Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130604/salesforce-com-makes-its-biggest-acquisition-yet-buys-exacttarget-for-2-5-billion/ <comment><USER2> Here's some perspective from someone deep within the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce has very concretely and deliberately pursued the "imperial" approach in the B2B/Enterprise market, which is to do a careful survey of existing products in a particular space, the potential revenue to be gained from expanding into that space, and what is needed to get a heads up on existing products.

As is generally the case in the enterprise space, this means providing more features than the competitors. There is also a network effect in that the more features and integration points a particular platform has, the more valuable it is.

Salesforce has done this extremely effectively, from salesforce automation, to customer relations management, to customer service, etc. In many cases now it is virtually unimaginable not to use Salesforce, since the feature set is so extensive. One note here is that although the UI has had its warts, Salesforce is actually has a much better UI experience compared to most other enterprise apps (lightweight competitors tend to be better, but not deliver the feature set).

In any case, marketing is a natural extension for Salesforce at this point and I have ever reason to expect they will be successful at dominating this market segment just as they have in other sectors and points on the value chain. If they have to pay a bit of a stock price premium in order to do so that's not a lot of sweat off Benioff's brow.

<comment><USER3> "Salesforce has done this extremely effectively, from salesforce automation, to customer relations management, to customer service, etc. In many cases now it is virtually unimaginable not to use Salesforce, since the feature set is so extensive."

This is the same strategy that Microsoft has pursued for years - and it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't - MSFT going after Intuit comes to mind, as does their own Salesforce.com competitor.

ExactTarget is a good large-scale email tool, but it is a very below average marketing automation tool. Now, they purchased Pardot, which is a decent, if basic marketing automation tool - good for small business but nowhere near an Eloqua or a Marketo - more comparable to Hubspot. So the question is how integrated they can make all these various tools. To date the Pardot/ExactTarget integration was rather weak - probably more to come on that front. I could see a world where they use Pardot's front end and ExactTarget just for scale email sending but the existing user base won't appreciate that move.

Now, I look at the integration (or lack thereof) with existing Salesforce acquisitions, and I have little confidence that Salesforce will be able to build a world-class, fully integrated product. For reference, look at the integration of Buddy Media or Radian6. So Salesforce may have all the tools, but true integration between the tools has been historically lacking. Now they're adding a company that is strong in B2C email and has a small B2B marketing automation tool that they themselves are trying to integrate. Sounds very complex and difficult - and sounds like something that would take a number of years to get right.

The real question for me is what now happens to Marketo and Hubspot - Hubspot, for example, has an investment from Salesforce, but was probably unavailable for acquisition as they want to spin public. Now that Marketo is public, and it looks like their business is not very sustainable (based on my read of the S-1), they'll likely see their stock price dip to the point where they look more interesting as an acquisition to someone. They're valued at around $800m right now - so if they show poor financial metrics, I'd expect that to dip. If they get cut in half, then a pick-up in the $600-800m range becomes viable - about the same price as Eloqua - but I'm not sure who would be the buyer at this point.

I think Salesforce did the right thing in terms of topline revenue (ExactTarget does around $300m vs. $65m for Marketo) and customers (ExactTarget has large B2C brands, Marketo mainly B2B), but they bought a far inferior product. Maybe they pickup another company in the space for the product?

<comment><USER4> Not sure I agree that Marketo's business is unsustainable - clearly they want to make more headway in the B2C space; the B2B Marketing Automation market would seem to be saturated, but I would argue that there's still plenty of growth for them for the next 3-5 years, at a minimum.

As far as I can tell, ExactTarget's marketing automation capabilities vastly pale in comparison to Marketo or Eloqua, I could be wrong though.

<comment><USER5> something like 90%+ of Marketo's customers integrate it with Salesforce. Of course Salesforce won't just cut them off if they have a competitor tool, due to anti-trust issues, but it doesn't necessarily bode well for Marketo now that Salesforce owns a competitor. Pardot is a fairly small piece of Exacttarget though so potentially Marketo could still be a target at some point.

Larger scale B2C marketing automation is generally much more complex than b2b. Ecommerce databases are generally less normalized across businesses, aren't hosted by an intermediary like salesforce and contain more data. Cross-channel retailers with physical stores track a ton of transactions and customers. I really don't think that any b2b marketing automation platform will make much headway trying to go b2c. Hubspot has some success only because they focus on local and small businesses.

<comment><USER6> As founder/CTO of HubSpot: We don't really sell much to local businesses. We're in the SMB space but with an emphasis on B2B companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: <http://twitter.com/dhh>

This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in _revenue_? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been proven wrong about this stuff before.

<comment><USER8> Buying ExactTarget adds 6000 more prospects/customers that Salesforce can sell to. Assuming that it signs up a fraction of those to use Salesforce Service Cloud or Data.com or any of the other Salesforce products, that's more money and helps justify the price.

Oracle has been doing this for years (and probably where Benioff got his playbook) They buy up a company, fold in their customers and cross-sell their other products to them.

<comment><USER7> Yeah but assuming that works out as profitable, those customers (assuming they all stay with them) would have to start spending 10x the money they're spending with ExactTarget now on Salesforce products. That's a _big_ stretch and risk, but again, maybe it'll work out for them. :)

<comment><USER9> Well, the purchase is a onetime cost, and revenue is recurring. If they spend 2x what they are paying now they'd recoup the cost (in terms of revenue) in 5 years. Plus, that's not counting new customers for ExactTarget's services. If you are a heavy SFDC user and were previously deciding between Marketo, Hubspot, and ExactTarget, you may go with ExactTarget because you know it'll be fully supported by SFDC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're the little guy competing against ExactTarget. I had no idea their business wasn't profitable. From their customers who have reached out to me, it seems that for web businesses to integrate with them there are huge complexities (like mirroring your production database, and having ET engineers write custom code for you).

Even with all this they've clearly been successful on the revenue front. With an acquisition like this (company losing money), it'll be interesting to see what SalesForce does to make them turn a profit.

<comment><USER11> The ability to set up a dev or test environment to test integration has been a problem with ET in past, maybe it still is (I did Drupal to ET integration several years ago).

However, from what I have seen of Salesforce, which is not direct experience but in watching demos over people's shoulders, their test environment setup is very smooth. I think you have to pay more for it, but you can get a copy of your environment, if you are writing custom plugins it checks that you wrote tests, that those tests pass, and that those tests aren't stubs, before it lets you put anything live. It seemed a legit best practices operation.

Maybe Salesforce can implement that setup for the ET service and APIs. In the meantime I will checkout customer.io for the next project that needs email campaigns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use Exact Target, every day, and I'm very happy with their product and their service. I won't speak to the valuation, but their technology and application is great.

<comment><USER13> You would call their technology and application great? I use it every day as well, and for me it's one of the worst pieces of enterprise software I have to use. Unusably slow, and what should be very simple makes me jump through multiple hoops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a natural fit.

Startups use Mailchimp & Sendgrid, etc. for email marketing, but then as they mature & grow, they see the need for more mature (although, yes, more expensive, complex, & slower) tools like ExactTarget.

Very similarly, how do startups track their customers & leads? Often, with no CRM other than spreadsheets or in-house tools. When they scale & have >10 sales staff, they realize they need a more mature, slower, more expensive CRM, & SalesForce is there.

So, yes, the acquisition price seems high, but the complementary fit is solid.

<comment><USER15> I used to work at a place that happily used SugarCRM (which is open-source) for both email marketing and for CRM, so there are better CRM solutions for small businesses than simply doing spreadsheets/in-house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another horrible deal for SF. BUDDY MEDIA ring any bells? I also loved this bit "It ran a $21 million loss on $292 million in revenue last year."

If I make $1 a year that means I earned $21 million and one dollars more than this company did last year.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Salesforce is paying $33.75 a share, which amounts to an 11.7 percent premium over yesterday's closing price of $22.10. Salesforce shares are down by more than 2 percent, or $40.16, in pre-market trading on the news."

How does any of that math make sense? Since when does 2% of $22.10 amount to $40.16, or is my brain just not working so early in the morning?

<comment><USER18> It's awkwardly worded but they meant that the salesforce stockprice ( not exact targets) is down 2% to its (at the time current) stock price of 40.16. As you can see from this link, <http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM>. Its now down to around 39.56, a 3.59% decrease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It sounds like they paid about 10x revenue per customer (according to dhh <https://twitter.com/dhh>). That doesn't seem unreasonable, but I'm not sure about the murky area of valuation. Is it high compared to other similar acquisitions? Also, how does talent factor into a valuation?

</comment><comment><USER20> What does exacttarget do?

<comment><USER21> ESP - Email service provider. Sort of like Constant Contact, but for enterprise. We send about a million email newsletters a day through them.

<comment><USER22> So, spammers then.

<comment><USER23> Not really. Like sendgrid if you start generating spam complaints, lots of bounces, etc. they'll shut you down. Their total deliverability is adversely affected by any spammers that use their service.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Date-fns v2 is out - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/date-fns/date-fns/releases/tag/v2.0.0 <comment><USER2> Wow, I really wait for this release</comment>


The cost of international transfers: A tax on the poor - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21663263-regulation-keeping-remittances-unnecessarily-expensive-tax-poor <comment><USER2> But isn't the cost almost entirely driven by risk? If someone else could come along and perform the same service for less, then it'd be a market opportunity. If not, then it's priced exactly where it should be. Right?</comment>


Your entire desk as a touchscreen monitor - <AUTHOR> http://codesketch.com/2010/11/your-entire-desk-as-a-touchscreen-monitor/

<comment><USER2> Someday, we'll have advanced enough software that "photo sorting" will be done automatically and photo sorting as some kind of common use case for touch computing will look quaint. No one ever looks like they are doing any kind of sorting in a photo sorting touch screen demo.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love it. It's the Starfire project come to life: <http://asktog.com/starfire/index.html>

(If you haven't seen Tog's vision for the future of computing from 1992, take a moment - it's eerily close.)</comment>


Artificial Intelligence as a Threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/fashion/artificial-intelligence-as-a-threat.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> As long as the word 'artificial' is prepended to intelligence, it will always be that; artificial.

Proper and decent intelligence has its roots more so in Language, rather than the analytical parts of the mind concerned with procedure and protocols.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless you've never even considered the possibility that non-human intelligence could be dangerous to humans, this article adds no value to your understanding of the topic.</comment>


How an International Hacker Network Turned Stolen Press Releases into $100M - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17716622/sec-business-wire-hack-stolen-press-release-fraud-ukraine <comment><USER2> "Their algorithms are designed to pick up on stock prices fluctuating before major corporate announcements, indicating that those buying or selling have insider knowledge..."

As someone who has coded high frequency algos that tracked orders and fill rate velocity, I love this little tidbit of knowledge that FINRA utilizes it's own types of analysis. It intrigues me to imagine the accuracy and dismissal of false positives. _sorry nerding out on the tech_

<comment><USER3> What I always thought to be interesting is by analyzing those pre-announcement movements. We all know there are always people trading on insider information so it would be possible to use those pre-announcement movements to your advantage. If you see the stock price dropping before the announcement, then best to unload your shares or vice versa.

<comment><USER4> This doesn't work because there is no insider trading in most cases, and even if there were, you might be fooled by mass idiots trading the opposite directon of the insider.

<comment><USER5> As an example why it might drop (or rise) with high volume: firms could be "derisking" before earnings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite part is when the Ukrainian officials start their own version of the plot instead of prosecuting. Something to be said about intellectual honesty.

<comment><USER7> Not surprised a bit. Usually the reason crime is flourishing in those parts is because there is protection from withing the judicial and executive branches of the government. The police and judges are often part of, if not the ones running many of the crime rings.

There is also the part where the Ukrainians then went on to blackmail Ieremenko, threatened to extradite him and asked him for a bribe. He paid up. Of course the go-between guy doubled the blackmail price (think big, right?), got his 50% share then forwarded the rest to the intel agency. And then Ieremenko realizes he couldn't be extradited anyway because Ukraine doesn't do that with its citizens! The article then says "the pair fell out when Ieremenko discovered he had been duped". I am surprised they hadn't had a boating accident of some sort, or fell on a knife, backwards a few times.

<comment><USER8> > in those parts

Not an Ukranian, but boy, does that horse look high!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The SEC complaint from 2015 is also a fun read: [http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2015/comp- pr2015-16...](http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2015/comp- pr2015-163.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> I knew Igor a few months before his arrest. He worked as a general contractor for renovating houses. I was told he was on the cheaper end for contractors, but I was surprised to see him driving an Audi/ sports car when my previous contractor had a beat up ford.

</comment><comment><USER11> ... in your newswire database.

"GE To Declare Bankruptcy", "Lockheed Sold to Chinese", etc. Sit back and watch idiots buy fake info and lose billions.

<comment><USER12> Somewhat related. I wonder how often someone would plant false information that would cause a panic sell-off, then buy on the dip, before everyone realise that it was a lie? It's like the opposite of inside information. (Does this particular scheme have a name?)

* Edit:

A quick googling suggests this is fairly prevalent. Must be keeping the SEC busy.

<comment><USER13> A recent one is Musk going "I'm thinking of making Tesla private at $420 per share" \- regardless of whether he's going through with it or not, it bumped the price of Tesla stock up by 10%, and people made a lot of money off of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So did anyone studied SEC insider trading convictions and then went back to trading records to train AI/DL networks to learn to detect insider trading patterns in close-to-real time?

<comment><USER9> Not gonna say its not possible... but its going to be very very hard. Only looking at market data is insufficient to determine whether there was insider trading. You need to know who was trading (the markets are anonymous) and many times insiders will direct their friends and family to trade for them... so you might need to plug a social network into your AI to filter out the false positives from using market data alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The logic being that the early trades were made on the basis of someone else's insider information"

This was one guy's defense. I love this - partly because so much of trading and investing is what I call "self fulfilling". There's only a trade to be done because other people are doing a trade.

</comment><comment><USER15> They are dumb criminals and smart criminals. A _certain_ amount of respect goes to these guys...and this is FU money we're talking about

</comment><comment><USER16> Why do we keep a newswire database that stores these things before being published? Why don't companies and officials not hold on to these documents themselves?

You could say newswire are better at protecting, but the companies who write the press releases will likely have a copy stores both before and after it enters newswire

<comment><USER9> If you are a registered company (like any publicly listed company in the USA) you need to release important information to as many people as possible in a timely manner. Newswire makes sense since it goes out to 1000s of newspapers and websites. It also makes sense to queue it up before release. Otherwise, that would give people listening to your earnings conference call or checking the EDGAR filings an unfair advantage over more accessible resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder why these people were so careless about keeping their meatspace identities private.

<comment><USER3> "we won't get caught"

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I suppose. And probably because "we're in [some former Soviet block country] where we can do as we like, as long as we don't mess with our countrymen".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > profits made public by the SEC stands at over $100 million, but that > represents only a fraction of the money authorities believe was made

I wonder, if they gained this much, who lost this much? Or nobody lost?

<comment><USER19> Everyone who didn't have this information and invested in the same stocks lost.

EDIT: "invested" here could mean purchased the stock, held the stock, or even sold the stock without the information. Depends on the information (e.g., is it good or bad news?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone else find this bit kinda creepy?

> The Dubovoys used the same brokerage accounts repeatedly, and they owned > some of them directly or through immediate family members with shared > surnames. Their association could also be easily confirmed through the fact > that they were part of the same church community.

Is there a database out there where you can search "SELECT * FROM PEOPLE WHERE communities INCLUDES (SELECT communities WHERE lastName = "Dubovoys");" If you know what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER21> Funny they should have caught them on Dendreon trading. Main takeaway ... if you're going to do insider trading make sure you are really on the inside. (ie. Wall St and US govt)

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't understand that the press release center couldn't be definitely secured once the problem was known.

<comment><USER23> When GCHQ hacked the Belgacom servers they had a real hard time discovering and getting rid of the backdoors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So a Borg is in charge of the US Cyber Consequences Unit. Resistance is futile?</comment>


Mark Karpeles Gets Suspended Jail Term - T-A https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-15/former-bitcoin-baron-mark-karpeles-gets-suspended-jail-term <comment><AUTHOR> As someone that still has Bitcoin tied up in the Gox civil rehabilitation suit, I feel justice is adequately served here.

Karpeles was clearly in over his head, and made terrible decisions after the hacking, but I don't believe imprisonment would serve any meaningful purpose, and I do believe he feels genuine remorse for his actions.

<comment><USER2> > _but I don't believe imprisonment would serve any meaningful purpose_

Sure it would! It would serve as a deterrent. Some people shouldn't be handling hundreds of millions of USD.

Karpeles' operation wasn't just unprofessional finance, it was a complete shit-show. The court should have sent the message to others to not attempt something as complicated and risk-laden as operating a financial exchange without even the slightest bit of know-how necessary to do that.

Startup culture can be great, but it's amazingly dangerous when operating certain trades or industries.

<comment><USER3> > Sure it would! It would serve as a deterrent. Some people shouldn't be > handling hundreds of millions of USD.

I don't think Mark ever expected to handle that kind of money. It just sort of happened. One of the things usually needed to prove a crime was committed was that there was the intent to commit it.

> Startup culture can be great, but it's amazingly dangerous when operating > certain trades or industries.

Mark's about the furthest thing from a startup bro. Honestly, I got the vibe he started MtGox as a hobby that happened to make money. A lot of it doesn't make sense from a business planning standpoint. Bet you didn't know the parent company of MtGox was named after his cat and served as a hosting company and domain registrar. He's a gentoo nerd that had a pet project win the lottery. There's far more to question about what the exchange had happen before he took it over, but I suppose jed won't talk about that.

To be fair though the year he spent in jail probably added some years to his life. While I doubt it was great for his mental health, it did wonders for getting his weight under control.

<comment><USER2> > _I don 't think Mark ever expected to handle that kind of money. It just > sort of happened._

That is probably true, and I wouldn't expect anyone to stand in the way of something that they had created and that developed such a momentum. How could one!

What I _would_ expect, however, is (1) that person to recognize this momentum, (2) to recognize that this momentum is way above the person's head, and (3) to rent or hire the know-how necessary to deal with this.

IT Security consultants, legal experts, people with experience in running exchange systems, etc.

> _One of the things usually needed to prove a crime was committed was that > there was the intent to commit it._

There's no question of that, as the court found that he had tampered with accounts and manipulated records to hide losses.

<comment><USER4> I actually met Mark once, on the very day that it was reported here on HN that Mt. Gox had been breached. This was a couple of years before the melt-down.

I had read the story here and, having just a little experience of Financial systems (nowhere near enough) I offered to help.

Mark took my meeting on that day because, in retrospect, he was likely looking for a Hail Mary. Perhaps hoping for a ransom demand.

He was at least smart enough to know I wasn't it. Nevertheless, if there had been good options, as you seem to suppose, I very much doubt he'd have taken my meeting.

Mark was in over his head, even then. And that tsunami just kept on rolling in. I wish him well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having lost over 350 Bitcoins myself, I would say this is a fair verdict. Mark Karpeles was in over his head, that is true, but so are most people in startups or companies that end up hurting people or losing their money. If we were to start jailing people who lost other people's money then 95% of all people who take investment would be in jail.

<comment><USER6> So, if you buy bank shares today and it turns out the bank has been insolvent for 2 years already and management was hiding this from investors, this is totally fine, as long it's not an established bank but a "startup" bank, am I understanding you correctly?

Mark was in way over his head but nobody says he should be jailed for being in way over his head. He should be jailed for defrauding people. He cooked the books and he hid the fact that MtGox was insolvent practically from the moment he bought it.

<comment><USER7> Comparing Magic The Gathering Online Exchange to an FDIC regulated bank.. He was running the equivalent of a fraudulent trading card ring that happened to become very valuable.

Mark has some of my coins and I think he's done enough time. Prison in general is cruel and unusual for anything besides violent offenders.

<comment><USER8> When Mark started running it it was a Bitcoin exchange. Everyone banters about the origins of the name, but all they really did was reuse a domain name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to buy M:TG cards at Mt.Gox back in the day. It was really confusing when I heard they were now a bitcoin exchange

<comment><USER10> To those saying you could not have traded cards on Mt. Gox:

" _sometime around late 2007, the service went live for approximately three months before McCaleb moved on to other projects_ " [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_(2006-10)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_\(2006-10\))

Gwern: _" we know the mtgox.com domain had a landing page discussing a forthcoming Magic card trading site (because a 2007 page is in the Internet Archive), but we can't find any evidence that there was any actual trading going on. Did anyone ever actually trade card for card or money for card on Mtgox.com?"_ McCaleb: _" yeah they did"_ [https://www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2014-mccaleb](https://www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2014-mccaleb)

<comment><USER9> Indeed. archive.org isn't helping jog my memory but I was buying cards around 2005-2010 from a number of sites, including Mt.Gox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great interview with Mark about the start and demise of MtGox: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cUBFXf678o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cUBFXf678o)

</comment><comment> j-c-hewitt Someone should put together a crash weight loss program that simulates being convicted in the Japanese criminal justice system modeled on this.

</comment><comment><USER12> There have been other exchanges getting hacked after him. How come none of them get jailed time and only Mark?

</comment><comment><USER13> So he's home free? If I were him, I'd be afraid that someone might want to physically harm me.

<comment><USER14> He is, all the time, which he shared on his Reddit AMA some time ago.

Might be worse than the actual sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A happy result for all involved. Karpeles was appropriately punished and all investors are being made whole. Most bankruptcies don't end that way.

<comment><USER16> I'm still out plenty of money thanks to Karpeles that I'll never see again. Not a happy result for me, sorry, no.

<comment><USER17> Same, not counting the money I lost due to his scam trading bot that was front running the market. I think 5 years would be a light sentence here.

<comment><USER18> I'm out of the loop, why do you say he was front-running the market?

EDIT: I found [https://twitter.com/grace_za/status/1016688636304265216](https://twitter.com/grace_za/status/1016688636304265216)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Use GitHub Releases for Painless Shipping - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/10/23/github-releases/#.We3n8v1lvKY.hackernews <comment><USER2> Caveat: GitHub zips/tarballs are generated on-demand and cached, so they're problematic for bit-for-bit reproducibility:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug- guix/2017-10/msg00070...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug- guix/2017-10/msg00070.html)

Of course, you can just clone the git repo.

<comment><USER3> > zips/tarballs are generated on-demand and cached

Isn't that a deterministic process? I thought if you zipped the same directory twice, you'd get exactly the same bits in the two archives.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Probably a timestamp. They're surprisingly pervasive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using [https://github.com/webpro/release- it](https://github.com/webpro/release-it) to automate releases. It requires your github key and for somereason my github key doesnt persist thru sessions but it works.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some CI software can trigger jobs automatically when a GitHub release is made, e.g. for Concourse: [https://github.com/concourse/github-release- resource](https://github.com/concourse/github-release-resource)

<comment><USER6> Travis CI has a deployment method for GitHub releases. [https://medium.com/@russleyshaw/typescript-package- deploymen...](https://medium.com/@russleyshaw/typescript-package-deployment- with-travisci-df788ffb8563) I like to use it to "npm pack" up my new releases and serve them that way.</comment></comment>


Mystery Languages - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brownplt.org/2018/07/05/mystery-languages.html <comment><USER2> > or wrap the index to a valid one (like Python)?

Python doesn't wrap indices to a valid one. However, it does allow for negative indices which are shorthand for the length of the list plus that negative index.

      >>> a = [1, 2, 3]
      >>> a[3]
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      IndexError: list index out of range
      >>> a[-1]
      3
      >>> a[-3]
      1
      >>> a[-4]
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      IndexError: list index out of range

<comment><USER3> That jumped out at me too, also an excellent example of where poking at a 'mystery language' rather than reading the documentation can lead to some really weird mental models (I'm reminded of myself trying to force a haskell program together until it ran).

On that note, how the hell would you understand currying or do notation by trial and error?

I wonder if they implemented one of their languages with true wrapping index behaviour.

<comment><USER4> Our SNAPL paper [[http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pkf- te...](http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pkf-teach-pl-exp- adv-think/)] has data on how long students spend. It turns out relatively few hours for pretty high levels of attainment (i.e., of finding the languages).

But as @justinpombrio says, this is also tied to a particular pedagogy. The day after the homework is due, in class, we:

\- collectively build up a classifier (programs that tell the languages apart)

\- present the intended theory (our ground truth of what is going on)

and then spend the remaining time (30+ minutes) talking about which languages did those particular things, and — most importantly — _why_ those languages did that, especially for the "weird" behaviors. There were often very good reasons for doing so, when viewed in a historical context. In this regard, I'm very much a historicist in the Kuhnian sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Syntax vs. Semantics: We are frustrated by how frequently discussions about programming languages revolve around syntax."

I couldn't agree more strongly. Syntax is bikeshedding and semantics is language design. My favorite example is the wholesale abandonment of M-Expressions by the early lispers. I don't know of any other (kind of) mainstream language community that has so wholeheartedly put semantics first. Maybe the ML family? Any other examples?

<comment><USER4> No, syntax is not merely bikeshedding, but endless discussions about it can certainly turn into that. I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream", but anything that sprang from the head of Milner, you can be sure, put semantics first. As, for that matter, did work from Dijkstra, Hoare, etc. Lots of good semantics work out there that has often indirectly had a huge influence on the mainstream.

<comment><USER5> I was engaging in a little hyperbole. Dijkstra has some compelling monographs on the value of choosing good syntax, it's true. You understood my meaning though as referring to the standard substandard discussion of the subject.

Yeah Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth, Lamport, and friends are basically my heroes. Algol 60 is fine work. It has a very readable syntax. It's easy to see why it's even now used for scholarly publication. Hadn't heard of Milner though, any suggested reading?

<comment><USER4> I have to assume you're trolling me at this point, but just in case not:

[https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/milner_1569367.cfm](https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/milner_1569367.cfm)

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

ML did not spring fully-formed from the heads of the creators of OCaml…

<comment><USER5> I meant a work or works by Milner

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was hoping this was about things like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language) and fearing it was about things like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senzar_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senzar_language)

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting as a pedagogical technique. This was never included in the curricula in any of the programs I've taken, except in those that are explicitly designed as adversarial, but those were more from the security perspective. I love the concept of teaching "tinkering" and black-box investigation as part of fundamentals. Is this is an exclusively Brown thing?

<comment><USER8> A bunch of schools include CTF-type reverse engineering challenges as part of a course. IMO those tend to be a little more addicting as well, as there's the instant feedback that you have the correct answer.

<comment><USER4> If you know of other places that do it specifically for programming languages, using this kind of approach, let us know so we can study and attribute properly. Thanks. (In the 2012 PL MOOC that Joe Politz and I ran, we had CTF- style exercises, which are still on the Web.)

Note: CTF is a very different kind of thing than what we are doing here. In CTF, usually, there is some clear sense of a goal and you are (as you note) given a measure of how close you are, or at least told when you've Ced The F. In mystery languages, there is no well-defined end and there is no measure. Also, your job is not to break one thing, but rather to break the _difference_ between _multiple_ things. That kind of «differential reasoning» is its own separate sort of activity.

As an aside, real life often does not give you a measure or an indication of when you're done. Sometimes, maybe, you've set yourself your own goal (e.g., to steal a particular resource), and then you may be able to tell. But otherwise, especially when it comes to learning new things (like programming languages), I'd say this is a more authentic learning activity. Indeed, it grew out in part from my trying to reflect on how I myself approached a new language. So, at least, it's more authentic to me. (-:

<comment><USER8> > Also, your job is not to break one thing, but rather to break the difference > between multiple things. That kind of «differential reasoning» is its own > separate sort of activity.

This seems like splitting hairs. You could wrap this differential reasoning assignment in a function that returns true iff the outputs are different and achieve the same CTF-style behavior. The only difference here is that students get one assignment at a time instead.

<comment><USER4> Reductionist theories don't work out that way in practice, but sure: Build it, teach it, and then I'd be happy to talk about your experience and how the difference is only "splitting hairs".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried this out, and DrRacket crashed whenever I used #lang Numbers (or other mystery languages) - did anyone else encounter this?

<comment><USER4> What version of DrRacket are you in?

<comment><USER10> In addition, what do you mean by "crashed" \- did the whole application quit or hang, or was there an error message?</comment></comment></comment>


Lustucru: From Severed Heads to Ready-Made Meals - <AUTHOR> https://publicdomainreview.org/2019/06/13/lustucru-from-severed-heads-to-ready-made-meals/ <comment><USER2> It's almost a shame to ruin such delightful clickbait, but I will. Here's the header text:

> Jé Wilson charts the migration of the Lustucru figure through the French > cultural imagination — from misogynistic blacksmith bent on curbing female > empowerment, to child-stealing bogeyman, to jolly purveyor of packaged > pasta.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pro tip: whatever weird story there may be behind the mascot, you want to buy Italian pasta, not French pasta.

<comment><USER4> Have you ever had Lustucru ? They're pretty good</comment></comment>


Ask HN: resources for creating fast webpages for very slow interent connection - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to create websites in a developing country with very very slow internet access. Which javascript framework should I use for best performance? Or should I even use javascript at all? If you have any techniques or resources on making fast webpages for slow internet connection, please let me know. <comment><USER3> The simplest answer is size matters.

I would look at the state if the network (slow as in slow to retrieve data from outside country? Slow as in slow in the same town? How is data between ISPs?

I suspect you ae not the only one in country with this problem - why not create a web site that is designed to help developers and ISPs like yourself - place known size blobs on external and internal sites and on different ISPs networks in the country then measure the download from anyone's clients using small piece JavaScript that posts back to your site. You don't have to do I all - just enough that it is obvious to ISPs it's a worthwhile map of the country. Also once ISPs are interested use tracert to get maps of the networks more detail. The aim is to create a site to discuss just this issue - <USER2> latency in your country - everyone will care about it and you should garner kudos.

Anyway. Apart from that keep sizes low - avoid the latest JavaScript frameworks - they are way way too large. Be cache friendly - Minify whatever JavaScript you do use and give it a hashed name to allow you to know what is or is not cached

Hope that helps - let us know which country as well</comment>


Subway Got Too Big – Franchisees Paid a Price - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchisees.html <comment><USER2> _Don Fertman, Subway's chief development officer and a veteran of the company for 38 years, said... that owning restaurants helps give development agents "a better understanding of all aspects of owning a small business." He said the company reviews the agents' work and expects them to uphold ethical standards, dealing with violations "on a case-by-case basis."

....

"Our business development agents are well-respected members of our business community," [Fertman] said. "And when we hear these allegations, I would say that they are false." He said he was not aware of any exceptions._

This is literally the same C-level clown claiming (a) that all violations are investigated carefully and (b) that no violations exist. No ethical person could have heard about this ridiculous "development agent" scheme and remained silent about how obviously abusive it is, therefore no manager at Subway corporate is an ethical person. I'm also pretty disappointed in USA courts: did no judge ever look at these bankrupted immigrants and see someone deserving of justice?

I haven't been in one of these dumps in at least a year, and after reading TFA I don't plan to go back. I'm just glad it's privately held, so the upcoming fire-sale to private equity will hurt the family and not honest investors. Not as much as they've hurt the poor entrepreneurs who trusted them, but that would be too much to expect in USA...

<comment><USER3> > did no judge ever look at these bankrupted immigrants and see someone > deserving of justice?

Probably, but identifying the deserving is something we train judges not to do. One of the great achievements of the law is the expectation that whether someone is deserving or not they should be given the same justice as everyone else.

If the courts are doing something you don't like, save your disappointment for the lawmakers.

<comment><USER4> The whole concept of equity at law is contrary to what you described. In legal systems descended from English tradition, fairness trumps codified or common law.

<comment><USER3> Ok, sure - but I suspect fairness in that sense means 'make sure this person isn't being treated (by the legal system) differently from someone else due to a technicality'.

Based on the phrasing, I suspect jessaustin was taking more of a 'justice for these bankrupt immigrants at the expense of Subway and their execs'. The judge would have looked at the bankrupt immigrants, seen people who deserved justice, then looked at Subway and its execs and seen another group of people who deserve justice and then made a decision most consistent with how such cases are handled.

Being deserving in the sense used in this thread _isn 't_ enough to overrule the basic priority of same situation -> same outcome in common law. And that is a principle that is worth defending, even in the passion of the moment when it causes outcomes that are unsatisfying.

<comment><USER4> It's more along the lines of a discretionary override when strict application of the law would offend the judge's interpretation of fairness. It used to be the King's privilege, and later became a judicial power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Subway, in an email, said that the franchisees who alleged misconduct were "anomalies," and that its surveys and "listening tours" found that 80 percent of franchisees in the system want to keep working with the company."

This was used to indicate how happy franchisees are but, to me, indicates the opposite. If one in five francisees don't want to work with Subway again, that's a huge red flag.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to work at a consulting firm that had subway as a client. The Subway ecosystem is very political. Part of the process that corporate Subway has to deal with is IPC or Independent Purchasing Coop. They are a Coop that represents franchisees to battle with Subway's corporate agenda. The problem is that in order to have a larger say in the topics that IPC fights for, you need to own more stores. Basically as a solo franchise you are at Subway's will until buy enough stores to have clout. With the most powerful franchise owner being the the guy who owns almost all the stores in California. A difficulty with owning a new store is you have to get approved by the regional DA. Who is typically an IPC member, and provides all new franchises to friends and family. I'm fairly certain if you failed out of government politics, you could take a shot in the Subway ecosystem. Regarding the politics at Subway, corporate culture was cut throat. While I was there Fred was mostly hands off, allowing execs to fight for projects and visibility. The executive turnover was high. Probably because they were cut throat in their hiring negotiations. It was common for people to cycle out in under 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> Subway is just the lowest tier of sandwich shop I can think of lately. Could easily see them going the way of Quiznos and forced to restructure at some point in the future.

<comment><USER8> You're right, of course; Subway tastes like resignation and apathy. But even the most mundane things can surprise you every once in a while.

Years ago, I walked into a random Subway, somewhere, and ordered some random sandwich. I asked for onions, olives, and yellow peppers on it. The energetic "sandwich artist" (their term, not mine) shook his head.

"No, no," he said, with a friendly sincerity, "that's not a good combination for this sandwich. You should go with olives, yes, but also the green peppers and spinach, with the sweet onion sauce. Much more balanced that way."

I let him make it his way. I couldn't even object, because I was struck speechless by this man, making probably minimum wage at the crappiest sandwich chain in America, caring so deeply about his work and my lunch. This man and his pride in his work, his determination to actually care, helped me see my own work in a new light, and honestly helped me climb out of the burnout I'd been suffering at the time.

Whatever you do, do it the best you can; thanks for the reminder, Subway dude.

<comment><USER9> I think the resignation and apathy is just something that happens always with chain restaurants and scale. At a certain point consistency becomes the big priority and it becomes soulless as process dominates and it depressingly seems to work.

<comment><USER10> I think cost cutting becomes a bigger priority than expanding to new franchises (I guess expanding becomes harder to achieve after a certain point and cost cutting becomes a better way to improve financials). So they use lower and lower quality ingredients. Burger King is a prime example of this. Chick-fil-A is good counter example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Side note:

I can't get NYT to load anymore. It's convinced I'm in "incognito" when I most definitely am not. Same behavior in Chrome and Firefox. Has anybody else had it break on them?

<comment><USER12> Off-topic: would you pay for it?

<comment><USER13> I'd gladly pay a monthly fee that gave me access to like the top 5 newspapers, but I'm not interested in maintaining all the subscriptions separately.

<comment><USER14> There is a service called "Blendle" that does something similar, but on a model where you pay per article.

<comment><USER15> They recently stopped this pay per article model in favor of a subscription model for unlimited access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Long ago, I was a sandwich artist.

One of our popular breeds was "cheesy bread". It was made the same way as italian herbs and cheese, minus the herbs.

(For context, all bread in Subway arrives frozen, is thawed, then cooked, with any toppings applied before going into the oven)

Corporate decided it should no longer be offered. We had several regulars upset, but couldn't serve it lest the corporate overlords revoke the franchise agreement.

There were lots of little incidents like this where corporate would come in with some bullshit rule or decision, we'd lose customers, then they'd backpedal.

I never saw any health issues - my manager was strict about labeling things with a date, and wrote people up if they didn't label since it forced him to throw stuff out.

But it wouldn't surprise me if years and years of bullshit decisions nudge owners to cut corners.

</comment><comment><USER17> On my college campus Subway was the only "outside" food option that used the campus meal plan. All the rest was different storefronts for the same undistinguished catering company. I ate a lot of Subway in those days.

<comment><USER18> Same story at Stanford. There was an Ike's but the catering cartel killed them.

<comment><USER19> That was sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think anything about Subway has changed in 20+ years. Everything, including the distinct colors of every vegetable and shape of every meat, is exactly how I remember when I was a little kid.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ever since the Jared scandal I absolutely refuse to step anywhere near, much less into, a Subway. And much better sandwich shops around. Except for Jimmy John's, whose owner wants to rid the globe of priceless animal treasures.

<comment><USER2> You have to admit, the priceless animals are delicious...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Oh, the food vendor, not the transit system.

<comment><USER23> Would the trains be franchises? Or the stations?

<comment><USER22> The NYC subways originally were franchises. They were operated by two private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) under franchises from the City of New York. The Independent Subway (IND) was a city-owned operation from the beginning.

From the article title, I expected an article about early NYC subway history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> First, I need to say I was a multi-unit Subway franchisee for 33 years until late last year.

When Subway field agents inspected our stores, we would be marked up "out of compliance" but that statement sounds more serious than it actually is. Yes, you could technically lose your franchise for a handprint on the glass but, unless it was a constant problem, agents would only point it out with a remark on the form of "need to pay more attention to the glass".

I need to call out the article treating the slicing thickness of cucumbers being a minor problem. It's not. It's sloppiness that should never happen but yes it happens to the best of us.

We had a problem with one older store where some of the ceramic tile was breaking and coming loose. It took a while to get to it--like months--because we were shorthanded, extremely busy, and the tile was a type that was difficult to find. While our field rep would constantly get on us about it, because it was in the customer area, he was also understanding of our issues.

Something to point out. You needed to be written up on compliance issues three times before you could get into trouble. We were inspected monthly so you had three months to fix issues.

I never felt threatened about losing our franchise. I always felt respect from our DA. Most of the groaning I would hear at meetings was more from newer owners than "original owners" as we older franchisees sometimes called ourselves.

Other groaning came from other areas not mentioned in the article. One was about marketing that didn't work including pricing of advertised deals. The other is the remodeling of older restaurants which would cost around the $200,000 level. If you owned 10 restaurants, that's a $2 million investment that someone of my age would never recover.

Fred DeLuca was stuck in his ways and wouldn't change with the times. His sister, when she took over, was more amenable to change but didn't have the respect from higher ups in the system. That she "retired" is not the right word.

The problems for most of us was marketing not competing well with the new competition causing sales to falter over the last several years. I sold out for that reason and because I didn't want to spend the money on remodeling.

So the problems with this one development agent (DA) in California is something I never heard of before so it really is an anomaly to me, at least.

<comment><USER25> >First, I need to say I was a multi-unit Subway franchisee for 33 years until late last year.

Thanks for for sharing your experience.

Why did you leave? What was the process for selling the stores? Did you sell to someone new or someone already a Subway franchisee?

<comment><USER24> I already stated why I was leaving.

I sold to a fellow longtime franchisee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As always, Gujjus are hardcore.

</comment><comment><USER27> I had Subway for lunch for over a year until one day I thought a bit too much about how the pork riblet sandwiches were extremely uniform in appearance, and I didn't like the way it was obviously processed to death. Subway is ok, but you can get much better, fresher options elsewhere.

<comment><USER28> > you can get much better, fresher options elsewhere

Of course and it's almost a cliché to say it for all chains :) What one needs to keep in mind is that such places are actually selling _minimising regret_ and lack of cognitive overhead via consistency of output and menu options, not maximising pleasure or variety.</comment></comment>


Kutcher/Jobs Movie Trailer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SH1jKZwcS9Y

<comment><USER2> The prequel to the social network.</comment>


Cruelty Redefined: Undergraduates vs. C++ on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://marknelson.us/2011/04/25/cruelty_redefined_c_plus_plus_on_linux/ <comment><USER2> Who assigns a problem that requires C and Unix novices to use fork() _as their first assignment_? This guy needs a teaching seminar soon, but more likely, CS just lost a classroom full of novices.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting chiefly for the brutality of the comments...</comment>


AMD – The Obituary - <AUTHOR> https://viceroyresearch.org/2018/03/13/amd-the-obituary/ <comment><AUTHOR> This article is from the research firm that blew up Steinhoff with their explosive report. So they are not entirely without credibility in hedge fund circles...

* For Steinhoff, see "Steinhoff's skeletons: off-balance sheet entities inflating earnings, obscuring losses" : [https://viceroyresearch.org/2017/12/06/steinhoffs-skeletons-...](https://viceroyresearch.org/2017/12/06/steinhoffs-skeletons-off-balance-sheet-entities-inflating-earnings-obscuring-losses/)</comment>


InstantClick 3.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://instantclick.io/3.0.html <comment><USER2> I had an interesting bug combining InstantClick with Clicky.com (a GA stats tracking alternative).

Clicky dynamically adds a JS file to the header so it's asynchronous. It does the same every few minutes to poll and indicate someone's still on the page.

When used with InstantClick, the first tracking request worked fine. But when I clicked - the first AND second Clicky tracking request were sent. Another click meant 3 new requests were sent.

It puzzled me for a minute, before I realized. Clicky's JS didn't have InstantClicks' data-no-instant attribute, so all previous tracking scripts were being re-loaded with every click.

The fix is to push the tracking requests to Clicky manually via InstantClick's on change callback. Then I used JQuery to add the data-no-instant attr to all the clicky script tags in the head:

      InstantClick.on('change', function() {
        clicky.log(location.pathname+location.search, document.title, 'pageview');
        // now stop any clicky scripts from being re-requested each time the page is insta-reloaded, to stop wasted tracking requests
        jQuery("head script[src*='clicky.com']:not([data-no-instant])").attr('data-no-instant', true);
      });

The same might happen with Google Analytics if you're using it asynchronously, but I've not tried that.

Hope this helps someone if they see the same weirdness.

<comment><USER3> Any one test this with any ad networks running? Clearly you don't want non- visible ads being called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to see the differences between InstaClick and Pjax.

InstantClick

      - InstantClick is a little easier to implement, with nothing required server-side
      - InstantClick works to reduce latency by prefetching page content on hover.
      - InstantClick always replaces the body's outerHTML
      - InstantClick provides a YouTube style loading progress bar

Pjax[1]

      - You specify specifically which page element is replaced (using the ID)
      - You set up your app to return only the required page fragment on ajax calls
      - No loading bar is included, but can easily be added
      - Content is not prefetched on hover

I think I still prefer the pjax approach because it sends less data over the wire. However, would be interesting to see a hybrid of the two approaches.

Also worth noting that both essentially turn your site into a single-page app that updates the browser URL bar using pushState. Both approaches also degrade nicely.

[1] [https://github.com/defunkt/jquery- pjax](https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax)

<comment><USER5> InstantClick seems to be using pjax? at [http://instantclick.io/](http://instantclick.io/):

        InstantClick uses pushState and Ajax (a combo known as pjax), replacing only the body and the title in the head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If someone hovers over a link but _doesn 't_ click it, will the page load still be accounted as a page view (e.g. by Google Analytics)?

<comment><USER7> not sure of the details of how prefetch work, but I doubt it( GA requires its little JS snippet to run)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you guys are interested in testing this out on a "real" site... i just implemented InstantClick on [http://www.topiama.com/](http://www.topiama.com/).

If I spot anything weird I'll let you guys know.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool idea.

Not sure how it works now but shouldn't Apple/Google just disable that delay if your viewport is already set to device-width? It's not like you're going to double-tap to zoom in any further.

<comment><USER10> You're thinking of fastclick. This is different, it's page prefetching so that you start loading the page before the UI event that would normally start loading it happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When Youtube started to do this "custom progressbar", now my Chrome history is inconsistent, when I type something and open the related history item, a completely different web-page comes. Please, if you are intending to do this, do it correct, don't break the expected behaviour of a browser.

</comment><comment><USER12> wouldn't it be nice if this was built into the browsers themselves ? probably with a settings to change the timeout etc/or disable the feature ..

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, links might change state. Links on some sites will delete records, and a browser has no way of knowing which.

Also, it generates a much larger server load. Look up FasterFox and the related controversy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this something like FastClick[1]?

1\. [https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick](https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick)

<comment><AUTHOR> FastClick removes the 300/450 ms delay and makes your click trigger right after touchend, InstantClick makes use of this delay (plus the delay between touchstart and touchend) to preload the page.</comment></comment>


Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/asia/11china.html <comment><USER2> I wouldn't be surprised if China started to become more aggressive militarily as this generation enters the proper age. An imbalance of men that don't have mates has caused problems for societies in the past, and they solved those problems by putting all of this pent up aggression to use.

<comment><USER3> It's not a binary issue, and you can't just say A > B = problems.

There are ~1.3 billion Chinese, but let's assume the this issue covers 1/3 of the population. So it's (1300/3 + 32/2) vs (1300/3 - 32/2) which works out to 4350:4318. Now we might guess that there will be large numbers of men that don't ever have a relationship. But, what people forget is relationships don't always last. People die, or get divorced ect. So what ends up happening is women will spend a higher percentage of their life in a relationship and while some men will never marry this is "normal" and they can still have relationship with women throughout their lives.

If anything expect women to marry younger and female widows to be in higher demand than males widows. Granted, if the male to female ratio ever reached 2:1 there would be issues but this is still a minor imbalance.

<comment><USER4> This imbalance is very common around the world. I don't understand why the press gets so anxious about it re: China. India has a similar surplus, like 20 million extra boys in the 0-14 range.

In places like South America there is often an imbalance favoring males before age 15 which shifts over to females from age 20 onwards. It doesn't mean war or revolution -- just a lot of urban violence and early deaths of males as they compete for mates. It's not pretty but neither is it a dire international problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is most preventable in rural areas and the cities more to the west. Places like Shanghai don't have such an imbalance.

The more likely solution, as opposed to using them for wars, it they get used for domestic construction projects: highways, railroads, etc. This has already been the case.

China is working hard on this problem. Its illegal to know the sex of a child during pregnancy. Some get around the issue, but I have personally seen it upheld pretty well. I knew the sex of my child before he was born, in Shanghai. But I was only allowed to know because I was an American and was in a hospital that catered to foreigners. The locals seem to have mostly settled in on the fact that they aren't supposed to know.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recently learned about the Mosuo, which have no gender bias.

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

<comment><USER7> Very interesting.

However, this kind of thing: _"Most significantly, when children are born, the father may have little or no responsibility for his offspring..."_ \-- that's terrible.

That WP paragraph "Walking marriages" somehow reminds me of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Harsh indeed.

<comment><USER8> Well the child doesn't have the actual father as a parent but he/she does have the males of the family. It's just a different way of raising kids as a community that we just aren't used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 32 million disenfranchised men, unable to find a wife, and start a family in 18 or so years?

The stuff that revolutions are made of.

<comment><USER10> I've heard this theory floated before. The people proposing it have a good point. They have to find something to do with all of these young men or trouble could emerge. I guess an alternative strategy would be to bring back monasteries. If this is too discordant with the official ideology of the state, they could send them to graduate school in science. ;|

<comment><USER11> _"If this is too discordant with the official ideology of the state, they could send them to graduate school in science."_

LOLOL. Would be even funnier if it weren't so true: [http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and- intelligenc...](http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and- intelligence.php)

A depressing statistic: _"only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex."_

<comment><USER12> There's a fairly obvious explanation that I didn't see mentioned anywhere in the abstract: assortative mating. People tend to have sex with people of roughly the same intelligence, socioeconomic status, and interests. As you go down the tails of the bell curve, there are fewer people of the same intelligence with similar interests.

If you have an IQ of 100, 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of you. Your chances of meeting someone you feel comfortable with in high school are pretty high. But if you have an IQ of 145 (3 stddev), only about 3% of the population is within one standard deviation of intelligence of you. Add to that the constraints of it being a member of your preferred sex, being reasonably attractive & socially compatible, and wanting to have sex, and it's no surprise that most such people don't find suitable mates until they enter college, which purposely brings together people of similar intelligence.

And if you have an IQ of 175 (5 stddev), less than 1 in 10,000 people is within one standard deviation of intelligence. (Though this is a bit meaningless, as IQ distribution has fat tails when you get past about 145.) Then add in that super-intelligent people often have very narrow and deep interests, and that males are overrepresented on both ends of the bell curve (there are both more male morons and male geniuses than female ones).

This also explains why the smartest men were most likely to hire a prostitute. If they had no chance of forming an emotional connection with a woman, why not pay her to leave afterwards?

Personally, I had about zero interest in 90% of girls in college. They were just inane. And this is at Amherst, which already selects for pretty smart people.

<comment><USER11> That's an interesting analysis, but I disagree on some points. My ideas:

1) people tend to have sex with people of roughly the same attractiveness. Only a fool would fail to realize that there's a sexual market out there, and one's price in that market is mostly dictated by looks, not intelligence or interests. (disclaimer: I live in Southern California, and I realize that I may sound overly superficial).

2) Sex and stable romantic relationships are way different things. It's true that people tend to start relationships with people of roughly the same intelligence, socioeconomic status, and interests... but come on! I would not turn down a funny, hot girl just because she's an English major who's not interested at all in Quantum Field Theory! I probably would not want to marry her, but some NSA fun once in a while is refreshing...

3) Grad students at MIT should be rather smart, driven people. They should be surrounded by people of the same intelligence and interests, and they still don't get laid much. Your cute analysis does not explain this.

<comment><USER12> 1.) I think it's both. People have sex with folks of the same attractiveness, but they don't _ignore_ intelligence. Could you imagine an MIT grad student having sex with a trailer-trash bimbo of slightly-below-average attractiveness? (Yeah, that's a bad mental picture.)

3.) They've had less time to be surrounded by people of similar intelligence and interests. The virgin rate among MIT grad students is roughly the same as the virgin rate among average high schoolers. That's consistent with the hypothesis that MIT-caliber grad students can't find anyone until they get to MIT, and then they follow the normal rules of chance & dating & random hookups that most people do in high school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A doctor friend of mine told me about removing contraceptive IUD's from Chinese women who are living in the US and now want to have more kids. The IUD's are designed to be permanent (not the same as US IUD's) and the women are forced to get them after they've reached their child quota in China. The interesting thing is that some doctors outside China probably perform more of these removal procedures than Chinese doctors ever do.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Nothing can be done now to prevent this" That's not true. Nothing that wouldn't land someone in the Hague maybe.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a long Chinese cultural preoccupation with having legitimate descendants who will carry on the clan line (that is, have the same surname as the father). This is expressed in Shang era bronzes from almost 3,000 years ago that I have seen in museums. The inscriptions on the cast bronze objects, which were often given as rewards to faithful subjects who achieved glory in battle or the like, include expressions of a wish to have children and grandchildren for countless generations.

The common saying is

不孝有三,無後為大

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AD%9D%E6%9C%89%E4...](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AD%9D%E6%9C%89%E4%B8%89%EF%BC%8C%E7%84%A1%E5%BE%8C%E7%82%BA%E5%A4%A7)

indicating that the very worst way that a child can be disobedient to a parent is to not give the parent descendants.

</comment><comment><USER16> If the law of supply and demand also applies in this market, the boys-girls gap in the next generation would be smaller.

However, given the thousands-years cultural norm that prefer boys over girls, it's likely the gap will likely persist for a long time to come.

Anyone has some ideas on what to do with this problem?

<comment><USER17> Induce another large country, e.g. India, to prefer baby girls.

<comment><USER18> Surprisingly, India also has an unbalanced ratio, and AFAIK, the root problem is the same: cultural.

Sex Ratio: At birth: 1.12 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.098 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.061 male(s)/female

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/country_facts/main...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/country_facts/main3328865.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wouldn't this also have an impact on China's morality laws? Maybe this will push same-sex relationships and all of the accompanying impacts (child rearing, financial planning, legal contract/consideration) to the forefront far faster than would otherwise occur...

</comment><comment><USER20> The anti-war solution? Monogamy is probably out the window.

\- "Full service" Chinese sperm banks (mildly nsfw) [http://www.inquisitr.com/20953/sperm-donation-in-china- comes...](http://www.inquisitr.com/20953/sperm-donation-in-china-comes-with-a- special-touch/) \- Special friends (like Japan) [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313230107AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313230107AAlIVdC) \- Robots

Better (and cheaper) than the alternative.

<comment><USER21> Read the comments on the first link, it's a fake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not Chinese bias, it's one-child policy bias against the Han Chinese

</comment><comment><USER23> So in other words -- 32 million baby girls were murdered.

One Day, severe Justice will be served to these people.</comment>


LaunchRock is posting job offerings in their HTTP response - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2095754/launchrock-hiring.png

<comment><AUTHOR> Try for yourself:

        curl http://platform.launchrock.com/v1/createSiteUserChannelLink -I

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this becoming the norm? I'd hate to think that this is a good way to filter applications to top developers.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny. That is all.</comment>


Australia's war on feral cats - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/australias-war-on-feral-cats-shaky-science-missing-ethics-47444 <comment><USER3> What a silly set of arguments:

1) "We have ethical responsibilities to cats as well as to biodiversity"

2) "[Compared to humans] are we really to believe that it is cats who are the enemy of biodiversity?"

3) "Out of respect for cats and the people who care for them, we should give preference to nonlethal alternatives in management first and foremost."

To which I say:

1) There will always be more cats. We're nearly out of some of their prey, such as brush-tailed bettongs and mountain pygmy possums.

2) Your argument is humans are worse, therefore we shouldn't do anything about cats? Really?

3) This is a reasonable point, insofar as you can figure out an ethical way to deal with an undomesticated cat once you've caught it.

<comment><USER4> I've hunted and killed feral cats on properties before, good luck doing any kind of rehoming with a feral cat. They are a lost cause.

<comment><USER5> You don't 'rehome' a feral cat. You do TNR. Safe, humane, and effective. <[http://www.neighborhoodcats.org/HOW_TO_WHAT_IS_TNR>](http://www.neighborhoodcats.org/HOW_TO_WHAT_IS_TNR>)

<comment><USER6> The arguments in that article don't seem to ring true. It's claiming that simple trap-and-remove just has other cats move into the area and that if you don't catch all of them, the breeding pairs bring population back to the same level. But with TNR, the population is never reduced, since you put them back; you have the same problem with breeders if you don't catch them all; and when the neutered cats start dying out, they'll be replaced by the same neighbours anyway.

<comment><USER7> Neutered cats compete for resources that otherwise breeding ones would access.

<comment><USER6> So you have a full competing population, otherwise there'd be spare for the breeding cats. Then when the neutered ones die, existing breeders fill in the gaps, or, as the article says, neighbours come in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cats are totally out of control here and there needs to be more action both on fully feral animals and those left to roam freely by their "owners".

I can't move around my yard at any time of day or night without disturbing a cat. They aren't chipped or tagged and there are no registration fees unlike dog ownership. There is no equivalent of a dog catcher or fines for people who let them wander.

I got a hefty fine for a chihuahua cross that bolted out the door a child left open and got a couple of blocks away before we noticed. A huge threat to humans and livestock that was.

My neighbours cats set up near permanent residence in our yard shitting Toxoplasmosis into my kids sandpit and killing native wildlife that would cost thousands of dollars in fines and/or a jail sentence if their owners did it and there is no recourse. I am surprised illegal baiting of them isn't more common.

<comment><USER9> >>> _They aren 't chipped or tagged and there are no registration fees unlike dog ownership. There is no equivalent of a dog catcher or fines for people who let them wander._

In Western Australia it's now illegal to let your cat out the house unless it's chipped, tagged, tattooed and de-sexed. Other states will probably follow soon.

<comment><USER6> what's tagging (as opposed to chipping)?

<comment><USER9> They have to have tags attached to their collar to show they're registered.

<comment><USER6> Ah, of course, silly me. Our cats are chipped, tattooed, and desexed - <USER2> not tagged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having grown up with a cat lady (17 cats at some point) I can tell you that anyone who claims 'look in the mirror' and try to apply human ethics to their pets is completely irrational.

Most of the time these people will actually make up complete nonsense story to justify the pet behaviour, including completely stupid stuff like "it's Tuesday, he always like to be on the dinning table on tuesday" and endless other nonsense.

There are several papers [ Example: [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science- sushi/toxoplasma...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science- sushi/toxoplasmas-dark-side-the-link-between-parasite-and-suicide/) ] describe how Toxoplasmosis could not only get into owner's system, but also change their behaviour; they had demonstrated that mices infected with it would actually be /attracted/ to cats completely irrationally.

When you look at this and extrapolate on how many people are actually /crazy/ about cats [ Check, the interweb! ] and could be affected by that sort of brain damage --all of them driving, voting and making 'rational' decisions-- it's really worrying...

<comment><USER11> I go home to see my mother on the weekends a lot at the moment (temporarily of no fixed abode). When I start getting ready to leave at around 6pm on a Sunday the dog will lie in the Hallway between me and the front door. We consider that he knows I'm about to leave, and that's why he's there. I spend plenty of time in my room without seeing that behaviour.

Am I suffering from brain damage in anthropomorphising his behaviour somewhat? Or am I simply choosing the explanation that gives me the most comfort?

The reality is I can't tell why any human being does something, regardless of the fact they can actually talk. I choose what to believe as the motives for them, and do the same for my dog.

<comment><USER12> Dogs are not cats. The dog cares about you and knows you usually leave then. They have a very good sense of time even thought they "live in the moment."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Weird article. The article finishes up complaining that humans are the prime agents of reducing biodiversity and are hence morally obligated to fix it... but apparently not by animal management. Somehow we are morally obligated to fix the damage we have done, but not by reducing the numbers of cats (or foxes, toads, pigs, rabbits, camels...). The proposed alternatives are merely links to sites that don't give clear paths of action - the first is a link to a book talking about ways to live near wild animals (ie: not wide-ranging maintenance of biodiversity) and the second is a puff site.

> _Out of respect for cats and the people who care for them, we should give > preference to nonlethal alternatives in management first and foremost._

Ah, the "this animal is pretty" problem. What a bizarre argument that the article makes; that humans are the actual scumbags that are the real cause of the problem... but at the same time, we shouldn't engage in a cull because it will upset some humans.

In any case, it's something a self-correcting problem - if there really aren't 20M fetal cats in Australia, then the proposed cull won't get 2M of them.

<comment><USER13> We should engage in a culling of humans. This despicable species of hairless African chimp has marauded the rest of the earth.

Humans are 7 billion. Ideally, we need some 500 million.

<comment><USER6> Well, going by the article, you're welcome to use any form of population control that won't upset any humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cats are everybody's problem. The scale of the carnage (there is no other word) is breathtaking. There is quite a bit of scientific literature available, however the popular press, though more sensationalist, gives a decent picture on how significant the problem is:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/outdo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/outdoor-cats-kill-between-14-billion-and-37-billion-birds-a-year- study-says/2013/01/31/2504f744-6bbe-11e2-ada0-5ca5fa7ebe79_story.html)

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/9-leading-causes-of-bird- dea...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/9-leading-causes-of-bird-deaths-in- canada-1.1873654)

<comment><USER15> I won't claim to have the final answer on this issue, but the study you are citing has been subject to a brief statistical analysis which I think reveals it as highly suspect, at the least.

[http://www.alleycat.org/document.doc?id=633](http://www.alleycat.org/document.doc?id=633)

[http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do- we-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-really- know-that-cats-kill-by-the-billions-not-so-fast)

<comment><USER14> Similar research has been done in the UK (I believe by the Mammal Society, sorry cannot find a reference) and the estimated number of bird deaths per year was 300 million.

This is a tough problem to quantify - typically the studies follow a number of cats closely and then extrapolate based on the estimated number of cats. Clearly this is close to an educated guess however the important part is that we are getting some idea of the scale of the problem. Given all the pressures on wildlife, this one is probably one of the more solvable problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> An interesting perspective and it seems like more science needs to be done to sort out the true scale of the problem. However I still don't take issue with using lethal means to control the problem, and I don't doubt in some areas it is a problem.

Looking at the issue pragmatically we're not going to see the political will to paying for a bait, neuter and release program. Meanwhile we're losing native prey species who cannot wait for the "ethical" solution to work its way through our parliament.

</comment><comment><USER17> The cat situation is so bad in some areas one guy made an automated cat deterrent:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8)

<comment><USER10> Best video ever. thanks, I needed that :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not really sure what the point of these sorts of article is - do they want to let feral cats roam free throughout Australia unrestricted? Do they want feral cats to be taken into captivity?

It's not really constructive to try and argue that Dingoes and Tasmanian Devils are excluding cats from the food chain. Dingoes are absent from much of southern Australia - and so they aren't competing with cats in the first place. Devils are stricken by a disease epidemic and are more scavengers than hunters - they aren't outcompeting cats. Native marsupials that cats might be competing with would probably more or less include quolls - and guess what? Quolls don't seem to be able to outcompete cats.

Then when it comes to cat numbers, the argument seems to be that unless we're certain about numbers no feral cat culling is worthwhile. That's a strange argument, given that the link to the ABC's Fact Check on cat numbers seems to conclude that numbers are estimated at anything from 5 to 20+ million but aren't verifiable. While we can't verify numbers (nobody has the time to conduct a survey of every cat in Australia, like we do for humans), I think it's fair to conclude feral cats outnumber domestic cats at least 2 to 1.

Thinking too much about the ethics of conservation is as dangerous as not thinking about it enough - humans caused the cat problem, so we should fix it. And also fix the cane toad problem, the fox problem, etc.

<comment><USER19> Nice post, it seems like two feral cats (at the least) is one feral cat too many, if they are fertile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It strikes me that there's a reasonably simple metric that can be applied, if you presume biodiversity to be good, and human induced extinction to be bad.

If you do, then the value of a feral's cat life is far lower than the value of a threatened native Australian mammal's life.

As for the non-lethal vs. lethal, it's all well and good to propose it, but I'd take such proposals a lot more seriously if you had a way of funding it. Conservation is always underfunded by government, so if you want to change how it's done, Morrisey, put some money on the table.

The same holds true for the usage of 1080 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fluoroacetate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fluoroacetate)) vs. using more humane lethal methods - trapping and shooting are far more expensive to administer per square hectare.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how many would be opposed to hunting and eating them. Apparently some Australians are doing this already:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat#Oceania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat#Oceania)

</comment><comment><USER22> Who here remembers John Wamsley? Is he still on a crusade to reduce the feral cat population in Australia? I remember this guy from way back, he made a lot of people mad.

[http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/wamsleys- war/clip1/?n...](http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/wamsleys- war/clip1/?nojs)

Also, this article reads hilariously close to an essay from a climate change "skeptic".

<comment><USER23> Yes, I remember him - was in the news recently, but can't remember what for. I remember going on a school camp to his reserve as a kid. A friend of mine was antagonising a large kangaroo and got attacked by it as a result - entertaining at the time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My goodness what a stack of incredibly illogical arguments.

Life is important. OK, cats kill many animals during the week to live, many per night even. We obviously have a moral obligation to save them from cats.

It's not true there are so many feral cats.... ok so we have to kill far less, which is better for everyone.

TL;DL I like cats (because humans have breed them to be likeable) and I don't like making hard choices.

</comment><comment><USER25> A lot of the problem with feral cats is not the cats in fact, is the environment. We need to start removing places from cats, not keep removing cats from places.</comment>


Course: Web Development with Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.usegolang.com <comment><USER2> I used this (in it's beta) to get started with Go. I learn best by doing. The course provided a solid base for me to understand the larger concepts and then diving into the language documentation as I progress. For me it was quite handy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here - happy to answer any questions.

This course is intended to be like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial, but for Go. Happy to go into more detail, but that should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.</comment>


On the Deadness of OAuth 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/07/28/Oauth2-dead

<comment><USER2> Wow, is it just me or is there a whole lot of passive aggressiveness in this post?

Anyway, to address the post, yes we do know that Google have implemented most of OAuth 2.0, but in reality not everyone is happy to use Google of various reasons.

There are plenty of people and organizations have to implement OAuth 2.0 server-side and wade through messy specification where half of it may be irrelevant.

<comment><USER3> A ridiculous amount. I'm an outsider to all this (iOS developer with a healthy interest in technology), and the constant pejorative adjectives directed at Hammer combined with the odd directions to the reader to "find (strong options re: Hammer) on the Net" and the horrible word insertion in Hammer's mouth that's Hammer's "pissed at everyone"...combine to make this post seem like it has a lot more sizzle than steak.

"First Take-Away" is devoted to "hay, Google implemented OAuth 2". That, as far as I understand it, is hot air because it doesn't obviate Hammer's original contention that OAuth 2 was impossible to implement without experts driving your implementation.

"Interop?" is devoted to him throwing out a wildly idealistic idea, immediately followed up by him noting that he has no idea if it's possible.

"Enterprisey" notes that he doesn't understand the enterprise requirements, understanding enterprise requirements requires expert-level domain knowledge (again, bolstering Hammer's point) and boy, those enterprise people sure are crazy!

"Standards-Making" opens by trying to use clever wordplay that has the effect of making Hammer seems small for being "pissed at everyone", and an unwarranted defense of standardization proposals aimed at those commenting on the fact the the head of a standardization proposal said standardization proposals are broken.

The most confusing part of this to me is that Bray wrote an article ([http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/06/29/Becoming-a...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/06/29/Becoming- an-Identity-guy)) _less than one month ago_ noting that "The new technology coming down the pipe, OAuth 2 and friends, is way too hard for developers; there need to be better tools and services if we're going to make this whole Internet thing smoother and safer." Yet, somehow he feels that Hammer's opinion is divergent enough from what he said to be worthy of a long sanctimonious, vacuous, article.

I don't understand why Tim Bray is respected by the tech community, and after two years of following tech news and giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm not going to bother anymore. He seems perfectly intelligent, but his tendency online of having overwrought reactions that conflict with prior overwrought reactions he had make it difficult for me to consider him anything but a bloviator.

<comment><USER4> I don't get that at all.

I think the OAuth 2.0 story _is_ complicated, support _is_ mixed and Bray's post acknowledges that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OAuth 2 does a job, it works - it's not broken. It's widely implemented by the major players in the web space (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo). It's being used by those companies (and many, many others) without their systems being compromised because of it. It's business as usual.

As engineers of the world wide web (and it's future), it's our responsibility to avoid the toys being thrown out of other's prams (strollers) from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER6> My worry is that in the interim period between this and an improved auth protocol we all agree on, devs will continue to just roll their own (much less well conceived) authentication protocols. Surely Bray's response has merit, and is more mature, this thing isn't perfect but it powers probably more logins than anything else on the web. Let's finish and standardise the 2.0 standard before moving on.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Removing my name from a document I have painstakingly labored over for three years and over two dozen drafts was not easy. Deciding to move on from an effort I have led for over five years was agonizing."

I feel like it's a safe investment to avoid anything that can bring about a decision that drastic.

<comment><USER8> Well, participating in the OAuth 2.0 committee is what brought about that decision, not OAuth 2.0 itself. In fact Eran has a suggestion in that post under the "To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade" heading: look at what Facebook does and do that.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but in the end, he's saying that he'd rather remove 5 years of his life from his resume than have his name on the monstrosity that _that_ committee will be releasing.

So back to the parent's post, why wouldn't you be wary of something that came from that situation if one of the primary creators doesn't even want his name involved with it?</comment></comment></comment>


Pcileech WebRadar – browser based radar cheat for CS:GO - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/EngineOwningSoftware/pcileech-webradar/blob/master/readme.md <comment><USER2> The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating.

The problem historically has been that game clients have access to a lot of game state that enables cheats. With a "thin client" like Google Stadia, there should be a lot less opportunity for hacks. The incoming game data is an audio/video stream, which makes many hacks hard/impossible.

It would be great to play FPS games without any cheaters, they can easily spoil an otherwise amazing game. Maybe future online tournaments will be cloud gaming only.

<comment><USER3> Competitive gamers care way too much about latency to use cloud gaming services for tournaments. Some Counter-strike players still use CRT monitors due to the latency advantage over LCD. I think that you won't see much adoption in competitive gaming, where every millisecond counts.

<comment><USER4> Not anymore, LCDs these days have less than 1ms input lag.

<comment><USER5> No, they don't.

<comment><USER6> Source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, what data is it accessing and where does that data come from? I assume it can show you players that you otherwise would have no info about in the game UI?

For example, this data had to come from network packets, so if the server is oversharing data, why wouldn't you just intercept the packets? What exactly is the cheat?

The file doesn't explain much.

<comment><USER8> It's accessing player location data after it's been decoded into structs in the game memory. The packets are encrypted, so you'd need to MiTM the key exchange to decrypt them, which takes you the same place this device goes (you either need something running in the OS, or something outside of the OS with access to host memory) - and it's a lot easier to just let the game handle that for you and slurp the data once it's available.

<comment><USER9> Why is the game sending all this data which is essentially just hidden by the UI? What is the point of sending enemy location and health data when they aren't near/visible to the player? For a non game dev like me it sounds like wasted bandwidth and a way to enable wallhack.

<comment><USER10> Because knowing which data is hidden by UI from server is hard problem.

To achieve real-time feeling game apply (most) your inputs immediately without having to wait relatively long time confirmation from server. So if you decide to push button and peek around corner you expect to see enemy immediately but server will know about your peek "much" later.

You can for sure limit some information by locations but you always must leak more than it's actually seen by client. Also it isn't easy to solve: can any part of volume be seen from another volume inside arbitrary 3D environment. Enemy size and movement through network frame => players all possible eye positions.

I think current best solutions rely on very rough (manual?) map piecing. So is it worth to invest for such thing that makes some cheats bit less powerful but cannot really prevent them.

<comment><USER11> Keep in mind that CS:GO is ALREADY built on very very old BSP maps, so knowing that some players aren't visible to others is super trivial, if not 100% accurate (ie it's a little conservative)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Readme seems out of date, seems to be detected by ESEA and FaceIt, unless the hardware ID mitigation fixes that.

Shouldn't the hardware ID be randomised to start off with? Not that I plan on using this either way, though.

<comment><USER8> The detection is based on hardware ID interrogation, yes. Here's an ESEA blog post about it although of course they don't go too far into their methods, besides claiming they go "beyond just hardware ID" : [https://blog.esea.net/esea-hardware-cheats/](https://blog.esea.net/esea- hardware-cheats/) . My suspicion is that they interrogate "suspicious" devices in various ways (for example, seeing if the IO mechanism provided by the driver for each device installed in the system can be used in the expected way), but this is of course easily defeatable.

<comment><USER12> Have you tried to honeypot the ESEA client? See what digging around they do, log absolutely everything you can, and see what you can learn from it.

Ugh, now I want to write my own game cheats for the sake of curiosity!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This cheat use PCIe DMA to read the memory of the target computer which is running CS:GO. No kernel/user space software on the target system is necessary and practically undetectable from the target computer.

My stance on this is it's inevitable and game design shall be changed to make this cheat irrelevant, by revealing everybody the all players location, thereby the player who use this cheat has no advantage over the other. I think it doesn't change the game that much for most of the game.

In case of the game which requires secret, it can be achieved by trusted authority server or by using mental poker algorithm.

My guess is, you can't use this system to modify the target memory without detection. Since it's impossible to change the multiple memory location atomically, it would be pretty easy to detect from the target computer.

Also the guess, but to detect this memory peak attack, you take control of all the memory bandwidth, no code but you can use all of the memory access, then consume all memory bandwidth with cache disabled so you can detect the slight bandwidth change that is either this attack, or it's DMA from the motherboard(Possibly malicious access from evil binary blob firmware such as Intel ME or AMD PSP)

<comment><USER14> Aside from that this is a few years old, and got detected pretty quickly from only the target computer without using the network...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> still wondering if you could not get some kind of radar cheat for cs, by 3d analysing the audio outputs and rendering them on top of the game. Not as good as a full radar, but seems pretty undetectable

<comment><USER16> Already exists - [https://www.nahimic.com/gamers/](https://www.nahimic.com/gamers/)

Utility is limited, since you can just .. hear the sound in the correct direction anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> this is years old

<comment><USER18> This was probably posted as related to recent discussion of Riot Games' anti- cheat running at ring-0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you notice an issue please report. :D

</comment><comment><USER20> Cocaine is that you? Lol pretty sure i know these guys</comment>


University of Oregon: no free speech for professors on race, religion, gender - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/12/26/at-the-university-of-oregon-no-more-free-speech-for-professors-on-subjects-such-as-race-religion-sexual-orientation/ <comment><USER2> > For a long time, universities have argued that the public has to tolerate > the views of professors, even when those views sharply depart from > established moral and political orthodoxy, and even when the views create > offense and upset

The universities' real opinions didn't change; the orthodoxy did (in the universities' favor). The direction of academically acceptable discourse had remained the same.

Says that dolphins deserve the same rights as people and nobody bats an eye ( [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-17116882](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-17116882) ); say that men and women have "innate" differences and everyone loses their minds ( [https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/14/summers- comment...](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/14/summers-comments-on- women-and-science/) ).</comment>