Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/17/spin-this-yahoo/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone have confidence in TechCrunch? I'm coming to hate them so much for their tabloid style.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey TechCrunch, the next time you complain about how the "mainstream" media doesn't take blogs like yours seriously and doesn't consider your writers journalists, you can look at your handling of the Delicious story as an example of why you _shouldn't_ be taken seriously and your writers _aren't_ journalists. You are TMZ for nerds.

</comment><comment><USER4> How these Techcrunch guys now all are ranting about Yahoo. I really wonder how bad it really is and how much this whole thing is just subjective ranting.

I mean something feels really strange about it. Has AOL some trouble with Yahoo?

<comment><USER5> <http://www.aol.com>

vs.

<http://www.yahoo.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't consumer confidence mostly apply when the consumer is actually paying a company for something? Also, what portion of Yahoo's users even know what Delicious is?

</comment><comment><USER7> WTF Techcrunch, calm down. Your lives may revolve around last minute internet news (rumors). Most peoples lives don't.

</comment><comment><USER8> TechCruch: a silicon valley based tabloid with an axe to grind against Yahoo! Inc for some unknown reason

<comment><USER9> >> for some unknown reason

AOL bought them, that may be one known reason IMHO.

<comment><USER8> I think the vendetta was apparent before the buyout, cause that was only what a couple months ago?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: DIY Simple Virtual Reality Goggle. Simpler Than Google Cardboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.folovr.com/ <comment><USER2> this is not a good design in my opinion. you have a big opening on top leaking light.

When I use oculus, sometime light leaks through the nose opening, that ruins the immersive feeling (because you will see the glare of the screen, or see light when the scene is supposed to be dark).

one of the required materials is "Google Cardboard Lenses", where do I get those? If I had cardboard, I would not dissemble it. I can't peel off pepperoni from one pizza in order to make another pizza.

also, the two examples you gave for the lenses, both links seem to point to the same [http://www.folovr.com/img/lens.jpg](http://www.folovr.com/img/lens.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> @billconan, the principle behind open designs is that the lenses literally "project" the image into your eye, and the screen brightness would always be higher than the ambient light. Try the design once maybe?.

Regarding the lenses, we currently cannot point you to a vendor who sells one, but there are a lot of options in ebay/aliexpress, or even your local hobby shop.

P.S: Thanks for pointing out the link issue. Fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> checked the video. Where can I get all the accessories if I want to make this in bulk? Do you guys take orders and deliver internationally?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do take custom bulk orders, and can ship worldwide. Do email us your requirements.</comment></comment>


Collectively designed/evolved fractals - <AUTHOR> http://electricsheep.org/ The system works kinda like SETI at home - people run the program as their screensaver and vote on the fractals they like.  A GA uses the recommendations to evolve new fractals.  Users can also design their own fractals and submit them to the gene pool. <comment><USER2> I highly recommend this. We have a still on the bulletin board at YC.</comment>


Express 3.0.0 alpha1 and Express 4.x Roadmap - <AUTHOR> http://tjholowaychuk.com/post/21162751096/express-3-0-0-alpha1

<comment><USER2> I am ecstatic to see that some node.js frameworks are trying to move toward being aggregations of standalone modules rather than growing into monolithic coupled frameworks.

Monolithic frameworks are plentiful in the PHP community, but recently some of the larger frameworks have started moving toward this aggregate component model. Unfortunately, the PHP frameworks are much older than node.js, so many of the corresponding micro-communities are entrenched in the idea that their framework is "best". This means that while it is awesome that frameworks are allowing you to consume individual components, you still do not see it happening very frequently. You almost never see the frameworks themselves sharing components, for example.

Obviously the module system baked into node.js helps steer the community toward the concept of consuming modules, but I'm optimistic that the community is also young enough to completely embrace the idea of frameworks being little more than aggregates of the most common modules for building apps and also that "sharing" between frameworks is not something to frown upon.

<comment><USER3> One big difference is that Node.js had an easy way to share small libraries between projects almost right from the beginning. Something like NPM is only now starting to appear in PHP, and seems to be slowly breaking projects out of the reinventing-the-wheel mindset. A great example is Drupal using the Symfony2 HTTP foundation (request and response objects, etc)

[http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/composer_solves_the_php_code- shari...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/composer_solves_the_php_code- sharing_problem/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the fact the the code is shrinking. It's refreshing to be able to read and understand _all_ of the source code that your apps are using.

There are a few changes that worry me:

* req.get() instead of req.header() - 'get' is an ambiguous word here, might be confused with req.params(). I'd keep the overloaded req.header() just dropping the `defaultValue` parameter

* res.render(404, 'not here') doesn't work anymore. res.statusCode goes against the rest of the 'minimal' api like res.xhr and res.type

* removal of layout/partials (but curious to see what will come out of it)

<comment><USER5> What would you suggest in lieu of the layouts/partials for visual elements?

The Django community has issues with this from time to time, where packages sometimes don't include any templating, leaving people to guess at what needs to be there.

I don't know of an obvious solution though, except maybe a kitchen sink example of some sort. Thoughts?

<comment><USER6> Up to the engines now, Jade implements django-like inheritance and includes, same with swig and a few of the others. There are a few that do not have any notion of IO so I plan on having a third-party implementation of the old partial() function, removing it greatly simplified the view system for people who were not using it previously anyway, and some of the rules partial() employed were needlessly confusing (collections etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone who came from other frameworks to node/express and like to share experiences they made?

<comment><USER8> I have experience in Python (wsgi, paste, pylons, GAE) and ASP.NET (MVC). I like programming using node/express - node packaging system is very simple, express code is understandable and very readable. There are some things that you do not get out of the box but overall that's minor problems.

The only problem for me as automated testing and in result I have written my tests in Python.

<comment><USER9> _The only problem for me as automated testing and in result I have written my tests in Python._

To a Ruby developer like myself, this seems like a pretty significant gap.

Have you looked at Jasmine or some of the other testing frameworks for Node? Or is there something inherent about writing async apps that makes them difficult to test?

<comment><USER10> There are some good testing libraries for node (eg. <https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha>, by the same author as Express), that make async testing fairly painless. However, there are things like DB setup/teardown that aren't integrated and you might be used to getting "for free" with other frameworks (eg. Django). I'm curious to hear what the parent commenter has found to be a roadblock.

<comment><USER8> Actually no roadblocks (details in other comment). Just python was simpler and I don't see problem writing different parts in different languages.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf <comment><USER2> I assume that this is actually a cynical guide to how your laziness as an employee is harming the war effort and not an actual field manual, right? It has to be.

The section where my mind was changed from "maybe this is actually a strategy" to "this is just a passive-aggressive list of grievances against anonymous subordinates" was all the machine shop sabotage suggestions. Nobody read the employee handbook when it said "sharpen your tools, store them properly, don't press too hard on your drill, and clean out the oil filters regularly", but when you say "the enemy never sharpens their tools, they store them so they'll break, and they're always pressing way too hard on the drill bits costing their employer PENNIES A DAY in replacement parts", suddenly it's your patriotic duty to do what Grandpa demands.

Everything reads like this. "Some idiot let the pilot light go out, lit a candle in the room, and then went home. Our building blew up and my precious stash of rare cigars was lost forever!" "You dumbasses flushed a sponge down the toilet AGAIN!? Are you kidding me!? WHY!?!?"

<comment><USER3> Nope, this is actually the kind of thing that e.g. the French Resistance would coordinate, under the guidance of the British SOE.

The pennies add up, and in the case of precision parts like drill bits producing endless replacements ate up very limited capacity in certain sectors.

(Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of dictatorial regimes; the subtle stuff is indistinguishable from extreme incompetence or institutional dysfunction.)

<comment><USER4> > Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of > dictatorial regimes

Not only that: if simple sabotage increases paranoia, then that paranoia can harm the enemy's war effort more than the sabotage.

<comment><USER5> Trust is the most effective attack surface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most of section 11 is what happens at companies where politics becomes more important than execution, you can only get away with this shit in such an environment and you don't need to actually do it there, it just happens naturally.

<comment><USER7> Man, I wonder if a couple places I've worked were loaded with CIA agents.

<comment><USER8> I think the same thing every time this pops up on HN. The Quality department is clearly loaded with spooks. XD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A thread from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771)

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881)

2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363)

2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443)

<comment><USER10> In other words a CIA sabotage Field Manual has super-impressive staying power with the subversives here on HN. Got it :D

<comment><USER11> It's almost as though someone were intentionally slowing down HN by deliberately and repeatedly getting this on the front page.

But I'm sure it's just forgetfulness.

... or is it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Plaintext version: [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual)

Quick link to the longest and most interesting and practical section: SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR SIMPLE SABOTAGE [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual/Specific_Suggestions_for_Simple_Sabotage)

</comment><comment><USER13> So this one confirms it - social media is a CIA operation -

Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

And then this - apparently most of our fellow citizens are operatives: Act Stupid.

</comment><comment><USER14> Would not be all that surprised if someone were to feel sufficiently inspired by this document to draft a similar pamphlet for disaffected employees of tech companies who spy on their employees and/or abuse their customers' privacy.

What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook?

<comment><USER3> An Italian Strike (aka Work-to-Rule) is a version of this aimed at minimizing civil or criminal liability to strikers - pick the most inconvenient and debilitating safety regs that no one follows, and follow every single one of them. This is particularly common in countries or workplaces where law or contract prevents direct strikes.

Unions would have trouble advocating this as a form of strike in a direct dispute, because a union can only exert negotiating leverage if it publicly declares its intentions. However, I've heard anecdotal reports of this kind of sabotage being common in secondary/solidarity strikes - shipments showing up late or damaged or incorrect, external maintenance being done improperly, etc.

EDIT: With a bit of poking around, I found that the Wobblies were big into this (and it's even where they got their name!): [https://www.iww.org/history/icons/sabotage](https://www.iww.org/history/icons/sabotage)

<comment><USER15> Is this similar to "work to rule?"

<comment><USER3> > (aka Work-to-Rule)

Yup! Same thing, different name. "Italian Strike" is what they call it in European and Middle Eastern labor organizing traditions.

EDIT: With a bit of research: the term seems to have originated with the Biennio Rosso in Italy in 1919-20, when work-to-rule strikes were practiced on a large scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Section 11 perfectly describes working in any sufficiently large organization. There are always a handful of people that seem to wield these techniques with great skill.

<comment><USER17> It would read like satire, if it weren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows._

Does this actually work?

<comment><USER19> anyone with a ceiling mounted projector in their home theater should be able to test this out in comfort, maybe they can report back

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My favorite bit is that on trains (6.a.2):

In trains bound for enemy destinations, attendants should make life as uncomfortable as possible for passengers. See that the food is especially bad, take up tickets after midnight, call the station stops veey loudly during the night, handle baggage as noisily as possible.

<comment><USER21> Air travel has been sabotaged, but for a few dollars extra, you can get a direct flight, a better seat, get to take some luggage and even have some food.

</comment></comment><comment> maze-le I once had a project management workshop, where this pdf was disseminated as an example of why projects fail. The basic questions were: Who are the actors that enable this failure, what is their motivation, and what are the tools they wield to enforce failure. I've seen a few projects where one or two of the more subtle sabotage techniques where employed -- probably unwittingly...

</comment><comment><USER22> > Always be profuse in your apologies. Frequently you can "get away" with such > acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, Ignorance...

I've always despised Hanlon's razor for this exact reason. "Hurr durr guess it's ok he's just stupid for that instant" gives so much cover just because there some fuckin "razor". Well this razor in particular is bullshit.

<comment><USER23> Maybe that is where the "sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice" rejoinder is supposed to come in?

<comment><USER3> I would think it's the other way around: "sufficiently sophisticated malice is indistinguishable from stupidity".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am mostly just disappointed in the absolute lack of creativity in their suggestions. Even The Anarchist Cookbook is a better read :(

<comment><USER25> I dunno. The part about bringing a bag full of moths to a theater showing propaganda films is kind of amusing. I'll admit I would not have thought of that.

Then again, they also tell you to short out your own electrical outlets so that nobody else in the apartment building can listen to the radio. I wouldn't have thought of that, either.

<comment><USER26> "bag full of moths"

That sounds good, but... how to catch and transport more than a couple and keep them viable? they're really delicate critters.

Shorting your outlets (i assume) to take out the building? What? Breakers and fuses exist to prevent that.

<comment><USER27> Bed bugs. The modern equivalent would be bedbugs. Breeding them would be comically easy, and distributing them in public places would be extremely hard to detect.

Buses, doctors offices, libraries, offices, You could cause a lot of damage with this.

<comment><USER28> Ok, but why??

[https://www.complex.com/life/2020/01/police-investigating- so...](https://www.complex.com/life/2020/01/police-investigating-someone- brought-bed-bugs-pennsylvania-walmart)

<comment><USER29> Sabotage, obviously. Sounds like a cheap way to really screw with morale in an industrial town that's building the parts for the bombs intended to be dropped on your homeland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you're interested in a guide from the same era on more... _direct_ forms of resistance, Bert Levy's 1941 _Guerrilla Warfare_ is a good read: [https://epdf.pub/guerrilla- warfare6b67033a7460226f89666685f2...](https://epdf.pub/guerrilla- warfare6b67033a7460226f89666685f202c06f86619.html)

(And even just Levy's life story is quite a story all by itself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yank_Levy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yank_Levy))

</comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of "The Freedom Fighter's Manual", which the CIA dropped all over Nicaragua to encourage its citizens to sabotage the government:

[http://www.nostate.com/docs/The-Freedom-Fighters- Manual.pdf](http://www.nostate.com/docs/The-Freedom-Fighters-Manual.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> CIA can't be criticized for this manual. Sabotage is one of the tools required in the statecraft; this was even recognized by Chanakya(Kautilya). Best examples of sabotage: tactics of NIMBYs, anti-housing advocates, and the politicians who are colluded with them.

<comment><USER33> Not everyone who disagrees with you on a policy question is a saboteur.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use Managed Servers? - <AUTHOR>

Im wondering: Do you use manages servers for hosting your applications? I do so and would like to discuss the pros and cons of various providers. But I have the feeling most of you here on HN use servers where you have root access.<p>To me, it seems very logical to use managed servers. Because it abstracts away some more parts of the whole stack. What do you think? <comment><USER2> I could write an essay on this subject, but here's a few thoughts:

Managed servers != no root access. Most good managed server providers will give you root and their 'managed service' is to keep things patched, deal with issues that span your cluster, higher tier of support than just making sure the machine is booted and network is available to the device, etc. Sure, there are some providers don't give you root, which brings me to...

Be very cautious of providers who don't offer root and want to do all your app deployments for you. If you subscribe to the "devops" concept then deployment is part of the development process and can't be thrown over the wall and given to someone else to do in isolation. Also, agile methodologies are now enabling us to deploy once a week/day/many times a day rather than the more infrequent cycles enterprise software is used to. These non-root folks are not going to handle a deployment for you on a daily basis. To not give the customer root is to really not subscribe to these new ways of thinking and new ways of doing business.

I would ask why you want to go down the managed server route in the first place? If you need help with your initial setup and deployment find someone in your network to help you on a consultancy basis. Simple on-going server maintenance should be something most technical people can pick up, and if you get stuck go back to your consultant. You'll probably still be better off $$ given the cost savings of managed vs dedicated hardware. Plus VPS and/or EC2 solutions might fit you better than 'bare metal' hardware solutions, but both are (usually) non-managed services.

The only managed services I do recommend is if you want to go down the Heroku route, which is excellent if it fits your technology stack and business. But I don't think that is what you were referring to.

<comment><AUTHOR> With managed servers I meant: Keep the LAMP stack up, running and secure. No App development. From my point of view it makes sense that a managed server provider does not give out root access. So theres no discussion whos responsible for what.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We tried going that route but it meant we didn't control enough of the stack to avoid issues related to updates etc.

Bugs would arise. Didn't work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of bugs did you encounter?</comment></comment>


The Curious Case of WebCrypto Diffie-Hellman on Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://blog.intothesymmetry.com/2020/01/the-curious-case-of-webcrypto-diffie.html <comment><AUTHOR> The TL;DR by Ryan Castellucci is excellent: [https://twitter.com/ryancdotorg/status/1214578765998645249](https://twitter.com/ryancdotorg/status/1214578765998645249)

> Neat attack. TL;DR: A "non-exportable" finite field Diffie-Hellman private > key can be extracted because the key object isn't bound to specific group > parameters. XSS the site, do some operations with deliberately weak group > parameters, solve for key.

<comment><USER2> The author found the bug inspired by: [https://github.com/google/wycheproof](https://github.com/google/wycheproof)

(it's in the thread of the original tweet, though the thread is in Italian: [https://twitter.com/asanso/status/1214450115777351681](https://twitter.com/asanso/status/1214450115777351681))

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In case anybody is curious about DH it is a cryptographic algorithm for key exchange: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange)

The basic idea is that public keys need to be exchanged to perform encryption from one end and decryption at another end. An example is encrypting with the remote users public key and they decrypt with their stored private key. It's complicated though because you don't want to exchange the public keys without restrictions where they can be obtained by unauthorized parties or disseminated without your consent. You also may not trust the distant end. That is why you have stuff like DH and key escrow.

<comment><USER4> Yours is at best a terribly muddled description. Public keys are _public_ and we don't care if they're "Obtained by unauthorized parties" or "Disseminaated without your consent". That's what _public_ means.

The specific issue here is that the WebCrypto API is supposed to be protected against XSS. So if your code has a private key P and it turns out a bug in your site means bad guys can run whatever they want inside the VM where P is stored, they can't discover P. A bug in Firefox meant that it was actually possible to modify P and then do operations which have the effect of revealing it without undoing the virtual machine's protection for the actual value of P.

It's maybe hard to come up with concrete scenarios where this is a problem (which will be why it was so easy for Firefox to just remove it from the current version) but on the other hand it's also really hard to come up with concrete scenarios where WebCrypto was the Right Thing anyway so this is certainly not a point against WebCrypto sceptics like HN's Thomas Ptacek.</comment></comment>


Reproducible builds are a waste of time - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/reproducible-builds-are-a-waste-of-time <comment><USER2> "Or submit "harmless" refactoring patches that exploit minifier, sorry, compiler bugs to introduce new vulnerabilities."

I like this line but I'm not sure I get the joke. Is it that serious attacks are likely to target a weak point like JavaScript in the browser, or that modern software is so darn procedural that the compiler is really just a glorified minifier that hardly does any optimization?

<comment><USER3> I guess he makes fun of a perceived special type of JavaScript developers: Those who were proud of their ultra-dynamic programming environment, laughing at all those poor C/C++/Java folks who have to run everything through a static, rigid, stiff compiler. And now we see them doing exactly the same things there were once laughing at: They run their code through some linter/static analyzer to catch bugs early, generating their CSS with a CSS- compiler like Sass, and running their JavaScript though a minifier.

Instead of a "change-test" loop now we (as JavaScript developers) have a "change-compile-test" loop, just like anyone else. It's just that we call it "build" or "minify" instead of "compile".

There's some irony in that, and I believe that's what he is mocking about in that dig.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _> Of course, the defense only works if only some of the compilers are backdoored_

I don't think so. To my understanding, to become unnoticed by reproducible build, all compilers would have to be backdoored _in the same way_. That's what makes reproducible build so appealing.</comment>


The CIA as Economic Spy: The Misuse of U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War - <AUTHOR> https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/cia-economic-spy-misuse-us-intelligence-after-cold-war <comment> java-man Despite all the assurance to the contrary, this is blindly obvious to everyone involved.

<comment><USER2> 1992

<comment><USER3> And 1970 and 2018. Those activities are evergreen.

<comment><USER2> My comment was short for: "The article was published in 1992"

<comment><USER3> Yes, and I responded to any implication that "and thus what it says is only valid for that era".

<comment><USER2> No such implication. C'mon man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Misuse", that's part of what it always did and does</comment>


Ask HN:Do you believe Natural Language Search will become bigger than Keyword Search? - <AUTHOR>

Ask HN:Do you believe Natural Language Search will become bigger than Keyword Search <comment><USER2> No. The way search works nowadays is basically natural language search. You just leave out the articles and keep things concise.

Why would I want to type "What is the temperature in Boston?" when I can just type "boston temperature"?

<comment><USER3> Why would you want to type "a guide to setting up a new tv that's easy enough for my mother to use" when you could just type... what? Keywordese is not as rich as natural language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you mean a search engine that does natural language parsing in its backend?

If yes, then problem currently exists, i.e: when i search for python, i get the results relating to computer language than snakes. So a search engine that does natural language parsing can solve this. But its tough to beat big brands(people may type "python snake" and that solves the problem). But still the company can do business with the tech. So there's market for sure.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope natural language interfaces eventually work. Not just for web search as we use it today, for all sorts of things. Think how great Hacker News would be if you could search for

[well written articles about concurrent programming, written by people who actually know what they're talking about]

Just try to get that with a keyword search ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best major for a start up? - <AUTHOR>

I am a high school senior about to go into college, and I wish to work for or found a start up in the future. My most immediate plans are to go to college next year, and I have disregarded the possibility of dropping out, since 1. As Paul Graham says, waiting a few years to do a startup isn't a big deal, 2. A degree sounds like a good backup plan in case things go south. With that being said, I'm deliberating in what to major in. Computer Science seems like an obvious choice, but I'm also considering Electrical Engineering or Physics since they seem more broad-based and will teach things impossible to learn by myself. Does HN have any advice? <comment><USER2> Anything to do with project management or marketing.

Running a startup means having to juggle many priorities efficiently. Being able to manage timelines/resources/deliverables etc requires a completely separate & necessary skill set to raise the odds of your startup surviving any reasonable period of time.

As to why marketing, read this: [http://ventureburn.com/2013/07/dave-mcclure- says-silicon-val...](http://ventureburn.com/2013/07/dave-mcclure-says-silicon- valley-is-functionally-illiterate-about-marketing/)

While its clearly a blanket statement, there is a lot of truth to what Dave McClure said.

Not knowing how to market what you've worked so hard on is pointless if you can't bring it to their attention in a way that makes them want it.

The other benefit of having project management/marketing knowledge is that they are transferable skills. If your startup doesn't take off, you will be in a better position to take advantage of opportunities in pretty much any industry (and every industry needs good project managers and marketers).

Ultimately whatever you choose to major in, it's worth thinking about what transferable skills that degree could provide you.</comment>


Ask HN: How to overcome my fear? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm 20 year old. And I suffer from this from the beginning, when I started school at 6. It's the fear. The fear form having a bad result, from dropping, when taking an exam, when you are late for an exam, obsession (kind you fear that you forgot your card or something like that). It started at school, when I was young and has since then evolved.
I have noticed that whether I'll have 17/20 or 10/20 I always have the fear. It's kind of a culture that they did create on us. It's like if you don't succeed that particular exam, your future is miserable.
However, this is not true. And I feel it's useless to convince myself otherwise. I have reduced my fear a lot. By convincing myself that the future can be better, if I decide to make it so. I read a lot and improved my resistance to fear. But this is not enough. It seems that I'm a long way from reaching a fearless life.
How do I overcome my fear? What have you done to overcome it? Did you take mental or brain games? Read a book or something similar? What was your strategy and how was the result?
This is something many people suffer from. At least, my friends. They have a lot more stress than me. I have improved, but I still not prefect yet. I want to reduce it to a maximum that it has no impact on my life.
I think, this could change my life for the better.
Thank you! <comment><USER2> It sounds to me like you are too single focused. Get some hobbies and by hobbies I mean the outdoor kind. Take up fishing or para-sailing or rebuild a classic car or something. Get away from the feedback loop. Some kids your age decide to party to get out of it, others take up a hobby. I personally think that a hobby is more constructive but the point is you need to make the world that matters bigger than a single focus, in doing so you have more to divert your mind from constant focus on a single issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's kind of a culture that they did create on us.

Who is 'they'.

Perhaps it's 'they' that you should be talking to. If they found out what they are doing to you then perhaps they would stop?

<comment><AUTHOR> Society, school, parents, teachers and also friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are still living among 'they', perhaps it's time to move.</comment>


Nokia's New Flagship Windows Phone Smashes Pre-Order Records On Orange U.K.* - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-lumia-800-pre-orders-2011-11 *One contributing factor might be Orange's offer to give anyone upgrading to the Lumia a free Xbox 360. <comment><USER2> Can you spot the three magic words?

"One contributing factor might be Orange's offer to give anyone upgrading to the Lumia a free Xbox 360."

Gaining market share is one thing, making a decent profit is another.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pre-order records _for Nokia handsets_ only.

From the source of the article that businessinsider link to:

"Preorders of the device have been higher than any other Nokia handset"

[http://www.winrumors.com/nokia-lumia-800-breaks-preorder- rec...](http://www.winrumors.com/nokia-lumia-800-breaks-preorder-records-for- nokia-devices-at-orange-uk/)</comment>


Western US 'literally out of firefighters and equipment,' fire official says - <AUTHOR> http://katu.com/news/local/western-us-is-literally-out-of-firefighters-and-equipment-clackamas-fire-chief-says <comment><AUTHOR> Why can't we use airships to douse fires?

<comment><AUTHOR> To the anonymous users who are protected from displaying their ignorance by downvoting me without any comments/replies: [http://www.euroairship.eu/index.php/forest-and-urban- fires/](http://www.euroairship.eu/index.php/forest-and-urban-fires/)</comment></comment>


A Mystery of Unix History - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10051-a-mystery-of-unix-history <comment><USER2> Because EMACS wasn't developed for the PDP-11. It came from the MIT ITS and Stanford SAIL systems, which had real "meta" keys.[1] Those keyboards also had a "Top" key, an additional shift for extra symbols on top of the keys. See "MIT Space Cadet Keyboard", and Symbolics keyboards.

The control-S/control-Q flow control only worked on UNIX in "line mode", which also did backspace and such. VI turned that off and ran in raw mode. Before BSD, UNIX mostly ran in line mode. The TCP/IP implementation we used, a heavily modified 3COM UNET, predated BSD networking. It normally ran in "line mode", and when running VI remotely, VI switched the pseudo-terminal to "raw mode", which caused the Telnet connection to send the options DON'T ECHO[2] and DO SUPPRESS GO AHEAD.[3] The connection was now transparent to special characters. This was necessary on the rather laggy links of the time. Exiting VI restored line mode.

If VI crashed, or you killed it, or, when job control came in, you switched tasks, you were stuck in raw mode, and had to reset the terminal session by typing "stty saneLF". You actually had to type LF, because CR->LF translation was suppressed in that mode.

BSD didn't bother with this, and ran terminals in remote echo mode all the time, which required lower lag connections. Berkeley was mostly IP over Ethernet at the time, without much long-haul, so that worked for them.

[1] [http://xahlee.info/kbd/iold51593/SAIL_keyboard_96232.jpg](http://xahlee.info/kbd/iold51593/SAIL_keyboard_96232.jpg) [2] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc857](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc857) [3] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc858](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc858)

<comment><USER3> Just to not leave a misimpression: Emacs (and TECO) never ran on the Stanford Sail machine (which ran the Waits OS); The "E" editor that was native to Sail/Waits used combinations of the Meta and Control keys for commands, which perhaps helped inspire their use in Emacs (written originally ITS at MIT).

It's worth noting that at Sail, the Meta and Control keys simply sent extra "bucky" bits on top of the 7-bit character code, resulting in a 9-bit input. And the actual ESC key was intercepted by the Waits for special commands from the user, and was never delivered to user-land programs (ESC-H tells the OS to hide your screen from others; ESC-I asks the OS to send an interrupt signal to your program; etc). The octal location 033, where ESC lives in Ascii, was instead used for the character "not-equals" on Sail; similarly, most of the other locations in the range 001-037 were used for other special characters that aren't in Ascii, and all were typically generated with a Top key- combination press. The whole notion of Control automatically stripping off the high-order bits of a character was foreign.

<comment><USER4> > octal location 033

 _of course_ this predates the invention of hex, or at least the modern conventional notation for it

<comment><USER5> Pre-PDP11, DEC had machines with 12, 18, and 36 bit words. Those are all multiples of 3, so octal was more natural. (For the 16-bit PDP11, the instruction format made octal natural.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bill Joy used an ADM 3A[1] terminal, and looking at the keyboard layout explains vi's key mappings almost entirely.

There are arrow keys printed on HJKL (accessed via control), escape is left of Q, control is left of A, and colon has a dedicated key rather than being shift+semicolon.

Another tidbit is that the home key is also used for tilde, which explains its association with the home directory.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#/media/File:KB_Terminal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#/media/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg)

<comment><USER7> This makes so much sense, and now looking at this image, I wonder if it explains "tabs vs spaces".

<comment><USER8> It does seem like an additional reason, but I'm convinced tabs were (are?) disliked primarily for historical and technological reasons. Historically the tab key worked with a tab stop; there's always friction when you switch paradigms. Technologically, accommodating a variable width non-printing character on an 80x25 character-mapped display for no particular reason must have seemed both gratuitous and wasteful when you consider the typical hardware of the time (monochrome terminals, CPUs on the order of 1-50 MHz, 1-5 MB RAM, < 1 MB ROM, etc).

<comment><USER9> > disliked primarily for historical and technological reasons

Huh? AFAIU, all the historical source code uses tabs for indentation. Both K&R and BSD style uses hard tabs, as does Linux kernel style and most older GNU project code for that matter. Various Unix programs _assume_ tabs, for example indentation elision in shell heredoc syntax ("<<-") only works for tabs.

Soft tabs (spaces) has been a relatively new thing in the C/Unix world. You may not notice it because, working as well as they do, hard tabs magically indent according to your local preference, so hard tabs aren't noticeable.[1]

[1] What doesn't work is right-hand alignment. That's most noticeable in modern BSD code, where the style is to tab-align variable types and names into different columns. If your tab stop isn't set to 8 (the required tab stop), they don't line up. Most hard tabbers don't mix indentation and alignment, anymore.

EDIT: Here's the earliest source code for vi I could quickly find: [https://github.com/n-t- roff/ex-2.2/blob/220a2cfa/ex.c](https://github.com/n-t- roff/ex-2.2/blob/220a2cfa/ex.c) It uses hard tabs. It's also still using pre- ANSI function syntax, suggesting this code wasn't cleaned up before committing to Git.

<comment><USER8> Ok apparently I'm super ignorant about this. WTF are people going on about spaces for if hard tabs are the historic standard? I always assumed that Go was progressive, C++ was the norm (ie had no preference), Python and Nim were designed by diehards clinging to the past, and that people were exhibiting their rather famous resistance to change. Apparently this is completely wrong?

I seem to have made assumptions due to only running into spaces in "old" places such as Python, Vim, Emacs, etc. To be fair, this all happened well before I was born. Why would software developers of all people try to do away with a useful abstraction?!

Oddly, the linked keyboard doesn't appear to have a tab key but the Vi source code you found contains them? Am I missing something obvious?

(`/* Copyright (c) 1979 Regents of the University of California */`, that's some impressively old code to find on GitHub.)

Re BSD: Yeah, tabs don't work for alignment almost by definition. I'm surprised anyone was crazy enough to author a code style that called for it.

<comment><USER10> Bit strange thinking of Python as "old" .. anyway, what I suspect happened was that tabs were the "new" innovation - in the post-punchcard era. Punchcards couldn't meaningfully have a tab _character_ , but they could have fixed character _positions_ , and this feature was required by COBOL and FORTRAN in their day. It was still present in the F77 standard.

I think the other thing that got in the way of standardising on TAB was that 8 character indent is too much, but once you let people configure it it's no longer consistent between systems.

> that's some impressively old code to find on GitHub

You may like [https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11)

<comment><USER11> > Bit strange thinking of Python as "old"

Python is about 30 years old. Started by Guido van Rossum in December 1989.

Python is older than HTTP, older than the Web.

It's older than most programming languages still in common use today (TIOBE).

I think most people would think of Python as "old" if they thought about its history. Its current cool factor in AI and employment makes it seem newer than it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe VT52 and VT100 terminals have a physical ESC key where you would expect it to be. On newer models, like VT220, etc, you can use the setup screen to put them in VT100 mode. Once you do that, the F11 key will function as an escape key.

Also note it was viewed as a weird choice to omit the key at the time. Televideo, a competitor, called it out in their ads: [https://imgur.com/a/u7KHRjQ](https://imgur.com/a/u7KHRjQ)

Somewhat interesting that Apple recently took away, then gave back the ESC key on their pro laptops.

<comment><USER13> I _still_ want my Meta key! How can we do Ctrl-Alt-Meta-Cokebottle? But, seriously, having three "control-like" keys gives us 8 'name-spaces' using different combinations of Ctrl / Alt / Meta. Pretty convenient.

<comment><USER14> I still want arbitrary modifier keys.

This is a feature of some game engines which allow people to use arbitrary keys (or combinations) as modifier keys. Which allow for less motion of the hand over the keyboard, by simply being able to hit the same keys (with some modifiers) quickly.

<comment><USER15> You would need an N-key-rollover keyboard to be able to do this, at least in the general case. Baseline keyboards do not register overlapping keypresses correctly, unless you are using the ordinary modifier keys.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but a lot of gaming hardware supports this, and it's a hardware issue. If one is customizing their editor to the point of using arbitrary modifier keys, they will probably be willing to buy a custom keyboard.

Also while on the subject 8 key rollover, which is pretty common, is probably more than enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article is simply incorrect. The VT100 (and VT52 before it) had an ESC key, right where you'd expect it to be. Just about any terminal you might have bought in the 1970's had one.

It's shown clearly in the document the article (indirectly) points to: [https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-ug/chapter1.html](https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-ug/chapter1.html)

<comment><USER16> Those have an escape key, but the VT220 doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Back then I wouldn't use a DEC terminal newer than a VT-100 because of the lack of an ESC key. The 220s were physically great terminals, but the keyboard layout was horrific for using _vi_.

Around 84 we started evaluating a purchase of hundreds of terminals for the university, and eventually settled on the Wyse WY-75, mostly because it was ANSI/VT-100 compatible _and_ had an escape key.

DEC didn't care, because they didn't use the ESC key in VMS.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Ctrl-3 and Ctrl-[ could send the character. However, this is downright > terrible for both vi and Emacs (as this is the only way to trigger meta > commands in Emacs).

Anecdotal, but I use Ctrl-[ in vi all the time. More comfortable the escape key in my experience. I've tried jj and jk, but I inevitably end up on a system without my .exrc or init.vim at some point, and struggle. Ctrl-[ has the benefit of working _everywhere_.

</comment><comment><USER19> UNIX wasn't the only OS that those terminals were sold for. DEC had this crazy notion that people should be using VMS.

<comment> mark-r Even VMS wasn't the first. The PDP-11 had its own operating systems, RTS and RSTS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> All of the RS232 (serial i/o) VDUs had hardware handshaking. A common problem was that some serial _cables_ lacked ALL the wires required. i.e. the bare minimum serial cable has only 3 wires (ground, in, out). Cables with more wires have greater capabilities (handshaking, modem control,etc,etc).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232)

<comment><USER21> I have a vt420, vt510, and IBM3151 and not one of them do RTS/CTS like we'd expect. The vt510 can apparently do that on the DTR/DSR pins, but the vt420 and below cannot, and neither can the 3151.

<comment><USER22> The VT220 had RTS/CTS. You had to turn it on in the menus, and you needed a cable with all the pins connected, but it worked fine.

[http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/vt220/EK- VT220-TM-...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/vt220/EK- VT220-TM-001_VT220_Technical_Manual_Nov84.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > why would both of these editors be developed in such a way that they are > downright inconvenient to use on the hardware on which they most frequently > ran?

As other comments note, they were developed on earlier models or non-Dec terminals.

Also Emacs was not developed on Unix. The first Unix Emacs was created by James Gosling of Java fame.

<comment><USER24> Certainly not. The first emacs was created for the TECO editor on ITS by various people. It was further developed and maintained by RMS. Gosling's emacs came a few years later.

<comment><USER25> Then there's this debacle I've never spent enough time getting to the bottom of... [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhrcxw/james_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhrcxw/james_gosling_on_how_richard_stallman_stole_his/)

<comment><USER26> [https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs- history](https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history) has the details... there's some Gosling code (notably display.c with the skull-and-bones warning) in Emacs 13, but none that I can find in 15 and later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a good book on Unix history? Something accessible like "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet"?

<comment><USER28> Also A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, [https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:q...](https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:qcu.pdf)

<comment><USER29> Thanks for this blast from the past. I bought the book in 1997 as a sophomore student at university. My favorite book at the time. Leafing through the PDF after all these years I came across some gems I hadn't appreciated back then:

On page 161 the author mentions in passing that Eric Schmidt had been working on BerkNet. THE Eric Schmidt. The Google Eric Schmidt.

Earlier the book mentions that Bill Joy was able to hire a developer with money they got from DARPA. That developer was Michael Toy and later Sam Leffler. There's a movie called Code Rush about the open-sourcing of Netscape's source code in 1998 (which begat Mozilla and Firefox) and Michael Toy was the project lead for the open source effort back then. Sam Leffler later developed TIFF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > _According to the EmacsOnTerminal page and other research, at least the > vt100 through the vt420 lacked Esc by default._

What?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100#/media/File:DEC_VT100_te...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100#/media/File:DEC_VT100_terminal.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER31> Here's someone asking about it in an old newsgroup from 1993:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.terminals/a73kE...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.terminals/a73kE6H6Cic)

<comment><USER32> Interesting to note that on my current Linux system, both CTRL-3 (ESC) and CTRL-8 (backspace) work as well.

<comment><USER33> And so they should. They are both standard ASCII codes.</comment></comment></comment>


I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html <comment><USER2> So it turns out that the wealthy and powerful are just like the rest of us - they like getting together in private with their friends to have raucous, alcohol-fuelled fun, and tell politically-incorrect jokes to one another.

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

It's just as well we don't live in a glass house! It would be pretty embarrassing if tech industry people were to spend millions on, say a lavish, LotR-themed wedding. Or if our awards ceremonies attracted protesters.

<comment><USER3> I have to agree with this. All the article have shown is that even billionaires are people. The fact that they make intolerant jokes or that they speak of the crisis lightly is not that shocking considering the fact that they are in a private context. From what I understood, they are here to relax, and that is actually quite similar to what you could witness in any conventional meeting in a more modest population.

It would have been way more shocking if it had been done in public speech. Not because it would have been known, but because it does not convey the same meaning. In a private context, you can expect people to know you are joking, or that this is a personal opinion you are able not to impose to others. In a public context, you are expected to express yourself clearly and to take position.

In regards to the conclusion of the sting, I can also understand that they would not like that kind of material to be published. Imagine someone threatening to publish recordings of you in shameful situations during a party? From what I read, they were reasonable they seem to have let him go without much trouble (I think they could have called the police and have his phone confiscated without too much hassle).

<comment><USER4> Agreed they are just people. The difference in this case being that they are being insensitive (even celebrating) about something they did which had negative nation wide (world wide) implications. Which is slightly different than the average person's drunken antics at a party.

For a different (arguably larger) example, if someone is making light of (or celebrating) genocide/slavery/some atrocity (that they or their compatriots caused) and it comes out, that is very different than pictures of Obama/Zuckerberg/Guy down the street being blackout drunk or even doing drugs at a party.

<comment><USER5> Most of them don't think "they did [something] which had negative nation wide (world wide) implications." Most of them perceive the financial collapse as a structural event caused by nobody in particular, that they couldn't have personally averted, that they didn't intend to happen, that they are getting blamed for. A very good analogy would be Google-ers and Facebook-ers getting together and drunkenly joking about driving up the rents in San Francisco and pushing out poor people. Possibly in bad taste, but not quite as bad as you're making it out to be.

<comment><USER6> I'm a fan of imperfect analogies to prove a point so I can sympathize. However, your analogy really lets off the bad agents in the financial crisis.

Enough people directly committed acts some would deem fraudulent (sell baskets of bad loans to unsuspecting municipalities, approve bogus mortgage loan docs, etc.) that they can't fall on the crutch of systemic breakdown.

It'd be like if these Googlers and Facebook-ers wrote software that inflated real estate prices, driving out the poor and increasing the value of their equity in their homes, before an inevitable collapse in which some government bailout had to occur to prevent urban blight in San Francisco, thereby creating a safety-net for the rich homeowners.

<comment><USER7> To extend and correct your analogy: it'd be like if Googlers and Facebookers, and 20 other companies had to create and continuously improve software that unintentionally drove up real estate prices, in order to engage in a highly competitive market.

Their actions, writing the software, aren't necessarily malicious or risky. To their mind they're just doing what everyone else is doing and trying to create the best system.

Then they have an awards ceremony to celebrate the best software. Maybe in poor taste, but they're not even really considering the real estate market. Their game is software, and the financiers game is profit.

Like we don't generally think about the lives of people who make our clothes or computers, because our game is fashion or programming.

It's groupthink that caused the financial crisis (and most other problems), not necessarily malice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem isn't with the wealthy. Wealthy and powerful people have been behaving badly behind closed doors since _at least_ the Roman Empire, and probably before then as well. The problem is with us. Why don't we hold them accountable for their misdeeds? Why do we buy into their rhetoric that they are the job creators? Why do we give equal time to their views that they are being persecuted like Jews during Kristallnacht, when the events of the last few years have show that, if anything the opposite is true?

I think articles like this, honestly, are a disservice. They're comfortable. They're easy. They put the blame on the wealthy -- "Oh look, those billionaires and plutocrats are at it again!" \-- without asking the real question: what systemic changes can we work towards today to ensure that people like Vikram Pandit, Dick Fuld and Jimmy Cayne can't wreak the same kind of havoc that they did in 2007? What can we do to ensure that people appreciate the impact that obscure financial regulations have on their everyday lives?

<comment><USER9> It's funny, I think exactly the opposite of this. Something along the lines about how a sham democracy is worse than no democracy at all, because people keep blaming themselves although they are being oppressed by plutocrats in ways not really unlike violent threats in terms of control.

Instead of being starved, the threat is to get fired. Instead of lack of education, people are blasted with advertisement. I think to say that the fault is "within us" is a platitude about as banal as "the answer is somewhere in the middle".

<comment><USER8> Our founders said that the legitimacy of government comes from the consent of the governed. Vox populi est vox dei. So why do we continue to consent to a government that sets up an economic system that ensures that plutocrats can behave badly and get away with it? I'm talking about cases like Dick Fuld, where he drove his firm into bankruptcy, nearly upended the entire American investment banking system, and still walked away with millions upon millions of dollars. I'm talking about cases like Jon Corzine's, where there was outright fraud -- M. F. Global was mixing its own proprietary money with its customers', which is fraudulent -- and nobody went to jail.

I'm not even talking about solutions. I think talking about solutions is entirely premature at this point. We haven't even identified the problem yet. Why do a significant fraction of Americans vote against their own economic best interests, even when they _know_ that their vote is harming them?

<comment><USER4> Identifying the problem is actually pretty easy and you mention it in your first sentence in the parent. It has been going on since at least the Romans.

Money begets power, power protects money.

There really doesn't seem to be much you can do about it... If you 'throw the bums out' you get a whole new set of bums. Its a terrible thing but also a possible fact of life.

One thing I would like to see though... Those who get caught actually getting punished... Even if it is just for 'revenge among kings' purposes. The fact that no one really gets in any serious trouble, for doing the sorts of things you mentioned, shows the system is really broken, rather than the things happening (because they will regardless).

<comment><USER10> If only Ayn Rand could see what her 'job creators' were up to these days ... LOL

<comment><USER11> If you were at all familiar with her works, I think you would realize that the "Bailout King" and his colleagues would be counted among the villains of her novels -- the "looters."

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that anything in Ayn Rand's novels actually corresponds to the realities of corporate capitalism. I'll take one illustrative example: the discovery of Rearden Metal. In _Atlas Shrugged_ , Rearden Metal is depicted as the product of the lone genius of Hank Rearden, who defied his own corporate scientists and a made a metal that everyone else considered impossible. At the time, Hank Rearden was not a lone inventor working in his garage. He was already a plutocrat, with multiple millions to his name, and a large corporation backing him.

Can you actually think of a case in the real world where that's happened? Where the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation has personally made a breakthrough discovery in his or her field? Of course not. Billion+ dollar companies are crazy complex machines, and our hypothetical CEO has far too much to be doing to be merely mucking around in the lab like a lowly research scientist. He (and I use the masculine deliberately) has a corporation to run. He has decisions to make!

No, the closest thing I can think of to Hank Rearden is Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. Genius CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations who, by virtue of their sheer brilliance come up with discoveries that all their trained underlings miss, despite having far less time to devote to the topic at hand. And, for that reason, I find Ayn Rand's scenarios to be deeply irrelevant. Her characters, plot, and morality are more suited to comic books than novels. There is no ambivalence, no ambiguity in any of her characters or her situations, and her books turn into thousand page morality plays that one reads without gaining any insight into how one should actually behave in the real world.

To say that a living person corresponds to a character in an Ayn Rand novel is akin to saying that a living oak tree corresponds to a page in a notebook. You can argue that there are commonalities. But the commonalities between living wood and dead paper do more to obscure than clarify. It is the same with comparisons to Ayn Rand characters. At this point, I'm ready to just throw out Ayn Rand analogies altogether in my rhetoric, for they seem to add more heat to the discussion than light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm tired of hearing the term "the 1%" used for stuff like this. The 1% is 3,000,000 Americans. I've seen income figures for that demographic ranging between $160,000 and $500,000 a year. The lower end is pretty much in reach of any professional working in New York or San Francisco with more than a few years of experience. (This is total compensation, 401k matching, stock, etc.) All this tells you is that the population mostly lives in expensive areas; rent in New York City can be 10x higher than elsewhere in the US.

I'll tell you as someone around that income range in New York... I don't get invited to parties where we discuss how to screw over the working man. I ride my bike to work, spend half the day there, ride my bike around Brooklyn, watch some TV on a 720p LCD that I bought 6 or 7 years ago, and then go to bed in my bedroom that's too small to actually contain a bed. (The mattress fits.)

Admittedly, I've accumulated some savings this way, but still, New York is really fucking expensive, and it's not hard to spend make what sounds like a lot of money on ordinary things like food and shelter in non-premium neighborhoods.

<comment><USER13> According to this, they also have 10 million in wealth, not only the 160.000 a year. You're probably not in the 1%:

"The 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million"

Source: economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-top-1-by-wealth- not-income/

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-paint-a-more-nuanced- portrait-of-the-rich.html

<comment><USER14> That's a convenient (at least for the young, upper-income HN demographic) but ahistorical definition. The use of "top 1%" in political rhetoric goes back at least to Al Gore's 2000 campaign for president, as a cudgel against George W. Bush's proposed tax cuts. Gore is quite clear in his October 17 debate that he's talking about income when he speaks of the $330,000 (household) earnings cutoff to be in the 1%[1].

It continued to be a common refrain against upper bracket tax reductions for a decade, and it was still being used in that sense by politicians and activists at the time it graduated into the slogans of Occupy Wall Street.

[1] [http://www.debates.org/?page=october-17-2000-debate- transcri...](http://www.debates.org/?page=october-17-2000-debate-transcript)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comments on these kind of articles on Hacker News are always more defensive than I'd imagine. I think we have a weird mix of people where 50% are "hackers of computers" who'd do this shit for free, and will be doing it until they die and 50% are "hackers of society" who are here because they see an opportunity to make it to "big time" without having to have the right parents/schools etc.

It's strange how most of the time the two groups get along so well!

<comment><USER16> You're giving the audience here too much credit that they're actually hackers. On most articles like this it just feels like a bunch of doe-eyed, aspirational men who really want to be rich one day, so don't want to spoil the fun for their future selves.

Tangentially, this is what struck me about visiting America. We went to Hearst castle and the reverence which the guides and the people on the tour paid to the ghost and myth of Hearst was unnerving. Explains a lot about how wall st gets away with stuff though.

<comment><USER4> I get that feeling as well. There seem to be a lot of people responding to these types of articles who have 'stars in their eyes' and think that they'll be able to join the 'old boys club' if they just work hard enough, or get lucky enough (though some also seem to deny that luck has anything to do with success which baffles me).

The reverence for the wealthy in America really is a whole other weird thing. America doesn't have the history (in time span) to really have many historical heros other than those who were wealthy enough to 'do things' so we have to make due with what we've got.

That is not to say that a great deal of any given place's heros of the past were not also wealthy in their time though.

<comment><USER17> Luck?

Luck is invented to be an excuse for the feeble minded.

There is no luck involved in getting rich. If you want to get rich you have to 1) work hard 2) be smart 3) be unscrupulous.

The 3rd dependency is often misunderstood and the results of it are attributed to "luck".

<comment><USER18> Yes, Paris Hilton had to put in a lot of hard, astute and unscrupulous work to get those parents of hers.

In a past life, presumably.

<comment><USER17> Your comment just proves my point - people refuse to face the reality and would rather come up with excuses, exceptions and other self-deceptions, than admit they don't have what it takes.

And for the record, Paris Hilton did not get rich. She was born rich.

<comment><USER18> Oh, I'm happy to admit I don't have what it takes, according to your little calculus. I'm lazy. I'm smart, but not that smart. And I find it emotionally difficult to climb over other people's bodies to get to the cash money. But that's fine - a life of relative material comfort and intellectual stimulation is quite enough for me.

The point is, there are many people who _do_ 'have what it takes' in those terms who will never, ever be rich. Are you seriously arguing that somebody with a comfortable Orange County upbringing has the same barriers to entry for riches, wealth and glory than somebody who assiduously grafts out a bare existence in some Rio slum?

> And for the record, Paris Hilton did not get rich. She was born rich.

Alas, now you have conceded the principle, and we can negotiate over the price. Paris Hilton was 'born rich'; what about, say, the child of a family wealthy enough to afford a private education? Who got preferential treatment in an Ivy League admissions process because they were born to an alumnus? Whose uncle got them an internship at some bank?

<comment><USER17> > _But that 's fine - a life of relative material comfort and intellectual > stimulation is quite enough for me._

No arguing there. I never said everyone should aim to be a millionaire. I just find self-deception amusing and sometimes even irritating. Perhaps because I fall for the same self-preservation techniques in different context at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In many ways we are politically a primitive society. Technology evolves faster than culture. We are still (and this is especially evident on HN) thinking in mid 20th century paradigms, remnants of half dead ideologies and long dead political maneuvering. Just because these ideas have evolved over time does not mean they are not half baked. That doesn't stop people from treating them like a matter of personal identity.

The "Left" believes extreme wealth will inevitably corrupt the political process. It's naive to think that billionaires will not use their money to buy power and more wealth. The "Right" thinks that the state will inevitably corrupt business and/or be corrupted by wealth. It's naive to think that bureaucrats with a rubber stamps that adds a zero to the value of land or a semi legitimate patent into an 8 figure asset asset will not be corrupted by wealth. They call it regulatory capture.

IMO both these views, if we call them views are impoverished. They rely on economic and political narratives that have "capital" & "labour" as their basis. They are based on the idea that trade between Moscow & Vladivostok is different to trade between Moscow & Milan.

We're always looking for ways to address power & money and their role in our world. We're still not there.

</comment><comment><USER20> > The jokes ranged from unfunny and sexist (Q: "What's the biggest difference > between Hillary Clinton and a catfish?" A: "One has whiskers and stinks, and > the other is a fish") to unfunny and homophobic (Q: "What's the biggest > difference between Barney Frank and a Fenway Frank?" A: "Barney Frank comes > in different-size buns").

We've got jokes about policeman, about blondes, about the French, about mostly everybody... So, if the target of a joke is a woman, it doesn't mean that it's a sexist joke, and a joke about being gay isn't a homophobic joke. If anything, making fun of something means accepting is as normal, as part of everyday life!

</comment><comment><USER21> I found this the most telling part of the article: _The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting._

Based on the few I've met, these sorts of people aren't exactly shrinking violets. Yet they live in fear that the rest of society will learn their opinions and that bad things will come of it.

Back in the tech world, it makes me think of the attacks on Pax Dickinson and Paul Graham. No matter how rich, powerful and competent you are, you live in fear of the opinion makers accusing you of sexism/homophobia/insensitivity/etc.

Definitely makes it clear where the real power lies in our society.

<comment><USER22> > Definitely makes it clear where the real power lies in our society.

It does? I don't think the logic follows. Just because Wall Streeters are paranoid and sensitive about their public image doesn't mean they are not invincible.

This will hardly be a blip in the news, because of apathy, and because anyone who would be mad about Wall Street guys acting like this is already mad and can't do anything about it anyway. I don't think a few more Rachel Maddow rants are really going to bring the system crashing down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So people who rule Wall Street are sexist and homophobic. I'm surprised... that some of those things seemed actually funny (a parody of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" called "Bailout King" has to be funny).

On a more serious note: congrats on the reporter for having the balls to crash that party. Most things were expected, and properly offensive. But I don't understand the shock at finance themed parody songs.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd bet the articles he would have gotten from these people as trusted sources would have been exponentially better than this piece.

This is just a bunch of guys hanging out with the only group of people who understand their pressures. There's no conspiracy here, there's no "great insight" to be had. I'm angry I wasted my time reading the article.

<comment><USER25> My thoughts exactly. In the excitement of being caught gatecrashing a pretty exclusive party, I get the feeling the author rushed to write what must have felt like an exclusive, bring-the-system-down exposé. Instead, we got a mildly diverting piece that confirms our suspicions about how the rich and powerful behave behind closed doors, and the author blew a career-making opportunity for inside access.

It's a shame, because there's definitely a story to be told about these people involving the 2008 crisis and the enormous drain on the public purse that the bailout caused. That story is surely more juicy than 'the rich think the rest of us are suckers for rescuing them.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't really see the problem with them telling insensitive jokes and acting like idiots in their time off. How they act at work is more important. Pretty stupid article.

<comment><USER22> We already know their behavior at work is pretty terrible. The article just highlights that, deep down, they're not actually great guys once you get to know them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Someone told a homophobic joke, that's it? @GSElevator[1] does more hard- hitting reporting.

If we're going to be upvoting TMZ-style articles, they could at least be properly scandalous.

[1] [https://twitter.com/GSElevator](https://twitter.com/GSElevator)

</comment><comment><USER28> Original title, and current headline: _1% Jokes and Plutocrats In Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society_

</comment><comment><USER29> I really hope this guys 1% reference is metaphorical. You can be in the 1% and not be able to afford a weekend stay at the St. Regis.

But you wouldn't expect accuracy from a guy who appears genuinely surprised that financial executives have a club. Guess what? Sometimes, they play golf and tennis together too. Someone alert the SEC...

<comment><USER13> "You can be in the 1% and not be able to afford a weekend stay at the St. Regis"

I think you're seriously underestimating the wealth of the 1%:

"The 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million"

So basically, everyone in the 1% has 10 million or more. I doubt a weekend stay at the St. Regis makes a significant dent.

Source: economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-top-1-by-wealth- not-income/

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-paint-a-more-nuanced- portrait-of-the-rich.html

<comment><USER30> haha - you should probably read the articles you reference:

"Some readers wondered if the 1 percent by wealth weren't an entirely different group of people from the 1 percent by income. But there is substantial overlap: the Fed data suggests that about half of the top 1 percent of earners are also among the top 1 percent in the net worth category."

<comment><USER13> So the grandparent poster is not in the 1% of wealth, but might be in the 1% of earners :) .

When I think of the 1%, I think of the former, but I guess many are referencing the latter.

In any case, I am neither :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The plutocrats are right. Of course they are being persecuted. I guess that's what happens when you have done everything in your power to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top. But then again, trickle-down economics has worked wonders for society.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think any of the antics of these guys should be a surprise. I mean they are all at the top of the finance ladder, and you don't get there without being a psychopath.

</comment><comment><USER33> There was a HN thread that suggested that Eric Schmidt be fired after the anti poaching scandal.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'll just leave this here: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Pyramid_o...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png)

This isn't new and it is unlikely to change unless Tyler Durden comes along.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I didn't crash the Wall Street secret society :) the article is adapted from Kevin Roose's book Young Money

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't believe the Wall Street bankers of the ' Greatest Generation' would have displayed such crass, even in private. This new breed far less class, far less men, far less respect for the countries citizens.

</comment><comment><USER36> The rhetoric is competition; the reality a cabal.

</comment><comment> winn-dixie Why did he wait two years to publish this article? Did he (attempt to) take advantage of what was revealed before publishing?

</comment><comment><USER37> Can someone in the wall street secret society plz send me an invite? Email is in my HN profile, kthx.

<comment><USER38> No invite needed. You can just walk right in! Although they'll probably be checking invites and ids next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This reminds me of the Simpsons' Republican party headquarters.

<comment><USER38> _Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We doooo! We doooo!_

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Megalomaniacs are also sociopaths. Who knew?

</comment><comment><USER41> Main takeaway: these guys aren't evil in the Sith Lord sense, but they're also completely not up to leadership. Rather than being cosmically evil, they're just a bit dumb, a bit insensitive, and a bit sad. Reality, for them, is emasculating and disempowering, but also humanizing.</comment>


Google treasure maps, april fools prank - <AUTHOR> https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl&authuser=0

<comment><USER2> I like that the little mermaid in Copenhagen is drawn in on the map. There are some cute details like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Street View is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER4> Accurate title...</comment>


Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman (.PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf

<comment><USER2> Searchable versions:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=%22all+experiments+in+psychol...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22all+experiments+in+psychology+are+not+of+this+type%2C+however%22)

<http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm>

<http://www.farnhamsfreehold.org/blog/?p=171>

[http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&...](http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=71415120&blogId=384636381)

[http://lanseybrothers.blogspot.com/2009/08/cargo-cult- scienc...](http://lanseybrothers.blogspot.com/2009/08/cargo-cult-science-and- doings-at.html?showComment=1249821398123)

</comment><comment><USER3> Related, here is probably the most important essay Jerry Pournelle ever wrote, <http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html> .

</comment><comment><USER4> Always a fun read- but I'd be interested in hearing if the situation is better in Psychology now, and/or if other fields have this problem today.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least a few psychologists are attempting to make things better.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405131128/></comment></comment>


Rayton Solar raised $2.8M on Fundable, now running  REG A+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.startengine.com/startup/rayton-solar <comment><USER2> We really need to end our dependance on fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy. I hope Rayton succeeds.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone think is going to be a trend? They had an IndieGoGo too but only raised $5k.</comment>


Ask HN: Can calc() be faster than static % - <AUTHOR>

I just made a little test to compare how slow calc() is comparing to an assigned % width.
But my test would show that calc() is much more faster. I can't believe it and think I made a mistake somewhere.
If you have the time please checkout and point where I made a mistake. If there's no mistake I would say calc() is truly much faster.
git: https://github.com/batjaa/compare-calc <comment><USER2> I'd guess calc is executed after your timer ended and therefore doesn't register in your measurement.</comment>


Web App Performance Testing with Siege - <AUTHOR> https://www.sitepoint.com/web-app-performance-testing-siege-plan-test-learn/ <comment><USER2> This is a good start, but only a start. Real users don't just type in random URLs for your site -- they follow a path. They might hit your site at one URL, then follow a link to another page, then a link to yet another page, and so on.

There are tools to help better simulate the type of load that might be caused by real users, and I'd love to see a follow on article that continues this example with those methods.</comment>


Alive Shoes: Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> https://www.aliveshoes.com/ycombinator

<comment><AUTHOR> 10/15% revenue share, discounts and a free shoe, depending on the quantity you sell

</comment><comment><USER2> There's making your own merchandise, and then there's trademark infringement.

</comment><comment><USER3> So this is like Teespring for shoes? What's your profit as a designer?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Y comb shoe was actually a fun/extra thing!</comment>


LR Parsing: More Elegant Than You Think - <AUTHOR> https://jasonhpriestley.com/lr <comment><USER2> 1\. Web site is just a blank white page on mobile Safari.

2\. LR parsing is elegant in the mathematical sense of the word, but use in production leads to regret. The problem with bottom-up parsers of any flavor, LR included, is that when you encounter a syntax error there is no context information, or context is difficult to infer, which makes creating a sensible error message less fun than poking yourself in the eye repeatedly with a sharp stick. I contend that giving good error messages is the most important factor in user-friendliness of any parser.

Look up "precedence climbing" \-- a recursive descent parser with expressions handled by precedence climbing is going be an easier path to a production parser with good diagnostics, IMHO.

<comment><USER3> > The problem with bottom-up parsers of any flavor, LR included, is that when > you encounter a syntax error there is no context information, or context is > difficult to infer, which makes creating a sensible error message less fun > than poking yourself in the eye repeatedly with a sharp stick.

Both LL and LR parsers share a fundamental flaw for error reporting; they are both prefix parsers. They will parse the input until it fails to be a valid prefix of the language represented by the grammar. However, it is rare that this coincides with the place where the actual error was made.

The difference in information available here at the end of the valid prefix is less about the difference between LL and LR parsing and more about the difference between LL and LR grammars. An LR parser parsing an LL grammar is able to recover the same information as an LL parser at the point of error. And for non-LL grammars, it is easy to extend an LR parser with additional context information by splitting states (see [http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/publis/fpottier- reachabili...](http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/publis/fpottier-reachability- cc2016.pdf)).

Parsing algorithms that do not produce prefix parsers (e.g. precedence parsing) are often able to produce more logical error messages with less work, because they continue making actions after the input is no longer a valid prefix, and this can amount to gathering more information about the error. For the same reason, LR-family parsers that perform default reductions (e.g. LALR parsers, or any minimal state LR parser) often perform reductions (but not shifts) after the point of error, and produce better error messages than canonical LR parsers.

My favorite approach to error recovery is Richter's approach of error intervals ([https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4019](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4019)), which uses alternating prefix/suffix parsers to find minimal error regions in the input that can not occur as a substring of any valid input. This has no dependence on the grammar or parsing technique. It was not (widely?) known at the time that Richter wrote his paper, but suffix parsing of LR grammars is linear time.

<comment><USER4> I'm unfamiliar with precedence parsing but what attracted me to (G)LR was its running time. What is the running time guarantee of a precedence parser for LR(k) and general (including potentially ambiguous) context-free grammars?

<comment><USER3> Operator precedence parsing is linear time, but it only produces a parser for a very limited set of grammars, the epsilon-free LR(1) grammars with no consecutive nonterminals.

Precedence parsing is typically combined with another parsing method to parse a non-operator part of a grammar, or it is used with preprocessing filters that insert extra marker tokens to work around the limitations.

Most programming languages have grammars that are very close to being operator precedence languages, so in the early days of parsing there were a lot of attempts to extend precedence parsing to handle more general grammars. After SLR/LALR parsing was developed, most of this work stopped.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! That sounds awfully limiting if I'm being honest, even if a language is 'mostly' well-behaved... I can't say I can see how you could use preprocessing to get around the limitations since it would seem that doing so properly would require already parsing the input. It sounds like a nice method for when it works but it doesn't really sound like it would substitute for LR?

<comment><USER5> Not really limiting. Crockford used it in jslint [0][1][2] to parse JavaScript, and OIL Shell also uses it [3] to parse a shell language.

[0] [https://youtu.be/Nlqv6NtBXcA](https://youtu.be/Nlqv6NtBXcA) [1] [https://crockford.com/javascript/tdop/tdop.html](https://crockford.com/javascript/tdop/tdop.html) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator- precedence_parser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator-precedence_parser) [3] [https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/31.html](https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/31.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The layout engine is making the lines too long, which combined with hard line breaks means that this is what I get:

        ************************
        ***
        ************************
        *****
        ************************
        **
        ************************
        ****

<comment><USER7> Honestly, the custom layouting on this website is cute but I wish the author would ship proper HTML code instead and accept the _slightly_ (if that!) inferior layouting of the browser engine.

At the moment the layouting als breaks the expected behaviour when selecting the text (double-click usually selects a word, but on this website it selects a seemingly arbitrary sentence fragment). But this doesn't matter because copy&paste is broken anway, since all spaces are removed (but random hyphens are instead included. uhm.)

Furthermore, the layout engine seems to attempt some microtypography corrections implemented by pdfTeX but does so relatively badly (dashes protrude too far, other punctuation doesn't protrude at all; punctuation is broken incorrectly across lines; ). In sum, I'm not convinced this layout is actually even better than the browser's, even ignoring the bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The code snippets use JS in a very non idiomatic way — which makes this post interesting IMHumbleO

There are few mutations that could be removed to have a clearer/purer functional approach, BTW

</comment><comment><USER9> I recently was looking at the original LR paper by Knuth, and for the first time noticed that it said "Case Institute of Technology" at the top.

i.e. he discovered it as an undergrad.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, there was a lot more not terribly complex yet still foundational stuff to be discovered then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What language is being used in the snippets?

<comment><AUTHOR> Javascript

<comment><USER11> Lol I thought it might be. The dialect has changed a lot since I last dabbled in JS.

<comment><USER12> It's come a very long way.

<comment><USER13> Not really.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Walmart Is Changing Its Official Name - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/12/06/walmart-stores-name <comment><USER2> From Wal-mart to Walmart. Saved you a click.

<comment><USER3> Well, Wal-Mart stores to Walmart. Not any more exciting however

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://fortune.com/2017/12/06/walmart-stores- name/](http://fortune.com/2017/12/06/walmart-stores-name/) non-amp link

<comment><USER4> Yeah thanks, I always check the domain before clicking a link and was surprised to see google.com...was in part the reason why I clicked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please, please, please, no amp links here!</comment>


Global Wealth 2013 report published by Credit Suisse - <AUTHOR> https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/news-and-expertise/topics/wealth.article.html/article/pwp/news-and-expertise/2013/10/en/global-wealth-reaches-new-all-time-high.html

<comment><USER2> Most revealing numbers of the "booming economy" report with its "average peaks" are hidden at the bottom last paragraph.

 _Taken together, the bottom half of the global population own less than 1 percent of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest 10 percent hold 86 percent of the world's wealth, and the top 1 percent alone account for 46 percent of global assets._</comment>


Ask HN: Do you own any vintage computers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A pre-release Amiga with the signatures of team members molded into the underside of the cover. Including mine. [http://obligement.free.fr/gfx/a1000-signatures_2.jpg](http://obligement.free.fr/gfx/a1000-signatures_2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, how can I enumerate them all? But here are the ones set up in the room, not counting what's not rigged yet:

Commodore KIM-1, Commodore 128DCR, Tomy Tutor, Apple IIgs, Canon Cat, IMSAI 8080,

game systems: Atari 2600 (Darth Vader variety), GTE Sylvania Intellivision, Bally Astrocade

Other systems set up that could be considered vintage: Outbound Notebook, Mac IIci (with MacIvory III), Power Mac 7300 with G4/800, Color Classic with Mystic board, Quadra 800, BeBox/133, Solbourne S3000, VAXstation 3100 M76, SGI Indy, SGI Indigo2, QuikPak Amiga 4000T, beige box DOS 486, ThinkPad 860 (AIX 4.1.5), RDI PrecisionBook (PA-RISC), RDI SparcBook

and more recent: Power Mac G4 MDD, Samsung AlphaPC 164LX, SGI Fuel, Power Mac G5 Quad, Sun Ultra-3, Sega Dreamcast

typed on a Talos II

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a large collection of digital equipment corp. flip chips in original packaging. I suspect they'd work in dec-10, pdp8 and pdp11 contexts (before the lsi-11 at least).

Dumpster diving from behind a university computer centre..

</comment><comment><USER5> I own a ZX81. It's not working.

I own an acoustic coupler. It is enormous.

I used to own an Atari XE, a luggable CP/M thing (I can't remember the brand, but Osborne or Burroughs might be it), a HPUX machine with monitor (sync on green and _heavy_ ), an Atari ST, and a Mac Performa something ro other. I lost these after an illegal eviction.

[http://www.thegameconsole.com/atari-xe/](http://www.thegameconsole.com/atari- xe/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I bought an old Commodore for a penny at a surplus sale when I was 10. I could barely lift it, and had to use my skateboard to get it home.

Here is some info from someone else who has the same machine [https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/commal-1000.html](https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/commal-1000.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> This year I got rid of most of my old computers, due to me emigrating to another country and because many were broken. Most were previously owned by my father who later in his life defected to Windows. Included were:

\- An Apple II (might still have that one)

\- 2 TI-99/4a computers and a Peripheral Expansion Box (learned programming on this machine with my father, expanded memory with 32k at some point)

\- Mac Plus

\- Mac Classic II

\- Mac Color Classic

\- Mac Quadra 660av

\- My brother's Mac Performa 5210

\- My PowerMac G4 and iMac G4 "lamp" \- probably still have both of these

</comment><comment><USER8> Many Oldest: Commodore PET 2001 Lots of Commodore 8-bits, (not the "whole set" but a significant portion) Some Atari 8Bits Apple IIc Various other bits and bobs.

Heh... probably sold/traded off as many other models as the ones I still have

Advantage: living nearish Silicon Valley but not in it - Disadvantage: apartment life.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have a non-functional Sparcstation IPX that spent _years_ in the trunk of the car of one of my dad's coworkers. I took the electronics out and intend to build something cool inside _any day now_.

I also had a C64 when I was about 6 yo, and I'd like to fetch one from ebay or somewhere and restore it. Any day now, too .

</comment><comment><USER10> APPLE ][+ Apple //e Timex sinclair 1000 Radio shack 100 Heathkit microcontroller trainer Rockwell aim RCA COSMAC ELF trainer Sun 3/80 Sun Sparc station 1 Tatung Sparc 2

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, an Apple //c, a RISC-PC 600, a Commodore 64, and a Vectrex. And soon to own a ZX Spectrum Next, which is a modern vintage computer.

<comment><USER11> Also an Apple IIGS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I own an Aristo 868, a Hemmi No. 149, a 62/83N and a mint condition NOS 2/83N. Also an HP-48GX.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a Tadpole portable SPARC UNIX (Solaris) computer from the early 1990s.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hmm.

I have a Tandy Model I 16K, and a Commodore C64. Pretty sure they both work.

I probably have others ...

</comment><comment><USER15> \- Some old rs/6000;

\- Some Sun Ultrasparc based;

\- Some DEC/Compaq Alpha based;

\- Some HP Itanium based;

</comment><comment><USER16> sun 3/80 sparc ipx sparc ipc sparc station 5 sgi indigio a few hp & power pcs sitting in the garage, i should get rid of them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Atari 800.</comment>