Uber banned from operating in Indian capital after rape accusation - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-india-rape-uber-idUSKBN0JM0CE20141208 <comment><USER3> Uber is not being banned just because of this rape incident. Uber did not following Indian laws & Delhi transport regulations, and operated illegally under the radar. Before this incident, Delhi Government was not aware about how Uber operated. This incident prompted Indian authorities to investigate the operations of Uber.

Uber's stance is that we are not a taxi company, we are an app company; so we do not need to follow transportation laws.

Uber is so secretive in India that the only way users can contact Uber is through Twitter. They don't provide any phone number, email or address. Moreover, Delhi police had to struggle to get in touch with Uber. They called an Uber cab using the App, and asked the driver to take them to Uber's office. When they reached office, it was almost empty. There was nobody who had any information about what is going on.

Uber claims they have a driver screening process, but it seems they skip through the due diligence process in India to save few bucks.

[https://www.uber.com/safety](https://www.uber.com/safety)

"Uber is committed to connecting you to the safest ride on the road"

Driver Screening:

[http://blog.uber.com/driverscreening](http://blog.uber.com/driverscreening)

which includes:

Criteria for drivers to pass through Uber's screening, going back seven years:

\- No DUI or other drug related driving violations or severe infractions*

\- No Hit and Runs

\- No fatal accidents

\- No history of reckless driving

\- No violent crimes

\- _No sexual offenses_

\- No gun related violations

\- No resisting/evading arrest

\- No driving without insurance or suspended license charge in the past 3 years

Unfortunately, Uber does not perform this due diligence while recruiting drivers in India. The alleged driver had previously served 7 months in prison for rape charges, that didn't stop Uber from recruiting him.

<comment><USER4> _No sexual offenses_

From the article: "Uber, which had employed the driver even though he had been arrested on allegations of sexual assault three years ago"

THe implication there is that he had not been convicted of any offense - <USER2> means no sexual offense was [in the eyes of the law...] committed.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand yeah, he was arrested for it and convicted or not, that's probably a risk Uber shouldn't be taking.

The other side of that an accusation or suspicion isn't a reasonable basis on which to ruin someone's employability.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/10/delhi-rape-one- conv...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/10/delhi-rape-one- conviction-706-cases-2012_n_4419374.html)

Of 706 reported rape cases, 1 lead to an actual conviction. So you have an under-reported category of crime which is irregularly prosecuted. There's obvious ethical issues with denying jobs to people based on accusation rather than conviction, but in a society with a broken justice system surrounding that, there's ethical dilemmas no matter how you slice it. There's also a serious question about how you rate the ethical utility of someone not being able to get a job in a specific area, versus possible endangerment of someone's life.

<comment><USER6> > _there 's ethical dilemmas no matter how you slice it_

You're exactly right. So the question becomes, "Is it better to disqualify applicants based on accusation alone, knowing that you'll disqualify some number of innocent people, or is it better to screen on convictions alone, knowing that you could possibly not screen out some guilty folks you otherwise would?"

<comment><USER7> You can go better than "accusation". Anyone could accuse anyone of anything. But you could set the bar in the middle with "arrested", which is half way between "accusation" and "conviction".

<comment><USER8> That's not really in the middle. The only difference between "accused" and "arrested" is that the accuser told the police.

<comment><USER7> Yes the accuser told the police, _and the police thought there was suffecient reason to arrest the accused_. That's the important difference. Sometimes the police are told, and they interview the accused and don't arrest them. Sometimes they do. The police are (in theory) supposed to have standards for who they arrest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've said it elsewhere too [0], and I say it again... There's no doubt that Uber is on a free ride in India.

If they can bully their way in the US, and not care about law and regulations there, then they have absolutely nothing to worry about in India. The law enforcement is weak, to say the least.

* Uber's customer service is a disgrace. I've tried contacting them 4 times for different issues ranging from bugs in their app to getting incorrectly charged for toll fees. Never got a response, despite countless followups.

* They do NOT really hire the drivers... they are in fact hiring "companies" that employs the drivers. Once I had someone else pick me up. The driver was using someone else's phone and cab that was registered to Uber. He told me the "Uber" driver was on a leave, and that he was deputizing on-behalf of him. And that he didn't really work for Uber, but for the "owner of the car" I could have cancelled the ride, but then Uber would have charged me 150 Rupees ($3) cancellation fee. And I didn't want to do anything with Uber's customer service, and I was kind of certain that I wouldn't get my money back.

* They're a faceless organization and that's unacceptable for something that involves physical contact with real strangers.

* They have their priorities mixed up. Instead of focusing on their "safety claims" (which they pitch as a distinguish-er) they are relentlessly focused on achieving the network affect that'd propel their business.

I'm firmly in the camp that believes that Uber used some of the funding $$$ in bribing the officials here to accelerate their growth (in terms of number of cities they operate in) in this country without any review.

The trajectory with Uber is very similar to how many a telecom providers made a killing during the telecom-boom in India. The government is set to have lost upto INR 300,000,000,000 [1] when a corrupt minister sold air-waves for cheaper prices.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708545) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam)

<comment><USER10> How do you pay Uber in India? Did you make a deposit, or is this on a credit card? I don't know the credit card rules in India, but in USA there's no way I would have ended up paying Uber's self-serving "fine".

<comment><USER11> You could pay with a normal credit card (like everywhere else) up to the 1st of Dec.

Reserve Bank of India has a rule about all CC transactions needing 2FA and Uber wasn't complying with it. They recently shifted to a prepaid wallet mechanism to do payments.

There's very little awareness around the fact that you can dispute credit-card transactions in India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Watching the Uber saga unfold has been a fascinating time-lapse into how and why industries become regulated in the first place. It's fashionable to decry calcified organizations that refuse to adapt to change, but we regulate industries in response to market failures, and Uber's approach has been to toss out the the baby with the bathwater.

<comment><USER13> Or another point of view is that this 'saga' has been caused by a political vendetta against Uber - a common problem for startups like Uber and Tesla who are attempting to scale and share their innovations with the world.

<comment><USER14> I see what you did there, mentioning uber and tesla in the same sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fwiw the story is still unfolding. Some parts of the media are reporting that the driver had a "character certificate" from an Assistant Police Commissioner. It is unclear (as of writing this) how legally valid (or even genuine) that is. Could be photoshopped for all we know. (the media can be quite incompetent and report rumors as truth and vice versa)

Fwiw [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Delhi- police-h...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Delhi-police-had- issued-character-certificate-to-Uber-cab-driver-in- August/articleshow/45412700.cms)

This is in someways the direct opposite of what the media was reporting so far. It will all shake out in the coming days/weeks.

Meanwhile Uber remains banned in Delhi (imo a good thing. The management is pretty scummy and they and Uber's operating procedures could use some sunlight). The government and the police will come under massive media scrutiny (imo, even better.)

It is now a full fledged media circus here, with politicians posturing,citizens screaming, parties of different ideologies protesting etc. Elections are due in Delhi in February, and safety (or lack of it) for women in Delhi is an issue that voters pay attention to, so the above is all par for the course. Again,just fwiw.

<comment><USER3> Delhi police is now saying that the certificate is forged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Their troubles in India may get bigger: The Indian Govt. is thinking about banning them all across India [1]

Can't come soon enough for a company that heavily advertised itself as being the Safer option in India and conveniently actually skipped the background verification part of the process. Then the asshat CEO put the entire blame on the "System" in a finger pointing blog post.

"Move fast and Break things" Indeed.

[1] [http://indianexpress.com/article/india/crime/delhi-rape- govt...](http://indianexpress.com/article/india/crime/delhi-rape-govt-mulls- banning-uber-cab-services-across-india/)

<comment><USER17> Not an Indian, but isn't mostly a matter of whom you have to bribe and how much?

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Threatening to ban Uber can mean only one thing-- The law-makers need a fund raiser too-- now that Uber is a $40 billion company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the very beginning, Uber has been fiercely proud of its eschewance of local regulations; and it's business model has always been, in a nutshell, about maximizing profit while offloading risk. So while I have no doubt that Travis is genuinely horrified by what happened, he shouldn't be in the least bit surprised, either.

</comment><comment><USER19> So, I'm not a Uber fan, but I get the feeling this is India deflecting a couple of other underlying issues and placing blame.

Sooner or later they have to face the issue head on, because scapegoating gets old.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. It's also not as if these sexual assault cases are not well documented already. I wonder what Uber will say about this.

<comment><USER21> So what then, an Uber customer would have to just say "yeah ok rapes happen so let me keep taking Uber"?

The point is, Uber is claiming to be better than cabbies in that they screen drivers, etc. Clearly they aren't doing anything of the sort. So they are as unsafe as taking any other cab.

<comment><USER19> I did not say that Uber doesn't have issues to address, I said that the Indian government has underlying issues, and can't scapegoat forever.

Not every situation in life has clear sides of "good guys" and "bad guys" or who's "to blame." Cause is a moving bar, and has different value depending what we are talking about causing.

Uber causes it's passengers to be in danger by not ensuring the people behind the wheel.

India on the other hand has a history of not punishing rapists. The guy gets acquitted of rape, because rape is too hard to prove under Indian law and because the juries are biased. edit: updated spelling

<comment><USER21> I'm not arguing about the scapegoating or anything. I'm just saying that Uber markets itself as "we don't hire those creeps" \- but it sounds like they ARE hiring those creeps. So what's the point of using Uber in Delhi when you are as unsafe as you would be in a regular taxicab?

What's the value proposition of Uber in that case? Just the convenience of using the app?

<comment><USER19> I don't like Uber, I do like the idea of competition.

I think the draw is upfront pricing? But I don't know, I've horror stories about that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am shocked, shocked that an unlicensed taxi firm has problems with its drivers.

<comment><USER23> Rumor has it the public transportation in India is kinds unsafe too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems like every time I get tempted to have an ounce of sympathy for Uber, something like this comes up to disabuse me of that.

This morning's sympathy was inspired by local government shenanigans. They had some city-manager jackhole on the radio explaining that they had informed Uber back in July that they would be considering Uber's business, and furthermore they now plan to do that consideration at the February city council meeting. Shameless!

</comment><comment><USER24> Few points worth noting

\- Taxi business is heavily regulated in India and anything like Uber is likely to be illegal.

\- India does not have any consolidated crime database. Background verification generally means asking the person to get a certificate from local police station. (Which anyone can get by paying a bribe).

I am surprised that Uber was actually operating in India. Clearly they were staying under the radar and as usual the government officials were too incompetent to understand what Uber is.

I think in this case Uber is clearly liable for a civil suite and must compensate the victim for lack of due diligence and fraud.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think Uber is being unfairly maligned here - too long for a comment, long piece at [https://medium.com/@sriramk/in-defense-of-uber-in- india-f81c...](https://medium.com/@sriramk/in-defense-of-uber-in- india-f81c4c6267f2).

tldr: Uber just can't do the same checks it does in the US in other parts of the world which don't have records. And even though it did actually get the right certificate from the cops in this case, they should have thought of doing more.

<comment><USER26> Then the logical strategy is not to operate in a market where your brand is at severe risk of being tarnished.

<comment><USER27> or don't accept status quo. Improve the current system by 10X and solve _real_ problems and position yourself as a great company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Uber failed to bribe appropriate Indian politicians through relevant channels. [http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians- among-...](http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most- corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm)

</comment><comment><USER28> Rape fear keeps US students out of India: Nancy Powell

[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Rape-fear-keeps- US-...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Rape-fear-keeps-US-students- out-of-India-Nancy-Powell/articleshow/26059607.cms)

</comment><comment><USER29> This combined with their app's shady activities ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8660336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8660336) ), it does seem like a very good idea to stop using it.

<comment><USER30> If you read any of the technical analysis, those claims are clearly unfounded and the hacker doesn't even understand how REST works: [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/27/ubers-app-malware- desp...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/27/ubers-app-malware-despite-may- read/)

As an Android developer, the root and vulnerability reporting behavior is pretty standard for bug tracking, and in Uber's case fraud prevention as well.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for pointing it out. I should make a mental note of not to just go by the top comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If the man was aquitted, why is background check even mentionned? You can't refuse someone because he was _accused_ of something, right? That'd be very discriminatory

<comment><USER32> You can actually hire (or not hire) anyone you want. Background checks can find all sorts of things, most of which can be used against you. Only a few classes are protected, and 'accused of crime' isn't one of them.

<comment><USER31> I don't know specifics about Indian law, but in Canada, any "personal caracteristic" (varies on a province basis) is protected under the charter. This is defined as "individual characteristics that are permanent or difficult to change, such as race, colour, sex, ethnic origin or disability."*. Accusation record seems to fit that description.

Therefore, it would be illegal for someone to refuse someone because of this.

Source: [http://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/en/pages/lexique.aspx#personal- charac...](http://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/en/pages/lexique.aspx#personal- characteristic)

<comment><USER32> I wonder if 'difficult to change' meant involuntary, like something you were born with. Your criminal record is by definition voluntary. You did something; it was recorded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hmmm..shouldn't Uber banned in whole of India instead of just Delhi, till the Govt of India figures out how to allow Uber to operate with better safety measures.

</comment><comment><USER24> Banned is simply not acceptable. They should also be charged for fraud, making false promises about their services to their customers which got one lady raped.

</comment><comment><USER33> Let me see...

If I buy a gun and shoot you, the government will ban gun manufacturers?

If I buy a baseball bat and smash your skull, the govt will ban all sports?

If I buy a potato and stick it in your throat and you die, the govt will ban agriculture?

If I offer you a ride (free or for a fee) and then decide to rape you and bury you in a forest, the govt will ban auto makers?

How does that make sense?

<comment><USER34> If the gun manufacturer claimed that they have verified that guns don't kill.

[http://blog.uber.com/driverscreening](http://blog.uber.com/driverscreening)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ive recently been in Cape Town and people recommended using Uber because you can see the feed back info about the driver and the official cabs were quite dodgy.

<comment><USER36> Often the driver is someone other than the official Uber driver, so you lose that advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article is 5 hours old, has 314 points is one rank behind an article that's six hours hold with 23 points right now. HN users certainly love to flag anything that's critical of Uber.

</comment><comment><USER38> So I guess they're going to ban public transportation, restaurants, public places, etc... as well, due to all the rape happening there.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is really weird... I have refreshed a couple times and watched some anti- uber comments appear

<comment><USER39> Shoot, meant to say disappear

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> i'm not sure why it's Uber's fault. in the uk, Uber drivers are all registered taxi drivers, because of regulations. it's not Uber's fault that the indian market is not as strictly regulated, and that one of their drivers did this.

Not that i'm saying it's ok, it's not. but uber seems to be catching a lot of flak for things they haven't done. sure they probably could have done more to prevent it, but so could the government.

companies always tend to the minimum required by law, it's cheaper that way

and the amount of rape happening in india is crazy, the government needs to do something about that, something more than blaming uber. what's the point in the state if it can't even protect it's people?

<comment><USER3> Uber hired drivers in India who does not even have a valid Delhi Transport commercial driver license required for all cab drivers in Delhi.

Edit:

> and the amount of rape happening in india is crazy, the government needs to > do something about that, something more than blaming uber.

Do you know that more women are raped every year in UK & US than in India? You hear a lot more about rapes in India because Indians are more outraged towards rape than Americans & British.

Rate per 100,000 population: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#UN_Rape_statist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#UN_Rape_statistics_by_country)

United Kingdom (England and Wales): 28.8

United States of America : 27.3

According to some surveys, 20% to 25% girls on American colleges campuses suffer sexual assault.

<comment><USER41> > Do you know that more women are raped every year in UK & US than in India?

Bullshit. Your link states "does not include cases of rape which go unreported, which are not recorded, and does not account for differing definitions between countries".

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/01/07...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/01/07/indias- rape-problem-is-also-a-police-problem/)

> Three-fourths of the perpetrators of India's 24,206 rapes in 2011 are still > at large, and that's not even including the rapes that go unreported, which > are thought to be the majority of cases. The women and girls who do report > being raped can sometimes face antipathy or outright hostility from police.

<comment><USER42> Lets take statistics for a type of crime that does almost always get reported.

Homicide rate in US : 4.7 per 100,000

Homicide rate in India : 3.5 per 100,000

Most of the world's perception of rape in India is based exclusively on foreign media coverage of the issue which presents a heavily skewed image compared to reality on the ground. Once the media settles on a popular narrative ("India is unsafe for women") they keep reporting every incident that reinforces that narrative. Fact of the matter is India has relatively low rates of crime (especially considering the poverty and inequality).

<comment><USER41> Hard to say how accurate a comparision that is.

[http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-officially- under...](http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-officially-undercounts- all-crimes-including-rape/article5121114.ece)

> The National Crime Records Bureau, India's official source of crime data, is > systematically undercounting virtually every crime in India on account of a > statistical shortcoming, The Hindu has learnt.

[http://newint.org/blog/majority/2012/02/07/dowry-deaths- in-i...](http://newint.org/blog/majority/2012/02/07/dowry-deaths-in-india/)

> For every dowry death reported, there are dozens that go unreported. Of the > 8,391 reported cases in 2010, although 93.2 per cent were charge-sheeted, > the conviction rate was a miserable 33.6 per cent. The murderers and their > families get away with it. What's worse, they go scot free and bring back > another bride.

I'd be interested in seeing murder rates for rural versus city areas. I know the tribal areas of Pakistan set up their own alternative courts, and wouldn't be surprised if similar things happened in rural India.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A major vulnerability has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars of Ethereum - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/a-major-vulnerability-has-frozen-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-of-ethereum/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we've moved most of the comments there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, what else is new.</comment>


All Number Converter, Nice Online Tool - <AUTHOR> http://codebeautify.org/all-number-converter

<comment><USER2> leading 0's might be helpful

e.g. insted of 1100 110 --> 0110 0110</comment>


Xanadu - <AUTHOR> http://xanadu.com/ <comment><USER3> Xanadu was Ted Nelson's proposed version of a hypertext publishing medium that predates the World Wide Web. (I believe he coined the term "hypermedia", but I could be wrong)

It is interesting alternative to "what could have been", and inspired the imagination of technologists in the 70s (I believe).

It featured some unique elements: \- subdivision of "documents" so that sections (sentences, paragraphs) can be folded in from other sources. Somewhat similar to remote CDNs for images, but did chunks of text (e.g. when quoting another article) \- UI: being able to see multiple documents at the same time and how they connect to each other. (Not the same as annotation, but if you can imagine seeing annotations on the side of the screen... something like that) \- greater similarity to the Memex in how information can be interlinked and displayed. \- in built royalty mechanism. (Micro payments) \- files are stored centrally in a docuverse, which is somewhat similar to a block chain in that there is an agreed interpretation of what a document "is" instead of having multiple copies of the same document.

Ultimately, the World aside Web came along and filled the need for a document publishing medium, rendering Xanadu a historical artifact, many of whose ideas have been realized by other projects in other forms.

Wikipedia entry here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

Also worth reading is Literary Machines, since that's an interesting historical read of how people were thinking about uses for computers.

<comment><USER4> I read Ted Nelson's autobiography. My impression was he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation. I actively sought to understand concretely what Xanadu is and came up empty, a lot of high level words that could mean anything to different people reading them. Nothing concrete, at least that I was capable of understanding in the amount of time I was willing to invest. Nelson's research and vision predates computers and programmers as we know it today, so it makes sense that he wasn't a programmer. Tim Berners Lee was of course a programmer, and wrote in Weaving the Web, "having a working demo is table stakes."

<comment><USER5> _"...he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation."_

I revisit Xanadu every couple of years. For its time, its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two- way links? Once you kinda grasp Xanadu, kludges like pingbacks and link liveness checkers seem ridiculous.

Alas, Ted Nelson, like myself, didn't anticipate, or was slow to fully appreciate, how DNS, HTTP, URL/URI would up-end the world. Whatever else was going on with Nelson, Xanadu, Autodesk, whatever, "the web" tsunami obliterated competing notions.

Animats' comment (below) about git (eg github) being today's closest realization of the Xanadu ideal is insightful.

<comment><USER4> "its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-way links"

That's a great example of a concrete implementation detail - unbreakable links means a central link database - that has significant implications in the shape of the vision. For example the only way I can think of to do unbreakable links but also distributed is an immutable public ledger perhaps something like a blockchain. And now we can talk about specifics like what other properties does a blockchain implementation shape? What does a database app with HTML forms and such look like? But did Nelson understand this? Can anyone cite an implementation source that goes into Nelson's analysis of this stuff?

<comment><USER6> Nelson was not a programmer. However, Mark S. Miller told me that he came up with [http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html](http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html) out of thinking about how to architect the full distributed Xanadu system. I believe Nick Szabo was heavily influenced by Miller's ideas in his first paper on smart contracts: it references Miller and mentions that Szabo did work for the company started up to commercialize those ideas (Agorics). It's not _quite_ a coincidence that you think of blockchains.

I don't know how Xanadu was supposed to work on the inside. I do have a dim vague memory of seeing a mailing-list post many years later in response to someone seeking the earliest prior art on using content hashes for a distributed content-addressable store -- from someone in Xanadu. That's all I got in my memory. I want to say they also mentioned Merkle trees, but I may be confabulating. (I'd be surprised if Miller didn't know Merkle personally -- they both worked with Eric Drexler, and Drexler invented his ent just a few years after Merkle patented his tree.)

Robin Hanson published a paper back then with a non-Xanadu design sketch with similar goals: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=43938](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=43938) but it's paywalled. (Hanson also got involved with Xanadu for a little while.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
      Q: Do you have had mixed emotions about "cashing in" on the Web?
      A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.

I wonder if this might be closer to the reason that Xanadu didn't take off than "worse is better". Where is the Xanadu implementation we can hack on, other than an incomplete dump of code here [http://udanax.xanadu.com/gold/download/index.html](http://udanax.xanadu.com/gold/download/index.html) built on a proprietary platform? Why is it that when I look up ZigZag I find an open source project that closed down over patenting concerns [http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/](http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/) ?

</comment><comment><USER8> Every once in a while I see references to Xanadu, as a solution that would fix all of the problems with current WWW by making broken links impossible. At some point, I spent some time reading about Xanadu's protocol, and I now think it would never work at all, since it makes some pretty wide assumptions:

Xanadu assumes that documents are stored on append-only structure: they never disappear, and instead of updating the document, one just publishes a new version (with all the text from the previous ones was still available). See for example [http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html](http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html) figures 9/10 and then figure 16. Later, there is a reference to cache, but with no details whatsoever: "... content may be cached in many places, as long as it has the same permanent IDs..."

I have no idea how is this supposed work in the real life. Today, the static web hosting is dirt cheap, but back in 90's it was $20/mo for just a few megabytes. In a Xanadu world, what would happen once you no longer pay for service?

<comment><USER9> The Internet Archive is willing to pay to preserve your content even if you aren't. One could imagine a system where your hosting fee includes an "archive tax" that pays for your content to be archived forever.

In general, I get the impression that Xanadu was designed for a world run by five mainframes and it was never really able to adapt to the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Xanadu is great and it will be one of those things that proves itself in the future. Perhaps whatever replaces the web someday will resemble it.

I bet that someday we will move to a distributed web hosted on something like the blockchain, with redundancy and revision history, and that will begin to resemble Xanadu. It reminds me of sort of a "Star Trek" vision of how things should be, but not how things actually are in this disorganized world.

I think that it's sort of like the Dynabook or early AI or VR, in that it's the correct vision of the ideal result of a technology, but was way too ahead of its time and the technology just wasn't ready.

</comment><comment><USER11> Depending on who you're talking to, it is either a revolutionary idea misunderstood or a massive case of vaporware:

[https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

<comment><USER12> "Nelson invented a new way of crossing the street: when arriving at a busy thoroughfare, he would dramatically turn his back on traffic and step with theatrical nonchalance off the sidewalk. Drivers, frightened, would slam on their brakes."

Well, there's that.

<comment><USER13> " _Eyes On The Road_ " might've been a reasonable assumption in the day before smartphones, but nowadays I'd advise against literally betting your life on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> see also: As We May Think (1945) -- [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as- we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)

discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577865)

</comment><comment><USER15> Ted Nelson got the name Xanadu from a short story by Theodore Sturgeon from 1956 called "The Skills of Xanadu". (I asked Ted about it when he visited IBM Research around 2000...)

Printed: [https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...](https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_1956_07#page/n117/mode/2up)

Audio: [https://archive.org/details/pra- BB3830.08](https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08)

"The story tells of a representative of the expansionist, imperialistic culture of the planet Kit Carson, and his encounter with the deceptively pastoral culture of Xanadu."

The story is about the social effect of wearable networked computers that can exchange knowledge -- very prescient for 1956!

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're curious about Ted Nelson, check out his Youtube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson/videos)

His "Computers for Cynics" series was entertaining to me. He's a sharp guy with strong opinions and an engaging speaker.

He doesn't post a lot and I see that I have some catching-up to do.

I didn't realize he just turned 80 a few weeks ago. I'll be interested to see the videos of the "Ted's 80th birthday show" at The Internet Archive.

</comment><comment><USER17> Free Creative Commons, "Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson"

[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5)

</comment><comment><USER18> It must have been painful to write a website for Xanadu.

<comment><USER19> Though websites are written for the web.

</comment></comment><comment> Chiba-City Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines was absolutely essential to drawing me into the software industry. It's entertaining and inspiring. Everyone should have fun sharing it. That book reached tons of nerds playing with terminals, phones, TV monitors, programmable calculators and modems.

</comment><comment><USER20> Upvoted in the hope someone will explain this to me

<comment><USER21> Long and short of it, it's a form of bidirectional links (so if you update one side, the other side automatically updates). This prevents link-rot.

The second is putting a payment processor on EVERY query. You want Internet for the Richies- this is how you get it. Of course, there's hand-wavey garbage that says 'everyone would contribute and nobody would owe anyone anything'.

Seriously, IPFS is the best way forward here. Links never change its content (but can still die if noone has the content). And no payment processor is there unless you want to pay other people to pin (read: seed) content.

(To see this post, please pay $0.02)

Edit: Seriously? multiple -1's in a row? I'd love to hear rebuttals if I'm wrong, or a further discussion. If you've read the Xanadu documents, then you'd know that the basis of this is a "Secure Environment and Secure Identification" of computers. AKA: DRM.

<comment><USER22> _> Internet for the Richies_

Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?

I understand where you're coming from with the DRM criticism, but IMO the primary fault in Xanadu's version is that it's an attempt at naïve mom&pop capitalism in a digital world that already is owned by plutocrats wealthy and powerful beyond Rockefellers' dreams.

<comment><USER23> > Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value > either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?

No, because you can download the entirety of Wikipedia, including its edit history and discussion.

Also, you can download a not insignificant number of primary sources through both sci-hub and various other sources like Project Gutenberg, IMSLP, etc.

Add to that all the things that swell to prominence on Bittorrent trackers whenever the Streisand effect is in play.

I have a hard time seeing that content disappearing any time soon. But I also have a hard time seeing how that content would have been aggregated in the first place if you had little micropayment barriers between all the things.

<comment><USER21> When I was much younger and more naive about how the US and capitalism works, I thought that it would be a splendid idea to be able to make money on my thoughts, experiments, and doings. And I thought that it too would be a great idea to be able to leverage others' works, pay them, and build on them.

And now, I do just that. Except there's no money changing hands. That's open source for you. Now, if Xanadu's ideas did come to fruition, then I would expect everything to have a paywall on it. And the worst/regular experience would be pages of pages of aggregate sentences, with each few words being a cent or 2. The pages themselves would be >$1 each to download. Instead of trying to trick browsers and people into spyware - it would be tricking people into automatic slow-reloading links that would cost a few cents... And would continuously reload treating unsuspecting users like a piggy bank.

Instead, the world we have is free by default. Only if something is deemed to cost a lot is there a paywall. Things under that threshold use advertising, which is slowly beginning to fail at the seams. That's because content is expensive, but copying isnt.

(BTW, my points on the main post are still yoyo-ing around 0 and 1. I wish people would respond rather than try to hide my commentary.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I corresponded briefly with him about this. From my understanding, his goals were:

* micropayments for authors * immutable revision history * persistent bi-directional links * _transclusions_ (quotes connected to the original source) instead of copies

Judging from "Computer Lib / Dream Machines," he obviously knows his stuff. I suspect he just doesn't like programming.

I think his biggest problem was that a lot of his goals were too big for the technology of the time. Even with distributed version control, blockchains, and cloud computing we're not there yet, but we are closer than we were.

</comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone else click on the random period in the bottom left corner hoping it was one of those old school secret links to the "admin" section?

</comment><comment><USER26> The Xanadu design of Ted and Roger (and others) is actually quite good. To understand, it does require a lot of reading (and rereading) sources like 'Literary Machines' and the online docs out there. I had to build and run Udanax Green to figure out areas the docs didn't cover.

Now the question is "Is the design feasible to scale?" I'm working toward building a xanalogical system using Udanax Green as a design reference and after 9 months of working on it, I'm convinced the design will scale.

I'm using RDF backend store for the links/endsets. SPARQL/RDF is easily distributed so there is no need to centralize. I'm using IPFS for images.

I'm currently working on a custom browser for viewing, publishing and editing.

There is still a lot to do but you can check it the source. [https://github.com/sisbell/oulipo](https://github.com/sisbell/oulipo)

</comment><comment><USER27> The site is down for me, possibly due to load (the request just times out).

Off-topic: Did anyone else sit down to watch Citizen Kane, purportedly the best movie ever, and come out of the experience ridiculously underwhelmed?

<comment><USER28> Citizen Kane practically invented modern dramatic film.

The techniques Welles developed for Kane were innovative at the time, but are now mundane or clichéd. In terms of writing, framing, lighting, directing, editing, scoring, it was unparalleled.

It's not the best movie in the conventional sense, and maybe not even a particularly good one - I found that the story itself failed to grip me - <USER2> it is _technically_ brilliant, and one of the most significant movies in terms of its influence on the art of film-making.

I don't remember the source, but there's a quote to the effect of "I don't think much of Shakespeare's plays, they're just one cliché after another".

<comment><USER29> AKA "Seinfeld Is Unfunny" [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Detailed (albeit 2009) review of Ted Nelson's influence: [https://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/bitstream/140.119/57633/1](https://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/bitstream/140.119/57633/1)

</comment><comment><USER31> So this could be an app, or a new browser, maybe.

<comment><USER32> You wouldn't need an app or new browser, this could be done using the semantic web technologies that already exist.

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

<comment><USER31> Yes, but you would need an app or browser to navigate through all that mess.

<comment><USER32> Not necessarily, you could navigate through websites.

<comment><USER31> Like you already do today?

<comment><USER32> Semantic web technologies are not very common today. You couldn't easily implement Xanadu-like content linking in a web browser without using semantic web technologies.

<comment><USER31> Are you trying to confuse me?

<comment><USER32> No, I'm not trying to confuse you.

To start again, what do you think I mean by the term 'semantic web'? If you're not sure, I'm happy to try and explain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Did someone remember the movie?

<comment><USER34> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_(Citizen_Kane)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_\(Citizen_Kane\))

Huge, foolish, excess. Once completed, unable to give it's creator happiness. Not a perfect metaphor, but it gets you thinking.

OT, but Kane is definitely worth watching. Probably enjoy it more if you don't go in to it expecting "the greatest film ever".

<comment><USER35> You don't think they meant the Olivia Newton John vehicle? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_\(film\))</comment></comment></comment>


Beer startups from Europe. Cheers - <AUTHOR> http://usersnap.com/blog/beer-startups-europe

<comment><USER2> Unreadable, roundabout 6 times the width of my mobile's display and zoom is disabled.

Is there a way to teach Firefox that this idea is utterly stupid, always and without exception?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you talking about the website or about Firefox now :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you know more beer startups, please add them here. Thanks!</comment>


Ironsides DNS Server in Ada Spark - <AUTHOR> https://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/ <comment><USER2> If you prefer to read code on GitHub: [https://github.com/mcejp/IRONSIDES](https://github.com/mcejp/IRONSIDES)

</comment><comment><USER3> > We describe the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS that is > provably invulnerable to remote code execution exploits and single-packet > denial of service attacks

Sounds like famous last words. How can something be provably invulnerable to RCE? Wouldn't you just be able to prove that it's invulnerable to known RCE's?

From [https://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/globecom_2012.pdf](https://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/globecom_2012.pdf)

<comment><USER4> The key is that it's proven within the formal method system used. For example, you can prove that you don't have an out of bounds write, but not that a hardware bug doesn't exist.

There was a proof of SSL or TLS (can't remember which) as a protocol was secure, but later was exploited. This was because the exploit was something the spec didn't cover

<comment><USER5> > For example, you can prove that you don't have an out of bounds write, but > not that a hardware bug doesn't exist.

Also, a bug in the compiler could introduce such a bug.

To my knowledge, the major Ada compilers have a very good reputation for correctness, but none are formally verified, and there's no such compiler on the horizon.

> There was a proof of SSL or TLS (can't remember which) as a protocol was > secure, but later was exploited. This was because the exploit was something > the spec didn't cover

Typically we'd expect the only vulnerabilities in such an implementation would be side-channel attacks, such as timing attacks. Do you have any more details on this? I couldn't find anything with a quick google.

<comment><USER4> Top of the second page: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00165-012-0269-9](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00165-012-0269-9)

My understanding is that both Needham–Schroeder and SSL had formal verification prior to the breaks, but the breaks relied on properties outside of what was proven (which was thought to be complete at the time).

<comment><USER5> Great, thanks. I found a freely available pre-print at [http://alfredo.pironti.eu/research/sites/default/files/cf11....](http://alfredo.pironti.eu/research/sites/default/files/cf11.pdf)

The relevant content is mostly on page 2. They seem to be saying that when it comes to crypto, both the requirements work and the implementation work are both challenging and error-prone, even for expert practitioners. I don't think they're exactly saying anything against formal methods, though:

> It is significant, for example, that the above mentioned flaw affecting the > Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol could be found by applying formal > methods

Later, under _Motivation_ , regarding what are essentially integration bugs:

> in OpenSSL an error condition returned by a cryptographic function was > incorrectly interpreted by the function caller, making the application > accept corrupted data; such a fault cannot be found if a formal model that > has no relation with the implementation code is analyzed

Not exactly a demonstration of a weakness of formal methods. Instead, an instance of a bug (a normal one, not a side-channel vulnerability) occurring in a system which was only partially formally verified.

> a large gap still exists between these models and a real-world protocol > implementation and its execution.

A problem with real-world implementation, not with formal methods. I wonder what they would have made of 'SPARKSkein', released around the time that paper was published. [0] I suppose it wouldn't have been anything all that new - integration bugs could still occur.

[0] [https://www.adacore.com/papers/sparkskein](https://www.adacore.com/papers/sparkskein)

<comment><USER4> My takeaway is that using formal methods is difficult to turn into any sort of actual security guarantee, due to the difficulty of connecting them to a real world system in a meaningful way. While formal methods could produce something meaningful with proper "inputs", getting that done is hard.

<comment><USER5> I'm more optimistic. There's real value in building ultra-low-defect crypto code, and as far as I can tell, formal methods have a good track-record there. We already knew that integration into non-verified code isn't guaranteed to be free of defects - that's out of scope by definition. That's somewhere safe languages can help though. What the paper describes as _corrupted data_ might well be the kind of bug that often happens in C, but rarely happens in a safe language.

The other question is vulnerability to side-channel attacks. Today's formal methods aren't much use against them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gambia's Jammeh in shock election loss after 22-year rule - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gambia-election-idUSKBN13R18G?il=0 <comment><USER2> Then again, The Gambia is special.

They have held multiparty free and open elections from independance until 1994 (Jammeh's coup). This a continent where most countries had experienced Coups, Single-Party rule or both by 1970. (The only country with continuous multiparty democracy is Botswana)

Jammeh himself quickly felt the need to organise elections to legitimize his rule. Sure there was intimidation and other manoeuvers but oddly he almost always won with results in the high 50's. Those are crazy tight results by African standards (even in democracies incumbents rarely go lower than 60).

</comment><comment><USER3> Apropos of nothing, the proper anglicized name of the country is The Gambia, which along with The Bahamas, are the only two countries whose official names include "The".

Obviously Reuters knows what they're doing and I'm sure adhere quite strictly to their popular style guide, so I find it interesting that their editors omit the "The". I wonder why.

<comment><USER4> I can't tell what they mean here, but: [http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=G#Gambia](http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=G#Gambia)

 _" Gambia: Not the Gambia, West Africa"_

<comment><USER5> Sounds like they are specifically _not_ calling it the _T /the_ Gambia, for whatever reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Norwegian Broadcasting Service just announced that he had conceded defeat to the head of the electoral commission.

However, they stressed that Jammeh had not yet publicly conceded.

</comment><comment><USER7> _Defeat and a concession from Jammeh would be momentous._

Yep, that would be huge and unprecedented.

</comment><comment><USER8> Gambia was recently the subject of an attempted coup by a group of Gambian- American immigrants.

It's a really fascinating story. A group of middle-aged middle-class immigrants from Gambia plotted, and attempted to overthrow Jammeh.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/21/how-former- us-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/21/how-former-us-army- officer-launched-disastrous-coup-the-gambia)

</comment><comment><USER9> Gambia largely lives on tourism. Any political instability could have disastrous effects on the economy. Maybe Jammeh realizes that and will concede peacefully.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Jammeh's eccentricities often made headlines. He once said he had invented a > herbal cure for AIDS that only works on a Thursdays. Once every year he also > invited a few hundred women to the grounds of State House, where he > personally administered a another herbal cure he had concocted for > infertility.

Yeah, that sounds like someone who's gonna peacefully accept election results.

<comment><USER2> That's why everybody uses the word "shock"

He has not publicly conceded yet (so we may still get a surprise) but :

\- his electoral commission has announced the results

\- the head of his electoral commission has announced Jammeh will conceide

\- rumour says his concession video has been recorded

\- the internet that has been cut-off on election's eve is functionning again

\- soldiers who were deployed have left the streets

It really sound this is happening

<comment><USER5> > \- soldiers who were deployed have left the streets

Is it known whether or not the soldiers in this case are loyal to Jammeh? Just thinking about what happened in Burkina with Compaoré.</comment></comment></comment>


Greenspan: Social Security Benefits Need to Be Cut 25% to Be Sustainable - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/greenspan-social-security-benefits-need-to-be-cut-25-to-be-sustainable/ <comment><USER2> Greenspan has a "long, tortured relationship with Social Security".

"Greenspan famously chaired a bipartisan commission that in 1983 issued recommendations for strengthening Social Security. Those reforms, which President Reagan signed into law in April of that year, made a promise to American workers: your payroll taxes will be increased in order to finance the build up of trust funds, which will secure Social Security benefits when you retire in the 21st Century. The Greenspan Commission's plan has worked even better than imagined, with projections today showing that promised benefits can be paid in full until 2052, according to the Congressional Budget Office."

"Over the past two decades, Greenspan has repeatedly argued that Reagan's "ironclad commitment" should be broken. Year after year, he has said that the benefits promised to future retirees are unaffordable, that the retirement age should be delayed further, and that other ways of reducing benefits should be considered. And yet in 2001, Greenspan endorsed the Bush tax cuts, which mainly benefited the highest income Americans. If made permanent, those tax cuts would amount to more than three times the size of Social Security's projected shortfall over the next 75 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In Greenspan's view, the Social Security benefits that his own commission promised to future retirees are not affordable, but tax cuts for the wealthy are."

Quotes are from [https://web.archive.org/web/20061008205611/http://www.tcf.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20061008205611/http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=873) in 2005.

See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Political_views...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Political_views_and_alleged_politicization_of_office) : "In March 2005, in reaction to Greenspan's support of President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, then-Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid attacked Greenspan as "one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington"[5] and criticized him for supporting Bush's 2001 tax cut plan."</comment>


The top 25 companies that pay software engineers the most money - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2013/chart-top-25-companies-pay-software-engineers-money/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the list would look like if they factored in the value of benefits.</comment>


Show HN: [ReactJS] Ultra-High Performance Reactive State-Management - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MananTank/radioactive-state#readme <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am the Author of this library.

My Goal is to Create a dead-simple API for state management in React so that even inexperienced people can work confidently on complex state.

I was inspired by immer.js use of proxies and Svelte's reactive state. I also found ways to increse performance and introduce new features like reactive- props, input bindings, always-fresh-state in React

Let me know what you think.</comment>


Show HN: Help test out swarm robot control - <AUTHOR> http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This experiment is the result of several months of back and forth with my good friend and collaborator Aaron.

The goal is to test several different control and visualization schemes for swarms of robots, and to gather quantitative data about what mechanisms help people work with these swarms most effectively.

Secondarily, we've created a simple platform for publishing these academic UX projects online--why settle merely for a handful of undergrads to sample with? We'd like to advance the state of the art a bit in experimentation.

All results are available as CSV or JSON from the results page, and we'll be posting up a link to the project source soon so that other people can learn from our work and extend it.

Thank you everyone here for giving me the feedback and motivation to start doing web stuff--without this community, I wouldn't have either the skills or motivation to pursue fun projects like this.

EDIT: We appreciate any feedback that we get, good or bad. Thanks again!

<comment><USER2> I proposed an approach for human swarm interaction in my Master's thesis [1] and published a conference paper based on the research [2]. I wonder if you have come across my work and would like to discuss it if you are interested.

[1] [https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/27879](https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/27879) [2] [http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~mike/mikeg/papers/MOSC/Bashyal_09...](http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~mike/mikeg/papers/MOSC/Bashyal_09007dcc80600f1e.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Your paper is interesting. Can you share a link to a video of your simulator in action? Better, is the code still live? It appears that you allowed the user to switch modes between global commands and "attract/repulse". What modes did the users prefer?

The term "assistive swarming" is intriguing. In future work, we'd like to simulate interacting with an intelligent swarm, perhaps a group of Boids ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids)). Our current work is inspired by micro/nano setups by colleagues here at Rice, and RPI, Drexel, and Harvard -- see the videos page for an overview: [http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/videos](http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/videos)

<comment><USER2> Here is the video for radiation source localization problem: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKofA3ygvPA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKofA3ygvPA)

And here are two other use cases: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rxqItJFeY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rxqItJFeY) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrq6nq3FLmo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrq6nq3FLmo)

This was all done in Matlab as that was the preferred platform for my lab.

<comment><USER3> Nice -- the transparent paths are effective for showing the explored area.

Lately I've started sharing code from my papers -- is your code available? Matlab code is easily shared at MatlabCentral: [http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/...](http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/74496) (my page).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Migrating jQuery to Knockout - <AUTHOR> At my current workplace, we are creating some fairly large .NET MVC portals on fairly short timescales.
The general opinion seems to be quantity over quality, which doesn't sit well with me and I'm pushing back to try and make things better. Currently all of our UI code is provided by an external agency, and they send full HTML / CSS / JS packages that we plug in to our MVC apps. The problem is the massive spaghetti jquery code that as time goes on just gets far too complicated to be easily maintainable.
I'm being asked for a rough estimate for migrating this provided jquery code to something like knockout so we can decide if it's worth the time spent on it. Any rough guesses for a fairly large application? (I realise this is a very hard question with a lot of variables to think about!) <comment><USER2> I have used Knockout to create some pretty complex pages.

Without knowing how many pages or use cases for your large app, it would be hard to say.

I have mixed Knockout and JQuery together to handle the AJAX queries in some cases. I have also utilized the animation aspects of JQuery withing Knockout.

I would tell you, a few days to a week for a pretty complex page including testing if you are fairly well versed in Knockout.</comment>


Is YCombinator News better than Digg? - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com <comment><USER2> let's take a pop over and see:

* Pot No Longer Beneficial Only to the Cheez-It Industry

* Judge suspends man's sentence after he raped 12-year-old 5x

* Box Wine Dispenser For Your Boxed Wine Presumably Comes in a Box

I'll stop there, and rest my case. More importantly, I haven't seen a single decent comment over there in many months. I don't come here for the news as much as the peers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I enjoy the reddit-like simplicity of YC News, but I come here mostly for the community of like-minded people, as jwecker noted. The digg community is much more vocal, however, and I'm hoping more lengthy discussions will come out of these links here at YC News.</comment>


As STEM majors soar at UW, interest in humanities shrinks - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/as-stem-majors-soar-at-uw-interest-in-humanities-shrinks-a-potentially-costly-loss/ <comment><USER2> _Those introductory classes — refined over the years by some of the university's best professors, and taught to several hundred students at a time in big lecture halls — are designed to inspire and delight, sparking an interest in literature, or history, or politics, that could lead a student to major in those fields._

The impacts of encouraging students to major in those fields has led to a vast skills imbalance in our workforce, and the sad situation of people with lit and history BAs taking unskilled jobs or jobs that are a poor fit for their skills. ([https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/fear- of...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/fear-of-a-college- educated-barista/500792/))

For those who graduate with PhDs in these fields, it's nearly impossible to get hired as a professor or researcher. There just aren't as many academic jobs available, and yet, amazingly, there are now more English and History PhDs awarded every year than 30 years ago ([https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/28/more- humaniti...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/28/more-humanities- phds-are-awarded-job-openings-are-disappearing)):

 _Humanities programs awarded 5,891 doctoral degrees in 2015. That is the largest number recorded back to the start of collection of such information in 1987. The figure was 3,110 in 1988, then rose steadily to 4,994 in 2000, dipped to about 4,700 from 2002 to 2007, and then started going up again, year after year._

As that article notes, jobs in those fields "are increasingly hard to come by." Yet the universities keep churning out PhDs in these fields, to keep the tuition rolling in and as a source of cheap labor for undergraduate instruction.

Regarding the following quote in the Seattle Times:

 _Academics worry that the nation would be impoverished — both culturally and intellectually — if only an elite few understand the arc of American history, know how to find meaning in poetry, or can discuss the ideas of the great philosophers._

This argument seems to be trotted out in many articles about the future of liberal arts, but it's a weak one. For decades many colleges have created core curriculums that require even the most hard-core STEM major to take a range of liberal arts classes. And, as noted later in the article, "the broad general education we want for all of our students is increasingly done at the high- school level." IMHO that's not a bad thing - particularly for those students who will never attend college.

One other comment: Not all STEM majors are created equal. For certain majors such as biology there are not enough available entry level jobs for BSc grads, let alone for PhDs (who often find themselves applying for some of the low- level jobs intended for people with bachelors or masters degrees).

<comment><USER3> Seems like those professors should be recorded and then put on YouTube. They could inspire and reach many more people that way!

It's funny because the marketing from Universities often highlight the professional value of a degree, essentially casting it as a "choose the best career ROI" decision. That and the high tuition naturally result in these sorts of outcomes.

As a former STEM major I never took liberal arts classes after high school, even though I enjoy history. I now get my inspiration and delight through Great Lecture courses and other content on YouTube.

Often, the best teachers are not at a research-intensive university anyways. Because, guess what, those professors are too busy writing books, working on their research, tooting their horns, to care much about teaching the next wave of undergrads.</comment></comment>


RetailMeNot Shares Spike After Raising $191 Million In IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/07/19/retailmenot-shares-spike-after-raising-191-million-in-ipo/

<comment><USER2> Please tell me there is something deeper in this than putting coupon codes on a website.</comment>


Greybeard Stories: The Black Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html <comment><AUTHOR> This item : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985965> : brought home forcefully not only that not every hacker is as old as I am, but actually that very few hackers are as old as I am. The result is that there are stories I take for granted, but which the hackers of today don't know.

So I've started to write them up.

I'm commenting here because this introduction doesn't belong in the generic item - it's really specific to Hack News.

I hope you like the account - there will be more as fast as I can get the time to write them.

<comment><USER2> This is also actually a great book idea -- collecting war stories from older hackers that the younger ones might never hear otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearly not such a good idea. I thought HN was the perfect audience. Apart from your comment and one up-mod each, both stories have sunk wthout trace.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I did an eight-part "tips on effective one-person startup teams" today that I thought was awesome. Lots of practical tips and stuff people probably haven't read elsewhere, startup-centered, easy-to-read.

It sunk quickly with only 3 votes.

So perhaps I'm not the best one to judge, eh? (grin)

I'd buy the book. And a couple other folks, including you. So that's 3. Another ten thousand or so and you've got a best-seller.

<comment><USER3> I think it's mostly a question of luck and time of the day when it comes to traction on HN. There are so many stories and the page is only this big....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a very hard time believing this. I can certainly believe the bit about finding the failure mode, but not the bit about deliberately sabotaging a public demo. That would be beyond stupid.

</comment><comment> hippee-lee I liked your story, though i am not really a hacker.

Regarding your story, it illustrates an issue I have been thinking about lately. Some background on myself so you know where i am coming from. I started in biotechnology running mass specs in a small molecule analytical lab. Later, when i moved to an area with very little small molcule r&d I took a job doing web development.

Here is my observation. In highly technical fields there are a lot of people like those on the 'Black' team who would rather make someone look bad by knocking over a box because they can than patting them on the back and telling them, hey nice code - we can't find anything wrong with it. I saw similar behavior in Amgens R&D department time and time again where the people tearing each other down were very smart and passionate about thier jobs but unwilling or unable to be civil to the competition.</comment>


How Facebook for iOS Continues to Drain Your iPhone Battery - <AUTHOR> http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/facebook-ios-drains-iphone-battery/ <comment><USER2> I have to force close facebook on android after every use, if I don't want my pocket to heat up and my battery to empty.</comment>


Entrepreneurs hope to save world 1 baby at a time - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/columnist/abrams/2008-09-19-entrepreneurs-hope-to-save--world_N.htm

<comment><USER2> Amazing: 726 breathless words about a contest _without a single link to the website_ ; the URL appears only as plain paragraph text. I wonder how many clicks that cost them?

N.B. As far as I can tell, this is a _prize_ , not an investment, so calling the winners 'entrepreneurs' is a stretch. They appear to be starting a charity, not a company. And charities, while often noble in their intent, are not particularly sustainable; for sustainability, it's hard to beat a profitable company.

To paraphrase H.L. Hunt: if this world is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit.

<comment><AUTHOR> upvoted for your h.l. hunt - that goes straight to my facebook quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the dialysis machine for babies that was up here a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267510>

</comment><comment><USER4> Next version - powered from a USB port.

</comment><comment><USER5> If they are saving premature babies, then say that. Isn't that a good enough cause on its own?

I object to dressing it up as saving the world, though, because population growth and world saving ... well, they don't go together too well.

Nice wax warmer idea, though.</comment>


Implementing Run-length encoding in CUDA - <AUTHOR> https://erkaman.github.io/posts/cuda_rle.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author. If there is any part of the text that is unclear, please ask, and I will clarify!</comment>


Homophony Groups in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/linguistics/homophony-groups <comment><USER2> This is not a bash on Haskell as I like Haskell, but is every Haskell article or discussion academic? It's all fascinating and interesting (especially the OP), but some of us would like to learn about Haskell's applicability in the real world, not just in computer science academia. I would like to read about Haskell workflows, productivity, and the positives/negatives of using it in your organization. Languages like Go and Clojure bring up these kinds of conversations all the time, so why is it so silent (or at least very low volume) on Haskell's front?

<comment><USER3> There aren't a lot of consumer facing companies using Haskell. Scrive is one, but I can't find blogs.

Galois makes "highly reliable" software stuff for hardware manufactures and crypto clients.

Edward Kmett is writing/using a Haskell variant for use at the bank where he works.

[http://elm-lang.org/](http://elm-lang.org/) Elm is a FRP/DHTML webapp- building language Haskell variant whose compiler is a Haskell program. Check out Prezi and Evan's blogs Prezi.com recent hired its author Evan Czaplicki

Draw amazing diagrams in Haskell, with Diagrams:

[http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/gallery.html](http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/gallery.html)

Yesod (Michael Snoyman) is a full-festured webapp stack. Michael blogs its features.

Ultimately, you don't see large teams using Haskell, and there isn't full integration with all the popular consumer web infrastructure. So instead you have a bunch of small niche products, and the language used to teach mathematical concepts in blogs like Dan Piponi's

<comment><USER4> Don't forget Simon Marlow is at facebook now [1]

But even there the goal is not about adopting Haskell in the large, but using rather using Haskell to create a DSL for end users/employees internally in FB to easily create search/spam filter behaviors.

Still, it's a start.

[1] [http://www.haskellcast.com/episode/004-simon-marlow-on- paral...](http://www.haskellcast.com/episode/004-simon-marlow-on-parallelism- and-concurrency)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've realized lately that [http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/) is always the place to go for latest haskell news.

<comment><USER5> I also like [http://haskellnews.org/](http://haskellnews.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In answer to his question about the equivalent problem in French: [http://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/exp- math-2/fullt...](http://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/exp- math-2/fulltext.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> I had no idea that draught is pronounced draft. I always thought that whatever I heard was always "draft", and that draught was some word that I only came across in written english.

<comment><USER8> I have a shockingly large "read-only" English vocabulary, at least relative to my age (42) and native language (American English). I still get caught out from time to time -- "quay" was a particularly humiliating bête noire.

<comment><USER7> My favorite was at a party where the (verbal) quiz question was what a "yamikah" is. I had absolutely no idea. Then they told me what it was, and I said - as if the quiz question had gotten it wrong - "Ohhhhh! You mean a YAR- MULK."

<comment><USER9> Something similar happened to me: a friend of mine kept telling me he worked for a security company called Semantic, and much later I realized he meant Symantec (pronounced like "semantic").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some of the homophone pairs the author used seem pretty dubious to me: ant/aunt, choral/coral, air/err, awed/odd, veldt/felt. This is partly British versus American English, but not wholly.

My personal homophony group is not trivial (I think); in particular, I believe that for all pairs of words I regard as having the same pronunciation, the number of "v"s is the same. The counterexample alleged on the linked page is "veldt = felt", but I (like the Dutch, I believe) pronounce "veldt" with a "v" rather than an "f" sound.

I can reduce everything else to the identity using only (what I think are) uncontroversial homophone pairs, so I claim that every native English speaker of large enough vocabulary has a homophony group that's either trivial or isomorphic to Z (and generated by "v").

(I did need some uncommon words, though I didn't try very hard to avoid them: od, gneiss, phlox, qat, flyte, lam. And some somewhat-uncommon ones: banns, rapt, wright.)

<comment><USER11> agreed, I didnt have to look far at all: affect / effect are (and sound) completely different.

also as an aside, both effect and affect are both verbs and nouns.

<comment><USER12> Most people pronounce the verb "affect" and the noun "effect" the same.

<comment><USER13> > Most people pronounce the verb "affect" and the noun "effect" the same.

Most people I've encountered pronounce the verb "affect" and noun "effect" differently, though the difference can be slight. (schwa for affect vs. short e for effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm going to put on my math hat for a second, because this blog post was a bit confusing for me at first. I had to read through the post a few times to understand what the "homophony group" was.

For this comment, I don't want to dive into this post from the perspective of someone who's never studied abstract algebra before, so what I'm about to write won't make much sense to anyone who hasn't. If you know a little bit of group theory, though, you should be able to follow along.

In math-ese, the group under consideration is

        <a,b,c,...,z | knight=night, ad=add, arc=ark, ...>

Defining a group this way is called a "group presentation". The symbols to the left of the | are called "generators" and the symbols to the right are called "relations." For example, one presentation of the integers modulo 4 with mod-4 addition is

        <x | x+x+x+x = 1>

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_of_a_group](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_of_a_group) for the gory details.

Anyhow, the blog post confused me at first because the "homophony group" is a kind of mathematical double entendre. In algebra one often omits the group operation explicitly, writing "xy" instead of "x.y," where "." is the group operation. This implicit understanding is what makes the "joke" work.

So, on the one hand, we write down the relation "ad=add" in our presentation because ad and add are homophones in English. On the other hand, in group- land, we mean a.d = a.d.d, where (again) "." is the group operation. In group- land, however, there's no sense that "a" is anything special. The 26 symbols "a" to "z" are arbitrary and we could easily write, say,

        <σ,b,c,...,z | knight=night, σd=σdd, ...>

or use any other 26 distinct symbols for "a" to "z." The generators tell us what symbols we have at our disposal and the relations tell us how we can reduce combinations of those symbols to the identity element.

Math jokes. Oh buddy.

For the CS folks among us, there's a computational problem called the "group isomorphism problem" which asks, "Given two group presentations, are they isomorphic?" This problem is provably undecidable: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_isomorphism_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_isomorphism_problem) This means you can't write a single algorithm which takes two arbitrary group presentations as inputs and correctly determines whether the groups as presented are isomorphic.</comment>


Is Cryptocurrency a New World Order? - <AUTHOR> Is this the realdeal or all a scam? <comment><USER2> neither. it's a prototype. can't scale yet. nor its endorsed by govs. a prototype car usually don't have seat belts. and you need gov to take care of roads.</comment>


Google for "Nokia Windows Phone" - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=nokia+windows+phone&hl=en&biw=1440&bih=763&prmd=imvnsu&source=lnms&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:h&ei=4UGCTtLVDoPqgQf-zaUt&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CCAQ_AUoAQ WTF? <comment><USER2> What's your point? That's not normal Google search. It's an image search and it's _only_ for results being indexed in the "past hour".

To put things in perspective, doing the exact same search, but for "Samsung Android phone" it also gets zero results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes... I thought before posting because it might be outdated soon, and probably I shouldn't have posted.

When I did the search, there were 4 results, one of them was a NUDE girls in sex position. Big WTF. Not sure if Google curates image search somehow... but they probably do, because the content is not there anymore.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Series LLC vs individual LLCs? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a self-employed contractor and want to incorporate with a partner to form an LLC.
Our company will have a consulting/contracting arm and incubate + launch new products (websites/apps).
While the looseness of LLC operating agreements would allow everything to be bundled into one LLC (and profit share + ownership of individual products/projects be defined in the operating agreement via "special allocations"), I think it would be easier to break up certain operations/products/initiatives into separate LLCs.
Series LLC's seem perfect for what we are trying to do, but I'm unsure about what the advantages/disadvantages are of a Series LLC vs opening multiple individual LLCs.
Fees? Taxes? Ease of opening new LLC's? How does ownership of the parent LLC affect management/ownership of the child LLC's?
If anyone can refer/recommend a good lawyer/consultant, I'd love to speak to an expert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_LLC
http://www.limitedliabilitycompanycenter.com/series_llc.html
http://www.mayer-riser.com/Articles/business/seriesllc.htm <comment><USER2> <Anecdotally> I've formed three series LLCs (one in IL and two in DE.) The first two times, they were basically used to register investment fund families so that each individual fund didn't have to be registered. We saved a significant amount of time and money in the long run, but we used legal and tax professionals that have expertise in using series LLCs for EXACTLY that purpose. The team had securities attorneys and compliance officers triple- checking our work and we were using it for much more than just saving on basic filing fees, etc. I would estimate we saved in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it was a very specific use case, and there have been many mutual fund/investment companies that have went before us and tested the boundaries.

The last time I formed a series LLC it was for almost exactly what you are proposing - a consulting firm/startup incubation company. I just went with my gut feeling based on what I had read on the internet and my prior experience with the fund companies. I had the series LLC formed by an attorney with series LLC experience in DE. I think I paid under $700 for the formation. Overall, it has been a HUGE mistake. The costs and hassles of keeping up the separation of the series (separate bank accounts, separate accounting systems, etc.) has been a pain and has far outweighed any of the benefits gained. In fact, it has been a pain just trying to do simple things like open a bank account for series companies here in IL. Bank officers are not familiar with series LLCs and their systems aren't set up for that, so I was issued company credit cards that have the wrong name on them, checks with the wrong name on them, etc. Branding is a nightmare if you comply with the letter of the law in some states. I just really didn't know what I was getting myself into for this usage scenario. I will most likely have to restructure the companies in the near future for various reasons...probably at significant expense.

As others have said, the series LLC form is not as well-known by the public or as legally tested as other entities. You really should have a great reason for choosing a series structure before you do so, and you should definitely speak with a tax attorney or accountant that has experience in this area. Some of the pros and cons are very easy to misunderstand. If I were doing it again, I would personally NOT use a series LLC for an incubator/consulting arrangement.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a tax accountant and I can give you some insight into the tax aspect of the equation.

1\. I don't think that an LLC is the correct legal entity you should be considering for your consulting arm because of self-employment tax. Many people forget that self employment tax is an expensive cost that could be avoided. You should be incorporating an S Corp to plan around the 15.3% tax. You're getting all the same benefits effectively except you'll pay less taxes.

2\. I question the value of a series llc because it is a new tax entity and unproven in a number of courts. When selecting a legal entity, you don't want the new and sexy because you want security and predictability.

Having standard llcs would allow you to be sure of the legal ramifications because it is an entity that every state generally recognizes as opposed to the series llc. Also, a lot of the tax circumstances are going to be questionable because we can't be sure of their consequences.

If you're worried about filing taxes and the paper work then you could simply create a tax structure that avoids these additional returns. LLCs allow you to check the box and select passthrough tax treatment for partnerships or corporate taxes to be levied against the entity's income. Also, single member llcs are disregarded for tax purposes but retain their legal status so you could potentially avoid a number of returns.

I hope that this helps.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Not entirely correct. In most states, S Corporations pay more taxes on their income than do LLCs. Also, you don't avoid paying the self-employment tax; you just pay it in a different way, as payroll and other taxes through the S Corporation. In many states, taxes incidental to the employee relationship will end up exceeding the self-employment tax. Moreover, wages paid through an S Corporation cannot be characterized as capital gain (15% rate vs. higher), whereas income earned from an LLC can be capital gain. Also, the S Corporation has significant restrictions. The most important is that only US citizens/legal residents can be investors. If any of the restrictions is not met, the S Corporation will be taxed as a C Corporation, resulting in double taxation of income.

2\. I agree; the only benefit of a series LLC is avoiding the administrative costs of forming multiple LLCs. Unfortunately, the accounting costs and hassles for a series LLC will more than swallow up the (relatively small) administrative savings. Also, the series LLC is not a new form; it's just an extension of the sub-partnership concept and will be taxed the same way. (If the corporate tax structure is selected, it each new LLC in the series will be treated as a subsidiary.)

If you're worried about filing taxes, just choose the simplest form. The tax code is very simple as long as you don't try to play games with it.

<comment><USER3> I think I'm having a difficult time understanding your logic. An S-Corporation is a passthrough tax entity that doesn't pay tax on a corporate level. The income is paid on the 1040 tax return with a K1. Thus, I don't see how the S-Corp would lead to a tax that is any different than a LLC. Its effectively the same tax treatment in this case except that there is the ability to lower SE Tax.

By paying a reasonable wage to the owner, the net income would be distributed as a dividend which is not self-employment income and thus would be exempt from SE Tax.

Also, wages paid to an owner/employee of an S-Corporation is not required to pay FUTA (unemployment) and etc, thus the only tax that you'd be required to pay is FICA and Medicare just like everyone else.

Clearly, the S Corp has a number of restrictions which ties in well with the fact that an S Corp is a "small corporation" But, for small or new companies that aren't getting major funding, this is a great option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IANAL nor an Accountant, but if my understanding is correct the administrative burden can be lower, costs can be much lower, and there may be some tax benefits.

Ultimately, it's going to depend on the state's laws where you're filing for the Series LLC. My state (CT), for example, does not recognize or allow for the formation of these types of LLCs.

Here is a blog post published by a law group that specifically focuses on the Series LLC in your state, Illinois. (That is, assuming your Twitter location is current.)

[http://www.acumenlawgroup.com/publication- categories/busines...](http://www.acumenlawgroup.com/publication- categories/business-consultation/the-series-llc-sure-bet-or-risky-business/)

</comment><comment><USER6> You may want to consider starting an S-corp (mainly for the self-employment tax savings) to be used as the management company.

You can then create individual LLCs as you see fit.

Your S-corp will invoice the LLC's for a management fee; and you pay yourself out of the S-corp. Be sure to recognize the tax benefits of distributions from your S-corp.

<comment><USER7> There are horror stories about people who have tried to recategorize their income as distributions on top of nominal below-market salaries in order to avoid self-employment tax. It doesn't seem worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> a tax accountant or lawyer for the USA will tell you that the IRS is cracking down on consultants in the programming area who do consulting work under corporations as they want to attempt to get full taxes..main reason why recruiting firms are so prevalent in the USA.

Check with your local accountant/lawyer as you may be in a state that has not been targeted by the IRS. IL is one that is targeted whereas IN currently is not targeted for example..

<comment><USER9> I don't understand this at all. Are you saying that consultancies cannot form an LLC or that consultancies that do are being scrutinised more by the IRS at this time?

<comment><USER4> He's saying that any consultancy, however structured, will be disregarded if its consultants perform too much of their work for a single client over the course of its tax year.

The IRS' reasoning is that the consultancy is just a way for the _client_ to avoid paying payroll taxes and other taxes incident to the employee relationship.

The result to the client: a deficiency for not paying those taxes. The result to the consultancy: a deficiency for taking now-inapplicable deductions or for paying the wrong type of taxes. Yes, its silly, but that's the way the tax code works...</comment></comment></comment>


Lawsuit: AT&T overcharging iPhone users by up to 300%  - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/19/lawsuit-att-overcharging-iphone-users-by-up-to-300/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29&utm_content=Twitter

<comment><USER2> _In response, AT &T issued a statement stating that the allegations were "without merit."_

I think it would come off a lot better if they just said "We're looking into the issue and will make it right if we've wronged anyone."</comment>


Microsoft reportedly wants to acquire GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/01/microsoft-reportedly-wants-to-acquire-github/amp <comment><USER2> Ah the Microsoft kiss of death still has its potency.</comment>


Hong Kong protests related texts are now "profane" in chat and character names - <AUTHOR> https://np.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/c3fqtm/ptr_82030889_hong_kong_protests_related_texts_are/ <comment><USER2> The title should mention that this is "in World of Warcraft".

It's sad to see Chinese censorship trickling into Western products. There were some Hearthstone tournaments recently where they wouldn't refer to the country as "Taiwan", and more and more games are banning phrases like "Tianenmen Square" that are banned in China. Some people are afraid of the internet separating into parts... I am afraid of a shared internet where 100 different entities all have the ability to censor discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ironic that this submission was also removed/locked by a subreddit moderator (see top response).</comment>


Making a C codebase reentrant by turning it into a big C++ object - <AUTHOR> http://phildawes.net/blog/2009/09/21/c-codebase-reentrant/ <comment><USER2> The author didn't, as far as I understand, make the code reentrant. The code still operates on mutable state outside of the scope of the call such that two calls that pass in the same inputs may produce different results. The author simply refactored global variables into instance variables of a class, allowing him to create multiple instances of his original program's state.

Interesting to read nonetheless.

<comment><USER3> There's every chance I'm being sloppy with the term reentrant. The factor vm obviously isn't functionally-pure as it accepts user input so I guess it can't be called reentrant by that definition. You can start multiple copies of the program running in different threads though.</comment></comment>


Intergalactic Computer Network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network <comment><USER2> come to think of it, how would (could?) a real _intergalactic_ computer network work?

<comment><USER3> Based on our current understanding of physics, latency would make two-way communication impractical. Even if you were willing to wait around a few thousand generations for the metaphorical ACK, you're not likely still interested in the response to your request. As far as I can tell, the only form of communication that would be relevant would be one-way broadcasts. Because of this, I would envision some kind of intergalactic CDN, continually updating caches in distant galaxies with the historical events of their senders. This information could then be queried by hosts within the neighborhood of these caches.

That said, I wouldn't want to be the one to aim that link... or stand anywhere near a transmitter powerful enough to be detected at intergalactic ranges. You'd probably need some kind of system that obscured the light of a very bright star in order for that to work.</comment></comment>


Neural Song Style - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rupeshs/neuralsongstyle <comment><USER2> Hello again, thanks for sharing this. I saw your video a few days ago. Keep up the awesome work, dude.</comment>


Today's Apple event spells the end for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/29134/Today_s_Apple_event_spells_the_end_for_OS_X <comment><USER2> Apple has really been pushing hard on Mac technology over the last few years. Fusion drives, Thunderbolt, 5K displays, the new MacBook's aggressively light form factor, a thorough UI revamp. The only sign of stagnation is the state of the App Store, but all that means is we carry on buying and installing apps the good old way.

Apple is trying to boost the iPad, so obviously they're playing up it's future role and persuading people it's the next big thing. What else does anyone expect them to do?

I think Apple genuinely do think iOS is the future of mainstream consumer computing, and a big chunk of professional computing as well. But that doesn't mean OSX has no future. Nor does it mean this future of computing is going to be here in full force and sweep traditional form factors under the rug in the next 6 months. But 5 or 10 years down the line? Maybe. But that's not a concern if you're buying a machine today.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "end for OS X" is a giant load of nonsense from someone focused on iOS. I could see eventually merging iOS and OSX, but Apple is a bit hoist on its own petard there since it insists that the experiences be completely different. Almost everything below the UI layer is the same.

Apple makes plenty of profit from its OSX machines, and needs to diversify more, not less. It also needs powerful machines for development, design and other tasks. Apple's culture would never accept switching to Windows, and Linux is still lacking in too many respects.

What Apple _should_ do is improve OSX (high color depth support, better graphics performance, ultra low latency etc.) as well as releasing cutting edge hardware that outperforms anything in the industry. Rackable, higher-end Mac Pros supporting SLI and gobs of memory that could gang together using Thunderbolt would be a good start. Apple should be using its vast market capitalization to lead the industry forward. It has the resources to do many things at once.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll believe that when I see xcode running on ios.

<comment><USER5> "More developers now use OS X than Linux, says 'most comprehensive survey ever conducted [by StackOverflow]'" [http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/18/os-x-versus- linux-developers/](http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/18/os-x-versus-linux- developers/)

<comment><USER6> Because Linux was always the most popular desktop environment...

<comment><USER7> For developers, yes.

<comment><USER8> No, read Stack Overflow's survey. Just over half of the developers use Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although I use my MacBooks and Linux laptops for most programming, I find myself spending more time on my iPad Pro. I wrote about this yesterday [http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/03/in-defense-of-ipads-as- pr...](http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/03/in-defense-of-ipads-as- productivity.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is clickbait at it's best. There is no hard evidence to prove this (obviously, it's Apple) and it couldn't be further from the truth.

iPads are far from a replacement for your MacBook or iMac - for one you can't properly multitask, and you as a developer you couldn't properly debug and write code on an iPad.

OSX will be around for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER10> To me, nothing in that article justifies the title, but it does remind me why I stopped visiting that site on a regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER11> Scientists from Johns Hopkins University crunch through Apple encryption.

[https://www.rt.com/news/336422-apple-encryption-break- bug/](https://www.rt.com/news/336422-apple-encryption-break-bug/)

<comment><USER12> What does this has to do with the fate of OSX?

<comment><USER13> Nothing. Pretty much the same Apple's announcement for the new iPad has to do with "the end" of OS X. ;-)

I do not see the death of OS X on iOS. If anything, I see it morphing.</comment></comment></comment>