Should Trump Have Indexed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-03/should-donald-trump-have-indexed-

<comment><USER2> This was already flagged and discussed here from the original article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165558)

TLDR: it's an incredibly reductionist and short-sighted conclusion that index funds would have helped Trump more than a real estate empire. Yes, having a rich family helps, but he couldn't simply just liquidate everything into stocks.</comment>


Leonardo Da Vinci's to Do List (Circa 1490) - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/leonardo-da-vincis-list-circa-1490.html <comment><USER2> Find the greatest subject matter expert available for a given discipline. Tap their knowledge.

The greatest people I have worked with have taken the same approach. Experts are incredibly willing to share. You may have to work around their schedule, but they will share. Just ask.

<comment><USER3> Give me an example. I have literally never had anyone show me anything unless I demonstrated proficiency on par with their own and they felt the need to impress me. That, or paying them lots and lots of money for personal lessons, which generally tend to be crap anyway.

I am baffled by the amount of people who espouse mentorship like it's actually a thing.

<comment><USER4> So, part of getting advice depends upon seeming to be the kind of person worth sharing with.

This can be competency in a different discipline, or being young and full of potential, or being personally interesting, etc.

In my experience experts will routinely and freely share their knowledge. People love talking about themselves.

If this has basically never happened to you, it's worth some self-examination. Do you make friends easily? Do you manage relationships well? Do you often find yourself in arguments? Do you have some recognized expertise or usefulness in some area?

There are many hints in your language. The "tend to be crap" anyways is a tell that you might have a sour attitude on life that turns people away. The "baffled by" indicates a lack of empathy and low ability to examine why your situation may differ from theirs. "Give me an example" is demanding. "Felt the need to impress me" views others' motives in a mercenary and petty way.

You're free to ignore this. But, consider that if you figure out why people aren't mentoring you specifically, it may also solve a bunch of related issues caused by a common thread.

(The thoughts above are based on little data, so don't take any of them personally if they're off base. The one big data point is never receiving advice - that is a sign of a problem. And, since you did want an example, when I entered business I cold emailed someone in my field how they did online work. They gave me a detailed and helpful answer, and we later became business partners. I have many stories like that.)

<comment><USER5> There's always the possibility that things are different in their country.

<comment><USER6> It seems to me that is less likely. Certainly there would be some unusual situations where people are unfairly oppressed to a point where they cannot take advantage of this, BUT for the most part... people are people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The list shows both Leonardo's dilettantism in Latin and mathematics, and how printing changed the way we learn. Even in 1490, to learn "how to square a triangle", you did not have to get the master of arithmetic to show you. You could find a copy of Euclid's Elements and skim it up to Proposition II.14 [1]. The first printed edition of Elements (in Latin) was published in 1482 [2].

[1] [https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/elements/bookII/propII14.h...](https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/elements/bookII/propII14.html) [2] [https://archive.org/details/preclarissimusli00eucl](https://archive.org/details/preclarissimusli00eucl)

<comment><USER8> I mean Leonardo himself knew he was horrible in both Latin and math. He had access to various books in both subjects during his lifetime (thanks in part to the printing press) but his lack of foundational knowledge made it hard for him to learn geometry when he lacked skills in arithmetic and algebra.

Secondly, it's a bit funny that you say the book could have shown him how to square a circle, seeing as it's an impossible problem.

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

<comment><USER9> He said "how to square a triangle".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're looking for more of Da Vinci, I can't recommend Walter Isaacson's biography enough. I just wrapped it up, and it gave me huge respect for a figure I knew only passingly before. Particularly the conclusion, which is one of the better summaries on lessons learned from a text that I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER11> >Really fascinating! Insatiable curiosity...

I see that several people commented on Leonardo's curiosity. When I was about 18 or therabouts I came across a book about Leonardo. That book made a big deal about how curiosity was the driving force in Leonardo's life. I was so impressed that I started to believe curiosity was the defining characteristic of humans. And I became curious about everything around me. I chose the study of how this world works as my mission in life. I chose not to make money. I only worked to make enough money to pay the rent. The rest of the time I was in the library. But there is a downsize to this. I now believe that it's better not to be curious. It's better to concentrate on building a business and make money. Because in this world money allows you to build new things and make new discoveries. Bezos can build his own rocket and go to the moon if he wants to. Google can and does change the world. They are not doing what they are doing for curiosity's sake. So I would not advise a youngster who is starting in life to be curious like Leonardo. I would advise to make lots of money so that he/she can achieve big things. I think the era of curious and solitary researcher is over.

<comment><USER12> Can you share more about this? How much time did you devote to study? Do you regret it, what did you learn?

<comment><USER11> Thanks for asking. Here's my reply [https://notlar11.wordpress.com/newton-the- greatest-genius-of...](https://notlar11.wordpress.com/newton-the-greatest- genius-of-all-times/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> He seems busy.

And each of his todo items, like mine, look like they could easily explode out into 20 more.

<comment><USER14> You might be interested in my newest (fake) product: [https://stackboi.com](https://stackboi.com)

<comment><USER15> You might be interested in using height: 100vh instead of min-height.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious about how you ended up inspecting the layout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316)

</comment><comment><USER18> Most items in his todo list seem to be Google searches in modern times.

</comment><comment><USER19> _Draw Milan_

What does it mean? Is he drawing the entire city?!

Jeez, here I am, writing "do laundry" in my list :(

</comment><comment><USER20> And here I am, writing down "get milk" like a rube

<comment><USER3> Plebs gonna pleb. Brb, going to go 'check tire pressure' and 'iron clothing'.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't be surprised to see 'iron clothing' on Da Vinci's list either, though perhaps less of a to-do than a to-make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really fascinating! Insatiable curiosity, and a wider perception even as time passed in his life, Leonardo is truly remarkable

<comment><USER23> And not at least the fact that he wrote his personal notes in mirror script: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_writing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_writing)

<comment><USER24> I'm left-handed and years later I found I had written things on my grandma's (outside, stone) wall with chalk in mirror script. This dated from when I just started writing, so on an anecdotal level, this seems to be a natural way to write if you're left handed.

<comment><USER25> I started taking some of my whiteboard notes in mirror script after reading it assisted in neuroplasticity, and it really didn't take long to get the hang of. I haven't done it in a while though, can you still do it like muscle memory?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like some sort of an ancient Google search.

</comment><comment><USER27> The given picture looks mirrored to me.

<comment><USER6> As others have commented, Da Vinci actually wrote all his personal works backwards

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Maybe it was done for copyright reasons but the image from the notebook is flipped horizontally. Anybody else noticed this?

<comment><USER29> Da Vinci actually wrote all his personal works backwards, for reasons unknown!

<comment><USER30> There's evidence that he was left-handed, or at least did a lot of his work with the left hand. He may have found it more convenient to write in that direction so as not to smudge the ink, especially if he wrote quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> People today are not as curious as Leonardo was. For him learning was an everyday occupation. Most people today seek entertainment and distraction. Maybe its the advent of so many cool technologies that did not exist back then to capture our time. But I imagine Leonardo would have read Hacker News for sure.

<comment><USER32> > People today are not as curious as Leonardo was

Nor were they in 1490.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Draw Milan"..pretty ambitious task. Obviously DaVinci didn't consider breaking down the tasks into smaller pieces. The GTD method involves this concept directly in its flow. In today's world, the breaking up of tasks is especially valuable. Here's an article about GTD from our blog: [https://zenkit.com/en/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-getting- thin...](https://zenkit.com/en/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-getting-things-done/)</comment>


Google + Twitter launch Speak2Tweet - where vms are automatically tweeted - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/dKiBsQq6nxw

<comment><USER2> That's very nice of Google and Twitter. I really appreciate all the efforts which allow people to keep sharing.

ps. I wish the Turkish land-line number (+90 212 339 1447) ended with 1337 instead =)</comment>


Ask HN: Why is HN so aggressively anti-Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> Two articles on the front page right now, both littered with negative comments. Google invested in Chainlink recently, is HN anti Chainlink/Blockchain? In other words, are there any blockchains that HN (generally speaking) has a positive opinion of? <comment><USER3> I don't think HN is anti-blockchain. HN is anti-hype. Bitcoin and blockchain are not the solutions for every problem; HN can sometimes respect the hustle of "say blockchain so that you get more VC money", but that _doesn 't_ mean HN won't criticize the actual technology if it's "X but with Blockchain!!". And HN can go either way on "technical solutions for social/legal problems", so it's at least _controversial_ to suggest that a blockchain will solve a social/legal problem without doing anything but writing code.

<comment><USER4> _> HN is anti-hype_

This is part of it, but that's faulty reasoning. Just because there's a lot of hype and fraud surrounding the technology and network does not mean that the technology and network is hype or fraud.

Another factor is that we're very talented at finding all the reasons something new won't work, and not so good at understanding how something flawed can still be useful.

Exhibit A is the infamous Dropbox comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

But fundamentally, most of us, like most people generally, fail to understand what money is. We use it every day, so we all think we understand it. Money seems tangible and valuable, but it's all just a very powerful social construct that's backed by nothing more than collective belief and utility.

The mind rebels at such a flimsy foundation, so many of the criticisms aimed at cryptocurrency are equally valid when aimed at dollars or yen.

Maybe we're doomed to an Eternal September of repeating the same arguments in an endless loop for decades more. Please, let's hear the story of Dutch tulips again, or how dollars are actually backed by taxes or the military or buying cups of coffee.

If we listened to the nattering nabobs of negativism, we'd never invent anything truly novel.

<comment><USER3> I never suggested that Bitcoin or Blockchain were entirely hype. I'm suggesting that many _uses_ of them, and many _articles_ about them, are, and HN treats them accordingly. I'm talking about the 23rd article on "let's do medical records but On The Blockchain, which will solve every problem with medical records". I'm talking about people who seriously suggest that Bitcoin will make existing currency and governments obsolete. I'm talking about comments that decry the slightest criticism or moderation as "the nattering nabobs of negativism".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All blockchains have fundamental problems including the majority problem[1]. They don't really solve any problems, because all blockchain problems are just restating other problems with the words "but on the blockchain" added. Tracking your fruit to make sure it's fresh by making trucks have sensors that post to the blockchain? Yeah, you're just shifting the burden of trust from whoever fills out the paperwork to whoever made and installed the sensor - <USER2> haven't done anything.

It's a buzzword that's used blindly in the hopes of attracting capital [2] that has no real meaning. Out of a dozen blockchain related job offers I was approached with, not a SINGLE founder could answer simple questions about how to assure verification or prevent blockchain manipulation.

Blockchain is up there with fad diets, crazy health claims for boring foods, and nonsense cancer treatments. Does it have a potential role? Sure, it'd probably be kind of a cute feature in a game.

[1] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp) [2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/bringing-blockchain-to-the- coff...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/bringing-blockchain-to-the-coffee- cup-1523797205)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can't speak for others but my thoughts are:

1\. It has become more of a speculative instrument than an actual currency. People are more concerned about making money buying/selling/holding BTC. Defeats the original purpose of a "decentralized currency"

2\. Not sure that decentralized currency is a good thing. Some things need to be regulated unfortunately. Yes, we all hate the central banks etc but I would trust a regular currency anyday over BTC. Not to mention that you are at the mercy of these "wallets" or even worse "centralized wallets" like coinbase etc which again defeats the purpose in my opinion.

3\. It wastes electricity. A lot of it just to mine. Why do we need to mine it again ? Oh it is because there is only so much of it ? Is that a good thing ? I don't know.

4\. Most importantly: adoption. My mother has no idea what BTC is and will ever know. It is far too away from being a currency that can be used by regular people. Perhaps that day will come but not yet.

5\. Too many scams due to the gold rush of BTC. Again, that is a bad thing.

Disclaimer: I don't know much about BTC but still have these thoughts about it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't speak for all of HN...

My $0.02: it wastes electricity to solve a non-problem.

<comment><USER8> Same for me, but "wastes" is an understatement.

> From 1 January 2016 to 30 June 2018, we estimate that mining Bitcoin, > Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero consumed an average of 17, 7, 7 and 14 MJ to > generate one US$, respectively. Comparatively, conventional mining of > aluminium, copper, gold, platinum and rare earth oxides consumed 122, 4, 5, > 7 and 9 MJ to generate one US$, respectively, indicating that (with the > exception of aluminium) cryptomining consumed more energy than mineral > mining to produce an equivalent market value.

> During this period, we estimate mining for all 4 cryptocurrencies was > responsible for 3–15 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I obviously can't speak for all of HN, but I'm annoyed by the number of projects that include blockchain technology for no good reason.

<comment> grumpy-cowboy HDD (Hype Driven Development). Like projects using Microservices, Serverless, NoSQL, CQRS, Hadoop, [add your preferred hype here]... technologies for no good reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> HN in general hates hype. The technology behind Bitcoin is interesting; "to the moon!" isn't. Blockchains have a few use cases when they are better than a database, but not billions of dollars in VC worth. That money is the result of FOMO, not innovation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I personally like Hyperledger Fabric ([https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric](https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric)) for a private blockchain technology.

That being said I still have not found the problem that it is the solution for other than addressing our CTO's case of FOMO.

<comment><USER12> It works well when you are trying to get several companies to interoperability. The hype gets them moving, I don't really care that they aren't using the best tech. What matters is that the supply chain is becoming more efficient and trustable. (even if the def of trust is not the "holy Grail" public/permissionless claims to have found.)

Honestly, trust the companies that obey the laws more than those trying to create a lawless society

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My take is that it's several things:

\- Lots of crypto links posted to HN are scams or have no technical merit

\- No one has come up[1] with a use case for blockchain that actually requires blockchain, outside of cryptocurrency (which is something non-technical people and speculators don't understand or won't admit)

\- Because of rampant scams and speculation, a lot of online blockchain/crypto conversations have a high noise-to-signal ratio

1\. [https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up- with-...](https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use- case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100)

<comment><USER14> Vehicle history. Health care history. Or any type of history storage, really. The fact the data is everywhere means it cant be easily destroyed, and doesnt have only one gatekeeper.

<comment><USER13> How does blockchain help? Why do I want "consensus" (let alone distributed consensus) on any of those histories?

It's easy to create data that can't easily be destroyed. Back it up. You don't need a cryptographic, anonymous data mutation algorithm to do that. Just copy it to more places.

And as far as not having one gatekeeper... none of those things have one gatekeeper anyway. Who is lamenting that there's a single gatekeeper for their health history? If anything, people are lamenting the opposite -- that it's such a mess where multiple people have to cobble it together from disparate records formats.

To paraphrase something once said about JavaScript: the useful aspects of blockchain aren't new, and the new aspects aren't useful. Immutable (aka append-only), distributed, encrypted databases are useful! They are not blockchains, though.

<comment><USER14> The point is that you dont have to go to a source owned by someone. For example, the DMV has your driving record. Blockchain allows the history of a vehicle to be stored and accessed easily. Mechanics all have their own records. Why not tie them directly to the object?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Many on HN had experiences with investment, or are themselves, investors. We need to see either enormous traction (beyond speculation) or solving of an actual customer problem. So far not a single "X but with Blockchain" startup did not deliver anything of true value.

Personal anecdote: a friend of mine was working on a project to utilize extremely counterfeit-resistant holographic tags to authenticate organic produce in China (where anything can be faked). 2-3 years and he still didn't have any significant customers. Enter Blockchain. They replaced the tag with a QR code, "blockchain cannot be faked" mantra, and within 6 months got $4 million investment and some customers. So when you scan the QR code, it opens a web page that shows some fancy data like id, date of packaging, etc. Who provides this data? The company. Who provides the web page? The company. Who can alter this data in any way they want? The company. And now the punchline: there is no blockchain in the code. Zero.

</comment><comment><USER16> For me personally, I think it's the fact that Bitcoin and especially other cryptos, are far far less secure than people think from attacks. The amount of money you need to move the market or execute at 51% attack ([https://www.crypto51.app/](https://www.crypto51.app/)) especially if you are working with other large investors is trivial. For a group that loves independence from "big banks" and "Fiat" and the democratization of money, they seem to miss out that they are constantly being manipulated by rich coin holders.

<comment><USER12> Go to coinmarketcap and you'll see the daily pump & dumps. Blockchain claims all this moral superiority, and then you look at what the majority have done on the space. Feel bad for those trying to do something meaningful...

Look at how the concentration of wealth is more skewed in cryptos than IRL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > are there any blockchains that HN (generally speaking) has a positive > opinion of?

Other than Bitcoin, three other coins that are sometimes talked about here are Ethereum, Monero, Zcash.

Ethereum was the first ICO. Many other tokens operate on its blockchain.

Monero is an open source project with lots of development and progress (third behind Bitcoin and Ethereum). Its transactions are private.

Zcash is open source but mainly developed by a for-profit company and uses interesting mathematics. Its transactions are public, with the option of being private.

Disclaimer: I'm only "invested" in one of the three coins I mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER18> I believe many people are against using crypto currencies as an investment opportunity instead of a technology solution.

The primary property of a good currency is stability. The crypto currencies are exactly the opposite.

I like smart contracts but I don't think public/permission-less blockchains are feasible/very useful in the real world. Engaging in a tech and electricity spending race doesn't look like a good way to verify transactions and protect the blockchain against attacks.

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally I like Ripple.

I like permissioned blockchains.

Why is it that blockchains weren't invented sooner? I'll contend that you'd be laughed out of any distributed systems conference if you suggested any protocol where the workload capacity doesn't increase when you add nodes.

If you have ten traders who trade under a buttonwood tree, then having ten copies of the database makes the system bulletproof. If you have ten million traders, there is no additional gain, but there is a huge cost because you have ten million copies of the database.

Blockchains attract people who know nothing about money or technology the same way that pot startups attract stoners. It's just a bad scene.

<comment><USER20> There's the additional issue that blockchains are almost always the wrong tool for the job. It turns out that immutability is not really a desirable property in a system where humans are involved, because humans always introduce mistakes that need to eventually be undoable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a currency, there's maybe some merit in given scenarios. But all of the "me too, I have $CURRENCY$, it's different this time" doesn't lead to a lot of faith.

It's over-hyped in general. Beyond that, often implemented in was suggested that don't really add much value compared to any number of other less complicated solutions.

If you are in a situation, where you have competing parties not aligned who want to ensure a given transaction is applied, and don't mind the implementation of that transaction being completely public, then blockchain might be the right solution.

If you are wanting to use cryptocurrency for financial transactions, then there is some merit, but in many cases suggested it's effectively a corporatist overload control over currency (such as Facebook's currency suggestion). If it's actual bitcoin or a handful of other alt-coins, at least it's decentralized but not as anonymous as many think. It's also, in general difficult to use without some centralization.

In the end, someone will win in this game. My guess is the banks behind the winner (MasterCard and Visa are backing FB's Libre venture). Given the actions against people with unpopular views (even if they are wrong thinking assholes), it terrifies me. Freedom to exchange property, and currency is a stand in for property, is a big deal and at least as big a deal as speech.

</comment><comment><USER22> Reading through the criticisms my main takeaway is that (1) there's a severe lack of empathy for the segment of the world that doesn't have the luxury of a stable currency and developed financial infrastructure, and (2) there's some extreme misconceptions about both the technology and the economics behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If your main point of opposition is that there's too much "hype" you're being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hyperledger can be useful, more in the non-tech sense, but then the cryptokiddies get all irate, lol, part of the fun.

HN tends to shun Blockchain because it has a non trivial amount of fraud and amature hour to it... IMHO. Too much focus on the marginally useful tech, and not enough on the outcomes (i.e. CO2 from mining) and solving real problems. Too much neolib. Forgetting no one really wants their finances made public to the world.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remain intrigued by Stellar Lumens and the protocol behind it. Ripple gets the attention but my perception is that Stellar's tech is a superior fork.

</comment><comment><USER24> HN usually has lots of negative comments - some of them are even constructive negative comments. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I come here to read these intelligent criticism.

Besides, I don't think it's particularly more negative on cryptocurrencies - go to any other internet forum (that are not specialized in cryptocurrencies) and I think you'll find a similar mixture of opinions.

Finally, "Google also invested in X" isn't a very good counter-argument here. Have you seen some HN comments when Google is being discussed?

</comment><comment><USER25> Chainlink is a scam. Other than that, there's a ton of hype and BS in the cryptocurrency world, lots of Ponzi schemes and fraud.

That's where a lot of negative opinion comes from.

</comment><comment><USER26> A comment off topic of a fashion that police have found in my country, they have discovered gangs are mining bitcoin with theft of electric power. Almost a real gold mine

</comment><comment><USER27> Coinbase was a YC S12 company for what its worth.

<comment><USER12> They now track your wallet history and paths, apparently banning you from the platform if you do something against their rules, even if way off their platform.

They work with data tracking companies, think Palantir for cryptos

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think it's the same reasons behind the infamous "Show HN" Dropbox post - technical people have a tendency to be too focused on pointing out technical flaws and miss the bigger picture.

Or it's psychological and many feel better believing that is a scam because they missed the run up despite likely being knowledgeable about bitcoin years ago and decided to ignore it.

<comment><USER29> I'm still waiting for somebody to come up with that bigger picture after 10 years, all we've gotten instead is a bunch of Ponzi schemes and marketing. It's a shame so many minds were and are wasted on a solution that's not solving a problem it didn't invent (or somebody just falsely attributes to it).

<comment><USER28> Why don't you think there are serious problems with how central banks around the world control money? Inflation steals from everyday people to varying degrees around the world...look at Zimbabwe and Venezuela. We're all beholden to secret monetary policy decisions made a small handful of people, sometimes just one.

The bigger picture, in my mind, is that in the future you should be allowed to choose your citizenship, which may be something like a digital country, and decide for yourself what sort of government you want to live in. Cryptocurrency enables that future more so than anything else that currently exists.

<comment><USER30> Interestingly money (or control thereof) is not named as one of the fundamental properties of a state [1]. So maybe having an independent currency won't help you much, as long as the state you currently live in holds the monopoly on legitimate use of force (for an example see [2]).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_\(polity\)) The most commonly used definition is Max Weber's, which describes the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory. General categories of state institutions include administrative bureaucracies, legal systems, and military or religious organizations.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > In other words, are there any blockchains that HN (generally speaking) has a > positive opinion of?

I can't speak for all of HN but I seriously doubt there was ever a need for the technology to begin with.

I've read numerous investigative articles on Bitcoin, in particular, that document the environmental impact and harm it does to workers who live in remote data centers. The situation is poor. And few, if any, bitcoin enthusiasts see these as problems. From what I understand the consensus among bitcoin enthusiasts is that we'll technology our way out of this and somehow we'll live in their techno-libertarian-utopia once they figure these things out.

Frankly I don't share their ideology.

</comment><comment><USER32> Because bitcoin is solving a problem that isn't a real problem by introducing a dozen more problems the existing system has solved.

Bitcoin decentralizes currency and leaves no one entity in control. Hurrah, the government can't stop you from moving money as you see fit. Except that most of the time, the government is stopping people from doing things that were made illegal for _very good reasons_. Money laundering of proceeds of crime, terrorist financing, tax evasion. You can debate all day about whether taxes are inherently evil, but right now the law says they are legal and you've gotta pay them. Saying "No worries man, I've got a NEW currency that the government can't stop" doesn't make it not a crime.

All the while, it's not actually free. We're burning huge amounts of energy to do mining, and the costs have to be passed on to someone. Miners get free BTC for mining, but that's a closed system- someone eventually must pay real currency for that energy being used. And it's getting expensive given the number of miners. (Plus, a lot of them are China which is using coal as it's primary energy source, which is killing people from pollution!)

And finally, there's no inflation/deflation controls. A currency's utility is increased by it's stability. Not knowing if my BTC will double in price or drop by half in the next 2 weeks means every day is a gamble. If this were my only currency, I'd be terrified about buying groceries.

Oh, and let's not forget that the huge spike in BTC prices in the last few years were found likely to have been caused by manipulation.

I love crypto and think bitcoin/blockchains are a really neat technology. But I just wish they weren't here, in the real world, because they seem to be a net-loss for the world, and a Ponzi scheme.

Edit after getting a coffee: ... okay, that was a bit of a rant...

<comment><USER33> Very valid criticisms, but they do not apply in all cases.

In terms of reducing governmental control, sure this isn't much of a problem if your government is altruistic. Governments do not have a great long-term track record here. In Venezuela for example, many would say Bitcoin is solving a very real problem. You're right about its ability to be used for illegal activities, however the same could be said for most technology: encryption, the internet.

In terms of energy, this can be a criticism of almost all currencies and stores of value. This real-world expenditure is much of what gives it value, especially early on. Gold is valuable because of the difficulty in mining/acquiring it. Even national currencies are valuable due to the resources committed by their military, or the military's of that nation's allies. People might argue it is GDP, but GDP does not mean much if you cannot defend it.

Manipulation and price swings are a valid concern, but no other currency is immune to those either. Silver for example has had very widespread manipulation in the past. Silver and gold have probably still been a net- positive.

<comment><USER34> "Untrustworthy governments manipulating currencies" appears to be the problem that decentralized digital currencies are supposedly solving. Instead of this indirection, how about addressing the root problem? Replacing that untrustworthy government with a trustworthy one, changing incentives, or identifying new forms of government/control.

<comment><USER12> We are likely (hopefully) near an inflection point for our current rule systems and their ability to manage today's complexities.

See: Rules for a Flat World

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To many people bitcoin (and similar crypto currency) more than adequately demonstrates why the protections provided by governments and etc for financal orgnizations, transactions exist / are needed.

As for blockchain I think we've seen a number of "solutions" to problems that are adequately solved by a database.

</comment><comment><USER36> Why? because its not the golden saviour.

Firstly its a panopticon, not anonymous

Secondly, it has a transaction rate of <10 a second Globally.

Thirdly, its chowing down huge amounts of power for no real gain

Fourthly, its snake oil. Its value comes from its mystique. As a store of wealth its horrifically expensive, as a trading currency, its too slow, you might as well buy gold.

Yes, its has a neat idea behind it, but blockchains are inherently niche. They have very few applications outside exceptionally high value, low transaction, zero trust systems.

Etherium and its smart contracts are inherently flawed, because they are not smart, or contracts. Unless your "contract" has a binary outcome, that is faultlessly measurable, then they aren't for you. The entire point of a contract is that there is a third party capable of issuing binding resolutions, using all available evidence. Etherium gives you none of that, despite the hype.

The only thing that might be worthy of a blockchain is something like the changelog of wikipedia, but then its not worth the spectacular cost. Just keep a couple of mirrors.

</comment><comment><USER37> In general people are critical of ideas that are new. HN has an especially critical user-base with technical skills, so attacks can be made on a larger surface area.

<comment><USER13> 1) Blockchain is not "new". It's 10 years old. We went through the hype cycle for it. The thousands of software engineers and mathematicians on HN have had time to assess.

2) HN is for more accepting and enthusiastic about new ideas than the general population.

<comment><USER38> > Blockchain is not "new". It's 10 years old.

More like 40 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree)

The only thing that's new about blockchain is that on top of being a Merkle tree, it wastes a ton of energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bitcoin, for being the original.

Ethereum, for providing smart contracts, that enabled many ICOs.

Monero/ZCash for being private.

All other currencies are mostly just clones of the 3 (meaning they can suffer from 50%+1 attacks), or remove the main feature: trustless transactions.

In general, unless a currency provides a novel consensus algorithm, that brings something new to the table, it would actually be better off as a token on one of the above. If it is not, likely it is a scam/money grab.

All other projects do not really need blockchain, with a rare exception.

Disclosure: I own ETH and BTC.

<comment><USER25> There are _many_ cryptocurrencies that are not clones of those three. Monero and ZCash aren't even related to each other. Cardano is not a clone. Tezos is not a clone. Stellar is not a clone. Qtum is not a clone. NEO is not a clone. I could go on all day with cryptocurrencies that are not clones of any of the three you mentioned.

ETH enabled a vast amount of scammers and BS artists. Monero isn't actually private, it's been broken. Bitcoin is the original, but even it has changed many times over the years.

<comment><USER39> I am still very skeptical of PoS. To my knowledge, no PoS system provided an adequate proof of correctness as of today.

Stellar is not trustless.

> ETH enabled a vast amount of scammers and BS artists.

I believe this is not relevant to a technical discussion.

You are probably right about Monero's limits in comparison to ZCash. But, TBH, I am not following their development, because I prefer lack of anonymity.

<comment><USER25> I didn't say anything about POS, but if you want to discuss it IOHK has done a significant amount of academic work in the field, which has been deployed with Cardano. Tezos is in operation now and has been for over a year doing delegated POS, and they're at the same level of academic rigor as the IOHK team.

My comment about ETH is an explanation of why it causes people to be anti- cryptocurrency. Its only actual working purpose is to enable scams. That's certainly relevant in a technical discussion. BTW, ETH didn't do smart contracts first. They were in bitcoin back at the very beginning, then were removed as a security problem. ETH proved Satoshi right, they've showed the world exactly how not to implement smart contracts.

<comment><USER39> The academic part would be interesting. The time of operation matters less, as if there is a fundamental flaw, it would go in flames over night. Anecdotally that point was demonstrated by a 50%+1 attack on one of PoW clones, which worked fine until someone actually bothered to make it happen.

I still don't think your comment on ETH and scams is either objective, or relevant to a technical discussion.

As for smart contracts - Turing completeness is a substantial difference from the development point of view. The idea of gas seems to be novel. The fact, that people made mistakes in the contracts themselves only shows their incompetence in developing serious contracts. It has nothing to do with the platform.

<comment><USER25> ETH has _objectively_ enabled the entire scam ICO market. right, wrong, indifferent, purposeful or not -- that's its entire usefulness, its entire value, and the entire usefulness of "smart contracts" at the moment.

Smart contracts in general have not been well thought through or implemented correctly. It has a lot to do with the platform if the platform enables it. Gas is nothing new, it's just a transaction fee.

Turing completeness in smart contracts is a bug, not a feature -- which is why it was taken out of bitcoin in 2010.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think a lot of HN users like to think of themselves as early adopters of new technology and are disappointed for missing out on the crypto highs at the end of 2017. I think they feel if they could have been in the loop at that time they could have cashed out. Thus crypto discussions are going to have a lot of negativity in the comments since the best way to make yourself feel better about it is to pretend it was a scam all along and you really didn't miss out. My 2 cents of course :)

<comment><USER41> Or if your like me, you bought at $10 held until $20000 and decided was time to sell. That's when I found out the wallet file format was no longer readable by the bitcoin client. So my coins are in cryptopurgatory. Maybe someday I'll hire a dude to come help me. But he will probably steal my coins instead.

<comment><USER25> Just extract the keys. Your wallet is nothing more than a vehicle to hold the keys. If nothing else, just download an old version of electrum or the bitcoin client and export your keys that way. That's trivially easy, you don't need anyone to help you do it.</comment></comment></comment>


How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/the-data-said-clinton-would-win-why-you-shouldnt-have-believed-it.html <comment><USER2> Data did not fail you. You purposely disregard the data that showed a different narrative from the narrative that you wanted to push. In an attempt to appear unbiased and to preserve your credibility, you're now pushing a new narrative, the narrative that data failed.

This is why Trump won. Because voters are tired of the constant media bullshit, like this.</comment>


NYC: Ruby Happy Hour - Beer and Pizza - 7/9 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.outside.in/2008/07/07/ruby-happy-hour-at-outsidein-on-july-9th/

<comment><AUTHOR> Given all the recent enthusiasm for NYC and startups, I figured I'd post this here as well.

We had about 20 people show up for the last one, and are making this a monthly affair, especially given the number of cool startups in DUMBO.

This is not a Ruby meetup and there is no pressure to present, the first one was just a bunch of folks dissing solr, ferret and lucene and throwing mud at RSpec while getting drunk.

I work at outside.in, so I may be biased, but we had a great time!</comment>


Using GitHub Webhooks to rebuild static web sites - <AUTHOR> https://writing.markchristian.org/2019/01/26/watchnrun.html <comment><USER2> Alternatively, just... have a git endpoint on your server with some post- commit hooks.</comment>


HNScore - another look at post quality on Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexc.me/hnscore-another-look-at-post-quality-on-hacker-news/211/

<comment><USER2> Not too long ago I stumbled across someone doing visualizations of comment threads, which seemed like it might help in sorting out what was going on: <http://demaws.net/projects/tldr>

Also, I wrote a very long essay on the problems of web forums (<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000>) which was covered previously here on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515682>

In that essay, I tried to rethink what exactly moderation and comments/conversations _meant_. I like your approach of contrasting threads that are over- or under-moderated with threads that maintain an 'appropriate' moderation/reply ratio. But as noodle wrote above (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794856>), it may not be able to distinguish between certain types of commenting.

My current instinct is that moderation tells us more about the moderator than it does about the comment being moderated. I'm just not sure how to to operationalize that insight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! You've written down a pattern I noticed on both Reddit and HN -- what I called the troll filter: if more comments than points, the troll filter fails (the link is a troll and unlikely to be worth reading).

Exceptions are the types of threads where people are encouraged to contribute, such as "who's hiring" or "I'm <something interesting>, ask me anything"

I'll use this.

</comment><comment><USER4> It works on /classic and /news, too, if you add an asterisk to the end of the @include url. I.e.:

      // @include        http://news.ycombinator.*/*

Would you mind throwing it on GitHub or somewhere similar? I really like the idea, and that way lots of people can easily contribute tweaks/improvements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course.

<http://github.com/alexcurelea/HNScore/tree/master>

(btw - for me it works on inner pages even without the second wildcard. Odd.)

<comment><USER5> I have the same problem as the parent comment. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/news> doesn't work while <http://news.ycombinator.com> does).

If it doesn't break anything for you to add the wildcard, you should tack it on.

edit: you also seem to have forgotten to add it to userscripts--that's where all the cool greasemonkey kids hang out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> doesn't seem to take into account the "ask hn" types of posts. the ones that tend to get voted up also tend to have interesting material in them, as well as a larger number of responses.

</comment><comment><USER7> It might also be pertinent to take into account how long ago an article was submitted. I've noticed the votes-comments quality filter myself, but I've never really added "submission age" to that mental filter. I'm not sure how it would affect the results, but I certainly think its something worth researching.</comment>


American Airline's SSL certificate revoked - <AUTHOR> https://www.aa.com/ <comment><USER2> According to the Entrust revocation list for the Entrust L1M CA [http://www.entrust.net/customer/crl_form.cfm](http://www.entrust.net/customer/crl_form.cfm)

        Certificate issued by L1M with serial number 1BDA21F20CD791160000000054CDC61A has been revoked.

        Revocation Date: Thursday, December 7, 2017 5:00:17 AM +00:00

        Revocation Reason: Superseded</comment>


How Many X86-64 Instructions Are There Anyway? - <AUTHOR> https://stefanheule.com/blog/how-many-x86-64-instructions-are-there-anyway/ <comment><USER2> An interesting read but basically boils down to "how many primitive opcodes are there" rather than instructions on the whole. It also doesn't take into account the use of prefixes: for example nop1 and nop2 are technically two instructions (0x90 and 0x66 0x90) but just counting opcodes isn't going to see that.

However if you are interested in assembly this is a well written post and talks about the problem of overloaded opcodes (eg mov, add) and gives different ways of coming up with the answers, which are between 900 and 2500 depending on what you count ...</comment>


Spam king Sanford Wallace indicted for Facebook hack  - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3295397/spam-king-sanford-wallace-indicted-for-facebook-hack/?cmpid=sbycombinatoranguyen <comment><USER2> Same story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849064>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849438>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849525>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850338>

Currently none of the HN submissions have comments worth reading.</comment>


Ask HN: other mathematical link/discussion forums? - <AUTHOR>

What are your favorite math/science link/discussion forums?  Not too many come to mind: Hacker News, Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com/ , NuclearPhynance http://www.nuclearphynance.com/ , MathOverflow http://mathoverflow.net/ .  I feel there must be some other big ones that I just have not heard of yet. <comment><USER2> [http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/10/19/100-incredible- open-...](http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/10/19/100-incredible-open- lectures-for-math-geeks/)

<http://www.mathpuzzle.com/>

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, related question- would you consider the old newsgroups world (I guess as filtered through Google Groups such as <http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/topics> ) as still being worth following?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a good replacement to Google sets? - <AUTHOR> I want to generate a set from some expected members of the set. Can any online service do that? <comment><USER2> Have you tried [http://www.onelook.com/reverse- dictionary.shtml](http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml)?

Edit: There is also : [http://wordgrabbag.com/](http://wordgrabbag.com/) \- which seems to do this better, but I'd probably use a combination of those.

Edit: Just remembered that this tutorial loads all of the word2vec data (and at the bottom) allows API access into it for similar words. [http://rare- technologies.com/word2vec-tutorial/](http://rare-technologies.com/word2vec- tutorial/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Viksit - those are all great. Thank you.</comment></comment>


DiscussHN: "Plastic = Bad"? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/_HannahRitchie/status/1215212756678385664 <comment><USER3> We had a bad side effect here in Ontario (Canada) not so long ago. The LCBO (liquor store) was using plant-based "plastic" biodegradable bags. Then our crack- and alcohol- addicted mayor (Rob Ford) passed a bylaw in Toronto so stores had to charge 5 cents per plastic bag. That sounds like a good idea, except that the biodegradable plant-based bags were still considered plastic. So, the liquor store stopped using them entirely, and opted to stick to standard brown paper bags, which haven't nearly the strength of the plant- based bags.

Eventually that law was given up because it was hugely unsuccessful - <USER2> didn't even slow their usage of plastic bags, and so a lot of resentment developed since no environmental impact was to be found, and stores were clearly happy to profit off of using super-cheap low-quality plastic bags they still charge 5 cents for.

Several years later, still _nobody_ is providing or using the biodegradable plant-based bags. People seem happier, or at least numbed to the idea of paying extra for plastic bags, than either carrying their own bags, or turning to other solutions.

BTW: The lcbo bags were made out of the same plant-based material as used in bio-degradable cutlery, which likewise has pretty much failed to replace single-use plastic ones. For no reason, since there is clearly no shortage of plant-based material from which to manufacture them.

I believe there to be a serious marketing problem when it comes to already existing solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice anecdote. Yeah, I have realised that just like everywhere else, virtue signalling doesn't, won't work. There has to be SITG(skin in the game), incentive alignment among all parties involved : now achieve this either via good policy(which is needed for a lot of solutions eg:worked for solar,elec cars), or free market or both.

Also, many policies confuse waste,plastic waste with climate change. There's overlap, but for lower earth temperature, policies are going to make the biggest change, not individuals. And Now I am realizing I got carried away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We can be sensible about it...for example I don't like using straws to drink, so I don't ask for one. If I get a burger to go I'll refuse ketchup packets and just use the bottle at home. And at the grocery store I bring my own bags. These are small changes that hardly impact my life, but if millions of people do it, then serious changes can happen.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> from the tweet:

Simple message of "plastic = bad" that can lead to complete plastic bans has potential to backfire & create larger env impacts.

Because:

– food packaging is important in preventing food waste

– plastic alternatives can have larger environmental impacts.

Links:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-51040155](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51040155)

[https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics#are-plastic- alter...](https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics#are-plastic-alternatives- better-for-the-environment)

2018 article:

[https://news.sky.com/story/amp/plastic-doesnt-reduce-food- wa...](https://news.sky.com/story/amp/plastic-doesnt-reduce-food-waste-study- finds-11324558?__twitter_impression=true)</comment>


Sony threatens to sue Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/250802459/Sony-Letter-to-Twitter <comment><USER2> So by the way, when and how will Sony be held liable for criminal negligence?

Their security track record is equivalent to a bank storing its customers, partners and employees crown jewels in a wooden bikeshed with no doorlock. Repeatedly.

Stomping your feet, blaming evil North Korea and launching lawsuits against unrelated bystanders may be a convenient way to distract the mainstream media.

But it's also completely missing the point and a little bit embarrassing...

<comment><USER3> Which part was criminal?

Various employees have started civil suits claiming damages.

Their entire IT infrastructure was obliterated and they had to spend tons of money on IR and new security tools. So quite a bit of damage has been done already.

<comment><USER2> _Which part was criminal?_

The part where they don't establish most basic protection at least for their critical customer data, after suffering from security breaches pretty much constantly[1] for over 3 years.

If you have an account with any Sony product (Playstation network etc.) then your personal and payment data (credit card numbers) have most likely been leaked not once but multiple times by now.

Why is Sony still allowed to store payment data? Why is their PCI certification not revoked?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790458)

<comment><USER4> Can you point out which law(s) you mean? It's a little hard to establish a criminal charge otherwise. Everything in your comment so far indicates cause for civil damages, which are already being pursued as pointed out.

<comment><USER2> I am not a lawyer, my question was rhetoric.

As a layman I would argue that we know anyway that these kinds of laws are rarely ever enforced upon companies the size of Sony. Especially not when there's a political PR spin as convenient as "omg North Korea" (was: "omg terrorists").

However, the least that they have obviously violated (on multiple occasions) are the PCI-DSS diligence requirements and probably every data protection act under the sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like fairly standard procedure to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the issue is here...?

Especially given quotes such as "To the extent that Twitter has previously suspended the accounts of users publishing the Stolen Information, SPE and its employees are sincerely grateful to you"

<comment><USER6> There was no need to be threatening in manner that they were, and, as far as I understand, the threats are non-actionable (that is, Twitter can't be held liable in the manner they are suggesting).

<comment><USER7> Letters like this go back and forth between companies all the time. It doesn't even sound threatening to me. Just a standard legal complaint. I'm sure there were a handful of phone calls made first. Sony and Twitter couldn't figure it out over the phone, so Sony sends the official letter saying, "here's why we're upset, this is what we want you to do about it, if you don't we will climb the legal ladder some more until it's all straightened out."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Though I understand Sony probably feels compelled to at least try to stifle links to the stolen data, I am a little bothered by their legal reasoning they are using to support their argument. That said, they seem to be wording their accusations towards Twitter very cautiously. It also does not seem to be worded as a threat, but more of a strongly-worded request, so I'm not sure saying that they're threatening to sue them is accurate.

<comment><USER9> Not worded as a threat?

>If Twitter does not comply with this request, and the Stolen Information continues to be disseminated by Twitter in any manner, SPE will have no choice but to hold Twitter responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by Twitter, including any damages or loss to SPE or others, and including, but not limited to, any loss of value of intellectual property and trade secrets resulting from Twitter's actions.

Page 3 of Sony PDF

Sony should be sending these letters to their network department as they are the ones that appear to have 'disseminated' the Stolen Information.

<comment><USER10> I have to agree. "will have no choice but to hold Twitter responsible for any damage or loss..." implicates a potential lawsuit if their demands are not met.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Should SONY's response been DMCA takedown notices? Does DMCA cover unpublished copyrighted work? If the DMCA applies to trade secrets and personal email, it seems like Twitter would be legally in the clear and particular users would be liable.

<comment><USER12> >Should SONY's response been DMCA takedown notices?

This lawyer letter goes beyond what DMCA Sec. 512 allows. 512 authorizes requests for "removal of material" that is believed to be infringing; in this case, Sony is demanding suspension of Twitter users' accounts (which even Sony would likely concede are 99.999% non-infringing as measured by number of tweets). The letter also raises non-DMCA CFAA and state law claims.

> Does DMCA cover unpublished copyrighted work?

Yes. The DMCA covers "copyrighted work[s]," and publication is not necessary for copyright to attach. The longer emails likely meet the threshold for copyrightability and the screenplays, even unpublished, are the very definition of a copyrighted work. Note fair use still applies to copyrighted works.

> If the DMCA applies to trade secrets and personal email

The C in DMCA stands for "copyright." It doesn't apply to trade secrets.

David Boies, the lawyer who wrote this on behalf of Sony, is a very capable hired gun (he represented DOJ in its futile pursuit of Microsoft and plenty of other high-profile plaintiffs). Twitter is going to have to be careful in how it responds.

Remember news organizations have also reproduced excerpts from the Sony-hacked emails, and in some cases the entire correspondence. Note Sony hasn't threatened to sue them, at least so far. Also note Boies' letter could have been addressed to the individual Twitter users, who are actually the ones responsible for posting the material. It wasn't.

<comment><USER13> > David Boies, the lawyer who wrote this on behalf of Sony, is a very capable > hired gun

He wasn't very capable when he was acting for the SCO Group in their never- ending bullshit case against Novell and IBM. He has also been criticized for ethics violations.

[http://gl.scofacts.org/gl-20031217025304677.html](http://gl.scofacts.org/gl-20031217025304677.html)

<comment><USER14> He also couldn't convince the Supremes that Al Gore should be president. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Rapid_development...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Rapid_developments)

Lawyers should (within the bounds of ethics) be advocates for their clients. I can't fault him for his role in the 2000 election, but as to SCO I think anyone and everyone who took SCO's side should be disbarred!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh great, I've been wondering where I could get my hands on this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER16> For some reason I always find it amusing to see US lawyers title themselves with a middle ages term such as "Esquire". It seems so incongruous.

<comment><USER17> That's because they can't call themselves the equally medieval term "doctor". Even though they have "Juris Doctorate" degrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This letter seems like a blanket that Sony's lawyers are laying out across @BikiniRobotArmy and pinning Twitter with a wall of federal and state law violation claims. Does anyone have information on what material @BikiniRobotArmy actually "published" ??? Did he upload the 26GB Sony dump into a Tweet? Did he upload a picture he found on Google Images? Did he retweet Greenwald?

<comment><USER19> This could be it. Amazing what "celebrities" are charging for product placement.

[https://twitter.com/BikiniRobotArmy/status/54688646593893171...](https://twitter.com/BikiniRobotArmy/status/546886465938931712)

<comment> shawn-butler Might just be me but it seems likely Sony and these celebrities are in pretty clear violation of the FTC 2013 .com disclosure guidelines?

It's one thing to give celebrities clothes, etc and let them parade them around so that gullible consumers buy the product to pretend to be "fashionable" via known endorsement contracts.

It's quite another to pay a celebrity millions of dollars to say something and hide it as their own statement without disclosure.

Payola 3.0?

EDIT: Added link to FTC guidelines [pdf] [http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press- rel...](http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc- staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure- guidelines/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf)

<comment><USER20> This seems to be the most glaring issue here, and likely the reason for the scare letter.

Probably unwise of them to have used this strategy considering the Streisand effect.

<comment> shawn-butler Again just speculating, but this could also elevate the dump of the documents on Twitter by the individual into a press issue now since it is showing wrongdoing.

Rights of journalist to distribute illegally obtained documents in public interest I think was firmly established by SCOTUS in BARTNICKI v. VOPPER [0] and they go over the DMCA implications in the opinion.

[0] [http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2171346211086974...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2171346211086974391)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is Sony requesting that twitter not shut down just this one account but keep up with every account that pops up for this purpose? If they are that naive then no wonder they hacked, no idea how technology works. If I can write a script to create a different twitter account every few seconds, imagine what these guys can do.

</comment><comment><USER22> So, from this now I know 1) that Sony pays celebrities to do gray advertising, 2) name of such person that does it, 3) that Sony uses lawyer threats to stop people from talking about it. It's hard to hurt Sony's public image any more at this point, but they certainly keep digging with vigor.

</comment><comment><USER23> You start with feeling bad for Sony and its employees. You see a letter like this and my response goes from feeling bad to "Screw you Sony. You first show immense stupidity in how you handle your security and then flex your muscle around."

</comment><comment><USER24> In a way, they are right about it being against the twitter terms of use, and twitter should comply because it's their rules anyway. Still, can twitter be "held responsible"? It kind of sounds like you holding a bar tender responsible for drugs being traded in her bar. Even if she was aware of it, why not arrest the actual culprits?

Any lawyers care to comment?

<comment><USER12> I posted some thoughts on the law here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8789302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8789302)

Service provider liability isn't exactly a new topic; it goes back to at least Cubby v. CompuServe in 1991 (note this is not necessarily the law today) and hundreds of law review articles and dozens of conferences have discussed the topic. You might also want to read DMCA Sec. 512: [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting that David Boies is representing Sony – he represented the US v. Microsoft, Napster v. the RIAA, Oracle v. Google.

</comment><comment><USER26> If twitter deletes that account it would take the owner a few seconds to create another one. Better to have this one account than for many to pop up. I think it is pretty clear that Sony was lax in their security and are now paying a huge security debt.

</comment><comment><USER27> How about a comeback of 1990s style action movies like: Die Hard, Air Force One, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, etc.

Instead Sony plans new movies like Captain America, Avenger, Ants Man. They milk the Marvel brand to death. Sad and boring.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sony is utterly incompetent and ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER29> The link is broken on Android :(

<comment><USER30> They do it on purpose. Use another browser, like "Boat", to change UserAgent to desktop and it'll work fine.

<comment><USER29> Ahh, that sucks. Thanks for the advise :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unless there is a unique piece of information and it is physically taken away, it cannot be stolen, only copied?

</comment><comment><USER32> why is the title of this post mispelled? Just seems like a really obvious typo.

<comment><USER33> A mod or the OP must have fixed it (it originally said "treat _h_ ens").

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Engineering with lawyers...

</comment><comment><USER35> Hmm. Up until now the Sony/NK thing has been confusing from a technical standpoint - there's lots of good reasons to be curious about and skeptical whether NK had anything to do with the SONY hack (see the bazillion threads on HN and elsewhere that cover it). Now for some conspiracy.

Here are some facts. One of the primary journalists responsible for announcing that the government had determined NK was responsible for the SONY hack is the same one responsible for falsely declaring the US had confirmed locations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on behalf of the State Department (Judith Miller), who hadn't yet gotten the public support it needed to go into Iraq.

But what could the US's motivation for falsely fingering North Korea in this attack, if that's in fact what was done?

First, either instability or regime collapse in North Korea would mean very good things for the United States. Not just because it would advance human rights or because NK represents a black mark on US military operations. But also because instability threatens China. A regime collapse would mean China would have to deal with a flood of millions of starving and brainwashed immigrants at its border, and in fighting due to power vacuums. The downside is that the US would need to spend a lot of money and man hours supporting their ally South Korea, as they would also be forced to handle the instability, and because of US military presence in the region.

But second - and this is where the conspiracy theorizing comes in - we've seen the US make several attempts to get Twitter to censor certain types of information. The US, through the NSF, wants to study 'social pollution' on Twitter ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is- unw...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of- tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html)). However, it already has studies on social contagion and memetic social influence and these are used in political campaigns today ([http://enga.ge/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf](http://enga.ge/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf) & [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas- internet...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet- campaign-changed-politics/) & [http://theweek.com/article/index/256160/how- obama-won-the-in...](http://theweek.com/article/index/256160/how-obama-won- the-internet)). Moreover, the United States uses these tactics to influence public opinion in enemy nation states, such as the use of Twitter this year to cause insurrection and organize riots to overthrow the Cuban government earlier this year (search Cuban Twitter CIA), the use of Twitter messages in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and others to spread US propaganda ([http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp- Lieberman.pdf](http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf)), and the US contracts with companies that are used to do the same thing (e.g. www.marayamedia.com).

The conspiracy here would be that since the US has so far lacked legal traction in giving it the ability to influence other nations with adversarial messages but preventing others from influencing US citizens in the same way, that it is using the traction of the NK/SONY event to create a civil law precedent for content curation in Twitter that can later be expanded to federal law. This creep from civil to federal law has happened before - notably with Youtube - which now removes content that the federal government wants it to (known examples include ISIL recruitment videos and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki's political messages).</comment>


CentOS 5.5 released - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.5

<comment><USER2> Here's a link to the repository to see versions of the packages: <http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5/os/SRPMS/>

It's a shame PHP is still 5.1 without using the CentOS-Testing repository.

<comment><USER3> That is not a bug, it is a feature... CentOS tracks Red Hat Enterprise Linux - since RHEL 5 doesn't have a newer PHP, CentOS 5 won't either.

However there are lots of RPM sources that will get you newer PHP etc. if you don't care about exactly-RHEL compatibility. E.g., the DAG rpm repository: <http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/FAQ.php#A1>

<comment><USER4> I wonder how many people here would actually benefit from running CentOS. The first thing I need to do on a new CentOS machine is install newer versions of PHP, Python, and Ruby. It's kind of becoming a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER5> I use CentOS and I like it because I get both the underlying structure and packages of RHEL but it doesn't get in your way (as Ubuntu or Debian try to) when you want to step off the beaten track and do things by hand. In Debian- based distros, not using the package manager feels like heresy.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, with CentOS you _have_ to step off the beaten track and do things by hand more frequently - for example, where CentOS comes with Exactly One Python Version, and everything Python-related is packaged against it, Debian comes with multiple Python versions, and anything Python-related you install automatically gets set up to work with whatever (compatible) Python versions you have installed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The full-stack employee - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@chrismessina/the-full-stack-employee-ed0db089f0a1?section=suggested <comment><USER2> Maybe in your bubble that's true. I work in enterprise and mid-market technical consulting; mainly ecommerce platforms, ERP and CRM.

Our products teams still have a clear distinction between our frontend JS guys and our backend Java guys. Sometimes people meet in the middle but I've never heard anyone say "full stack" in anything less than an insulting term for 'jack of all trades and master of none'.

The same seems to be true across most companies, that I work with, that actually have money to hire good people.

8 years into my career and I've never seen it any other way. (I've moved around a few times too as well as consulted for dozens of different clients now).

You can write all you want about the bubble in which you operate, that doesn't mean the wider world operates in the same way.

Obviously, I have only experienced things within my bubble. I believe my bubble is somewhat larger than yours though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant article. @kneebook I would not characterise this as a bubble more the leading edge of change (as in the future has already arrived it is just unevenly distributed). Networks and platform empower the generalist and turn them from a "jack of all trades" (pejorative) to "full stack employee" (positive).</comment>


Libcbor – CBOR implementation for C and others - <AUTHOR> http://libcbor.org/ <comment><USER2> Duncan Coutts has been working on replacing the current fairly brain dead Data.Binary encoding for Haskell by using CBOR [1], which I believe is currently on the back burner (more important work to be done elsewhere). The results appear very promising and I'd love to see this announcement provide the impetus to keep the work going.

[1] [http://code.haskell.org/~duncan/binary- experiment/binary.pdf](http://code.haskell.org/~duncan/binary- experiment/binary.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Please, someone let Duncan know that CBOR encoding is somewhat not as useful as it could be.

I twitted about that unusefulness here [1] and here [2].

In short, CBOR orders major types in such a way that if you use memcmp negative integers go as bigger values than positive integers. This breaks important invariant "memcmp ordering as value ordering" which is EXTREMELY useful. If you preserve that invariant then you can sort, index and navigate over compact opaque representation of values without their decoding, saving time and memory.

[1] [https://twitter.com/sergueyz/status/603491963258740736](https://twitter.com/sergueyz/status/603491963258740736)

[2] [https://twitter.com/sergueyz/status/603492486191947776](https://twitter.com/sergueyz/status/603492486191947776)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found a previous discussion on CBOR fairly insightful from 572 days ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632576)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote some Python bindings[0] for fun some time ago. I never did get around to implementing the full spec. I never did get around to implementing the full spec, but I did enjoy parsing the tests directly from the RFC.

[0] [https://github.com/michaelmior/pycbor](https://github.com/michaelmior/pycbor)

</comment><comment> c-rack See [http://cbor.io/](http://cbor.io/) for details about RFC 7049 "Concise Binary Object Representation" (CBOR)</comment>


Withings Releases First New Smartwatch After Purchasing Itself from Nokia - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/9/18/17851392/withings-nokia-steel-hr-sport-smartwatch <comment><AUTHOR> "The Steel HR Sport shares a lot of the same features as the Steel HR smartwatch released under Nokia in 2016: the 25-day battery life, heart rate monitor, and smartphone notifications. The GPS connectivity is new — paired with a smartphone, users can track their walking, running, or cycling workouts and view their routes afterward in the Health Mate app (available for both Android and iOS). There's also a slightly updated analog watchface on the embedded digital screen that shows your health data and app notifications, plus a new silicon wristband."</comment>


Students in India Can't Earn College Admission on Merit, They Buy Their Way In - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/08/04/745182272/when-students-in-india-cant-earn-college-admission-on-merit-they-buy-their-way-i <comment><USER2> Students in the US can buy their way in as well, although it's rare as it totally requires board approval and a significant amount of money. I know of a high school classmate who talked to the board of a public University after his parents were willing to fund a building and was accepted only after that. The issue with the Varsity Blues was that the money didn't go directly to the school and that it involved bribing an athletic coach in order to grant admission on false pretenses.</comment>


Get rid of boolean function parameters - <AUTHOR> http://mortoray.com/2015/06/15/get-rid-of-those-boolean-function-parameters/ <comment><USER2> One of the things I wish C# did was allow for inline declaration of enumerations in method parameters.

Something like:

        void DoSomething(Thing thing, enum logging{WithLogging,NoLogging}){}

Because I'd frequently like to be able to make my parameters more explicit, but the overhead of creating a new enum type seems a tad heavyweight.

Edit: Raised it as an issue on GitHub with more details - [https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/3497](https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/3497)

<comment><USER3> Why not just use named parameters at the call site instead?

        DoSomething(thing, logging: true);

<comment><USER4> I definitely like this approach in my own code. I think the main advantage of a different approach such as enums is enforcing the explicitness at the call site for all users, especially in library functions.

Another thing to consider: In some cases, it may make more sense to split the function into two versions, one for 'true' and one for 'false'. Then you gain the enforced explicitness. The function could call a private method to share code and pass the Boolean. Clearly that isn't ideal for all situations, but it might help in some situations today.

<comment><USER5> > Another thing to consider: In some cases, it may make more sense to split > the function into two versions, one for 'true' and one for 'false'. Then you > gain the enforced explicitness. The function could call a private method to > share code and pass the Boolean.

The author describes exactly this approach and implementation, under the heading "Distinct functions".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I get that

        calc_formula(a, b, false)

Is unclear but so are `a` and `b`

        ctx.arc(100, 200, 300, 0, Math.PI*2, false)

or

        gl.texImage2D(gl.TEXTURE_2D, 0, gl.RGB, 100, 200, 0,
                      gl.RGBA, gl.UNSIGNED_BYTE, null);

How are those examples any more self documenting? I don't see anything special about boolean anymore than the other arguments. If you really want your code to be clear (and I'm not saying I do this) you'd need to either use a language that allows naming every argument or else put every argument in a variable with a descriptive name

        var centerX = 100;
        var centerY = 200;
        var radius = 300;
        var arcStartRadians = 0;
        var arcEndRadians = Math.PI * 2;
        var counterClockwise = false;
        ctx.arc(centerX, centerY, radius,
                arcStartRadians, arcEndRadians,
                counterClockwise);

<comment><USER7> I'll say that I do that (define constants to variables/consts/#DEFINE/etc and then use them as arguments), and I do it for exactly the reasons you describe. I also try to make magic numbers as self-explanatory as possible - rather than (say) use the number 84600 I'll write 60 * 60 * 24 for when I want the number of seconds per day.

It's way easier to remember what's going on when you come back a year later, and all but the simplest compilers will be smart enough to bash it down to constant parameters if that's possible.

Yeah, more lines of code, but I think readability trumps terseness (within reason). Some functions just use a bunch of parameters and it's not really the extra line to name the parameter that's causing the issue. Also if you're using an editor that does code folding you could just fold that block away.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure if the transposition was intended, but your comment shows another reason why using a calculated value here is good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That comes up again and again. For me, named arguments solve that problem.

        float CalcFormula(int a,int b, bool isGain) {..}

        var x = CalcFormula(4, 5, isGain: true);

<comment><USER10> You may love Ada:

        function Calc_Formula(A, B : Integer; Is_Gain : Boolean) return Float is ...

        X : Float := Calc_Formula(4, 5, Is_Gain => True);

<comment><USER9> Actually that was 'real' C#, so the language I'm working with does support this feature.

That said, Ada is certainly something I want to learn more about at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think booleans (flags) are unavoidable at times. Consider a case where you want a flag to switch verbose logging on and off selectively. Writing an enum is a viable solution, but heavy weight nonetheless compared to the primitive boolean-flag based approach.

I agree with the author that with flags in fn-signature, the code becomes tough to reason about at the call-site; but a preferred solution, IMO, is to use "named arguments" or "labeled arguments" in the languages that allow them and/or write proper doc-strings in languages that don't.

For instance in OCaml you'd do (note: specifying types is optional):

        let calc_formula (a :int) (b :int) ~(is_gain :bool) :float =
          if is_gain then
            (* something slightly different *)

          (* common stuff *)

You'd call the above as:

        calc_formula 10 20 ~is_gain:true

Optional arguments allow for a terser call-site syntax at the cost of implicit behaviour:

        let calc_formula ?(is_gain=true) a b  = ...

You could then call the above fn:

        calc_formula 10 20
        calc_formula 10 20 ~is_gain:false

<comment><USER12> > I think booleans (flags) are unavoidable at times. Consider a case where you > want a flag to switch verbose logging on and off selectively.

In my experience, even these situations tend to grow arms and legs pretty quickly, so you end up with a 'verbose' boolean that accepts four values: True, False, "superverbose" and "off". Then you notice that in some places the function is being called with an array as the value for 'verbose', because you're in a language where arrays are implicitly cast to Boolean (I'm looking at you python).

There are too many cases where the optional parameter is not really a boolean, but merely a sum type which coincidentally only has two members at the moment, but is likely to grow to more members.

<comment><USER11> I have seen these cases crop up myself. But... as Martin Fowler would say, YAGNI... you ain't going to grow arms and legs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Compare Boolean Blindness ([https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean- bli...](https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blindness/)).

<comment><USER14> Came here to post this. This a rather deep analysis of of the semantics of Boolean abuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Several years ago I found this Little Manual of API Design, and found it very useful. It discusses boolean arguments among other things. [http://www4.in.tum.de/~blanchet/api- design.pdf](http://www4.in.tum.de/~blanchet/api-design.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> Ugh, what about avoiding flags entirely? I think "slightly" different behaviour is a smell of god-functions. Why not split the functionality in two, perhaps composable, functions?

<comment><USER17> This would be a great case for pattern matching in Elixir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Named parameters are nice in this case, e.g. in Python

        def calc_formula(a, b, is_gain=False):
            ...

        calc(a, b, is_gain=True)

<comment><USER19> Also worth mentioning that Python 3 supports keyword only parameters, which enforce this calling styling [http://blog.gahooa.com/2009/12/08/python-has- keyword-only-pa...](http://blog.gahooa.com/2009/12/08/python-has-keyword-only- parameters/) e.g.

        def calc_formula(a, b, *, is_gain=False):
            ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My guess is: The fact that Booleans only encode a single distinction fools us into thinking we can be sloppy with naming their values or the places those values are stored (not just function parameters). In any given context, that distinction may seem trivial.

It takes a good deal of practise to know from experience how wrong that would be. So take my advice and always have a copy of this article under your pillow :)

</comment><comment><USER21> In an old job, I saw some code like this

        refunder.Refund(orderId, customerEmail, true, false, payment=="visa", order.shipping == 0, true, true, order.day == "sunday")

Not verbatim, but you get the idea -- and yes, the refund method was even more confusing than then invocation

</comment><comment><USER22> Swift can help with this. There's certain ways to specify that a parameter must be named.

</comment><comment><USER23> Even simpler: Just use a const variable instead of a constant literal in the caller code:

      const bool useWayA = true;
      int result = foo(a, b, useWayA);

instead of

      int result = foo(a, b, true);

<comment><USER24> This would essentially be the enum option: giving names to constants. But this way wouldn't enforce the convention, you could still use `true` or `false`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wouldn't the use of named parameters solve the confusion aspect that's cited as the reason to not use boolean parameters? Not that the use of enums or distinct function wrappers is a bad approach (it's probably more elegant), but the hash approach does eliminate quite a bit of ambiguity.

With languages that include full pattern matching support and atom/symbol literals (like Erlang and friends, for example, and like most other functional languages IIRC), you could alternately match on a particular symbol instead of relying on a boolean flag.

</comment><comment><USER26> Even in PHP (no named arguments):

        class Route
        {
           const RECURSIVE     = true;
           const NON_RECURSIVE = false;

           public function __construct($pattern, $recursive = Route::NON_RECURSIVE) {
             // ...
           }
         }
         $route = new Route($pattern, Route::RECURSIVE);

<comment><USER27> Why not

       $route = new Route($pattern, $recursive = true);

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Or hover your mouse over the call, and see the prototype in a popup. Its maybe easier than visually parsing that complex enum form.

The problem with enums as class members is, they have to be scoped when used. I wish that method invocation included the scope of the class being called on.

</comment><comment><USER29> the problem with the "distinct functions" case is if end up doing this:

      if is_gain: calc_formula_is_gain(a, b)
      else: calc_formula(a, b)

However a completly agree it makes sense with sin/cos functions.

</comment><comment><USER30> I hate to be _that_ person, but these are lessons in coding that we learn during the 'self documenting code' life lesson. Being part of any team and you'll find yourself doing these sort of changes during code reviews. Not quite refactoring, more spit and polish.

<comment><USER31> I'm not really sure what the point you're trying to make is; What other purpose would a software blog have than to share information gained through experience?

Is it that the information is not helpful to others, because it is not helpful to you?

<comment><USER30> I guess I forget that there are a whole bunch of people on here that don't code _at all_. I think is really is lesson two, the one where you learn about functions and what to name them and about parameters.

It's not helpful to anyone who has written more than a few lines of code. Which is why I replied in surprise. HN doesn't let me down vote, so I comment.

I like to think that stuff on here should represent what hackers (coders) would find interesting. Advanced coding, distributed systems, the other wooly things like marketing, people skills etc. I didn't think this fell under the scope of _hacker_ news. It's not news to any hacker.

<comment><USER32> I disagree. I've worked with people who have written tens of thousands of lines of code, but didn't see anything wrong with throwing a boolean parameter into the mix. It's not that they were bad developers in other ways. It's just that they valued immediate productivity over long term maintainability.</comment></comment></comment></comment>