Server Sales Are Down As Cloud Apps Abound - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/server-sales-are-down-as-cloud-apps-abound-at-the-expense-of-ibm-enterprise-giants/ <comment><USER2> Server sales are healthier than ever. Unless all this clouds the apps run on conjure their computing resources out of thin air they purchase quite a lot stuff.

Its just the middleman slice of the pie that is shrinking.</comment>


Facebook Bans Links to Competing Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.ksat.com/news/national/facebook-wont-let-you-type-this_ <comment><USER2> This is rather interesting, and the second case of FB using its spam filter as an excuse to ban an unfavorable site or article this month, as mentioned here on HN.

I went to the competing site and found it quite interesting, actually and signed up. I think there is compelling opportunity for people to use it. After all, if you are actually compensated for the quality of what you share, that could be a significant disruption to how social networks operate. I'm optimistic so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> This definitely feels like they're advertising using through Streisand effect. Especially as it looks like it's pretty simple for them to get unbanned - don't have a function that allows users to post to both at the same time

> Facebook says it will unblock Tsu if it changes just one thing: Tsu users > shouldn't be able to simultaneously post to Tsu and Facebook.

Apparently I signed up to this site at some point in October last year and have since completely forgotten about it. I actually thought there was something dodgy going on at first when my email address was in the login field!

As for the site itself, I think the adverts are a bit much and can definitely see why Facebook sees it as spammy. Don't get me wrong the adverts aren't terrible, but there are at least 4 of them on every page I browsed to - all of which were animated images. I was also unable to reproduce it but there was also a "Sponsored" post under my one single post on my profile which was also animated, excessively so even. I wouldn't go as far as to say it needed an epilepsy warning before it started but it wasn't far off!

I think the problem is that there's money involved. The more people see your post, the more you earn. The more people you invite in, the more people see your post. That's definitely an easy-bake recipe for spam.

Having a browse round (indirectly via Google searches as I somehow signed up without joining a network) I couldn't find any profiles that were there for any other reason than solely to make money on their posts. From what I can see this isn't really a social network, it's a get rich quick scheme..

> The other half of your earned revenue on tsū comes from the growth and > activity of your personal social network. One third of all users' content- > generated revenue is passed up to the person that directly invited them to > join tsū. A third of the remaining shared revenue will then go to the person > that invited that user, and so on.

..if not pyramid scheme.

</comment><comment><USER4> The irony is that the publicity generated from the mass banning might actually be helping tsu

</comment><comment><USER5> Anybody trying to compete with Facebook now is setting themselves up for failure. Even Google could not make a dent. We need to wait for fb to make a blunder. Right now, they are at the top of their game.

<comment><USER2> I disagree; it just takes a good idea, and anything can be disrupted. That FB is actually censoring mentions of the site does show to some extent that FB is a bit worried.

Google's social networks didn't really take off for a lot of reasons, mainly because they weren't really offering anything new that people would find preferable over what they were already using, which was FB or Twitter.

<comment><USER6> While it's a nice thought that 'it just takes a good idea' but that's patently false. Social networks are heavily effected by network effects (what a surprise?). Additionally, while I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but an idea without execution is beyond worthless. Social networks are extra difficult because there isn't much to drive most people off of one unless all their friends also move.

<comment><USER2> I still disagree, I think we've just seen the beginning of what social networks will do in this century. Facebook is barely scratching the surface, and there is ample room for disruption. It is inevitable that new ideas will emerge, and they will be embraced.

<comment><USER6> You are moving the goal posts here quite a bit. Do I think that facebook will forever be a giant, without question? Of course not. What I disagree with is that all it takes is a good idea.

I believe that the more likely course of action, as others have stated, is facebook will make mistakes which will be capitalized upon. Large organizations gain cruft, slow down, choose the wrong direction. Many things can happen.

<comment><USER2> I agree that good execution is required, but I usually assume, perhaps mistakenly, that this is implied.

<comment><USER6> If you ever do consulting, you will run into your fair share of 'great social networking' ideas :)

<comment><USER2> I've heard quite a few, but none I'd consider "great" by any means.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The First Seasteaders – Raising the Spar - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=c83TiSJ6sfA <comment><AUTHOR> So the other thread got quite derailed regarding the concept of sovereignty and was somewhat lacking in empathy for a startup founder now facing the death penalty.

That and the sometimes cringeworthy libertarianism aside, the business concept is quite interesting.

This couple planned to manufacture these homes in Thailand for about $20k each. They can then be towed out somewhere and raised.

While not in this video there's a unique team of Western volunteers and local manufacturers behind this.

Also interesting was their concept of building an artificial reef under the seastead, this is a simple but slow process, yet would help ameliorate depreciation of the home. Could easily imagine large movable artificial reefs to be quite valuable resources for anyone living at Sea.</comment>


Understanding Serde - <AUTHOR> https://www.joshmcguigan.com/blog/understanding-serde/ <comment><USER2> Serde is one of Rust's killer feature which makes you appreciate the philosophy behind the language. With just a few annotations you have a robust and complete parser for whatever format (JSON, TOML, etc.) automatically built for serializing and deserializing your data structures. And it's fast, and optionnally zero-copy. I've never seen this in other languages.

<comment><USER3> Haskell? Data generics isn't really nothing new. We had this technology for years.

<comment><USER4> Haskell has been around for more than a decade and had huge uptake by language nerds, but the only significant OSS written in it is Pandoc. In contrast, Rust already has Servo and a number of CLI tools, ripgrep being the most prominent.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what you consider 'significant', but to my mind, there are many great haskell open source projects: xmonad, shellcheck, stack, haxl, to name a few.

Not to mention how many languages are written in it: Elm, Purescript, Idris, GHC itself.

<comment><USER4> I almost listed xmonad. I haven't heard of the other ones. Doesn't change my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Serde is very strong indeed (although not the easiest to understand, this would have been useful when I implemented a Serde library for [de]serialising with the AWS DynamoDB AttributeValue format).

That said, I've always had a slight problem with this approach to serialisation in general, which is that it makes it very hard to have multiple serialisation approaches for a single type (e.g. I want one casing rule for one target, and a different one for another). This seems effectively impossible with an approach based on annotations/macros. Would love to know how others have dealt with that.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I want one casing rule for one target, and a different one for another

Hmm, this is interesting, and something I hadn't thought of before. I'd probably try to solve it with a combination of the newtype pattern (create wrapper types for `MyThing`, like `MyThingJson` and `MyThingToml`) and the Serde flatten attribute. Then you could, for example, add `#[serde(rename_all = "lowercase")]` to the `MyThingJson` struct and `#[serde(rename_all = "snake_case")]` to the `MyThingToml` struct.

I haven't tested this though, so I'm not sure if the `rename_all` would flow through the flatten attribute as expected. Worst case you could duplicate the struct (or more likely, find or build a macro to do it for you) rather than use the newtype/flatten technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pronunciation question: Does Serde have one syllable or two? Looking at the word out of context, it seems the e at the end ought to be silent. But it's derived as an abbreviation from SERialize/DEserialize. Does the author or community have a consensus on one of these being the "correct" form?

<comment><USER8> Original author of serde here. I call it sir-dee, but the current maintainer, dtolnay, calls it sear-day. But we really don't care how people pronounce it. It's really more of a neither / potato thing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K75g7eRhH9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K75g7eRhH9M)

<comment><USER9> Just wanted to thank you for the great work. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently saw this strange word Serde in some Hive table create commands...

<comment><USER11> [https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/SerDe](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/SerDe)

This was where I first saw it as well. Years ago...</comment></comment>


Tesla to Pay Hackers to Break into Their Model S - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188120-tesla-swings-by-def-con-in-search-of-car-hackers

<comment><USER2> <Slightly Informed Speculation>

I don't own a Telsa but I do work in the car industry. A modern car, with a _new_ infotainment system has separate computers for displaying fun stuff, and running your engine.

Their connected with a standardized CAN serial bus. The idea is that if the complex infotainment system (Windows CE on Fords, Linux on new high end GM's) fails as its a complex operating systems + multiple processes. It won't take your engine down with it.

I figured Telsa is pushing for this in part because they don't have separate controllers for engine + fun in car stuff. They just have one computer to cut costs. I know both Ford and GM have played with this model and they hated it, primarily because of security and reliability concerns.

This makes it equal parts publicity stunt and R&D. They can claim their cars are _more secure_ then other American Automakers. Who hide behind proprietary internal standards to ward off would be hackers. And the claim will be rightful.

</Slightly Informed Speculation></comment>


Launching My First Incubated Startup Today - <AUTHOR> http://artvankilmer.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/launching-my-first-incubated-startup-today/

<comment><USER2> Good that it works when you're directly on twitter.com, that's essential.

Do you intend on making money from it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely but I want to hit some other big milestones before charging for anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Suggestion: On your landing page, remove the definition for Twitter. Your users are already using Twitter, so they don't need a definition. It's probably more important to set focus on the "Slipstream" definition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll consider it. Always more to A/B test :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting that the different incubators would provide such a different experience. Thanks for the post.

</comment><comment><USER5> good! now i can start filtering #4sq and random twitter quizzes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Hiding checkins is a very popular use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice concept - keep up the good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do! Always appreciate feedback. Just tweet @slipstre_am or email feedback at slipstre.am

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> congrats Arthur.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


The Case for RSS - <AUTHOR> https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2017/11/the-case-for-rss <comment><USER2> > If you're not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be > 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose > of using RSS.

No, it does not.

The point of RSS is that you subscribe all your interests which you consciously come into contact with. You then have a steady stream of content waiting at your fingertip.

The solution for "1000 unread articles" is to have a shift of perspective in your mind, that it is okay if you cannot get to all the knowledge and information in the world. This is, as long as you have prioritized your reading lists properly.

<comment><USER3> RSS was strategically killed by Google, Facebook, and Twitter and the rest of the web followed. RSS was basically the open source TiVo of content distribution.

Content not wrapped in ads, isn't good for business. Period.

The creativity unleashed by hackers with unfettered access to Twitter's RSS payload was legendary.

I loved RSS. I still do. I still use Shaun Inman's Fever RSS every day. It is really unfortunate that he has discontinued it, the guy is an artist at the highest level, but I get it.

RSS would be all but dead today if it wasn't for Wordpress's universal support of it. Major props to Matt Mullenweg and everything he stands for.

It should have become the backbone of the web and Dave Winer and Aaron Swartz more celebrated for it.

Instead it is just a footnote. A story of a time before everything digital was wrapped in glorious, money making ads and companies discovered charging for API calls as a business model.

<comment><USER4> I think the RSS decline is more of due to a simple supply/demand problem. (I hypothesize) RSS lost because most people who are on the internet aren't tech savvy enough to configure an RSS reader.

Because reading from an RSS source required you to have an RSS reader of sorts and there was some configuration required on the users' part - Install a client/setup an online tool, this was an extra (rather complicated) step as compared to say, simply going to Facebook and subscribing to a page you like with the click of a button.

Now, I'm not discounting the possibility it may have been killed strategically by the internet giants, because it's not in their interest, but I do believe Google Adsense (at that time) did allow you to publish ads into your RSS feeds somehow. So, maybe they killed it because of poor adoption rates and the configuration required to setup one?

<comment><USER5> > Because reading from an RSS source required you to have an RSS reader of > sorts and there was some configuration required on the users' part

Up until a few years ago Safari supported RSS natively: there was a button you could click and a native RSS url would open in your browser that you could read and filter and everything.

Nowadays the alternative in Safari is "reader" mode, which removes all the website styling and leaves just the main content and also the notifications API, which allows you to subscribe to a site (if they support it) and get notified of new content without even opening your browser.

I didn't really use RSS and don't use the replacements either. I really like the idea of RSS and I think it's worth implementing for people who like it, but I never found it useful for myself.

<comment><USER6> Actually, when you open a RSS feed in Firefox, it shows a simple interface with the organized feed and propose you to subscribe to it, creating a "magic" bookmark in your bookmarks toolbar which lets you quickly access it and tweak it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google Trends for RSS is pretty telling: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss)

Personally, I think it's a big loss that we have moved away from the RSS format specifically, and the open web generally.

<comment><USER8> Nobody has moved away from RSS, it's just not as trendy, but major blog platforms ship with RSS by default. Every time I want to add a blog to my list I can find an RSS link (on some rare occasion there is no such link, and an email to the website developer is enough, actually I'm suspecting that most blogs have a RSS feed nowadays because at one point they received requests to create one)

<comment><USER9> RSS is nigh-unusable for many sites now because they only put the first few sentences of an article in the feed, then "continue reading on our site <link> [where we can show you our ads]". It makes sense from a business perspective, because RSS has no good way to embed ads. However, it greatly diminishes the value of RSS -- reading ALL of your content in one easily-organized place.

The best alternative that I've found is Feedly, which can show ads inline.

<comment><USER10> As someone who hosted RSS, but not ads, the reason for doing that was primarily bandwidth related. Serving unchanging content to clients every five minutes is just wasteful. A lot of RSS clients are shit.

<comment><USER8> that's why we had feedburner. Is it still a thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The big offender here is Google. They nuked it with killing Reader and FeedBurner is also minutes away of being sunset.

Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook, ofcourse, but these actions they've taken will backfire for them eventually. The more "open" and "accessible" web, should be in their benefit, long term thinking.

But what I see, what they're busy with is self driving cars, google glasses, augmented reality and all of that: GREAT.

But supporting some basic, easy, cheap, webstandards, they're just completely neglecting and they might up being the next AT&T, or IBM.

They do have some charm offensives going ("Google News Lab") and, well, basically any big tech corp looks better then Facebook -- if you care about the internet in it's current form, Google is really screwing us over. I really am convinced Google is completely losing it's way.

There's no real good quick adequate alternative that I can think of, but they could've just done things so much better, and it would've costed them, quite literally, nothing.

<comment><USER12> > _Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook_

We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't have to choose between evils.

> _The more "open" and "accessible" web, should be in their benefit, long term > thinking._

An open Internet is only in the benefit of small and medium companies and startups.

Companies like Google have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal. All doors are open for them, all possible loopholes are within reach. When all else fails they can just drop a couple of billion $ and nobody can say no to that.

<comment><USER13> > > Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook

> We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't > have to choose between evils.

This is very very slightly OT but I've asked this exact question within HN comments before and never really received any satisfactory answers...

Yes, I fully agree that it shouldn't and doesn't need to be a choice between the two sports teams, but even in a hypothetical world where it was, how on earth is anyone presuming that the infinitely pervasive Google is somehow more ok than the very opt-outable facebook?

<comment><USER14> I've found it's easier to opt out of Google than of Facebook. The former is difficult because their products are relatively good (I consciously use a different browser, search engine, etc, but at the same time there's eg no competition in the field of mail clients), whereas the latter (including WhatsApp) is difficult due to the immense social pressure. I appreciate that far less.

<comment><USER13> You're not opting out of Google simply not using their service though. You're using Google invisibly just by visiting most major websites or by using a lot of (non-Google) software which integrate their services.

<comment><USER14> True, but in that regard Facebook almost equals it. But yeah, it's worrisome for both - luckily also mostly blockable on an individual basis.

<comment><USER13> Facebook is mostly blockable on an individual basis, but Google really isn't. There are so many vectors:

\- Google provides a geolocation service for applications to locate you by triangulating you relative to nearby wifi hardware. This sends data to Google about your devices wifi hardware and the ssids it detects. This isn't an in website feature, so normal content blocking doesn't help, it will be an application setting. Firefox and Safari both used to use this (Mozilla have now created a competing service).

\- Google provides suspicious site screening services ("safe browsing" advisories) to many applications, including browsers.

\- Google hosts most of the CT logs. I'm actually not 100% sure how the mechanism works here in detail, so this may eb a red herring, but it seems to be that browsers may periodically send a list of https sites you visited to these log servers to audit the certs for those sites

\- Google provides free fast DNS which sends all of your DNS traffic to their servers. This may be set by the administrator of the network you're connecting through.

\- Google analytics is used by many non-browser applications, and also in areas of the browser not covered by content blockers, e.g. Firefox's add-ons settings page.

\- Many sites use Google js cdns and ajax apis for required functionality, so a content blocker will need to set whitelists to get the site to work.

\- there are more such things, these are just examples

Facebook does none of the above.

Something like Decentraleyes will help with the cdns and a custom firewall, hosts file, filtering proxy or things like Little Snitch can help with some of the others but none of these are trivial.

<comment><USER14> In my eyes the CDN was the hard thing among those, as I'm not sure how many of them Decentraleyes manages to replace. Most of the others, though, are either blocked/not used for me, or used because I feel there are benefits (i.e. not through social pressure), namely the safe browsing advisories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who's been working with RSS aggregation since its inception I can say that even if there's a steep decline from a trend perspective, the support from almost any major site is still alive and kicking. For those who remember popurls 1), I've recently launched a new site at [http://www.hvper.com](http://www.hvper.com) and 90% from it is based on pure RSS. So long for its death.

1) [https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes- hvper-2867b1b6b2bd](https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-hvper-2867b1b6b2bd)

<comment><USER16> Thank you for chiming in here. Reading so many of these comments of people basically talking out of their asses?

Hey guys, just because you don't think about or use RSS anymore doesn't mean the entire platform is dead and no one uses it, haha.

Jesus the hubris in this thread is insane. I have been using RSS via Feedly uninterrupted for 4 years and counting. No problems, haven't paid a dime, works great.

Yes, not as popular. Apparently losing mindshare these days is akin to actually not existing.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, Google Trends has been advocated by so many Create-a-niche-site Marketing Experts that it's become the undisputed barometer for putting a number or value behind just about any term, including Bitcoin price forecasting. The only times I'd use it is to decide whether I should still wear my 80s fanny pack today.

Now let me check my Alexa ranking.

<comment><USER16> Alexa ranking! xD

Oh man, we can be friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been hacking on a Twitter client that batches your tweets and lets you consume them in a more pull-oriented daily digest format, with the ability to customize rules for which subset of tweets get included in the digest. In my personal usage I've found that this makes Twitter feel more like a manageable RSS feed, and limits the impact on my attention because I only get updates once a day. Is this something people would be interested in using if I released it? Any feedback on the idea?

<comment><USER18> It's a good idea, and I do the same.

Except I actually just have Twitter via a RSS feed. I wrote some code that generates RSS from Twitter lists and I consume it and filter it just the same as any other RSS feeds.

<comment><USER19> Do you plan on releasing the Twitter list RSS feed generator? It's something I've wanted for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really feel like RSS+<something else> could've been the standards for open social networking if the major feed readers didn't loose steam and FB and Twitter supported it (which is probably why they don't)

I often wish for the Open-Social equivalent of email. Anyone can host it, I can subscribe to people on different hosts. And if I don't like the way my feed is aggregating I can choose another.

<comment><USER21> > I often wish for the Open-Social equivalent of email...

This is a pretty good description of the Mastodon social-network model, there are several nodes, and your account on one node can subscribe to accounts on others. It's distributed in a kind of nntp-like way.

In my world, it made a pretty big splash about a year ago, but I've drifted away from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> RSS is great. Most of the major news sources, from the BBC to Fox News to NPR, have useful RSS feeds. Technically, it works OK. Real content is out there.

But there are two big problems. First, it doesn't add ads, as others have mentioned.

Second, it's really easy to unsubscribe. This is why so-called "newsletters" are sent as spam emails. RSS could do the job just fine. If the recipient really wanted the newsletter. The first time a "newsletter" sends out "NEW OFFER BIG SALE...", the recipient clicks "unsubscribe". They're unsubscribed then and there, will never read another item, and the sender can't do a thing about it. The sender doesn't even know they're gone.

RSS doesn't disempower the end user. Modern web technologies are designed to keep the user firmly under the thumb of advertisers. That's the problem with RSS.

<comment><USER23> > First, it doesn't add ads, as others have mentioned.

I think this is more a problem of scale. Simple, text-based ads could work if the audience is very specific. For instance, you could start each item with a one or two line message by a sponsor. Ads could be purchased for a fixed amount or even on a pay-per-click basis if the url is a referral.

This could work brilliantly on a regional level I think. For instance, a local news paper could draw attention to a new restaurant that will open up soon, a sale at a mom&pop store and so on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love RSS and shout-out to newsblur.com for keeping the dream alive. It is wonderful to use a system that isn't being optimized around the needs of advertisers.

<comment><USER25> newsblur! I've been happy with that as well since Google dumped Reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I bet if someone re-wrote the specification using JSON or YAML, everyone would start using it again.

<comment><USER7> I suspect you might be right.

Personally, I think the main reason RSS failed to get bigger adoption was a UX problem. Clicking on RSS and getting a page of code is just too confronting for most people. Thus it never managed to get the same adoption as other republishing buttons like Pin, Like or Share.

<comment><USER27> The main problem with RSS is that it is simply not _discoverable_.

The related UX problem is that major browsers didn't have a built-in reader, so there is nothing with which to discover RSS.

To use RSS, you have to get some add-on like Brief for FireFox, or third-party app for Android. Or else use some website like Google Reader (I think that's dead now?).

Before you do that, in the first place, you have to know what the heck RSS is, and what are the benefits: why should you be installing this additional stuff for interacting with some hidden aspect of the web.

Browsers need to make it discoverable by alerting users, like by bringing up a bubble: _" Hey, user! This web page's updating listings are available in a condensed RSS feed [learn more.] You can register the feed into my built-in feed reader, and then not only browse the items conveniently, but be alerted of new ones, search through the items, and delete ones you don't want."_*

When we were recently looking, on Craigslist, for a bunch of different types of items simultaneously, I showed my wife RSS. From the beginning: how it is the condensed version of a web-site, and how you need a program to deal with it (went through an installation of Brief on Firefox). Then how you add feeds to the reader, and go look at them through the Brief toolbar button, etc. Then configuration: explaining how Brief just surfs the RSS periodically the same way that a human being refreshes a web page, and that the frequency can be configured, as well as how long the items are stored.

So after that she was using it daily, no problem, and mostly liking the convenience of just checking the feeds for what has dripped in, and being able to erase the duds, as if it were an e-mail inbox.

<comment><USER28> Profiles on FB and Twitter are decidedly less discoverable than blogs and potential RSS feeds. I can subscribe in one click from Firefox, same from Chrome with an official add-on. I won't need to come back to the original site unless I absolutely want to.

I think the problem is in monetization, that's why FB and Twitter stopped offering them, and Google killed GReader too. It's not a coincidence that Twitter is having trouble monetizing, when it's the new way to get news. As a publisher and as a reader RSS makes perfect sense, but how do you build a generic infrastructure in between the two as a utility? This is essentially the question.

<comment><USER27> Yes; sites don't want you to know about RSS because it's a way to bypass their portals to just get to the goods.

I suspect that most sites that have RSS feeds don't expose them _intentionally_. They just used some framework which automatically creates it. If they knew, they'd put an end to it. "What, someone can grab a list of our items without seeing the main page at all? Turn that shit off!"

Even though the items do contain links that beckon the user to that site, it still minimizes their interaction.

<comment><USER28> No, it helps discover-ability, and makes me more likely to come back when instead I might not bother. Marketers and someone wanting people to read their content would know the value of RSS.

Even if you're ad-supported, I'm more likely to visit you if you have an RSS feed. Not to mention any non-profit or academic website could let people follow new developments easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Haven't seen it mentioned in here yet, but I've recently started using Inoreader ([https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)) as my RSS reader and am quite happy with it so far. I haven't tinkered with it very deeply yet, but it seems to have a lot of great features for organizing feeds, viewing in different formats, and so on.

<comment><USER30> I love RSS, and have been using Inoreader since Google Reader's demise. Well worth the $15 annual subscription fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Google will never recover in my eyes for the shuttering of Reader, which was an attempt to move people to G+.

</comment><comment><USER32> Huge fan of feedly.com here. I would for sure reduce my consumption of web news in favor of print if it wasn't for feedly. Just helps me organise and read content so it is usable for my own purposes.

<comment><USER33> Second. I am super cheap - but i actually pay them now, so I can get "mute filters." Want to live in a world where no one mentions Trump or chatbots? I do :D

This lets me focus in on my 1000s of other feeds, which have something interesting and valuable to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Been really enjoying using Feedbin ([https://feedbin.com/](https://feedbin.com/)) to keep a curated list of things I actually want to read, but often miss via Twitter or even Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER35> Hear hear! I've been arguing this for several years now, most recently: [https://bryanalexander.org/2017/07/07/i-defy-the-world- and-g...](https://bryanalexander.org/2017/07/07/i-defy-the-world-and-go-back- to-rss/) . Facebook's algo is deeply messed up.

</comment><comment><USER36> When we talk about RSS I hope we are including Atom in that too!

After Google Reader went "tits up" I switched to Inoreader (a web-based reader). Still using it quite happily.

Yes, the case of the disappearing feeds is something I wrote about recently - I believe it's all part of a plot to control the web...

[https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/woeful- web.html](https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/woeful-web.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> There was a brief "Golden Age". I want to say around 2005 or so. When you had a proliferation of MP3 music blogs such as "Hype Machine". All with distinctive curatorial voices and great taste. And all distributing their MP3s using RSS. Just the music. No ads, filler or other detritus.

And you could write your own little client program in like 100 lines of C#. That would aggregate all the various feeds. And download just the MP3 files overnight. Providing you with a tasty gigabyte-sized bouquet of rare bootlegs, unreleased demos, forgotten imports, and much more every morning.

Spotify playlists have supplanted that particular use case. But the design favors promotion. Pushing overlooked talent to the fore. And bubbling up gems that may have been subsumed in the volume of noise.

To find rarities, such as this classic R.E.M. set from the Paradise Theater in Boston, Summer '83 (where they opened for The Replacements). You have to stumble on it via Youtube. Or find a friend with an actual collection of old vinyl ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kok2fGjIUWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kok2fGjIUWI)

<comment><USER38> Hype Machine is still around & active. [http://hypem.com](http://hypem.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love RSS! I'm between readers right now though. The one I'm using only loads a few feed items at a time so it's annoying. If someone can recommend a reader that presents feeds as a list of links, and has a bookmarklet I can use for subscriptions, I'd greatly appreciate it! Keep in mind that I'm using a screen reader. Lol it doesn't have to validate perfectly though.

</comment><comment><USER39> > "For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS > format."

I wish he would've named even a handful of examples that prove the point. Even Medium offers RSS feeds for users, publications, and tags.

And also, RSS is also at the center of the enormous and growing medium of podcasting, which nearly a _quarter_ of Americans enjoy every month.

</comment><comment><USER40> I make heavy use of RS -- I use TT-RSS as a reader and subscribe to lots of feeds. I pretty much use it as a 'starting point' for most of my news gathering. Even if RSS seems to be dieing off, pretty much all major news sites and CMS systems still have RSS built in so it is not dead yet..

</comment><comment><USER41> I still use RSS. After Google News was discontinued I moved to NewsBlur, [https://newsblur.com](https://newsblur.com), and never looked back.

RSS is the one way I keep track of the things I want and the speed I can follow, differently from Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER42> I've kept my subscription list in Feedly, which I open every now and again. I like the highlights it selects for me.

At peak Google Reader I suffered from "inbox zero" syndrome and recall zapping through hundreds of posts a day (being full time student in dorms help with having free time). But something rss, email and social media have thought me is that you'll never see it all. So I never pay much attention to the vast majority of the dress I subscribe to.

I certainly look forward to more decentralized systems like rss in the future.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's a good case! Though I don't use dedicated readers as I used to, it's a great format and important part of the open web.

I still hold on to customizable aggregator protopage.com, though I wish iGoogle hadn't gone away. Also regularly check the fixed-selection aggregators like alltop and popurls, though the latter seems to have been abandoned.

Posts like this encouraging desktop clients are fine, but where is the slickly designed web client for RSS feeds? Until I find it, I'll stick with protopage.

<comment><USER44> Is Feedly slick? I like it

<comment><USER43> Turns out I had an account with a bunch of follows from years ago. Thanks for the reminder!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is RSS/Atom sufficiently unpopular that it need somebody stepping up and making a case for it?

If so, that makes me sad, I rather like it. I am currently on my fourth iteration of building an RSS reader with a web UI, using a Bayes network to distinguish between interesting and boring articles. It is not very sophisticated, but it works well enough in filtering out the items I do not want to see.

Needless to say, this thing relies on RSS to fetch news items. Kind of what it was made for, as far as I could gather.

</comment><comment><USER46> I for one built my own RSS reader which I serve locally with NodeJS. I update the sources every minute and keep them in a MongoDB collection. I even added a Mercury API integration so if I like a summary, I can click a link and read the whole article in-line (formatted consistently, and just how I want it -- no ads)

[https://mercury.postlight.com/web-parser/](https://mercury.postlight.com/web- parser/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Contrary to trends & general opinion, RSS usage for content aggregation & monitoring is on an increase, specially in the business world and niche industries.

I'm speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), that helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage.

</comment><comment><USER48> The biggest case for me is no rescanning over things I've already seen. Also, filtering things I know I'll never want to read (anything from certain domains and some keywords) removes a ton of cruft, even when subscribed to otherwise high-volume feeds.

Edit: Another big win, not needing yet another account to be tracked and targeted through just to get at a feed. Best example being YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER49> Who remembers the time before they'd hammered out the rules for escaping html in RSS item title elements, and all the cool kids were syndicating each other's feeds on their blogs, then some chucklehead posted an item whose rhetorical title was "What happens when you put <blink> in the title?" and the whole blogosphere started blinking?

</comment><comment><USER50> What I'm hoping to get time for to help out here is starting to write on my dumb blog again and have full RSS.

I never earned anything from ads anyway (can't remember if I even activated them).

Anyone else would like to try?

As long as it isn't about "building an audience" and monetizing we could have blogrolls, links to post by other programmers and forget all about SEO nofollow etc etc.

</comment><comment><USER51> Newsbeuter user here... usage dipped in the last year but have been looking to get back into the habit. Nice CLI speed and efficiency!

</comment><comment><USER52> Does anybody here know of a good native RSS program for Windows, Linux and/or Android? All of the ones I've tried are buggy or ugly or just unfriendly to use. My Reeder envy has gotten so bad, I've been running Reeder in a VMWare instance.

<comment><USER53> On Android I am using Flym, though it doesn't seem to get old entries upon subscription. It is built on the sparse rss app, it is GPLv3 and it has a newer relative spaRSS [https://github.com/Etuldan/spaRSS](https://github.com/Etuldan/spaRSS) which is more recently maintained.

<comment><USER52> Thanks for bringing that to my attention! spaRSS is a decent contender. It's pretty, fast and it looks like it does what it should. One small wrinkle: it doesn't seem capable of importing opml files on newer android devices. A bug was filed 2 years ago, but it was closed without being fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Filter the articles based on the rules you define: [https://nodetics.com/feedbro/](https://nodetics.com/feedbro/)

</comment><comment><USER55> It works. Very tiring to have stuff that is rock solid exchanged for junk. Move on, find something else to go after.. there is so much that is just mediocre

</comment><comment><USER56> I use theoldreader myself, and have very little reason to stop checking my RSS feeds.

</comment><comment><USER57> If you're looking for an RSS reader that does away with unread counts, check out [https://siftie.com](https://siftie.com)

</comment><comment><USER55> It works.

</comment><comment><USER58> RSS is as important as E-mail.

Sure today people are mostly focused on corporate run social media like Twitter or Facebook but nobody really likes them. Everyone is constantly bitching about their practices. And you can't really make money on Social Media, which means corporate run social media is going to die some day, when they all realize there's no cash in that expensive cluster of cows.

RSS is free, and everyone can use it, no matter what blogging software you use. Operating your own blog gives you more control over content and presentation, as well as smaller details such as how your commenting system works. It's the superior choice.

It's free. That's important. Nobody controls RSS. Anyone can write an RSS reader. Anyone can write a blog app that publishes RSS. This ensures it will be around to survive the rise and fall of social software trends. When the smoke clears and people emerge from the rubble of the corporate landscape, RSS will be there, welcoming them home.

footnote: I saw this article in my "Hacker News" RSS feed.

</comment><comment><USER59> Yeah VSS can be quite misleading, =p</comment>


Soundsquatting: Uncovering the use of homophones in domain squatting [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/471405/1/soundsquatting_isc2014.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is rather poor academic research to mention "utube.com" as soundsquatting on Youtube.com, since it is actually the reverse that is happening. When his traffic "problem" hit the news in 2006, I called and talked to the owner of Utube, the company, for a bit. I'm sure I wasn't alone in advising him to put ads on his pages to recoup some of his loses, but he was really pissed at the disruption to his business that Youtube's popularity was causing. After a few months, he started showing ads with a little button to get to his new site. Now I see he has a pure advertising page. I'm sure Youtube had lots of opportunities to buy his domain, but they didn't want to pay his price, so utube.com shows ads forever.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Tube_%26_Rollform_Equ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Tube_%26_Rollform_Equipment)</comment>


Adding Glue to a Desktop Environment - <AUTHOR> https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2019/01/07/win-automation.html <comment><USER2> One more thing not shown: Attach GDB to a GUI program by clicking on it. I have this in my setup:

        python
        import gdb
        import subprocess
        class AttachOnClick(gdb.Command):
            def __init__(self):
                super(AttachOnClick, self).__init__('attach_onclick', gdb.COMMAND_RUNNING, gdb.COMPLETE_NONE)

            def invoke(self, arg, from_tty):
                if not from_tty:
                    print('Only supported in interactive mode (from tty)')
                    return
                if arg:
                    print('No arguments supported')
                    return
                xprop = subprocess.Popen(['xprop'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
                awk = subprocess.Popen(['awk', '/^_NET_WM_PID/{print $3}'], stdin=xprop.stdout, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
                xprop.stdout.close()
                try:
                    bpid = awk.communicate(timeout=60)[0]
                except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
                    print('No click within 60 seconds, giving up')
                    xprop.terminate()
                    awk.terminate()
                    awk.wait(1)
                    xprop.wait(1)
                    return
                awk.wait(1)
                xprop.wait(1)
                spid = bpid.decode('ASCII').strip()
                if not spid:
                    print('No pid could be obtained')
                    return
                cmd = 'attach ' + spid
                gdb.execute(cmd, True)

        AttachOnClick()

        end

Then you can type attach_onclick at the gdb command prompt and just click on a window to attach to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> For being written in 2019, I am surprised that the article had no mention of the existence of Wayland. On my systems I have already moved off of Xorg onto Sway¹ as my compositor and window manager and have no intention of going back. Sway has a great programability via it's own swaymsg IPC protocol that allows me to do all the manipulations that I would care to do, and even works on my dual-paned HiDPI 5K monitor.

¹ [https://swaywm.org](https://swaywm.org)

<comment><USER4> Oh. I was planning on trying out i3 for the first time this weekend. I assume you'd recommend swaywm instead, given that it says its basically a drop in replacement for i3? What else does it give you that i3 doesn't, or make it a better choice than i3? Besides being a wayland compositor; or is that the main reason to choose it?

<comment><USER3> I came from i3, so I pretty much copied over my i3 config mostly intact. Had to add the output configuration for non-default resolutions. Had to add environment GDK_BACKEND=wayland to applications to tell them to use wayland instead of x11 via Xwayland such as firefox (65 and newer has wayland enbaled by default), vlc, gedit, terminal and anything else that supports wayland.

Downsides to Sway is that's it has only just entered beta and doesn't really have nice packaged/maintained releases yet. Also I use X11 gnome-panel overlay on top of the swaybar panel, because I wanted a real taskbar, which is kind of a hack and also why I know about the window manipulation features.

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With Xorg on his way out, are there similar options for Wayland? I quite like being able to use xbindkeys with xautomation or xdotool in basically every Xorg WM. I might try Wayland once there is a tiling WM that supports the Master layout (like dwm).

<comment><USER6> What makes you think Xorg is on his way out?

<comment><USER7> And what makes you think Xorg is male? ;)

<comment><USER8> It's probably a language thing that stayed in translation. At least Spanish doesn't have gender-less pronouns, so every object, living or not, has a "gender". In any case, it makes more sense for Xorg to be male than female.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out Simon Schneegans' useful and beautiful application launcher, Gnome- Pie, which he's been developing for many years, and is rearchitecting as OpenPie for Wayland.

Gnome-Pie 0.4 (7 years ago): [https://vimeo.com/35385121](https://vimeo.com/35385121)

Gnome-Pie (6 years ago): [https://vimeo.com/30618179](https://vimeo.com/30618179)

Gnome-Pie 0.6.1 (3 years ago): [https://vimeo.com/125339537](https://vimeo.com/125339537)

Wayland Gnome-Pie 2 (WIP) (1 year ago): [https://vimeo.com/224827490](https://vimeo.com/224827490)

He's written all about Gnome-Pie and the concepts behind it on his site:

[http://gnome-pie.simonschneegans.de](http://gnome-pie.simonschneegans.de)

And his Bachelor Thesis analyzes Gnome-Pie and realizes some really innovative and cool looking forms of pie menus:

[http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor- thesis](http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis)

Including the Coral Menu (6 years ago): [https://vimeo.com/51072812](https://vimeo.com/51072812)

And the Trace Menu (6 years ago): [https://vimeo.com/51073078](https://vimeo.com/51073078)

He discusses the problems of Wayland properly supporting pie menus and other non-traditional, deeply customizable user interfaces here: [http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2017/07/09/gnome- pie-071](http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2017/07/09/gnome-pie-071)

>Wayland – in it's current state – makes applications such as Gnome-Pie hardly possible. Due to security concerns, applications are much more isolated. There is a good summary on the cairo-dock forums. Here are the big bummers: [...]

More recently he's written about his latest ideas for bringing pie menus to the modern Linux desktop with OpenPie, with a new architecture that solves some of the problems with Wayland, and enables any application to use pie menus and other novel types of menus:

OpenPie: [http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2018/05/31/openpie](http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2018/05/31/openpie)

>With the advent of Wayland Gnome-Pie will slowly die. OpenPie is my new concept for bringing (pie-) menus to the Linux desktop. In this post I will give a motivation and describe the planned software architecture.

I've written more about the work he and other people have done with pie menus here:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective: [https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie- menus-936fed383ff1](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly enough, I use cwm on OpenBSD and I have never run into half of those tools. The interaction simulation ones could be used to fuzz user input in graphical applications for crashes. Has anyone tried this before?

</comment><comment><USER10> Practical use I've found for some of these tools: Shell script that detects when any app is full screen (ex: Kodi, or Steam in Big Picture mode) and prevents Xscreensaver from activating.

</comment><comment><USER11> And you can write your own. I use i3wm and was not satisfied how it handles Window Titles by default, so I wrote my own daemon for renaming windows automatically, which makes a huge difference for me: [https://github.com/kissgyorgy/i3-window-title- changer](https://github.com/kissgyorgy/i3-window-title-changer)

</comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately the opening sentence "Windows are objects living in the X server" is increasingly untrue as the world migrates to Wayland.

<comment><USER13> It is in the context of X servers, which is the context of the article.</comment></comment>


US regulators charge three Bitcoin operators with fraud - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/19/cftc-charges-three-cryptocurrency-operators/ <comment><USER2> CFTC complain links:

[http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7675-18#PrRoWM...](http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7675-18#PrRoWMBL)

[http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7674-18#PrRoWM...](http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7674-18#PrRoWMBL)

Second fraud is very common on bitcointalk. Many people who have gotten rich off bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies don't know how to spread their risk. They are not exactly investment savvy. So they routinely fall for fraudsters claiming to be expert investors. These fraudsters solicit coins to be converted to fiat and then invested in real estate or some other commodity.

This obviously is a bad idea because if you give say 1 BTC @ 10k USD, two things can happen:

a. BTC price increases to 15k USD. Now the fraudster needs to pay back 50% more in USD. So, the fraudsters routinely come back claiming the investment was a bust or they got hacked.

b. BTC price decreases to 8k USD. Now fraudsters need to pay 20% less. So they will come back claiming some family emergency and paying back all outstanding BTC obligations.

And I have tried explaining it to people on the forum only to be drowned with "This is FUD" posts.

<comment><USER3> I know saying this makes me unpopular, but I think maybe the best solution is to just leave things unregulated and let dumb money get burnt. The "this is FUD" crowd will never learn their lesson if the people teaching them get prosecuted. If someone wants to loose money on blatant scams with many warning signs, I say let them. If I want to take my life savings and put it all on red, that's my prerogative.

<comment><USER4> It is theft. It's not a scheme, or a game, or a trick. They are stealing money. It needs to be made punishable.

As these frauds get more sophisticated, it won't just be "dumb" money getting burnt. The answer to "someone stole this from me" isn't "well you shouldn't have been so dumb" \- whether it is your wallet, a package from your doorstep, or a bit. Theft is theft.

<comment><USER5> If someone takes a pallet of hundreds sitting in the open on the back of a truck. It's reasonable to say: _" Take reasonable precautions, temping targets promote crime."_

Bitcoin forums are filled with people that are both incompetent and well off, that's going to attract sharks. For similar reasons Google brought in investment advisers pre IPO to educate staff that where about to become targets.

PS: That's not to say any form of theft is ok. Just locked doors keep people honest and let police focus on more important things.

<comment><USER6> If someone takes a pallet of hundreds sitting in the open on the back of the truck, and it doesn't belong to them, it still meets the legal definition of theft. It might not be the best idea to leave it there, but that doesn't magically absolve the thief of legal responsibility.

This example isn't even one of those murky ethical grey areas around property (see: copyright law extensions, squatters' rights, medieval concepts of hunting rights, privatization of public resources, farmers' rights to re-grow seeds, etc.) - it's out-and-out theft.

<comment><USER5> I completely agree. However, a large chunk of society would take it even if they had never stolen anything before and did not intend to commit a crime that day.

PS: Look up _Duty of Care,_ people can share responsibility even if a third party is commuting a crime. Placing a 10 lb solid gold statue on your roof and advertising this is is not just negligent, but flat out dangerous.

<comment><USER7> What you say shows the exact same mistake (but in opposite direction) as the "victim-blaming" crowd - conflating moral responsibility with practical wisdom. Yes, putting that gold statue on your roof is _just stupid_ , because of the world we live in. No, that doesn't make the burglars less responsible, morally and legally, for robbing you. Those two statements are true at the same time.

<comment><USER5> What makes you think I disagree with that idea?

If everyone walked around holding a loaded gun, you would see far more gun violence. That has nothing to do with morality, just impulse control.

I am not saying people are not responsible for their own actions. Just that forms of crime prevention do actually work.

<comment><USER7> > _What makes you think I disagree with that idea?_

The whole subthread kind of looks like you're disagreeing with the idea that theft is theft.

> _I am not saying people are not responsible for their own actions. Just that > forms of crime prevention do actually work._

So we agree on that. My point is that it's not either-or - effective crime prevention doesn't make a crime not a crime.

<comment><USER5> > looks like you're disagreeing with the idea that theft is theft

I don't. If you're reading that into what I said that's on you.

A mass murder will commit fewer crimes in solitary confinement. That does not mean solitary confinement makes them a better person, or not a murder. It simply prevents future murders. So, the concepts are independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those who've been drawn into this craze don't seem to realize the risks involved. I've had several people with barely any technical literacy who've "invested" or asked about what it is. None of them understood the purpose, mechanisms of transfer, or risks.

When your your dry cleaner is telling you about a sure thing, you know the bubble is already over.

Once cryptos are roped off from money laundering, we'll see the prices fall back down to Silk Road levels because black markets were and seem likely to remain their sole utility for some time.

Blockchain tech is really interesting. I think there's some amazing stuff that could come out of the space. But anyone watching this closely should realize that there is a lot of magical thinking going on, largely because of the deflationary nature of many of the coins.

<comment><USER9> >Once cryptos are roped off from money laundering, we'll see the prices fall back down to Silk Road levels because black markets were and seem likely to remain their sole utility for some time.

Hmm, I think you might doubt the amount of true believers out there. Many bitcoin investors seem to be in a mindset where anything that happens is 'good for bitcoin.' Dips are good, high prices are good, volatility is good, lack of regulation is good, no wait regulation is happening? Actually regulation _is_ good. Since bitcoin requires you to up the stakes and put money in the pot but also has no fundamentals there is a kind of concentrated effect we see on facebook and other social networks where you're massively incentivized to enter a thought bubble and only read good news about bitcoin.

<comment><USER10> > _I think you might doubt the amount of true believers out there_

If you've experienced a proper run on an illiquid asset, you'll remember that the true believers never stop believing. People just stop lending to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article itself isn't particularly useful, but I'm pleasantly surprised by how well the CFTC has done with their press releases. They clearly explain the nature of the alleged crimes without any legalese.

One of the companies is accused of being an outright Ponzi scheme. They took money and promised to invest it, but just paid off other customers with the money instead. The second company took money, then vanished into the night without providing services.

As someone who is developing a business that involves Ethereum smart contracts, I'm pleased to see that the regulators seem well versed in crypto currencies, and they have a nuanced view of the subject.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is appropriate. You don't need cryptocurrency to engage in a ponzi scheme - they've been going on since time immemorial.

I'm a pretty hard-headed realist, but I find it irritating that every price movement, every regulatory action, every rumour of new legislation is parroted about as proof of the broader illegitimacy of cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange.

Maybe the corollary to the rule of bubbles is - if everybody and their dog agrees that something is a bubble, but the price doesn't correct itself, maybe there are other factors at play beyond the simplistic media narrative?

<comment><USER13> Indeed, additionally it's a myth that libertarians and advocates of decentralized markets in general are against all government or law enforcement intervention as well. Enforcement of fraud and theft are exactly the type of stuff they view as a critical and necessary role of a centralized government.

The Bitcoin community should openly support this type of stuff which would help legitimize their industry, assuming the charges are credible I haven't yet checked. Only the tiny group of the most extreme (crypto) anarchists believe in some sort of total private/self-regulation in some idealized future.

I've never been convinced that Bitcoin will allow thieves and pedophiles and all the worst things the media talk about being able to operate without fear. It's extremely difficult to be a criminal in 2018 even with a decentralized pseudonymous currency, even assuming the police follow constitutional, targeted, and warrant-based approach to law enforcement (which would obviously should be the implied limits of community support for law enforcement action).

<comment><USER12> Ironically the best way to be a successful criminal in 2018 is probably to be as low-tech as possible. Bitcoin transactions are trivially easy to track, and the exchanges are an obvious place to apply regulatory pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tip of the iceberg... building up public opinion going after low hanging fruit first, then raiding the big US exchangers.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16183454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16183454)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder who the third case is. Bitfinex, perhaps?

<comment><USER16> Bitfinex isn't in USA and doesn't service US customers AFAIK. Not that it's not possible they're being charged with something, but it seems like a stab in the dark to guess it's them.

<comment><USER17> AFAIK they used to have some form of presence in the US until last year.</comment></comment></comment>


Critical flaws revealed to affect most Intel chips since 1995 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/security-flaws-affect-every-intel-chip-since-1995-arm-processors-vulnerable/ <comment><USER2> Hm, looks like the websites describing the bugs...require Javascript. Forgive me for being a bit nervous about running random code from the Internet at the moment...

(Edit: problem is gone??)

<comment><USER3> How does
Stay tuned
 require Javascript?

<comment><USER2> That was not there when I first visited...</comment></comment></comment>


How much gold is there in the world? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21969100 <comment><USER2> The longer quote from Warren Buffett is very interesting

Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold's price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today's annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything.

You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

<comment><USER3> I don't get it. Warren Buffet seems to be wrong, which is somewhat unlikely.

First, there is only one "world's most profitable" Exxon Mobil. You can't buy 16 of them. Second, oil will run out. Sure offshore drilling will extend how long we can produce it for, even one Exxon Mobil producing at this rate doesn't look like it will last much longer than a century [1]. It is likely that the price of oil will go _up_ (I think orders of magnitude) as the reserves dry up, but not enough to keep producing $40 billion/year. As one of my professors in college said "Your children will not believe you burnt this stuff" as it is so useful in other ways.

Second, oil is not end-all be-all. Cold fusion [2] is coming, and it will make energy cost a rounding error as compared to today's cost. It is not clear when there is a good chance it will happen within the next 100 years. This will mark a singularity past which even the investment genius of Warren Buffet is unlikely to see.

Because of point #2, crop fields _may_ lose their value. Why bother growing things under the sun, when we could grow them using an artificial energy source much closer to us, that we control? If all of a sudden, every household has a self-regulated food growing companion cube, powered by dirt cheap energy, why bother with corn fields?

I suppose his larger point is that you are better off investing your money in companies that produce value in the world vs holding onto value. I would agree with that. However, for the love of god, don't buy 16 Exxon Mobils! If you have that kind of money, talk to me instead. I have a very profitable bridge to sell you!

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power>

<comment><USER4> How is cold fusion related to a technology singularity?

<comment><USER3> How will basically free energy affect your day to day life?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most interesting point is that gold is being "consumed" for the first time.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't burying gold in funeral ceremonies classify as consuming as well?

<comment><USER7> One would hope that this is true in Tutankhamun's case; although we cannot compute how many other priceless archaeological treasures have been melted down for their precious metal content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice to see if there is not more gold "sold" to investors than there actually is.

<comment><USER9> If that were the case, we could just declare that gold has been taken off of the gold standard.

<comment><USER10> Repo's, gold certificates etc. Good luck getting "your" physical allocation if everyone tried to take delivery of "there" of the underlying assets all at once.

<comment> daniel-cussen This is the original form of a bank run: everybody wants to cash the goldsmiths oversold certificates at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I watched a depressing documentary[1] about gold recovery in India.

People in a jewellery district would sweep the floor to recover the gold dust. Sometimes gold gets into the drains, so one guy takes a bucket and crawls into the drains to gather sludge, which he then tries to sell to other reclaimers. It's filthy, dangerous, work for little money.

Chemicals used are harsh and there's not much protection.

And then there are the people recovering electronic components from discarded computers. Cables are gathered in bundles and burned to get rid of the insulation. Burning plastics (on open fires, in the open air, with no worker protections) are nasty. Lack of education and equipment and skills mean the worthwhile bits are not recovered (from PCBs - no copper, gold, lead, etc) and any safety equipment is sold for cash. One of the episodes in [2] is particularly sad. A small boy smashes electrolytic capacitors off a PCB with a rock to try to sell to someone else. It's preferable that young children don't work (UN rights of the child, etc) but if they must work at least give them something that's not utterly pointless.

Corruption is rife.[3]

And children[4] feel the need to work because they are poor. They're poor because they get paid a tiny amount of money for the work they do. (Don't fucking start with the 'cost of living' bollocks that always crops up on HN. $1.5 per day is a tiny amount of money no matter where you are.)

[1] (<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8278>)

[2] (<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1984404/>)

[3 ([http://www.theatlantic.com/international/print/2012/03/the-w...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/print/2012/03/the- warlord-and-the-basketball-star-a-story-of-congos-corrupt-gold-trade/253813/))

[4] ([http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94822/KENYA-Gold-mining- beats...](http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94822/KENYA-Gold-mining-beats-school- any-day))

<comment><USER12> The worst thing is that what you describe is a profitable business, even in London. Every jeweller shop gather floor swipes, drain sludge, ... and have them processed (edit: processing is done in the UK, that's normal job for a refiner). The recovery is in the thousands of pounds a month for a small shop. There is an amateur community in the US and UK that recycles gold from all sorts of electronic part for fun and profit.

You do not have to have miserable work condition to make a profit recycling gold. The sad thing is how little valuable is human life in India.

Another example, they flatten silver into gilding leaf by hand, with a hammer. They frequently break bones and become disabled (and out of work of course). Gilding leaf, especially silver, is cheap (like round wire, flat sheets), as you may imagine the machine that do that in Europe are extremely low tech, reliable and cheap. Yet, in India, it is even cheaper to use human labor to do that. Depressing.

<comment><USER13> Is the machine faster and more productive?

Then the issue is of upfront capital investment surely? No sane silversmith shop will hire 20 workers who need attention, break bones etc when 5 can operate a machine _if the shop can ge the machine for free_

(Of course firing all those workers now you have them may be harder)

It's unlikely to be true that indian business owners sit around saying "I would buy capital machinery, but it's sooo much more fun being evil and anyway human life is worthless round here. Unlike London where my cousin lives and I visited last week"

Yeah off on a strange rant there - basically saying "oh the Indian culture does not value human life so they don't bother buying machinery we Europeans have is flyin real close to racism - or wilful blindness. Have faith in rational actors and economics - there is always a rational explanation

<comment><USER12> The way it works is the following: workers pile outside the refiner and buy a lump of silver. They spend the day hammering away. Once it is flat, they sell it back to the refiner for a profit or use it to do stuff (dies, ...)

Unfortunately, there is no need for evil motivation, culture or racism. Good old economic and rational actors: humans to do the labour are just cheap and plentiful. I have no doubt that the very day it makes economic sense to use a machine, they will use machines. The reason we use machine in London is also simple: silvering leaf are 1GBP/g and silver grain is 0.6GBP/g. You would need to do hammer 300 sheet of silver per hour to earn minimum wage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate gold. It is a relatively useless metal that comes at great environmental cost, with an over-inflated value driven by war and insecurity.

<comment><USER15> By 'relatively useless' do you mean 'historically useful because it was a way to store tokens of wealth in a way that didn't decay/corrode'? And as mentioned already, there's plenty of uses for it in the modern world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What happens if they come up with a way to make gold in 100 years?

Or a way to find/mine it far more easily before then?

Since they came up with a way to make perfect diamonds and their value still hasn't gone down, makes you wonder.

<comment><USER17> I suspect gold will prove a lot harder to manufacture than diamonds.

Gold is created in the explosion of a large supernova that was formed from the remnants of generations of supernova before, each explosion creating heavier and sometimes totally different elements.

All the Silver in the world was formed in a different chain of supernovae to the one that formed all the Gold in the world.

(A fact that blows my mind when I think too hard about it.)

<http://www.world-science.net/othernews/120906_silver.htm>

Diamonds need carbon and a fast-moving object to strike it. They are therefore relatively common and relatively easy to make. There is one meteor crater in Russia that contains 3000 years-worth of diamonds (at current consumption rates). It is considered uneconomical to mine for them.

<comment><USER9> You can create gold from mercury, but it costs more than it's worth and ends up being radioactive.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Go...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I believe the asteroid belt is heavily undermined. With the Soviet 'Energia' rocket system it was within reach.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is gold on the frontpage of HN? Not because of the strenght of gold itself, but because of _the weakness_ of the other actors in this global tragedy; the currencies and the political class governing them. Aks the people of Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Vietnam, Iran, Argentina, etc about their faith in their currency and their leaders...

<comment><USER20> Irish person here. There is no distrust in the currency or banking system. No one's doing a run on the banks here.

Ireland was a traditional 19th century bubble

<comment><USER19> Ireland was also a traditional 2007 housing bubble ;-) The way the Cyprus debt was taken care of makes smart people of other indebted country's think twice about _their savings_.

Yahoo News: _Big depositors at Cyprus' largest bank may be forced to accept losses of up to 60 percent, far more than initially estimated under the European rescue package to save the country from bankruptcy, officials said Saturday.

Deposits of more than 100,000 euros ($128,000) at the Bank of Cyprus will lose 37.5 percent in money that will be converted into bank shares, according to a central bank statement. In a second raid on these accounts, depositors also could lose up to 22.5 percent more, depending on what experts determine is needed to prop up the bank's reserves. The experts will have 90 days to figure that out.

The remaining 40 percent of big deposits at the Bank of Cyprus will be "temporarily frozen for liquidity reasons," but continue to accrue existing levels of interest plus another 10 percent, the central bank said._ [http://news.yahoo.com/bank-cyprus-big-savers- lose-60-percent...](http://news.yahoo.com/bank-cyprus-big-savers- lose-60-percent-135608668--finance.html)

Le Monde: Anything is possible now _how much confidence is it possible to have in the single currency and the sacrosanct guarantee of bank deposits when customers of a European bank can wake up to find that part of their savings has disappeared overnight?_ <http://mondediplo.com/2013/04/01nicosia>

I'd say (the loss of) confidence is one of the main reasons there is so much talk about gold.

<comment><USER20> _Ireland was also a traditional 2007 housing bubble ;-)_

Sure, it was a housing bubble that popped around then. My point was that it wasn't fancy financial instruments or arcane hidden scams that broke it, it was an old fashioned "This thing (property) can only go up in value! Invest in it now, keep making more of those things (houses), invest now and you'll be able to flip your asset later for a higher price! It can't go down in value!" type bubble.

If everything was on bitcoin, you still could have had the irish property bubble happen, just like how there was bubbles like that when the currencies were gold based.

<comment><USER19> I have to respectfully disagree, _…the expansion of money through debt is unsustainable and necessarily fuels and creates economic bubbles. This concentrates wealth in the hands of private banks as the populace is forced into debt simply to own a home and educate their children, hoping that the loans can be repaid by others going into debt in greater amounts later to purchase the assets they themselves have purchased through incurring large amounts of personal debt. However, debt expansion leads to price appreciation of assets through speculation as the financial market becomes riskier and this process is unsustainable in the long run, with the last cycle of indebted being wiped out when they cannot find anyone to buy the assets they themselves have purchased by going into massive debt._

[http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Criticism_of_fractional_reserve_b...](http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Criticism_of_fractional_reserve_banking)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate my idea - a site for OCD sufferers - <AUTHOR>

Recently I've read a book called "Brain Lock" which is about effective 4-step technique of rewiring your brain and getting rid of OCD symptoms. The steps are "Relabel", "Reattribute", "Refocus", "Revalue". Not getting into details, but among other things the author suggests to have a log of successes, which means a person should write down when he was able to workaround his compulsion.<p>The idea is to create a website, which is a place for people to have their ocd-journals, read each other successes and tips on how to struggle against compulsions (which might be useful, because one of the ideas in struggling against compulsions is to switch the attention to something else). What do you think about it? Do you think it'd be hard to makret such a thing? Getting money out of it? Any OCD sufferers here? <comment><USER2> How would your site be different from "Patients Like Me" where people discuss their medical conditions?

[http://www.patientslikeme.com/symptoms/show/1920-obsessive-c...](http://www.patientslikeme.com/symptoms/show/1920-obsessive- compulsive-disorder-ocd)

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking of a more specialized OCD site, but you're probably right that's it's not going to be that much of a difference. Thanks for the tip, will think about it. Probably not worth doing then.</comment></comment>


Want to work with computers. Don't like Coding. What should i pursue?  - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Im 28 years old.  I have loved working with computers my entire life and consider myself very tech savy.  However, I never learned to code anything, and I really don't have the will to put myself through an engineering program.  I would love to work with technology tho. I guess you could you could say I would like to be involved more in the creative, innovation, idea side of development, more than I would like to code or engineer products.
Im looking for advice on what fields you all think I could pursue to fulfill this passion.  Any input is appreciated.  Thanks folks. <comment><USER2> If you don't get any answers here, try Quora. That place seems more likely to give you answers to these sorts of question. Posting questions on HN during US business hours also seems better for getting answers.

I'm not qualified to give anyone advice on anything. However, I remember reading a blog post somewhere on game development career advice: get a degree in English/writing/literature. There is a big demand for people who can write. Hopefully, others can add more details about that. Best of luck.</comment>


I Smell Smoke - Rob Conery on Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wekeroad.com/2010/06/21/i-smell-smoke <comment><USER2> This is a religious war. However, innovation in the C# language places it as the most advanced production level language on the market (IMHO).

Form validation (client and server side with the same code) is still a killer feature. Easy deployment as there is only IIS, no decisions about fcgi, mogrel, keeping your processes running, etc.

I don't really see his point. You've got one of (if not THE ) best IDE's with easy debugging, intellisense, etc. You've got a super stable platform (IIS 7), some of the best documented API's and code in existence and you want what?

I guess I don't get what he wants? Is there some missing feature or just sad that he can't be one of the cool kids?

<comment><USER3> > _innovation in the C# language places it as the most advanced production > level language on the market (IMHO)._

On a scale of 1 to 10 of vagueness/subjectiveness, this would be a 30.

I like the new additions, like Linq or the properly done closures or generics.

But throwing words like "innovative" or "advanced" for techniques used from the late '70-ties brought together in a language with the same corporate- stinch of Java or Cobol?

Yeah, right.

> _Form validation (client and server side with the same code) is still a > killer feature._

Form validation is a hard feature to get right. I do not agree that the validation done in ASP.NET MVC is a "killer", especially since I've hit hard limitations in the first hours of me trying it.

In case you're wondering about what limitations I'm talking about ... try building a dynamic forms system that gets stored in the DB (fields, references to validation rules) allowing a user to build some forms and for another user to supply values for those forms.

The only validation system I've seen that's reasonably productive and that works in most cases is the one in Django, but even that is lacking considering you have to add your own code to have client-side validation and keep it DRY (although that happens due to Django's policies, not due to bad design, and really it's not that big of a deal to add something that works well in most cases ... bringing server-side validation to client-side is an easy to solve problem, unless your framework is fucked-up).

> _Easy deployment as there is only IIS_

You are probably kidding, although I'm happy they finally discovered the virtues of text configuration files.

> _no decisions about fcgi, mogrel, keeping your processes running, etc_

Not every platform is as fucked-up as Rails ... mod_wsgi for Django (or any wsgi compliant Python framework) just works with no headaches.

It takes me 20 minutes flat to manually get an EC2 instance up and running with everything needed. And I can quickly automate that in a way Windows devs cannot begin to dream of.

> _You've got one of (if not THE ) best IDE's with easy debugging, > intellisense_

Sometimes I miss that, but not that much, mostly because I need the flexibility to use the best tool for a certain job, not to mention that sometimes I don't have a choice in the tools I use.

That's why I'm using Emacs ... the flexibility I gained made me several times more productive than a clicky-clicky IDE.

If you don't believe me, try working with Python from VS.NET, while using pychecker/pylint to automatically check your code (let's say it's a company policy) and to also use ReviewBoard in combination with a Git repository.

Or better yet, try debugging with VS a production environment.

> _some of the best documented API's and code in existence_

In comparison with Django it pales.

Not only does it have good documentation, but when it's lacking the clarity of the actual code is breathtaking ... yes, devs using Django are actually looking at its source-code and I have quite a few friends developing on top of ASP.NET ... none are doing that.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe it's because ASP.NET is proprietary, the end-result is the same though ... the Django devs I know have intimate knowledge of Django's internal mechanisms, while ASP.NET devs do not.

> _Is there some missing feature or just sad that he can't be one of the cool > kids?_

HN has degraded a lot recently. I see many comments containing ad hominems that are getting upvoted.

Pity.

<comment><USER4> > Not every platform is as fucked-up as Rails ... mod_wsgi for Django (or any > wsgi compliant Python framework) just works with no headaches.

erm... Phusion Passenger is the deployment platform of choice for Rails (Rack) applications. It's even easier than mod_wsgi.

<comment><USER3> Nice ... had no idea about Passenger. While working on a Rails project 2 years ago, had to wrestle with a Mongrel cluster and it wasn't nice.

Thanks for the tip,

<comment><USER4> Yes, it was admittedly a nightmare back then. Passenger is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I smelled smoke 4 years ago and promptly evacuated (to rails). Rob Conery was always my favorite asp.net open source dev, I hope he's able to teach the Microsoft community what exactly they are missing.

<comment><USER6> That article taught me nothing about what I'm missing. Why write something like that and not fill it with examples? Show me what you can do in rails that is a pain in asp.net mvc.

<comment><USER7> This is an honest question, not snark: has ASP.Net MVC got anything like cucumber available to it out of the box? Or rubygems, for that matter?

I did suggest to Sara Ford at a MixUK conf a couple of years ago that a Visual Studio plugin that would search for and import projects from CodePlex straight into your project would be pretty awesome; I never followed up on it, and I've been out of Windows dev since then so I haven't heard if anything similar exists. I still think it would rock :-)

<comment><USER8> _> has ASP.Net MVC got anything like cucumber available to it out of the box?_

Cucumber isn't strictly speaking out of the box - it's dead easy to install of course, but it's not part of the rails core distribution. Rails still uses Test::Unit by default.

Specflow (<http://www.specflow.org/>) is a .Net oriented BDD framework that uses Gherkin - essentially Cucumber for .Net.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can try to stream the video from here: <http://streaming.ndc2010.no/tcs/> The server seems to be overloaded right now though.

There is a torrent of 33 talks from NDC2010: [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/757631/NDC2010/NDC2010%20Part1.torre...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/757631/NDC2010/NDC2010%20Part1.torrent) Rob's talk is in there.

<comment><USER10> For people looking at the torrent, Rob's talk is the one named "The Next Big Thing Or Cool-Kid Koolaid Slicing Through .mp4"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a great example of why I'm wary to get into iOS development. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have the resources and talent to make great platforms, and the control they have allows for really polished tools. The allure of the integrated ecosystem is strong, but then if they fall short in some critical way, or become irrelevant over time you have to either start begging the vendor for change or else chuck your whole time investment.

In the open source world things are often buggy and rough around the edges, but the cross-polination of ideas happens faster, coupling is looser, and the cost of switching is lower.

I'll still probably pony up for the damn ipad sdk, but hopefully I'll know better than to pin my career on it.</comment>


New York Had the Second-Lowest Voter Turnout So Far This Election Season - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/article/new-york-had-the-second-lowest-voter-turnout-so-far-this-election-season/ <comment><USER2> I'm wondering why we're not seeing any accusations of malfeasance. 126k voter registrations disappearing on election day seems a bit fishy to me.

I'm all for streamlining voting processes to make it easier on the voter, but I'd also like to see advocates get on board with streamlining the rest of government - streamlining the tax code to make it easier (or unnecessary) to file, streamlining business formation to make it easier to form the entity, register the name, and get the first trademarks and/or copyrights registered, streamlining vehicle registration so you never have to leave your house, etc etc. Voting is quite fluid when compared to other interactions with the government.

<comment><USER3> If you want these things to happen, you will need to advocate and fight for them. I speak from experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the Republican side, I'm sure a number didn't vote because they thought, correctly, that it would be a Trump landslide. If they supported him, no problem, if not, well, that's harder to justify.

My father didn't vote in the Missouri primary because it was only for presidential preference, and he was happy with either of Cruz or Trump winning as was clearly going to happen (and he's getting old enough he didn't want to go to that much trouble that particular day; I'm sure he'll be voting in November, though).

</comment><comment><USER5> It goes to show that the more you suppress the vote or the more obstacles you put in the way, the more people won't vote or simply can't vote, or do vote and don't get counted because they didn't decide they liked Bernie 6 months earlier.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe they shouldn't require you to be a registered democrat/republican, like other states do.</comment>


Self-Driving Mercedes Will Sacrifice Pedestrians to Save the Driver - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcoexist.com/3064539/self-driving-mercedes-will-be-programmed-to-sacrifice-pedestrians-to-save-the-driver <comment><USER2> That will change soon enough. The probability of surviving in a car crash is higher than getting run over by a car. These cars have seat belts, airbags, solid frames.

It would be interesting to see what algorithm they use to determine who gets saved. A lawsuit will change that fast enough.

I can already see a case, The speed limit is 45mph, someone overrides the car and forces it to go faster 70mph, something happens and the car has to make a decision, do you save the driver or the pedestrian who has the right of way?

Let's say Mercedes says the pedestrian, well, these are kids going to school, would they still save the driver?

Perhaps they would program the car to save the pedestrian if kids, else the driver. Maybe they would take into account the socioeconomic state of the environment. I firmly believe that a law would be passed in the future, where the pedestrian would be saved, but then what happens if an idiot jumps into the street/highway, should you die or have the car run them over? As we can see this is not simple, I think places are going to have laws and rules on who gets saved and how. In California the driver gets saved, in NY the pedestrian. It's going to be a mess.

</comment><comment><USER3> > One of the biggest debates about driverless cars concerns the moral choices > made when programming a car's algorithms.

This garbage should be downvoted on HN. Even on the subject of self-driving cars, these articles are a distraction, clickbait suitable for twitter arguments.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is not much to discuss in a practical way here, because the fear of the incident related to Mercedes's statement is near totally superfluous.

Many are imagining a world similar to our own today, but with self-driving cars; this kind of effort and R&D is meant to be applied graceful over decades, which isn't what Mercedes is planning for today and shouldn't be contextualized within out current _modernity.

What I believe is envisioned (obviously IMO) and why I feel this is a superfluous discussion is because in the world of self-driving cars of the Level 4 and up variety we are talking about beacon detection e.g. there are no pack of kids walking behind parked vans, because they all carry detectable devices such as laptops that always run Wifi, iPads, iPhones, etc. Everywhere they go these kids are detected and reacted in a world of Level 4+ cars. This is the same for pedestrians. Buses are also self-driving and all are communicating with each other in real-time and in fractions of a second.

A Mercedes car in this world didn't just discover a patch of ice on the road that went previously unnoticed. The previous 100+ cars that drove over it detected a level of decreased and decreasing level of traction (probably on a predictable curve I'd even assume) and communicated it to the network that coordinates cars, traffic, pedestrian signals. It's insane to think that in a world of Lidar systems, infrared, AI and so that these things will just 'happen' as they do today; that isn't realistic or even reasonable.

Ice? Oil spills, diesel spills, specs of glass, even a snot rocket from your local motorcycle gang are all detected immediately and compensated for with heat, humidity, tire traction quality deviation etc. It'll be just short of outright freaking amazing what this technology will eventually be able to do.

For me this is just fun conversation, but ultimately totally useless beyond the ethical dilemma (which is more of a Pandora box discussion than anything), because it just won't really exist in any material manner in the future. Like a chicken or the egg. ;)

_Sorry haven't had a reason to use that word in a long long time; too much fun to pass on.

</comment><comment><USER5> These make for interesting thought experiments, but how often will the observable data lead one to a clear cut reliable belief that action A causes X deaths and action B causes Y deaths? And it only gets more challenging if the injures are typically going to be non-life threatening in most cases but could still cause death (there are plenty of cases of people receiving a punch that normally would just bruise but thanks to a stumble or hitting a pavement edge they end up dead?)

</comment><comment><USER6> I would hope that the logic in saving the driver would ultimately save the pedestrian. I'd think that the "collision" of any object, including that of the body of a human being, could potentially do damage to the driver.

<comment><USER7> In extreme corners of the state space that doesn't hold, but one would hope self-driving cars would manage to stay far away from most of those corners.

For example, if a self-driving car is heading towards a concrete wall at speed, the safest thing to do is decelerate just fast enough to come to a stop touching or just after hitting the wall. If there are pedestrians between car and wall, Mercedes' statement seems to imply they will use the pedestrians as an additional crumple zone, rather than to decelerate really fast in order to not hit them, even if that saves lives and only causes the passengers some bruises.

More realistic: a pedestrian starts crossing the road between parked vans with darkened windows; a self-driving car doesn't see him until 10 meters away. Should the car swerve into the first van or into oncoming traffic to prevent the collision with a pedestrian, just brake as fast as possible, or brake as fast as is safe for the driver and the passengers? If the car knows the passengers did not put on their seat belts and are carrying loose heavy baggage on the rear shelf, should the car decide to decelerate very lightly, pedestrian be damned? What if this is in a pedestrian zone, and the driver overrode the car's intentions to keep speed below 10mph?

Another extreme example: a Mercedes is driving to pick up its owner, and has to decide between lightly harming its owner and killing a stranger. What will it do?

I doubt Mercedes' statement ( _" zeroeth law of robotics: A robot may not injure its owner or, through inaction, allow its owner to come to harm"_) will hold up in court, and also whether they will really implement it to the limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Self-Driving Mercedes Will Sacrifice _mere peasants_ to Save the Driver

<comment><USER9> I find it slightly concerning that the word "brake" isn't used anywhere in the article.</comment></comment>