Linux Reverse Engineering CTFs for Beginners - <AUTHOR> https://osandamalith.com/2019/02/11/linux-reverse-engineering-ctfs-for-beginners/ <comment><USER3> For some great fun and learning I recommend Googles beginner CTF. [https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com/#beginners/](https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com/#beginners/)

The last thing that glued me to my seat like this was maybe 10 years ago. Good to have had that feeling again. Hope they make a 2019 version! :)

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone who is not very knowledgeable about the field, I find reverse engineering fascinating. One thing I've been curious about is the economics of the security industry and the role reverse engineering plays in it.

To my novice eyes it seems that reverse engineering is more of an academic exercise and I don't see any direct ways to commercialize that skillset. How do you make a living doing this? Are you essentially paid a stipend to conduct fundamental research (finding zero days) that is inherently risky (no exploits = no return on investment)?

<comment><USER5> There are plenty of money to be made, just not in the way you typically do with other kinds of software. For example, a company named Bossland reversed many popular games and made bots for those. Their most recent effort was Pokémon Go. Nobody has reversed the newest versions of Pokémon Go and I believed you can make millions off it if you play your cards right.

<comment><USER6> Not really ethical though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Up to how many characters does it loop? Here's how I found it. Basically, > our password must be of 7 characters in length.

One way to see this without running the program is look for where $ebp-0x24 is set:

      1210: c7 45 dc 07 00 00 00  mov    DWORD PTR [ebp-0x24],0x7

</comment><comment><USER8> I recommend anyone who is attempting to do a ctf reversing challenge to checkout r2.

[https://rada.re/r/](https://rada.re/r/)

It's a free and open source set of tools specifically for reverse engineering.

There are some commercial options as well such as HexRays IDA Pro (probably the defacto standard tool) and binary ninja.

<comment><USER9> Do you use Cutter or the CLI?

<comment><USER8> I use the CLI when I use it (mind you; it's largely for CTF style questions most of the time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd definitely recommend trying the flare-on RE challenges - they do a new compo every year, and the previous compos, with helpful hints / solutions, are available.

[http://www.flare-on.com/](http://www.flare-on.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone recommend a guide for network security CTFs, ideally including how they are typically set up and common tools? It would be great to know what is typically allowed to be done in such contests and what is explicitly against the rules.

</comment><comment><USER12> For Beginners, I'd begin with defining "CTF".

I don't see that defined anywhere in the article.

From some googling, I guess it's a "Capture the Flag" challenge? It's worth stepping back and explaining that general concept.

<comment><USER13> this is now an hn trope (complaining about some jargon in the title). newsflash the meaning of the title isn't "Linux reverse engineering for beginning humans that don't know anything about the universe, language, or electricity" because then you'd need to define Linux and engineering as well. the meaning of the title is always "____ thing for people that know a little about ____ thing but not everything". i think it's a very reasonable assumption on the part of the author that the only people he/she is accountable to for the intelligibility of such a title is someone who searches out the article, since after all this isn't about regattas nor is it assigned reading in some kind of primary education course. this kind of bad faith reading of these articles is beyond worthless (and certainly doesn't merit a comment). what I can't for the life of me understand is why hn is like the epicenter of this kind of pseudo-critical engagement with media - <USER2> Reddit not Facebook has these kinds of comments nearly as often (nor the closely related "... didn't read after ___" where ___ is a word in the first sentence). my hypothesis is that it has something to do "intelligence signaling" because people wrongly believe that being critical is an indicator of intelligence.

<comment><USER14> While some people might post such comments for the sake of "intelligence signaling", the GP seemed to not know what "CTF" meant. I think he offered a fair and simple criticism, and I found your comment needlessly harsh and presumptuous.

Even if some people post comments like that as a trope, some - if not many - post them sincerely. I think the original criticism makes perfect sense: an article for beginners might better benefit its readers if it offers just a simple sentence or even link that briefly explains what the topic is before delving into its details. I personally have read a number of articles where I've encountered this problem, despite my familiarity with the given topic.

Also, I think it benefits the HN community at large if we try our best to read people's comments in a positive light, within reasonable, and encourage giving and receiving constructive criticism from one another.</comment></comment></comment>


Bookmarklet: Reddit-like Collapsible Threads for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-hacker-news/

<comment><AUTHOR> It always happens to me that I get lost in long threads on Hacker News that get started from the highest-ranking comment.

In order to be able to easily view the second-ranking (top-level) comment I wrote a small bookmarklet to achieve just that. Enjoy :)

<comment><AUTHOR> For your convenience, here is the source code: [http://alexander.kirk.at/js/hackernews-collapsible- threads.j...](http://alexander.kirk.at/js/hackernews-collapsible-threads.js)

The bookmarklet first loads jQuery from the Google Ajax libraries, then that script. Both should be cached by the browser so that upon the next use of the bookmarklet it should not need to ask a server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Very nice. Though it apparently needs a bit of polishing, this is something I'd love to have on the site, rather than having to use bookmarklets.

Maybe Firefox & Chrome quick plugins to do this automatically? The dev channel for OSX-Chrome finally accepts plugins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, maybe we can get Paul to integrate it into Hacker News :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for making this, collapsing comments is one of reddit's best features.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just a little note: I read hacker news from hackerne.ws, and you currently have it domain restricted to news.ycombinator.com. Not a big deal, but why not just remove the domain restriction? Seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Other than that, fantastic. I can't believe you made this - I was honestly thinking to myself earlier today that HN needed a collapse comment link.

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw in the server referrers that people were trying it on other pages where it has no effect, or might have strange effects, so I think it's good to have it there to be sure people understand where it's to be used :)

I have added the hackerne.ws domain to the check and also added a no-domain check bookmarklet to the blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've written a greasemonkey script that does the same thing. Unfortunately the test page I used didn't have things like downvoted comments and a few edge cases that caused it to fail. It would be much easier if comments were given a unique class name or id.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a bit buggy if you collaps a child before collapsing the parent, and then expand the parent again

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, see the "PS" in the blog post. For now, I think it's probably not worth the trouble fixing that.

<comment><AUTHOR> That bug is now fixed, too.</comment></comment></comment>


Everything is getting heavier - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_kilogram/all/1

<comment><USER2> Editorialised title - actual title is "The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram". Wired should use your title though ("Everything is Getting Heavier") - it's a catchy title for an interesting article. Also the picture half-way down is totally a TARDIS.

<comment><USER3> The article did state that the 'secondary' versions of the kilogram were getting lighter with respect to the Grand K and it was up to 500 mG which is quite significant.

It would be interesting to know what is the source of that error (I didn't find the speculation of out gassing to be particularly compelling, but I didn't recall them mentioning how the companion standards were built).

<comment><USER4> It's not "five hundred milligrams" (500mg), it's "five-hundredths of a milligram" (0.05mg, or 50μg).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can somebody (preferrably, a physicist or a chemist) explain to me two things.

1\. Why do we need both kilogram and mole as fundamental units when they measure essentially the same thing (at least in case when the thing being measured is pure)?

2\. Why not reverse the definition: postulate that 1 mole is Avogadro's number of elementary particles; 1 mole of C-12 has 12 grams and derive (kilo)gram from that.

<comment><USER6> (I'm not a chemist, but):

1\. They are not both fundamental, a mole is defined as the amount of substance that contains an equal number of elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012kg of the isotope carbon-12. So the mole is defined in terms of the kg.

2\. This is essentially Arnold Nicolaus' project (described in the article). He wants to define the kg as the mass of a certain number of atoms. But we don't yet have an accurate way of counting atoms, so if we pick a number (i.e. define Avogadro's number by fiat) today, then later when we count more carefully the mass of everything (denoted in kg) will fluctuate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Marty McFly: Whoa, this is heavy.

Dr. Emmett Brown: There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?

From, of course, Back To The Future (1985)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting article. I was under the impression that the kilogram was defined as the mass of one liter of water, but that appears to just be an approximation now.

<comment><USER9> The problem with using water as a standard is that "water" isn't well defined when you're measuring to eight decimal places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Huh?

"In fact, of the seven fundamental metric units — the kilogram, meter, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela — only the kilogram is still dependent on a physical artifact."

Followed by:

"And the luminosity of light, or candela, is measured in terms of power, designated in watts, or joules per second."

I'm not an SI expert, but Wikipedia suggests the candela is in fact an SI base unit with a definition based on physical phenomenon of the universe, so the second sentence seems erroneous.

[edit: clarity]

<comment><USER11> What I don't get is why ampere is a fundamental unit while coulomb isn't. I mean, it seems more natural to think of amperes and coulombs per second rather than to define coulombs as the amount of charged carried by a 1 amp current in 1 second.

<comment><USER12> Techinically, neither the Coulomb nor the Ampere are fundmental. Both are derived from the meter, second, and kilogram.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SI_base_unit.svg>

Now, in the abstract, yours is the more natural definition. But experimentally, it turns out to not give the best accuracy.

I believe one starts with (1) the meter (which is based on a second defined using a atomic transition, plus light) and (2) the Newton (which is the force required to accelerate the all-important kilogram at 1 meter per second squared). Then an Ampere is the amount of current flowing through two parallel wires required to produce a force of one Newton per meter between the wires.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere#Definition>

Now, the technology is apparently improving enough that it may be possible to actually count elementary charges like you suggest. See here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere#Proposed_future_definiti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere#Proposed_future_definition)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would it be possible to define the KG as the amount of copper wire, when arranged in a configuration (a coil?), that causes a magnetic field of a certain size when a specified current is applied?

<comment><USER14> The problem lies in how will you define the other parameters over here.

First up is the question of defining that 1 KG itself and the configuration; how will we define the parameters of the copper wire? (edit: to clarify after reemrevnivek's excellent comment the configuration of the solenoid is important because the strength of the magnetic field generated is directly related to the configuration of the coil) We can't use the radius, length of the copper wire accurately because as it gets heated up it will expand not only longitudinally but radially as well.

Second, how will the magnetic field be measured to the precision needed? If you use induction of current in another coil then according to lenz law that will create a downward force on our coil leading to inaccurate measurements (I'm assuming that it will be constantly measured) , this means that the coil needs to be strictly constrained, by how do you constrain it without adding/rubbing material on to the surface of the copper wire?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sure the Wall Street protesters would break into there and steal the kilogram.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this affects the price of very expensive per weight materials.

It would be nice for HP to start measuring their ink in grams instead of ml, that way they could increase their prices based on the grand K.

</comment><comment><USER17> In general, everything is getting X. By some definition of X.

</comment><comment><USER18> A fabulously overwrought drama of no value. Similar to Tibetan rituals.

Other standards are related to fundamental physical constants. Time for weight to do the same.

<comment><USER19> The article makes it quite clear why it isn't possible to relate weight to fundamental physical constants yet: the constants that can be used for this haven't been measured precisely enough yet. Until they are, using a block of metal in a vault that has lost about half a speck of dust worth of matter in two hundred years is more exact.

[edit: typo]

<comment><USER18> You are right of course.

"Aside from a yearly ceremonial peek inside its vault, which can be unlocked only with three keys held by three different officials, the prototype goes unmolested for decades. Yet every 40 years or so, protocol requires that it be washed with alcohol, dried with a chamois cloth, given a steam bath, allowed to air dry, and then weighed against the freshly scrubbed national standards, all transported to France."

Sounds sensible and reliable. No issue with corrosion, infiltration of gasses or lint I guess. And what about the other standards? Who knows which is changing?

"Steiner argues, the watt balance, with its Planck constant, is "a better realization," because his system is self-contained and replicable, whereas the Avogadro project spans several continents and relies on a single artifact. "

A non-reproducible result is not science. It doesn't matter how many zeroes are involved; its not actually a verifiable fact if there's only one experiment, right?</comment></comment></comment>


RISC-V Hardware So Far Isn't Entirely Open-Source - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RISC-V-Not-All-Open-Yet <comment><USER2> The RISC-V CPU cores are open source. The other stuff on the chip is the same proprietary IP you find on any other silicon. The example given in the article is the DRAM controller, which they probably bought from the foundry.

I don't really see this as a ding against HiFive, per se. They only have so many engineer minutes to spend, and making a whole chip is hard. Someone needs to sit down and generate open source DRAM[1] and clock/PLLs and power gating frameworks and GPIO and ADC/DAC and I2C and SPI and flash[2] and USB and...

These guys are great and they make great products. We just need more. This is like writing an article in 1985 about how GNU isn't "really" open source because all this RMS guy has is an editor and a compiler.

[1] Which really means the analog signaling end, not the "controller" interface which is pretty simple.

[2] Particularly hard, given that the cell dimensions themselves are usually foundry trade secrets.

<comment><USER3> It is inevitable that the first sentence will itself become false. As things go forward the ISA will be open source but the cores themselves will cease to be.

<comment><USER2> That's not the way it happened in software. As free implementations come to dominate it's the proprietary products that tend to wither. The existence of ANSI C89 as an open standard didn't result in an explosion of proprietary yet compatible compilers, instead GCC ate the world within a decade.

I mean, sure. You can make a closed-off RISC-V. But I don't see why that's required or "inevitable".

<comment><USER4> GCC is licensed under the GPL, RISC-V chose a license that allows for proprietary modifications. Inevitable might be taking things too far, but it's certainly within the realm of possibilities and thanks to the license always will be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course not. RISC-V is open instruction set, not open microarchitecture.

There will be some totally open RISC-V microarchitectures, but they are not competitive with commercial ones. Maybe some verified and intentonally very simple designs for security applications.

I would like to be proven wrong, so if there is some IC experts who can explain the business case where someone invests $300-$500M to develop new top notch open source microarchitecture (patent free?) every 5-10 years that can compete with Intel, AMD and others, I would like to see it.

<comment><USER6> > I would like to be proven wrong, so if there is some IC experts who can > explain the business case where someone invests $300-$500M to develop new > top notch open source microarchitecture (patent free?) every 5-10 years that > can compete with Intel, AMD and others, I would like to see it.

To develop an open-motherboard marketplace where code can be shared openly between motherboard designers. Or maybe even "daughterboard" features.

You know, like OpenPower / Power9. Where additional boot-level capabilities (ie: OpenBMC) are open source and standardized and documented.

[https://openpowerfoundation.org/presentations/openbmc-a- refe...](https://openpowerfoundation.org/presentations/openbmc-a-reference- firmware-stack/)

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

A practical use of this, is to have the BMCs of servers report status (IE: power, temperature, etc. etc.) in a secure, open, and extendable way. BMCs also have the ability to act as a remote terminal, such as a serial-over- ethernet port. These sorts of features have security concerns that Open Source / openly-vetted code would at least make some people feel better.

We're talking about a component that has the ability to remotely reboot, remotely attach keyboards / mice, and virtual terminals at the hardware level. So yeah, security is pretty important.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Consider this article as why people want Coreboot / Open Source boots: [https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc- port...](https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc-port- offer.php)

If you can't trust the bootup procedure of your computer, then you can't trust the computer at all!

<comment><USER7> All of what you describe are not done, or guaranteed, by RISC-V. RISC-V only refers to the CPU cores, the same way Arm refers to the CPUs as well.

Actually, Arm cores don't force any kind of proprietary board architectures or binary blobs in order to be manufactured and shipped. Why do people expect that this will change with RISC-V?

<comment><USER6> And that's all this article is bringing attention to.

Some people care about open-source, and they care quite strongly. I'm not necessarily part of open-boot or coreboot... but I at least understand their sentiment.

For these OSS advocates, they really believe in controlling the full computer with fully open source hardware. They feel like calling RISC-V an "Open Source" core dillutes the term.

At the end of the day, its just a blogpost on a popular OSS benchmarking website dedicated to the server market. RISC-V doesn't serve their purposes (yet), so that's all they're writing about.

99% of the Phoronix content is about Linux Benchmarks btw. So its not like they publish these internet politics issues too often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I love the promise of RISC-V but let's not delude ourselves. Some of the potential for RISC-V is to allow manufacturers to extend the ISAs with their own features. Some of those are bound to include undisclosed instruction sets. So it should come as no surprise that beyond that, SoC designers will likely be bound by their suppliers to keep some bits secret.

<comment><USER9> This doesn't seem to be about instruction sets so much as it's about the boot process; in particular, the first stage boot loader.

Quote from linked email: "A high-level list of tasks that FSBL performs is in the manual[1]:

       • Switch core frequency to 1 GHz (or 500 MHz if TLCLKSEL =1) by
         configuring and running off the on-chip PLL
       • Configure DDR PLL, PHY, and controller
       • Set GEM GXL TX PLL to 125 MHz and reset it
       • If there is an external PHY, reset it
       • Download BBL from a partition with GUID type
         2E54B353-1271-4842-806F-E436D6AF69851
       • Scan the OTP for the chip serial number
       • Copy the embedded DTB to DDR, filling in FSBL version, memory
         size, and MAC address
       • Enable 15 of the 16 L2 ways (this removes almost all of the L2
         LIM memory)
       • Jump to DDR memory (0x8000_0000)

The manual can be found by googling for that GUID. [https://static.dev.sifive.com/FU540-C000-v1.0.pdf](https://static.dev.sifive.com/FU540-C000-v1.0.pdf)

I think the demand for "open source" hardware needs to accept that, because there are fundamental physical limitations on software freedoms 2 and 3 ([https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html)), the market for open hardware is going to behave differently. We can certainly keep asking for _more_ openness, but _perfect_ openness will probably not be acheivable.

<comment><USER10> I'm inclined to be more optimistic. Compared to how much Free/Open hardware progress has been made in the last couple years with RISC-V, getting a pure FOSS boot loader sounds like a cakewalk, no?

<comment><USER11> Its quite a bit more complicated than "bootloader" might make it sound. From the mailing list:

"The original boot chain on the SiFive FU540 looks like this:

      MSEL (ROM0) -> ZSBL (ROM1) -> FSBL (SPI) -> bbl (SPI/SD) -> Linux

Where the individual pieces mean this:

MSEL: The "Mode select" ROM, consisting of a register that represents the state of four pins on the chip, and six instructions, which jump to the selected boot device or ZSBL. Fully documented (with an instruction listing) in the manual.

ZSBL: The "Zeroth stage bootloader", several kilobytes of code in ROM, which parses a GPT header on SPI flash or an SD card and loads the next stage. Short, high-level documentation in the manual; I haven't seen the source code.

FSBL: The "First stage bootloader", where interesting things like RAM init happen. High-level documentation in the manual; I haven't seen the source code.

BBL: The "Berkeley bootloader". Its most important role, as far as I understand it, is to implement the SBI. The source code is public.

See also chapter 6 (Boot process) of the FU540-C000 Manual[4].

With the unfinished coreboot port, I want it to look like this (although _a lot_ of work has to be done on coreboot first, and I'm currently not actively working on that, for a few months):

      MSEL (ROM0) -> ZSBL (ROM1) -> coreboot (+bbl?) -> Linux,  or
      MSEL (ROM0) -> coreboot (+bbl?) -> Linux

ZSBL can be skipped, so you don't need to run closed source ROM code, at least as far as the hardware is concerned.

(And note that this is just the situation on this particular SoC. Other SoCs from SiFive or other vendors may boot differently.)"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone who's interested in learning about how RISC-V works via open source should check out the Bitwise project. It's a series of coding streams building a RISC-V based computer from scratch on an FPGA, all open source. [https://github.com/pervognsen/bitwise/](https://github.com/pervognsen/bitwise/)</comment>


Fingerprinting Images for Near-Duplicate Detection – Real Python - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/blog/python/fingerprinting-images-for-near-duplicate-detection#.VlBBDRBn_0s.hackernews <comment><USER2> On a big of a tangent, can someone help me identify the history behind the use of image similarity based on fingerprint similarity?

I've been exploring the history of a certain type of chemical similarity search. The core idea is to take the molecular graph and turn it into a fingerprint, the use fingerprint similarity as a proxy for molecular similarity.

I think the parallels to the image search described here are obvious.

I've been trying to figure out where the term 'fingerprint' comes from. Historically, my field didn't use the term in this meaning until around 1990. While I have come across earlier references to 'fingerprint' (in infrared spectroscopy from the 1970s), they were hash values designed to find identical matches, not similar matches. They could not be used for similarity.

Similarly, Rabin's early work on fingerprinting / hashing, in 1981, available from [http://www.xmailserver.org/rabin.pdf](http://www.xmailserver.org/rabin.pdf) , wasn't designed for similarity.

I'm curious to know the evolution of how other fields handled this approach to similarity search. Searching just now, the I can't find references to this approach being used for image or sound search until the 1990s, which is well after it was established in chemical information.</comment>


Similar Hacker News Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/

<comment><AUTHOR> People asked for a similar users tool back in the early days of HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701>

And recently, too:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036247>

How does this particular tool work? It's based on the threads a given person comments on, who else comments on those threads, and how the topics and terminology of threads and comments relate to each other. Karma on the relevant threads is used as a subtle authority metric. Incorporating voting relationship histories would almost certainly make the tool better. Particularly at finding interesting (and not merely similar) stuff.

That said, it'll be interesting to hear what folks think.

<comment><USER11> I commend you on an elegant UI. Would you mind explaining a bit how exactly you anticipate using voting relationship histories in future revisions? Also, am I correct in assuming that there is some sort of distance function involved in computing 'similarity'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently changed my user name from antiismist to idoh. When I moved the karma setting to Diamonds in the Rough, it listed idoh as the #2 most similar user to antiismist. Nice!

[http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=antiismis...](http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=antiismist&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.4&weight2=0.2)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is awesome. Having computed a reasonable distance function between users, you should be able to use this distance function as edge weights in a big graph. Rendering this graph with a force-directed layout algorithm like Fruchtermann-Reingold might create visually appealing results by clustering related users.

I've done this before on different datasets and would love to cooperate with you on it...

</comment><comment><USER14> Interestingly, there seems to be a local minimum (or maximum) in your algorithm that I found when searching for myself:

Start here: [http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...](http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.5&weight2=-0.15)

The next two 'clicks' to the left (towards co-commenting) don't have 'spolsky' in my list: [http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...](http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.3&weight2=-0.15)

But one more click to the left, and he reappears in the list: [http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...](http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.2&weight2=-0.15)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting, thanks for pointing this out. The top result is actually getting filtered out from the displayed results (don't ask). spolsky is going from being the second result, to the first result, to the second result in your examples.

<comment><USER15> You keep mentioning filtering… are you sure we can't ask? I'm curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> excellent choice setting the defaults to give very flattering results... there's a lesson in that.

<comment><USER3> I could probably turn this into a blog post (and will later), but there are a lot of microoptimizations of default settings for B2C apps that make huge differences in conversion:

\- Defaults should be almost sufficient to use the app. (i.e. if it has some workflow, you should be able to pretty much hit "Next next next" and get it to work. Bonus points for making the number of nexts as low as possible.)

\- Pick something that results in visually impressive output rather than a blank page. See Balsamiq for inspiration here -- they start you with a mockup in progress that demonstrates most of the highlights of the software.

\- Ever seen Firefly? I really like how they use the word "shiny". Ideally, your defaults should show the shiny in your app. In Hollywood they have a saying: make sure your budget makes it onto the screen. In B2C apps, make sure the stuff you did all the work on makes it into the user experience most of your users will see.

\- Assume your user is a novice at both your software and the problem domain until you have evidence otherwise. A lot of people ask the user "Hey, are you a novice?" That is one way to do things, but it makes your core workflow one stage longer and every stage costs you conversion. I prefer "Assume they are and give them a discrete 'skip ahead' button" or "Assume they are and watch them for evidence that they are not".

\- If your app is supposed to make the user feel like they just killed an effing lion, then your default settings better have a lion bound and gagged sitting under a forty-ton weight suspended by a weak string which passes through an open pair of scissors next to a sign saying "Snip this."

\- (Do this if nothing else.) Track actual usage of the app and modify your defaults based on actual usage. Bonus points if you can do it dynamically, if that makes sense for your app. For example, if you pick A as the default and 25% of your users go out of their way to change it to B, then that probably should have been B. (You can split test and see how many people would have changed it to A if it had defaulted to B.)

<comment><USER16> While all of these are true, I find that they usually derive from a simpler rule: Have a laser focus on the users you're trying to reach, and everything you do should make their lives easier in some way.

When I find people breaking these sorts of rules, it's usually because they're thinking of themselves or some non-customer stakeholder.

edited to add a corollary: until you've done the sort of testing patio11 advocates, you _don't know_ who that customer is.

<comment><USER3> I think what you are saying is good advice, but don't think it is necessarily co-extensive with what I'm suggesting.

For example, say you're targeting teachers. Keeping a laser focus on what teachers want is important. However, I think you need to put _extra_ focus on making their first five minutes absolutely amazing. (And their first 30 seconds. And their first 5 seconds.) My reason for this is simple: almost all apps are going to leak an amazing number of their customers between first and second use. I don't have my report in front of me at the moment, but I think something like 40% of BCC users never complete their first bingo card and never log in again. Essentially none of these people buy the software. On the other hand, roughly 2.4% of trialers convert, or roughly 4% of users who succeed in their first interaction with the app. Increasing my bottom line by 5% requires converting 5% more of that second group -- which, let me tell you, is _hard freaking work_ \-- or, in the alternative, improving the first run experience of _three_ out of every 40 users who fail to complete Task #1.

It is really hard to optimize your entire application, user experience, value proposition, etc to get +5% conversion. However, polishing your first five minutes until it freaking shines is not nearly as difficult. Do you present people with a blank page currently? Spend an hour and put something on it. I will put money on that helping. Does it take a critical mass of friends/input/lions slain to get fun? Do the work for them. Fake it if necessary.

And, yeah, instrument _everything_. Can I plug Mixpanel here? _plug_ Every time I think "You know I should really build more instrumentation into my app..." I remember "Oh, wait, it takes a twentieth of the time to just throw it on Mixpanel -- no visualization code or complicated controls to refine the data range required, praise be."

<comment><USER17> What does instrument mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quite flattering - no matter what I set the sliders to, the names I recognize are people I respect.

I think that only really says something about HN, not about my comments :)

<comment><USER19> I had the same result. Perhaps this is not measuring similarity after all. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Aww, I was hoping to get amichail.

<comment><USER21> I think I was filtered out.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct. I feel terrible. There is no question that you're the posterchild for controversial-interesting. I will fix this.

<comment><USER20> LOL! There was an actual amichail filter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does moving the karma slider to the right look for people with low karma, or does it ignore karma? I want the option to ignore karma.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent question. Middle ignores karma in the quantitative ranking. Far to the right gets lower karma users. Users who consistently get almost all 1s and/or negative points are separately filtered out since they generally don't make for interesting recommendations. Users who sometimes have negative comment scores but also make lots of 2+ comments are included (these users are rare but are arguably the most interesting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Based on what other people here are reporting, I wonder if there's a bias towards matches with a large number of comments (e.g., pg, patio11, edw519, etc.). Perhaps there's some normalization needed?

<comment><USER24> There's a bias towards people on the leaderboard, though one of the knobs adjusts it.

<comment><USER7> I was happy to see you in my list, silentbicyle :-)

<comment><USER24> :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A few weeks ago, I tried searching through old threads to find where PG had an archive of old comments and server stats. Does anybody have link(s)? Thanks in advance. (This post is meta enough that it's probably as good a time as any.)

I'm guessing either such a corpus was used here, or it's based on a cache of recent comments.

</comment><comment><USER25> Based on the default settings, I'm up there with PG and Patio11. I like your algorithm ;)

<comment><USER26> I'm up there with patio11, but not pg. (I get nostradeamous)

Not sure what that means though.

<comment><USER19> Interestingly, nostrademons and pg are the top two for me, so I wonder what would produce one but not the other. I'd love to see if comments could be separated into [user1]-like comments and [user2]-like comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, one potential solution is lists of users.

Another route might be clustering ('technical', 'political', etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got quite a few people I respect (mixmax, edw519, mattmaroon) and one I consider a personal friend, dennykmiu.

Neat little utility, thanks.

<comment><USER28> hey thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Am I missing something or does this not work for the majority of us who are casual commentators on here?

<comment><USER24> It probably needs more data points.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there's really two issues here.

Most of the techniques for this sort of thing don't work that well for sparse datasets. So given a choice between showing bad results for users with relatively few comments, and not showing any results ... especially when users can search not just for themselves but also for folks they know and enjoy ... Also, scraping the full history of HN is not cool.

<comment><USER24> A while ago, pg posted an archive of HN comments, specifically so that nobody would have to scrape them. (It was coupled with comments on how the arc server was holding up, IIRC.) I haven't had any luck searching for it, though - <USER2> are too many discussions about the ethics of scraping comments, archive file formats, and the like.

<comment><USER30> I remember that too. It was, as you say, a while ago, meaning long time outdated. And I indeed recall it to be pg-posted, but instead all I can find is this non-pg release with all links broken: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045>. I looked for in all links to tar and zip archives, could've missed something.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, they're 404. Thanks for looking!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love it! My results were very encouraging:

      S W G W                      einstein

                                   newton
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
      | edw519                 |   liebniz
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
                                   turing
      </comment><comment>=====||</comment><comment></comment><comment>=
                                   carnegie
      Co-Commenting..SEMANTICS..
      Word Choice                  tesla

                                   godel
      =====||</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=
                                   escher
      Leaderboard.....KARMA.....
      Diamonds in the Rough.....   bach

                                   edison
      This site has no
      affiliation with Hacker      galois
      News or Y Combinator
    	                       patio11

<comment><USER31> I think your leaderboard dial was set to 11.

<comment><USER32> Yeah - he should just make 10 louder.

<comment><USER33> I don't understand why ... his goes to 11

<comment><USER34> For $2,000 I'll build you one that goes to 12.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. After the obligatory vanity search I tried searching for people I know have different (more technical, less startup/strategy(marketing) taste than me. And it seems to work quite well. I have nothing in common with those guys :-)

For instance the top pick for tptacek is cperciva, which seems natural. Doesn't work the other way around though, so there's still some work to be done...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, you bring up a very interesting point: reciprocity. If I am closer to you than anyone else, does it follow that you are closer to me than anybody else? I'm not sure the right answer to that is yes ...

<comment><USER35> Definitely not in the general case of points in n-dimensional Cartesian space. For instance, in the 1-d case, consider points at 0, 10, and 12. 10 is the closest point to 0, but not vice-versa.

Put another way, it seems as though the algorithm considers tptacek more distinct (from all other HN users) than cperciva.

<comment><USER36> I was wondering the same thing. I don't show up in the lists of any of the people that show up in my list.

I take it that means I am the cheese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hmm, small bug(?) When I typed my name in all lowercase it didn't come up. That might be by design though. Cool tool ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. Let me see what I can do. The catch is that HN is case sensitive as well.

works: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SapphireSun>

doesn't work: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sapphiresun>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like my company. I don't know if they feel the same way about me.

One newer participant whose posts make me think "I wish I had posted that" doesn't show up on my list of associated participants. But I show up on his. Maybe that is because of the karma setting in the default operation of the search. Interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't mind telling me the user you're thinking of, I can take a look as well.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the positive response.

If three things were to get added to this, what should they be?

<comment><USER39> 1) If I understand correctly the first slider ranks greater similarity in commenting on the same threads the farther left you go and similar word choice the farther right you go. Why not make this two separate sliders?

2) For each of the matches could you show some of the data used to compute the matches... e.g., for semantic matches, show the top X (maybe five?) common words or phrases you matched on. For threads, show the parent or OP of the five most recent threads... something like that.

3) Really neat. I like this. It's quick too. How did you do it? Did you replicate the entire HN database? Third suggestion: post the source or just post an explanation of how it works.

<comment><USER39> ... and 4: apply the same thing to twitter (!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's one of things to consider. All of the logic for this was originally developed for another purpose, and it got applied to HN for fun. The human connection element makes it very cool, and so do the possiblities for applying it to so many different applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think there is still a subtle bug in there somewhere.

When I set the sliders 'semantics' all the way to the right ('word choice') and leaderboard all the way to the left, then check I get this:

      - <USER3>
        - <USER7>
        - <USER5>
        - <USER6>

      - <USER7>
        - <USER8>
        - <USER9>
        - <USER10>

Shouldn't the relationships be symmetrical, so 'edw519' would get 'mahmud' as the first match and 'mahmud' would get 'edw519' ?

edit: also, your 'match' is case sensitive, so 'riderofgiraffes' won't work but 'RiderOfGiraffes' does.

<comment><USER41> It filters on karma as well.

All of those guys showup in my default results, but I can't get any of them to pick me up. Clearly I don't post enough.

<comment><USER40> If that were the case then I would show up, and I don't either.

I've received some email from David (the guy that built it), he's going to fix this and the lowercase issue as soon as things quiet down a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Really fun app! Great for boosting one's ego.

Slight note about the page formatting: My screen resolution is 800x480, and the text by the sliders wraps in a very confusing manner.

It looks like this to me

      </comment><comment></comment><comment>===||</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=
      co-commenting......SEMANTICS.....word
      choice

A little confusing at first, until I realized that it was wrapping. It's the same for the other slider.

Great app though!

</comment><comment><USER43> Very cool.

My matches using the default settings: pg, swombat, mahmud, wheels, SwellJoe, edw519, mattmaroon, gojomo, davidw, mixmax, unalone, tptacek

Did you get permission to scrape the data? (I tried once without asking with mediocre results: [http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get- notice...](http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-noticed-by- yc/))

<comment><USER40> As someone in the comments on your pages also notes, you could use the google cache. But it would still be nicer to ask first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Awesome! I knew SwellJoe and I seemed to end up in the same threads, and IIRC, agree on things. Even though I'm a relative neophyte. I love it!

</comment><comment><USER45> Very interesting. Depending on how I adjusted it I was judged similar to pg, unalone, and a couple other people on the leaderboard. I guess that means my comments are on the right track....

Are there any other details about the algorithm or how it works. I'm curious about what exactly the different weightings mean.

<comment><USER46> Same story here..Is pg is added to all users by default?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> How is "word choice" similarity calculated? If you have a high similarity with someone, does that mean your range of words is the same (perhaps because you write on the same topics) or that your word frequency is the same (because you have similar patterns of speech)?

Are quoted sections filtered out? URLs?

</comment><comment><USER48> Cool. Now we can play six degrees of hn.

</comment><comment><USER49> My girlfriend and I have almost the exact same lists... smokey_the_bear and andrewljohnson.

</comment><comment><USER50> So, some great users are on your similarity list... but are you on their similarity list?

<comment><USER51> For exactly zero of the twelve users listed, no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I approve of all the people I've been grouped with, except that bizarre swombat fellow.

</comment><comment><USER53> How does colins_pride compare with riffer? Aren't they the same person?!?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a cool question. Two things: the first is that I stopped using the colins_pride account and subsequently started using the riffer account, so the co-commenting commonality is not particularly high. The terminology score is substantially closer. The other thing is that because the dataset is tilted towards the recent, the colins_pride user is only lightly represented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Interesting both of my co-founders (tolmasky and boucher) showed up on most of my lists. I guess that means it works, since we tend to talk about similar things.

</comment><comment><USER55> Apparently tumult is most similar to me no matter what I select, so clearly I can just stop posting entirely. (Thanks, tumult - more time in the day!)

</comment><comment><USER56> Interesting, similar to:

        edw519

        btilly

        patio11

        pg

        tptacek

</comment><comment><USER57> websense doesnt like you.

Security risk blocked for your protection Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging Content. URL: <http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/>

</comment><comment><USER58> hrm, I seem to have gotten tptacek as my top result, if the results are so ordered.

Id say thats a good thing. In general the whole list is people I would happen to be even somewhat similar to.

</comment><comment><USER59> [http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=auston...](http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=auston&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.9&weight2=-0.2)

</comment><comment><USER60> It didn't return any results when I tried from the iPhone

</comment><comment><USER61> I don't show. Guess I'm not "one of us" yet :-/

<comment><USER62> Did you capitalize your name? It seems to be case-sensitive... [http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=Sukotto&#...</a>

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I got a great list. Neat.

</comment><comment><USER64> got swombat. lame. :)

</comment><comment><USER65> pg was number one for me :D</comment>


Cooking up an Office Dashboard Pi - <AUTHOR> https://gocardless.com/blog/raspberry-pi-metric-dashboards/

<comment><USER2> We had fun building this - it would be interesting to know what other companies do with their CI servers</comment>


10 Boring Boston-area Tech Companies That Are Actually Interesting - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2011/03/03/you-snooze-you-lose-10-boring-boston-area-tech-companies-that-are-actually-interesting/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Sonian is a great company. They were a Amazon Startup Challenge finalist a few years ago and just raised a series B found from Amazon a few months ago.</comment>


When Free Software Isn't (Practically) Superior - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-software-isnt-practically-superior.html <comment><USER2> I think the article makes a good point. Most comments complain about some technicalities, like using the word "open source software development" vs. "open source software", or mention that "no it isn't inferior!" (which is true, but not the point).

A few months after meeting me, my girlfriend wanted to try a Linux system and I was happy to help her install it. In the end she didn't see what I thought was better about it. I thought I never said it was better, but apparently I gave off that impression, leading to a false expectation.

And it's true, Linux desktops are still notorious despite being actually very stable these days. Open source programs like Firefox, Chromium and Telegram all work the same; and some others like the average file explorer is functionally equivalent too. It's just not _better_ , at least not for most people. It might even eat more battery because of inferior drivers.

The inherent advantage of free software being _free_ (as in freedom) is what the article is about, and that is a good point.

<comment><USER3> The problem with this argument is that it doesn't achieve the aim of winning more users, even if it is true.

The "open source" movement recognised that users don't _care_ about freedom, but they do care about other aspects. In a choice between 'proprietary and easy' and 'free but slightly-harder' users go with the first option: it's actually worse that this because consumer users are actually willing to go beyond 'zero cost' and actively sell their privacy in return for ease/sociability etc.

I think the actual issue with the OSI's marketing is that it turns out these words work for professional users of software and not for general consumers. Professional users such as IT departments care about 'power', 'flexibility', 'maintainability' etc - general consumer users don't think that way.

End users (particularly consumer users) care about achieving _aims_ in very straightforward, simple terms! Neither, the FSF or OSI philosophy translate into perceived or real benefit for them.

To a large degree I think it's something like this:

Developers (care about freedom) <\---> professional users (care about attributes) <\---> consumers (care about ease of outcome)

'care about attributes' is the wrong word, but professional users tends to care about aspects of the software, they ascribe value to the software itself.

<comment><USER2> > it doesn't achieve the aim of winning more users

Winning more users is not an aim in itself, not to me at least. It's not a cult that I want to win hearts for.

But if people see how wrong it is to have a single entity control your computer (and almost everybody's computer), they are definitely welcome to ask for help installing something better (in that regard).

I didn't respond to the rest of your post because it builds on that assumption.

<comment><USER3> That's fair enough, there are lots of FOSS users who don't care about there being more users. They care about their individual freedoms - it's a perfectly rational view.

Perhaps I mis-spoke because I personally do care about there being more users of FOSS.

Really, we're trying to discuss how the FSF approaches its aim to "preserve, protect and promote the freedom" ...

Do you think that aim is enhanced by spending energy on what I consider to be academic hair-splitting, rather than addressing and explaining the philosophy to wider audiences such as users / academics / policy makers. Or am I misunderstanding how Free Software is promoted by denigrating open source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Free software or even open source software is neither superior nor inferior by definition. It is just software and its quality will largely depend on how much effort the developer is putting into it.

Typically some form of commercialization is often a good incentive to improve any type of software but obviously there are plenty of examples that go against this rule.

It is common to see these days open source or free software that comes with some form of commercial options and that's very good in my opinion because you get the best of both worlds - still it doesn't mean it is better or worse.

Is Gitlab better than Github? It depends who you ask.

<comment><USER5> > Free software or even open source software is neither superior nor inferior > by definition.

Strongly disagree with your implication here and the rest of your comment, though I agree with the literal text you wrote in this sentence.

FOSS is superior for the end user because it can help avoid vendor lock-in (someone else can always take the code and run their own service/app that the user can then switch to) and allows the user themselves to pay someone to fix issues/maintain the software if it becomes unmaintained.

You are quite correct in your point that FOSS is not necessarily more featureful, more secure, or easier to use than proprietary solutions though.

<comment><USER4> I understand where you are coming from but I disagree with some parts of your comment.

FOSS is not superior to the end user because by no means it helps with the vendor lock-in. Remember that the vendor in FOSS is the developer and when they decide to ditch the product it does not mean that someone automatically will step in to take the job. Therefore, the customer is locked in anyway. You are assuming that the customer will support the product but they may not have the technical know-how nor the interest to do it. What is the difference between a dead closed-source product and a dead open-source product?

In fact, more often than not you see the opposite happening - someone creates an open-source alternative of an already established closed-source products or services to piggyback on the established success.

I am dissing FOSS. :)I am only only trying to present a balanced view that at the end of the day all software is equal as long as it does the job for the time it is used.

<comment><USER5> > What is the difference between a dead closed-source product and a dead open- > source product?

The difference is that with an open source product you can always choose to pay someone to maintain it, even if just for long enough to move away from it. With a closed source product you are SOL and may not even be allowed to use it anymore after the company goes under depending on the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I respect that ethical motivations of free software in an age of mass surveillance, retail tracking and the copyright war but I routinely use proprietary software.

In practice when a free clone lacks a feature or has a bug that stops me, I have no choice. I seldom have the skills and time to pop the hood and fiddle with the code.

If I need to read a document typed in MS Word that is unreadable in libre office, I'm going to download MS office viewer...

<comment><USER7> You "may not have a choice" at the _exact moment_ that you need to do something that only a proprietary solution can provide, but those that really want to support free software can still adopt a strategy to avoid such moments: every time one "consumes" proprietary solutions, take a percentage of the value spent and donate to a free alternative.

Imagine if every graphic designer that "has no other choice than Photoshop" decided to donate $10/year to Gimp, and that took one hour week to use it, provide bug reports, feature requests, etc.

Imagine if every web developer that uses Apple "because it is a better desktop than Linux" decided to donate 5% of that to Canonical (or Fedora, or Arch) and took a few hours every month just to _try_ to get their issues sorted out.

Imagine that every company that is so invested in AWS (or GCS or Azure) realized that there are cloud providers that are based on free software solutions and have no lock-in, and that they made a commitment to make quarterly donations to them.

<comment><USER8> No, that's not the way it works.

Consumers pay for services rendered, not for R&D.

<comment><USER7> First, I am not telling all consumers to do it, but the ones that "really want to support free software"

Besides, with software (and free software even more so), services rendered _is_ R&D.

<comment><USER8> So, if a consumer has the reasonable expectation to pay for something which fulfils an immediate need, they do not "really want to support free software"?

Surely you must understand how that is a meaningless phrase?

Software services are R&D _at some point in time_, which is also a meaningless phrase. Right now I can go buy Microsoft Office and fulfil all my document editing needs I'll ever have. However MSOffice to me is a product, not some distant R&D objective.

Maybe FOSS could be better guided by focusing on what a product really is.

<comment><USER7> If your focus is only on your editing needs and you buy MS-Office and stop there - then no, you do not really want to support free software.

If on the other hand you have a document edit need that no free software can provide, and you understand that you can buy MS-Office to fulfill a need and _also_ donate/support to LibreOffice or any other project you might be consider worthy of support - then you are at least walking the walk and doing something in support of FOSS.

It seems to me you are making an either/or proposition: either you are a _consumer_ or you are an _contributor_ of software. It doesn't have to be like this.

<comment><USER8> It is an exclusive proposition for non-FOSS. As a customer, I can't contribute to MSOffice.

However, I can contribute _and_ be a customer to FOSS. That's not what we're talking about, though.

<comment><USER7> To be honest, I think we both lost the point of the conversation.

All I was trying to say is that those that (1) respect/value FOSS but (2) end up buying/consuming a proprietary solution due to the current shortcomings of the free alternatives can _still_ support FOSS, which might lead to (3) not needing proprietary solutions in the future.

I don't want us to be arguing past each other, so please help me understand what you mean by "this is not how it works". Does it mean that you think that such strategy can not work? If so, why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I once was on an elevator with Richard Stallman at MIT with my 14 year old son. He turned to my son and asked him what OS he used. My son replied 'Windows', because it's free.

Stallman might have lost his mind at this point, but instead smiled and said 'Windows isn't free and free software isn't free'.

This post reminds me of that exchange.

<comment><USER10> I was with my son and my wife and the same thing happened to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think a core issue here is that despite being a buzzword, 'free' just isn't all that meaningful or important to most developers, especially since the freedom that is granted to end users is explicitly not given to creators (see GPL). Open source however, especially with something like the MIT license, at the very least gives you access to read and hack at cool source. F is not the meaningful part of FOSS unless you happen to be a lawyer or really enjoy lawyering.

<comment><USER12> It's true that the definition of "free" is somewhat overloaded, and means different things to different people. But to say it's not all that meaningful or important is, I think, going way too far.

As for your point about creators' freedom with copyleft, that limitation is explicitly to ensure that end users' freedom remains unrestricted. And, by logical extension, that creators are not exploitive of the original authors' efforts. Think of it as "locked open." So yes, it may be less "free" in the strictest sense of "do whatever you want free" \- but we as a society have clearly decided _that_ level of freedom is unacceptable (see eg, murder, slavery). GPL has simply chosen to draw the line closer to rights for the people than rights for the ruling class (ie, end users vs corporations, respectively).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "Open source advocates must defend their thesis that freely developed > software should, or will with time, be better than proprietary software."

IMO open source advocates should stop defending and start making better free software. (most) People use what's good not what's ideologically pure. Example : you don't have to defend Linux as a server OS because it's an excellent OS for servers. Now if we're talking as a desktop OS ...

<comment><USER14> The "I'll use it when it's better" argument is self-defeating. If we can convince people why this software that may be practically inferior is better for our society and get them to invest in that mission, the missing features and bugs can be addressed more easily.

<comment><USER8> If that's not a self-defeating argument, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER15> Suggesting a long-term investment instead of a short-term one is a self- defeating argument? Or the suggestion that convincing people about the value of long-term investments is feasible?

<comment><USER8> The 'argument' is an infinite regression. At the end of it, if we can convince everyone that FOSS is better for our society, we can make it better for our society. But how do we convince everyone? By demonstrating it is better?

<comment><USER14> >But how do we convince everyone? By demonstrating it is better?

That would be an infinite regession, but free software is not about being better in a practical sense, but being better socially. You also make an assumption that everyone needs convincing, which is also not true.

<comment><USER8> If FOSS is not about being better in a practical sense, it can't possibly be better socially. Not in our capitalist societies, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think one has to be fairly pedantic to hear the open source argument and not realize that some open source projects are better than others. That said, the philosophy is a bit dated. Good, solid software often comes from having a large user base. With lots of people using a tool, issues get identified quickly and there is more motivation to fix those issues. What can make the open source method so powerful is that it opens the door for numerous people to improve the software. For important projects, like cpython or boost, this often means having significantly more resources than proprietary software. Its not an absolute rule, but it can often play out that way.

</comment><comment><USER17> So if I'm reading this right, the freedom that in principle someone could make the software better is more valuable than actually having better software?

So the freedom isn't valuable because of what it achieves, it's just valuable intrinsically by existing in principle.

That's not completely bonkers. I've never been to Arbroath in Scotland, but I could if I wanted to. That freedom has value right? But only if I can actually exercise it in practice.

</comment><comment><USER18> It feels as though the open source community (I'm talking about the Linux Desktop space here) is being pulled in two different directions at the same time.

On one hand, there's a strong desire to have a closer to the metal experience, allowing more veteran users to quickly adapt and modify the software to how they see fit.

On the other hand, there's a push to bring new users in and create a more beginner friendly environment.

Frequently these two objectives clash with each other, especially when trying to find solutions for common problems. It's pretty common to see senior members complaining that the user is at fault for not reading the appropriate doc/guide (not to say the user is totally absolved from reading them), or seeking an "easier" solution that doesn't involve applying advanced terminal commands to people who have rarely used one before.

After using Debian based distros for a while, I switched to Arch. Installing wasn't too bad except for a few weird hiccups. The amount of looping from the help forums to the Arch Wiki, which doesn't contain your issue, would make your head spin.

<comment><USER19> But those two objectives don't have to clash with each other. MacOS is able to support both objectives quite harmoniously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This piece looks to me like a major strawman argument example.

Let's get back to the sentence that's quoted at the beginning:

"Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in."

1\. This sentence is about "open source development method", not "open source software" (two different classes of objects). Software can be open source (if its licence is open source, i.e. acknowledged as such by the OSI) but not developed using the "open source method" (i.e. if, still quoting the initial sentence, it doesn't "harness the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process").

2\. A "promise" is just a promise. Whether it's realised or not is still, to a large part, up to the talent and determination of the developers, or organisations, doing the work on the project.

3\. Also, "better", "higher", "more" and "lower" should be defined in the context of which object we're talking about. In this case, this is implicit but I guess the comparison should be with similar software not developed using the open source method, i.e. with not distributed peer review and no transparency of process.

4\. Last, I'm sure that both FSF and OSI agree that putting "an end to predatory vendor lock-in" is a good thing. Two bad the FSF doesn't mention it in this text.

<comment><USER21> You probably missed the part where they say how many sourceforge projects have only one developer. That clearly says something about the development method, and how often are these promises realized.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that proves anything at all. If you said to a free software advocate: 'Freedom is pointless because most of us don't exercise most of our freedoms' that would clearly be a nonsense argument. Enumerating open source projects and counting their contributors is barely more coherent than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article is an example of what over ~20 years has steadily turned me away from the FSF. How does this article do any good?

At the bottom of the page it says:

      "Our mission is to preserve, protect and promote the freedom ..."

And yet, they're endlessly stuck dividing the world into smaller and smaller cohorts of purity.

It's 15 years since the OSI. Open Source as a term has done more to get FOSS into business than anything else: Open Source is the Heineken of Free Software whose slogan was "reaching the parts that others can't"! And yet, they still don't get it!

There is value in being controversial as it makes headlines and spreads the word. But, they're too insular - arguably, at a time when the values of FOSS needs more positive explanation and engagement, given the direction of software and technology today.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open- sourc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open- source_software#The_launch_of_Open_Source)

<comment><USER23> >There is value in being controversial as it makes headlines and spreads the word. But, they're too insular - arguably, at a time when the values of FOSS needs more positive explanation and engagement, given the direction of software and technology today.

What direction are you referring to? As I see it, Open Source has won. The shift to cloud based solutions means more people are using at least _some_ open source than ever before, whether it's portions of their browser to massive Linux or BSD server farms, they are engaging with open source. Companies that once sold proprietary systems are moving more and more to open source solutions (e.g. Microsoft).

The irony is, of course, that as open source _software_ has won, freedom has actually been damaged.

<comment><USER3> I feel like FOSS is growing/winning for developers and shrinking/losing for users.

FOSS is _used_ a lot by the major SaaS companies to deliver their solutions, but none of their solutions are themselves FOSS. For example:

      Google search, Google email (I mean why not?)
      Facebook
      E-bay
      Amazon
      SalesForce
      LinkedIN

All of these companies now believe in Open Source for developers, and not for users.

And I think that division has firmed up over time, a new generation of Web- centric developers have come through. Challenger app developers are highly in favour of FOSS for infrastructure, but I don't think they even consider it for the application [0]. For example, Asana, <and a bunch of stuff I don't use>

If anything, I think the steady move towards apps/closed-gardens is a big risk to FOSS as a vision for _users_ , though the vision for _developers_ continues to grow.

[0] what everyone is doing may well be rational from their perspective, we've learnt since the 90's that open source is a development methodology not a business model.

<comment><USER24> This is why I find it important to use AGPL3+ for my code. We need more developers who are committed to user freedom and who work not only on free software but specifically software with a strong copyleft.

<comment><USER25> Yeah but the FOSS guys decided it would be too hard on companies to make the AGPL provisions part of the GPLv3.

I think that makes them hypocrites, but oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The risk of software not being maintained anymore now or some time in the future is important in most contexts, especially if data formats are specific to the software.

This risk is higher with open-source projects, especially if being developed in academia, or by few developers (not a community).

<comment><USER27> It's exactly the opposite. With open source software there's no risk at all. You can always hire developer to support this unmaintained software, because sources are available, or just to export data. With proprietary software you just can't do it legally and if you want to reverse-engineer it (allowed in some countries), you'll need exceptional expertise.

<comment><USER26> It depends on the amount of money you can spend on it. For most companies, where money is not an issue, it is better to have commercial support for software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> From what I can see, the whole

> For open source, poor-quality software is a problem to be explained away or > a reason to eschew the software altogether. For free software, it is a > problem to be worked through.

is a big unexplained pile of garbage, and without that the whole thing falls.

<comment><USER29> > is a big unexplained pile of garbage

What is unexplained?

If it respects your freedoms, then it's a viable replacement for an equivalent program, even if buggy or lacking in certain regards. If it's completely unusable, then obviously that's not practical, but if you reject proprietary software, then the alternative is simple: nothing.

A good example that I'm experiencing right now is Replicant. It lacks many features---not to any fault of its own---that require proprietary drivers. The front-facing camera, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, NFC, certain video drivers, etc simply don't work. Consequently, it can't take video or run certain programs like FF/IceCat that require special drivers for rendering.

But I can do everything I need to do with the phone except for take videos of my children.

<comment><USER28> So your problem is that some totally separate pieces of code are not open source. Yeah, well, that is not the fault of open source.

Whoever wrote Replicant could just as well have written it in GPL and it would have made absolutely no difference unless some of the driver makers chose to distribute Replicant. Open source is friendlier for gradual adoption of openness, and that can make the process a lot simpler. It also allows users to have mixed stacks which adds a whole new set of people that can contribute code.

<comment><USER29> > So your problem is that some totally separate pieces of code are not open > source. Yeah, well, that is not the fault of open source.

No, I don't have a problem. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is until someone develops a viable replacement. My understanding is that the Android version in Replicant 6 will solve many outstanding issues.

In any case, it's the fault of the developers of those drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> All the product qualities have value only as long as they're important to the customer. "Respecting the users' freedom" referenced here is a thing that most users don't even understand, let alone value. In their eyes, free (or open source) software doesn't have this inherent advantage the author talks about — and for most professional users (as in those who make money using the software) the "free as a beer" isn't that important as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> >> Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. [1]

More to the point, some of them are regular contributors to free (and open source) software projects:

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open- source-2...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open- source-2016-9)

[1] Says rms; gee, thanks Doc.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use a lot of open source, but there are definitely times I prefer to write something myself because it's faster than learning how someone else implemented it, and needing to hack a lot for special customizations. My favorite open source project is probably three.js.

</comment><comment><USER33> Honestly I grow tired of rms and his Ivory-Tower ideals. I'm sure that if I lived in my office, had no family, and someone paid me a salary to do nothing but give the same talk over and over, then I too would have lots of time to wax poetic about how freedom is more important than actually being able to use the software.

But I don't.

I have a job, and when I come home I have a family to pay attention to, so I don't have time to hack away at my desktop environment or perhaps my phone's OS. I'll just stick with Android, even though it is not strictly "free", because for me the choice is between nonfree and not having a phone.

<comment><USER34> _...for me the choice is between nonfree and not having a phone._

Surely it would be better to have the free option too? That would just give you one more choice.

That's why RMS takes the idealistic position. If no one does it, the available choices inevitably get watered down to "nonfree or nothing at all", as you put it.

It's like human rights: the principled stance is important in itself and must avoid the appearance of corporate or government influence. You wouldn't want the American Civil Liberties Union to be controlled by Wal-Mart and ExxonMobil. For the same reason, we shouldn't want open source to be controlled by Google and Facebook.

<comment><USER33> Oh, absolutely.

If given the choice between free software and functionally equivalent nonfree software, I'll choose the former.

But in my line of work, the only real choice is proprietary software. Same for my phone, frankly.

I'd love to live in the world rms lives in but most of the time free software just isn't good enough to be a viable option.

<comment><USER35> Even while it's not good enough to be a viable alternative, it _does_ act as competition - it provides a "floor" of price/performance that noone can afford to breach and acts as a (weak, but still) limitation against a particular proprietary product exploiting a de facto monopoly position.

Even if _now_ the only real choice is one particular proprietary software package, then you probably can imagine some level of price increase and/or usage restriction where the currently poor free alternative would be worth considering, if you and others put some effort and/or money towards it instead of the proprietary licence - and the proprietary vendor can imagine this as well, so the existence of the free alternative by itself is putting a limit on how much they can exploit the market.

<comment><USER33> Perhaps in some markets, you may be right. In aerospace there are very few free alternatives and most of the clients are large enterprises who can afford multi-thousand dollar license fees.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should a established biz consider applying for YC? - <AUTHOR>

I've been asked by a few colleagues who are still slightly bouncing around in their Startups if they should apply for YC, Techstars, aka incubator.   A few have healthy startup revenues, they have offshore "staff" but have run their biz like "lifestyle businesses".  The words they keep telling me is "I want to create a sustainable model".   Would you advise them to apply or should they go another route? <comment><USER2> Depends what their goals for growth are. What defines a startup is its target growth rate. If they want to grow as fast as successful startups do, then we could probably help them.</comment>


Allcancode: from a coding game to a tool that simplifies software production - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@voxelperfect/allcancode-from-a-coding-game-to-a-tool-that-simplifies-software-production-e2459ff5f0cd <comment><USER2> There once was a tool that simplifies software production built into nearly all 8-bit machines. It was called BASIC.

Millions of kids learned how (and how not) to code using it. Many of them gained a career as a result.

Unfortunately kids in the future had to do without it. Because there were a -thousand- 'better ideas'.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right! I used to be one of those kids that learned machine code and BASIC while still in primary school. But technology evolves and expectations grow. That is why we need better tools all the time.

<comment><USER2> Hypercard was a better tool. And then they took -that- away.

The fundamentals of coding don't change. Built-in BASIC was -so- easy to use. Which 'better tools' can say that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a blog post telling the story of Allcancode that started with a coding game featured in code.org and played by millions of kids around the world and then transformed to a tool provider that streamlines software development.

<comment><USER3> it apears they have not entered the market nor created a prototype yet though. maybe the next pivot will be a platform where designers can find developers. youre very lucky as a dev to find a good designer and vice versa.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will start with a private beta in about a month. The tool is already in use in-house to deliver real projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you build your tool with your tool? That's really the only question that matters as far as I see it. If not, why not?

<comment><USER5> > That's really the only question that matters as far as I see it.

Why do you feel this question matters at all, let alone be the only question that matters?

<comment><USER4> If it is being proposed as a new way of doing general software development, yet it could not create the system itself, then it has clear and profound limitations. Most markedly in the case of visual programming paradigms, it means they haven't solved the problems that have tripped up visual programming all along - what happens when things get complex?

The approach of encapsulating things to present bundles of code as a black box is a good one, but it needs to be paired with a powerful navigation interface that allows flying down into those black boxes pretty instantly, and figuring out how you can be viewing the internals of those alongside the 'outer' code at the same time to understand how things are interacting when things go wrong.

<comment><USER5> > If it is being proposed as a new way of doing general software development

Which it isn't. It's being proposed as a tool for rapid application development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder whether there is a Go4-like approach to control Marco, you know, that kind of PatternPattern that makes your code hard to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are many things that could be done with Marco as experiments. Companies cannot survive on experiments, though :-) so we had to move on.</comment></comment>


Tesco: 'Wal-Mart's Worst Nightmare' - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2008/gb20081229_497909.htm?campaign_id=rss_topEmailedStories <comment><USER2> Some background: I worked on some Tesco online projects, I have friends who have worked on their data mining. I'm British but I now live in California.

Tesco's data mining is easily the biggest operation I've ever seen. Everything I did at Tesco had a large clubcard component. The clubcard was one of Tesco's major innovations in Britain. It's not dissimilar to a Safeway card. Tesco issue these things in keyfobs as well as card so you always have them.

I've seen people use their clubcard when they buy a newspaper. They don't save money, they don't even get points, it's just habitual.

You can tell Tesco have really nailed data when you see their customer demographic. I saw something in the Guardian (British newspaper) a couple of years back which showed the Tesco customer wealth demographics matching the population norm almost exactly.

When a retail group can organise their stores and retail inventory such that every walk of life uses them they are on the road to success. Most people I know in Britain that don't shop at a Tesco as their primary store have competing store much closer to where they live.

<comment><USER3> Those cards are annoying. I don't understand why they are necessary. Don't most people use the same credit card anyway?

<comment><USER4> Some people pay with cash or check.

<comment><USER5> I don't think anywhere much accepts cheques in the UK any more. Perhaps some shops, but it's unusual. Worst offenders are probably students paying for drinks by cheque.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sort of thing is one of the most convincing signs of how much future growth there still is left in software. Companies of all types are effectively turning into software companies. And this is still the beginning of the trend.

<comment><USER7> That reminds me of a Greg Egan short story where a doctor (in the near future) laments that if he wanted to have the most impact helping cure disease he should have gone into software design.

</comment></comment><comment> bjelkeman-again They describe the Tesco data mining tools in terms that make them look a lot better (to me) than they feel when you see the result in the store.

Tesco opened a new flag ship store in London, UK, close to where I lived, in Earl's Court. (This was a while ago, so I am sure they are better now. About 5 years ago.) This is in an area which has a number of competitors, all who had fine tuned what the store offered to the local market. The area has people with high income and a lot of (rich) immigrants, think Saudi, stock brokers etc.

The Tesco store's range of products was awful for the first 12 months. It was like they had drop-shipped a generic store, tuned for general suburbia, and then slowly tried to fine tune it. 50% of what they sold seemed to be the wrong stuff for the market.

They later opened a Tesco Express as well, just a couple of blocks away, and compared to the Marks and Spensers Food Only store down the street (which opened a year later) it was awful, really bad. I couldn't go in and actually buy anything I wanted there other than maybe milk. I have visited recently and the Tesco Express is still there, the same crappy collection of goods and hardly anyone seems to buy anything. Whereas the M&S is packed.

It could well be that the area, Kensington / Earls Court, has such a special set of clientele in it that the "standard" model of product provisioning for Tesco just doesn't cut it. But I could have easily come up with a better set of products to sell in there myself and I am just a customer not a retail specialist.

So I guess I am saying that I think there is plenty of scope for improvement.

<comment><USER8> They are a lot smarter than Sainsburys. I lived in Belfast when Sainsbury opened their first NI store. Their planning obviously just went Belfast=Capital=London so they stocked exactly the same high-end products they would in Earl's court, so 18 brands of extra-virgin olive oil but no bacon.

Tesco's system is smarter. There are 4 Tesco in Cambridge in different parts of town and all have a different type of stock to fit the local market even in such a small town.

<comment><USER9> Tesco is expert at tailoring their ranges to exactly the sorts of local customers. Most big chains try to standardise ranges across the entire company in search of non-existent efficiencies.

Tesco realises that what a shopper in the poor area of Belfast wants is quite different to a middle-class Glasgwegian, and it profits accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the key successes that Tesco had was managing to create a single brand that appeals across all consumer ranges, selling both cheap and premium goods under one core brand. Since then it's become ingrained on the cultural psyche that you get few preconceptions of what a Tesco store is and who it appeals to, it almost just "is".

In the UK, on the higher-end you have Waitrose and M&S Food, on the upper- middle Sainsburys and (before it closed) Safeway, on the middle-to-low end you have Morrisons and Asda and on the low-end Aldi and Lidl. Tesco totally transcends that, selling budget ranges similar to Aldi and Lidl, having prices comparable to the middle-to-low end supermarkets, and selling high-quality goods similar to the high-end supermarkets. I was talking to my Dad about this earlier and he was explaining in the 70s and 80s how Tesco were largely a low- end budget supermarket and how this was a massive shift in the early 90s which lead to them getting the upper hand on Sainsbury's in the market.

This was combined with a move towards large-format stores selling a mixture of non-food goods which weren't popular in the UK until then, movement towards smaller inner-city stores to extend their brand, the fact that unlike other supermarkets Tesco had less of a north/south divide and, of course, the Clubcard.

<comment><USER11> The genius of Tesco is that it's classless, which is exactly what the UK wants to be.

<comment><USER12> We shopped at Waitrose at Gloucester Road tube station in London, and there was a Tesco Express right across the street. The prices seemed similar to us but each store had a different selection. I don't remember being asked at Tesco if I had a club card.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't universal prosperity be Wal-Mart's worst nightmare? Or sustained high gas prices? Or Amazon?

<comment><USER14> If people became rich and the price-elasticity of demand dropped way off, then a business model based on squeezing every last bit of inefficiency from the supply chain and passing the savings onto consumers to gain market share would be in jeopardy.

Sustained high gas prices? That'll push more people into its target demographic. It will increase shipping costs, but that's a problem for all Wal-Mart competitors, too.

I don't know if Amazon has any plans to target the down-market niche. I am guessing that some things like clothing, food, and housewares most people will never buy online. Also, I don't know that it will ever be as efficient to ship to individual homes as it is to ship to large retail locations. So, I don't think Amazon will ever win out on price.

<comment><USER15> > Also, I don't know that it will ever be as efficient to ship to individual > homes as it is to ship to large retail locations. So, I don't think Amazon > will ever win out on price.

Maybe not, but that seems like the wrong comparison. The question is if it will ever be as efficient to ship to individual homes as it is to ship to large retail locations, _plus have people get to those locations to pick up the goods_.

<comment><USER14> People seem to be accustomed to that, though. And they enjoy being able to look through various options for a particular good in person. And the store makes out when people buy things that they weren't planning on buying. And most folks tend to batch trips (my family would take a trip to Wal-Mart about twice a month and buy a lot).

<comment><USER16> Over the past 2 years most of my durable goods purchases where though Amazon. With amazon prime it's free 2 day shipping on most things which is fast enough that I don't really care. With a low base price, zero shipping costs, and no sales tax makes buying brand names online a lot cheaper and I don't need to drive anywhere so it saves me a lot of time. On top of all of that I can research stuff online so I don't have to worry about buying junk with a nice package.

In the long run I think online shopping is going to win as long as shipping costs stay low enough. Delivery costs relate to the number of packages drooped off in the same area so they should drop as online delivery becomes more popular. Toss in all the people who use catalogs and I expect a significant portion of purchases don't require wondering though a physical store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From a UK comedy program called Time Trumpet: The Tesco Wars

<http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=20IpSch8sSk>

</comment><comment><USER18> i heard that tesco was planning to put carbon footprint on all their product labels. has this been implemented? do they generally have an environmentally friendly or social good philosophy about them, or is this new?

(my first thought when i hear of a huge super market that encourages consumption and driving is not "that'll be good for the environment", but perhaps their products reduce packaging and so on, which would make the success of their own brand especially awesome)

</comment><comment><USER19> I remember walking up to the Tesco in Ennis. (I think it was Ennis.) From the narrow little street I was on, there was just the glass doors visible, squeezed in between some typical shops. I go inside, and it's this entire sprawling supermarket. It was like the freaking T.A.R.D.I.S.

(Not big by American standards, but I'd been in Ireland for a week, and had readjusted my sense of scale.)

</comment><comment><USER20> The supermarket and department store situation in Chicago is somewhat interesting. In addition to the two major supermarket chains (Jewel and Dominick's), we have six Whole Foods, three Trader Joe's, four Targets, five Kmarts and exactly one Wal-Mart.

The sole Wal-Mart was only approved about four years ago and is far out on the west side. Another Wal-Mart location was denied.

</comment><comment><USER21> Tesco looks like a solid competitor, though if I were them I wouldn't slow down now. I would speed up while loans are hard to get. The longer they wait, the longer Walmart has to use their dominance to finance completely duplicating what Tesco has.

But as good as they are, the _real_ worst nightmare for Walmart is what it's always been: unions.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's interesting. When I was in Thailand a few years ago, I thought Tesco Lotus was a world-wide branch of Wal-Mart. I guess I never gave it a second thought until now.

<comment><USER23> Same here - 4 weeks in Thailand and I saw a Tesco on a Southern island. I'm from the UK so it was a surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't Warren Buffet own a stake in Tesco?

<comment><USER25> Yea. He's got around 2-3% of Tesco. He purchased shares back in 2006/2007 though.

Not sure what he's done since.</comment></comment>