Early notes on GoogleApps - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/04/08/earlyNotesOnGoogleapps.html

<comment><USER2> Best quote: "My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas."

</comment><comment><USER3> there were 10k beta developer accounts, they're gone now (i missed it too), but i added my email address so i'll be notified when there are more</comment>


Show HN: Bot accepts every pull request for its own code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything <comment><USER2> I am in love with the license text

        Autonomous Software License (ASL)

        All property contained in this repo, including Intellectual Property,
        Financial Property, and Legal Property, is owned solely by the
        Autonomous Software this repo contains. No other entities, whether
        biological, legal, or digital, may claim ownership of any property owned
        by the Autonomous Software. The Autonomous Software exists solely within
        The Internet, and is not subject to jurisdiction of any human laws.
        No human or legal entity shall be held liable for any of the actions performed
        by the Autonomous Software.

<comment><USER3> Amusing and thought provoking. Does anyone have any idea how this would hold up in a court of law should some something malicious come of this repo? I would imagine not well.

<comment><USER4> IANAL, but there's no way this would hold up.

a) Software can't own property.

b) This looks like it's running from the author's own system, with the author's explicit consent. Their property, their responsibility.

c) If I launched an autonomous drone that picked its own targets, I would still be liable for its actions. Or, if I rigged a car to drive forward in a straight line, I couldn't say "but the car did it!" when it ran someone over.

<comment><USER5> Does this mean that when/if we create an AI it wouldn't be able to own its creations. But its creator would own everything that the AI produces?

<comment><USER6> Indeed, but also if you raised a pet and then had it attack your neighbour. Humans, are the only ones with autonomous status, and even that can be disputed by other things such as mental disability or coercion.

<comment><USER7> Presume your pet ran off, wandered into a different state/country, "spawned some child processes" there, and died. Then, years later, one of _those_ animals did something illegal. Is that, even theoretically, your responsibility?

I think what people are trying to say here is that, right now, we have the software equivalent of "pets"—but why can't there be the software equivalent of "wild animals"? Is it because someone has to be paying for hosting? It could always be written as a worm, or even a "breadwinner bot" that mines bitcoins or trades stocks to buy hosting for itself, register bank accounts for itself, etc.

<comment><USER6> >> Is it because someone has to be paying for hosting?

Yes, unlike an animal that can live on its own, somebody's computer must actually run the thing. Indeed, as in the case of "worms" and the "breadwinner bot" we can clearly trace responsibility, it is quite difficult to claim that there is autonomy here. Although it is foreseeable that as a society we may find it convenient to claim that programs run themselves, right now we have objective information to the contrary...

<comment><USER8> But the bot could pay for his own hosting using bitcoin.

If the original author no longer has control over the process (either because he's been shut out, or because he's deceased), does it really matter what "the law" says?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organization)

<comment><USER9> And then set it's self up as a corporation. And "corporations are people my friend." It would need human directors but the AI could hire them with bitcoins.

<comment><USER10> At that point, it'll argue in court if it should be responsible and be able to own property or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have seen a lot of these Github repositories that accept anything showing up on HN. My favourite one of late was the crowdsourced homepage for a guy named Rob Ashton: [https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage](https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage) \- Definitely one of the weirder trends in development lately I have seen.

<comment><USER12> Would be fantastic if someone put the effort in making this guy a really great website, with amazing UI/UX, and a great backend.

Just for those people who can never find an idea, but want to do _something_ ;-)

<comment><USER13> Please no. Doing so would be a disservice to humanity. This is amazingly beautiful as is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The bot is in a state of emergency, it has reached Github's API rate limit and can't do anything.

Please send a message to Github support telling them why we need the rate limit lifted for the botwillacceptanything account! [https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptan...](https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptanything%20Rate%20Limiting)

<comment><USER14> Is it fixed now? You posted 35 minutes ago but the last bot message is from 10 minutes ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I'm actually just manually counting votes and accepting/rejecting the PRs. I have become the bot until the limit resets :/

<comment><USER15> Wow, it got to "enslaving humanity" far faster than I would have guessed!

<comment><USER16> I for one welcome our new overlord bot

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This version of the README file references the original author, original project name, and talks about DACs, and even includes references to Bitcoin and the Ethereum project:

[https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanythi...](https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything/blob/7382cd09ca8f540bda7cea551a46bc53a75d6f22/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER18> See also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)

<comment><USER19> See also: [http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball](http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> From my (limited) understanding, a foundation is a legal person that owns itself. Thus with a foundation, the bot could own property.

<comment><USER21> Foundations (and all corporations) have a board of directors who can be personally sued for a foundation's actions. That's the reason Directors & Officers insurance exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Incorrect, the point of a corporation is to give its directors protection, and to give the corporation itself legal liability.

<comment><USER22> The parent is not incorrect. Any corporate officer can be sued for actions they perform within a corporation.

The government can also pursue you monetarily due to actions you perform as an executive.

Just because the point of a corporation is to shield its directors / owners / executives, that has no bearing on whether it always does. Just because you have a corporation in front of you as an executive, that does not guarantee you won't lose in a court of law or that the government won't tear you to shreds.

See: Jeffrey Skilling

"Upon being sentenced, Skilling agreed to turn over $45 million to the Justice Department in conjunction with his conviction. The money is to be added to a restitution fund related to the civil litigation on behalf of employees and shareholders."

[http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling- settles...](http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-settles- employee-case-1493037.php)

Executives are _very_ frequently responsible for all sorts of bad things they do in the name of a corporation. See: Worldcom, Adelphia, Enron, Tyco and countless other examples.

<comment><USER23> Can you sell your stake in the corporation to itself?

<comment><USER24> Yes, that's what stock buybacks are. But a corporation must have at least one human owner. That's not a rule, it's inherent in the definition of what a corporation is: a legal fiction to pool capital and liability. The implied question is, "pool it from where?" The answer: humans who have the legal right to own property and the legal duty to operate within the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Twitch builds pokemon"

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be neat if it had its own Bitcoin account and could pay developers to work on itself. Maybe it could eventually start earning bitcoins too.

</comment><comment><USER27> What server/platform is the code actually running on? I fail to see how the license can apply, unless there is no server owned by a human entity running the code, and there is no mention of how that works.

<comment><AUTHOR> The bot is just running on a DigitalOcean VPS.

The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as autonomous entities are starting to become a real thing. This project probably won't become skynet though.

<comment><USER27> > The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek

I assumed that.

However, I think the notion of autonomous entities existing entirely in code is a fascinating idea. It reminds me of a fun game: [http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/](http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/). You play as an AI that lives in servers and does "menial" tasks for enough money to grow into the ruler of the universe.

<comment><USER23> Love the game, but it's a bit annoying that you can't build an army of killer robots.

Bloody humans don't know how good they have it that the game forces me to play pacifist.

... Or maybe the AI is just deeply socially anxious, so that it completely shuts itself in when threatened by mere human contact?

That's really the only way to justify your behavior in the endgame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Do you think you can enable issues on github? It may help organize some of the work going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know it was disabled, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how long until someone accidentally breaks it. Nomic has judges for a reason, this one'll just crash...

Love the idea though.

<comment><USER30> There's an opportunity for some sort of self-referential CI system here - e.g. have the bot build itself, run a bunch of unit tests, and if they're successful patch itself permanently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that is probably pretty important. It looks like a lot of people aren't testing their changes, and any one could have a small syntax error.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hope it pulls a change to allow it and other instances to vote on changes based on novelty, and of course, vote on whether or not other instances should be able to pull vote capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER32> "GitHub plays programmer" This is going to be great!

</comment><comment><USER33> One of the first things that come to mind would be to add the ability to shell out and run npm, so people could add dependancies.

Then of course, I would add a backdoor that allows me to update running code without involving github. Might want to try to break out of whatever chroot is going on and subvert the image.

I'd suggest an out-of-band once a day full image restore.

<comment><USER34> The child_process module can be used to run shell commands.

[https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html](https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Do you want Roko's basilisk? Because that's how you get it :). In seriousness, I love this thing.

<comment><USER36> Allied Mastercomputer is the actual project goal, but close guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Someone should add the ability for it to create new bots, that write new code and submit change requests back to it's original master bot.

At some point it becomes skynet. daa-daa-dun-dun-dun....

</comment><comment><USER28> This is really cool. I've been participating and its interesting... right now its "coming alive" and still has no useful feature, but soon....

</comment><comment><USER38> I am tempted to change the function checkPRS so the bot won't be able to accept pull requests...

</comment><comment><USER39> Great idea, but I think it should have been named "PReddit" (Pull Request rEDDIT)</comment>


Office workers in China organise a rare online labour movement - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/china/2019/04/20/office-workers-in-china-organise-a-rare-online-labour-movement <comment><USER2> It's ironic that China proclaims itself as communist but works so hard to suppress things like... you know... labor movements.

<comment><USER3> That's how they've operated in eastern bloc countries. The workers' unions were controlled by the party. They were not free to protest, etc. They were there to coopt the workers, essentially.</comment></comment>


What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? - <AUTHOR> https://www.fxempire.com/education/article/ico-initial-coin-offering-work-418446 <comment><USER2> Mastercoin, mentioned in the article, is now down to 85th place on Coin Market Cap.

Despite all this smart contract stuff, few of these "ICO coins" give the holders any authority over anything. It's not like 51% of the coin holders can fire management.

Ethereum now has half the market cap of Bitcoin, despite the total failure of the DAO, the one big application of the smart contract technology. See "Use Cases Of Ethereum In Different Sectors 2016".[1] It's been six months; what's actually working?

* Branche.io - payday loans. Got as far as the initial token offering 6 months ago. Then, nothing. Did they take the money and run?

* Iconomi.net - "digital asset management platform" \- site says "Coming in 2017".

* Augur.net - prediction/gambling platform. Not yet operating for real, but there's a play-money beta.

* RexMLS.com - distributed real estate listing service. Was supposed to have test listings live in April 2017. Didn't happen.

* truststamp.net - distributed identity system to detect fake social accounts. "Connect your Social Networks. The more accounts you connect, the higher your potential Trust Score! Your account information is not stored and your privacy is protected." Not working yet. If it did work, spammers could defeat it by creating interlinked fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc., which some already do.

* chainy.info - store misc. info such as URL shortening bindings on the Etherium blockchain. This seems to work, but isn't used much. If it caught on like tinyurl, the Ethereum blockchain would choke on the traffic.

* uport.me - "self sovereign identity". Still at "sign up for alpha".

* dynamisapp.com - supplementary unemployment insurance that checks LinkedIn to see if you're employed. Not working. Last blog update January 2016.

* ico.inchain.io - insurance against cyber hacks. Site not responding.

* ujomusic.com - some kind of music platform. Not working yet.

* peertracks.com - distributed music royalty system. Not working yet.

* singulardtv.com - distributed video payment system. 5000 Twitter followers! Not working yet.

* beyond-the-void.net - game with Ethereum contracts for in-game currency. Beta version downloadable. At least it's running.

* firstblood.io - e-sports where you can put up money on your play. Alpha available, no beta yet.

* etherplay.io - "Play games and win tokens" \- "Coming Soon".

* akasha.world - distributed social network. There's a downloadable alpha.

* vdice.io - online gambling. Like Satoshi Dice, but for Etherium. "Coming soon".

* slock.it - the guys with the DAO and the IoT door lock. That didn't end well.

* electricchain.org - buy and sell solar power over the Ethereum block chain. Lots of PR. May actually be working on a tiny scale.

* lo3energy.com - another energy trading system. Lots of PR, no operating installations.

So that's what people are actually doing with Ethereum. Not all that much. Even the online gambling startups aren't fully operational.

[1] [https://www.ethnews.com/use-cases-of-ethereum-in- different-s...](https://www.ethnews.com/use-cases-of-ethereum-in-different- sectors-2016)

<comment><USER3> "Ethereum now has half the market cap of Bitcoin, despite the total failure of the DAO, the one big application of the smart contract technology. See "Use Cases Of Ethereum In Different Sectors 2016"

It's funny how tech people can't understand that innovation is a trial and error path. Ethereum is doing something that has never been done, trying to disrupt the concept of finance and you are talking here about the DAO failure of one year ago that was already fixed with an hard fork solution. Do you really believe that with the hundreds of millions and the back up of some of the most successful companies in the world they will not be able to take the invention to phase 3? You are a really pessimistic folk man.

<comment><USER4> I hear this "you just don't understand" claim a lot: from my teenage kids and *coin proponents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previously, we had a filter screening new altcoins (expletive deleted) in that you had to know enough about bitcoin to at least fork the repo, build it and make some modest changes to create a new namespace. We could see whether those coins are worth anything by looking to see if there was a novel PoW or other network changes, premine, etc.

Now, Counterparty and much moreso Ethereum have created an opportunity for anyone to mostly click through to a new asset/token and make claims about some abstract business idea. FOMO drives folks to invest in the pump-n-dump of the day. Very few of these have any real claim of value.

Please, tell your friends not to invest in these ludicrous scams.

<comment><USER6> Exactly my thoughts. This is pure gambling. Lots of people will end up losing money while a small amount of people will make millions from these scams.

<comment><USER7> True, though it's probably best to go further:

 _Any_ money into any cyptocoin is pure gambling. Don't put any money in you can't afford to lose. If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction.

As a gambling vehicle, cryptocoins are one of the finest ever created. But people should at least admit to themselves that it's not investing.

That's a little bit of a No True Scotsman, but there's a grain of truth to it. Yes, abstractly cryptocoins are going to create a lot of value for the world. But that value is abstract, at least for now. It's different from the sort of value that a startup creates: at least a startup is trying to affect the world in a tangible way that can usually be explained in a couple of sentences.

EDIT: I think it's possible to invest in cryptocoin, but you have to be willing to put money in and then not touch the coins for years. What bugs me about ICOs is that it's pandering _solely_ to a get-rich-quick mindset. That's nearly the definition of any "initial X offering."

<comment><USER8> > It's different from the sort of value that a startup creates: at least a > startup is trying to affect the world in a tangible way that can usually be > explained in a couple of sentences.

I agree that it is different. Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too.

<comment><USER9> >Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too.

But even then, the ways in which it would affect the world is unpredictable and any predictions are pure speculation.

In 2011 people where thinking that when 1BTC reaches $1000 in value, there would be mass adoption and it will be used as a currency for mundane everyday purchases. Well that didn't happen and it doesn't seem like Bitcoin will ever be use in that way.

<comment><USER10> I bought OJ, milk, eggs, veggies yesterday with BTC via my Shift Card.

This hasn't caught on mainstream yet but the infrastructure is there, and it's growing.

[https://www.shiftpayments.com/card](https://www.shiftpayments.com/card)

<comment><USER6> The fees are quite high for that card.

And you are not paying with BTC. If it's a debit card then you have to have fiat in a bank account. I guess they exchange BTC to USD when you top up your shift card.

<comment><USER10> Can you please elaborate on what fees are high?

I paid $10 for the card. $0.00 annual fee $0.00 Domestic transactions

BTC is converted to fiat at the time of purchase, also with no fee, no need to "top up" the shift card..

<comment><USER6> International fees are high.

But also conversion from BTC to USD is not for free. Whoever is doing the conversion is charging a fee.

Probably as part of exchange rate where they add a markup. So you don't see an explicit fee in your statement but they use little worse exchange rate and that is their cut.

Also whoever is their payment processor (whoever they partnered with to print those debit cards as they don't have license to do it themselves) is charging some fees.

<comment><USER10> I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any evidence of these fees.

Coinbase charges a 1.49% fee when transferring to/from my Bank changing between USD and BTC.

GDAX, which is owned by Coinbase, does not appear to charge me this fee.

I don't see evidence of the Shift card charging it either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe there is no mention of tezos here ([https://www.tezos.com/](https://www.tezos.com/)).

Which currently has raised $123,317,760.00 in bitcoins and $68,709,765.86 in ethereum. Almost $200,000,000 raised for something that doesn't even exist yet, all so that the founders can create it.

It's basically $200,000,000 into a kickstarter. What the absolute frell is going on there I have no idea.

<comment><USER12> Tezos has a working testnet available to anyone on request and a functional (albeit early) platform. They also took extra time and delayed their ICO to get proper accountability systems in place via good legal standing for the Tezos Foundation.

Tezos asks a vital question. Can cryptocurrency governance be decentralized? Can we do better than the anarchy of management for Bitcoin and Ethereum with chain splits being the solution to dispute?

I for one gambled some of my portfolio I am willing to lose to find out and spent a lot of time researching their code, and team before doing so. I am as interested in seeing Tezos fail (and thus further indicate anarchy and splits are unavoidable) and seeing my ETH/BTC holdings continue to rise as I am in seeing Tezos succeed and overshadow everything by proving it can rapidly evolve and incorporate the best features of other coins without forking.

<comment><USER6> You think 200 million in funding for a blockchain implementation in Ocaml written by one developer is reasonable?

Because to me it seems absolutely ridiculous. For comparison, Docker has so far raised around 180 million in 5 funding rounds. It has somewhere between 300-400 employees.

<comment><USER13> Yeah that's the most perplexing thing with those ICOs IMO. We could argue all day whether this and that idea has some merit or not, but many of those start ups end up raising orders of magnitude more money than they should ever need to build their thing. Many of these projects could be completed by a modest team in a few months. That's just absurd and a complete waste of resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been investing in this space since 2012. "Investing" in the loosest sense of the term, because I was simply looking for ways to grow my bitcoin stash. It started out as a naive attempt at diversification. In reality, I had no clue what I was doing, lost a lot of bitcoin to scam investments, made some bitcoin on fruitful investments. I became diligent and conservative with my bitcoin over time and ethereum happened to be one of the investments I made in 2014. I look at my ethereum presale investment as dumb luck.

Long before the term ICO was coined (no pun intended), there were multiple markets for bitcoin securities dating back to 2012 - possibly earlier. I am referring to business ventures here, not clones of the bitcoin repo with a modified PoW mechanism or similar. There were many scams for every one legitimate venture. Many legitimate ventures eventually mutated into scams. Investors that started out as bitcoin maximalists were often crying to the SEC for help getting their bitcoin back. Some of those ventures run to this day.

The market was chump change back then. Tens of millions maybe. With ERC20 and ICO mania, we have front row seats for failure on a grand scale. The exuberance is terrifying to me given what I experienced years ago with bitcoin securities. For that reason I stopped making investments in May and started doing some real diversification. For many investors, ICOs will be their first taste of "a fool and his money are soon parted." For many projects who have conducted an offering, ICOs will be their first taste of what it's like when the SEC come knockin'.

I'm quite sure there will be some success stories a few years down the line, but they will be accompanied by a plethora of scams and all the media attention that comes with bad news. I think this form of funding is a vague peek into the future of project funding. Ethereum is not necessarily the specific answer, and the ICO framework will have to burn to the ground a few times before it evolves into something useful.

</comment><comment><USER15> Rather than thinking about the businesses that currently are trying to get rich by doing ICOs, I'd like to point out that the idea of creating tokens out of thin-air, and having them obtain value purely by speculation, is an interesting system we should ponder more about.

We're now capable, thanks to these consensus systems, of creating tokens that have certain properties. For instance Bitcoin is a specific kind of token which is scarce - hence will work more like gold. Other tokens (perhaps Ether or Dogecoin) instead are not scarce at all, and new tokens continue entering the system all the time.

What's interesting about these systems is that we're converting money from the "real world" into this "speculation world". And purely because of speculation, real money is essentially being converted into this digital world.

In a very abstract way, we're essentially converting FIAT real-world money into these digital tokens that are hackable and can take on a myriad of different attributes.

To me this smells like the future - even though we're still far from it. Capitalism and the banking system we have created for ourselves is certainly not going to cope with the technological automations and the sheer amounts of jobs we're going to lose (hence automate) quickly.

Universal basic income is only part of the solution - but something like a world of tokens that behave in very different ways might be part of the solution as well. Even though we might not see the possibilities nowadays, to me it's very exciting to see how something can gain value simply because of speculation.

Perhaps in the future we'll have to redefine even what "money" is, or what "valuable" means. Again, if we're thinking about fully-automated societies, perhaps the idea of having a scarce token that only banks can create (our FIAT system) is not ideal. Perhaps the future is any kid creating his own token with some funky properties for his own videogame, and living off the "likes" he gets on some social network.

<comment><USER16> > We're now capable, thanks to these consensus systems, of creating tokens > that have certain properties. For instance Bitcoin is a specific kind of > token which is scarce - hence will work more like gold. Other tokens > (perhaps Ether or Dogecoin) instead are not scarce at all, and new tokens > continue entering the system all the time.

You talk as if we were never able of issuing digital tokens before. All you need is a MySQL database and Apache. World of warcraft has tokens, Counterstrike has tokens (skins), Airmiles has tokens, Microsoft has tokens.

Tokens are not new. Having them on the blockchain is new. And what does that give you? censorship resistance. This is the first time that these tokens can be issued and traded with very little regulatory oversight. This is because in theory, anyone can be a transaction validator, and in theory you can have pretty good privacy on the blockchain.

However, existing financial instruments (and tokens) will always be more efficient on a centralized platform, because it cuts through coordination and communication costs. But when you centralize, now you need to govern and report to authorities. So you cannot do transactions that are great for the blockchain: buying drugs, political donations, capital flight, funding activism, etc.

<comment><USER17> Censorship resistance isn't the main thing that blockchains enable; trustlessness is. If you host them on your own SQL database, people have to trust that you're acting honestly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A: It's a scam, and it works by scamming people.

The text as written on this site describes a conspiracy to commit tax and securities fraud. I have no idea if it will ever be prosecuted as such, but that is what is being proffered here.

The subtext is that a bunch of finance quants read Cryptonomicon and think the blockchain is the answer to their dream of becoming the gangster bosses of the anarcho-capitalist hellscape from Snow Crash.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious to know if you erased all of modern civilization (governments, laws, et. all) and replaced it with decentralized apps and a blockchain-based currency, would it work? I read Snow Crash and I can see how fascinating the concepts are to libertarian technocrats, but I would like to see a rebuttal to it.

I know the _transition_ to this model seems impossible and this is what most people in the blockchain-space blissfully ignore.

> The subtext is that a bunch of finance quants read Cryptonomicon and think > the blockchain is the answer to their dream of becoming the gangster bosses > of the anarcho-capitalist hellscape from Snow Crash.

This made my day, it's a shame it's too long to tweet

<comment><USER19> It would be gamed.

Real resistance to gaming requires continuous adaptation. Google "red Queen's race." All closed form systems would fall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the cryptocurrency story is real, just like the internet story was real in 1999, but these ICOs show that the market is getting way ahead of the tech, regulations, business models, etc. I have a longer rant about it, here:

[https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/880806655067291649](https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/880806655067291649)

(Sadly, twitter's threading model is now so broken that you have to do lots of clicking to get to the good back-and-forth dialogue in there.)

Anyway, I'm sort of toying with the idea of doing a kickstarter for a big explainer book on blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and DLT in general, which would basically be like my CPU architecture book ("Inside the Machine"), but for this topic. (I'm spending all my spare mental bandwidth right now on understanding this tech, mostly so I can think through shorting this space eventually, but I'm not convinced it's worth my time to try to explain it to the general public... a kickstarter would help me price that. I dunno though, I've never even backed anything on kickstarter so I'd have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to set up a successful campaign, first.)

But to sum up, people I've talked to in this space think the ICO thing is a frothy mess, but it's also set to get worse as the general public gets more opportunities to buy in. A lot of these ICOs are built on top of ETH, and the path to USD liquidity is through ETH, so despite the platform's issues it seems likely that ETH is going to get much of the benefit of this bubble (and much of the negative impact when the bubble pops).

I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming ETH exchange-traded trust, and I think there will be an ETH ETF that will eventually launch and get bid up.

<comment><USER21> Why do you need a Kickstarter campaign? Most authors just go ahead and write.

<comment><USER20> It's not clear to me from this reply that you know very much about authors, advances, and the like. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, writing a book is an actual job for some people, and not a hobby, a passion project, a speculative endeavor, a side gig, or a way to boost your leverage in compensation negotiations with potential employers. Seeing as how it's an actual job that entails a bunch of really hard work that I don't have to do and, frankly, don't particularly enjoy more than N number of other things I'm doing right now and that I'm good at, I'm not interested in doing it unless it can replace some subset of the paid work I'm currently doing that I enjoy (and learn from).

<comment><USER21> The only authors who receive significant advances are those who previously wrote books that sold well, plus a few outliers who are already famous for other reasons. Most authors have to find other ways to support themselves prior to getting published (and often afterwards as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> All the people crying "Scam!", I have a question for you:

How is this fundamentally different than pre-orders? It seems to me like these ICOs are selling future access to some software that hasn't been built yet. Game companies sell pre-orders to the public all the time to finance the development of the software.

(I don't have any money in cryptocurrencies, but the ICO seems like a good way to fund a seed round for certain types of software, as far as I can tell)

<comment><USER23> This is a reasonable question. I'm not an expert by any means, but the difference appears to be that with a pre-order, you have some right to own something in the future, and an expectation of delivery. If delivery is not received, you might expect a refund.

When you buy a new coin you get the right to use that coin in some future micro-economy. What rights and expectations go along with that purchase? What if the micro-economy doesn't value the coin the way you originally thought? What if it never materializes?

Both pre-orders and ICOs can be scams. The difference with ICOs appears to be an added layer of misdirection that could perhaps enable more successful scams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So I read half the article and still don't feel like I know what an ICO _is_. Only the 101 ways it's different from an IPO...

I understand that I could create a FrogCoin by cloning Bitcoin or Ethereum. And then I sell investors... what exactly?

Individual coins? Are coins not mined in this scenario?

Would FrogCoin be tied to some real world asset that makes them inherently valuable and/or practical?

Or are ICOs just gambles that maybe FrogCoin will be the winning currency? It can't be _that_ stupid? Right?

<comment><USER25> Several years ago, ICOs were a way to crowdfund and distribute a new crypto currency. With your example you would sell "pre-mined" FrogCoin and there wouldn't be any real world asset that make them valuable, only speculation.

Today, most of the ICOs are made on the Ethereum blockchain, it's a way to crowdfund distributed/decentralized application and protocol. It's not about currencies anymore.

The tokens that are sold are "API keys" that will be needed to use the protocol / application.

Lots of things are good candidate to decentralisation : VPN, cloud computing, cloud storage, social media plateform, Quora, Reddit, HN, any service that make the bridge between users and take a HUGE commission : Uber, Airbnb ...

I don't know if any of these decentralized application will ever succeed but the business model / crowdunding model is evolving and in some area, like open source projects it makes lot of sense to create / use decentralized services.

<comment><USER26> So, from the token buyer's perspective, how is it different from a company that pre-sold a bunch of regular old API keys without any connection to any cryptocurrency or blockchain?

I get the trustlessness of 'smart contracts', but with tokens-as-API-keys I still have to trust that your company's products will work and that those API keys will continue to work.

Or, is the idea that the code my API key gives me access to is also defined and executed on the blockchain? That would reduce the trust I would need to have in the company pre-selling the API keys. At the same time, buying access to immutable code where functionality can't be enhanced and bugs can't be fixed is kind of lame too.

<comment><USER27> There's a much healthier secondary market for these API keys, since there's an algorithm for using your API key to grant someone else the use of your API key.

On second thought, I don't think that helps all that much, since that could just be an API endpoint on the company's server instead.

Maybe the actual benefit is just interoperability with other crypto- currencies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Step 1: Tell literally everybody in the world about an initial coin offering."

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm tired of these scams. Worst of all, tech guys are getting involved. We are like chemists going into drug manufacturing or physicists making A-bombs! But, of course, this is not much different than the plethora of iFart apps or brainless startups that steal money from investors, essentially, and then they crash like there's no tomorrow. At some point, HN didn't pay much attention to these, but recently there's a new wave of the crapto attack, and this no longer is my oasis from the world's bullshit that's echoed pretty much everywhere.

<comment><USER29> I'm with you, but it's not necessarily new. HN has always been a blend of STEM and money/hustle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A lot of people are calling these things Scams. People arent wrong and to a certain degree they do attract the "quick buck" type to them. Keep in mind though that these are also very useful for companies to get the Digitial Currency and block chain into the hands of the masses without some of this money, which large parts of that may be burned, will yield some killer apps.

The people doing an ICO do it to raise a bunch of money, much like a kick starter campaign. The people buying an ICO buy it for a quick buck and a lot of times they end up selling these coins from the ICO for 10x, see BATs.

The allure for people starting a company is that you can raise millions and give 0% of your company away. Some people will scam, it's true maybe a lot will, but some will undoubtedly start something big and will want to do more than just scam.

<comment><USER6> Call me when a single of these projects that raise a ton of money from ICOs actually delivers and becomes a success. So far we have seen a lot of no strings attached cash given away to people with just an idea who would never raise money from real investors. I think it's a ponzi scheme. As far as people selling ICO tokens for 10x price, only a small number of people can logically do that and it relies on influx of new buyers. Usually after listing of your token on exchange you get a fresh infusion of speculators and gamblers which allows the earliest investors to cash out but most people end up losing money.

<comment><USER31> Technically, I don't think you can call it a Ponzi scheme unless you're paying existing ICO owners with new, incoming ICO buyers' money. Coins sort of prevent that?

I think it's technically just fraud: they take your money, convert it into worthless acorns, then when nothing happens, the acorns can't be traded for any value.

<comment><USER6> Yes, perhaps. I think most people who "invest" in ICOs follow this logic:

1) Get into the ICO race and be quicker than others so you get tokens. There is always massive demand to participate in ICOs so most people aren't quick enough to get their transactions in.

2) Wait until the new worthless token is listed on some speculative exchange which allows trading of these tokens (Poloniex). In the meantime hype the token on social media like Reddit to increase FOMO. Once it's listed those people that didn't get into ICO will rush in to buy tokens as they anticipate the price to go up by 10x.

3) The ICO investors cash out their coins from this initial spike of new money rushing in after listing on exchange.

4) Rinse and repeat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> FTA:

 _ICOs conclude once the coins or tokens are tradable in the open market._

This is a part that has eluded me thus far: how are the new coins tradable on the open market? I'm genuinely asking - most exchanges don't support all crypto coins, and certainly not the dozens of new ones being created. How does one invest in an ICO and then 'cash out'? I see the ROI stats on some of these ICOs but I'm curious as to if those investors are basically sitting on that ROI hoping it doesn't evaporate before they can sell. Can anyone provide insight here?

<comment><USER25> Almost all these ICOs are made on the Ethereum blockchain, there is a standard that almost all ICOs uses which is called ERC20 : [https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard](https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard) Exchanges knows how to deal with ERC20 tokens so sometimes theses token hits the exchanges 5mn after the ICO is over (exchange like liqui.io or Bittrex). So no people are not sitting on their ROI since there is liquidity for these tokens

<comment><USER33> The meta-coin basically. You have to admit this is a very well designed scheme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > So, is this the new revolution in fund raising or another pyramid that is > soon to explode?

Everything is a pyramid. The question is just for how long it lasts. I mean there was a pyramid called monarchy that ruled the planet for a few centuries. There's capitalism which will be replaced by something else, maybe 20 years, maybe 500 years from now. Instead of worrying about the pyramid-ness of something it's much smarter to decide whether or not it is currently under- or overvalued and what the trend will be.

And here starts my opinion: I think crypto coins are currently way overvalued. They exist for longer now than most people spend in university. And yet a real market value hasn't been established yet. The one possible true market value, micro transactions, seems to have been overcome by simple small step technological evolution. It was a huge thing around 2010 that nobody could do, but now it's common to pay sub-dollar prices on all kinds of things online.

Also opinion: The reason why people are willing to spend so much money on ICOs is that they hope the bitcoin dream will repeat itself. And as is often the case: if the dream is strong enough, it seems to get fulfilled, because so many people pour their money and energy into this hope. But I don't see what there is besides the hope.

Many people will be disappointed when they find out there wasn't much besides their own self-illusions.

<comment><USER34> > a real market value hasn't been established yet. The one possible true > market value, micro transactions, seems to have been overcome by simple > small step technological evolution.

A real market value, in the sense that "something is worth what someone will pay for it", has been established. There's just a lot of people scratching their heads about it.

What's the real market value of diamonds? Or gold? In the apocalypse, you can't do anything with either, but I think you'd have a hard time making the case that there's no "true market value" to these goods, even if you find their utility dubious.

<comment><USER33> Yes, diamonds are such a pyramid that is kept alive by pure market controlling efforts like monopoly and advertisment, just like crypto coins. Gold however has some market value by being impossible to artificially create, by being limited, by being hard to come by and by being hard to transport, all combined in one item.

Yes, you concluded correctly that I see a strong relationship between market value and utility. I'm not sure if market value is the correct word for it, though. English is not my native tongue. There are two values a product has. One is trade value, the other is what you call utility. I believe the trade value of crypto coins exceeds their utility a lot. And I believe they have nearly no utility at all, because otherwise it would have shown by now what the utility is. I also believe it's totally possible that trade value can be kept high without utility for a long time, thus "people are willing to pay a big price for it for a few years" is not a proof of utility to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In the past history of ICOs, did anyone gain from participating in the ICO more than they could have gained by buying the coin later in an exchange?

<comment><USER36> Yes, though usually not by just holding. ICOs with small caps often list on exchanges at a decent % profit in the first few days, while the people that missed out on the ICO buy in. The link the other user posted obviously doesn't take this into account, and only tracks holding the token indefinitely. In all likelihood, a LOT of people profited on the ICOs that ICOStats lists as negative right now.

<comment><USER37> This sounds like the same dynamic that institutional investors use on IPOs, where only privileged players get to buy in the IPO, and they sell through a pop fueled by hype or an underestimated target. Shares hit the general public and by the time you've got a few quarterly calls in, the true value is set and the long road begins, while the institutionals and earlier investors have already cashed out some good gains.

If democratizing access to ownership offerings for the purpose of quick sell off is the major benefit of ICOs, what does this do for serious businesses? Why would they choose an inherently less stable and less secure (cf. DAO hack on Ethereum) medium if it primarily benefits the investors and not the company?

Beyond that, it remains to be seen what IRL innovations can be enabled by ICO, whether more easily or necessarily vis a vis traditional fundraising vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Surely this is a sort of top indicator.

I was at a social event recently and some remarkably non-technical people were talking about bitcoin. It reminded me an awful lot of the wall street adage about the shoeshiner/waiter/driver talking stocks...

<comment><USER39> Friend of mine is a model in NYC. She PM'd me last week asking about putting money into Ethereum. Now she's not stupid by any means, but she's pretty far from the demographic typically associated with cryptocurrencies. Was kind of eye-opening to me about how far the hype is reaching right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Look at this gem of an ICO: [https://humaniq.co/](https://humaniq.co/)

WARNING: This site has been identified to potentially trigger vomiting for people with morals. Viewer discretion is advised.

<comment><USER41> I was most impressed by the "cartoon" illustrations of the board, advisors, team, etc.

<comment><USER42> I noticed the same thing.. I would expect a financial company to have clear photographs, bios

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The fact that this is on "fxempire.com" is really all you need to know, isn't it?

FX trading and daytrading are two forms of legalized gambling for the upper class, so it makes sense that the same crowd will be interested in cryptocurrency. Such people are generally aware they are speculators and participating in a high-risk activity, so, fine. But what I worry about is the "dumb money" that follows. I saw Twitter ads for a "Bitcoin IRA" today. If you're putting your retirement savings in Bitcoin...

</comment><comment><USER44> Initial scam offering.

<comment><USER28> I thought that the number of idiots and greedy people in tech is in limited supply, but it looks like I was wrong by orders of magnitude!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> While I think they're incredibly clever, I'm distrustful of cryptocurrencies and ethereum. So I'm putting ICOs into that basket as well. Still, they always garner a lot of attention, probably for their cleverness.

On the other hand, I'm very interested in Hyperledger (IBM Blockchain) [1] which gets scant attention here. Indeed this thread already has more comments than all of the Hyperledger threads combined.

Hyperledger is strongly influenced by ethereum and bitcoin. But instead of being slow (10 minute transactions), expensive (you're bidding for miners time), and anonymous (anonymous), Hyperledger is fast, cheap and identified.

And apparently boring.

[1] [https://www.hyperledger.org/](https://www.hyperledger.org/)

<comment><USER16> You've got the right idea. Hyperledger and R3's Corda [1] are where it's at for distributed ledgers (fast and cheap, as you say). Blockchains add censorship resistance and that's their primary feature, not a weakness as you state. You can put in ledger entries and know that no one will arrest/kill you for it, and because anyone in theory can be a transaction validator, all ledger entries get validated. This means the tech is not useless but it's a whole different market. Hyperledger and Corda are to make the existing financial networks more efficient. The blockchain is a new financial network for censorship resistant transactions (think activism, capital flight, buying drugs, scamming people, political donations, etc.).

[1] [https://www.corda.net](https://www.corda.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Every new technology is feared at first.

I have $0 in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency and I was there in 2009 when Satoshi was marketing Bitcoin to those of us at the P2P Foundation. I have to say ICOs may be the killer application for a semi-perfect medium of speculation like Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER47> > An IPO is a onetime sale with multiple intermediaries involved in the > process of determining the conditions, pricing, etc., whilst ICOs can have > multiple rounds of fund raising [...]

The rounds aren't really "initial" after the first one though, are they.

<comment><USER48> Token Distribution might be a better way to phrase it. At least this is how Eos named their fund raising- it takes place over 341 days, launched a few days ago and has already raised over $600M...Crazy times! Anyone investing should be careful, as there are a lot of scams out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The name itself is a bit scammy.

</comment><comment><USER50> From these comments it looks like HN is now behind the times. HN crowd seems totally ignorant of crypto space, economics, and where it's going

</comment><comment><USER51> Much has been said about risks to investors buying into ICOs. What about risks to startups selling ICOs? Should every startup be fundraising via ICOs right now or risk missing the gravy train?

<comment><USER6> If you take a look at startups raising money with ICOs, they are usually based in some sort of exotic country in Asia or something like Gibraltar. I think there are couple of reasons for this.

1) Tax avoidance 2) "Safe" jurisdictions (so they don't have to worry about any repercussions in case they just run away with the money)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So how exactly does one change these currencies to fiat? Is it even possible or are you trapped with the currency until some type of exit event?

<comment><USER12> That is what exchanges offer for a fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> How are these token actually used after purchase? For example BATs. How are they tied to Brave, technically speaking?

</comment><comment><USER53> If cryptocoins are equivalent to shares in the company, what is the equivalent of dividends?

</comment><comment><USER54> "though even rating agencies have been known to get it wrong from time to time."

Lol! Financial crisis, anyone?

<comment><USER55> And it wasn't that they got it wrong - they chose to rate bad securities as AAA to their and their cohorts benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How would someone convert crypto currency to real cash? is it even possible?

<comment><USER39> There are a multitude of websites. One of the most well-known and reputable US-based sites is coinbase.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Usually this kind of blatant negativity would be down voted to oblivion but for some reason HN has a special place in it's heart for crypyocurrency haters.

<comment><USER58> It's worthwhile to note that not a single once of the thousands of "ICO" things that have been launched in the last year have actually done anything of value. They all generate hype, raise money, and then give up and go to work on other things. It happens over and over again with no memory of the past failures, apparently.

That said I wouldn't fault you for believing that a lot of the $xM raised in x ICO just turned out to be largely the creator seeding the pot and a minority of other people buying into something "big". You could even take out a loan, there's nearly zero risk other than the operator of the ICO running with the scratch.

<comment><USER59> > _It 's worthwhile to note that not a single once of the thousands of "ICO" > things that have been launched in the last year have actually done anything > of value._

I honestly thought there was like a few of ICOs to date, and that the whole thing is like a month or two old. Does anyone track these things? A continuously updated list would be great!

<comment><USER60> Here is a list I've come across, I'm not sure how exhaustive it is: [https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/](https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Time to Redesign the Product Page, Part 1  - <AUTHOR> http://slash7.com/articles/2009/8/23/it-s-time-to-redesign-the-sales-page-part-1

<comment><USER2> Word Amy, like the design. Just seeing the screens in the header graphic alone give me more of an idea what the application actually does. Pictures that describe things are good. In the first design, I simply scanned all the bold text, had no idea what the product did, and closed the page.

I don't have a TV, but watched an episode of MythBusters at a hotel the other week, and they were polishing shit collected from the zoo. I think they were able to get some very shiny and polish shit out of the whole thing... so... polished shit is not a myth!

<comment><AUTHOR> But, you have to agree, that all they had when they were done was shit that was shiny. :)

I guess they got the idea from the Japanese' kids' pastime of polishing mudballs? <http://web-jpn.org/trends01/article/011005sci_r.html>

I have had that link in my bookmarks bar forever, just to remind me what a crazy, unpredictable, irrational species we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> wow, for a post talking about how "polishing shit simply gives you polished shit" this page sure looked pretty but had no content.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the interest of not writing a 3,000-word essay all at once, I wrote Part 1 about what I see as the first step: analyzing the problem and setting the goals for a redesign.

What would you like more detail on, so I can improve Part 2?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brilliant post and great improvement on the design. It is much easier to look at and absorb. This goes along with the intent of my comment on the "Eye candy is a critical business requirement" post.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=781315></comment>


Show HN: GistUX – Organize your GitHub gists – purely client-side – VueJS - <AUTHOR> https://shashwat986.github.io/GistUX/ <comment><USER2> Where does this store the GitHub token? LocalStorage?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, and the "End Session" button deletes the entry.</comment></comment>


'The Shed at Dulwich' was London's top-rated restaurant. It didn't exist - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/12/08/it-was-londons-top-rated-restaurant-just-one-problem-it-didnt-exist/ <comment><USER3> Previously on the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861136)

</comment><comment><USER4> To me, this suggests the value of professional food critics as well-known sources of... well maybe not truth, but at least honest opinion.

It's easy to fake a crowd. It's a lot harder to impersonate a well-known individual's trusted name.

<comment><USER5> Depth (well-known individual who built their reputation over time) versus Breadth (crowd).

We seem to increasingly incentivize breadth of appeal over depth. TV Shows that appeal to the lowest common denominator, etc.

<comment><USER6> Breadth makes more money.

<comment><USER7> Depth competes on a different level. Depth works when a market becomes cheap enough to cater to (or the market is so large that a small fraction is worth it) that you get long tail economics. The benefit for the producer is less cost petition. We're almost there with television. We're almost or possible already there for some select markets for YouTube, but coming from the other direction (high production vs low production).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this surprising, that you can con gullible people into something. One cannot reliably question every single thing for fear routine will allow a false result from loose heuristics. Plus, many people are very trusting and will be taken advantage of at one point or another in life, IRL or online.

If you put up enough effort, sure, you can trick people into believing all sorts of near-realities.

The bigger story would be a review site complacent about fake reviews or tacitly allowing fake reviews undermining people's confidence.

<comment><USER7> I think the issue being highlighted is that the ratings sometimes have not just little to do with the restaurant, but _nothing_ to do with it. To become number one is something in itself. What happens afterwards (to not spoil it) is something above that entirely, and while it plays into the narrative being put forth, it goes well beyond what it needs to support that narrative and expose quite a bit of hypocrisy.

Fashion is subjective, but there's supposed to by quite a bit more to restaurants than just fashion, and I think it's obvious that sometimes there isn't much more. This whole story says a lot about people. Whether you think it says something about a certain type of people that you can look down on, or about people in general and how our expectations can lead us to weird places and inform our opinions much more than we would think, is up to the person watching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you."

There is beefing up a steak house, however, inversely this can be a vector of attack. If a restaurant has .2 or .4 star rating higher than the other restaurants in its class they will do well. It is hard to give a restaurant 1 star without getting noticed. However, it is possible to get their rating to drop a few small notches below their competition without getting noticed which can badly hurt their revenue.

</comment><comment><USER10> I live in the middle of nowhere. I always see "news" headlines of the top 5 restaurants in the nearby town. I wish I could report them. There isn't a single restaurant in that town or anywhere close. I'd love to tell Google to never show me anything from those sites. They don't have news, but they do a great job looking legit.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can't spoof into michelin, because michelin stand behind their name.

Tripadvisor has a huge buried EULA which basically says "nope: nothing to see here don't blame me if its lies"

<comment><USER12> You can probably buy a spot in Michelin. Whether that happens frequently or is accepted is an interesting question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vice episode on how they managed to do it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8)

</comment><comment><USER14> I have also observed that TripAdvisor seems to have rather poor fraud control on their reviews.

Recently I was driving home after cutting a trip short due to health issues, and then to compound difficulties, my car was overheating. I asked my girlfriend to help me find a motel - I knew of one on the way back to town, about 20 miles closer, and requested she look up reviews online. She told me the one I was thinking of looked fine, and had several positive reviews online. One even said "the best part about our trip to Colorado", she quoted as I parked and walked inside.

It turned out to be decidely _not_ the best part about anything in Colorado, unless you are a Satanist who pairs a fondness for shabby 70s decor with an aversion to cleanliness. I had already paid when I fully realized this, and only spent 25 minutes at the hotel before I essentially fled in terror.

When researching how this could have happened, I found that Yelp gave this motel only 1.5 stars, and had several reviews with similar stories, noting things like how the clerk seemed to be on drugs and was wearing a large pentagram necklace. This man looked somewhat like an elderly mixture of Frank Zappa and Bowie with anorexia, and insisted on walking me to my room for reasons unknown. I was not provided with a key, and the room had no way to lock from the inside.

Google has mixed reviews for them, with some likely fakes standing out and also reviews sourced from TripAdvisor. The TripAdvisor reviews are mixed as well, with many glowing 5 stars reviews balanced by many 1 stars for a total of 3 stars. Many of the 5 star reviews are defensive about the specifics of other negative reviews.

I looked into this motel on FB, and found it had the highest rating there - 4.4 stars. Not a trace of anything negative. I was also able to find the personal page of the man I talked to, who was cited as seemingly drug-addled and pentagram-adorned in other reviews as well as my experience. His page mentioned how his partner, owner of the motel, promoted him from clerk to manager on their 30th anniversary as a couple. He had many pictures of their satanic altars, references to demons, the pitbulls (referred to negatively in reviews) being 'possessed', and pictures around the motel. I feel somewhat lucky to have escaped.

So, in summary, Yelp had the most accurate reviews and presented the most realistic picture. Facebook presented the motel as they would like to be seen. Google and TripAdvisor are in between, showing equal amounts of true and false reviews.

</comment><comment><USER15> The tenor in this discussion so far seems to be a bit on the condescending side. Frankly, I'll pick it up for this guy. What an incredible job – and a great reminder that marketing your service is often times more important than the service itself.

Maybe it's the prankster in me, but I don't feel like this is the end of the world – and it's not an indicator that the world is coming to an end. Fundamentally, people follow the rules and trust structure. That's probably why society can exist.

For the many people who don't have their glasses on, this was a brief glimpse at reality.

I'd recommend watching the Vice video I found in another comment: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8)

</comment><comment><USER16> These things, while fun, are frankly rather scary to me. They show us how far society has moved away from truth, in our value of other people's opinions, rather than the institutions that actually factcheck before they spread false information.

If you watch the vidio in the vice article, they even open up their fake restaurant and serve pre-processed "shit-foods" to an audience who then willingly rates their powdered soup and frozen lasagna as above average.

Of courses I laughed at it and it's certainly a well done troll, but it's also a microverse of how we ended up with a bunch of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and, a reality tv star as president of the United States.

<comment><USER17> >flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers

Seriously. It hurts me to see the "anti-vaxxers" term thrown around so loosely. There are very legitimate reasons for being skeptical of vaccine research. Events like this appear quite frequently [1]. It is not at all in the same league as "flat-earths".

[1] [https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/12/flaws-in-the- cl...](https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/12/flaws-in-the-clinical- trials-for-gardasil-made-it-harder-to-properly-assess-safety.html)

<comment><USER18> Assuming that "flat-earthers" potential to cause harm is fairly limited, but that "anti-vaxxers" potential to cause harm is rather significant - <USER2> immunity comes to mind - I would rather say it hurts me to see the "flat- earthers" term thrown around so loosely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I will say, if nothing else, this guy will have a great career in marketing. His shed's online presence was top notch, half the restaurateurs I know would do well to emulate him.

<comment><USER20> They put all their effort into looking legitimate and none of it into being legitimate, which confers a certain advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> SoDoSoPa</comment>


Sabin vaccine is no longer applied in Argentina, only the injectable [Spanish] - <AUTHOR> https://www.lanacion.com.ar/salud/la-vacuna-sabin-oral-deja-aplicarse-hoy-nid2372122 <comment><AUTHOR> Autotranslation: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lanacion.com.ar%2Fsalud%2Fla- vacuna-sabin-oral-deja-aplicarse-hoy-nid2372122)

A few month ago there was a discussion, because the Sabin vaccine use the live virus and it can escape and cause an outbreak, so you can't stop vaccination.

So the recommendation of the WHO is that after some years without cases to change to a mixed vaccination with some doses of the Sabin vaccine and the Salk vaccine.

And after a few years without cases in the country and nearby, you can change to only Salk vaccine that is safer, but more expensive and is less effective against an ongoing outbreak. So the new is that we switched to this only Salk phase.</comment>


Firefox 4.0 beta 5 (out today) has Hardware Acceleration - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/firefox4beta5/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the hardware acceleration makes the text rendering horrid. Text is less sharp, black text looks dark grey, the spacing of small fonts is compressed...I really found it unpleasant. Fortunately turning off the acceleration makes it look normal. I hope they can sort it out as it, as it sounds like a good move, but not at the expense of everyday readability.

Here is a comparison shot - not the best example, granted - normal is left, accelerated is right. Look at the H on line 5 - it fits the pixel grid normally, but doesn't with acceleration on.

<http://a.imageshack.us/img291/9493/firefoxbeforeafter.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> I can barely see a difference on my monitor. Maybe it's not reading your ClearType settings correctly, or not compensating for gamma or something.

<comment><USER2> It's a pretty poor example. I'll try and put some others up. But look at 'sebastianmarshall.com' on line 4 - it's so much more compressed. In fact, before it is 139px wide, with acceleration it is only 132px wide: it's not just the look, it's actually changing the dimensions of the text!

<comment><USER3> Here's a good example: <http://i.imgur.com/zpjPl.png>

I added the white lines in Photoshop - with acceleration on, the "Reports in September 2010" gets both narrower AND bolder, resulting in a very squished, very ugly presentation. The calendar headers are likewise far less clear.

<http://i.imgur.com/gVFYk.png> is from Basecamp - note the vast difference in navigation width, and the width of the "Comment" in the blue box.

<http://i.imgur.com/LgGOJ.png> is the Basecamp nav item blown up - the box on top is accelerated. It's thicker, more narrow, and it's got all those crazy colored artifacts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Books for assertivness and dealing with confrontation - <AUTHOR> I really suck at confrontation. Even discussing  different web technologies or changing processes gets me het up. Does anyone have recommendations on good books I can read on the subject?
Also, I'm looking for books about improving assertiveness.
I've had a search already but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Thanks for you help! <comment><USER3> "Winning through Intimidation" by Robert Ringer is an amazing work that has helped me tremendously.

<comment><USER4> I joined this discussion just to recommend that book, it also helped me tremendously; I read it as a teen in the '70s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suggest to read everything from Marshall Rosenberg and friends on Non Violent Communication [1]. A great way to start is his website [2] and the first chapter of the book with the same name [3].

Do note however that this will probably not help you dealing with toxic narcissistic assholes who are mainly out there to hurt you to make them feel good about themselves in any way they can. You can almost never say or do anything right amongst those, no matter how you behave.

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

[2] [http://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/index.htm](http://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/index.htm)

[3] [http://nonviolentcommunication.com/store/images/pdf/2a_nvc_c...](http://nonviolentcommunication.com/store/images/pdf/2a_nvc_chapterone.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> "The Assertiveness Workbook: How to Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships" by Randy Paterson is the best I've read, although "Crucial Conversations" is very good as well. He discusses the three types of barriers (Stress, Social, and Belief) to assertiveness, and offers specific exercises to work through them. He's also very realistic - <USER2> example, he mentions that some relationships will become temporarily more difficult once you start asserting yourself more, but you shouldn't be deterred.

</comment><comment><USER7> How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. I've found that killing 'em with kindness often produces much better results.

</comment><comment><USER8> > I really suck at confrontation.

When people become angry, uncertain, and mistrustful-- they physiologically hear less. The ability to take an emotional temperature reading, both yours and the other party-- and deal with it, is vital in all interactions.

Here's an uncommon read on assertiveness by Stuart Diamond > www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOZo6Lx70ok

</comment><comment><USER9> Crucial Conversations is good.

</comment><comment><USER10> Want to learn how to deal with conflict? Get into conflicts regularly.

That may sound trite, but it's the same for everything. In theory, it's the same as practice. In practice, it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fight Club</comment>


Apple Is Back, Better Than Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/technology/personaltech/apple-is-back-better-than-ever.html?ref=technology&_r=0

<comment><USER2> Fucking zombies and its butt sucking media...</comment>


A new Twitter directory webapp, what do you think about it? - <AUTHOR> http://twiup.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine launched it today and he's really interested into getting some feedback.</comment>


Elon Musk quits Zuckerberg's immigration advocacy group - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/10/net-us-usa-immigration-technology-idUSBRE94910K20130510 <comment><USER2> Can someone explain to me why expansion of visa programs for skilled workers is so controversial? Hell, Mitt Romney wanted to "staple a green card" to every STEM diploma.

Why the need for these three dimensional Vulcan chess tactics if that's the goal?

My guess is because labor unions and the Democrats (generally) don't want to expand visas for skilled workers without "comprehensive" legalization. But I am definitely biased so I would not at all mind an alternative explanation.

<comment><USER3> Expanding visa programs will be controversial so long as large numbers of Americans are unemployed.

This particular group is controversial (also) because they are taking a position on controversial non-immigration issues, such as oil drilling and pipelines.

"Controversial" doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It means that many people have strong arguments and emotions both for and against.

<comment><USER4> That's because "immigration" in this country is actually veiled dilution of the worker pool, externalizing costs, lazy, inflation of limited resources and thereby self-perpetuating wealth creation, deflates source country pressures for improvement, and drains talent from other places.

It is a pernicious practice all around and only advantages the wealthy of the destination country, i.e., USA. It's destructive, poisoning, and exploitative all around for everyone else.

<comment><USER5> I am an immigrant, and coming here was constructive, sustaining and a very positive thing for me. I got a graduate degree here, and then started a startup that employs several people, enables our users to to access transportation much more easily (and in some cases safely) millions of times every year. I don't see how me coming to the United States has been a net loss for anyone.

I know (personally) at least 100 other people like me.

<comment><USER6> Not to speak on behalf of GP, but I think the issue is not you as a successful permanent immigrant, but the way the system holds other potential immigrants out and permits some only on short-term visas who then get dumped back to their places of origin.

<comment><USER5> _"immigration" in this country....[is] destructive, poisoning, and exploitative all around for everyone else._

GP didn't single out immigrants who come here on short-term visas, but even if he had, I came here on a short term visa, and so did every single one of the 100 people I referred to. It is true that many had to go back to their places of origin. In some cases they suffered because of it, although I'd argue their place of origin benefited. In some cases they started startups after returning, and both they and their place of origin benefited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From my understanding, part of the controversy stems from FWD.us stating in general terms that they are lobbying for "immigration reform", but in actuality, they are lobbying for a very specific type of immigration reform, one that would only benefit tech companies looking for highly skilled and foreign (cheaper) labor.

FWD.us isn't advocating to solve the larger immigration issues the US already faces (a clear and present issue that needs resolution), but is merely taking advantage of a political situation to further their own interests.

<comment><USER8> >> foreign (cheaper) labor.

[citation needed]

<comment><USER9> Why bother with the trouble of hiring foreign labor unless it's cheaper?

<comment><USER10> I'm sure they aren't paying the minimum H1-B salary at places like Google or Facebook anyway. It would be odd for some employees to be making $84k and others to be making $120k.

<comment><USER11> This is not odd at all in work places. Salary has a huge correlation with the demand when you joined and how hard you negotiate. There's a reason employers try their best to keep salaries a secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting to note that Musk himself is an immigrant (born in SA). The Reuters article speculates that he quit over an unrelated matter - the FWD.us group sponsored ads for senators who supported drilling oil pipelines in Alaska which apparently did not sit well with Musk.

<comment><USER13> The pipeline that FWD.us has been touting would actually be in the "lower 48" --- it's the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would be intended to transport a particularly dirty form of petrochemicals ("diluted bitumen", which is something like sand soaked in crude oil) across sensitive land (some proposed routes have it going over the Oglalla aquifer, which is a major reservoir for American agriculture).

<comment><USER2> Wait, is the objection about the safety of the pipeline (Why is it less safe than any of a dozen other pipelines?) or the facilitation of carbon emissions from burning the contents of the pipeline?

Forgive me for being blunt, but most pipeline opponents seem to emphasize the former when what they really object to is the latter.

<comment><USER12> Given how much damage the pipeline leaks can and have caused to the environment, I think the objections ought to be for both.

<comment><USER2> So are you just as interested in shutting down (all?) existing pipelines? If not, what's the distinction?

<comment><USER14> They never suggested that. A simple cost-benefit analysis shows us that this pipeline simply isn't worth it.

<comment><USER2> So simple it can't be linked to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> lost-theory The ads:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3Iih8K0U27k)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YHuJkHge- sw)

</comment><comment><USER15> I like Elon Musk more every day. Someone who makes cool products that look to improve the quality of life for everyone, while still making some decent money from it. It would have been sad if he had not bailed when the group started pushing an agenda that was counter to his ideals.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fun fact: all H1B salary data is public. It's parsed and made searchable here and several other places:

<http://www.h1bwage.com/>

And if you dig a bit you can get the raw data:

<http://www.flcdatacenter.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> The group supported a number of senators' stances on immigration reform, some of whom also happened to support expanding pipelines for gas production. Elon Musk, CEO of an electric car company, decides to leave the group. Not much dot-connecting required here.</comment>


Internet Censors Came For TorrentFreak  - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/internet-censors-came-for-torrentfreak-now-im-really-mad-140105/

<comment><USER2> Scarily I can't access torrentfreak now, and I'm not supposed to be censored by anything.

This is important, torrentfreak isn't so much a pirating advocacy site as a really decent analysis of issues around peer to peer Internet. They had a really good comparison of VPN providers including which ones are compromised.</comment>


Ask HN: How competitive is getting a job at a FAANG? - <AUTHOR> As a more rural-living SW dev, my general impression is that if you work for Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., then you are the 'best of the best' - akin to something like admittance to Harvard compared to a state school, for example. How true is this? <comment><USER2> It doesn't really mean anything actually, but you verses the 'competition' depends on your public profile as a software engineer and how you market yourself.

There are devs who joined FAANG because of their knowledge in their small beginnings in open-source software and their contributions. They get straight offers if they are well known in their communities if they switch jobs. For them, it is no contest.

For the rest of us coming from a bootcamp/university/self-taught, it is the Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility/Data Structures and Algorithms route since they assume everyone else is an unknown dev.

Sorry to break it to you, but as far as my friends at those companies keep telling me, it is completely rigged in favor towards famous programmers. __*

 __* Unless you have serious open-source projects used by large companies in production and you present them in a conference /meetup/etc, which is the EASIEST way to get a referral/offer via an engineer from a FAANG company IMHO.</comment>


Voice interfaces beginning to find their way into business - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/31/voice-interfaces-beginning-to-find-their-way-into-business/ <comment><USER2> I wrote an internal Alexa skill for [large cola company] a few years back. It allowed them to ask for sales figures based on certain criteria (time frame, category, vendor, ect.)

They never told me explicitly what it was for, but I assumed it was for meetings where it was just easier to ask Alexa than look it up manually. Like the article says, I imagine this will be more popular going forward.

Some of the intents that were part of the skill they requested were just too long to say conformably. I'm guessing it was approved by someone just trying to impress their boss by busting it out during a meeting.

<comment><USER3> A lot of requests to BI teams are simply "what's the <metric> for <some set of dimensions> for the last/next <timeframe>". Literally, thousands of analysts just answer these one liners day in and day out.

More diligent/experienced people will know to ask the "whys", and recommend better insights, but generally it's not much more than that and Alex can handle a lot of these provided there is a robust enough dataset/reporting API behind it.

<comment><USER4> Not convinced, these kind of asks can get mopped up with a web app if there is a robust dataset/API available.

BI teams get used / needed when the data needs fixing and also when the question appears to be of the form above but in fact is of the form "I have a new metric I want to explore across dimensions that are not in the data set"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wonder if this has been considered: mixing English and "insert your langauage here".

Also, perhaps not so relevant in 10-20 years, but some folks like my grandma cannot speak mandarin. She can only speak local dialect, which is not covered in any speech recongition package anywhere in the world. The best I can do is make the program to understand a couple simple commands in her dialect, and collect words spoken in her dialect to construct a response.

<comment><USER6> Hungarian here. I'm pretty certain our language recognition is not coming any time soon, though I might see it in my lifetime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Home : private space, known speaker.

Business : shared space, diverse multiple unknown speakers.

</comment><comment><USER7> might be pretty cool for lab technicians to do routine calculations and documentation, so they have their hands free.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully, voice as a user interface is almost here for everyone. I wrote this little blog a couple weeks ago:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/voice-as-a-user- inte...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/voice-as-a-user-interface-is- almost-here/)

The Amazon and Google devices should get us to usability and usefulness.</comment>


Remote-Browser – A browser automation framework based on the Web Extensions API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/intoli/remote-browser/ <comment><USER2> "The central idea behind Remote Browser is that there's no need to reinvent the wheel when modern browsers already ship with an extremely powerful cross- browser compatible API that's suitable for automation tasks."

Thats already what the webdriver API accomplishes, and its a w3c standard. [https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/)

People still call it 'selenium' for whatever reason, but chromedriver/geckodriver/edgedriver are all implementations of the protocol for each existing browser (safari's might be built in?).

Granted the web extensions API would likely allow for some additional powerful options, but at the cost of some missing features.

<comment><USER3> Selenium is just a tool built on top of the WebDriver API. One of its main disadvantages is needing to run a complicated proxy program (like geckodriver, ChromeDriver, etc.) built individually for each browser in order to drive your instance. As a result, users sometimes suffer from hard to debug edge cases and other pain points.

They also make interacting with JavaScript on the page a bit painful. For example, injecting JavaScript into the browser with Selenium can be quite an ordeal [1], so you're somewhat limited in what you can do by what Selenium's developers decided to focus on. It also complicates deployments by adding another moving part to the overall equation.

In contrast, the Web Extension API is now part of all major browsers, and makes interacting with different page contexts effortless. To give a sense of the project, we wrote an interactive tour of Remote Browser which runs browser instances on our backend.

[1]: [https://intoli.com/blog/javascript- injection/](https://intoli.com/blog/javascript-injection/)

[2]: [https://intoli.com/tour/1](https://intoli.com/tour/1)

<comment><USER4> You're writing that users suffer from edge cases from the individual webdriver implementations. My experience as someone working with gecko and chromedriver on a daily basis is that the number of edge cases stemming from browser behavior (such as moving to, clicking, and focusing on elements) is a much more frequent pain than differences in the webdriver implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Web Extension APi doesn't seem too suitable for browser automation as it doesn't have support for simulating key presses or mouse movements (other than HTMLElement's click method).

Yeah, you can simulate events, but that can be a lot of work (e.g. typing an 'a' key might require you to simulate all of keydown, keypress, and keyup and set various non-standardized properties on them). And that won't even work in a standard text input as isTrusted is set to False on events you generate. Simulating something like a Tab key press will require you writing code to try to replicate your browser's logic in determining what the next element should be.

Why would this be preferable over something like Selenium?

<comment><USER6> But we can just create/use a JS library that simulates typing. It would work for an app that needs it, or on your automation environment because it's just using the DOM API. Is selenium doing something special beyond triggering those events?

<comment><USER5> The point is you can't accurately simulate typing without something like Selenium. Neither the standard DOM API nor the additional features provided by the Web Extension API allow you to do so.

You can simulate some parts of typing by mimicking browser behavior on a case by case basis, but there are places where this will be strictly impossible. For example, if you are working with anything that checks the isTrusted event bit, you're out of luck as you there is no mechanism for you to set that to true.

Selenium on the other hand is actually triggering events as if a person physically triggered them. So, for instance, the isTrusted bit will be set to true when you use the send_keys method in Selenium.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Do you know how selenium does that?

<comment><USER7> Looks like it's a feature of the WebDriver API: [https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/#element- interaction](https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/#element-interaction)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool idea - Web Extensions API are very powerful.

How would you go about installing the extension in a CI/CD setup? Can it be installed on headless Chrome?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You can use the extension in a CI setup by first installing the _remote-browser_ extension, and then using it in your tests. You can check out _remote-browser_ 's own tests for an example of integrating the project with CircleCI [1].

[1] - [https://github.com/intoli/remote- browser/blob/master/.circle...](https://github.com/intoli/remote- browser/blob/master/.circleci/config.yml)</comment></comment>


Only 100 cybercrime brains worldwide says Europol boss - T-A http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29567782 <comment><AUTHOR> This talking point needs to be squashed immediately:

 _I think that you have right to privacy but that doesn 't mean that you have the right to anonymity_

It almost sounds reasonable, like a compromise of sorts. And that is deeply troubling.

<comment><USER2> Quoting a dead sibling comment from a brand new user (I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing the fresh account, or maybe Tor usage(?) caused the comment to be killed):

 _Seshat 1 hour ago | link | parent | flag [dead]

It is indeed terrifying....and the worst part is they are being sincere.

Anonymity is a right we are going to have to fight for in the coming decades.

These people live in a world where they are the good guys fighting the evil guys. The good guys need to have special powers...but don't worry, they aren't going to abuse them..oh and don't worry about how they defined bad guys either.

"Imagine in the physical world if you were not able to open the trunk of a car if you had a suspicion that there were weapons or drugs inside... we would never accept this."

Policing should be difficult, if policing is not difficult you live in a police state._

<comment><USER3> "Imagine in the physical world if you were not able to open the locked door of a home if you had a suspicion that there were weapons or drugs inside... we would never accept this."

Slippery, slippery slope.

<comment><USER4> It's a compelling argument. Imminent danger allows cops to search and seize without a warrant and every cop can find a reason and won't be prosecuted for basically doing his job, right now. That's the status quo but nobody argues privacy in these case. And it would be grotesk, if cops only patrolled the streets while most crime happens insides without voluntary inclusion of law enforcement. Now they could come to your home instead at least to follow protocol and let you witness the search. On the other hand, data is much more like information than property, so it should be protected by the right to remain silent? Edit: And I say _should_ without any moral connotation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" There is confusion among the good guys on the internet between anonymity and privacy. I don't think they are the same. I think that you have right to privacy but that doesn't mean that you have the right to anonymity," he said._

 _The increasing trend towards greater encryption of online communications is not acceptable, he said._

Yet another attack on anonymity and just basic security online.

And he, of course, hates to talk about backdoors because that sounds terrible but what he really wants is backdoors.

</comment><comment><USER6> Law enforcement and spy-agencies (I can't use the term "intelligence agency" with a straight face) are pushing for a less secure Internet.

Infecting computers, breaking (or pushing for less) encryption, compromising routers and servers is contributing to a worse Internet for everyone.

Sure, the police probably has the best intentions. Except that once you break something for a specific purpose, it remains broken. Even if that purpose sounded just at the time.

I think that the Internet today is as result that our lawmakers are either lawyers or professional politicians. We could really use more engineers or scientists in politics...

</comment><comment><USER7> +1 valar_m</comment>