SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live - <AUTHOR> http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_11162011.html <comment><USER2> Zoe Lofgren's statements were really good, and her criticisms of the way the hearing was structured (5 for, 1 against, no engineers) were compelling. Her question of, "How many sites would you want to see taken down?" and the dodging is telling, too.

And Darrell Issa did a phenomenal job calling into question the need for the legislation because of the function of the ITC & usefulness of administrative law solutions already in place.

Wow, Dennis Ross (R-FL) apparently doesn't understand that free speech protections apply to the GOVERNMENT, not to business. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech..." So yes, when Google takes down a site, it's not unconstitutional. When the government does it, in some instances, that is unconstitutional.

<comment><USER3> I agree on those two, but unfortunately I haven't heard much encouraging come from anyone else. Two people on a 38-member committee is not a strong showing...

<comment><USER4> Any political action that can restrict the behavior of business is crippled in advance.

<comment><USER5> Not so. The Republicans have a large majority in the House at present and the SOPA bill was introduced by the chairman of this committee. That's why the hearing is tilted unusually heavily in favor of the proponents. 'Business' includes all the tech companies who are lobbying uphill against SOPA as well.

<comment><USER4> The tech companies lobbying uphill are copyright consumers in this context. They are users, and the copyright owners' interests are those being prioritized, and whose interests have been favored in the entire SOPA (and before) movement. That the hearings are tilted in favor of copyright owners is simply public evidence of structural bigotry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chair: "I came to this meeting undecided on this bill, and hoping to make up my mind during this discussion, but this discussion is bringing up concerns (e.g. interference with DNSSec) that seem highly problematic. Can the panelists comment on whether this bill would dis-incentivize adoption of more secure standards like DNSSec?"

"We disagree." - big content shill

Chair: "If you believe these concerns are unfounded, please submit written responses to that specific question explaining why you believe that."..."I'm very concerned that these [DNSSec] experts are not part of this hearing!"

Yes bro!

<comment><USER7> To quote tptateck as he has recently enlightened me:

[quote] I just don't think "it breaks DNSSEC" is the most compelling or intellectually honest argument. I think the honest argument is, "because we don't think any one authority will be an adequate steward of the Internet".[/quote]

I think that point is just as salient for SOPA as it is for PROTECT-IP. Don't setup that argument for them to knock down. Keep the focus on holding the copyright infringers accountable, not the service providers in-between.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 10:45am mountain time: Ted Poe (R-TX): "This panel or this committee is made up of former prosecutors, defense lawyers and there are even two former judges here."

Consider the conflict of interest that exists when lawyers are making our laws. In this case if this bill passes there will be more laws and legal complexity and consequently more work to go around for everyone on the panel and all their previous and current firms and law school mates.

It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing.

<comment><USER9> You're joking, right? Who would you propose is more qualified to draft the word of the actual laws than lawyers? What lawyers _are_ at their essence are experts in law—the word 'lawyer' even has the word 'law' in it.

 _It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing._

Who would you ask whether code needs to be written, then? The lawyers who aren't dealing in law? Housewives? Veterinarians?

It's the same thing with lobbyists—they end up getting hired by government because they are experts in what they are talking about. You're going to be very hard-pressed to find an expert that doesn't have some vested interest somewhere in what they're talking about.

 _Consider the conflict of interest that exists…_

A common tactic I see when people argue about politics is that because someone _could_ be doing something corrupt then it means that they then therefore _are_ doing it. I could certainly go walk outside and push someone in front of a bus right now, but assuming I'm a murderer just because I could is not a good assumption. Conflicts of interest certainly raise the possibility of wrongdoing and should be scrutinized, but the simple existence of a conflict of interest is not proof of wrongdoing; for that you need not aspersions but, well, proof.

I am staunchly against SOPA being enacted without industry input, and I think it's misguided to try to prop up dying content businesses that aren't innovating, but spouting conspiracy theories about the politicians passing it for their own benefit isn't going to help.

<comment><USER8> Actually this is an established theory. Here's Dr Clifford Winston, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution chatting to Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University about the conflict of interest when lawyers make our laws. They also cover the bar system maintaining artificial scarcity among lawyers, thereby inflating legal fees.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.html)

<comment><USER5> You could just as easily ask why the bar has been certifying to many law schools when there are so many unemployed lawyers and less than half of JD graduates are able to get jobs practicing law. I'm kind of supportive of Winston's proposals for deregulating the legal services market, but there is definitely not an artificial scarcity.

Of course, you might be wondering why decent legal services still cost upwards of $300/hour, and my answer to that would be that a lawyer who charges $50 an hour has a hard time getting taken seriously. I've seen people come into internet forums asking the most asinine questions before going on to explain that they didn't trust the answers they received from their public defender, because he works for free and therefore he must not be any good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reps now bitching that Google's senior management is not in the room. FUCK YOU, SENATOR. Those people deliver more value per day than you will deliver in your entire career as a public servant.

Oh god: "Why not hire some whiz kids?"

What a goddamned fool.

"We have the brainpower in this country [to design a machine to distinguish copyrighted works from non-copyrighted works]."

Actually, no, we don't. Fair use is a thing, holmes.

<comment><USER10> And then cutting off the answer when it's exactly what he doesn't want to hear.

Certainly frustrating.

<comment><USER11> She clearly explained why it was not do-able, and then he goes on to saying that it is. Hire those "wiz kids" I'm sure they can do it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm listening currently (11:43a EST) and they're quoting cyber security experts about how it could undermine security. From consumer union groups about how it affects consumer safety, from venture capitalists about how it can stifle innovation. A lady right now is addressing how it's an issue that they don't have any technical expertise on the panel. It's not ALL madness..

<comment><USER13> That's not the madness of the legislative process.

You'll witness the madness play out when the legislators, having given the plebes their "voice", ignore every single one of them and proceed with graduating the bill to a full vote. Which will likely pass.

<comment><USER14> If it does pass, there is still a chance (however small and expensive) that it will be ruled against in the courts. The judiciary seems like the branch least impacted by the influence of big-media.

<comment><USER15> That requires someone to bring a relevant legal case to an appropriately positioned judicial body, which requires a great deal of money, and two sides willing to take it that far.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't that just mean YouTube v. Viacom redux?

<comment><USER17> Viacom v. YouTube. The one who complains is listed first.

But yes, it does mean wasting a lot of money on lawyers to fight a very bad law which Google could instead be using to build computer-driven cars, improve machine translation, and to create more high-paying jobs.

Instead, we're getting the broken window version where they're forced to create more highly-paid lawyers, instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry for not attributing all these...exchange is between a Rep whose nameplate isn't vieible and multiple witnesses, primarily Ms. Oyama.

"We have harshly criticized governments whose service providers monitor and censor the actions of their users. [...] How would this legislation affect our diplomacy with nations like Iran, for example?"

"When there are realtime events, it's important that content services allow for infrastructure to support realtime public response to those events."

"This bill hurts both large and small content intermediaries severely, but in different ways."

"We've seen Libyan officials trying to take rivals' YouTube channels out of their national internet stream."

"The Justice Department has new responsibilities under SOPA while at the same time we've been talking about downsizing government. Are we creating an unmeetable burden for U.S. Gov as well as content intermediaries?"

</comment><comment><USER6> "The #1 way to decrease piracy is to increase the number and quality of legitimate content services on the internet."

Preach it, sister.

<comment><USER18> The shift in focus to movie piracy from music piracy (where there are many mature legit content services) is tell here, imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "...protect American jobs..."

"...innocent civilians and American soldiers at risk..."

Who would have thought BitTorrent was such a threat to American civilisation?

<comment><USER20> ...and has been destroying the country for over a decade.

<comment><USER21> Well yeah, look what it did to the housing market!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So I've been doing every google search these clueless legislators have brought up in defense of the act:

"You can search for 'free harry potter movie' and watch it for free"

"You can go type 'j edgar' into google and piracy links show up above legitimate links"

"You can watch breaking dawn online right now, and it's not even out yet"

etc...

Try them yourself as they bring them up. They're full of bullshit.

<comment><USER23> I've been doing the same. It's really infuriating listening to these people lie through their teeth, and go mostly unchecked.

<comment><USER24> Although it's really not that complicated to find a free stream for Harry Potter movies. I found all of them with just a few minutes checking Google- results, although the quality of the stream wasn't too high. Then again I'm pretty sure I'll continue to find ways to stream Harry Potter movies as well in future no matter if this law passes or not (I might have to search a few more minutes then, that's probably about it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 12:19PM central time - The chairman, Rep. Smith, was asking whether this bill would impact our ability to implement DNSSEC. He seemed legitimately concerned that it could weaken security on the internet.

I have no idea whether there's any basis for concern, but I'm sure we have some DNSSEC experts here on HN. Comments?

<comment><USER26> DNSSEC is a bad idea that will damage the Internet. I think it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps. But this bill would breaks DNSSEC for the same reasons that it breaks "infringement-inducing sites". It's going to pose the same difficulty to any other organized security features added to DNS.

The result will be chaos.

<comment><USER26> Totally not arguing for SOPA. But SOPA doesn't break DNS edge security systems like DNScurve, and those are the solutions we actually need.

<comment><USER27> Skimming the site, it looks to me like DNSCurve is more of a transport protocol for DNS records, almost like running DNS over DTLS. This would certainly be a useful improvement, but I don't see where it talks about how the records are authenticated.

It is pushing off the "do you trust (Versign+USDoJ | greatfirewall.cn) to give you the legitimate answer to your .com query" problem. Which is the kind of problem that the Internet is good at routing around but would be bad for it to do so.

E.g., users will (at best) change to alternative DNS systems or (at worst) toss out this hierarchical authority naming concept entirely. Consider how many users simply _wouldn't notice_ if Google started returning IP addresses or proxy names for search results. Or maybe they set up an alternate with their own naming scheme for Chrome, Android, ChromeOS, and everyone with their search bar. (Oh wait, I just Googled it and they already did that and I didn't notice [http://www.infoworld.com/t/dns/google-launches- alternative-d...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/dns/google-launches-alternative- dns-resolver-918) )

If Google does it, then Microsoft must too. And Amazon, and The Pirate Bay and so then we need a protocol for deciding which DNS system the client will use on a per-request basis, and civil-rights-disrespecting governments try to sabotage that too and round-we-go the Internet we know and love is circling the drain.

<comment><USER26> The point of DNScurve is not to bother attempting to create a cryptographic chain of custody for all DNS records (which is what DNSSEC does), at least not until after we've set it up so that a browser can make a request of a server that cannot be tampered with.

It is a vastly simpler, tactical solution to the DNS "security problem" (I'm a skeptic about the long term importance of this problem too).

<comment><USER27> So why would a kernel-level rootkit like TDSS start dropping the DNSChanger trojan on 600K to 1M machines?

Just another pay-per-install malware module?

Hard for AV to detect the settings are wrong?

[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Researchers-Discover- Link-...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Researchers-Discover-Link-Between- TDSS-Rootkit-and-DNSchanger-Trojan-753018/)

<comment><USER26> I can't see any connection between what a kernel-level rootkit does and how we should secure DNS. If you lose your kernel, you're done, full stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We know right now that a young film-maker starting out today will not be able to have a career because of piracy."

ORLY? We know that? Someone had better tell the market, which continues to fund (and see returns on) indie films.

<comment><USER28> This is really funny, since Justin Bieber claimed recently that his career would never have existed if this law had been applied to him. [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/justin- biebe...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/justin-bieber- streaming-bill-author-should-be-locked-up.ars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I object to this bill in its current form because I believe it _fails to use existing tools_ [injunctive relief] and does a worse job than those existing tools at solving this problem." - Mr. Issa (for the micro-win)

Unclear whether Mr. Issa's alternative bill (yet to be seen, focused on empowering the FTC to issue injuctions) would allow for DNS-based remedies, whether the injunctions would take more traditional forms like fines/C+D/damages, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please just stop. The people/bands I download are not ones I'd pay for right out of the gate.

For example: Pink Floyd. I hear a lot about them, but don't know if I'd like them. So I downloaded some of their popular albums for free and gave them a listen.

After recovering from the awesomeness, I've since bought two of those albums on iTunes, and yesterday 3 friends and I _each_ dropped $78 on tickets for a concert with one of the old band members.

If I could only pay for it, which is the record company's ideal world, I would've seen the $16.99 price tag on iTunes and not taken the chance of listening to it.

The people downloading something illegally are, for the most part, not the same people who'd be paying for it.

<comment><USER30> Though these days with services like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora, you have free, legal access to huge libraries of music. It's at least enough to allow for use cases like the one you mention.

Yes, I know these services are not available in many jurisdictions and that's a shame and I believe it will change over time. Point is, the situation is getting better and the so called "need" to pirate music is increasingly gone.

<comment><USER29> Yes, the need is going down. That's _one_ reason why this law is unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is truly a waste of humanity's time.

Edit: Check out the guy in the back on his iphone most likely looking at some form of "infringing content."

<comment><USER32> It is. I believe heavyweights like Google won't let them get away with this. They have lobbyists too.

<comment><USER33> There are also heavyweights like Microsoft who are _sponsoring_ the bill. My guess is there are still more money being invested to make this a reality than otherwise.

<comment><USER34> Do you have a source for that info? A quick Google search turns up nothing on Microsoft's stance on SOPA.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't look like Microsoft is directly lobbying either way, but the Business Software Alliance has been lobbying heavily in favor, and Microsoft is often considered the dominant player in the BSA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Stealin' is stealin' and thieves are people we oughtta deal with!"

"If I had my way I'd lock all three of ya in a room and don't come out until you agree."

"As a consumer I can't tell who's a thief and who's not a thief. What can Google offer this bill that would allow Google to sign on to this bill?"

How is "Google signing on" the key issue here? Is Google the gatekeeper to basic constitutionality in legislation now?

"Google would publicly support a "follow the money" approach."

<comment><USER35> Seriously, I have the sickest feeling in the pit of my stomach. These congresspeople don't understand what's going on AT ALL, and the deck is already stacked against anti-SOPA activists. They don't seem to be even discussing the constitutionality of what they're suggesting.

<comment><USER36> Maybe I'm just cynical, but I think that's because discussing constitutionality isn't a winning strategy. Constitutionality hasn't been a primary concern in the legislative process for a while, especially when internet commerce is involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Thanks everyone for the stream of comments. This law has global implications for how the internet works, or does not work.

1: The real question we should be asking is the source of the SOPA text. It was pretty clearly written by lobbyists, for their clients, and its just as clear that the committee has no idea about the contents. We should be attacking/ranting at the sponsoring companies while helping the congress people to understand through measured lobbying and public action.

2: Larry Lessig's latest book covers the process of making USA's laws extraordinarily well. Congress people are trying to do the right thing, but it's hard to believe laws are made in an unbiased manner when we look at the flow of cash supporting their elections.

3: New Zealand had a similar moment when copyright legislation was debated earlier this year, and the tech community suddenly saw how laws were made. It was a rush job, not pretty and the major parties suffered for it as they took stances which often lacked logic. We now have an election on, wand while it is not a big issue, I expect we will see a lot more support for the Green party, who were the only ones crying foul.

</comment><comment><USER38> Did Mr. Ross just equate government censorship with corporate page takedowns? The difference: one is prohibited by the Constitution, one is not.

<comment><USER39> I think you mean 'equate'; equivocation is a deceptive/evasive form of speech.

<comment><USER38> Thank you; edited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> <http://www.livestream.com/sopaproceedings> re stream for anybody who is having trouble viewing it

</comment><comment><USER6> "From which countries originate the biggest threats of digital piracy?"

"Is China on your list?"

"What might be the total losses due to piracy [...] any studies done on that? Does anyone have a more comprehensive solution [than shutting down websites]?"

What does Mr. King want to hear? Bomb China and Russia and Sweden because OH NOEZ PIRACY? What. The. Fuck?

"Are you aware of state sponsored IP theft? China?"

Good god, man.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Is it possible under this legislation that [the largest search engines in Russia and China] could be disappeared from the US DNS system? And if so, how should we expect the Russian and Chinese governments to respond to such action?"

\- Mr. Cohen

</comment><comment><USER29> Just watched a guy talk about countries who are using practices like this.

He says "the Internet is working just fine there".

One of these places is Turkey. A guy got arrested there for talking about a Chuck Palahniuk novel there on some sort of forum or similar.

<comment><USER41> We had to delay the launch of our streaming service in Turkey because our CDN was inexplicably censored by the government without recourse—and having nothing to do with us! So I can point to at least one case of significant material loss for Turkish consumers due to Internet shenanigans.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, it's insane. This law isn't that extreme yet but it's a push over the ledge towards censorship (it seems...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there a chat room we can go to discuss the stream live so we aren't increasing the signal to noise ratio here?

<comment><USER43> Freenode: #startups ?

Or could always make a #sopa on freenode.

<comment><USER42> #sopa on freenode it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> How unfortunate. Ms. Jackson-Lee seems to have fallen for the fallacious argument that every file that was downloaded would have otherwise been bought if piracy wasn't a viable option. This does not bode well for the future...

<comment><USER6> "stealing our nation's genius"

FAIL. Genius, like digital bits, are not zero sum. This isn't digital Highlander; a kid pirating a film does not magically soak up (and away) the genius of the auteur.

<comment><USER44> The solution, of course, is to stifle our nation's genius so that nobody can steal it.

Nice Highlander metaphor, btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's scary hearing some of this. I don't think some of these people use the internet, except to find reasons to censor the internet.

</comment><comment><USER45> The person speaking now has pointed out that there are 5 people in favor of the bill and only 1 speaking against it. She also lamented the fact that there are zero technical experts speaking.

</comment><comment><USER46> I would rather download the SOPA Hearing video in 720p HD quality than watch a crappy cheap low quality lowres version. Offer next day 720p/1080p HD version of TV shows and movies and piracy will go down. Even iTunes HD versions are crap, not to mention Netflix 2002-era stream quality.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is simplistic, but I think the people who make the technology work need to (find ways to) stop providing support -- stop enabling -- the Luddites who seek to monopolize it for their own gain.

Simply/simplistically put: Unplug them. We'd all be better off.

</comment><comment><USER48> If this goes through, it is doubtful that the US will remain the tech startup mecha for very long afterwards. Just about any revolutionary technology could find itself in hot water with this bill. A sad day if this gets passed.

</comment><comment><USER49> Mr Rogs(Ross?) statements are ridiculous and he's not giving the female (lawyer?) a chance to respond and fully explain what he's asking -- and then he switches to CP as a defense in eliminating our free speech on the internet

</comment><comment><USER6> People in the chamber are now comparing search results on their iPads. So that's something.

"Service providers do not have the technical means to do what this bill requires."

^^^^^^^^ more like that. Update: that was Zoe Lofgren again.

<comment><USER50> Is this the right argument? Should the bill pass once the requirements are there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't understand why they are talking about counterfit medicine. Is that covered under the DMCA? OR SOPA?

<comment><USER15> SOPA claims to cover counterfeit goods as well, and some of the previous DNS- based censorship targeted sites distributing counterfeit goods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Was there anyone from an organization like EFF invited? Or just representatives from companies? Because I could see how companies could agree to supporting a bill as long as it's viable for them, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's something good for the people, too. Who's actually protecting the interests of people there?

All I can see is politicians saying "this SOPA breaking the Internet is nonsense". And yet, they didn't even invite engineers there to testify for that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Watching the legislative process for people who claim to believe in democracy is sort of like actually reading the bible for people who claim to be christian.

</comment><comment><USER53> Cohmert just proved the point of piracy

he searched for some obscure song and found it free illegally but not on iTunes. if it was available then he would have bought it.

<comment><USER54> It pains me that from what he said he took the gigantic leap to "we need to make it more obvious that it's illegal" rather than the tiny one to "we need to find a way to make it easier to get legally".

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Final result of this SOPA campaign is going to show how much influence does American internet users actually have in the "Real" world.

</comment><comment><USER56> If you know what you believe about SOPA (and its Senate equivalent), ignore the stream, call your Congress critters, and tell them what you think. Then after the vote, call them and thank or complain. No, it's not much, but it's almost certainly more efficacious than voting. Especially since you can legally do it many times.

</comment><comment><USER57> So... Tech companies, feel like moving your base of operations to Europe? We really need some investment right now ;)

<comment><USER58> What does it take to move to Europe and join a tech-based company there..?

<comment><USER57> temporary move or permanent? If you find a company interested in hiring you, it should be easy to get a working visa. A permanent move may be more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This seems like an appropriate place to write this.

I'm a self taught programmer. If it wasn't for the internets I would be a pretty poor guy. Spolsky gave a nice answer on SO about teaching a newcomer how to program. He listed SICP, k&R and Code. I read SICP online and I downloaded a version of K&R. Both books had a fundamentally awesome impact on me and I just decided I should buy them along with Code.

All the tech books I've ever read I read online with the exception of The Definitive Guide to Action Script 5, which cost me 50$.

SICP is on sale for 80$ K&R is 50$

If I'm poor (or: a kid) I don't have 50$. Denying me the option to steal this books without harming anyone will just make me less educated.

<comment><USER27> SICP is full text online by the publisher, you didn't "steal" it. You didn't need to "steal" K&R. It's a classic, but there are a whole lot of successful programmers who've never read it.

I don't know where you are, but everywhere I've lived in the US there's at least one very cheap book on C in every used book sale or public library. Today of course, we have more information about programming and Computer Science free on the web than anyone could ever have time to read.

I do buy relatively expensive computer books today when they fit my budget, but it's a rare book that has information I couldn't find on the web.

<comment><USER59> No, I didn't need to steal K&R, but it's better than online tutorials. If there's one thing that you should be allowed to steal, it's education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Nobody has this old track that I love available to buy online, but people offer it online for free. When we talk about following the money, that's pretty impractical if the business is in (for example) China. [...] Why is it too onerous to block sites after probable cause is met and a federal judge concludes the site meets the description of 'dedicated to infringement'?"

Fair enough question. When the money is all interior to some foreign country, and doesn't touch typical payment hubs (e.g. Visa), how does "follow the money" address the problem effectively?

Well, because putting DNS in the hands of any single government or financial interest is a terrible remedy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mr. Ross's "I think simply" folksy routine makes me want to slap a bitch.

<comment><USER60> Also the random pandering involving child pornography. THINK OF THE CHILDREN. Gah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rare well-turned to Mr. Deutch: "Follow the money" leads to Google!

Google's response: "We spent a ton of time and money to create tools to allow rights holders to identify infringing content."

</comment><comment><USER6> "This isn't to protect the big dogs in Hollywood. This is for [set builders, etc.]"

So are those guys still getting paid, or aren't they? Are movies still making money, or aren't they?

</comment><comment><USER6> They need to chill with drawing parallels between child porn and copyrighted movies. It's technically distinct and morally distinct. Just...no.

</comment><comment><USER61> Did anyone record the stream? I couldn't see it live.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Would you agree that the current piracy landscape makes it much more difficult to start a new fee-based distribution model vs. a free/ad-supported distribution model?"

Good question. Piracy status quo, without some sort of crackdown, already skews the "legitimate" distribution models to those that benefit companies with Google's model (e.g. for YouTube).

<comment><USER62> I'm not convinced government should be concerned about the effectiveness of different business models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting point about reordering search results to favor known-legit content distribution channels...roughly: "Can we get Google to put Netflix above TPB in search results?"

If this is still a terrible idea, it's not an obviously terrible one.

<comment><USER63> It's terrible in that a lot of the times smaller organic sites are much more relevant than big-box "trusted" sites. That's why organic search algorithms are good.

Furthermore, there's a terrible burden for startups moving into certain spaces if suddenly you can't get ranked because you're not a Trusted source.

Plus, controlling search engine neutrality or listing position is not the business of the government or rightsholder. Remember, Google is a private entity.

<comment><USER6> So instead of framing it in terms of "promoting known-legit" sites, what about "demote known-sketchy" sites?

Does that help your concerns about effects on unknowns, startups, etc? All the non-sketchy results should still be organically ranked, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> "Google just said that content owners are responsible for rogue websites. That can't be the truth."

Yes, truly, in a free market, seller policies cannot possibly influence the creation of market alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER64> Finally someone is asking the right question. Thank you Ms. Waters.

</comment><comment><USER65> Stream is working fine for me. The content makes me wish we could find a way to firewall ourselves from powerful Luddites.

</comment><comment><USER66> to the UK works via media player, but at work can not test sound.

This is not looking good brothers on the otherside of the sea. What i read today is a 5to1 debate :/ and i got a horriable feeling the nervous looking girl might be the 1 against :/

<comment><USER67> Got any room on your side of the pond?

<comment><USER68> You don't need to go that far. Canada! We're not far away and most day-to-day things are the same here.

Also our Supreme Court recently ruled that hyperlinks are like footnotes in a book so publishing a hyperlink to defamatory material doesn't mean you're responsible for the defamatory material (not republication). Sensible ruling. Heading in direction of internet freedom not away from it.

<comment><USER67> Honestly, I had not heard that, that's awesome. Keep going that way and I'll ditch the Cali sun for your forests (sorry ukgent :)

<comment><USER68> Should have included case in original post: <http://scc.lexum.org/en/2011/2011scc47/2011scc47.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I can't watch the stream, but the comments here are endlessly interesting.

</comment><comment><USER70> Quality is unbearable.

<comment><USER71> Content is, too, I imagine.

<comment><USER6> Disagree with both of you. Video and audio are both smooth and free of dropouts, and the testimony of this attorney (who is she, btw?) is clear and informative.

Compared to some other hearings, the reps asking questions seem legitimately interested in making the bill suck a lot less. Time will tell, I suppose, and it sucks that this bill made it this far, but I'd highly recommend watching the feed if you care about the outcome.

For example, your next letter to your elected representative could reference specific content of the discussion rather than rehashing something that was talked about. Nothing says "I care" like "I cared enough to sit through the same hearing you did."

<comment><USER15> > the reps asking questions seem legitimately interested in making the bill > suck a lot less

That seems like a large part of the problem; they treat it as a foregone conclusion that the bill will pass, perhaps with a bit of tweaking. This bill needs to die. All bills should have the presumption of failure, with a very high bar to get them to pass, not the other way around.

<comment><USER72> The problem is the "think of the children" argument will come back to haunt them come next election season.

<comment><USER73> They really should. Should the 10 year old girl that posted a video on youtube of herself singing along with a Justin Beiber song be considered a felon and put in jail for 5 years?

<comment><USER15> And should one person doing so cause YouTube to get shut down?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Is there anyone liveblogging the proceedings?

<comment><USER6> Anyone object to me using this comments thread to do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "I know crime when I see it." Do you?

</comment><comment><USER75> Jesus, the horror, the horror!

</comment><comment><USER76> stream is broken for me

<comment><USER77> Works for me, open with VLC. Audio is only in my right ear though.

<comment><USER78> I think the left audio channel was reported as copyright infringing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "silicone valley"

Mispronunciation win!

<comment><USER79> Is that that place near LA producing 80% of the world porn?

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> This is SO OFFENSIVE!!! She gives such great, clear technical answers -- they can detect child porn by a combination of reverse image search analysis and manual checks, but they can't visually tell whether a movie or song is licensed to play. Makes sense. "I'm sure we have the technology, we have the brainpower," responds some congrasshole. What fucking idiots these people are. They don't have a right to dictate terms to people smarter than them.

After watching this incredibly infuriating thing, I hope they pass it. I hope it passes, and the economy of the US tanks, and it eats itself. Fuck these people, and fuck everyone who voted for them.

If you're the only person in the room who has technical expertise, Submit your comments in writing.

<comment><USER81> His response to her explanation about how they don't have the technology was "Google does have the technology". These people are all idiots.

<comment><USER82> YouTube does have automated copyright detection though

<comment><USER83> You mean YouTube has information on all of the photographs I've ever taken and who I've licensed them to? I don't recall making this information public, so I don't see how they could possibly detect copyright infringement of my content.

<comment><USER80> Throw one of your images at tineye.com. It's a reverse image analysis tool; their algorithm is under wraps, but I'm sure a few people around here could speculate on how it works. It works nicely with cropped and scaled images, which is a hint =)

<comment><USER81> I think his point was that you can certainly detect an image in use on other sites but that does not matter because it may or may not be infringement. Nobody could possibly know if he licensed his work to be used by certain sites or not.

<comment><USER80> The comment you guys are responding to was in jest. I wrote the original post in this subthread. My point about Tineye was that it's obviously capable of picking up duplicates (which is the immediate question I was responding to) and equally incapable of determining which of those duplicates are licensed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> These hearings are nothing more than democracy theater, and I'm a bit surprised that otherwise smart people, namely most of those posting on HN, actually believe differently. The government has already shown, many times, its willingness and ability to shut down sites, unilaterally, by simply telling ICANN to redirect where a domain points. SOPA is merely a formalization of that power. I surmise that the best way to let a congressman know that you are serious about this issue is to put a bullet in the head of the congressman sitting next to him. If you aren't willing to go that far to protect your freedom, then you are just as full of hot air as the OWS crowd. I don't expect upvotes on this comment, but I am certain that all of the downvotes will come from cowards, the uniformed, idealists, or agents of the government. DNS is broken, and needs either extreme violence to protect its existing fragility, or an awesome technical improvement that will pry the government's grubby fingers off of it for good. Take your pick as to the best route, but wishing for logic and common sense at these hearings is pointless.

EDIT: I should point out the following, for those who think that there really is no need to worry. "Risk of Jail for Ordinary Users: It becomes a felony with a potential 5 year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are a totally noncommercial user, e.g. singing a pop song on Facebook." - <http://americancensorship.org> A felony is a felony is a felony. Once you are guilty of one, your life changes significantly. It all comes down to which law you are willing to break. Just a couple of decades ago, murder and treason were pretty much the only serious crimes. Now, manipulate certain bits in a particular way, and it's treated as almost the same thing. Think about how much we've already lost through our passivity, and how much more we have to lose.

</comment><comment><USER85> Let's see, we're ready for another exciting episode of 'Hackers Go to Washington' or 'As The Real World Turns':

Step 1. At a fancy lunch spot on Rodeo Drive a lobbyist gets with someone in Hollywood, and they talk about a Hollywood dream law, e.g., shut down Internet movie sharing or some such, just to pick a hypothetical issue! Wink, wink!

Step 2. The lobbyist sells the Hollywood guy on an effort to get the dream law passed. "Sign your check, and we will get started from our M Street offices." They do get started and draft the Hollywood Dream Act.

Step 3. The lobbyist finds some Dumb-Dumb legislators on Capital Hill who are not very bright, not doing very well, and need some campaign donations, maybe some trips to Vegas, etc. and hands them copies of the Hollywood Dream Act and some campaign donations, trips to Vegas, etc. Maybe if we did some searching we could find a list of the Dumb-Dumbs? Ah, that would assume that Dumb-Dumbs exist! I ask you, are there any Dumb-Dumbs on Capital Hill?

Step 4. The Dumb-Dumbs hold hearings and look like they are about to get the Hollywood Dream Act passed.

Step 5. People who oppose the Hollywood Dream Act, and there is no shortage, get up on their hind legs, write checks to other lobbyists on M Street, and the battle is on. Legislators who oppose the Hollywood Dream Act get campaign donations, trips to Vegas, etc.

Step 6. The Hollywood Dream Act dies in committee or in negotiations between the House and Senate or has some killer amendments added, etc.

Ah, it was always just the 'Hollywood Dumb-Dumb Public Wet Dream Act' or 'Who Gets Screwed As the World Turns' anyway!

Net, M Street gets richer; both the Dumb-Dumbs and all the opposing legislators get campaign donations, which they don't return, and trips to Vegas, but nothing real happens. It's just Hollywood.

Naw, no one would ever do anything so stupid. That would be called a 'scam', and that's SUCH a pejorative locution! We can be SURE that M Street and Capitol Hill would NEVER engage in anything like a scam, can't we?

<comment><USER17> The idea that they're not seriously pushing for this is flawed. Yes, they've hired expensive lobbyists, but that's not all they're doing. They've put up their own campaigns ("Makers vs. Takers" I believe they called it) and are pushing their own employees into supporting it.

Moreover, they have quite a bit of political support in this administration. They've got everyone from the RIAA lawyers now in top Justice Department spots, the new Copyright Czar, the US Trade Representative (who negotiated ACTA), several members of the House Judiciary Committee (who are sponsors of this bill), and Vice President Biden.

Don't underestimate their ability or willingness to pass crazy laws.

<comment><USER86> Here's the Makers vs Takers video. Replete with scary music and "The Daily Show has been watched x million times.. illegally" (because Comedy Central doesn't let the whole world watch it on their website? I watch it there and sit through their ads. What's not working about that? Oh, I know. Sometimes my net connection might suck. If I hypothetically can't watch it streaming in RT I might look for other options.)

<http://www.viacom.com/news/Pages/anti-piracy.html>

<comment><USER87> It's a well made video, actually. I felt moved by it, at least a little bit.

I think hackers in tech industry should start making similar videos for our own, arguing against SOPA. For that thing, we indeed do have the technology, and we have the expertise.

<comment><USER88> I was almost moved, but it's so obviously manipulative in other ways that it's kind of sickening. I'm not sure we have the stomach for competing on that level.

<comment><USER87> It doesn't have to be manipulative. Just informative and moving. Truth doesn't have to be manipulative to move people.

<comment><USER88> It doesn't have to be, but in this case, it is.

They've made a large part of this about the common working man, when that's clearly not the motivation behind this video. They did it because they're pandering to their audience, who cares about that.

Throw in repeated South Park and other brand cameos for broad based appeal and an instant emotional connection (I have a hard time believing that Matt Stone and Trey Parker support this given their history of railing on people who complain about piracy as the reason they can't make money).

Finally, add in a lot of questionable statistics.

Basically, it's too carefully crafted for maximum impact to be or feel authentic. It's professional work and half truths masquerading as heartfelt interviews. That's why I say it's manipulative.

<comment><USER87> You're right, it is. What I meant is that the tech industry doesn't have to copy the 'manipulativeness' to make a convincing videos against SOPA.

<comment><USER88> Oh I see, sorry for misunderstanding you. You're probably right. It can be hard to make a strictly factual video have the same emotional impact, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> "Silicone Valley." Yep, Waters sure sounds informed.

<comment><USER78> Or how about "Solidan O'Brien"

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> "If we could get Google to index those sites [iTunes over the Pirate Bay] in a way that favored legitimacy..."

Hey, duck duck go might get some real legs if they work this one out =)

<comment><USER20> That sort of intentional favoritism could lead to legal action for search engines. It's happened before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Is there any silver lining here? Despite the over whelming feeling of disgust I have for these godgie old farts running this country who think they know a damn thing about the Internet, I can't help but wonder if passage of this bill would finally ignite adoption of a better success to the Internet. Something where security and privacy are baked in from the beginning and not an add-on.

</comment><comment><USER91> Are these hearings that house.gov streams archived somewhere? If not, why?

<comment><USER92> I can not find an archive of it.. arg!

<comment><USER91> Some House hearings are archived at judiciary.edgeboss.net. But not this one.

Some House hearings have transcripts at judiciary.house.gov/hearings/transcripts/. But not this one.

I decided to read the bill instead. I highly recommend it. The definitions alone are worth the read.

What if content is not addressed to a "location"?

What if there is no "site"?

What if a network is not accesible to the public?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> "It's time to try something." "It's time to move."

Not if it means breaking the Internet.</comment>


Show HN: CX_DB8 - A state of the art, biasable, word-level extractive summarizer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I wrote this in my spare time, originally aimed at the American Competitive Policy Debate community (though it's applicable to anyone) - <USER2> notes.

1\. No one seems to have made anything like this (queryable, word level extractive summarization) , and I was pissed because when I was doing competitive debate I really wanted this tool (I spent days doing this stupud underlining and highlighting of evidence that I'd like back).

2\. This is also equivalent to a "Semantic Search" engine. I've seriously thought of trying to write a word2vec powered ctrl-F replacement for a web- browser. I'm convinced that CX_DB8 is proof that this could be neat.

3\. While my idea of making a tool that can make any document "say what I want it to say" was cool, the reality is that it's kinda hard to make it look like a document says the opposite of what it naturally says. To a word vector model, "X is bad" and "X is good" are usually very similar, meaning that the summaries given for each query are very similar.

4\. Is there anything I could improve? I feel like there's gotta be something better than Cosine Similarity and mean pooling for the creation of document vectors out of word vectors. I saw something implying that TF-IDF weighting doesn't help - which sucks - so I'm skeptical.

Thank you to all the people who contributed the packages that makes CX_DB8 possible</comment>


The Virtual Revolution (BBC iplayer link) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qn37q/hd/The_Virtual_Revolution_The_Great_Levelling/

<comment><USER2> I watched this and was very disappointed. Not recommended - go build something instead.</comment>


Keep Bananas Fresh Longer - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5967424/keep-bananas-fresh-longer-by-separating-them-and-wrapping-the-stems-in-plastic-wrap <comment><USER2> A less confusing article about the same solution:

[http://lifehacker.com/5967424/keep-bananas-fresh-longer- by-s...](http://lifehacker.com/5967424/keep-bananas-fresh-longer-by- separating-them-and-wrapping-the-stems-in-plastic-wrap)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. We changed to that from [http://awareness- time.com/?p=4195](http://awareness-time.com/?p=4195).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read it twice and didn't see the actual solution. The picture shows plastic wrap on the stem. I've seen that at some groceries and didn't know what it was form

</comment><comment><USER5> What a weird article, it spends more time describing links to the science than the actual solution. Is this some new form of scheming/optimizing search engine rank by quoting and linking a lot of tangentially related academic topics?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My apologies for posting a poorly written article. I came across it through Prismatic ([http://getprismatic.com/](http://getprismatic.com/)). From my understanding their content is curated directly by them and not the users.

Just as @jeroen has commented, here is a less confusing article giving the same solution: [http://lifehacker.com/5967424/keep-bananas-fresh-longer- by-s...](http://lifehacker.com/5967424/keep-bananas-fresh-longer-by- separating-them-and-wrapping-the-stems-in-plastic-wrap)

<comment><USER6> The posted article is just a cropped (and possibly plagiarised) copy of the one linked at the end of the Lifehacker one:

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Keep-Bananas-Fresh-Longer- sl...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Keep-Bananas-Fresh-Longer-slices- too/?ALLSTEPS)

It seems that whoever tried to copy the article didn't read it and forgot to include the steps.

<comment><USER7> Scroll down further and read the comments to the article at instructables.com. Someone tried the suggestion to cover the stems in plastic wrap and found that it did NOT work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So we can just tl;dr the better article a couple of people have posted and leave it at that: Keep Bananas Fresh Longer by Separating Them and Wrapping the Stems in Plastic Wrap (that's the headline from the better article).

</comment><comment><USER9> Banana's are best eaten at the instant in time when the brown spots cover the peel like freckles and are just about to make contact with each other. Why anyone would want to delay this moment is beyond my comprehension.

<comment><USER10> Banana on the right is proper ripeness. The one on the left is unripe and tannic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Holy moley, the initial scrolling on that site is horrible.

</comment><comment><USER12> _EDIT_ : jeroen's post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093790)) links to a better article.

tl;dr (as PeterWhittaker suggests): "Keep Bananas Fresh Longer by Separating Them and Wrapping the Stems in Plastic Wrap".

\----- ORIGINAL GRIPING SESSION -----

NOTE: Just for context (so this comment doesn't look quite so silly as it now does :))... The post originally linked to awareness-time.com/?p=4195

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

So... am I right in my assumption that the picture of the bananas is a demonstration of this "simple way"? (With the intent of covering the stem with plastic wrap being for the purpose of minimizing exposure to gases that speed the process up?)

It's not made explicitly clear in the blog entry. In fact, the entry is very poorly structured. It...

1\. gives an anecdote about the bananas turning brown

2\. says there's a better way to slow the browning

3\. immediately jumps into a section it marks as "optional"

4\. starts the optional section with an ad

5\. begins actual optional content with a short blurb

6\. _finally_ shows the picture (is this optional??)

7\. follows it all up with the _actual_ "optional" science

All without at least a short text explanation of the "simple way". You don't need complicated words to explain that processes occurring at the stem speed up the ripening effect, and that an easy way around that is to cover the stem with plastic wrap... so why is such a simple explanation omitted? Yes, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but when placed poorly, makes for a very confusing thousand words.</comment>


Building maintainable Angular 2 applications - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/curated-by-versett/building-maintainable-angular-2-applications-5b9ec4b463a1 <comment><USER2> Check out this article- [https://goo.gl/EuDH5w](https://goo.gl/EuDH5w) . I hope this article is helpful for your knowledge.</comment>


Show HN: How Will We Explore Books in the 21st Century? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those who want to go straight to the demo, it's at [https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/](https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/)</comment>


Using the TypeScript type system to validate Express handlers - <AUTHOR> http://federicoferoldi.com/2017/12/28/using-the-typescript-type-system-to-validate-express-handlers.html <comment><USER2> I closed it at IResponse, IResponseJson, IResponseOkJson, IResponseNotFound, IResponseOk

<comment><AUTHOR> hi there, author here, love to hear your feedback about the approach!</comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds proposes a change to the Git commit object format - <AUTHOR> http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/threads.html#161308

<comment><USER2> OK, finally found a decent explanation of what a Git generation number actually IS:

<http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg161165.html>

<comment><USER3> So it's almost, but not quite, like the revision numbers everyone else has always had?

<comment><USER4> Yes -- almost, but not quite. If you and I each create a branch off of a commit with gen #123, then, as I understand it, the subsequent commits in my branch would be #124, #125, etc., and your commits in your branch would _also_ be #124, #125, etc.

Contrast this with CVS, where I would have 18.104.22.168, 22.214.171.124, erc., and you would have 220.127.116.11, 22.214.171.124, or with Subversion, where I might get revisions 125, 128, and 129, while the server gave your commits #124, 127 and 130, and someone else, on a totally different part of the project got #126.

As long as development proceeds linearly, on a single branch, then yeah, it's about the save as revision numbers in a centralized RCS -- once you start branching and merging, though, it represents a different concept entirely.

<comment><USER5> For a single repository, it does have a very similar interpretation to, say, svn revnos.

You can speak of "revision #125 of a branch" in a specific repository. Which is generally exactly what you need for human-to-human communication about development.

"Can you see if that bug is in r125 of unstable?" "I've got all changes up to r245 of prod"

I guess the confusing aspect would be if "r245 of prod" in the central server was "r100 of prod" in my local repo because I haven't cloned the full history?

<comment><USER6> It would appear to me that multiple commits in a branch can have the same generation number (see the diagram in <http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg161165.html> ). So unless your history is linear, using generation numbers in human-to-human communication may get confusing really fast.

<comment><USER5> In that diagram, I see 2 sequences of commits (two branches).

The 'original branch' (e.g. "unstable") goes: 0,1,2,5,6

Then there is a topic branch (e.g. "add-frob"), which goes: (0,1),2,3,4,(5). Note that I consider the the 'add-frob' branch ended at the merge commit, so there is no "revno 6 of 'add-frob').

I don't consider that merging 'add-frob' back into unstable means that "revno 2 in unstable" could mean commit D - I would call commit D "revno 2 in add- frob".

Does that system work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I like about git is that it stores only the minimum amount of information, and this makes it easy to explain. A commit hash is a hash of canonical information, not of derived information.

It seems really ugly to store derived information in a commit (specifically, that the hash would be altered by it).

It seems that Jeff has said the same thing, but Linus disagrees. Vocally.

<http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg161336.html>

<comment><USER8> From my understanding, they're essentially adding this as an additional bit of information that's minimally required. The currently used timestamps are error prone and thus will be replaced by generation numbers which are more robust. They're still adhering to the principle of only storing the minimum amount of information, they're just adding generation numbers to that set.

In fact, you could make the argument that _timestamps_ are the derived information that git has been storing all along while generation numbers are the canonical information which should have been stored from the beginning. Generation numbers are a result of the state of the tree, while timestamps are derived from the ambient (and potentially incorrect!) environment from which the commit was made.

<comment><USER7> Well, generation numbers can be determined by counting up through parent commits. So they are derived information, it's just that that takes ages and lots of disk seeks to count through.

Timestamps aren't really needed. They are information that is useful to use that we want to store, just like the date in an email. Thus they are as required as the names of the author and committer.

The reason for the discussion about the commit timestamps is (AIUI) a heuristic optimisation that works because they happen to be there and happen to (most of the time) be in order.

<comment><USER8> By that definition of "derived information", the hash is "derived information" since it's based of the changes made to source data (whatever that data may be).

That said, point taken about the necessity of both generation numbers and timestamps. But that invalidates the OPs comment about git storing "only the minimum amount of information". It sounds like that's never been a hard principle.

<comment><USER9> git does store "only the minimum amount of information".

Here's what Linus had to say about it:

> Generation numbers are _completely_ redundant with the actual structure

> of history represented by the parent pointers.

Not true. That's only true if you add ".. if you parse the whole history" to that statement.

And we've _never_ parsed the whole history, because it's just too expensive and doesn't scale. So right now we depend on commit dates with a few hacks.

So no, generation numbers are not at all redundant. They are fundamental. It's why we had this discussion six years ago.

From: <http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg161348.html>

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the background! (Seriously, not trying to be snarky.)

That info does support my original point that generational numbers probably should have been stored from the start and timestamps are the more "derivative" bit of information since it comes from the environment and not the data itself.

Thus, rlpb's concern that storing generational numbers pollutes its design of storing "only the minimum amount of information" isn't necessarily well founded, since the generational number might be more minimal and correct than the current timestamp. That was the aim of my original post: generational info is fundamental, not extraneous derived info, and probably have been stored with commits in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't generally come across Linus' dev threads, but it's usually in the context of some linkbaity 'watch Linus smack this dude down' or something of that nature.

This reads like a really productive thread from my limited understanding of git internals. It's pretty cool how much good engineering thought is going into this proposal.

Maybe that's why git rocks so hard.

<comment><USER11> Minor smackdown from this thread here: [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version- control.git/1771...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version- control.git/177186)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah! I knew I was going to stumble upon Linus' signature "that's total and utter bullshit" somewhere: <http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg161348.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the suggestion of storing the generation numbers in the pack index. When you generate a pack you're already parsing the entire tree. That makes more sense than requiring all future git objects to have 'generation numbers' jammed into them. Especially because it introduces an incompatibility with current git objects, which it would probably be best to avoid.

</comment><comment><USER14> What operations would be sped up by having generation numbers?

I see Jeff King's message that they would make certain bounding traversals faster, but when do bounding traversals need to be computed when I'm using git day-to-day?

<comment><USER15> It's also about making git not error-prone, which the current timestamp approach seems to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Change last name to 'Torvalds' (edit: name in title changed)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was wondering how they got along without generation numbers for so long. It was by comparing timestamps and those are unreliable because systems can be misconfigured. How they are going to handle legacy repos with that problem I still don't get. I am guessing that history is f'd.

<comment><USER18> New versions of git will actually go back and generate this information for old commits. This will lead to git being slightly slower when in old repositories until all the commits contain the generation information, but that should happen fairly quickly.

<comment><USER17> I was talking about the case where the timestamps are off. I don't think there is any way to fix that.

<comment><USER19> You just go the whole way up to the root node counting parents (taking max length when there are many routes), no problem with amiguity. The problem is - it's slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Can someone explain what generation numbers are? Googling "git generation numbers" pulls up mostly this discussion thread.

I'm assuming they're easy-to-remember incremental numbers tied to commit? Like 1, 2, 3, or tied to commit and branch, like master/1, etc.?

<comment><USER20> Here is how I understand the problem.

At the moment, each commit stores a reference to the parent tree. By parsing that tree and reading the entire history you can obtain a hierarchy of commits. Because you need to order commits in many situations, reading the entire history is extremely inefficient, so git uses timestamps to determine the ordering of commits. This of course fails if the system clock on a given machine is off. With a generation number, you can get an ordering locally from the latest commits, without having to rely on timestamps or read the entire tree.

When you have a commit with generation n, any later commits that include it wound have generation >n, so to tell the relation between commits, you only need look as far back as n, and you can immediately get the order of any intermediate commits. It has nothing to do with "easy to remember". It's about making git more efficient and robust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why call it a "generation number" and not "depth"?

<comment><USER22> Think they're using "generation" here in the context of number of parents (yes, "depth" would work fine as well, but is a more general term)

<comment><USER13>
      > number of parents

s/parents/ancestors/

But that statement only holds up on branches without any merge commits. Because the actual algorithm does not just total up the number of ancestors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd love an explanation of what "generation numbers" are.

<comment><USER24> Looking at the diff, it seems like a generation number is just a number the parents that a commit has. For example:

Commit a553af has no parents, it has generation number of 0.

Commit c464e0 is the next commit, it has generation number 1.

And so on. Branches count independently of one another. When commits have multiple parents (e.g. merges), the generation number starts counting from the previous maximum.

<comment><USER13>
      > just a number the parents that a commit has

It's the max length from a commit to reach a root node in the graph. So any time that you hit a fork in the path you take the longest route.</comment></comment></comment>


Pomotodo Combines Pomodoro with a To-Do List that Tracks Your Progress - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/pomotodo-combines-pomodoro-with-a-to-do-list-that-track-1604536855

<comment><USER2> Downloaded. _Really_ like the fact that it lets you run through a working demo without registering. The whole thing works very smoothly, and I think I have a new favorite app.</comment>


Case Study: Using Historical Transaction Data to Reduce Chargebacks - <AUTHOR> https://blog.maxmind.com/2016/01/04/case-study-using-historical-transaction-data-to-reduce-chargebacks/ <comment><USER2> I've worked in fraud prevention for large e-commerce sites for the last decade. Surprised these types of stories are still noteworthy enough to trigger a blog post by Maxmind.

However I'd love if this triggered some comments and questions from people who are interested in this kind of thing.

<comment><USER3> yeah, i'd figure most large sites have automated processes for this too, often with at least some machine learning stuff.

doing the analysis and cancellations manually in excel, without backtesting, feels super irresponsible (she tested it in production!!)

"How could Jenn be sure that the transactions she was canceling were fraudulent transactions? Jenn anticipated that legitimate customers would complain; however, she never heard from anyone whose transactions were canceled for this reason."

wat

<comment><USER2> A large number of e-commerce shops still rely on heuristics (rules of thumb) to manage their fraud risk. Accertify is a major software vendor in the e-commerce space and their framework doesn't incorporate machine learning. Their sales pitch is that they give tons of flexibility to write a rule that adds or subtracts point from the score. My response was always how do I know how many points this rule should be? Once you look under the hood at most shops you see that everything is + or - 1 million and essentially the scoring engine becomes a simple pass/fail engine.

The super-majors like Amazon are heavy into machine learning and rebuild some of their models daily. But even with their prowess they still had a thousand people doing manual investigation a couple of years ago. One subtle signal that you have triggered their fraud system is that they will ask you to renter your card number.</comment></comment></comment>


What are valid intellectual professions? - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoinrevolt.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/what-are-valid-intellectual-professions <comment><USER2> "Software construction itself is immune to replacement by software, because software can generally not be constructed by other software." \- I stopped reading after that sentence.</comment>


How we use BEM to modularise our CSS - <AUTHOR> https://m.alphasights.com/how-we-use-bem-to-modularise-our-css-82a0c39463b0#.epb79vkom <comment><USER2> Moved to something like BEM recently, liking it so far, I think I saw this article when I was looking at an alternative to the tarpit.</comment>


Spanish publishers move to halt Google News closure - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/spanish-publishers-move-to-halt-google-news-closure/

<comment><USER2> Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ok, I agree that is a bit mean. But seriously folks, a snippet is not a 'royalty worthy' bit of a copyrighted work. But getting your traffic from Google, now THAT has some value. So the publishers are finally figuring out that this equation is "Publisher gives rights to publish snippets created by Google on its Google News page, Google publishes those and sends the resulting traffic to the publishers site IF SOMEONE CLICKS ON IT."

There alternative is to pay some web site to put their snippets on it and train users to go to _that_ site to figure out if they want to visit the paper's web site. Not going to be cheap for the publishers, that is for sure.</comment>


Ask HN: How to help a friend find her first tech job? - <AUTHOR>

A close friend of mine has decided to take a career shift from QA and started learning web development basics after I recommended it.
She loved it, she learned HTML, CSS some basic JavaScript and even started with PHP.
She feels (and I agree) she is ready for a job (junior / intern), but it's hard for me to help her out as it seems the job market has only 2 types of roles, which she doesn't fit fully into one of them yet.
One is Web Developer / Front End Developer - she can be a great one, but she needs to start somewhere, and she knows HTML / CSS enough to be productive, but not enough JavaScript to do well without a mentor
The other is Web Designer - seemed to me the best description, but it seems that in most of the job posting it is also required to have some graphic design or UX (or copyright) skills, which she might have but not yet sure it's what she is good at / want to do (and doesn't have experience at it beyond knowing how to open a PSD and make it into well written HTML/CSS)
So I'm wondering what should be her next route
1) Learn some aesthetics / UX somewhere, design some websites on her own, get a portfolio and go the "Designer" path?
2) Or if she finds out the world is not ready yet for her creative design ideas, try the coding route and try to improve her PHP / Ruby / Python / JavaScript by doing some "full time side projects"  and go the "Developer" route
3) Or, what I hope is the right option, not worry about it, find any job that will allow her to pursue either 1 or 2 (most agencies, startups and even enterprises probably have both) as HTML/CSS is enough of a skill to get something going (at least for entry level roles)
But if 3 is the right way, then how? What job title should she look for? in what sites? (Dice? Indeed?) what should she put in her resume? Does she need a portfolio? (e.g. do some free websites for friends and neighbors) or is that unnecessary.
Does she need to open a GitHub account (but what would she put there)? Does she need to have some Stackoverflow presence? Is having a HN account going to help? any of these are relevant? or just adding a very small icing to your cake if at all? does she need a twitter account? start following potential employers? any suggestions are welcome <comment><USER2> I'd get her set up with a GitHub account and have her start improving open source software.

There are also a number of companies doing 'developer boot camp' <http://devbootcamp.com/>

Some of the dev camps will charge a nominal $10k-$20k but will take consulting referral fee and pay for the boot camp costs if you get placed by one of their recruiters.</comment>


Real-Life Schrödinger's Cats Probe the Boundary of the Quantum World - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/real-life-schrodingers-cats-probe-the-boundary-of-the-quantum-world-20180625/ <comment><USER4> Hey everyone! This is similar to work I do in my PhD. Feel free to ask me any questions! (I believe Ralf, the first author of the paper cited in the article, will likely come to my group for a postdoc)

<comment><USER5> I wonder, is there any science that making conscious decisions could be related to quantum mechanics? The mechanics of both feel similar to me.

<comment><USER6> The connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics is in the same realm as chemtrails and homeopathy.

<comment><USER7> Not quite. The measurement problem only exists because of this recognition that I only _experience_ one outcome. The key word is _experience_.

Contrary to the author's loose writing, Schrodinger's Cat (and environment) _is_ in a superposition before it entangles with me. Decoherence (which is just a name for really complicated entanglement) does not change that; it only makes it hard to _demonstrate_ the superposition.

And yet, after _I_ entangle with it, I am no longer free to treat the system as a superposition. If you try to pin down when "I entangle with it," you will notice yourself trying to make precise when "I experience it." Clearly these problems are linked.

To quote Ed Witten:

> _I'm not going to attempt to define consciousness, in a way that's connected > with the fact that I don't believe it will become part of physics. And that > has to do, I think, with the mysteries that bother a lot of people about > quantum mechanics and its applications to the universe._

> _Quantum mechanics kind of has an all-embracing property, that to completely > make sense it has to be applied to everything in sight, including > ultimately, the observer. But trying to apply quantum mechanics to ourselves > makes us extremely uncomfortable. Especially because of our consciousness, > which seems to clash with that idea. So we're left with a disquiet > concerning quantum mechanics, and its applications to the universe. And I do > not believe that disquiet will go away. If anything, I suspect that it will > acquire new dimensions._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the article...

> _Schrödinger's point was not, as often implied, the apparent absurdity of > quantum mechanics if extrapolated up to the everyday scale._

And a few paragraphs down:

> _Schrödinger wanted to show how Bohr's notion that nothing is fixed until it > is measured could lead to logical absurdity if we imagined blowing > entanglement up to everyday size._

<comment><USER9> There's a subtle difference between the two statements that is more clear if you read the entire article.

He's saying that Schrödinger didn't think that _quantum mechanics_ in its entirety was absurd at everyday scales, only that the indeterminacy prior to measurement led to absurdities.

<comment><USER10> ... except that the cat _was_ the measurement device...

<comment><USER11> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you may be placing special importance on the cat as a measuring device because it is conscious (at least until poisoned). If we assumed that consciousness has nothing to do with measurement, and that two particles interacting is enough for decoherence of one particle relative to another, the cat isn't a measuring device any more than the many constituent atoms in a bucky ball are. If a bucky ball can be in a state of coherence, why not a cat?

I know Schrödinger meant for his thought experiment to be obviously absurd, but I think he may have been underestimating the absurdity of the universe and thus accidentally proposing an entirely possible contraption that could not be feasibly built in his own time.

<comment><USER12> The radiation detector is a valid measuring device. The hammer that smashes the vial of poison is a valid output device. The cat is a valid observer. But even the cat and the hammer are redundant - the radiation detector is enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Many Worlds helps explain how wave-particle duality could be plausible in some sense. How does one explain non locality????

<comment><USER14> When learning quantum mechanics, you have to let go of the commonly-held belief (often unknown to the holder) that everything in our world can be explained in terms of concepts that are familiar to us and our human-sized environment. You cannot reason your way through QM with classical analogies. You find the wave-particle duality confusing; why? Only because you cannot imagine a human-sized object that is both a particle and wave. Let go of both of those concepts - forget about particles and waves as you know them - <USER2> accept that QM objects fall into new ontological categories which do not map well onto any classical concept. This is fine! As a child, you learned new ontological categories all the time. Everything was alien to you. You've learned new categories before, and you can learn them again.

If we cannot use the language of everyday experience to understand quantum mechanics, what can we use? The answer is math. We have found math to be an incredibly effective language for describing quantum mechanical phenomena. Superposition isn't really like a particle being "in two different places at the same time", it's a complex linear combination of state 0 and state 1. There are differences between those things, and the differences are fundamental to understanding quantum mechanics.

A corollary to the inability to meaningfully explain QM with classical analogies is that all pop science dealing with QM is absolute, irredeemable garbage and always will be. Stop reading it.

<comment><USER15> Just to somewhat gently push back on this a little bit, math is probably not enough if you want someone to really get how quantum mechanics work at a fundamental level.

So quantum superposition isn't just two things at the same time, it's a complex equation that combines the two states. Great. Except that non-math majors don't think of linear equations as a singular 'thing' that describes a state. That in itself is a huge paradigm shift for people like me. I'm not used to having an axis in an equation not refer to a continuous range that I can move through.

There's a comic[0] on this springs to mind, that being able to plug equations into something is not the same as understanding it. Most tutorials or technical articles I read about quantum mechanics skip concepts and assume that showing the math is enough. In doing so, they skip all of the hard, useful parts of education and focus only on the language and terminology we can use to talk about something.

I spent a lot of time in physics, statistics, and calculus where I understood the math and not the concepts. I graphed things in 4 dimensions before I encountered Flatland, but I didn't understand the 4th dimension before Flatland. I worked with complex numbers all the time in calculus, but I didn't start to understand complex numbers until years later when I started watching Numberphile.

So I'm at least a little bit skeptical of claims that that quantum mechanics are different. We've had to build new paradigms to understand a lot of stuff in the past; concepts like infinity don't map to tangible analogies, but we can still build tutorials and scenarios that demonstrate interesting behaviors and properties.

Right now the only people I can find trying to do that for quantum are the pop-science writers, and like you said they're mostly all crap. It's kind of frustrating.

[0]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20120206011811im_/http://zs1.smb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120206011811im_/http://zs1.smbc- comics.com/comics/20100620.gif)

<comment><USER14> I think quantum mechanics really is different. Consider a fundamental aspect of the quantum world, familiar to anybody reading Scott Aaronson's blog: the 2-norm.

People are familiar with how probability works in the classical world. For a given event with several different possible outcomes, like flipping a coin, the probability of those outcomes sums to 1 (here, 1/2 + 1/2 = 1).

In the quantum world, probability doesn't work like that. Rather, the _sum of the absolute value of the probability squared_ equals one. A quantum coin flip has probability (actually called amplitude) 1/sqrt(2) for heads and 1/sqrt(2) for tails. |1/sqrt(2)|^2 + |1/sqrt(2)|^2 = 1.

This has huge implications. It means probabilities can be _negative_ , since |-1/sqrt(2)|^2 + |-1/sqrt(2)|^2 = 1 (actually it goes further - <USER3> probabilities can be complex numbers!). It means negative probabilities can interfere and cancel out positive probabilities. And a whole bunch of other wild stuff. All of quantum mechanics (or so Scott claims) follows from this.

I submit that a world where something as basic as the probabilities of all outcomes summing to 1 not holding is a world so alien that attempts to explain it in terms of our own experience will only end in confusion.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but we don't need to explain everything in terms of our world to still try to explain concepts. We can use contradictions, or games[0], or experiments, or any number of mechanisms.

Infinity doesn't really map to anything else that I understand. Some of the better tutorials I've gotten on infinity are literally just saying, "hey, look at this scenario. Do you think it works the same way as with really big numbers? Well it DOESN'T! Now watch me shove even more guests into your hotel! :)"

I'm not pushing back against the idea that quantum mechanics is a completely new paradigm, I'm pushing back against the idea that math, by itself, is a good enough mechanism for teaching new paradigms.

The math/pop-science dichotomy actually reminds me a bit of my early physics lessons on electricity. I'd either get a really awful analogy (electricity is just like water flowing through a pipe), or I'd get the formula to add up the resistors and calculate voltage and then get told, "well, this is all you're going to need to know for the test."

Neither approach was concerned with understanding how electricity worked; one just said "think of it as something else", and the other said "don't think about it."

[0]: [http://www.4dtoys.com/](http://www.4dtoys.com/)

<comment><USER16> The problem is that our best way to describe QM is using math, and the experiments can only verify that the predictions made with math agree with the results.

There are many interpretations of what the math mean, like many words or wave function collapse. But the interpretations are equivalent, in any experiment they use the same math to get the same results.

So you may like one interpretation or the other, but the only sure part is the math.

Games, analogies, think experiments are nice and are useful to understand how to apply the math and get an intuitive idea of how the math work and how some approximations may simplify the calculations.

I still sometimes move my finger in circles to think and do calculations about spin, in spite the spin of a particle is not exactly equal to the spin of a ball. It's a nice analogy and (for me) it's useful, but the real particles don't behave like balls or moving finger.

Another important part is to understand how to translate an actual lab setup to math and how to relate the result of the calculation and the experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ain't this me?

</comment><comment><USER7> > If you simply stick a cat in a box and link its fate to the outcome of some > quantum event, you're not likely to put it in a superposition of alive and > dead, because decoherence will almost instantly force it into one state or > the other.

This is a non-sequitur. Decoherence will not force it into one state, but merely prevent us (in practice, but crucially not in principle) from detecting interference between the two states. It is still in a superposition.

When am I required to stop treating it as a superposition? When it entangles with _me_. From the MWI perspective, there are then two copies of me, and each must say that there is no superposition. In other words, from "my" perspective, the superposition ends precisely with me.

Which part of "me"? My toe? My nose? No, clearly it has something to do with my consciousness. A materialist might say that consciousness is a strictly physical process, and when the relevant components entangle with the system, that is when the superposition ends (from my perspective). An idealist might say that consciousness is the very fabric of reality, and so it's obvious that "becoming conscious of an outcome" and that outcome becoming real are one and the same event.

Nonetheless, once this happens, nobody in "my world" can demonstrate interference, even in principle. In this precise sense, you do occupy a unique role in what you call "your world."

<comment><USER10> Even though it is possible to treat macroscopic objects as quantum systems, the _science_ of quantum mechanics finds it necessary to continue to treat them classically; it is an interaction of a quantum particle with a classical object that constitutes "measurement." The cat is merely such a measurement device.

<comment><USER7> But crucially, it is _two_ branches, _each_ evolving classically. It is true that this system will obey the same statistics as a classically indeterminate one, but claiming that it's now a single classical system is disingenuous. It's a great place to sweep the measurement problem under the rug.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: memcubed, a simple memory game - <AUTHOR> http://kyleconroy.github.io/memcubed

<comment><AUTHOR> My first game using Unity. Nothing impressive, but in only took a day. If you don't have the Unity webplayer, download links are in the README[0].

[0]: [https://github.com/kyleconroy/memcubed](https://github.com/kyleconroy/memcubed)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice! I like it. it would be cool if you had a counter that showed how many rounds you have made it though.</comment>


Too Many People Dare Call It Conspiracy - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/14/too-many-people-dare-call-it-conspiracy/ <comment><USER2> My conspiracy theories are " _reasonable hypotheses_ ," yours are " _deranged_." Better luck next time!</comment>


The Evil Zynga - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/the-evil-zynga/

<comment><USER2> I think I know how this went down:

Mark Pincus: Hey Mike, since you know we're in our IPO quiet period, can you write a rebuttal to that NYTimes article for me? I'll give you an interview or let you invest in my next deal.

Michael Arrington: Sure thing! You better speak at my next conference!

Mark Pincus: Okay, here are some talking points:

      - Blame everything on EA.
      - I actually think we offer too many perks, point that out
      - I think Roger McNamee is still upset I never let him invest, so he's basically just a sore loser

Can you be sure to include that in the article?

Michael Arrington: This looks great! It will go well with my other piece defending your terrible labor practices!

Mark Pincus: You're the best.

<comment><USER3> The NYTimes article was rather bizarre, with all the EA references and connections. (And EA Spouse worked at Zynga! hah)

Mike as linked called out Zynga for their scams, which are arguably worse than being hard on employees.

<comment><USER2> Maybe everyone aside from those at EA are too afraid of Pincus to say anything? If you're in the Valley, you know what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER4> And if you're not in the Valley?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldn't it make sense if you're writing an article on Zynga to talk to and use as a point of comparison the other giant player in the video game industry, EA? I don't know, feels pretty reasonable to me. If I'm doing a story on Google Search I'd probably want a quote from someone at Bing...

<comment><USER6> Is Zynga anywhere close to EA in any relevant measure, like revenue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In domestic abuse cases between wife and husband where the man is abusing the wife. The reason the wife doesn't get help sooner is because she is trained to focus on the good. This process can cause a phenomenon where the man only abuses the wife and does nothing good, yet she will focus on inconsequential things as she lives in complete denial.

I see pincus as manufacturing this situation where the employees are the abused yet thankful wife.

<comment><USER8> But they get free acupuncture and organic food!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Zynga and EA are douchey, hardly news.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yet another example of the kind of abuse of power that writers for "well respected" publications get away with all the time. That shitty NY Times article would have been ignored/laughed at on its own, but hosted on nytimes.com it becomes credible and generally beyond reproach. A permanent black mark on Zynga's reputation.

Now Arrington reveals that it's essentially a hitjob by scorned investors and direct competitors. Big fucking surprise.

All hail independent writers. Down with "well respected" media brands.

<comment><USER6> > Now Arrington reveals that it's essentially a hitjob by scorned investors > and direct competitors.

He reveals nothing of the kind. It's speculation.

And frankly, the chummy relationships in the Valley itself are really no better. Plus, Arrington's entire schtick as a startup blogger/investor depends on a frothy startup environment, which another dud IPO--namely Zynga--would directly endanger.

<comment><USER11> Arrington in particular has a well-deserved reputation for ignoring good journalistic practices, writing and publishing hit pieces on startups that don't jump through hoops when he asks them to, and similar doesn't he?</comment></comment></comment>


Where to Submit Your Cyber Security Paper - <AUTHOR> http://timkrause.me/post/wheretosubmit/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am looking for the right conference to submit my Master Thesis research to and in the process I though it would be a good idea to have a list of research-focused security conferences. Did I miss an important conference? Do you have comments for one of the listed conferences?</comment>


D-Day: How a British Oceanographer's Invention Decided Normandy's Fate - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.com/article/45649-d-day-tide-predicting-machine <comment><USER2> Now _that 's_ an exaggerated title. The headline on the page has "74 Years Ago, a Brilliant Invention Decided When D-Day Would Occur" not "Decided Normandy's Fate". I was under the impression that hundreds of thousands of people fought in that battle? Did they not influence the outcome somewhat?

<comment><USER3> One could argue that what really decided Normandy's fate, and the fate of all of occupied France, was Operation Bagration, the real gut-punch that smashed the Wehrmacht and broke them, hundreds of miles to the east.

The scale and savagery of war on the eastern front is so mind boggingly incomprehensible, and relatively unknown for an English-speaking audience. If you have not, I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Ghosts of the Ostfront series of podcasts, to get even a sense of the insanity.

The western front was, in totality, almost a sideshow in comparison to the titanic, inhuman struggle raging from Black to Baltic seas.

<comment><USER4> The same goes for WWI. I'm not downplaying the horrors and scale of the Marne, Somme and Aisne, but the siege of Przemyśl, the battle of Lemberg were comparable yet not nearly as infamous.

When we think of WWI we think of the trenches in Belgium and northern France. Sure, Belgium was hit pretty hard (120,000 casualties, about 1,7% of population) but compare that to Serbia: 1 million casualties, a staggering 25% of population... and most people don't even realize that Serbia was affected by the war in the first place.

<comment><USER3> The austro-hungarian war, and its futility is also incredible - I don't have the title now, but I've read something outlining their mobilization plan up to Tannenberg. The whole Balkans region that started the conflagration is so confusing and bloody...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its an impressive example of human knowledge and ingenuity, although the article does get a little overly dramatic with it.

Perhaps that's a side effect of how crowded that period of history is with these kinds of things. It's hard to look at any date range between 1939-1945 and not find at least one or two accomplishments which seem almost impossible for the time and technology.

<comment><USER6> I'm watching WWII in color and when they got to late 1944 and the rockets, I was pretty floored. I thought, "holy crap that was close. Imagine what could have been if they had mature rocketry even just five years earlier..."

<comment><USER7> Not much. The V-2's guidance system was primitive, and so where it hit was fairly random. Force has to be concentrated on targets of military value to be effective.

Consider the vastly more bombs dropped on Germany day and night, far more than V-2's ever could have dropped. Aside from destroying the oil infrastructure, it's hard to see the military value of destroying city after city, and that bombing was much more precise than the V-2s.

For rockets to be effective, one needs either precision guidance or a nuclear warhead.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking more about how rocketry leads to jet planes. But also, my understanding was that bombs were awfully inaccurate. Not that pre-gps long range missiles are any better. My understanding was that the ramjet rockets were pretty terrifying too and did hit cities often.

<comment><USER7> > did hit cities often

Randomly hitting a city has a very small chance of hitting anything with military value.

> terrifying

Sure, but it turns out that terrifying citizens tends to harden their resolve to fight on, rather than surrendering. On both sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a summary.

He built an analog computer that could predict tide levels. They wanted extreme tides so that at low tide the navy could map out the traps the Nazis left, and at high tide they could land lots of troops. It turned out that acceptable tide conditions happened on June 5, 6, and 7.

The actual invasion happened on June 6.

<comment><USER9> They also sent x subs mini 2/3 man subs to drop divers to take samples of the beach surfaces

<comment><USER10> They also collected as many postcards, maps, personal photos as they could, to build up photomosiac maps and models of the beaches.

Anthony Beevor talks about a lot of this stuff, as does Carlo D'Este and others. Great reads.

(my mum was an art college student at the time, and amongst other things she was drawing maps. My Aunt was doing technical drawings for the mulberry harbours. Everyone pitched in)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ok fine. The title is somewhat exaggerated.

Look at this story as another in a series of extreme efforts in 1943/1944 leading up to D-Day, the absence of which could have resulted in a different outcome. The portable Mulberry harbors. The Higgins boat. Operation Fortitude's ghost army. Juan Pujol's network of fictitious German agents. And even with all of those efforts, had Hitler decided to move Von Schweppenburg's panzers, D-Day would likely have failed.

So yeah, again, the title is a bit breathless, however it's not a stretch to say that much like at Incheon getting the tidal flows wrong would have significantly altered history.

<comment><USER7> The Allies had total air superiority, and the panzers would have had a very hard time against that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: Invest in blue-sky research since you might never know when you need it.

</comment><comment><USER13> What decided Normandy's fate was germany's lack of a navy and their air force and soldiers being locked down on the eastern front.

Germany had like 5K soldiers on the beach with no air and no naval support against the combined might of the US and UK.

D-Day was 200K US/UK soldiers + US/UK navy + US/UK air force vs 5K germany soldiers.

It was such a rout and easy victory that most of our casualties on that day was friendly fire and accidental drowning rather than germany bullets.

D-Day is so overplayed in our media. The real fighting was in the east.

<comment><USER14> The typical number for German combatants is closer to 50k, so I'm curious what your source is for 5k.

<comment><USER15> He also said "real fighting was in the east", so you can guess the source.

Edit: also the claim "most of our casualties on that day was friendly fire and accidental drowning" is pretty ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> > He also said "real fighting was in the east", so you can guess the source.

It's called stats.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_\(World_War_II\))

The vast majority of the german military and casualties, were in the eastern front.

> Edit: also the claim "most of our casualties on that day was friendly fire > and accidental drowning" is pretty ridiculous.

It's pretty much common sense. Considering the low number of german troops, the poor coordination on our side and of course the odds of accidents and friendly fire incidents. It's pretty much a statistical certainty that most of the deaths on D-Day were accidents and friendly fire. But lets throw out common sense and statistics out the window.

The germans had no navy. They had no air force. They had nothing. Against the might of the US and British power on D-Day. But we can pretend that the germans managed a 2 to 1 casualty victory. Or I'm sure that's what your "sources" will try to convince us.</comment></comment></comment></comment>