GDPR: Why We Stopped Selling Stuff to Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selling-stuff-europe/ <comment><USER2> Data protection rules are this century's equivalent of pollution regulation. The online ecosystem has trashed the global commons with huge amounts of everyone's personal data, with no meaningful control or consent to how it is used, and now it needs to be cleaned up.

There are companies that will go out of business, or have to pivot heavily, as a result of GDPR. If this doesn't happen, it's is not doing its job.

More mainstream companies will grumble about this, just like they do about environmental regulations now. But, then as now, _we 've done the experiment_. As an industry, we were left to self-regulate for 2.5 decades, and look what we did.

I am not looking forward to finishing our GDPR compliance. Anvil doesn't rely on personal data for its business model, so it's not a big deal, just a bit tedious - it's a textbook frictional loss from regulation. But I _am_ looking forward to living in a world where everyone has to comply.

<comment><USER3> There is a third option beyond go bankrupt or pivot, as this story shows very clearly - cease trading with the EU or citizens of its member states entirely. Like the effect of FATCA but in reverse.

That's the decision this small training firm has taken. It's a loss of 5% of revenue, they say. That's not bankruptcy or pivoting.

This seems to be the unsurprising outcome of the EU's modern "obey us or we crush you" mentality. The UK is walking away. This small company is walking away. Apparently Microsoft is at least thinking about it for some products (the connect site is back now but looks semi abandoned). How many others will look at this and conclude the risks are too high to justify the costs?

GDPR does not seem like a well thought out law. I have always been satisfied with my ability to delete things from the cloud. If I end up being banned from useful services because the costs of complying with the EU's very transparent attempts to bulk up their budget by repeatedly fining tech firms, I will not be happy.

<comment><USER2> _> There is a third option...cease trading with the EU..._

This is the direct equivalent of demanding the right to dump whatever I like into the river, because some other company in another country can.

More generally, this is an example of "all regulation bad" thinking. If it is inherently evil to impose any rules on companies operating under your jurisdiction (and that's what you're implying with phrases like "obey us or we crush you")... Well, now you're arguing that no government should try to solve _any_ coordination problem. No auto efficiency standards, no pollution regulations, no product safety standards...not a world I want to live in.

(I'm going to ignore the Brexit stuff, as that's a long-standing flamewar that's already producing more heat than light in this thread.)

<comment><USER4> > More generally, this is an example of "all regulation bad" thinking

"any regulation good" is a fallacy as well, and just because data protection is a good thing, not all regulations claiming to achieve that are good, too.

And the GDPR is an especially bad and totally overblown regulation. I'd be totally fine with not being allowed to do bad things, since I'm not doing that anyway. I don't sell customer data, I don't collect PII from obscure third parties, I delete what I'm supposed to and I don't store what I should not.

Unfortunately, just not doing anything wrong does not help me at all, because GDPR requires basically everyone to be able to _prove_ , which -if possible at all- would take ages to implement properly. Sure, Google and Facebook can afford to spend a few man-years on this, and they can also afford a bunch of lawyers in case some obscure bureaucratic EU entity finds that they followed a wrong interpretation of the vague and unclear requirements in this directive.

As the sole developer for a small SaaS, I cannot afford that luxury. I can either write code, which earns me money, or I can write pages of pages of process documentation instead, which earns me nothing and does not even guarantee I won't be fined anyway, since who knows what obscure requirement may be hidden in those 201 pages of undecipherable legalese.

So my only realistic option is to do what most smaller businesses will do: Ignore the GDRP, and hope they won't come for me first. They probably won't, since they can't go after everyone at once. Sure, there's a rest risk, but hey, one can get cancer too. At least, if you get GDRP instead, you won't be dead, just broke.

<comment><USER5> I've worked for a few companies that handled clients' private information for financial purposes. There is a standard that you must observe if you work with payment cards, PCI-DSS. It is complicated and costly to implement in full, so some of the firms I worked for didn't - and instead avoided handling sensitive data that was subject to the strongest of protections specified by PCI-DSS. That meant, for example, never directly handling transactions and bouncing them off to PayPal instead. These were still successful companies, that kept growing while I was working for them.

One company I worked for sold software for card transactions and so needed to get the highest level of certification. They did and they worked very hard to achieve this, which is why they were (and I believe, still are) highly respected in the business. They also did great financially and had big contracts with huge clients.

There's also companies that specialise in that sort of thing- they help others get their PCI-DSS on. For a fee- but it's cheaper than doing it yourself, or paying the price of running wild with peoples' card data.

There are many more options than "ignore the standard" and "drown under it" is what I'm trying to say.

<comment><USER4> While this approach is reasonable and practical for credit card data, I doubt it's possible (let alone practical) for most businesses to do the same with what the GDPR considers personal data. You'd have to avoid email addresses, names, postal addresses, phone numbers, ... - even in fields where such data is not even supposed to be, like comments or emails.

Might be possible if one just sells ebooks or similar digital goods without much customer interaction. But for anything more complex than that, you're pretty much out of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > You wouldn't think that would be a big deal – but you'd be surprised. For > example, students send us information about their databases all the time as > part of asking questions – and they often send it unsolicited, through > unencrypted email channels. That information ends up all over the place: our > mail server, our desktops, phones, laptops, search indexes, etc. I'm not > really worried about us maintaining the confidentiality of that data, but > now we'd have to add in new audit-able tracking.

That's a _good_ thing! Is it really that much to ask that when someone holds your data, that you can ask them to delete it and be assured that it's gone for good?

Apparently, for them, it is. And I'm sure it'll be for a number of other businesses (and their competitors will just take their place, no big deal). But I'm looking forward to a world where unrestrained data collection and handling is no longer tolerated.

<comment><USER7> > Is it really that much to ask that when someone holds your data, that you > can ask them to delete it and be assured that it's gone for good?

That doesn't give you the right to send someone your private data, in a channel they didn't ask for it, and demand that they secure that channel.

This is the tough part about being a training company online: students send in questions with their personal data, unsolicited, via channels I simply can't secure. Your PII doesn't belong in email.

> But I'm looking forward to a world where unrestrained data collection and > handling is no longer tolerated.

Read the post. It's not about what we collect - it's about what people send us voluntarily. That's the part that I'm most worried about.

If I have no business relationship with those people, and they're just sending us personally identifiable data for no reason, I'm a lot more comfortable defending that in court. But if we have a business relationship where they're paying for our advice, and then they start sending more and more data, that's where I'm on shaky ground.

<comment><USER6> I am absolutely not criticizing your decision; you're perfectly within your rights to refuse to deal with all the rigamarole of GDPR compliance. It's easier and only 5% of your revenue, so why even bother.

And I completely understand the issue of people sending unsolicited data. I'm sorry that my comment came across as though I was targeting you specifically.

I'm just excited for a world where data is no longer a "yeah let's just store everything with no thought", and instead is a hot potato that you keep a trail of and want to get rid of as quickly as possible. What a difference that'll be from the situation we have today. This article is just highlighting how just accepting random data puts businesses "on shaky ground" as you said. The GDPR will require everyone to be a lot more thoughtful about their data retention policies, and that's just great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Basically companies like facebook and google have abused the data collection and public trust so bad that EU had to come up with these absurd fines just so those behemoths would pay attention. Also is there a reason why it is a maximum of x and 2% of revenue? Shouldn't 2% of revenue big enough for a company to be scared?

<comment><USER9> You also want smaller companies to comply, where 2% is maybe too little for them to care, as it would cost more to comply with GDPR.

<comment><USER10> 2% of revenue is a huge fine for any profitable business.

<comment><USER7> > 2% of revenue is a huge fine for any profitable business.

Not necessarily. In a business like ours (online training) where any additional new customers basically flow through to the bottom line, if I got 20% of my revenue from the EU, and I had to pay a 2% fine now and then, it wouldn't be terrible.

I can see how some slimy businesses would say, "I'm not even going to bother complying - I'll just keep taking revenue off the table and paying the small fees."

<comment><USER10> Sure, if your profit margins were 50% on EU revenues, it wouldn't be a big deal to pay 2% of the max fine. Or if your startup doesn't have revenues, you could get off scot free.

But most profitable businesses are going to have profit margins in the 10-20% range, and that fine is considerable. And if the EU applies it to the last 5 years revenues, they could wipe out a years profit.

For example, Apple probably has close to $100B in annual EU revenue, $2B is a huge incentive to invest in doing this right. But if your EU business is $1M, $20,000 is probably a fraction of your cost of implementation.

The law would have been far better if it specifically limited fine levels by size of company. IE < 1M in sales, 1M to 10M, 10M-100M, 100M-1B, 1B+.

<comment><USER11> It's on worldwide revenues, not EU revenues

<comment><USER10> Ouch, that's amazingly short-sighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Automating PII detection & audits is a hard problem! Especially across sundry data storages and formats.

Compliance firms typically provide a high-level paper trail, but what happens when you don't even know where the PII data is, like the OP says? What if you need to answer concrete individual Subject Access Requests?

So, as a technology company, we've attempted to solve parts of it with technology. We really hope to make that pesky "PII stuff" detection and auditing easier for companies:

[https://pii-tools.com](https://pii-tools.com) (in private beta, feedback welcome)

</comment><comment><USER7> Whoa, didn't expect this to hit HN. I'm here if anybody has questions. (Author)

<comment><USER13> How can you prevent EU users from using your service (it seems that's where you are headed)? I can think of IP geofiltering if you have a web service, perhaps blacklisting some countries in the AppStores if you publish an app... but people can travel & VPN somehow. Will part of the registration be "Are you a EU citizen?" And if EU people work around your safeguards and manage to register, are you still liable?

<comment><USER7> > How can you prevent EU users from using your service

The first step is disallowing EU-VAT-eligible folks from purchasing. The plugin I mention in the post is really good for that - it looks at a variety of factors including the user's billing address for their credit card, for example.

It's still totally possible that an EU citizen could be on Chinese soil, using an American's credit card, while using an Australian VPN. That means the next part of the registration will be a terms & conditions checkbox saying the GDPR doesn't apply to me. (We're working with our attorney on that language.)

At that point, if someone still registers, AND they later ask for the right to erasure, we'll still do our best to delete their data. But if they try to go to the EU and complain, we'll be on much better legal ground to say, "Look, they lied to us from the get-go, and we can prove it."

Nothing's certain - just trying to mitigate our risks as cheaply as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't seem like it now, but this is just a storm in a teapot. All of the necessary bits to comply with the GDPR will be commoditized sooner or later. I'm betting on sooner. This also presents a business opportunity to provide those bits.

I do appreciate the fact that it's a nuisance at best and significant costs at worst to be compliant to GDPR. Only in time we will be able to tell if it was worth it or not. Maybe the US model of free-for-all access to user data will work better, maybe the EU model will...I don't think anyone can say for certain now.

If anyone does know with a high degree of certainty which will, it's time to place the bets.

<comment><USER13> > I do appreciate the fact that it's a nuisance at best and significant costs > at worst to be compliant to GDPR.

I don't know that it's that simple. What happens when you have conflicting requirements, for example (I'm making them up) EU requiring you to delete PII within a period of time and US/Homeland Security/IRS requiring you to keep the (meta)data for some period of time?

There may be conflicting requirements that have nothing to do with technology & costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can a EU citizen call AT&T/Verizon and ask them to delete all records of their calls?

Would the call logs also disappear from "the other side of the call"?

</comment><comment><USER15> Naive question: If there are no such laws in the US, can one just simply store ALL personal data in Iceland?

<comment><USER9> How would that fix the problem you still can't save data from users from the EU.

<comment><USER16> That's exactly it. GDPR doesn't particularly care where you're storing the data, nor whether you have a "European presence". If you're storing data on people from the EU, from the EU's perspective, you're required to follow GDPR.

From an enforcement point of view... if you have no EU presence, it'll probably be pretty hard for them to actually collect on the fines they levy, but as a director, travelling to Europe could be problematic. It's not entirely clear here, but it looks like there's a possibility of directors being held personally liable.

<comment><USER17> In fact, the EU considers all citizens of the world to fall under their legal protections. That is, you don't have to be a EU citizen to have the same legal rights.

<comment><USER18> Technically this is true for the US as well. We just like to pretend there is a distinction.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Common Craft Stopped Doing Client Work, In Plain English - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_common_craft_stopped_doing_client_work_in_plain_english_redux.php <comment><USER2> A great example of listening to their customers to find the opportunity to re- define their business strategy in line with the overall lifestyle goals they wanted.</comment>


Panspermia - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia <comment><USER2> Ok, this is a bit of a tangent but this is a smart crowd and I've been wondering something.

Was reading about the Silurian hypothesis from NASA researchers, which talks about how hard it could be to detect a previous technological society in the geological record. (Harder than I'd assumed.) [1]

Given that — and climate change being top-of-mind — I was thinking about Venus and wondering: how certain/uncertain are scientists that Venus's greenhouse effect wasn't caused by a technologically advanced society, a very long time ago?

From my understanding, it's so hot there that anything we've sent has burned up rather quickly. If it's indeed very difficult to detect a previous civilization in the geological record _on earth_ , what does that say about Venus?

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

<comment><USER3> All the carbon that we are releasing into the atmosphere was there at the beginning, and was taken out by life. So I do think it's quite unlikely that a civilization can appear in a planet that has enough carbon on its crust to make it completely unsuitable for life.

<comment><USER2> Interesting - could you expand on this a little further?

(Edit: sounds like there's been recent research suggesting there was a decent window of time where life might have had a chance to appear on Venus: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hellish-venus- mig...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hellish-venus-might-have- been-habitable-for-billions-of-years/))

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I didn't take the Sun heating up into account. Whatever you take from astronomers is going to be better based (and take more factor into account) than my speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting to note that, regardless of actual origin of life, a significant exchange might have been occurring (or is still occurring) between Solar System bodies (judging by how we found a number of Martian meteorites on Earth). So if we find life elsewhere in the Solar System, it might be quite compatible.

The idea is mentioned in Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312", where simple organisms exist in Enceladus's ocean, and some people inject them for fun (with neutral or mildly beneficial effects).

</comment><comment><USER5> I, for one, have been busily working in my backyard launching nano-rockets filled with water bears that I've manipulated via CRISPR to contain encoded messages of funny dad jokes.

<comment><USER6> But then, disaster strikes!

It transpires that when encoded into quaternary, and thence to base pairs, the joke "What lies at the bottom of the sea, shivering? A nervous wreck!" encodes a viral sequence for a novel but entirely deadly pneumatic disease.

When one of the rockets misfires and detonates in a Bernard Matthews turkey farm, all human life on this planet is quickly extinguished.

100 million years later, a crashed alien spacecraft is discovered by the inhabitants of Gliese 15s, triggering a cultural revolution involving terrible puns and mildly amusing logical inconsistencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an interesting paper mentioned: The DNA of Bacteria of the World Ocean and the Earth in Cosmic Dust at the International Space Station [https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2018/7360147/](https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2018/7360147/)

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea explained in a computer animated video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWChhdIgT6Q&gl=BE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWChhdIgT6Q&gl=BE)

<comment><USER9> The source used in the music video: [https://archive.org/details/sims_panspermia_1990](https://archive.org/details/sims_panspermia_1990)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see it mentioned on wikipedia, but one tin-pot theory I heard once and quite liked was:

* The universe at the moment is on average large, cold and quite hostile to life.

* At some point in the past all the energy in the universe was concentrated roughly at one point

* So, in between, the universe was a soup of energy that would have been, on average, warm, comfortable and conducive to life.

It dovetails with this because it is a plausible "why would life have evolved somewhere else but not here" counterargument. I wouldn't buy it though, it seems likely to me that earth's life is a local phenomenon.

<comment><USER11> From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe):

> Between about 10 and 17 million years the universe's average temperature was > suitable for liquid water (273 – 373K) and there has been speculation > whether rocky planets or indeed life could have arisen briefly, since > statistically a tiny part of the universe could have had different > conditions from the rest, and gained warmth from the universe as a whole.

<comment><USER12> But temperature alone isn't sufficient for life as we know it. Here on Earth we enjoy an atmosphere providing us with oxygen, a large planet protecting us from most meteor impacts, and a magnetic shield against radiation.

<comment><USER13> Life didn't start out breathing oxygen, oxygen was actually a waste product and the introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere was a disaster for a lot of the life existing at that time... [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One argument that life is common is that life appeared very early on Earth, and so by inference Origin of Life is likely to be an easy process.

But there's another possibility: perhaps panspermia is easy in the dense star cluster the Solar System formed in, which packed 1000 or more stars into a cubic parsec. In that case, if life originated early, it could then spread to all the other star systems in that cluster. This would amplify the statistical weight of "early" OoL. Most planets on which life gains a foothold would be those in which OoL happened to occur in this birth nursery, and then spread.

This concept has interesting implications for SETI and science fiction. Life might be extraordinarily rare or absent elsewhere in the universe, but there may still be thousands of other systems in our galaxy that were seeded along with ours. They'd be spread out now around a ~180 degree arc around the center of the galaxy.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had a conversation with someone about cryonics a few years ago, and they brought up an ineresting problem with the viability of cell over long periods of time. DNA repair is an active process, and if frozen in Liquid Nitrogen, all molecular activity stops, yet radiation damage can still occur. It seems like on a long interstellar voyage, gamma rays and other cosmic rays would turn an organisms DNA into soup.

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_panspermia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_panspermia)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it possible that self replication was ignited at the time of heavy bombardment? It's really strange how origin of Life on Earth is correlated with this time. One possibility might be that our planet was covered with ice at this time while constant bombardment should produce a lot of phase shifts and randomness, contributing to significant recombinations of available molecules in water. It's a kind of top-down approach.

</comment><comment><USER18> Check out Nick Lane's videos on his theory of life origins on earth. Fascinating stuff.

</comment><comment><USER19> A theory that can never be tested is as much a religion as any.

<comment><USER20> I don't get it... how is this a religion? Doesn't a religion set out rules for living and have weekly services and stuff?

Also isn't a theory a hypothesis that has already been tested and supported with evidence?

<comment><USER21> Religion is choosing to believe that something is true without evidence.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's right. Here are some definitions from Google:

the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

a particular system of faith and worship.

a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> OP, did you just watch "How the universe works"?

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) Nope, I was reading an article: _The Milky Way Could Be Spreading Life From Star to Star_ -> [https://www.universetoday.com/140223/the-milky-way- could-be-...](https://www.universetoday.com/140223/the-milky-way-could-be- spreading-life-from-star-to-star/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This just pushes the problem of abiogenesis one step back.

<comment><USER24> I think some believers see a steady state universe. Life then becomes a boltzman brain. But I think panspermia is likely a thing _and_ I think life naturally arises in open dissipative systems. Get a rock, water, and a heat source and wait a few million years...

<comment><USER25> > Get a rock, water, and a heat source and wait a few million years...

And you get a warm, wet rock.

Statistics, probability theory and physics don't work like that. You can't arrive at the conclusion by stating a premise and wishful thinking.

<comment><USER24> Why does everyone claim to know things they don't know? The more I know the more stupid popular opinion becomes.

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

<comment><USER26> I think what's missing from your closed system is some kind of variation to induce change. Earth might not have enjoyed life without the rotation and revolution of the Earth generating conductive (and other) currents in the air and water.

Side note, I think you could make stronger points by not distracting with that kind of off-putting sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My wikipedia-chain for the past hour and a half: [https://hedwig.orenhazi.com/misc/nerdsniped.jpg](https://hedwig.orenhazi.com/misc/nerdsniped.jpg)

I hope you're happy.

<comment><USER28> I see that list and all I see are purple links. It's still early :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_%28physics%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_%28physics%29)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- electron_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28physics%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28physics%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember they used a "Panspermia" animation for Pantera's cover of "Planet Caravan" back in 1994.

[https://youtu.be/kWChhdIgT6Q](https://youtu.be/kWChhdIgT6Q)</comment>


Hackers conquer Tesla's in-car web browser and win a Model 3 - sahin-boydas https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/23/hackers-conquer-tesla-and-win-a-model-3/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a really great accomplishment. Tesla says that they only breached the entertainment center but other car manufacturers have said similar things, only to have the attackers be able to flash the lights or open doors. I wonder how serious this hack really is?

As a side note, I'm impressed with how engaged Tesla is with the "hacker" community. Not only do they put their products directly in the path of people trying to break their products, they are increasing the bounty as well!

</comment><comment><USER2> wish my ad blocker blocked those paid articles too.

<comment> sahin-boydas i really think hacker news should put a small icons for paid links and also a fact checker</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Book Recommendations on Western Civilizations - <AUTHOR> I perceive it as a common belief that western civilizations are more successful, for their own definition of success, due to some intrinsic features that they possess, which others don't. I am of the opinion that countries end up where they are mostly by happenstance. Are there any books about these ideas that you might recommend? <comment><USER2> If you want to check out a great "Audio Course" (essentially reads like a long audiobook) on this topic, I recommend 'Foundations of Western Civilization II' by Robert Bucholz. No need to read the first part. Its a great outline of the culture, politics, and turning points that led to where the western world is today.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari. If you have not given this a read yet it gives a good overview of how humanity (and civilization as a whole) developed.</comment>


T-Mobile Austria is apparently storing customer passwords in plain text - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Scott_Helme/status/982325137130139648 <comment><AUTHOR> Customer Service representative Käthe acknowledged in a Twitter convo posted by security researcher Scott Helme, that agents regularly view the first four characters of customer passwords for authentication purposes. When confronted with the bad practise this represents, the rep got defensive, stating that hacks would not happen because the telco giant would be "100% secure," and indeed asked whether the hints dropped by the experts were to be understood as a threat against the company.

</comment><comment><USER2> Fun fact. A few weeks ago I received a reminder email from a service I used months ago. The transaction was done in person, but I guess I somehow agreed to sign up for their web service.

Not only did they attach my username and password in plain text, the default passwords are constructed using a very obvious procedure. Essentially, you can bruteforce any account with 10k to 18M attempts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Consumers' personal information are at risk in the hands of multinational corporates. That's why i'm working on a blockchain concierge services project called PREEVE to help consumers pay without giving out their identity or personal info. If you want to join me on this mission DM here or via telegram @sammydeeknight for a chat.</comment>


Graphing Ireland's wealth distribution: Top% own as much as the bottom 70% - <AUTHOR> https://kyso.io/KyleOS/ireland-wealth-share <comment><AUTHOR> And the top 5% own as much as the bottom 80%

Data is from Credit Suisse's 2018 Wealth Report</comment>


Ask HN: How can I get reviewed on TC/Gigaom/etc ? - <AUTHOR>

We recently started a new service (freeringer.biz). We flooded our press-release through a number of PR agencies, but it has zero effect (as it was expected). So, I'm desperately trying to contact bloggers and other startup press while the product is still hot, but all my attempts are futile. Any suggestion on how to get big guys' attention ? Thanks. <comment><USER2> Few miscellaneous observations:

\- Seeing the ".biz" domain immediately made me suspicious of the site. Right or wrong, ".com" still rules. I'd strongly recommend finding a better domain.

\- Why does the registration ask for DOB, gender, profession, marital status, and children? Seems like a scam at first.

\- I signed up with bogus info and made a call. The app asked me to grant it use of my microphone and camera. I declined, though my phone did ring and tell me to call back a #. I stopped there.

Overall, its just... eh. Doesn't seem legit. It may very well be, but the overall poor design really makes it seem shady. My 2c: Hire a designer to improve the interface and go from there. If it really does let you make free calls to all those places, you should have no problem getting your publicity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate your opinion, thank you.

The service is ad-supported, so we need to know about user as much as possible to target ads. The ads will be interactive flash applications shown while user is on call.

The problem with .com domain is known: there no more unregistered domains left and all decent names are taken by moro^H^H^H^Hclever guys, which they sell starting from $5000. We developed service on a very tight budged, so we could not afford such expense on domain name.

Adobe Flash player always asks user to permit access to microphone, there's no way to overcome this "issue".

By poor design do you mean design of the website or the app itself or both ? :-)

Thanks again.

<comment><USER2> I'm no expert, but screw ad support for this app. You're not going to get enough page views and in order to get targeted information you have to ask a lot for a lot of intrusive information up front.

You can provide free long distance? A lot of people would love to use this. But don't make it free. Make it, I don't know, $4.99/mo. Makes the whole thing seem more legit and you solve the money issue. And you can hire a designer ;)

Good luck --

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you ever tried to charge end-users ? We are doing this on gtalk2voip.com for past two years. I can tell you it's a bitch! We are trying to get rid of this model soon as possible. I don't advise to any other startup to step into this crap as we did.

Thanks anyway.

<comment><USER2> Can you elaborate? What's the problem with charging users?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a lot many problems, starting from all kinds of frauds and ending with offering $1000 support for each $5 paid, esp if you are in voip industry where connectivity problems happen just out of thin air. If I manage to find a spare minute, I'll try to put together all the things into another essay. I put my essays on <http://www.gtalk2voip.com/essays>, just if someone cares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> After a few months of writing to TechCrunch personally, as well as sending them my press release I finally managed to get www.HearWhere.com covered by them this week.

This happened after TechRadar ([http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/20-websites- you-n...](http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/20-websites-you-never- realised-you-needed-478989)) covered HearWhere. I don't know if having another site cover my site first had an effect, and TechCrunch never contacted me directly, they just wrote, and I found out about it after i saw a traffic spike.

I don't know if it is the current economic climate, but TechCrunch did not drive near the amount of traffic I was expecting. Good reviews and comments, but as far as traffic, I saw an increase of course, but it wasn't a great spike in traffic I expected.

With respect to your comment about 'no good .com domain names left', I have to call that a load of b.s. If I managed to get "HearWhere" as a domain name, as well as some of other good names for other businesses, you can find a good name. It takes time, and can be a pain in the ass (it took me about a week to find HearWhere and maybe it was the 30th domain name I tried, but take the time and find a '.com' name. At the least a '.net', but '.biz' just doesn't cut it. Plus, when freeringer takes off, you would be increasing the value of a .com or .net name, and making it a prime target for a competitor to get at your market.

Much safer to get a new name I think.

Your reasons for DOB and other data doesn't quite cut le moutard either in my opinion. Particularly if you aren't getting users because you are asking for too much information, then you aren't going to get the add revenue either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you are right and our domain name choice was a failure, but do you really believe that everything in this world depends on just a domain name ? If so, I'm a retard.

<comment><USER3> No, I never said 'everything...relies on a domain name'. It isn't even the name that is the problem, it's the extension and what that says about your company.

You can look at all of the successful domain names that have little or no real meaning, but they are all '.com' , or '.net'.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly when users type your URL, they are gonna type COMPANYNAME.com - you are going to loose users instantly if by not having a .com name. Sometimes users will know to try .net, but not everybody will, and getting people all the way to .biz is a stretch.

I suspect the only companies who have been able to grab traction without a .com name are the ones who have used clever play on words to make the .EXTENSION work with their name, like Del.icio.us

Don't take my word for it, look around, make a list of how many companies you can think of use a non-.com/.net name.

The problem is that you are creating barriers for your potential customers to get to you, and as a start-up you already have enough challenges, no point getting in your own way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, let me tell you what users actually type. 90% of Joe Random Serfers never type .com, .net or .biz or anything... they just don't have a clue about TLDs, nor what they mean. They just type company/product name right into Google search and hit enter. The others 9% type it into browser address bar, which in most cases lead to same result! So, this .biz/.com matter has some sense for you and me and to some of these insignificant 1% who happen to know some piece of technology, but not for an average user, that's for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As the TechCrunch news tip page says, they'll feature you only if you are news worthy and if you break the news thru them. Its the same with Mashable.

But I suggest you get your first batch of users with just word-of-mouth marketing. These users would stay with you if they like the service. Those visitors who come by blog and advertising traffic give you no gurantee that theyll stay with you. Most will just be one-time visitors.

By the way, is Talkster your site? Coz when I clicked the link _30 countries_ I was led to Talkster. Incase this is your competitors's site, don't link to them. Just create your own page. You might lose users this way. Coz when users click the 30 countries link and then click the home link(they'll be on tlkster and signup for talkster).

I tried signing up my country isn't listed. Talkster also supports using Google Talk if I'm gonna call from a non-supported country. Thats what I noticed from their register form. Do you have any plans to support this feature?

Your service sounds cool. You don't need TechCrunch/GigaOm/Mashable/etc. All you need is a handful of friends to tell them about this. Free calls to 30 countries(!). Who wouldn't save phone bills?

Nice service! Good luck! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. I read through their news-tip hints, but I still cannot get what it means to "breaking the news through them" ? I send them a couple of tips, a week before the launch, noone responded back. How do you make them responding to your emails at all ? I believe my emails were deleted before reaching the destination :-)

FreeRinger is a joint service made by us (GTalk2VoIP, Inc) and Talkster. We are developing the gateway and the flash app parts while Talkster runs their extensive voip network. That's why we refer to them on our site. The app currently allows to make calls to SIP phones as well, calling to Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo is coming soon. :-)

Thanks for reviewing.

<comment><USER4> "breaking news thru them" means that they wanna be the first one amomg the mass media to break the news.

Hint hint: make sure the PRs you released weren't being indexed by a search engine. A google search is the first thing they would do. :) make your emails short and not an essay about what you do. Let you service not be common. Atleast hav some different features. If these and 'more' conditions of theirs are satisfied. You should be lucky.

Also mashable has a separate category which features a startup every week. That category is sponsored by Sun.

Also, can the method u use to make free calls be used to send free sms? I have a requirement in my startup to send sms. But there's only one carrier in my country which has a free email to sms gateway. The rest charge millions. If yes, then is the a way i can contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I understand that they want to be the first guy, but I was not able to contact them in any ways before release, so we send PRs through the "standard" channel. And my emails were very short, I can see it quite clear that nobody expects to receive essays in emails :-). My frustration came when none of the dozen top bloggers I sent tips to did not respond.

Our calling method cannnot be applied to SMSes, sorry. We are using Clickatell to sends SMS notifications to users which cost us quite a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do you care about TC/GigaOm? Neither of those sites will drive significant traffic. Concentrate on SEO, real/traditional press, and smaller blogs. If your site handles free calls internationally, hit the blogs that target large groups of overseas callers. If you're trying to compete with Jajah, you may wish to study their marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Traffic is not everything. It's much easier to pitch to investors once you are covered by TC or some other "press that matters".

<comment><USER5> The exact opposite of that statement is true. It's easier to pitch investors with an innovative service with a solid business plan that looks like 100x growth in 5 years. It's much easier to raise your valuation with real user/subscriber/customer growth and a well defined sales cycle. The A tier investors see the good deals long before they ever break on TC/Om/Cnet/etc.

Getting a meeting on Sand Hill Road isn't hard. If you're relying on a blog to get your investment, you're doing it wrong.</comment></comment></comment>


PlentyOfFish Starts Charging Premium Membership Fees - <AUTHOR> http://onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2009/03/plentyoffish-starts-charging-premium-membership-fees/

<comment><USER2> Thank you, Markus.

If just a handful of users are stupid enough to pay the fee to put a badge on their profile that effectively says "I'm _really_ desperate" it will have the opposite of the intended effect, and maybe improve _my_ chances. And at the same time they'll be paying for my share of the bandwidth.

<comment><USER3> Actually, back when I used to frequent dating sites (10 years ago or so), I met most people when I had a paid membership.

OTOH, I met my wife on Yahoo Personals when it was free. In fact, if it was only for pay we'd never have met since she wouldn't have bothered with a paysite.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "There will be no addtional features and functionality for users, this upgrade will be strictly to signal intent to the community."

So basically, all you get for your $20 a month is a badge saying that you're cooler than people who didn't pay. And for your premium membership, you still get the same crap service that freeloaders get.

Are people really that stupid? Asking people to pay something for nothing reeks of arrogance. I'm starting to think Frind got lucky with PoF.

<comment><USER4> Well luck definitely had a huge component of it. Speaking of his new subscription model, I wouldn't exactly call it "stupid," (nor would I call it especially smart) I just think he didn't explain it correctly.

That's the psychology that the luxury goods market exploits. A $30,000 watch won't tell time any more accurately than a $30 watch, nor will it look much better than, say, a $500 watch, but some people who can spring for luxury items do simply as a token of wealth. Just look at the stereotypical nouveau riche spending habits.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, usually the $30 watch is more accurate than the $30,000 watch. After all your cheap quartz watch is 99.999% accurate, while your $30K watch is only 99.997% accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anybody ever seen this website before?

It feels like if you hired a "webmaster" from the mid 1990s to build you a domain parking page.

It is AWFUL.

<comment><USER7> This comment reminds me of people who complain about the design of Hacker News, and miss the point entirely.

Plenty of fish has a large and growing user community. I know of more people (personally) who have met dates on POF than any other site (though I am in Canada, where his community is strongest).

<comment><USER8> From the Inc. article I read he really believes in the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

He doesn't know how a design change will effect the users or how changing the badly-cropped user images will effect click-throughs etc.

<comment><USER9> A/B testing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I contacted someone with a serious member badge and she says it was given to her for free and she never asked for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting typo in the text quoted from Markus: "funcationality".

I'd like to speculate it reveals usage of a famous language, but PoF has been described as a Redmond-only shop in the past.</comment>


Site reliability engineering is operations - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jerub/site-reliability-engineering-is-operations-17a213ff88bc <comment><USER2> Why is there so much hand-wringing about this role?</comment>


Adrian Chen from Gawker pretends to be cancer patient? - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/Adrianchen
 A post on Reddit from a person who said they were going to end their life using Oregon's 'Death with Dignity' program is a hoax according to Adrian Chen from Gawker, he's bragging it was him all along. <comment><AUTHOR> Original post on Reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fy6yz/51_hours_left_to...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fy6yz/51_hours_left_to_live/)</comment>


The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996 - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/id/2212108 <comment><USER2> This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.

<comment><USER3> There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.

<comment><USER4> Oh, Usenet is still out there. There are even still communities, although it's mostly just used for binaries now.

<comment><USER3> Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.

<comment><USER4> P2P?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Articles like these makes me want to strangle the author.

No, Sir, my Indy with Ethernet and Mosaic/Netscape was quite up to the task. In fact, my telnet to the Sun and ftp and gopher pre-web was already immensely useful.

If it sucked for you 1996, maybe it was just you.

<comment><USER3> I don't take your meaning. You think compared to what we have in 2008, the web of 1996 didn't suck? I was connected directly to the backbone (I ran an ISP), and I agree with him.

<comment><USER6> The web was awesome in 1996. It sucked in 1993.

By 1996 you had actual webpages you could visit. IQ tests. News sites. Hotmail. But it was still difficult to tell professional content from amateur stuff. Conspiracy theory and Internet trolling were fresh and interesting and the blink tag was in wide use. And port 80 wasn't the only game in town still: there were still lots of independent BBS that had interesting content and where TELNET was king.

So what if you weren't online all the time. The communities that existed expected asynchronous access. You could grab lots of content and download it for use offline. There were brilliant software applications and games ready for the taking: DOOM had left Wolfenstein in it's wake? Online was liberating. Online was brilliant. It still is.

<comment><USER7> The web in 1993? I don't remember NCSA Mosaic in 1993, I think I first used that app in 1994 in the lab at UW in Seattle. It was installed on a machine running X Windows, I think it was a DEC terminal. Before Mosaic I can remember an ftp site in Sweden that had a lot of photos. Downloading a photo of the space shuttle with Fetch and then opening it up a second later on the Mac IIsi with the 12" monochrome monitor and being pretty blown away by being able to do that so fast. I had a modem at home and could dial in to the UW Switch (via a friends student id number) with my external ViVa 9600 baud modem that I got for $75. That was a big improvement over my first modem, an external ViVa 2400 baud job that I paid $130 for. The early web was sparsely populated, photo.net wasn't born yet and Philip Greenspun had a nice site "Travels with Samantha" and that had some good advice on scanning your slides with Kodak PhotoCD technology, and then how to remove the magenta cast in Photoshop. AOL always sent out free discs, so after the UW access dried up (my friend graduated) I used that free access (17 hours of free access!) and then got a dial up account from Eskimo North in Seattle. Later found out about nocharge.com free dialup. MUD games were cool back in 1991 when all there was was rn and irc and ftp.sumex-aim.stanford.edu for entertainment.

<comment><USER8> Mosaic was released in 1994, but Lynx was available by 1992. But yeah, in 1992 most of the action was in ftp sites. They were already a lot better than the local BBSes where I lived, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was on the internet in 89 and found tons of things to do:

Irc, Usenet, Mucks, Muds, Gopher, Ftp.

By 1996 we were complaining about the Aol users ruining the internet.

<comment><USER3> In 89 you complained once every September about the students ruining the Internet; not a major change.

<comment><USER9> This is true and by 98 gave up complaining about Internet newbies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember at a young age telling my step dad that he should be buying domain names of big companies and sitting on them. he laughed at me. :(

I'm the sort of kid who was buying candy in bulk and reselling it at school for a hefty markup. I'm pissed I missed out on all the easy money in web 1.0. If only I was born 10 years earlier.

<comment><USER11> Domain Squatting is illegal and has been for about 10 years.

<comment><USER12> If you had a time machine and wanted to make decent amounts of money, one way would be to register the generic keyword domains (like creditcards.com which sold for $3m)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most people these days are lamenting about the death of innovation in the valley. It reminds me of when Arthur Rock said that innovation was dead right before the internet started taking off.

"He predicts few dramatic technological breakthroughs in the next several years, but expects that recent inventions will enable dozens of companies to push electronics into every aspect of life."

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00.html)

Many people copy success so tons of "me-too" companies get started, but technology just like all industries are dominated by black swans.

</comment><comment><USER14> In 1996 I was just starting to "code" web sites, so I found lots to do. That doesn't seem like a long time ago until I remember I was 12 at the time, but I digress.

Also, spending all evening on IRC was a common event.

</comment><comment><USER15> Journalists shouldn't write science- or technology-related articles. Ever.</comment>


'Legacy system' exposed Black Hat 2018 attendees' contact information - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/legacy-system-exposed-black-hat-2018-attendees-contact-information/ <comment><USER2> I guess this is a story because it's Black Hat and someone who wasn't supposed to be able to access this info did. However, conference attendee information is widely sold and shared as a matter of course. You shouldn't consider it as anything approaching confidential.

<comment><USER3> > conference attendee information is widely sold and shared as a matter of > course

Is that something people get warned when buying a ticket?

edit: [https://www.blackhat.com/us-18/registration- terms.html#priva...](https://www.blackhat.com/us-18/registration- terms.html#privacy) links to [https://legal.us.ubm.com/privacy- policy/#Choices](https://legal.us.ubm.com/privacy-policy/#Choices) which someone smarter than me should interpret.

<comment><USER4> Having never been to a black hat conference, I'm surprised that such people would be so easily open to attack. Surely no one gives out their real email address or phone details at these events? I hope they don't take critical hardware with them full of secrets to be happily liberated by someone more enthusiastic. They wouldn't have "interesting" conversations in taxi/ubers, would they?

Maybe there are less black hats at these conferences than the numbers suggest.

<comment><USER5> Black Hat is a corporate "vendor" conference. You're probably thinking of DEFCON. At DEFCON, you don't register. You pay them in cash, and they give you a (complex, hard to fake) badge. You wear the badge and they let you into the conference area. They don't want to know who you are, which nicely avoids the problems Black Hat was having.

<comment><USER6> Black Hat is the most important industry vulnerability research conference of the year. It is also very corporate, and for the last several years it's had a large trade-show vendor "expo". It's a big-business UBM conference and certainly makes money from vendors, but don't get confused; that stuff is all bolted on to the gigantic multi-track speaker conference.

There are, so far as I know, no pay-to-play Black Hat talks; all the listed briefings were picked by the review board.

<comment><USER5> That's good to know that there isn't pay-to-play (and [http://www.blackhat.com/about.html](http://www.blackhat.com/about.html) confirms that). I assumed anything so corporate would be.

<comment><USER6> It would be a fair assumption for something like RSA, and the vendor side of Black Hat looks a bit like RSA.

<comment><USER7> On the plus side, if you have a talk that was accepted at Black Hat, you usually can just re-submit it to RSA.

It's been several years, but I remember the RSA conf held in early Spring usually had it's CFP deadline something like a 6 months before. So if you were speaking at BH, then around July/August you had everything ready to present, which was perfect timing to submit for the following year's RSA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we change this to the original post? [https://ninja.style/post/bcard/](https://ninja.style/post/bcard/)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's amazing the number of things you can find by simply enumerating through a sequential series of integers, in what is basically a "gimme data" request to some public facing data endpoint.

<comment><USER10> I once heard of a very major website essentially being DOS-ed because a scrapper was enumerating IDs in the URL. (Can't say the name because I signed an NDA.) The engineers involved all assumed the scraping was legitimate indexing by a 3rd party or researcher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's worth noting that Black Hat was spun off from Def Con to get corporations to allow employees to expense it. Often speakers at Black Hat also present at Def Con. Def Con as a matter of policy does not collect any information about its attendees [0].

[0] Read the fine print: [https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20rec...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20receipt.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> In related news, apparently 90% of the attendees were named "Chuck U Farley".

</comment><comment><USER13> Integrity is quite a thing ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why would you goto black hat and use your real name / identity ?

<comment><USER7> Because real black hats don't spend multiple thousands of dollars to go to BH, unless they also have a corporate day job. In which case, they have no reason not to use their real name. Otherwise it gets a little awkward to meet your co-workers for a MS -sponsored happy hour with a con badge that says "Mr. ThE PlaGUe"

<comment><USER14> But even if your a civilian player you might say I am "John" from Att or BT - but that's not your real name and you actually work for the security group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> in other words MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) from BH2018 are free (if your know how to get them).

</comment><comment><USER16> ironic

<comment><USER17> and nothing more</comment></comment>


"There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state..." - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/globalization/common-error-no.-61-200803151059/ <comment><USER3> The question is not what creates wealth but what keeps it unevenly distributed.

There have been experiments (computer simulations) that tried to explain 'Pareto distribution' -- a power law distribution of wealth leading to 20 percent of population having 80% of the wealth. I refer to 1996 Axtell and Epstein book (google for Sugarcape).

Basically, they created a number of software 'agents' and placed them on a landscape full of resources. Each agent possessed a 'fitness function' that controlled its further survival. Having access to resources improved the fitness function since the agent could replenish its energy and could go on hunting for resources having some surplus for the rainy day.

What transpired from the simulation is that 'the Rich get Richer' axiom is basically true. First generation agent might have stumbled on a resource nearby by accident. It has improved its fitness function and he was able to successfully compete on the next round.

Meanwhile similarly fit agent who had bad luck in the first round (no resource nearby) was left chronically under-fit and his chances of 'making it to the top' diminished with every round.

This piece of empirical knowledge makes two important points about the society and the wealth.

Firstly, even in the free market society people always have unequal opportunities because this is an emergent quality of the system, not the result of some corruption, inability, personal passivity etc. The best and the brightest will stay poor unless they stumble on a resource which is not taken. (A new internet business idea for example).

Secondly, revolutions have their merits. They re-shuffle fitness landscape. Even when people do not directly 'expropriate' somebody's wealth by simply levelling the playing field revolutions create competing chances for the talented and the hard-working who would otherwise be forever destined to be relatively unfit comparing to those who already have access to resources.

Looks like extreme pro-market views are as primitive as extreme 'left' views. Social science really becomes fascinating when aided by computer science, doesn't it?

<comment><USER4> "The best and the brightest will stay poor unless they stumble on a resource which is not taken. (A new internet business idea for example)."

Where does this data include for the fact that resources have been forcefully extracted from certain people groups for centuries?

Need not look further than look at Central and South America, and the entire sub-Saharan African continent. (Also of course, several areas in Asia)

it is no surprise then, that the wealthiest nations and societies are those who extracted the resources (in this case ranging from gold, diamonds, oil, rubber, ivory, even crops such as fruit, coffee beans, and cocoa beans) by means of blatant corruption, deceit, and thievery.

Secondly, many have remarked on this site that ideas in and of themselves don't have much value -- it is the execution on the idea that makes it powerful.

That being re-hashed constantly on this site, how then does a new internet idea count as a resource? Without the ability, or the actual resources to execute on the idea then there is absolutely no value of that idea to the person. (say, if a poor person has little or no access to a computer or the internet, it seems a bit ludicrous a new internet business idea is a resource)

"First generation agent might have stumbled on a resource nearby by accident. It has improved its fitness function and he was able to successfully compete on the next round."

Not by accident, but by intent.

<comment><USER5> The Sugarscape models are interesting because they show that you are likely have a "rich get richer" accumulation _even when_ there is no coercion.

<comment><USER4> point taken, but surmising about how a society would operate in a fictitious world is a bit pretentious -- what real world value does that create?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Short blog entries on complex topics most often won't tell the entire story. There's more on getting out of poverty than not resting or asking the wrong questions. This is not about dumb wealth redistribution but social institutions and technical infrastructure. Instead of such intellectual fast food better one reads something useful like the (free) first chapter of "The Birth of Plenty": <http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/404/CH1.HTM>

After that one should look for 'new institutional economics' and 'complex adaptive systems' to better understand how social institutions, path dependencies, and (general) environmental conditions drive or constrain a society and how that influences social stratification and mobility (and indirectly poverty).

This posting isn't meant to be an arrogant indoctrination. But saying "there are no causes of poverty" is simply (and sometimes fatally) wrong. But to understand this one should switch from polemics to empirics.

It even has some direct relevance to hackers: Being busy and producing something other people want is not enough to generate wealth. When you think a supporting social and technical environment has no influence on the probability of success, then go and try to run your startup in (obviously restful) North Korea.

</comment><comment><USER7> He's half correct. Poverty is the rest state, but there is significant artificial inertia in many parts of the world keeping people from accelerating beyond it.

It's hard to understand this when you live in a first world nation. We have that problem but to a very minor degree relative to much of the world.

</comment><comment><USER8> If I were a criminal defense lawyer, murder would cease to be a crime. After all, there are no causes of death; it is the rest state, that which happens when you do nothing ...

In fact there are plenty of causes of poverty -- war, corruption, disease, overpopulation, debt, ecological destruction, etc.

<comment><USER9> The correct analogy would be suicide -- stop eating, drinking, and breathing, and you enter the "rest state"

Murder, because it involves another actor, misses the point.

That is, unless you believe that some people "make" other people poor during the course of regular life -- an odd and unsupported statement.

I would agree that there are plenty causes of people losing what they own. Seems to me, however, that no matter how much money you have, you cease to be poor once you move beyond looking to external actors for the source of your internal pain. Or perhaps that statement is a bit too Zen for the board. Dunno.

<comment><USER10> The murder suicide analogy is perfect, both end in death (poverty) but you can get their either by youself (suicide) or by the actions of others (murder). Calling poverty a rest state is to ignore all the outside forces that can be impairing a persons ability to create wealth. You can indeed make other people poor, and its not always a crime to do so, nor require them to be complicit in it. I think most people here find some truth in the idea that food aid makes farmers in developing countries poor.

<comment><USER9> I would suggest we be careful with definitions here. Certainly certain policies impact certain jobs. My grandfather was a farmer. That is, until the economy changed. Then he wasn't a farmer any more.The policy may have had negative impacts on farmers, but it could only have a very limited impact on my grandfather.

I would also distinguish between "making somebody poor" and "poverty", which is a state of existence. Likewise, I would also distinguish between internal poverty, ie, despair, and external poverty -- lack of money.

The definitions always get you on these things. For instance, most people are familiar with studies that show "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" in some western societies like the United States. What readers fail to gleam from these studies is that while the numbers for the quintiles do show those movements, people move around between quintiles a lot more than is acknowledged. So when we say the poor get poorer, we are confusing the statistical average of a category of random people with actual, real people. Actual, real people move about in income levels quite a bit. The statistical bottom fifth of people in general, however, is not doing so well.

Likewise when we talk about poverty, or the economy, or social policy, we're dealing in large, averaged groups of things, not individual people. It makes a difference because we are individual, unique people, not statistical clumps.

I'm not saying that the internal attitudes of a person is enough to overcome any external obstacle. What I am saying is that the way we internalize external challenges is a better measure of anti-poverty and future happiness than the amount of money we have in the bank. Therefore, you cannot "kill" me, make me poor, by taking away my money. My internal wealth is outside of your ability to change.

<comment><USER11> I create wealth by increasing efficiency and destroying jobs. I have made many people redundant and gotten them laid off. It's the name of the game hop from one useful skill to the next or become obsolete.

I don't really care about these lost jobs but saying it's their fault that they become redundant is missing the point. Luck is a large factor in both the generation and retention of wealth. The risk of true poverty limits society's just as excessive crime by reducing people's willingness to take risks. Young people are more likely to do a startup because they have lower risk of failure. Losing everything at 25 is vary different than losing everything at 55.

Note: I am not saying we need to do anything with the 3rd world but I feel limited job training and basic welfare help many people bounce back. Spending a small percentage of GDP on such things is an investment that may or may not pay off but saying it's useless as an ideological stance is missing the point. However, the numbers I have seen on wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state>) suggest that we spend 14% of GDP on welfare which seems insane. Are they looking at SS as welfare?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems that they are classifying social-insurance programs like Social Security as "welfare", whereas most people would define "welfare" as programs that are specifically targeted to poor people.

And one of the reasons Social Security is so politically secure--even at the height of the Dubya Administration's influence, a proposal to privatize it went down in flames--is that middle-class as well as poor voters expect to benefit from it.

<comment><USER12> No one benefits from social security.The average payout is below the input.

Members pay so that more senior members may benefit and then hope that newer member will pay enough so that they may benefit as well. It functions like a large, mandatory pyramid scheme and only survives because people who have paid fortunes into it expect to be compensated.

<comment><USER5> The benefit you get from Social Security is that if you retire before you die, if a spouse or parent who provides your family income retires or dies before you die, or if you become too disabled to work, you don't have to worry about outliving your savings, and you don't have to worry about inflation making your annuity worthless.

<comment><USER12> Both of the problems could easily be solved by replacing SS with an ordinary savings account. Not to mention that Fed loans to SS aggravates inflation greatly.

<comment><USER5> An "ordinary savings account" can't give you a stream of income for the rest of your life that adjusts for inflation, even if you have to retire early due to disability, regardless of the state of the stock market or interest rates.

And right now, Social Security loans money to the rest of the government, not vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come."

I know lots of people - the working poor - who are doing a hell of a lot more than nothing, and poverty still comes.

<comment><USER14> _I know lots of people_

Just wondering--do you _really_ know "lots of people" who are among the "working poor"?

I come from Appalachia and have known--genuinely, no bullshit here--lots of "working poor" and can't honestly say that there was some systematic conspiracy to hold them down, rough them up, prevent them from rising, etc.

Fact is: There are a lot of people living in the lap of luxury--luxury measured by creature comforts--who in any other age would be _lucky_ , yes _lucky_ , to spend 12 hours a day behind a horse's ass.

The real reason for people staying in the lower ranks is exactly what we already know: They have some dysfunction. Perhaps a lack of intelligence, or an excess of impulse, or simply a chronic inability to show up to work on time. The latter might suprise you, as it hardly matters if programmers get up at 8 or 9 or 10, but in low-end jobs, one of the big problems among "trouble employees" is simply their unwillingness to follow a schedule. Who's to blame?

<comment><USER15> There are lots of examples of poor people who are hard working and still poor, and lots of examples of wealthy people who fell into it. There is no moral value to wealth and to say so not only insults our intelligence but attempts to justify terrible injustices.

<comment><USER16> At the same time, many people (we'll call them "left-wing") claim that there is no agency behind wealth or poverty, and that therefore we should punish the "lucky" rich people to help the "unlucky" poor. This attitude is utterly simplistic and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (the left- wing tends to be extreme).

<comment><USER17> "punish the rich"... "the left-wing tends to be extreme"; this is just blatant partisanship. There is nothing to support, just opinion... what productive conversation could start this way?

This is why politics here is dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is insightful. One should point out however, the inverse does not hold true. Poverty is not a universal sign of laziness or inaction. You can become poor in spite of working very hard. It is important to keep this in mind lest we become completely unsympathetic to those less fortunate, who, in some cases work very hard and yet have nothing.

Also, as an aside I'd like ot point out that material wealth is something that isn't universally pursued. Some people a happy investing in other things instead once their very basic needs are met.

</comment><comment> meat-eater In some situations and places, wealth can be harder to create. On the individual level, it would be hard to refute the fact that somebody with an Ivy League college education has more wealth creation opportunities than a farmer from a 3rd world country. Same thing also applies to poor countries and rich countries. So even though poverty is the rest state, it really doesn't help that some people are taking advantage of other people to create it.

<comment><USER19> This just shows that there are forms of societal wealth, without which there is just another form of poverty. Things like a legal system, low crime, enforceable contracts, public safety, etc are all forms of wealth that enable new investments and more wealth. Falls in the same category as seaports, natural resources, an educated populace, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When analyzing systems, we typically look for a transient response and the initial conditions. Extending this analogy, it would seem natural that even if we knew the characteristics of a system, the behavior of the system would be largely controlled by the inputs.

I'm not sure either element can be excluded when trying to solve this - <USER2> guess is that it's the need to fit things into our own frameworks and understanding that pushes people to grossly oversimplify.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe a bit more enlightening (if you read further than the opening quote) <http://www.techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=120302A>

</comment><comment><USER22> In other words, Poor people are just lazy.

Sorry, but it's been my experience that people who submit that argument have know neither people nor poverty well enough to speak as an authority to its causes.

</comment><comment><USER23> In other words, capitalism is a treadmill!

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a woefully ignorant article that fails to include any piece of evidence to back up these claims.

Take, for instance, many countries in Africa. What prevents these countries from not rising in the poverty ladder is not the lazy, dumb people of these countries.

First, they can't sell products to other countries because the majority of countries are land-locked, meaning they have no way to ship their goods out at a reasonable price. They don't have any ports in their country and the neighboring countries with ports are hostile or unsafe.

Second, wealth is not a stable commodity in these countries due to coups and constant political restructuring and military action. Even if you were a very hard ambitious worker, there is nothing you can do about external forces (read: rebels invading your home/shop and stealing all the wealth you have built up).

Third, little of Africa is actually arable, and Africa can't even become an agrarian society because there isn't really the resources for them to do so. And the resources that are valuable to the rest of the world that could generate money for African countries - like, oil and diamonds, become hotly contested and a source of conflict and instability, furthering reducing the value of storing wealth.

Take some time to learn about the world if you have a strong opinion on this matter.

<comment><USER19> You're totally agreeing with the article's premise that poverty is a lack of wealth. Seaports, navigable rivers, stable, friendly neighbors, political stability, and arable land are all forms of wealth. Just because they aren't owned by an individual doesn't mean they aren't wealth. Most people in Africa lack these things and therefore they are poor. If these things existed, then there would be an infrastructure that would let individual, hard working and industrious Africans become wealthier.

If you compare any rich country with any poor country, you can make a similar list of things the poor country is lacking that make it poor. Those things are all forms of wealth. Whether it is natural or man-made doesn't matter.

<comment><USER24> My mistake - I read the first two lines and that set the tone for the rest of the article. Those first two lines, though, have no relevance to the rest of the article. You can in no way argue that the lack of wealth (the definition of poverty stated in the article) is caused by a 'rest state of doing nothing' (also a definition of poverty in the article), which is what the first two lines imply.</comment></comment></comment>


The XPS 13 Developer Edition - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/ <comment><USER2> Does it beat a decent modern thinkpad?

<comment><USER3> Not sure, but it doesn't beat a fully loaded Thinkpad from 4+ years ago. I hope Lenovo rolls out the retro design they are teasing.

<comment><USER4> I came here to comment about the Thinkpad.

They are cheap, they are sturdy, and they are fast.

The design is one that works with the user. Even though it doesn't look 'good', I love it and don't think I'll ever be able to change.

This video embodies my opinions of how great the old thinkpad designs are: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doEZMNXz1JY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doEZMNXz1JY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What do you guys think of it? I think it's beautiful!

<comment><USER6> Anything smaller than a 15" screen feels cramped to me these days. I'd like to see it in person before passing judgement, but the specs don't really seem worth the premium price to me. For that kind of money, you can get into a pretty nice Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER7> I prefer my XPS13 over a Macbook Pro though.

It's lighter, much smaller, same screen size, the carbon fiber inside feels comfier than the macbook's cold and hard aluminum.

And it's definitely drawn more attention than the (now) rather plain looking macbook pro.

The biggest negative is the webcam position. It's under the screen, and makes me look terrible on calls.

<comment><USER8> The webcam is also obscured by typing fingers which is more annoying than the weird angle to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ze Frank's New Stealth Startup : Star.me - <AUTHOR> http://star.me/

<comment><USER3> Sounds to me like this would be a very good Facebook/iPhone/Android app - <USER2> as a standalone, it doesn't seem to appeal to me.</comment>


Meteor Acquires YC Alum FathomDB for Its Development Platform - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/meteor-acquires-yc-alum-fathomdb-for-its-web-development-platform/

<comment><USER2> "... there are now plenty of companies that have raised more than $7 million each that run almost completely using the Meteor framework ..." \- anyone know who some of those companies are? I'd love to see some large-scale examples of Meteor running in the wild.

<comment><USER3> Off the top of my head, Lookback.io ([https://lookback.io](https://lookback.io)) raised $2.2M and Workpop raised $7.9M ([http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/workpop/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/workpop/)).

Lots more: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startups-using- Meteor](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startups-using-Meteor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait, MeteorJS was funded? I'm starting to think investors are strangely out of touch with the projects they throw money at. Famo.us is the one that stands out the most to me; I have no idea how they got funding or were able to pay employees. Now Famo.us is open source, like it should have always started as, with nowhere to go for investors. Meteor seems like a similar thing, a web framework of sorts with no concrete way to monetize, also in a very weird niche space (Famo.us for people who think they can get away with not making native apps, Meteor for people who think they can get away with undocumented voodoo in their web development). Now Meteor somehow has enough money to purchase a database company? It seems like the only exit they could have is sell their souls to enterprise. Look at Django, which is a complete, robust, mature framework compared to Meteor's collection of magic. Django is a non- profit entity, which makes sense for this type of software. We've all built a web framework or animation library in our spare time, since when did investors start dishing out cash thinking these things were monetizeable?

To me this just smells of bubble, of too much money for too small projects / markets. Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do something unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right now.

<comment><USER3> > Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do something > unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right now.

Visit [http://meteor.com/about](http://meteor.com/about) and you will find this:

> [...] a new platform for cloud applications that will become as ubiquitous > as previous platforms such as Unix, HTTP, and the relational database.

Meteor is not "an MVC framework", it is a platform for creating applications. The investment seems to reflect the ambition described on this page and after having watched them execute over the past two years, I'm glad they're funded, because it clearly enabled them to continue working on this without running out of steam and having to go back to their old jobs.

They have also been quite open about their future plans for making money, such as in the post announcing their funding back in 2012: [https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors- new-112-milli...](https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors- new-112-million-development-budget)

> Eventually, we plan to make a commercial product too, called Galaxy. Galaxy > will be a product that the operations department at a large company might > buy. It'll be an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for > Meteor apps.

<comment><USER5> The success of this future plateform obviously depends on the success of their core product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's just me, but I feel like every meteor site I see just feels a little ....off, for some reason, or just not as polished. Like the [http://lookback.io](http://lookback.io) site, the location of the navigation items at the top shifts slightly between pages, and completely when jumping from 'explore' to anything else. I've messed around with meteor and really like it, but I'm still waiting to see a "Made with Meteor" site that blows me away.

<comment><USER7> The change in navigation position you're seeing when navigating between pages other than Explore is caused by the browser displaying a scroll bar. The nav bar on the Explore page (for whatever reason) has an entirely different style applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is surprisingly light on details, and their websites seem to have few others. Does this mean that Meteor will support SQL databases for the 1.0 release?

<comment><USER9> I hope that to be the case as well. The way the data model works is pushing data updates back to the client through the mongodb cursor and this db solution should be able to provide that data update functionality

<comment><USER10> Experiments with Redis and other databases have been done, so SQL support will almost certainly arrive at some point.</comment></comment></comment>


JS++ Easy, Fast, Powerful. Nearly No Learning Curve - <AUTHOR> https://www.onux.com/jspp/ <comment><USER2> install in windows\system32 ? doesn't feel right</comment>


How to recover lost Python source code if it's still resident in-memory - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/simonw/8aa492e59265c1a021f5c5618f9e6b12 <comment><USER2> If it's a single file can't you just copy the deleted filehandle from procfs?

[https://www.linux.com/news/bring-back-deleted-files- lsof](https://www.linux.com/news/bring-back-deleted-files-lsof)

<comment><USER3> The code was deleted, not necessarily the file. But that's a nice tool to have as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is worth a read just for the explanation of how to get an interactive python shell connected to a running script.

<comment><USER5> To save everyone a click: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyrasite/](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyrasite/)

Wish I'd known about that years ago just for the ability to grab a call stack from a running program.

<comment><USER6> For those wondering how it works, it's basically just a wrapper around gdb which calls the internal C exec implementation in the Python interpreter (which then executes some other script file which you specify). Pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The method described is for recovering and decompiling bytecode into equivalent Python code, which is not exactly the same thing as source code, since it won't contain things like comments and unexported object names.

edit: made more accurate

<comment><USER8> Of course, Python is a little better than most languages for things like 'comments' \- as a lot of them aren't really comments but docstrings, which are actually a part of the class, not a true comment, and so presumably can be restored.

<comment><USER9> Not if you use `python -OO`, which will optimize the docstrings out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it ever makes sense to do this it means you aren't committing frequently enough.

<comment><USER11> Yep.

Amusingly, Simon and I were working on the same codebase during Eventbrite's quarterly hackathon when this happened. He was working solo on one feature while myself and three other developers were working on another. Because we were collaborating, we had to commit frequently simply to stay in sync. Because he was working alone, he was able to avoid committing and get into a situation where figuring out the process in this gist was necessary.

Despite this distraction and 1/4 the personpower, Simon arguably still wrote something cooler than we did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is certainly an interesting technique, however in this case surely git- reflog would have been easier/resulted in not losing code comments etc?

<comment><USER13> He presumably used checkout on a file with uncommitted changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome use of pyrasite, great job! \--luke (pyrasite author)

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. One of the comments asks why he didn't copy the .py from the docker container, but it doesn't get answered. Too bad because I was curious also.

<comment><USER15> Depending on the author's dev practices, the script might have been in a volume so that editing it on the host would allow the container to receive the changes as they get saved. While I wouldn't normally suggest this approach, it can be handy at times.

<comment><USER16> Mounting host directory in a container is quite the popular approach. n almost every development tutorials I have read using Docker mentions this approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had to do the exact thing for my .bash_profile, as I accidentally had deleted it (with tons of customizations) and I didn't have quick access to my backups, but I did had the deleted .bash_profile loaded into memory in some open terminal sessions.

Fortunately, you can just write:

      declare

to get all your aliases, functions, etc from the current shell session.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pardon my ignorance but why is this a big deal? Debuggers can attach to running processes and pyrasite can inject code into running processes so for a language like python, it makes sense that you would be able to fetch either the resident bytecode or the code itself. What am I missing?

<comment><USER19> You're not missing anything. But a bunch of us didn't figure it out before and we're just now learning about it. So we're excited, we're learning something new!

(Please, please, don't be condescending to people who are learning something new.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would this work on Dropbox, which is mostly written in Python?

<comment><USER21> They only ship encrypted pyc files, along with a one off Python interpeter that has the key inside it. Additional tricks as well, like scrambling the opcode table, disabling built in functionality you could use to dump in memory structures, etc.

Of course, since the key is in the binary, you can hack at it: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot13/workshop- program/pr...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot13/workshop- program/presentation/kholia)

<comment><USER22> Yep and they change things around every once in a while too. I RE'd dropbox several times using several different techniques. I just checked my old tarball containing a script which downloads dropbox binary, downloads the Python interpreter, builds the opcode table database and then decompiles everything.

      gvb@santarago:/tmp/lookinsidethebox$ ./run.sh
      fetched all dependencies..lets try decompiling
      no saved opcode mapping found; try to generate it
      pass one: automatically generate opcode mapping
      108 opcodes
      pass two: decrypt files, patch bytecode and decompile
      1928/1928
      successfully decrypted and decompiled: 1727 files
      error while decrypting: 0 files
      error while decompiling: 196 files
      opcode misses: 7 total 0x6c (108) [#9],  0x2c (44) [#14],  0x8d (141) [#15],  0x2e (46) [#1],  0x2d (45) [#14],  0x30 (48) [#5],  0x71 (113) [#11783],

A starting point to do this yourself is: [https://github.com/rumpeltux/dropboxdec](https://github.com/rumpeltux/dropboxdec). After unmarshalling the new pyc files the seed read in via the rng() function is in newer Dropbox installations passed through a Mersenne twister from which 4 DWORD values are being read which are then used to construct the key for the Tiny Encryption Algorithm cipher.

After that you get the binary blob back which you can unmarshall now. But you still need to figure out the opcode mapping. For that I used a trick publicly first done (to the best of my knowledge) by the author of PyREtic (Rich Smith) released at BH 2010. He just compares the stdlib pyc files with the stdlib included within dropbox (after decrypting those pyc files) byte by byte. That should yield a mapping of opcodes.

Then pass everything through uncompyle2 and you've got pretty readable source code back. Some files will refuse to decompile but that means hand-editing / fine-tuning the last bits of your opcode table a bit.

EDIT: follow-up on parent comment; the encryption keys are not in the interpreter. The interpreter is patched to not expose co_code and more (to make this memory dumping more difficult; injecting an shared object is a different technique that I used too). It's also patched to use the different opcode mapping and the unmarshalling of pyc files upon loading them. However the key for each pyc file is derived from data strictly in those files themselves. It's pretty clear when you load up the binary in IDA Pro and compare the unmarshalling code with a standard Python interpreter's code

<comment><USER21> I thought that they would have added more obfuscation after that paper was published. Since the opcode generation and parsing is reset, per pyc file, I expected to see stuff like:

\- A rotating opcode table that changes every X opcodes

\- Multiple opcodes that referenced the same operation, selected randomly at generation time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anybody knows if it's possible in Ruby? Just being able to have a live irb from a process ID would be pretty awesome

<comment><USER24> "sudo gdb -p [process id]" will attach to the running process. If you attach that to a Ruby process, you can do:

       call rb_eval_string("puts 'hi from the Ruby process'")

(The latter will output to the _ruby scripts STDOUT_ so if you can't see the stdout from the Ruby interpreter, it won't produce anything - test it by just starting a ruby interpreter and find it's pid)

You can use that to (try to) load code. For example try loading pry and setting up a pry-remote connection. You can also use any other part of the MRI extension API - gdb can do quite complicated calls.

Note that any uncaught error may easily cause the Ruby script you're connected to to terminate, and there are plenty of opportunities to cause problems since when you're connecting gdp to the process, the Ruby interpreter will be paused at an arbitrary point, which may leave the interpreter in an inconsistent state.

To wrap the above up into anything reasonable, you'd want to first ensure the interpreter is in a decent state by setting a breakpoint somewhere "sane" in the interpreter, continue execution, and then execute some _very_ carefully crafted code to let you inject the code you need without triggering any errors that mess up for the script, or changing variables etc. the script depends on.

It probably could be wrapped up into something quite nice combined with pry/pry-remote, though.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, I will probably make a wrapper gem around that (e.g. maybe just a `call rb_eval_string ("binding.pry")`).

In my case I get "No symbol "rb_backtrace" in current context.", I will look deeper into it.

Also, there is a great gist about Ruby GDB debugging: [https://gist.github.com/mmullis/6211061](https://gist.github.com/mmullis/6211061).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I did this yesterday. However IntelliJ had my back. It's History feature has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

One time I was able to go back weeks to fetch some code I'd long since deleted and was nowhere to be found in git.

<comment><USER26> I have this in my .vimrc which serves a similar purpose:

        " persist undo history to file / across sessions
        set undofile
        set undodir=$HOME/.vimundo
        " max out history length
        set history=9999
        set undoleves=9999999999
        set undoreload=10000

(Don't forget to mkdir "$HOME/.vimundo".)

Combine that with [https://github.com/mbbill/undotree](https://github.com/mbbill/undotree) and you can easily walk the entire history of every file you edit.

<comment><USER27> Is it actually `undoleves` or is that a typo?

<comment><USER26> That should be `undolevels`, yes. Unfortunately I can't edit it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting! I wonder if...

gdb -p `pidof python`

gcore foo.core

strings foo.core | grep -a200 -A200 knowntext

.. would also work.

<comment><USER3> I don't think python keeps the text file in memory, since it compiles everything to bytecode on startup.</comment></comment>


Discrete Differential Geometry for Image Processing [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/DGPDEC/paper.pdf <comment><USER2> A more accurate title would be "Discrete Differential Geometry: An Applied Introduction" or "Discrete Differential Geometry for Mesh Processing"</comment>


Open Source Framework for Cooking - <AUTHOR> http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2012/04/06/infographic-of-the-week-open-source-framework-for-cooking/ <comment><USER2> Very nice.

I've been tossing somewhat similar ideas around in my head for a few years. My own name for it is "Cooking for Ns", where "N" refers to the Myers-Briggs S/N preference. Most traditional cookbooks, cooking classes, etc., strike me as detail-oriented to the point of absurdity. It is refreshing (not to mention _useful_ ) to see a "big picture" view, telling us _why_ certain things are done, and what other things might be done in their place.

I'm not really sure why this is called "open source", though.</comment>


The Dark Matter of a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://learntoduck.com/startups/startup-dark-matter

<comment><USER2> I've never had a positive experience with a co-worker or employee who "just kinda does stuff." I have had the pleasure to work with a number of people who do many things well, and adapt in rapid succession to the kinds of situations startups find themselves in. These are the people you want to be surrounded by when you're really fighting it out early on. Need a coder to wear a sysadmin hat for a few weeks? Done. Need a designer to crunch a spreadsheet? No problem. Need a technical founder to fix an HR problem? Handled.

Over the course of a day or a month or a year, a key person might do all sorts of tasks, with their variance in role inversely proportional to the age of the startup. But what they do in the short term is clearly identifiable. No dark matter to be found.

<comment><USER3> I have to agree with you.

Having an all-rounder is good for short term goals. Ultimately having clear responsibilities and goals is better as the scope should be narrowed down to achievable goals, whether its a startup that's bootstrapping, or gone really successful

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmmm, i dont actually agree with this very much. In the early days its quite important that you know what everyone is doing. Maybe when things are 1-2 years along there is the position for the guy that does the job that everyone else _kinda_ doesnt want to do (setup vanilla os's on machines so the unix admins can get to the real configuration, do different types of data entry for things that cant be automated basically mechanical tasks) that yes contributes to the success of the company.

But in early days there are 2-3 people and none of them can be dark matter otherwise this person evolves into a vortex or blackhole for your capital/profits.

</comment><comment><USER5> The dark matter of a startup: mysteriously absorbs money without emitting product.

<comment><USER6> e.g. middle management

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, I can run an IT startup (as I'm doing) only by myself. I do pretty good at everything (coding, HCI, Design, Management/Law, PR/HR, etc).

I think a employee like this can partially hurt an early-age startup (as also sid says).

</comment><comment><USER8> Give me a fucking break, this is the kind of shit that led to the first dot com bubble.

You either sell or develop in a startup, if you're doing neither or these, you're useless. Pick one and do it.</comment>