Random computer simulation produces wealth distribution similar to reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/ <comment><USER2> The reason I go by luckydude is my acknowledgement that me getting somewhat wealthy is in part pure chance.

I used to think I made my own luck, it was the groundwork I did that lead to Larry and Sergey wanting to hire me, it was the work I did in creating my own company, etc. I thought it was all me.

And I still believe that I had to do all the things to get some wealth but I've watched much more talented people do all the right things and get nowhere (and I've watch far less talented people get quite wealthy).

There is an element of luck, you have to do your part but you can do your part and never be at the right place at the right time. I think that's the part that is luck, you can't control what the rest of the world is doing and unless you can predict the future, it's luck.

Signed,

luckydude, retired at 54.

<comment><USER3> The Louis Pasteur quote that summarizes your observation is "chance favors the prepared mind."

Of course chance plays a role in almost anything, but if you don't do the work, you won't be prepared to take advantage of good fortune when it happens.

<comment><USER2> I've never heard that quote before but it perfectly sums it up. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The study does not demonstrate what the headline claims.

The study shows that a simulation where randomness plays a major role can produce similar wealth distribution to what's observed in the world. But that doesn't rule out a more deterministic mechanism.

<comment><USER5> True. But by virtue of Occam's Razor, we should prefer the random explanation, which doesn't require any deterministic rules.

If I walk into my kitchen and see a broken egg on the floor, it _could_ have been left by a wayward chicken. But the simpler explanation is that my spouse broke an egg from the refrigerator. If I prove that my spouse was home and up before me this morning, I don't really need to disprove the chicken theory to reasonably believe the simpler explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was established that it wasn't chance, that it was basically family wealth? I.e., your family is rich, therefore you can afford to take risks and fail, therefore you're more likely to make it big.

<comment><USER7> I consider family wealth to be chance as well. You don't choose which family you're born into, after all.

<comment><USER8> _You don 't choose which family you're born into, after all._

 _You_ couldn't have been born into any other family—a child born into a different family would be a different person entirely. Is it still chance when there is only one possible outcome?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It depends on how one define's 'rich', but if you go by the metric of having $1MM+ in the bank, it strikes me there are plenty of opportunities to get there that aren't pure chance.

The most obvious is to join a high-growth startup, particularly after the initial period of high risk. An example of this would be to join Google in the early 2000's, Facebook from 2007 to 2012, Stripe from 2012 to 2014, Uber from 2012 to 2014, etc etc. Today those companies would probably be the ones on this Breakout List, plus a few others like Coinbase and Robinhood: [https://breakoutlist.com/](https://breakoutlist.com/)

Join one of those companies as a software engineer and there's a very good chance you'll make decent money. You don't have to be that lucky or clairvoyant to identify these opportunities. This current cultural phenomenon of explaining all success as either the result of luck or immoral behavior is seriously troubling...

edit: would appreciate a discussion here rather than just being down-voted.

<comment><USER3> The most obvious and reliable way to get $1MM in the bank is to work, live frugally, and invest savings for about 40 years.

<comment><USER10> You forgot "...and never have anything go wrong".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can't win if you don't play the game. The more you play, the better your odds.

Sure, you can play often and hard and still lose. It's even possible to play once, not do much, and win.

The probability of those outcome are vastly different.

Don't play = 0% chance of winning.

Play once and don't try hard = .000001% chance of winning.

Play hard and often = 15% chance of winning, with a 80% chance of coming in the top 10%.

*figures are made up, but logically realistic.

<comment><USER12> There is an opportunity cost in playing though. There might be a 10% chance of $1 million but what if it required giving up $100,000 in opportunity costs?

<comment><USER11> So true. I wouldn't argue against your point, especially when you're talking about straight dollars.

I was trying to be more general though. Forget money, think effort.

For almost $0 dollars there is a ton of opportunity out there. Let's just take something we know, tech.

For effectively $0 you can learn everything there is to know about coding.

You could go to the library, get one book about html, and try being a web developer in two weeks. That's probably not going to go well, but not because you're unlucky.

Or, you could spend every waking moment consuming fundamentals of programming, read everything, forums, blog post, write tons of sample apps, contribute to open source and become a bad ass programmer. Chance of success is very high.

That is not about luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Luck does play a role in life, but clearly it is not the entire story.

The simulation in the article does NOT explain why five of the most valuable public companies on earth, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, are all cofounded by people with IQ and possibly work ethics 3-4+ SDs above population means. (Check out the biographies including the academic records of the cofounders if you have doubts about this statement.)

Many mechanisms can exhibit the same broad effect. Showing that a simulation reproduces _one_ phenomenon of the real world falls far short of showing that it resembles the real mechanism in any substantive way.

<comment><USER14> All those five company cofounders depended for their success on algorithms orginated by the likes of Donald Knuth, who is as hardworking and probably smarter than them, but they are exponentially richer

<comment><USER13> Knuth never wanted to run a business (to my knowledge). Ambition and desire are necessary though not sufficient factors for business success.

Knuth did achieve immortality through his magnum opus, which is another kind of major success.

I'm just arguing that wealth distribution is _not_ random in the real world, not justifying whether it should be one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> while wealth distribution follows a power law,

the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100,

but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

</comment><comment><USER16> So this obscenely simplistic model produces a certain result and it's interpreted as "confirming" that wealth comes from pure chance? Silliness.

Many holes we could poke in this one. First, there shouldn't just be one talent parameter. There should be many different types of talent, each of which contribute in their own unique way to a probability of wealth accumulation over a lifetime.

Most wealthy and successful people I've met are intelligent, confident and likeable people.

<comment><USER17> > Most wealthy and successful people I've met are intelligent, confident and > likeable people.

This is the wrong metric. Are most intelligent, confident and likeable people wealthy?

<comment><USER18> To be at the far right of the distribution for any measure of achievement, you generally have to (a) start on "third base", (b) devote your life to learning and practicing from an early age, (c) have far more innate talent than most, (d) have the right personality, with irrational faith in yourself and drive, and (d) have far more luck than most people.

I think it's pointless to argue about whether people deserve great success, because whatever attributes you consider "deserved" vs "not deserved", the most successful must have _all_ of them - otherwise someone else would take their place.</comment></comment></comment>


Prisma – An open-source GraphQL API layer for your database - <AUTHOR> https://blog.graph.cool/introducing-prisma-1ff423fd629e <comment><USER2> I've been using graphcool (0.1) for quite some time, on a paid plan. I feel so lost with so many changes lately, graphcool 1.0, now prisma, first it was a baas, then open sourced, then only a graphql database, etc.

My question are (and I totally thank you guys for the great tool you created)

#1 how will you profit from it? I need to make sure we invest in a tool that will be supported.

#2, how do I migrate? I understand that now I have to take care of a lot more than before, but the information available ain't clear, instead of saying "Hey, we no longer will create everything for you, make sure you learn how to tie graphql-yoga + bindings+ prisma" you were saying "We will focus on graphql database" which led us wonder what it meant.

I think your decision to focus on the hard problem is the right one, it just that our relation as users/customers of graphcool has changed and that wasn't very well explained.

keep the great work!

<comment><USER3> Thanks mrbarletta!

Let me try to clear things up :-)

The Graphcool Framework is a all-in-one framework that combines a GraphQL query engine (now called Prisma), serverless functions and managed hosting (Graphcool Cloud).

Prisma is a major rewrite of the query engine. You can think of Prisma as the query engine powering the Graphcool Framework.

Today Prisma can be used stand alone as a GraphQL database layer in combination with GraphQL Binding. Later we will change the Graphcool Framework to use Prisma as the query engine.

In short - if you like the features of Graphcool Framework, you can keep using it like nothing changed.

<comment><USER4> Could you please address #1 how will you profit from it?

<comment><USER5> > Later we will change the Graphcool Framework to use Prisma as the query > engine.

Which includes integrating it into their BaaS/PaaS platform, I imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These DB -> API tools show promise, until you want to do something outside the CRUD box like upload images or process payments.

Also, I've found it much harder to modify functionality because now your business logic is embedded in your DB which is harder to version than backend code.

In any event, if you want a GraphQL/DB API and don't want to pay for graph.cool, there's a great similar tool called PostGraphile: [https://www.graphile.org/](https://www.graphile.org/)

<comment><USER7> If you want an automatic REST API, but on top of PostgreSQL and Haskell (you don't have to touch Haskell, but benefit from its type safety and performance), check out PostgREST:

[https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest](https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest)

If you need GraphQL and standard PostgREST endpoints (as well as a few other tools like Openresty), this starter kit is really nice and fires right up with docker-compose:

[https://github.com/subzerocloud/subzero-starter- kit](https://github.com/subzerocloud/subzero-starter-kit)

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/subzerocloud/postgrest-starter- kit/wiki/B...](https://github.com/subzerocloud/postgrest-starter- kit/wiki/Beyond-Data-Access#when-all-else-fails-take-full-control)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Graphcool is awesome. I think you guys made the right choice moving to a code- first, open-source platform.

Obviously you still need to make money. Besides hosting and automatic backups, how will you monetize? What are your plans for Graphcool Enterprise on- premise?

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot!

It was awesome to see how Graphcool enabled so many frontend developers to get started with backend development.

And it has been even more exciting to see these same developers move to a combination of Prisma and GraphQL bindings with relative ease.

The GraphQL ecosystem is maturing to a point where the tools are now easy enough to be used by small dev shops and powerful enough to be used by large enterprises. There was an episode on GraphQL Radio ([https://graphqlradio.com/](https://graphqlradio.com/)) diving into how IBM build their own library to standardise schema composition. This is a fairly advanced concept, but with GraphQL binding this is now part of day-to-day development for thousands of developers.

To address the money part - Enterprise and on-premise is certainly a thing. We get a lot of requests for custom setups. If you are interested to explore this option, please get in touch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huge fan and user of Graphcool the BaaS! My question concerns permissions.

I thought Graphcool did a phenomenal job of permission/authorization. The tutorials seem to kick authentication to the application layer. That seems appropriate.

I think one of GraphQL's pain points is lack of a permissions pattern. It's typically hand rolled at the field / resolver level, leaving a lot of messy code. Will permissions be a part of Prisma and, if so, is there a road map for how granular they can be?

<comment><USER3> Thank you so much for putting your trust in Graphcool!

The Graphcool Permission system is super interesting because it ads a surprising amount of expressive power to a declarative permission system. We actually brought over the idea to prisma-binding [https://www.npmjs.com/package/prisma- binding](https://www.npmjs.com/package/prisma-binding) by including the `exists` query. For now you have to manually perform the check in resolvers, so it is not a complete substitute.

Speaking of permissions in Prisma in general. For now it includes a fairly primitive token based system: You either have full access or no access at all. In the future we will add more fine-grained grants so you can give some users read access to specific types while preventing data mutations for example. The details are still being worked out, and this system will not be as flexible as Permission Queries in Graphcool Framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried to use graph.cool as my first graphql project, everything was a breeze, except:

* I couldn't for the life of me find out how to implement user auth. * The json fields are sooo small, it's a huge no-go for developers (like me) who are used to postgres's amazing json support.

I ended up just using neelance's Go lib and postgres.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Your experience match the feedback we are getting from a lot of people.

With Prisma we are focusing on the core technology and exposing as much raw database power as possible. We will implement native PostgreSQL support in the future to take advantage of the superior json handling

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried to deploy this the other day and got stuck waiting in it's wizard to create a bunch of docker containers. (which I waited 30 minutes then gave up)

I'd like it more if it was just a standalone server and not a bunch of "magic" scripts to standup/deploy.

<comment><USER3> Hi Turtlebits.

I'm sorry you got stuck setting up docker on your local machine. We have put a lot of work into making sure local clusters "just work". It would be a big help if you could start a thread on the forum so we can help identify the issue.

The reason we are using docker to run Prisma locally is that we believe it is super important to have the same environment locally when you develop as when you run in production.

If you are familiar with docker you can follow the guide in the docs to set it all up without relying on the CLI. That should give you a little more transparency into what is going on :-)

<comment><USER12> The error messages need to be improved. Especially when the docker server logins failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would like to hear compare/contrast with [https://www.graphile.org](https://www.graphile.org)

<comment><USER3> PostGraphile is a super cool project that was on hn a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16150663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16150663)

See my comment higher up about the main difference :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to Postgraphql?

<comment><USER3> Please see existing answer to this question as well as the hn thread from a few days ago :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very excited for this!

</comment><comment><USER16> How looks great! After looking about the BaaS, Framework, and now Prisma, I don't really have a question about the relation between them. I feel that it just a "wrapper" or something else, because it combine with the binding and yoga package, so it's not really clear what is the role played by Prisma inside this ecosystem? (but soon i will look at it very closely)</comment>


Atom text editor 1.8.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.8.0 <comment><USER2> I am an early adopter of Atom, but it sucks at displaying really large files. It crashes often when I look at a client's html page I've pulled down. Sublime Text handles these pages no problem.

I still choose to use Atom, just because otherwise I like it so much.</comment>


"BadBIOS" features explained - <AUTHOR> http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/10/badbios-features-explained.html <comment><USER2> There are polite and impolite ways to express skepticism, and I'd encourage anyone to give Ruiu the benefit of the doubt as far as his motivations are concerned, even if you can think of an uncharitable explanation. "Here's some odd behavior I've seen and a possible explanation" is far from a hostile or irresponsible thing to say, especially when there are long histories of state- level and non-state level bad actors engaging in behavior to warp the target's perception relative to observers' of what's going on. [1][2]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung)

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

<comment><USER3> As a counterpoint - I would also like to point out that just because someone is _" a well-respected researcher for 15 years"_, that doesn't mean everything they will ever say will be a quality statement above reproach or should be taken as fact at face value. [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.#Mental_il...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.#Mental_illness)

<comment><USER4> I will also point out that Dragos is not actually a prominent security researcher. He organizes a security conference. He has never presented research at his own conference, or at any other conference, as far as I can remember.

I only say this because people want us to take these claims on faith, citing a credential that he hasn't actually established. Furthermore, his tweets so far seem to be full of rookie mistakes. I've seen a fair number of "security enthusiasts" do exactly what he is doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _But at the same time, this is Dragos Ruiu, a well-respected researcher for 15 years. If he says he 's got an infected BIOS, I'm going to believe him._

My first impression was that badBIOS was an elaborate troll on the part of Ruiu, to make the point that just taking what even a "well-respected researcher" says at face value is NOT good security practice.

<comment><USER6> There are so many people out there who are delusional...the truthers, the "Moon landing hoax" folks; even Nobel prize winners can be susceptible, just recall Pauling and Shockley. Also, Bobby Fischer. This guy could easily have fallen prey to the same kind of brain eater.

<comment><USER7> It seems telling that unlike most such paranoid fantasists, he hasn't blamed anyone for this yet. Usually such delusions come with accused culprits and the like. I really don't like how people are jumping to labeling as suffering from a mental malady. Maybe he's in error, but why does he have to be ill?

<comment><USER6> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, I haven't seem him providing the latter.

<comment><USER8> That's because he isn't making the former. It took a hack [1] like Dan Goodin to make him look as though he were.

His actual claims, as far as I can determine and as corroborated by the Errata Security article, are: (1) that BIOS firmware, and potentially also built-in peripheral device firmware, might serve as a durable reservoir for malware; (2) that buffer overflows and similar sloppy coding practices in USB HID device drivers can serve as infection vectors; (3) that pre-existing malware can use ultrasound as a (buggy, flaky, slow) C&C protocol transport; and, finally and most controversially, (4) that he has live examples, as yet unpublished, of malware which demonstrates all three of these behaviors.

Claim 1 seems not particularly controversial, given that prototypes have been demonstrated at conferences.

Claim 2 has at least one example in the wild, in that a PlayStation 3 jailbreak has successfully used the exact method described as a code injection vector. The PS3, of course, is a static target; how well the method scales to the PC platform is therefore an open question, but given the apparent relative paucity of implementations available, it seems at least plausible as a useful attack vector for malware.

Claim 3 is theoretically valid and, as another HN user pointed out [2] in response to my own skepticism on the subject, has at least one strong proof of concept in the wild.

Claim 4, of course, is unverifiable at this time; given Ruiu's provenance in the field, though, I'm with the Errata Security writer in considering that Ruiu deserves the benefit of the doubt, on the presumption that he'll soon substantiate the claim.

At most, then, his claims are 25% extraordinary, and I argue it took a useless hack like Goodin to make them seem even that much so -- to say nothing of all the recent speculation with regard to Ruiu's mental state, which I can only ascribe to a spectacular failure among HN commenters to consider the source -- specifically, the source of that Ars Technica article, whose lack of credentials should be plain to anyone with the time and interest to examine his journalistic history. What in God's name possessed Ruiu to give a hack like Goodin an interview is entirely beyond me, but that's as close to a sign of poor or impaired judgment as I can see.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655448)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650152)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would someone please explain how the firmware dumps of the infected computer are being made?

Is it true that if you control the firmware, then you control what the dumps of that firmware will look like? The only way I can imagine getting a clean dump of that machine is by desoldering the chips and imaging them via some specialized tool. If the machine's firmware is rooted, how can you trust any signal the machine sends, especially firmware dumps? The virus could trivially hide itself by detecting a firmware dump is in progress and sending a decoy (clean) image.

<comment><USER10> A system's BIOS image is usually written to an EEPROM chip, and they are often removable. So you can either just pop them out, or desolder them in the worst case.

Then you can use an external EEPROM reader that can dump the contents, but is not capable of running the code.

The EEPROM is storage only; it's contents are loaded by the PC at boot. So if it is removed, there is no processing that an occur internally than can mask the data inside of it.

<comment><USER9> ROM is Read Only Memory. If it's read only, how could it become infected?

EDIT: Sorry for being unclear. I'm aware EEPROM can be overwritten. But presumably that requires special privileges, or a special circumstance (like the user physically holding some button on the motherboard during bootup, or something). The article isn't at all clear how it's possible to write a program that escalates its privileges to such an extent that it can then overwrite EEPROM. Is it really possible? How?

<comment><USER10> EEPROM -

Electronically Erasable Read Only Memory

It's re-programmable (i.e. by re-flashing it).

edit: I should add that motherboard manufacturers could prevent this type of attack by "locking" the BIOS for flashing unless it was explicitly unlocked by changing a setting in the BIOS menu (some have this already, I believe). The problem at the moment is that the BIOS is writable at all times, even when the OS is running. This makes BIOS updates easier (i.e. you can make a Windows application that can do so, for example), but the problem is that this allows ANY process with Admin access to alter the BIOS as well.

<comment><USER9> _The problem at the moment is that the BIOS is writable at all times, even when the OS is running. This makes BIOS updates easier (i.e. you can make a Windows application that can do so, for example), but the problem is that this allows ANY process with Admin access to alter the BIOS as well._

I'm speechless that this horrible idea was ever taken seriously, much less implemented. That answers my question as to how a BIOS could become infected.

I'm seriously sitting here in shock. How could any hardware manufacturer think it was a good idea to let a userspace program permanently alter EEPROM, ever? One does not need to be very intelligent to realize hackers will hack that.

This brings us full circle to the original question, though: Did the security researcher write a program to dump the contents of EEPROM rather than desoldering the chips? if so, then he may have been hoodwinked by the virus.

<comment><USER11> > How could any hardware manufacturer think it was a good idea to let a > userspace program permanently alter EEPROM, ever?

Because most hardware manufactures are selling to consumers and not cypherpunks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Ars Technica article is nothing short of offensive. It's an article that does not need to exist. We need to sit down and have a nice long talk about the ethics of fear mongering in the security industry, as well as the idea that a "well-respected researcher" would not only hype up his findings, but not even _reveal_ his findings until a conference that _he_ organizes. Talk about a conflict of interest.

I'm willing to give Dragos the benefit of the doubt here and just assume that Dan Goodin has his head so far up his ass he can't see clearly and that Dragos has no intention of misleading people.

But having these issues for 3 years? Let's just say that extraordinary evidence needs to come out fairly quickly now. Or at least a massive correction of the hype here. Surely, in 3 years, _someone else_ would have discovered this thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't believe how presumptuous every one is here. Let's just wait and see. The idea is completely plausible. I like to operate off of facts and right now we just don't have them.

<comment><USER14> _The idea is completely plausible_

I disagree. The definition of plausible is "seeming reasonable or probable".

To say "the idea is completely possible" might be accurate but has a completely different meaning.

A security researcher discovering malware that infects several different BIOS types including on PC and Mac hardware with every major operating system that can spread via USB and communicate via sound between standard speakers and a standard microphone over distance and then going about his normal day-to-day life over the next three years is the very definition of _improbable_.

<comment><USER15> That's Google's definition, which in my opinion doesn't capture the word correctly. That definition implies "plausible" suggests "likely". Turning to Webster:

        1 superficially fair, reasonable, or valuable but often specious <a plausible pretext>

        2 superficially pleasing or persuasive <a swindler… , then a quack, then a smooth, plausible gentleman — R. W. Emerson>

        3 appearing worthy of belief

To me, an idea is _plausible_ if I can entertain the possibility without suspension of disbelief.

<comment><USER16> Which, as the parent said, does not seem to describe this bizarre malware. As described, it is so exotic that it requires some serious suspension of disbelief for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm just thankful that China doesn't make computer hardware.

<comment><USER18> In this day and age, does it really matter if China or US makes the hardware. I think it's been definitively proven that one is not better than the other, when it comes to privacy and hacking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >With a slightly more expensive dongle that can transmit as well as receive, your laptop can pretend to be a wifi access point or a cell phone tower...

I understand the point being explained here, but is this really accurate? I don't know of any SDR platform, let alone a "dongle" with anywhere near the capacity necessary to operate as a wifi AP.

<comment><USER19> Maybe I'm wrong here. Looks like bladeRF and USRP B200-series have the bandwidth, sample rate, and data speed to do 802.11b.

Maybe some radio smartperson can clarify?

<comment><USER20> The USRP B200 sales page actually says it can be used for WiFi. It also says "up to" 56MHz of bandwidth -- if that's actually available in the 2.4 and/or 5GHz bands, it should be able to implement 802.11n which uses 20 or 40MHz channels.

(802.11ac is out of bounds, its channels are 80MHz minimum.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For a summary of quite a few of the techniques mentioned in the Ars article, have a look at:

Hardware backdooring is possible - By Jonathan Brossard [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU)

(This one more recent from nullcon, made a splash from DefCon 20 earlier).

It's not really much of a stretch that an agency (commercial, criminal or government) that dedicated a few man-years of work could come up with something along these lines.

There's really only one-and-a-half "out there" claims: the "half" being networking via audio, the "one" being cross-platform.

It'll be interesting to see if they manage to grab a dump of the malware and we can get more eyes looking at it...

</comment><comment><USER22> I encourage people to learn about ITP port and JTAG debuggers for processors. It is easy to verify all of this with ITP debugger in no time. I am surprised nobody did it. It is amateurish at least for a 15 years of experience. I'd expect a researcher like that to know about hardware ITP port. How do you think BIOS or UEFI firmware are developed and debugged? The cost of the debugger is 20k USD and you hook directly into the CPU bus and see everything from SMM mode transitions to cache events. Complete transparency without the sci-fi claims anymore and crap publicity.

EDIT: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In- target_probe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-target_probe)

</comment><comment><USER23> A mild omission in the blog posting: the BIOS continues to run after the OS boots. See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode)

<comment><USER4> A not so mild omission, Macs don't even have a BIOS.

<comment><USER23> Modern Macs have UEFI, which is a form of BIOS.

(edit: actually called UEFI: EFI is an old name...)

<comment><USER4> Apple still uses EFI. It's not a form of BIOS, it's a BIOS replacement. They're quite a bit different.

<comment><USER24> "Basic Input/Output System" fits the bill for me even for (U)EFI.

It doesn't implement PCBIOS APIs (those int10h calls everyone came to lo{ve,athe}), but neither does a PC BIOS implement CP/M BIOS functions.

For the BadBIOS topic (and many other firmware debates), the "UEFI isn't BIOS" thing is useless semantics:

PCBIOS, EFI and UEFI serve the same purpose: They initialize the hardware, load the OS loader, then provide some amount of services to the OS (just through different means).

All of them provide runtime services to the OS (that the OS might or might not use). All of them have extensive control over the OS at all times through SMM, even if the OS decides not to use those runtime services. And all of them make use of these capabilities.

That is: All of them survive the boot process and have a considerable level of control over the hardware at all times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How would you write an OS that would be encrypted or otherwise inaccessible to the hardware on which it's running? It would be a kind of hypervisor OS, but you might run only 1 VM so you could connect via console and maximize resources, as though it were a standard PC. Or maybe have a small server VM to help your network manage resources.

Are we looking at a future where a standard OS install is a multi-VM situation?

<comment><USER24> Intel wants to introduce in-CPU encrypted memory regions with its SGX extensions for such uses. That would allow encrypted virtual machines that the VM host (or SMM or TXT or whatever other super privileged mode you control) couldn't analyze.

Of course, you're merely moving your trust anchor from code (verifiable, easy to subvert) to CPU (unverifiable, hard to subvert). Pick your poison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How could malware jump across an air gap to a clean machine, even theoretically? No uninfected machine would reflash its firmware from what it was hearing on its speaker.

<comment><USER20> This is driving me insane. Why do people keep asking this question? Even Ars's poorly written article was crystal clear on this. The article you just commented on is crystal clear on it as well. It says:

> _Dragos believes that two infected computers can communicate with each other > over the audio port_

 _Infected computers_. The audio communication is between infected machines. It is not the vector of initial infection.

<comment><USER26> I am responding to this (quoted from the Ars article):

"We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD," Ruiu said. "At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we're using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of a sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys."

"Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps."

I presume the computer that had reflashed BIOS, fresh disk drive, with zero data, installed from a Windows System CD, was uninfected. Then it became infected. Then he mentions a theory that it jumps airgaps with speakers and microphones.

This strongly implies that the claim is of a virus that jumps airgaps from an uninfected machine to an infected one through sound.

Which part of this is incorrect?

(Also, the claim that infected computers communicate via sound to bridge airgaps is not mutually exclusive with the claim that infection can spread over airgaps. So what you quoted does not contradict this claim, which is why I didn't take it as a refutation of my previous reading).

<comment><USER20> The computer had been infected. They scrubbed everything you would normally scrub, and it was reinfected. The hypothesis being that the infection persisted somewhere, such as the Realtek firmware.

At no point has anyone believed a never-infected computer would become magically infected via audio. You are _looking_ for such a suggestion and finding it in poor writing. In reality, it is not there.

If you want to lambast Ars Technica for shitty writing, go right ahead, but don't criticize Dragos's claims until you are certain you know what they are. And as we all know, such a certainty can _never_ come from the press. You must go to the source. Read Dragos's Google+ page and his Twitter feed. And read them carefully, not hastily and not with the intent of finding fantastical claims where they don't exist.

You've been primed by a sensationalist article to look for something sensational. Be conscious of that.

<comment><USER26> > You are looking for such a suggestion and finding it in poor writing.

You have crossed from facts which you know into speculation about my mental processes, and in fact you are incorrect about the latter. Without any preconceptions about this whatsoever, I read the Ars article and it strongly suggested to me that the claim was that the infection itself had spread over an air gap.

Otherwise, why even lead from this story into the theory of communicating via sound? If indeed the computer was already infected, then it would be no surprise that it could do something like interfere with running a registry editor. The air gap jumping would be entirely irrelevant to the story.

<comment><USER20> Why would a never-before-seen-in-the-wild malware technique be irrelevant to a story about the malware implementing in?

<comment><USER26> Sorry, I was unclear. By "story" I meant the specific story about the machine they attempted to wipe clean but that still remained infected somehow. The theory that the virus could communicate over air gaps would be irrelevent to that _specific_ story, because if we assume that the computer was still infected, jumping air gaps is irrelevant to what was observed in that specific instance.

In other words I'm agreeing with you that the Ars article was misleading. But my initial comment was not meant to be critical of Dragos or anybody else. It was an honest, uncharged question about how my reading of the Ars article would be possible, even theoretically. The answer (it sounds like) is that the Ars article misled me about what Dragos was actually claiming.

<comment><USER27> I think the point is that anyone with an ounce of technical competence knows that the claim of formerly a normal computer being infected via sound is patently absurd, so even bringing it up is unnecessarily distracting from the discussion at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am reminded of N rays.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-rays](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-rays)

</comment><comment><USER29> #1 feature: being able to sway large portions of IT-sector opinion, with unsubstantiated fear and security threats, to be pro-internet regulation.

<comment><USER24> Why internet regulation? This is firmware, so it can be fixed at the firmware level.

However I'd advise to limit the impact UEFI can have on a system (which, right now, is universal). And sometimes I even work on it ([https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot- pkg](https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot-pkg))

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Guess I'll be adding a frequency emitter in this range near my air gapped machine.

<comment><USER31> Doing something easy to get wrong rather than removing the speakers?</comment></comment>


How the Digg team was acquihired - <AUTHOR> https://lethain.com//digg-acquihire/ <comment><USER2> Digg is a classic example of a webpage getting a working model right, totally by accident. This happens quite a lot in that they cobble something together and it got trajectory. Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem. They had no clue and they changed it causing the whole thing to crater.

The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.

<comment><USER3> And reddit is doing the new thing. Their new design caused me to leave, even their "old." subdomain is pretty bad.

Didn't really need it in my life anyway.

<comment><USER4> But _old.reddit.com_ is the same as reddit before they implemented the bloated redesign.

<comment><USER5> it constantly tries to make you to the new page. I actually have an extension to keep me on old.reddit.com. TBH I really miss Usenet. That functionality is what essentially I'm trying to get from them.

<comment><USER6> It's an account setting -- you can completely opt out of the new version. I use Reddit every day, and have never been sent to the new version by mistake.

Unfortunately, if you use the old version, you will also not have access to the newest mod tools, including a lot of sub settings. But the old version works fine for reading and commenting.

<comment><USER7> I've set my preference to old numerous times. That setting seems to either revert or disappear entirely / appear as a new setting.

I'm constantly directed to www.

That's obvious as I've disabled JS for the domain, and so get an empty page with a spinner.

It's a clusterfsck.

<comment><USER8> It's a cookie, and it's linked to your login session. If you log out or clear cookies, or use incognito mode, it will revert to new by default. I used to have the same issue until I figured that out. Now I just have a dedicated container for it in Firefox and all is well.

I would have left reddit a long time ago if I were forced to use the terrible new UI. The fact that they still keep it around, years later, is a telling sign. When you are so scared of your own decisions, you know you messed up.

<comment><USER7> This occurs consistently whilst logged in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I remember pre the redesign of the Digg front page, it was controlled by "Diggers" who were being paid by blogs and brands for the traffic (Digg.com could deliver 100k>1m+ visitors a post with the right content angles). The redesign was to take back control of the homepage results and be able to charge brands for the exposure. Once the users realised they had little sway in getting a post to the front page they left.

<comment><USER10> I remember the days when mr babyman and friends controlled the digg front page and all the drama that followed. It was a perfect example of an over aggressive parasite killing the host. Reddit solved it by creating sub- reddits. HN solved it with clear rules and diligent mod work.

<comment><USER11> Reddit solved nothing. As far as I know there's little-to-no transparency in each subreddits moderation or content approval process. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a glaring issue with that platform.

<comment><USER12> You don't like a sub, you don't sub to the sub.

The frontpage you see is the one that you compose yourself, that's _the_ thing what makes reddit work.

<comment><USER13> This isn't true for a number of reasons. Firstly, the existence of a sub- reddit on a topic makes it almost impossible for a different sub-reddit for the same subject to gain traction. So, sure you can disagree with how /r/politics or /r/motorcycles moderates their subs, but the result is you don't get to read about motorcycles or US politics on reddit. The barrier to creating an alternative is almost infinitely high. I'm struggling to think of any sub-reddits that have been replaced by alternatives on the same subject.

So you end up with a tiny number of redditors who are the moderators for the largest sub-reddits. There is practically no turn over in these people, they have functionally complete autonomy over the vast majority of the traffic on the site, and they quite literally can choose to ban individual websites. What makes you think that companies were paying for digg power users to be friendly but the exact same class of users at reddit aren't getting the same treatment?

And in reality, what the majority of people see on the frontpage is the frontpage filled with the default sub-reddits. Which, again, are entirely at the discretion of handful of moderators who have 0 accountability.

<comment><USER14> > And in reality, what the majority of people see on the frontpage is the > frontpage filled with the default sub-reddits.

This is a fair point. I'd argue that there is one single frontpage for reddit; each signed-in user has their own and this raises the cost of astroturfing with the same reach (%) as the universal Digg frontpage. Mods get their own fiefdoms in subreddits, but they don't wield the kind of power mr babyman had over the overall frontpage. This balkanization means disgruntled users are likely to leave _subreddits_ , but stay on reddit itself, or if sufficiently motivated, create a competing subreddit (see the countless _/ r/X_ vs _/ r/true-X_ for any given X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the benefit for an average software engineer in going along with the acquihire rather than looking for a completely new job?

<comment><USER16> Benefits are for the founders. For employees, its just another day. No need to go for job hunting immediately.

<comment><USER13> It's almost never going to be just another day. For a start, the acquiring company is almost certainly going to immediately stuff fucking with your benefits. Your projects are incredibly unlikely to survive- so if you care about what you're working on, forget it. If your project does survive be ready for a massive influx of new people all of whom have their own ideas of why the acquisition happened and what your project was for. Oh and because acquihires almost always happen where the acquiring company is a behemoth you're going to subsumed into a massive bureaucracy that is clearly not what you signed up for in your original job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Because acquihires are "star" oriented, if you're a senior

>leaders who doesn't explicitly refuse to move forward,

>pressure will converge on you from all sides: investors, the

>team wanting to return to stable employment, and the non-

>participating leadership team who all want you to commit so

>they can move on to new things for themselves.

That's not pressure, that's leverage. Demand a better deal and let them know you're prepared to walk and sink the ship.

<comment><USER18> > that's leverage.

Yup, when Pixar went public, Jobs decided to keep 100% of the shares. (You could argue that he deserved it, since he spent the majority of his fortune on Pixar and Next.)

So his 4 top managers threatened to quit and derail the IPO.

So they got shares, but no other employees did.

<comment><USER17> Totally the right move.

I've been through an acquisition. Everyone is jockeying for position and if you're not, unless you're really good friends with the founder, you will be exploited. As an engineer, they want you to stay on to increase the value of the deal. If you're a star on the team, they absolutely need you to stay on for the deal to go through.

All of those extra hours, nights, weekends, that made you the go-to dev, pays off with this piece of leverage.

Use it. Say it loudly that you're willing to sink the deal for everyone else impress your demands are met.

If they let you go, you never had any leverage to begin with. But if they listen closely to your demands, you're right where you should be.

Do not think for a second that any of the founders, managers or other devs have your best interests in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's funny because Im now back to checking out DIgg daily. I find it much more enjoyable than Reddit these days.

<comment><USER20> Often it seems Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, FB, even local newspapers are just are recycling the same content.

<comment><USER19> This is because no one pays for journalism anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious about this "everyone must sign" contract mentioned. Since employment is not mandatory, what is stopping the author or anyone from signing and then walking away after 1 day working there?

<comment><USER22> There is usually some form of compensation attached to it that must be returned if the employee doesn't satisfy their obligations or is deferred so that the employee is incentivized to stay at least that long. You can quit if you really want to, but you might not want to return the lump sum signing bonus you received a few months ago. Or you decide to stick it out for a year at which point you receive stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > our starting point was far less: 200 DAU.

Digg currently, or recently, was down to 200 daily active users? I knew they lost a lot of users but that sounds like they lost everybody.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, I think that sentence was a bit unclear. What it meant to convey is that we had 200 daily active _Facebook_ uniques, essentially that very few folks used FB to connect to Digg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone see the same fate happening to Reddit? Or are they too big and too entrenched at this point?

<comment><USER26> One thing that really made reddit different from the other communities that were a thing in its early days was the insistence on wholly-separate subreddits rather than the various overlapping tag schemes which were trendy at the time on delicious, fark, digg, LJ, etc.

I don't know if spez and kn0thing had some special insight about this, but my experience with it over the long term has been that you can be subbed to a few reddits for your preferred niche interests, and enjoy almost complete isolation from whatever toxicity is going on over in r/politics or wherever else (barring the occasional bit of brigading, which is basically just a mess for the smaller-community mods to clean up).

So there's clearly a large number of mainline users who basically just read whatever reddits are default on the logged-out homepage. But I think there's also a super long tail of users who don't read those at all, and my hunch is that it's that long tail of users who have probably sustained the site over the long term, and will continue to give it a lot of resiliency going forward.

<comment><USER27> The three reddit founders didn't have special insight initially: for years, reddit had no subreddits. Those came later as a sort of necessity.

<comment><USER26> Per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit#Full_timeli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit#Full_timeline), the site launched in 2005, and from pretty early on there were a handful of centrally-managed ones like science, programming, etc, with the option to create arbitrary ones coming in 2008.

So _technically_ "years", but those were the very early days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's the leverage the old company has over its engineers when negotiating an acquihire? Why does the new company not approach the lead engineer and the selected employees directly?

<comment><USER29> Non-competes, probably, are the easy way. Accusing the potential acquirer of acting in bad faith also happens.

Also, a loyal and cohesive team can do the "we go together or we don't go" move.

<comment><USER28> I am not fully convinced.

That cohesive team, why would it make money for the old company and its investors? That signing bonus can be split entirely among themselves.

Non-competes are not allowed in California. And in any other location, the team can wait it out because the company most likely ceases existing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Digg was losing so much money and required so much infrastructure to run at the end. I wonder if the team at the time could've done a complete restart. I think it required a new team without the history and loyalty to old decisions to move forward. Betaworks was able to right the ship, but it was too late, the world had moved on.

<comment><USER31> Yes, the fall of the original Digg happened long ago.

[https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires- digg/](https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/)

At the time Digg was acquired in name only. The team had a short period to replace the then current (and very expensive) infrastructure and hijack all traffic. They did a pretty awesome tech job of moving to AWS and stopping the bleeding from the then in place bare metal setup. I remember a tech talk where they spoke of the money they saved from moving to AWS, it was substantial and allowed them the resources to try to save the product. Since then it was a re- birthed startup with a new team that had quite a long runway IMHO.

<comment><USER32> Clicked on your link... that Verizon Media privacy page is a nightmare. And then it fails to load the article...

Do you have any more information about the move to aws and why that was cheaper than their old setup?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thanks for writing these stories up - great examples of how the earlier days were the wild west - we were all code cowboys, and it all lead to spectacular failures at times.

</comment><comment><USER34> Can you even submit to Digg anymore? The basic functionality is broken and it's unclear why the site is floundering? Are you serious?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to know more about why a failing news site had 2 data scientists on the payroll.

<comment><USER35> I remember Digg Labs produced some really cool animated real-time visualisations of stories on the site.

A little Googling suggests that they were collaborations. But I wonder if the data scientists were also involved

[http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html](http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html) [http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585](http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585)

<comment><USER36> No, the Stamen work happened before we had any data scientists on payroll.

Edit: We _did_ have an R&D team that did things that might today be considered data science, but at the time they were mostly focused on documenting and optimizing the Digg "algorithm"</comment></comment></comment>


Federal Court Rules Case in Favor of Crypto ICO Against SEC - <AUTHOR> https://www.ccn.com/monumental-federal-court-rules-case-in-favor-of-crypto-ico-against-sec/ <comment><USER2> The court simply denied the SEC's request for a preliminary injunction, saying it will need to see discovery and proof to judge on the merits. The case still has some way to go, it was not at all dismissed.

"At this stage, without full discovery and disputed issues of material facts, the Court cannot make a determination whether the BLV token offered to the 32 test investors was a 'security,'"

[https://www.scribd.com/document/394382912/Blockvest- Ruling](https://www.scribd.com/document/394382912/Blockvest-Ruling)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well whereas the SEC had taken the position that airdrops could violate the securities laws of the tokens were a security...

>According to the court, in the ICO context there must be a 'risk of financial loss'. This supports the proposition that something like an airdrop, by itself, cannot be a securities offering...

So tokens even if securities may not violate securities laws by being distributed via airdrop.

I think ultimately the tokens here will be securities here, unless the transfer of the tokens are restricted (and they include no right to company profits).

<comment><USER3> > I think ultimately the tokens here will be securities here, unless the > transfer of the tokens are restricted

Transfer _probably_ doesn't have to be restricted. From what I've heard, the promoters of the security aren't allowed to solicit exchanges to list their token, but aren't under any obligation to stop others from selling it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I'm just an attorney that works with the SEC on these matters, and have had these exact conversations with the Office of Chief Counsel. What do I know, keep the down votes coming.

<comment><USER3> I mean I'm not saying you're wrong, on the surface it just doesn't make any sense though and it's seemingly different than what the SEC was saying as recently as six months ago. It's easy to see how if something were a security then the issuer could be required to restrict transfer, but under the framework of the Howey Test (or whatever else) what is the justification for how not restricting transfer could make an airdropped asset a security if they didn't also do an ICO or do something else to make themselves a security?

I mean clearly it could contribute to an expectation of profit, but how do the other prongs of the test get violated?

Last year I did invent a novel mechanism to allow tokens to comply with securities laws while both allowing end users to spend them as utility tokens and accredited investors to profit from them as investments, so I'm curious to see if a real market need develops here.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Last year I did invent a novel mechanism to allow tokens to comply with securities laws while both allowing end users to spend them as utility tokens and accredited investors to profit from them as investments, so I'm curious to see if a real market need develops here.

Not saying you didn't. But keep in mind one of the biggest and most prominent law firms in the tech/startup/Blockchain space published the original "legal framework" for SAFTs (simple agreement for tokens) based on SAFEs(simple agreements for equity) which was premised on a utility token...18 months later the SEC dropped the hammer on companies who ICO'ed using said SAFT framework.

So question did you submit your legal framework to the SEC and they told you it is compliant?

<comment><USER3> > So question did you submit your legal framework to the SEC and they told you > it is compliant?

I haven't, but it's done in a way that makes it impossible for any of the prongs of the Howey Test to be met for non-accredited investors. (There is no investment, there is no possibility of profit, etc.) So if there are things that need to be changed, which there may be, they're probably relatively minor.

> 18 months later the SEC dropped the hammer on companies who ICO'ed using > said SAFT framework.

What the SEC has repeatedly affirmed is that the law hasn't changed since the 1920s or whatever. The fact that the law firm in question may have been advising their clients to commit crimes doesn't mean the law has changed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well no offense but until you submit your legal proposal to the SEC and get their opinion...any claim about "SEC compliance" is suspect. Again you may very well may have done what you say, but if anyone had developed a legal framework, it's unexplainable why they wouldn't get the SEC to confirm the same.

The SEC created an entire division and online submission portal to handle these requests, and to date no one has established a legal framework for ICOs (short of registering the token as a security, or accredited investor only exemptions). Congress has even asked the SEC to publish guidelines for a legal ICO, and to date the SEC hasn't (likely because short of registering/accredited investor exemptions/transfer restriction the SEC can't come up with a legal framework).

<comment><USER3> > if anyone had developed a legal framework, it's unexplainable why they > wouldn't get the SEC to confirm the same.

I mean it's not something I'm actually working on so it would be a waste of time and money to solicit the SEC's guidance. I've told some other people who are planning ICOs how the system works, so if they want to actually implement it then it's their responsibility to pay to have their lawyers sit in on SEC meetings and for a legal opinion, documents, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI checkout [https://www.sec.gov/finhub](https://www.sec.gov/finhub)

It's free (no SEC fees) and you don't need a lawyer. I'd recommend a lawyer...but there are no SEC meetings for them to sit in on and bill you for.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I'll send them my architecture and writeup at some point. I'm avoid spending much time working on crypto stuff until the markets capitulate, but it's looking more and more like that could be within the next six months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a crypto investor (I currently hold XRP, XLM, ADA, and ETH) and even helped someone develop a prototype for a new exchange, but at least part of me is rooting for the SEC on this one.

If ICO abuse is not curbed, it will become the weapon of choice for all kinds of scammers and hucksters. I'm obviously not anti-crypto, but the scene __has__ become a Wild West. Tying law enforcement's hands will embolden the bad actors and make it less likely for the good actors to attain mainstream acceptance.

<comment><USER5> Just like Kickstarter. If anything, I'd like to see ICOs stay unregulated.

<comment><USER6> The problem with ICOs is you can put some very shady crap.

For instance, there was EtherDoge. They were pushing their air drop on Reddit. However, they coded in to the smart contract pushing back the air drop. Their website showed a "team" with photos stolen off of Twitter and LinkedIn. Whenever you called them out on Reddit, the mods of the subreddit were deleting the posts.

Obviously not every ICO is conducted thusly, but straight up fraud still needs to be addressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The court made the correct decision, but the idea that this sets some sort of anti-SEC precedent is false. It's more like the SEC just made a minor mistake in their court filing and then got told to go back and fix it.

It does offer legal protection to people who only did an airdrop and not an ICO, but realistically the SEC wasn't going to go after any of these people anyway unless they solicited exchanges to list their token.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please change the title here — the ruling was in preliminary motion practice and was no way dispositive of the "case."

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's the link without Google cruft:

[https://www.ccn.com/monumental-federal-court-rules-case- in-f...](https://www.ccn.com/monumental-federal-court-rules-case-in-favor-of- crypto-ico-against-sec/)

<comment><USER9> And by cruft they mean spyware.

<comment><USER8> I was going to say something to that effect, but who are we kidding - I'm sure Google tracks visitors to that site whether they go there via the AMP link or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI for anyone who hasn't read the time tested definition of what is a security look it up in the letter of the US law and you will see a 'security' is something traded in a federally controlled exchange. Methinks this is why the oligarchs are attaching DEXes now. That poor EtherDelta guy...

<comment><USER7> Important glaring factual error here.

Under securities law, ALMOST ANY kind of deal to trade money for an intangible where the buyer expects to profit from others' work is a security. Exchange listings having nothing to do with it.

Nothing is new under the sun and since the Securities Act of 1933 innumerable schemes to sell paper to rubes have been tried using different names, labels, or tweaks to avoid the regs. Universally the shenanigans get slapped.

Pretty much, the thing that ICO promoters want to do (get money or pseudo- money from people looking to profit) is tautologically securities sales under our current US regulatory regime.

Source: business partner and I burned a lot of lawyers' time in late 2012 seeing what was going to come of the equity crowdfunding/JOBS Act stuff for a startup, and ultimately decided to wave off (you'll note that essentially nothing new has come from that; most all the issuers in that space still rely upon traditional SEC exemptions etc.)</comment></comment>


A cute technique for avoiding certain data race conditions - <AUTHOR> http://www.cilk.com/multicore-blog/bid/9328/a-cute-technique-for-avoiding-certain-race-conditions

<comment><USER2> Offtopic: I once worked on the yearly revision to a certain popular football game. We had a bug at one point where players would show up with one skin color head, and a totally different skin color arms.

I suggested we call this the "race condition bug".</comment>


As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html?mabReward=ART_CTM1&recid=34cea0ca-c023-4fb8-6ca8-9047ebcd5412&recp=0&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0 <comment><USER2> This feels quite political. I agree that robots are the future, but I think that some structural changes will be needed. Trying to sell it like no jobs are lost is quite naive at best, and purposefully misleading at worst.

If I remember correctly (don't quote me on that) Amazon used to employ quite a lot of temporary workers and had a high turnover (hire/quit) rate. Then they would no need to purposefully fire anyone to reduce their headcount. Just not temp hiring those people would be enough. Or not hiring as many people as befoe as they grow. Or ... My point: there are many ways of making it look good on paper; but when a robot does a human job, that job is not needed anymore.

What IMO we need to do is to keep on discussing structural unemployment from all points of view.

<comment><USER3> > _Trying to sell it like no jobs are lost is quite naive at best, and > purposefully misleading at worst._

Well, the article does literally say "No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Mr. Clark said.". Either Mr. Clark is lying, or this point is moot.

<comment><USER4> I'm not following. Suppose they "normally" ran 150 full time employees and 150 temp workers for holiday peak. Suppose they have a 25% attrition rate. (37 of those 150 employees quit voluntarily.)

After the robots, they could have 115 employees working and still not laid anyone off. Yet, in terms of full time employment, they went from 150 to 115 and in terms of temp labor went from 150 to 0.

Did the robots destroy jobs in such a case? I'd think "yes". (I still support the deployment of robots in such cases; I'm only responding to the logical argument here, not the philosophical implications thereof.)

<comment><USER5> They also remove the need to make future hires, expanding the workforce to match growth. There is a lost "opportunity cost" of unrealized employment caused by massive automation.

The reallocation of labor during the throes of the industrial revolution worked because the new technologies needed constant care and babysitting. Reliable machines that need infrequent service will not need much maintenance staff.

<comment><USER3> The reallocation of labour also worked because demand for consumer goods increased dramatically as mere living effectively became cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the historical wage share of gdp of workers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share)

And i'm sure the story for the bottom 50% of employees is even worse.

The trend is downwards, and the internet accelerated it. Does anyone think that robots and a massive technology boom that may soon happen won't accelerate it ? Why ?

And from that trend, given minimum wage, it seems that at some point in time, we'll have large unemployment.

<comment><USER7> Why is that necessarily bad? Does everyone need ongoing employment? Why can't more people build and own a business (or a robot, or other productive capital) instead?

<comment><USER8> There's a reason why "I started my company with only myself, a garage, and a $3 million dollar inheritance" is an apt description of so many founders' stories.

Perhaps seizing the means of production is the way to go ;)

In all seriousness though, Even starting a small business requires a decently large buffer that most people simply don't have. Hard to build one if you're surviving on mimimum wage + food stamps. Living paycheck to paycheck is a real thing. Especially if you have family

<comment><USER7> Well, how many super wealthy people's stories are described by "I worked really hard for 45 years and got every promotion and now I have a pension and SS check"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So in short, robots do the boring and physically demanding tasks, making the humans more efficient. No workers were laid off.

I see the benefits of "relieving" humans of boring jobs, but most of the article seems like a weird PR spin. Nobody got fired because Amazon is expanding its warehouses rapidly enough that those people have work to do despite the robots. Without this modernization Amazon would have needed to hire more workers, meaning this is still a net job loss.

<comment><USER10> Very few parents say: "I hope my child can get a shipping center job stacking bins, day after day, and hold that job for 40 years."

Shipping-center automation is going to move people out of rote jobs in the same way that farm automation sent a lot of workers off the land. From this story, it sounds as if the people working at Amazon shipping centers have found mildly more palatable jobs that could lead (with more training) to better paying careers in industrial operations, design, etc.

We can (and should!) argue about how fast "better" jobs are taking shape. We can explore ways of making that happen more systematically so that children of pallet stackers have a brighter future. But it's a dim world if we think rote labor like pallet stacking ought to be preserved as long as possible.

<comment><USER11> >Very few parents say: "I hope my child can get a shipping center job stacking bins, day after day, and hold that job for 40 years."

For a lot of parents, the possibility of their children having a secure full- time job is a lofty aspiration. Millions of Americans are trapped in cycles of unemployment or in low-wage jobs with no security and no benefits. Vast swathes of the US are blighted by long-term unemployment, crumbling infrastructure and a lack of inward investment.

Amazon aren't buying these robots out of some altruistic desire to lighten the burden of their workers. Their treatment of warehouse staff is notoriously dreadful. If Bezos could fire every single worker in his warehouses, I have absolutely no doubt that he would.

Better jobs would be great, but at the moment we just need jobs.

[http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-18/news/mc-allentown- amazo...](http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-18/news/mc-allentown-amazon- complaints-20110917_1_warehouse-workers-heat-stress-brutal-heat) [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon- devas...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-devastating- expose-accuses-internet-retailer-of-oppressive-and-callous-attitude-to- staff-10458159.html)

<comment><USER12> If you work in a software company, why don't you stop using calculators and hire a team of 20 women to do computations on slide rules? That's 20 jobs for salt of the earth, hard workin' families.

Your on a PROGRAMMING forum and your advocating for doing things less efficiently just to keep people employed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fact that nobody was laid off _does not_ mean that no jobs were lost. If efficiency increased, and nobody was laid off, what does that mean? More product/service was produced. That marginal additional product/service _would have_ required more workers, had they not had this efficiency gain from automation, and I think it's only fair to consider those jobs to be 'lost'.

That being said, I think this is all wonderful, in spite of the misleading framing.

<comment><USER14> > _I think it 's only fair to consider those jobs to be 'lost'._

Is that like someone losing a child because they decided never to have any?

<comment><USER15> It's like a recording studio claiming they lost sales because people downloaded the album they produced.

<comment><USER16> Or like complaining that physical media is crashing and burning while paid digital media is exploding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Robots are cool. Even though amazon is hiring, they employ robots for a reason, it means that fewer employees are needed per a unit of work. In the absence of robots, more employees would be hired.

I like efficiency. I think abundance is great. Our economic system ensures that those things will not help the great mass of people in our society.

<comment><USER18> Whoever said it, the quote about digging with spoons instead of shovels and backhoes comes to mind.

Productivity is the root of economic surplus. It's the lodestone of the economy. If we stop increasing productivity, the pie stops growing. Productivity is the reason the poor today live better than a king or emperor of old.

<comment><USER11> It's patently obvious that the freshly baked pie is being hoarded by an elite. Average wages and compensation have been almost entirely stagnant since the 1970s. At best, this unequal growth is irrelevant to most people; in all likelihood, it's driving rampant inflation of house prices, rents and an array of essentials like healthcare and education.

If trickle-down economics ever worked, it certainly doesn't work now.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/08/resea...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/08/researchers- have-answered-a-big-question-about-the-decline-of-the-middle-class/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article prints Amazon's claims and vision - even their animated VR presentation about future robots - but doesn't tell us the warehouse workers' reality or their point of view. I think it has one short quote from one worker. So we know the former, which is interesting, but we have no idea how it really works out for the employees.

If someone asked your boss about your experience of your job, or someone a couple of levels above your boss (much of the article quoted "Dave Clark, the top executive in charge of operations at Amazon") and didn't ask you, how accurate a picture would they get? Can Amazon's (effective) COO really tell us what it's like to be a factory worker there?

In my experience of being in the position of the interviewer, as a consultant, the boss and even the immediate supervisor usually have little idea about their subordinates' actual work, challenges, frustrations, etc. Unless you ask the person doing the work, you really have no idea what's going on. A common experience: The boss says, 'the new system works great!'; the subordinate says, 'it's awful and I just have to work around it'. But I shouldn't have to talk about consulting fundamentals here; I thought that was a journalism fundamental too.

<comment><USER20> I don't really have an answer, but you may be interested to know that the retail half of Amazon has a program in place whereby all employees (up to a certain level) are required to visit a one of the warehouses. This is a 3 day affair with a mix of "classroom" time and floor time. While this is obviously far from the unfiltered reality of associates, we (corporate) are at least not totally oblivious.

I don't know about Clark, but I'd imagine he has a rough idea, at least of the general state of affairs. The quote about wanting associates to have less monotonous jobs rings true- I've heard that notion before, and it's good to know that it comes from that high.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for responding. IME, the types of things you discuss are things "corporate" and executives talk about and sometimes believe, but often are not reality on the ground.

Without evidence, why do you believe it? If you were given that sales pitch about something core to your job, would you buy it at face value? If corporate actually cares, why isn't this issue taken as seriously as other Amazon projects? Wouldn't they be collecting data to evaluate the results? Why is there no regular, quality, anonymous objective survey of the warehouse employees?

For all I know, there is, but there's no evidence of it in the article (the NY Times dropped the ball on it too - and they are supposed to be the skeptical journalists). If not, how do I, the NYT reader and Amazon customer, know if it's not just feel-good stuff that eases hearts and minds not on the factory floor, but in the corporate offices and in the customers' homes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know why Amazon has such visually striking facilities? I'm not used to seeing a warehouse like that. I imagine there is some sort of reason for it (reduces workplace accidents by making certain things stand out), but I suppose it's also possible that Jeff Bezos just thought it looked pretty.

<comment><USER20> What makes them striking to you?

I work at Amazon in operations, so I'm a little more able to answer than most, but to me it's just a warehouse. The buildings are built as huge boxes. The only thing I can think of is that they're brightly lit. There is an eye toward safety.

<comment><USER21> Everything is the exact same shade of yellow with a splash of red for danger and occasionally blue. However, after seeing the video (I read this on mobile initially), there is more photoshop going on than I gave it credit for.

However, there is still a high degree of color-coordination, even when you're not looking at shots emphasizing the orderliness of the place with the colors brightened.

There are lots of very clear, systematic horizontal lines. Part of that is how all the equipment is the same, and those self-moving crates are all the exact same height, but they went to the trouble of painting the bottom of poles yellow and the rest white. When you do see red, it's all on the same horizontal line, too. The bottom of the self-moving crates are red, then nothing until you get the tops of the poles, which are all at the exact same height. If I didn't know anything about the company, say it was Walmart's warehouse, I'd expect it to look more like this: [https://imgur.com/a/A8ALC](https://imgur.com/a/A8ALC)

<comment><USER20> The photos are definitely unusually bright. That said, the 360 video in there seems strangely "dusty" as well. From my recollection, reality is somewhere in between. The photo composition is also having an effect on things- they are crafted to show, as you say, order.

It's also worth considering that there may well be an intentional effort towards aesthetics. These are frequently hard and unglamorous jobs. If white poles and good lighting help make the place feel less oppressive, then I think we'd consider those merits.

Side note: I liked "self-moving crates". Those are Kiva robots carrying pods around. They're fascinating and oddly adorable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Automation is good. It enables greater productivity.

The kind of automation here doesn't seem actually much different from the 19th century when hand weavers were replaced by power looms. Except we're talking about warehousing and fulfillment instead of weaving thread. But same case of workers now moving from doing something themselves (weaving or stacking) to overseeing (multiple) machines doing the previous task faster. But this doesn't mean the old jobs required less skill; oftentimes automation actually REDUCES the required skill level.

...and so overall, more stuff is made. And this can reduce worker leverage (especially if combined with devaluing of skill... such as skilled spray booth technicians replaced with people tending automated spraying machines). And THIS is where the negative part comes from.

So we need some way to give leverage back to workers. Whether minimum wage, labor unions, tech cooperatives, etc.

Automation pays for the $15 or $20/hour minimum wage. $20 minimum wage also drives automation. If employment is maintained and innovation in automation continues, this is a virtuous cycle that COULD benefit everyone.

But there's also this: [http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> > "For me, it's the most mentally challenging thing we have here," Ms. Scott > said of her new job. "It's not repetitive."

This is a really important statement. If you ever feel like your job is boring, unchallenging and repetitive, that is a sign that it could be done by a robot. Either you need to figure out how to automate it and get a promotion, or you're eventually going to be replaced and let go.

</comment><comment><USER24> I really love the 360 video here. Makes the content much more interesting when you can see all around.

</comment><comment><USER25> HS dropout. I used to build windows and doors when i was nineteen at an industrial park for wage. I wrote poetry and prose, d&d adventures and designed games + drew maps. Later I fixed cars on the side but wasn't very good at it. Studied philosophy in comm college and on my own.

Eventually I started coding and building/modding PCs and became a TKD instructor and international FC fighter. I've since become an experienced SA and systems programmer.

Where is the alike progression to be found now?

</comment><comment><USER26> Does that mean that the info in [1] is no longer true? I don't think so...

[1] [http://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2016/10/13/tech- secto...](http://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2016/10/13/tech-sector-booms- but-job-creation-is-falling/)

</comment><comment><USER27> We tried to create this system in Turkey with AltaTech technology and we can't find a solution about virtual routing.Workers can't find a job in the future because even the backward countries try this system.

</comment><comment><USER28> The captions "Human pickers followed instructions on computer screens" and "A robotic arm in Florence" are swapped, depicting a robot and a human respectively.

Oh the sad irony.

</comment><comment><USER29> The truth is that Amazon will most likely be adding job, but the industry as a whole wont.

At some point Amazon will start dropping jobs too.

</comment><comment><USER30> Until they further automate... this ride is just getting started ... lol

</comment><comment><USER31> Whether you read article or not it is quite clear the Robots will eradicate a lot of working force though not very soon for delivering products but even that after some time considering the development of drones.

<comment><USER32> At a quicker rate than they already have been for decades now? New tech has always displaced workers but we've survived it before. Unless you foresee major unprecedented advancements in AI, I don't think it's going to be catastrophic.</comment></comment>


The state of Bitcoin multisig - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alcio/the-state-of-bitcoin-multisig-82b3bf09b1ca#.i5p6z085t <comment><USER2> There is an important part of the multisig puzzle missing in the article: the need for an out of band protocol to communicate copayers for joining a wallet and spending bitcoins. This is something that Copay ([https://copay.io](https://copay.io)) does but there is no standard way to do this.

There are other issues. For example, Coinbase doesn't support it fully. See this thread for more info: [https://twitter.com/coinfabrik/status/661992065841123328](https://twitter.com/coinfabrik/status/661992065841123328) but other wallet services like Coinkite does: [http://blog.coinfabrik.com/independently-generating-your- pri...](http://blog.coinfabrik.com/independently-generating-your-private-key- for-coinkite/)

<comment><USER3> I haven't read how the wallets are implementing multisig but what is this out- of-band protocol you are talking about?

If I want to spend coins from a multisig address, I create a transaction, sign it with my key and send it to the other party who can sign it and relay it or send it back to me and I can relay it. It's a very simple protocol.

<comment><USER2> The way you send it to another party is not standarized. Think in your grandpa, he would want to just create a transaction while everything else happens behind the scene. Sending an email is a manual process and you need to recheck if the other party received it.

Beyond this, there is a bigger reason: if you want a risk service like Sig3 or CryptoCorp you should adapt the system to every multisig wallet while if you have an standarized way to communicate you wrote an standard system.

<comment><USER3> You can send an email(messaging) behind the scene, need not be manual nor is a task that require standardization.

Sig3 is more secure theoretically but its an overkill & non-requirement nevertheless. Why not have Sig4? Sig100 would be theoretically even more secure!

<comment><USER2> > You can send an email(messaging) behind the scene

So... how Coinbase handles it, what is the format? Coinkite? Copay? The nth popular wallet? You can easily see that you need a standarization, it doesn't matter if its by email, morse, or slack.

Now, Sig3 is the name of a service, with Sig3 you can use any n-m wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two cents from an apps developer: few months ago I've implemented multisig on top of BitcoinJ(generic signing code providing a signature dependless on current state of a partially signed transaction). The experience was truly horrible. Bitcoin documentation is a mess, BitcoinJ documentation is also outdated, so finally I investigated BitcoinJ source code pretty deeply to go forward.

<comment><USER5> BitcoinJ is no frills and unfortunately doesn't have much development manpower despite its popularity. I'm actually in the midst of trying to debug an edge case issue I'm hitting within BitcoinJ itself.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Everything about your movies from the command line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iCHAIT/moviemon <comment><USER2> I like the idea! Unfortunately I hit an error at 33% of my scan:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/moviemon", line 9, in <module> load_entry_point('moviemon==1.0.11', 'console_scripts', 'moviemon')() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/moviemon/moviemon.py", line 61, in main util(args) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist- packages/moviemon/moviemon.py", line 77, in util scan_dir(docopt_args["PATH"], dir_json) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/moviemon/moviemon.py", line 281, in scan_dir data = get_movie_info(name) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/moviemon/moviemon.py", line 300, in get_movie_info return omdb(movie_info['title'], movie_info['year']) KeyError: 'title'</comment>


YCW2019 application – video interview - <AUTHOR> Hi, did anyone get an invite for a video interview? <comment><USER2> I've been video interviewed in the past prior to an onsite YC interview. That being said, it appeared it was a way to gather more information as my application needed some more clarification.

I don't know if that is standard practice or not. I've also had an onsite interview without having a video interview.</comment>


Does Trump's Withdrawal from TPP Signal a New Approach to Trade Agreements? - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/does-trumps-withdrawal-tpp-signal-new-approach-trade-agreements <comment><USER2> Obviously it does.

Bernie Sanders and big labor applaud.</comment>


Twilio has sms is Canada now And they never emailed me to tell me - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/

<comment><USER2> Sorry about that, we did email a subset of Twilio customers who had either explicitly asked for Canadian SMS or who already had a Canadian billing address or Canadian phone numbers in their account. It sounds like we missed you somehow - but I'm glad you found it and put it on HN!</comment>


Reddit's traffic grew by 300% in 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/evmek/2010_we_hardly_knew_ye/

<comment><USER2> Title's wrong. Growing by 300% means Reddit would be at 1 billion pageviews. Grow by 100%, you get 500 million. Grow by 200%, you get 750 million. Grow by 231.6%, you get 829 million.

</comment><comment><USER3> They are not handling the load well, and it is getting bad enough to discourage me from commenting there. It was annoying but livable when it was just slow loading when reading, but lately it has progressed to errors when trying to post. That is a lot more annoying because then you've either got to give up on the post, or save a copy somewhere to try again later.

It's also losing the status of inboxes. That is, it will show the orange envelope meaning you've got a message (typically someone replied to one of your comments). You then click that to see the reply, and it just sits there not responding. If you give up and go elsewhere, it often has marked your messages as read, even though you never saw them.

I'd prefer if posting and dealing with the inbox were given high priority, even if it meant more "you broke reddit" messages when I try to read stories.

<comment><USER4> We're almost ready to hire a couple of really awesome folk. Then we have to train them. Then they can be useful and help us make the site faster and more stable.

We're just really constrained on human time right now.

<comment><USER5> so hire people you don't have to train. you have enough traffic to monetize a better team

<comment><USER4> Even the smartest person in the world will have to learn our architecture and codebase, our processes, our logins, our machine names, etc.

No matter how amazing they are, I'm not giving them the root password on the first day or letting them redo the databases or write major code changes.

Everyone requires training.

<comment><USER6> You obviously need Roger, the cokefiend. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Traffic in December exhibits weird patterns (lower for business sites and higher for leisure sites due to the holidays).

I wonder if they avoided a December 2009 to December 2010 comparison on purpose (or if they preferred the Jan-vs-Dec one to get a better growth).

<comment><USER8> Not quite as simple as business vs. leisure, but I agree that the only reason they'd chose Dec10/Jan10 not Dec10/Dec09 is to make the stats look more impressive.

<comment><USER4> Actually, they would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec. Our traffic is usually down in Dec.

We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010.

<comment><USER8> Then that's really odd, the way any business would normally review a year's performance is to compare December/December, because that's the best way to get a decent comparison without being influenced by factors such as "Our traffic is usually down in Dec." Same thing for other time periods - if you want to see how good traffic was over a weekend, you don't compare Sat/Sun to Thur/Fri, you compare Sat/Sun to the previous week's Sat/Sun.

      Our traffic is usually down in Dec.

Oddly, I've found that to be the case every year, across a range of non- business for-leisure websites.

<comment><USER4> We weren't trying to review our performance year to year though. We were just showing how the beginning of 2010 compared to the end.

All the media decided to make it a year over year comparison, which it was never intended as.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember a few years back top bloggers and industry 'experts' talking about reddit being toasted in competition with digg. Amazing momentum after 5 years. Congrats.

<comment><USER10> At the bottom of articles on websites when I see share on digg and delicious icons I think "Oh my."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how much of that traffic is from folks who ditched Digg?

<comment><USER12> Judging by Quantcast, it's not correlated. Reddit has been steadily growing, and Digg just did a face plant.

<comment><USER13> Reddit has stated that Quantcast and Compete's numbers are pretty much flat wrong for them. You'd have to assume the same for digg.

[http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate- our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our- traffic.html)

<comment><USER14> What about adplanner data?

[https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com&geo=001&trait_type=1&lp=true)

Seems to be right, as it comes from Analytics.

<comment><USER13> That shows a huge spike in traffic in late August and Sept, right around the launch of the digg redesign, unlike Quantcast and Compete ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And revenue? Will we see more begging for money this year?

<comment><USER16> Reddit Gold is not really "begging". They allow you to set your own price for an enhanced set of features. While Reddit Gold is mostly about expressing your support for Reddit, it's not a straight up donation, and Reddit didn't spend two months with a banner at 25% screen height with a bearded kn0thing or ketralnis staring down the userbase.

<comment><USER17> _set your own price_

That was only the deal for the first couple of days; it now has a fixed price of $4 (or a postcard) per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The search: sucked => works part is us (IndexTank). Thanks Reddit for the mention!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious to know if it's reddit's GUi design/usability or it's content/community that keeps it a growing success.

For me, it's their design approach that i enjoy using, especially after reviewing their second project, hipmunk.

<comment><USER20> Interesting. I came to Reddit for the intelligent conversation compared to Digg. The commenting system was pretty great, as well as the subreddit system though, so I'd call it as a good mix of people and UI.

Eventually, I realized it was wasting my time like digg, just in a less obvious way. Also, the community had grown enough that those long joke threads and aggressive attempts at meme creation were hurting my enjoyment. These are not solvable problems on reddit in my opinion. I finally turned in the towel after an extremely long thread on how useless churches are in America: criticize all you want, (and I will certainly continue to do so), but churches feed and take care of homeless people and poor people in every county (and probably, town) of America.

My final solution was to add the following to my /etc/hosts file:

188.8.131.52 reddit.com www.reddit.com

This has saved me a lot of time. In exchange, I've missed (I imagine) many outrage-generating stories on US civil rights, a lot of great pictures of cats, and in exchange get to skip reading the perspectives of many, many 4chan alums.

<comment><USER21> The trick to post-2008 Reddit is to be very, very judicious about which sub- reddits you subscribe to. There are still quite a few gems. I've flirted with abandoning ship since the early 2009 hockey stick growth, but found peace by continuously weeding out sub-reddits that had gone bad. It's kind of like pruning a bonzai tree.

<comment><USER22> This is my go-to answer to anyone who complains about pun threads and whatnot. If you're running into that stuff, you're on the wrong subreddits. My discussions there are perfectly enjoyable since removing r/atheism, r/pics, r/reddit.com, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How many monthly uniques?

<comment><USER4> About 12 million last month. About 5 million last January.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Congrats Reddit! Wish you and Hipmunk greater success in 2011 :-)

<comment><USER25> Why thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No mention of revenue or profit or how many millions they're paying Amazon for hosting.

Traffic is great but profit is better.

</comment><comment><USER27> Any overflow effect on HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> I for one found HN through Reddit.

<comment><USER22> Same. Given that HN was originally supposed to be _part_ of Reddit, that's not surprising.

<comment><USER4> > Given that HN was originally supposed to be part of Reddit, that's not > surprising.

What makes you say that?

<comment><USER22> I thought the story was that PG wanted his own subreddit where nobody could downvote, you said no, so he built HN (this is a paraphrasing of hazy memories)

edit: If memory serves, Steve mentioned this offhand in a video interview I saw somewhere. I think this one, but I could be wrong.

[http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve- huffman...](http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve-huffman-on- reddi)

<comment><USER25> That is correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How validating early rejuvinated my falling moral - <AUTHOR> http://www.frankienwafili.com/articles/earlyvalidation/

<comment><USER2> > How validating early rejuvinated [sic] my falling [sic] moral [sic]

s/rejuvinated/rejuvenated/

s/falling/failing/

s/moral/morale/

Please don't invent titles for your submissions. Just copy the existing one, assuming the author of the linked article is more literate than you are.</comment>