Ask HN: Any experience with Python-in-the-browser (Python-to-JavaScript) tools? - <AUTHOR> I have some existing Python code that I would like to run in the browser, without having to rewrite it in JavaScript. Has anyone used any of the tools that allow the use of Python in the browser?
There seem to be two classes of such tools:
1. Python interpreters written in JavaScript. These include Brython [1], Skulpt [2] and Batavia [3].
2. Compilers (a.k.a. transpilers) that convert Python code directly into JavaScript. I would expect this to provide better performance than an interpreter, but perhaps be a less accurate Python implementation. This seems to be the approach taken by Transcrypt [4].
Has anyone used any of the above, or similar tools? How did you find them in terms of compatibility, performance etc?

  [1] https://brython.info/
  [2] https://skulpt.org/
  [3] https://github.com/beeware/batavia
  [4] https://www.transcrypt.org/
 <comment><USER2> There is also python interpreters compiled to webassembly

see: [https://pmp-p.github.io/micropython- next/](https://pmp-p.github.io/micropython-next/)

see: [https://hyperdev.fr/pypyjs-todomvc/](https://hyperdev.fr/pypyjs- todomvc/)

</comment><comment><USER3> yes, I'm using pyodide [https://github.com/iodide- project/pyodide](https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide) to build

[https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=d40c08258ef10f2fe9acff4ab738...](https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=d40c08258ef10f2fe9acff4ab738edc3478e8f5deb232f59082bda5e321529c6)

the loading time is a bit long, because the matplotlib package is too large. loading python runtime is actually fast.

compatibility should be 99%, as this is the same cpython built for web.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I share equity with a sales partner? - <AUTHOR> We are just getting started with a new product. I have been the sole developer and founder till now. The MVP is now ready and I've met a really enthusiastic sales rep that I can see myself working with. But we haven't made a sale yet.<p>What are the terms I should offer this person to be fair and keep them interested? <comment><USER2> Are you looking for a sales rep or a cofounder?

If the former, high commissions are motivating. Anything the rep sells at this point is a sale you wouldn't otherwise have. If you're worried about the "wrong" kind of sale, you can put bounds on what you'll pay commission on, like "nothing below $X dollars" or "nothing if the company doesn't fit the definition of 'good fit'".

If you're looking for a cofounder, then give them a meaningful equity chunk of the company, vested over 4 years.

Sales is hard enough -- don't try to come up with a comp plan that adds a bunch of complexity to a rep's decisionmaking. When a customer is ready to buy, you want in clear in the reps head whether they should push for a longer contract, or a higher per-month rate, or a strategic fit for product development.

What does your company need right now?

<comment><USER3> An additional thought. Given the sales guy is an unknown (enthusiasm means little against results) why not put equity into sales results. E.g. 1% equity against every $10k in sales up to XX% + some level of reduced commission if this seems fair to include. Also you can put a minimum sales in so if he turns to a dud or loses interest quickly you don't have some random with a tiny share.

And make sure you have a get out of gaol card if they are no good. You don't want some one burning your hottest leads if they can't get over the line.

<comment><USER4> This sounds like it's offering salespeople the worst of both worlds: they have the cofounder's risk that the equity is worthless unless they do everything in their power to help the company succeed for as long as it takes, and yet they're not being treated like a cofounder in terms of share of equity and influence at the start. And the people that want to share in the growth of a company they've helped run and the people that choose to work commission-only roles because they like the autonomy and are confident they earn more being paid on performance tend to be different people.

If you want a cofounding salesperson, offer them a cofounder equity share and responsibility from the start (with a vesting schedule, a cliff, and an expectation of what they should deliver that may include a sales target). If you want a hired gun that gets paid purely on performance, you ought to be in a position to pay them a share of the cash they bring in which is what they really want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best thing I've ever read on coming up with a sales commission structure is this article by Lars Dalgaard > [http://a16z.com/2015/07/23/sales- compensation-beware-you-get...](http://a16z.com/2015/07/23/sales-compensation- beware-you-get-what-you-ask-for/)

<comment><USER6> Some valuable lessons there from a Sales perspective

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would advise against incorporating a company until the first sale is made. You want to delay this as much as possible. When you do incorporate, setup reverse vesting for him so you can easily get his equity back in the case you have to fire him.

Vest his equity over 4 years with a one-year cliff. This way you have a full year to evaluate if you want him as co-founder/salesperson. If he is not happy to be under this performance-based scheme then that's a huge red flag. After all, you have already proved you can hold your side of the bargain but he has not.

If you are already incorporated then you will have to setup a stock option pool with similar terms.

In terms of fairness of compensation, this depends on the competitive landscape. You should probably try to source a few more potential salespeople to get a feeling of what that landscape looks like.

</comment><comment><USER8> Whatever you decide will probably be wrong.

So I'd try and set your sales guy up for success, get him off to a positive start, and be generous with commission. Agree targets that should be achievable.

If he's amazing, you'll want to agree something attractive to both of you. Possibly involving equity. If he can't sell your stuff, then you'll probably want to try someone else. So you'll need the ability to "undo.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is the legal structure of the company?

Is the focus of business operations to produce recurring cash flow for the owners or is it to produce capital gains via growth of the underlying equity?

What is the vesting period for your equity?

Sales person psychology:

1\. Sales people are always enthusiastic.

2\. Commission based sales incentivize closing deals that don't advance a company's general interests.

3\. A milestone based contract can help align interests.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> Make sure they're commission incentivized. I learned this the hard, expensive way. If there's a way to structure equity grants around sales performance, do it. At the very least, make sure you have minimum requirements beyond 1 year of time for your cliff on any equity agreements - ideally, attach a reasonable sales target as a schedule.

Don't let them sell you on vesting based on time - they're not adding value if they're not selling.

</comment><comment><USER11> you should be vary careful.

never forget that sales people are good at selling things, which includes their own value, whereas traditionally software developers are not.

you may be particularly talented in this area for all i know, but be aware of this.

making reward results based to avoid becoming a victim of their superior ability to convince you they are worth more than they are. commission is a classic approach... its hard to argue with getting paid better if you do good work... but it does incentivise bad work if not done carefully.

... on the other hand, if you get legal advice to draw up paperwork for sharing equity the default position is to make it very difficult to cash in on, so offering equity might be safer... but i'm not sure the recipient will enjoy having to learn the lesson of how difficulty equity can be to turn into cash.

what kind of product is it? do you really need sales? usually its a way to sell more, not sell at all...

all of that said, why not discuss it with them and see what they expect too? that might be an easy way to rule them out or bring them onboard because what they might want might be either completely unrealistic, or undervaluing themselves.

<comment><USER12> > making reward results based to avoid becoming a victim of their superior > ability to convince you they are worth more than they are.

OT: This sentence was exceedingly difficult to parse. Had to read it multiple times and the next sentence to figure out your intent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 10% commission for the first sale he gets you. SEE what happens after that.

</comment><comment><USER5> A16z have just released a podcast on this exactly >[https://overcast.fm/+BlzEI52II](https://overcast.fm/+BlzEI52II)

</comment><comment><USER14> Hello !

If you shall require help with sales at your startup, please do let me know. I don't require anything in return but may not be able to devote a lot of time, but would try to do my best.

I have more than 15 years of hardcore sales experience across 7 different industries, this includes working on my own startups for 52 months.

cheers!

<comment><USER15> should put contact info in profile.

<comment><USER14> hi !

I have mentioned my email address in my profile. I am not sure it is visible to others or not.

I thought it was visible.

sorry for the trouble !

i can be reached at realmccoy2k2AtGmailDotCom

cheers !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just give him money. An entitled salesdude is a problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> don't do anything until 3-6 months of constant sales.</comment>


Cancer pill fights disease and gives lifelong protection - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10893387/Cancer-pill-fights-disease-and-gives-lifelong-protection.html

<comment><USER2> This seems game-changing. Can anyone here confirm that this is legit?</comment>


The world is running out of sand and there's a violent black market (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://globalnews.ca/news/4274233/world-running-out-of-sand-black-market/ <comment><USER2> In Serbia local mafia is controlling river sand excavations ever since mid-90s, and the most of these sites work completely illegally all this time. Beside the obvious problem of exploiting natural resources, causing erosion of river banks, and destroying the river ecosystem, this also has a much wider negative influence on the society as it's creating a huge chain of corruption of government officials and police. And this is a serious business with a lot of money in the game, to the point that all drug lords there are also in the sand business.

<comment><USER3> Same in Romania, the local mafia is controlling all the legal and illegal tree cutting with _help_ from the politicians and forest rangers since exporting it to Western countries is lucrative enough to grease the whole chain.

The taxpayers then have to deal with the aftermath of deforestation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 99% Invisible did an episode on Sand and it's black market: [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on- sand/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I recommend the documentary Sand Wars from 2013. Here's the trailer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAPfwwb59uY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAPfwwb59uY)

I believe it's available on Prime.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is interesting, I didn't know that desert countries were actually importing sand for construction! Here's a relatively recent paper looking at the suitability of desert sand to replace the fine aggregate in cement: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09500...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950061806001917), concludes that it can be used in small percentages.

Idea: It would be useful to have global competitions with hefty prizes, e.g > $1M, for process inventions that address scarcity problems like this to spur independent young researchers.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing I found interesting when visiting the Bahamas is that every few years some entrepreneurial locals pitch the idea of using the sand from the beaches to turn it into glass. Only problem with that: the "sand" is made up of crushed coral and seashells (probably some limestone in there, too), so it's not possible to furnish glass from it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Planet Money had a good episode on this about a year ago.

Audio -> [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/episode-853-peak- sand)

Transcript -> [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=628890875)

</comment><comment><USER9> This should have a (2018) on it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I envision a machine that takes in desert dune sand, arranges four individual grains into a tetrad, and uses concentrated solar light to melt some sand into glass, to bind the tetrads together. Then it ejects the tiny glass-bound pyramid into a collection bin and repeats.

Like a Spacechem/Opus Magnum puzzle that has a dune sand input and a construction sand output.

<comment><USER11> Creative thinking, I like it. Pyramidal sand might be even grippier than the standard, cubic version.

Alternatively, I wonder if just splitting spherical sand in half would work?

<comment><USER12> Particle size also matters. Even if your split sand didn't cross the threshold from "sand" to "silt", the coarser sand is still better for construction, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Large reserves of sand is getting accessible in Greenland: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/01/climate/green...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/01/climate/greenland- glacier-melting-sand.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can we modify desert sand particles into more irregular shapes with heat or something?

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there good alternative building materials? Perhaps wood?

Edit: It seems I am shadow banned. I am going to take this as a deep insult.

<comment><USER16> No, it's worse. You are not shadow banned, people just don't care about what you have to say.

<comment><USER17> Harsh.

<comment><USER16> I agree, this is a harsh place.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What expert domain to focus on? - <AUTHOR> I'm an almost-40 software engineer, I am doing consulting work for various companies - sometimes I help them shape the product, sometimes I just code. One person software house.
The problem is that it's hard to compete with real software houses who have teams, managers, sales people etc.
I came to a conclusion that I need to specialize in terms of domain knowledge and offer expert knowledge + solutions.
Any ideas what could be profitable now and in +5 years? I need to be able to do this alone, or maybe in some cooperation, and plan to eventually end up with a product.
Any consultants have been through this?
Thanks <comment><USER2> I have been through this.

I'd need to know more about you to give useful advice. You can talk more about your background here or click on my HN profile link to take this off line.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

17 years in the software business, including a couple of years as project manager. Consulting since 2008. Been in Java, Ruby, Javascript, Golang. Full stack.

As for domains... some telco, some public sector, some education, publishing, etc. - the problem is that nothing deeply enough.

That is why I am determined to pick anything and just go deep. I successfully came back to development after the PM years, so I optimistically assume I can become expert in any domain, as long as it is possible to sell it as one person consultancy and it looks viable for the future (and potentially build a product around it).

Should I add anything more?

<comment><USER2> Where are you based and why did you drop out of PM?

<comment><AUTHOR> Europe. Dropping PM was a result of: 1) could not get hired in my area, 2) the feeling that not getting my hands dirty in tech was less valuable.

<comment><USER2> Do you imagine some domains that would be easy to get expertise in your area? For instance, many second-tier cities in the U.S. have drone hubs. Is there anything near you like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, have to research for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://philipmorganconsulting.com/](https://philipmorganconsulting.com/) has lots of good advice on this.

</comment><comment><USER4> That depends on your history. You won't become an expert over night, especially in your age (this sadly is a factor). So pick something close to your history and as always... go for passion, otherwise you just won't be good enough. Passion can fill a huge part of your lack of experience in this new domain.

<comment><USER5> > You won't become an expert over night, especially in your age (this sadly is > a factor).

What do you mean "especially in your age"? Are you saying it takes younger humans to become experts quicker?

<comment><USER4> Exactly, younger peoples brains are able to learn faster. On top they have more time due to (most of time) less responsibilities. Their whole body is in a better state to evolve, this also includes their brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was also hoping anyone who has gone through this could share their story.</comment>


Mazery: a map generation visualizer (HTML5 canvas + CoffeeScript) - <AUTHOR> http://mazery.sjackson.net/

<comment><USER2> See also <http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/under-the-hood> for a collection of awesome posts about maze algorithms.

<comment><USER3> Specifically this page: [http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation- algorit...](http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorithm- recap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey, author of this here. Cool that it showed up! This was actually was my first shot at using CoffeeScript, so if anyone wants to check out the github and throw some pointers out for better CoffeeScript style code, that'd be awesome!

Apparently this is a resource hog and runs pretty slow in Firefox and IE9 at the moment. I'll see what profiling shows up.

I hope to implement some other generation algorithms so people can compare them side-by-side. Suggestions welcome!

<comment><USER5> Brilliant. How about a nethack style room maze?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It amazes me how a really good presentation can make something relatively simple simultaneously novel and interesting.

I've seen other maze generators, and even written a couple before, but this one stands out just by looking really awesome.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really love visualized algorithms like this. To less-than-brilliant people like me, it's often the only intuitive way to understand how an algorithm works.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Loved that he showed the vertical refresh in the algorithm. The colors were nice, too. Would love to see more about algorithms like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aren't mazes supposed to have entrances and exits?

</comment><comment><USER10> Very, very nice visualization.</comment>


Dispensing with a Co-founder - <AUTHOR>

I'm in an uncomfortable position.  I've been working with a partner in my spare time on gathering information for a business I want to start, and we had a meeting to discuss incorporation (as in, fill in the blanks on the filing and put postage on it).
My about-to-be co-founder expressed hesitation.  He's an undergrad student who left university for several years to work in IT, then returned and basically had to start over, so he's got a couple of years left, while I'm graduating in about seven months.
Effectively, he said that he didn't want to incorporate because the expense (90 bucks, if) wouldn't be justified if the venture failed, plus we'd be out the $35 required to formally dissolve.
Instead, we just bought a couple of domains from GoDaddy, and a year of hosting.
As you can imagine, this left me unsettled and severely doubting his commitment. The idea is going to be very capital-intensive, and simply can't tolerate founders who are going to waver on it.  Although he brings some pretty good knowledge and connections, I wouldn't call him indispensable.  My biggest concern going forward would be not having enough time to find a better co-founder, since the window of opportunity for this business is somewhat narrow.
We've got excellent personal rapport, but I don't think I can choose short-term goodwill over the chance to build something great.  Sanity check?  Advice? <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, most serial entrepreneurs I've talked with tend to advise waiting a while before incorporating. If you're still in the kitchen table phase, which you say you are, then your co-founder may be right. Until you graduate and begin working full-time on the project and have a demo that are you pitching to investors, incorporating is really just a distraction. At best it doesn't really help anything and at worst you screw it up and it takes thousands of dollars to fix.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't recommend incorporating until you need to. Unless you have money or legal documents that require a separate legal entity there is no reason to incorporate while you just have an idea. Incorporating is a bit more time consuming than filling in the check and mailing. Depending on the type of incorporation and the state you might find incorporating to be a serious distraction you can do without for now.

On the other hand if the reason your co-founder doesn't want to incorporate is because it would be a waste of $135 dollars than you seriously need to talk to him about his commitment to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My business partner and I incorporated, specifically with an LLC. There was never a question about that. On the other hand, we weren't exactly a startup and we were diving into making some money. Our plan had always been from the beginning to spin off other ideas, and incorporate those as the time was right.

When putting together the articles of organization and the operating agreement, I remember a big emotional wall. It wasn't just the fees. It was as if, by signing my name and registering the paperwork, I would come out as a different person.

We got registered with the IRS, the state (all three agencies), and the city. Looking back, it seems trivially easy. However, if you are not operating and taking in customers, it is a lot of overhead in terms of ongoing paperwork.

We're currently working on a (real) startup idea right now, but we don't have plans on spinning it off into its own entity until we at least get a prototype or some revenue going.

In working with my biz partner, I have noticed something similar to the dynamic with my girlfriend. All the issues that crop up early in any relationship -- whether professional or romantic -- always repeats itself down the road. It is possible, though exceedingly difficult, to change that dynamic. They usually involve at least one person in the dynamic to become at aware of an uncomfortable truth about himself. Your misgivings about your co- founder (and friend) may point to that. It can end up as a source of a disaster, and left unexamined, you end up with a totally different set of people repeating the same dynamic. It can also be a source of strength; likely, what you find annoying (the hesitation?) may very well also be what's needed to succeed.

One last note, according to "The Google Story", the Google founders didn't incorporate until their first angel wrote them a check made out to "Google, Inc." At that point, to cash the check, they had to incorporate. And so ...

</comment><comment><USER5> IMO, if he can't justify the 90 bucks, he does not believe in it, and will not be the right partner.

Even in times when I was completely college-student broke, I could find ways to come up with $100 for the right opportunity.

I'd also question his availability and opportunity to contribute if he will still be finishing studies for a couple of years. The first couple of years are arguably the hardest, and most formative part, of the whole operation.

</comment><comment><USER6> > We've got excellent personal rapport

Then why are you posting here instead of having a serious sit-down talk with him about it?

<comment><USER7> why not? The guy is young, and is asking about some advice in here (which is probably the right place). When you are friends with or get along with somebody, sometimes it is harder to tell them up front that what they are doing is not working out.

<comment><USER6> He posted here asking about "Dispensing with a Co-Founder", not "Talking to a Co-Founder about Risk."

Different people involved in a startup have different risk tolerance. The general solution is for someone with more money and more risk tolerance to risk more money and get equity. I would advise this guy to offer to pay the whole $90 in exchange for a higher equity stake in the corporation.

Another option would be to delay incorporating until you're getting seed funding, and get some incorporation advice from your funder. YC prefers startups not to have incorporated when they apply, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You are definitely right to question the other founder's commitment at this point. Me and my cofounder had a pretty big argument over whether to incorporate or not this summer. However, in our case the heart of the debate was whether or not it was needed yet, not the cost.

If they are having trouble parting with $100 or so, I really think they should consider what they are getting involved in. Startups are cheap these days, but they still are not free.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dispensing of a Co-founder? check out Murdr, Inc

</comment><comment><USER10> He MIGHT just be expressing concern over the cart-before-the-horse issue. I'd echo the "build something first" sentiment.

That being said, one of the hardest challenges to overcome is a founder with substantively less commitment than you. It's like dating/marrying a girl (or guy, I suppose) who wants to spend EVERY evening together when you still want to spend a lot of time with friends or alone... Either person who compromises has a good chance of feeling resentful.

So gather an understanding. Set some initial expectations, like:

"we will each spend an average of 25 hours per work a week until we hit milestone X"

"we well get together 4 evenings per week to work together"

"if we hit milestone Y, we will dump everything and work full time on it, borrowing money if we have to."

"if we fail to hit milestone Z after 8 months, we'll close it down."

</comment><comment><USER11> At the risk of sounding like a certain Quack Dr. on TV who just uses his first name (Dr.Phil) .... Perhaps the $90 is a stop gap measure to avoid discussing some concerns he may have about the working relationship terms & conditions moving forward -- happens all the time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was on a similar position some time ago.

I do think your co-founder isn't ready for the startup ride. You can talk all you want with him, but at the end it will come back and bite you. If he isn't passionated about it now, he probably won't be in some months.

If you really need to start rolling, go ahead, talk with him and tell him (gently) you're going on your own.

As many others have said, trust your gut feeling! Generally, the first reaction is the most visceral and truthful one. So if he is reacting like this to the incorporating issue, don't fool yourself, he's not the right partner for _this_ venture.

Good luck

</comment><comment><USER13> He doesn't have much perspective yet, but that's not too important. He isn't as completely bought into the plan as you are, but you have a head start so that's expected. If you can work well together, that's what counts.

</comment><comment><USER14> 90 and even 125 bucks are not that much, eh?

<comment><USER15> 125 bucks is a lot of money for a coffee.

It is not a lot of money for incorporating a company and gaining all of the benefits of doing so. It is also not a lot of money if you compare it to spending 10,000 hours of time commitment.

It also is not a lot of money to start a company, compared to your hardware costs, etc.

<comment><USER14> I was asking purely rhetorical question :) Surely 125 bucks is not a big investment into startup. We invest a lot more each month :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where can you get incorporated for 90$ ?

I always thought it was several hundred at least

<comment><USER17> I paid $55 for an LLC in Oregon, and did the paperwork myself. I also shelled out around $100 for various Nolo books. (My calculation was that I'd rather spend the money to get a basic understanding of the process than to just pay someone to do some simple paperwork).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dump and run.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why finagle over a form? Why don't you make a product, court some customers, and design the webpage before spending the 125?

But it also seems the timing isn't right. I think in the back of his mind he might still want to do the school thing. I know I do.

</comment><comment><USER20> He hasn't understood what a startup means. If he did, $135 would seem very tiny compared to the huge amount of work he was planning to do.

He's not planning to do that work. Yet. Don't dump him immediately. People are complicated, and sometimes they grow into things very quickly, or there was only one little thing missing. And it's possible you misunderstood his reasons for hesitation, or there was some other kind of miscommunication.

So, go talk to him again and explain your vision carefully and how much work it will be, and why $135 is trivial. It's worth a try. And if you can't agree, OK, then go find someone else, _with his blessing_ , since he will see that he doesn't want to be part of your vision (at this time in his life).

<comment><USER21> Excellent answer. I deleted my response because this is a better one.</comment></comment>


DevOps Leaders to Follow on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://blog.newrelic.com/2016/07/20/devops-leaders-follow/ <comment><USER2> I'm questioning a list like this with no Martin Fowler or Adrian Cockcroft

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea often is to go beyond "the usual suspects."</comment></comment>


Why Does Bad Customer Service Still Exist? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.continuum.net/why-does-bad-customer-service-still-exist

<comment><USER2> Probably for the same reason that bad management practices still exist: it's more fun for the higher ups.

It's pretty well established that working from home/remote work ends up with more stuff done, happier workers, etc, but above manager level, directors really hate remote work, for the most part. I think the directors feel more "in control".

I'm hesitant to put a reason why to bad customer service, but I could suggest a range of reasons, like the upper management likes to squeeze employees, which indirectly results in crap service. Or maybe upper management believes bad customer service is more profitable, despite the evidence.</comment>


XDG Base Directory Specification - <AUTHOR> https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html <comment><USER2> A list of software (not) adhering to this specification is maintained in the Arch Linux wiki: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory)

</comment><comment><USER3> Too little, too late, *nix filesystem directory structure is a legacy mess and plenty program not respecting the xdg spec, so the poor HaikuPorters needs to patch everything to stop littering the $HOME folder.</comment>


Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience - <AUTHOR> http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/ <comment><USER2> In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even get much utility any more from them, except for access to some older articles. Moreover, the services they provide to authors are also usually worse than the non-profit journals: no copy editing, crappy editorial tools, just a complete disregard for the actual producers of the (free) content they make money off. It's a complete and unmitigated scam.

<comment><USER3> Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be _Elsevierum_? You need an accusative, and _–er_ nouns tend to be second declension iirc.

<comment><USER3> Yes, accusative, but I'm not sure how to decline it :-) (apparently it's a Dutch name of Arab/Moorish origin, also spelt Elzevir).

<comment><USER3> Just occurred to me: We could consider it neutral, and then nominative = accusative...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Playing devil's advocate: Sci-Hub is good thing for the publishers. Instead of revolting, those who can't afford (or don't want) to pay the high subscription fees for journals will just quietly use Sci-Hub. People can still continue publishing their papers via the same high profile journals and achieve a wide distribution without moving to open access scheme. Publishers may loose some money, but high profile institutions probably don't see Sci-hub as real alternative and continue paying.

In a similar fashion software piracy can actually help large, established players. Take for example Photoshop, which back in the days was quite pirated piece of software. Adobe certainly lost some money, but I think the main losers were cheaper alternatives. Young and poor pirated Photoshop, learned to use it and when they got employed wanted to continue using Photoshop since that was the only package they really knew. If piracy had not been an option, many would probably have gone for other, more affordable alternatives.

<comment><USER6> Economists would label it basic price discrimination, albeit with a floor of 0, and as a way to suppress competition rather than capture value on the low end.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So long as we're looking at intellectual property, and arguments against it:

An online book by UCLA economics professors Michele Boldrin and Mark Levine, making the case against intellectual property -- patents, and copyright most especially.

The opening chapter leads off with the patent battles of James Watt, which are credited by some authors with setting back the start date of the Industrial Revolution from 1769, when the patent was issued, to 1800, when it (after parliamentary extension) finally expired.

[http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstne...](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm)

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.

[http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...](http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Interesting side note: the book itself is copyright Cambridge University Press. The authors have a free version accessible online and a promise to keep it that way, but seemingly no open license on it.

I don't blame them, probably not much choice to get a decent print run, but it's an interesting display of how pervasive copyright is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This round is going to be fun.

See, I'm old enough to remember this battle starting for music and movies. We know how that ended.

But now, it's for the very knowledge that drives our civilization.

"Stallman was right", oh how that statement is going to get tested.

<comment><USER9> This is quite different to music and film for a variety of reasons:

1\. Film and music were always _vaguely_ reasonably priced, and collecting a fee is totally reasonable - at least some of the money goes to the creators. This is not true for papers. The authors are never paid and the prices are insane.

2\. Music & videos are luxuries, and are also somewhat fungible. If you need a specific paper (e.g. because it was referenced by another) you usually can't just swap it for another.

3\. The actual files are usually a lot smaller than music and definitely smaller than films, so it will be easier to share entire libraries and hence harder to stop.

4\. Morality is clearly on the side of sci-hub. Music/film piracy is much more ambiguous.

<comment><USER10> Regarding point 4: piracy has provided the ability to masses to a wealth of obscure, hard to find cultural gems. I for example am into animation. There is no way I would have been able to access, legal or otherwise, half of the films I have seen, many of which are cultural milestones in the history of animation.

Also, in wealth terms, if you start with the reasonable assumption that a pirated copy doesn't directly translate to a sales loss, then piracy can be argued to be a net plus, since vastly more people "profit" from it (the people who download) than there are people who suffer from it (the people being pirated).

Just wanted to mention those arguments, since I rarely hear them in these discussions.

<comment><USER11> > if you start with the reasonable assumption that a pirated copy doesn't > directly translate to a sales loss

I think the reasonable assumption is that it translates on average to a fraction of a sale loss; less than one, but more than zero.

<comment><USER10> Even that is debatable, because it also creates exposure. This is especially true for non-mainstream stuff. So you might end up with a net sales-win because of the "advertising"

<comment><USER11> There's never been any impediment to people giving away their music for free to create exposure. To radio stations, TV, movies, as free concerts, as mp3s to download from their website, whatever.

The argument "I'm pirating the fruit of your work and investment against your will, but trust me it'll be in your best interest, I know your interest better than you do" is untenable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is rare that true heroism can be framed as a catchy story. Those working for campaign finance reform is another example. People who fight "David-like" against these Goliaths are doing extremely radical work, and they will be canonized in the coming centuries. They don't get the semi-celebrity of Snowden or Ellsberg in the present day because they lack the whistleblower story of one person verses the full power of the federal government - the only sort of punishments they face are an unsexy sinking into obscurity, or a quiet snuffing-out such as with Aaron Swartz.

<comment> aaron-lebo "True heroism" is raising your kid well because it's the right thing to do even though nobody except your kid and maybe grandkid will ever know what you did.

These people have gotten their acknowledgments (as they should), let's not act like they are nobodies in the shadow of history. You're reading about them on HN precisely because media knows who they are. How many people have documentaries made about them after they are dead?

<comment><USER12> I understand where you're coming from, but I was more focusing on the difference between a household name (e.g. MLK, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela) verses being the subject of a footnote or a chapter in books that are only read by graduate students. I meant heroism in terms of securing advances for the whole human race or an entire country, rather than being a hero to another individual or family...two meanings of the word "hero" that can't be compared.

<comment> aaron-lebo You're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am a person who has been benefited by Sci-Hub immensely and hope that it continues to stay just like the Libgen project. Journal publishers need to wake up and get their wits together and do something.

It used to be proprietary Software everywhere before GNU and Linux. Nowadays FSF has made FLOSS a good thing. Today we have FOSS everywhere. Even Microsoft which used to be a bastion of proprietary software now has Open Source projects.

Something similar to that needs to sweep the Academic publishing world otherwise progress will only slow down due to closed nature of existing literature.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master." \- Pravin Lal, Alpha Centauri.

<comment><USER15> So many pithy quotes, that game. Lightning really struck when they made it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm an academic and I have access to most journals through my college's library. I still use sci-hub all the time simply because it is much easier than the legal method where I have to go to my university's library page, log in, search for the article that I already found, struggle with the shitty search to find the article that I already found through google, then click the link to the database, then I get to download the article I already found 10 minutes ago.

Or I could just click the bookmarlet to search scihub...

<comment><USER17> Does your college not offer integration with google scholar? Go into the settings and check 'Library Links.' Scholar then gives me a link directly through the library proxy if the University has access to the Journal. It is amazing, but I have always wondered how many people have access, or even know it exists.

<comment><USER16> it doesn't for some reason. If I go into the settings for google scholar my university is greyed out. The college I did my phd at had it though and that was nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know how Elbakyan was 'outed' as the creator of Sci-Hub? When I first started using it, it all seemed quite secretive as to the creator's identity. Was this something uncovered during the lawsuit?

<comment><USER19> I am not completely sure, but I think I doxxed her by accident on public IRC on 2013-07-06 ( [http://gnusha.org/logs/2013-07-05.log](http://gnusha.org/logs/2013-07-05.log) ; someone else edited the public logs ("strangeland") to try to minimize my damage to her).

I recognized the rotated scihub admin profile picture because I had met her in person at a Harvard conference in 2010. She was on my pidgin buddy list, of all things.

Opsec is super important, y'all. Even someone who likes scihub (such as myself) might accidentally doxx you when they get all excited about finding who you are (such as I did). I get the sense from the rotated profile pic and subsequent self-publicity that maybe anonymity hasn't been a top priority for her the whole time, maybe she had her name on it earlier than 2013?

I should have exercised more caution.

<comment><USER7> Huh, fascinating. In all the stories about Elbakyan, I can't seem to find any reference to when she was first revealed as the Sci-Hub founder. It'd be sort of wild if this was how it came about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would it be illegal for a person to publicly claim that they would mirror content from sci-hub _if_ N other scientists also made the same public claim?

Further, suppose a person anonymously made a copy of a partial snapshot of sci-hub content. Would it be illegal for that person to post a public search engine that responds to requests for articles from the collection with a only the hash of that document?

Finally, suppose N scientists have the above public hash engines and claim they will mirror a randomly chosen part of sci-hub content when N+1 scientists make the same claim. For what value of N would you be willing to mirror sci- hub content?

<comment><USER21> NAL, but (in the US) almost certainly not. After all stating the following is/was legal:

They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if closed-access publishing is part of why academia seems so insluated from the "real world". People write for their audience, and if the general public can't read academic papers, then academics are going to write as if only other academics are reading.

Likewise, if research output is difficult to access, the feedback loop between ideas and implementation is broken; folks outside academia can't easily comment on the cutting edge work in a field, and academics only have to worry about what other academics think of their work.

<comment><USER23> I need to say this carefully.

Some things can't be written for a general audience. It can not be distilled that much.

That isn't to suggest that citizen scientists should be discouraged, just that some things are actually pretty difficult to explain and to grasp.

To be very clear, I support open publishing. I just feel obligated to point out that most of the general public isn't going to understand and it isn't ever going to be written with them in mind.

I'm a mathematician. I don't understand some of it.

<comment><USER21> Math is one thing. I did a lot of research into bio to check if Aspartame was dangerous, and while I didn't understand everything I was able to gleam enough.

I have also read many psycology papers, never had a problem with them.

<comment><USER23> Excellent. Again, I don't ever want to discourage learning. I just know many will not. That and, well, some of it can be pretty rough to digest.

But, absolutely keep reading, learning, growing, and sharing. I'm just not going to publish with the general public being the intended audience. On the other hand, I'm more than happy to try to explain stuff, for those who are curious.

I'd never discourage a citizen scientist. Never.

<comment><USER21> Oh I didn't think you wanted to discourage anybody - I just wanted to point out that of the different sciencies theoretical math is probably the most difficult for an outsider to get and psychology is surprisingly easy.

<comment><USER23> Ah... That makes sense. I had another person reply as if I were suggesting I weren't for open access - even though I specifically mentioned it. Thus, I was improperly primed, methinks.

But, absolutely... The idea of the citizen scientist is so important to me. I have some complains about the scientific community but this may not be the place for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Worth noting: Many authors will be happy to email you a copy of their paper. People understand that not everyone's library can pay the hundreds of thousands needed for subscription fees. Research Gate has this functionality built in. Also, everyone likes to be cited :)

Being easy to circumvent is a big reason why these for profit journals still exist.

<comment><USER25> True, but I doubt that would scale, for popular papers that got press coverage. Authors could automate, of course. But do for-profit journals limit reprint distribution?

<comment><USER24> In my field (computer graphics) most conferences have put clauses allowing authors to host the submitted version of the paper in their websites. Far from ideal, but some compromises from the part of the publishers have been made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> elbakyan surely belongs to the category of contemporary outlaw-/folk-heroes. at least she is in my personal pantheon.

<comment><USER27> I send her $5 a month and it's 1000x more valuable than HBO go or any of that sort of shit.

She is quite simply a hero, full stop.

<comment><USER28> If you don't minD telling us, how do we send her money to support her?

<comment><USER29> [http://sci-hub.cc/](http://sci-hub.cc/) lists a bitcoin address for donations

<comment><USER15> Thanks. I was looking for something like that. Are we certain that the .cc subdomain is under her control?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why isn't Google allowing the Sci-Hub extension in its Chrome store?

This is why it sucks to have app stores and walled gardens. The vendors effectively become censorship agents for states. And Microsoft wants to take us in the same direction with Windows 10 S.

<comment><USER31> I wouldn't call chrome a walled garden, it is just curated list, if you don't like it you don't have to use the "store" . You can still install the extension without the store. There are plenty of extensions they reject and you can download, same for android(for ex:F-droid). You can maintain your own curated list in your own app store. Google will get sued if they allow listing in the store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Slightly off-topic:

I downloaded the same file both directly from IEEE and sci-hub and the checksum did not match. I am a bit worried that sci-hub is/will be used to spread malware.

<comment><USER33> Was the version of the paper the same?

<comment><USER32> Same version, different checksums.

As new299 mentioned, this could be due to watermarking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Related to this, I have one question.

Suppose one is going to write a paper and he need to add a reference of another paper which he has got from Sci-hub. So is there any check or any sorts of things of originality of reference paper ?

(I don't know exactly how publishing works)

<comment><USER22> It doesn't matter how you get a copy of the paper; the citation is the same either way. Plenty of academics have been passing around PDF copies of papers their libraries don't buy access to for years before this!

<comment><USER35> Also relatively recently though probably pre-SciHub, #ICanHazPDF hashtag was widely used on Twitter to request a paper from whoever happens to have access to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo _This means it is our duty to the citizens to reduce our publishing expenses to no more than currently ~US$200m per year (and we would even increase the value of the literature by making it open to boot!). If we were to do that, we'd have US$9.8b every single year to buy all the different infrastructure solutions that already exist to support all our intellectual outputs, be that text, data or code._

Is is also our duty as the people to reduce all expenditures on software? Is piracy justifiable especially within government institutions?

I guess my point is that _necessary_ is a really strong claim and you can justify a lot of crazy stuff with that. Scientific progress has continued on just fine despite these cartels. With no supporting evidence I'd argue that today's scholars have hundreds of times the free information available than they did a century ago and that ramps up the further you go back. It's easy to imagine that Elsevier's lockdown of a paper is the difference between an academic breakthrough or not, but in reality that's probably not the case, even if it's a noble cause.

<comment><USER2> I don't believe the publishing model is significantly impeding progress in science , but that doesn't change the fact that the publishing companies are simply leeches, profiting off the work and labor of others. It's worth breaking that up, because there's no actual value there.

<comment><USER36> As a layperson who hasn't looked into this in detail, I can't tell whether or not the academic publishing racket has impeded sciences. But I do know it impedes public access to the findings of research that is frequently supported in whole or part with public money.

That public access to its own research is a good is clearly recognised (at least here in Australia) by universities, most of whose libraries are open to the public (as are the databases via in-library PCs, but not remotely). But you must be near one for this to be practically useful.</comment></comment></comment>


Free Kindle Math Books - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2010/12/30/free-kindle-math-books/ <comment><USER2> Calculus and Algebra have bad reviews.

[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042XA2Y0/antoniocan...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042XA2Y0/antoniocangia-20/)

[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042XA344/antoniocan...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042XA344/antoniocangia-20/)

<comment><USER3> Good thing we have <http://khanacademy.org>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been reading the 21st Century Physics one. It's a very readable explanation of some of the things I never got to in College. I think it's great that more and more educators are doing things like this and releasing them for all to read. Creative Commons ftw.

</comment><comment><USER5> My problem is not a dearth of maths books, it's a dearth in effort of reading the ones I have.

</comment><comment><USER6> The same in epub format: <http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/books/epub/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Earth/Life Science, Physics, Chemistry, Biology too...[1]

\----

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Ddi...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=CK-12&x=0&y=0)

</comment><comment><USER8> From the comments: "Not available outside of the US…"

Is this true? Why would this be?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Canada, but visiting the page through a paid US proxy I see them as available.

<comment><USER9> In the UK (on amazon.co.uk) the items are available but 75p each: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=ck-12&x=0&y=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tip: on your Kindle search the store for "ck-12" to bring them all up at once.

<comment><USER11> The same thing works in the Apple iBooks store ("CK-12 Foundation").

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kindle for non-.txt files is pure scam. I can't read most pdf files I tried.

Want proof? Download the very 1st book recommended on the article. Look at the very first formula on a non dx kindle.you can't read it. Not even in landscape. Not even with zoom.

Now get apdf with two columns. Like the car manual I bought. you have to zoom to read. But you can't make one column fit in the screen. It's not lack of space. Theres lots of white space, but the pan will skip just more so that you can only ever read half of each column at a time. Just patetic... Btw that's how adobe treader for nokia symbian works. You get the idea.</comment>


The Battle Agaist Any Raid Five initiative (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.baarf.dk/ <comment><USER2> Where is the 2016 from? This looks like it's from 2003, when RAID levels were something you had to think hard about. I agree RAID5 is unsuitable for most database uses... but I also haven't had to think much about it in years. RAID5 was all about maximizing drive space while maintaining some level of reliability. It came at the cost of write speed but for many use cases was the ideal mix. For write intensive applications, RAID10 or equivalent across several pairs of disks is a no brainer. But these days in the cloud the physical disk arrangement is not something I spend much time worrying about.

<comment><USER3> I learned that RAID5 has a hidden gotcha in it's implementation: it maintains just one parity drive, no matter how big the array is. This is a bit counter intuitive; you might expect it to instead maintain 1/3 of the available drive space in parity. I found this out when I ran across a customer maintaining a 23-member RAID5 array. It had tons of usable space of course, but could only tolerate a single disk failure, and worse, rebuilding that disk required fully reading all 22 remaining drives to recalculate parity across the whole set. Somehow it hadn't caught fire yet when we discovered it, but it was a disaster waiting to happen.

<comment><USER4> > just one parity drive

That's not RAID5, that's RAID4.

<comment><USER5> Technically true, but with RAID5, you still only get one drive's worth of redundancy, no matter how many drives are in the array.

<comment><USER6> That is the trade off. It's not exactly a revelation given the definition of RAID 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm using RAIDZ2 with 8 drives. It's even more fault tolerant than traditional RAID1 (when you lose <= 2 drives at once) and still only eats 2/n x capacity (n=8) for parity.

</comment><comment><USER8> How amusing. I wonder if the original founders have the same objections to modern implementations of RAID-6 and such.

Disk storage had gotten cheap enough, fast enough, for RAID-1 to be sufficient for my organization's storage needs. We've briefly flirted with RAID-5, but it proved troublesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> Phew! I guess RAID-6 is good.

Probably not.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue that is is. In their arguments against RAID5 ( [http://www.baarf.dk/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt](http://www.baarf.dk/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt) ):

> OK here is the deal, RAID5 uses ONLY ONE parity drive per stripe

In RAID-6 you have multiple redundancy, so the probability of complete failure can be arbitrarily reduced. However, most people go with RAID-5 because they haven't got enough disks for RAID-6 to make sense, whereas if you have loads (like Backblaze for instance using 3 parity out of 15 disks) then it does make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > we'll arrange various BAARF Party Conventions where we'll proudly display > our logo, which says "I'm NOT talking anymore about RAID-5.

Hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that this is because too many people use RAID as a backup, instead of something in place to help prevent downtime.

<comment><USER13> They are specific about the RAID levels. RAID 5 is troubelsome because your data is smeared across disks. That has all kinds of negative consequences when it comes to performance (write amplification) and recovery (unlikely).

<comment><USER14> >RAID 5 is troubelsome because your data is smeared across disks.

So is RAID0.

>negative consequences when it comes to performance (write amplification)

If you're using SSDs, not really a concern with spinning rust.

>recovery (unlikely)

Really? I've successfully rebuilt literally thousands of RAID5 arrays successfully over the years, with maybe a two dozen failing over that time period, and in most of those cases the rebuilds were not kicked off shortly after the initial disk failure. (I used to work in the hosting industry. Many a customer opted for RAID5 in the servers they leased from us)

I've opted for RAIDZ3 at home, and don't know that I would recommend anything under RAID6, but I think it's pretty silly to claim that recovery is unlikely.

<comment><USER15> >>negative consequences when it comes to performance (write amplification)

>If you're using SSDs, not really a concern with spinning rust.

This is not true. Raid5 has the same problem with "you must write a unit of x at once" that SSD have. If I've got a 64K chunk size on your raid5, assuming that the disk has been written to, if you are writing a whole 64K chunk, you are good. but if I'm writing a 32K chunk to a stripe that already has data (and you have the same 'I wrote the data and deleted it but maybe my underlying block doesn't know that it's deleted' problem you have with ssd) you need to read all the data in that chunk you want to keep, recalculate parity (the fast part) and then write that whole 64K chunk back out. It really is a lot like the problems you have with SSD, raid or no, only you have more choice over the chunk size when building the array.

All that said, I have also managed a lot of raid5 on spinning disk in my day... it absolutely screams for read-only workloads, and write back caching can usually mitigate the write amplification issues (of course, adding in more data consistency issues when you lose power) and while yeah, there is danger of losing a few sectors during rebuild, people also leave the hardware write back caches enabled on their disks. Given the choice, I'd trust data on a raid5 over data on disks with write-back cache enabled in your typical 'unexpected power loss every three years' situation. Either way, technically, yeah, it's not 100% safe, but most of the time it's good enough if you need the performance per dollar.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tough Crowd - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-13/tough_crowd.md#readme <comment><USER2> I actually was thinking the same thing when I scanned over the comments for this article. One reader wrote something similar to, "it seems like you fell for every trap the interviewer put out".

What trap? Thinking before speaking? Someone who answers general, ambiguous questions with a general, ambiguous answer cannot be much of a programmer. Aren't we trained to do just the opposite after all?

<comment><USER3> This.

Who wants an employee who never questions the requirements?

I can't think of a better way to end up in project management failure than to start writing a solution to a problem you don't understand.

<comment><USER4> _Who wants an employee who never questions the requirements?_

More than you might imagine.

Think of all the people you've worked with, in whatever capacity, who never question requirements. It seems likely they will hire people of the same sort, not just because they might have a bias toward the "good" employee being subservient, but because someone who questions the requirements to them will inevitably want them to question the requirements to their superior. They've already spent their career up to this point avoiding this, it seems unlikely they'll take some action now that prevents it.

<comment><USER5> Or, more simply: "A people hire A people, B people hire C people."

<comment><USER6> Then, who hires the B people?

<comment><USER7> Yahoo.

<comment><USER6> actually I was asking in sincerity.

<comment><USER7> It was a sincere answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my experience as an interviewer, the original post was an example of what I always hope for--when the interview turns into a real discussion, and you're able to gain insight into the interviewee's character as well as his/her technical prowess. I always ask a mixture of open-ended and technical "quiz" questions.

More than that, I was a bit baffled by the negative responses. Willingness and ability to examine the assumptions behind a task are attributes I want in teammates.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author of the initial post did make some technical mistakes. Here's one that jumped out at me -

 _"What will you do in the event of hash collisions?" the professor asked.

"How do you know there will be any?" I said. "Look, the English language only has a million words. We're hashing a million words into a table that can hold four billion. The load factor on the table is negligible. If we're getting collisions it means we need a better hash algorithm._

This is intuitive but incorrect. The principle is also known as the birthday paradox -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox>

If you hash a million words into a 4-billion table, you _do_ expect collisions. You expect to get collisions when you insert on the order of the square root of the size of the table, and the square root of 4 billion is much less than a million.

<comment><USER10> _If we're getting collisions it means we need a better hash algorithm._

It would hardly be the first time. The hash function which is the default for Java strings, for example, sucks.

int hash = 0; for (int i = 0; i < length(); i++) { hash = 32 * hash + charAt(i); } return hash;

( _Lots_ of collisions on any English dictionary unless you use huge numbers of buckets.)

This actually had important implications for a project I once worked on, in _exactly_ the manner you would expect it to have implications for this interview. The difference was that, in meetings about this issue, I did my best to a) give the customer what they needed and b) did not give the impression I was saying "Screw what you want, I'll _tell_ you what you need".

The birthday paradox problem, by way of comparison, is negligible for this use case. Words in English follow a zipf distribution (you may hear "long tail" more these days). If there is a collision, it is overwhelmingly likely to be between two words on the long tail (no impact to first 10k words) or between a word on the fat head and the long tail, in which case you're overwhelmingly likely to encounter the fat head word first, and even if you don't, whoopsie 1/100th of a percent of your output was corrupted.

Wow, twice in one day natural language processing has reared its head. Thats more than in my last two years! Booyah, old interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As soon as I saw the title of the post, I was pretty sure what you'd be writing about. I thought the similar things when reading the discussion. One thought that went through my mind was: this kind of negativity doesn't really reflect well on the community.

</comment><comment><USER12> One thought that came to mind is this: why not answer with, "I have a straightforward, textbook answer, but also some thoughts/questions about your assumptions in the question. Which is it that you're looking for?"

(Note: this question would be asked in a friendly, collaboration-seeking tone of voice/body language.)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two subjects: How to interview, and how to be interviewed. Say we were talking about wearing a tie. My post would be about why you don't want to require ties in interviews. Your comment is that if the company might require ties, it might be sensible to ask them what to wear before showing up.

I think that your suggestion and my post can coëxist happily.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely... I guess as someone who will be doing two interviews with different companies in the next several days, I've been in the mindset of the interviewee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck finding the right situation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real problem with the author of the initial post was that not only he had an "attitude", but he even was technically quite incorrect (he could have done worse, but still...), and not just once!

The collision fundamental misunderstanding was really not forgivable :/

Had he been technically correct, the whole non-stop "your question is really too imprecise" thing and perhaps even maybe the stinky "oh my God, the interviewer does not even know the XORBLUB algorithm" one would be more tolerable. But in the context of his own report of the interview, he is just pedant and not that smart...

</comment><comment><USER14> 'The interviewer wanted him to give a technical answer to a technical question, not enter into a discussion about what "The ten thousand most-used words in the English language" actually means or whether it's feasible to collect a corpus of such words.'

Is it not technical to consider the sample size of your data? It's not even interesting how you do the +1 to the frequency count of a given word if the # of words get huge - nobody has any business talking about hash table collisions blah, it's too low level. I'll estimate a half million english words and use the Java hash table or a database with a words table, now I will setup my web crawler to get data... but how do I know what text is a word and is not? That is actually the only interesting bit of that question! So first I need to scrape dictionary.com and then start spidering say livejournal vs msnbc vs whatever.

If someone talks about hash table collisions for this problem, they are likely to suffer from "not invented here".

</comment><comment><USER15> What exactly is the problem? Some people would have hired the guy in question, others wouldn't have. Why can't they both be right? Tastes are different, and no two companies are the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, just my surprise at the overwhelming mass of comments criticizing the poster. I'm not saying his actions were perfect, but similar posts in the past (such as "Stupid Interview Questions") elicited a much more balanced split between criticizing the interviewee's actions and criticizing the interviewer's actions. I just expected something else from the _aggregate_ of responses, which is not the same thing as disagreeing with any one individual response.

<comment><USER15> In a real world situation people's reactions might have been different. I guess it is just easy to interpret different things into a written account of the interview (like "arrogance").

<comment><AUTHOR> My surprise was at the aggregate tone of the posts being about the interviewee and almost nothing questioning why the interviewee kept hammering away at the pre-conceived point of the question.

But I don't have any issue with any one individual person's conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did he just use a french word to close one section, and a latin phrase to open the next ("fin" and "post scriptum")?

That bothers me.</comment>


Things I hate about Git - <AUTHOR> https://stevebennett.me/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/ <comment><USER2> Come on, a 2012 tag would have been nice. Both Git clients and documentation have improved a lot since then to make most of the valid arguments here non- issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the most important and overdue articles I've ever read. Git is a nightmare and I don't understand how we got to the point of having to use it.

</comment><comment><USER4> the clue's in the name.</comment>


Google+Apple+Microsoft+Yahoo can save the future of emails - <AUTHOR> Emails are one of the most popular communication tools we have today. It works! Everyone has at least one email address. People are registering @gmail.com addresses for their kids. Email is used for verifying you're a real user when signing to new services.
Many attempts to replace email were made, but email is here to stay.
Email works, but CODING EMAILS IS HELL! Email clients support a subset of undocumented HTML with many quirks and a 1998 feeling to it. Companies spend money and time on writing these. This has got to change.
The only companies that can change this are Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. Not just one of them, but all of them together.
They hold the most useful email clients (gmail, outlook and apple's iPhone client, yahoo mail). Releasing fixes for ALL past clients that includes a modern browser for showing the emails will solve a lot of pains. There won't be breaking changes if we use the HTML5 doc type. Emails can become amazing and evolve, just like the web did.
Let's make emails great again! <comment><USER2> You named 4 out of 5 companies that everyone should avoid for privacy reasons. Add Amazon (no email for now, but...) and you'll have the full stack.</comment>


Checking in front-end dependencies - <AUTHOR> http://addyosmani.com/blog/checking-in-front-end-dependencies/ <comment><USER2> (2013)

I know many people still use Bower quite happily these days, but this is pretty dated. If you're talking front-end, you'd have to be talking in _very_ broad terms for something three years old to be relevant. The advice (have a good reason) is still reasonable, but the tools and services have come very far since then. What was reasonable then is not _necessarily_ correct today.</comment>


The US dollar is losing its status as the dominant reserve currency - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1150533/the-dollars-days-as-the-worlds-most-important-currency-are-numbered/ <comment><USER2> The elite of the world own trillions in US treasury bonds. Its why the US can continue to run up their national debt. The US is the safe deposit box of the world. There's simply not enough debt elsewhere to rival the US.

<comment><USER3> You are lightyears ahead of most people for understanding that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is nothing in this article that says anything about petrodollar. The U.S. will lose the global reserve currency once it's no longer used in oil exchanges. The U.S. will do anything in its power to retain that right as already proven in the Iraq war and countless other debaucheries.

<comment><USER5> I have no expertise in this area, but my understanding is that global trade in general is carried out largely in dollars, not just oil.

<comment><USER6> To address this, a discussion about political ideology seeps in, which violates HN guidelines.

It has to do with the Gold Standard, the Bretton Woods agreement, Nixon taking the US off the Gold Standard, and countries in the Middle East that the US has attacked (either overtly or secretly). Basically the hypothesis is that the US has attacked every oil-exporting country soon after they threaten to transact oil in any currency other than the petrodollar (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, etc).

I haven't read into it enough to support or refute the claims, but it's a common refrain in US-libertarian media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This will likely happen more if the current administration continues signaling that the US may not necessarily be there for other countries when they need it.

How conservatives who usually correlate with nationalist feelings (which I sometimes sympathize with) can tolerate seeing the US lose its status as world hegemon is beyond me.

<comment><USER8> I guess: American exceptionalism makes us stronger, working with others (i.e. acknowledging their needs, compromising, diplomacy. etc.) makes us weaker.

Seems fear-based/emotional to me. As opposed to rational, logical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> dominant reserve currency as a sentence invites reflection on what dominant means: it means there are other reserve currencies. Its a basket. (basket case?) Inter-reserve bank settlement regime and the use of non-national settlement tokens at a denominated exchange is a thing. The reserves, and what currency they are in, becomes something of a speculative hedge (of the best kind, certainly, best for some measure of "my suit is better than your suit" best)</comment>


How do I know what to look for in a technical cofounder - <AUTHOR>

I'm non-technical with an idea, and want to develop a product similar to Magic (W15 batch). I want to post an add to look for a developer on websites like Elance but don't know what specific skills to request. It seems like a straightforward backend so I'm hoping that someone good could do this fairly easily.<p>Any tips on what I should be asking for? <comment><USER2> Whatever you're looking for you won't find it on Elance or similar sites. Generally, those are places to pump out boring work at cheap prices.

As far as skills go, just look for programming skills, ideally with a body of completed prior projects. Hopefully the projects are somewhat large and/or complex (not a GitHub profile with a few forked repos and toy projects). Of course, many good developers have no publicly available projects but as a non- technical person you will have a hard time judging those people and they're probably not the type to work with you anyhow (they want benefits and paid vacation).

I'd recommend something like Craigslist - Computer Gigs or if you want to pay someone market rates, Craigslist - Internet Engineers or Stack Overflow Careers.

Also, if you are paying market rates, you should reframe how you're explaining this. The gal/guy with an idea in search of a coder on Elance is a pretty poor first impression. Just say you're a bootstrapped/self-funded startup. And make sure to do your share of the business side of things which somehow most non- technical people aren't actually good at. Line up paying customers rather than taking a Field of Dreams approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It seems like a straightforward backend

No offense, but if you're non-technical, what are you basing this on? Literally every client I have worked with has said this and it's almost never been the case.

And as for your actual question: the most important attribute you should look for besides basic technical competency is someone who really believes in your idea and wants to see it through.

Looking for the lowest bidder on Elance will result in a lot of pain for you. They will see your baby as just another project to knock out. They won't have you or your business' best interest in mind and will cut corners. You will end up spending a lot of money for a low quality result, and other developers likely won't want to touch it.

Unless you have the money to pay a full time, market-rate salary, you will have to find someone who doesn't need a high salary (although they will expect a significant amount of equity, like 10-50%) and believes in your idea enough to deal with lots of iteration without cutting corners.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are so many tools out there that literally make building an MVP a not- so-difficult process in the end.

If you cannot do that, then why are you trying to build a tech(ish) startup when you are afraid of using tech to build it?

Here's your 3 options: Rails, Django, Meteor

All 3 claim to help make rapid prototypes, so use/learn one and push a prototype out in 2/3 months.

I promise I'll upvote you if you do.

</comment><comment><USER5> If it's similar to Magic, why have something built at all? It sounds like you could validate your concept by creating a brief landing page and generating an extra phone number using something like Flyp.

The beautiful part of Magic is the simplicity of just interacting through text. If you generate enough interest you can worry about scaling it up later.

</comment><comment><USER6> "I have this guaranteed excellent idea that I want you to develop for free, but I'll give you equity".

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, it's not about the money at this stage. I'm willing to pay whatever is reasonable/necessary. I'm mainly interested in knowing what technical skills I should be looking out for.</comment></comment>


Cache Oblivious Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://jiahai-feng.github.io/posts/cache-oblivious-algorithms/ <comment><USER2> I implemented a bunch of cache oblivious search trees and benchmarked them against their classical counterparts. The results showed that while the cache oblivious ones were more cache efficient, they were slower overall.

The implementations and benchmarks can be found here if anyone is curious: [https://gitlab.com/VladLazar/cache-oblivious-data- structures](https://gitlab.com/VladLazar/cache-oblivious-data-structures)

<comment><USER3> Your readme lists the cache-oblivious data structures you tested. But, it would be nice to also list what baselines you tested them against. I'm curious if they were explicitly cache-aware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried cache-oblivious algorithms for some numerical code, but found them underwhelming. The cache-oblivious model does not consider the effects of prefetching and cache line associativity. Both can make a huge difference.

They are a great starting point and work well for the RAM/Swap level of the memory hierarchy, but for the L1/L2 caches manual tuning still pays off. This unfortunately makes the implementation non-oblivious and even depended on the specific CPU used.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. Thinking of them as a starting point is a good way to think of the approach.

I had some code that was slower than I intuitively expected it to be. I looked around for approaches and came across cache oblivious algorithms. In my case I was thinking of RAM as a cache and some of the inputs would fit in RAM and some were larger than RAM. All inputs and outputs were in network drives. The final output was 4.5 GB. Using cache obvious algorithms as a inspiration I managed to get my runtime down from 5 mins to 20 seconds (numbers are approximate as this was nearly ten years ago now).

I was quite pleased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd not heard about van Emde Boas layout before, and it sounds super cool! I wish the author had included a simple example before focussing on the general case -- I find it hard to get an intuition for the general without a specific example! In particular, after some searching, I found the diagram at the top- left of page 4 of [https://www.cs.au.dk/~gerth/papers/soda02.pdf](https://www.cs.au.dk/~gerth/papers/soda02.pdf) to be immensely helpful in getting my head around the concept.

</comment><comment><USER7> How hard is it to empirically detect cache size at startup and tune the algorithms based on that?

I guess you'd miss out on inlining / constant folding opportunities. If you didn't have a JIT.

<comment><USER8> Certainly possible. Glibc has the sysconf function which can provide the cache sizes at runtime.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Constants...](https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Constants- for-Sysconf.html)

However, consider a scenario like a database where you might store on disk once and don't get cheap opportunities to reorganize data when the memory or processor hardware is switched out.

Or when your data is sent over the network for processing by some arbitrary client hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there might be a mistake in this article, or at least something requiring clarification.

> For convenience, suppose the binary tree is complete and has height H=2^K.

What is K? It's never stated. I'd usually assume H = log N, if N is the number of nodes in a balanced tree.

<comment><USER10> I think K is just an arbitrary natural number. The author is assuming the height is a power of 2, and giving the name K to the log_2 of that height.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love cache oblivious algorithms in principle, but I feel they break my ultimate rule: you can't please everyone. At the end of the day, the restrictions presented by your system are everything. Without those restrictions you have no problem to solve. Not taking them into account seems crazy.

However avoiding details as much as is feasible is very powerful and should be kept in mind. I feel like simple approaches like streaming computations (not necessarily cache oblivious) share many of the same underlying principles.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't most CPUs have 64 byte cache lines anyway?

<comment><USER13> 128B is pretty common (especially for outer caches, but even for L1 on some ARM cores), and 32B is not unheard of.

<comment><USER14> I'm fairly certain that DDR4 has 64-byte bursts (64-bit data bus x 8 length bursts per command == 64-bytes per DDR4 operation). I'd expect all modern systems with DDR4 controllers to have 64-byte cache lines or greater.

LPDDR4 is a totally different protocol however. Maybe 32-bytes is optimal on cell phones... I don't know much about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember my professor Michael Bender teaching those M/B stuff and it was interesting (somehow related to origami). Sadly I pretty much forgot everything now.

<comment><USER16> Hey there Seawolf! Which year were you there? Did you take CSE548?

<comment><USER15> Was 2011, long time ago. Yes I think it was CSE 548 and some seminars. It was an easy course to pass since Bender is super nice even though the topic is hard</comment></comment></comment>


Why online reputation needs to be portable - <AUTHOR> http://soroker.blogspot.com/2013/03/why-online-reputation-needs-to-be.html

<comment><USER2> Earlier:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie>

<http://craphound.com/down/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this really an AirBnB problem?</comment>


New improvements to IPFS Bitswap for faster container image distribution - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-container-distribution/ <comment> jude- Would be curious to know how using IPFS for internal container distribution compares to using BitTorrent. IIRC BitTorrent has found similar uses in the past.

Also, how well does BitSwap work when the underlying network is congested? Do IPFS nodes do any kind of congestion control?

<comment><USER2> You can't update a torrent, if the content changes you have to create a new one. IPNS helps with that. And you can't share pieces across different torrents, if some still have the old torrent, they share it separately from the new one even if the differences are minimal.

<comment> jude- The article doesn't mention IPNS at all, nor does it talk about the need for mutating an image while it is being shared, so I'm not sure why you think IPNS is even desirable in this use-case?

<comment><USER3> "Inter-Planetary Name System (IPNS) is a system for creating and updating mutable links to IPFS content. Since objects in IPFS are content-addressed, their address changes every time their content does. That's useful for a variety of things, but it makes it hard to get the latest version of something."

[https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/ipns/](https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/ipns/)

TLDR IPNS are pointers to IPFS content (ie "latest"). If you're tracking your containers and pinning to their versions elsewhere, might not need IPNS.

<comment> jude- Thanks, but I already know what IPNS is. My points were that (a) it's not needed for this use-case, and (b) it's a distinct system from IPFS. I think you agreed in your TLDR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Netflix use IPFS? That's quite an endorsement and makes me take it a lot more seriously.

<comment><USER5> "Netflix and IPFS began collaborating on ways to incorporate peer-to-peer services into Netflix's developer tooling"

Developer tooling is a pretty limited part of their traffic probably

<comment><USER6> The volume of traffic doesn't really matter that much. Developer productivity is just as important as the service you're actually selling when you're the size of Netflix. If your N thousand engineers are suddenly unable to work, or slowed down by X%, that's a huge problem. Large companies treat (or should treat) developer tooling issues as seriously as application outages.

If Netflix is using IPFS for anything worth mentioning, it's almost certainly substantive enough to be considered an endorsement.

<comment><USER5> Of course the service itself is more important. If there are outages in the service, you will lose customers. If developers lose time at most your new features risk delays. If developers are less productive over time you lose a bit of money.

I say this as a developer for a FANG company.

It's still an endorsement, but not nearly as strong as if the broadcasting was somehow relying on IPFS. As it is, this is probably just some engineering manager that made some non-crucial tool and put that on ipfs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One big optimization that could help in some cases for container platforms like Fargate is not downloading the entire image just to run the container. Instead read files (or even just blocks) from network storage on demand.

This is basically how booting from a disk image works on most cloud platforms too.

<comment><USER8> That should be there soon : [https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues/3731](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues/3731)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm shocked to see IPFS used to make something Faster...

<comment><USER10> it's remarkable! a bootstrap technique to improve time coherence -- what an innovation!

<comment><USER11> I think that was a dig at ipfs's issues with real world usage where a lot of traffic until recently was wasted on metadata and every node used lots of bandwidth to gossip. Meanwhile the actual throughout on a non-tuned node was not great at all.

<comment><USER12> Has this changed now?

<comment><USER11> I just realised that "recently" happened at the end of 2018 [https://blog.ipfs.io/53-go-ipfs-0-4-18/](https://blog.ipfs.io/53-go- ipfs-0-4-18/) \- oops.

There was also a change later which turned off nodes being the middleman by default, but not sure which version.

It's supposed to be much better these days, but I haven't tried it again in a few months.

<comment><USER12> Ah, that agrees with my experience, I noticed the IPFS node behaving much better some time in the last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's awesome to see these kind of improvements on IPFS. A while back as a side project I created an IPFS-backed docker registry which allows you to push and pull docker images from IPFS [0]

[0] [https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr](https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr)

</comment><comment><USER14> Yay. I last used ipfs for leeching abandonware around November. Although it had a tough time getting started and it would occasionally freeze up for several minutes, it worked well when it worked. It's seems to be getting better from when I first tried it.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't aware of this use case, can you post a link/CID (if it's legal)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The node sends out a want for each CID to several peers in the session in > parallel, because not all peers will have all blocks. If the node starts > receiving a lot of duplicate blocks, it sends a want for each CID to fewer > peers. If the node gets timeouts waiting for blocks, it sends a want for > each CID to more peers.

Trying to recall how the protocol works. Doesn't this pattern of behavior mean that a lot of machines will end up with the beginning of a file and few will have the end? It sounds like the start of downloading would be very fast and the end would slow down while it hunts for a source

May be why this is only 20% faster than Dockerhub.

<comment><USER16> Files are not downloaded sequentially, they're chunked into blocks which are sent in parallel.

<comment><USER15> Each client downloads in random order, or all clients download in the same order?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _" Web 2.0"_

Hadn't seen that gem for a while.

<comment><USER18> 3.0, no?

<comment><USER19> pretty sure we're already at 4.0 with the Internet of Shit (IoT) and Mobile Internet, depending on the one using the buzzword

but thats besides the point of the parent. web 2.0 hasn't really been mentioned in ages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "the container runtime can be modified to retrieve layers identified by their CIDs"

How do you do this? Exercise for the reader? :)

For the case of distributing containers in a datacenter with P2P, theres also this work:

[https://github.com/uber/kraken](https://github.com/uber/kraken)

<comment><USER21> This might be related: [https://github.com/docker/distribution/pull/2906](https://github.com/docker/distribution/pull/2906)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't understand why there is a big hype towards IPFS which is still in development stage although, there are other options which are already out and working like Sia - Skynet which is not even getting a fraction of attention IPFS is getting.

<comment><USER23> Skynet is barely two weeks old fwiw. As more people play around with it and see how strong it is I think it'll get a lot more attention. Lot of crypto projects are already planning to add support in the coming months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Saving Netflix's bandwith costs by sacrificing your privacy.

IPFS and bittorrent don't do anything to protect the data you are uploading and your IP address.

Case in point: [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/)

Now every website you visit, any ad/tracker, any homecalling phone app can tell what movies and contents you watch and when you are at home. For years.

<comment><USER25> I thought that ipfs is about high availability, fault tolerance, including some resistance against addressed censorship.

It never looked like an anonymizing tool to me; did anybody advertise it as such?

<comment><USER24> "resistance against addressed censorship" does not work at all when all your traffic is made public.

People can be prosecuted or otherwise harassed for sharing contents on a P2P system.

> It never looked like an anonymizing tool to me; did anybody advertise it as > such?

You are confusing "anonymizing" with "leaking a lot of information to the whole world".

They constantly "forget" to tell people about the huge security impact.

<comment><USER11> Ipfs helps you distribute content which may get taken down. It does not help you evade local police.

For the second scenario, you want another layer which maintains secrecy. (Like the tor transport [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYKQvBsbYrRhdaGvQXcEoSam7s5gKVYULfRgNP...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYKQvBsbYrRhdaGvQXcEoSam7s5gKVYULfRgNPzN5JM8N/IPFS- via-OnionCat.html))</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is the problem you are solving really a problem? - <AUTHOR> http://jonbischke.com/2009/10/04/is-the-problem-you-are-solving-really-a-problem/

<comment><USER2> From "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming :

<http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~anab/grad/hamming.html>

        I started asking, "What are the important problems
        of your field?"  And after a week or so,  "What
        important problems are you working on?" And after
        some more time I came in one day and said, "If what
        you are doing is not important, and if you don't
        think it is going to lead to something important,
        why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"

        I wasn't welcomed after that.

It doesn't necessarily apply, because that was research he was talking about, not "making money" or even"making a living."

Even so ...</comment>


Bill Gates AMA: 31 questions and answers about Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/A-coronavirus-AMA <comment><USER2> I'm distracted by how he skirts around so many questions. Especially in the second half. Not sure he means to. I think it's just something people do. I really want to know the actual answer to this. Won't they just have to shut everything down again?

Q: But when they open back up is not like starting over? The total number of cured vs those who can still be infected is still small.

A: The goal is to keep the number infected to a small percentage. In China less than .01% of the population was infected because of the measures they took. Most rich countries should be able to achieve a low level of infections. Some developing countries will not be able to do that.

<comment><USER3> I think Bill is answering in such a way to be politically neutral. Other questions he has in his post here read as if they are politically biased and well to be honest, in this global pandemic there shouldn't really be any political tension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was a good, quick read, but... TLDR; Social distancing and organized testing (as well as more testing) are required, but neither have yet been well implemented in the US.</comment>