Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous's ass - <AUTHOR> http://pegontech.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/why-tumblr-posterous-ass/ <comment><USER2> I think this is actually an unfair comparison. For one thing Tumblr really works the social network aspect of the site (reblogging, hearting articles, following users) whereas posterous is more an "island" blog.

Which is fine, as they both solve different problems.

I also think Tumblr is a technically superior product as well as a superior designed product (right now): for example I can embed javascript into my Tumblr, posterous doesn't allow that. Tumblr has fantastic iPhone and mobile applications, and generally feels, well, more mature.

You mention Posterous have top tier investors and developers, Tumblr does too. Tumblr has spark capital and union square ventures as their investors. Marco Arment, the technical lead at Tumblr is a perfect balance of technical chops, getting stuff done and doing it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that Tumblr's social aspects are more developed than Posterous's and that this has been a huge driver of their growth but to me that's not so much solving two different problems as Tumblr being more smartly designed -- realizing that blogging, even minimalist blogging, is inherently social.

As for Tumblr's top tier investors -- sure, that's true. I was trying to emphasize that Posterous, on paper, has everything it takes to win.

<comment><USER3> I chose Tumblr over Posterous because of the elegant templates and the art/music tastes, so I agree here. If Posterous compares itself to Gmail for blogging, then Tumblr is like a public Evernote for scrapbooking. I'm not using it to promote my own ideas or build my professional "brand". Posterous seems as though it's trying to cater both to the computer illiterate and the time-crunched techie/professional who lives and dies by email to organize life a la GTD. For example, Tumblr has a quotations format separate from the text post option, more useful to me than the Google analytics tool that Posterous offers.

The downside is that Tumblr does have a greater share of Livejournal/teen angst, but I've carved out my niche of grad students, graphic designers, and classical music aficionados who upload great performances. The fact that TED Chris and John Maeda (President of RISD) use Posterous is tempting, but also makes it more businesslike.

I have yet to understand why I would want to email posts other than videos, as it's not particularly onerous to use bookmarklets. And Posting within Tumblr means my tags autocomplete, whereas Posterous has you write tags in your email subject line. Posting videos to Posterous is easier though, as Tumblr requires videos first to be hosted on Vimeo. Posterous might have another advantage as it is more useful to coordinate updates to a multitude of other sites, including Tumblr. But I screen different content on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and Tumblr, so I actually don't want the same things posting on all my sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the article posted here recently about the locations of ancient Woolworth's stores. If you'd written an article 3 months ago that led off with the compete.com graph of the two sites' traffic, you could have written about how Posterous was kicking Tumblr's ass, and used that to support an equally plausible sounding thesis about how this was because they were based in Silicon Valley.

This article is like an inverted pyramid, balanced on a couple months' trend in compete.com stats. Not actual traffic stats even, but compete.com estimates of traffic, which as anyone who runs a site knows, can be way off.

<comment><USER5> From Compete - yearly change:

tumblr: +184.36%

posterous: +297.36%

So, uh, even with the last 3 months in posterous is still growing faster than tumblr. If it were a stock its valuation would have increased more than tumblr. Also, wouldn't there definitely be less hits to posterous based on the fact that you _EMAIL_ posts in rather than sign in? That being said, the tumblr landing experience is probably one of the reasons I blog with them and not posterous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points. I'll incorporate them into the post.

It's growing faster from a smaller base, though. I find more relevant that Tumblr is still much, much bigger. And I think it will stay that way.

<comment><USER6> One way to normalize this is to ask: How quickly was Tumblr growing when it was as small as Posterous is now? Then you're comparing apples to apples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been waiting for someone to write a post like this. Not because I think it's important to discuss one startup versus the other necessarily - they have very different markets in my mind - but because an exploration of the developing NYC aesthetic is worth examining.

I actually think it has a lot to do with early users. In the Bay Area, it's easy to find a large group of beta testers and early users who "get" technology in a profound way that (sadly) no where else in the country does. This contributes to the SV echo chamber and yields a certain type of feedback that in turn creates very distinctly "west coast" products. In New York, the number of truly tech-savvy social web types is much smaller and the majority come from media and advertising - ie, people who care first about design, and second about everything else.

While I'm sure the debate could rage all day about _real_ growth and traffic stats, that's not what I took away from this article at all.

<comment><USER8> Yes! That's the point I gravitated towards as well, there really is a similar playful yet polished vibe from several New York startups like Vimeo, Boxee and Tumblr, off the top of my head.

As for the main point of the article - couldn't disagree more, from my personal use case. I'm a Bay Are startup geek but also a designer, so hopefully my biases cancel each other out. I like Tumblr's look but abandoned it after a few days because I didn't want to get sucked into their community features. I'm not a big fan of design subcultures like deviant art or livejournal, really the only online community I've been attracted to and stuck around for is HN. And it's a pet peeve of mine when sites or apps have only good import tools and not export, it's like they want to pretend the identity you've built up around the rest of the web doesn't exist. I'd rather see better integration with my _existing_ networks elsewhere - that's where posterous' autoposting feature really impressed me. After starting up a posterous account as part of the ycombinator application process a few months ago, I gave it a try earlier this month for personal blogging and it's completely reinvigorated my site.

And I really disagree with his contention that posterous is only for geeks - the main feature set is pretty newbie-oriented. I can have my mom set up a blog in seconds via something she already understands - email - and have it autopost to her flickr and facebook accounts, which saves her the hassle of having to refer to her notebook on my instructions on how to upload and manage those services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally I don't really care for the Company A versus Company B frame, or the Region A versus Region B frame. However, I was _quite_ interested in the discussion of how a feature which sounds great to an engineer can have negative consequences for your conversion rates versus something which is quicker to implement/less sophisticated/flies-in-face-of-received- wisdom/whatever.

Other examples: "breaking navigation" during conversion funnels, long copy, 10 Ways To Write A Title Cosmo Editors Don't Want You To Know About, etc etc.

<comment><USER10> He's not really doing analysis though- he's more trolling the west coast and posturing.

<comment><USER9> That was my impression at first glance, but look at his description of the steps involved in signing up with a three element form versus signing up via email, and ignore the sarcasm for a second. His conclusion is _correct_ and would not have occurred to me absent reading the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Am I trolling? I don't think so, insofar as I use a provocative example to illustrate trends that I do think are important: the coming of age of New York as a startup hub and as a "school" for building consumer startups, and the growing importance of design vs. "hard" technology in building a successful consumer web app.

<comment><USER9> _Am I trolling? I don't think so..._

In order to avoid being mistaken for trolling in the future, you might consider:

\+ Cutting down on the curses, particular in titles.

\+ Avoid personalizing any conflict. Your favorite sports team or the hated cross-town rival "eats dust", case studies on the other hand calmly discuss math.

\+ Ratchet the sarcasm down seven notches. Eight if you're talking to people who know the people you're being sarcastic about.

\+ Avoid interjections like "(ugh)" unless they are being used in a self- deprecating fashion.

Believe it or not, you can take this advice and still sound passionate, intelligent, engaging, and perhaps even hip, if you're into that sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind advice. For me, blogging is a conversational medium, I try to write blog posts the way I would speak, and so it's pretty unfiltered. Also I try to be engaging. And insofar as my opinion/analysis has any value, I think it's better for those concerned that it be unvarnished. I don't believe most things should be sugarcoated, and I don't think the kind of people who do startups do either.

<comment><USER11> His advice might help the way you speak too. Courtesy is not sugarcoating. He noticed some good engineering in your writing, but if you want to reach people maybe your words need better design.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was hilarious. I'll keep it in mind.

<comment><USER12> you use the word insofar a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There seems to be a contradiction in his argument. He talks a lot about the signup pages, focusing on what he guesses is Tumblr's much higher conversion rate and the reasons for why that conversion rate is high. Shortly thereafter, he lays into Posterous for being too metrics-driven. How could a company that's too metrics-driven let themselves get crushed (again, according to the author's guess) on something as important as signup page conversions?

The whole piece has this arbitrary anti-Silicon Valley animus that I don't really get and which doesn't seem to serve any purpose.

It's useful to talk about conversion rates, the importance of good UI/UX, and what Tumblr and Posterous do or don't do well, but the broader, hand-waving indictment of Silicon Valley doesn't add anything.

(Also, the author doesn't directly do this, but articles like this can falsely suggest that the two companies at hand are playing a zero-sum game.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The signup pages are an example of a broader mindset which is different at Tumblr and at Posterous and which in turn, to me, exemplifies broader trends for startups. That's what I think is interesting.

I'm not saying startups should not be metrics-driven. Design and engineering are both driven by metrics. But they're different mindsets. And in this case, one is clearly winning.

You're also right that the zero-sum fallacy is wrong. However, those two companies _are_ competitors in the market and one, at least on publicly available data, is winning hands down.

<comment><USER12> you also seem to suggest that they are directly competing with each other. i use both tumblr and posterous, but i would venture a guess that many many posterous users would never ever consider using tumblr, while many tumblr users would never ever consider any form of transportation other than the fixed gear bike or any type of pants other than the skinny jeans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking at the Tumblr landing page on a touchscreen PC makes me feel like someone is trying to tell me "MASH THE BUTTON WITH YOUR PALM TO MAKE IT GO."

It's probably just because I'm not who Tumblr is for, of course. But it's still interesting to ask: can you overdo design simplicity?

<comment><USER15> How else are you supposed to use a touchscreen PC?

<comment><USER6> Shh, Jacob, get out of here, we're talking about your stuff!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just thought i should mention soup.io (i am not affiliated with them) which i found to be wonderful in design and functionality. It aggregates my flickr, last.fm, picasa updates into one blog and posts new blog entries automatically on facebook. While mobile i can just send new images/texts/links to a cryptic mail address which gets posted. Love it!

</comment><comment><USER17> Until I realized, just now, that the OP also wrote the article, I felt folks were treating him a bit unfairly. Now, not so much.

Pegobry, your point is well taken; I'm an engineer myself, and I agree -- as Web frameworks mature, and engineering/development patterns level off, design becomes the differentiating factor. And yes, provided your numbers are correct, Tumblr currently appears to be "winning." Not sure whether the latter really matters, or whether it even supports the former at all, but it's a concept with which I happen to agree.

Your mistake was to post the article here, primarily since you wrote it yourself. Most folks here are engineers who follow YC startups. You might as well have posted a link titled, "Why Microsoft Is Kicking Apple's Ass" in an Apple forum.

<comment><USER18> And the downvotes the OP is getting clearly indicate that

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> First impressions. I get what posterous can do from the get go (faq). I don't have a clue what tumblr can do for me. I scrolled through a load of self flagellation on the about page, and it still didn't tell me. Both have stupid names.

After working at a myriad of places doing web work, people tend to skimp on the important little pieces that make a site usable. A lot of the time it's style over substance.

I'd have thought tumblr could improve by having the login on the homepage. And I'd prefer to also find a simple paragraph about what it can do.

</comment><comment><USER20> Don't forget to take into account the year headstart tumblr has had.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. Isn't Tumblr at least two years older? That graph only shows a few months of 2009.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it shows the past 12 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To be honest I found this post pretty annoyingly reductive.

The essential thesis seems to be: 'I personally speculate that the design of Tumblr's signup page is better, ERGO Tumblr is kicking Posterous' ass.'

There are a lot of words in there, but none of them actually help link premise -> conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with your take on mindset. But eyeballs isn't what makes the company successful in the end, the revenue does. And who has/will have more revenue is an open question for now. Personally I'd put on Posterous.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right -- obviously this isn't a post mortem or anything. The trends could reverse, and Posterous could become wildly profitable with less users while Tumblr has plenty of traffic but no money.

Although it seems pretty obvious that both are headed for a combination of advertising/freemium model, and the revenue that comes from that seems pretty correlated to userbase size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use posterous because I like it. Tumblr is slower and isn't as power full when it comes to import/export. Javascript support or pre_made modules would be a plus for posterous as long as they keep is simple as its now.

</comment><comment><USER24> A blog entry comparing Tumblr with Posterous hosted on Wordpress. Hmmm.

What OP _does_ screams much louder than what he _says_.

<comment><USER25> Where's the contradiction? He doesn't say 'Tumblr is the best choice for my needs.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "You can't just engineer anymore. You have to design" is bullshit. Design is a tool, you still have to measure its results, pretty is not equal to better.

You can really see this if you look at the history of direct mail, some of the best performing mailers ever were pretty ugly. (source: [http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Mailings-Dension- Hatch/...](http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Mailings-Dension- Hatch/dp/1566251621))

<comment><USER6> If you read past the first paragraph, he explains how the design goes far beyond "pretty". He explicitly says that "pretty" is not the point.</comment></comment>


Willow Garage: The Personal Robot Will Be Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2009/06/22/willow-garage-the-personal-robot-will-be-open-source/

<comment><USER2> I took a class with one of the Willow Garage guys, Kurt Konolige, last fall, and near the end of the quarter he took us on a tour of their offices. The PR2's arm is a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Their navigation was a little buggy when I saw it, and from the milestone video it looks like it's still not quite there. Glad to see they finally hit the self-charging milestone though.

I don't think the article mentioned this (may have missed it) but WG will be building several (10?) PR2's and loaning them out for free to research labs. Their business model is basically "encourage and support open source robotics now so that we can bring forward the point at which we can all start making money off it".

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I've been looking through their website for a while now (extremely interesting) and wondered what their business model is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm hoping we will see an open source hardware revolution in many different area's (consumer electronics is long overdue). It's so much easier when you don't have to hack the bios.

<comment><USER5> I'm hoping we'll see an easily-hackable high-quality hardware trend, much like the iPhone. Its a very solid product for 90% of users, but enthusiasts can mod it out with just a little effort.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately the iPhone isn't a great example of a hackable device. With each new hardware revision, Apple has closed security holes and made it more difficult to jail break your device.</comment></comment></comment>


WIRED NextFest opens tomorrow... But here's a sneak peek of the technologies you'll see - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/wired_nextfest_2008-chicago-preview-pt1.php

<comment><USER2> Related post written by one of my reporters: [http://windycitizen.com/news/magnificent- mile/2008/09/26/pre...](http://windycitizen.com/news/magnificent- mile/2008/09/26/preview-of-wired-next-fest-at-millennium-park)</comment>


AtomizeJS: A library for writing distributed programs in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://atomizejs.github.com/

<comment><USER2> This sounds very impressive and interesting. Synchronized distributed applications without deadlocks, while worrying only about client-side code? Sounds amazing, I'll have to play with it.

<comment><USER3> Same here, I'll have to put something together with this later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe I'm missing something, but how do you ensure that nefarious clients don't screw up your state?

<comment><USER5> Currently, you can't, so you're not missing anything. :) But I'm currently working on the necessary hooks so that any security model you want can be enforced by the server.

<comment><USER4> I have worked on projects that occupy this space. I tend to think that it's ok for the client to have arbitrary read access, but for writes it's a better idea for the client to generate events that are then approved and applied by the/a server. The reason for this is that it's much easier to approve high level events than low-level change-sets.

<comment><USER6> Yup. I haven't dug too much, but is there anyway to have the web clients just respond to state changes and then have some server "client" (in node or what not) be allowed to alter state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've just pushed new versions of the client and server which solve a couple of bugs. Please let me know how you get on if you have a chance to try out this stuff. Would be great to get some feedback.

<comment><USER2> Just out of curiosity, how much is it tied to Node? I mean, I imagine the server side could be implemented in other languages, but how much are you leveraging the fact that Javascript is used on both server and client? Just wondering because I'd be interested in running this with a Python back-end.

<comment><USER5> The protocol between client and server is dead simple, and the server is currently about 400 lines of code. The only reason the server is still in nodejs is because it's quite neat to be able to write transactions on the server-side too and by being in JS, I can just use the same client code as in the browser to do that, with very few changes. Writing just the txn engine in other languages would be very simple too. Next week I'm hoping to write some documentation for the protocol. But it's really just abstract addresses and version numbers and such. No rocket science at all - especially given that Node is single-threaded!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool idea! I hope it never gets popular at the same time.</comment>


1400 Bitcoins stolen after a user installed an old Electrum wallet - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/_benkaufman/status/1299971319430352897 <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the original github issue: [https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecommen...](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecomment-683356052)

And here is the transaction: [https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ef600c380a239d9b9...](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ef600c380a239d9b929c6c964deaf7060e309750950a516cee65576232b0c53c)

</comment><comment><USER2> Its possible to track the coins. I'm curious, if some innocent third party ends up buying all or part of the stolen coins what are the implications ?</comment>


Things I Should Have Known at 20 - <AUTHOR> http://inoveryourhead.net/20-things-i-should-have-known-at-20/

<comment><USER2> 'reduce expenses, learn to cook, sleep well and get a six-pack (get thin)' are the last things you want to do in your 20s.

Well, get a six-pack or better a case of beer and meet your friends. 20s passed so quickly.

In your 30s there is plenty of time to save money, read useless crap, educate yourself with propaganda, do a lot of programming and 'get known for 1 thing'.

I wish I spent more time doing nothing but unfortunately couldn't afford it...

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey HN, I'm 19. Can you tell me if this is BS or not ? Thanks.

<comment><USER4> I'm nearly 50 and from my experience this isn't BS. I have no idea whether the OP speaks from experience, but the advice itself is worth keeping in mind.

<comment><USER4> I should also add that applying such advice is difficult, but just beginning the process sets you apart from the vast majority. You have to make an attempt to understand the shades and nuances, and that requires talking to those with experience and/or reading some really good books over and over until you've soaked it all in.

The key is to seek versatility in core areas. If you want to be a programmer (or a musician, or anything else), by all means go for it. BUT you still have to figure out what successfully managing your finances and relationships, etc. entails - just don't be guided by loose advice from family and friends or even "experts". Do your own homework, set your goals, even as you pursue your passion. The sooner you understand the pitfalls of debt, risk management, and perhaps even the notion of passive income, the sooner in your life you will be able to make more time to pursue your passion, your pleasures and the relationships that form the far bigger part of a meaningful life.

In my case I began my move to get things in order in my mid-thirties. Most of my productive years prior to that were spent pursuing my passion then, golf (and nope, I was never PGA material even in my dreams, so be careful of your passions as well) ... but luckily I caught myself in time. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks. This was too late for me, but perfect to pass on to my 16 year old daughter.

</comment><comment><USER5> I may be 21 now, but I'm taking the advice seriously.

<comment><USER6> That's a very good thing. The one that struck a cord the most with me was #20. I can't emphasize just how important this is. I learned a lot from them, but I wasted a number of years in my 20's on trying to fix relationships that were bad because I thought "if I just put in more effort, problems X, Y and Z affecting my significant other will be solved and everything will be better." That's only true if the other person is working toward a common goal with you, and the same thing goes for friendships as well. Do _not_ try to be the person who solves people's problems; I know that I got burned in doing so.

FWIW, I just turned 30 earlier this month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was actually a pretty tame article compared to the other stuff this guy posts on a regular basis..

</comment><comment><USER8> Learn how to start a business and lead a healthy life lol</comment>


We Asked People Around the World How They Feel About AI. Here's What We Learned - <AUTHOR> https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/we-asked-people-around-the-world-how-they-feel-about-artificial-intelligence-heres-what-we-learned/ <comment><USER2> I'm mostly just tired of all the hype, and at this point really wouldn't mind another AI winter.

Machine learning ended up being a useful technique to add to the classical computer vision toolbox to do things like object identification and semantic segmentation. These things were almost impossible to do robustly before, and now they're relatively straightforward, if still a bit challenging.

Same with audio identification and synthesis. It's a lot better than the old Markov chain based systems for these specific tasks.

But that's about it - it's useful as a _tool_ for certain classes of highly specific tasks, but has been largely crap everywhere else.

The promised super smart products that were end-to-end "AI" never really materialized. Smart speakers are shitty and pointless. And IBM renamed all of their products Watson.

<comment><USER3> The most interesting applications are what you don't see.

For instance, you can do a lot of your engineering and even data science work without ever touching real data (due to ML):

[https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont- necessarily...](https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily- need-data-for-data-science-48d7bf503074)

Not saying it's not over hyped, just that good AI would augment your life in ways subtle, but hugely impactful.

Edit: Another thought - how are funds in the market allocated? Partially by humans, largely augmented (if not explicitly allocated) by AI... meaning AI determines which companies get funding and thus what you can buy / access is determined by these algorithms

<comment><USER4> If you work primarily on synthetic data as a data scientist, you deserve to get fired. The link is pretty cool though.

<comment><USER3> The argument is you can design a model, check that it runs, then submit the job to train / evaluate the model on real data. The data scientist doesn't necessarily need to touch the real data ever (especially if ML is used).

<comment><USER5> This is not a great setup if one requires a model that can extrapolate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> AI does not exist. There is no 'intelligence' in ML model.

<comment><USER6> I find that, if you look closely enough, there can never really be any "intelligence". Everything is just a model or a likely association or a statistical model, etc. and it will always be that. This statement of there being no intelligence really seems overly reductionist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 10% of the world "well educated" about AI, that's not how I would usually use that term.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to see how much more excitement there is for AI in the developing world. They're the ones with the biggest problems so it makes sense. Seems NA/Europe feels like they have the most to lose. While the reality should hopefully be win-win, it does seem likely to level the playing field around the world. But a hyper-capitalist country like the US is definitely going to have the biggest social challenges adapting to job losses.

</comment><comment><USER9> Al who?

</comment><comment><USER10> Open AI GPT-2 model is pure trash, and self driving cars don't work. These could be considered break throughs, or AI beyond what we've seen, if they worked.

Until one of these two works as promised, AI is a failure and neural networks are still just simple stacked linear regressions. They aren't greater than the sum of their parts.</comment>


Why Christmas tree prices have risen 125% since 2013 - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/why-the-price-of-a-christmas-tree-has-risen-125-since-2013-2514840259.html <comment><USER2> My girlfriend took me to her preferred "tree shop" \- paid $236. Had to laugh as I wasn't anticipating the premium, and that was merely mid-level at 6-7'

Growing up I always recall them being ~$80

<comment><USER3> Yowza, I went to a San Francisco lot run by a charity. No frills, ~7' for ~$80.</comment></comment>


Show HN: FI Calc – an early retirement calculator for engineers - <AUTHOR> https://ficalc.app <comment><USER2> Nice design and great idea but I got lost and did not succeed to build up a successful strategy

<comment><AUTHOR> Bummer! There are two main levers: increasing your portfolio value or decreasing your spending. If you do one of those two things I'm sure you'll be able to create something that feels successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why are you specifically advertising this as "for engineers"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Two reasons:

1\. engineers are disproportionately represented in the early retirement community, so in a way any FIRE resource could be considered "for engineers". ...maybe? Do you buy that? No? Yeah I get it.

2\. a couple of weeks back, an early retirement blog that had nothing to do with engineering landed on the front page having also advertised itself as "for engineers." It seemed like an ingenious marketing strategy so I decided to try it out. It didn't work out so well for this app, though. So it goes.</comment></comment>


Lisp in the Cloud - The Next Lisp Machine Will Be Everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/mtraven/lisp-in-the-cloud <comment><USER2> This seems kind of contrived, since you can already use a lisp to target the JVM, CLR and the browser. But I guess since the author thinks lisp adoption (??) is a political imperative, maybe I'm just missing the point.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that is and always will be a second-rate citizen on those VMs. They weren't made for LISP.

<comment><USER4> I'm writing a Lisp compiler for one of those, and I'm surprised how well it fits. x86 wasn't designed for Lisp, either.

<comment><USER5> Does it run on ARM as well?

<comment><USER4> No, it's designed to run on a VM that provides a lot of high-level support. If you want a Lisp compiler for ARM, it'd be much easier to start with one of the mature free Lisp compilers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lecture from the Man Who Dropped Both Atomic Bombs - <AUTHOR> http://warisboring.com/articles/listen-to-this-lecture-from-the-man-who-dropped-both-atomic-bombs/ <comment><USER2> Surely the pilots were briefed about the destructive power of the weapon they were going to drop on civilians. He knew. He had a choice. He could have chosen not to fly that mission. Even with the risk of being court marshalled. Even if somebody else would have done it anyway. He could have stepped aside and chosen despise or even punishment over glory. But he didn't. He went ahead and pulled the trigger on women and children. He chose the glory.

Saying later that "those were the times" does not exonerate you from the sins committed.

\--

This is a good example of choices that we might face in our lives.

We all have a choice not to participate in the insanity (or "immorality") of war. In fact, if we all did, wars wouldn't exist at all.

Refusing to go to the battlefield and kill other young people is not immoral. It is the most moral and humane thing you can do.

If you ever need to make that choice, remember this.

I highly recommend reading Tolstoy's "The kingdom of God is within you", were he does a very deep analysis of war, state, violence and Christianity not as religion, but as a non-violent philosophy of life.

<comment><USER3> Hindsight is easy isn't it?

Thoughts on the matter might be different when fighting an enemy that has more or less threatened to wipe out all who disagree with them. Including the fact they have no problem killing your women and children before you've even decided to fight back.

You should really speak to some Chinese that are old enough to remember what they survived before you start judging with your modern sensibilities.

It was total war not declared by the side that eventually won. Consider yourself lucky.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I don't think he or she is referring to only the Allies side doing harm. The same blame would be placed on any war-wager, and that includes Japan.

This feels a bit like a "the other side did worse things therefore revenge or killing is justified" type of argument to me. Using this kind of justification, either side could use it to their own advantage and we'd end up with an long spiral of justifications simply because "the other side attacked first" or "the other side did bad things, and we'll make it right by killing more people".

That said, this is just my view of what's right and wrong, and I'm quite ignorant on WWII - but the idea of attacking and invading in the name of preventing killing would seem to be not only unethical (killing is being done) but also irresponsible because the other side will retaliate with more killing. Not many people think of the responsibility.

<comment><USER3> If you are referring to me, I am speaking in terms of the actions of the Japanese against the Chinese. I'm not even discussing Allied behaviors. I do feel that in many ways the Allies did things I personally would not have approved of, I still have no problems that they were done.

The problem as I see it with these discussions, much as you point out you are ignorant of WWII, is that too many people do not fully understand WWII. They look at it with their modern sensibilities and judge accordingly. This is extreme ignorance in action. The simplest reason is because we are now working on our second or third generation of separation of the time. We have not had a total war like there was with WWII. People are losing that perspective, that it was total war. I would imagine many recent college grads don't even realize what the term total war means.

So, why do I not have a problem with the nuclear bombings of Japan and the potential invasion? Because the Japanese were the aggressors. I have little problems with the actions of people defending themselves against aggression.

<comment><USER5> _They look at it with their modern sensibilities and judge accordingly._

It seems that they think that Hitler was evil and everyone else got taken along for the ride. It's so much more complicated than that, especially for those people who were there at the time.

 _I would imagine many recent college grads don 't even realize what the term total war means._

A great many college grads, high school grads and people born after 1950.

We're talking about people who don't understand that "War" means more than people shooting at each other. People who don't understand that we haven't had a war in over 70 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The US dropped incendiary bombs in dozens of japanese cities, so an atomic bomb didn't really add much to the brutality of the situation.

Furthermore, if the objective of these bombs was to simply convince the japanese to shorten the war, couldn't they have been dropped off the coast of Tokyo?

<comment><USER7> They needed to demonstrate not only the awesome and terrible power of the bomb, but also that it could be accurately targeted (hence, two bombs).

<comment><USER8> > but also that it could be accurately targeted

I think it was more to prove that it wasn't a one-off ... that it was repeatable and could be used as many times as is necessary. But that too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" I say war by its very nature is immoral. If you are going to prolong a war by using a lesser weapon, that is an immorality. But I do not see any special immoralities where it comes to using the best weapon to get it over with in a hurry."_

That's a pretty unassailable statement.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure it is unassailable.

More quickly doesn't always equal less casualties, for instance. And even where more quickly does equal less casualties for your side, it could mean vastly more for the other side, or less military deaths but more civilian one. Or how about the potential for ongoing damage to both environment and survivors health.

This isn't to say that a nuclear attack, or any other weapon that could bring a war to a swift close, is automatically worse - just that's not automatically and unassailably better either.

<comment><USER11> Given an average of 100,000 [EDIT 100,000 per month since 1937] civilian deaths at the hands of the imperial army just in China alone (there were civilians being slaughtered in Indo-china and the Korean peninsula also), if the bombs ended the war just two months earlier than it would have ended (incredibly unlikely to the point of absurdity), it was a net gain in civilians saved.

And it can be well argued that the Japanese civilian deaths should be blamed on the imperial army for not capitulating when it was obvious the war was lost.

<comment><USER12> 100,000 per... month I'm guessing?

<comment><USER11> Yikes, thanks. Yes it averages out to about 100,000 per month since the start of the mainland invasion in 1937.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Probably related: The testimony of Charles Sweeney, who flew both atomic missions: [https://eahnc.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/senate-testimony- of-m...](https://eahnc.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/senate-testimony-of-major- general-charles-w-sweeney-may-11-1995/)

Both seem to claim they are the only one who flew both missions though, I can't tell if they are correct.

[Edit: Changed the link to a wordpress site for easier reading.]

</comment><comment><USER14> All new evidence points to the fact that the Japanese were thinking of surrendering and that the Americans new it, before the bombs were dropped. Also it shows that the bombs had little to no effect on their reasoning. They whished to surrender on their own terms which they did, more or less, despite the "unconditional surrender" bs.

<comment><USER15> What new evidence? I searched for this a couple of months ago and found that the "Japanese were close to surrendering" is one more recent 'internet myth' that's been propagating lately, with no real hard, substantiated evidence. Please help me correct myself on this issue.

<comment><USER16> The intercepts collected by the Allies on the internal debates of some of the Japanese, and the internal debates the US decision makers had over whether to opt for unconditional surrender or something believed to be more likely to be accepted are pretty well documented by this reasonably neutral source: [http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/)

<comment><USER17> I'd really appreciate your at least calling out which of these 75 documents supports this thesis. I started skimming the titles and descriptions but didn't find anything contradicting the Official Story which I've been studying closely for the last few months before giving up.

Yes, of course, the Japanese were considering surrender, that was no secret to our decision makers, and yes, of course there was consideration of relaxing "unconditional" surrender, as we signaled to them WRT to the Emperor. We weren't stupid, that was one of many reasons War Secretary Stimpson removed Kyoto from all target lists (he was familiar with the east Pacific region and had visited the city prior to the war).

<comment><USER16> Fair enough. Try documents 33 and especially 40

Of course it doesn't make it clear that some form of surrender is going to be straightforward since the Ambassador who's outspoken in acknowledging Japan should accept a settlement like that forced on Germany as the only way to preserve the Emperor is not in a position to influence an internal vote, and the more important Foreign Minister attempting to arrange "end the war" is also quite adamant that it won't be "like a unconditional surrender".

But it's also impossible to cogently argue that the US, being aware through intercepts that Japanese ministers both (i) want peace and acknowledge it might be painful and (ii) don't want peace if it involves "unconditional surrender", was sincerely interested in avoiding further casualties when after internal debate they chose to unambiguously insist upon (ii) being the condition for not wiping out cities.

Document 49, an appraisal of the situation which opens "President, Leahy and JFB agreed Japan looking for peace. President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia rather than some country like Sweden" is a reasonable indication the substance of these intercepts was available to Truman and other decision makers. Easy to see why the U.S. wanted to avoid protracted and potentially duplicitous negotiations via their frenemies; less easy to set the value of uncomplicated negotiations at ~200,000 lives...

As for Stimson, he wasn't stupid, but he was also heavily outgunned by the war party when it came to arguing for the relaxation of unconditional surrender, which is why it was not included in the Potsdam declaration against his express wishes. [There's also no evidence that signals of the relaxation of unconditional surrender were sent separately from this (and abundant evidence from cables the US was intercepting either side of Hiroshima that even Japan's peaceniks were only _hoping_ they might be able to secure the Emperor's status)]

The US had of course outlined conditions for peace much earlier (before it was clear Japan had lost) which included a right to choose a form of government, were aware the Japanese ambassador was using this as a basis to argue the emperor's status might be an acceptable surrender condition _prior_ to the Potsdam Declaration, and yet opted to _remove_ signals of the Emperor's status from earlier drafts of that ultimatum before issuing it. Given all this was known and debated at the time, it's difficult to cogently argue the Potsdam Declaration that actually went out was intended as anything other than a prelude to dropping the bomb.

<comment><USER17> Sorry for this not well proofread wall 'o text, I don't have time to condense it. It's based my analysis of the 3 documents you cited, and to the point of analyzing document #49 was written without close notice to all the points you make above.

The #1 point I'd make in response to them, which I touch on below, is that the Foreign Ministry had no power to speak of in the government to affect the needed change in posture. Not all ministries and ministers are created equal, the US traditionally elevated the Secretary of State to the highest level, xeno"phobic" Imperial Japan not at all.

33, MAGIC intercept (diplomatic PURPLE, and I'll note the leadership of Japan didn't trust the Foreign Ministry as of Pearl Harbor....), Foreign Secretary Togo to USSR Ambassador Sato, July 17th, a month after we took Okinawa, things were utterly dire, the US Navy was freely rampaging on the coasts and 3 days earlier had sunk 7 of the 12 railroad ferries that ran between Hokkaido and Honshu, taking out 80% of 1/4 of Japan's coal supply.

WHOA! I wrote the preceding before reading to the end of this document, based on _Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945_ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=10132884](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=10132884)), and this exact set of facts with numbers is discussed in detail at the end.

Anyway, note this language in the message to Sato:

" _Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not asking the Russians ' mediation in anything like unconditional surrender._"

40: Wow, Sato ... spoke truth to power, totally burned his relationship with the government back in Japan (the members of which would soon be tried as war criminals, e.g. Togo died in prison), put Togo, subject to assassination, in an untenable position, and Sato's suggestion for immediate action, what we signaled we were willing to do, and which we actually did, surrender with the one condition of retaining the Imperial House, was utterly rejected.

And in part II we see us signaling the all but Imperial House surrender prior to dropping the first bomb. And:

" _I am fully aware of the delicate aspects this matter involves at home._ "

Yep, do the right thing, get assassinated for your trouble. A bit like Germany falling to the Nazi's, Japan was doomed in the 1920s when a culture of acceptable political assassination developed. That plus a constitution that required the Army to form a government (the Navy as well, but for Japan the Navy was survival, the Army a luxury, a very very expensive one in the end).

Also mention of the rail ferry sinkings in Sato's July 20 message to Togo; it really was a big deal.

Side note, the Japanese never had any air or civil defenses to speak of. They really were unprepared. And they're really concerned about food and the fall harvest, something I've heard before. Plans were being draw up to collect acorns....

Sato also realizes that the only path to peace is through the Emperor, only he had the station to get the Army etc. to stand down, and even then it was resisted with murder ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident)).

" _The Government will surely choose the road..._ "; yeah, following this message, just barely after 2 cities got nuked, the Soviets invaded Manchuria, and the Emperor intervened at the possible cost of his life.

" _We must also recognize that another cause for the evils we have drawn upon ourselves today lies in the fact that even before the Manchurian incident there were those who showed contempt for diplomacy and indifference toward international relations_ ".

I.e. those who rejected this proposal by Sato.

" _We should, however, give a fair hearing to the argument that 'if the enemy actually carries out a landing, we will concentrate all our strength on a counter-attack and will thus bring about his disillusionment._"

Note, this is a strong argument. Kyushu had been massively reinforced, 9 division or so, enough to prevent a successful amphibious assault, along with 8,000 or so kamikazes, which, under more difficult conditions, a long flight over water, had off Okinawa inflicted the worse causalities in a battle on the US Navy. Something we had no answer to. BTW, we knew they had ... at least 6,000, our estimate turned out to be an underestimate.

Anyway, Sato is wrong here, Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, as originally planned was dead except in the eyes of MacArthur, who didn't believe the intelligence we were producing. Those who knew about the atomic bomb were planning on using a total of around 15 in the invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, 5-9 in the former. After the 2nd bomb was dropped, there was serious discussion about using the 3rd in another strike against the homeland vs. reserving it for Olympic. See this excellent account about that period: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691128189](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691128189)

Ah, those who didn't know about the bomb? They were planning the details of liberal use of poison gas, this was not a "clean" theater like the one in Europe, this was war to the knife.

And, as I noted above, Sato's proposal was soundly rejected.

I don't think 49 is at all definitive, I'm not sure it's even useful. It was clearly drafted after the fact, it's undated but written after the surrender, and is a brief summary of two consecutive days two days before Hiroshima.

It's usefulness depends on one non-major actor's interpretation of events that I'm not even 100% sure he was a eyewitness of. I'm not even sure what the hell the content of the middle sentences of the first day is about.

What news was Leahy supposed to be holding out on? Neither he nor his Navy were involved in the future atomic bombings besides potential rescue of crews if ditching was required. It was all Army/War Department, and it almost resulted in the effective abolition of the Navy under Truman (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals)).

Anyway, I still see no better alternative to the bombings as soon as we could possibly do them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I still don't really buy this whole trade-off idea used to justify dropping the bombs, massacre from above vs massacre on the ground.

<comment><USER19> Massacre from above minimized American losses.

<comment><USER20> Which was traded for Japanese civilians though, no?

<comment><USER21> By most approximations, there were about 200,000 causalities from the bombs and their aftermath.

That said, had the bombs not been dropped, estimates ran into the millions for Allied casualties and tens of millions for Japanese (civilian + soldiers) casualties.

Ultimately it boils down to an issue of numbers (achieved by expediency).

<comment><USER20> True, if you assume it was only between dropping the bombs or full scale invasion though. In the end we'll never know I guess.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. All this "we can predict a future that never happened" bothers me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Plenty of US leaders at the time opposed it (some privately). Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc:

[http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm](http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think the article makes it too obvious, but he died in 1992. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser)

A person who thinks they know lots, but actually don't. Especially with age they think they are owed respect, but no

</comment><comment><USER24> Accepting that a nuclear weapon was the best way to end the war, was it really necessary to use 2? It's the second one that doesn't sit well with me. Even by the logic in this account, the first bomb made the threat of subsequent attacks real. At least it is still being discussed and debated.

<comment><USER22> What's crazy is that they planned to continue using them as they became available. So 3, 4, 5 ..., 20, etc. 100? It's hard to know at what point they would have stopped had the regime not surrendered (which they were already planning to do).

So it's not really "it's better that 200k Japanese civilians die than x US soldiers" (which is a despicable view and is based on the false views that massacring civilians is OK and that unconditional surrender was necessary), because they didn't know two bombs was the magic number. It could have been 10, or 50. Basically they were probably willing to kill a whole lot more civilians than they did.

<comment><USER25> They were willing to fight until they won. Just like the other side. It had been reduced to that: fight to survive. Remember, 50 millions dead already. No time for philosophy.

<comment><USER22> > They were willing to fight until they won. Just like the other side. It had > been reduced to that: fight to survive. Remember, 50 millions dead already. > No time for philosophy.

Where "fight" means massacre civilians by the hundreds of thousands or millions. Where "won" means received unconditional surrender when they could already have a very favorable conditional surrender. Where "fight to survive" means they (the US in general and the US military, not individual soldiers) at this point (when they dropped the bomb) were in no danger of not surviving. Where "no time for philosophy" means no time for a conscience or morality.

And plenty of US military leaders at the highest levels did have a conscience and opposed using the atomic bomb against civilians at that point in the war. See my link in other comments.

<comment><USER26> Is soldier versus civilian really such a different thing? It seems more like a gradient, to me -- you support your country by building bombs / planes / etc., that's very different than just living peacefully on your own farm.

It's important to recall that every nation's entire economy was subsumed in the war effort. American "civilians" wanted to kill Japanese; Japanese "civlians" probably hated Americans (there was a lot of racial prejudice in that era, on both sides).

Civilians may not have been combatants, but they were very much a part of the war machinery, and as such became a strategic target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not all statements have to be timeless.

I think the arguments are valid for his paradigm. Some of us may have problems even entertaining such ideas, but then again we grew up to a docile, friendly japan. Just to make it more contemporary, swap Japan with Iran.

(Disclosure: I'm not in anyway against Iran or something)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious, for those who oppose the nuking of Japan---would you also oppose the hypothetical nuking of Germany before Normandy?

</comment><comment><USER29> What most people in the west neglect about Japan was what it was doing to China and south-east Asia during the war. Their killing of civilians was greater than what the atomic bombs did. That's where the good came from - saving the rest of Asia, not saving America.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial cities making the weapons that the Japanese were using to kill the Chinese civilians. The residents were civilians but not entirely innocent. They were part of the war machine.

<comment><USER30> You could say the same of anyone working in any industry on any side during the War. The civilian farmers in the US weren't actively killing people, but their food was sustaining soldiers who sure were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So by this man's logic it would be OK to nuke Iraq?

<comment><USER32> how so?

<comment><USER33> The cost in Iraqi lives and destruction has probably been a few times greater than that from the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it would have been quicker.

Whether it would have lead to functioning government that wasn't expansionist and that served Iraqis without prejudice is another question entirely. We never really discussed the aims to be achieved by the use of conventional arms either though.

One could also weigh the thousands of US soldiers lives lost and >$1T cost against the cost of a few nuclear warheads.

I don't think it's too difficult to see how the arguments to justify two specific uses of atomic bombs are entirely dependent on their context, and making them sound like general rules probably does people a disservice.

<comment><USER34> It wouldn't have been quicker, though. Anyone can see that: if you nuke Iraq, you'd face a massive, worldwide, prolonged counter-movement.

The fact that this didn't happen during WW2 means that it was one of the only times you could actually get away with using nuclear weapons, and the people making that decision knew that they could get away with it. If they couldn't, they wouldn't have used them. They relied on ignorance that simply doesn't exist today.

<comment><USER17> _They relied on ignorance that simply doesn 't exist today._

I think that goes a little to far. More like they "relied" on the context of a World War that had butchered 75 million people, 1/3 of that in the Pacific. And as I've noted elsewhere, was butchering 250,000 people per month in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and was looking to kill maybe a million Allied soldiers, with no upper limit for the Japanese population, as had just been demonstrated in Okinawa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> tl;dr Man who kills children still not remorseful. Says made correct decision in light of new information.</comment>


Ethernaut: wargame to learn about smart contract security - <AUTHOR> https://ethernaut.zeppelin.solutions/ <comment><USER3> If you're interested in smart contract security, this repo [1] is a good resource too.

1\. [https://github.com/trailofbits/not-so-smart- contracts](https://github.com/trailofbits/not-so-smart-contracts)

<comment><USER4> And more:

[https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best- practices/](https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/)

[http://dasp.co](http://dasp.co)

Disclaimer: I contributed to the first link.

Also, I wrote this a while back for any experienced engineers that want to learn Solidity:

[https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/solidity/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/solidity/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another related resource (seems similar to the design of ethernaut) [https://github.com/pdaian/hackthiscontract](https://github.com/pdaian/hackthiscontract)

</comment><comment><USER6> Before investing time in learning how to program on ethereum, one should first assess the engineering feasibility of it's blockchain:

[https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/how-does-ethereum- work-...](https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/how-does-ethereum-work- anyway-22d1df506369)

Take a look at their github and how the overwhelming majority of users can't run a full node (If you can't run a full node, you rely on an intermediary, you are not decentralized).

I'm not sure if the "marketing team behind a decentralized project" is still doing it but they used to be continuing to market ethereum as an immutable blockchain which is patently false due to their roll back of the DAO.

<comment><USER7> That's a blatant lie, running a full node is not required to "be decentralized", for the same reason you don't need to run a full node in Bitcoin. Light nodes have the same guarantees about the integrity and irreversibility that full nodes do. Perhaps you should try learning about them - see [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client- protocol](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-protocol) \- before stating things you don't understand? The fact that the worst thing a "fudster" like you has to say against Ethereum is that it had a hard fork to revert a millionaire hack caused by a bug in early stages of the project; whereas something not too different also happened to Bitcoin - <USER2> [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident) \- when it had the same age; says it all.

I don't often comment here, but I simply can't understand why an human being would come to the internet and hatefully attack things it doesn't like with straight made-up facts. I mean, I know this is so common, I just don't get why. This kind of thing makes me sad about humanity as a whole. Why can't we be nice to each other?

<comment><USER8> > Light nodes have the same guarantees about the integrity and irreversibility > that full nodes do.

This is not true. SPV nodes blindly follow the longest chain and are at the mercy of miners. Running a full node guarantees you that all the protocol rules are being followed to the letter, while an SPV node cannot verify chain validity rules (like the 21M coin limit) and could be fooled to accept payments with money made out of thin air.

> Ethereum is that it had a hard fork to revert a millionaire hack caused by a > bug in early stages of the project; whereas something not too different also > happened to Bitcoin

The Bitcoin developers fixed a bug in the Bitcoin protocol. The Ethereum developers bailed-out a buggy smart contract written by a third-party, where the bug had nothing to do with the Ethereum protocol itself. I don't think the two are comparable.

Something that would've been comparable is the Bitcoin developers doing a chain-rollback to save the funds lost by MtGox. Which of course would be a horrible idea.

Also, when that happened in 2010, Bitcoin was a pet project valued at $0.08, with a total market cap of ~$250k. Ethereum was nearly a two-billion dollars project when they bailed out the DAO!

<comment><USER7> > where the bug had nothing to do with the Ethereum protocol itself. I don't > think the two are comparable.

You're defining "bug" to fit your purposes. It wasn't "just a faulty contract". The entire protocol had a reentrancy situation that wasn't intended by any of its developers nor expected by any of its users, and that went against the expected semantics of its official programming language; it was a protocol bug, for any sensible definition. I don't see anyone neutral arguing it wasn't.

If you argue The DAO hacker had the right for the Ether he got because "that's what the code said", you could also claim the Bitcoin address had the right to claim his billions BTC, because that's what the code said back then. He only followed protocol rules and got all his money taken away by the hard fork.

<comment><USER8> > see anyone neutral arguing it wasn't.

Well, FWIW, I've never heard _anyone_, neutral or not, claiming the DAO hack was a bug in the Ethereum protocol before now...

And that's because, well, it very clearly isn't. hackingdistributed has a good overview[0] of the coding bug in the DAO that enabled the hack which I recommended you to read.

Looking at this another way, this could've been avoided by the DAO developers if they developed the smart contract more carefully. And the exact kind of bug that lead to the hack was still possible on Ethereum following the bail-out hardfork. So how can one claim the hardfork fixed a protocol bug?

> If you argue The DAO hacker had the right for the Ether

I didn't say that. I only argued about the differences between fixing a protocol bug and bailing-out companies that build on top of the protocol.

[0] [http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the- dao...](http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/)

<comment><USER9> I agree it wasn't a bug in the protocol. However, it was an issue that people in general weren't aware of, and even the official tutorial code on ethereum.org had similar vulnerabilities. For that reason I think the fork was reasonable.

By comparison, Parity's wallet bugs were just a result of carelessness, and independent audits probably would have discovered them. Consequently, the community strongly pushed back when Parity tried to get a fork for the second one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> followed the instructions. was getting an error in the console when clicking the blue button "Get new instance". refreshed the page and tried again. worked after a few tries

<comment><USER11> I presume you had Metamask installed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The 21th century computing stack is being built.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternaut](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternaut)

It's not an association free name

<comment><USER14> It's named after that comic. Images from the comic are littered all over the app.</comment></comment>


Humble Bundle #3 is Live - <AUTHOR> http://www.humblebundle.com/#3 <comment><USER2> The way that they preselect an amount $1 above average is extremely clever. It appeals to people's need to see themselves as above average without costing them anything substantial.

Screenshot: <http://screensnapr.com/v/QciSbr.png>

<comment><USER3> I'd love to be a fly on the wall for the A/B test, but I still think something a wee closer to

[http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep- disc...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-discount- mockup.png)

would kill both the A/B tested options. Bringing in people's psychological need to be above average is great, but I might do that by putting a nice 37Signals style yellow highlight on one of the expensive options (for some value of expensive which would pay for more than a Big Mac) and say "24% of people went for this"

<comment><USER4> Personally, "Tired of overpriced games from soul-crushing megacorps laden with spyware and DRM?" really puts me off.

<comment><USER5> Are you tired of underpriced games from small indie dev shops without spyware or DRM?

<comment><USER6> It's a somewhat antagonistic statement, and those can rankle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For people who are interested in the business story behind the Humble Indie Bundles, the creators gave a talk covering Bundles 1 and 2 at the 2011 Indie Games Summit:

<http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014437/The-Humble-Indie>

One of the take-away messages they had was "always target Mac and Linux, because it's a bit more work but you'll double your revenue".

<comment><USER8> As a Windows user - seeing that the software available for different architectures says to me that the code is more than likely robust and well debugged.

<comment><USER9> The thing is you have no guarantee that the Windows binary have been generated _after_ the port was done. Also, no guarantee it's the same source tree and not different forks of the same base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These bundles are all great. I keep pointing them out to my non-gaming friends as much as possible.

I've dumped my consoles in the last year and moved to finding 'indie' game devs like these because, as the old saying goes, 'It's not about graphics, it's about gameplay'[citation needed] and I don't care how many polygons you can throw at /next big game/ it is almost invariably yet another FPS.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's fair to say it's "yet another FPS". I think that people who only play Indie titles are missing out just as much as those who only play huge AAA releases.

<comment><USER12> What about people who only play Dwarf Fortress?

<comment><USER13> You're missing out too - and I say this as someone who used to only play DF. DF is amazing, but there are tons of other games that are just as amazing or nearly so (Minecraft, Fallout, Terraria, Portal, Spacechem ... dear deity, Spacechem. If you buy one game this year, buy it). None of them really compare to DF in learning curve or sheer complexity, but they're all really good.

<comment><USER12> Who's got the time though?

<comment><AUTHOR> I view it similarly to any other varied hobby. If you like to cook you can either choose to cook American food all the time or you can branch out and try different styles.

Although, the difference is that hunger and food are pretty constant in relation to each other where as there are just masses of video games. But I think the principle is close enough :)

<comment><USER14> The problem with this comparison is that an average meal doesn't take upwards of 20 hours to prepare. For someone working full-time, completing a game can be a large time investment.

<comment><USER12> Generally I play games maybe 2-3 hours a week max due to the double whammy of having a family and working at a startup :) This means for the average game it might keep me busy for a few months at a time. DF on the other hand...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A commenter on habrahabr.ru+ noticed (<http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/gdev/124990/#comment_4110999>) that there are Russian black marketers buying bundles for $ 0.01 and reselling for around 50 rubles ($1.50) that, unfortunately, may drive the average price down. Supposedly, people who can't be bothered to get a credit card or Webmoney account buy from them.

I'm worried how the pay-what-you-want model accommodates this behaviour? I hope clients buying directly for a reasonable price will always outnumber the black marketers or people intentionally buying for $0.01 to cause loss, but I don't know for sure.

\+ habrahabr.ru is Russian IT news blog filled in large part with content translated from Hacker News.

<comment><USER16> Since there's no DRM you can't help it if people are buying one key and then burning a bunch of CDs, but that won't affect the average price much. Seems to me that if they're selling license keys for $1.50, the best way to counter this is to change the download screen title to:

        Thanks for purchasing the Humble Indie Bundle #3 for $0.01!

... if the customer thinks that's fair, so be it, but it might at least encourage the "resellers" to pay slightly more.

Alternatively, I don't think setting the minimum payment to $1 would be at all incompatible with the "pay what you want" slogan & worthwhile if it eliminates the payment fees problem.

(But what would I know? I've bought all four, and last time 'round I felt like I got my money's worth just out of Braid.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> vvvvvvv is awesome by the way. You can try it here (assuming you have flash installed/enabled): <http://www.kongregate.com/games/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv- demo>

<comment><USER18> Not only that, but they just upgraded to VVVVVV 2.0, which has a level editor and bunch of really good new levels. I'm a huge fan of the game, and this is like the best thing that happened to me today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Always excited to see another Humble Bundle. I purchased right away and gave a greater proportion to Wolfire in hopes of encouraging further bundles sooner (not that I paid that much, but I don't have that much money right now :\\). The Linux support is what makes this such a happy deal for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting stats. There appear to be as many Mac users as Linux users, and Linux users pay 2x more than Mac users.

I guess Mac users spend all their money on OS upgrades :)

<comment><USER21> This is a really interesting statistic actually. I got the last 2 bundles and I'm a Mac user. I am definitely pro-Mac OS. Seeing those stats made me pay a little more.

I am also an iOS dev and try and keep up on trends. I'd wager most Mac users are also iOS users. And current stats indicate that most iOS users are willing to spend money on software.

So why the stinginess here!?

<comment><USER22> iOS users get many chances to spend money on games. Linux users only get a few chances, so when a Humble Bundle rolls around, they jump on the opportunity. You can bet that iOS users spend more money (total, not per-game) on games than Linux users, because of the App Store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Linux version pays the best average amount. Is there any message?

<comment><USER24> Yes, Windows and MacOS users spend more money on buying software so their budget is already stretched, while Linux users have money to spent.

Or Linux users cannot assess the worth of software as they are not used to buy software.

Both probably not what you wanted to hear, and probably not the real reason. I just wanted to point out that we can project everything into the fact that Linux version pays best average amount.

<comment><USER25> Or "I'll pay more for this to reward these people for making games for my platform, and more developers will hopefully follow."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to thank the Wolfire crew for making these marvelous games available at a reasonable price - and especially for the Linux support. :D

</comment><comment><USER27> Lame question: What techniques are used to show real-time stats like that on a web page? I assume those are truly real-time, anyway.

I'm no web developer, but this feature really strikes me as cool in this particular instance. I rarely fancy overly-busy web pages, but these stats seem very nicely executed; interesting in and of themselves, yet clean and nice visual presentation.

<comment><USER28> They're constantly requesting a JSON file about once a second. Example contents, formatted: <http://pastebin.com/uMv7d8xS>

<comment><USER29> Seems like excessive transfers. I achieved a "real time" counter by having requests return a start value and a rate of change per second. The GUI would then update every second with the estimated values. My AJAX requests would happen much less often and update the start and rate of change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is always absolutely awesome. I chipped in over average this year but I'm dismayed by the people throwing in less than a buck, you're just making the developers pay the CC companies!

<comment><USER31> Surely they wouldn't put the transaction through unless they were getting money from it though?

<comment><USER32> That's a good point! If they're not going to make any money, there's no sense in even taking it. Though, it might be illegal to sell something and then not accept payment. (Fraud? Money laundering? I don't know, but it seems potentially sketchy.)

<comment><USER20> It's not fraud or money laundering. You don't see people refusing payment for the simple reason that most people would never give their stuff away for free.

<comment><USER32> I didn't mean to say that it is fraud or money laundering, just that it might look like it.

Anyway, what's the difference between giving something away for free, and selling something and receiving $0?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how the Mac App Store and any upcoming App Stores for Windows will impact these various software bundles. Does the Mac App Store allow bundling? If not, this would be a nice add-on feature.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hammerfight is an excellent game, very fun and beautifully rendered.

I hope they make a sequel.

</comment><comment><USER35> The youtube video showing the youtube video was a nice touch. Recursion: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4c6PWtE9mI&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4c6PWtE9mI&feature=player_detailpage#t=95s)

</comment><comment><USER36> The promo video is fantastic. Reminds me of those car demolition show commercials: THIS WEEKEND...CARASAURAUS REX...THE FIRE BREATHING...CAR EATING...ROBOT MONSTER DINOSAUR! Live at the civic center, tickets available now!

<comment><USER37> The promo video is great, and had me smiling the whole time. John's voice is recognizable and hilarious.

<comment><USER38> I actually kicked up a couple more bucks towards Humble tips just for that promo video -- it gave me a good laugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm starting to feel foolish every time I look at a indie game in the steam store. Bought all four bundles, which are about a quarter of the steam games I own.

</comment><comment><USER40> these are awesome, i just do a $25 and let them decide how to balance it all out. question though, any chance for an iOS humble indie bundle!?

<comment><USER41> apple doesn't allow for 3rd party sales, best you could hope for is a jailbroken humble bundle.

<comment><USER42> Think creatively. Create a humble bundle 4 app with an interface that allows you to play any of the included games within the app. Have it be a free download with IAP of various amounts to allow people to show their support that way.

Apple's 30% cut would be a downer, but it could be done.

<comment><USER43> Didn't Capcom did something like that with their old console games? I think they had an app with some demos and were selling their games as IAP. Might work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The average is less than 5 bucks. That's simply pathetic. If I remember correctly, it was a couple of bucks higher in the earlier editions.

<comment><USER45> Pathetic, how so?

The people paying that amount could already own the games, they could already donate to charity. This is pay what you want for a reason, a large portion of people purchase _just because_ it's a donation thing. If someone has a spare $5 why don't they spend it here? It isn't pathetic, it's better than nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> "It's better than nothing"

Agreed.

Introversion managed to stay alive through selling their four games for $5 on Steam. That's ultimately not too much better than the current average bundle sale ([http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?...](http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=2512)).

These deals tap into the reservoir of people who aren't invested enough in the games to pay full price (I forget the exact term for that), and these games certainly aren't new, and each has been on sale on Steam at least once so the people who were going to buy for full price likely already have.

<comment><USER46> Price discrimination. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination>

<comment><USER47> Not sure what your message is exactly, can you clarify?

<comment><USER25> Dysiode said they forgot the term, Wilduck reminded us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't consider myself to be a fan of that kind of music, but I always enjoy the Humble Indie Bundle ad. It's so awesome. :-)

</comment><comment><USER49> These guys rock, they always do a great job on the pitch video too and this one might be their best.

</comment><comment><USER50> Anyone else get 'cogs' to work on the mac? 10.6.6, 13" 2010 mbp, and cogs won't start.

</comment><comment><USER51> As awesome as this is, I'm quite bothered with the payment options. As it stands, I can't pay even if I wanted. I don't have a CC and all of Paypal, Amazon and Google are utter no-gos for me. It makes me a sad panda that options like PaySafeCard aren't as widespread as I would like them to be.

<comment><USER52> I think HIB did due diligence by offering CC, PayPal, Amazon, and Google. I honestly think you're an extreme outlier and would fall into a fraction of a percent of their users. I'm not saying that it's OK to marginalize you, but if I were them, with complete honesty I would have thought that those four options would cover everybody, and then doing something like Bitcoin would be going an extra mile. I've never heard of PaySafeCard (not to say that it can't be cool if I haven't heard of it, because it is), so I think it may have a long way to go before it's widely accepted.

Edit: You elucidated why you aren't using these services here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809572>, but really you've painted yourself into a box. It's not that you _can't_ use those services, it's that you _won't_. I understand why you don't want to (really, I feel you, I'm an idealist too), but at a certain point I just have to bite the bullet and if I want something bad enough and I can only pay for it in certain ways, then I'm going to do it.

<comment><USER51> You're right, I kind of miss-phrased that. And yes, I am aware that I'm part of a very tiny fraction of customers. My post shouldn't be understood as a demand or anything, I was just rambling.

Oh, and for PSC: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paysafecard> , if you (or anyone else) is interested. It's based in the EU (Austria to be exact) and is used and promoted here, but it's pretty much unknown in the US (and the rest of the world) as far as I know, so I'm not really surprised when people tell me they've never heard of it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which happens first, we become multi-planetary or an extinction event? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> multi-planetary.

Though I'm skeptical that humans being born and dying on e.g. Mars will happen in the next couple hundred years. The economics seem strange. Maybe there's some amazing technologies that require rare minerals or something but I'm unsure how a Martian economy could sustain itself. Why would people go actually live there when so much of the work could be automated? There will be more uninhabited inhabitable space on Earth than on any planet for a long time to come.

</comment><comment><USER3> Evidence suggests that it is very, very hard for humans to go extinct, so I would say the former.</comment>


Everyone likes scrabble.. right? Help researchers improve AI. - <AUTHOR> http://ciigar.csc.ncsu.edu/tbarik/wwf/ How do people play games? We are researchers at North Carolina State University (Digital Games Research Lab). Help participate in research by spending a few minutes or more playing a variation of a popular online game, Words with Friends (Scrabble). Playing our game will help us improve the design of games in many areas, including usability, interaction, and artificial intelligence.
We are interested in a variety of in-game actions, such as what words people choose, why people shuffle (and when), the circumstances in which people choose to swap tiles, and more. Data collection on this type of work is difficult to obtain in general, so we hope you'll take a few moments to play the game. Plus, it's fun to play.
Feel free to post questions or comments here. We thought this study would be interesting to some of HN members here, particularly to those individuals working in the area of social games.
Thank you for supporting science! <comment><AUTHOR> We are researchers at North Carolina State University. Help participate in research by spending a few minutes or more playing a variation of a popular online game, Scrabble. Playing our game will help us improve the design of games in many areas, including usability, interaction, and artificial intelligence.

In particular, we're really interested in how people make decisions in games. Why do people shuffle? When do they shuffle? Why do people swap? When do they swap? How often do people play optimal words? What are time intervals between words? Do people change their minds after placing words? There are a host of such questions that a simple game like Scrabble can help us with to create believable agents, rather than simply optimal agents.

If you have any questions about the study, please feel free to post them here and I'll do my best to respond. It's difficult to get data on HCI studies in any reasonable way. Participating in studies is good for karma.

Thanks in advance! The game is free to play, you can play as many times as you want, there is no annoying survey or questionnaire, and even playing for a minute or so is useful for us -- even that means that you submit only a single word to the system.</comment>


Coal Power Plants Are Killing Thousands in Europe: Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/03/coal-power-plants-are-killing-thousands-europe-report/4924/ <comment><USER2> A truly massive amount of electrical power is essential to maintain a human environment. For example, try drinking water from an unfiltered stream. You run the risk of getting giardiasis, which is a terrible way to spend a couple of weeks writhing in pain. Cooking food on an electric stove is way, way healthier than cooking it in your fireplace. And what about hospitals? They require a huge amount of electrical energy. If you force them onto a power source that isn't available 24/7, all year round, no matter the weather, lots more people will die.

 _Coal brings light and life to billions of people._ It literally _cleans_ their environment: coal power purifies drinking water, washes their clothes, keeps their homes from getting too cold/hot/damp/dry, pumps the water they take showers with, fuels the industrial processes that produce the antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals that keep them healthy, and so on.

Take away those coal power plants, and millions will die. Likewise, anything you do to make energy more expensive will cause people to suffer. Energy bills that leave me poorer do not help me out.

Whenever you see someone talking exclusively about the negative aspects of a technology, step back and consider the entire context, including the alternative that people face. And remember that the people you're considering have the same right to exist that you do.</comment>


The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/275537/

<comment><USER2> Amusing juxtaposition:

"More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in 1930 it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold."

The text "recent research" points to the Reason article that very few people seem to realise is written by free market fundamentalist economists and not ergonomic historians. These economists believe that there is no such thing as lock-in. According to their theories the market always chooses the best tech. Which means any tech not chosen by the market must be worse than whatever wins.

Yet he contradicts their dogma in the very next sentence after citing them, with the common sense view that entrenched tech can be worse than the alternatives if it gets there first.

</comment><comment><USER3> The truth doesn't matter anymore. The meme that "QWERTY was designed to be inefficient, caught on, and now we're stuck with it" has mythical emotive power, much like "women were worshipped for their mysterious ability to give birth, before agriculture gave us the patriarchy", so much so that Alan Kay still uses "a QWERTY keyboard situation" to describe "network effects of something designed to suck"; and layout hipsters will be touting the superiority of their Dvořák layouts long after the time_t-pocalypse twenty- five years hence.

<comment><USER2> If you read the paper the actual reasons they propose for qwerty are as bizarre and anti-ergonomic as the arm jamming and "typewriter" demo theory. Namely: putting z,c,e together to help with decoding Morse. Putting the letters i and o near 8 to help type the years 1870 and 1871 faster (early keyboards had no zero and one key), and (topically) switching a couple of other letters to avoid patents, but still vaguely following the original idea of a-m going right and then n-z going left on a piano style keyboard.

This paper completely supports the view that old decisions stick around long after they are no longer relevant even if the exact details differ from the standard version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not about the layout of the keys when coding in perl it's how soft they are for when you roll your face on it.</comment>