Of course, net it's the same. But language matters.

</comment><comment><USER19> More progressive still would be funding startups that disintermediate lawyers and the billable hour system.

<comment><USER3> [http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/11/yc-backed-clerky-helps- star...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/11/yc-backed-clerky-helps-startups- save-time-and-money-on-legal-incorporation-stock-issuance-forms-and-more/)

<comment><USER19> In my humble opinion this barely scratches the surface. But it is better than not investing, so I hope you and they do well with it.

I'm personally interested in projects that flip the incentive structure for people to use lawyers for tasks of all kinds, not just startup-related ones.

<comment><USER3> All startups start by scratching the surface. Clerky doesn't plan to limit itself to startup deal docs forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love that this is #1 on HN and I'm going in for my YC interview on Sunday to explain how we can help insurers, banks, and VCs (and apparently startups) reduce their legal expenses.

It's a sign!

For a more substantive comment, moving the legal bills into the hands of a "bigger fish" is bad news for law firms. VCs are less likely to be willing to pay for over-billing, unnecessary tasks, and other bad behavior. (shameless plug) VCs, especially those that use my team's software, can save a bundle on legal fees with very little effort.

</comment><comment><USER21> Spark have been excellent partners for us over the years at Sincerely. I'd highly recommend them.

</comment><comment><USER22> Finally. Next step: removing the option pool from the pre-money? (as PG has tweeted) Lots of other 'standard' terms that need to be reexamined as well

</comment><comment><USER23> This is nice for larger funds to do, with fatter management fees. Smaller funds, not so much so.

There's not really a structure to take it out of the fund commitment, so this comes out of management fee. Smaller funds don't have this luxury though - <USER2> you're running a microcap fund, you simply don't have $250k free in your management fee budget for something like this. That's the salary for another partner really.

</comment><comment><USER24> I always understood that the company receiving the money is supposed to pay it's own fees and use a lawyer that it trusts, without taking money from the VC on grounds that if you use the VC's money, to pay the VC's lawyer, on the VC's terms, you aren't necessarily getting a fair deal. I think paying your own legal fees to an impartial third party is a prudent investment. Perhaps I'm just naïve.

<comment><USER25> The problem they're describing is a little different.

Your lawyer always works for you. You pay them with the company's money. Which is also generally investor money. But that's ok; your lawyer will be very clear that they work for the company. (Which, it important to note, is different than working for the founders.)

Here, VCs require you to pay their legal expenses for doing the deal. So when the deal closes, they send you a bill for their lawyer. The VC's lawyer definitely knows who they are working for: the VC.

One of the problems with this, besides the you-must-be-fucking-kidding-me factor, is that the VC's lawyer has no incentive to keep things quick. The VC has a very slight incentive to speed things along. But if it's coming directly out of the VC's books, then hopefully they'll keep a tighter reign on all the last-minute stuff that somehow hasn't been made standard and turns what you'd think would be an easy thing into a $25k bill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Startups are slowly but surely getting more power/respect when fundraising. This is excellent, and hopefully the "heavy-handed VC oppressor" will go away for good some day...

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting read, I never knew the founder(s) had to pay VC legal bills just to get the paperwork all situated.

Can you...pay the legal fees with the money the VC gave you? :)

<comment><USER28> That is of course exactly what Startups do today. And it feels unfortunate. "Wait, you have me cash just to spend it on your legal bill?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Smart guys. Good move. Hell of a great advertising and deal flow move for $25k * X deals per year they do.

</comment><comment><USER30> I feel like I just read "Women just got the vote" or "Pennsylvania Turnpike will no longer admit horse-drawn carriages" in the newspaper.</comment>


Ovh.com and customer servers are down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=ovh%20down&src=typd <comment><USER2> Status page is also down, which I guess is not such a good sign...

[http://status.ovh.com/](http://status.ovh.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pinging my machine, about 20%-30% of the pings return. I guess this means that some part of the network is overloaded (either by an increase in traffic (DDOS?) or by some part of it going down, leaving the remaining machines overloaded).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm currently logged into two kimsufi dedicated servers and using them perfectly happily. At least some part of their platform is alive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am able to curl their website from my online.net server in paris.</comment></comment>


Ask HN about Server Side Javascript - <AUTHOR>

What's the best server-side javascript implementation? Why?
There are a few out there.  mod_js, Rhino, various Spidermonkey implementations.  Have you used any or some of these?  What were they good for?  What did you like about them?  What would have made them better?
Not interested in debating the merits of javascript as a server-side language in general.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> JScript and the .Net framework works just fine if you are happy with IIS and Windows

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's just say, hypothetically, that you've sworn a blood oath never to knowingly install Windows for any purpose other than browser testing, and yet _another_ blood oath never to deal with IIS, ever again, for any reason whatsoever.

What's your #2 pick?

<comment><USER2> After that, server side JavaScript gets a bit thin.

I came to this after writing a lot of client side JavaScript which made me realise just how cool a language JavaScript is. I found it disruptive to have to change languages when I wanted to do part of an action on the server - after all it was all part of the same integrated process. This was why I took a good look at running JScript on the .Net Framework. Must admit that I did not end up using that though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> AppJet <http://appjet.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> What makes appjet so great?</comment></comment>


London police use super recognizers to fight crime  - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-09-london-police-super-crime.html

<comment><USER2> DARPA has a thing where they feed multiple images to people and monitor their brains for signs of subconscious recognition. This would pair well with super recognizers. Policing precrime will likely be a thing that catches on. Having this capability is also good for counterinsurgence, which many states seem to be investing in these days.

<comment><USER3> _DARPA has a thing where they feed multiple images to people and monitor their brains for signs of subconscious recognition._

Well, why not be a selfless biovegetable strapped down for some twisted kind of obscure use as a glorified sensor by someone else's software? I can see how the military were the first to get in to that! Talk about lack of ethics.

 _Policing precrime will likely be a thing that catches on._

The thing that's catching on is totalitarianism, which, simply put, is "policing" everything, everywhere, all the time, even though nobody did anything to warrant it.

 _Having this capability is also good for counterinsurgence, which many states seem to be investing in these days._

Err ... s/investing in/using as an excuse to spy on and curtail the rights of their own citizens/</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I view stories that have gone into spam (shadowban)? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any way to view new stories that have been banned or shadowbanned or spam filtered? My buddy just asked why he wasn't getting any comments or upvotes. I checked his profile and also new stories list and nothing was showing up. Apparently he's been shadow banned. I remember there was a url like /banned or something or /dark or /shadow that showed these stories and if you upvoted them you got out of spam. Anyone remembers the url? <comment><USER2> If you set "showdead" to "yes" in your user profile, you'll see dead stories/comments.

I've never heard of any way to display _only_ the dead items, but there may be one.

<comment><AUTHOR> That worked. I can't upvote his dead stories to get out of death though :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> He can try emailing the mods to see if they'll unban him.

I don't think user voting can unban hellbanned users. It's a nice idea though.</comment>


Ask HN: Who are your most influential failures? - <AUTHOR>

Basically; which now defunct startups have been your biggest inspiration, most influential or their failure was your success? <comment><USER2> SnackSquare[0]. It wasn't `mine` precisely, but I was considered a co-founder (on some days; on others I was just a hired coder.) The strange situation was because I started working on it from the first day, had verbal agreement about equity, but was unwilling to move next to the business founder in New York.

The project was almost a child to me. You know how engineers can attach themselves to the stuff they create. The train wrecked in the end, engineers lost interest in moving targets and neverending milestones. It would have saved it if we received customer feedback in the early stages.

It wasn't my first job, but first in its kind. It didn't inspire me in the way that successful companies do -- but it certainly constantly reminds me about the path I should be walking.

[0] <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/snacksquare>

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope you are sitting down. In fact, I will allow you to go and grab a cold one from the fridge before starting.

...

My first foray into business ( I was 14): being an Amway distributor. It taught me the value of salesmanship. I lacked it, and made me focus on it for years.

Then it was the idea of selling bottled water at a local political event. It failed because me and my partner arrived there too late! It also taught me about funding, because we borrowed some money for that. Money that we had to pay afterwards. I did, however, drink lots of refreshing water that week.

My first auto repair business. I took out a loan to buy equipment before even having one customer. Taught me the importance of getting customers before buying anything. Lost 5K in that one (at age 21).

My second auto repair business. I focused on doing on-site auto repair (like yourmechanic.com (the Y-combinator funded startup)). It failed because I lacked the marketing resources. Also, that business model has razor thin profit margins.

The shrink wrap business that almost was. It failed when I ordered $2K worth of product for my first client ( a family member, no less), and had to eat the cost (still have the prodcut!). He (his company) backed off, and left me broke. Taught me to put everything in writing and to get deposits.

My first tech startup, which was about selling websites to doctors. I did not believe in the idea and it led me to waste time cold-calling doctors (well, their staff). Taught me to not do anything unless I really believe in the idea.

A mobile carwash service that I had for a couple of months (still have the equipment...). This one was an eye opener. First, it taught me the importance of pricing. I was asking for $5 per car wash and it drove customers away. Second, it was a business I wanted to operate but I did not want to do. I hate washing cars.

I'm missing a few, but all of my failures have led me to really sit back and negatively judge every idea I get. Innovafy was only born after I thought about it for months. Even though it has not launched, most of the focus has been on getting the marketing and customers, and the other on getting the software done. For me, getting the customers are first, then comes the software. Forget the MVP, get me the a bunch of people who will pay to have the MVP developed before even a line of code is written. This is what I cal MOP (Money Oriented Programming). Innovafy is at that stage right now, getting people to pay before they even see the service. How so? Turns out that being an avid student of marketing for more than 20 years has proven itself very worthy.

 __*

I could publish an ebook if the interest is there.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a shame you don't have anything to show publicly for your latest idea, even a landing page, because that's also a valid way of determining how your idea will be received.

You are pre- minimum viable product by all accounts, and even with experience that's a hard sell.

Good luck this time round though.

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

I wish you all the very best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great question.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of two for me:

\- Color (taught us to lead with your product, not your fundraise or domain name price)

\- Eventvue (a TechStars 2007 company that taught me the importance of A/B testing and talking to your customers)

<comment><AUTHOR> Eventvue - mmm interesting concept, I just saw a pitch from a guy who'd been working on exactly this concept for a while.

Could be an interesting app for the Google goggles.</comment></comment>


Digger by Windmill Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.futrega.org/digger/

<comment><AUTHOR> WebAudio synth sound support anyone?</comment>


The FizzBuzz Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://nadamhu.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/the-fizzbuzz-paradox/

<comment><USER2> One reason for the paradox could be that solving a problem on a whiteboard or in a similar interview situation is different from actually writing a program. I could easily see myself failing the fizzbuzz test on a whiteboard. My programming style is highly iterative, even on a micro-level. I don't expect what I write down in the first iteration to be correct. I begin by writing something so I have something to look at and, more importantly, to step through. A full understanding of the problem and its solution evolves in that process of write code - write test - step through code - rinse - repeat. For me, that's more efficient and gives better results than to mull over that first draft and trying to get it right, the way you would on a whiteboard.

P.S. I found an error in this comment after I posted it, so I had to edit it. The iterative method rules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point, this can be an important factor. (I also have a very iterative coding style.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the key things about FizzBuzz is testing divisibility by 3 and 5. There is a lot of software you can write without using the % operator, so perhaps there are large amounts of self trained programmers who never learned about this?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is also a very good point, I did not think about this. Maybe we should come up with a FizzBuzz-like basic test that is similarly easy, but does not need the modulo operator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just because people say that 95% of the candidates could not solve does not mean it was actually 95%.

The other thing to consider is how many candidates have they actually interviewed to arrive at that stat?</comment>


Dataless Programming (1967) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2007/RM5290.pdf <comment><USER2> This one of the ideas we have been attempting to realise in Eve (eg [http://www.lighttable.com/2014/07/18/imperative- thinking/](http://www.lighttable.com/2014/07/18/imperative-thinking/)). We separate the data model (expressed as relations) from the physical implementation of that model (one or more physical data structures per table that implement the queryable interface). The compiler is then responsible for deciding how to evaluate a given query, based on the available data- structures, indexes, hereustics and user hints.

It seems radical in a programming context but it is a pretty standard and well proven separation in the database world. My favourite work along this line is [https://infosys.uni-saarland.de/publications/DJ11.pdf](https://infosys.uni- saarland.de/publications/DJ11.pdf) which defines the data model to be an append-only list of tuples and treats the creation of all other data- structures, indexes, views etc as part of a single global optimisation problem.

<comment><USER3> Have you read the "Out of the tarpit" paper ([http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf](http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf))? It deals with using relations in programs as opposed to just in your databases.

At Standard Chartered we regularly used relations as a perfectly cromulent data structure in our programs.

<comment><USER2> Many times :)

Some of our other big inspirations are Bloom ([http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/index.html](http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/index.html)) and OctopusDB ([https://infosys.uni- saarland.de/projects/octopusdb.php#secti...](https://infosys.uni- saarland.de/projects/octopusdb.php#section_publications)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This appears to roughly describe a precursor to SQL, which appeared 7 years after this document. This was definitely a common problem. Imagine building your most recent application, but not having easy access to an SQL-backed ORM. How would you go about implementing it? The data model would definitely heavily confound your attempts to build a clean system.

<comment><USER5> > The data model would definitely heavily confound your attempts to build a > clean system.

Can you expand on that. I build systems that don't use an ORM but still requires interfacing with a SQL database so I'm curious how one ends up writing "unclean" systems if not using an ORM. Sure, if you've got SQL all over your code-base that's bad but if you were to use the repository pattern it would be as if you were using an ORM in your code-base except within the repository itself.

<comment><USER4> I actually equated using SQL to using ORM in my comment since I imagined most people would be using one, but imagine if you didn't have SQL and you had to store the data on a file system yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> chris-laffra Interesting tidbit: Hard to imagine these days, but this language specification appears typed by hand on a typewriter, most likely this model: [http://magazinesadsandbooks.com/Magazine-Ad-for-Remington- Ra...](http://magazinesadsandbooks.com/Magazine-Ad-for-Remington-Rand-KMC- Typewriter-1967-P2184062.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER6> So the solution to this problem is common knowledge by now, isn't it? Separation of concerns, different abstraction layers, MVC (at least the M and C parts), even OOP interfaces. These after all should be known by all CS professionals.

The article seems to be just a piece of history. What am I missing?</comment>


NBC publishes 200,000 tweets tied to Russian trolls - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/373777-nbc-publishes-200000-tweets-tied-to-russian-trolls <comment><AUTHOR> You can download the tweets here:

[https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/now-available- more...](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/now-available- more-200-000-deleted-russian-troll-tweets-n844731)

Would make an interesting training set for machine learning.</comment>


Intuit 50k business challenge - <AUTHOR> http://jumpup.intuit.com/start/

<comment><USER2> What is in it for them?

<comment><USER3> publicity</comment></comment>