Richest Bitcoin Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100 <comment><USER2> Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever.

Look at this address:

[http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5...](http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi?charttype=balance)

The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins (back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in what?... a few hours/half days?[1]) The owner probably ran his system for a few hours, collected 8000 coins, thought it was a ridiculous concept and deleted everything from his system.

[1]: [https://blockchain.info/charts/total- bitcoins?timespan=all&s...](https://blockchain.info/charts/total- bitcoins?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=)

<comment><USER3> This seems like a fundamental flaw in the currency that makes it's deflationary properties worse.

Let's say bitcoin is to last a century, over time, there will be gradual losses to all kinds of problems, like hardware failures, owner errors, etc that cause lost of wallets, and thus, coins, forever.

There's no way to replace these, so over time, the total number of coins it not only limited, but after the last bitcoin is mined, it must decrease.

This suggests to me that bitcoin is a marvelous experiment that finally proved that such a currency is possible on a wide scale, but as a foundational currency, it has serious flaws, and it sounds like it needs to ultimately be replaced by a Bitcoin 2.0.

However, creating a new Bitcoin that is incompatible with the old would massively destroy value in the old system, so it's an interesting proposition as to how you can 'version' the Bitcoin protocol over time while not causing great upheaval.

<comment><USER4> In theory there's no limit to how much a bitcoin can be divided. Currently 0.00000001BTC is the smallest amount possible. But if there's only 0.00001 bitcoins left in the world then the program can be easily updated to allow 0.00000000000000000001BTC to be sent and used. Bitcoins are a bit like gold, you can just keep dividing a bar up smaller and smaller into dust. Of course if all bitcoins in the world vanished after the last block (with a reward) had been mined then that would be the end of bitcoins but that seems pretty unlikely right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question: How hard/impossible would it be for me as a US citizen to cash in on a large lot like that? Say I want 10 million dollars for some partying I want to do for New Years.

It seems some people have mega riches, but is it actually feasible for me to realize that money (in US Dollars, deposited to my Chase bank account)?

<comment><USER6> The whole price of Bitcoin is an illusion that they use to get people to keep buying. It's the result of a bidding war.

There is an article here about that basically explains (this is my interpretation not his words) how the price of BTC is kindof like the sticker price on an item in the store. It doesn't represent the real value, it's simply the value as perceived by consumers and is, in a way, fixed -- [http://falkvinge.net/2013/09/13/bitcoins-vast- overvaluation-...](http://falkvinge.net/2013/09/13/bitcoins-vast- overvaluation-seems-to-be-caused-by-usually-illegal-price-fixing/)

But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system. Basically if everyone started selling the market would destabilize because supply/demand curve would change & I'm pretty sure the value of what they're selling would plummet before they can unload most of their stack.

EDIT: Since I was immediately downvoted, please note that this happens regularly any time you speak ill of Bitcoin's pyramid scheme aspects and is completely expected/anticipated when I post these responses. It's a public service that I will drop eventually, but think about this -- even people who own a ton of BTC (article I linked to) criticize it as being insanely flawed. They only stay with it because as they point out, they believe the price will continue to rise. Speculators love it because they KNOW it's flawed, but still feel confident in a bet that the price will rise. I think it's why ultimately it will take gov intervention or a market catastrophe that screws over all the speculators to finally destroy such interest in Bitcoin and finally give it a chance to start over again... as a currency.

<comment><USER7> Falkvinge thinks they will be worth 100k-1000k in the future. If we accept that (which I don't btw) is it so weird that people want to spend 700 today for something that might be worth 100k in a few years?

<comment><USER8> It's not weird. The problem is that at some point bitcoins must acquire an unambiguous intrinsic value which is not related so much to their possible future value. If they don't, that's the definition of a bubble--prices that are considerably higher than intrinsic value.

Consider tulip mania from the 1600s. Speculation drove up prices of tulip bulbs to the point where the only people buying tulips were other speculators who were willing to pay the high prices because they thought they could sell it for more later on--the exact reasoning you just posted. Speculators were just trading tulips--or worse, tulip futures--amongst themselves. When the time came to sell the tulips to people who wanted them for decoration, it was discovered that none of them actually valued tulips that much, and the bubble popped.

There _are_ arguments for a bitcoin having an intrinsic value of $100k. If bitcoin were ever used for, say, something as large as the real estate market, it would be hard to imagine the price being any lower than that. But bitcoin is _extremely_ far from being used as the dominant currency in any market that large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This analysis linking the richest address to Silkroad's DPR is interesting: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0)

</comment><comment><USER10> I know nothing of BitCoin, but could one figure out which Address belongs to the Winklevoss brothers? Does it matter?

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/11/09...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/11/09/the-11-million-in-bitcoins-the-winklevoss-brothers- bought-is-now-worth-32-million/)

<comment><USER11> It's likely the Winklevoss brothers have all their coins spread over many addresses. Their wallet will show 100,000+ coins but you can't tell because they are spread among many addresses inside the single wallet file. If they use a brain wallet seed they can create unlimited deterministic addresses but only have to remember one key, and you won't see large accumulations of coins.

<comment><USER12> What's the point?

Spreading the risk of loss by hack? And reducing their visibility as a target?

<comment><USER11> The reason is privacy. It's not going to spread the loss of a hack because if the hacker gets the wallet they own all the addresses.

One of the core developers theorized that memory corruption at the exact time you sign a transaction could lock away all the bitcoins in a single address. However this has never been observed. (remember every transaction spends the entire balance of an address and returns your coins to the same/or change address, if that change address has 1 bit wrong the entire balance would be lost)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I sure hope those guys are keeping their keys safe.

Also - there's 4 addresses with almost exactly the same number of coins (40000) who all last transacted on april 9. Surely connected.

Also also: why do so many btc balances end with ".0411"?

<comment><USER14> There are 10 in total in the top 100 with their last transaction on April 9th. I agree that can't be chance.

And 6 blocks of 10.000 bitcoin with a last transaction on the 4th. So it looks like that there are far less than 100 players in the bitcoin top 100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really don't understand how BTC make better world. I mean, it monopolized by a few people from FIRST. And the monopoly will sustain forever.

If someone else make another BTC?

<comment><USER16> Suggest a better way to distribute new asset "fairly". Facebook shares are also distributed unfairly. And gold. And dollars. Also, something that looks fair for you, wouldn't look fair for another person.

What's important to me is that money is _hard_. If you have it, it can't be printed out of value. It should not be very costly or risky to store or transfer (like gold or USD). I want to be sure that even the richest guys can't simply extract money from me. That they have to earn it by doing work. Or earn service from others by paying them, not forcing them. Bitcoin allows us to get to that kind of protection closer than ever.

Consider this: gold was always as hard to protect as to confiscate it. It's symmetrical. Therefore, most powerful and brutal were accumulating gold over time. Gold is now owned massively by largest governments and banks. Regular people can only own as much gold as they can hide in their pockets. Extra gold is too easy to take ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102)). Bitcoin is much cheaper and easier to store and transfer than to extract it. It's asymmetrical. Now big guys with guns would have to work more and steal less to get some money, then before. Stuff that was stolen or destroyed will never come back to you, but at least, over time, distribution of wealth would match more closely actual merits of market participants, than amount of gunpowder that they have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Note, this isn't a list of rich people, it's a list of rich _addresses_, and one can have many addresses.

<comment><USER18> For some proof of that there are ~350,000BTC unspent from ~feb 2011 presumably owned by the same person.

[http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png](http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Back in early 2011 I ran a BTC miner for awhile on a spare system and generated around 18 BTC. I bartered them later in 2011 for a pair of movie tickets to take my wife out to see Moneyball (ironically).

</comment><comment><USER20> You got hellbanned, saneshark.

<comment><USER21> And you defeated the purpose of hellbanning by pointing it out to the user. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning)

<comment><USER20> I know. I disagree with the practice, especially when I look through the history of the account and see no flagrantly offensive remarks. HN mods might think this site is a temple, but it's disrespectful to waste someone's time and mislead their expectations of feedback for months at a time.

<comment><USER22> Agree. I saw some guy's hellbanned account who was happily commenting for over a year on HN - again nothing abusive I could see.

I tried to message him on twitter but no reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can we link IP addresses and hence approximate locations to these wallets using announced transactions on the network? That might be an interesting visual. Maybe not because I doubt anybody was logging bitcoin network traffic in the early days. But doing that even starting today might turn out to be useful. And there's little doubt NSA and friends are likely already doing this.

<comment><USER24> No IP address is saved in the block-chain. You would need to trust the source of this IP listing service, and still you wouldn't be able to actually prove people's real IP address if they were using systems like TOR to send money.

<comment><USER23> I understand it isn't saved, I meant you could connect to the network and listen in on transactions.

And what percentage of bitcoin nodes use Tor? With NSA-like global passive logging, I think even Tor could be vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if Satoshi is amongst those...

<comment><USER25> afaik 90+% (100%?) of all the blocks mined by satoshi have never been touched. Satoshi's wealth would be in thousands of separate 50BTC wallets, not 1 big one.

Can't be bothered to find the source atm but someone did some analysis on the mined blocks in 2009/2010 and found the likely blocks mined by the same person who mined the first block, all unspent.

<comment><USER11> Thousands of separate addresses, most of those coins still sit in their mined blocks. However it is likely Satoshi has all the addresses in one single wallet so that he could move them all at once if he wanted to. Satoshi's estimated wealth is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 coins.

<comment><USER26> 1,000,000 coins is ~10x the top person in that rich list i.e. 840 million USD going by that page's prices

<comment><USER11> Yeah, right now Satoshi is worth at least 100k btc up to 1,000k btc. Some analyses has found that perhaps 2,500k btc are controlled by the same group but that was highly speculative.

I would think Satoshi is getting close to becoming the first Bitcoin billionaire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting as BitCoin proponents complain about Bankers greed and how 1% own a huge percentage of the wealth. It seems that a really small percentage of addresses owns most of the BitCoin wealth. And these addresses might be owned by even less people.

<comment><USER28> Compare the distribution of global wealth, or American wealth. And note that we can expect the distribution to gradually get more equal (as indeed it has been all the time) as early adopters slowly sell out and diversify their holdings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Scrolling down, there are addresses with an even 10000 bitcoins. If these all belong to the same person (trying to mitigate risk by spreading across wallets?) then it adds up to about 186 million...

<comment><USER11> They may have all the addresses in the same wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The most surprising thing to me is the number of those addresses that haven't had a transaction in several years now... how many of those people lost their "wallet" so to speak?

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't see btc as being able to retain its hundreds of dollars in exchange currency value. Imagine you have 1 mil usd worth of btc, and then imagine trying to dump it all on the open market. You would probably find a widening gap in the bid-ask as your position is liquidated. In other words, there isn't likely enough buyers.

Someone is probably manipulating the supply and demand to serve their own purposes. You might as well day trade something more liquid.

</comment><comment><USER32> How does this fit with today's transfer of 194,993 BTC? That's significantly more than the #1 address on this list. Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER24> What kind of repercussion will this have in the future, say, when Bitcoin will be more widely utilized? It seems to me that it might only cause an issue to Bitcoin's market during these initial stages, where a rich bitcoin owner could fluster the market by selling large amounts. But in the long run, there will always be the rich and the poor. Or is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER33> Couldn't everyone could just switch to a client that blacklisted all of the coins owned by people that were in the top 100 on nov 22 2013?

<comment><USER34> Yes, that would work.

And better yet, everyone could just switch to a client that works exactly like the clients we use to day except that it allows a new wallet I just created containing 100,000 bitcoins. This one is better because I get rich.

And to make it work the only thing I need to do is convince everyone to use it. It's kind of like that guy who convinced everyone to allow little green slips of paper to be traded for goods and services -- ALL money has value only because society consents to value it, and society could change it's mind. We've done so before -- consider when the Euro was created and how after a transition period the currencies it replaced became worthless (except as collector's items).

The hard part is convincing everyone to use YOUR plan. The deftness with which Bitcoin has navigated that social dilemma is one of the most impressive things about it. Somehow we have all come to agree that certain bit patterns and secret keys are worth valuable goods and services.

<comment><USER35> That is a very interesting idea, it makes the fungibility of BTC seem highly questionable, if you can look at its history forever and do an arbitrary 'blacklist'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why when you click on the wallet does the last transaction on some of them go to 2013 when the list says 2010?

[http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS...](http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS78k7WMkVq?charttype=balance)

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting that many of them were last used within a few seconds or minutes of each other. Indicates to me that one person or party is controlling quite a few big wallets.

</comment><comment><USER38> Top 100 richest people using bitcoin control 20% of bitcoins.

<comment><USER39> Some of these addresses are cold storage addresses controlled by businesses that are holding BTC for a large number of individual customers.

Some of the richest holders own multiple top addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why are there so many at the EXACT same amount (71-94)?

<comment><USER41> Probably holding accounts/cold storage for a single group or a small number of groups using a similar division plan, say an exchange. I bet the idea is keep them in separate wallets to ensure that one compromise doesn't lose their whole investment.

All just wild conjecture though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Needs an update, currently the largest wallet know is this one 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. It's holding about 200k btc.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't think this richlist is a list of different people. Look how many have 10k BTC flat. A lot of these are spare wallets.

</comment><comment><USER44> Pretty interesting to look at the last transaction date. For the most part it looks as if they've been pretty inactive lately.

</comment><comment><USER45> doesn't the fbi haul belong on at the top of this list?

[https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...](https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH)

<comment><USER11> Top of the list for single address, most people in Bitcoin have their wealth in one wallet but many addresses inside that wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Who are these people? And if any of them are out there reading this thread -- reach out to me and let me know if want to invest in something that will help adoption of Bitcoin, which will result in its value continuing to go up...

</comment><comment><USER47> Litecoin doesn't have this problem.

<comment><USER11> Whoa, you sure about that? I recall several million ltc are controlled by a handful of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.

<comment><USER49> See "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph",

a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of "RSA".)

Preprint available here: [http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf)

(The "Rich List" seems obviously inspired by this paper.)

<comment><USER50> The original Bitcoin "Rich List" predates that paper by years.

Sadly that paper is pretty poor. It's adequate for informing someone bitcoin isn't anonymous though— but the bitcoin.org website also does that without being littered with basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works.</comment></comment></comment>


Rails Rumble 2012 - Winners Announced - <AUTHOR> http://railsrumble.com/entries/winners The winners of 2012 Rails Rumble have been announced, so go check them out! <comment><USER2> Awesome. There was a little bit of discussion here about the winner (<http://findthin.gs/>) a few days ago at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4659320> .

I have to say that I was really surprised with the prizes described at <http://blog.railsrumble.com/2012/10/13/prizes-prizes-prizes/> . It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors. Our local start-up weekend awarded $20,000 in cash between the top three winners, in addition to a lot of free services, and the competition wouldn't be nearly as stiff.

<comment><USER3> _It seems modest given the sheer scale of the event (500 teams) and the size of some of the sponsors._

I think a couple of things come into play. It was far from guaranteed that 500 teams would actually sign up. The Rails Rumble didn't take place in 2011 and was fresh back this year. Also, I'd make a guess that having _more_ sponsors reduces their interest in putting up more than they have to. If it were just a few, they'd get more out of it so might put up more goodies. Collectively, though, I think the prizes are pretty good.

(Disclaimer: I'm partly involved with the Rumble but am not involved with sponsorships at all and know no details.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, just amazing how much some people can do in such a short time. The winner's design is awesome <http://findseri.es/tv_series/search>

<comment><USER5> I was very impressed by that background animation for the first 10 seconds and then I got really dizzy. I think they should stop the animation a few sec after.

<comment><USER6> I really like the animation too. But I'm wondering why they chose to make a collage of movie posters if the search is for tv shows. Awesome nonetheless.

<comment><USER7> Check at the top on the front page or any of the show pages - there is an option to toggle to search movies as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> DeployButton (<http://deploybutton.com>) and Revision.io (<http://revision.io>) were my favorite.

<comment><USER9> Awesome, thanks a ton! Fixing up deploybutton now, hope to have some of the bugs worked out soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> RR is always enjoyable.

UI issue: I found the descriptions hard to read. Too many things thrown at me, and the thing I want to see, the description, is in a small font and low contrast color.

<comment><USER11> My teammate and I agreed that the site needs some work and thought it would have been fun to Rails Rumble a new Rails Rumble.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, although apparently this has been tried a few times without success. Do it next year!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We built <http://planswiftly.com> as our RR 12 submission.

After seeing the amazing entries that did win, we are humbled and inspired to try harder next time around. (And next time, we will absolutely hunt down a great designer)

<comment><USER14> Your design is veeeeery attractive. In fact, it was the one that stood out the most to me when I first looked through the entries. I'd love to "borrow" your mediocre designer

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Congratulations to everyone involved. Also, many thanks to the organisers & judges, it was a blast!

</comment><comment><USER15> One of the most interesting things to me about this is the listing of gems/plugins and APIs used for each entry. If it's all in a structured form, it'd be interesting to see a table/list of the most used.

In terms of API, just browsing through, I saw that the Solo winner (<http://medpass.es>) used a government drug pill identification API I'd never heard of before:

<http://pillbox.nlm.nih.gov/index.html>

<comment><USER16> From what I can tell, here are the most popular gems for the ten winners:

      haml (8)
      devise (6)
      coffee (5)
      sass (5)
      pry (5)
      sidekiq (4)
      mysql (4)
      honeybadger (4)
      simple_form (3)
      pusher (3)
      bootstrap (3)

It's pretty clear that haml/coffee/sass are just flat out winning, despite all the handwringing.

<comment><USER12> We used Slim for findthin.gs—it's faster, has much better whitespace control, and, imho, better achieves Haml's reduce noise, increase beauty aims. But there's no contest about Sass and CoffeeScript being amazing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems? - <AUTHOR> I don't generally expect society to listen if computer programmers tell them to do or not do something.  But, just maybe, they might listen if programmers said, "don't use software for this", en masse.  I feel like voting systems that have no voter-verifiable paper backup are a horrible idea and (in the literal sense) a threat to democracy.  Is it possible for programmers to somehow get this message across to the rest of society?  Or do most other programmers think this is not a problem and the security risks are overblown? <comment><USER3> Multiple engineers have testified before congress that they were ordered to make systems easy to hack. This has been going on for decades and nothing has changed AFAIK. I suspect everything will go fully electronic with no paper- trail, despite my having a paper trail every time I fuel up my vehicle.

<comment><USER4> Citation?

<comment><USER3> This isn't a college paper. I do not need to cite everything that I state. You can find these on search engines and youtube easily enough.

<comment><USER5> If you claim something that is not generally known, a citation is kind of nice. If you are asked for one, a citation is even nicer - where one asks, ten or a hundred others may have the same question. You want the asker to go Google it, but you might save a hundred people the work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you want horror story in this area, look for how elections are done in Brazil. 100% digital, from voting to counting to totals.

</comment><comment><USER7> Software-only voting systems are a worse idea than paper-ballot voting systems. Unfortunately, issues do come up with paper-based voting systems so people think the system can be improved by throwing software at it.

At this point, voting by mail seems to be the way to go in places that are going all in with software systems.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am not sure why Software should not be used. My solution would be

1\. Open Source software, which can be verified by everyone.

2\. Voting via an app with authentication as good as or through your bank account.

3\. After Voting, We should be able to query and verify who our vote is with - on a particular day of counting, and get whole history of our votes. An individual persons vote is append only.

Please, do let me know drawbacks.

<comment><USER9> > Open Source software, which can be verified by everyone.

What makes you think that the open source software you verified is the software actually loaded on the machine you are using to vote. What about the software on the machine that counts the votes?

> Voting via an app with authentication as good as or through your bank > account.

What about voter secrecy? Logging in and then voting defeats the purpose of voting.

> After Voting, We should be able to query and verify who our vote is with - > on a particular day of counting, and get whole history of our votes. An > individual persons vote is append only.

If you can query to find your vote then anyone else can. Do you want everyone to know who you voted for?

<comment><USER8> Why do you think that paper ballots cannot be faked? Why do you think counting paper votes is better?

You can't force people to declare their vote, If they don't want to. If the country is totally lawless, then I don't think voting will change it anyway.

Just because we can query some info about ourselves, doesn't mean anyone else can. That is clear malicious intent.

<comment><USER10> > Why do you think that paper ballots cannot be faked? Why do you think > counting paper votes is better?

Faking paper ballots is easy; getting any substantial number of fake paper ballots into the count in a system with the kind of controls associated with paper ballots virgin hg in the US, OTOH, is not.

> Just because we can query some info about ourselves, doesn't mean anyone > else can.

Yes, it does. That is, it means that the information is permanently more to your identity. It means it's subject to vote buying/retaliation, because people can choose you into proving your vote and can reward or punish you for it.

> That is clear malicious intent.

That doesn't mean it can't be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-fried-egg The part where regulation failed was when the engineers went before Congress and not a Grand Jury to testify.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting enough, i just came across a project that is working on this using the blockchain [http://188.8.131.52/papers/VerusVision.pdf](http://18.104.22.168/papers/VerusVision.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why would you turn down the ability to hack entire countries democracy? Think of the power! /s

</comment><comment><USER13> Most software people I know aren't particularly persuasive. One trait noticeably missing among them is the ability to simplify a complex topic without losing too much relevant information.

But even if some are, ways exist to undermine an expert's credibility about a complex topic.

For example, when Robert Oppenheimer began warning people about the dangers of nuclear war, the attacks came. Once the government felt comfortable enough with Edward Teller, it could proceed with revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance.

That said, not sure a paper receipt actually helps because it's certainly possible for a voting machine to spit out a receipt, then change whatever data the receipt was supposed to capture. And unless the change was drastic and massive (e.g. Trump wins California) then it will probably go undetected.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point on the average persuasiveness of software people.

On paper receipts, the idea is that it allows for recounts. Not that paper is invulnerable, but the fact that more people understand how paper works than understand how software works, makes it a better option, I think (speaking as a software person).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow this thread is very depressing. I'm really sorry to say that this time I strongly disagree with HNers.

I'm a previous human rights activist and I worked in a lot of past elections in Turkey. I am very opinionated on this issue and I strongly believe the future is software-only votes.

Naive reasons why we should use software-only voting:

1\. Humans can do mistakes. Machines can't do mistakes (unless humans who programmed them did mistakes)

2\. It takes more time and resources to count votes compared to automating it.

3\. You'll use less paper, so better for environment.

Better reasons why:

1\. Voting is an entirely impossible-to-debug process. If you live in a corrupt republic like Turkey of Russia you need to spend thousands of dollars and people to ensure elections are held democratically. Because government won't ensure that or they will actively work against it. Software can be made debuggable.

2\. If you live in a country like Russia, government can attempt collect data about your votes to estimate/learn which party you voted for. With cryptography this can be made mathematically impossible (or equivalent to very hard problems like PvsNP)

3\. Recalculating election results is very infeasible in real life. If you store election data (so that it's impossible to find who voted what) and make it open, everyone can confirm election results EVEN IF we find a bug in retroactive computation script.

4\. With free software (free as in freedom) it is possible for experts (computer scientists, cryptographers, law makers, attorneys etc...) to audit the process of election. This is not possible in real elections: lawyers cannot audit the election so it's possible some people make wrong decisions interfering in people's votes (i.e. deciding a bad vote to be ok, vice versa)

Problems:

1\. Backdoors etc. Solution: use free software and pay experts to redundantly confirm system works. Pay software engineers to maybe write parts of the system in agda, idris, coq so it's provable. This is not terribly worse than the space program etc.

2\. Not everyone can use computers. Solution: you can organize the exact same election system, call people to special places to vote and use computer instead of paper.

3\. What if we're hacked even after experts checking the system? Solution: redundantly store the data, use parity bits RAID etc to ensure data integrity. If there is some unrecoverable data loss, cancel elections.

<comment><USER15> > Humans can do mistakes. Machines can't do mistakes (unless humans who > programmed them did mistakes)

That's an incredibly limited view of the issue. Machines can make mistakes regardless of human intervention (albeit probably indirectly, because humans have an unprecedented level of influence on reality). First, there are known software glitches caused by unexpected bit flips. Second, software systems can grow to a level of complexity where unless you invest orders of magnitude more time in theorem provers for it you cannot guarantee that 'machines can't do mistakes'.

Electronic voting is an interesting problem and I agree with you, it's probably the future. But it's not a near future or not as near as you'd think. Electronic voting is vulnerable to attacks which cannot be detected when they happen. Armies of diverse human observers for paper ballots are much more effective for detecting fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Today's XKCD is on this as well: [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The way I could see doing it would be to hack several states' voting systems, and totally mess with the results so that they are _clearly_ incorrect. Like, Trump wins California and Massachusetts over Hillary by 99% - <USER2> obviously, blatantly wrong.

Note well: I am _not_ advocating actually doing this. But that's what I think it would take.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect you might be right, and I wonder how many not-clearly-incorrect hacks will happen before the first clearly-incorrect one does.

But, if one were doing that, better to cause Mickey Mouse to win the state, it is a more clear signal. But I'm not the person to send that signal, which is why I was thinking about how else to communicate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would you convince them to discard something that is at least better than the alternative? Manual voting systems are easily to hack and more difficult to find who/when or even if it was hacked.

<comment><USER18> How would you hack a paper ballot?

You see your choices in paper.

You place the paper in a ballot box.

The ballot box is watched by people on both sides.

The ballot box is sealed and transparently transported to a counting facility.

The ballot counting is observed by people on both sides.

The counting facility counts the ballots twice, with both counts having to agree. The counts are communicated to a central tallying location.

The counts for each counting facility and the total are publicly communicated.

<comment><AUTHOR> The most important feature of a paper ballot is that the general populace can read them, and understand how they work. The worst feature of any electronic- only voting system is that the general populace cannot verify that they work. This is a bad thing even in the case where no hacking occurred, since it reduces trust in the validity of the outcome by anyone who dislikes the result.

<comment><USER19> The general populace can't really verify the results of paper ballots either, that would mean letting anyone who wanted to do their own manual counts of all ballots.

<comment><USER20> [https://www.eac.gov/voters/become-a-poll- worker/](https://www.eac.gov/voters/become-a-poll-worker/)

<comment><USER19> A poll worker isn't the general public, though, that's still a limited number of privileged individuals. The general public would be literally anyone off the street.

And a single poll worker still wouldn't be able to verify _all_ of the votes in an election. There's still an insurmountable trust issue where most of the public has to accept the results from what amounts to a black box, which paper ballots don't entirely solve.

<comment><USER21> > A poll worker isn't the general public, though, that's still a limited > number of privileged individuals. The general public would be literally > anyone off the street.

In Australia we have observers for the counting process and every party or candidate can send representatives. Political parties are practically begging for volunteers in this role. We also have a much more complex preferential voting system but the manual counting process still shows results 30-60 minutes after polls close in all but the tightest races.

> And a single poll worker still wouldn't be able to verify all of the votes > in an election.

Anyone cheating would have to involve a huge number of people around the country and the people watching those people. Getting elected legitimately would be far easier.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Archaological Work of the H Language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Btup/H-lang <comment><AUTHOR> I am ready to implement the forgotten H language here: [http://dcoj.wmh3.com/cscos/h/](http://dcoj.wmh3.com/cscos/h/) Feel free to join me or add suggestions to my implementation.</comment>


Square responds to Verifone's allegations - <AUTHOR> https://squareup.com/letters/security

<comment><USER2> PR-wise, very well done on Square's part:

-Didn't mention the competitor by name, and stuck to addressing the arguments, without any messy ad hominem stuff.

-Set up a separate page to address this issue. They could have easily lost by simply shifting the focus of the discussion to questioning Square's security. Posting a message on their home page or their blog, for example, makes it an issue to people who had no previous exposure to the issue.

-Stuck to a basic analogy that everyone has experience with, and everyone can understand.

-Used the opportunity to discuss other aspects of Square without throwing it in the reader's face. I had no idea they had a partner bank.

Good on them. I feel Dorsey has a mind for this, but I also find myself wondering if they had any PR consultation.

<comment><USER3> _I had no idea they had a partner bank._

Chase is probably their processor.

<comment><USER4> Verifone mentioned that Chase was their gateway.

<comment><USER3> I think you mean payment processor. Verifone (and its systems) are actually the gateway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to develop kiosks that accepted credit cards for a company I started. We purchased some $20-$30 USB card swipers in order to capture credit card numbers and process orders. When you swiped the card, it would return an ASCII text string with the credit card number, name, and some additional codes (CVV1 and CVV2, I believe). If I recall correctly, the magnetic strip has a number of tracks, and you could program the reader to read one or all of these tracks. If you submitted the full string from the swipe to your merchant, you got a much better rate on the transaction.

The device was something like this: [http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=usb+card+swipe+read...](http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=usb+card+swipe+reader&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=ivns&resnum=3&biw=1214&bih=688&bav=on.2,or.&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=9253952205062488166&sa=X&ei=BoB4Tb7pJ5CWsgP4uqSDAw&ved=0CF0Q8wIwAA#ps- sellers)

Anyway, seems to me there's nothing new here... just the fact that people can now get a device capable of decoding the tracks on a magnetic strip for $0 instead of $30.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. At first, I listened to Veriphone's complaints with an open mind, because credit card fraud is pretty serious.

But then I started thinking, "That's it? A magstripe reader! You can get those anywhere and it will do the exact same thing. Unencrypted."

We had to pick one up for a customer so the can use magstripe time cards. To test it out, we plugged it into a computer, opened Notepad and started scanning anything with a magstripe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When the entrenched established companies start coming after you, that's when you know you're onto something.

<comment><USER7> This made me think, "I wish I could invest in Square."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> UPDATE Since I raised some serious concerns, I wanted to update from the comments provided. Square _does not_ store the data on the device. The device must have an internet connection and the data is sent, securely, online. In other words, the original allegations are stupid any way you slice it.

\---

I think I'm missing something.

People seem to think that the problem is that Square can be used as a skimmer - which I agree is stupid. That's like saying a pen & paper is a skimmer.

However, it _seems_ like the real issue is that Square _stores_ the data on the device in the clear. What happens if the device gets stolen?

Imagine if a web app stored CC information in the clear and it got hacked, people would rightfully hold the vendor/processor responsible. _If_ devices get stolen and data is stored in the clear, Square is totally wrong and they are totally deflecting/mis-representing the issue.

Can anyone with actual knowledge about this, rather than two business pointing fingers, clear this up for us?

<comment><USER9> From <http://www.sq-skim.com/>

> _Let me explain how easy it is to exploit the vulnerability.

A criminal signs up with Square, obtains the dongle for free and creates a fake Square app on his smartphone. Insert the dongle into the audio jack of a smartphone or iPad, and you've got a mobile skimming device that fits in your pocket and that can be used to illegally collect personal and financial data from the magnetic stripe of a payment card. It's shockingly simple.

The issue is that Square's hardware is poorly constructed and lacks all ability to encrypt consumers' data, creating a window for criminals to turn the device into a skimming machine in a matter of minutes._

The "problem" is that the Square reader thing doesn't encrypt its communication to the iDevice.

And it shouldn't. As Square said in the letter, by merely _seeing_ your card someone has enough information to steal from you. At best they could public- key encrypt the data in the reader itself and pipe the encrypted data to their servers... until someone cracks the key. Or makes a fake Square reader that's identical to the ones out now. At which point we're back at square one. As it stands, Square just made a simpler version of a standard credit card reader, and for some reason they're claiming it's a security hole.

FWIW: Verifone just guaranteed I'll go out of my way to avoid ever being a customer of theirs. This is FUD, plain and simple; they're probably doing it because they see a threat and are trying to squash it, rather than out-perform it.

<comment><USER10> Is that really right tho?

Lets follow the waiter example. In order to skim the card number they'd have to put the card down, pull out a pen, and copy it. Likely within plain sight of their employees. With a skimmer they just discretely 'double swipe' the card and they got what they need. It certainly makes it a simpler attack vector.

Now you don't really need square to do this. There are plenty of magnetic card readers out there (I seem to recall someone got caught doing precisely this with a PDA of some kind). That doesn't mean that Square should make it simple. Why not provide some sort of encryption to the communications layer?

<comment><USER9> People have cell phones with cameras - just take a picture. Nobody would think it strange that they have a cell phone in-hand while walking around.

What sort of encryption would you think they could do? And how much larger and more expensive would it make the reader? And where would it get enough power to perform the encryption (which MUST be asymmetric to be secure, or the key can be extracted from the device)? They'd lose all semblance of interoperability between devices, add a battery, add significant cost, and all to fight a bogus claim and do nothing to prevent someone from buying a standard, unencrypted card reader that isn't under fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Verifone has a point, but it comes through very badly in what they wrote. It's all about the issue of trust and habit.

Skimming equipment, both software and hardware, has been freely available for ages now. And it's quite simple. Anybody who knows how to use ebay and write a small application can create quite sophisticated skimming equipment themselves.

The problem is not the availability of the equipment or the know-how. The problem is what "average Joe" is used to. If "average Joe" would balk when presented an off the shelf mobile phone to swipe their card through, well, then skimming using a mobile phone would be hard. But if the banks and payment processors have trained "average Joe" to know that a mobile phone is a completely legit way of reading credit cards, well then this type of skimming is easy.

If no ATMs existed, well, then it would be really hard to skim cards using an ATM-like device, because people would balk.

It's all about keeping the different legit ways of accepting credit card payment to a minimum. The fewer legit ways, the fewer possibilities of skimming.

On the other hand, there is no doubt in my mind that mobile payment will be the future. Replacing the standard plastic will a chip in your mobile phone will become commonplace soon, and we will also probably see applications where you can transfer money to others simply by having both mobile phones interact.

So the question is if the big fuss really helps anyone, or if it's only delaying the inevitable.

<comment><USER12> Giving any credibility to that argument is entirely fallacious because it fails the infinite regression test. Ultimately, you end up back at the argument that if we all relied on cash, there would be no credit/debit card information to steal at all.

Making it difficult to process credit cards doesn't solve the problem of credit card security.

<comment><USER11> Not talking about making it difficult to process credit cards, but rather standardizing it as much as possible. I will again use the ATM as an example. If all ATMs looked exactly the same anybody should be able to detect fake ATMs and ATMs sabbotaged with external skimming equipment.

Security wise an inexpensive portable standardised terminal would make much more sense. In the end it would cost a bit more, but this would not necessarilly translate to increased cost for the POS. Less skimming equals less cost to the service providers _and_ the POS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The original allegation can be found at: <http://www.sq-skim.com/>

(if there's a permanent URL for that, I can't find it).

<comment><USER13> Man, that letter's awesome. You could replace 'Square reader' with 'Pen' and the letter's truth and value remain intact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Their defense essentially places the onus on their processor (JPMorgam Chase) to employ "risk mitigation" techniques we all admonish PayPal for.

I guess the question is this: why not use smartcards or RFID? Other countries have for years. Why not in the US?

<comment><USER15> Chase wouldn't be the one processing skimmed transactions, anyhow - it would be any merchant or processor the thief could find with weak fraud controls. In the US, ultimate liability for fraud is usually with the wronged merchant.

You know why Paypal lost a hundred million in fraud? One way was because they were the weakest link at the time: Paypal got used for cashing. (The hardest, riskiest part of stealing credit cards: transforming a credit card number into hard currency, without getting arrested. There are any number of ways to do this: buy items with a high resale value on eBay, pay with Psypal backed by stolen cards, sell items for cash. Set up affiliate account with merchant of high margin item, put sham transactions through using Paypal account backed by stolen cards, withdrawal clean money from affiliate account to which no accessible link to Paypal accounts exist. etc, etc)

Smart cards/RFID are basically worthless for preventing card not present fraud, which is the lion's share of it.

<comment><USER16> I know it's an innocent typo, but I love the idea of Psypal. That's when they use psychics for fraud detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Big kudos for keeping the rebuttal short and clear.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sure, the CC data can easily be stolen even now but assuming square gets popular, consumers then will have to "trust one more device" in addition to the card-readers used by merchants, any other place where you swipe the card, the waiter, etc etc. And more so because its much easier to write rouge apps or malware-apps for smartphones than to hack the dedicated card readers. In case of a malware-app, the danger is not just limited to one merchant. It seems to me that the real question raised by verifone is not being given enough concern. Why can't the square card encrypt the CC data ?? with a private key that only square-app can make sense of?

<comment> brown9-2 _And more so because its much easier to write rouge apps or malware-apps for smartphones than to hack the dedicated card readers_

When I hand over my card to a merchant in a store, how do I know what they are swiping it in is a dedicated and secure card reader? I don't.

<comment><USER18> In the UK the merchant is not permitted to touch the customers card; all the card readers face the customer and are used by the customer (restaurants all have mobile PIN entry devices).

Now each credit card in the UK is has a chip (which uses end-to-end crypto), they're looking to phase out magstripes completely.

Currently if the merchant has to fallback to using the magstripe then he'll have considerably less protection against customer fraud, and he'll pay a much higher transaction fee.

Square would not be permitted to operate in the UK.

<comment><USER19> _Square would not be permitted to operate in the UK._

However neither would would the other 99% of the credit card in the US. The US infrastructure is insecure, and Square is no worse than the rest of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing that could help this would be if Square let you pick a secret image, and they would show it in the app, when you're signing.

If someone is using a fake app, they wouldn't be able to incorporate your secret image, and you'd be tipped off. They'd still get your credit card, but you'd know it right away, and could cancel your card/call the police right there.

Same thing banks do on web sites to prevent this same kind of attack.

</comment><comment><USER21> A very measured and sensible response. No set of security measures is 100% perfect. How you deal with and manage the imperfections is the real test.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wait. Isn't the data on the magnetic strip unencrypted anyway? Sure, your little card reader could encrypt the data, then send little ones and zeros through the headphone jack to be decrypted by your proprietary software, but the original data still isn't encrypted. It's just sitting there on the card in all of it's unencrypted glory. This is essentially security through obfuscation.

</comment><comment><USER23> Relevant, how Verifone have been gunning for Square since teh start: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVOzysmxhyM>

</comment><comment><USER24> At best, the issue I can see here is that Square would make it easy to very quickly and casually skim a card without having to look at it, or be seen writing down the info from it. A marginal advantage if you already have access to the card, but conceivably, a fast fingered waiter could pull this off in public view, and the Square app is perhaps a little easier to conceal than other card readers.

What about the value of also capturing the CVV1 code, which, as I understand it, is the only piece of info not already printed on the card?

<comment> brown9-2 CVV is printed on the back of the card. Thus the point remains, once I hand over my card to someone, all of the information they need to use my card is printed right on the card.

<comment><USER24> My understanding is that the CVV2 is printed on the back of the card for phone and online orders and the CVV1 encoded on the strip for in person orders when the card is swiped.

I'm not sure what the security rationale is for 2 distinct codes. Maybe the CVV1 value is designed to prevent thieves from making swipable cards when they only have the credit card number and didn't clone a card (e.g. they obtained the card number from a rogue or compromised online store).

<comment><USER16> The two codes are probably because the banks distinguish between merchants that take cards online and those that only accept physical cards; the latter get charged less, because they're a lower risk. (At least, that used to be the case.) With two codes, the banks can require physical-only merchants to include the CVV2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Change is so Scary to big Business.

</comment><comment><USER26> ~

<comment><USER9> TiL;De...R? If so, that's kinda clever...

I disagree with tldr on this entirely, however; it's short, to the point, and an _astoundingly_ good way of responding to the allegations (ie, FUD).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> tl:dr - FUD backfires, Dorsey FTW.

<comment><USER28> It was already pretty short.</comment></comment>


Viewtron - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewtron <comment><USER2> >Viewtron did not initially allow users to send private messages to each other, a conscious decision by Knight Ridder to exert editorial control.[9] Knight Ridder's vision for the service was offering products and services for users to consume, not in providing a medium for communication.[10] When interactive features were later added, Knight Ridder discouraged their use, fearing that users interacting directly with each other would lead to a "dystopia without newspapers."[11]

Prophetic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every time I come across a mention of videotext I'm reminded that marketing- friendly industry buzzwords are nothing new. "Video" was the era's token tech buzzword. Videotape, videotext, Video Hits 1, "video dialtone" (a form of internet-like, cable operator-provided services that never took off), an entire pop song called "Living on Video" and another one called "Video Killed the Radio Star."

Another note: videotext was the product of an era that figured out the future was easily-accessible information, but couldn't quite nail down that it wouldn't be provided in walled gardens at high expense.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, it _was_ kind of revolutionary to a lot of people that a CRT could be used for something other than watching broadcast programs.

Ask anyone who was a kid back in the 1970s about the first time they saw themselves on TV using a camera. It was nothing short of a miracle. Even Disney World had it as part of an attraction.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZrLgoZunYA&t=1m41s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZrLgoZunYA&t=1m41s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Video at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127607)

<comment><USER6> Wow. That video is something. I would not suspect people were complaining about information overload _in 1983_!

<comment><USER5> That goes back to the telegraph in the mid 19th century, if not earlier. There's a famous quote from Thoreau questioning whether the new quantity of information has any quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the French Minitel which started in 1978 and was retired only in 2012: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)

<comment><USER8> Videotext had vector graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was one of the 125 homes in Coral Gables that was an early tester of Viewtron. I was only 10 or so at the time so I only vaguely remember the Viewtron, but my memory was that it seemed like magic compared to the BBSs I was able to dial in to from an Apple II we also owned.

At some people point we got a Source account (which was acquired by CompuServe) and there wasn't much need for the Viewtron anymore. I think we may have canceled our Viewtron subscription even before the service was shutdown.

Perhaps HN readers can help confirm a related memory of mine. I recall their being a graphical BBS called I think gbbs for the Apple II that existed maybe around 1985 or so. I can't find any confirmation of this via Google though. The client was written in assembly (it was one of the first programs I recall printing out the assembly for and trying to understand) and used hires graphics to emulate 70 col text as well as could draw graphics. Does that ring any bells for anyone?

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Ahoy! praised Viewtron in its November 1985 issue, citing e-commerce, chat, > news, and games as strengths and adding that the service had "the best > customer service department it has ever been my pleasure to call"_

Page 83 here:

[https://www.commodore.ca/gallery/magazines/ahoy/Ahoy- issue-2...](https://www.commodore.ca/gallery/magazines/ahoy/Ahoy- issue-23-02.pdf)

Note that this is part 2 of the scan of that issue, starting at page 81.</comment>


Linus Torvalds: Apple's HFS+ is probably the worst file-system ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxveda.com/2015/01/13/linus-torvalds-apples-hfs-probably-worst-file-system-ever/ <comment><USER2> This is just blogspam of something that was popular on social media yesterday. Which is where Linux Veda found it in the first place and proceeded to not add any meaningful commentary or context.

It was already discussed to death here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876319)

</comment><comment><USER3> For reference, NTFS is case-sensitive. _Win32_ is case-insensitive. The case sensitivity is implemented at a layer above the filesystem so that classic Windows apps will behave the way users expect. (Case sensitive filesystems are confusing for users and mostly create opportunities for horrible mishaps.) As a result, the POSIX subsystem can store case sensitive files just like a linux FS would, with 'FOO' and 'foo' being separate files right next to each other:

[http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100625](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100625)

Case insensitivity like win32's is still kind of a mess, but it's unfair to paint the developers of NTFS as idiots when they actually got this right. Above the FS layer is the correct place to implement case insensitivity, because case insensitivity is a feature that aids _users_ in _selecting_ files, not a feature that aids applications in opening them or creating them.

<comment><USER4> I don't know. Now you end up in a circumstance where you have N files named some variant of "Foo" and the GUI layer can't distinguish them.

Enforcing this invariant at the filesystem layer (with well defined semantics, which HFS+ at least documents semi-well) seems eminently reasonable to me.

</comment></comment><comment> babl-yc As a developer I could see case-sensitive file systems as more "proper" and predictable. But as an everyday Mac user, I'd be annoyed if I accidentally selected "upload.png" instead of "Upload.png" and sent the wrong file.

<comment><USER5> _But as an everyday Mac user, I 'd be annoyed if I accidentally selected "upload.png" instead of "Upload.png" and sent the wrong file._

That assumes you somehow created two files with names differing only in case, which I'd argue would happen only if you were naming your files with such generic names. Also, I don't think the fact that two files' names _look_ similar should be any reason to treat them as the same - otherwise, would you suggest that the letter O and the number 0 (along with the letter o) should be considered identical for filenames?

<comment><USER6> You obviously don't understand how a lot of people actually use their computer: [http://xkcd.com/1459/](http://xkcd.com/1459/)

(please note the tongue firmly planted in cheek, even if a lot of people actually DO work like this. which is terrifying)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another "funny" detail:

>The maximum representable date is February 6, 2040 at 06:28:15 GMT.

[http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.ht...](http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.html)

<comment><USER8> Interesting: I didn't realize the "Epoch" in this case was "midnight, January 1, 1904, GMT". Given that the representation is stored as an unsigned 32-bit integer, it seems like you cannot represent dates older than this "Epoch" starting value. Since it's a file system, that's probably of much less concern than a more general date-time format.

However, does anyone know the genesis behind which this particular date was chosen? It's far enough back to not cause any issues and appears to be close to the minimum date-time value obtained using the minimum value for signed 32-bit integer and the standard Unix Epoch (which would be around 13 Dec 1901), but other than that?

<comment><USER9> [https://support.microsoft.com/kb/180162?wa=wsignin1.0](https://support.microsoft.com/kb/180162?wa=wsignin1.0)

The 1900 epoch needs additional code to handle the fact that 1900 was not a leap year. Why not the UNIX epoch? Well that's another question entirely.

<comment><USER10> Also: [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214326](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214326):

 _" Explains why the year 1900 is treated as a leap year in Excel 2000"_

Mac OS was written in a time of memory scarcity; 1904 is just an easier choice for the epoch than 1900. That's also why they didn't choose the Unix epoch, as it would have required supporting multiple epochs, one for disk time stamps, and one to handle birth dates (time stamps on classic Mac OS are unsigned; there were no times before the epoch. And yes, there were no Mac users over 80 :-))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yesterday's discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876319)

</comment><comment><USER12> There are very real problems with HFS+ related to reliability and data corruption. It really is quite bad. Linus's argument is silly, however, and purely a matter of taste. Case insensitivity certainly isn't the reason that HFS+ is bad.

<comment><USER13> I don't even understand why he doesn't like case insensitivity. I can't think of a reason to have two files with the same name that vary only in capitalisation.

<comment><USER14> Are these two names the same case insensitively? Pick and PICK. Hint: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I)

How about Straße, STRASSE and strasse?

For an American audience, how about Résumé and RESUME and resume?

How about Ⅸ and IX? Hint: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normalizat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normalization)

The answer to all that is that it depends on the user and their locale settings. So to get this right you would have to pass the locale settings into system calls that go into the filesystem so it can do the right thing on every call. But then what happens if the locale later gets changed? Before some file names may be considered equivalent, but with the new one they are different and things break. Ok how about a system wide locale setting that can't be changed? Are you going to require a disk reformat each time a different user is on the system, or a multilingual user who travels?

The right solution is exactly what Unix did in the first place. The filesystem stores names exactly as is without having to deal with locales. User space is then responsible for doing the right thing for a user. For example a word processor can treat Résumé and Resume as the same for Americans in file selection dialogs.

User space already has to deal with all this, for example by sorting file names. Here is how hard that is [http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/](http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/) and a simple example is if z comes before or after ö. Or when showing a list of Swedish names to a German user do you use Swedish or German sort order?

A similar analogy is dealing with time. The best approach is to store the time as UTC in the filesystem and let user space show it in whatever way is relevant for the user. On the other hand if you store local time in the filesystem, you will end up in a world of hurt trying to work around that. (UTC to local time is a lossy conversion making local time back to UTC hard to work out.)

<comment><USER15> But half the time, I'm having to deal with file access and creation in the terminal. That's as an important user experience to me (a power user) as anything in the GUI. Does Unix change the way the terminal handles files depending on the locale? My understanding is that it does not. (If it did, maybe that would be the best solution for everyone, but I imagine a lot of geeks would be up in arms about how the terminal experience is not consistent...)

<comment><USER14> There are multiple layers at play. For example someone looking a file selection dialog in a gui has at least these layers, lowest level first:

\- Filesystem implementation (actual on disk bytes)

\- Filesystem compatibility (adjustments to OS semantics)

\- Generic filesystem layer in the kernel

\- System call interface (between userland and kernel)

\- Userland low level library (eg system call wrappers)

\- Higher level libraries (eg libc)

\- User interface libraries

\- App level modules & libraries

The problem with the filesystem being case insensitive is that is the first level above, where there is virtually no context or user information. That is the hardest place to work out if the user considers Résumé and RESUME to be the same. The lower down the list the easier it gets. The important point is that how you store things and how you present does not need to be the same.

Command line tools typically use the libc level of things. It is perfectly possible to make that level so the system appears case insensitive (another poster mentioned Windows doing that).

Your Unix command line experience is very much affected by your locale. For example the ls command does the following:

\- Sorts filenames

\- Displays sizes (different locales have different conventions for floating point representation, digit grouping etc)

\- Displays times

Environment variables like $LANG, $LC_*, $TZ etc control this in Unix.

Individual programs can also alter behaviour. For example bash can be configured to do case insensitive filename completion.

TLDR: while case insensitivity is a nice user experience for humans, it is awful for the lower layers including filesystems. The closer a program is to a human, the easier it is to give that nice user experience. There is no requirement for a case insensitive user experience to then make filesystems also implement that. And as my examples show, they couldn't do it correctly anyway.

<comment><USER16> Don't forget the additional fun that terminal emulators add in the journey from libc to your eyeballs. Some of the most difficult bugs I've worked on involved grep with the color flag and automatic build systems...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He's absolutely right about NFD, it's horrible. If you're using plain latin-1 you usually don't have any problems. And everything changes if you are using "composite" characters like à or ё or й. It's not just HFS+ issue, it's a system-wide issue, that break mounted network resources for example. Or even USB sticks.

</comment><comment><USER15> Technical hurdles aside, I just can't agree that case-sensitivity makes sense. To most people, an "a" and an "A" are not different symbols; they're the same letter with "uppercase" formatting applied, much like bold or italics. And although one could argue that you could make a case-insensitive GUI layer while keeping the implementation case-sensitive, I feel that the terminal can be just as important from a UX perspective as anything else in the OS. After all, it's one of the main places power users create and access files.

Given how much Siracusa and Torvalds (to an extent) advocate for better user experience over ease of technical implementation, I feel I'm missing something. Our job as programmers is to encompass the complexity of the real world in our programs, not to make our users think like machines.

<comment><USER2> _not to make our users think like machines._

If differentiating between "file" and "File" is thinking like a machine, how isn't differentiating between "my files" and "myfiles" thinking like a machine?

Should "my files" and "myfiles" be collapsed to mean the same thing? What about "files"?

<comment><USER15> An "f" is not a different character from an "F". To most people, it's the same letter with special formatting applied. They don't see it and think, "Oh, that's ASCII character 102." An F is an f, no matter how you type it.

On the other hand, "myfiles" and "my files" have different numbers of characters. They sound different in your head, and you can easily point to the difference. It's the same as typing "alien" versus "a lien".

<comment><USER5> A Ford is a very different thing from a ford. You can drive the former through the latter.

If "most people" cannot tell the difference, then I believe that would be a failing of the education system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how much Adobe's incompatibility with case-sensitive filesystems affected Apple's decisions: [https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error- case-sensiti...](https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case- sensitive-drives-supported.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Focusing on the non-technical details… case-sensitive filesystems just seems horrible for consumers!

At my day job, I work with people who have barely used a computer before. I could see an 80-year old woman having three versions of a letter she typed in Pages or Word, simply because she had mixed use capital letters, and then mistakening the versions and deleting the wrong file.

</comment><comment><USER20> I seem to remember a story of how this decision was made (or at least a part of it). I thought I remembered hearing that Steve Jobs was in a roomful of developers and took a quick poll of whether they liked case sensitive vs case- preserving filesystems, and case-preserving won.

I could be totally making this up though. Anyone remember hearing this and can confirm?

</comment><comment><USER19> Another misleading headline, simply for linkbait and dollars.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is just Linux grumping about subjective tastes—he rags on the default case sensitivity of HFS+ and the finder, neither of which he's forced to use even if he's stapled to a mac. If you want a case sensitive filesystem, reformat your damn mac! I've seen it confuse enough non-computer savvy people I wouldn't want Apple to change their filesystem for the sake of developers who need to distinguish between headers by case.

NB: I use a case-sensitive HFS+ install for cross-compiling when it's necessary.

<comment><USER22> Don't underestimate the power of defaults.

Also, this can trip up in several other contexts besides headers. For instance, someone renames a file in their repository, changing just a filename case. And then you'll have to scratch your head a bit to understand a git issue that will invariably arise when you pull in the changes. Unless you are fortunate enough not to have a deadline, you won't be so quick to reformat the machine.

This actually happened to me. In the end, it was quicker to spin up a linux vm than to reformat the machine.

EDIT: Also, you appear to have missed the part that says "There is a case sensitive option, but Apple actively hides it and doesn't support it." No support is really, really, really bad. Noone will deploy OSX machines formatted like that if it is unsupported.

<comment><USER23> OS X is primarily a consumer's OS. Every time a decision has to be made between making the life of the programer or the consumer easier, Apple will choose the latter.

<comment><USER24> On iOS, Apple made a consumer-unfriendly change when they disabled virtual printing, e.g. local Print-to-PDF from any application to a virtual-printer app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> HFS+ and NTFS both suck pretty hard. There seems to be some kind of pessimism filesystem principle in popular mainstream OSes.

It's kind of impressive that Apple and MS have managed to make such balls of crap work as well as they have.

</comment><comment><USER23> What a shitty article. HFS+ has many problems, but case insensitivity is a feature. It's good for end users. There's a case sensitive version of it, but it's not the default, and for a good reason.

If you want a good critique of HFS+, check one of John Siracusa's many rants[1].

Also, Gruber is not the author of Byword:

 _Even John Gruber of Daring Fireball and author of Byword…_

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7/12/](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/)

<comment><USER26> what a shitty comment. did you try to use some Adobe product on case sensitive version of HFS+? let me guess, no you didn't. because if you would, you would find out that some programs simply doesnt work on case sensitive HFS+, most likely because people like you, who simply "know" whats better for end user

<comment><USER4> It's almost certainly a bug in a build script somewhere, and they're dynamically linking against something via the wrong name. I once linked against Quicktime.framework, and it worked on everything but my case-sensitive Mac. QuickTime.framework worked everywhere.

So your Adobe example is flawed. They should be testing on case-sensitive volumes, but the vast majority of normal users don't want a file named README and readme in the same directory, and enforcing that invariant seems reasonable to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Really? The developer who wrote software for Windows and OS X that depends on a case-sensitive file-system is going to throw stones about bad software?

Windows and OS X use case-sensitive file-systems. That sucks. But if you are going to release software for those systems, you need to accept that that is the reality, and write your software accordingly. This is hardly the first issue Git has had due to this, Linus's time would be better spent fixing these issues rather than stamping his feet and expecting OS X and Windows to change.

<comment><USER28> Linus didn't write or port git for Windows or OS X. In fact for the longest time git on Windows required Cygwin. I doubt Linus was even much involved in git maintenance by the time native Windows support was merged... or was it ever? Is msysgit a fork?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Mandatory use of 3rd Party IDs (Facebook Connect, etc)? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed that 750words.com doesn't have an independent account login/creation system; you can only use it with an existing FB, Google or Yahoo account.
This is the first time that I've seen an app force you to use a 3rd party account. While it would certainly reduce account-related code, it could also have unintended effects. For example, on a social site, this lack of anonymity might result in nicer user comments.
What do you think about forced use of 3rd party IDs? What kind of sites would benefit from it? Is the trade-off worth it? <comment><USER2> I think that I would be extremely hesitant to sign up; there would have to be a major value proposition for me to give that info up to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if it were for a site where you'll be providing real, personal details anyway. Like LinkedIn for example?

<comment><USER2> Same problem: do I see it as a major value to my life? If so then I'd be less hesitant. Truth is that I don't want "just one login" so maybe I'm different than most.</comment></comment></comment>


My iTunes Account Was Hacked for $375 - By My Own Kids - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/07/07/my-itunes-account-was-hacked-for-375-by-my-own-kids/

<comment><USER2> Mis-titled: correct summary is I got ripped off by a combination of an App that was deceptive about in game currency and forgot to turn off in-App purchasing (in fact still seem to have not done that).

<comment><USER3> Honestly, in-app purchasing should be off by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And/or don't buy your kid a $300 phone with a $100/month plan. Maybe this just shows how 'old' I am at 27, but I didn't have a cellphone as a kid. In fact I didn't have one until I was 19 and was paying for it myself. My parents didn't have them, and they thought I was crazy for paying $35/month for a Sprint plan.

But I did accumulate a set of 'hidden fees' when I was younger to my parent's phone bill. I was within the monthly limit for our dialup provider, but we were using a 'local long distance' number to dialup, which we were unaware of. Large phone bill that month ensued and it wasn't a fun conversation then either.

<comment><USER5> The phone is $200. Adding an extra line to a FamilyTalk plan is $9.99/month along with a $15/month data plan, bringing the monthly total to $24.99/month. I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers, but they are grossly exaggerated. Furthermore, the article doesn't say anywhere that the author bought his step-child an iPhone.

<comment><USER4> True, it could be a touch or iPad. I'll give you that.

I remember looking at the plans when I first got my iPhone and there were no company or family discounts at all. They must have changed that. My bill hits around $100/month for my 3GS.

<comment><USER6> It does mention iPhone specifically:

"It's an aquarium on your iPhone that requires you to take care of your fish."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since we got a whole board full of developers, the question is how do you build this kind of app without getting yourself in trouble with consumers (and I guess eventually after a lot of credit card reversals: Apple)? Or do you just do ads or charge for the initial app?

</comment><comment><USER8> On a side note, I wish apple would allow the option of greater locking down of app deletions. My 16 month old daughter has a few apps on my phone she loves playing, but she also often accidentally deletes some of my apps.

<comment><USER9> Please limit her time on the phone, excessive viewing of screens at a young age can expand one's field of view and cause dyslexia.

<comment><USER8> Can you link to any citations of this, I'm really curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> Consider using the iTunes Allowance system that places $10 to $50 in an iTunes account on a monthly recurring basis.

Wow, those kids sound spoiled.</comment>


LHC Ready to Unravel the Mystery of Dark Matter Particles - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldreportnow.com/lhc-ready-to-unravel-the-mystery-of-dark-matter-particles/308/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's for the first time that I come to know that there is only 5% visible matter in universe. This also implies that we know about less than 5% of the total matter.</comment>


China's Little-Known Big Dealmaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/china-s-little-known-big-dealmaker <comment><USER2> Chinese government buying up foreign companies before they devalue yuan by 50%. makes sense.

<comment><USER3> I think it would be maximum of 20% devaluation. But if we look at the numbers, 20% devaluation would put it back to USD to CNY @ 7.8, this is 2006 / 2007 numbers. This is right before the financial crisis.

Since then China GDP have grown 4x!!! 4X

In that sense I don't think CNY were ever properly valued.</comment></comment>


Google sacks dozens over sexual harassment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45986510 <comment><USER2> That's 48 over 2 years, and Google(Alphabet) employs 85,000+ so 0.02% per year.

That actually feels quite low, though perhaps we can generously say it's due to Googles hiring and training standards.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "In a normal world this would mean Rubin is done"

What is this supposed to mean? That accusing someone of sexual assault should not only result in the person being fired, but becoming unable to work anywhere else?

Our society already has an underclass of unemployable people who have actually been convicted of crimes beyond a reasonable doubt, since it is now common for many employers to run background checks and refuse employment to convicted felons.

Won't that problem just get worse if we expand that system to include people who have been found guilty of sexual assault in settings where there are fewer protections for the accused? Such as a closed-door HR hearing, or the court of public opinion?

</comment><comment><USER4> It will be interesting to see how the performance of companies and universities like Google and Harvard suffer as they shift their emphasis from competence and performance to focus on "diversity" and "social justice".

<comment><USER5> Competence entails diversity and justice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know if David Drummond, Alphabet's Chief Legal Officer, was sacked? He was prominently featured in what Sundar Pichai called a "difficult to read" NY Times article.

If Drummond is still working there, then Pichai's email is nothing but self- serving bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Mr Pichai's letter said the New York Times story was "difficult to read" and > that Google was "dead serious" about providing a "safe and inclusive > workplace".

Politically motivated cleaning of the workforce seems not very safe and inclusive to me.</comment>


Securing Update Propagation with Homomorphic Hashing [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/227.pdf <comment><USER2> Already been discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19288633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19288633)</comment>


xkcd: Common Cold - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1300507567974735875 <comment><USER2> We aren't going to shelter in place the virus away!</comment>


Matrioshka Brains: computing at the limits of physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/MatrioshkaBrainsPaper.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to note that this is probably the biggest borderline-plausible hard SF idea _not_ to have caught on (at least on a large scale) in genre fiction. And that I shamelessly strip-mined Mr Bradbury's mountain of ideas for props in "Accelerando".

(In case you were wondering where SF writers get their ideas from ...)

<comment><USER3> Probably because it's so improbable. It essentially assumes that we'll hit the limits of technological innovation without discovering that any of our current ideas about physics and the nature of the universe are completely wrong.

Long before we could ever make such a device I suspect we'll discover something along the lines of zero-point energy being real harvestable, that the universe is not in fact material and local, etc. I'm sure there are thousands more possibilities. And any one of them being true would make this device completely obsolete way before our technology advances to a point where we can create it.

<comment><USER4> The universe is in fact not 'material' in some senses of the word. We already know that information / entropy is as least as real as energy and matter. And there are some hints that they may be even more fundamental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One would imagine that on a Dyson sphere sized computer, intercommunication (limited by speed of light) will become major bottleneck. At some point amassing components will stop winning you performance due to physical dimensions.

<comment><USER2> Yes, lightspeed _is_ a bottleneck. A particular problem is that the computing elements are presumably vulnerable to radiation damage, thus placing a lower limit on the internal radius of the MB's innermost shell. If MBs are migratory, that's a good reason for expecting them to be associated with cooler, dimmer red dwarf stars -- or to be concentrated some way away from their stellar energy source, leaving a classical Dyson sphere in place to harvest energy and beam it to them via laser or maser.

(This stuff got chewed over a lot on the extropians list in the early 90s, when the subject of "Jupiter Brains" -- what you get if you dismantle Jupiter and turn it into computing material -- was first raised. Googling on "neuron star" might provide some transitory amusement ...)

<comment><USER6> I found your exposition on the other limit--bandwidth outside the brain--even more interesting. Assuming life expands to fill the available resources, once you create a Matrioshka brain you're pretty irrevocably tied to your star, for good or for ill.

<comment><USER4> You might still want to send out `seeds' to other stars. Even if you can't communicate with them fully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_s...](http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm)

The link above is to a fermi lab program to look for Dyson spheres. The Matrioshka brain is a subset of the Dyson sphere. Something made famous, unfortunately, by Trekkers.

<comment><USER8> Why is that unfortunate?

<comment><USER7> Unfortunate because it has distorted the original idea beyond recognition. :) A lot of people know F. J. Dyson only for Dyson "spheres" (the original conception was that of a swarm, SF modified the idea to a sphere, then shell). Though it's obvious he did a lot of other work and that the Dyson sphere was nothing as compared to what he has done. It was just a thought experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Jim Von Ehr, the president of Zyvex LLC, has publicly stated that he believes that Zyvex will be able to do diamondoid nanoassembly by 2010."

oops guess they missed their deadline. i would like to see a graph of how these predicted dates keep receding as a counterpoint to all the exponential graphs of progress.

</comment><comment><USER10> Humans looking for extraterrestrial intelligence might be looking for intelligence "similar" to humans, but might not "mega-intelligences" also be looking for things similar to what spawned them (i.e. similar to human level intelligences)?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey Zyvex, it's 2010. How's my diamondoid nanoassembly coming along?

<comment><USER12> Drexler Sayeth:

 _Contrary to popular opinion, diamond synthesis seems almost irrelevant to progress toward advanced nanosystems. At the current stage or research, it is both difficult and unnecessary._

The current view is that we're ready to start work on a first generation of nanoassembly tools using designed proteins for tooltips and DNA scaffolds for programmable, atomically precise structure. The trouble is that it doesn't _look_ like a first generation of molecular manufacturing tools are just around the corner, so the research isn't getting done.

[http://metamodern.com/2008/12/27/toward-advanced- nanosystems...](http://metamodern.com/2008/12/27/toward-advanced-nanosystems- materials-1/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> how much will it cost to buy a solar-scale matrioshka brain? will it improve one's sex life and\or social status?

</comment><comment><USER14> i hope no one is taking this seriously, becayse the logic/"science" presented here is well... science fiction i guess.</comment>


You buy virtual goods - <AUTHOR> http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-buy-virtual-goods.html

<comment><USER2> Hi Eric is there a good way to get in touch with you, always read your blog posts. =)

Great article as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course. You can find me on facebook or linkedin pretty easily, or you can email me at mailto:startuplessonslearned-eric(at)sneakemail(dot)com (usual disclaimers about spam filters...)

Thanks for your kind words,

Eric</comment></comment>


Readlists is bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://brooksreview.net/2012/05/readlists-bs/

<comment><USER2> I don't see a difference between this and Pinterest or Instapaper. The author says "In Instapaper (as far as I know) you can't grab an article list from another user and package an eBook that you can then download." I would say that's something that Instapaper should/will add as a feature. Now I understand what the author is saying, but this is a bit paranoid:

Readlists is a service to allow people to completely avoid reading a content producers site, allowing them to repackage and redistribute their content all without permission.</comment>