Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48853230 <comment><USER2> Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh cool, real world use!"

Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching, Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots of people want this!"

Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most importantly, Bitcoin inspired others. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh huh... This is really changing the world..."

Now, the problems are rearing their heads. Energy consumption, 51% attacks, scalability issues, etc. I wonder how the creator feels? "Oh dear..."

[ this is, of course, assuming the creator is still alive ]

It just boggles my mind that this weird internet currency exposed something so powerful in society: The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns.

<comment><USER3> > The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns.

Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger. Also philosophically speaking, "wealth that one truly owns" as in "wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing. If your wealth is in Bitcoin, you are trusting in fellow Bitcoin users and your wealth is entirely dependent on their feelings about the cryptomarket. That is hardly a better safer store for your wealth.

<comment><USER4> I prefer depending on the market instead of the state dictating how much my money is worth.

<comment><USER5> Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly monitoring and adjusting. It's like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self drive Tesla.

Sure the Tesla makes mistakes and kills someone every now and then, but I'd take that over the brick.

<comment><USER4> > Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly > monitoring and adjusting.

The market is relatively 'dumb', but its decisions are based on human expectation and applied peacefully through voluntary transactions. The state is relatively 'dumb' too, but it's also evil most of the time, and its decisions use violence to be committed.

Also, when the market is wrong, some people may lose money (specially those that were the most wrong), but the system corrects itself. When the state is wrong, the error accumulates because the system can't self-correct.

>It's like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self drive Tesla.

The market is much like a machine learning algorithm. I say the market is the Tesla AI and the state is a drunk driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, article cites a source that contradicts the headline. The Joule paper puts the number at 45.8TWh. The main focus of the article has some guys putting the number at 58.93TWh. That's quite the discrepancy.

In general I have come to treat anything that cites Alex de Vries with suspicion. Amongst other things, the repeated discussion of the number of transactions and the power expenditure. The power expenditure does not scale by number of transactions. Associating the two without mentioning one is not a factor of the other creates a misleading impression. Doing so repeatedly suggests bad faith.

Bitcoin does use a lot of power though. On the other hand, the reward halving does mitigate some of this. If you are confidant that Bitcoin won't increase on average 20% every year forever then you should be happy that the problem will fix itself.

The current problem comes from the value rise being greater than the reward halving. To sustain that it has to double in value every 4 years _forever_. The early growth has been higher than that, but to just sustain current power levels BTC would have to be worth millions in a few decades.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. People here always seem to assume that its power consumption will increase linearily the more people it use (from what the whole network consumes now).

But in the future, the amount of energy consumed for a single transaction will tend towards exactly the fee paid for that transaction multiplied by the cheapest electricity price in the world.

So either the transaction fees will be outlandish, or for a transaction that costs $0.10 you will consume roughly 2kWh.

<comment><USER8> You make it sound as if it is reasonable for a transaction is to cost 2kWh, that is a huge amount of electricity/energy. If anything that used that much energy became the dominant means of payment, the average person would use more energy in payments than they would in powering their home in a day.

Trip to the shops, but fuel, some take away and a few things online when you get home and you've used 10-16 kWh of energy, multiple that by a population (even a small one), and even the massive investment into renewables that there is now will be quickly eclipsed.

Adding transactions that are so intensive to people's everyday energy consumption would be a huge step backwards IMO.

<comment><USER9> Who is claiming that bitcoin transactions will be used by average person for everyday payments?

Making a bitcoin transaction is like recasting gold bars - not something you want to do often with small amount of gold. This will be done only for large individual payments or for large settlement payments aggregating thousands or millions of normal payments. Everyday payments will be performed on second or higher layers (e.g. Lightning Network)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://medium.com/@hillpot/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-hurts- the-...](https://medium.com/@hillpot/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-hurts-the- environment-more-75193863dfb6)

gold vs btc, at least BTC energy expenditure can be patched / limited to only renewables.

<comment><USER11> Neat! I wonder how they arrive at these numbers though?

I had a conversation with a non-techie friend the other day about cryptocurrencies and she expressed scepticism about the technology because of its immateriality or intangibility. Something about cryptocurrencies being artificially constructs doesn't sit well with some non-techies. I mean, when you think about it it's just as arbitrary that precious metals and gems have a store of value/worth above and beyond their utility. I guess we're in a transitionary period.

<comment><USER12> Eh, try to explain to people that money (as in USD) is the same thing as Bitcoin, except in centralised databases (plus a very small portion in portable pieces of paper/metal). There's a database in the FED that tracks who has how many dollars (it's coarse grained, banks subdivide it into accounts themselves). And new dollars are minted all the time when someone is issued credit, ending their life when the credit is paid back.

This is not to defend Bitcoin, but it is mind boggling how few people ask themselves "where does money come from, exactly?".

<comment><USER13> I think this is the reason all sort of conspiracies regarding who controls the money become so popular. People just use money, no time or reason to think of those things or even why the world moved to fractual first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Relevant info is at the end of the article :

"The electricity used for Bitcoin produces about 22 megatons of CO2 annually, a study in the scientific journal Joule estimated. That is as much as Kansas City in the US."

Bitcoin = Kansas City

<comment><USER15> Interesting: Kansas City = Switzerland??? A bit mindblowing if true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh I see it is that time of the year - People upvoting Bitcoin has breached $X or Bitcoin energy consumption is equal to Y country stories.

And the discussions are also same old - People criticizing bitcoin, others defending and then a small majority who feel quite smug about buying at $10.

Can we really stop upvoting stories which add zero value to what we already know?

<comment><USER17> Bitcoin's price is going up again, however its many severe problems remain unsolved.

On the other hand, the climate crisis is more urgent than ever. Is a huge waste of precious resources by something as useless as today's bitcoin really tolerable by society?

My hope is that bitcoin is soon abandoned in favor of something more eco friendly, scalable, usable and with better privacy. With a low bitcoin value there will be fewer miners and less waste of resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The last time some ding dong did this, it was Czech republic, and the math was off by a factor of 10,000 or so.

Bitcoin, realistically, uses about as much energy as a popular video game. For reasons which should be obvious.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does this energy consumption come more from mining (i.e. finding the new bitcoins) or from transactions?

If the former, then the Bitcoin network should find a way to reward nodes for transactions in a more environmentally-friendly manner since mining should (in my understanding) disappear or become insignificant at some point.

<comment><USER20> Why would miners ever agree to that?

<comment><USER21> The alternative is government regulation eg banning mining cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER22> Bitcoin was literally designed for the express purpose of surviving that.

<comment><USER21> In the sense that bitcoin miners can 'just' more their operations to mining- friendly countries until there are no more mining-friendly countries, sure. But _pragmatically_ Bitcoin would not survive a coordinated assault on it's legality if enough countries decided it's too environmentally toxic.

Plus, there's no reason why _Bitcoin_ should survive. Another cryptocurrency that's much more energy efficient would work just as well, so people could move their money if regulation was likely. It's one of the existisitential threats that Bitcoin faces in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The energy consumption is priced into the cost of holding and transacting Bitcoins.

I wonder if it is any different with any other thing you pay for. Or if any money you pay for anything ultimately results in energy being used up.

<comment><USER24> That is all fine and good, but is it necessary at all (even if some people are willing to pay for it).

<comment><USER22> At the moment, we don't have anything clearly better. But everyone except the most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists believe some form of Proof-of-Stake will work well enough. PoS will bring along a different suite of problems, but requiring a nuclear power plant's worth of energy will not be one of them.

<comment><USER25> I would like to bring Open Representative Voting (ORV) into the game. On ORV, every account can freely choose a Representative at any time to vote on their behalf, even when the delegating account itself is offline. These Representative accounts are configured on nodes that remain online and vote on the validity of transactions they see on the network. Their voting weight is the sum of balances for accounts delegating to them, and if they have enough voting weight they become a Principal Representative. The votes these Principal Representatives send out will subsequently be rebroadcasted by other nodes. Open in this context means, that every account can be chosen as a representative by every account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I know the most people on here have a terrible opinion of bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general but I think a lot of the criticism based on energy usage and transactions per second is in bad faith. When you consider layers built on top of bitcoin (lightning network) this argument holds a lot less weight.

<comment><USER27> If every single transaction in the world was Bitcoin it would still be a _ridicilous_ amount of energy by several orders of magnitude. It is totally, fundamentally, broken

<comment><USER28> Just to play devil's advocate, how much energy could be saved by closing all bank facilities and backend systems etc, in case they wouldn't be needed anymore?

Would BTC mining consume more or less energy then today's mainstream solutions?

<comment><USER29> For a fair comparison, you'd have to match the current bank features first, and they're simply not available in current cryptocurrency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just to play devil's advocate, how much energy could be saved by closing all bank facilities and backend systems etc, in case they wouldn't be needed anymore?

Would BTC mining consume more or less energy then today's mainstream solutions?

<comment><USER30> Do not forget the energy expended by the employees necessary to run the bank, i.e. housing, commutes, food, etc.

<comment><USER29> Unless you plan to kill the ex-employees after closing the bank, I'm not sure why this is applicable ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have yet to see a technical subject that polarizes the HN crowd so much.

Interesting data point.

You know what they say about products that polarizes people..

</comment><comment><USER32> Which is why we need useful proof of work. There is no appropriate solution yet. But I know researchers are working on it.

<comment><USER33> It's pretty hard to do. It appears that you need problems where (1) you can generate a practically unlimited number of arbitrary instances, (2) of arbitrary difficulty, (3) deterministically based on a random seed, (4) that are roughly constant difficulty to validate, and (5) where a randomly-chosen instance is likely to be useful to know a solution to.

<comment><USER34> If someone thought those cycles could be put to better use they would pay out bitcoins themselves to mining machines to convince them to run their computation instead, it's straight arbitrage.

<comment><USER33> You might be able to convince a lot of cryptocurrency adopters to switch to coins that were based on a useful proof-of-work (sometimes called "proof-of- useful-work") even if the kind of useful work that secures the coin isn't one that many people are currently paying for. After all, some present and prospective adopters care a lot about externalities, whether ethically or out of fear of future regulation or marketing.

A wonderful case would be where biomedical research somehow had an unlimited and ongoing need for solutions to arbitrary, random simulation tasks (where it was also relatively easy to confirm the correctness of an alleged solution). This doesn't really seem to be the case, but cryptocurrencies' impact and popularity would be improved quite a bit if it were!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> it's important to note that it should be compared with what it's supposed to change: gold mining, bank stores, payment systems. Then the cost is less.

Also important that this is the first iteration of a technology that will eventually be replaced with Proof of Stake systems which will be replaced by X.

<comment><USER29> There are already online only banks without physical presence in most places and many countries don't tie their currency value to gold. The payment systems are not great on either side of the issue.

<comment><USER36> > many countries don't tie their currency value to gold

Is there any national currency still on the gold standard?

<comment><USER29> It doesn't look like it. I wanted to stay on the safe side without research :-)

But it's interesting - not really a gold standard, (they're pegged to USD) but it looks like Lebanon has between 1/3 and 1/2 GDP worth of gold backing it's currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> But how much energy does a bank serving as many customers as bitcoin consumes?

<comment><USER31> That's the right question, how much energy does the current financial system use, solely for our "basic" transactional needs (store/retrieve/send payments).

Did anyone come up with an estimate?

<comment><USER38> Back of an envelope maths:

bitcoin does some ~450k transactions/day [1]

Switzerland has some 8.5m people [2]

Let's assume bitcoin is only used in Switzerland, meaning we get some 0.05 transaction per person per day, or in other words every citizen of Switzerland may execute one transaction every 20 days. I have no numbers for how many financial transaction swiss people perform per day, but lets use a conservative estimate of one per day (think of the daily coffee paid by cc), so that there are 8.5m transactions/day handled by the swiss banks.

Now, if the total energy budget of Switzerland would be going to running their banking system (which it probably does not do) it would still be 20 times as efficient as bitcoin.

[1] [https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is not a bug, it's a feature.

<comment><USER40> It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process transactions.

<comment><USER41> Bitcoins energy consumption has no correlation with its transaction throughput.

Price goes up > People turn on more miners > Difficulty goes up > Less efficient miners become unprofitable > People turn off more miners > Difficulty goes down.

It's a self-correcting dynamic purely due to economics, not linked to usage.

<comment><USER42> So ever since Bitcoin's creation, it has been using the exact same amount of power? Because the transaction throughput surely has changed.

Do you not agree that, loosely, there is a correlation between transaction throughput/ popularity/ real world usage, and the amount of people being happy to invest time, effort, and money into mining?

<comment><USER29> Throughput increased (from 0), since people started using it. But the maximum throughput cannot increase without protocol changes. There are workarounds like lightning network, but that's off the main blockchain. There's a hard limit on how many transactions you can put in one block. More mining power doesn't change that maximum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This will be bad for global warming. All that extra energy being produced.

<comment><USER44> I read somewhere that many of the larger mining operations use solar power to make it affordable.

<comment><USER45> Hydropower works at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Another day, another anti-bitcoin article on HN.

<comment><USER47> It looks like HN has to be anti-Bitcoin while the adoption rate of Bitcoin is tiny.

As more people adopt it, they will probably be less afraid of it / against it.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, but more people are NOT adopting it. Plus, HN is a community of highly intelligent people, who know technology, unlike the vast majority of Bitcoin holders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bring it on.

The net benefit of Bitcoin existing outweighs the energy consumption. If we really care about the planet and all of that, then let's start by cutting down our use of internal combustion engines first.

<comment><USER17> > The net benefit of Bitcoin existing outweighs the energy consumption.

Says who? The laughable number of transactions and the huge energy required per transaction are saying quite the opposite.

<comment><USER48> Well, sickos need to be able to pay for child porn somehow. Without Bitcoin, it just not possible. Chinese Commies also need to move their dirty money out mainland China - how is this possible without Bitcoin? So, there are many use cases for Bitcoin, but none of them are good for the planet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So Bitcoin cannot trivially be subject to a 51% attack, certainly not by Sweden anyway.

<comment> So awesome, I have to make an account to see the dead comment. Way to go HN mods.

<comment><USER50> Hashing power is not directly equal to power consumption

Sweden may hypothetically purchase miners 2x more efficient than the average miner and therefore need only half their countries power output.

In addition I would be surprised if Sweden can't source power from other countries ( prove me wrong I'm not sure on this one)

<comment><USER51> > In addition I would be surprised if Sweden can't source power from other > countries ( prove me wrong I'm not sure on this one)

They absolutely can, though I think they've been mostly net exporters for the last ~10 years.

According to [https://www.svk.se/siteassets/drift-av- stamnatet/bilder/map-...](https://www.svk.se/siteassets/drift-av- stamnatet/bilder/map-of-the-national-grid.pdf), Sweden has 7 HVDC (Denmark x2, Germany x1, Poland x1, Lithuania x1, Finland x2) plus 2x 400kV to Denmark, 2x to Finland and 4x to Norway (plus a 220kV).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Missing from all of the discussions about this is the fact that almost all of the electricity is purchased with the mining reward, which is _temporary_. It is cut in half every 4 years, and will eventually dwindle to nothing. The amount of electricity Bitcoin miners can afford to buy therefore will fall.

Of course, until now that effect has been more than compensated by the increase in the Bitcoin price. But that certainly can't continue forever either, and so the electricity usage and carbon footprint of Bitcoin will inevitably fall in the future.

<comment><USER36> Mining rewards will be replaced by transaction fees. There will still be an economic incentive to keep the hardware running.

<comment><USER52> But at that point the cost of the electricity consumption of Bitcoin will be borne entirely by Bitcoin's users, who will not pay more than the value they derive from use of the network. That would only fund a small fraction of today's Bitcoin mining electricity consumption.

<comment><USER36> > But at that point the cost of the electricity consumption of Bitcoin will be > borne entirely by Bitcoin's users

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If a certain percentage of energy is used by PoW, less is available for other purposes, and thus prices will rise for all energy users.

<comment><USER52> My point is that Bitcoin users will not pay transaction fees that are anything close to the current mining reward that is subsidized by inflation of the Bitcoin money supply. Therefore when the subsidy inevitably falls, so will the total income of all Bitcoin miners. And in the long term Bitcoin miners collectively cannot afford to buy more electricity than their total income, therefore their electricity consumption will also fall.

<comment><USER36> Thanks for clarifying!

Fees are denominated in satoshis though, and even today the average USD amount of fees is around $8,000 per block[1] (around 6% of the total reward). A 10x increase of the BTC price will make that amount around the same as the current total reward.

[1] [https://fork.lol/reward/fees](https://fork.lol/reward/fees)

<comment><USER52> Fees may be denominated in satoshis but unlike the block reward they are not fixed. Users choose their fees at every transaction, and they will not pay more than the value they derive from making transactions. The total value of all fees paid is determined by the actual usage of the network, not the Bitcoin price.

Of course today usage of the network is somewhat correlated with price, but it's not directly proportional and the correlation will weaken in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The sensationalism ignores that this tends to be trapped pockets of otherwise wasted surplus energy. Bitcoin creates a global energy arbitrage market for the first time. Energy can't be transported long distance, but it can be used to mine bitcoin. The benefits here are massive, including incentivizing cheap green energy, or the use of mining for ambient heating.

<comment><USER54> "Energy can't be transported long distance" \-- Electric power is regularly transported long distances with low loss. Total transmission losses in the US are about 5%, and a lot of power is shipped 1000 km or more.

"Bitcoin creates a global energy arbitrage market for the first time" \-- There are existing energy arbitrage technologies, such as aluminum smelting. The requirement is low capital cost with high energy cost, so you can have plants that are idle most of the time, waiting for low marginal-cost energy. Bitcoin mining isn't actually very good for this: the capital costs of rapidly depreciating mining chips are quite high.

"Incentivizing cheap green energy" \-- every consumer of energy does this. Consumers that run mainly during the day are much better at incentivizing wind and solar.

"Mining for ambient heating" \-- also suffers from the problem that mining chips are too valuable to leave idle, so you can't place them in homes and only run them when it's cold.

<comment><USER45> re: aluminum smelting... @see Coinmint [0]

In this case, the Moses Saunders dam [1] used to get a nice steady stream of draw (necessary to keep the equipment operational) from the Alcoa plant, but when it shut down that draw went away. Throwing a bitcoin mining operation into the old facility is a great way of keeping things running smoothly.

      [0] https://www.coinmint.io/
      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses-Saunders_Power_Dam</comment></comment></comment>


Is spam email still a big deal - <AUTHOR> Is spam email still a big deal? Does it really consume that much bandwidth? I can imagine in the past when computers were slower that spam was more of a resource hog than it is now. <comment><USER2> It's a complexity brake of multiple dimensions.

Much of the email I now receive is spam. This is both because of and a reason why I've abandoned using email -- it's too painful and too low-reward to even open my inbox. Privacy, surveillance, and other concerns are leading me to largely abandon email (and most other private electronic comms) in any regard.

If you want to set up your own email service, addressing span, _and proving you 're not a spammer yourself_ is a major hassle. There are hoops to jump through on both ends, reducing the incoming flow, and ensuring that outbound peers will pick up your mail.

If you're engaged in any large-scale outreach (think: accounts-based services, notifications, etc.), then dealing with spam accusations on your own service are an issue. Those might or might not be legitimate -- in many cases, users will, with a high degree of legitimacy, _not_ try to unsubscribe or opt out of email but instead simply flag it as spam. As accounts die or are closed, simply continuing to email them may mark you as a spammer (a periodic re- validation process is a good way to avoid this). I've seen decade-plus old services with hundreds of thousands or millions of questionable addresses. The devs may not care about that, but as ops, and as the point person for ensuring that notifications and alerts _do_ get out, _I do_.

The noise alone of spam, outbound or inbound, causes logistical problems.

TL;DR: Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughtful response. What is the future of email? How will person to person text communications evolve so that they are more secure, in your opinion.

<comment><USER2> That's hard to call, though I see a few dynamics affecting the outcome.

1\. Cost matters. In communications, a low- or zero-marginal-cost solution almost always has an advantage overy _any_ marginally-priced solution. I'm quite confident in predicting that micropayments will _not_ be the solution here, though some time-based all-you-can-eat solution _might_ work, more likely at an _annual_ or _decadal_ scale than a monthly (or shorter) one.

2\. New media tend to be adopted based on attractive founding cohorts. People are drawn to communities _that are selective, exclusive, and /or generally represent a higher socio-economic-political status than they have._ If you look at the history of communications, going back to speech and writing themselves, _those with facilities in spoken or written language were seen as attractive and appealing._

Early Usenet, and later Facebook, _both developed among selective-admissions research /prestige universities_. I don't think this is _at all_ a coincidence, and each network could be contrasted with more general, less- selective emerging or extant networks of the time, say, BBSes, Prodigy, AOL, or MySpace. See dana boyd who's also pointed this out.

(Corollary: do you want to create a Facebook killer? Create a billion-dollar fund and and seed $10m to each of 100 new networks within an aspirational community, reserving the right to merge any successful networks emerging from those into an aggregate, aspirational community. Google came close to this formula for G+, but erred, contrary to a great deal of commentary, in opening up the network _too soon_ , and most especially, to the kiss-of-death native Google community of marketers, SEO, and advertising. If it had stuck to tech and STEM for a few years, it might have created that vital community. In my opinion.)

3\. The directory is a critical element. In SMTP email, this includes DNS and local elements. DNS itself is a stumbling block for many people to self- hosting services, and it really wasn't meant to scale to billions of individual domains. There _are_ hierarchical structers that _could_ do this, including DNS hierarchies (domain, subdomain(s), host, user), or X-500 or LDAP, but which have not been widely adopted. Microsoft's Active Directory (an LDAP variant) exists, but is proprietary. I'm not sure _what_ the solution here looks like, but it's actually among the key sticking points.

4\. Support _and_ privacy of metadata. The history of the standard RFC 822 message header structure is an interesting one, _and dates to the early-20th century development of the inter-office memo_. See Kathy Yates, "The Memorandum as Management Genre" ([http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989....](http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989.pdf)). Among the surprises I found there, "In-reply-to" actually _pre-dates " the "From", "To", and "Subject" fields -- _creating chains of referenceable communications matters.* A key problem of current SMTP messaging is that these metadata are _among the most useful to any surveillance system, capitalist or state_ , and yet _are not protected by extant content-encryption systems_. At the same time, _some_ access to metadata may be critical for filtering purposes.

5\. Various forms of trust and graduated trust-delegation. This applies at various levels. There's a level of trust which must generally be granted to message transport systems -- software, hardware, channels, protocols. Filtering against spam or unwanted email may involve some level of disclosure of either identity or contents. (It's likely that spam _won 't_ generally be (strongly) encrypted making filtering of it more viable, but this remains to be seen.) The ability to layer trust and encryption such that access, approval, and/or vouching may occur at various levels in a _limited_ fashion could help.

(1/ cont)

<comment><USER2> 6\. Built-in full whitelist / greylist / blacklist capabilities. This is almost certainly going to be required generally of networked infrastructure, not just email. As an example: I'm finding I am making increased uses of extensive blocklists for general network and web traffic. Mechanisms for doing this on a generally straightforward, useable, trustable, and effective basis will almost certainly be required. _This includes the ability to selectively- though-intentionally bypass such filters on an occasional basis._

The ability to restrict general messaging access to known trusted and vouched sources, to provide for bypass on an occasional basis, to allow third-party vetting (and to specify the trust/distrust level of same), etc., all strike me as necessary. Keep in mind that this applies to _any_ messaging and comms channel, inclusive of postal mail and voice telecoms, both of which are _also_ increasingly subject to nuisance attacks. I see the imminent death of conventional phone systems within a few years if the junk call problem isn't addressed, and most likely the solution to that being a disposal of number- dial-based systems as a resolution, also within a few years. Already, the abandonment of _all_ phone-based comms by Millennials and many Gen-Xers is fairly widely reported.

7\. The alternative, generally, to points 3-6 above, is the emergence of one or more _exclusive_ messaging networks, following generally the selective and aspirational founder cohort as mentioned above. _Note again that early comms systems tended to reflect this._ Letter-writers, in the early 19th century, _reflected the 5-25% of populations which were educated and literate._ Telegraphs were limited in access to companies and wealthy individuals (historical note: president U.S. Grant learned of his electoral victory in the home of a neighbour in rural Galena, IL, who had a personal telegraph line installed). Telephones were initially _uncommon_ , found in upscale households, a fact _still_ pervasive enough in 1948 to lead to the famous "Dewey Beats Truman" _Chicago Tribune_ headline _based on the misleading sampling error of a teleophone-based survey_. Long-distance and international dialing were limited through the 1950s and 1960s respectively. Long-distance _charges_ were high through the 1990s (see above: marginal vs. fixed-rate pricing). Email was initially limited to a restricted set of college undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff, government departments, and technology-company professionals. The Blackberry was, for a time, _a badge of membership amongst a professional elite._ _Each of these was a selective and aspirational cohort at its founding._ The _popularity_ of the media eventually, in virtually every case, _killed the appeal of the addressible community_ , and did so _most especially_ amongst the highly- valued members.

(One of the recurring themes of science fiction authors' essays of the 1960s - 1980s was the issue of postal mail, and the burdens this imposed on various authors. Arthur C. Clarke wrote on this several times, noting that eventually he'd be reduced to having to send only a pre-printed postcard, "Arthur C. Clarke regrets ...".

Attention is fundamentally limited. _Rivality is the counterpoint to virality._ The greater the _reach_ of a medium, the more intrusive _and annoying_ it is, axiomatically.

8\. Standardisation of formats. I've long strongly favoured simple ASCII email. It's been ... amusing and validating to watch this issue be re-hashed with succeeding generations of messaging systems and devices. HTML allows far too many sins, ASCII not quite enough, but the balance seems to be toward simpler. I'd like to see a _semantically structured_ message format emerge that has the concept of headers, emphasis, possibly even links, and perhaps images, but nothing more. I use the term "STML" (structured text markup language), though there's an extant concept of "POSH" (Plain-old Semantic HTML). The products of simple markup languages such as Markdown would generally work, though experience suggests that _any_ markdown format is too much for the masses.

 _The ability of recipients to specify what messaging formats they are willing to accept, and have this occur as a negotiation at delivery time, strikes me as especially useful._ "This recipient accepts only 7-bit ASCII unencoded messages", for example. Or lists of _specifically whitelisted_ file formats, or encoding formats, by sender or sender category (family, friends, business, vendors, government, strangers, etc.). This serves to impose a _complexity constraint_ on what a sender might attempt to deliver. Yes, you can _try_ to send some highly-complex, highly-formatted newsletter, but 99.98% of recipients will reject it at delivery time, _after_ all other checks have been completed.

Note that standardisation _also_ might include the concept of forms-based email, something that's been ... _exceedingly_ poorly supported to date. This is a concept addressed at length in the Kathy Yates article above about business correspondence standardisation. The ability to send an email _that structures responses into a specific format_ (with, perhaps, a catch-all free- form field required) could be immensely useful.

Standardisation might also include calendar, lightweight messaging, voice/video, and other types of exchanges, all of which current messaging systems ... more or less completely fail at.

9\. A re-thinking of authentication and validation. The ability to have the _sender 's_ identity be _locally_ verified, and potentially _cross-checked against multiple third-party systems_ could be highly useful. Presently, email _quite literally_ allows _anybody_ to claim to be _anyone_ , simply by filling out the appropriate headers or text. A local identity validation would rely on local PKI validation, whist a third-party validation would send credentials to one or more third-party sites for confirmation. This would tremendously reduce the attack vector for misrepresentation, though of course it also produces risks of metadata leakage -- means for validating _without_ divulging who is requesting the validation would help.

Creating one-off identities triggering validations might be an attack on this though -- the validation could _only_ come from a specific recipient, or someone capable of accessign that party's messages. At the same time, one-off identities and their validation might be used as canaries indicating disclosure of private information, contacts lists, or other data.

Attacking the _motives_ for phishing through improved authentication systems would of course also be useful.

I could continue, but let's end here.

(2/end)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a mental resource hog if nothing else. Just changed a setting on my moms phone and noticed she had 108k unread emails between two accounts. All spam.

<comment><USER4> I got locked out of a Yahoo account years ago that I used solely as a spam account for signups. It was getting hundreds a day and I just looked for that one email confirmation as necessary. Sometimes I wonder if it's still active. It might have a million emails waiting (were Yahoo to allow unlimited messages).

<comment><USER3> One of the two is Yahoo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably for many people. I haven't even had to think about it in years except to check my spam folders once a week for ham. And that's for 8 email addresses including two catch-alls.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes.

Network bandwidth is not the problem.

The problem is disruption of effective communications channels.

I have three layers of anti-spam technology on my e-mail addresses, and still much of the traffic I get is spam.

</comment><comment><USER7> Outlook/Hotmail still hasn't figured it out. It seems to get it 50% wrong, putting important email in junk, and highlighting phishing mail.

</comment><comment><USER8> I setup a solution for spam that lets in 0 (zero) spam emails a month. Without having a spam filter :)

If anyone would like to try give me an email address.

<comment><USER9> I am not sure if you are being sarcastic and tricking people to let know that's how they end up getting spams.

But if you are serious, I would like to know more what you are doing- filtering out all the emails is also one way to get 0 spam mails.

<comment><USER8> I'm not being sarcastic. It's a kind of anti-filter with proof of work.</comment></comment></comment>


Driftless – The best stuff of Amazon from your Twitter friends - <AUTHOR> http://driftless.co <comment><AUTHOR> I designed and built this over the past week after a freelance project fell through. The idea came to me the Friday night before the election, and I figured would be fun to build over a few days.

Right now I'm keeping things small and simple: What are the best products you and your Twitter friends have bought on Amazon recently? Hope you dig it.</comment>


Seven lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup - <AUTHOR> http://bohanes.me/

<comment><USER2> Excellent stuff! Your seven lessons should be required reading for anyone thinking of becoming a start-up entrepreneur.</comment>


Best Colleges for You - <AUTHOR> https://thompsonml.shinyapps.io/BestCollegeApp/ <comment><USER2> It has tooooo many items. Perhaps you can split the page in a few pages that make questions and then it sends you to a page that shows the result and you can change the previous selections.

I'd would reorder the questions. Without any evidence, I think the more important questions are career, location and prize.

Why do I need to answer if I'm male or female? Also, expand the options.

Can you make the names of the universities clickable?</comment>


Ruby jobs in New Zealand for foreigners - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I'd like to travel abroad and I'd like if somebody here knows about the current ruby job scene for foreigners in new zealand and how hard is it to get the work permit there.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> The NZ governments info page on visas is genuinely useful - [http://www.immigration.govt.nz/migrant/stream/work/](http://www.immigration.govt.nz/migrant/stream/work/)

Also, given it's just past 3AM in NZ, the likelihood of a Kiwi answering your question is quite slim!

</comment><comment><USER3> The 2 main job boards here are [http://seek.co.nz](http://seek.co.nz) and [http://trademe.co.nz/jobs](http://trademe.co.nz/jobs).

</comment><comment><USER4> me too. thanks :D</comment>


What the iPad means for the future of video games - <AUTHOR> http://features.techworld.com/personal-tech/3219659/what-the-ipad-means-for-the-future-of-video-games/ <comment><USER2> Will be interesting to see how app gaming progresses, especially with the big players getting even bigger. This will definitely make it harder for your average entrepreneur?</comment>


5 Secret Features of »Chocolat«, the Popular Text Editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.git-tower.com/blog/5-tips-for-chocolat-text-editor/ <comment><USER2> Given that most of these are listed on the homepage for the editor, this doesn't seem like a very interesting article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I guess the secrets are out now.

</comment><comment><USER4> just ate another chocolate on account of this article :@</comment>


Ask HN: What problems if any do you have with the Google search engine? - <AUTHOR> What problems do you encounter using the Google search engine?  Or if you do not use Google, with the search engine that you do use?  Is there anything that is particularly annoying?  Are there any features that you especially want? <comment><USER2> Search for exact strings could be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google has search for exact strings:

Search with an exact phrase. Put quotation marks around words "[any word]" to search for an exact phrase in an exact order. Keep in mind that searching with quotes might exclude relevant results. For instance, a search for "Alexander Bell" will miss pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell. Search Tips & Tricks – Inside Search – Google [https://www.google.com/intl/en_u/insidesearch/tipstricks/all...](https://www.google.com/intl/en_u/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html)

<comment><USER2> I'm talking about strings containing special characters. see [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4685615/how-can-i- use-a-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4685615/how-can-i-use-a-search- engine-to-search-for-special-characters) for example</comment></comment></comment>


Interview with nanotube, founder of the Bitcoin-OTC, IRC's Marketplace - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2012/03/interview-with-nanotube-founder-of-the-bitcoin-otc-ircs-marketplace-on-bitcoin-multisigs-and-security/

<comment></comment>


Comicgen: Comic Creator - <AUTHOR> https://gramener.com/comicgen/ <comment><USER3> RIP mschat.exe

[http://kurlander.net/DJ/Pubs/SIGGRAPH96.pdf](http://kurlander.net/DJ/Pubs/SIGGRAPH96.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Not mine, but is fun to run Comic Chat in normal channels...

Download MS Comic Chat 2.5: [http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm](http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm)

Comic Chat Fixer MITM Proxy: [https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15](https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great work, I've added it to my belt of solutions. Now I just need the right problem to use it!

It's interesting that knowing this product I was curious to follow the link to the parent (at [https://gramener.com/](https://gramener.com/) ) and now I know another company.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love it, but having tried to build the same thing myself in the past I realized a horrible truth: you can't make comics, even ones that strictly informative, without being able to draw.

If you look at "Understanding Comics" try to picture what parts could be made procedurally. It's a tiny percentage. It looks neat and is eye-catching, but it's hard to add information using comics. When done well, it's amazing - <USER2> really hard.

<comment><USER7> It's more subtle than that. For any given technique used to illustrate a scene, you could come up with a means of automating it, and those means are employed by professional artists on the regular, from rulers to draw straight lines up through 3D modelling software. A lot of finished work will go between the sketchbook and the computer and then back again to iterate on technical elements like proportioning and perspective.

But what you cannot automate is the design work that puts together each of those techniques. You have to decide: how much detail to add? What are the spatial relationships? What will my light values and colors communicate? What shapes and forms should be given emphasis?

And then at the level of storytelling, all the considerations around plotting and characterization; the themes of the story and how scenes develop to express those themes, and how that translates into imagery and the physical description of a character.

Working on commercial art today is much more about these kinds of conceptual distinctions than about the quality of traditional pen-to-paper drafting skills. If you know how to pull out those techniques through automation, you can still get a satisfying result. But getting the "eye" for knowing what is possible still needs training.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Exactly the difference between templated, frameworked software and software that is great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Saw it on twitter [1] where they ask for help to create more characters. The comments on that thread also provide more information

[1] [https://twitter.com/sanand0/status/1120887415319691264](https://twitter.com/sanand0/status/1120887415319691264)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. I recently wanted to make a political cartoon, and even tried adapting some images from other political cartoons. But I am a terrible artist, so I just gave up. Would love if they had characters for some of the 2020 presidential candidates so that we could all create/share political cartoons/commentary!

<comment><USER9> Great idea! We'll plan to add some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now I really want to see someone use this to make ML generated comics.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I imagine it might be similar to [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/)

I'm with you. The result would either horrify, or be hilarious

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great work. Now I just need a project to go along with it.

</comment><comment><USER12> If they could add stick figure characters like xkcd it would be useful.

<comment><USER9> We planned for it but then got too ambitious. We now want _animatable_ xkcd- like characters :-)

We'll probably try it for a few weeks before giving up.

<comment><USER11> Can I use these cartoons in a game?

<comment><USER9> Absolutely! Do let us know if you need any specific characters.

<comment><USER11> More thinking needed. Time for pizza, beer and a small gaggle of creatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is awesome! Amazing work

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone really think replacing the browser's back button with a "undo" feature equals a nice UX?

<comment><USER15> Each combination is generated by a unique URL, so it's addressable. All you're doing is going back to the previous address. No change in browser behaviour, or expected result.</comment></comment>


Setapp: a subscription service for macOS apps - <AUTHOR> https://setapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Browsing through the full range of apps, I'm personally unconvinced by their selection. A lot of the provided apps seem to provide similar functionality, in some cases being attached to competing services. I think I'd rather have a smaller range of more carefully curated apps.

That being said, it's very nice to see a novel approach to app distribution. The low price is particularly enticing.</comment>


Google Consumer Surveys - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/how

<comment><USER2> Way too expensive for small groups.

</comment><comment><USER3> Old news, by a few months at least.</comment>


A malicious module on npm - <AUTHOR> https://blog.liftsecurity.io/2015/01/27/a-malicious-module-on-npm <comment><USER2> now you've made me all paranoid, I hope you're happy</comment>


Show HN: Skod – FTP client for humans in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod <comment><USER2> I can't see any correlation between an FTP program that makes a point of stating its written in C and saying that's for 'humans'. Also, why on earth are people still using FTP in 2015?!

<comment><USER3> Wait... What is wrong with FTP?

<comment><USER4> Password sent in the clear.

<comment><USER5> FTP is quite often anonymous with no password. And you can use SFTP (secure FTP, not to be confused with SSH file transfer).

It's much better than HTTP if you need entire directories. There isn't really any better protocol for giving public access to entire directories.

<comment><USER6> > And you can use SFTP (secure FTP, not to be confused with SSH file > transfer).

Do you mean FTPS?

<comment><USER5> I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

        $ ./skod -s "mirrors.digipower.vn" --download "/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7"
        :: Error Failed to get '/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7' size.

This works:

        $ curl ftp://mirrors.digipower.vn/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7

</comment><comment><USER8> In what sense is this 'for humans'?

<comment><USER9> I was wondering that, too. Maybe it means that it's meant for end users and not for scripting and programmatic use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand the reason for two `tcp_connect` functions. One just adds the option to pass "w" to the fd mode. Both functions are otherwise identical. Despite the "IPv4 only" comment, both structure pack with `getnameinfo()` so both appear IPv6-capable. Looks like this could be optimised to remove the first connect function.

<comment><USER10> ftp_getdataport() should return a char with sprintf, not an int. The port member of ftp_t could then be the same as the port member of skod_t, negating the need for two different tcp_connect functions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need to do cleanup for the code. sorry for that.

<comment><USER10> I'll send a PR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very well written source code! Great job. I didn't think an FTP client could be so cleanly written.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is not "Written in pure C, without any external library" : just see skod.h it depends on socket.h

[https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod/blob/master/src/skod.h](https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod/blob/master/src/skod.h)

<comment><USER13> How else do you expect the application to use sockets?

<comment><USER6> Syscalls via asm block? :)

<comment><USER14> Someone would then argue that that "isn't C".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg's political group funds ads promoting Keystone and ANWR drilling - <AUTHOR> http://grist.org/news/mark-zuckerbergs-political-group-funds-ads-promoting-keystone-and-anwr-drilling/

<comment><USER2> One more reason not to work for, or use, Facebook. A few high-profile resignations or rejections might make a difference.

<comment><USER3> You do realize that if the current global temperature trends continue for another 2 years every global warming model will fall outside the 95% confidence interval (ie, wrong).

<comment><USER4> You're missing the point. You're conflating 2 ideas:

1) science is so much better and verifiable ! (this is for atheist versus religious people discussions ONLY)

2) when I actually verify $scientific_theory it doesn't stand up to scrutiny (this is for discussions against farmaceutical companies denying that they understood the effects of a drug 40 years ago EXCLUSIVELY)

3) Oh my god we're all going to die because some grad student claims it's once again a lot worse ! (this is for climate change discussions)

You see your mistake ? The world is massively invested in climate disaster theory being right. We've got 20 years of treaties, massive infrastructure dependant on it. Lots of important people getting elected, getting cushy jobs, getting ... and you're just saying that looking at the numbers it doesn't work out. Then you're giving people 2 options :

a) global warming is true and yet worse still and man-made and ... ! ($10 billion "well spent" by politicians on their friends)

b) global warming ... is a natural phenomenon that just starts and ends, humans or not, policies or no policies ! $10 billion bribery scandal ! Fire them all !

You're asking loads of people to acknowledge they've been stupid for decades. Many of them (esp. the grad students) have never known any other way of doing things ... good luck with that.

Get on the bandwagon. Find some vaguely reasonable excuse for people to pay you millions (think Solyndra) because "we're all going to die of global warming ! More money !". You'll have much more success, because the whole house of cards depends on having ever more people on the payroll. If you're loud enough, they'll have to include you too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of the South-Western pact decades ago to support western projects in exchange for their votes on civil rights. Happens all the time, but impressive that people actually caught on and linked these two.

</comment><comment><USER6> How anyone on this forum can claim to believe in science and rationality and not abhor this is appalling and beyond me.

<comment><USER7> Compartmentalization. Smart people can hold incredibly stupid beliefs. I believe Michael Shermer's book on "Why People Believe Weird Things" argues that smart persons are actually better at self-rationalization of untrue/cognitively dissonant "facts".</comment></comment>


YouTube: Where is my damned reply button? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MuofdTPhEA

<comment><USER2> I'm amazed this is the only link about this major change on HN with any comments that I can see.

Everything about this update is a mess. Requiring linked G+ account without properly informing users (causing mass confusion), the visual clutter that is bolded hashtags and G+ usernames, and removal of 'In reply to x user' link (resulting in having to guess what it's a reply to in long threads)... Ugh.

PS: nice to see a Gopher fan ;)

<comment><USER2> The author has since added a far more objective and in-depth video criticism of the new system [youtube.com/watch?v=wqaLXlfA94s].

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seriously, whoever is in charge of Youtube's comment system is a complete idiot of galactic proportions.

Every time they update the comment system, it doesn't get better, it just gets stranger. As if the person in charge of it has no clue how people interact online.

The comment system, as I see it, should be very simple:

1) Comments are shown as a tree (with limited depth possibly)

2) Upvote/downvote/reply/flag-as-spam on every comment.

3) Sort by top / new (would be nice within today, week, month, year, ever).

4) Limit comment length to something sensible like 10K characters, if you want your users to have meaningful discussions.

That's it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, normally the UI/UX changes that people get so cross about at least seem to be in aid of making the way users interact with something more intuitive and/or simpler.

This is none of those things. As to point number 4, the top comment on that video is a fairly complete script for the movie "Braveheart" >.></comment></comment>


Jackpot lotto winner reflects on how it poisoned a great deal of his life. - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1174512--lottery-winner-craig-henshaw-paid-a-big-price-for-his-millions

<comment><USER2> Good story.</comment>


How to write an object oriented program that doesn't suck - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/naveen/how-to-write-an-object-oriented-program-that-doesnt-suck <comment><USER2> Don't want to nitpick but:

      /* -- */
      private int _accountType;
      /* -- */
      if (_accountType == "SavingsAccount")
      /* -- */

String to Int.</comment>


Awesome tools for creating Web 2.0 sites and services - <AUTHOR> http://www.solutionwatch.com/578/a-roundup-for-developers-developers-developers/ <comment><USER2> I definitely recommend FireBug. It is, as the article states, a dream extension for Firefox. After it becomes second nature to use, you'll wonder how you got by without it. (Probably quite fine, but the app is great!)

</comment><comment><USER3> ClickTale should be in any new startup's arsenal. Saves the need for expensive, old-school usability testing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you use any of these tools? I used basecamp before and I would like to add oDesk to the list

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I use Firebug too and love it

</comment><comment><USER4> Great List; Thanks Brian!</comment>


Joost v. Babelgum - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/09/hands-on-with-babelgum-a-poor-mans-joost/ <comment><USER2> I've been trying out Joost off and on for about a moth or three, but the performance is sluggish. on my WinXP box. That makes it extra annoying to hunt around for something worth watching.

Democracy TV (soon, I think, to be called Miro) is somewhat better, not least because it runs on my Ubuntu-laden laptop. But it also has a more interesting range of content.</comment>


The Mystery of Steve Jobs's Public Giving - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving/

<comment><USER2> I think it's inappropriate to speculate on what "good" someone is contributing to the world, period. So much of it is determined by intentions, plans, and time -- these are things that are invisible to everyone but the individual.

Instead worry about your own contributions, don't try to determine what to give based on expectations you draw from observing others (or try to force this thinking upon others) -- it's unlikely your choice will be anywhere near the truth, and it skews the act from one of generosity into one of keeping up with social standards ("keeping up with the Joneses" sort of thing).

<comment><USER3> Reflecting on the decisions of others is an important component of human cultural development. Alone, we all have limited experience. We can't possibly match the diversity and reach of the outcomes resulting from decisions made by everyone around us. Reflecting on Steve Jobs' decision to abstain from philanthropy is an important cultural point of discussion.

Asking what "good" Mr. Jobs has contributed to the world is a question that should be approached with an open mind. The objectivist would look at his actions and hold them up as an example of a shared positive outcome resulting from self-motivated action. By Mr. Jobs' relentless focus on advancing Apple, we have all enjoyed the benefit of the many devices that were brought to market by Apple under his leadership.

That's just one perspective though. It may not hold up under scrutiny, but we owe it to ourselves to ask the question: Is philanthropy the best and only way?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised the article didn't mention that Jobs is a Buddhist.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%81na>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it is inappropriate to draw attention to somebody's personal life like this. I wonder what the results of someone analyzing the author's charitable giving would be.

<comment><USER5> It is considered a social norm to comment on or assess the "personal lives" of people with, say, $US8.3B in personal wealth. As least as far as "what are said people doing with these unusual quantities of money" goes. There might be a bit of public significance in that; see also Gates and Buffett.

This isn't discussing the length of his dick, for crying out loud.

Trying to turn it around on the author is questionable, given that Andrew Sorkin would be lucky to have one thousandth part of the wealth of Steve Jobs and thus the public interest in what Sorkin is doing is quite small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What brand of journalism is this? Is the New York Times trying to shame Steve Jobs into donating his wealth? Basically, there is no information on Steve Jobs' philanthropy so the article is about other billionaires giving money and investigative dead ends encountered so far.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you want out of a cryptocurrency/blockchain newsletter? - <AUTHOR> I run Grasshopper Capital Daily. We have about 900 subscribers. I've been playing around with different formats. I'm trying to be like Stratechery for cryptocurrency and am looking for feedback. Here are the archives: https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=c940b226bf9e756fb6db6f0f7&id=f29ad470fa <comment><USER2> I work in this space. Token Daily and Proof of Work are the two best ~blockchain~ newsletters I subscribe to — in particular, Token Daily has been killing it. So I'd look to them as models.</comment>


Ask HN: Google Docs meets CodePen – would you use this? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to launch a KickStarter campaign for http://codr.io, a collaborative editor with realtime HTML rendering.
Codr is like Google Docs for code. Codr also provides a live render pane for HTML/CSS/JS similar to CodePen's, except that changes are shared in realtime with all viewers.
If you'd like  a pre-launch invite to try out Codr, then see https://twitter.com/CodrEditor/status/612600217058344960
Please share your thoughts! Your feedback is appreciated. <comment><USER2> some comparison with c9.io / nitrous.io would be nice

<comment><AUTHOR> C9.io / nitrous.io are online IDEs with collaborative functionality.

Codr is much more lightweight - a collaborative paste-bin if you will. In this regard Codr is similar to Code Pen or Gist.

Codr is great for quick, informal collaboration - when you're on the phone or on IRC with someone you can say "let me show you" instead of "let me tell you".

Unlike C9.io or nitrous.io, you don't need to create a project, share an invite link, mess with permissions, etc.</comment></comment>


WordPress Sites Now Support Google's AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/24/wordpress-sites-now-support-googles-amp-to-make-mobile-pages-load-much-faster <comment><USER2> As I've noted elsewhere: to use AMP, you _must_ load JavaScript from the AMP CDN, which is operated by Google. So you are handing over the security of your site and your user's privacy to them. From <[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-h...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-h...): > The AMP runtime is loaded via the mandatory <script src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>) tag in the AMP document <head>.

<comment><USER3> AMP is just a subset existing web technologies. It's entirely possible to build a page that loads just as fast or faster, without loading the AMP scripts, if you so choose. But AMP greatly simplifies the process, which is what developers need, and the script enforces the limitations necessary to make the page load and render quickly, which users love.

Right now AMP is under heavy development and lots of changes are being made very quickly. That mandatory script loads other resources from the same domain on an as-needed basis, which is a crucial aspect of how AMP is designed to work. I don't know if the v1 release will include a distribution package for self-hosting, but it's not too much of a stretch to believe they've decided to go with a central CDN just to simplify development for the early stages of the project.

At any rate, this is no worse in principle than the Google Analytics scripts everybody includes on every page everywhere, so it's mostly just a bunch of FUD.

<comment><USER4> AMP erects walls around the Open Web and enshrines Google as the gatekeeper.

Want to embed content from another site? Great! You can choose from <amp- twitter>, <amp-facebook>, <amp-instagram>, <amp-pinterest>, or <amp-youtube>.

Building an advertising startup? Hooray! I hope you're one of the dozen whitelisted ad networks that <amp-ad> allows.

In Russia or China? Maybe Google will deign to implement <amp-vk> and <amp- sinaweibo> if we're sufficiently humble.

This is not the Web I want.

<comment><USER3> The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone. Every single time this comes up the project contributors have said that they will gladly modify <amp-ad> to support any network they can. They're also constantly developing new <amp-X> components to fill in the gaps for other embeddable services. You want <amp-vk>? Submit a PR! Open an issue! It's open source!

And please, _please_ tell me what's wrong with using e.g. <amp-youtube>? It's just a web component! All it does is what you want it to do, and if it _doesn 't_ do what you want then either you _shouldn 't_ do that, or you can just submit a PR.

The whole point of AMP is 1) make sure the developer doesn't do anything that'll make the page load unnecessarily slowly or repaint/relayout unnecessarily and 2) make it way easier for the developer to accomplish #1 because all you have to do is type <amp-youtube>.

AMP is no different from, say, jQuery, or React, or Angular. It's a different way of doing things, but it's not a "gatekeeper" on the web. It's just another option, one more tool in your belt, if you so choose.

<comment><USER4> > _The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone._

The project is exclusively governed by three Google employees, listed at [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/GOVERNANCE...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/GOVERNANCE.md), all contributions are at their discretion.

All contributors must sign a legally binding licensing agreement with Google which includes a patent grant, per [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/CONTRIBUTI...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md).

The Web is powerful because you don't have to ask permission. AMP is not cut from that cloth.

<comment><USER3> I don't see what makes it different from any other open source project. Of course it's going to have technical leads and core committers, it's not like you can go force a PR merge on jQuery trunk any time you please. I'm aghast that you would even suggest such a thing.

And CLA's aren't fun, but they're hardly new, either.[1]

If you don't like that it's Google, that's fine, but at least be honest with yourself about it. But unless you've submitted a PR or can cite a PR (on any Google OSS repo at all) that they've rejected purely on the basis that Google is somehow doing wrong by the developers, then what are we even talking about?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#Users)

<comment><USER5> To me the problematic part that makes it different to at least some open source projects is that all those technical leads and core committers are apparently employed by Google (and working on company time, I assume). That could mean Google, and Google alone, gets to decide where it goes.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, the only criticism I'm hearing over and over is "because Google", and considering their track record with Chrome, Android, Angular, Polymer, Go, and literally hundreds of other open-source projects, I'm perfectly okay with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Benchmark time! For the example article mentioned in the article [1],

\- Default page: 74 requests, 1983kB, 2.98 in Firefox

\- Adding amp/ at the end: 14 requests, 464kB, 0.51s in Firefox

Good! And sad it's not the default :-/

EDIT: after proper reading of the consequences, of course it's not the default. Indulgent readers will correct the above sentence as _" hope we're moving to this kind of performance by default."_

[1] [http://blog.longreads.com/2016/02/18/the-freelancers- roundta...](http://blog.longreads.com/2016/02/18/the-freelancers-roundtable/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm assuming this TC article thinks its audience is WordPress content-creators and not just media companies? Here's its first acknowledgement of tradeoffs (or rather, that the tradeoffs are no big deal)

> _And you don't lose much as AMP markup supports a wide range of features. > For instance, AMP has worked with ad networks, such as Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, > DoubleClick and AdSense, to create optimized tags for mobile pages. So you > can still put ad tags in your AMP-enabled pages. Similarly, you can add > analytics tools. But these JavaScript calls will be optimized._

I've never been in the work of dealing with ads though now that I think about it, that probably is one of the key things that the average, devoted content- creator would care about.

But I do think this is a bit underplayed:

> _As for all the things that usually slow down web pages today, such as > embeds, JavaScript-heavy content or Flash, WordPress strips out this content > from the AMP pages. Comments are also omitted by default._

So...YouTube videos and things like embeddable Google Maps are not allowed? I was assuming "no"...because that is Google's bottom line...(also, they're whitelisted in the spec's extensions [1]). And I know the anti-comments- section sentiment is strong in the media industry, but kind of weird to see "oh yeah, no comments" as an afterthought. I'm assuming that means no _WordPress_ comments (which come built-in with a standard WP install)...but what about Disqus and Facebook? There are more than a few media companies in which comment sections are more than trivially important.

[1] [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious what long term ad click rates are going to be for publishers that use AMP. The user experience is very reader-centric. When you do a search and click on an AMP-enabled page (at the top of the search results) you can then swipe left and scroll to the next AMP-enabled page. It's a strong incentive to just read the headline of an article then swipe away. This is great for readers but bad for publishers since they'll get fewer clicks and less time spent on the site from users who come from google. For those of us who just skim the headlines we'll never even see an ad.

google search will funnel users to amp-enabled pages, so anybody /not/ on the amp train will suffer. In that way it is a walled garden. It's google's version of becoming a portal.

How does google make money off of this?

<comment><USER9> > How does Google profit from this?

Isn't AMP intended to compete with the likes of Facebook Instant Pages?

At the same time, Google thrives by returning high quality search results. It also depends heavily on web over native. For the web to stay relevant on mobile, it needs to meet some minimum expectations met by native experiences.

I frequently find fault with the websites I arrive at through Google because of shitty performance and irritatingly obtrusive advertising. There's more to mobile friendliness than a responsive CSS grid system and publishers need to realise that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is all about ads. "A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user- centric approach." It's mostly about optimizing some very inefficient ad delivery systems. If you're just displaying text without ads, you don't need AMP.

<comment><USER11> That's only one benefit of AMP. Another is ensuring that all of the excessive and crappy Javascript that many sites run isn't used -- we expect to be able to do a consistent and better job archiving AMP in the Wayback Machine than arbitrary pages with arbitrary javascript.

<comment><USER12> > Another is ensuring that all of the excessive and crappy Javascript that > many sites run isn't used

While I wouldn't argue that there isn't a massive amount of god-awful javascript being written today, but why does a third party, private company get to determine what is or isn't "excessive and crappy" on someone's own website? This sounds like a slippery slope to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've got Ublock Origin and funnily enough, the LongReads example AMP page loads only marginally faster than the "full" one. I don't understand why people can't just remove all of the crap from their main pages rather than relying on this Google-sponsored equivalent?

<comment><USER14> This way, they probably improve their (load-based) SEO without changing the non-AMP site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No, your WP site supports AMP if you haven't bothered to do anything custom and don't care about anything other than standard design.... in which case you have work ahead of you.

<comment><USER16> Definitely—but far less work than starting from scratch. The goal was not to make it 100% plug-and-play for everyone, because that would be...impossible. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How To Get Started With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

[http://searchengineland.com/get-started-accelerated- mobile-p...](http://searchengineland.com/get-started-accelerated-mobile-pages- amp-240688)

"More than likely, simply installing the WordPress plugin will not be enough, and you will have to go through and validate all of the pages you'd like to benefit from Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Depending on how your articles are formatted, you may need to make some changes in order to get the AMP pages to validate. The most common problems I personally experienced were with specifying height and width attributes for images and correcting old YouTube embed codes that weren't using https."

</comment><comment><USER18> The official WordPress AMP plugin doesn't currently offer much. It seems to be a simple install-and-go plugin with very little configurations.

There are some developers working on a few other plugins. I found this PageFrog plugin [https://wordpress.org/plugins/pagefrog/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/pagefrog/) which AMPs your page but includes a bunch of other stuff.

Particularly PageFrog comes bundled with Facebook Instant Articles support along with configurations for ads and analytics, which seems to be missing from the official WP plugin.

</comment><comment><USER19> WordPress is schizophrenic

Oh hey let's load up your webpages with all this cr*p by default, tons of javascript, css, external files, fonts, headers, footers useless markup.

Oh hey, let's use this plugin to strip all that out.

How about not putting it in there in the first place.

<comment><USER20> I would say in that case, the administrator who didn't properly configure their theme and plugins is "schizophrenic."

<comment><USER21> Most administrators are lazy. If you write software for thousands or millions of users, sane defaults are a must. I find it useful to keep Saint-Exupéry in mind: _" It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."_

Let's look at the first lines of WordPress's default template:

      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
      <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

Why bother with _xmlns_ if it's not well-formed XML anyway?

Why _dir_ and _lang_ if you don't really know what language the content is in? We now have the funny situation that most non-English pages wrongly declare _lang= "en-US"_ because W3C evangelists told template authors that _lang_ is really important, rendering the attribute completely useless.

What the _heck_ is _profile= "[http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"](http://gmpg.org/xfn/11") _ supposed to do?

<comment><USER22> What "default template" would that be?

As for the "lang" attribute, it is set to the language chosen when WordPress was installed.

<comment><USER21> Oops, sorry, I was looking at the HTML of the theme previewer instead of the theme itself. With regard to WordPress, only my "XHTML friends network" point remains valid. Concerning web development in general, I have seen way too much cargo cult boilerplate, too many hardcoded _lang_ attributes, etc.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, the value of "XFN" is debatable. But it's usually written as a link element that doesn't really break anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are AMP and HTTP/2 best practices contradictory to one another?

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate? From what I can tell, AMP makes use of on-demand resource loading, which HTTP/2 prefers over bundled resources thanks to multiplexing.

<comment><USER23> From what I understood, there are a few contradictions like splitting up assets (preferable in HTTP/2) as opposed to concatenating/merging them (preferable in AMP). Perhaps I misunderstood

<comment><USER3> AMP encourages you to keep your assets separated, so you only load the bits you need. If a page is going to use <amp-youtube> you'll have to include the appropriate script tag for that component in the page, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are two articles about AMP on the front page right now, this one and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167478). Which is better?

<comment><USER25> I actually found both useful. Both target different audiences and provide different perspective on the issue. I probably wouldn't click through to 11167428 if I didn't use WordPress; whereas I wouldn't click through to 11167478 if I had already seen the AMP announcement last year ("I know about AMP; when will there be stuff I can download/install/play with?").

<comment><USER24> Ok, we'll leave them both up.</comment></comment></comment>


This Is Your Brain on Podcasts - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/science/this-is-your-brain-on-podcasts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront <comment><USER2> This is what I got from this article: Researchers looked at MRI scans of people listening to a Podcast on their daily commute. The researchers don't know what any of it means.

<comment><USER3> Functional MRI scans are the equivalent of looking at what transistors are switching in a chip at any given moment, only more useless since the brain is much more generalized.

"Oh! Cache is lighting up!"

<comment><USER4> [http://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/](http://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/)

It's from 2009, so things have improved, but still.

<comment><USER5> You know what? I bet the differentiation in the exposure to light (via different pictures), combined with ever-so-slightly-still-electrolytically- active neuro-pathways, produced those results.

Dead salmon, though they may be, light-sensitive organs the eyes still are.

And provided that the salmon were probably preserved on ice, much of the carcasses probably remained fairly chemically stable, so while the electron pumps in the electron transport chains of the multi-polar neurons were deactivated, I bet the whole pipeline from salmon's visual cortex to its eyeball probably was still slightly capable of transmitting photo-sensitivity.

Then, it probably came down to the fMRI imaging software being so fine-tuned as to notice that differentiation, and amplify it into statistical significance!

<comment><USER4> If that is true, then fMRI studies of V1 in humans are totally screwed. You show them anything, and the unconscious effects overwhelm the stats software and you get 'hits'. As the article goes into, you better be damn careful with your controls and your p values if you want to actually do anything useful in fMRI. If you want to just publish papers, it seems like a great field, but there seems to be better ways to just make a paycheck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The paper this article references has not much to do with listening to podcasts while commuting. It's about how _" the meaning of language is represented in regions [of the brain]"_.

Wonder if the post would have received the same attention with the more precise title "This is your brain on stories".

<comment><USER7> I certainly would like to read an article on "This is your brain on stories" that would highlights and explores escapism, role of story-telling, etc. That would make a nice book as well.

I recently got into listening to podcasts. I noticed that I really don't like the "get together to discuss a topic" kind or the "here's a 2 minutes segment from the radio news" but really do enjoy one-hour long political, history and documentary podcasts.

<comment><USER8> Just wanna make sure you have these in your feed: Revolutions Podcast, History of Rome podcast (finished, but with 5 years of content), Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.

Idk, the "get together and discuss" podcasts vary _widely_ in quality. I find that the way the hosts talk really determines whether I like it. I really enjoy _My Brother My Brother and Me_ (A comedy podcast around answering YahooAnswers questions), and listening to _Boars, Gore and Swords_ helps me solidify and digest what I watched in Game of Thrones.

But some of the discussions podcasts are just babbly. "One bad mother", "Throwing shade". There's very little content.

Even RadioLab does me wrong sometimes, but that's probably just because I have a basic science education and Robert Krulwich is an idiot. Radiolab suffers from the balance fallacy, argument to moderation, and false dilemma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article itself is pretty light on the details, but good opportunity to ask the HN community -- which podcasts really fire your neurons?

<comment><USER10> I'm not into podcasts but I am VERY into audiobooks via audible. I listen to them while commuting, while doing chores around the house and while walking the dog. I used to read voraciously and never had time any more. I alternate fiction and non fiction. Some recommendations: 14 by Peter Cline, the Power of the Dog by Don Winslow, and The Like Switch by an ex-FBI agent about likability.

Changed my life immensely for the better. I read about 5 books a month now.

<comment><USER11> I'd argue that listening to the book is quite different from reading it.

<comment><USER10> Why?

<comment><USER11> Well for starters, different areas of the brain are used and the voice or accent of the narrator can have an effect

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> EconTalk The RSA events London School of Economics events CATO Institute Events Commonwealth Club of California Big Ideas produced by Australian Broadcasting Corp Stanford Entrepreneurship Series Inquiring Minds BBC Thinking Allowed Science Friday Both US and UK Intelligence squared debates

Edge.org talks are great, too, but I don't think they're offered as podcasts yet. Minor inconvenience..

For stories, there's Radiolab, Freakonomics, Snap Judgment, and The Moth

</comment><comment><USER13> Podcasts are my tool of choice for bike riding smooth cardio sessions. They drive my mind off the effort, it makes my rhythm more regular and the experience more pleasurable. Sometimes I'm even thinking "hard" while pedaling.

<comment><USER14> I do the same when running. Much better than music

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Amusingly, I heard about this research on the Nature podcast.

I was skeptical at first — these fMRI studies are a dime a dozen these days, with dubious results — but this one is pretty robust. The use of training data is nice, and definitely adds a level of verifiablility to it. It's a nice step toward actually understanding how the brain processes not just language but ideas. There is definitely a future where we can understand what people are thinking by observing their brain.

<comment><USER16> Isn't it just the bloodflow within the brain that we're observing?

We'll never be able to read a mind based on fMRI-style data any more than we'll be able to judge the ongoings of America by the headlights on the highways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> C++ podcasts, anyone?

A niche request, yes, but my podcast app's search won't respect the plus characters. :(

</comment><comment><USER18> Incredible that they were able to predict areas of the brain that would light up.

</comment><comment><USER19> Link to paper full text?

<comment><USER20> [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v532/n7600/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v532/n7600/full/nature17637.html)</comment></comment>


Company hiring growth hacker via github - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/seatgeek/seatgeek-is-hiring-director-of-customer-accquisition

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Why?

I don't mean to be an ass, I just expected more when I read the headline. Applying via pull request or something. This is really just a link to job description, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like an interesting company but from the tone of the job ad it really feels like the current marketing mix is based on dogma. I'm not saying inbound marketing isn't great but outbound marketing should really have a seat at the table as well if you are looking to accelerate growth.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting the aversion to paid marketing. I would definitely be hiring someone that had at least solid Adwords experience and maybe other networks and pushing into that area in a big way, given the funding raised.

</comment><comment><USER5> Growth hacker is the new 'rockstar' or 'ninja'.</comment>