Vegetarian low protein diet could be key to long life - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6710896/Vegetarian-low-protein-diet-could-be-key-to-long-life.html

<comment><AUTHOR> People interested in caloric restriction, optimal nutrition (CRON), should find the latest research reported on in this article very interesting.

This article reports that a diet low in the amino acid menthionine is hypothesized to be the key to longevity in humans, rather than calorie restriction.

      …in a series of new experiments on fruit flies, scientists
      discovered that simply varying the mix of amino acids in
      the diet affected lifespan.

      *Further study revealed that one particular amino acid,
      methionine, made all the difference.*

      Although flies and people are very different, the
      researchers believe the effects are likely to be conserved
      throughout a wide range of different species including
      humans…

      "If it turns it has the same effect on humans, then the
      message is avoid high levels of methionine."

From Wikipedia:

      High levels of methionine can be found in sesame seeds,
      Brazil nuts, fish, meats and some other plant seeds. Most
      fruits and vegetables contain very little of it. Most
      legumes are also low in methionine.

<comment><USER2> Time to eat more veal and lamb :) The wikipedia article has a somewhat limited selection of example datapoints, but if you want a somewhat larger list I found the site <http://www.grubiq.com/> has a little widget that lets you select by nutrient, including methionine, to get a more complete list of foods and amounts.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In 2005, the below paper was published showing life extension in mice allegedly due to methionine restriction.

So the instant article would make it appear that at least some scientists think they are closer to showing a similar mechanism at work in humans.

From 2005, "Aging Cell" journal:

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15924568>

Methionine-deficient diet extends mouse lifespan, slows immune and lens aging, alters glucose, T4, IGF-I and insulin levels, and increases hepatocyte MIF levels and stress resistance.</comment>


The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-01-08.html <comment><USER3> For impatient types like myself:

Proposed flaw #1:

 _That is basically the first flaw of libertarianism: If you shrink the government down to nothing and have corporations in control then you won't have a rule of law._

Proposed flaw #2:

 _That leads me to the second flaw of libertarian economics: efficiency. ... economists use the term "efficiency" differently than programmers.

You see, most libertarians think of efficiency as "Fast! FAST FAST FAST!" They think it means lean and trim companies all working to gain the maximum profit with the least effort necessary._

\---

Of course, at no point does Mr. Shaw prove that libertarians think this way, but that would put a stick in his spokes, I suppose, and boy, is he riding quickly down the hill of psuedo-political invective.

And as for flaw #1, libertarianism is _not_ in any way, shape, or form, anarchy. Rather, libertarianism preaches that the government should be as small as practical.

<comment><USER4> You're right. Zed is confused.

Libertarianism is NOT Anarcho-Capitalism. Libertarianism advocates that the government should be reduced to the minimum which is necessary to protect the citizens' rights. Anarcho-Capitalism advocates that corporations should replace government.

<comment><USER5> But that can quickly devolve into arguments as to what counts as a 'right': the most obvious examples being food, water, shelter, healthcare and education. That 'minimum' is an arbitrary line.

<comment><USER4> You made a very good point. I don't know what to answer. Defining what a "right" is and what it is not would lead to endless discussion.

In any case, I would say that instead of discussing in rather vague terms whether more government is better / worse than less government, it would be sensible to think of what kind of government.

By principle, I believe that goverment bureaucracy and interference should be kept to a minimum. However, I would rather live under a Scandinavian-like government (even though it's _big government_ ) than in a Somalia-like anarchy. We all agree on the goals: freedom, prosperity, etc. Sometimes we disagree on how to get there. I vote for pragmatism over ideology.

<comment><USER6> > However, I would rather live under a Scandinavian-like government [...] We > all agree on the goals: [...] prosperity, etc.

Yes, I've totally cut up your point, and I'll take this over Somalia any day. But Scandinavian government (Denmark in this case) couldn't care less about prosperity. Right out of college, you're in the top tax bracket, paying 63% on everything above $64.000 annual income (and just under 50% on everything below). Buying a car? 180% registration tax, and slap 25% sales tax on top of that.

But yeah, we've got worse schools than Portugal and free mediocre healthcare, but most importantly: we have high economic equality.

So no, unfortunately we don't agree on the goals.

<comment><USER4> With all due respect, compared to 90% of the world's population, Danes are pretty prosperous IMHO.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely, we are. But Denmark is, along with the rest of "old Europe" going to wake up pretty soon and realize that the half bln. Chinese and Indian citizens that are moving into the middle class these years, are going to send their kid to college, and the white collar jobs are going to go the same way the blue collar jobs did over the past 20 years.

Without a strong focus on wealth creation, instead of the constant preaching to the mediocre and the "good enough", we're not going to have much to show once the Chinese and Indians get started.

In short: Prosperity is not a goal to attain, it's a continuous effort, and we just stopped trying.

<comment><USER4> A few years ago I spent a Summer in Copenhagen, so I know a _tiny_ bit of Denmark. I remember talking to Danish friends on how ridiculously high the taxes were. Yes, I was amazed that you guys pay 180% tax on cars.

On the necessity of wealth creation, I fully agree with you. I think the Germans, Danes, Swedes (etc) will soon find out that they will have to work a whole lot more than their parents to enjoy the same standard of living their parents could enjoy. It's not a pleasant thought, but then, the prosperity that _Old Europe_ has enjoyed over the last few decades is pretty much an historical anomaly.

I could not agree more that prosperity is a continuous effort. I suppose the old Europeans are just a bit _blasé_ and refuse to look at the facts. The world has changed.

<comment><USER7> _I remember talking to Danish friends on how ridiculously high the taxes were. Yes, I was amazed that you guys pay 180% tax on cars._

<http://www.skovgaard.org/europe/denmark.htm>

 _The Danes believe Denmark is the best country in the world, that Danish beer is the best in the world, and that anything they do is better than anywhere else in the world. But however contradictory it may seem, between them, they don't like to see others being successful. Thus, they do everything they can to bring down the brightest amongst them. The communist tax system that has brought the highest overall taxation level in the world is an effective way of doing so._

<comment><USER6> That article is a bit on the edge, it should be said. But, by and large, his points are valid.

Most importantly, most parties aren't communist, they are "social democratic", definitely very left leaning compared to anything. There is a general (far from thorough) respect for private property, something you wouldn't expect from communists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like Zed, but this is full of bullshit. Every economist worth the name (fuck that Krugman/keynesian bullshit, read some Tyler Cowen, Peter Boettke, Steve Horwitz) knows that the Fed is to blame for the current episode of the business cycle. They printed too much money, it causes inflation and, even worse, disastrous malinvestments. In short: printing money fucks up the structure of production.

Moreover, the Fed isn't even a libertarian institution. He tries to discredit libertarianism by proclaiming that an airhead like Greenspan is a libertarian. He's not. He might once have said he was one, his actions have proven otherwise. The Fed is a government monopoly on money. And that's a bad thing.

<comment><USER9> > fuck that Krugman/keynesian bullshit, read some Tyler Cowen

Well, _there's_ a clear, cogent, and knowledgeable rebuttal of his points. Even for someone such as myself who is not a libertarian, Shaw's arguments are weak, and yet the best you could do is sling around a bunch of four letter words?

By the way, I do read Tyler Cowen, who is, by the way, much better at elucidating his point of view without resorting to profanity, and most likely has a lot more respect for smart people like Krugman and Keynes, even where he disagrees, and he is certainly not pinning blame on "The Fed":

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/my- views-on-the.html)

<comment><USER10> Usually I agree with you on profanity. But in this case, I think its irony (in light of Zed's recent history) is amusing and actually has a point. In fact I the thought of writing a profanity-laced blog post as a rebuttal to this article actually crossed my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's nothing like attacking something you are oblivious to.

I think I have a new maxim for the internet: Never have so many people said so much about that which they knew so little about.

(And yes, I count myself in that)

<comment><USER12> > There's nothing like attacking something you are oblivious to.

This is why, when it comes to rejecting a particular ideology, I believe you need to have adopted that ideology to the point that you genuinely _grok_ it. If you can't replicate the mental operations that allow a subscriber to make sense of the world, what its problems are and how to solve them, and the ways they derive comfort and validation from those operations, then you're guilty of being uncharitable to their worldview. And if you're uncharitable, you're unlikely to develop an argument that demonstrates how an ideology is flawed given its own values and assumptions, or how that ideology actually conflicts with one's pre-ideological values and assumptions.

The ideologies that survive are always more resourceful at countering counterarguments than a non-grokker will expect. Which is as good a reason as any to actually try it out, first.

<comment><USER13> One of the problems with that viewpoint is reality is harsh. Pollution is a classic cases of the tragedy of the commons and all successful forms of government need to deal with this and thousands of other issues. Maximizing prosperity is something with many local minimums over the short and long term. IMO saying X is correct when you are wrong should lead to ridicule lest others assume it's a reasonable argument.

PS: Read <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene> works as an analogy for ideologies. They don't need to help their followers as ideology only needs to propagate faster than it's killed off.

<comment><USER12> > IMO saying X is correct when you are wrong should lead to ridicule lest > others assume it's a reasonable argument.

I think ridicule is a bad idea, because it invariably activates one's ego defense mechanisms. When that happens, your chances of convincing someone that they're wrong (assuming that they're wrong) drop to zero, while the level of polarization goes up. Granted, some people are so hardened in their beliefs that only widespread ridicule may be able to put a crack in their shell (albeit at high psychological cost).

<comment><USER14> Since this reaction is so strong, wouldn't the logical move be to _exploit_ it? I think successful salesmen often figure out how to reinforce people's ego defense mechanisms. They play to their audience's fears and offer some sort of relief.

<comment><USER12> Not if you want to live in a reason-based society.

Exploitation as an effective maneuver is dependent on a society unpracticed and unconditioned in the use of reason. It may be a practical move in the short run, but invariably has terrible consequences in the long. A society that remains vulnerable to such exploits will be swayed by the best exploiters rather than the best arguments (which is how it is now).

In the long run, our best strategy is to cultivate cool, calm, collected, and charitable discourse.

<comment><USER14> "cool, calm, collected, and charitable discourse" will always only exist in the right environments. At no time in history has there been a society that was completely rational. It's just not human nature.

<comment><USER12> There was a time in human history when it did not exist, period. There are no demonstrated limits as to how pervasive it can be.

The ability to engage in charitable discourse is simply a skill that can be taught like any other. Parents could be teaching it to their children, but socially and culturally we haven't yet made it a priority. We should.

<comment><USER14> I agree with all of your points. But the truth is, is that it is just one current in human affairs. No nation has ever been free of irrational delusion or demagoguery and entirely driven by rationality. This includes regimes like the Soviet Union, which supposedly had rationalist materialist philosophical underpinnings.

True, rationality can be pervasive, and it can be taught, but it can never be totally dominant. Our primitive substrate keeps coming out, and that is every bit as pervasive as rationality.

<comment><USER12> I agree that we'll never be completely free of irrationality, or that rationality will be totally dominant. It takes self-restraint to keep our primitive substrate, as you put it, at bay, and that's impossible to do every time. But I nevertheless think there's considerable room for improvement, and it starts with efforts like, say, PG's essay on disagreement.

Someone suggested turning that hierarchy of disagreement into tags that people could assign to comments on a debate site, and filter accordingly. I built something of precisely this sort for my master's project, and believe the idea should be implemented for nearly all online communications. It's doable, and an effective way to impress a great many people with the value of rational discourse, to which they simply may not have had enough exposure to appreciate.

And there is, I think, potentially a tipping point or critical mass where a culture of charitable discourse enters a positive feedback loop and makes gains even faster than before.

Whatever the case, I think there are definitely plausible means for improvement. They deserve to be tested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thank you, Zed, for debunking internet-forum libertarianism. To the non-naive libertarians among us, however, you have provided no new information.

If you have the time, you should pick up some Friedman or Hayek. Friedman's "Free to Choose" is a mass market book on libertarian economic policy. Hayek's "The Use of Information in Society" is a beautiful exposition on the function of a decentralized market. But there are plenty others.

You might also benefit from a well-reasoned, economic critique of regulation. "Regulatory capture" is a real phenomenon, as is self-serving bureaucracy. If hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and a multi-trillion dollar budget weren't enough to fix the market, there is probably something wrong with the process. "More rules and money" probably isn't going to fix things.

I can find such writing for you if you don't have the time. Drop me an email.

However, you will find that writings by competent libertarian economists are not so easy to "debunk" when compared to forum posts written by 16-year-olds. Or Misesians. Those guys are crazy.

<comment><USER16> _Or Misesians. Those guys are crazy._

How so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would like to see a social news aggregation site, such as Reddit and Hacker News, focused on quality debate. Users would tag each submission with its label in Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy (<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>).

This submission, for example, would probably be tagged "Level 4: Counter- argument". And, probably, also with "Strawman".

You could filter out all submissions rated lower than Level 5 or 6 or whatever your threshold is.

<comment><USER12> I actually think this sort of functionality should be present throughout all forms of online communication. If that happened, the same standards of discourse might leak into offline communication as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would just like to point out that Enron pushed for deregulation and always blamed government regulation of the market for the huge price rise that followed the deregulation, even though it was made on purpose by their corporation. Check out this documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the...>, it's nice to learn from history. I agree that government regulation can be as dangerous as out of control police force, but libertarians (similar to communists) are completely oblivious (sometimes on purpose) of how absurd their idealistic word is and lack basic understanding of human nature. It's better to have an open, accountable, public police force than nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER19> The thing for me is, I don't just distrust the government, I distrust large organizations in general (government, fortune 500 companies, religions), I find that they are fairly inefficient. I am not interested in replacing one inefficient system (government) with another inefficient system (corporations). I don't want a corporatist society at all, I do want a strong rule of law.

I would welcome a world where we have an efficient market, not only of companies but of governments. There is a market for governments now, but it has very high transaction costs (moving to another country is expensive and dificult, often requiring years of residency to establish yourself as a citizen). One way to make for a more efficient market for government in america would be to have a less powerful federal government, note I didn't say "and more powerful state governments", at the state level you can break it down to counties and then cities. Ideally you could have (and actually do now) a world where people choose the government they want (not so much by voting but by moving). Voting by moving sends a much more powerful message than voting at a booth.

Here's the thing, if we had a small government, there would be no point in lobbying (rent seeking) because having the government's favor wouldn't get you much. Campaign finance reform attacks the wrong side of the problem, like using insecticide around your garbage can instead of taking out trash to get rid of flies.

Notice also that zed asked for a strong rule of law. We don't have that. The result of a bank becoming insolvent is not known, sometimes they will get a bailout, sometimes they won't. Many of the regulations for financial industries wouldn't be necessary if the companies thought they would be held accountable for their actions, they didn't think they would be held accountable, and they weren't, so given that set of rules they played the game properly.

Zed alludes to a couple of concepts. I think the efficiency that he is referring to is better thought of as maximizing utility.

No one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

A state where the above is true is known as a pareto optimal state. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency>

Sorry if this was rambling, just my thoughts.

<comment><USER20> The EU (or more specifically the Schengen agreement) eases migration in Europe --- making voting by moving easier. Unfortunately they also tune down the competition between regimes by making the differences smaller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What most people do not see is that libertarianism is against big corporations as well as big govrnment. In fact bigcos can not exist without government support. Reducing government and allowing the market to work should result in smaller, not larger organizations, a dinosaurs to mammals transition.

<comment><USER22> "In fact bigcos can not exist without government support"

That is a mighty big claim which flies in the face of practical experience.

<comment><USER17> alexandros might be referring to the argument was made by Roderick Long in Cato's lead essay in November: [http://www.cato- unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corpora...](http://www.cato- unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corporations-versus-the-market-or-whip- conflation-now/)

He points out that government funding of highways acts as a de facto subsidy of Walmart and similar chains by partly socializing the costs of shipping, making it easier to compete with local businesses; and that regulations (which large companies can more easily understand and comply with than smaller companies) provide barriers of entry to industries.

He concludes: "In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous"

(I don't have a strong opinion on this. It sounds plausible but it's a bit anecdotal for my taste.)

<comment><USER23> I'm sympathetic to this, but at the same time, most local sellers (outside of those who exclusively sell locally-produced goods) rely on the same transportation system.

<comment><USER24> I would argue they don't rely on it so much as make use of it. As cities grow then they need to truck supplies in from elsewhere, but for suburbs and rural areas they can survive on the local economy.

<comment><USER23> Maybe. It depends where you live, though--not every area is capable of sustaining its own food supply(1). And, even those that are still import some goods.

But I think we're shifting the discussion a bit to a "Long Emergency" scenario.

As a bit of localist, I'm more troubled by local governments who bend over backward to bring large retailers into an area. I think these more localized benefits (tax breaks, development dollars, etc) are far more beneficial to, say, Wal-Mart, than the highway system.

(1) And many that can have transformed that land into housing and strip malls.

EDIT: Fixed formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Zed's point 3 is fascism not libertarianism.

Fascism the the standard straw man to throw at libertarians.

And because I can't bare to go through this again, let me just say:

Hitler was a vegetarian, and if you're a vegetarian you're a nazi.

Good day and Goodwin!

</comment><comment><USER26> I stopped reading when he misstated everything about Libertarianism: " 1. Corporations are more "efficient" than the government because of the "natural selection" of our capitalist system. 2\. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything. 3\. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it."

This guy obviously not only misunderstands what Libertarism is, or Austrian economics. But also grossly misunderstands the cause of our economic collapse. I tend to trust the scientists that have models that can accurately predict the future: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o>

<comment><USER27> He also misunderstands evolution; That's a greater offense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This sort of thing always happens when people who know a bit about computers stray outside their area of expertise.

<comment><USER29> this sort of thing is known as argument ad hominem.

<comment><USER28> Dude has just made up his own definition of a word in order to have something to rant about. What would _you_ call it?

<comment><USER30> But you are still attacking the person, rather than his argument.

<comment><USER14> Okay, then, Zed's _argument_ fits the pattern of something formulated by someone outside of their area of expertise.

Zed has exhibited difficulty with the precise use of terminology before. In the recent talk that was posted, you hear him saying for people not to come up and correct him on his use of terms like "Turing Complete."

[http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead- cu...](http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cusec-2008/)

There are other terms that he unintentionally abuses in the talk. (left as exercise) Still, I think it's a great talk and agree with a lot of what he says. He reminds me of a coworker of mine. This coworker is hazy on things like the laws of Thermodynamics and some aspects of Object Oriented Programming, but he seems to get things done, and I'd have to say he's a good programmer.

<comment><USER28> I shudder to think what Zed's code is like. Did I say rm? I meant cp...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Zed's essay is actually pretty good after applying the following transformation:

sed 's/libertarian/republican/'

Without that transformation, the essay is positively enraging.

I should note that republican here refers to the republican party who at times has espoused libertarian ideas. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

<comment><USER31> Excellent point. There has been nothing remotely libertarian about the Bush administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> His article made me angry enough to write a rebuttal post. It can be found at [http://justlikejesse.com/2009/01/08/re-the-two-flaws-of- libe...](http://justlikejesse.com/2009/01/08/re-the-two-flaws-of-libertarian- economics/) for all two of you that may be interested

<comment><USER32> Good point about gov't encouraging home ownership. It is extremely frustrating to hear all the rhetoric about the failure of capitalism and free markets when the markets are anything but free due to government subsidies designed to encourage home ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In case you were wondering what this guy is describing. It's basically our current system of corporatism (where corporations control government) - <USER2> is not only the very opposite of Libertarianism, it approaches Fascism. More info: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticytEUvVhQ>

</comment><comment><USER33> The best solution I've heard proposed was Socially Responsible Libertarianism. Which means the public is held responsible (not the government).

So basically when pollution problems arise, for example, it is the obligation of the general public to boycott or pressure the corporation to change (instead of the government fining the corporation, which ultimately may pay for the people in office to carry out the litigation in the first place). Another downside is that the government can easily be inflated with lobbyists to carry out a corporation's dirty work.

Libertarianism by itself is flawed because many corporations will establish monopolies or duopolies, stop innovating, raise prices, and call it a day.

<comment><USER34> > Libertarianism by itself is flawed because many corporations will establish > monopolies or duopolies, stop innovating, raise prices, and call it a day.

Whereas with big government, they'll never ever hire lobbyists to ask for bailouts, subsidies and protectionist legislation...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think Zed should stick to Ruby rants.

</comment><comment><USER36> >First off, the unstated goal of most libertarian doctrine is basically the following: > > 1\. Corporations are more "efficient" than the government because of the > "natural selection" of our capitalist system. > 2\. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything. > 3\. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it. >

and >> But that means that the only way to get government out of business is to get business into government.

>> There's already a lot of money in Libertarian think tanks; it comes from business. The explosion of dedicated Libertarian volunteerism necessary to transform the United States has yet to materialize, even though the Republican Party has harnessed an explosion of socially conservative volunteerism in the service of the same business interests that benefit from Washington's "Libertarian" bullshit factories. Money from business interests provides the only real political pressure pushing policy in a Libertarian direction.

Yes, the libertarian "movement" in USA is quite undefined. Very often statements by referents get out of the core of the concept. For example:

* Privatization of large public sectors, but not making a proper market and destroying regulation, therefore placing monopolies or oligopolies (e.g. Enron's abuse of pricing.)

* Keeping a systems of taxes and special bailouts or credit lines to large corporations that never reach small business or individuals.

* Keeping the system of immunity of owners of corporations for the behavior of the organization (something that appeared after Adam Smith, and is more aligned with his economic rivals.)

* The backers of US mainstream (alleged) Libertarians (save Ron Paul) are mostly backed by the US military-industrial complex, an industry completely against free market and almost exclusively based on tax-dollars supplied by a gigantic war-mongering government.

And the list goes on. I'm sure there are true good Libertarians but the masses seem to be enchanted , yet again, by large anti-free market interests.

IMHO, Libertarians shouldn't support _any_ large organization as it would just replace government with similar flaws. And a true Libertarian can't be part of the Republican Party.

<comment><USER37> Hey! Put some carriage returns in there! You're screwing up the page rendering...

<comment><USER3> Not his fault that "pg" hasn't implemented something along the lines of:

      pre {
          overflow: scroll; /* currently set to hidden. Why? */
          width: /* something reasonable */
      }

A little CSS goes a long way for usability.

<comment><USER37> I think he did that so that things like code, which are messed up by wrap- around, can be presented cleanly.

<comment><USER10> That could be, but there's got to be a solution that doesn't force me to set my browser window to 1920 pixels wide to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a job for user preferences.

<comment><USER38> Thought you were going to say "Sounds like a job for big government!" :-) only joking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> puzzle-out "Greenspan and friends were all major libertarians, and even Greenspan said he was full of shit." Oh well, at least that line made it worth reading.

<comment><USER39> Greenspan was a self-proclaimed libertarian who used to support a gold standard.

Of course then he gained virtually unlimited power by controlling the entire US economy. Power naturally corrupts, he renounced his views, encouraged every American to spend more than he or she possessed, artificially lowered interest rates and caused the entire housing boom.

Article is a joke. Can't believe this crap gets out there.

<comment><USER40> This is, however jaded it sounds, is basically correct. Read Greenspan's book (Age of Turbulence) to get it in his own words. While he was running the fed he was definitely not a libertarian.

In fact, I'd argue that that you can't be a member of the fed and be a libertarian, their entire purpose is to artificially manipulate the economy through government... or quasi-governmental intervention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Maybe I missed the day where they fed us the bullshit that it all is a zero sum game. You cannot "make a fortune" at the expense of others, but only by offering others a better deal and, thereby, making them richer.

</comment><comment><USER42> Zed's political commentary is a ghetto.

</comment><comment><USER43> See how pointless BSchool is?

</comment><comment><USER44> Libertarianism is fundamentally about _liberty_ , not efficiency or anything to do with government vs. corporations. The "unstated goal of most libertarian doctrine" is to prevent people from getting bossed around or stolen from at gunpoint. He can't even comprehend such an approach from his "let's tinker with society for optimal outcomes" political vantage point.

</comment><comment><USER45> Zed. There are _many_ more than two.

For starters:

<http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_libertarianism>

Notwithstanding these and the adolescent, Platonic fantasyland in which libertarians reside, it's a source of predictable and endless amusement how libertarians perenially attempt to present (and poorly camouflage) simpleminded greed as supposed societal good.

Odd, that dishonesty. And the last eight years, if not the last three decades, further show the lie of libertarian economics.

Any libertarians celebrate the 24th anniversary of Bhopal (and all the subsequent "market corrections" of Union Carbide) back in December?

</comment><comment><USER46> This is the first well-written, lucid piece of writing on zedshaw.com in a long time, and it's actually quite good. For those of you turned off by just the name Zed Shaw, put that aside for a second. I'm not sure I agree with what he's saying, but there is no cursing, complaining about mean people, or talking about how unfair the ruby/rails community has been.

Maybe he _is_ going to keep that no-rant promise.</comment>


Ask HN: How to enter the Chinese web market? - <AUTHOR> I'm consulting for a small bootstrapped startup right now that is trying to build a web-based business that serves customers in mainland China.  The business model itself is a non-mobile, niche market, but requires access to a few U.S. based web resources which we don't control (none are Facebook or Google related).  Has anyone in the community had experience building a product for Chinese consumers like this?  Our biggest hurdle appears to be constructing something that can access these U.S. based partner sites with any speed - how do you get around this beyond requiring every consumer have their own VPN?<p>Any other suggestions for a small company trying to make a model like this work? <comment><USER2> Yes, I work in China facing these challenges constantly. Non-locally-hosted doesn't make sense. Locally host everything. The issue isn't only availability, it is speed. Host in China. You'll probably need an ICP License for this (actually, for anything online), so make sure your customer gets you one (as they're legally accountable for what they agree to host in China, as they should be, and are, the 'legal person'). Alibaba have VPS solutions very similar to Linode or DO. Get your customer to agree and pay for this, as you are legally not able to.

You mention accessing US sites: Is this front end or back end? Locally hosted servers face the same restrictions accessing outside the mainland as home connections do unless specifically negotiated.

Do have mobile, at least as a responsive level. I have no idea who your customer is, but it sounds like they're in China and are not-so-tech. That means they will likely check-up via whatever's convenient, and that would probably be via mobile.

</comment><comment><USER3> How niche is it? Can they pay with credit cards (which most people in china and can't)? You'll need a local entity if you want to do payments through Alipay etc. Which can be done with a WFOE if you have aprox. 100k in registered capital.

If you're confident that it'll be successful AND your strategy is fairly stable and you just want you product in China then go for it. But if you ever want to go mainstream there, want to take Chinese investment or anything of that sort that requires you to abide by their regulations just forget about it.

As far as the technical side goes, yea, just proxy their connections if you cannot cache it locally. And you want to use shadowsocks or something else that doesn't get hit by the GFW rate limiting super fast. But you'll still want to have 5 or so exit nodes that you can rotate (or bind togather) in case the throughput goes radically down. And yes if you're a popular product it probably can get you banned in China.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi, I am working as a business development executive for a startup software company which develops UX prototyping tool for mobile and web apps in China. Actually, companies like us generally visit the international sites through VPN. It is really inconvenient and we often lost connection very much. The speed is also quite slow. We are suffering from that so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Serve the assets from your own server(s). Proxy or cache the third party stuff. If you can't do this (e.g. if you're relying on third parties for OAuth) then consider removing those dependencies, or at least have graceful fall-back if clients fail to load any third party stuff. (You can test this with uMatrix, by blocking all third party connections.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Create a redundant setup across multiple popular cloud providers (ec2, gce, azure, digitalocean). Replicate each node type in your architecture at each cloud. At any given time, there is a high chance that at least one datacenter will be available. Setup monitoring infrastructure to route to whichever datacenter is performing the best for a given node type at a given time.</comment>


Where the TechCrunch Tablet Got it Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/what-the-techcrunch-tablet-should-really-look-like/

<comment><USER2> This guy's analysis is basically this: they won't be able to do it.

Also, his assertation that a touchscreen doesn't add much value to a web browser is nonsense. I love browsing on my iPhone, because it's intuitive and easy to navigate. But browsing on my blackberry was annoying as hell. Scrolling through all the links on the page to get to the one you want is a horrible user experience.

I'd say that $250 - $300 is a more realistic price range for this thing that they're building, but let's see what they can pull off.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have an old keyboardless Viewsonic Tablet PC, the only thing is is missing is a good tablet-centric browser user interface.

Being older, it's kind of heavy, but it has a lot of ports so the 802.11b isn't a problem, I can always put in a new card. It's not the hardware that's the limiting factor, but the OS and UI. Hopefully, this project will get enough people excited that we'll actually see some innovation in the tablet browser UI.</comment>


How good is your country? - <AUTHOR> http://www.goodcountry.org/

<comment><USER2> The rating methodology is absurd. Just looked at the Science and Technology ranking:

\- Rating includes noble prizes which span more than a hundred years.

\- Ukraine, Bulgaria and Bosnia are above the US. Don't have anything against those countries at all but it seems strange.

\- Belarus is at 36 and Egypt at 45 while JAPAN is at 46! It seems the number of international students skews the data way too much(and doesn't seem that relevant for a science and tech rating)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a ridiculous rating. Colombia is 31th. I'm sure if all countries from later places (ie. most of the world) would become just like Colombia the world would become a much better place. The whole thing looks like meaningless metrics with weights fitted in so that highest places look reasonable.

<comment><USER4> 31st* (What a teerible lithp.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The 'source for data' is very poorly written. USA has a negative for culture, yet we export the most culture of all. Most of the world watches Hollywood movies/TV or has heard American recording artists. Why was it a big negative? No answers given.

</comment><comment><USER6> Any ranking that has Ghana 6th for Prosperity & Equality has some serious problems with it's methodology.

</comment><comment><USER7> #1 for "International Peace and Security" is Egypt!?</comment>


'Secret' City of Heroes Emulator - <AUTHOR> https://massivelyop.com/2019/04/15/score-city-of-heroes-emulator-leak/ <comment><USER4> Oh man, city of heroes. I spent a long time reverse engineering this game when it originally came out. It had some unusually complicated networking code, IIRC. I was able to write a (the first?) client that was able to emulate some of the protocol, but eventually I sort of lost interest. It was fun to work on for a while.

I remember there was an incident once where an online acquaintance of mine got hold of the admin tool for the game. I believe he found it by tracking down one of the engineer's personal websites, which for some reason had a copy of this tool accessible on it. The tool gave you administrative access to the servers (not ssh, administrative within the game), with no other form of authentication. We had fun with it for a little while, and then eventually the engineer who's site we had taken it from joined our little IRC channel to ask us to stop using it, and we did. Fun times.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To say this has been a bit of a storm would be an understatement. People are understandably pissed off, because there's been a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Paragon Chat is led by a lot of the same people behind the private server where they admitted that they used it as cover for their fully fledged server. Additionally they've been behaving in generally scummy ways, deleting posts, taking down any references to the private server and more. On many of the City of Heroes communities they had members of the mod team seek out and delete any comments that might've even slightly hinted at the server's existence.

It's like the strangest conspiracy theory but it's over a dead MMO.

<comment><USER5> I dont understand why people are so pissed. I loved coh/cov and have been waiting for a successor for many years.

NowI find out that some people have had a successor in secret, and have been acting to keep that secret because of the near certainty that it would get legally stomped. Hard.

Why should this piss me off? Because some people are luckier than I? Because they've lied to protect this secret the way I'd wang them to if I had been in on it?

Everyone talking about this says how obvious it is that people should be angry and I just feel like I'm missing something. NCsoft is the one responsible for denying the game to everyone, and if some few have been able to get around that with some effort, that doesn't make my situation worse.

<comment><USER6> I find the article unclear: do they actually have the original server software, or have they just made their own server (with tips and data from ex- employees)?

<comment><USER5> Just to update: It's allegedly the original server code, and it's now gotten out and about so it can be found in various corners of the internet (shortly to be followed with malware-infested copycats, I'm sure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly I feel like there should be more consumer protection - <USER2> extending to the server side of things. It doesn't seem particularly ethical to be able to kill off entire products just by unplugging the server.

I'm not asking company to maintain the server though, that would be unfair also.

<comment><USER8> Having been part of a relatively popular game shut down, we agonised over this.

There were several reasons given, from "we might use it again in the future" and "we'll need to be really careful about the database" I suspect there was also a case of some embarrassment, as some of the code was far worse than an outsider might imagine :-)

Ultimately we just deemed it too much effort to release it as even if you explicitly state it's totally unsupported, people will go to really strange stalker-esque lengths to try and contact the original devs for any level of support, and we just didn't want, nor have time to deal with that burden.

Note, my memory is a little hazy around all of the details, so I can't quite remember all of the finer points.

I do remember that the topic would repeat in passing as an "ah, I wish we could..." for a very long time after the call was made.

</comment></comment><comment> apk-d I don't understand why this kind of support of long-obsolete (and officially unavailable) multiplayer games is met with negative reaction by the copyright holders. These might be some of the most loyal fans of your game that you've ever had. How is this a danger and not an opportunity?

<comment><USER9> Because the copyright holders have new games that they would rather you gave them money for, instead of you playing old games without paying them.

<comment><USER10> well that's where things get a little wonky though, right? CoH was a subscription-based game, so technically these extremely loyal fans would, theoretically, still be paying the company.

The fact that companies shut down popular games due to their profit simply not being as high as projected is just stupid. (note I said profit, not income. In the case of CoH, the game was 100% making profit still when it was shut down).

<comment><USER11> It's about the time value of money.

If you give me 100, and I make a profit for you of $0.50 a year on it, it's profit right? But this other investment, investment B, makes $5/year. Which one are you going to put your money in?

Investment B every time.

The companies don't want profit, they want the MOST profit - <USER3> because if they don't choose wisely, they'll find it difficult or impossible to seek extra financing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It sounds like this isn't an emulator but rather the actual retail server software. This group has been sitting on it for 6-7 years while dishonestly encouraging emulator development publicly.

This whole thing reads like a crazy conspiracy theory that actually turned out to be true. The insidious part is that is has apparently been kept under wraps by banning leakers (and everyone associated with them) followed by gas lighting them since a lot of the top people in the community were in on it. Totally nuts.

<comment><USER13> On one hand, I can totally understand bad feelings about this. Especially with how people have been treated and the fact that people want to play the game as it was and not in a shallow imitation of itself. On the other hand, I can understand why it was kept secret. If they are not served with a C&D that means they can keep reverse engineering the code behind it, and figuring out how to pull out the resources or make their own. I hope that's what they were doing anyways, rather than just sitting on it. What an amazing opportunity to pick at a game via a private server! One would hope it would be tons easier to build an open source private server while having a working copy rather than just guessing at what kind of responses the server should send.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Then it was hit by a Cease and Desist order by NCsoft in November 2011. The website was seized, the forums went dark, and progress completely stopped. One thing was made abundantly clear to everybody: NCsoft was not going to tolerate the development of servers for their games, even four years after they were shut down.

Why do companies do this? If they're clearly not making any more money off of it... I understand not wanting to release source (the IP could technically still be worth something), but why go after fan efforts to resurrect a service they're making $0 on? What's the business reasoning to spend lawyer money on stomping out unofficial servers?

</comment><comment><USER15> I was never big into the traditional superheroes of Marvel and DC but I had a real soft spot for this game. They got into animation as they matured but the original walls of text from missions were pretty good reads. Heroes and villains had a lot of polish. I had to stop for a while and by the time I was ready to get back in they were shutting down. Champions Online came afterwards but the IP it was based on seemed stereotypically awful. Dr. Destroyer as the main villain? Come on. There's a project called Ship of Heroes that might be a good substitute if they make it to release.

[https://www.shipofheroes.com](https://www.shipofheroes.com)

<comment><USER16> Dr. Destroyer isn't the main villain of Champions or of Champions Online. He does have a somewhat strong arc in the central hub city of the game, that was briefly played up in one of the versions of the tutorial.

Part of the problem with the IP is more that it doesn't have a main villain or follow a central storyline. It's decades of tabletop adventures that go in all sorts of directions (some light almost parody, some power fantasies, some mixtures in between).

Paragon City of CoH/CoV had the opportunity of being designed as a singular place with a natural story flow built to roughly coincide with player level flow. Champions Online is much more a loose association of vignettes and interesting settings with less of an over-arcing story. As a player you could see some of that problem directly too in the way Cryptic kept rebalancing the levels of zones to try to offer more variety to early players, more introduction to other plot lines in the game in the idea that maybe you'd fine the one that most interested you/your player faster.

One interesting thing Champions Online attempted (and didn't quite succeed at) was letting players build their own main villain. It's a shame that the Nemesis system still takes far too many levels to unlock, because had they found ways to wrap that into even low level storytelling, that would have been a big deal. That should have been something more of the game was built around. Most people don't even realize it exists because it comes around at a very high level and is basically optional at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I will be shocked if NCSOFT doesn't pursue immediate legal action. It's one thing to infringe on the copyright but the bigger story is that someone, presumably a current or previous employee, stole the entire CoH database AND made money off of it for years? They're gonna try to make an example out of this guy.

<comment> crooked-v "Made money off it"? How?

<comment><USER18> Not sure if this applies in this specific case, but many private MMO servers finance their operation (and probably generate a bit of money) through selling "premium slots" and other special powers.

<comment><USER19> Well, private servers will usually do lots of stuff that an official server wouldn't. I used to play on a private Lineage 2 server where you would get things like 100x XP and gold gain for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Everything is available for a price. Has anyone actually contacted NCsoft about a price? My sense is there are enough people who would contribute to a purchase, given enough organization.

</comment><comment><USER21> Lawyers are first and foremost bureaucrats, and the primary duty of any bureaucrat is to justify their own pay. Six years or twenty, it doesn't matter. If NCsoft has a legal claim to the ip their lawyers will send a c&d. We need a digital consumer rights bill that includes the right to operate private servers for defunct games.

<comment><USER22> I think you're angry at the wrong people here. NCSoft wants to keep the IP dead - their lawyers are just there to serve that function.

But I agree, we need some way to keep these dead game alive. I can understand if there is a franchise there'd need to be considerations, but CoH is totally gone from this earth, and that's not right.

<comment><USER11> Why is it not right? They built it, financed it, drew it, programmed it, marketed it. They own it.

If they want to smother it with a pillow, they should be able to. It is theirs; the players and fans certainly don't own it.

<comment><USER21> Except they sold a piece of it to every person who bought the game. What right do they have to revoke the functionality of software on other people's computers when it isn't them maintaining that functionality?

They didnt put an expiration date on the box, and therefore every single City of Heroes box is currently a false advertisement and they owe everyone a full refund.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure the agreement people made to play had language about changes to the service, 100%. Lawyers dont miss this kind of stuff.

"I don't understand how online games work or terms and condition" is not the same as false advertising.

<comment><USER21> Oh I don't argue they have good legal standing. I'm arguing they're morally bankrupt scumbags.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Up to date London Underground/Overground station data - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/radoi90/housequest-data/blob/master/london_stations.geojson

<comment><AUTHOR> Needed station data for building [http://housequest.co.uk](http://housequest.co.uk) (sorry, cheeky plug) and there wasn't one up to date source out there so I reckoned I'd share this. Used a bunch of sources such as wikipedia, [http://www.doogal.co.uk/london_stations.php](http://www.doogal.co.uk/london_stations.php) which needed some updating.

In the repo you'll also find the .csv file for stations and a GeoJson of the London Boroughs aligned to Google Maps based on [https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1WlXk5R...](https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1WlXk5RnE3oVRtrsqnm48V75pfN66Do0nbIw2xX8)

<comment><USER2> This is great. Could you add some kind of licence/readme stating that anyone can use the data for free?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers, added a license.txt to the repo. Do I need to add it as a comment in the individual files? (never used licenses, slightly new to this :) )

<comment><USER2> No I think having one in the repo is fine.

Housequest looks very good, will use next year if it's still around!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The term "TfL station" is unclear. Technically speaking, London Overground stations are operated by LOROL as part of the National Rail network. LOROL is not owned by TfL but merely operates under a TfL franchise. As such it would be nice to see this enhanced with other rail stations and operators within London.

That being said, this looks useful, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated the title, cheers for mentioning it.</comment></comment>


Sam Altman admits Y Combinator gets over 90% of quality startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXLeBW3H2Vk

<comment><USER2> Misquote, he actually said:

"Yeah. I think we get the best companies, which is 90 percent of the hard work."

Which has a completely different emphasis.</comment>


Getting started with Flask, Redis and wercker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wercker.com/2013/06/11/Gettingstarted-with-flask-redis.html A tutorial on continuous integration with Flask and Redis on the wercker platform <comment><USER2> nice</comment>


Entrepreneurial Journalist: Andrew Ross Sorkin - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/media/61870/

<comment><AUTHOR> "While Sorkin basks in Wall Street's attention, his image at the Times is more conflicted. His rise at the paper was jet-propelled—he was a kind of legend before he was 20. And he was one of the first at the paper to realize the centrality of the web and also one of the first to realize that on the web, a journalist's personal brand can sometimes be more valuable than that of the institution that employs him. With his DealBook e-mail, read by some 200,000 people, plus the blog, with 2.5 million unique monthly visitors, plus the weekly column, breaking news scoops, television appearances, and 60,000 Twitter followers, he is one of the Times' most visible players. Media ubiquity is a strategic decision. In the cubicle jungle of the Times, he's an entrepreneur. "All of it is self-reinforcing," Sorkin says.

Still, part of Sorkin's problem at the Times is that he's a new sort of creature at an essentially conservative institution, albeit one that desperately needs new models. He's not a Timesman, exactly. He's his own creation, and he doesn't genuflect to Times traditions."

^ this is interesting, he has already started to garner resentment by other journalists at the Times, but he seems to be doing well for himself and is really building a brand</comment>


What is happening to good old language C? - <AUTHOR> "The programming language of all programming languages C is consistently going down since November 2015. The language was in a range of 15% to 20% for more than 15 years and this year it suddenly started to suffer. Its ratings are now less than 10% and there is no clear way back to the top. So what happened to C? Some months ago we already listed some possible reasons: it is not a language that you think of while writing programs for popular fields such as mobile apps or websites, it is not evolving that much and there is no big company promoting the language. May be there are more reasons. If you happen to know one, please share it with us."
I found this question in the December 2016 TIOBE Index. Now please, let's not argue about how wrong the index is, I know, but still such a large plummeting does not make sense unless they recently changed their methodology, which they did not.
So, what might the reason be?! <comment><USER2> There's more code of any type being written, and most of the new stuff does not benefit from C? In other words, I wonder whether lines of C code written has changed much. The Linux kernel, for example, isn't moving to Javascript or Ruby, and those guys are cranking.

</comment><comment><USER3> You do realise that what you've written makes no sense, don't you?</comment>


Facebook acquires face.com - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/facebook-facial-recognition-api/

<comment><USER2> That would be really cool! Wonder what Facebook can come up with it...</comment>


Abandoning segmented stacks in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/006314.html <comment><USER2> As noted in the link, Go is also moving to contiguous stacks[1]. This is supposed to be implemented in 1.3.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAaf1rYoM4S4gtnPh0zOlGzW...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAaf1rYoM4S4gtnPh0zOlGzWtrZFQ5suE8qr2sD8uWQ/pub)

<comment><USER3> I thought the segmented stack was the key to having hundreds of thousands of userland threads. It seems pretty farfetched (though not impossible) that realloc'ing the entire thread stack when it gets too big.

<comment><USER4> I think Go is primarily designed for servers and servers are overwhelmingly 64bit these days. In a 64bit virtual address space, you can have millions of contiguous stacks each of gigabytes size.

<comment><USER5> Not really. Assuming that page size is 4KB, and given that for most systems, the minimal amount of memory that can be committed is a page, you will exhaust all 4GB of your server's physical RAM with only 1 100 000 threads.

<comment><USER6> I don't think many real servers have 4 GB these days. The dev box under my desk has 32. Linux servers often have 1 TB of physical memory. So based on your calculation that's 256 million threads. Sounds enough :)

<comment><USER7> The whole point of a cheap concurrency like goroutines is the ability to avoid using callback based async IO (i.e. the go standard libraries perform select/epoll/... under the hood but your code behaves like if it was blocking on IO).

You might have better use of your memory (caching, in memory databases) than wasting it for even a fraction of a million of routines that are just waiting for something to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a big fan of Mozilla and the Go team, but do recognize this is something Dlang's Walter Bright criticized from the beginning. As I assume all parties know much more than I do, I wonder what reason both languages chose this route...

<comment><USER9> I'd rather someone tries segmented stacks and determines it isn't a good fit than to just discard it on a comment from something someone said. This way future researchers have more data points, whereas just dismissing out of hand leaves a rather big question mark.

<comment><USER8> Well, I agree I'd rather someone try it for another data point. However, this isn't just a random internet comment, it's a man who has probably written more compiler code than about anyone of recent times .

<comment><USER9> That probably is true, but lots of great men were wrong about stuff that were in their domain - see Einstein and Cosmological constant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The hot split problem is an example of a poor grow/shrink algorithm, and the contiguous stack would exhibit the same behaviour if the growth and shrink thresholds are the same.

How about avoiding hot split by changing the deallocation algorithm to allow empty blocks and see what happens?

<comment><USER5> > The hot split problem is an example of a poor grow/shrink algorithm

Not really. With segmented stacks, when you hit the end of a stack, you must (1) allocate a new segment to extend the stack and (2) copy the current function frame to the new segment and resume execution. Then, when the function returns, you have to (3) deallocate the new segment and shrink the stack, and (4) resume execution of the last function frame on the previous stack segment.

Now, steps (1) and (3) are optional, but steps (2) and (4) are not, and incur a significant overhead (compared with non-segmented, contiguous stack, e.g. C stack).

<comment><USER11> You could add step (5) recognize that you have a hot split and amend step #2 to copy all of the hot frames to the new segment.

Their point is that if you have done something wrong if you have to dynamically turn on profiling to keep the stack from catching on fire.

<comment><USER5> That's a possible solution, but it requires that stack is relocatable (i.e. that you can find and rewrite all pointers to data on the stack), which is a significant complication with regards to a segmented stacks implementation. If you have a relocatable stack, you might as well use copy-the-whole-stack strategy with continuous stacks.

<comment><USER12> Segmented stacks are better even if you have a relocatable stack. GHC switched from monolithic copy-the-whole-thing-to-grow-it to segmented stacks a while ago, and it was a big win. Not just because we waste less space, but because the GC knows when individual stack segments are dirty so that it doesn't need to traverse the whole stack. To avoid the thrashing issue we copy the top 1KB of the previous stack chunk into the new stack chunk when we allocate a new chunk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" [...] I expect that on 64-bit platforms the number of concurrent tasks will be comparable to using segmented stacks. On 32-bit platforms, with their limited address space, the situation will not be as good, but this is a calculated risk that we can live without the same amount of concurrency there."_

I thought that Rust is meant to aim for a "C replacement", but then doesn't the above quote raise some concerns towards ARMs and more embedded targets (e.g. AVRs, ...)? Or maybe my hopes were misguided from the beginning, I start to think now, given multithreading etc.? I'm confused now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Embedded targets normally don't want segmented stacks anyway, and running hundreds of thousands of threads/tasks (which is what segmented stacks allows) is unlikely to be particularly useful(?).

In any case, this ML post is basically saying "Rust is reverting to C-like stack behaviour" (with some checks to handle stack-overflow safely (i.e. memory safety & security), the current implementation just aborts the whole process on stack overflow).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Disclaimer: not a language designer/implementer (yet).

Couldn't segmented stacks for async/await-style IO be simulated by swapping the stack out at every await? I mean copying out the registers and the raw stack to some heap location, then restoring them by reversing the process later.

(One problem I see is that it'd be slow when lots of IO operations are involved.)

<comment><USER15> Doesn't work if threads can have pointers into each other's stacks (which we'd like to support someday for fork/join parallelism).</comment></comment>


Let it Rainbow – An indie game with 7 levels of despair - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/let-it-rainbow-indie-game/id912777251?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> Very addictive game. I can't really win it, but I loved it xD.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it \o/

</comment><comment><USER4> should have an android version, just saying</comment>


Senator Feinstein Now Using Safety Concerns to Target the Drone Industry - T-A http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/12/03/senator-feinstein-now-using-safety-concerns-to-target-the-drone-industry/

<comment><AUTHOR> i wish she had the same level of concern when it comes to unwarranted surveillance and releasing an unredacted torture report.</comment>


Craigslist totally blacked out - <AUTHOR> http://craigslist.org

<comment><USER2> Not totally blacked out, there's a timer at the bottom that allows you to access it.

<comment><AUTHOR> you are right i missed that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is not blacked out for me? Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> perhaps you aren't in the US? I know some of the blackouts are only for US ip addresses.</comment></comment>


Why you need to look at Local - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grimwire.com/#2013-03-20-why_local.md

<comment><USER2> awesome concept, this could be the start of some really cool stuff.</comment>


How Big Data is changing historical research - <AUTHOR> http://littleatoms.com/big-data-changing-history <comment><USER2> Looks like the site is down @ 15:20 UTC.</comment>


Vanhawks (YC W15) Raises $1.6M to Help Put the Valour Smartbike on the Road - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/vanhawks-raises-1-6m-to-help-put-the-valour-smartbike-on-the-road/

<comment><USER2> So many WTF, so little time.

They designed a carbon frame and fork for a commuter bike, going through the huge time and money sink that is creating their own moulds (plus need at least one per frame size and they are expensive) and it doesn't have fender or rack mounts (for aesthetics). Nice practical choice there.

Maybe it is just prototype photos, but custom designed bars/stem/fork and they couldn't route the cables for the electronics internally? Plenty of examples of that working already (look at Di2 builds using PRO parts from Shimano). And on that: integrated stem/bars might be fine, but only if they are exactly the right size for you.

And routing/directions? (Ooh, haptics, that'll work on a bumpy street.) For a short-ride/commute bike? That you'll need once to learn the way and then not again? Maybe on a touring bike to get you through a complicated all-day route, but this is not that bike.

Yes, I'm a bike snob, but I'll stick to my cheap commuter and my fleet of pricer rides, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Mcbain!

Thanks for the comments and feedback!

Our bike can be equipped with off the shelves fenders and rack mounts. :)

All of our cables are internally routed.

We suggest you routes for your way as we collect data from people around you, giving you best route suggestions aka waze alike. :)

<comment><USER2> Proper fenders and racks, or clip on ones that fall off if you look at them the wrong way?

We don't need a Waze-alike - Strava heatmaps already do it. Cyclists are pretty good at finding the most efficient paths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Imagine a car saleman explaining to you "these batteries under the bonnet run the headlights, these batteries at the back are for the tail lights, over here there's another battery to light up instrumentation at night, and the dashcam has it's own battery as well. You'll need to keep all of them charged manually with this car, and they're each charged seperately"

The salesman then proceeds to give another tour around the car showing where each of the switches are located to turn on each component, and how many times you need to press them.

Who would put up with such a car? I deal with that crap every day plus _another_ battery on my helmet. To drag bikes into the 20th century, we need frames with 1 [good] internal battery, 1 chargepoint, 1 switch, and a multitude of compatible accessories which can be attached in different places and hook into the frame's standardized internal electrics.

This makes me feel like I'm going crazy - seeing a new bike manufacturer skipping such everyday basics and deciding that what bike frames have been missing is bluetooth connectivity. Including a comms wire in the frame wiring gets you that anyway - people who want a "smart bike" can plug in a smart device under the seat and some output devices on the handlebars. Better upgrade path too.

(Include a wheel sensor in the frame, as wireless speedos suck, and having the sensor output available on the comms wire means all devices can use it as wake-up)

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't look very smart to me.

I commute year round in all weather: pouring weather, snow. I need fenders. Look at the frame: it has no receptacles for the screws for installing them.

For $1250, you don't even get lights, nor reflectors in the wheel spokes: basic safety features.

Also no suspension in the frame. Thin tires. For something pitched for commuting, this is designed an awful lot like a racing bike, but not optimized for that use, either.

For commuting you generally want 1.5" to 1.75" road slicks. They require less pressure to achieve low rolling resistance (you will be grateful when you don't have to jam 115 p.s.i of air using an emergency hand pump), provide more comfort and protect the wheel against damage from surface irregularities better. In commuting you have potholes, stones and curbs to contend with, as well as junk that falls out of trucks. Some of it you don't see very well at night.

I would probably trash that frame in about a year.

[http://www.roadbikereview.com/reviews/why-you-should-be- ridi...](http://www.roadbikereview.com/reviews/why-you-should-be-riding-steel- and-not-carbon)

This is a bike to separate yuppie fools from their money.

Not to mention investors.

"LED's to guide you on your commute". WTF? You can get voice directions via headphones from a navigator. Approaching right turn. Ding!"

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not trying to be cynical, but if software is eating the world, does it make sense to build _hardware_?

It seems to me that sticking an iPhone on any bike via an attachment would do everything this bike does. It has an accelerometer for pothole detection. GPS for speed and navigation. You could even charge your phone in the process!

The two things that can't be replicated are blind-spot detection and theft protection. There is no shortage of small devices on Kickstarter that can duplicate these features. A small IR sensor that bolts to the back of the bike. And for theft protection to work as expected, there needs to be hundreds of such bikes on the street. At the $1200+ pricepoint, I find that unlikely..

</comment><comment><USER6> As a crazy street biker and very opinionated person, this just makes me say "ICK."

It reminds me of one of those swiss army knives with the 16mb USB stick built in. Seems cool at the time until you realize something that should last a decade or more is now irrevocably tied to something that's going to be obsolete next year.

Plus the market for $1,200+ commuter bikes simply cannot be that large.

They should have just made nice-looking attachments and left it at that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey !

Thanks for the comment and feedback! Really appreciate it.

We have something in the work for an attachment in the future. The Valour is our way of offering an experience versus just a new spot of technology. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like an expensive way to replace smartphone + google maps + earbuds. As far as I can tell from the article (which was pretty much silent on the product), it does not address any of my problems with bicycles: 1) US cities are too spread out 2) Biking up hills feels like it takes a lot more energy than just walking up them, so I generally don't bike anywhere that has hills (= I guess I'll just take a car, then). Maybe fancy $1000 bikes zoom up the hills, but I don't want to spend that much. I've already got a car... 3) My destination usually does not have showers, which is a problem when the temperature is 90 - 105 deg F for a large portion of the year. 4) The most direct roads sometimes have cars speeding by at 45 - 60 mph; not safe. In Austin, one of the popular biking routes has one biker killed every year; I don't really want to be part of that statistic.

I would love to bike, but frankly, I'm kind of lazy (especially regarding the hills). I would be interested in an affordable bike that mitigated some of these problems, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> I congratulate anyone that can get funding toward making their dream real. However after spending a year riding an electrically powered bike, I would be curious how this will address/handle the following things that finally caused me to hang up my wheels:

1) As you get older, particularly if you work in tech, you will notice your wrists, elbows, and shoulders getting a little sore. Ergonomics can go some way toward minimizing that, but riding a bike in any kind of traffic will put a lot more strain on you. Any kind of cushioning/shock absorbers/breaks?

2) Mentioned the electric assist. Is that going to be an option for these, or is your audience only folks who can ride a regular bike from day 1? A number of folks I've run into wanted to switch to a bike from their car, particularly during nice weather, but wanted some assurance they wouldn't get exhausted halfway there. The assist made it possible for me.

3) In the same vein, some way to fold this so it can be carried in a small car or some special rack so it can be carried by car? Particularly for a commuter audience I would think you would want the ability to hop a car or bus or train for part of the ride?

4) Lights rechargable? How many recharge cycles? Batteries replaceable for the lights/sensors/bluetooth?

5) Someone has already mentioned a smart helmet. I know there are a couple companies working on those, but are y'all working with any of them to incorporate a handshake so you can possibly trigger things at the best time?

6) Lastly, any thoughts to collision avoidance signals for other traffic? Something where it senses a car or other vehicle is getting too close and either hits the horn or flashes a light(s) to try and get the driver's attention?

Thanks in advance for your time.

<comment><USER9> I can update you on a few of these points:

For 2), there is no electric assist (as in no electrical motor). Any reference to electronics refers to the main-board in the handlebar that contains a bunch of sensors and things.

4) The lights are totally rechargable. There is a dynamo in the center of the front wheel hub that generates far more power than the system uses. Its expected that the dynamo will be sufficient as the sole power source. There is one high-capacity battery in the handlebar that powers all electronics.

6) At the moment the bike only notifies you if something moves into the blindspot, however it wouldn't be difficult to make it flash the rear lights at the same time to notify the driver.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ewan + Allgood38!

Thanks for the comments and feedback! :)

1) We use ergonomic grips and saddle from Ergon!

2) the bike is not paddle assist, we might have something in the future though ;).

3) No way to fold it but you can carry this on a bus, train or a car easily on a bike rack.

4) yes they are chargeable!

5) We will look more into this forsure. :)

6) yup! Thanks for the suggestion! Will look into it more!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a biker, for this style of bike, if I was to buy a bike today I would prefer BMC's AC01 IGH, which albeit more expensive, has parts which are more standard and for which BMC has made a kit of custom fenders and lights (City Kit lighting): [http://www.bmc-switzerland.com/int- en/bikes/lifestyle/mounta...](http://www.bmc-switzerland.com/int- en/bikes/lifestyle/mountainroad-alpenchallenge-ac01_igh_alfine-alfine_11/)

However I think attempting to mass produce a high-quality smart bike is a very commendable endeavor as it is dearly needed on the market. A great city bike with a good setup for lights, theft security (screws, tracker, lock), low maintenance (belt, hub) easily cost more than a cheap used car and you have to curate all the accessories yourself whereas most of these things com built-in on a car/motorcycle.

<comment><USER10> Something I'd like to add, what's greatly missing in the bicycle world to me is a smart bicycle helmet. My current setup involves:

      * Bell Muni helmet
      * with rear and front flea lights
      * front GoPro
      * jawbone which falls all the time
      * Rudy project glasses with chromatic lenses

We're already talking about over $500 and 4 different batteries.

I have seen some attempts at smart bike helmets, but none doing it right.

Also, I second that the rear proximity sensors and haptic feedback are likely to be a gimmick, I would drop the navigational indicators and place a built-in anti-theft tracker instead. Besides they are easily confused with turn signals for a buyer looking at the bike for the first time.

As an experienced San Francisco city rider, rear sensors are a gimmick as you learn to grow eyes on your back and you already see these things, or it is too late. What matters though is a front camera first, rear camera maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In computerland, technologies trickle up. The PC, the iPhone started out at home, found a niche in business, and then took over.

With cycling, innovations trickle down from the top. Starting out with a flat- bar hybrid is not starting at the top, and seems like a really weird choice. Hybrids are marketed to beginners, or mountain bike people who want to train on the road with the same hand position they ride off-road.

Sofware may be "eating the world," but Asian manufacturing has been eating the cycling market for 40 years. Shimano, specifically, is a far more profitable business than any of the branding companies or manufacturers. If you aren't going after Shimano, you're fighting for scraps.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks good! How about a high-visibility version in bright yellow and large reflective surfaces?

Why did you choose the Fallbrook N360 over the Shimano Nexus Inter 8 which is cheaper and 2 lbs lighter?

</comment><comment><USER13> Why flat handle bars?

<comment><USER11> My guess is that they're targeting middle-aged-monied-nerds-who-don't-ride- bikes, which is a reliable but tiny market. The kind of people who buy recumbents and put them on Craigslist a few years later, unridden:

[http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/bik/4910738255.html](http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/bik/4910738255.html)

[http://inlandempire.craigslist.org/bik/4894883743.html](http://inlandempire.craigslist.org/bik/4894883743.html)

<comment><USER14> You get that based off the handle bars alone? God there are some snobs in this thread...

<comment><USER11> If you're inviting me to pile on..

I'll also point out that carbon is a terrible material for bikes that are getting banged around with locks and bike racks. Minor carbon damage can cause total material failure. Your bike shatters underneath you.

People who spend >$1000 for a bike don't usually buy hybrids. Existing roadies won't want this. The market will be people-who-don't-currently-ride, but won't think anything of spending >$1000.

People-who-don't-currently-ride are going to be very uncomfortable on a bike that has its handlebars lower than the saddle.

They will sell some, but few will get ridden for any length of time. If they want to create something like bike-Waze, they need network effects, which is going to be very difficult at this price point with a product that isn't interesting to current cyclists with disposable income.

Bike shops are going to avoid stocking these, as they don't want to be on the hook for supporting a complicated product from an untested vendor. Buying a bike though the mail means assemble-it-yourself, which is easy to get wrong. It's even more perilous with carbon componentry.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hgiyiyi: Amazon test page has 11 customer reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Hgiyiyi-hgjhjh-hjhk-jjjj/dp/0649875427/ <comment><USER2> Frequently Bought Together

        * This item: Uranium Ore by Images SI Inc. $39.95

        * Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner Hardcover $10.78

        * The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Paperback $14.28</comment>


Software bug causes YAM cryptocurrency to implode two days after launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/13/yam_cryptocurrency_bug_governance/ <comment><USER2> I keep seeing the rhetoric that it was just an experiment and that it was expected to implode. Sure, okay, maybe it was - but in that case, the hype built around it was completely inexcusable.

From its creator to shills on Twitter, I hadn't seen such fervent shilling (obviously, they were all in a prisoner's dilemma with it, but still).

<comment><USER3> All cryptocurrencies live or die by "shilling". Like with any software, it's not terribly likely that any single one of them is entirely bug-free, but the loyalty of invested early adopters is what hides mishaps from the public and persists the hype.

<comment><USER2> The problem is, this was technically a financial instrument (it falls under DeFi - decentralized finance) that was completely unaudited, and could've been released in stages, on a testnet, etc. To use an analogy, this was essentially pushed directly to prod, not even to master... unless I'm missing something.

It just seemed so reckless to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's very interesting to see what happened on Ethereum this week. After YAM fiasco, there is another drama. Someone front-runned the official project by launching the code first on Ethereum.

[https://twitter.com/CurveFinance/status/1294088489118715905](https://twitter.com/CurveFinance/status/1294088489118715905)

<comment><USER5> They probably shouldn't have published their admin (public) keys in advance. That way it would have been impossible to "front-run".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I probably wouldn't trust someone 2-years out of college to manage my money (YAM creator's capital management firm).

I sure as hell wouldn't invest in their home-grown crypto currency.

Story Headline: Recent college grad doesn't know what they are doing and it ended as expected.

<comment><USER7> I think the moral of the story is to focus less on making the business work and more on finding suckers to solicit investments from. Just like WeWork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be fair YAM was an experiment, always communicated as-such, and was intended at-best to implode.

<comment><USER9> People threw real money at something that was intended at-best to implode? Did that intention make it into the sales pitch?

<comment><USER10> Yes... (I suppose it depends on which "sales pitch" you listened to).

Sometimes people are just crazy and stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "If the funding goal is reached, upon the completion of the audit, we plan > to support the launch of YAM 2.0 via migration contract from YAM."

Shit happens. At least they're undeterred. Couldn't this just be fixed with an immediate hard fork? They're new enough that probably nobody would protest.

<comment><USER12> It wasn't a separate block chain, just a smart contract running on Ethereum. And it was an experiment the creator advertised at the start as crazy and untested...

So the odds of walking the Ethereum chain back are about like a penny stock convincing the NYSE and all traders in world to walk back all their trades for the last two days.

<comment><USER13> In this case, I imagine that a "hard fork" would entail starting a new smart contract and copying over the old balances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found that these two articles provide some good context about YAM and yield farming. It seems like there is some messy, but really interesting experimentation happening in DeFi right now.

[https://www.coindesk.com/defi-degens-gaming-ethereum- money-l...](https://www.coindesk.com/defi-degens-gaming-ethereum-money-legos)

[https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token- expla...](https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-explained)

<comment><USER15> If you look into the backgrounds of a number of there big proponents of defi, it gets scarier.

<comment><USER16> What do you mean?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess they didn't see any reason to fix it

[https://github.com/yam-finance/yam- protocol/blob/master/cont...](https://github.com/yam-finance/yam- protocol/blob/master/contracts/token/YAM.sol#L340)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why did it become half a billion dollar worth in one day? What is special about YAM?

<comment><USER19> That figure was the market cap, the price at which a token was sold multiplied by the number of tokens on the market.

If a billion tokens are available, the market cap is $0.5B if you sell a single token for $0.5. That's what happened yesterday more or less. You won't be able sell all tokens for $0.5B, so saying they are worth $0.5B is misleading for such a volatile and young project.

The metric works much better (but not perfect) for established shares, financial products or contracts for physical objects.

<comment><USER20> Yes. To give an example: many bitcoins are lost (ie deleted private key), or in accounts that presumably will never trade, so you should remove those when calculating bitcoin total market capitalisation.

<comment><USER21> Except that it's literally impossible to distinguish between a "lost" bitcoin (no private key) and one sitting in a cold wallet (private key exists offline).

<comment><USER22> Lots of things are impossible to calculate 100% precisely, but that doesn't stop anyone from building models anyway.

Just like "How much US$ is out there in paper currency?". Impossible to know, especially as it's never been demonetized, but models exist and are used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems like software defined scarcity in this case almost defeats the point of the currency because if it's not based on anything hard and immovable it can be bypassed. It's almost as though you need some non digital impossible to fake process to back your currency. Like maybe digging in the ground and pulling out precious metals?</comment>