Aim Higher: Stop Building Photo Sharing Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.cristinajcordova.com/2011/03/aim-higher-stop-building-photo-sharing-apps/ <comment><USER2> It's a lot harder to break into solving real, hard problems.

For instance, consider the market I know: neutron physics modeling of nuclear reactors. The existing solutions represent a ton of accumulated domain knowledge, but they're none of them very user-friendly or well-integrated into either the reload design process or the document creation process, nor were they designed with certain improvements in technology infrastructure (distributed computing, GPU computing) in mind.

Getting into this type of technology is hard, though - you need to pay for access to nuclear data files, and vast reserves of historical data are essential for validating your code's predictions, as well as reams of experimental thermal-hydraulic data for building empirical correlations. Information about modern neutron transport algorithms is scattered throughout academic journals, and unbiased comparisons, to say nothing of sample implementations, are so rare as to be nonexistent. Once you've done all of _this_ work, then you need to produce all of the documentation required to convince the NRC that your algorithm is accurate enough for design calculations.

And after all of that, chances are the utilities will just buy the fuel vendors' codes because why deal with two companies, and the fuel vendors will keep using their in-house codes, because fuck you, that's why.

To compete in a market like that, you need _connections_ , and you need _experience_ , probably way more than 4 or 5 people's worth of either. A minimum viable product is probably a man-decade or so of labor.

<comment><USER3> It's especially difficult because investors aren't interested in funding long- term projects. I've put in that man-decade of labor (I've been working on my current project in various forms since 2001), but no one in the Valley's elite circles could care less. This is okay in that I own 100%, but it sure does make it difficult to get things done sometimes.

<comment><USER2> FaceCash looks pretty cool.

What were the barriers to entry? I imagine competing with the credit card oligopoly at point of sale is pretty tough.

<comment><USER3> Barriers to entry include, but are not limited to:

1\. Building a scalable accounting system that works for merchants and consumers

2\. Keeping good enough records to get audited financial statements for as many years as it takes you to build (1)

3\. Building mobile applications on 3 or more popular platforms with completely different SDKs

4\. Applying for 43 state money transmitter licenses

5\. Getting enough money to be able to afford (3) and (4)

6\. Complying with the changing USA PATRIOT Act, Bank Secrecy Act, Federal Reserve Bank and U.S. Treasury / FinCEN directives on an ongoing basis while maintaining profitability

7\. Convincing people and POS vendors to sign up and develop for a new system en masse...

8\. ...without allowing malicious hackers to sign up en masse

9\. Not moving so slowly that Apple, Google, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Intuit, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or any other startup trying to break into mobile payments can copy you

10\. Not moving so quickly that everything breaks, because it can't

It's a hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _These aspirations are depressingly low. Where are all the entrpreneurs trying to compete with Google over self-driving cars? How about competing with SunRun's solar energy systems to power homes across the country?_

Just because you don't see them on TechCrunch doesn't mean they don't exist.

<comment><USER4> Reference? When I do a search, all I get is Google: <http://www.google.com/search?q=self+driving+cars>

Granted, there could be three competitors in stealth mode ... but I'm not getting any whiffs of any.

<comment><USER5> There have been many entrants to Darpa's Grand Challenge over the years, and that's unlikely to be the only development in the area: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My theory as to why so many photo sharing apps:

(2007-2008 CS193P) Stanford Apple iPhone app project involves twitter api -> many twitter clients created.

(2009-2010 CS193P) Stanford Apple iPhone app project involves flickr api -> many photo sharing apps created.

[http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi- bin/drupal/system/f...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi- bin/drupal/system/files/assignments/Paparazzi4.pdf)

"By this point, your Paparazzi app looks up real users on Flickr, finds and lists their photos and lets you view them up close by zooming and panning. It also plots these photos on a map and lets you browser photos by location."

<comment><USER7> Theory only works if the majority of these apps were built by Stanford CS Alumni who took the 2007-2008 or 2009-2010 iPhone class.

That's not the case for Path, Color or Instagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Okay, look. Worth 41 million? Sheesh, I dunno. But I think comparing Color to Instagram is probably a mistake.

Instagram is a photo application. Just like Flickr is a photo application. They're about Photography. They're shrines to images, where the image is paramount. These are apps where energy and attention is poured in, and photos come out.

I think Color might be a valid attempt to invert that idea. I think it's possible that Color is no more about photos than Twitter is about words.

Maybe photos are a real medium. This isn't a masturbatory attempt to tag and glorify false-attempts at art with a camera phone. The photos are visual information, and frankly I don't really think we've figured out how to deal with that elegantly. Youtube, Google Image Search, Flickr.. these are all really brute 'Search for something to look at' kinds of ideas.

I've been waiting to see someone think differently about visual information, and I'm hoping that Color is doing that.

Or whatever. Maybe they're a bullshit bubble-canary that's gonna spend the money making grunge-photo-filters and hooking iPads up to beer kegs. I dunno. Just hoping.

</comment><comment><USER9> For what it's worth, Color (the company) does not see itself as just another photo sharing app.

When I was in their office, the executives kept making vague references to how they would be doing some heavy data crunching and creating recommendation algorithms. They really didn't elaborate, but it sounded like the photo-taking was very much just a Step 1. Almost like an excuse to get people to pull out their phones so that Color could collect a bunch of data beyond just the photo itself (the implicit social graph, location, time, audio, etc).

Maybe they were just saying this stuff so that I wouldn't put them in the same bucket as Instagram and the rest, but this is a really smart team, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Also, I don't think Sequoia would have poured this much money into just another photo sharing app.

</comment><comment><USER10> First, the domain of knowledge to create a photo sharing app is far different than the domain of knowledge required to _compete with Google over self- driving cars_ or _solar energy systems to power homes across the country_. Both of those examples are clearly physical products which require teams with far different skills than creating a team to develop a piece of software.

I understand the point here, but I disagree with it completely. Let people build what they're passionate about. Fund passionate people. If there's a market for the product it will be successful. If not, the investors made a poor decision. The money went into the ecosystem, it didn't disappear, it wasn't wasted.

We hear a ton about the venture firms that fund internet and software businesses because of what we read and pay attention to. Because we don't hear about all the bio-med and energy companies on TechCrunch or HN doesn't mean that they're not out there building the exact same products and getting funded by VC firms specializing in that space. They are getting attention, you're just not looking in the right places to see it.

All I've been reading lately are opinion pieces on what people should and shouldn't be doing with their lives, their businesses and their talents. If you're so passionate that you need to tell everyone what to do, quit complaining about about what should be happening and go make it happen.

 _Edit_ \- Plus the author is _currently head business development at Alphonso Labs, which develops iPhone, iPad and Android applications_. What sense does that make? Quit making apps and do something else, but I'm going to keep working for a company that makes apps?

<comment><USER11> I never said to quit making apps and do something else. There are many, many apps that solve big problems. I love apps and work at a company that makes apps for mobile devices. I just don't happen to find photo sharing to be a big problem requiring $41M to solve at the moment.

<comment><USER10> It's been clear from the first article about Color that the investment was not about a photo sharing application, but about the underlying technology. The recent information that they are applying for six patents supports this.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh... so because you have a patent... it must be REAL technology???

<comment><USER10> You're drawing conclusions outside of my argument. Please re-read what I wrote.

She said _I just don't happen to find photo sharing to be a big problem requiring $41M to solve at the moment._ And my comment regarding the patents was based on the $41M investment being in their technology, not a photo sharing app.

I made no other comment on the validity of the patents. I believe the investors based their investment on the underlying technology used to create the app and not the app itself. They valued the technology and the team that created it worthy of a $41M investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a reason people all over the world are building photo-sharing apps.

1\. It's a huge opportunity. Huge market. 2\. No one has nailed it yet. (No, Instagram has not yet won.)

It's perfectly reasonable to build a photo sharing app if you think you have the right formula.

</comment><comment><USER13> Aim Higher: Stop Building Group Buying Services

Aim Higher: Stop Building Location Based Services

Aim Higher: Stop Building Social Networks

Aim Higher: Stop Building Search Engines

Aim Higher: Stop Building Online Retailers

If its a big space with lots of potential people will try to fill it. Remember, people build the future, it doesn't just "happen." All these services and large funding rounds are just proving that photosharing is a big unsolved space (just like group buying, LBS, social networks, search engines, online retailers, computer manufacturers, operating systems...). Relax and let the market do its thing. Or jump into the market. But please don't complain about the way innovation works.

</comment><comment><USER14> Companies like those do get funded, but they are usually run by industry veterans that cut their chops on consumer internet companies the like. ie. Tesla Motors. I do not think it makes sense for internet entrepreneurs to go after markets with such heavy capital restrictions, it's not reasonable, it's much more reasonable to start small and slowly mature/graduate up to the more complicated and advanced problems/companies.

<comment><USER15> True, but I don't see any reason why low capital = low innovation. Cheap internet companies aren't derivative by default.

<comment><USER14> My second reply is simply: free markets.

If there was a better ROI for young entrepreneurs, they would do it. There is nothing that scales like the internet/software that can be built with such a low cost. Michael Lewis said this best in his book, the last 20 years have been the largest legal value creation in the history of mankind in Silicon Valley (measured by normalized job creation, revenue, new businesses, etc.)

<comment><USER15> I don't disagree with you in that entrepreneurs choose software because it's cheaper.

My question was: what's inherently derivative about software startups? Why is everyone making photo-sharing software and not software to solve other (unaddressed) problems?

<comment><USER16> What unaddressed problems do you think they should be solving? All in all, the consumer web is a pretty over-served market. I don't see a problem with there being ~5 serious competitors in a big, fresh problem area.

<comment><USER15> 1\. According to that line of thought, every problem has been solved already. Are we really at that point? There are _hundreds_ of problems that are more relevant than "how do I share images of my location with people in my same location".

2\. ^What real problem does a company like Color solve? Is there one?

3\. Maybe the problem is that startups are targeting _consumers_? B2B has a way of culling the herd: if you don't solve a problem, no one buys your product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook started basically as a photo-sharing app. Look at it now.

<comment><AUTHOR> She's not saying that the idea is wrong in and of itself, but that we should all be focusing on ideas that go beyond sharing photos - solving hard problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I agree with the sentiment. If we only worry about the social, society gets tied up in trivialities. It extends the echo chamber for the same old things.

On the other hand, this is simply what the media is obsessing over. It's easy to understand convenience apps, but not new technology for which the implications on large scale are still pretty unknown.

It's all still happening: Better and smaller chips, commercial spaceflight, more efficient solar energy, interesting developments in DNA sequencing. Real high tech. Just look past the attention whores.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it's more interesting to enable people to share other people's photos. I can certainly take more creative commons photos that other people took than I can take myself. See

<http://ookaboo.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> While I don't disagree, I did notice that the author works for a company that develops a mobile news reader app. Not exactly breaking new ground there either.

<comment><USER11> Actually, when we launched many did call our design revolutionary - we were the first visual news reading application on the iPad and iPhone. Steve Jobs even pointed out our app at WWDC -[http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110324/video- the-pulse-boys-to-...](http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse- boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/?mod=ATD_rss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This photo sharing phenomenon reminds me of PG's ideas. <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> [9]

</comment><comment><USER22> amen</comment>


Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case of Sci-Hub (2016) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/why-science-better-communism-case-sci-hub <comment><USER2> In an ideal world people would not even argue about whether knowledge/research should be free and open to everybody. The current situation only shows how primitive the world still is.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that research isn't free. (Free as in free beer)

<comment><USER4> No, the problem is that publishers take research that they didn't pay for, ask researchers who they aren't paying either to review it and then and put it behind paywalls.

<comment><USER5> Of course, researchers don't have their work "taken" by publishers; there are big incentives (via the citation count metric of academia) to provide their work to these publishers. This problem has been hashed out so many times, and I'm so upset that we're still at the status quo (especially since I'm at the end of my graduate student years, and will soon no longer have access to the university's library!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a note, this presentation is by the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan.

<comment><USER7> >"To sum up, we have the following take-aways. Science, as a part of culture, is in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential roots." (Elbakyan, ibid, translated)

From the transcription, [https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript- an...](https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript-and- translation-sci-hub-presentation).

The video is awful, long preamble, translators that talk to and over each other; the transcript is much better here.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for this link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The woman is a hero, as far as I am concerned.

Also note that at least one researcher in researchgate chose to mail their paper to me when I asked, once I found it wasn't available on sci-hub. This was extremely nice of them and made my day.

As a student I love this decade for finally having access to such a vast repository of knowledge that wasn't available to me in the previous years. I am also thankful for the researchers whose work I am accessing now.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you write a paper, no one is allowed to copy the paper without your permission. When you patent writing papers, no one is allowed to write a paper without your permission, which is ludicrous (and I'm pretty sure you can't patent something like that). Meanwhile there are people sitting on great _ideas_ that would be good for humanity or able to make lots of money or whatever, but are too afraid to tell anyone because they are afraid their idea will be stolen.

<comment><USER11> Rule #1 of entrepreneurship. There are at least ten other people out there with the same idea. With seven billion people on the planet it is highly unlikely that anything is so special and unique it requires hamstringing the rest of human creativity to reveal it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly, most anarcho-capitalists are opposed to intellectual property precisely because it violates physical property. Being opposed to intellectual property is not unique to communism.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it's a shame that the HN article title was changed from something which is clearly expounded by the video i.e Communism, and mentioned several times even with quotes by proto-Communists and Communists themselves, and the attack on private property. Copyright is merely used as an expemplary in the talk. Why was the title changed? Is it that Communism is seen as "click bait" or too radical for the HN audience that it must thus be tuned down to something with less flare?

<comment><USER14> Because Communism is cancer.

<comment><USER13> Why do you say this?

<comment><USER14> Because I live in a country that was under Communism for almost 90 years and actually experienced how bad it is first-hand.

<comment><USER15> I've lived under Capitalism for over 30 years, and have first-hand experience of how bad it is.

<comment><USER16> Speak for yourself. Also you have the option to move to socialist/communist countries whenever you see fit, they exist. Don't force your horrible ideology on the rest of us (which communism literally calls for).

<comment><USER17> >Speak for yourself. Also you have the option to move to socialist/communist countries whenever you see fit, they exist. Don't force your horrible ideology on the rest of us (which communism literally calls for).

A perfect case of strawman.

In his comment, GP was never advocating that communism is particularly good. He was merely using the same logic as his parent.

Also, moving to different countries is not straightforward. The statement does not even come close to being an argument for anything, and does not contribute to the discussion.

<comment><USER18> Thank you for calling it a strawman when the person I was arguing just admitted that communism does call for forced confiscation of property. You people are delusional.

<comment><USER17> >Thank you for calling it a strawman when the person I was arguing just admitted that communism does call for forced confiscation of property.

Yes, it is a strawman, when you attribute something to someone who did not say it. That he agrees with you or not doesn't have bearing on what makes an argument a strawman. The discussion of property arose _after_ you made your comment.

>You people are delusional.

Very consistent with strawman-like behavior. Tell me how _I_ am delusional. Not the other commenters in the thread. Me. In what way am I delusional?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could someone explain what Sci-Hub has to do with the common ownership of the means of production? The presentation didn't even attempt to explain this from what I gathered.

To me, Sci-Hub sounds a lot more like anarchism than anything ( _property is theft_ and so on..)

<comment><USER20> > To me, Sci-Hub sounds a lot more like anarchism than anything

The more I see people pushing the idea of communism lately, the bigger overlap with anarchism I see. Even explicitly mentioned. Maybe people are ok with that.

<comment><USER8> Communism as originally described by Marx is essentially an anarchist ideology. The idea of having a state attached to it before the complete transition to classless society worldwide is complete and how powerful that state should be, are areas of debate that came up later.

Given that we've seen most communist states fail or abandon non market-based economic models, the anarchist flavor seems to be in greater intellectual vogue these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really? I know scientific publishing is terrible in a myriad of ways, but communism? Communism? We have to throw out the underpinnings of modern advanced civilization because Elsevier makes too much money?

<comment><USER13> No, the case made in the talk takes the example of Sci-hub and agreement with its principles into a wider scope to ask, if intellectual property is a problem (itself a radical idea, even on HN) what about property in general? And by this 'property' nobody means one's toothbrush, the Communists and anarchists mean private property. As Proudhon tells us the difference; near the beginning of his most important work (which went on to inspire Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin and every other Communist and anarchist) he writes as follows:

"There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. "Possession," says Duranton, "is a matter of fact, not of right." Toullier: "Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact." The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.

This double definition of property — domain and possession — is of the highest importance; and it must be clearly understood, in order to comprehend what is to follow."

In my opinion, and apparently that of the person giving the talk, when we talk about science we don't only want the journals to be free (as in free speech), we want the "means of production" for it to be free. In this way, we believe, science can serve the broader community as a tool to advance knowledge rather than only when it's convenient for profit. As an example, look at how the funding was recently pulled (though I'm not fully up to date on the story) on a US government study into the effects of coal mining on health. I contend that there would have been less motivation to do this, if it was possible at all, in a Communist society.

<comment><USER8> I think that very much depends on what your communist society looks like in practice. If you actually somehow managed to create somewhere a successful communist society that actually succeeded at completing the revolution without a powerful state, maybe what you describe would happen.

But we never have seen that happen because in practice communist regimes tend to have strong states that engage in rather heavy-handed central planning of the economy. As a result, funding for scientific enterprises in these societies ends up being directed toward whatever the political priorities of the planners are. In the Soviet Union's case, that was military technologies and Lysenkoism.

Lysenkoism is a particularly troubling counter-example to your US coal mining example. In the US, the political inconvienence (presumably to the new administration) simply resulted in the project's funding being cut. In the Soviet Union, the political inconvience of natural selection resulted in thousands of scientists being jailed or killed, set back Soviet biology at least 150 years, and was partly to blame for the low crop yields that the Soviets kept experiencing.

So yeah, I don't particularly like the status quo in scientific publishing, but it's better than abolishing private property. Abolishing private property is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory and always ends badly in practice.

<comment><USER13> I agree, it's something that sounds difficult to get right, and if it's possible to get right, what's the best way to go about it? I contend that the model which the Soviets adopted was poor, not only for the reasons you mentioned (rigid central planning, authoritarianism, and opposition to recognised science in favour of nationalism-based "science"). It's important to ask why these things happened, so I think that the solution is not as simple as I perhaps made it out to be.

However we see that in the Soviet Union, places of science remained private property, administered by either private institutions or a state which claimed to be in control of the people, while it was clearly not. The whole Soviet model collapsed very early one because certain factions were banned, and their members executed. I do not think that this is the best that we can do. However I think that the solution, however utopian it sounds, lies in abolition of private property because otherwise we are still beholden to the whims of speculators and their profits rather than the interest of the community. Even if you only democratised science, this would be problematic; the scientists need to eat, and I would argue that they shouldn't have to eat only if the State or a private institutions tells them that they can eat.

There are other examples to go along with what you said. I can't remember the source, but there was a time in the Soviet Union in which scientists wished to implement a much better system of central planning which took into account input and output tables continuously; whether or not the computer power existed at the time I don't know, but the system was quickly shut down by the Soviet bureaucracy - I think because it posed a threat to the power of the State. This is why I tend to by more sympathetic to anarchist ideologies (as a questioner at the end of the presentitaion mentions), because by destroying the material conditions of the state then the state ceases, what you describe as happening has less chance to take hold.

This is why Communism is an anarchist ideology, in recognition of the very problem you have mentioned. Modern day Communists such as Zizek and Badiou accept this, and Badiou urges us to continue with the _Communist Hypothesis_ [0]. The Soviet model was initially radical, but it was not radical enough to overcome the power structures which were much more entrenched than the founders of the revolution thought. So I still think Communism is the answer, but in what way is yet to be found out, and the debate fiercely rages. It's not that I think Lysenkoism is better than what we have currently (including all our junk "science" coming from here and there), it's that I think there is a solution superior to both situations, namely, in the reduction of power of the state and the diminishing of nationalism by making a global revolution as Marx's internationalist roots envisioned. It's not the abolition of private property that was the cause of Lysenkoism, it was exactly what we see now - rigid state bureaucracy and private institutions.

[0] [https://newleftreview.org/II/49/alain-badiou-the- communist-h...](https://newleftreview.org/II/49/alain-badiou-the-communist- hypothesis)

<comment><USER21> > it was not radical enough to overcome the power structures

there are issues that are even more deeply rooted than that. for example it completely eludes me how luxuries would be handled and distributed according to needs, or if it's ever recognized a need for luxuries and if it were how they'd be distributed to each according to personal interests and preferences

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> bytefederal-ceo Scientific advancement and technological innovation both greatly benefit from societies that have the greatest individual liberty and the least central control. The ultimate abstraction of this has yet to be designed but I'm thinking that it will be some form of ethical anarco-capitalism. I'll take a page from Dashcoin mining, where at the point of currency creation 10% goes into a general fund. The pseudo-central micro government functions solely out of it while the free market allows all companies to compete to ever decrease its market share. As transparency is a requirement of any truly ethical society, usage of blockchain technologies become ubiquitous in virtually every aspect of business and personal interaction. This then catalyses real time global value governance and regulation giving rise to a society entirety driven by dynamic hierarchies, where an individuals level of power directly correlates to their value to specific market / solution domain.

This type of dynamic global ethical anarco-capitalism has at its roots a resurrected US Constitutional based Republic. The transitional process is in its infancy but the forces of cryptocurrency cannot be undone.

As I said on 1490am Henry Raines show yesterday (slightly more developed), if we are to succeed we need to ensure that those allowed to regulate cryptocurrencies are as intelligent as those who created them. At the foundation of programmatic global value transmission are the keys to real time micro-economies that, by their very nature, foster the rapid evolution of dynamic hierarchies.

<comment><USER13> >Scientific advancement and technological innovation both greatly benefit from societies that have the greatest individual liberty and the least central control.

Communists agree, and this is why democratic Socialistts such as Oscar Wilde praised the fact that Communism nurtures individualism, _especially for those in the arts and sciences_. He wrote about this in _The Soul of Man Under Socialism_ :

"What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want."

Your idea that anarcho-capitalism is a legitimate heir of the liberal ideas which were used to found the US is, to be honest, a silly one - as one can see the exact opposite in the writings of the Communists and anarchists whose whole idea was based on the freedom of individuals and their free association, something which even individualist anarchists such as Stirner realised is not possible with private property.</comment></comment>


Differences between Heavy Metal, Thrash Metal, Black Metal, and Death Metal - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5n3sfx/eli5_the_differences_between_heavy_metal_thrash/dc8ogpa/ <comment><USER2> > This one's a bit unique as it all began with a small group of teenagers in > Jessheim in Norway in the late 80s/early 90s. They wanted to be 'evil' and > 'extreme' but they lacked the musical ability to rival the predominantly (at > the time) Swedish and American Death Metal scenes. So instead they did what > anyone would do (not) they started burning down churches, proclaiming > themselves 'Satanists' and killing each other.

That statement ignores a big part of the black metal aesthetic and does a huge disservice to the many great musicians in the scene. The raw production values were in response to the rising popularity and commercialization of death metal around the late '80s and early '90s and the 'plastic' production that came with it. Listen to Soulside Journey and then A Blaze in the Northern Sky and try telling me it wasn't absolutely intentional. Then listen to anything Emperor released and try telling me "they lacked the musical ability to rival the predominantly (at the time) Swedish and American Death Metal scenes."

Euronymous spent tons of time perfecting the production of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Whether it sounds harsh to the average listener or not (it does), he went out of his way to have 1) audible bass (check it out on headphones sometime), 2) thunderously huge drums and 3) cacophonous guitars, true to his playing style. These were all calculated, intentional decisions, meant to drive the cold, bleak aesthetic.

<comment><USER3> I take _extreme_ exception to their characterization of the beginnings of black metal. Not just because of the unfortunate dismissal of technical ability. Rather, anything that doesn't start off by mentioning Venom and Bathory and instead jumps to what is arguably the second wave totally outs itself as not having actually listened to what the larger names in the genre have themselves said. If you read interviews with the members of bands who started in the late 80's and early 90's they all have the same influences in common (with few exceptions): Kiss, Mercyful Fate, Venom, Bathory, and Celtic Frost. Skipping ahead a decade kinda misses how the aesthetic was established. Which as you mentioned was very much intentional.

<comment><USER4> Slightly off topic, but any recommendations on Mercyful Fate stuff? I don't know much of their back catalogue, though I did play this at a Halloween party once, I enjoyed it immensely, other people not so much!

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ObAaVZwULH4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ObAaVZwULH4)

<comment><USER3> Personally I'd recommend "Don't Break the Oath"[0] or "Melissa"[1]. But really their whole LP discography can be listened to in an afternoon. King Diamond as a solo artist has been a bit more prolific though.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpk1wJ62CrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpk1wJ62CrQ)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great overall but the omission of "Death" (the band) in death metal is a mystery to me. Death was a great influence not just in death metal but metal in general and defined the genre. They were impeccable musicians and brilliant virtuosos. I think any song from Death's early albums is a much better example of the music's "sound" than anything else.

<comment><USER4> I used to enjoy The Sound of Perseverance, haven't heard it properly in a while, what was that instrumental track on that album with the harmonised guitars?

<comment><USER6> "Voice of the Soul"

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's the one I was thinking of.

Forgot it had a decent cover of Painkiller too:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=quPliK3eAy4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=quPliK3eAy4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find metal is one of the more interestingly diverging genres. The range of sound that falls under 'metal' is shocking. You can go from slow, with clean vocals and a (fairly) relaxing sound, to something earshattering.

Also, you can very often tell that the musicians are putting all they can into it. The music is very emotional in a lot of the subgenres, particularly black metal, and post-metal.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was sold with the opening sentence "I wrote my dissertation on this very topic..."

I don't read dissertations and I'm not even a huge metal fan, but the idea of a dissertation on metal subgenres just sounds interesting to me.

<comment><USER2> "Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult" is a great introductory book on early black metal scenes around the world. Most black metal works focus on the Norwegian scene (Mayhem/Burzum/Darkthrone primarily), but Evolution of the Cult has chapters on Rotting Christ from Greece, Sigh from Japan, the Les Légions Noire bands from France and a whole host of others.

[https://www.amazon.com/Black-Metal-Evolution-Dayal- Patterson...](https://www.amazon.com/Black-Metal-Evolution-Dayal- Patterson/dp/1936239752)

<comment><USER9> had to double take that book title. I assumed they would have gone with "kvlt" instead of "cult"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I consider myself a minor, amateur metalhead (to which I'm sure a real metalhead would take umbrage), and I have to look up the definitions of black and death metal every few months to remember the difference. It doesn't help that their names are so similar, and that I don't particularly like either genres.

Off-hand, there's also sludge, stoner, prog, doom, folk, nu, and power metal, and several different slices of each genre.

<comment><USER11> It would have made sense to divide up Death Metal into subgenres. Doom metal/stoner metal is the most interesting thing I've come across in recent years.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pcfW9pP8XQ&t=10m58s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pcfW9pP8XQ&t=10m58s)

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't put doom and stoner under death metal, very different aesthetics. That's just me though.

<comment><USER11> I agree. The definition of death metal is a real hodgepodge. It's sort of like classifying animals as

      1. dog
      2. cat
      3. horse
      4. other

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The depth and breadth of all the sub-genres of metal is really pretty shocking, even for people that have listened to it all their lives. I have a slightly loose definition of metal, so in my mind I can go from Blackened Thrash/Death from someone like Skeletonwitch (an all time personal favorite), to whatever the hell 3 Inches of Blood is (all I know is it's awesome), to viking themed Death Metal, to all acoustic stuff from Eluveitie, all the way to a cello trio like Apocalyptica or maybe even Break of Reality (less so) and still be "in the genre" so far as I'm concerned.

Its amazing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Djent - (Periphery - The Walk) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfPNEGy5L-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfPNEGy5L-w)

Thrash - (Stone - Get Stoned) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWHlr3U_s8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWHlr3U_s8Q)

Melodic - (Children of Bodom - Towards Dead End) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fbeGWZ5gw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fbeGWZ5gw) Also (Galaktikon - Dangertits) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVB8lM- oCSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVB8lM-oCSk)

Black - (Dimmu Borgir - Progenies of the Great Apokalypse) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuIxl0vip6Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuIxl0vip6Q)

Heavy - (Smashing Pumpkins - Zero) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBkjcvNztKQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBkjcvNztKQ)

Progressive - (Between the Buried And Me - White Walls) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNdRh2un5eg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNdRh2un5eg)

Parody - (Austrian Death Machine - Get To The Choppah) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPIO86jTrQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPIO86jTrQQ)

<comment><USER14> Good list of examples. I like to point people to Every Noise at Once ( [http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html) ) to show the differences between the types of Metal.

BTW, it is really really nice to see a post related to this my favourite type of music here in Hacker News. For people that do not understand Metal I can recommend the documentary "Metal, A HeadBanger's journey" ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal:_A_Headbanger's_Journey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal:_A_Headbanger's_Journey) ) which tries to explain in a "anthropological" way, the background of metal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those who want a very in depth tour of all metal genres, with example songs, check this website out: [http://mapofmetal.com/#/home](http://mapofmetal.com/#/home)

</comment><comment><USER4> Metal is a fairly broad group of genres, I'd suggest there's something in it for everyone.

Just for fun, I'd be interested in hearing some recommendations. I'll start with one, this is The Space For This by Cynic, I'd guess you could call this melodic tech death metal, but as Zappa said, talking about music is like fishing about architecture, just see if you like it!

[http://youtu.be/gw-6IIBXNSQ](http://youtu.be/gw-6IIBXNSQ)

<comment><USER16> My typical music tastes lean mostly toward classic rock and indie. Never was a huge metal guy. Then I stumbled on the doom metal band 'Pallbearer.' Their album 'Foundations of Burden' blew my mind. Epically melodic, complex, and moving all while fully living up to the 'doom' sound of the genre. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER4> Just started listening, sounds great! Thanks for the recommendation.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N99KPZ2RsoM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N99KPZ2RsoM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish there were some representative samples linked from this. Based on the description, I don't think I'd be able to distinguish Black Metal from Death Metal.

Also, metal is an incredibly varied genre. If you think you don't like metal, I'd be happy to recommend a couple of different sample songs and see if any of them catch your fancy and change your mind.

<comment><USER11> My interpretation: Death Metal sounds really hard; Black Metal sounds like crap

<comment><USER11> It's not my opinion... the description of Black Metal made it sound like crap.

<comment><USER18> Give it a chance, I'm not a fan of the "we're like srs evil" aesthetic but the genre has produced a lot of high-quality art. A lot of bands sidestep Satanism and focus on paganism's affinity with nature, letting the atmospheric quality of the music lull the listener into a trance-like mindset of connection and oneness. Here's Agalloch, perfect for a snowshoed stroll through the forest: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cXz69kk9YU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cXz69kk9YU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As with any other classification, start with Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge)

</comment><comment> blubb-fish Whaaaaaaat?

Nobody posted Harald Schmidt talking about Metal, yet?

[http://www.sat1.de/tv/die-harald-schmidt-show/video/heavy- me...](http://www.sat1.de/tv/die-harald-schmidt-show/video/heavy-metal-clip)

It's a classic!

</comment><comment><USER20> Thrash Metal is basically "L.A style" high pitched voice , Death metal is more like "Tampa style" growly voice, Black Metal is more about the look than anything else and Heavy Metal, well any rock band can play heavy.

</comment><comment><USER21> I won't call the author right or wrong on their categorizations, but metal - and maybe all genres of music - break down in the following ways:

1) Subject matter, which for long-running bands tends to have a fad-like flavor (e.g. AC/DC's Highway to Hell and Back In Black have more satanic subject matter than DDDDC or Fly On The Wall.)

2) Presentation / aesthetics / "Dress code" \-- For instance, Van Halen vs. Mötley Crüe. Both wore spandex; MC also wore obvious makeup, dyed / teased hair, and sort of shambling / fishnet clothing, VH did not. Black Sabbath tended a little more towards leather and black, while their equally-loud peers Led Zeppelin looked a little more hippy.

3) Band composition / Musical direction -- For instance, it is nearly impossible to call your band metal if it has a keyboard player (Sorry Styx and Deep Purple.) How about guitars? Some bands - GnR and Aerosmith had dedicated lead and rhythm guitarists, who harmonized a little; Other bands, such as Priest and Iron Maiden, had more-or-less two lead guitarists who would split leads and/or harmonize multiple times per song.

Just a forinstance, KISS would be metal based on 2, but not so much 1 (their subject matter was mostly sex and drugs, very little death and hell.), and their approach to 3 was pretty much Rick Derringer territory.

<comment><USER18> Please stop perpetuating the myths that metal has to concentrate on "death and hell" and that keyboards somehow aren't metal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> But let's not forget all the other subgenres, as beautifully illustrated at www.mapofmetal.com

<comment><USER23> There's also the Metal Evolution tree[0]

[0] - [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/originals/18/3b/19/183b...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/originals/18/3b/19/183b19cafe1e9d15e0c500fa396e0747.jpg)

<comment><USER22> that's very nice too, although I can't quite work out why someone's labelled grunge as "goth metal"

<comment><USER23> Good catch, I never noticed that one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687 <comment><USER2> > For reasons associated with U.S. export restrictions, no cryptographic > security of any kind is likely to be included in the original sources

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687#c1](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687#c1)

Creepiest thing with seeing this ticket (again?) is noticing that the first comment is about that is used to be illegal to write anything with cryptographic security in the US and sell/give it to the outside world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States)

<comment><USER3> Any signatory to the Wassenaar Arrangement, which includes the entirety of North America, Europe (including Russia), Australia, India, and Pacific Asia (minus China) must consider cryptographic technologies to be munitions for the purposes of export. Now, these restrictions have been considerably loosened to the point that the export isn't really controlled, but international law still considers it a munition. The US is hardly unique in this regard.

It works the other way too. A surprising number of countries still restrict the import of cryptographic technology, including several EU states.

<comment><USER4> Side note: don't call the countries in the European Union "states". They're sovereign countries that have committed themselves through treaties to the Union, not a US like government body

<comment><USER5> Languages are strange in very different ways. The Italian word for country is "stato". How do we translate state as in "NY is a state of the USA"? Again "stato". We have "nazione" for nations but really nothing for countries. We do say "paesi esteri" for "foreign countries" but that's almost the only occurrence with that meaning. A "paese" is a town, so nobody will ever say that Germany or France are a "paese".

<comment> alberto-m Actually, "paese" is the normal translation for country (optionally with capital "P" if one wants to avoid ambiguities with the "town" meaning)

> nobody will ever say that Germany or France are a "paese"

Google lists > 200.000 results for "la Germania è un paese".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember back in the 90s exchanging PGP keys with my roommate to exchange encrypted emails. It was supposed to be so easy. Just 12 simple steps. Every time.

<comment><USER7> at least you had a friend to email! I couldn't get any of my friends to do it. "Man we can encrypt our emails." "But why..." "It'd be cool" "This seems hard." "Come on, exchange keys with me." "I don't want to make one."

<comment><USER8> My high school friends and I settled for using Gain and Pidgin to enable the "secure" icon. :)

<comment><USER9> Ah, the good old days when I could just plug my IM services into one desktop app. I miss those days very much.

Now I use three Electron apps on a typical work day.

<comment><USER10> Matrix bridges do that for me today! Currently using IRC and Telegram bridges, thinking about adding Slack.

Sadly, Electron-based Element is still the best Matrix client by far.

<comment><USER11> The lack of thread support in Element makes Slack bridging very hard to use, sadly.

<comment><USER10> I needed some time to figure out you're not talking about multithreading in JavaScript/electron, but about this

[https://github.com/vector-im/element- web/issues/2349](https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2349)

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used to love PGP, but I now think encrypted email is a bad idea. [https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using- encrypted....](https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using- encrypted.html)

Better to use a protocol designed with encryption in mind, like Signal, to get forward secrecy, avoid leaking metadata, and have encryption always on by default.

UPDATE: I have been reminded that PGP does not have to be used with email. I meant to say that I used to love using PGP with email, since that is the primary way I have used it. I will not comment on the use of PGP outside of email, since I haven't carefully examined its use in other contexts.

<comment><USER13> That is the single most common misconception around PGP, and it comes up every time:

(Open)PGP is first and foremost a flexible packet format (and other specs), and GnuPG is more of a CLI "library" to interface with it -- all of it. You can build something that hides metadata, you can have forward secrecy, and encryption always-on by default with PGP (and GnuPG). You can use it for whatever trust model you want, neither OpenPGP (the specs) nor GnuPG prescribe a certain model. It provides _building blocks_. It just happens that no good client exists and no more high level specs were written that use it, which is highly unfortunate. The client in this case here used to be "Enigmail" (a wrapper around GnuPG), and now is built-in since plugins are not allowed to be as powerful with the new browser architecture that Thunderbird piggybacks on and this was the only way to bring PGP to Thunderbird users. Also, there are some more modern libraries nowadays for standard use cases around PGP.

Signal was able to move faster since it did not exist, did not try to build things in an open and collaborative fashion, still refuses to work in any open way. Its founder Moxie even openly argues against standards [x]. I am not saying he does not have "a point", but in the long run this will lead to just more silos and ultimately technical stagnation, and for me goes against the ethos of "a public and open inter-net." (and the learnings behind it. 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.')

That said, I do agree with your comment on a pure end-user level. It still makes me sad to always see this confused and not acknowledged better in places like HN, where people "should know". Technologists can defend and strive for the most promising long-term solution and "proper way to do it", and at the same time recommend "the best of the bad that is currently available". Even if it is confusing sometimes.

Just to give an example, there are plenty of high security use cases that require using smartcards. I'm very grateful that the OpenPGP standard and GnuPG exist that (can be made to) work in such cases. Signal does nothing in that space, rightfully so. But you are comparing different fruit to each other, which is kind of unfair.

[x] and still calls himself an "anarchist". You would think those know better...

<comment><USER14> > GnuPG is more of a CLI "library" to interface with it

It abjectly fails at that. It's just awful to interface with.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. It has been long overdue that alternative OpenPGP implementations exist that try to address some of the peculiarities of GnuPG -- most of which are [still] there because its founder wants to preserve compatibility at all costs to support some of its long-term institutional users. And, yes, dealing with these peculiarities should not the responsibility of end users, but of further abstraction layers built on top of it (of which there are only a few, and all of them focused on the email use case).

The constant confusion between OpenPGP (the standard) and GnuPG (one implementation) has led many users to look elsewhere, which is unfortunate, but has also led many developers to look elsewhere, which is just sad.

Yes, trying to work within the existing standardization bodies can be very painful and disheartening, but the few people who try and survive in that space can use every good soul willing to assist.

The OpenPGP community has done hundred times more than Signal for the state of security on the Internet, and I'm sure it will continue to do so. Signal is great, and pushed the limits quite far (and still does), and I'm very grateful that it exists and use it every day.

<comment><USER15> What is a good non-email use case for the PGP format?

<comment><USER16> Any usecase forwhich no specialized solution already exists. Source code signatures and Apt/RPM packages are good examples of this.

<comment><USER15> What does OpenPGP bring there? At least GnuPG has the benefit of being a tool that's present on many system and which is capable of verifying signatures.

If you're not using GnuPG, you can pick any format you want! What does OpenPGP add? Everything I can think of is a negative.

<comment><USER17> OpenPGP is the standard, gnupg is a implementation.

<comment><USER15> Right, so why talk about the standard when you mean, specifically, GnuPG?

If you want an explanation of why GnuPG is dangerous for anything besides email, let me know. But parent post was very specifically NOT about GnuPG- it was about OpenPGP.

<comment><USER17> because gnupg is not the only implementation.

<comment><USER15> Yes, that's what I said, and why I was asking!

What does the OpenPGP format bring to the table, BESIDES HAVING A COMMONLY AVAILABLE IMPLEMENTATION IN GNUPG?

<comment><USER17> It's the generic term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Credit to the people that wrote and maintained bugzilla, both as software and this particular instance. It's still ticking, much longer than (I assume) they planned it to.

<comment><USER19> My opinion for 20 years has been that Atlassian JIRA would have been stillborn if somebody had added a blue and white CSS theme for Bugzilla.

<comment><USER20> No no no you don't understand, the end users NEED drag and drop (and loading indicators, and slooow and heavy pages to admire those indicators).

<comment><USER21> > the end users NEED drag and drop

Ummm... they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Never seen a timestamp on the web that said "20 years ago". Wow.

Reminds me of a tiny blog post I put up years ago about the future of archaeology. Forgive the silly site title.

[https://meaninglessdreams.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/156/](https://meaninglessdreams.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/156/)

<comment><USER23> I was born 20 years ago...

<comment><USER24> It would have been hilarious if you'd fixed this bug... :-)

<comment> dane-pgp Now that you mention it, I'm surprised I can't think of any example of someone fixing a software bug that is older than them. (I'm assuming Warner Losh is older than 35).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> globular-toast Thunderbird has the only calendar I know that has a "multiweek" display as opposed to (well, in addition to) the utterly retarded month view that exists in every other GUI.

We've been doing electronic calendars for how long now? Why are we still using a paradigm from paper based calendars? At the beginning of a month I can see three weeks ahead, but at the end of the month I can see three weeks behind. It frustrates me no end that this is still a thing. It reminds me of the early days of Google maps when they were no better than paper maps, but now we can rotate the map, zoom in and out etc. But calendars are _still_ no better than paper calendars. Apart from the one in Thunderbird.

<comment><USER25> Sorry for nit-picking and being off-topic (I get your point!), but I don't think there was ever a version of Google Maps without zoom. Actually, I have the fondest memories of the first version of Google Maps (the orange-themed one). It was so much better than anything it replaced at the time, and I think it would be perfectly usable even today, 15 years later!

<comment> globular-toast It did have zoom, but they were fixed levels so no different to having multiple paper maps at different scales. Yes, of course there is the advantage that it's "not paper", but that was the only advantage really. This is not unexpected at all as new technology very often mimics existing technology in its first iteration. If you look at the first outputs of the Gutenberg press you can see they were trying to mimic handwritten books of the time. But usually the new technology very quickly surpasses the old after the first iteration, as electronic maps have now done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I do think there ought to be a way to do good cryptography in email. Email is not going away anytime soon, so giving up on it as a legitimate place where cryptography is needed seems too ivory tower for me.

The "dead simple solution" is to just run the Signal protocol over SMTP, although I'm sure it's possible there is a better design if you were to think about the specifics.

<comment><USER27> Not if you want to interoperate with anything currently in existence. And if you don't, why bother building it on SMTP?

<comment><USER26> You build it on SMTP because upgrading clients is easier than doing a clean slate redesign of ubiquitous internet protocols.

Presumably we're discussing how an open protocol addition might gain any traction at all over walled garden protocols like Slack -- and in those cases you want to maintain as much compatibility as possible.

"Federated SecureEmail 2.0" would be dead-on-arrival, where "Secure Client on top of bog-standard email" is ever so slightly less DOA. You get to re-use the existing identity/routing system, existing servers, existing authorization, etc.

<comment><USER27> >You build it on SMTP because upgrading clients is easier than doing a clean slate redesign of ubiquitous internet protocols.

Why not just toss the whole shebang and rebuild it below that layer? Signal Protocol seems to be pretty successful here.

>Presumably we're discussing how an open protocol addition might gain any traction at all over walled garden protocols like Slack

No, I'm asking how a new open protocol can be built on top of email in a way that maintains strong backwards compatibility while offering strong security guarantees, like end-to-end encryption. I don't think it's possible.

<comment><USER28> > No, I'm asking how a new open protocol can be built on top of email in a way > that maintains strong backwards compatibility while offering strong security > guarantees, like end-to-end encryption. I don't think it's possible.

You can't have strong security guarantees with backwards compatability, because backwards compatability requires plain text sending.

Unless you're OK with limited guarantees like the UI will tell you when the mail could be sent in plain text. Or if the UI tells you the message will be end to end encrypted, it won't fallback to plain text, etc.

<comment><USER27> >You can't have strong security guarantees with backwards compatability, because backwards compatability requires plain text sending.

That's right.

>Unless you're OK with limited guarantees like the UI will tell you when the mail could be sent in plain text. Or if the UI tells you the message will be end to end encrypted, it won't fallback to plain text, etc.

This would require changing all the clients.

<comment><USER28> > This would require changing all the clients.

Not really, the old clients would never send (or receive) end to end encrypted messages, so they don't need new UI to tell you that. That's the cost of unbounded backwards comptability.

If you want to have 100% coverage of email users, changing all clients is part of the deal. But, uhhh, good luck with that. Server based standards are an easier lift --- you could build a standard to require hop to hop encryption on mail and expect that to plausibly gain enough adoption to use over a managable time frame. Of course it would be trivial for a hop in the delivery path to subvert that and remove the request, and all hops in delivery would still have message content access; but if people like it, a large majority of servers might support it in 5-10 years.

<comment><USER27> >Of course it would be trivial for a hop in the delivery path to subvert that and remove the request, and all hops in delivery would still have message content access; but if people like it, a large majority of servers might support it in 5-10 years.

You're describing TLS, and this is already happening.

<comment><USER28> Not just TLS, but a way to say, while composing a message, if it's can not be delivered via TLS with a valid certiticate, then don't deliver it. Which apparently already exists as REQUIRETLS [https://www.rfc- editor.org/rfc/rfc8689.html](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8689.html)

Published November 2019. I didn't see any data on support, and hadn't heard of it before looking just now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm more impressed that a ticket managed to live on in a tracker for so long without getting lost over the years.

<comment><USER30> In contrast to ansible issues, which would have changed tracker or repo ~30 times in that time.

<comment><USER31> Or any other recent repo where issues get "stale" and closed automatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Previously on HN:

36 comments, 1 day ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501872)

226 comments, 2 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23864934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23864934)

51 comments, 12 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197327)

</comment><comment><USER33> "How much do you trust the owner of this key to sign other keys properly?

* I don't know

* I do NOT trust

* I trust marginally

* I trust fully

* I trust ultimately"

This is a real pop-up I got the last time I tried to use PGP with Thunderbird.

If people still get regular pop-ups like these, I don't think PGP will ever be popular.

They might have switched to PEP (pretty easy privacy) that uses TOFU (trust- on-first-use) so maybe this is thing of the past, but I don't know.

<comment><USER34> I know it's virtually forbidden to discuss practical details of PGP on HN, but what do you think is the sticking point about that pop-up? It makes people think a little rather than trust blindly, which seems to be...good?

I do agree that the marginally and fully options are useless. Wonder if adoption would be better if you just removed them, and were left with:

\- I don't know what PGP is (exit, opens documentation or a tutorial)

\- I definitely _dis_ trust this key (because it has been marked as malicious in the wild)

\- I trust this key (because I have verified it either in person, or through a proof like Keybase)

<comment><USER33> Even you misunderstood that question.

It's not "how do I trust this person key", but - "how much do I trust this person to _sign other people 's keys_ ".

As in "how much do I think that other person is careful in checking other people's keys". Not judging his key, or your ability to check keys. You are judging the other person capability to check another, third person keys.

This is important for PGP "web of trust".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 21 year old bug, and Damon Gallaty apparently still works at the company that he worked at back then, albeit with some changes to the name on the checks he gets.

I have some serious feels for the guy, that had to have been a frustrating experience.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wonderful. What an amazing amount of work to implement a terrible idea.

See [https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp- problem.html](https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html) for why we shouldn't be using PGP in 2020.

<comment><USER37> Gee, this anti-PGP rant showed up 3 times so far in this thread. I think that justifies a link to my critique:

* [https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:tpp](https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:tpp)

<comment><USER36> Honestly, I have no idea who you are. I'm not surprised that someone out there thinks that it is a good idea.

However every cryptographer that I know to trust who has bothered to comment on PGP has said to not use it. For example see [https://www.schneier.com/tag/pgp/](https://www.schneier.com/tag/pgp/), or [https://secushare.org/PGP](https://secushare.org/PGP).

Therefore I won't be using PGP. No matter how much you like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good for them, but PGP is essentially dead for any non-technical zealot users. S/MIME is better supported and easier to use.

<comment><USER39> That's actually the deal with Thunderbird, too. Supported S/MIME and needed a plugin, Enigmail, to interface with OpenPGP. What is happening here is that the thunderbird add-on interface is changing and they decided that instead of porting Enigmail they are integrating OpenPGP straight into Thunderbird like S/MIME is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Gave me memories of the times when US had cryptography export restrictions :)

</comment><comment><USER41> _sigh_ Thunderbird has so many great features under the hood, but the hood is the biggest issue I have that prevents me from switching full time. Classic and wide layouts are not optimized for wide resolutions in modern laptops. Their vertical layout is unusable. The columns in the list of messages are horizontal, taking up too much width. Each layout is a tradeoff on whether I want to message pane to be usable or the list of messages to be usable.

<comment><USER42> Have you tried turning off some of the columns in the message list and using Vertical view? There's an absurd number of them that you really don't need all the time.

<comment><USER41> I have, but the biggest horizontal space eaters in that view are the most important ones - subject, from, and date. Turning off the others don't really help that much. Besides, Mail.app gives me the all the same information as in Thunderbird's, but the list of messages is rearranged for that view. It doesn't eat into the message plane. Thunderbird's vertical layout is just a re-arrangement of the panes.

Edit: I mixed Vertical and Wide in my original message. I meant the vertical view is unusable. I've edited it.

<comment><USER43> Each to their own I guess. I use vertical and like it. Left pane on the left is all my accounts and folder tree; middle pane is email star:subject:sender:date; right pane is email contents.

Above the three panes I simply have the message filter box and above that is the main toolbar (get messages, write, address book, view drop down, quick filter button).

Simple but works well for me on 1920x1080 or higher (and dealing with about a hundred or so emails a day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is anyone else having problems with this, after migrating from Enigmail on Thunderbird 68?

It fails to associate my accounts with my keys in my keyring, so I try to import an exported key. Whenever I do this, it gets stuck in a loop asking me for the passphrase for an old, revoked key :( Even after I deleted the revoked keypair -- which I know I shouldn't -- it's refusing to cooperate.

So it looks like I've actually lost this feature by upgrading...

</comment><comment><USER45> Where's the actual diff? It would be interesting to see how much and what sort of code is actually involved.

</comment><comment><USER46> Nice to see Thunderbird still improving.

It also reminds me of the infamously long delay on JIRA-1369, the 20 year old ticket.

[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1369](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1369)

At least it's neat software can be used for 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER47> As someone who deals with the opsec/public interface (and is a cynic about technology in general), I have to say that encrypted email via PGP has to be the computer security nerd's biggest and longest running "emperor has no clothes".

</comment><comment><USER48> Remember when someone had to set up a GoFundMe for the one guy that was supporting OpenPGP and everything thought, "let's help this guy out" _but at the same time thought_ Why, though?

</comment><comment><USER49> Reminds me of this article on HackerNews a little while ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368888)

</comment><comment><USER50> Wow, this could have made such a difference to the direction of the internet, government surveillance, and maybe even saved the lives of dissidents- if it had been done 20 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER51> Has someone made a ranking of the oldest bugs Mozilla has? Maybe even by severity?

I remember some years ago a security ticket was resolved after someone on reddit celebrated its decennial.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is this the longest time between request/bug and fix?

<comment><USER52> It's in a different field, and I'm being very tongue-in-cheek - but the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the US Constitution has it beat.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty- seventh_Amendment_to_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty- seventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Revival_of_interest)

<comment><USER53> Cool link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Ignorant question time, will this mean native support for email services like proton mail?

<comment><USER30> protonmail is different in that they have their own client/server protocol and you need something like their protonmail-bridge to interface with them over IMAP (which is only for paid accounts and does not depend on this feature).

It makes it smoother to send and receive e-mails signed/encrypted with PGP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> How is the Thunderbird development speed nowadays?

<comment><USER56> Pretty moribund. They got dropped by Mozilla so it's entirely community- driven, and there's only so many things you need to add to an email client, unless you want it to turn into emacs or something.

That said it's a damn good product that's damn good at what it does.

<comment><USER57> There's as many developers working on it now as there were when it was a part of Mozilla.

<comment><USER56> Are they still paid by Mozilla, though?

<comment><USER57> They are not paid by Mozilla, but there are still paid contributors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Any thoughts on Enigmail?

</comment><comment><USER56> Who knows, we might even see GNOME getting thumbnail previews in its file picker!

</comment><comment><USER59> Why even bother at this point? PGP encryption in email is... not a good way to do secure communication.

<comment><USER60> For one, it works.

<comment><USER61> And if it doesn't work, you're doing it wrong. Or maybe never figured it out well enough to even try in the first place.</comment></comment></comment>


No More Working Late: At the End of Each Day, This Office Disappears - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3035778/no-more-working-late-at-the-end-of-each-day-this-office-disappears?utm_source=facebook

<comment><USER2> I realise they think this approach encourages a better "work/life balance" but I just see it as another way for managers to say "If I'm in the office, you have to be in the office. If I can't see you working how do I know you're working?"

I can't help but be reminded of an interview I had for a web development company in Melbourne several years ago.

When I asked "what's your policy on flexible working hours - in previous (government office) jobs I've usually been most productive working from around 11am - 7pm". To this day I cannot understand the thought process required to produce the answer I got, and say it with a straight face:

"Oh yeah, flexible working hours, sure. I mean, we have a daily sit-down meeting at 8am which you're required to attend, but you are free to take your lunch hour any time during the day..."</comment>


Lessons from the Lawbreakers - what entrepreneurs can learn from the mob - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/43421823

<comment><USER2> There is a gray scale of "entrepreneurs" and "companies" based on the means they use to gain power and influence, so this is rather natural,just as people already read Machiavel or Sun Tzu before. Law, customs, means of legitimation (media) and force are fuzzy and moving barriers.

But one should not forget that this is only one aspect, one dimension, the "power and influence" one. Companies are structures for making things together with others : people spend much time there so we should also seek other aspects within them. E.g more "horizontal" and "democratic" structures preventing mafiaesque hierarchies can also bring fullfillment to much more employees : this is especially important in companies employing well-educated and smart people like programmers at the lowest positions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there also books on what entrepreneurs can learn from homemakers who keep their families on a budget, raise well-behaved, happy, and productive children, and stay married for decades?

<comment><USER4> Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will this hold me back when looking for investors? - <AUTHOR>

Long story short, I have written a series of fitness books for a traditional publisher. They are a fun amusement for me at night. I'm pretty serious about fitness as a hobby and writing is a good outlet for that as well.
I also had a deal with my wife that when the kids got to a certain age, I could pursue my startup. They are approaching that age. I have been working on the prototype and should be ready to get in front of people in maybe a few months. I'm going to bootstrap as much as possible, though the nature of the venture requires I have a bit more capital than I can outlay myself.
Note: my venture has nothing to do with fitness so the overlap is zero.
My question is 1. would the books be seen as a negative by investors? I currently work in tech and get some pretty weird looks from people who know what I do on the side. I'm wondering if the same thing will happen when I sit down with potential investors. I'm sure it will come up in their due diligence. I'm wondering if I should address it directly or wait for it to come up. Obviously don't want to be written off as "a dumb jock".
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> This would be a plus for me. The fact that you've published books about something you have a passion for shows that a) You can get shit done, and b) You are organised and you can get shit done.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. I doubt they'd even notice.</comment>


Science Reveals Something Surprising About Metal Fans and Classical Music Lovers - <AUTHOR> http://mic.com/articles/87385/scientists-reveals-something-surprising-about-metal-fans-and-classical-music-lovers

<comment><USER2> If there are any metal fans here who think you just couldn't like orchestral music, permit me to recommend Rachmaninoff's Symphony no. 1. It's dramatic, it's bombastic -- it _rocks_!

The symphony was not well received when first performed, and his later symphonies were not as adventurous. I like the Third very much too, but not in the same way.

I'm having more trouble coming up with recommendations for classical fans who don't think they could like metal, though _Stairway to Heaven_ , if you've really never heard it (?!), would be a fine place to start. Anyone care to offer any other suggestions?

<comment><USER3> I'd recommend Nightwish. Start with "Moondance" and go from there.

And, of course, there's always Yngwie Malmsteen.

<comment><USER4> Or for something heavier, try Emperor's "Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire & Demise," written while Ihsahn took a classical music composition course. I think it has an interesting structure and brings out some of the best aspects of using distorted music and voices for dramatic effect. Might take a few listens to get it though.</comment></comment></comment>


Guy spotted wandering London Tube skimming contactless cards with POS device - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154000160962146&set=a.10150122896072146.326593.564277145&type=3&theater <comment><USER2> Looks like this FB post is just a hoax.

Linked FB post is not an original. There is an older story here in Russian: [https://tjournal.ru/22625-staling-money-with- terminal](https://tjournal.ru/22625-staling-money-with-terminal)

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe someone else can confirm, but that doesn't look like any TFL carriage i know. In fact, it looks a lot more like moscow: [http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/inside-modern-subway- car-1214...](http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/inside-modern-subway- car-1214290.jpg)

and was posted on EnglishRussia a week ago: [https://twitter.com/EnglishRussia1/status/697017291494596608](https://twitter.com/EnglishRussia1/status/697017291494596608)

It may have existed before this...

<comment><USER4> It is indeed a carriage from one of the Russian underground systems. I vaguely recall having seen this story sometime ago, and back then it was reported that this guy was spotted in Moscow underground, but these kinds of carriages can be seen in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev and possibly other cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Exact same photo was making rounds in Russian Facebook few weeks ago, judging by the door and the handle I bet it is indeed Moscow, not London.

As in this case, no one saw the guy actually skimming cards. Also if he was doing really that, why not hide POS in a bag or his pocket?

<comment> at-fates-hands This was my reaction.

If you're skimming cards, you probably want to make sure your target is unaware of what you're doing less someone sees you and notifies transit cops or some other authorities and you get arrested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get this. Credit Card fraud is used to acquire goods from unsuspecting traders. This requires a trader to have a POS and money is not usually credited for 1-4 weeks, by which time his/her account will be frozen and the police on the way.

<comment><USER7> No kidding. If you're collecting payments through a credit card processor, this sort of scam would be shut down and reversed almost immediately, since the credit card company is directly in the middle of the transaction.

<comment><USER8> While you're mostly correct, it doesn't prevent people from "trying" this sort of scam. IIRC Square had to fight many battles like this, where fake "merchants" would open a Square account, swipe stolen cards, move the money away from Square and close their account. It's many small time crooks, not one big operation (it doesn't take a genius to figure this out), so it's actually really hard to fight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would anyone ever pull a scam like this? To get a POS terminal, don't you have to submit a lot of personal information? And then, how would you anonymously get the money from the bank? It's not like you could do this over a long time lime where you slowly accumulate < $30 charges and then one day withdrawal all of the money. You would surely get flagged?

</comment><comment><USER10> I doubt he's actually skimming cards.

The risk-reward is pretty terrible. It's hard to subtly press it up against someone's pocket, and the range is pretty bad, and the first time anyone notices your account is frozen and you'll be prosecuted

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those inclined, you can get neat little leather sleeves that have two pockets, one protected, one not, here [https://www.faradaystore.com/rfid- blocking/wallets/](https://www.faradaystore.com/rfid-blocking/wallets/).

Helps me keep my debit/credit card safe(?), but if nothing else, stops it clashing with my Oyster, which can otherwise be a pain.

<comment><USER11> At this price it might be cheaper to ship it from ThinkGeek (although they seem only only have the S.H.I.E.L.D. model nowadays...): [https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1d95/](https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1d95/)

<comment><USER12> One can make an RFID shield for a folding wallet fairly easily. Take a manila folder or something similar and cut it to tightly fit in the outside pocket. Cover that with aluminum foil, then cover that with packing tape.

Place this in the outside pocket of the wallet, fold it so the RFID shield covers the contents, and cards inside are protected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you connect your card to Apple Pay you get an immediate notification every time your card is charged (might depend on the bank), which is useful for detecting this sort of thing.

Actually I'm not sure why Apple Pay should be necessary--if you have the bank's app installed that should generate notifications on "purchase" as well.

<comment><USER14> I only seem to get the notification on the phone if it was a transaction initiated with Apply Pay. I don't get them when just using the contactless card.

(I think 'modern banking with apps and notifications' is what new UK banks like Mondo[1] and Atom[2] are aiming to do)

1: [https://getmondo.co.uk/](https://getmondo.co.uk/) 2: [https://www.atombank.co.uk/](https://www.atombank.co.uk/)

<comment><USER15> >(I think 'modern banking with apps and notifications' is what new UK banks like Mondo[1] and Atom[2] are aiming to do)

Yep, I'm a customer of [https://number26.eu](https://number26.eu) and I often get a push notification about online payments even before I'm redirected back to the merchant's site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How to disable contactless cards

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Disabling-Contacless- Payment...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Disabling-Contacless-Payment-on- Debit-Cards/step2/How-to-disable-it-on-your-card/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Naive person here: if this is a thing that works, how did it escape notice as an attack vector in the stages in which this technology was debated and standardized?

<comment><USER18> It didn't. This is a known attack vector; the decision has been taken that the costs of cancelling fraudulent transactions are less than the benefits from allowing easier payment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What this guy can take advantage will be victims don't check their bank statements carefully and he can get away with the money, or else he will be in pretty bad shape to handle all the charge-backs. I will say the chance of a stolen POS is low as his goal is to get the money. If he borrows the POS from his merchant friend for this purpose, then that is not cool at all.

To me this is not a serious security threat to ordinary people.

<comment><USER20> Charge a penny and then refund it to capture the details for a recurring charge. 30 days from then you can hit the card with a $5 charge using some ambiguous merchant name like "Card validation services".

90% of people don't inspect their bank statements close enough to notice something like this. Get 1000 people and that's a healthy sum for a criminal to live off of.

<comment><USER21> > 90% of people don't inspect their bank statements close enough

But 10% of people is more than enough (by a substantial margin) to get the operation shut down, the money (all of it) returned, and probably land the guy in jail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Other commenters have pointed out that this does not appear to be on the London Tube. The post mentions nothing saying that the poster took the photograph or that it was on the London Tube, the London-Tube association of the HN headline seems to be mis-inferred from the poster's location, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, although that's quite a ways from London...

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course this is possible. Sign up for a Stripw account, feed it a PAN (credit card number), and charge it. With anti fraud mechanisms however, you're not going to get very far.

</comment><comment><USER24> Tin foil wallets is already a thing these days.

<comment><USER25> Or solid aluminium if you're looking for something more fancy: [https://www.secrid.com/en/](https://www.secrid.com/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!" \- Guy carrying POS device

</comment><comment><USER27> For the record device is Verifone VX 680.

This must be the dumbest thief ever. They practicality signed their theft. With their real name.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm definitely NOT buying an RFID-blocking wallet if they have to do marketing with hoaxes like this

</comment><comment><USER29> This is Russia. I have no difficulties believing it's genuine.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yet another reason why we can't have nice stuff. Sigh.

<comment><USER31> Contact less payments without verification is certanly not "nice stuff" but simply negligently and stupid.

<comment><USER32> Its nice because it makes payments significantly faster especially for small transactions.

When your in a busy shop getting lunch, or a bar, it saves a significant amount of time and effort.

<comment><USER33> It does save you some time, but is this time worth the security downgrade?

I guess it is up to each person to answer this question.

The main issue I have with this is that no one gave me a choice : I received my card with this feature turned on and absolutely no way to have a card without it (I asked at the bank).

<comment><USER31> I changed banks about things like this. My bank once thought that i have to have Online Banking with my account, while all i wanted (and still do) is absolutely no remote access except with the debit card. They also told me that their eTan is much safer than the classic Tan system via post so they stopped it.

I really think less is more when it goes about the safety of my money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> wait, so there is no pin that you have to enter?

<comment> yoz-y For contactless payment, no. But the transactions are limited in amount (according to the article in UK it is 30 GBP and here in France it is 20 EUR). You can also pay only a certain amount before having to use "standard" method with chip & pin.

<comment><USER35> I'm fairly certain you don't need to use chip, but you do need to use the PIN.

<comment><USER36> In the UK at least, PIN-challenges for contactless payment are random. I've heard it's supposedly approx 1 in 10 payments require the PIN, but I've been using contactless payment for just over 6 months, and it hasn't asked once (I've also used it a few times in mainland Europe, again, no PIN needed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> this is stupid</comment>


SignNow raises from Khosla to help kill faxing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/06/khosla-ventures-leads-2m-round-in-mobile-e-signature-service-signnow/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the founder of SignNow. We just finished a product release blitz, so would love to hear feedback on the apps. Trying to develop simultaneously on Android, iPhone, iPad, and the web has been quite a challenge. Pays off big if you pull it off though.</comment>


ARM v8-A with Scalable Vector Extensions: Aiming for HPC and Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/10586/arm-announces-arm-v8a-with-scalable-vector-extensions-aiming-for-hpc-and-data-center <comment><USER2> Intel losing the HPC space to NVIDIA(GPU's) and now ARM they can't be happy.

Don't know how "profitable" the HPC market at least nation-state level supercomputing is, at least directly. But the indirect gains from it, prestige, contacts, and technology transfer during the codevelopment process are likely to be quite huge.

If AMD actually hits Intel where it hurts with Zen and we don't get a Bulldozen at the end like we got with well Bulldozer; Intel might be up for a rough ride, especially if it's 3D Memory technology which seems to be now the "next big thing" at least as far as Intel's development goes doesn't pans out that well.

<comment><USER3> Intel just announced they will be fabbing ARM chips

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel- lice...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-licenses-arm- technology-in-move-to-boost-foundry-business)

<comment><USER4> Which only means ARM chips will become even more competitive with x86 chips. Intel seems to want to be in the "dumb chip manufacturer" market (kind of like how ISPs are "dumb pipes") - because if this business pans out for them, then the x86 business will struggle even more as a direct consequence of it. x86 was barely competitive with ARM at the same performance and power consumption level when Intel was using its manufacturing edge against ARM chip makers. If that gets equalized, then ARM chips should win big against Intel's own chips.

However, I expect Intel to try and shoot itself in its own foot in this business, for the same reason they killed Xscale previously. Because Intel is at a cross-point now (pun intended). They have to make a choice - either they "go big" with ARM chip manufacturing, or they try to protect the interests of the x86 division. They may put all sorts of caveats on ARM chip customers that want to buy Intel's manufacturing, so their chips can't compete directly with Intel's own x86 chips. But that will significantly hurt the potential of its ARM chip manufacturing business - so then may have to ask themselves, why are they even bothering with ARM chip manufacturing, if they're not going to go all-in on it?

So either Intel repeats its Xscale mistake by protecting the x86 chip business, and risks being completely left out of the mobile/IoT markets forever (in any capacity), while also losing a few more billions of dollars with this "ARM manufacturing experiment". Or it goes all-in with ARM chip manufacturing, manufacturing anything from IoT ARM chips to Xeon ARM competitors for anyone from MediaTek to Qualcomm, and then its x86 risks a severe decline over the next decade.

Either way, Intel has to make a choice. They can't have their cake and eat it, too, no matter how much they'd wish that to happen right now.

<comment><USER5> Still I would like for them to keep improving the x86, otherwise we will eventually just switch our chip overlord.

<comment><USER6> AArch64 is a very clean ISA. From an architectural point of view, I wouldn't be upset if AArch64 eroded away x86-64.

Of course, I don't want to sacrifice competition. It'd be awesome to see Intel and ARM competing in features, performance, power, and price on a simple target for compilers and programmers.

(Yes, I know as a practical matter x86-64 will never go away; it's simply that I like the direction the market is going.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> with code examples:

"Little ARMs pump 2,048-bit muscles in training for Fujitsu's Post-K exascale mega-brain"

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/armv8_scalable_vecto...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/armv8_scalable_vectors/)

<comment><USER7> Those code examples are all NEON or no vector ops. No SVE unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love see more attack from ARM toward Intel in different sector. I would love to see ARM SoC for desktop users.

Intel is kinda company which is used to ripping off people without serious competitor.I really like the idea of competition in CompArch area.

Lets be honest, before smartphone raise, Intel was socking people's blood and in most area, they didn't have any serious competitor.

I know ARM was selling small chips, but AFAIK (I might be wrong) those market is not even close to servers,desktops, etc market's which Intel was king for long time.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this is part of the reason Intel decided to re-license ARM and get fabbing

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel- lice...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-licenses-arm- technology-in-move-to-boost-foundry-business)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know how this compares with Hwacha or the still unreleased RISC-V Vector extension?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://community.arm.com/groups/processors/blog/2016/08/22/...](https://community.arm.com/groups/processors/blog/2016/08/22/technology- update-the-scalable-vector-extension-sve-for-the-armv8-a-architecture)

</comment><comment><USER10> More details in the upstreamed binutils support: [https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2016-08/msg00166.html](https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2016-08/msg00166.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have details on the cache design for this? 2048 bits is much larger than most cache lines in chips today.

<comment><USER12> Looking at the article, I'm not sure 2048-bit lines are quite needed (not to say that that wouldn't be interesting), from ([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/armv8_scalable_vecto...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/armv8_scalable_vectors/)): "And once a program has been built for SVE, it will run comfortably on any SVE-capable processor without recompilation, whether the CPU has support for 512, 1,024 or the full 2,048 bits. The SVE unit can automatically break a 2,048-bit vector into, say, four 512-bit vectors if its silicon implementation doesn't support the full length." This paragraph from The Register implies that you could have smaller chunks or larger depending on the silicon implementation. If you look at a 64-byte cache line (what most architectures have today, power & itanium are notable exceptions) that would mean 512-bits per line (assuming you can use the whole line, i.e. packed). For 2048-bit that means 4 cache lines worth of data could potentially be operated on at once.</comment></comment>


No One Owns the Law. Everyone Owns the Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/no-one-owns-law-everyone-owns-law <comment><USER2> EFF is wrong. This guy[0] owns the law.

0\. [http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/docum...](http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/papa- francesco-motu-proprio_20130711_organi-giudiziari.html)

(Don't believe me? go read the 1984 concordat between Rome and the US.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never understood this. You need to read case law in order to know what's illegal and what's not. How can the government expect us to follow those decisions if they don't make them public?</comment>


How are you going to celebrate Pi day? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> The 14th of March we'll have the ultimate pi day. 3/14/15 at 9:26. There'll actually be a precise instant where all the digits will be presented in the seconds' decimal places! Plus it coincides with Einstein's birthday.

How are you going to celebrate this?</comment>