HD Videos from Startup Bootcamp at MIT now online - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/startupbootcamp

<comment><USER2> I took some pretty detailed notes while I was there for anyone that's interested:

[http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/10/notes-from-startup- bootcamp...](http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/10/notes-from-startup-bootcamp/)

Enjoy --

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! I can't wait to start going through these later today. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER4> From Robin Chase's video:

Luck: When preparation meets opportunity.</comment>


EU to implement electronic ID to accelerate adoption of e-government services - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/06/eu-to-implement-electronic-id-for-residents-to-accelerate-adoption-of-e-government-services/ <comment><USER2> > _The document is largely a philosophical statement. The EU still faces the > challenge of defining standards, creating a timeline for implementation, and > determining how the systems would be funded. In addition, it can expect some > controversy, as privacy remains paramount for many residents._

Uh, okay. So all that's left now is the _hard part_.

Hopefully they'll focus on strong virtually unhackable authentication methods like smart cards, U2F, and such, and won't _also_ allow alternative methods like SMS, digital certificates, facial recognition, and other options that will make it easy for hackers to abuse their e-government systems/electronic voting, etc</comment>


Beyond Bitcoin: Truly Decentralized Banking - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/beyond-bitcoin-truly-decentralized-banking-d7793edc7d99 <comment><USER2> "The embrace of Bitcoin is largely driven by dissatisfaction with the modern banking system but the designers and proponents of Bitcoin have made the fundamental and fatal mistake of believing that the problem with modern banking is that paper and digital money have no intrinsic value. Since digital coins must be created out of thin air the creators of Bitcoin developed an ingenious method of making coin creation take computational power, thus imposing a cost on creating new coins, and allowing them to limit the total circulation of coins. These measures give Bitcoin an intrinsic value (the cost of creating a new coin) and make inflation impossible by setting a hard limit on total currency issue."

This is just filled with misunderstanding. The purpose of mining is _not_ to give intrinsic value to Bitcoin. It is to economically incentivize a fair system of transacting without centrality. The cost of mining is the price the Bitcoin system pays for distributed, trust-less consensus.

Just like fiat, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Just like fiat, Bitcoin is a bubble that seemingly never pops, because it is a collectively imagined means of transacting. A discussion of the disadvantages or advantages of Bitcoin should start with this understanding.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the purpose of mining gives Bitcoin value.

The value of gold and silver is that it is a store of value. In order to acquire those gold or silver, it required doing expeditions to search for where they are, it required heavy machinery to mine it out of the earth, it required human labor paid to mine them, it required factories to process them to purity, it required transporting them, etc...

All of that WORK is stored in the value of the gold or the silver to make it rare. This is why they are real money. Bitcoin digitally replicates this using computing power. This is important because essentially it ensures that a BTC has stored value. It is still currency but it ensure banks and the Federal Reserve cannot just print them digitally whenever they see fit.

"Bitcoin developed an ingenious method of making coin creation take computational power, thus imposing a cost on creating new coins, and allowing them to limit the total circulation of coins. These measures give Bitcoin an intrinsic value (the cost of creating a new coin) and make inflation impossible by setting a hard limit on total currency issue."

<comment><USER4> No, value does not come from rarity alone. Many things are rare but are not valuable.

> This is important because essentially it ensures that a BTC has stored > value.

If people believe bitcoin has 0 value, then it will have 0 value, regardless of the work that was put into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > While it is true that pound-for-pound gold is more valuable than paper it is > not true that gold has any other magical properties that make it any more > useful as a currency.

I'm not a "gold aficionado" (author's term) but gold has plenty of "magical" qualities: it's fungible, divisible, universally recognized and easy to test, non-reactive, enduring, beautiful, scarce, and essentially indispensable for some industrial uses.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >universally recognized

The value of gold is not universally recognized, and is inflated more from idolization than by its practical uses.

>When I was older, I learned what the fighting was about that winter and the next summer. Up on the Madison Fork the Wasichus (white people) had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted to have a road up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was... Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there; but they did not bother with it, because it was not good for anything.

-Black Elk Speaks

<comment><USER6> People have used many things as "a token of delayed reciprocal altruism" in different times and locations. People in pre-Columbian North America used wampum and other items instead of gold for that token and, not surprisingly, would not find much value in a such a soft metal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a pretty poorly researched and written article, but the core idea of switching to a trust-the-individual decentralized network is a solid one. It seems like we'll need a couple more advances before it's reasonable, but if you can move to a system where there is no ground truth, but rather a record of successful transactions or proof of stake/reputation in an identity then you only need to reach out to the global state to see if there are outstanding deals with an identity or broken promises.

The basic idea I've been floating is something like the following:

1) Alice generates a private/public key pair 2) Alice performs some work on their public key (e.g. low hash) 3) Alice finds Bob and promises to send 0.1 BTC to Bob's public address IFF bob performs publically verifiable service X (e.g. provides boolean assignment that satisfies some constraints or rejects the problem as unsolveable) 4) Both parties transmit the unsigned contract 5) Both parties reach out to trust brokers that tell them if either party has been involved in a broken promise, or has outstanding contracts greater than their current credit. Don't sign contract if thats the case 6) Both parties sign the contract (outstanding problem here, this needs to be atomic) 7) If contract goes well each party appends this to their record 8) If contract goes poorly offended party broadcasts this to the network and gains some portion of the lost reputation.

There are many outstanding problems that are not fundamental, but serious obstacles to writing this today. The ones that I know of off the top of my head are:

1) Need well understand exchange rate of reputation -> contract value (might be doable if you can buy reputation) 2) Need non-Sybil trust brokers (e.g. trust broker with rep >> contract value) 3) Atomic contract signing 4) contracts need to be publicly verifiable.

Any problems I am missing?

</comment><comment><USER8> Two things bother me about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies:

1\. The process of "mining" seems like arbitrary busywork that is ultimately a massive waste of computing power and electricity. At least Folding@home was contributing to scientific research. Is there any way around this? Incentivizing a bunch of computer geeks to build massive GPU clusters and waste tons of electricity mining for coins doesn't seem like a great idea.

2\. Much of the "wealth" of these coins is concentrated in the hands of early adopters. This seems to be by design (due to the increasing difficulty of mining) and is not the result of actual economic activity, but merely because those early adopters started mining first.

Can anyone (more familiar with Bitcoin than I am) comment?

<comment><USER9> To your first point:

While there are definitely valid concerns with just how much energy we spend maintaining the bitcoin network and the blockchain, it's hard to call it wasted and it's definitely not busy work.

The energy we spend doing all the mathematical problems behind proof-of-work can be seen as an investment. In the blockchain there is a mathematically certain record of all transactions that have happened since 2008. While that may not sound all that impressive think of it like this: if a single entity was responsible for building that ledger, it would have taken less "energy", but that entity would have to be trusted by every participant transacting.

With the mathematical underpinnings of proof-of-work, we are instead spending energy to create that trust model inside the currency (network+blockchain) itself. Not busy-work.

Think of it like adding microchips to paper money for counterfeit detection. That is materials and energy spent creating a more trustworthy system.

There are certainly alternatives to the BTC proof-of-work that might make for a more efficient protocol, and they might win out in the end. That should be explored. But BTC mining has value.

<comment><USER10> @eduren, WRT " _Think of it like adding microchips to paper money for counterfeit detection. That is materials and energy spent creating a more trustworthy system._ "

Building up merkle tree root, distributing the merkle tree, I agree, is like 'adding a microchip'. But what's not clear, at least to me, how does, specifically finding hashes with certain number of 'leading zeroes', helps with counterfeit detection?

<comment><USER11> It helps detecting counterfeit blocks claiming some transactions never happened.

More specifically, it provides confidence that some minimum amount of energy must have been used to calculate that hash. As blocks n+1, n+2, ... are added, the amount of energy that must have been used to create an alternate history of transactions since block n increases. After a certain number of blocks have been added, the cost in energy to forge a longest chain that does _not_ include some transaction (while that transaction does exist on the original chain) will eventually exceed the potential benefit gained by "stealing back" that transaction's BTC. Note that this doesn't guarantee such an attack doesn't happen, it just guarantees such attacks would be uneconomical.

Thus, the "energy waste" of mining is really more like a security limit on transaction amounts and latencies. As the energy used--more specifically, the cost of the energy used--for mining increases, Bitcoin becomes more useful for transferring larger amounts more quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The main issue isn't solved by replacing fiat currency with a digital crypto currency. The problem that must be solved is how do you manage (the creation/destruction) of a medium of exchange in a manner that is equitable to ALL participants. The current system uses a combination of central banks, plain ole banks, and government bonds. I'd argue that their management hasn't met the goal of being equitable to ALL participants, however, I don't see how crypto currency improves on this.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't. It just puts a different set of people on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bitcoin would be a very flawed currency. It has deflation baked into it's design.

Imagine if bitcoin was legal tender in the country. If my country produced 5% more goods and services in a year, but the bitcoin supply increases by just 1% due to the mining mechanism, resulting in deflation.

This means I am better off hoarding my surplus bitcoin, stashing it under the digital mattress, as I know it can buy more in the future. I won't spend it on goods and services, or risk it by investing in a company.

Most others would do the same. The reduction in demand for goods and services means companies would have to lay off workers or close down, causing unemployment. The reduction in investment will mean less companies starting up, and less coin for companies to invest in staff or equipment to increase efficiency.

All this will depress economic growth, and cause unemployment. Which in turn reduces demand even more, causing a reinforcing cycle of economic contraction. A great depression in other words. The similarity is apt, because the great depression was partly driven by the gold standard, which had the same dynamics as my hypothetical bitcoin economy.

<comment><USER15> So say your country produced 5% more goods, and the bitcoin supply increased 1% or even decreased. Production is higher than monetary supply increase.

Seems to me that sure, the cost of investment would rise in this deflationary scenario, but to assume this results in no investment is a foregone conclusion. Wouldn't you just get a new investment vs savings equilibrium? One that may be more aligned with responsible investments and purchases? Why is it a downward spiral? If saving is greater than investment than production wouldn't stay at 5%, it's ostensibly fall, reducing deflation, and making investment more appealing relative to saving.

Doubtless this 'target inflation' debate has raged for the past century. Does anyone have any book recommendations that explore these ideas?

<comment><USER16> Debts are denominated in money, if that money becomes more scarce, people will spend a lower fraction of their income on consumption articles out of fear of not making ends meet. At any point in time total spending equals total income, so this will reduce total demand inside the economy. If people's income diminishes, their debt-to-income ratio rises. This results in what is called a debt-deflation spiral.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anybody else irked by the use of the word "myth" to mean "a position I am so confident is false that I'm now going to talk down to the opposition"

</comment><comment><USER18> I appreciate this article because of how radical it is and I think it's worth thinking of different systems but, its sounds silly to me.

"If everyone issued their own money in a free market the free market would do what it always does which is regulate supply and demand."

I don't really have time to do a credit check on every person I interact with?

"When you swipe your card you are giving your consent for the merchant to obtain your credit score. The merchant's system then decides whether or not to extend you credit based on your credit score and the credit policy the merchant has specified."

Really? With every transaction, such as in this example a coffee, your credit score would be checked? And who would do the checking? Would that be centralized?

I like Bitcoin but I think it faces a few challenges unrelated to this article: 1. It takes longer than 10 minutes to explain what value it provides to the average person (particularly in a Western country where their currency has not been devalued) 2. Its slow and cumbersome to move dollars onto an exchange in order to attain Bitcoin. 3. It's highly risky. I think it has plenty of intrinsic value reflected by the network of people willing to sustain it but at the end of the day, it's more like a stock than a currency. 4. There's no one to call if you lose your hash - no customer support, no backup. Does this really work well for most people? 5. And it now has a lot of competitors who offer a similar/better setup and want a piece of the pie...

</comment><comment><USER19> I like bitcoin and gold, yet I don't think they have "intrinsic value". At least that's certainly not the main point. To me gold has no intrinsic value. It's just a metal. I can't eat it. I have on a personal level no use for it. It's terrible as a construction metal, I'm not interested in jewelry and there are probably many shiner alloys anyway. "Intrinsic value" is not the point, and I don't think money needs any such thing to be useful.

Money is a complex concept, but to me one of its functions is to be a tool for measuring value in economic exchanges. All other things being equal, the value of goods is inversely proportional to their amount. For instance if the amount of gold was suddenly multiplied by two, then the price of gold would drop by half.

Thus, to measure the value of goods, one needs to get an idea of its quantity. So you need to compare quantities. You thus need a fixed reference of quantity for comparison. Just as for measuring say length you need an object of fixed length somewhere to use as a reference.

That's why bitcoin proponents often also like gold : they are attracted by the idea of a fixed amount of money.

By contrast, most central banks pilot the amount of money in circulation in order to try to keep the price of goods stable. This is, imho, as absurd as changing the length of the meter because we've noticed that generations after generations people are getting taller and taller.

When prices vary, this is supposed to have a meaning in the economical sense. Prices are economical signals. Tempering with them defeats their purpose.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >By contrast, most central banks pilot the amount of money in circulation in order to try to keep the price of goods stable. This is, imho, as absurd as changing the length of the meter because we've noticed that generations after generations people are getting taller and taller.

Indeed, and this is why central banks are counter productive to automation.

The two primary goals of the Federal Reserve are to maintain stable prices and achieve maximum employment, despite the fact that automation is making goods and services better, faster, and cheaper and designedly eliminating the need for human labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting concept, but there's only one paragraph explaining it with very little details after pages upon pages of handwaving theories about bitcoin and gold.

<comment><USER21> Would love to read a deeper dive into this concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > By offering short term credit to each other market participants will be able > to engage in economic exchange without having to pay the cost of money.

I don't think this person understands bitcoin, currency, debt, or money.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Bitcoin and other digital coins are at the peak of their hype cycle.

Why do you think they are at their peak?

<comment><USER24> It's referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle) which is meant to describe the pattern of hype -> disillusionment -> eventual larger-scale adoption that often accompanies new technologies. Seems like a fair estimate that it's near that peak given that Bitcoin has broadly reaching excitement around it but few similarly broad use cases as of yet.

<comment><USER25> But that pattern fits the 2014 peak and crash, and thus, now 'large scale adoption'.

<comment><USER24> Would you really argue that Bitcoin has "large scale adoption"? Most people aren't using it yet apart from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and currency speculators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If these sort of ideas interest you, you might want to check out Interledger:

[https://interledger.org/](https://interledger.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Great idea. Here comes an idea on how to implement it:

* Everybody (people and companies) trust their bank * All banks trust their central bank * All central banks trust SWIFT

This is effectively a chain of trust. Therefore, piggy back on this existing trust relationship and let SWIFT be the global CA, and let them sign all central banks certificates, and let all central banks sign all their banks certs, and now finally, let all banks sign all their account holders (=people and companies) certs.

This way, all people and companies only need the SWIFT root CA to verify the validity of a monetary decentralized transaction from a stranger, since the stranger can prove the issued IOU-note has been issued by a certain individual or company, since all banks have verified the identity of their customers (i.e KYC'ed them).

</comment><comment><USER28> For anyone interested in the idea of using blockchain-based digital currency to create a competitive currency scheme, I wrote my undergrad thesis on this topic:

[http://roymurdock.com/thesis/murdockthesis- final-2.pdf](http://roymurdock.com/thesis/murdockthesis-final-2.pdf)

Hayek, a famous Austrian school economist, had the same idea in the 1980s - remove control of currency from central banks and governments, and give it to private institutions, having them compete against one another. Digital currency removes a lot of the technical barriers to issuing a new currency, but technical barriers are not the main barriers to adoption.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is really confused. Nothing has intrinsic value, but certain things have objectively-measurable properties that make them more suitable to be used as money.

Scarcity, fungibility, divisibility and portability are some of these properties. Mass adoption is another (because money effectively has "network effects"), but if a society widely uses a particular form of money when a better substitute is available, they will very likely switch at some point (see: dollarization).

Bitcoin and gold are both superior to fiat in terms of scarcity. (The author is correct that the gold supply grew massively at certain points in history, but there's very little chance of this happening again any time soon. That said, there's still a lot of Au in the earth's crust left to dig up and with modern mining techniques the global stocks grow at about 1.5% a year). Anyone with a lot of usd (or rmb or euros or whatever) puts it somewhere less prone to inflation (stocks, bonds, real estate). This means there's always a lot of fiat currency looking for a home - though people at the bottom don't see this over-abundance of money, it is visible in things like the crazy prices for premium real estate, the crazy size of tech acquisitions (everyone else is investing their money in FB/AMZN/GOOG/AAPL, so those guys have huge cash hoards with little opportunities to put them to use - so they buy many startups).

On top of that, bitcoin is highly divisible and very portable (it's easier to send btc around the world than gold or usd). A couple of years ago I saw nothing that could stop it long term. I've since become convinced that its weird supply formula makes the price inherently, permanently volatile. Longterm, the finite supply limit will incentivise everyone to hoard, causing the price to skyrocket - but if everyone hoards the amount traded will become so low that even a small amount leaving the hoards (as hoarders suddenly spend some of their overpriced btc) then causes a big price drop. This bouncing up and down incentivises people to stay away.

Gold, on the other hand, has ties to economic reality - if the price increases gold miners can mine more, and vice versa. This natural adjustment in supply dampens price swings. Unfortunately gold needs to be kept in a vault and can't be transferred easily (that said, for non-technical users, securing one's bitcoins appears equally difficult).

If someone made a cryptocurrency with a gold-like supply rate, that would have real world domination potential. Maybe some startup founder with the connections to pull this off is reading this - if so, take a look here for more theory: [https://keithweinereconomics.com/2013/12/28/the-theory-of- in...](https://keithweinereconomics.com/2013/12/28/the-theory-of-interest-and- prices-in-paper-currency/) (his argument is more complicated than those you may have encountered in libertarian/goldbug circles. It's not simply that the scarcity of gold means it will be more valuable long-term - it's the arbitrages that modulate the supply and thereby make it suitable as a store of value).

Writing this comment has gotten me thinking, so here's a few other thoughts on how this will pan out. I've read many different thinkers who write about such topics, and spent much time evaluating and integrating, so hopefully some stray reader will find this of value.

The other thing I've come to realise is that economics is one aspect of human society. It has a kind of permanent, fixed reality, despite being based on human decisions and actions, because the incentives humans face are universal and eternal (everyone needs to save, everyone needs to trade, even in a socialist dictatorship semi-regular economic activity continues on the black market). But the ideas that spread in a culture also count. If most people believe that the usd is money, and bitcoin and gold are for weirdos, then the usd can remain money for a long, long time. I thought that over time people would see the bitcoin price constantly rising (though unstably), and realise that they needed to buy in. (First the risk-takers and early adopters, then the more adventurous asset managers investing 0.5% of their funds, then the early majority, and so on). But with the recent price spike, I saw that though many people suddenly wanted to pile in, they had no understanding and little interest of bitcoin's fundamentals. They buy now and hope to sell before the next crash. Maybe some entrants will become long-term holders and help drive the price up - but not many. The btc market cap is around $50bn - tiny in the world of finance. If/when it approaches $1tn, things will get interesting. Our current world economic order (BW2) is a hacky fix from the 70s on an agreement made in the 40s. It suited the great powers of the time and was based on certain assumptions. Now the assumptions are proving wrong and the balance of power is shifting.

I don't believe in the mass automation/sustainable energy/basic income future most of the tech crowd is looking forwards too. I foresee two likely futures - one, a return to 19th century great power politics, as Putin hopes for - definitely not a utopia, but hopefully a world where at least some countries realise that freedom is the path to prosperity and advancement. The other, a darker world, where dictatorships (both in socialistic and nationalistic flavours) become dominant on every continent. In both scenarios the usd is likely to lose its status as the global reserve currency, but in neither scenario is bitcoin guaranteed to be the replacement.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Gold is a less efficient form of money than paper and Bitcoin is an even > less efficient form of money than gold.

I don't think that's true in most cases. I can more easily send someone $10,000 in Bitcoin than that amount in gold. And the larger the sum becomes, the easier it is to do that with Bitcoin.

<comment><USER31> You're not really transferring Bitcoin though, you're just adjusting a ledger of who owns what. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing with some gold, you could probably even create a setup where it is done at lower transaction costs.

<comment><USER32> > You're not really transferring Bitcoin though, you're just adjusting a > ledger of who owns what.

If not this, what do you think a Bitcoin transfer looks like?

> There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing with some gold

The custodian of the gold would be able to steal it from me at any time. I wouldn't actually be in possession of the gold, whereas I would be in possession of my Bitcoin keys.

<comment><USER31> The point is that physically sending the gold is not the equivalent sense of the word transfer in this case. There will of course be some differences, but the gold ledger is the best gold analog of a bitcoin transaction.

<comment><USER33> The question is a matter of trust in the correctness of any such ledger.

Bitcoin only exists as entries in a trustless ledger. The trustless ledger of gold is physical possession of that gold -- that's the only way that you can verify possession (or spend freely) without a mutually trusted third party.

<comment><USER31> Sure, that's a valid issue, but it's unrelated to my comment on the ease of changing ownership of an asset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This article is painful to read. Author seems to have no familiarity with the space and should read some earlier work[1]

[1] [http://archive.is/TSdxy](http://archive.is/TSdxy)

</comment><comment><USER35> "Paper money is a significant technological advance over gold money"...Bullshit.

Gold is a commodity which marks a certain amount of labor and energy expended before it can be exchanged for other goods and services. Paper money is a debt note that represents a promise of labor and energy to be expended in the future.

So what happens when there's no demand for the already created paper? History has shown time and again; depression and war.

<comment> Ar-Curunir Rarity does not endow something with value. There are many things that are difficult to extract yet are not valuable.

<comment><USER35> I never implied monetary metals' value is due strictly to the energy it takes to extract from the ground.</comment></comment></comment>


The Machine Stops - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/oliver-sacks <comment><USER2> I read the original "The Machine Stops" (written by E.M. Forster in 1909) a few weeks back, following a link from this very website. It's worth a read!

[http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

EDIT: Looks like that link is a little overloaded right now... This one works: [https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The- Machi...](https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine- Stops.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, that Oliver Sacks. Yes, he did die.

Strange of the New Yorker to publish this 3.5 years posthumously with no explanation.

<comment><USER4> I am just inferring from the blurb at the bottom that he does have a final book coming out and this is probably an excerpt.

 _A final collection of his essays, "Everything in Its Place," will be published in April_</comment></comment>


Package managers hurt open-source - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/package_managers_hurt_open_source.html <comment><USER2> cd ~;

apt-get source [PACKAGE];

That's not really a barrier to tinkering.</comment>


How not to do URL redirects (… the way Quora does) - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.webengage.com/2012/01/19/how-not-to-do-url-redirects-the-way-quora-does/ <comment><USER2> Best I can tell, there is zero incentive for Quora (or any other site, for that matter) to care. Their current redirect logic in no way hurts their user experience.

Right now they protect their users' privacy. What benefit do they realize by providing their users' viewing history to other sites?

I personally think that the referer header was never a good idea. I disable it in my browser, and appreciate sites that do right by their users with privacy protecting default behaviors.

<comment> avlesh-singh Of course there is zero incentive for anyone to do it. And if everyone chose to link the way Quora does, you get a Google Analytics dashboard which cannot tell you what all URL's are sending traffic to your site/blog. I find it really difficult to imagine.

<comment><USER3> The long term effect would be that websites can no longer use referrer as a metric. What difference would that make? HTTP resources (webpages) shouldn't change semantic meaning depending on the referrer anyway. Doing so is arguably an unintended use (or abuse) of HTTP.

<comment> avlesh-singh Absolutely! And see the funny reasons people have been citing in favor of such an act - [http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora-redirect-to-URLs-in-a- wa...](http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora-redirect-to-URLs-in-a-way-that- loses-the-original-referrer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to crash the party, but why is the premise that "overriding links is absolutely okay" taken for granted?

Says who? Google and their `/url`? Facebook and their `l.php`?

<comment><USER5> Why wouldn't it be okay? This is a link on their own website, they can control it how they want.

<comment> avlesh-singh That's the point. It is okay as long as they play nice with HTTP headers and other info which needs to be passed downstream.

<comment><USER6> Quora don't "need" to do anything. You just want them to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is probably _not_ the case, but is it possible that Quora is intentionally stripping the referer header? Duck Duck Go does just this in the interest of user privacy: why should site X know where I came from and what I was searching? <https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html> Seems unlikely in this case but possible.

Incidentally, it seems that encrypted.google.com does this but not regular google. EDIT: This happens for all https->http requests, it's not a google feature (TIL).

<comment><USER8> The User-Agent generates the Referrer header, not the site. Also, encrypted.google.com doesn't do it, the HTTPS standard says that browsers shouldn't send referrer headers to sites not in the same domain or not with https.

<comment><USER7> You are right, I'm writing carelessly. I meant strip loosely as "causes the header to not be sent" or not in full.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see how this could be a result of simple mistake. There doesn't seem to be any reason to do redirects this way except hiding the referrer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly what is pointed out in the post. Why would someone want to hide the original referrer for a link.

<comment><USER10> That's not the only thing they're doing...

<http://nerdr.com/quora-needs-to-die/>

Seems they're going down the annoying search visitors by hiding information route (similar to what expertsexchange was riled on for, although not quite as bad yet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's most likely done intentionally to protect against leaking the clicker's identity. See the issue Facebook had back then: <http://www.benedelman.org/news/052010-1.html>

<comment> avlesh-singh Sending an incorrect site referrer to a downstream website doesn't solve the identity problem! HTTP headers have existed even before all these applications came into being. One just has to abide by some of those basics.

<comment><USER11> It can be fixed through a double redirect. Basically, redirect the browser to a internal page that redirects to the original page and have that page redirect to the outbound link.

For example:

Say you're on this page: <http://site.com/article?_uid=123> (_uid being the identity leaking query param) and clicked a link that appears to point to: <http://google.com/>

When a user clicks on that link, the page redirect the user to [http://site.com/redirect?target=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com&...](http://site.com/redirect?target=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com&src=http%3A%2F%2Fsite.com%2Farticle)

The server will then redirect the browser back to: <http://site.com/article>

And when the server sees that request with referrer set to /redirect?target=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com, it will then parse out the target url and redirect the browser to <http://google.com>.

This way, the target url can be given a meaningful referrer url without compromising user's identity.

<comment><USER12> Isn't that exactly what Quora is doing?

<comment><USER11> OP's blog post says Quora is not doing that. It says Quora's redirecting to gigaom.com from [http://www.quora.com/_/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgigaom.com%...](http://www.quora.com/_/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgigaom.com%2F2010%2F06%2F08%2Fhow- zynga-survived-farmville%2F&sig=4f01ab) instead of [http://www.quora.com/What- are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-c...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday- apps-that-use-cloud-computing).

The technique I described allows Quora to customize the referrer associated with an outbound link.

<comment><USER12> Ah yes, I misread your post. The trouble with that approach is that you have to enumerate the dangerous params, and if the actual page URL needs a private parameter to work, you can't get rid of it.

<comment><USER11> Right, but you can always pass the canonical url to the redirector. That lets you avoid maintaining a whitelist/blacklist of query params. This should be trivial for Quora as most of their pages already contain the meta tag specifying the canonical url:

        <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-computing" />

They just need to update their outbound link interceptor to take that version instead of the actual url.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _We let you create surveys and display those on your website in a "targeted" manner_

A better title for your article would have been:

 _why to never rely on referers_

(which can be blocked or purposely malformed)

<comment> avlesh-singh Absolutely! The post might have got some attention from Quora in that case :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would we get the right referer if 302 is done via quora redirect?

<comment> avlesh-singh Not sure if I understood this correctly. If Quora chose to send a Location: some-url and Status: 302, it would have definitely worked as expected.

<comment><USER14> So what should an app do if it wants ro track all outbound links and send the real url as referer to the outbound link

<comment><USER9> The best way to do it is probably to track clicks on outbound links using javascript.

<comment><USER15> Aren't there a few cases when this method won't work?

<comment><USER9> Are you referring to the fact that the browser will interrupt your tracking request because it already started loading the linked page? I haven't really tried, but I believe this can be dealt with if your server-side code expects it to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since you are a hosted service, you could periodically loop through all of the Quora redirect links you've received and resolve them. This might be against Quora's TOS, though.

I believe Twitter does this with URL shortener links posted in tweets.

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone asked on Quora, why Quora does this?

<comment> avlesh-singh Someone finally asked the question on Quora - [http://www.quora.com/Why-does- Quora-redirect-to-URLs-in-a-wa...](http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora- redirect-to-URLs-in-a-way-that-loses-the-original-referrer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So Quora works for you now? That must be nice...

<comment> avlesh-singh Seems you saw a Quora survey on our site? We had to change the targeting rules to make it a generic "referring site starts with Quora.com" kinda rule instead of specific URL's :(</comment></comment>


Lebedev's pyramid - <AUTHOR> http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/153/

<comment><USER2> Yes, yes, and we'll all nod and smile in agreement, thinking to ourselves, "Of course I'd be one of the smart ones! What a clever pyramid! How true!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyone does stupid things. The same person could end up in either section depending on when the data was collected.

I understand the diagram to be a joke for people who have worked in large organizations rather than a precise statement about the way things are.

<comment><USER2> Sure it's a joke, but I expect a lot of people, especially here, will feel self-satisfied at being "in" with the smart people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lebedev's pyramid may be correct in terms of proportion but the structure of the pyramid with said distribution rarely maps to the structure of an org chart.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I say it's flipped vertically, balanced delicately on the pointy end of the smart people, with the weight of the others on top, driving the smart into the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law>

</comment><comment><USER6> Strange that he didn't put himself at the pinnacle of the pyramid. Lebedev is a successful businessman and a relentless self-promoter, but he is widely despised in Russian design circles as a _designer_. His f#ck-you-all attitude (clearly demonstrated by the poster) doesn't help matters either.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guilty by association? As I said, I thought it was entertaining from the perspective of someone who's worked for a large organization. _Everyone does stupid things_.

Also note that I posted an article within the same hour that was clearly more thought provoking: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380023> .

<comment><USER6> Oh. Heh. I meant the actual "artwork", not you personally :-) My apologies for the ambiguity, it was unintended.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha. I wonder if this happens when people speak German.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the person who made that must be a real smart ass...</comment>


A table that should exist in all projects with a database - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cherouvim.com/a-table-that-should-exist-in-all-projects-with-a-database/ <comment><USER2> It's all true, but please take the lesson from rails and use timestamps rather than sequential id's.

<comment><USER3> What's the advantage?

<comment><USER4> Consistent ordering even if two developers happen to add migrations starting from the same source version.

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate on that?

<comment><USER6> Schema version is at 200.

Developer A creates a migration numbered 201. Developer B creates a migration numbered 201. They push their code, pull, and get conflicts.

So instead, they use a timestamp based system. Developer A created his and got 20100604181252. Developer B got 20100604182530. Now, everyone is happy, and no one has to change their migrations.

<comment><USER7> I think I prefer the first version. At least the conflict is obvious.

Developer A creates migration 20100604181252. Developer B creates migration 20100604181253. Developer B doesn't notice Developer A's migration: there's no way to know from the timestamps that there might be a conflict. Everything breaks.

vs

Developer A creates migration 201. Developer B creates migration 201. Developer B gets a handy notification that something has happened in the meantime, and gets a chance to patch the migration if necessary.

<comment><USER8> Actual conflicts from working with the same fields in the same tables are so rare, I haven't even experienced it once.

However, the second scenario would happen every single day in a team.

<comment><USER9> I have occasionally modified a sproc, only to find that a conflicting check-in has also modified that same sproc. One of our modifications has been overwritten by the other.

I do concede it is rare, but it happened, and we only discovered the bug too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some frameworks take care of this automatically. Mango has an excellent library called South that does exactly this. It keep tracks of migrations and it can automatically detect nearly all migrations. It's much easier than doing it all by hand.

<comment><USER10> s/Mango/Django/

Danny you autocorrect on my Android

<comment><USER11> "Danny you"... heh, priceless!

Mango would be a good nickname for Django + MongoDB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another approach I've seen used is to map the hash of your schema to an upgrade script (which would be an empty script for the latest version):

        while(true) {
          string current_version = <sha1 of the dictionary table contents>
          if (!upgrade_scripts.containsKey(current_version)) {
            complain_loudly()
            exit(1)
          } else {
            string script = upgrade_scripts[current_version]
            if (script.empty())
              break
            else
              execute(script)
          }
        }

</comment><comment><USER13> Another option is to have the schema creation/upgrade as scripts (either hand made or autogenerated ) , then check them into source control.

And resist the temptation of hacking the schema directly in your servers, it ends being a larger effort :)

<comment><USER14> Checking the schema and upgrade scripts into source control is extremely important, and this is how I have managed it in the past. (names like table.alter.12.sql). I regret not setting this type of versioning table up from the beginning, though - when you have multiple environments (dev, QA, staging, etc) it can get very confusing in a hurry as to which schema changes have been applied to which databases. With a versioning table and maybe even some deployment time scripts to sanity check versions between the release and the DB, mismatches become immediately apparent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's no particular reason to keep a whole table for this, since all you really want to know is what version you're at.

We use a UDF called VersionNumber that returns an integer. When the continuous build processes a new database change script, that function gets modified to increment the value it returns. So you can always call VersionNumber() on any of our databases and know which version you're looking at. The builds actually use it to decide which scripts they need to run to get from where they are to where they need to be.

You already have all the commentary you need in source control and in the change scripts themselves. I don't see a reason to duplicate it in the database as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd argue that "all projects with a [relational] database [and an ORM]" should rather move to modern tooling instead of writing migrations by hand.

Rails is surprisingly anachronistic here, which probably stems from that awful conceptual separation between model and schema.

Most other platforms have semi-automatic schema evolution that usually works very well (datamapper automigrate, django south, hibernate SchemaUpdate, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER17> If you don't have enormous amounts of data, one thing I've found helpful on my own projects is to make a hot backup of the database every time the schema changes, as well as make hot backups daily, and then when you check out a version of code you pair it with the latest hot backup.

(This is far easier when using SQLite, which has its own tradeoffs.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, django-south, how I love you.

<comment><USER18> I find this a more informative comment than the one above:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1984609>

as I don't have to google around to find out what south is (I haven't used Django yet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes yes yes. In my experience in Enterprise Dev teams it seems to be way too common that people just don't version control their DB schema, or use tools to produce schema diffs between dev and prod to product upgrade scripts, all driven by using GUI's to create their tables and then exporting the DDL using a tool (eg TOAD if you are doing Oracle work).

A few years back, I built an installer in Ruby to apply 'plsql modules' to an Oracle database. This was a massive project with > 100 developers at this point and probably heading toward 1M lines of code.

My migrations table worked on modules, so there were a set of migrations per application area, but it was really just an extension of this idea (and I borrowed the idea from Rails too)!

</comment><comment><USER20> Migrator.NET uses a similar setup for .NET programmers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Although the project is still pretty young, liquibase(<http://www.liquibase.org/>) is a solid opensource project for not only managing schema revisions, but inserting seed data as well as abstracting schema structure from DBMS.

Nathan also does a good job of applying submitted patches quickly.

<comment><USER22> There are also other projects like:

DbDeploy <http://dbdeploy.com/> DbMaintain <http://www.dbmaintain.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wrote a blog post on the same DB migration topic about 2 years ago. This can be applied to any RDBMS and any programming language. Check it out: <http://shashivelur.com/blog/2008/07/hibernate-db-migration>

</comment><comment><USER24> I have small PHP/MySQL projects I develop across multiple home computers and the server. This is a problem that's sometimes a bit hampering. Files are source controlled through SVN. Any suggestions on a tool that would be lightweight enough to be worth my time using it.

<comment><USER25> You could use phing.

Here is an older article... [http://www.davedevelopment.co.uk/2008/04/14/how- to-simple-da...](http://www.davedevelopment.co.uk/2008/04/14/how-to-simple- database-migrations-with-phing-and-dbdeploy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> <ads> Just use <http://bitbucket.org/stepancheg/mysql-diff/> to compare schemas. </ads>

</comment><comment><USER27> Its generally true, but I've developed systems that go sideways and fork into multiple versions, so the data structures get more complicated.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why manually specify a key as a string instead of using an int auto_increment?

<comment><USER29> In this case, the key corresponds to the filename containing the migration statements.

Further, consider if your company had three deployments of your product. One for bleeding edge testing, one for staging/QA, and live. You'd want the schema version to be consistent across all three schemas.</comment></comment>


Free Speech Defenders Don't Understand the Critique Against Them - <AUTHOR> https://arcdigital.media/free-speech-defenders-dont-understand-the-critique-against-them-4ed8327c0879 <comment><USER2> I'll summarize this article.

"You say you want free speech, but it is free speech and expression for us to decide and exclude you from our society both economically and socially".

Probably interesting things could have been said and investigated but none of that is to be found. I also find this article confuses countries just to make a point about hypocrisy, for example Jordan Peterson can get away with suing for defamation in the commonwealth because no other country except the US has real freedom of speech/expression laws. In the commonwealth you can just claim you were defamed and the onus is on the defendent to prove they didn't defame you. There was already a famous case about this involving some holocaust denying author who sued a critic and the federal government (note: not US government, we're talking about foreign countries) came down on this critic with the full force of unlimited resources and power forcing them to defend their criticism.

If you write an article like this it would be nice to try and run test cases against your own hypothesis that it is freedom of expression for a vocal majority to exclude somebody economically and socially they disagree with, like what if the comments were socially acceptable when they were made, but no longer are, should you still be removed from society and is this still freedom of expression. Classic example that could have been used is politicians signing petitions in their naive young past that are now socially unacceptable, which are brought out in the current political climate and used as a weapon. Another hypothesis that could have been explored is what if the current social climate is overtly racist, like it's acceptable to hate a specific group, then is it still freedom of expression to cancel that hated group from society using Rwanda as an example and numerous other ethnic conflicts.

tl;dr it would be nice if somebody put some rigor into these kind of articles, like negating your hypothesis and seeing if your claim still holds ie: some signal in the noise. It would also be nice if these author's at least read Orwell's classic essay on how to do political writing: [https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...](https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit) while you read this article, look for tired methaphor's like 'preach to the choir'.

<comment><USER3> I encourage everyone to read the article themselves because this summarization of the article is incomplete and misses the actual point of the article.

<comment><USER2> I assume everybody reads articles here yo. The authors proposition is spelled out "You say you value free speech and oppose social penalties for bad speech, but your actions show that you don't. You value free speech for you and people who agree with you and oppose social penalties for expressing things you agree with. You're open to disagreement on some topics, sure, but when it comes to things that are important to you, social penalties for speech you identify as bad — such as "Bari Weiss sucks" — are not just acceptable, but good, something to be proud of, something to broadcast on a public forum so others know that you did it, encouraging them to do it too." but his arguement is actually my summary.

But then my summary stands when he summarizes: "It's drawing the lines of socially acceptable expression" and claims an angry mob coming after you is indeed what the definition of free expression is and comes with the territory of a free society. My snarky Orwell comment still stands too with his "social penalties" newspeak.</comment></comment></comment>


Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions - <AUTHOR> http://www.bailis.org/blog/scalable-atomic-visibility-with-ramp-transactions/ <comment><USER2> Peter Bailis's talk at Ricon West ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rAdJkAbGls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rAdJkAbGls)) is a good introduction to this topic, and is more approachable than the full paper.

This is very interesting research, both as a piece of distributed systems theory and as something that's likely to change the way (some) large-scale database systems are designed. When reading this paper it's worth noting that a lot of the conversation, in both academia and industry, around distributed systems is a conversation about constraints. From time to time new and profound results do show up, but the general thread of research is looking at application requirements and looking at system models, and trying to find new and interesting ways to meet these application requirements in the provided system models. This research, the earlier HAT research from the same group, and active research into CRDTs are all great examples of this. I'm not trying to diminish the importance of this research by explaining it this way. Indeed, the 'how do we solve this constraint in this model' research is generally more immediately useful, more applicable, and has a faster turn-around to production systems than the more purely mathematically-focused research in the same fields.

This kind of thing is really going to make it to a database near you, and give distributed databases a great shot at beating single-machine databases in some areas where they lag behind today.</comment>


Android app swipes contactless credit card - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/android-app-lets-you-swipe-con.html

<comment><USER2> The one mentioned in the article is no longer in the Play Store. However, this one is still available for download: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idstrongho...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idstronghold.CCReaderMkt)

I gave it a quick try with some credit cards I have and it immediately displayed information.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the github link to the App for anyone who wants more details: [https://github.com/thomasskora/android-nfc- paycardreader#rea...](https://github.com/thomasskora/android-nfc- paycardreader#readme)

<comment><USER4> It 404s now.

<comment><USER3> wow that was quick, guess it was kind of inevitable, wonder if all the forks will have gone as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a clone which is still up at github: <https://github.com/rayyan/android-nfc-paycardreader> and this is the most "interesting" bit of source : [https://github.com/rayyan/android-nfc- paycardreader/blob/mas...](https://github.com/rayyan/android-nfc- paycardreader/blob/master/src/net/skora/eccardinfos/ECCardInfosActivity.java) \- it can identify card types and that's about it...

<comment><USER6> Looks like it's not quite up to date - it doesn't have the latest pull request in it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So what's the exploit here? Is it a bug in the cards or the protocol or what? Or is the card info considered "public" by the protocol (i.e. I could imagine an authentication scheme where the card could provide its number but the bank would only honor charges via the secure contactless scheme which came with a RSA cookie or whatenot).

</comment><comment><USER5> Sorry.. Am calling BS on this... To read any protected memory regions on an NFC card a fairly complicated handshake has to occur with various exchanges of keys - you can't just read details with your average NFC reader in an Android phone using an app that doesn't even require root...

<comment><USER8> The app is designed to be used with the German GeldKarte which appears to use an old NFC technology. It isn't a credit card, you have to load cash onto it before you can spend it, and doesn't use the same security as modern contactless bank cards.

Also it appears this isn't the first app to do this:

<http://www.nfc.cc/2011/12/11/nfc-geldkarte-broken-by-design/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Along these lines - are there any good 'hacker' tools out there for the various phone platforms? I know there are port scanners and some other things out there but is this a well-developed space?

<comment><USER10> Depends what you're interested in, but as an iOS developer I highly recommend Jonathan Zdziarski's "Hacking and Securing iOS Applications", published by O'Reilly. It's a good primer, and covers a wide variety of both exploits and hacks.

<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023234.do>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems it's already removed from Google Play.</comment>


China's Demography: The consequences of an ageing population - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18832070

<comment><USER2> Is there any businesses targeting this demographic online? I don't have much idea how to create markets for a very sophisticated demographic that's averse to new things yet it's probably the richest demographic in many countries if not all.

I've seen the elderly happily depositing hundreds of dollars per day on pokies to the point that venues are very dependant on them. To give an example, there was an ad in the local paper how the RSL club would be unable to support local charities, jobs would go, veterans would suffer, etc if gamblers were discouraged by setting limits before gambling by law.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pensions, Welfare, Medicare... The more I read about these things (and the coming crisis ahead) the more I feel like it is a classic example of a (mild) Ponzi scheme.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whilst reading the article I was reminded of Animal Farm, the last paragraph confirmed my suspicions.</comment>


In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub - <AUTHOR> http://custodians.online/ <comment><USER2> Remember that the TPP will enact new laws and penalties related to copyright, affecting 800 million people. First they came for the librarians... Unless there is public opposition, the TPP will likely be voted into effect during the US post-election lame duck period. Instead, the TPP can be made into a visible 2016 election issue, to forestall post-election flip-flops.

The US Copyright Office has a progressive report [1] on Orphan Works, a positive example of practical steps negotiated among a wide range of business and civil society stakeholders. This example can be expanded to other areas of copyright law. Instead, the TPP favors a subset [2] of corporate interests, at the expense of competing corporate and public groups who were excluded from deliberations. We can do better.

[1] [http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/](http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect- yo...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your- digital-rights)

</comment><comment><USER3> SciHub is now at [http://sci-hub.io/](http://sci-hub.io/) :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just one more reason to never publish in or cite from Elsevier journals.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for sharing this.

I wonder, apart from financies, how can we support their efforts?

<comment><USER6> One thing to do is to improve peer-2-peer technology , that it will be fit for the task.To do this we'll need a few things :

1\. Torrents(as the most proven tech) should be able to handle storage of rare file (i.e. persistence) well[a].

2\. A working peer to peer search mechanism - i believe tribler has that. It might need some customization for academic papers - but it's written in python , so it won't be terribly hard.

3\. Tribler has mechanisms for anonymity and against censorship. One more thing that should be added is a secure pdf reader - maybe pdf.js via chrome is the most secure we have today.

4\. Maybe there would be a need for some spam protection.

[a]search for 'bad for storing "rare" files' in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253)

<comment><USER7> [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/) is the long term solution.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. like i mention in the link of the previous discussion - At least for this goal - Tribler seems to be mostly there including being part of the huge torrent community, it's written in python - so it's seem like it could easily do the job - so why complicate things at this stage which should be about and MVP and building a community ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do they publish like this anyway? Does Elsevier offer anything extra? Or does it force scientists to use it?

<comment><USER9> Inertia, mostly. If you want your research visible and you want mad street cred for tenure, you publish in the biggest and baddest journals. The biggest and baddest journals are the biggest and baddest because they've been around since the days when scientists would go the university library to read papers.

<comment><USER10> _> Inertia, mostly._

I agree with inertia, but I want to add a few more details from experience that could shed a bit more light onto it:

* There are not that many open journals around (see e.g. [1], probably slightly outdated); plus the throughput of a journal is generally low (the linked journal ToC has published 20 articles in 2015).

* Graduate students often want to maximize the impact of the journal they're submitting it to simply because the work itself is say of medium importance to the field.

* The review process takes a lot of time, it can even take more than 100 days. This encourages the researcher into trying as few journals as possible, which benefits the more impacted, more numerous closed journals.

* At least at my university neither the administration nor the school library promote open journals in any significant way. Which is strange, seeing as they are the ones paying the journal subscription fees.

[1]: [http://theoryofcomputing.org/toclinks.html](http://theoryofcomputing.org/toclinks.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you support Sci-Hub, don't forget to donate:

[https://blockchain.info/address/14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQg...](https://blockchain.info/address/14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA)

</comment><comment><USER12> How hard is it to nullify a publisher's copyright claim (which has been consented by the authors), based on the fact that they do none of the work, thus indirectly appropriating public money?

<comment><USER13> It's not possible in the US. If the authors validly transferred copyright, they validly transferred copyright.

(There is a takeback provision after 50 years or so, but ...)

<comment><USER14> Anything is renegotiable or litigable.

Schools and academics can drop subscriptions or boycott submissions. Law can be changed.

Even if that's future-looking only, it can change the balance of interests for journal publishers.

<comment><USER15> Or you can show civil disobedience:

      > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
      > https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto

If lots of people would do it, there can only few show trials be initialized by the publishers.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." \- Mahatma Gandhi

<comment><USER16> I'm proud to have done something similar to this. I knew I was going to have to sign over the publication rights to my dissertation. Before I did that, I published the approved, and signed off "final draft" to the Internet Archive with an open license. (I hadn't heard of Aaron or the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto at the time.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone here remembers gigapedia?

<comment><USER18> I do, it was a nice site. libgen.io has taken it's place I guess.</comment></comment>


Splunk CEO tells tech sector to hire more women - <AUTHOR> http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/2427716/splunk-ceo-tells-tech-sector-to-hire-more-women <comment><USER2> He even uses the word "discriminate", and yet behavior like this is encouraged and celebrated.</comment>


How to Understand the Universe When You're Stuck Inside of It - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/were-stuck-inside-the-universe-lee-smolin-has-an-idea-for-how-to-study-it-anyway-20190627/ <comment><USER5> I have been working the past two years trying to understand how would be possible to create a simulation of the universe and a lot of what Lee Smolin says resonates with some of the conclusion that I have got at the moment

for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other electrons of the universe, I will more specific and say that there is a Functor that describes all the possible states of the surface of any observable system and it behaves as a wave function when that system tends to the stability. (this can be related with holographic theory)

Lee Smolin that the universe is looking for maximum variability, which I think is not correct, the universe is looking for maximum stability in all matter hierarchies because it allows describing any possible surface with a Functor, and makes the simulation more easy to carry.

this is big because it means that is not necessary to simulate every electron on the universe to create a good simulation of itself, or every atom, or every molecule, or even so every planet, imagine the natural numbers, we don't need to create all the sets of the natural number in memory in order to use them and we can peek at any moment at any region of the natural numbers, while the memory support it, and we will be able to make any computation over them, so why the electron can not work like that, or any kind of matter?

those functors, are passed between two systems when a system observe to another system using what we have called photons. also when the universe can't describe the surface of the system with a functor that can easily be transported to the observer, this system appears as a black hole.

I am 100% sure that we live in a simulation, not necessarily made by "gods", but it could be a fundamental way in which the universe behave

<comment><USER6> I understand you have likely been looking into this for a while, but do you have any citations for any of this material? There are quite a few claims in here that need to be parsed out.

<comment><USER5> not at the moment, is something that I am formalizing, it just the general idea, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it will take time, but I feel that I am in the right path

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps "understanding 'intelligence' when you're stuck inside it" is even harder and yet a lot of artificial intelligence research seems very linear and not interested in unknown unknowns.

If we are following the "anthropic principle" the two questions might not be entirely unrelated.

<comment><USER8> It is even less interested in the more consequential unknown knowns, better known as "what you think you know that ain't really so". If Donald Rumsfeld could have understood this concept, we might have stayed out of Iraq.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quanta Magazine has been producing a lot of stories that have been appearing on HN lately.

An interesting aside it that Quanta was started by James Simon's Foundation. James Simons is an interesting person. He doesn't get the publicity of a Gates, Buffett, or Bezos.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0)

<comment><USER10> The Numberphile YT channel managed to get a rare interview with Mr. Simons.

[https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0](https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0)

<comment><USER9> That's the same link I posted.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry, I should have checked. I would delete my comment if there was not another interesting child.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not a physicist, nor a philosopher, and certainly not a mathematician - <USER2> maybe what I'm going to write will seem both naive and probably wrong, but I'm doing it anyhow.

In this Quanta interview, Amanda Gefter writes:

"Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there's no fixed backdrop to the universe, no "stuff" of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin's imagination, as did Leibniz's enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world's fundamental ingredient is the "monad," a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It's a concept that informs Smolin's latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside."

For some reason, my mind went to the idea of "nodes and edges" of a graph; with the nodes being these "monads" and their relationships being the "edges", and then later in the interview...Smolin notes:

"The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its "view" of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we're taking the universe as constituted of relations among events."

I don't know for sure if what I was thinking is the same thing as what he expresses here, but I think I might be close. Regardless, I now wonder something else:

Could the colloquial concept/idea of "6 degrees of separation" apply here? If so, what implications might that have for Smolin's theory?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Math...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Mathematics)

I won't pretend to have any answers here (again, assuming anything I wrote above means anything)...

<comment><USER12> There is a very good introduction - 20 lectures of 45 minutes - to loop quantum gravity by Carlo Rovelli [1] who worked together with Lee Smolin on that topic. In a nutshell loop quantum gravity is about triangulating space with tetrahedra, then representing this triangulation as a graph - one vertex per tetrahedron, one edge between every two tetrahedra sharing a face - <USER3> the edges labeled with SU(2) transformations describing the change in orientation due to spacetime curvature as one moves from one tetrahedron to a neighboring one, and of course the dynamics of this description. I hope I got this right, I am totally not a physicist. There is also a very good talk for the general public focusing on the nature of time by Rovelli [2] in case the lecture series is to long or technical.

Well, I initially started writing this comment because of the quote »Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there's no fixed backdrop to the universe, no "stuff" of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships.«. According to Rovelli - he talks about this in the lecture series mentioned above - Newton was fully aware [3] that his notion of space and time are just abstract notions and that space and time are fundamentally relational. But due to the success of using abstract space and time in science and engineering this got somewhat forgotten and those abstract notions were and are considered much more fundamental than they are. This in lectures two (space) and ten (time) which both provide an overview about the philosophical evolution of the concepts and should be - at least the first part of the lectures - <USER4> without [almost] any background.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp4fpwl9loQ&list=PLwLvxaPjGH...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp4fpwl9loQ&list=PLwLvxaPjGHxR6zr421tXXlaDGbq8S36Un)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M)

[3] I just skipped a bit through the second lecture on space and I may have somewhat overstated Newton's awareness but I will leave this as first written. It is more like he was aware that we only have access to relational space and time but we can infer from that a true abstract notion of space and time. I really recommend to just watch the lecture for a more nuanced picture, it starts out very non-technical and this very discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _But if your goal is to discover new, deeper laws, you need to mix with > philosophers again._

Some reading in this direction:

"How Hume and Mach Helped Einstein Find Special Relativity", Norton

"Range", Epstein. Ch 1 discusses Bool's influence on Shannon for the discovery of information theory. Ch 5 includes anecdotes and research for "Thinking Outside Experience", including the methods of analogy used by Keppler regarding theories of planetary motion.

> _Then there was this pragmatic turn, where the dominant mode of physics > became anti-foundational, anti-philosophy._

Related papers:

"Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Science, and Global Philosophy", Tieszen

"Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy", Hanna

</comment><comment><USER14> Kind of an interesting limit question though. Like what could we know about an instrument from a tune played on it, or from a collection of sheet music that may or may not have been written for it?

The instrument can be thought of very loosely as representing a monad where force, reason, intent and all these other things go in and then "phenomena of type music" comes out. If the universe were monadic the way he describes, there is probably some information theory-meets-ontological limit that has to do with whether you can ever get "upstream" of these monads, of which our universe is the effect.

Other than perhaps being able to discover and reproduce them.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought the article was going to be a more scientific take on this fun talk by George Hotz: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ)

</comment><comment><USER16> Some of it you can _only_ understand from inside the universe. It would be difficult at best to guess at the Born rule from a simulation.

<comment><USER17> And why would you need a way to calculate the bias on observing a system from the inside out if your observations lack that bias?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps you're interested in what it would be like to live inside that system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The most interesting and mind blowing insight: "When most physicists said that the laws of physics are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of cosmic Darwinism."

</comment><comment><USER19> Typo: The linked paper [1] refers to Monodology and Monadology

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04799.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04799.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> Smolin dropped out of highschool, played in a rock band, thought himself mathematics and suddenly he is in Harvard... good jump Smolin. Flawless victory!

</comment><comment><USER21> All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.

<comment><USER22> Does the universe require perception in order for there to be existence?

If so, does the perception require consciousness?

Is consciousness constrained to the universe, or orthogonal to it?

<comment><USER23> No, all you need is to observe things. Be it a simple detector or conscious observer, you've extracted information from the environment. The observation implies existence, what observed it is inconsequential.

<comment><USER22> So is entropy really about energy, or information? Or is there any difference.

<comment><USER24> Statistics.

Imagine any given configuration of the universe. Of all possible changes to a new configuration (think Levenshtein distance) from that configuration there's a large set of "equivalent" (in the aggregate) configurations, let's call those the future. There is a smaller set of configurations which we would ascribe some special character too, such as being somewhat orderly let's call those the past. the set of possible configurations encoding a broken pot are larger then the set encodings an unbroken one. But the state brokenness of the pot is entirely a subjective things, without that interpretation of the encoding they are equally random

Now if you are a "process", a kind of pattern that can be identified as the same entity in several of those configurations, it would seem necessary for that pattern to follow some rule in which most of those "future" configurations would retain its unique characteristic.

So if you throw a dart into this mess of configurations and hit such an entity, selecting any direction to move from that point at random would most likely give you a configuration with higher entropy, but in which this particular pattern would be retained.

Some patterns would have a higher chance than other of being traceable along those changes, perhaps they encode a kind of anticipation of likely futures yielding a rules set which a higher likelihood of existing from one configuration to the next. Let's call this patterns "living"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps those morphic resonance guys are onto something.

</comment><comment><USER26> > _This relational framework captured Smolin's imagination, as did Leibniz's > enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world's > fundamental ingredient is the "monad,"_

If this is not evidence that Haskell is the language of the Gods, I don't know what is...

<comment><USER27> Monads were used in APL language long before Haskell came to be.

Surely all those are different monads though.

<comment><USER28> They are different...I can understand the APL ones. I have no idea what a "monoid in the category of endofunctors" means :)

<comment><USER27> Look at this statement enough times over long enough period, and it starts making sense.

"Category" is that central thing of the science of nodes and arrows between them.

"Functor" is a mapping - a function - from a category to another category, where each node is mapped and each arrow is mapped according to node mapping. Like, if 1 in number category maps to A in character category, 2 maps to B, and there is an arrow 1->2 in number category, then this arrow should map to arrow A->B in character category.

"Endofunctor" adds that the resulting category should in fact be the same as original. So, 1->2 can e.g. map to 3->4 in the same number category.

"Monoid" is requirement that with the category we also have defined binary operation (let's call it X), that the operation is associative and also that category has "identity" node (let's call it I) - that is, for any A both operations A X I and I X A both produce A. It's like adding with zero.

Now, this is not enough to understand monads - but it provides a foundation for what those monads, mathematically speaking, are. Consequences of these definitions can lead far :) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe one of the laws of the universe is that, one should never understand "it".

Perhaps we should just enjoy what we have.</comment>


Startup's success rate falls by 19% if founders are college buddies - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/228371/a-startups-success-rate-falls-by-19-if-the-founders-are-college-buddies/

<comment><USER2> Augh. The editors changed my title. I will ask them to change it.

Some readers have pointed out that the research on diversity I quote is about investors, not founders. This is a very important point. It's the closest thing we have to a large-scale founder diversity study, however. I meant it as an example of how even basic assumptions can be wrong, and why it's important to revisit them.</comment>


Newsledge.com for a Macbook Air - <AUTHOR>

Hello Hackers,
My only tool of work, the Dell I've loved like my dog had broken yesterday.
The most immediate asset I can sell to purchase a new laptop is newsledge.com
If you are interested I'm trading it for a Macbook Air 13" (http://store.apcom.ro/macbookair13inchintelcorei5128gb-p-1107.html) which costs 1.79191 USD in Romania.
Newsledge is a project I'm thinking on since the last couple of years. If you want to make it a startup I can help you with both developing further the idea (http://metaman.tumblr.com/tagged/newsledge) and designing the interface. I'm also an average coder (Ruby) so working together would be easy.
Thanks a lot!
Csongor (firstname.lastname@example.com) <comment><USER2> Can you tell us more about newsledge? Or are you just referring to it as a domain that you are selling?

<comment><AUTHOR> Newsledge.com is a domain for sale and/or an idea for a startup.

To put it with Ray Kurzweil's words: "Your memory will be constantly, instantaneously aided by the information available on the Internet. The two will begin to become indistinguishable."

Newsledge can be a tool visualizing what's in your head.

You're probably consuming endless information (news) day by day; newsledge would be a summary of what knowledge you have acquired.

Or:

Newsledge is a multi-faceted tool because it knows everything about you.

You can name it Your Personal Search Engine, Your Mind Rate Monitor, Your Own Flow Engine, or Your Quantified Meta Self.

It makes you a Metaman, it makes your digital ego and echo visible, visualisable, analysable and understandable.

Without Newsledge you are a simple consumer with no feedback and knowledge distilled by your — more and more obvious — digital existence.

It is your power, reputation, attention in one place. So guard it with your life.

Read more about the idea here: <http://metaman.tumblr.com/tagged/newsledge></comment></comment>


You Can't Even See This Hypersonic Sled Hit 6,599 MPH - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/you-cant-even-see-this-hypersonic-sled-hit-6-599-mph-1838027056 <comment><USER2> Thanks, taxes!

<comment><USER3> Better this than hundreds of tanks. At least this might increase our collective knowledge. Many great scientific discoveries have come about as a result of defense research.</comment></comment>


20 Years After the Hijacking of Air France Flight 8969 - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lefigaro.fr%2Fassets%2Fmarignane%2F

<comment><USER2> The wikipedia page reads like a Clancy novel: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969)

Intense situation. It's remarkable that in the end there were so few casualties.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just FYI if you load the original page ([http://www.lefigaro.fr/assets/marignane/](http://www.lefigaro.fr/assets/marignane/)) you can see the video reenactment and a comparison of essentially before and after of the cockpit.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know for sure if it truly was their plan but it was later revealed that their goal was either to crash the plane on the Eiffel Tower or on an other tall building of Paris.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the untranslated piece on Le Figaro's website for those who read French: [http://www.lefigaro.fr/assets/marignane/](http://www.lefigaro.fr/assets/marignane/)

<comment><USER5> Merci :)

I wonder why Google translated "huis-clos" to "camera" in the header text. Best I could find is that Sartre's Huis Clos was originally called "in camera" which means: [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_camera](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_camera).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18tmnc_mayday-s02e03-the-k...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18tmnc_mayday-s02e03-the- killing-machine-hijacked-hijack-rescue_shortfilms)

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a movie made about this...

The Assault [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1793239/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1793239/)</comment>


A guide to analyst relations for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2015/07/25/A-guide-to-analyst-relations-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> Not totally crazy, but as somebody who's been an analyst and also a marketing consultant for decades, I'd quibble with various details and oversimplifications, as per [http://www.strategicmessaging.com/online/technology- marketin...](http://www.strategicmessaging.com/online/technology- marketing/analyst-relations/)

Specific points that concern me include:

\-- You do not need to pay to brief an analyst. Really. If you're under the incorrect impression that you do, we'll eventually stop trying to talk you our of your error, as we like money. But you don't need to pay.

\-- On the other hand, when you give a briefing and then ask for free consulting in the form of "feedback", the free part can be extremely brief.

\-- Analysts' preferences in the style of presentations they receive varies WILDLY.

\-- Engaging with analysts can be productive earlier than the article suggests, if you're looking for consulting. I had my first contract with Cloudera when they had 22 employees, and it wasn't even at my lowest tier of service. Other clients have started before they had revenue, venture capital, or a double-digit number of employees, and I think most are glad they did.</comment>


Ask HN: Negotiation/biz book recs? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to head out on a trip where I'll have sometime to read.  Last year I read Getting to Yes and liked it a lot.  I find negotiations very interesting, and was curious if any one has suggestions on other books?  Right now considering Secrets of Power Negotiating: Inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator or Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond.
Also if you know a really good general business book, let me know!
Thanks,
Daum <comment><USER2> A few:

\+ "Pitch Anything": he presents an algorithm for pitching your deal or idea at the start of a negotiation. His "three forces" approach works really well when done correctly and I use it for a lot of our enterprise sales.

\+ "The Pyramid Principle": not really about negotiations, but corporate communication in general. I find a lot of technical folks get stuck "in the weeds" when negotiating or presenting and this provides strategies to get away from that. Senior executives or whoever you're negotiating with rarely cares about the details at the start of a conversation. Structure accordingly.

\+ "How to Win Friends and Influence People": not really negotiations but I find 99% of our negotiations go well when we have good relationships and rapport with those we're negotiating with. Showing an interest and human appreciation for those you're talking to is crucial.

Good luck!</comment>


OneWeb about to launch its first internet satellites to connect the unconnected - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613043/oneweb-is-about-to-launch-its-first-internet-satellites-to-connect-the/ <comment><AUTHOR> _Today's launch, scheduled for 4:37 p.m. US Eastern time_

There's a link to watch the launch live in the article.</comment>