SEC Rejects Rule Change for Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/batsbzx/2017/34-80206.pdf <comment><USER2> Bitcoin just went from a high of 1327.1926 to 995.9575 in the blink of an eye.

Wow.

From the ruling....

> First, the exchange must have surveillance-sharing agreements with > significant markets for trading the underlying commodity or derivatives on > that commodity. And second, those markets must be regulated.

> Based on the record before it, the Commission believes that the significant > markets for bitcoin are unregulated. I'm not sure I entirely understand if > they mean that Bitcoin itself must be regulated or just that the SEC needs > to see that the major exchanges are regulated.

If its the former, then I think this is game over, if its the later then............hmmm I really don't know.

EDIT Having gone through the ruling it looks like they have a few reservations.

1) Most of the bitcoin trading happens on unregulated markets

2) Most of the volume happends in China and not the us and is therefore hard to regulate.

3) The ETF is tied to the Winklevoss own Gemini exchange which has little volume and often inferior pricing to other more liquid exchanges.

4) They bring up the lack of a liquid futures market, though I'm not sure this is really a concern.

> The Commission has, in past approvals of commodity-trust ETPs, emphasized > the importance of surveillance-sharing agreements between the national > securities exchange listing and trading the ETP, and significant markets > relating to the underlying asset. 144 Such agreements, which are a necessary > tool to enable the ETP-listing exchange to detect and deter manipulative > conduct, enable the exchange to meet its obligation under Section 6(b)(5) of > the Exchange Act to have rules that are designed to prevent fraudulent and > manipulative acts and practices and to protect investors and the public > interest

So until bitcoin markets are regulated by the SEC or similar no ETP/ETF products I suppose.

I'm a bit disappointed that there is no ETF but this is pretty darn reasonable.

<comment><USER3> The next step seems to be to create a regulated market - anyone know what that means, or whether there is something inherent to Bitcoin that doesn't allow it? Coinbase has KYC, banking relationships and tax integration, I'm sure that can be extended to an exchange.

<comment><USER4> You'd need to force all the unregulated exchanges to close down, and block ability to run smart contracts or any other software on it.

And do it in all the major jurisdictions?

<comment><USER5> Not "all" of the exchanges - I think the key is the term "significant markets". You need to have most people who do significant amounts of BTC transactions on regulated exchanges as opposed to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito:

> The Winklevoss ETF proposal was rejected because the SEC found that the > significant markets for Bitcoin tend to be unregulated overseas markets that > are potentially subject to price manipulation. But this creates a chicken > and egg problem. How do we develop well-capitalized and regulated markets in > the U.S. and Europe if financial innovators aren't allowed to bring products > to market that grow domestic demand for digital currencies like Bitcoin?

Source: [https://coincenter.org/link/coin-etf- statement](https://coincenter.org/link/coin-etf-statement)

<comment><USER7> The SEC's job (relevant to the issue at hand) is not to make it easy to drive demand in the US on the hopes that that might create conditions for mature markets in $COMMODITY, it is to assure that exchanges listing derivatives of $COMMODITY have adequate rules in place to protect against manipulation, including manipulation of the derivative through manipulation of the underlying commodity.

If the key driver for domestic demand for the commodity is readable derivatives such that one needs to create such in order to drive demand, then, well, _too bad_.

If there is sufficient inherent utility in the underlying commodity, you won't need to violate normal exchange criteria to create derivative markets to stimulate demand for the commodity, the commodity will drive itself, and create the conditions where it won't be unduly onerous to create derivatives markets that meet the normal criteria.

<comment><USER8> How did oil ETF pass with OPEC in existence? Did they just stop doing their job that day?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty big blow.

The ETF has been the talk of the town for the last four years, and it is not unreasonable to think that it has been holding the hand under the price, since to a lot of people it represented the coveted inflow of institutional investment into bitcoin.

With this gone, the immediate outlook for bitcoin is bleak. There is little market adoption to speak of, in fact bitcoin is probably losing market share, as the initial hype and attention grabbing announcements of bitcoin support have died down, and a lot of merchants have decided that the miniscule business it drives is not worth the trouble. Also, the network is straining even under the current load, leading to (much) longer transaction confirmation times and higher fees. The average fee for a bitcoin transaction is now almost one dollar - this rules out a lot of use cases that previously people would have said were ideal for bitcoin.

Which leads me to the even bigger problem: The bitcoin community and ecosystem is in a massive deadlock, between two sides that are equally rabid and antagonistic, and dividing the project down the middle, between the developers and the mining operators. Few outsiders likely know how bad it has become, but visit r/bitcoin and r/btc on reddit if you're curious. This would be concerning in itself for the future of the project, but it also means that right now _no major updates can be made to the bitcoin network_ , because each camp runs a big percentage of the network and block any new initiative from the other side.

All of this makes me very bearish for bitcoin in the medium term. I am very sure that bitcoin has a future, but how long out that is, and how big it is, remains doubtful and could well be influenced negatively by particularly the issue of governance. Satoshi once said something like "in ten years bitcoin is either worth a huge amount or nothing". I'm starting to fear that might not be true - bitcoin could also become a small niche platform for a very limited set of use cases.

<comment><USER10> > since to a lot of people it represented the coveted inflow of institutional > investment into bitcoin

I would say coveted inflow of retail investment. I don't think any serious institution would invest in bitcoin. The risk is too high given that the AUM can go to 0 instantly with one data breach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So what are the expected benefits of a bitcoin ETF? Many of the traditional benefits of ETFs are obsolete when you can just buy and hold an equivalent amount of bitcoin

The biggest benefit I can think of is that some institutional investors have restrictions on the types of securities that they can buy.

Someone could solve this by creating a company to buy lots of bitcoin, and then having an IPO to list that company on a public market. Then pension funds would be allowed to buy it, Jane Doe could buy some in her IRA, etc.

Any reason this wouldn't be just as good as an ETF?

<comment><USER12> > Someone could solve this by creating a company to buy lots of bitcoin, and > then having an IPO to list that company on a public market. Then pension > funds would be allowed to buy it, Jane Doe could buy some in her IRA, etc.

You're repeating yourself. That is more or less what an ETF is.

<comment><USER11> Got it thanks, that makes sense. I guess I was expecting this proposal to somehow be more complicated, and didn't realize that the bar is this high for listing a company thats a bucket of X holdings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So if you have a rare-earth metal commodity ETF that can be dug from the ground in conflict areas and have exchange markets in these wild areas, would the SEC deny that commodity ETF then because they wouldn't have surveillance- sharing agreements with those markets?

<comment><USER14> Why would the exchanges be in the areas where the metal is mined? The London Metal Exchange seems to do pretty well despite the scandalous lack of zinc mines or steel mills inside the M25.

<comment><USER13> In this hypothetical situation, lets say it's because the countries that the occur in want a cut of the proceeds, so they force the sale of these metals to be in their country.

And instead of rare earth metals, lets say it's iron? Something that is mineable almost anywhere, kind of like bitcoin. So you would have exchanges with these agreements, but you would also have exchanges without the agreements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting, based on the rest of the ruling, that they're not _particularly_ concerned with any other aspects of it as a commodity (they acknowledge various interesting properties of it but note that those wouldn't themselves prevent them from approving this), but instead solely concerned that the rest of the Bitcoin market isn't controlled and monitored well enough for them to regulate activities on it.

<comment><USER7> The criteria of surveillance agreements with regulated markets for the underlying asset appears to be (based on the discussion in the paper) well established, clear in its application to the facts, and dispositive in this case.

That doesn't mean it's their biggest concern; regulatory entities (and courts) tend to focus on criteria that meet those qualifications over other because they produce decisions which don't require creation of substantial new rules/precedent, and are more difficult to challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The Commission believes that, in order to meet this standard, an exchange that lists and trades shares of commodity-trust exchange-traded products ("ETPs") must, in addition to other applicable requirements, satisfy two requirements that are dispositive in this matter. First, the exchange must have surveillance-sharing agreements with significant markets for trading the underlying commodity or derivatives on that commodity. And second, those markets must be regulated.

Based on the record before it, the Commission believes that the significant markets for bitcoin are unregulated."

<comment><USER17> Which is exactly right, but couldn't the same argument be used against a gold etf?

<comment><USER18> Isn't gold traded on commodities exchanges, which are regulated?

Note that the CFTC, which regulates commodities futures trading, is (or was?) considering regulating digital currencies:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Trading_Comm...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Trading_Commission#Regulating_digital_currencies)

However, it doesn't seem like they've come to a decision yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yet the price has only dropped around 80 dollars compared to yesterday. Not too bad. For a few minutes it dropped by around 250 dollars but it picked up quickly somehow.

<comment><USER20> It just happened, not many people are aware of this news yet and Bitcoin tends to be volatile as all hell, give it a few days to sort itself out.

<comment><USER21> More specifically, wait for the news to be translated to Mandarin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a good thing for Bitcoin. The ETF rules in my opinion gave too much power to miners. The rules stated that the ETF would follow the chain with the most work after just 48 hours.

Miners need income, because mining is actively expensive. In the long term, this means they have to mine on the chain with the most valuable block reward. This means the economy really gets to decide the longest chain, not the miners.

But the ETF likely would have been large enough to tip the scales. Miners can stomach 48 hours of loss to push an agenda.

And it's probably not good to have such a huge portion of the economy in one place anyway. An ETF will make more sense when bitcoin has more maturity.

<comment><USER23>
      function generateBitcoinNewsReaction(oldPrice, newPrice) {
        if (oldPrice > newPrice) {
          return "This is good for bitcoin.";
        } else if (oldPrice < newPrice) {
          return "This is good for bitcoin.";
        } else {
          return "The price is stabilizing; this is good for bitcoin.";
        }
      }

<comment><USER24>
        function generateBitcoinSkepticism(oldPrice, newPrice) {
            if (oldPrice > newPrice) {
              return "It was a bubble all along.";
            } else if (oldPrice < newPrice) {
              return "Deflationary currencies can't work";
            } else {
              return "The market cap is too low to support a stable currency";
            }
          }

<comment><USER25>
       generateBitcoinNewsReaction();
       generateBitcoinSkepticism();
       generateButteryPopcorn();

<comment><USER26> Lots of frontend devs here on HN huh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In summary: " _First, the exchange must have surveillance-sharing agreements with significant markets for trading the underlying commodity or derivatives on that commodity. And second, those markets must be regulated. "_

</comment><comment><USER28> I am surprised to see how many people on HN do not understand the value proposition of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER29> HN is notoriously bad where discussion of bitcoin is concerned.

<comment><USER30> Yes, it's a bit weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://cryptowatch.de/kraken/btcusd](https://cryptowatch.de/kraken/btcusd) \- chart

gravity is strong here

</comment><comment><USER32> I very much agree with SEC's decesion, just for other reasons.

The usuall ETFs are baskets of bonds, stocks and commodities. Regardless of the level of volatility, they are all priced per the capacity of those stocks/bonds/commodities to create economical value. That means you have a solid economical logic to price them. Of course, supply and demand impacts the price, but even if no one wants to buy a certain stock, that stock has a marketable value. You can take the assets of that company, sell them and divine the cash by the number of stocks out there. Without going to too much details, I fail to understand how bitcoin can be treated like a stock/bond/commodities? Bitcoin value is purely based on the supply and demand forces. Without supply and demand, bitcoin has no value. On its own, it has no value generation power and therefore cannot be compared or traded like a stock, neither can be packaged into an ETF.

As much as I do not like to agree with SEC, this one is a right decesion!

</comment><comment><USER33> > First, the exchange must have surveillance-sharing agreements with > significant markets for trading the underlying commodity or derivatives on > that commodity.

> And second, those markets must be regulated.

So, essentially: bitcoin does not and can not satisfy these two conditions (nor can any other such scheme) and therefore you can't trade anything that is directly or indirectly representing bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER34> Something useful like bitcoin etf gets rejected. But look at some of the stocks that are allowed to trade... Magnegas for example has been an ongoing fraud for 17 years. Fake delivery of machines to Kazahkstan. It would be easy to prove this a fraud but the SEC does not care.

<comment><USER35> This is the same SEC that ignored multiple warnings about Madoff because they didn't want to know the truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This ruling should win an award for plain English - it's exceptionally well written. (not /s)

<comment><USER37> You may enjoy the US Supreme Court's writings. Their judgement are usually really well-written and understandable.

<comment><USER36> Funny you should mention it, as legal judgements are not the sort of thing I normally have reason to read. However (copyright troll) Prenda Law's 9th Circuit appeal on sanctions came up in discussions on HN a couple of days ago and, having watched the humorous video of the proceedings, was curious as to the outcome, so tracked down the ruling [1]. It was similarly well written.

As a lay-person I've come to expect convoluted legalese as found in contract terms, but where those are typically designed to bamboozle and obfuscate, or at least keep corporate lawyers employed decoding and negotiating each others writing, judgements and rulings are designed with the opposite goal in mind. If you are potentially creating case-law, it better be clear what you have decided and why.

[1] [http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate- courts/ca9/13-...](http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate- courts/ca9/13-55859/13-55859-2016-06-10.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This seems to be a victory for bitcoin. Why would a government entity know what to do with a purposely designed non governmental decentralized currency? Especially a profit seeing ETP loaded on top with 0.xx% commission? It's ludicrous to imagine the SEC jumping on this train, BTC will outlive them. As for the Wrinkles twins, they are profit seekers, nothing more. The purpose of a decentralized currency is to be a decentralized currency, enabling peer to peer outside of sovereign intervention economics. This is a non sovereign movement regulated by supply, demand, peers sprinkled with occasional robbery here and there. This digital currency which will outlive many sovereign states that currently exist.

</comment><comment><USER39> The volatility of bitcoin to regulatory announcements is basically sky-high, and I imagine a money making opportunity.

Checked Coinbase right about 30 minutes after it cratered down to 995. Text price alerts don't seem to be working :/

</comment><comment><USER40> Can't they just file in another country? I mean, it doesn't really matter where it's traded; any decent bank will give you access to at least the LSE and Xetra in addition to the two big American exchanges.

<comment><USER41> It matters, because the US retirement funds (401k, IRA) can't invest into some other country's ETFs, correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER42> This would be news to me.

US 401k / IRA accounts can, and do, buy stocks in a variety of markets, whether directly or through instruments such as NYSEARCA:VEU (also available as the mutual funds VFWAX and VFWIX.) I'm not aware of any special reason why foreign-traded ETFs would get special treatment that foreign-traded stocks don't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There is another proposed ETF being ruled on in a couple weeks:

>"The Commission, pursuant to Section 19(b)(2) of the Act,9 designates March 30, 2017 as the date by which the Commission should either approve or disapprove the proposed rule change."

[https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-delays-decision-solidx- bitcoin-...](https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-delays-decision-solidx-bitcoin- trust/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Can someone please explain to me the logic in treating Bitcoin as an investment vehicle? I get that fiat currencies are traded like equity, but this is not that. I also understand that there is a huge potential for short term gains, but the risk is just as great for a total loss.

Bitcoin is a means of transferring wealth. It is a tool, not a commodity. When are people going to stop this speculation and treat it as such?

</comment><comment><USER45> The Bitcoin markets don't have to be regulated for this ETF to be tradable. The Winklevoss could still list their ETF on the OTC Markets and anyone with a brokerage account would still be able to trade it. There's already a Bitcoin Investment trust that is currently tradable on the OTC market though as one commenter mentioned it's currently trading at a premium.

</comment><comment><USER46> Could someone explain what a Bitcoin ETF is? My understanding is that ETFs are like index funds, which group other stocks into one basket. There's only one Bitcoin though, so what would a Bitcoin ETF collate? The "Description of the Proposal" didn't really make that clear to me.

<comment><USER47> ETFs group arbitrary assets into something that can be traded like a stock. So the closest comparison would be something like a gold ETF, which lets you buy and sell something like you would a stock with gold's approximate price. A Bitcoin ETF would let you buy and sell something like you would a stock with Bitcoin's approximate price.

It's basically a wrapper class that lets people interact with things as if they were stocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Here's the basic thing: Bitcoin is fatally flawed. Is it meant to be a payment method (in which case an ETF or otherwise treating it as an investment vehicle is roughly as nonsensical as having an ETF that deals with blank checks) or is it an investment (and if it's an investment, what on earth are people investing in?). The volatility of Bitcoin plus the constrained supply leading towards upwards pressure on the price of bitcoins mean that it's a deflationary currency and deflation is a bad thing as it creates an incentive to not spend. This means that the only real reason to spend Bitcoin or otherwise use it as a payment is for situations where that's the only option and right now, and for the foreseeable future, that means assorted illegal or at best borderline illegal products, which gives it a halo if unrespectability that the Winkelvoss twins are not going to erase. Perhaps a blockchain-based cryptocurrency might in the future resolve these issues, but otherwise it's a doomed product that I wouldn't put a single penny (or watt of household electricity) into.

<comment><USER49> How is Bitcoin significantly different from gold?

I suppose gold does get used for something.

<comment><USER5> Nobody is pushing for vending machines or retailers to take gold...

<comment><USER33> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_to_Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_to_Go)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As usual in the bitcoin universe we are going to get a lot of people trying to explain you why something they were saying it would be so great for bitcoin until 1h ago, is actually a very bad thing for bitcoin and that this was actually the best possible scenario.

<comment><USER51> First time I've even heard of this honestly, but my reaction is sort of "meh". Might have been interesting had it gone through, but I don't see how it changes much of anything that it didn't either. The courts ruling seems fairly reasonable as well in that bitcoin is a relatively unregulated commodity (in as much as a currency not controlled by any government is unregulated) so I can't really say the ruling was unfair. Given a choice between increased regulation of bitcoin and allowing the exchange to go forward vs. keeping the current relatively lax regulation and no exchange, I'm of the opinion no exchange is the better option.

There's also the minor fact that a significant chunk of wallstreet already treats most of the bitcoin markets like commodity exchanges anyway. A significant driver of the massive instability in the bitcoin market is directly attributable to wallstreet treating bitcoin as a commodity. One possible upside of having an actual commodity exchange is that it might have helped stabilize some of that by decoupling the speculation from the actual bitcoin market a little, but I guess we'll never know at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wonder what assets are resistant to mass systemic failures arising due to calamities such as war etc. Bitcoin: without the internet, it would be hard to transact Fine Art and Gold: hard to carry around Dollars, land, guns, alcohol?

</comment><comment><USER53> Coinbase is down.

<comment><USER54> I've just been trying out Coinbase recently and I'm pretty annoyed with them. For one, Canadians can't sell & withdraw money, and their buy/sell limits are ridiculously annoying. On top of this, their fees are very expensive and just right now, they have an outage in the middle of an important news. This is like failing at all the core important bits.

Is there a more serious thing than Coinbase that exists?

<comment><USER55> Kraken.com?

<comment><USER56> +1 for Kraken, their track record is excellent

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> How did you find this? I was unable to do so from the SEC's main page.

</comment><comment><USER58> That's a bummer I always hoped I could invest into an Exchange Traded version of exposure to Bitcoin

ha ha ha, now china gets all the exchange data, morons

</comment><comment><USER59> What is the best real-time source for Bitcoin's value?

<comment><USER60> [https://cryptowat.ch/](https://cryptowat.ch/) is great. The front page gives a good overview of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Click on one to see charts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> PBoC must be pissed if their intention of suspending leverages from Chinese exchanges was to smooth out the ETF approval.

</comment><comment><USER62> Whats the advantage to buying into a Bitcoin ETF vs just buying the same value directly in Bitcoin?

<comment><USER63> Tax avoidance on capital gains since it can be added to your IRA. Also it would allow bitcoin to be purchased from any trading station in the US rather than a website you have to sign-up for

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Bitcoin fans will still try to spin this as good for bitcoin and that everyone needs to buy bitcoin now

<comment><USER65> On sale, 25% off!

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> i don't know why people get surprised it was obvious from the begining sec won't approve the request i am afraid it was just a trader manipulatioin

<comment><USER67> Surely you made a lot of money shorting the market today then, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Bubbles burst. Even the current price is pumped by China and the miners who can't survive at a low price. The crash to $0 is way overdue.

</comment><comment><USER69> Good. It makes no sense to base an ETF on an unregulated crypto-currency. It was pretty much just a scam to juice the Bitcoin price...

</comment><comment><USER70> At least somebody has some sense.

</comment><comment><USER71> Time for people to start using [https://byteball.org](https://byteball.org)

<comment><USER72> Pff

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> that was great to watch, went from $1300 to $975 in about 90 seconds.

We'll see how long the dead cat lasts.

See you at $600.

<comment><USER74> imho it stabilizes and goes back to 1200. It surged from 2011-2014 without the ETF...Bitcoin is seen as a safe haven against global destabilization. A lot of money on the sidelines looking for a buying opportunity that has come

<comment><USER75> "Bitcoin" and "safe" in the same sentence is an odd look.

<comment><USER74> safer than many foreign currencies, which have lost 30-99% of their value relative to the USD since 2013

<comment><USER75> As opposed to Bitcoin, where the statement is sometimes along the lines of "lost 30% of its value since _20:13_ "?

<comment><USER74> In 2013, depositors in Bank of Greece lost 50% of their deposits above $100k, overnight, by decree. Not saying Bitcoin is perfect, but the alternatives are often not better.

<comment><USER76> Wasn't that in Cyprus?

<comment><USER77> yes not only was it in cyprus but it was 60% and in addition the rest of the 40% you weren't allowed to touch it, or more generally you need to submit around 3 forms to get funds from the money that is still there that you and i state this "used to own"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I selled my BTC in these days but I didn't know this topic. Always charts of BTC is too reactive so I think it's not for investment...

</comment><comment><USER74> This is the same committee that approved VXX and UVXX ,which have lost 99.999% of their value

There is an OTC fund that holds Bitcoin...but at a large premium to NAV

<comment><USER79> VXX and UVXY buy and hold contracts in a contango futures market. They are always going to decrease over long time periods. That is their design.

<comment><USER80> People that don't understand VXX talking about VXX is one of the funniest things on the entire Internet. For some good laughs, take a look at the comments section on this post: [https://sixfigureinvesting.com/2013/04/how- does-vxx-work/](https://sixfigureinvesting.com/2013/04/how-does-vxx-work/)

A choice quote from elsewhere on the Internet: "Write call spreads, collect $$$ when they expire... this worthless stock is a goldmine!"

I have no words.

<comment><USER81> XIV is the inverse fund, it looks like the real gold mine, rising 9 times in a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Unrealistic security should be the only reason to disapprove of a bitcoin ETF governed by the SEC. Not only is it poorly suited for reckless centralization by thousands of indirect investors, but bitcoin as a whole would be setup up for massive government retaliation once the keys are compromised. MtGox x 10,000.

</comment><comment><USER83> Having sold all of my bitcoin at ~800 at a small loss (a significant portion coming from commission fee( ~$150+ to convert low four digit USD amount of bitcoins to fiat.) I am paying attention to the bitcoin prices closely. As USD gains more interest it's going to put downward pressure on gold and bitcoin.

There's no way this is going to gain mass adoption by being this expensive.

More importantly, this signals strong government regulation in the bitcoin and cryptocoin industry in general. I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing security laws being applied retroactively to all the scams like initial coin offering (like IPO but unregulated and heavily manipulated) on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

To the wary trend watcher, this is exactly what VC's feared and noted by the significant decline in VC investment in blockchain and cryptocurrency startups.

<comment><USER84> > There's no way this is going to gain mass adoption by being this expensive.

I struggle to understand what you mean. What sort of anchor are you using for how much the exchange rate should be for adoption? Cost of electricity, cost of mining equipment, cost of running a node? Satoshis are so abstract that "this expensive" seems irrelevant to everything except for historical rates.

Conventional wisdom on BTC is that one element that would improve adoption would be lower volatility and that in order to get that, the market cap would need to be much, much higher. Given the fixed inflation rate this usually suggests that the exchange rate has to be correspondingly higher.</comment></comment>


Google Public DNS turns 22.214.171.124 years old - <AUTHOR> https://security.googleblog.com/2018/08/google-public-dns-turns-8888-years-old.html <comment><USER2> Google's DNS service is interesting. I was never really sure what the business case for operating a public DNS resolver is, for any company really, but it was warmly welcomed when it was unveiled, at least for me. At the time, the public DNS resolvers I can recall were mostly oriented around blocking content.

A lot of people are worried about the privacy implications of using Google's DNS resolver. Paranoia is good, but it's probably overblown here. As far as I know, the primary objective of the project is to provide a fast, accurate DNS resolver, not to collect data. So much so that when it launched, it was originally called 'Honest DNS', as you can see on this bizarre Twitter account: [https://twitter.com/honestdns](https://twitter.com/honestdns)

edit: Also of interest, Google does disclose exactly what data is logged, for the paranoid and curious: [https://developers.google.com/speed/public- dns/privacy](https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy)

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on this. All of my knowledge of this service comes from being an end user, on the outside. Hopefully I didn't mess up any of the details.)

<comment><USER3> Google has done nothing so far to substantiate any trust in them. The "don't be evil" motto was abandoned.

It is a business that relies on collecting data, monetizing it, and using it to further reinforce its position.

<comment><USER4> While Google's business model certainly relies on collecting and monetizing user data, I have yet to see any cases of abuse on their part. Rules for employee data access are very strict and I don't know of any cases whee they directly share data with third parties (excluding government demands).

For me, this makes them one of the most trustworthy companies when it comes to handling my data. If you know of any cases otherwise, I would love to hear about them.

<comment><USER5> Google abuses its position plenty and was found to be guilty in court multiple times.

There are endless examples of shady practices on Google's part, the obvious elephant in the room is ignoring the GDPR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        In [1]: (8<<24) | (8<<16) | (8<<8)| 8
        Out[1]: 134744072

Oh how the time just flies past.

Incidentally there are 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who try to write too clever headlines.

<comment><USER7> they could have used that ~4 years ago with seconds.

<comment><USER8> Exactly.

      >>> dt = pendulum.datetime(2018, 8, 12, 0, 30)  # from the article
      >>> born = dt.subtract(years=8, months=8, days=8, hours=8)
      >>> born.add(seconds=int(ipaddress.ip_address('18.104.22.168')))
      <Pendulum [2014-03-12T05:24:32+00:00]>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too bad it wasn't launched 4 days earlier so this could have been on 2018-08-08

</comment><comment><USER10> There are also 184.108.40.206 and 18.104.22.168 from the 'easy remember' DNS list.

<comment><USER11> who runs 22.214.171.124 ?

<comment><USER12> [https://quad9.net](https://quad9.net) \- IBM and two groups I haven't heard of.

<comment><USER13> One of those groups is Global Cyber Allience (GCA):

"GCA, a 501(c)3, was founded in September 2015 by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, the City of London Police and the Center for Internet Security."

[https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/advice-and- support/cyberc...](https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/advice-and- support/cybercrime/gca/Pages/default.aspx/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find that map breaking down usage by country interesting. It seems almost nobody is using it in India and Australia. Is it performing badly, is it blocked by ISPs, or are those people just overly obsessed with privacy? Even China's usage is higher, surprisingly, even though it wouldn't help at all with bypassing censorship.

<comment><USER15> > I find that map breaking down usage by country interesting. It seems almost > nobody is using it in... Australia. Is it performing badly

No. It works well.

> is it blocked by ISPs

No.

> or are those people just overly obsessed with privacy?

No.

I don't know why it's low in usage, bit I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be low. I don't know anyone who would even think to change their DNS servers.

<comment><USER14> Sure but I'd have expected similar usage throughout western countries. here in Germany I wouldn't consider the average person any more techy than in Australia or anywhere else. People are pretty conservative and stick to what they know in general. I don't know anyone besides coworkers or friends working in the field who would do that, but then at least half of them are probably too skeptical of google to actually do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Public DNS is just one of the many free services that Google provides in order to slurp up every single possible activity that happens on the internet. Visit this website in your logged-in Google browser tab:

[https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity](https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity)

I don't know what it says for you, but for me it lists everything I do in my life. The restaurants I look at in the Seamless app. The Reddit posts I clicked on in the Reddit app. Every single YouTube video I watch. Everything I search for. All of the places I went yesterday and in the last 6 months.

And these are only my "explicit" actions. Now imagine that Google also passively knows every single web address I look up via DNS? We share private browsing sessions to them _all the time_ regardless of in-cognito mode or any other privacy safeguards.

<comment><USER17> Google DNS is not used in any way to associate to your Google account. They say exactly everything they record and how it's stored and used.

[https://developers.google.com/speed/public- dns/privacy](https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy)

<comment><USER16> What if I don't believe them?

<comment><USER18> Well then you don't believe them. But then whom do you believe _would_ keep your DNS data private, and by what rationale do you find them more believable than Google?

<comment><USER19> A company whose business model isn't based entirely in analyzing user data in order to sell them the most things. Remember: these data don't _have_ to be tied to your account. Google can use your ip address to glean your (approximate) location, and then use the websites you visit to better tell what kind of people live in that area. Even if they don't store the websites themselves, they can categorize the websites and store a category breakdown. They can find out what demographic you belong to from your account, and then associate the websites you visit with that demographic rather than that account. Lots of data that can be stored even if they're not directly associated with your account or the individual websites you visit.

<comment><USER18> > A company whose business model isn't based entirely in analyzing user data > in order to sell them the most things.

Really? That's the only bar? So you're going to trust any company who isn't in this business without even reading & comparing their privacy policy or looking at their past history?

I also have to say I don't understand what you guys' true fear (read: threat model) is. It seems like for Google your criterion is "if they could potentially keep such data, they're automatically dangerous (doubly so if their name is 'Google')", whereas for anyone else not in the advertising business your standard suddenly changes to "I don't care what data they have, as long as I don't see evidence of active misbehavior". To me this sounds like what you really fear is _personalized advertising itself_ rather than an actual privacy or security breach, which doesn't entirely make logical sense considering what the dangers of each of them are.

<comment><USER19> > So you're going to trust any company who isn't in this business

I never said that. I said that I'm _not_ going to trust a company that has this business model. That by no means implies that I'm going to blindly trust a company with another business model, rather that trust in such a company is possible.

<comment><USER18> OK, then you didn't answer my question either. I was not asking "which companies would you _not_ trust, and by what rationale"? The question I asked was: "Whom do you believe _would_ keep your DNS data private, and by what rationale do you find them more believable than Google?"

Telling me you wouldn't trust someone who meets some disqualifying criterion isn't useful if you have so many disqualifying criteria that you wouldn't trust anybody, which frankly is the impression I get reading people's comments on this issue. If you have an actual company that you _would_ trust, and a clear rationale for doing so, that's where we can have a real discussion.

<comment><USER20> > Whom do you believe would keep your DNS data private

You presupposing that it is necessary to send all DNS traffic to one entity. I run a local recursive nameserver (unbound) instead of sending all of my queries to a different nameserver.

Combined with aggressive caching, any particular DNS server (from _.ROOT- SERVERS.NET down to the specific authoritative nameservers for a specific domain) is only able to view a tiny subset of my browsing behavior. Most of the time the query to the final authoritative nameserver is to be followed quickly by a TCP SYN packet that reveals roughly the same information.

Yes, running the full recursive resolver locally can be _very slightly* slower than asking e.g. the local ISP's server that probably has the query cached. Fortunately, local caching limits this (very minor) problem to only the first request for a domain.

<comment><USER21> Running a recursive resolver isn't really that great from a "trust no one" perspective, because the .com nameservers are getting a decidedly _not_ tiny subset of your access activity.

<comment><USER20> The TLDs are only queried for the NS records of the second-level domain, and the A (or AAAA) records of the those NS names. This is cached, often for longer than the record's specified TTL. The rest of the traffic is with the 0delegated nameserver,

<comment><USER21> The second level domain under com is the important part 95% of the time.

<comment><USER20> > This is cached, often for longer than the record's specified TTL.

NS records don't change very often. They can see that I looked up the delegation data about "example.com" _once_ every $CACHE_TTL (~months). They do _not_ get repeated queries at the beginning of every session I have with a website.

A lot of security is about being in the habit of minimizing attack surface. The only thing a TLD (or ISP) nameserver _needs_ to know if I want to use the Doomain Name System is "pdkl95 asked for example.com's nameserver once last month" Instead of giving Google (or whomever) an update e.g.:

        ;; ANSWER SECTION:
        news.ycombinator.com.  300  IN  A  188.8.131.52

...every 5 minutes. This is not trying to stop someone discovering that I have _ever_ been a domain; I'm limiting the ability to model my _pattern of life_ [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of- life_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis)

<comment><USER21> So what I get out of this is that your system protects your privacy because it uses a custom TTL, and not really because you run a recursive resolver. It helps reduce errors, but you could get _almost_ the same effect with a pure cache.

<comment><USER20> No, I'm still requesting the A/AAAA records at the normal TTL rate. This doesn't expose useful information, because those queries are sent directly to the domain's nameserver. The domain learns that data point anyway from the TCP SYN packet I'm probably sending immediately after I learn the A/AAAA record.

Separating the requests _allows_ for different cache policies. If you simply delegate the entire recursive resolution work to Google (or whomever), they get to record that you needed "www.example.com" every TTL (5min?). You don't even need to see the domain's NS records in that case, so there isn't an opportunity to choose a cache policy.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure why you lead with "No" because you didn't disagree with anything I said.

<comment><USER20> > and not really because you run a recursive resolver.

"No", because the system depends on running a recursive resolver locally to separate queries onto different nameservers.

<comment><USER21> It depends on doing so to _work better_. But a similar not-quite-as-good system could do without that feature. It's not integral.

<comment><USER20> What is this system that prevents pattern-of-life analysis while still sending all DNS queries to one nameserver? I'm still sending frequent short-TTL (normal caching) DNS lookups for most hosts that would betray my pattern-of- life in aggregate. The vast majority of the security is from sending those requests to the domain-specific nameservers instead of aggregating it all through a single upstream nameserver.

Aggressive caching of NS records for TLDs doesn't do anything to prevent a single upstream nameserver from leaning your pattern of life from the frequent DNS lookups for A records that are not cached longer than normal.

<comment><USER21> > What is this system that prevents pattern-of-life analysis while still > sending all DNS queries to one nameserver?

Setting $CACHE_TTL to "months" on everything, and doing nothing else.

> I'm still sending frequent short-TTL (normal caching) DNS lookups for most > hosts that would betray my pattern-of-life in aggregate.

Your system does that. This theoretical mildly-inferior system would not have frequent DNS lookups for any record type.

<comment><USER20> > Setting $CACHE_TTL to "months" on everything, and doing nothing else.

That will break a _lot_.

DNS isn't static; IPs regularly change as servers move, CDNs are introduced/changed. Long-term caching only works on NS records because changing DNS delegations is relatively rare. NS record caching _does_ cause problems, but they are infrequent. Caching the addresses of the actual servers will break some things within days, and most of the internet the next time each server is updated/moved/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about 188.8.131.52 / 188.8.131.52?

<comment><USER23> I don't think that 188.8.131.52 is a current DNS server. Perhaps you mean 22.214.171.124 or 126.96.36.199? 4.2.2.X was originally intended to be 18.104.22.168, but it didn't happen: [https://www.tummy.com/articles/famous-dns- server/](https://www.tummy.com/articles/famous-dns-server/)

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the very first post Google said they will publish learnings from this experiment. What have they learnt from this experiment that we can benefit from.

</comment><comment><USER25> 134,742,054 BCE? I really underestimated the early hominid tech stack.

</comment><comment><USER26> For performance and privacy reasons, you should use Cloudflare DNS. Please don't trust blindly Google when they say they don't use your DNS request data. It is their core business model to get their hand on all the data they can.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/)

<comment><USER27> Cloudflare's 184.108.40.206 DNS blocks [https://archive.is](https://archive.is)

<comment><USER28> I didn't believe they'd do something like this, so I went to check and prove you wrong, but sure enough, it doesn't resolve. According to this post on CloudFare's support site, it's not their fault: [https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is- error-1001/182...](https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is- error-1001/18227).

> This is unfortunately something we can't do something about. Nameservers > responsible for archive.is (ben.archive.is, anna.archive.is) are returning > answers tailored to the IP address of the requestor.

<comment><USER29> I did the same research because I too found it hard to believe and it's still not clear to me how the problem is not on cloudflare. They claim the upstream is misconfigured, but how then does every single other DNS provider manage to handle it correctly?

Or are they claiming archive.is is explicitly blacklisting the cloudflare IP range? If that is the case it seems odd they are claiming the upstream is misconfigured as opposed to explicitly blocking them. Something does not add up correctly.

<comment><USER30> Sometimes 184.108.40.206 is used as a testing value, and can get blocked for reasons. CloudFlare is getting a huge amount of spam IP traffic to 18.104.22.168 from misconfigured equipment, it wouldn't be too surprising if some upstreams have firewalled valid IPs.

<comment><USER29> When cloudflare resolves addresses, the DNS request is not coming from 18.104.22.168, it's coming from the IP address of the server actually making the request. You can confirm this by looking at the results of a VPN DNS leak test [0] and seeing the IPs being used to resolve the addresses do come from cloudflare, but are not 22.214.171.124

[0]: [https://www.dnsleaktest.com/](https://www.dnsleaktest.com/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Learning Representations" - <AUTHOR> https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-deep-learning-representations-4ce83fc663cf <comment><USER2> I see a good explanation of the problem and a good evolution of the done steps. But I see a problem in the approach. When you are getting the most similar result, you are supposed to compute high cosine similarity between all the embeddings. If you have more than a billion of embeddings and the embeddings have 1k dimensions, it will take a lot of time. How would you solve this problem? Clustering the embeddings?

<comment><USER3> There are off-the-shelf libraries like ANNOY and nmslib that index the vectors in a way that allows for fast (possibly approximate) nearest neighbors searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking at pictures and categorizing them by appearance has very limited application. The human context can't be in grasped that way, can it?

For instance, 'wedding pictures'. A cake being cut; a cute kid throwing flower petals; a black-clad clergyman; a hand with a ring on it. Any human could categorize a pile of pictures into those that are in the 'wedding' category, and those that aren't. But no strategy based on weighting pixels is ever going to get there.

Likewise, 'cute' or 'scary' or 'funny'. And on and on.

<comment><USER5> There are definitely networks in our brain that classify what we're seeing. An uneducated guess, though, is that the networks in our brains have many, many intermediate representations and don't go directly from image -> words, but rather go to abstract classifiers that can go back to words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I find unreasonable is doing all this without knowing what the model is doing. It's blind with no way to steer and correct it.

That is what feed forward networks and back propagation do for us. So why do we keep using them?

Then there's the statistics of it all.. what are we actually modeling? 'The real world' you say? Think again.

Data has to be changed and manipulated into i.i.d. form, or the algorithms won't work. How does an independent set of random variables give us a model of the actual dataset which is a very limited representation of the real world? It doesn't. It's modeling something else.

Okay, why don't we take dependence into account? Surely that would represent the real world better. Good question! (Shirley has nothing to do with it.)

It's because there is no formal definition of dependence in statistics. Let that sink in for a minute.

So the math needs work, statistics needs a revolution, and then we can begin to change AI enough for it to finally start making sense. Focus on explainable algorithms and actual ability to validate that what models generate make sense and will not be unlawfully biased or have outliers that will cause harm.

There appears to be only one company who has something like this. But few actually care.

<comment><USER7> > So the math needs work

Finally! I thought I was alone (and stupid) for thinking like this.

Is there any literature or any meta-work that discusses the notion of probability itself? What is expectation? What is dependence?

<comment><USER8> what do you mean by the notion of probability itself?

probability was mastered far before computers were a thing

<comment><USER9> Probability is far from clear. Very briefly, there are two main camps:

1\. Bayesian probability is about degrees of belief. But that's always subjective and belief about _what_ , if not probability? It's circular.

2\. Frequentist probability is about, after _X >> 1_ runs of an experiment, an outcome with odds of _Y_ occurs _Y /X_ times. But it's only exact with an infinite number of runs, which never happens. And what's the odds of exactly _Y x 1000_ outcomes after 1000 runs? Again, that's circular.

My favourite way to think about probability is the multiverse kind:

3\. Assuming there are an infinite number of fungible identical worlds, if a coin flip has 50% of heads, it means observers in exactly half the worlds see heads. However, this isn't actually probability at all - from a god's eye view it's objectively certain what happens.

<comment><USER10> > Probability is far from clear. Very briefly, there are two main camps:

Isn't this a bit like saying there are two main camps when it comes to coins:

1\. "heads"

2\. and "tails"

?

At least to me it felt like the different forms of statistics where only different techniques.

<comment><USER11> I don't even understand how the frequentist view is a valid alternative. It always seemed to me like either you are honest about your priors, and use Bayesian logic to take them into account, or you sweep it under the rug. Lying to yourself always produces bad results, is my overriding heuristic. But I'm not good at math.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=OP_IEA_20140829&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=3

<comment><USER2> The author says "everyone" then only talks about white people being racist against blacks and hispanics..

I don't think serious discussion is the authors intent. Just my humble opinion.</comment>


Survival Ball: Making the Game, in 1716 Hours - <AUTHOR> https://lopespm.github.io/2019/02/06/survival-ball-making-the-game.html <comment><USER2> I like the way the anti-aliasing is done along with the art style.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really interesting breakdown of how it developed over time and I love how the levels are so distinct. The treadmill level in particular looks really cool and creative. Here's to hoping it'll eventually come out on the Nintendo Switch, since that's the easiest place I can do couch co-op (I still bought a copy for PC as well).

</comment><comment><USER4> I sure hope Halliburton doesn't sue them for infringing on their SurvivaBall trademark.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3a3XBnMe5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3a3XBnMe5Q)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joUVgVEZx7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joUVgVEZx7U)

<comment><USER5> Note: not actually Halliburton, or real

[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/movies/07yes.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/movies/07yes.html)

<comment><USER6> I recommend skipping the article and jump straight to the movie if you have the time: [https://archive.org/details/The.Yes.Men.Fix.The.World.P2P.Ed...](https://archive.org/details/The.Yes.Men.Fix.The.World.P2P.Edition.2010.Xvid)

It was released under a Creative Commons license on recommendation from the EFF, so that the U.S. House of Chambers could not stop it (yes, they tried!).

The movie is a documentary of sorts, featuring two people who go to conferences posing as high-profile businesses, promoting oft-ridiculous products to make a point...the only problem is, people keep taking them seriously (even Halliburtons SurvivaBall).

At one point they end up live on BBC news and inadvertently wipes $1B+ off a companys public stock value.

It is hilarious, and well worth the watch.</comment></comment></comment>


Nexus 5 listing appears in the Play Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/17/nexus-5-16gb-349-play-store/

<comment><USER2> It's a nice looking phone but the excitement about the Nexus range seems disproportionate with the sales figures for them. The total sales figures for the Nexus 4 were on a par with the monthly figures for the Galaxy S4.

Does anyone know if this is down to a lack of demand or is the supply constrained in some way? Curious as to the desire for vanilla Android that's often talked about but doesn't seem to be a big thing for the average consumer.

<comment><USER3> Google simply has no idea how to launch advertising campaigns. It's been their weak point with all of their products and it's rather pathetic; the general public just doesn't know what the Nexus product line is.

<comment> k-mcgrady I see Chrome ads on TV all the time. They know how to do it but it seems for the Nexus 4 they just didn't bother. Maybe because it was out of stock for so long after launch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one with a confused and blown mind why they refuse to offer a slot for MicroSD and insist on hard wired internal memory?

<comment><USER5> Android Engineer, 2011:

"There's no particular hardware reason a device can't have both. The problem is that there is no good UI for it. One of the core Android principles is that you never need a file manager. Ever. We wanted to avoid the obnoxious "sneeze and a file picker appears" syndrome of basically every other OS. Local data that apps know how to handle should just be magically available within the apps, or stored in the cloud. You shouldn't have to go spelunking on your SD card to find data. The problem with having both internal storage and SD cards is that suddenly that goal gets a whole lot harder to achieve. For a given shot, should the camera save to internal-16GB, or to SD card? Should an app from Market be installed to internal or SD? etc. Yes, we can solve this by letting the user choose, or have it be in settings. But then, that's a file picker, or close enough to the file picker experience that we dislike it just as much. And besides that, there are API consequences: if you stick in an SD card with photos on it, do you add those to the system media content provider? If you do, you will screw up apps because they aren't designed with the concept that photos can come and go. What we will probably do eventually is add an import/export concept to removable storage. So the Camera will always save to internal-16GB, and when you pop in an SD card (or insert a thumb drive on USB host devices) you can start a migration or import/export dialog. But until we have that, devices will generally either have an SD card, or a large internal storage, but not both. I totally get that a lot of people like SD cards, and I miss USB Mass Storage myself. But then, that's why it's great that there are so many devices to choose from. :) tl;dr: it's a can of worms. We're thinking about compromises for future versions."

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/11/18/impromptu-qa- session...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/11/18/impromptu-qa-session-with- android-engineer-dan-morrill-brings-to-light-reasons-behind-galaxy-nexus-lack- of-usb-mass-storage/)

Head of UX, 2012:

"Everybody likes the idea of having an SD card, but in reality it's just confusing for users. If you're saving photos, videos or music, where does it go? Is it on your phone? Or on your card? Should there be a setting? Prompt everytime? What happens to the experience when you swap out the card? It's just too complicated. We take a different approach. Your Nexus has a fixed amount of space and your apps just seamlessly use it for you without you ever having to worry about files or volumes or any of that techy nonsense left over from the paleolithic era of computing. With a Nexus you know exactly how much storage you get upfront and you can decide what's the right size for you. That's simple and good for users"

[https://plus.google.com/114892667463719782631/posts/JAAMUzx1...](https://plus.google.com/114892667463719782631/posts/JAAMUzx1PFX)

tl;dr Technical/UX issues.

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying I like the idea, but Microsoft's way of handling SD cards is a solution for all of these issues. When you put an SD card in a Windows Phone, it becomes part of the internal storage in a way akin to Windows 8 storage spaces. There's no picking where a file goes, it just goes to internal storage which includes the SD card.

The major drawback of the way Microsoft did it is that if you take the card out of the phone, the phone needs to be reformatted and the card cannnot easily be reused.

<comment><USER7> That sounds much, much worse. I'd take no SD card support at all over having to explain to people why, when they take their card out of the phone and put it in their camera, their phone shits itself.

<comment><USER6> The last phone I had that did this was an old Samsung Focus, and Samsung was very quick to point this out at every step of the way. The emphasize in the manual very clearly that this storage is a permanent addition, not a way of removable storage.

Is it any different from telling people if they unplug their desktop's boot drive, the computer will stop working?

<comment><USER7> People don't have an expectation of hard drives being removable(most people probably don't even realize they can be removed), whereas SD cards are explicitly designed to be mobile. People treat them as mini USB drives, so this behaviour is directly counter to most people's intuition, regardless of its technical merits.

<comment><USER6> What are the numbers of people swapping their SD cards out of their phone and into something else (and expecting it to work)? I don't know the statistics, but I'm willing to bet it's low. In fact, the number of people in general putting SD cards into their phones is likely to be very low, since a _lot_ of phones don't support it.

I really don't understand your argument that phones just shouldn't support SD cards rather than having the option to expand the storage for cheaper than buying the next model up just to avoid user confusion. If every phone locked out useful features just for the sake of avoiding user confusion, Android wouldn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was a slip up by Google and has now been taken down. Droid Life took a copy of the high-res photo for anyone interested:

[http://www.droid-life.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/nexys-5...](http://www.droid-life.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/nexys-5-huge.png)

And their article on the "leak".

[http://www.droid-life.com/2013/10/17/nexus-5-appears-on- goog...](http://www.droid-life.com/2013/10/17/nexus-5-appears-on-google-play- starting-price-of-349/)

</comment><comment><USER9> That would be pretty sloppy.. which makes me think it is intentional. In the end, I guess there's no difference.

</comment><comment><USER10> Leakiest phone release in modern history :P

</comment><comment><USER11> just release it already!!!

</comment><comment><USER12> why would you buy anything but</comment>


Ask HN: Was Wikipedia.org hacked? - <AUTHOR> check link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_motorcycles <comment><USER2> [https://archive.is/dNUhg](https://archive.is/dNUhg)

</comment><comment><USER3> it's gone now, probably someone fixed it

for the record - it was a flashy red on yellow position:absolute div

<comment><AUTHOR> it is, there are still other wiki pages showing it though, look up justin bieber's wiki

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> several pages are showing a message accusing someone of a murder

<comment><USER4> Did you get screenshots?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did, the "hacker" claims he has evidence of the death of jonbenet ramsey, and he/she linked the twitter handle of a guy EDIT: you can go check twitter</comment></comment></comment>


20 CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and the iPod Team - <AUTHOR> http://nobi.com/entry-1239.html <comment><USER2> Good choices.

I'm not a big classical music listener, but if I had to pick only one record to listen for the rest of my life and everything else would be gone forever, it would be the Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould (1981 recording if I had to choose). No other piece of music has ever had so strong effect on me. Not even close.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.</comment></comment>


How to make your Apps Retina ready - <AUTHOR> http://www.allanberger.com/post/49938151321/how-to-make-your-apps-retina-ready

<comment><USER2> If you're designing for mobile _at all_ , then retina is _meaningless_ , unless you're disabling page zooming.

Because zoom levels can be anywhere from 0.25, say, to 8x. One user might be viewing part of the page at 2.78x. Another, at 1.3x.

So all this talk of "2x" or "4x", or serving up different files for diffrent resolutions, or aligning to pixel boundaries is quickly becoming meaningless.

<comment><USER3> That's why scalable solutions like CSS & SVG are a great idea for UI elements.

That said right now often you still need raster graphics (e.g. screenshots) and making sure you provide them in a way that takes zoomability and devices with high pixel density in account makes a lot of sense :)

If you go mobile-first you can avoid many of these mindset pitfalls :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our app WebCode (<http://www.webcodeapp.com>) helps with many of the hassles of making your website Retina ready. It is a vector drawing app that generates Retina ready CSS, JavaScript Canvas and SVG code.

<comment><USER3> Wow, looks neat :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't retina just another word for higher resolutions?

Why do they make it sound like it's all magical and needs you to be "retina ready"? I don't remember seeing that kind of stuff back when computer resolutions could be anything from 320x200 pixels to 1024x768 pixels...

<comment><USER6> Technically it stands for high DPI, not necessary high Resolution, but one implies the other I guess. Anyway "Retina" is used, because it's established and everyone knows what it means. Don't see the point in fighting terminology.

<comment><USER3> Spot on. It's just easier to communicate than "devices with higher than 'usual' DPI" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Missed one of the most important points, which is to design for Retina first, but design so all graphical elements are aligned to two pixel boundaries.

<comment><USER8> Can you elaborate more on the two pixel boundaries? I'm not familiar with that and don't really know what it means... Thank you

<comment><USER7> By that I mean designing with all graphical features having a size that's a multiple of two pixels and aligned such that all features fit entirely within a 2x2 grid. One common way to do this is to design everything in vector at the normal size with features aligned to the usual one pixel grid, scale up to 200% to add details and export the @2x asset, before scaling back down to export the @1x asset. For fine details, it may even be convenient to scale up to 400% or 800%. Another useful tip is to set your graphics program to show gridlines every 2 pixels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can the title be changed to something along the lines of:

"How to make your Apps Retina(AKA High Res, High DPI) ready?

Perhaps something that doesn't perpetuate the incorrect thinking that Retina is any different than other high definition/high resolution monitors?

I don't mind using Retina as the main keyword for communications sake, but it seems we should communicate that high res/high dpi are the same thing :D</comment>


QuickMailer – Send mail quickly and undisturbed - <AUTHOR> http://quickmailer.im

<comment><AUTHOR> We would love to hear what you think of QuickMailer, so feel free to get it using one of these promo codes:

JWMK9F44MEEE

TH4YETJ36XLF

AM7RTJLKPAWF

EM6R44H97YT4

AREFYR3RFPHP

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HLYWFHH944H7

A4XAEP9HFERJ

JLRKF9Y3HHTJ

TF4KPY6RYM9X

* I'll try to mark them if they've been used.</comment>


Using ElasticSearch and Logstash to Serve Billions of Searchable Events - <AUTHOR> http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/using-elasticsearch-and-logstash-to-serve-billions-of-searchable-events-for-customers/ <comment><USER2> I've used ElasticSearch & Logstash (& Kibana, also shown here), and I've been nothing but impressed.

My primary concern was how it would cope when data exceeded RAM (I like to call this the MongoDB fallacy). However, based on this post it looks like the ElasticSearch setup works just fine.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it takes a bit of tuning, depending on what you want to do with Elasticsearch. There are so many different use cases. I found that especially keeping the heap size for field data down to 40% helped quite a bit, in my case.

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see a blog post that went into detail about those issues: what to measure, what to tune etc.

<comment><USER3> What I found most important is to monitor Elasticsearch while doing that tuning. That's when I set up Graphite and StatsD and [https://github.com/ralphm/vor](https://github.com/ralphm/vor).

First of, you need to make sure Elasticsearch can lock a chunk of memory (using mlock). About half of the available RAM is a good size, as other system processes need some memory, too, and not everything is on the heap.

You want to look for how many items you are indexing and how much of the heap the field data cache is using while doing queries. By default ES tries to keep the total heap size at about 3/4 of the allocated memory. The types of queries are important, too. E.g. if you do faceting or sorting on fields that have many different values, this will fill up the field data cache in no time.

Is that the kind of information you're after? I can go into in more detail if you have more specific question.

<comment><USER2> That's great stuff - thanks. Just trying to collect tips from those that have been there, so that when I get there I have something to start from!

<comment><USER3> You're most welcome. Drop me a line any time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you considered using any Graphite alternatives? I found it to be very slow with rendering data, especially when multiple arrays are being used as sources. Also, it lacks some features that graphs rendering software is generally supposed to have, at least the half-a-year old version.

<comment><USER3> I did look at the greater landscape. What I found great about Graphite is the number of functions you have to massage the metrics. Not all metrics come in the same form (total number of bytes received since boot, or number of bytes received per second) and things like the `hitcount` and the `perSecond` (in the upcoming 0.10) functions really help.

It can indeed be slow, and this is usually a I/O issue. The Whisper storage backend does a lot of seeks, and people recommend using SSDs to deal with that. Also, you can have graphite-web just give you the (calculated) metric data for a particular query in JSON, and have it rendered client-side. [http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tools.html](http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tools.html) lists a few.

Finally, we are investigating other storage backends for more fault tolerance. Probably we'll settle on something based on Cassandra, like [http://blueflood.io/](http://blueflood.io/).

<comment><USER5> Have you looked into using Elasticsearch's date histograms as sources for Graphite-functions?

Jordan Sissel wrote a short note about it over here: [https://gist.github.com/jordansissel/3760225](https://gist.github.com/jordansissel/3760225)

That'll obviously be very expensive when the resolution is very high, though.

<comment><USER3> I missed that, but that looks pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Elasticsearch is really awesome for keeping large amount of searchable data. I used it in a previous application where we stored millions of items a week.

For data retention I had different indexes with different TTLs, depending on the type of queries that hit them (queries that only dealt with frequent items were sent to an index with a very short TTL).

For graphing I also used Graphite, with metrics ([http://metrics.codahale.com/](http://metrics.codahale.com/)) for sending data from Java programs and scales ([https://github.com/Cue/scales](https://github.com/Cue/scales)) for sending data from Python applications.

The only problem I had was tuning it for faceting (Faceting consumed lots of RAM).

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is a blogpost we ([https://commando.io](https://commando.io)) wrote on shipping nginx access logs using LogStash and ElasticSearch

[https://medium.com/devops- programming/b01bd0876e82](https://medium.com/devops-programming/b01bd0876e82)

</comment><comment><USER8> After reading this article, I checked out logstash.net today nearly after an year.... I am happy to see they added so many connectors and it has grown so much.... This open source software can be serious competition to splunk..

</comment><comment><USER9> How much time was involved in building this setup? Just curious.

<comment><USER10> 2 devs and 2.5 months, including multi-tenant client service with authorization

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this a compelling OSS replacement for Splunk?

</comment><comment><USER4> Also, are you using local statsd installations at each server that is sending stats, or you keep statsd separately?

<comment><USER3> In our case, most of the metrics come from the events flowing through Logstash, and statsd is on the machines running the Logstash server. Note that we are not using Logstash for shipping log events.

<comment><USER12> I'll bite: what are you using to ship logs?

EDIT: or I can read it in the post...

<comment><USER9> Probably just syslog or its recent variants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone used elasticsearch as a database, like mongodb ?

<comment><USER14> It won't have a decent Disaster Recovery plan until 1.0, so I would suggest holding off on making it the authoritative source of any of your data.</comment></comment>


EU Scolds Visa et al. For Killing WikiLeaks Donations, Initiates Regulation - <AUTHOR> http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/20/europarliament-scolds-visa-mastercard-paypal-for-killing-wikileaks-donations-initiates-regulation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Falkvinge-on-Infopolicy+%28Falkvinge+on+Infopolicy%29

<comment><USER2> This is a proposal, for legislation to be drafted, backed by the Pirate Party. Falkvinge is the founder and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Much less has happened than this article implies.

<comment><USER3> Well, the proposal has been adopted as a report today. The Parliament has formally requested legislation to be drafted - it has gone beyond the proposal stage.

So this has entered the famous _wurstmaschine_ - the legislative sausage machine - where something will come out the other end.

Cheers, Rick

<comment><USER2> The article opens by asserting that the EU has "ordered new regulation to regulate". I took this to mean regulation had been passed. Instead, this is analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives passing a motion to send an issue to committee (where legislation is subsequently drafted). Not insignificant, but nothing that will change too much on the ground (yet).

<comment><USER4> Sadly this is pretty typical of Falkvinge's pieces.

Continuing your example, the "EU scolds" part of the article would be: the sponsoring Representative makes a blustery press release.

How it all connects back to why and how the Swedish banks were forced by Visa and MC to discriminate against '"questionable products" like horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys' isn't particularly clear. Especially since those types of products are as american as apple pie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same thing happened when the US cut non-friendlies (or basically any nation that does business with Iran) with denial of access to the SWIFT system. What use to be a financial transaction highway became a political weapon of choice. This basically backfired when China refused). [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/15/swift-iran- sanction...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/15/swift-iran- sanctions_n_1347361.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is important news and I am happy a first step is taken.

I am not sure about the accuracy of the title of the submitted post though. The official EU text, as reported in the post,[1] does not scold or name anyone. The scolding comes from a press release of the Pirate Party.

1\. "[The European Parliament] considers it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance"

<comment><USER3> The headline has, as always, an amount of liberty in summarizing the article to a few words.

The person responsible for inserting the text into the report, who is a Member of the European Parliament, and therefore in some sense representing this particular piece of text, names WikiLeaks and the donation blockade specifically.

Cheers, Rick

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could not anti-competitor laws be expanded to also include depended parties? It sound as an logical approach, since anti-competitor laws always discuss market abuse by parties of an monopolistic nature, and the activities against wikileaks looks to match that exactly. The problem is not VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal per say, but their monopolistic statue as payment systems in regard to access to and by end-users. For companies and organizations depended on online revenue like donations or webb-shops, VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal has complete market control over them.

<comment><USER8> Well, if you do that, bitcoin wouldn't gain traction. This is the kind of scenarios that bitcoin excel at.

The others being that bitcoin is a great way to transfer wealth out of the country at any moment, allowing individuals to vote with their wallet.

<comment><USER9> > bitcoin is a great way to transfer wealth out of the country at any moment

For a high-tax region like EU, that's a severe bug, not a feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Didn't Visa & Friends kill WikiLeaks donations two years ago? What good does it do for the EU to "scold" them now, two years later, after it turned out WikiLeaks was able to survive and keep operating without credit card companies?

Even if something comes of this, it would have been a helluva lot more useful to have happened in December 2010/early 2011. Doing something now _might_ discourage this kind of behavior in the future, but it seems a lot more like calling the fire department after watching your neighbor's house burn to the ground.

<comment><USER11> I would say it's more akin to calling the police about the arsonist that's already burnt your neighbor's house to the ground.

Sure it won't save the house, but the wrongdoer is still on the loose and might well do it again given the opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know why EU seems to have so much more common sense for issues like these than US, but whatever they are doing is working, and I love it. Maybe US needs to model its democratic system more after EU.

<comment><USER13> Theory: The US gutted its educational system some generations ago, and the results are now showing on a policy level.

As George Carlin once said: "When you have a selfish, ignorant public, you get selfish, ignorant leaders."

<comment><USER9> Myths and legends supported literally by a joke. American educational system is no worse than Western European[1], and definitely better when it comes to higher education[2].

[1] [http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth- abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa- scores-usa.html) [2] pretty much any ranking will do

<comment><USER14> [2] Better for just the lucky few who can get to the top universities.

<comment><USER15> Literally anyone can get to a top university if they work hard enough

<comment><USER16> Certainly, but that doesn't have terribly much to do with what you can say about the population at large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is good. Thank you Europe. But what about regulations that favour market diversity? We should regulate the payment interface to encourage the emergence of non-US companies in the system.

</comment><comment><USER18> Personally I'd rather see the payment card companies nationalized. Make them operate at zero profit, and vastly reduce the friction in the flow of capital. Or, if you prefer not to nationalize, institute a government-operated competing global payment card system that's free for merchants and consumers alike. Watch the payment card companies collapse under their own weight.

It makes a lot of sense to me: the governments of the world are in the business of governing currency, and payment card systems are superseding that power. Time to take it back and return the power to citizens.

<comment><USER19> The actions of these companies were done at behest of the U.S. government. How would this problem be reduced if the companies were eliminated and a nationalized system implemented?

And if you think nationalization will increase efficiency, please compare the U.S. post office to European post offices, which were nearly all privatized decades ago. (They're operating with significant profits b/c they've combined with convenience stores, allow you to opt out of spam, offer scanning services, etc)

<comment><USER18> Well for one thing, the private nature of the card companies means that they can be 'pressured' by the government and they have no accountability. If the government operated the payment card systems, the constitutional constraints would apply (so for example, wikileaks could have some shelter under the first amendment). As for the postal system, it's being sabotaged from within - [http://my.firedoglake.com/mmonk/2011/08/19/the-pre- funding-m...](http://my.firedoglake.com/mmonk/2011/08/19/the-pre-funding- mandate-bringing-down-the-american-postal-workers-union/)

<comment><USER19> The legal restitution is likely to be identical, as this is a post-Patriot act age of gag orders. However, with multiple competitors it's a lot harder to shut down something like wikileaks in a completely silent and uniform manner, without indication that it's been silenced.

Most important of all, however, is that a us gov monopoly precludes the use of foreign competitors from countries with better speech laws.

As far as the post office is concerned: Leaving their numerical financial situation aside (which is hard to ascertain exactly due to the opaque nature of government spending) there is simply no excuse for why, after decades and decades, they haven't implemented any of the modern efficiency mechanisms or services that modern post offices have.

<comment><USER18> Also as far as the post office is concerned: one troubled branch of the government != indictment of all government involvement in public utilities (which is what a government-operated payment card system would amount to). Not every government project is a bureaucratic failure. For example, this internet thing we're using to argue about how the government can't do anything right...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Vague rules from Visa and MasterCard will become vague laws on the books of the EU, and nothing will change.

<comment><USER21> Vague rules are still better than nothing. Vague rules might be also be transformed in more efficient regulation if the effect still hurts in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> First, one government uses power to regulate who and how receives money. Than another government uses power to regulate who and how accepts money. Why nobody questions why governments are regulating money flow at all?

If nobody was after WikiLeaks, Visa and MasterCard would be happy to provide them with payments. Or, on the other hand, if Visa does not want to provide a service for any reason, why anyone should force them to?

<comment><USER23> > if Visa does not want to provide a service for any reason, why anyone should > force them to?

Since Visa (and MasterCard) are such a big part of the flow of payments that leaving that decision to them is almost like letting organized crime charge protection money.

I guess you missed this part:

> banks in Sweden were caught in the act of arbitrarily > discriminating > against fully legal business owners that the > banks claimed sold (according > to the banks) "questionable > products" like horror movies, movies with > nudity, or sex toys; > meanwhile, these same banks happily channeled stock > in > corporations under investigation of genocide. When pressed on > the > matter, the banks referred to vague rules from Visa and > MasterCard

Imagine being a startup that competes with (say) Amazon in some fringe market (say porn, of which Amazon has plenty). _You_ get shutdown (by Visa/MC proxied by your bank) for selling "questionable products" while Amazon happily can continue selling the same products, since they bring so much more profit to Visa/MasterCard. Is that fair?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And so it goes. I have a feeling many people on here would be singing a different tune if the EU suddenly decided that it was a "right" for people to use their software no matter who they are. Think of it this way. Would anyone truly benefit if the EU decided that Hacker News was "a valve of free speech" so it must not discriminate who uses it? I think this is a terrible decision and a massive overstep of the state into private affairs. As an aside, I'm not so convinced that wikileaks is as noble an organization as many on here seem to think it is.

<comment><USER25> So, for example, if I operated a bus company, and I wanted not to accept, say, jews on my bus, it would be a "terrible decision and a massive step etc. etc." for the state to intervene?

Reductio ad absurdum doesn't work in political matters. Because reality isn't based on simple monotonic logic.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely reductio ad absurdum works for political arguments. If you didn't think that then why did you literally just use it on my comment? I would say discrimination based on some sort of inherent trait is completely wrong (race, religion, etc) but if a private company chooses to deny service to another private company what affront to civil rights has been committed? I'm sorry but there is no human right to the visa or mastercard network. If you want to support wikileaks send them government issued currency through the government run mail.

<comment><USER25> Actually, I used reductio ad absurdum exactly to show it can work as a rhetorical device, but in politics you can easily construe "demonstrations" for both sides of an argument using it. So it is not a good argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


California's Assembly Votes to Allow Communists to Hold State Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/09/527586682/california-assembly-votes-to-allow-communists-to-hold-state-jobs <comment><USER2> Fact: most Americans, much less Californians, don't understand the nuances between communism, socialism, and Marxism. America has been anti-socialism since at least 1919 in the era of the First Red Scare. Heck, Oklahoma was a hotbed of socialism. In most Americans' minds, little green men are trying to corrupt their childrens' precious bodily fluids with fluoride. In effect, anarcho-capitalism/libertarianism is the only politically-correct and acceptable belief system in the vast majority of Americans minds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess it's just a label now but "true" communists are not compatible with US way of life. It's a fact.

<comment><USER4> Please don't mistake communist party with communist government. Apple in a fruit basket vs apple tree

<comment><USER3> Really? How about an Islamist with Islamic rule?

Shall we try it again, since USSR, North Korea, Cambodia and the likes "didn't do it right"? It's all fun and games until communists confiscate your iPhone and laptop.

<comment><USER5> The communists won't confiscate your phone or laptop, that's personal property. They would take your factory away, yes.

<comment><USER6> They did it in Hungary.

Even the country had good telco infrastructure, only the armed chiefs, vets (important role in a self-sustaining economy), doctors had phones at home. I lived in a major city and only in 1996 you could get a landline. Personal computers were on COCOM lists. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls)

So yeah, they did take your personal belongings. If you had a pretty wife or daughter, the local armed chiefs might take them too.

<comment><USER7> ^this. Thank you for providing some perspective. Both of my parents immigrated to the US from countries occupied or torn apart by Communism. I think the many downsides of the Communist ideology are lost to younger modern Americans (and I think many Western Europeans?)... the Cold War is not even a memory for many, and its easy to deconstruct its lessons as part of oikophobic self- criticism. It seems fashionable to expound Leftist ideology today and extol the virtues of Communism since "now we have the technology to do it right!". Even the "This time we'll do Communism right!" refrain is historically old.

For a more modern example of pervasive, invasive control, look no further than China. Why confiscate glitzy consumer toys when you can just monitor and control everything? ;)

I spent a semester in Budapest back in '92, and I recall a Central European History professor wryly observing: "The only Marxists left are all in the West."

<comment><USER8> China is not a communist country: they don't have the N1 criteria: "a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production".

<comment><USER6> Isn't The Party controls the means and The Party represent the people?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Color is not stupid, it's evil. - <AUTHOR>

I wish I could go back to those naive times when I thought Color was just a silly VC move, an overrated photo sharing app, a confirmation of bubble times or anything like this. After reading some of the PR they've been pushing to fight the massive bad rap they got on their first day in business, I'm convinced Color is bad, evil bad, 1984 bad. For instance, according to 'Color CEO: The Tech Justifies the $41 Million' published on RWW, "When you take a picture or video, Color gathers a variety of information. It collects sound levels, Bluetooth readings, light readings, antenna strength, the time - even the direction you're pointing your phone - and more and uses it all to determine your proximity to other users." Wow! Scary thing... I'm not sure they do have the technology they claim to have, if all this is true or pure PR. But if they do, I wonder how will they use this data? What for? Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'll play safe and not install that thing. <comment><USER2> This submission would be better suited as a comment in one of the (many) Color threads, or submitted separately as a blog post.

If this post ends up [dead] it's probably for that reason, and not part of some conspiracy on Color's part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. It was my first HN contribution, so please be a little indulgent. I'm still getting the hang of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what use cops and stalkers will be able to make of this tech?

</comment><comment><USER4> They're probably going to attempt to use the sensor data to get more data to form a mesh grid, so as to determine what point in a venue they're shooting.

For example, say there are four phones, in a square, and they all have color enabled, it would be possible to tell that they were all facing the middle of the square. From there, it'd be cool to stitch together the images and create a reverse panorama -- think of something like 'Streets' view, wherein you can 'enter' the scene and move around in it, from a variety of angles and perspectives.

At least, that's what I'd use it for.

</comment><comment><USER5> I totally agree with you:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367299>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367277>

I am not interested in their ability to get a clear picture of my surrounding through the sensors in my phone, or of the phones around me.

It is amazing tech, if they have it -- But I don't need that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, hadn't seen your posts. Agree with you. And I'd add that there's not enough transparency regarding all these capabilities. It's like that cigar smoking baby from Bugs Bunny -- you think it's a photo sharing app, but that's just the coverup. You're helping them collect data God only knows what for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Collecting data is not evil. Using data for evil things is evil. Color is not evil. If the secret police used proximity location to capture people and kill them, that would be evil. But do you see why that doesn't make Color evil?

Having control of how your data is used is nice, but it's not helpful to throw around terms like "evil" for such small things.

People get really trigger happy with "1984" on the Internet and sometimes it borders on ridiculous. Orwell didn't have a picture sharing program for handheld computers in mind when he wrote his book.

<comment><AUTHOR> And maybe Sequoia didn't have a photo sharing app in mind when they put tens of millions in the game ;-)</comment></comment>


3-Way Disk Mirrors with ZFS on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.bhoey.com/blog/?p=27 <comment><USER2> A much easier way to test ZFS configurations is to use files instead[0]:

      $ mkfile 128m /home/user/disk1
      $ mkfile 128m /home/user/disk2
      $ mkfile 128m /home/user/disk3
      $ zfs create tank mirror /home/user/disk1 /home/user/disk2 /home/user/disk3

[0]: [https://flux.org.uk/tech/2007/03/zfs_tutorial_1.html](https://flux.org.uk/tech/2007/03/zfs_tutorial_1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, thanks for the heads up. It doesn't look like mkfile is included with the Jessie base system I was using to test. For those wishing to use this method it looks like the xfsprogs package contains xfs_mkfile which operates the same as parent's example.

<comment><USER2> mkfile is standard on Solaris. On Debain use fallocate:

      $ fallocate -l 128MB /home/user/disk1

<comment><USER3> Is there an advantage of using fallocate over say, dd to pipe random or zeroes to a file?

<comment><USER4> fallocate doesn't do any IO; it's much faster.

From the fallocate man page:

> For filesystems which support the fallocate system call, preallocation is > done quickly by allocating blocks and marking them as uninitialized, > requiring no IO to the data blocks. This is much faster than creating a file > by filling it with zeros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing to note: the '-o ashift' option is a per-drive (vdev) attribute according to the manual. So, when replacing a vdev, be sure to specify this option again if you do not use the default:

zpool replace -o ashift=12 old new.

<comment><USER6> I realize this article is aimed at Linux, but on FreeBSD you can simply set

      vfs.zfs.min_auto_ashift=12

in _/ etc/sysctl.conf_ to handle this automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another nice property of ZFS mirroring is the read performance. Since data integrity is verified by checksums rather than by reading the data back from all disks and comparing it, the disks within a ZFS mirror are able to serve read requests in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER8> Also, standard linux raid (mdadm) will allow 3 or more disks in RAID 1 and will read from all of them for better performance. ZFS has a lot of overhead compared to mdadm+LVM but it depends on your specific use case.</comment>


Security Flaw Shows Tor Anonymity Network Dominated By Botnet Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519186/security-flaw-shows-tor-anonymity-network-dominated-by-botnet-command-and-control/

<comment><USER2> This doesn't seem to me to mean as much as the author thinks.

By the same reasoning, after all, email as a communication mechanism is "dominated by" spam, much of it similarly shady in nature.

There _is_ an interesting difference, though -- while spam actively hurts the usability of email, botnet traffic which parasites on the TOR network helps make the system as a whole _stronger_ , by adding more noise in which the important uses of TOR can be lost.</comment>


Ask HN: Would it be okay to build a better (web) game from someone else's idea? - <AUTHOR>

I saw a game I liked, and I know I can remake it and provide a better user experience. Would it be okay if I went ahead with the project? This wouldn't have been a big deal if the game I saw was created in a different language (HTML5 languages), but that's not the case. <comment><USER2> I call this pulling a zuckerberg. I don't think so. I personally believe there is no such thing as an original idea. We are made up of other people thoughts and ideas, that we choose to either accept and make it apart of us or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahahahaha. I agree with there never being a truly original idea, but there are ideas that the original developer can take credit for, unlike me, since I'm copying the concept right out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You only have to improve upon the idea by 10% and it is a value-added alternative.

</comment><comment><USER4> Add a little twist or something to it then it is fine

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That's what I was going to do, but then I thought I should at least link to the original game and give the developer some credit. I should do that in the credits page or something like that, right?

<comment><USER5> If you want to and feel ethically inclined to do so then sure.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't use change data capture logs as your domain events - <AUTHOR> https://www.kislayverma.com/post/domain-events-versus-change-data-capture <comment><USER2> I learned this lesson the hard way when I realized my cloud-based database provider won't give me access to change logs.

Ended up building a write queue where updates to be made are put.

Now I have one place that captures all changes, so it doesn't matter if the db has change logs, or if the provider gives me access to it.

I can set up a domain events system even if the backing store is the file system.

Queue changes, publish event after successful change.</comment>