Nuget Versioning Hell - <AUTHOR> http://isolineltd.com/blog/2017/03/23/NuGet-Versioning-Hell <comment><AUTHOR> I do not think that this approach leads to success. You will get a lot of problems of compatibility. Instead of that solution it is better to keep all packages up-to-date.</comment>


A Better Vim – How to Configure Neovim - <AUTHOR> http://patrickmarchand.com/posts/neovim-tuto.html <comment><AUTHOR> My first blog post after a request on lobsters. Commentaries, suggestions and insults welcome.</comment>


Ask HN: alternatives to launchrock? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for an easy squeeze/email capture for a product that I'll be launching this summer (a backpack) and I wanted to know what alternatives to launchrock were around and what your experiences with them were like.<p>Did you use a service or build it yourself? or what? <comment><USER2> Hi, I built launchvalue - <http://launchvalue.com/> that offers clean interface with google analytics and twitter integration. I also offer customized solution that you can self host for more control on a consulting basis. Let me know if you might be interested.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a great project by Daniel Kehoe, that I used for <http://makerops.com>:

<https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-prelaunch-signup>

This, along with a 5-10$ bootstrap theme and heroku, makes it very easy, and it integrates with mailchimp.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've recently used Prefinery (<https://www.prefinery.com/>) to handle a Beta launch. Highly recommended.

Out-of-the-box support for "viral" social referrals, exporting to MailChimp, webhooks to notify of new sign-ups. Nice minimalist bootstrap interface as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat, I'm looking at it right now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I spent yesterday and today playing with the API from MailChimp, it's easy to use + they have various embeddable widgets.

It would be viable to just use them although you'd need something for the analytics as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would google analytics do the trick?

<comment><USER5> Yeah I think it'd be okay, although LaunchRock also looks at Twitter and LinkedIn sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I vote for <http://kickofflabs.com>

I know both cofounders and have worked with them in the past. They're standup guys and provide great support too.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's your email? I'll shoot you our custom solution that uses Campaign Monitor to collect emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! I'll hit you up tonight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> whats your email? we've built this at userfox and would love to get you involved. we'll do everything for you. i am also interested because i care deeply about backpacks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! I'll shoot you an email tonight!</comment></comment>


Ace of spades, Minecraft like FPS   - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/13/10-reasons-you-need-to-play-ace-of-spades <comment><USER2> Nice to see that Minecraft has seemingly created a new genre of first person world building games.

<comment><USER3> It's not correct to attribute the voxel game genre to Minecraft. It's just the first game of the genre to reach a considerable level of success.

Minecraft is just one of many games that were directly inspired by the underground hit Infiniminer.

<comment><USER4> I fondly remember NovaLogic's Comanche series. While it isn't of the 'world building' genre, its voxel engine was _very_ impressive for its time:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_series>

Also interesting (historically) is 'Rescue on Fractalus'. Not just for its cheesy name, but also due to its reliance on fractals to draw 3D mountain sceneries:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_on_Fractalus>!

Edit: videos of both games:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usj17cxSCKs>

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ- chrOgGg&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ- chrOgGg&feature=player_embedded)

<comment><USER5> Rescue on Fractalus had one of the most genuinely terrifying game moments of my 'career'. I won't spoil it here, but you can probably guess what it was from the wikipedia page.

<comment><USER4> Indeed! Spoiler alert:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8opv5u9nf0>

First time (as a kid) was shocking...

<comment><USER5> Actually the one I was talking about is when the pilot actually gets aboard the ship first!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI: Windows only.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this a completely new thing or is it based on Minecraft's engine?

<comment><USER3> Not based on the Minecraft engine. The Minecraft engine is proprietary and closed-source. Also, it is (according to the developers) a bit of a runny mess, so licensing doesn't make sense either.

<comment><USER7> That's a shame. I guess this game would progress more quickly if it could leverage Minecraft's engine, since it looks the concept is nearly the same.

<comment><USER8> Leveraging "a bit of a runny mess" doesn't sound like it would make progress quicker. And, once the voxel rendering is implemented, is there that much more for this game to borrow from Minecraft?

<comment><USER9> I hope they borrow ambient occlusion. It makes it possible to see the edge of a voxel that's in front of an identically colored voxel, and makes the whole game much easier on the eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jut DL'ed and played for a few minutes. I really like it, but there were issues with lag and general UI responsiveness.

Though very rough, I'm excited about the potential for this one.

</comment><comment><USER11> So, where is the code?

<comment><USER8> Why has this been downvoted? The game is free software, yet the (temporary) homepage has no link to the sources.

This is a most relevant question in a "Hacker News" site.

<comment><USER12> I haven't heard any mention of this game being free or open source. The software it uses (Voxlap & GenLand) both have permissive non-commercial licenses w/ attribution but are not viral like the GPL.

<comment><USER8> I stand corrected. I thought I'd read somewhere that it was free software. Maybe I misread "freeware" in TFA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a shame it has no Mac client. :/

<comment><USER14> I actually play AoS on Snow Leopard using a Wineskin wrapper + ie7 (gross, I know.. but all AoS games are launched from the browser and FF didn't work right for me..)

If you're familiar with wineskin, the process was something like:

1\. create new wrapper 2\. in advanced settings, launch winetricks and install ie7 (ie8 is always weird/crippled for me) 3\. set homepage to <http://ace- spades.com> 4\. in OSX, download the AoS installer MSI 5\. Install the MSI from your Wineskin wrapper 6\. Set the ie7 bin to be the "start program" for your wrapper 7\. Launch the wrapper 8\. Click game 9\. Profit!</comment></comment>


Stop the Press: Building A Startup Presskit 101 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chuwe.com/a-press-kit-thatll-get-your-startup-press

<comment><USER2> Hi, I'm a writer at TechCrunch. Because many entrepreneurs on this forum are going to eventually be reaching out to bloggers, here are a few tips that are probably better suited for 'new media' rather than traditional press. Note that I haven't conducted any kind of formal survey - these are all tips that make things easier on me, which may or may not be applicable to other bloggers (though I suspect they would be).

-Quotes are lame and I never look at them. They rarely say anything unique and often were never even said by the person being quoted (PR agencies generally just write the quotes and then have the person being attributed 'sign off' on them).

-Don't be afraid of talking about your competitors if it helps describe your product, just don't be overly arrogant. Example: "We're an aggregation service that scours the web for all of your friends' updates, give you a place to talk about them, and then use location based technology to show you where they are!" could have easily been stated as "We're like FriendFeed, but we use maps too". This isn't a bad thing, and it's much easier for me to figure out what the heck you're actually doing. Just don't go around saying you're the "FriendFeed killer", because I'll immediately think you're full of shit.

-Stats are great if they're from a legitimate source and you can show us what they mean. Don't try to pull up some obscure metric showing you're incredibly popular when Compete, Google Trends, etc. haven't even heard of you. People try this all the time, and we're pretty good at figuring out when you're boosting your ego a bit too much.

-Put together a professional, 3 minute video showing off what your site does (I emphasize showing off - don't just talk about why your startup is great. Show us what it does). Videos are great because they show bloggers what they should be paying attention to as they browse your site instead of having to click around blindly. We can also embed them in posts in the (incredibly unlikely) event that we don't do such a great job describing your startup. And you can post the video on your homepage/help section to introduce new users to the site.

<comment><USER3> This is a welcome post, thanks. Perhaps you could also follow up with a more elaborate write up? One thing I would like to see covered is "5 examples of good videos and 5 examples of bad videos, with explanations of what makes them so".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And numbers. The tech press loves numbers as the hook. 600 TB of data or 12% growth in signups every month, whatever.

<comment><USER5> For good reason. Numbers tell a story. Precise numbers tell a better story.

Good: Wrote software to save money.

Better: Wrote dozens of programs to help many people do a better job.

Best: Wrote 12 programs and refactored 6 database tables in order to help 143 call center agents turn around calls 18% faster, saving $41,500 per month.</comment></comment>


Why Multi-armed Bandit algorithms are superior to A/B testing (with Math) - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/bandit_algorithms_vs_ab.html <comment><USER3> For what it's worth, I've been following this cross-Internet debate with more than a little professional interest. Cards on the table: I have coded A/B testing software, I frequently code and/or administer it for clients (often in ways which are provably suboptimal), and I am a dirty loyalty-free scientist- cum-capitalist-pig who would stab A/B testing in the back in a second if I thought there were an easier way to extract more money for the same amount of work.

I strongly, strongly suggest that anyone attempting to look at this problem from the perspective of a site owner rather than a mathematical abstraction read and digest btilly's comment from earlier this week:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4040616>

The issues he lays out are _very real in the course practical use of site testing to actually make money_. In particular, his #2 would scare the heck out of me, in a much deeper way than "A/B testing provably doesn't minimize regret" worries me in the other direction. (Or e.g. other flaws with particular A/B testing implementations. For example, repeatedly checking the results of your A/B test and deciding to end it when you see significance has been explained quite a few times as a bad idea with stats to match. However, even if you check like a hyperactive squirrel, you're still winning, you're just winning less often than you think you are. Take your B- in stats class but proceed to make motivational amounts of money for the business.)

The worst possible takeaway you, personally, the typical HN reader, could possibly have from this debate is "Oh, I guess I shouldn't A/B test then." Pick A/B testing, bandit testing, whatever -- any option in the set, even with poor algorithms and/or the easiest errors I can think of, strictly dominate not testing at all. (Actually testing today also is better than "testing... someday", which from my own experience and that of clients I know is something which is very easy to slip into even if you theoretically know you should be doing it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Pick A/B testing, bandit testing, whatever -- any option in the set, even with poor algorithms and/or the easiest errors I can think of, strictly dominate not testing at all._

So I submitted this post and went off to boxing. On the train ride back, I thought "I hope I don't make people think they shouldn't A/B test. And at the same time you were writing this post, I added a conclusion to my blog post saying the same thing.

Bad A/B testing is an 80% solution. Good A/B testing is a 90% solution. Good bandit is a 95% solution. 80% >> 0.

A/B testing has another benefit to software engineers that bandit doesn't - <USER2> lets you delete code.

<comment><USER3> Unless I misunderstand bandit algorithms, there's a trivial modification that makes the actual, practical administration of them essentially identical to A/B testing with regards to when you can rip out code.

If A smashes B, then bandit will converge in a very obvious manner on A, and you pick it and delete the B code branch, accepting future regret from the possibility that B was in fact better as a cost of doing business. If A doesn't smash B, then at an arbitrary point in the future you realize it has not converged on either A or B, pick one branch using a traditional method like "I kind of like A myself", delete the B code, and go on to something that will actually matter for the business rather than trying to minimize your regret function where both possible solutions are (provably) likely non- motivational amounts of money between each other.

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this -- I have a bad flu today and take only marginal responsibility for my actions.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct for practical purposes.

However, you are mathematically wrong. Doing things the way you describe is another form of A/B testing, just one designed to reduce the regret incurred during the test. You still get the linear growth in regret I described (i.e., there is some % chance you picked the wrong branch, and you are leaving money on the table forever after).

Of course, your way is also _economically_ correct, and the theoretical CS guys are wrong. They shouldn't be trying to minimize regret, they should be minimizing _time discounted_ regret.

(Yes, I'm being extremely pedantic. I'm a mathematician, it comes with the territory.)

<comment><USER4> Well fundamentally website optimization is not a multi-armed bandit problem. You are not simply choosing between machines. Instead each website change is another node on a tree and you want to find the highest performing path in constantly changing world, with additional constraints that you can't keep incompatible machines for very long.

A guess at good strategy in those situations would be something that enables you to choose a good path from a small number of options and keep doing so - on the basis that the cumulative advantage will be far more important than any particular choice in itself. Sounds like A/B testing would win if you could actually map the complexity of the problem correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's settle this with science rather than rhetoric. I'd like to do some proper comparisons between bandit algorithms and A/B testing. Unfortunately we haven't been saving time series data at Myna, so we don't have any test data. If anyone has time series data from an A/B test, and is happy to donate it to the cause, please get in touch (email in profile).

Updated for clarity.

<comment><USER3> Write out what .CSV columns you need and what formats they need to be in, and I will happily get you this for a handful of A/B tests. (Though probably not faster than late July. As much as I love A/B testing there is the small matter of a wedding and honeymoon to throw a wee bit of a wrench into my near term schedule...)

<comment><USER6> Gosh, congratulations Patrick. You have helped so many of us. Good luck ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's being glossed over here, and explains a lot of the confusion around which is the best method of "solving" the multi-arm-bandit problem, is the classical bias-variance tradeoff. All of the methods presume some model of the problem, and some of those models are more flexible than others. When a model is more flexible, it allows solutions to take on more shapes and must burn more of its training data choosing among those shapes. Models that are more biased toward a particular shape, on the other hand, can use more of their data for convergence and so converge more rapidly.

Which method is "best" depends on what you know about the problem. Does its optimal solution look a certain way? change over time? and so on. If you're willing to bet on your answers to those questions, you can choose a method that's biased toward your answers, and you'll converge more rapidly on a solution. The risk, however, is that you'll bet wrong and converge on a poor solution (because your biases rule out better solutions).

If you're not willing to bet on your answers, you can choose a method that will place bets for you based on what it sees in the data. But now you're burning some of your data on betting. So that's the tradeoff: you can use more of _your_ knowledge to place bets (and risk placing the wrong bets), or more of the _data_ 's knowledge to place bets (and burn some of your data on betting). Where you adjust the slider between those two is up to you.

Which brings us back to our original question. Which method of solving the multi-arm-bandit problem is best? It depends a lot on where you want to adjust the slider. Which depends on your knowledge, aversion to risk, and expected payoffs.

In life, sometimes one size does not fit all. If you're going to test one shoe size against another, make sure you know which foot will end up wearing the winner. Likewise, if you're going to compare algorithms for solving the multi- arm-bandit problem, make sure know the particulars of the problem _you_ need to solve.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is is the half-time rate of this debate? 300 days or less? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831455>

Sadly, the option to drop this problem over Germany doesn't exist any more.[1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- armed_bandit#Empirical_mo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- armed_bandit#Empirical_motivation)

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who works for a major e-commerce site, I am often the one who has the most influence when it comes time to decide which testing method to adopt. Multi-armed Bandit testing can be good, just as standard A/B testing can be good. But the factor which trumps all of these are the total costs of testing (and the return on investment to the business). One must consider the following before undertaking any of these testing methods:

1\. Implementation Costs - How much time will it take to implement the testing code? Some tests are easier to implement than others. 2\. Maintenance Costs - How much time will it cost to maintain the test for the duration of the testing period? We've ignored this in the past only to realize on occasion that implementation introduces bugs which incur cost and can be disruptive. 3\. Opportunity Costs - What is the cost of doing the test versus not doing the test? Consider setup time, analysis, and final implementation.

After going through a few tests now, we have a pretty good sense for what the total cost to the business is. We don't really look at it as adopting one test method over the other, but instead rely upon the projected ROI to test this versus that, versus doing nothing.

<comment><USER10> If you've conducted multiple tests and "time to implement the testing code" is a major consideration, then you're doing it wrong. If ROI is also a major consideration, then again you're doing it wrong.

Seriously to add an email test right now at the company I'm contracting for takes 2 lines of code. One appears in the program that sends email and looks like:

        $email_state_contact->ab_test_version("test_1234", {A => 1, B => 1});

where test is the name of a test, and 1234 is a ticket number to avoid accidental conflicts of test names. The other appears in a template and looks something like this:

        .../[% ab_test.test_12345 == 'A' ? 'button1' : 'button2' %].png...

That's it. The test automatically shows up in a daily reports. When it wins, you get rid of that code and put the right thing in the template.

Done.

<comment><USER11> I can imagine a number of situations where the implementation is significantly more complex. While _ideally_ A/B tests should be looking at relatively small changes, where each change is independent, many times people are making profoundly larger changes.

If you are testing the conversion rate in shopping carts, and the changes involves drastic redesigns of the flow through the shopping cart process, that could be a serious technological difference and requires substantial time to implement.

Not every test is as easy as changing the copy on an email.

<comment><USER10> Even if you're making larger and more complex changes, the overhead of your testing methodology remains the same. That is how you measure things should be a fixed (small) effort, The cost of building the test is whatever the test is.

In other words multi-armed bandit versus A/B test is something that you shouldn't be deciding based on the effort of the testing methodology.

<comment><USER11> I don't think he was referring to the technology behind the A/B test itself, but rather the technology behind the change that was being made.

That's how I interpreted his statement. I agree with you that the actual A/B testing overhead should be minimal and fairly trivial to put into place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Disclaimer: I also have software for running AB/MVT as well as adaptive control problems (so bandits as well as extended sequential decisions) at www.conductrics.com.

I wouldn't sweat too much UCB methods vs e-greedy or other heuristics for balancing explore/exploit. E-greedy (and e-greedy decreasing) is nice because it is simple. Softmax/Boltzman, is interesting since it is satisfying in that it selects arms weighted by the estimated means, and UCB-Tuned and UCB-Normal are nice because, like AB testing, they take variance measures directly into account when selecting an arm. Take a look at this paper from Doina Precup (who is super nice BTW) and Volodymyr Kuleshov from 2000 <http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~vkules/bandits.pdf> they have comparisons between various methods. Guess what - the simple methods work just fine. Of course there are various Bayesion versions - esp of UCB. Nando de Freitas over at UBC has a recent ICML paper on using the Gaussian Process for Bandits (based on a form of UCB). See <http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~nando/papers/BayesBandits.pdf> I have not given it a tight read, but not sure what the practical return would be. Plus you have to fiddle with picking a Kernel function, and I imagine length scales and the rest of hyper parameters associated with GPs. I did read a working paper from Nando a few years back that used a random forest as a prior - I can't seem to find it now. BTW - John Langford is program chair of this year's ICML over in Edinburgh. If you are in the UK might be worth it to pop up and attend. Plus Chris Williams is there at Edinburgh, so maybe you can corner him about GPs. Although he has moved on from GPs - he still wrote (well, co-wrote) the book and is one of the smartest people I have ever met.

</comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't this method also (over) simplify? It goes into pseudo explorer mode anytime there is a >0 probability that the presumed worst cast is actually better than the presumed best/better case. Shouldn't there be a threshold to that process, so that the presumed worst case must have at least a (for example) .05 probability of being better before the algorithm gives it a shot?

</comment><comment><USER14> So am I getting this right?

(Edit) So the two steps to run are:

1\. Run a traditional A/B test until 95% confidence is reached. This is full exploration.

2\. Then, switch to the MAB after that, showing the better performing variant most of the time. As time increases, the display of the worse performing variants decreases.

<comment><USER15> Option 1 will NOT give you the correct answer. You CANNOT use confidence intervals as a stopping criteria. If you do this, you end up running many tests, and then you need to apply a multiple test correction to account for this. Otherwise you run a VERY HIGH risk of picking the wrong result.

I emphasize, because this is a common problem made by A/B test practitioners. For a fuller discussion of the problems, check out the papers by Armitage (frequentist) and Anscombe (Bayesian) on the topic. Or see my summary of the issue here:

[http://blog.custora.com/2012/05/a-bayesian-approach-to-ab- te...](http://blog.custora.com/2012/05/a-bayesian-approach-to-ab-testing/)

<comment><USER14> Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant run #1 first, then run #2. I didn't mean them as different options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What, now it's indirect argument over HN?

Dear UX specialists with no knowledge of statistics: you can use the MAB algo with 2 choices, no problem. And it is a better way of getting 'the right choice'.

Dear statisticians: there's more to life (and to UX) than A/Bing (or MABing) everything

<comment><USER17> _> What, now it's indirect argument over HN?_

This has obviously been standard procedure for a while now. I see this on almost a daily basis. Afraid your comment on a HN thread won't get enough traction? Make a blog post instead, meant expressly for submission to HN (or reddit, or ...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My guess is 98% of developers use neither.

<comment><USER3> You are, sadly, overshooting the worldwide population of A/B testing developers by at least an order of magnitude. Great news for my consulting business, bad news for everyone else.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Y Combinator Focus? - <AUTHOR>

I really appreciate this community. Found it through PG and "Hackers & Painters" originally, and simply consumed passively before registering for an account several months ago.
I wanted to ask before I start making too many posts. Is news.ycombinator.com biased toward Y-Combinator people and the startup school schedule? And if so, would it be more polite to stay quiet?
The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something. But I would like to participate, even as an IRL outsider.
Edit: The guidelines and community feedback, are really very clearly biased toward the 'informative/thought-provoking'. I am hoping the algorithms detect that more and more alongside account aging and points gained. Cool.
Thanks for the replies. Pretty close to my best guess. <comment><USER2> We have people from all walks of life here, from Silicon Valley startups in the ramen-munching phase to CEOs at companies with eight figures of revenues to a wide, wide assortment of folks with an interest in business and/or technology. Folks are generally pretty friendly and interesting things about non-YC companies get voted up all the time. Don't feel the need to be quiet just because you're not in YC.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say there's an enormous bias, (ycxxx) in the title gets a lot of early upvotes. Not to mention the obsession with PG - even his tweets get submitted, and fast.

But those stories aren't that frequent and once they get their friends' votes they're competing on a pretty level playing field ... if the submission's not genuinely interesting it won't last.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, right. This post is an example. :)

<comment><USER4> I think he meant the posts like "YCS09" etc. from companies that have completed or a part of YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something."

There are no algorithms that care about total karma.

<comment><AUTHOR> I jumped to a conclusion there.

Curious--does anyone have a ratio of the total number of submissions to the "submissions that stick" for lack of a better term?

I posted a couple of fascinating (to me) articles that were pretty quickly subsumed.

Given the number of fascinating articles/resources that hold up on the front- page, the world is an even more interesting place than I thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a lot of overlap between the HN community and the YC community, largely due to PG's leadership role in both; but of the people on HN only a very small minority have been through YC.

Welcome! You'll learn pretty quickly what sort of stories get voted up and which ones get killed by the editors; let that be your guide to content.

</comment><comment><USER7> Most of us are IRL outsiders. Maybe back when HN was started it was an inside club for YC folks, but now no way. The top 4 guys on the leaderboard--and probably four of the most respected HN users--are a security guru in Chicago, a couple freelance developers from Pittsburgh and Europe, and an expat living in Japan making his living from a bootstrapped bingo card software company. It's way more respected here to be an interesting person than to be a YC insider, or failing that, to be a person who says interesting things.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just start posting. If you get a lot of downvotes, try to figure out what you are doing wrong. Learn as you go. You'll be fine.

<comment><USER9> Also, don't let downvotes discourage you. It's an experience to get a downvote on HN. Just try figure out why, a lot of the time it's unwarranted, a lot of the time it isn't. Learn from it as Mz says ;)

<comment><USER10> Downvotes are often from people who disagree with you, without being able to articulate why.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, I think that's the minority case here. I've rarely seen comments go to 0 or lower unless they were "objectively" bad, e.g. weren't interesting, were insulting, etc.

<comment><USER12> you forgot to mention smart ass remarks or lame attempts at humor. That's an easy way to get down voted. I've seen down votes also for opinions which go against the grain but those are rare, if you down vote something like that, at least post a reply.

Be polite, reread your post (I don't always do it) and bring something new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I submitted a very nice article about PG by forbes, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820805> which went unnoticed. That tells much.

<comment><USER3> That was a dupe though: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813445>

You have to be fast if you want to submit anything PG says. It kind of reminds me of XKCD on digg a couple years ago.

<comment><USER13> why it didn't go as up vote to existing ? wondering.

<comment><USER14> It won't show as an upvote to the other story if the URL is different, for example:

      domain.com/nameofarticle

vs

      domain.com/nameofarticle?view=singlepage</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/ <comment><USER2> > It's tough to con Reddit.

That is debatable, Reddit has been conned a lot in the past.

 _But_ one error when trying to con the site seems to be too much information: many users apparently love snooping around and digging (and are pretty good at it), so giving more information initially makes claims more credible, but also gives more strings on which users can pull risking unraveling the whole thing.

Furthermore, there's a high level of dependency on the subreddit in which things go "viral", some subreddits are far more credulous than others (and credulity depends on the subject matter as well, you can get both /r/atheism and /r/libertarian to lap up claims unchecked, but it's unlikely the same claim will work on both) (this also means hoaxes are far more likely to unravel as they spread outside of a given subreddit and get wider exposure in the community)

<comment><USER3> Exactly, the hive mind at work, for example: [http://gawker.com/5751581/misguided-internet-vigilantes- atta...](http://gawker.com/5751581/misguided-internet-vigilantes-attack- college-students-cancer-fundraiser)

Also every once and a while a hoax reaches the front page, usually some highly suspect family situation or someone finding a treasure chest in their basement and asking reddit what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speaking of Reddit, People on HN often jab them when they discipline others for violating community norms, as in "This isn't Reddit. Please keep on topic."

Not once have I seen the Reddit jab helpful. I've only seen it superfluous and petty. I like people saying "Please keep on topic," but why jab another community? I don't even use Reddit.

I say this hoping it helps people simply remind others of this community's norms without needlessly jabbing others.

<comment><USER5> It's not a jab. It's just different community norms. HN wouldn't be HN if people were allowed to open up 10-level nested comedy threads. If I want to read those - and sometimes I do - I know I can go to Reddit.

<comment><USER2> > It's not a jab.

It is a jab.

> It's just different community norms.

There are no "community norms" for reddit, each subreddit has its own norms and things which work in one may get all your comments mod-deleted in an other.

<comment><USER6> To be specific, jokes are much more welcome in /r/programming than they are here, which invites Eternal September.

I think the pro-business mindset helps as well. People start complaining when the depth that they remember isn't present in the discussions of the internet community (sometimes the gap is only perception/nostalgia).

I am pretty much a poster child for someone who threatens HN culture. While I am deeply interested in the intersection of computers and human enterprise, I came over from Reddit, and I don't have any practical experience to speak of. There are many times here (or in /r/askscience) when someone leaves an opening for a joke and I feel like I just _have_ to make it. I'm sure that originally the impulse was tied to the possibility that a lot of people would like it, but now it's merely a conditioned response.

At any rate, my tendency to temporarily believe that my youngish impulsiveness would be a positive thing for the community make me an outsider here, but I don't want to change that.

I know that that having a clearly defined purpose helps a community to be strong and it isn't worth making HN (or /r/askscience) more like me if it jeopardizes their existence.

What's more, once in a great while, when it _really_ is time to make a joke I've watched them go by unmolested.

Edit: I'm sorry about the double post. I was having trouble typing on my phone.

Edit2: In response to your comment below, I'd say that people who are pro- business are probably less introverted than I am. Given that assumption, I'd say they'd be less motivated to make those kneejerk comments because they're probably getting enough social validation elsewhere. Granted, those are assumptions layered on assumptions, but at least that was what I meant

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I posted some comments below laying out the reasons why I don't like this. I got heavily downvoted and the majority opinion is clearly against me, saying essentially that he is a great teacher with the white hat for teaching everyone not to believe what they read on the internet. I guess I ought to gracefully admit defeat and bow out to oblivion.

Still, I cannot resist making one final farewell appeal. Consider carefully the near future, when prof. Kelly will have produced a flood of busy graduates, all experts at disinformation. What is the likely outcome of his program if it succeeds? It is not that hard to guess. You will get what you applaud: you will no longer be able to trust anything you read, ever. You seem to consider this to be of some great educational value but I must admit that the value escapes me.

Let me extrapolate one step further. What is the point of reading anything if it is all likely to be false? Exactly. Stop reading and sit on your dumb asses watching TV.

<comment><USER8> >Still, I cannot resist making one final farewell appeal. Consider carefully the near future, when prof. Kelly will have produced a flood of busy graduates, all experts at disinformation.

As others have pointed out, masters of disinformation have existed long before this class existed. To take just one example, if you're left-leaning, Fox News (to liberals, Faux News). If you agree with Fox News, then you'll consider everything from the the "Mainstream Media" (or "Lamestream Media") to be disinformation.

Furthermore, there is a grand tradition in explaining about how the "darks arts" are done so you can defend against it. In order to devise defenses to nerve gas, you need to understand how to effectively deploy nerve gas. If you want to understand how politicians and other masters of disinformation use statistics, the book "How To Lie Using Statistics" is an invaluable guide.

> What is the likely outcome of his program if it succeeds? It is not that > hard to guess. You will get what you applaud: you will no longer be able to > trust anything you read, ever.

Yes, this. You should _never_ blindly trust anything that you read. That's what critical thinking is all about. The point of reading is to find alternate points of view and information that you might not have known before, but everything should be cross-checked to some degree. In some cases you can trust the source because you've previously found the source to be authoritative (say, a professor teaching a class).

But the point of what people are trying to point out with respect to wikipedia is that just because one Wikipedia article has been proven to have a reliable secondary source of information, aggregating multiple primary sources into a handy reference article, is absolutely no guarantee that that particular article will continue to be reliable, or that any other Wikipedia article is guaranteed to be reliable. Using Wikipedia to expose yourself to something that you didn't know before: Good. Not cross-checking anything you read at Wikipedia with primary source material to learn more and to verify the facts that you found in the Wikipedia article? Foolhardy.

<comment><USER7> >In some cases you can trust the source because you've previously found the source to be authoritative (say, a professor teaching a class)

Allow me to laugh. This is a professor teaching a class (how to lie)! I guess that makes him an authority on lying but can someone like that be said to be authoritative? Or all other professors, by association?

I must say that I accept many of the valid responses here, thank you. His classes no doubt are educational and one should, of course, check the sources.

However, he is taking practical assignments too far. You can teach students to beware of liers without them first having to lie themselves. It does not seem like the skill of a great teacher to make them actually lie to the public. More like a desperate stunt from a teacher running out of ideas and morals.

Understading is one thing and I agree with all that but in terms of your examples, he is demanding the equivalent of his students actually deploying the nerve gas against unsuspecting people. (Thank you for suggesting that hyperbola)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm ashamed to admit in my youth I created a fake Wikipedia page in a couple hours (between 3 and 5AM) that lasted for months before a friend of mine accidentally exposed it as fake by being silly in the talk section.

It was flagged as dubious because the date that the fictional piece the fictional composer I created had supposedly been performed the day of a new Pope's election didn't match the date on that Pope's wikipedia article.

Turns out we had the right date and the Pope's wikipedia article the wrong one. So our hoax ended up resulting in another article being corrected. From then on, anyone who looked at the talk page saw that someone had already flagged the page as dubious but that it had been resolved in our favour. This gave the hoax quite a bit of credibility. Made me realize how easy it is to create convincing hoaxes.

<comment><USER10> Or the person who had an extra name added by a Wikipedia editor, which was then copied by mainstream media. The hoaxers then used that as a citation, creating "truth". Wow!

<comment><USER11> Well, wikipedia doesn't talk about truth, but about verifiability. That's a bit of a problem because most people (even most wp editors) don't get the difference. Certainly people visiting wp expect it to be both truthful and verifiable.

<comment><USER12> Well "verifiability" means the ability to show that it is true. Something verifiable is demonstrably true. WP verifiability means something different. 'being cited as true by a trusted source' seems close but you can't blame users for Wikipedia's misuse of a word. Of course that just shifts the focus to what is a trusted source ... presumably the answer is one that is true ...

I can prove it too ... <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verify> [lol!].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if you also find this professor really really objectionable?

I certainly do. First off, any bona-fide academic ought to have respect for the truth, not deliberately set out to build his carreer on lies. One has to wonder: does he also encourage lies in academic publications? Does the publishing outlet, i.e. traditional paper journal versus the internet justify that much difference to the principle of being honest in research? I think anyone this confused about the necessity of the truth should not be an academic. If I was his colleague, I would support steps to have his tenure terminated forthwith.

Secondly, the techniques prof. Kelly teaches and employs are classical disinformation tools, as practiced by Hitler, KGB and other such illustrious preceptors of his. Presumably some of his college funding is intended 'for the public good'. I really question prof. Kelly's idea that expanding the skills base in the disinformation field is for the public good.

Thirdly, and most importantly, one has to ask: what is his real agenda? Clearly it is to disable/discredit/damage/destroy the free exchange of valid information on the internet. If there ever was a real 'information terrorist' it must be him.

<comment><USER13> I agree that this behaviour is quite objectionable, though for a subtly different reason.

In particular it's not a case of malicious spreading of misinformation, it seems that in the case that the hoax worked the lies were deleted.

Rather it's a case of abusing a public resource. It feels to me somewhat like training a group of school-children to play Rugby on a village bowling green. Sure the damage to the grass will be undone over time, and sure the chance of knocking over any real old ladies is very small; but it's still an irreverent gesture that shows a dangerous lack of respect.

In the real world we have checks to make sure this kind of behaviour doesn't get too out of hand; on the internet we've so far managed to avoid the need. I hope that continues.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I can relate to that but I think the quaint imagery of a village green does not nearly capture the insiduousness of this. He enourages his students to do their best to make the hoax work. Deleting the lies later, while laudable, does not undo the real (intended?) damage to the reputation of the internet.

I really struggle to think of positive educational outcomes from teaching students to pull off successful disinformation exploits.

<comment><USER14> > Deleting the lies later, while laudable, does not undo the real (intended?) > damage to the reputation of the internet

Your problem is that people might start to mistrust things they read on the internet? That's surely the opposite of a problem.

<comment><USER7> Yes, call me old-fashioned but I just don't like the idea of the internet becoming totally discredited and useless.

<comment><USER15> You're setting up a false dichotomy. You seem to feel that either the Internet is a place that is 100% trust-worthy (so much so that you can take off your critical-thinking cap), or it's a place where everything is a lie. The point here is that people should learn that they can't blindly believe things just because they read it on the web, not that lies on the web will render it completely useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So these students failed. A new batch will be back next year, and they'll not slip up this way - they could well be creating wikipedia aliases already in preparation for taking the course later, for example, or using other collaborative sources.

The key thing is that reddit hasn't just saved us. It hasn't just demonstrated you cannot put out bias and falsehood on the Internet. Its just whacked a mole because the students were, well, students.

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's about success or failure.

What's more interesting is how the different communities responded to the attempted hoaxes. This can help us understand how different hoaxes, memes etc. are spread and how they are, or aren't, debunked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel strangely compelled to check on Reddit if this really happened ;-)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd rather have a link to the actual Atlantic web page for this story, not the Print view. It's at [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how- th...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the- professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/)

I think directly linking to the print view is dishonest: telling the Atlantic you plan to print an article, and instead posting it to HN is essentially stealing their ad revenue.

PS: Even if you claim ads are distracting and this is actually a service to the community, I'd rather install ad blockers and make such decisions myself.

<comment><USER2> I often prefer print pages for BI-type "articles" where 300 works are split across 5 different pages, but yeah in this case the article is a single page originally, and the site's own chrome isn't overbearing. There was no reason to link to the print version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The top of the page says, "...helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet". It makes it sound like the ►internet is a different reality. The internet is just a reflection of what is already going on in the world. What people do offline is what people do online.

</comment><comment><USER21> How big a feat is fooling Wikipedia? I doubt I look 50 pages per year.

<comment><USER22> It's not hard. A friend of mine nicknamed a very rare disease on Wikipedia. A few months to a year later a news organization used the Wikipedia page's nickname for the disease when writing an article for it. He then cited the use of that nickname on the Wikipedia page with the news article, and thus, the nickname had a validated citation, and will possibly never go away.

<comment><USER23> Obligatory xkcd refernce: <http://xkcd.com/978/>

<comment><USER24> Now you'll have to wonder if the events in the parent post were inspired by the xkcd comic you cited. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are the common elements in our dreams the result of basic biology? (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/77/underworlds/why-you-keep-dreaming-about-being-naked-rp <comment><USER2> As they said in the comments:

> Whenever you are in the mood to find out what you already know, strike up a > conversation with an experimental psychologist.</comment>


Ask HN: How to report a website that streams tv channels illegally? - <AUTHOR> I came across an advertisement which I found disturbing.
An online wesbite that apparently offers streaming of TV channels such as HBO and sports etc like premiership.
The person owning the website is trying to sell off through fb etc saying the services he provides are legit.
I tried to find a way to report his site to e.g Paypal which is the form of payment on that website, godaddy which apparently owns the domain.
Nothing so far, I can't seem to be able to somehow let the authorities to know about it.
Could you please help me on what to do? (I reside in the UK)
P.S: I usually come across pirated content and am fine. Reason I want to report this site is that its trying to get people to pay bundles for like £150 etc to watch pirated content, and I feel many will fall for this. <comment><USER2> There used to be some kind of automated reporting form at [https://www.fact- uk.org.uk/](https://www.fact-uk.org.uk/) but I haven't checked in a while. (I was trying to report someone for singing "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant back before that case was settled.) Another thing you could try is posing as a potential subscriber who isn't smart enough to understand PayPal and ask them if they'll accept a payment by bank transfer. When you have their bank account details you can report them to the police. I did that once to a craigslist property rental scammer and the police wrote back to me that they didn't have enough time to follow it up, but I'll bet copyright infringement is a much higher priority of theirs.</comment>


British Library warns of 'black hole' in history if websites & files not preserved - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1127362/British-Library-warns-black-hole-history-websites-digital-files-preserved.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this article interesting because my parents just moved to a new house after 20 years. The move unearthed photos that hadn't been seen in decades and prompted hours of fun memories and discussions about good times past.

Those discussions happened because the pictures were there in huge boxes and in our faces as we sorted through their stuff. It's hard to imagine that same thing happening if the pictures had been locked away on a DVD or hard drive somewhere.

I know archive.org is doing a good job of cataloging the history of web sites, but what about all the un-archived pictures that people take and leave on their hard drives until they crash? This article makes an interesting point.

</comment><comment><USER2> There are some benefits to digital content that might help work against the "black hole" effect:

1\. It's much easier to create copies of digital documents. Looking at my own data that I consider important, many photos I've taken of my family exist on probably dozens of machines around the world belonging to relatives and friends. Of course this also happened in the pre-digital age, but I don't think to the same extent.

2\. It's easier to create digital content in the first place, so there will be more of it. How many photos were snapped during the construction of, say, Taipei 101 as compared to the construction of the Empire State building? I don't know, but I'd guess orders of magnitude more. So, even if many are lost and many are of low quality, there is still likely to be some preserved historic record.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stuff gets lost all the time. Deal with it.</comment>


An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30815/An-Anti-Reverse-Engineering-Guide

<comment><USER2> As someone who has decided to do all (or most of) his personal coding in public, I must say the idea of spending time and effort making sure no one reverse engineers your stuff is kind of funny.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It seems like a big waste of time and energy.

I suspect most of these techniques are defeated in one fell swoop by debugging the process from kernel mode and/or under virtualization.

At best, you're only going to delay reversers who aren't as experienced as this high school senior (and can't find articles on codeproject.com).

<comment><USER4> To be fair he does say clearly that all of these would be reasonably easy to bypass.

Perhaps he needed a better, but less catchy, title. "Some tricks that will slightly delay reverse-engineering" or "What I know about making reverse engineering a little bit harder than it needs to be".

<comment><USER5> If you read past the title and into the article content, you'll see that he says "In this article, I plan to travel a bit deeper into the interesting world of reverse engineering and explore some more intermediate level techniques for annoying reverse engineers."

He's right - these techniques basically just annoy any mildly competent reverse engineer.

<comment><USER6> Of course there is the 'knowing you're being reverse engineered and doing something else'. I don't doubt for a minute people who write sensitive code, be it malware or DVD decoders, might simply act differently if they thought a debugger was involved, not so much as not act at all. Some of these techniques could be used there.

That being said, the more interesting thing is poking around in the inner bits of the machine and seeing how it comes together. Highly recommended for anyone serious about wanting to know how the machine does what it does.

If you want to practice on code that is easily obtained I suggest you poke around the World of Warcraft rootkit code that it uses to prevent people from cheating at WoW.

<comment><USER7> Detecting debuggers and altering behavior is so much the oldest trick in the book that it is actually covered in depth in this Codeproject article (Codeproject is often unusually well written, and so is this article, but be clear that this is really basic stuff he's talking about).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, nothing new. If it runs, it can be cracked. I say it as a reverser (legal) with more than 10 years of exp. So, instead of investing money/time into the protection mechanisms, it's better to use the resources to improve your software. Yet well-thought custom protection (i.e. not ASProtect, Armadillo, etc..) can be harder, but it's all the same crackable.

<comment><USER9> It is true the techniques in the article are nothing new. However, this comment is a knee jerk reaction and largely misleading. The notion that something being crackable is a failure is incorrect. The time a protection scheme needs to hold up varies depending on the industry, but the economics of DRM to not require it to last forever. For video games it's a month or two (Starcraft 2 sold 75% of total copies told to date within the first month). Also, there are several DRM schemes deployed in production today that are acknowledged by those in the field as quite effective, namely BD+ and DirecTV's scheme. Indeed, as far as I know there hasn't been a break in DirecTV for over half a decade.

As far as malware goes, virtualization obfuscators are the current state of the art. They are a fundemental advancement in packing. Up until virtualization obfuscators, all other packers had the weakness where at some point the unprotected program would end up in memory. This weakness is easily exploitable (ala VxClass, see Recon 2010 for an easily digestible talk). Virtualization obfuscators are still beatable with manual reverse engineering (see Rolles WOOT 2009) and some effort has been made to automate the process (see Wenke Lee's group at Oakland 2009). But when a packing scheme forces you to hire reverse engineers who know what symbolic execution is, you know that you've substantially raised the bar.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure DirecTV's scheme is entirely relevant, because it revolves around protected hardware rather than protected software.

The idea behind DirecTV is that the crypto code runs entirely in hardware the user can never see, heavily protected physically - a protection method which isn't possible for software on most modern x86 machines. Plus, satellite providers have a distinct advantage in that their content needs to be protected only in real time.

I do give kudos to DirecTV for managing to create a technology that's less of a sieve than Nagravision (although that might also have to do with DirecTV suing everyone who dared go near their smartcards into oblivion in the early 2000s), but they play a totally different (and, IMO, much easier) game than software protectors do.

As for BD+, with HDCP broken so widely I don't really see a point to breaking it. Scene groups can source movies of equal or greater quality from many other sources, even using decrypted HDMI as a last resort, before needing to care about actually exploiting the BD+ VM.

<comment><USER11> _"Plus, satellite providers have a distinct advantage in that their content needs to be protected only in real time."_

I could be wrong here, and it's been a while since I missed with Echostar/Dish hardware, but DVR recordings are stored on the hard drive in raw, encrypted form and then played back through the decryption hardware.

<comment><USER10> Yet another mistake Dish made - IMO, every iteration of Nagravision is end-to- end pretty poorly implemented.

At any rate, I was speaking more to the practical aspects than the technical ones. In the eyes of a DRM writer, a game needs to be protected for at least a few weeks (launch purchase window), and once it's cracked once, it's pretty much the end - the game is in the wild, and the damage is done, because what's being pirated is _the game itself_.

On the flip side, what satellite providers are protecting isn't really the _content_ \- it's the ability to display the content in at a certain point of presence as a stream. Public exhibition (bars, clubs) and live PPV fights are the big game for satellite encryption, not Joe Public (or Joe Pirate) watching his shows. They'll be available to pirates immediately after they're aired through other means (stations, screeners, stripping HDCP off of HDMI) anyway.

That's why I think the satellite game is easier - not technically, but practically. As a satellite TV provider, even if your DRM can be removed post facto, the benefit to the pirate is greatly diminished (and the downside to you, as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Impressive article by a current high school senior; I wish I wrote at this level in high school!

Note that it is from 2008.

<comment><USER7> There is something about high school seniors and low-level code like this. From numerous observations over the last 15 years or so. I think it might be because your first 5 years in the profession serves in part to teach you what technical issues to be "scared" of, and high school kids haven't learned that yet.

<comment><USER3> I certainly did my lowest level stuff (building PC ISA hardware from scratch) in high school. Mainly it was out of necessity as I didn't have the money for the real hardware. Other folks I've known who have gotten into ASM in high school did so for game cracking/cheating/modding, also a form of necessity.

Any* sane professional development organization is going to try to minimize the amount of time their developers spend writing ASM by hand. There's almost always a higher level tool that's more productive.

* Actually, I worked at a place where the main DOS product had been hand written entirely in x86 ASM. The sanity of continuing such a practice into the 90's is an open question. Rumor had it that even the Windows versions of Wordperfect were written in ASM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is probably a very naive question but can't any of these measures be easily bypassed by running the observed software in a VM like KVM and just attaching a debugger like GDB directly to the VM?

<comment><USER10> They absolutely can be. At the time this article was written (2008), VMs weren't as in vogue as they are today, VM-attached debugging wasn't as mature, and the leading "ring-0" / above-the-kernel debugger (SoftICE) had just been discontinued.

Today, there are a host of new measures designed to thwart in-VM debugging, but the playing field differs substantially from the one present when this article was written, and your observation is a good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And my all time favorite technique...an army of lawsuit happy lawyers!</comment>


This Is How We Fix Silicon Valley's Sexual Harassment Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40437872/this-is-how-we-fix-silicon-valleys-sexual-harassment-problem <comment><USER2> Ouch, that lede.

" then closer to the lesser end might be things like holding meetings at strip clubs, company cultures where team bonding means getting black-out drunk, having an almost exclusively male leadership team, or naming all your conference rooms after male scientists" ... _this_ is close to the lesser end?! We have a lot of work to do.

Overall I appreciate the article's approach and recommendations. There are unfortunately no easy answers but we can work to make things better around us.

(Internally we intentionally renamed our conference rooms diversely, avoiding that last mistake. It would have been easy to make though!)</comment>


Power from wireless signals [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qpd7WnZ4sg <comment><USER2> Cool technology, but interviewer was obnoxious and rude.</comment>


Fed aid program for corporations won't require them to preserve jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/28/federal-reserve-bond-corporations/ <comment><USER2> Words like "aid" or "stimulus" or "relief" are one word arguments. Who doesn't like aid? These are marketing BS words. We need to use more clear language like "economic transfer". This puts us in the right frame of mind to discuss who the money is being transferred from and to.

"Pardon me, Average Joe Taxpayer. We noticed you haven't been purchasing any tickets on American Airlines lately. In order to help you with this problem, we're going to take money from you and give it to American Airlines. What's that? No, you won't be getting free flights, you silly goose. We're just going to give them your money and you get nothing in return."

<comment><USER3> The word you want is "loan." The Fed makes loans, not grants. Maybe you have this confused with the stimulus bills Congress has been passing?

There is also no direct connection to taxes, since the Fed creates any money it needs.

<comment><USER2> Deflating the value of my dollars by increasing the money supply is no different than taking money right out of my pocket.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't, or at least not yet. Increasing the money supply might _eventually_ cause inflation, but it's not a mechanical link and doesn't happen automatically. For example, the money might be paid back, and that decreases the money supply again.

Also, for inflation to happen, people will have to try to buy more stuff than what's available, and merchants will have to raise prices. Although we've seen shortages for a few things, that kind of overall spending is unlikely to happen until the recovery phase when people are feeling confident again.

Other than the staggering amounts, it's not really different from any other bank making a large loan.

<comment><USER2> There's more to inflation than CPI. For example, the entire stock market is being inflated right now with these dollars. We should be experiencing deflation because many classes of assets should be crashing harder than they are. Keeping things steady when they should be deflating is still taking my money through inflationary forces.

<comment><USER3> There aren't many people who benefit from a stock market crash, which is why the Fed is propping things up. I happen to have money to invest when the price is low enough, but that's unusual, and complaining about not having that opportunity (yet) would be "world's smallest violin" territory.

An opportunity cost is not a real cost. There are always missed opportunities.

<comment><USER2> Stocks are not the only thing that would be falling rapidly. Real estate is another. What's happening here is that the Fed is making sure that the people who are rich and powerful stay rich and powerful. Otherwise, why not let average people get functionally infinite loans at zero interest? Why can a bank/corporation sell their depressed assets to the Fed at before crash prices but I can't? Every privilege given to incumbent wealth is a middle finger to the average worker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In the interview, Mnuchin also said many companies are ceasing stock > buybacks and are likely to use the additional capital to retain workers.

So they are on the honor system.

> Some experts disputed that assertion. "Some companies have ceased buybacks > and dividends and some haven't. We shouldn't have to keep our fingers > crossed," Gelzinis said.

Is there a public list of the companies that took the aid?

Absent real restrictions on the loans, the next best option might be a website that shows the amount borrowed by those companies next to any layoffs, dividends, exec bonuses, or share buybacks they did while taking the loans.

<comment><USER5> Government bailouts should come with very onerous conditions so they are used only as last resort. But I guess 2008 should have taught us that this is not going to happen.

<comment><USER6> Government bailouts should be in the form of stock purchases. Want a bailout? Government owns part of the company. Want to issue dividends after the bailout? Government gets some. Too many bailouts, and the company is now state-owned.

<comment><USER7> taking equity seems to pop up with every story on corporate bailouts.

the problem with taking equity is that it's not simply an income stream, it's a responsibility. you become a stakeholder and need to manage the asset lest it devalue in ways you don't like. it's messy and much more criticizable, something politicians and bureaucrats loathe.

fixed-income assets like loans are much simpler, and have the added benefit of naturally having higher liquidation preference (bondholders get paid before shareholders).

loans with performance penalties/incentives are cleaner to implement, but the problem there is lobbying that waters down penalties and magnifies incentives.

there's no simple solution, including taking equity. i'd love every loan to have a clause stipulating no executive stock incentives or share buy-backs for 7 years post-loan, but no one is lobbying for that.

<comment><USER8> Loan means the company will be required to pay it back at some point. Suddenly increasing a company's liabilities by millions or billions, not to mention the interest burden, might have major significance for the long-term survivability of said company. That's fine if you only care about easing the short-term shock of the lockdown, but it could very well slow down the post-lockdown recovery.

<comment><USER9> These loans can be forgiven if stipulations are followed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You CAN'T preserve jobs, given the economic catastrophe that is occurring. Demand for many products and services have fallen off a cliff. Air travel is but one example. It's not like demand is going to recover overnight for the airline industry. It will take many years to recover. They will have to pare back flights and they will likely have to consolidate carriers in order to remain profitable.

Propping up zombie companies does nobody any good. It just leads to capital destruction.

<comment><USER11> If the government has required your legal business to close, you should be compensated for that. Just as if they take your land to build a road, they have to give you the fair market value of the land. Otherwise, if you're not being compensated, you should be free to stay open.

These are only "zombie companies" because they've been directly shuttered by the government.

<comment><USER12> I don't think this analogy is applicable. The government hasn't banned air travel, and the drop in demand is more of a second order effect as the result of minimizing potentially detrimental behavior (spreading the virus).

In general I don't believe the government is required to compensate businesses if regulation results in loss of business and possibly the loss of the business. As an example, look at CFC bans and fuel/emissions regulations. A company may suffer a loss and/or go out of business because of a regulation, but they can't demand compensation for that from the government.

<comment><USER13> The government has, in fact, banned most international air travel.

<comment><USER12> The US government hasn't banned most international travel for legal residents. There's a list of restricted countries that require legal residents coming from them to only go to specific airports with enhanced entry screening.

It has banned entry by foreign nationals from those countries, but I wouldn't call that banning most international travel.

[https://www.dhs.gov/coronavirus/protecting-air-travelers- and...](https://www.dhs.gov/coronavirus/protecting-air-travelers-and-american- public)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most comments here focus on the question if "who deserves what?". This is a stupid question, as it becomes a tautology revolving around how people define the word "deserves". A more intelligent question is "what should we do to have the best outcome?". Is it better to have more companies around to provide goods, services and jobs, or more people around with stable housing and pocket money to purchase goods and services?

<comment><USER9> In an economy driven mostly by consumer spending at the bottom, definitely the latter. This is almost a chicken and egg scenario, but not quite.

You can give a company money to hire people and make product X, but it doesn't do you any good if no one has money to buy product X, or most people see X as a luxury and are tightening belts. You can counter this by giving more companies money to hire more people, so that the workers at company producing Y have money to buy product X. Then it becomes difficult to determine what companies to prop up, and which to avoid. Inevitably, who gets propped up are the industry leaders, not the tiny players, and that sector consolidates and contracts.

A better approach would be to inject the money directly at the bottom. Let consumers make these picks on which companies are economically productive and should be supported, let the free market sort this out by adding liquidity at the consumer level. 70% of our global economy is driven by consumer spending, not by blue chips paying off their corporate debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Warm, trickle-down economics. The people clearly aren't bothered enough by losing their jobs or receiving pittance consolation prizes, or they would've revolted by now.

<comment><USER16> Ironically, the people who I've come to respect recently are the ones protesting the quarantine. Don't get me wrong they are stupid but the fact that they are protesting something they believe is wrong says a lot about the people who have been exploited by the system and did nothing about it.

<comment><USER15> _Rebel without a cause, rebel without a clue._

Barking up the wrong tree is either virtue-signaling, divide-and-conquered tribalism, a failure of moral courage, and/or a failure of critical-thinking skills. It's easier for most people to make pointless gestures or scapegoat certain groups than attack the root causes of their misery... and there's no strategic thinking involved.

The obvious matter for everyone with a net balance sheet less than eight figures is that small segment of society whose greed and entitlement has greatly outpaced their respect and decency towards others and the planet. The vast majority of people are too afraid of the corporate state's militaristic violence potential or too complicit in relative comfort to rock the proverbial boat. In inverted totalitarian societies, you get deplatformed or harassed at airports; in totalitarian societies, 70-some students and teachers get delivered by the police to other criminal gangs for disposal in the hills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://outline.com/rJ9PVJ](https://outline.com/rJ9PVJ) , b/c archive.is wasn't working for me.

<comment><USER18> archive doesn't work if you use CloudFlare 220.127.116.11 for your DNS because archive screws with CloudFlare DNS requests for their own reasons. Top answer is archive's side, second answer is CloudFlare's side: [https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why- does-...](https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why- does-1-1-1-1-not-resolve-archive-is)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We need a new plan. Every single job before-covid (BC) is not coming back. Even if we opened the country at 100% tomorrow not every job will come back. There's a paranoia that's set into the American psyche that will take years to adjust.

<comment><USER9> It's pretty sad that this is glossed over so much. Plenty of business have folded already, let people go, broke their leases, liquidated what can be liquidated, and whoever held ownership got their portion of the remaining pie.

To bring these pieces back together, the lease, the workers, the investors, the money, is impossible. Some of these pieces are no longer in existence, and the economic conditions that enabled the company to form in the first place are no longer present. It's like trying to make a living tree from ash and smoke.

Some places have been hit particularly hard. In LA county, only 45% of people have jobs right now: [https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-17/usc- coro...](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-17/usc-coronavirus- survey)

<comment><USER20> "45% compared with 61% in mid-March"

"a significant majority of job losses, 67% nationally, were reported as temporary layoffs"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why does aid for corporations rely so heavily on loans or bonds? If a continuing source of frustration and dysfunction is that profits are privatized and losses are nationalized, and if the issue is that companies need an influx of cash, why do we not ask these companies to sell the federal government a stake? If the companies recover, why shouldn't the public benefit as a result of their investment?

The idea that the federal government would take an ownership stake in companies in exchange for this cash infusion seems like it's been a fringe left wing proposal -- but I don't understand why it's fringe.

<comment><USER22> Because the notion of government ownership of the means of production is, if not the very definition of leftism, at least a key ingredient.

Of course it's not that simple, but it _sounds_ that simple, and these days that's all that matters. People hear "government stake" and they reflexively think Cuba or Venezuela or China, not Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> To be fair, the Fed is buying corporate bonds, essentially lending them money with interest. Yeah, it helps businesses but then I doubt the Fed will lose any money in the long term.

<comment><USER24> The Fed can't really gain or lose money, as they create or destroy it at will. They're loaning with much lower interest than would be available on the open market, which is a direct subsidy.

<comment><USER23> >> _They 're loaning with much lower interest than would be available on the open market, which is a direct subsidy._

Sure the companies benefit, a lot. Warren Buffet might give them loans with 12% a year, the Fed at 3% or whatever. But what does the Fed lose? Nothing, if x% don't pay others will make up for it and USGOV will try to recoup from the failing biz whatever they can.

If they go bankrupt or downsize, what does USA gain, other than more unemployed people? So this is great IMO. Lend them money, as long as the money comes back, the Fed can create trillions and trillions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And yet again, privatized profits, socialized losses.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mirror: [http://archive.is/8ZWPY](http://archive.is/8ZWPY)

</comment><comment><USER27> I doubt the Fed has the legal authority to impose employment-related restrictions on companies.

<comment><USER28> It's not a restriction on the jobs, it's a restriction on the loan or even a restriction on conditions under which the loan will be forgiven without being paid back.

Edit: Now that I've seen a mirror of the article, this program is about buying bonds that have to be paid back with interest no matter what. Point stands about the conditions being on the buying side though.

<comment><USER27> > _it 's a restriction on the loan or even a restriction on conditions under > which the loan will be forgiven without being paid back_

I'm not sure the Fed has the power to do something like that. It's a huge expansion in purview, particularly with adding forgiveness conditions, in which case it's literally giving free money to private citizens without Congressional authorisation.</comment></comment></comment>


"They thought video on demand would be a killer app... but it never caught on" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHQxr2uOoKY&feature=player_detailpage#t=346s

<comment><USER2> OK. The late 80s, early 90s experiments with the cable company offering "interactive Tee Vee", a.k.a. "video on demand" never caught on. That was almost a cliche by 1995.

So what's different now? Netflix on-line streaming videos is quite nice, and so successful that the shadowy "movie studios" are starting to strangle it by making it pull movies every so often, etc etc.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention, er, YouTube.</comment></comment>


How Investigators Used the Doppler Effect to Trace Flight 370 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2014/03/25/how-investigators-used-the-doppler-effect-to-trace-flight-370/

<comment><USER2> Where is the plane?</comment>


If birds descended from dinosaurs, why are they warm-blooded? (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/11/23/3073903.htm <comment><USER2> This review article may also be of interest, "The evolution of concepts on the evolution of endothermy in birds and mammals" (2004): [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pawet_Koteja/publicatio...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pawet_Koteja/publication/216812468_The_evolution_of_concepts_on_the_evolution_of_endothermy_in_birds_and_mammals/links/0deec52e0e3159ee5f000000.pdf) [pdf]

<comment><USER3> Interestingly enough, some fish also have the ability to heat parts of their bodies and the opah/moohfish seems to be fully endothermic.

See: [http://io9.gizmodo.com/behold-the-first-fully-warm- blooded-f...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/behold-the-first-fully-warm-blooded-fish- known-to-scien-1704472418)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because dinosaurs were warm blooded.

<comment><USER5> Then why did they go extinct?

<comment><USER4> Due to a gigantic asteroid strike. Interestingly, crocodiles, which are cold blooded creatures, survived OK.

<comment><USER6> This article doesn't make the connection, but it's an interesting hypothesis to assume that all cold blooded creatures that were big couldn't maintain their body temperature after a drop in temperature from a comet impact, but that creatures that were small already were better in coping with fluctuations because of their smaller size.

<comment><USER7> The thought the latest theory was the entire earth was engulfed in flames from the impact and killed almost everything except stuff underground / underwater

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/dinopocalypse/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/dinopocalypse/)

<comment><USER8> I didn't listen to this audio, but if this were true, shouldn't geologist have already discovered a layer of ashes spanning the whole world?

<comment><USER7> they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This presupposes that dinosaurs are cold-blooded which apparently is a matter of dispute: [http://www.livescience.com/51162-dinosaurs-warm-blooded- grow...](http://www.livescience.com/51162-dinosaurs-warm-blooded-growth- rates.html)

<comment><USER10> No, in fact, the whole point is discussion of the evolution of warm- bloodedness among dinosaurs. Are you just guessing what the content might be based on the headline and reacting based on that guess?

<comment><USER11> > the whole point is discussion of the evolution of warm-bloodedness among > dinosaurs.

And the question of whether dinosaurs were really cold-blooded is obviously a part of that discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >> "What we can see in the fossil record is a number of bird-like theropods with hair-like structures and simple downy feathers. Being mostly small creatures [they must have generated their own body heat] and evolved hairs and feathers to help retain the body heat they generated," says Willis.

Is it possible that feathers evolved first, for some other reason, particularly mating displays, and, once evolved, opened the way to endothermy?

[Disclaimer: I'm completely not a biologist at all, so this is probably a stupid question, but I seriously wonder nonetheless]

Edit: Funny typo in the article. The phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs says: "Theropods (meating-eating dinosaurs)".

Aye. They're dinosaurs that meet you and eat you.

</comment><comment><USER13> "descended from" is kind of a common misconception about evolution. Birds and Dinosaurs have common ancestors. Earlier researchers thought they were closely related to reptiles, but more recent research has shown they have a lot more in common with birds.

It's still somewhat of a mystery as to why dinosaurs went extincted. A very large asteroid did hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous. But there was a lot of other thing happening on Earth at that time. Pangea was breaking up and major waterways/oceans were opening up at that time, so there was likely major climate changes occurring, incearse Volcanism, etc..

</comment><comment><USER14> I suspect it's because birds fly high and in cold wind, they had to evolve, or they would crash down like a frozen cube (at the very least stiff muscles and wings are not beneficial to flight). Quite the pressure from survival of the fittest.</comment>


Exploiting SHA-1-signed messages - <AUTHOR> http://journal.batard.info/post/2011/03/04/exploiting-sha-1-signed-messages

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's another post that discusses the same technique - extension attacks on SHA-1-signed messages. <https://blog.whitehatsec.com/hash-length-extension- attacks/>

The idea is that if a message is being signed using SHA-1 to prevent tampering from the user side, given an existing message/SHA-1 hash combo and the length of the secret key (which you can guess after a few trials), its possible to craft arbitrary messages and sign them without obtaining the secret key.

This came up while I was doing the Stripe CTF 2.0, and I thought it was an interesting read.</comment>


UX trends: 6 expert-based predictions for 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://whallalabs.com/ux-trends-2016/ <comment><USER2> > 2\. Artificial intelligence is going to be huge

Makes one slight refrence to AI but the rest of the section is all about VR.</comment>


Show HN: ZFS+Rsync = Time Machine in the cloud - <AUTHOR> http://blog.strongspace.com/announcing-strongspace-app-for-the-mac <comment><USER2> I'd like to try the service out, but before setting up another account, is there anyone who can compare it with Dropbox? Personally I'd like the 15GB plans (if I don't back up my photos), more than enough for my code, .ai, .pdf and .tex files, but the lack of snapshots (from the front page I understand that I can't go back in time without snapshots) in the cheap plan stops me.

I know that with a local version control repository I can get my files back from the past anyway, but in that case I don't see why I should switch from my free Dropbox account (currently I have 8GB of free storage, and I'm using 1.5 of them).

Any _hint_ would be much appreciated.

Edit: _help_

<comment><AUTHOR> The cheap plan actually does support snapshots. It might not forever - but if you sign up now it will.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Will it support snapshot forever if subscribe now, or only up to a certain moment? BTW why is it not stated in the homepage?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rolling out a new design - it will stay supported!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is super cool. Lightweight, off-site Time Machine-style snapshotted backups.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been using the beta and it really works well. rsync backup could not be easier than this!

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using this for a while now and it's absolutely brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER6> i first loved StrongSpace for the ability to programatically back things up.

now i love it for the automated snapshots.

who needs carbonite or mozy? this is backup done right for geeks

</comment><comment><USER7> this is awesome! I really hope this hits the fpage.</comment>


Ask HN: hosted service for building dashboards? - <AUTHOR>

We're looking for a tool to build a dashboard that can collect and present different types of data (sales numbers, technical numbers, uptime, indexed  pages in google or anything else) for internal use.<p>If it's hosted and user-friendly would be a +. This is definitely something a startup like ours can pay some money for. A startup opportunity, if any of you don't have a kick-ass solution out there somewhere already! <comment><USER2> I went through the same question myself a few weeks ago.

I was first searching in "Online Reporting" solutions, then I realized that maybe Google Analytics could cover most of the data I wanted to display in my dashboard if I used events correctly.

Unfortunately Google Analytics doesn't allow you to have a custom dashboard. So I started looking at third party solutions that use Google Analytics.

Could find anything that suited me enough and I developed my own dashboard that shows Sales (with diff from last week), New Users (with diffs) and a few more KPIs. (It also shows stats on the trending searches on my website).

Anyway, I allow anyone who is working on a elegant solution for startup dashboards to contact me, I will gladly answer any questions and serve as a guinea pig.

Cheers.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to pick your brain about your specific requirements for a solution. Would you mind shooting me an email if you're willing to chat about it? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss a possible solution. I don't know if what I'm working on would be a perfect fit, but I'm in a good position to pivot if there is a real need and my project can be modified to fill it well.

megamark16/gmail

</comment><comment><USER4> We are building an online data visualization tool, which may be of interest to you. Email me at email@example.com if you would like to discuss a solution.

</comment><comment><USER5> We are working on something similar to this. Keep your eye on <http://sanityapp.com>.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know of one myself but it is a great idea.

How would you have an external app access your private sales numbers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Since we already use salesforce.com for sales numbers, which is an external app, that wouldn't be a problem =)

<comment><USER7> Have you checked Salesforce's third-party add-ons?

[Though I'd rather see somebody on HN succeeding with this--we don't harness our collective power here as much as we could.]</comment></comment></comment>


Dunnnk – Beautiful Product Mockups on Demand - <AUTHOR> http://dunnnk.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

My name is Sam and I created Dunnnk to help other designers and developers make their products and designs look beautiful for presentations or production.

Creating the mockup generator to be as fast as it is was very challenging and I'm happy to share a few juicy details if you guys and gals dig it.

I would love to get your feedback if possible. You can either email me firstname.lastname@example.com or hit me up on twitter @samatrouh.

Cheers, Sam</comment>


Mojang challenged to Unreal Tournament CTF over trademark - <AUTHOR> http://mojangdontkillhandmadegoods.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/hey-mojang-lets-settle-this/

<comment><USER2> Oh, the delicious irony! For those of you who missed the original:

[http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9038258448/hey-bethesda-lets- se...](http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9038258448/hey-bethesda-lets-settle-this)

</comment><comment><USER3> These are quite different circumstances though. Bethesda were trying to apply their trademark in an overly broad way to an unconnected game, whereas the makers on your site are using Mojang's exact trademark to sell unlicensed goods based directly on their product. Had Bethesda actually taken Mojang to court it was debatable which way the case would go, although on balance most opinions I saw went with Mojang. In this case it's very much more clear cut.

<comment><USER2> It's also different from the Scrolls situation in that Goodsmiths isn't trying to claim the right to use the Minecraft trademark. They'd clearly prefer to put the crafters in touch with Mojang and set up some license deals to make things right, rather than doing a complete takedown. But if the two sides can't reach an agreement, they've already said they're going to deactivate the listings.

The way I see it, the challenge is harmless fun with no actual legal implications. Notch should totally take them up on it.</comment></comment>


CurdBee - simple billing solution for freelancers - <AUTHOR> http://curdbee.com

<comment><AUTHOR> CurdBee follows much simpler and straightforward approach than others. Its not overloaded with features, but provides the essentials you need. Also you could easily integrate it with Google Checkout and Paypal.

</comment><comment><USER2> Does this do anything better/faster/smarter than Freshbooks and Blinksale?

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks nice. I'd use it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Been done already. Many times.

</comment><comment><USER5> Really like the clean interface.! :)

</comment><comment><USER6> simple but attractive interface. Will be great for small & medium businesses specially.

</comment><comment><USER7> looks good !! ..</comment>


Making Radio Chips for Hell - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/making-radio-chips-for-hell <comment><USER2> These chips are not really for Hell, as Hell is much hotter than 500°C, see Healey, T (1979). A Refutation of the Proof That Heaven is Hotter Than Hell. The Journal of Irreproducible Results, 25(4), 17-18

</comment><comment><USER3> Well that felt like a tease. They're using silicon carbide and... That's all the detail she wrote.

<comment><USER4> SiC and GaN are being used for a fair number of parts these days for RF applications. It seems that the novel part of this paper is that the device worked up to 500C. The device worked for 3 hours with some degradation, likely due to Al electromigration from the metallization.

The acutal paper is here: [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8345290/](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8345290/)

<comment><USER5> I wonder if simply cooling isn't an option in those applications? I guess that'd depend on the chips power output. Otherwise you could just surround it in a really good insulator and pump residual heat out somehow (maybe can peltiers withstand such high temps using multiple stages?)

<comment><USER4> Cooling only works if you have somewhere to put the extra energy. Peltiers are inefficient to run and generate a ton extra heat. It's best to build something that can run with as little support needed.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, cooling would be quite bulky and require lots of extra energy. But for an environment like Venus cited (instead of small sensors), I think it should be a good option. The Carnot efficiency to cool from a Venutian environment (462C) down to 50C (reasonable chip temp) is a surprisingly good ~60%. In practice you might get 15% (? plus insulation leaking), that should still allow cooling a chip of less than ~1 watt of tdp without too much hassle inside a robot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very neat. Dealing with a thermal problem in a design right now at work; wish these were available for an 802.11 radio!

<comment><USER7> The issue is that your 802.11 radio needs digital logic, whereas this is just a dumb mixer. Which is, conceptually, just a dual-gate MOSFET run with a bias voltage to exhibit linearity and often without the body diode, in order to permit AC inputs. I do hope for SiC based VLSI, but this won't happen any time soon. One could probably run them pretty hot though, possibly without special cooling fans or such, or at temperatures that allow radiating the generated heat away into space, as long as it's not needed/used for anything better. This would also allow the recycling of waste heat from electronics for industrial processes and generating steam, for which we already know pretty well how to pipe it across a city in a city-scale central heating system.

Absorption cooling (often using ammonia/water as a mixture) could be powered by this and provide sufficiently low temperatures for airflow-free cooling of e.g. hard discs or other components where the temperature would kill them.

<comment><USER8> I think the VLSI is coming sooner than you expect! There are already teams trying to build a 4 bit microprocessor. And when they get the layering and packaging working, scaling is going to go a LOT faster than Moore's law did because so much of the technology from silicon will just be reusable.

[1] [http://www.imapsource.org/doi/abs/10.4071/2016-HITEC-242?cod...](http://www.imapsource.org/doi/abs/10.4071/2016-HITEC-242?code=imap- site)

[2] [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/meetings/archive/vexag_14/pre...](https://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/meetings/archive/vexag_14/presentations/21-Zetterling%20-SiC- Electronics.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Any predictions? How long until we get a 486 in SiC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OT, but the site doesn't load in firefox for me.

<comment><USER10> Hmmm. Fine in Firefox (59.0.2) for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> $ cat reduce-clickbaitiness.sed

s/Hell/Venus/

And it's portable to every major news outlet.

<comment><USER12> I think it's a concise and appropriate title. Making electronics that will work on Venus is essentially designing for hell, with all the heat, pressure, corrosives, and who knows what else. And 14,000 Gs of acceleration? Wow. I've never heard of that happening in hell.

This one weird trick lets a microchip survive temperatures of 500C! Intel and heat sink manufacturers HATE this! That would be clickbait.

<comment><USER13> I would have been more interested if the title had said Venus.</comment></comment></comment>