The Teflon Toxin - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/ <comment><USER2> What struck me most about this article is how much rationalization occurred. I'm amazed that a (presumably licensed) doctor can in one breath say they have a moral responsibility to safeguard the public, their workers and the environment, then in the next breath describe why the results of their own study didn't apply.

But looking inward, I wonder if our industry doesn't do the same thing in many cases - what about:

\- Eye strain caused by lack of contrast due to our favorite color palette.

\- Stress induced by unintelligible workflows.

\- Failure to protect a user's privacy.

\- Programs that induce RSI.

I realize this is a far cry from polluting the environment with toxins, but shouldn't we at least think about these factors more often?

<comment><USER3> _> \- Failure to protect a user's privacy._

Advertising is our C8. It pollutes nearly every corner of the web with deception and manipulation. It is the cause of the cancer called click-bait. It is so profitable it has given rise to factories that pump out cheap junk "content", overwhelming anything of merit on the web[1][2]. Then, to extract even more from the devil in this Faustian bargain, we invade our very customer's privacy, selling our soul twice over.

Most of us avert our eyes from this moral abdication because it funds our high salaries and our get-rich-quick startup schemes[3]. Everyone seems happy with their "free" non-stick pans and waterproof boots, so why spoil the party?

 _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."_ – Upton Sinclair

If you agree with me, send me an email. I'm starting a project to whistle blow, to raise awareness, to inspire change.

[1] Most people will miss this article about C8 because it doesn't stand a chance against all the ad-supported garbage. The Intercept doesn't do click- bait. Journalism, a cornerstone of democracy, is dying. This toxin analogy is sadly too accurate.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761)

-

 _> I realize this is a far cry from polluting the environment with toxins, but shouldn't we at least think about these factors more often?_

Yes, demand a better work environment, but please don't compare "eye strain caused by lack of contrast due to our favorite color palette" and "Stress induced by unintelligible workflows" with an environmental toxin that never existed until we created it, is now "in the blood of 99.7 percent of Americans", causes cancer and birth defects, and may outlive humanity. Many jobs have some stress on the body or mind or risks to life and limb (manual labor, fire fighting). It is called "work" after all. The fire department is not being evil. Dupont and 3M are. I hope you can see the difference.

<comment><USER4> > Advertising is our C8.

This. Not to mention the malware that hitches rides on ad networks. Adblockers being the new condoms and all that.

<comment><USER5> Nah, we can always protect ourselves from ads or malware. Worst case we can go completely offline or use an extremely locked down system.

C8 and similar compounds pollute the only inhabitable planet we have access to, there's no escape from the pollution. The man-made C8 will remain in the water and soil far longer than any human will be around, but before that it will accumulate in our bodies and poison us. And C8 is just one such compound, how many more are there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And the settlement reached was around 0.0086 DuPont's yearly revenue to be provided for education, water treatment facilities and medical expenses of the class action members.

Is that really going to deter them from doing it again? Where is the real penalty?

[http://www.hpcbd.com/Personal-Injury/DuPont-C8/C8-Class- Acti...](http://www.hpcbd.com/Personal-Injury/DuPont-C8/C8-Class-Action- Settlement.shtml)

<comment><USER7> > And the settlement reached was around 0.0086 DuPont's yearly revenue to be > provided for education, water treatment facilities and medical expenses of > the class action members.

> Is that really going to deter them from doing it again? Where is the real > penalty?

Stefano Quintarelli, an Italian ISP-owner-turned-ITC-journalist has the nice habit of converting those "huge" fines ("millions of euros!") into equivalent fines for people with normal incomes. In this case he would write

"The equivalent fine for a person with an average income of € 30k per year would had been € 258."

<comment><USER8> this is great, I'd like to see this in every news article!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of- court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X...If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

What applies to the Car Industry (via Dialogue from Fight Club) applies to the Chemical Industry in Spades. DuPont Knew (or strongly suspected) that C8 & (Teflon) were causing Cancers, Birth Defects etc. But the cost was going to be too high to move away so they all "kicked the can down the road".

Time to sock them with a multi-billion dollar verdict after some of these people are locked up for long periods.

<comment><USER10> The crazier thing is that for negligence torts (cars would be products liability, which is different), that's exactly how the law works.

It's called the "Hand Formula" and you are only liable for negligence when PL > B, where P is the probability of loss, L is the gravity of loss, and B is the cost of avoiding the risk.

In practice though, it can be hard to argue that sort of thing. It's a little academic.

<comment><USER11> Yes, of course. In a resource-constrained world, i.e. the world we live in, spending more on prevention than the expected loss makes no sense.

Refusing to spend $10 to avoid a $5 expected loss is not negligence, it's economic common sense.

(You should still be liable for the loss if _someone else_ is experiencing the risk. You should be liable to compensate them fairly, but it's not _negligence_ ).

In fact in a world with scarce risk prevention resources, PL = B is not even a sufficient criteria to say you should spend to prevent the risk, because there might be opportunities to prevent greater losses elsewhere; i.e. you should not be investing to prevent PL = B type risks if there exists PL >>> B type risks. (For a finance analogy, if you are capital-constrained, you don't want to put your money in any investment with a positive ROI, you want to put you money in investments that have _the highest_ ROI.)

In other words, spending $10 to prevent a $10 expected loss risk when there is an opportunity to prevent a $100 expected loss risk for the same expenditure makes no sense.

But since we're not smart enough to cooperate and globally allocate the total risk-prevention budget to minimize losses, locally and in terms of personal responsibility PL = B is a decent rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've never understood the gravity of Teflon pans. I can never seem to keep them non-stick, whether it be because of using too high of heat or somehow scratch the damn thing.

So, I got cast irons. It's trivial to keep them seasoned and thus non-stick, and they can take the beating of very high heat -- searing meats -- and any metal utensils or rough substances.

<comment><USER13> How do you keep them seasoned? I tried a couple of times, but couldn't get it right. Could you give me some tips?

<comment><USER14> Serious Eats has a very comprehensive guide [1]. The short version is rub lightly with canola oil, put in hot oven for about 30 minutes. Take it out and oil again. Repeat 3-5 times.

The only thing you need to avoid while cooking is overly acidic foods. If you try to make a tomato sauce in it you will see the seasoning flake off. That's not good, but is very easily fixed by repeating the above steps.

To clean it, scour the plan with kosher salt and a paper towel. Once clean, coat lightly in canola oil.

[1]: [http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/06/how-to-buy-season- clean-m...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/06/how-to-buy-season-clean- maintain-cast-iron-pans.html)

<comment><USER15> For acidic things, buy an enameled cast iron. Those things are also great. They need no seasoning, but are a bit more delicate (you don't want the enamel to chip or crack).

<comment><USER16> I grew up with traditional CI cookware. I know how to season it and how to wash it.

The roommate recently purchased an enameled cast iron skillet. The use and care guide was pretty poorly written. So, a couple of stupid questions on the topic follow:

* The coating inside the pan is enamel, and doesn't need maintenance?

* One needs to not use metal utensils (or steel wool) in order to not damage the coating?

* One can wash the damn thing with soap and water without harming the coating?

Thanks in advance. :D

<comment><USER17> As I understand it,

* no maintenance for inside

* don't use steel wool. With a stubborn stain I use a little baking soda, which some folks say is ok and others forbid. I use metal utensils despite being told not to. I use them gently and accept a few scratches; I try to avoid cutting things in the pan. I also wear contacts while swimming because I'm that kind of rebel. Meh.

* Soap + water = great :)

<comment><USER15> In addition, a lot of enamel will just stain after some time, which is normal; This is why some of the vendors are just going with black enamel these days, instead of the long-used white. I haven't tried baking soda to clear up the stains on mine, I'll have to give it a shot.

Also, if the enamel cracks inside the cooking area of the pan, you may want to throw out the pan; it may expose your food to contact with toxins used in adhering the enamel.

<comment><USER18> I'd be more worried about eating chips of (sharp, hard) enamel than any toxins - the firing process is not going to leave much other than the ceramic behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Horrible. This is what's so scary about the free market and our current chemical regulations of innocent until proved guilty.

People cover up, even the biggest most "professional" here (DuPont), and the public gets decades of abuse.

Why is it that medication requires FDA approval with lots of animal/human tests before you can sell it, but chemicals do not? Here the tests internally done showed prove of issue year after year, and would have been a big red flag.

<comment><USER20> Free markets when supported by strong property rights can have strong protections to prevent harm or pollution.

Non free markets, although regulated, don't necessarily perform better and can even perform worse in this regard. The FDA is a great example of an agency which often can be seen to work harder to protect the industry than the individual. For example, look up the story of Vioxx. A drug which killed 50k people, passed all FDA processes and when the manufacturer was caught hiding data showing this would happen the product was not even removed from the market as that would have opened the door for lawsuits against the manufacturer.

<comment><USER21> > Free markets when supported by strong property rights can have strong > protections to prevent harm or pollution.

Can someone explain how this is supposed to work? I don't mean to sound rude/biased but this sounds like one of those cases where the theory is sound but when it meets with reality we get unpredictable(and sometimes disastrous) results.

<comment><USER22> In Economics, the Coase Theorem[1] predicts close to this outcome, although it speaks to efficient outcomes and not necessarily harm reducing outcomes. When strong property rights exist (and it is feasible for all parties to negotiate), then parties may reach an efficient allocation of resources regardless of how the resources were initially allocated.

To use a typical example, imagine a train track runs through a farmer's land and sparks from the train sets the farmer's wheat on fire, causing monetary harm. If the train company owns the tracks, then the farmer should be willing to pay to put spark guards along the tracks to protect his crop. Alternatively, if the farmer owns the tracks, the train company should be willing to pay for the damage to the crop to ensure that it can continue to operate.

In practice, there may be costs associated with negotiations (e.g. lawyers), it may be infeasible to negotiate between all parties (e.g. if there are many farmers affected), or property rights are not sufficiently strong for one party to bar another from producing negative externalities, all of which can lead to failures of the theorem.

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

<comment><USER23> The sparking train analogy fails because it supposes a single obvious entity causing a large amount of damage to a single person.

To modify the analogy to fit the real-world situation, it would be more like if there were a million train tracks going all over the place, and the sparks from each train falls on millions of wheat fields, such that everyone lives in a diffuse cloud of sparks, and no single fire can be blamed on any individual train, and the harm from any single train is relatively small, even though the collective effect is extremely damaging.

The Coase Theorem assumes that transaction costs are negligible. In a many-to- many situation like real-world pollution, transaction costs necessarily become prohibitively large, because you basically have a quadratic explosion of connections between polluters and victims (many of whom are also polluters!).

<comment><USER22> Just wanted to point out that you restated what was said in the parent.

>In practice, there may be costs associated with negotiations (e.g. lawyers), it may be infeasible to negotiate between all parties (e.g. if there are many farmers affected), or property rights are not sufficiently strong for one party to bar another from producing negative externalities, all of which can lead to failures of the theorem.

<comment><USER23> Yes, I was just trying to reinforce and generalize that, not try to argue anything.

<comment><USER22> Gotcha

<comment><USER23> And, sorry, I probably could have made that a little more clear! Like it or not, the default on the internet is often to assume argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the topic of chemical, how do you know if something is dangerous -- in the context of household item? Even with the MSDS and/or knowledge of the compositions, layman doesn't really have any sense on how dangerous something is (as it's all missing dosage). I'm a bit on the paranoid side (mostly because I think my roommate/ housemate has always been too liberal with spraying chemicals crap everywhere), and most of the time, even if I wanted to I have no idea if I want to use something in my house.

<comment><USER25> >even if I wanted to I have no idea if I want to use something in my house.

Everything in your house is toxic. Pick up anything with the ingredients on the label and google a random one that has a funny name. Then read about it on wikipedia and you can go further from there if you want and see the studies. Chances are it is very toxic but it's used in small ammounts so you shouldn't worry about it because the effects only show up after years and years of use.

Then look at the unlabeled stuff and food packaging. What's it made of? What is it coloured with? What's in the glue that holds it together? What does the paper have in it?

Checkout the uses for isothiazolinone and related compounds like methylchloroisothiazolinone if you are curious about something that's in practically everything.

<comment><USER24> I think that's exactly the point I was trying to make. I know that whether something is dangerous or not depends entirely on the concentration, and/or the form of it (ie solid metal lead isn't too scary, any type of its compound is). Unfortunately, I can't know the concentration(since packaging obviously doesn't mention it), and I don't know what's the threshold I should be careful about either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> More on C8, the chemical discussed in this article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid)

</comment><comment><USER27> As the article says: this is another tobacco case, so they'll deny everything even with fake/bought peer-reviewed studies. Just look how they treat their own workers... My family already moved from non-stick cookware to stainless steel. Consider doing the same in the mean time. As with the tobacco this will be a marathon, and hopefully common sense will win.

</comment><comment><USER28> Stick with cast iron ( or even aluminium ) chef's skillets. Season them with oil or lard and build up that patina. No need for any teflon or manufacturing. Plus the heft and look is way cooler. If you want to cook on plastic, do it in a microwave. :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Question - I use these pans: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Circulon-Infinite-Hard- Anodised-Skil...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Circulon-Infinite-Hard-Anodised- Skillet/dp/B003ZYERM0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439371445&sr=8-1&keywords=circulon+infinite+30cm)

They are non-stick. But are they covered with Teflon? I honestly don't know. They are oven safe up to 240C, I can put them in the dishwasher...they are seriously the most durable pans I've ever used, unlike normal Tefal Teflon covered pans which scratch easily. Does anyone know?

<comment><USER30> These are Hard Anodized pans, and they don't use Teflon. I've got this set of Circulon pans from Costco [1]; absolutely no problems and my friends have been equally impressed with the non-stick properties. You can especially see it when making something like scrambled eggs where the egg just doesn't stick.

[1]: [http://www.costco.com/Circulon%C2%AE-Premier-Professional- Ha...](http://www.costco.com/Circulon%C2%AE-Premier-Professional-Hard- Anodized-Nonstick-13-Piece-Cookware-Set.product.100104723.html)

<comment><USER31> The pans you linked to do have a Teflon coating. Look at the fourth bullet point under "Features," where it says it uses DuPont Autograph. Autograph is a product within the Teflon line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You can make superhydrophobic surfaces with laser etching that affects the nano structure of the metal. Thus if you take a strong metal and laser etch it there is no need for potentially dangerous Teflon coating.

[https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/superhydrophobic- metals...](https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/superhydrophobic- metals-85592/)

<comment><USER33> Except doing that on a large scale would be super expensive.

<comment><USER34> Why? Typically, whenever you do something in the large scale, you can amortize the capital cost of the equipment to zero (economy of scale) and if the product is popular, inventors will come up with cheaper ways to run the manufacturing facility.

That said, lasers do use lots of power so it will probably be marginally more expensive.

<comment><USER35> It's not just capital cost for equipment that needs to be considered at this stage, but also the research needed to make suitable equipment for large scale production. Per the article, a 1"x1" section of metal takes an hour.

Maybe some day, but then "there is no need for potentially dangerous Teflon coating in 10-15 years" would be more appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I guessed this might be about PFOA when I saw the headline! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid) has the whole story, minus the anecdotes. Apparently a few parts per billion of PFOA in your drinking water is enough to detectably raise your risk of some cancers. Most environmental regulatory agencies propose 0.5 to 1 ppb as a safe limit for _drinking water_ , while 4–5 ppb _blood serum levels_ of PFOA are currently common among "unexposed Germans".

I was pleased to see that they aren't hyping the risk of cooking on Teflon.

</comment><comment><USER37> Teflon has been known to be toxic for years. I'm not sure why "default trust" is a good position when dealing with companies like DuPont and Monsanto that have been caught lying to the public before. "Default suspicion" seems like the more cautious and logical approach here.

It's been more than a decade since I cooked with Teflon. I use glass, stainless steel, cast iron, or ceramic/enamel (love that old original Corningware from eBay!).

Much like eating real food, it's not hard to switch and the result tastes better.

<comment><USER38> > and the result tastes better

I don't doubt all your other points, but why did you include this one?

Are you claiming that teflon-coated surfaces somehow add a taste, or demonstrably change the texture of the food cooked on it?

<comment><USER37> I've tried both and like the result from stainless steel and Corningware better. Granted, I was using older-style pans made a decade or so ago. YMMV, though the Teflon is not healthy for high-heat cooking. I avoid it, why bother?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I highly recommend watching The Human Experiment documentary about chemicals, toxins and the chemical industry strong lobby. It's available on Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER40> > A DuPont lawyer referred to C8 as "the material 3M sells us that we poop to > the river and into drinking water along the Ohio River."

Yet another lovely thing I'm sure I ingested when I grew up drinking tap water in New Orleans what with the Ohio being the biggest tributary to the Mississippi.

</comment><comment><USER41> It may seem nit-picky, but the word "toxin" refers to a harmful substance produced by a living organism (e.g. snake venom). For a synthesized or manufactured chemical that is harmful, "toxicant" or simply toxic chemical is the correct term.

</comment><comment><USER42> All that teflon is going somewhere when it falls off the pan. Its going in the food and into your body. I'd rather not run that experiment.

So many years ago I started using a glass frying pan.

<comment><USER43> Teflon itself is pretty much inert. That's the whole point - nothing reacts with it, nothing sticks to it. The worry is about the chemicals used to manufacture it.

<comment><USER19> Heat your Teflon pans with nothing in it and it'll kill a canary. Hardly inert.

<comment><USER44> Heat it with oil and it will kill the canary at a lower temperature than teflon.

Ergo oil is toxic.

You are using bad logic and bad science.

<comment><USER19> Where are you getting that info?

<comment><USER44> From the FDA. Before they approved teflon for use in cookware they tested it vs oil.

Oil was found to be toxic at a lower temperature than teflon, making teflon safer than oil for high heat cooking.

Obviously when I say "oil is toxic" I'm being sarcastic.

<comment><USER45> Not that I'm doubting you, but can I have the source for your claim? I want to present it to my chemophobic friends.

<comment><USER44> [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0002889738506828](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0002889738506828)

Exposure of Japanese Quail and Parakeets to the Pyrolysis Products of Fry Pans Coated with Teflon® and Common Cooking Oils

Lethal temperature:

butter: 260°C/500°F

Teflon: 330°C/626°F

plastic handle: 370°C/698°F

<comment><USER19> Fascinating. Luckily butter almost never gets to those temperatures. We're obviously different animals, and it seems that birds can eat butter, so I wonder what it is about oils specifically that kills them. Likely the mechanism will be different from PTFE and PFOA and maybe incompatible with humans who also suffer from large-scale inhalation (see article). We don't know much about long term PTFE/PFOA inhalation in small quantities.

So it seems to be that cast iron itself, heated, doesn't cause the bird to die. Cast iron + butter kills the bird, but so does teflon + butter. So in butter-less dry pan to dry pan scenarios, cast iron is non-toxic yet teflon is toxic.

As you can see here [1] if you leave your pan on the stove heated it can hit these toxic temperatures within minutes. So the exposure to the gas isn't hypothetical. Dry pan toxicity is a real concern which is unique to Teflon.

Then there's digesting it since it will slowly wear off into your food. We don't have science specifically looking at long-term slow exposure to PTFE/PFOA. So you're taking your chances... but we do know that PFOA is much less inert than PFTE when digested.

Non-stick pans won't last as long as cast iron or stainless steel, and cast iron can perform like non-stick while also adding flavor and necessary iron. Oh and cast iron can be often as cheap or cheaper than non-stick (except for the super crazy low end, but talk about most likely to be toxic...), and most certainly is cheaper in the long run (I'll have my great-grandmother's pan for the rest of my life which I do 90% of my cooking in... try that with your teflon).

So if you don't need non-stick pans, so why voluntarily expose yourself to the risk?

[1] [http://buffalobirdnerd.com/clients/8963/documents/Teflon.pdf](http://buffalobirdnerd.com/clients/8963/documents/Teflon.pdf)

<comment><USER44> > so I wonder what it is about oils specifically that kills them

I think it's just the smoke, nothing special about oil or teflon. I wonder if smokers have a problem with bird health?

Cast iron has oil on it when seasoned. I suspect the study used "clean" cast iron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wait... _so nobody even got life-in-prison for this shit??!!_

My gut reaction is the we should _seriously consider_ resurrecting worse-than- death-penalty sanctions for the executives and scientists involved. I'd propose something like this for the fully-informed company executives and free acting scientists: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations)

</comment><comment><USER47> This was one of the best investigative reports I've read. Thanks for sharing this cover-up.

</comment><comment><USER48> Teflon is an insulator compare to iron. Thermal conductivity W/(m K) Teflon 0.25, Iron 80[1]. So Teflon coating reduces cooking, heating efficiency. [1]engineeringtoolbox.com

</comment><comment><USER49> Tl;dr? How badly am I destroying my health by using a Teflon pan?

<comment><USER50> Now Teflon has not C8 on it as it is manufactured.

You will create dangerous compounds though if your pan goes over high temperature. This could happen if for example there is no oil in the pan. I have seen housewives and cookers heat the Teflon pan without oil for evaporating the water. Big no no with Teflon.

I have seen metal scrappers burning teflon pans to use the pan for something else and painting it!(with teflon you can't paint it)

The big problems with exotic chemicals is that people could do extremely stupid stuff without them realizing they had done anything wrong.

It is not like red alarms will start ringing or something. It is just silent, and two years later you will have cancer.

<comment><USER49> >I have seen housewives and cookers heat the Teflon pan without oil for evaporating the water. Big no no with Teflon.

Oops... I regularly do this. Same question as previously.

<comment><USER50> I do this on cast iron. Never on Teflon.

You can use an oven thermocouple to measure the temp of your pan as you heat it without oil. If you do it once,and compare with the temps that are dangerous(you could see it on Internet) you will never do it again, as you will realize how fast temp goes up and how easy is to manufacture C8 with your pan.

Water acts as a limit of temperature, when it is wet it can't go higher than 100 Celsius(locally, it can in the parts of the pan that are dry). But once all water is gone, it goes hot incredibly fast. Oil does the same but with higher temperature than water, with way higher boiling pressure.

If someone does this mistake in one of my Teflon pans, I just throw it away. I never trust pans that are not mine.

Obviously, when you see smoke in the oil it is not good either.

By the way most of my pans are ceramic or cast iron.

<comment><USER44> > Obviously, when you see smoke in the oil it is not good either.

Exactly. The important takeaway here is that teflon becomes toxic only _after_ the smoke point of the oil. i.e. oil is more toxic at high temperature.

So putting in the oil doesn't protect you from toxic fumes since you get those from the oil, but rather it gives a visible signal (smoke), that you could quickly turn off the heat because you are about to damage your pan. But as far as toxic fumes go it's too late - you already had those from the oil.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaFX 2: ListView - <AUTHOR> http://zoranpavlovic.blogspot.com/2012/05/javafx-2-ui-controls-listview.html This is tutorial about JavaFX 2 ListView. The ListView class represents a scrollable list of items. Below is a example how our ListView will look in the end of this tutorial. In this tutorial, I am going to create JavaFX 2 ListView and implement OnMouseClicked Event Handler <comment><USER2> I have not been following JavaFX along for some time because it seemed abandoned. Is there any news? And, could someone give some context: What is special about this tutorial? Seems like nothing post-worthy at first sight...

<comment><USER3> JavaFX is no longer a script language ,it's now supported more than ever by oracl ,and you can now use it as an API, on the other hand Swing is no longer supported

<comment><USER2> ah, thanks! thats neat. Had I had a real look at the source code I would have noticed. but the prospect of knowing how to do a simple list view did not seem that interesting to actually scroll down...</comment></comment></comment>


Tumbling Interest Rates in Europe Leaves Some Banks Owing Money on Loans - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-interest-benchmarks-go-negative-banks-may-have-to-pay-borrowers-1428939338

<comment><USER2> The thing is that the bank is still doing OK out of this (as is the customer obviously).

Banks have the ability to raise capital. Then they can do something with the capital or they can leave it in the bank, in this case the central bank, who would give them negative interest. If they lend it to a customer who buys a house then they will get slightly better return on their capital with that customer (Trying to avoid the term "a less bad return").

As long as it's a temporary thing then the banks will ride it out and the customers will remember it fondly.

<comment><USER3> Most banks raise capital by holding deposits from customers. If the bank now tells me that it's going to charge me -1% for my savings account, I'm going to pull that money out and keep it in a safe.

Think about how aggressively banks compete on "no fee" accounts, and how aggressive customers are about moving their money to avoid fees. Mint, for example, practically sounds an alarm on my phone whenever I get charged a bank fee.

<comment><USER4> You might think twice about the safe if you had to keep, say, $800,000 in there.

<comment><USER3> 1% of $800,000 is $8,000. I can rent multiple large safe deposit boxes in that same bank, with plenty of room for 8,000 $100 bills, for a few hundred $ per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to borrow 100 trillion dollars please. I won't actually do anything with it, so you don't need to worry about my credit or ability to repay. In fact, I'll happily keep it in my account at your bank!

<comment><USER6> I think if you don't have 100 trillion in assets to secure the loan with they might not give you the favorable rates that people got on these mortgages.

<comment><USER5> Do the 100 trillion in assets have to be marked to market, or can I make up whatever price I'd like and they have to accept it as valid? If it's the latter, that'll be no problem at all!

<comment><USER6> I expect the banks would want to value the assets themselves.

<comment><USER5> I know, I'm making a tongue-in-cheek reference to the banking crisis in 2008 where for a time the banks didn't have to mark their assets to market, but were instead allowed to hold them at "other" valuations.

<comment><USER7> Mark-to-market really is the best thing since sliced bread -- until you end up with a liquidity crisis and the only market left is fire-sale prices, in which case it just amplifies the crisis and (further?) undermines the entire notion of banks being risk-tolerant entities who are in business for the long haul instead of just chasing after the next quarter's results.

Much like in 2008.

This isn't a problem with an easy answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Zero is an arbitrary limit - It may have a psychological signal, but there is no reason it should be more shocking that the rates drop under zero than when they dropped under 0.1% or any other number.

<comment><USER9> Time value of money - meaning that its better to have a $1 today rather than a $1 tomorrow - isn't really an arbitrary thing. If its not true, then we have deflation.

<comment><USER4> There are two concepts here:

1\. $1 today might buy you less stuff than $1 tomorrow would. For example, maybe today $1 will buy you three today-apples, but tomorrow $1 will buy you five tomorrow-apples. This is arbitrary. The example shows deflation in apples, but there's no reason, a priori, that today should be better or worse than tomorrow, whether measured in apples or any other dimension. Maybe tomorrow $1 will get you two tomorrow-apples.

2\. Under the assumption that the buying power of $1 is fixed and eternal, $1 today is _necessarily_ better than $1 tomorrow because you have more options. Among other things, you might die later today. This phenomenon can't reverse, it can only make earlier money (or anything else) more valuable than later money. But it's not the same idea as #1.

Deflation is an idea related to concept #1. $1 today being better than $1 tomorrow is concept #2.

<comment><USER7> The traditional point made for #2 isn't about the fact you could _die_ but more that $1 today could be invested in some profit-making enterprise (directly or through a bank account paying interest).

For a concrete non-financial-system example, $1000 today could let you re- insulate your home, saving you $250 over the course of the next winter. Every year you put off that $1000 then costs you around $250 (modulo any depreciation and the variability of heating costs).

The thing that's a little different with the banking system is that you're not just getting paid for the time value of your deposited money and the returns it could get in the economy writ large, you're losing a little bit for the sake of safety (deposit insurance) and liquidity (you can withdraw money from a bank account any time, unlike if you had issued a mortgage loan directly yourself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would banks lend to homeowners at less than 1% spread? That seems extremely low.

<comment><USER11> A mortgage is basically a commodity, so a as long as you have several competing actors margins should approach zero. Secondly banks can bundle a bunch of other services together with a mortgage so they can condition the low rates on the customer buying into other higher margin products .

<comment><USER12> > A mortgage is basically a commodity, so a as long as you have several > competing actors margins should approach zero.

No, it should approach the chance that it won't get paid back, which is decidedly not zero.

<comment><USER11> The margins the banks make should approach zero, and that takes into account the fact that sometimes they'll get back slightly less than they lend out. However to get the type of interest rates we are talking about here you can probably only borrow at about 75-80% the price of the house and only for a relatively secure house, so the expected payback for the banks is pretty close to 1.0.

<comment><USER3> Would you like to explain that to all of the American banks who lost billions of dollars when housing prices crashed?

Also, when a customer defaults on a mortgage, the bank gets "one house", not the cash value of the house. The bank then has to care for the house, list it with a broker who takes a sales commission, pay property taxes on the house, fix any damages that the prior owner may have left, and sell the house (which in the US housing crash meant competing against dozens of other foreclosures on the market in the same neighborhood).

<comment><USER11> _when a customer defaults on a mortgage, the bank gets "one house", not the cash value of the house._

In the US. We're talking about Europe here and the laws are different. But in most parts of Europe you can't just hand over the keys to your house and be clear of your loan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I wish all these stories would do is capture what the net-impact is at the end of the month after all the fees are considered.

For example, is there anyone who has ever _netted_ a positive return at the end of the month?

<comment><USER14> Banks have quite a few tricks up their sleeves.

I know of some cases where they massively mark up the life insurance policy fee % for their loans (particularly mortgages such as in this case), it's not such a significant fee but it's very profitable and it adds up (and more than offsets the interest rate loss I guess). You can hypothetically switch life insurance providers, but they probably don't even have a procedure and the bank would end up declining your loan.

<comment><USER15> This is interesting, so this mean that you can not change the insurance company of your house offered by the bank to other company during the mortage?

<comment><USER14> I'm talking about life insurance on loans (Mortgage Protection Insurance), not fire or house insurance on mortgages which is much more flexible.

Also, it depends on the bank. I'm pretty sure it must be much easier in the U.S., the cases I know of are in South America (they basically won't give you the mortgage unless you use their approved overpriced life insurance, which is very low compared to the principal anyways).

It seems that it's a little less dodgy in the U.S., but not too much:

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/052014...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/052014/why-you-dont-need-mortgage-protection-life-insurance.asp)

Edit: a related case in Canada:

[http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/04/15/Insurance-Giant- Defraud/](http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/04/15/Insurance-Giant-Defraud/)

Edit: exactly what I'm talking about, an English example

[http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?39...](http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?396772-Is- Life-Insurance-compulsory-on-a-mortgage)

Edit: another example of how banks use other products to drive profits, but this one misfired:

[http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-3035922/B...](http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-3035922/Banks- forced-pay-billions-compensation-mis-selling-payment-protection- insurance.html)

Wikipedia article:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_protection_insurance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_protection_insurance)

" the insurance would commonly make the bank/provider more money than the interest on the original loan, such that many mainstream personal loan providers made little or no profit on the loans themselves; all or almost all profit was derived from PPI commission and profit share "

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm sure their respective governments can do something about this tragedy. The banks always win, everyone else always loses; that's Capitalism 101!</comment>


Trump Surprises G20 with Huawei Concession: U.S. Companies Can Sell to Huawei - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2019/06/29/trump-surprises-g20-with-huawei-concession-u-s-companies-can-sell-to-huawei/#3fcc28ed1e21 <comment><USER2> I'm not so surprised by this, let American companies sell but not buy.

</comment><comment><USER3> nAtIoNaL sEcuRiTy</comment>


Advice for Startup CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advice-for-startup-ceos

<comment><USER2> Some good advice in there.

But the best advice is this: be lucky

:-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am glad you are self analyzing yourself. Wag of the Finger at you, You got me Wrong!

Igor The Troll</comment>


Why majority of silicon valley founders are existentially depressed? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I think intelligence is kind of like a fountain. All the water being sprayed in the air is how smart you are. As the water gets higher, the individual drops are further apart from each other and from the source of the water.

Intelligence is similar, the smarter you are, the later you are in the "stream" and further you are from either people earlier in the "stream" or others who are at the same stage.

I think a lot of what makes existential depression (at least, if you are referring to the Dabrowski theory) [1] is the lonliness of having such a unique way of thinking.

Ignorance is bliss and most people do not worry about the world depleting resources, EMP attacks, meteorites, shifts in political discourse or other threats to humanity from such a "meta-self-aware" level. They just live their lives.

For very smart people, continually worrying about large scale threats to humanity instead of your own small problems is both inevitable and makes you feel powerless.

It is like the Peter Principal for environment threat neutralization. You will keep thinking of higher order threats to protect against until you run out of locus of control.

The theory also suggests that this can be overcome by deliberately accepting our limited locus of control, through love and relationships, and through contribution.

[1]: [http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/existential- depressio...](http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/existential-depression- in-gifted-individual)</comment>


A simple tool for bulletproof web typography - <AUTHOR> http://ffffallback.com/

<comment><USER2> Dup, see discussion here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2468376>

</comment><comment><USER3> Completely OT: I'd consider this to be one of the worst domain names ever.

<comment><USER4> You'll enjoy <http://rrrrthats5rs.com> then.</comment></comment>


CoreOS Stable Release - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/stable-release/ <comment><USER2> We recently switched (like 2 weeks ago) our project from deployment on ubuntu servers via 'git pull' managed with supervisord to docker/coreos/fleet, and it's been epic. While coreos is built for large clusters, we run a 3 host cluster in ec2, and couldn't be happier. We switched from multiple servers running 1 instance of each service to load balancing all instances on these 3 hosts. This increased uptime, made deployment and management easier, and gave us the benefits of docker as well (verifying things work locally).

There's only 2 real problems, both of them very minor:

* fleet managing state. We've had to manually kill containers sometimes, and destroy systemd services before we could start it again.

* all EC2 amis use ebs backed instances. We haven't used a higher-IOPs ebs backed instance because the only delay we see are in startup times (which doesn't matter, just longer rolling deploys). But an instance-backed ami would be nice.

<comment><USER3> How do you handle persistent storage in a fault-tolerant way?

You could technically pin your MySQL container to one host, but that seems to defeat the point of fleet. I considered trying to mount an iSCSI target to run the database from, but CoreOS doesn't have a working iSCSI initiator.

I guess I could just run all the persistent stuff on a more traditional OS, but then why mess with CoreOS at all?

<comment><USER2> We use Amazon RDS and S3. Only applications are run in the cluster.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this seems to be common.

CoreOS seems to do a decent job as the application layer for something operating in a larger cloud that provides database and file storage as services, like Amazon or OpenStack. However, I think Docker has the potential to eliminate the need for infrastructure-level "clouds" to be so complex. The basic unit can be the container instead of the instance, so you don't need fancy automated instance management and all that. It'd be nice if you could also obviate the need for the other external services, and just run everything in containers on metal.

I was really excited by CoreOS as a way to do this, but it seems to fighting me at every turn. It seems much easer to just wire together the REST APIs of several Ubuntu/CentOS nodes running Docker.

<comment><USER4> I haven't used CoreOS, mainly just watched, but have you tried deploying a Galera cluster at a scale of 5 containers?

That is more likely what they'd have in mind than a single MySQL master container.

<comment><USER5> Who uses Galera successfully? Every DBA I've ever spoken to about it has advised me to avoid it because it's incredibly deadlock-prone.

<comment><USER4> [http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2013/09/24/from-mysql- mmm-...](http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2013/09/24/from-mysql-mmm-to- mariadb-galera-cluster-a-high-availability-makeover)

That explains how they chose to minimize deadlocks.

Yes, if you use it incorrectly and/or for the wrong problem space, you will have issues. It isn't a magical solution to all problems. It is, however, an effective solution for a specific problem space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like Digital Ocean hopes to eventually support coreOS: [http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital- ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital- ocean/suggestions/4250154-suport-coreos-as-a-deployment-platform)

I can only find a tweet that linode is "considering" it: [https://twitter.com/linode/status/488045339023532032](https://twitter.com/linode/status/488045339023532032)

anyone have any other information re vps vendor support?

<comment><USER7> DO promises A LOT of features they do not deliver.

<comment><USER8> I personally think they will pull this one off, mainly because CoreOS will be providing support to the DO team and help however possible to make sure DO is added to the list of supported cloud vendors.

<comment><USER7> Ah yes, because FreeBSD hasn't offered their help already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a bit confused on the licensing here. CoreOS says it's Apache 2.0 licensed. But it also says its Linux. If it includes the Linux kernel, as it appears to, then those bits is licensed under the GPL and can not be re- licensed as Apache 2.0. So, it's a bit disingenuous to claim the whole package is Apache 2.0, since it isn't.

<comment><USER10> Where is the text you find confusing? What I found about licensing says "Code produced by the CoreOS team is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license." That's extremely clear about what the license applies to.

[http://coreos.com/products/](http://coreos.com/products/)

<comment><USER11> Yes, for people who understand licensing stuff. For the many people who don't, they could say that 3rd party components of CoreOS are under various open source licenses, but the code they produce is Apache 2.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm very excited about this release. CoreOS, Docker and etcd are a great fit for one another. I love the separation of concerns that is provided.

IMHO, the weakest part of CoreOS is fleet ([https://github.com/coreos/fleet](https://github.com/coreos/fleet)). Compared to the other components in the stack, it just feels very inelegant. The systemd configuration syntax is complex and ugly. I wonder if there will be work invested to upgrade fleet to something that is as elegant as e.g. etcd/Docker/CoreOS itself.

<comment><USER12> fleet definitely does not provide a nice integration with docker, and we're definitely trying to decide how we can provide a better integration story. And yes, systemd is complex, but with that complexity comes great power.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear you're thinking about this. Understanding the complexity provides power, but the tradeoff in this instance doesn't feel quite right.

For example, etcd is a powerful primitive, and then more complex/sophisticated systems can be built on top of it.

I wonder if an 80/20 solution that is simpler than fleet/systemd for pushing work into a CoreOS cluster would be a win, and then more complex systems (e.g. Kubernetes-esque orchestraction) could live on top of that.

<comment><USER13> I took one look at Kubernetes, and decided that for our purposes writing our own orchestration scripts from scratch would be simpler... So many of these systems are hopelessly overcomplicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm puzzled as to why it's called "stable," while at the same time it appears to require btrfs-on-root to be useful (i.e. for hosting Docker containers) but that part is "experimental."

Can someone from CoreOS clarify?

<comment><USER14> Where is it marked experimental on the website? Almost certainly a mistake.

<comment><USER15> He's talking about the PXE kernel option specifically: [http://coreos.com/docs/running-coreos/bare-metal/booting- wit...](http://coreos.com/docs/running-coreos/bare-metal/booting-with- pxe/#setting-up-pxelinux.cfg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Super great to see CoreOS making it to its first stable release. It really feels like the future.

I've been reading about using vulcand to do frontend deploys and traffic management ([http://coreos.com/blog/zero-downtime-frontend-deploys- vulcan...](http://coreos.com/blog/zero-downtime-frontend-deploys-vulcand/)) and using ambassadors to do dynamic routing to backend stores ([http://coreos.com/blog/docker-dynamic-ambassador-powered- by-...](http://coreos.com/blog/docker-dynamic-ambassador-powered-by-etcd/))

But it is hard to get my head around this - has anyone actually tied all of these concepts together in a deployment that they've written up?

</comment><comment><USER17> Flynn 1.0 release in 3, 2, 1... _crosses fingers_

<comment><USER18> Beta's coming soon and we're still on target to ship a production-grade stable version of the major features in a few months.

<comment><USER19> This is excellent news. Two weeks ago I looked into flynn and the various repos had very little activity compared to deis so I went with that for now.

Edit: I posted this just FYI. I thought it'd be useful to know. Perhaps this is a consequence of splitting the project across a large number of repos, where some of them don't get many commits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been using Vagrant/Virtual to run Ubuntu LTS for my Javascript dev env. Does it make sense switch to CoreOS? I generally run it as a headless server. No X-windows or GUI needed.

<comment><USER21> Stay for now on Ubuntu. Personally I would be sceptical for some time before the hype of a new Linux settles down. Ubuntu is proven for many many years and stands on the shoulders of giants named Debian. CoreOS is a pretty new shiny product which still needs to prove itself.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it, but will hold off on making a switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I know Hyper-V isn't particularly sexy around these parts but it appears to work there as well. It doesn't support the Hyper-V integration services but that's par for the course for most Linux distributions.

<comment><USER23> Hyper-V support interests, me, as I have a cluster of Windows hosts and would love to add CoreOS to the mix and deploy to my private cloud when needed.

CoreOS is putting some effort into Hyper-V support. There's a way to get it working, though I haven't tried.

Hopefully there's an elegant solution soon.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coreos- dev/S3lbY2BV4...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coreos- dev/S3lbY2BV4bo)</comment></comment>


Nasdaq experiments with Bitcoin's blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/13/nasdaq-bitcoin-blockchain <comment><USER2> I'm going for a "wait and see" attitude on this one because I suspect there must be some hidden opportunity to extract wealth from the blockchain that I'm just not smart enough to see, but just by reading the article, it seems like this is another case of "groundbreaking because... blockchain."

FTA: _The company will be creating "coloured coins", appending special information to the blockchain indicating that a particular fraction of a particular bitcoin can be redeemed according to the terms written into it. That coloured coin can then be passed around just like a normal bitcoin, while preserving a record of who owns the asset it is linked to._

Ok. I don't have an inherent dislike for bitcoin. I understand how bitcoin works. I understand the incentives. I've read the whitepaper. I don't see how decentralization is useful for this task. Why would I want to store asset records on the blockchain? What does this make possible that isn't already possible without the massive computational overhead of a global decentralized ledger? I understand the implications that financial assets can be tagged to colored coins and that those coins can be traded without the need for a third party. I understand that it's all public and that the blockchain's data integrity is fortified through global consensus. Why does this matter? What does this make possible?

I also wonder how the institutions will react when rich investors start getting their colored coins stolen by hackers. Will the NASDAQ honor the value of APPL colored coins that were pilfered from someone's laptop? What about in situations where coins are lost or accidentally sent to the wrong address? Will some random bitcoiner wake up one day to discover that they're a majority shareholder of Microsoft?

As I said, I'll wait and see, because if I was as smart as these finance people then I'd probably have an apartment in the heart of Manhattan to prove it.

<comment><USER3> It allows one to put a piece of information on the internet, and as long as the network lives, nobody can possibly remove that piece of information. It's stuck there forever. Not sure if that will be useful or not in the future, but that sort of thing was not possible before bitcoin came along.

I look at bitcoin more as a breakthrough computer science theoretical finding. It's not just an idea that needs to "make something possible". It exists in nature whether we find a use case for it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate "proof-of-work."

Sure, it's possible it's the only way to get all of the benefits that we all love. But I really wish there was a better way.

<comment><USER5> Imagine you are sitting in the bunker and only get some bits of data from outside world. You cannot have any other trusted source of information about these bits except from the bits themselves. And there's a plenty of reasons for someone to actively try to deceive you ("active attackers" as in "hostile environment"). You have no idea how many people are out there and how much they are connected and who is connected to you. You are just sitting in this blinded box with a radio station.

Your goal is to make sure that whatever bits you receive are exactly the same as everyone else is seeing. In other words, that it is practically impossible for an attacker to produce alternative bits satisfying your requirements and show them to someone else (and not showing to you). One way to make it is to make these bits fully predictable (like digits of Pi), but that's not useful. Another way is to implement a gigantic ever-growing proof-of-work that implements the condition of "practical impossibility". You receive some bits with such a big pile of PoW that you can be sure it's not possible for someone to quietly build an alternative bunch of bits with the same PoW and unleash it on you or anyone else.

Protein folding and proof of stake do not help with this problem. You need abstract ever-growing scarcity implemented by converting energy into a short number.

You might ask: why should we be so strict with the security requirement? Well, because history of civilization shows that people always try really hard to build hierarchies of power to manipulate property and human beings. Any system of global consensus outside of existing power structures will face huge amount of resistance and therefore must be designed from ground up to withstand it.

<comment><USER4> If you have no idea how many people are out there, then you don't have any idea how expensive it would be to produce a false "big" pile of PoW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        Bob Greifeld, Nasdaq's chief executive, said: "Utilising the
        blockchain is a natural digital evolution for managing
        physical securities. Once you cut the apron strings of need
        for the physical, the opportunities we can envision
        blockchain providing stand to benefit not only our clients,
        but the broader global capital markets."

What?

<comment><USER7> "144 MB per day ought to be enough for anybody." \-- NASDAQ

The problem with trying to store data that does not represent actual BTC transactions in the Blockchain is that it simply does not offer a lot of storage space. Currently one 1 MB block is added on average every 10 minutes. That's 144 MB a day that the chain can store. The miners operating the network receive a reward of 25 BTC per block plus transaction fees. At a price of 235 USD/BTC that is at least ~5900 USD per MB stored which makes storing anything in the BC extremely expensive.

Unless the BTC developers make a decision to implement changes in order to improve the scalability of the network, I really don't see why you would even try to use the BC for something like this. When you start to actually store meaningful amounts data in the BC, you are going to jam the network since there is no elastic supply of storage space. Secondly, the increased demand for inclusion of transactions is going to drive the transaction fees higher. In the end, you will have a high costs for a solution that does not even remotely offer the kind of performance you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One question from someone who isn't very well versed in Blockchain technology.

As I understand it, it is potentially possible to attack Blockchain integrity by amassing the majority of computational capacity among the people computing the blockchain.

Who would be computing blockchain changes in the NASDAQ case and what are the implications of this kind of attack for NASDAQ?

Apologies if this is a silly question.

<comment><USER9> Nasdaq is (apparently) using the Bitcoin Blockchain, so the same people who mine bitcoins will be adding Nasdaq's transactions to the Blockchain.

Anyone with a large amount of Bitcoin mining capacity is implicitly incentivised to _not_ mount an attack on the integrity of the Blockchain because doing so would probably dent confidence in Bitcoin, causing the price to drop. That would reduce the "net present value" that the miner can expect to receive going forward, likely by more than the short-term "win" they could achieve through a successful attack.

However, if the Blockchain is being used for _other_ purposes (e.g. recording ownership of high-value assets) and the potential gain to someone with a large amount of mining power of attacking/rewriting the Blockchain is large enough that it significantly outweighs the "net present value" that can be realised from normal mining operations, then the incentive to _not_ attack the Blockchain is somewhat diminished.

<comment><USER7> > Anyone with a large amount of Bitcoin mining capacity is implicitly > incentivised to not mount an attack on the integrity of the Blockchain > because doing so would probably dent confidence in Bitcoin, causing the > price to drop. That would reduce the "net present value" that the miner can > expect to receive going forward, likely by more than the short-term "win" > they could achieve through a successful attack.

That's the argument Bitcoin advocates always use, but it oversimplifies the problem. The assumption is that no one would do this, because it is not in their _long-term_ best interest. What it leaves out that mounting one attack of a series of attacks in quick succession may actually make it worth the costs in the short-term. This is especially true when we talk about large amounts of real assets. Furthermore, there may be malicious entities that are prepared to pay the costs just for the sake of wreaking havoc. The argument that 51% attacks cannot happen has, in fact, already been disproven since there is evidence that the GHash mining pool did perform such an attack [1]. All it takes for something like this to happen is one rogue employee in an organisation that controls enough hashing power.

[1] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nasdaq is doing an _experiment_. Not going all-in with Bitcoin as the title suggests.

<comment><USER11> Overselling non-news into massive victories is basically what the bitcoin community does. I could list 25 things that were going to bring Bitcoin mainstream over the past 2-3 years without even trying that have all failed to pan out.

Since failures fade away silently most of the time they are left wondering why these 'victories' aren't leading to increased prices and repeating the phrase "how can we have all this good news and no increase in price?".

<comment><USER12> Bitcoin has also died over 70 times- [http://bitcoinobituaries.com](http://bitcoinobituaries.com) so maybe it's not a bitcoin community problem but just journalists creating linkbait.

<comment><USER11> Have you ever read through that list? Most of them don't say it has died they say it is dying. Given the amount of investment, the number of new services, and the publicity it has received over the past 2 years the complete lack of interest from the general public says it probably is.

Will it disappear anytime soon? Not a chance.

Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly.

<comment><USER13> > Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite > possibly.

Quite possibly but it's too soon to tell. The fact is that price isn't always the best proxy for success. More people using it, more companies getting involved etc, can be more important.

When we look at price historically we can find strange things like the price being a fraction of a dollar (some 70 cents or so) in April in 2011. Only a few months later, in June 2011, the price was $30. And then it collapsed that very same year and the price dropped to $2, a few times more than it was earlier, but far from the peak.

It'd have been pretty myopic to then conclude that bitcoin was past its peak, even though in the short term it was, having lost more than 90% of its value at peak. It'd also have been wrong to say it missed its chance at mainstream success.

Today the price is an order of magnitude larger, and users, usage and involvement with mainstream (large) companies has grown even more.

So again, it's quite possible, but I think too soon to tell.

As for the lack of interest from the general public... I think bitcoin at its core is a utility, like you could say the internet is. The internet is extremely uninteresting to people, very few get it, nobody is excited about it. But the web is huge, as is emailing and skype and netflix. That's completely different from the Internet though, the boring platform/utility/infrastructure that supports it. I can't blame someone not being interested in bitcoin. But internet of things having digital wallets and doing payments, contracts, deeds etc on the bitcoin ledger, where all the consumer sees is that it 'just works', that's interesting. It's up to companies then to build ontop of bitcoin, and there is tons of interest from companies, both startups and traditional (tech) companies. Which means it's not very surprising to see companies and VCs get excited, but the general public not, in the same way that few got excited about the Internet, but Internet entrepreneurs did, who built companies like Amazon or Skype that people did get excited about. The fact that bitcoin couldn't start out like that and had to grow based on a small amount of fanatics looking to avoid the dollar/euro/etc and live on a new currency is probably a great source of distraction from the larger point of bitcoin as a platform, as it reduces bitcoin to being a currency used to shop online and not many feel like doing that, making it look as there is no interest from the general public and nobody will ever use it etc.

<comment><USER11> What I see in the bitcoin space is the participants constantly trying to find a reason for its use.

Payments - It isn't actually a better experience for customers so it is failing against the incumbents. The only play it is better is DNMs.

Store of Value - It is extremely risky so the only people pushing this are ones that are already bought in and figure hoarding is the only thing that will drive the prices back up

Sharing money between friends - Venmo and friends far and away destroy bitcoin in this use case.

Remittance - Has potential but all the companies so far are basically saving money by skirting money transfer laws and using other peoples services. That isn't sustainable. The expensive part of remittances has never been the movement of value. They are also all extremely secretive about their numbers which makes me suspicious since their reasons given are extremely week.

Micropayments - Bitcoin sucks for micropayments so every solution for this is basically an off chain system. Soon enough they will discover that all the other micropayments services shut down because the demand for micropayments is non-existent

Data Storage - We're seeing this one more and more. The problem is all the things people are trying to do still require third party validation and registration(shareholders and landholders need to be identifiable and someone needs to verify that information). I don't see this panning out in any big way.

Communications protocols - This is another big one. With the 21 announcement everyone and their dog is talking about how the blockchain will allow devices to communicate without needing to agree on a protocol. But they are ignoring the fact that in that use case the blockchain is a medium not a protocol so there would still need to be an agreed protocol on top and if you're going to do that might as well just centralize it or use private APIs.

Did I miss any?

Bitcoin people also love to compare it to the early internet but the existence of the internet itself makes that comparison weak since the internet has massively sped up the distribution of information and technologies. They then say that its different because it involves money but look at the early Paypal growth. It wasn't like getting people to use their credit cards online was easy in 2000.

<comment><USER14> You missed anti-censorship. Many controversial entities have been banned from traditional funding sources (see wikileaks, mega, etc.)

<comment><USER11> Yes, I guess the first one should be DNMs and controversial entities.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Is More Important Than Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudave.com/19858/data-is-more-important-than-algorithms/ <comment><USER2> Sure, and knowledge is more important then intelligence, I suppose... Subtracting data from algorithms makes no sense; while I understand the economic relationship that's being drawn to data, without intelligence, a brain is just a dumping ground for useless weight.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand how the author can separate data from algorithms.

He advocates stock piling data but apparently not doing anything intelligent with it?

I really have a hard time viewing this as a credible source on algorithms or data.

<comment><USER4> If you have limited resources, go after data first and then algorithms. He could have used "GIGO" [0] to make it clearer.

Anecdote: there are a few movies that completely muddy the statistics, e.g. Napoleon Dynamite [1]. More background [2].

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out>

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374900/>

[2] [http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2009/10/netflix- prize-w...](http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2009/10/netflix-prize-was- the-napoleon-dynamite-problem-solved.html)</comment></comment>


Why Subversion does not suck - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/7437/Why-Subversion-does-not-suck.aspx The Subversion Sucks meme is popular on the Internet.  However, if we imagine a world without Subversion and other centralized version control systems, it's easy to see why Subversion does not suck, is not fading away, and in fact, has a rapidly growing user base. <comment><USER2> Curious, we use assembla on our team and our designer uses git (assembla's git) without any problems.

It's great if people want to have the choice for subversion, tho. Some people just prefer the tools they are used to instead of learning new, more powerful ones. But to use that as argument that svn doesn't suck is not a very strong point.

<comment><USER2> Though, when I showed him the article, he agreed with it.. so maybe he's right. :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's an idea. Instead of throwing around "Subversion sux", "Git is the new hotness", how about we all just use what works for us and the projects we're working on.

<comment><USER4> Agree ! Having gone from nothing to Subversion, I think Subversion is great (with TortoiseSVN, at least).

Are there better tools ? Is Git better ? Maybe, but different tools for different uses. For me personally, Subversion does not suck, and I don't need a "better" tool.

It works, and gets the job done for me !

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All I know is is that Git i supereasy to use for a beginner for 1-man-projects if you get the right help or tutorial. Preferrably start a repo at github and you will be waled through how to create a repo(not that there is much to it).

git init git add . git commit -m "blah" git push origin master

git branch name git checkout

easy-peasy

</comment><comment><USER6> The author sets up a false dichotomy: Subersion or git. But those are two different models of source control: centralized and distributed. If you want to use centralized source control, the choice is more likely to be cvs or Subversion.

The popular notion isn't that Subversion sucks, but that it's pointless. The claim I hear is that it's a reinvention of cvs, but it doesn't actually improve much. Personally, I had to learn cvs, it's simple enough for my needs, and I see no reason to switch to something that's fundamentally the same thing.

I think most cvs users are in a similar situation as me. We know Subversion is better, but those benefits seem marginal and not worth the effort to switch.

<comment><USER7> Subversion, in my experience, is worth the effort of switching from cvs. It's a breeze to set up, and it's a lot cleaner than cvs.

<comment><USER8> I have a lot to say about version control, but I won't get into the details here.

However, on the 'switch from CVS to SVN', I'll comment and say that SVN is far superior to CVS.

The whole 'changes committed to the repo up the entire repo version' alone make this worthwhile.

SVN is also less arcane in its usage.

SVN has better tools for, well, everything.

SVN integrates well with all major IDEs (mine being VIM, but also Monodevelop and Eclipse).

The switch from CVS to SVN also made our releases much easier to manage (merging branches is fairly trivial and tagging is a no-brainer).

If you're using CVS in a company, do yourself a favour and switch to SVN. The basic concepts are the same, so re-educating developers takes all of 5 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Branching and merging suck in Subversion. Offline commits suck in Subversion. Does that mean Subversion sucks? Depends on whether you want good branching and merging and offline commits. I do; therefore, for me, Subversion sucks. QED.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, they've improved branching and merging (on the backend) not long ago. Of course it's not inherent to the platform like most DVCS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a world without Subversion, Subversion would be built out of Git. In a world without Git, Monotone, Darcs etc. ... well that's where we were 5 years ago, and it sucked.

<comment><USER12> Did it really suck? I was using subversion in a team of around 15, 5 years ago, and all in all it worked pretty well. It was rare that there would be any issue or that subversion got in the way.

Maybe git is better... maybe it doesn't matter enough to bother changing. But you have to admit these types of things are more about what is "in fashion" than what is better suited to a particular task.

Things go in big cycles. For a few years centralization is excellent, offers massive benefits, then suddenly distributed is excellent offers massive benefits etc etc As the post hinted, I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years from now git is pronounced as a terrible idea, and the trend setters go back to something more like svn.

<comment><USER11> It sucked because we didn't have the possibility of distributed version control, even if we really wanted it.

Some people and some projects prefer centralized. That's fine. But you can't build a distributed version control system out of a centralized one.

<comment><USER13> svk? Also BitKeeper was built on SCCS, and ClearCase MultiSite was built on ClearCase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a terrible argument.

Easy when it comes at the cost of features is another way to say it's OK to be ignorant.

It's one thing to make things as easy as they can be.

It's one thing to not complicate things unnecessarily.

But it's a whole'nother thing to make things easy at the cost of features and power.

Anyone can make _anything_ easy if they are allowed to cut enough features.

<comment><USER15> Is declining to use something significantly complicated by features you know you will _never_ need ignorant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the stuff I do I find both svn and git get the job done. The only thing that I regularly experience that sucks about svn compared to git is the speed of checking out a working copy. Even when using tiny local file:// repositories svn checkouts on my OSX laptop often take several seconds where similar git operations are instantaneous.

</comment><comment><USER17> Subversion isn't even better than CVS across the board: it's slower, wastes a lot of space, is way less stable, and doesn't have independent implementations.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Even designers can use it."

Why does everyone assume that designers are stupid luddites who can't wrap their heads around complex systems? UI design is full of nuance and complexity. It's insulting to designers to assume they cannot deal with DVCS.

<comment><USER19> Amen.

Meanwhile: To claim that SVN is intrinsically easier to understand than DVCS is to be very shortsighted. Subversion is a more mature technology: It's eight years old, and is conceptually based on CVS, which goes back to the eighties. DVCS is all of eleven years old in its _eldest_ incarnation (according to Wikipedia) and the current generation of tools (git, Bazaar, Mercurial) date back only to 2005.

DVCS is a maturing technology. One of the things that happens as a technology matures is that people learn better ways to explain it to new users, build better interfaces, build better infrastructure.

If you don't think that DVCS makes enough sense to non-geeks yet... give it time.

<comment><USER6> I understand your point about maturing technology, but distributed _anything_ is usually hard for people to wrap their heads around the first time.

<comment><USER19> _distributed anything is usually hard for people to wrap their heads around the first time._

I don't think that's necessarily so. Have you ever tried to get an office full of people to collaboratively author a Word document? What's their instinctive behavior? They all grab copies. Then each of them hacks away on their copies. Sometimes two or three of them email their hacked copies to each other and mash them up, using cut and paste. Eventually some poor SOB has to get everyone to email over their individual versions so he can merge them. Hopefully they've all been using Track Changes (which is, in a sense, a poor man's facsimile of a single-document DVCS!); otherwise it's an even bigger clusterfuck.

That's a distributed model. Ever since the invention of photocopiers and email attachments, people have had to develop a very good understanding of how that model works, and how it fails.

It's tempting to think that the way to sort this out is to centralize it. But in my experience, centralized document-management systems are _not_ that intuitive, which drives people to secretly work around them. ("Why can't I save my changed document on the shared drive? Oh, no, Joe checked it out and then went on eight-week vacation! I'll just stash my edited version on my local drive and distribute it via email." Or, "I created an alternate version of the doc, but I don't dare upload it to the shared drive because I might make another mistake and overwrite the official version. That always makes the admin really mad. So here it is on this USB stick.")

I think the most confusing aspects of version control are the navigation of history (just look at the wacky extreme that Apple' Time Machine designers went to in order to make it very obvious that you're looking backwards in history), and merging, particularly merge conflicts. But those aren't special features of DVCS; they're tricky no matter which VCS you use.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AllConcur: Leaderless Concurrent Atomic Broadcast - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05866 <comment><USER2> Paper's network assumptions:

"We assume a model of reliable communication—messages cannot be lost (only delayed). This is a reasonable assumption if we consider a reliable protocol, such as TCP."

Paxos network assumptions:

"Messages can take arbitrarily long to be delivered, can be duplicated, and can be lost, but they are not corrupted." \- [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Sounds like Paxos could be implemented on top of UDP whereas AllConcur requires TCP?

<comment><USER2> Duplicated and lost messages will happen in practice - TCP attempts to build reliable communication on an unreliable medium. Not clear from the paper if this matters.

I think the larger misunderstanding of the paper is the requirement that paxos have a leader - lamport's synod algorithm does not require a leader, the leader is an optimization!

<comment><USER4> Without a long-lived leader, the performance would be so bad that I doubt there is a single production implementation that doesn't use that optimization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this differ from RAFT?</comment>


A biotech startup is making CoW-free ice cream. Would you eat it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613955/perfect-day-biotech-startup-is-making-cow-free-ice-cream-would-you-eat-it/ <comment><USER2> They're going to make ice cream without using Copy-on-Write technology?

I'm confused. When would you be writing to your ice cream and would then need to issue a copy command to it?</comment>