Ask HN: Start-up success as a non-technical? - <AUTHOR> Do you need the technical skills to succeed or are you better off gaining the complementary skills (marketing, pricing etc) and partnering up with people with the technical skills?
Why I ask: I'm a grad. civil eng. who wants to get out of the industry, saving up hard to start my own business/further my education. Would my money be better spent on a MBA or MSCS? I see a Stanford MSCS doesn't require a CS background (although I may be hard pushed to get in anyways). Neither is also an option but I see huge value in the networking potential of going back to school.
Really interested to hear what you guys reckon! Any (potentially life changing) advice is greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> _Would my money be better spent on a MBA or MSCS?_

Neither.

1\. Find someone who needs something.

2\. Start building it.

3\. Trust that when you need to learn something, you will.

The education you will receive this way will be way better than any formal education for multiple reasons. First, you will automatically triage your lessons; you will learn what you need, not what someone else (who probably doesn't know) thinks you need. Second, almost all the "data" you will need in this education is easily available and free. Third, for the education you need from other people, you will begin building a network you'll need anyway. And finally, this is exactly what you'll have to do _whether or not you get any more formal education_ , so just skip the unnecessary step and get on with on. From your own self description, you already have way more formal education than you need.

This may not seem intuitive, but believe me, this is the way things get done in the real world of software development. At this point, the creme rises to the challenge regardless of education. Save your money for living expenses and start-up expenses. You'll probably need it. Best wishes!

<comment><USER3> Exactly, if you're serious about startups, you need e-school not b-school: <http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262670582>

I dropped out of my business program after creating a startup during college and realizing I was learning far more from my startup. My classes began to seem so non-relevant by contrast. The only selling point for school is access to smart people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a civil engineering grad too (08). Started two companies, both are profitable and doing decently well (timesvr.com and gameventures.com). I don't write code myself (wish I could), but I've learnt a few things along the way. One of those things is that an MBA would be utterly useless.

I'm not good with long posts, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of solid advise here, but if you'd like to chat, email/IM me on alizaki (at) gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER5> Note that my answer will be hugely biased, but then again so will everyone else's. ;)

Nonetheless, I'd say to go for the MSCS (or similar). You're looking for the networking potential of going back to school, and you want to start a start- up. In a technical master's program, you'll be around exactly the sort of people you need to meet for this to happen. In an MBA program, you'd network with a bunch of other business guys, many of whom wouldn't be interested in start-ups at all.

You'll obviously also gain a lot of truly valuable technical skills. You might not be able to single-handedly carry the technical side of a start-up by the end, but you'll definitely be able to make meaningful contributions and decisions about the technology. This helps your future partners as well, since they know you can contribute to the tech while working the business side.

If you're worried about missing out on the education side of the MBA, don't be. I think you could get a better version of an MBA education by just buying a pile of books [1] and starting a company. You'll learn everything you need about business along the way. And, as for the networking part of an MBA, you'll get way more interesting conversations out of "I'm running a start-up" vs. "I'm working on my business degree."

[1] Possibly a topic for another thread, but here's an example of such a reading list: <http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Take your money and move to the Valley. Network, join meetups, and tap into the community. Try to get into a startup that is founded by someone who has been successful in startups before. You will have to convince the founder you will do anything asked and then bust your ass. Don't expect a lot of money from a startup especially if you don't have the skills they need. If you are hungry and stay focused you will gain experience, knowledge, and the connections needed to do something on your own one day. My advice for you on going technical is only go this route if you truly enjoy technology, coding, etc. because you will be spending a lot of time on it. You can become a startup founder without technical skills but if your product\service is web based then find a technical partner.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm non-technical and co-founded a startup. I would never do it again without a technical co-founder or learning to code myself. So I'm learning Ruby. You can do a full-on MSCS from Stanford, or you can just teach yourself how to code, but that's the path I'd take - _and I'm going to business school to get an MBA in the fall_ : [http://www.sachinagarwal.com/why-this-startup-guy-is- going-b...](http://www.sachinagarwal.com/why-this-startup-guy-is-going-back- to-busines)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it matter on what interests you more... the business side, or technical side? Whatever is more interesting, start investing in it right now by learning and taking some risks.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's not what you know, it's who you know. Invest in your network and everything else will fall into place.

</comment><comment><USER10> I highly suggest going the technical route. Ask yourself this: would you prefer to be a software developer in a start-up (including your own), or a manager in a more established firm? If the only sort of management you see yourself doing is in _your own company_ , I don't see an MBA as being very useful to you. You need to be some self-sufficient, meaning you should know how to code and not _just_ how to manage. It's easier to bring in outside managerial talent to a purely technical firm rather than vice versa (I personally would _never_ be the first programmer in someone else's company, many other hackers are similar).

You already have a strong background in a quantitative discipline (CEng). It means you'll have an easy time picking up either. Don't forget the advantage that this gives you. That means you'll have an easier time with statistics, mathematics and numerical analysis: this opens up a whole new world for you that's closed to many programmers who are only good at programming.

That being said, there's a lot you still have to learn. Start with learning C (you might not develop your application it, but a) you need to understand how physical memory works in order to be a programmer b) C is the lingua franca of programming languages which means you'll have no problems learning whatever _other_ language is better for the task at hand), then learn algorithms and data structures and at least three of (compilers, operating systems, databases, computer networking). Then specialize: machine learning/NLP/IR (given your "real engineering" background, you might have an easier time here than most programmers), further into systems, further into databases, etc...

That's a multi-year project and you have to be ready for it. Don't under- estimate the value of experience (by experience I mean working in firms whose product is software i.e., _not_ consulting or internal IT development) in doing a start-up: it's possible to start without "having done it before", but several years of work experience (alongside people much smarter and more experienced than you) is extremely useful. Experienced developers have a huge role to play in a start-up: partly by making it possible for apt junior developers to be recruited (they want to work alongside "hard core" hackers) and mentored.

If you join a start-up, it's also a chance to be exposed to the "business side" as well -- although certain types of established firms (in my experience, those who build software for other developers) will give you exposure to customers and sales/support cycle as a developer too.

If you prefer a more structured environment in which to learn (as do I -- there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), an MSCS will serve you well. It's also a chance to meet hackers, show your "worth" to them (they'll have collaborated on lab projects with you) and make connections without looking like a "shmoozer". It will also give you credentials for employment (getting initial experience), although I'd have zero hesitation in hiring a self-taught hacker with a degree in Civil Eng (software development is really an engineering discipline rather than a science).

<comment><USER11> " _I personally would_ never _be the first programmer in someone else's company, many other hackers are similar._ "

Including myself; the one time I inadvertently violated that it ended in tears (the idiot penny pinching salesman who was the founder tried to put off really hiring the first programmer until he got at least 1 other programmer ... and the first got a better offer; I think the only benefit I got out of that was by the end of it I could port code between subtly different versions of UNIX in my sleep (1H83)). In that case, it turned out to be impossible to hire the 2nd programmer and the start-up never started up.

As for your sequencing recommendation, I think it's better to learn foundational CS with something like SICP/6.001 and then reifying it with C (this CMU course looks _damned_ good: <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/index.html>). I think it's easier to make your mental tool box bigger if you can do it this way.

<comment><USER10> > As for your sequencing recommendation, I think it's better to learn > foundational CS with something like SICP/6.001 and then reifying it with C > (this CMU course looks damned good: > <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/index.html>). I think it's easier to make your > mental tool box bigger if you can do it this way.

Thanks for pointing out SICP/learning a non-imperative language. It's very important to learn a functional programming language and Scheme is the best choice because a) it's the language SICP (one of the best computer science books) uses b) it's "pure-enough" (you still have set! if you need it, but tail call elimination is a part of the language specification) as a functional language and doesn't introduce too many other (important, but unrelated) ideas (unlike Haskell or ML which have strict typing and unlike Scala or F# which have OO).

I would, however, disagree with you that it should be the first language: it should be taught before "blub damage" takes place (e.g., before students think only in terms of OO) but it's good to be familiar with programming and data structure to some extent (it helps to understand cons cells as pairs of pointers). C is a great language to _precede Scheme_ : it doesn't force the OO paradigm and teaches students to differentiate between the value of the object and the address of the object (thinking in terms of multiple levels of indirection).

The reason I argue _against_ teaching SICP to complete newbies is because otherwise students tend to think of functional programming as some sort of an academic exercise and not as an approach to solve the problem. I am basing this on actual observations of students that I know at UC Berkeley and at my own school (where a Haskell based course served the same role). Unfortunately in general I find that students don't appreciate the value they get out of a non-"Blub school" ("why am I messing with pointers and recursion instead of writing GUI apps") until much later in their career ("oh, I know how to reduce the state to take advantage of all the cores!").

(1) I use "Blub school" rather than Spolsky's "Java school", as teaching C#, Python or Ruby as _sole_ languages would have the same effect (it's trivial to learn all of these languages once you already know C and Scheme, it's an uphill battle do the reverse).

<comment><USER11> First on the Blub School note: it's interesting that MIT is now a Blub School since with the purging of Scheme from the curriculum a student can graduate having written code only in Python and Java (shades of the changes to US Boy Scouting that for other reasons drove me out of it, one could become an Eagle Scout without ever having camped out, built a fire or cooked food over an open fire). Wrapped in cotton batting, as it were, I wonder if they will even learn recursion well enough....

This was an entirely political exercise (the command to entirely purge Scheme from the base undergraduate curriculum), now that I think about it an example of not letting a crisis go to waste, for the department panicked over the enrollment crash and SICP was replaced with flashy robots for students to play with.

Anyway, the old official philosophy was that functional programming should be learned before imperative (serious OO wasn't even taught, that got added to 6.001 but not SICP later when the OO mania took a firm enough hold); in spring 1983 6.001 Sussman stated with a variation or subset of this famous quote by Dijkstra:

" _It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration._ "

You _do_ have a good point about sequencing. Many have noted that the people who learn and appreciate functional programming best are those who have been thoroughly scared by imperative programming experiences. I for instance took 6.001 exactly 7 years after my start with punched card IBM 1130 FORTRAN "IV" (only numeric IF statements) and by then a lot more imperative programming including a fair amount of C, and I sort of got it. I get it a lot more now that I've gotten many more scars (back then I sensed there was something really big here, now I feel it in my bones).

I can well believe what I've heard from others as well as you that many less experienced programmers don't get it when they do SICP early in their programming careers. On the other hand, there's a _lot_ more to SICP than functional programming ... and there's pretty much no way to give students enough scars in 4 years of undergraduate programming so that a late functional programming course will be certain to "take". So for those who aren't autodidacts I'm not sure what to recommend....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My strong bias is towards getting the technical background.

If you have that, partnering with more technical people is a lot more likely to work, otherwise the only possible posture that works is blind trust, which most people aren't capable of.

However this is coming from the son of a businessman who started reading his _Wall Street Journal_ in 3rd grade, so I've found partnering with business people to be easy (amusingly, in many of the startups I've worked for I've helped the point man procuring office space, since unless you have a background in that area you e.g. have no idea how slow the real estate clock cycle is).

To finish, when you think of the historical hardware and software long term superstars many if not most were founded and lead by at least one person with serious technical chops, perhaps even uber-salesman Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Obvious examples are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the founders of Google and the Chairman/CEO they picked, Ken Olsen of DEC, H&P of HP and I'm sure I'm forgetting many others.

Tom Watson, Jr., who saved IBM with his massively successful push into computers, is the most famous exception to this pattern ... but seeing that he grew up in the predecessor punched card industry and undoubtedly absorbed a lot of technical stuff including most especially attitudes he's got to be a special case.

As you probably know, the list of technical companies ruined by non-techie leaders is nearly infinite, but it's balanced at least in part by techies not getting the business side of things. Can any of you think of major counterexamples of complete non-techies who massively succeeded over a long term, including retaining their initial key technical people?

Steve Jobs is the only one I can think of off the top of my head (and he fails the retention test, e.g. he burned out the Macintosh development team, didn't he?) but he clearly has unique relevant design talents that make him a special case.

<comment><USER12> I've said this before, but: People only think Steve Jobs is a "non-techie" because he went into business with Woz, next to whom almost anybody would have looked like a non-techie.

<comment><USER11> To the extent I've studied this, which has very little to do with Woz, he doesn't pass _my_ threshold of "techie".

Your mileage will vary and my information is woefully incomplete, but on the other hand I sure don't think he's in the league of any of the techies I cited, although I'm willing to believe he's significantly more technical than Thomas Watson, Jr. was and _perhaps_ a bit more than Larry Ellison is (don't know much about that aspect of the latter).

<comment><USER13> What exactly is your threshold of "techie"?

<comment><USER11> In this context, the beginning would be designing, building and debugging (getting to work) a "serious" digital circuit or piece of software. Woz's analog work, e.g. the critical switching power supply for the Apple, is a bit beyond that.

I'm not sure how to define the threshold for a digital circuit in those days (that's not my field, for one thing, and the Lisp Machine ones I was vaguely familiar with are _huge_ in comparison to a personal computer of that era).

For software, I'm not sure how to define it in words, but "I know it when I see it" ^_^. Certainly more than "a few thousand lines of C code" ... maybe, it depends on the code. More than you're generally required to do to get an EE (sic) degree....

However, for Jobs, as far as I know he hasn't come close to the thresholds in either domain. Famously, he hired Woz to do that block of Atari digital design work, and as for software, I'm not aware of any programs he's written, and there's these tidbits for backup:

Woz: "Steve jobs never programmed in his life." (<http://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/10/woz-at-microsoft.html>)

This one may be folklore but it's just too fun not to include:

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Close_Encounters_of_the_Steve_Kind.txt)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How important is "general knowledge" to you? - <AUTHOR> I met two people that work, or worked, in senior positions at one of the big 6 tech companies in the US. (Not Google.)
Neither of them knew that: Sundar Pichai was the CEO of Google, or that Google had re-organized as Alphabet, or that Larry Page had taken over as CEO of Alphabet.
Is this just an outlier in the world, or is that something you would expect a senior manager to know? <comment><USER2> I would definitely expect a senior manager in a tech company to know that! Keeping an eye on trends, competitors, influencers, big shakeups is a must for doing their job.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a surprise. Were they fresh out of school?

<comment><AUTHOR> Middle Managers. I don't know the various ranks of managers but if I had to guess in the upper half of management.</comment></comment>


PM Abe says Apple to build big R&D centre in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/09/apple-japan-idUSL3N0TT34U20141209

<comment><USER2> This will be awesome. I'm curious, why Japan?

</comment><comment><USER3> That title is painful. It makes it sound like they're building an R&D facility near the PM's house or offices. Plus the word "allegedly" has a different connotation than "according to" or as quoted by (and the term "allegedly doesn't appear in the article).

You could have done with e.g.:

"Apple has decided it undertake cutting-edge R&D in Japan" \- Japanese PM</comment>


Stop Using FTP - <AUTHOR> http://stevenf.com/archive/dont-use-ftp.php

<comment><USER2> Note that "SFTP" has no single meaning. Depending on the client, it may mean "FTP encrypted with SSL" or "FTP with encryption extensions of one of a couple of types invented independently by FTP server authors over the years" or "SSH File Transfer Protocol" (which is actually the real meaning of the abbreviation, and was in use for several years before secure FTP began to be common).

Historically, people tried to convince folks to call it FTPS (for FTP over SSL, which is the most popular form of secured FTP), but that seems to have never taken off. Unfortunate, since SFTP means too many incompatible things.

It's stabilized somewhat in recent years, and usually clients will do the right thing--and the most common meaning of SFTP has come to be "FTP encrypted with SSL" (which is actually one of the weaker forms of security for FTP--but it's got some semblance of "standardization", and works in lots of clients and servers, so that makes it superior). And, of course, there is no RFC defining secure FTP, so it's a de facto "standard" which can lead to buggy implementations and a lot of finger pointing--server says client is wrong, client says server is wrong, user says "I give up" and uses FTP, instead.

<comment><USER3> On that note, from a Linux system, what does `sftp` use on the command line? I had always assumed that SFTP was always and only SSH transfers, just like using `scp`. Is this wrong of me to think this way?

<comment><USER2> _I had always assumed that SFTP was always and only SSH transfers, just like using `scp`. Is this wrong of me to think this way?_

No, this is absolutely correct. But don't be surprised if someone misinterprets you.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work there, Lou. SFTP is its own protocol; it runs over SSH, but is substantially more complicated than "scp". "sftp" is not just user interface, like scp is.

<comment><USER2> I took his comment to mean, "I've always understood SFTP to be the FTP protocol that runs over SSH", and so I replied that his understanding was correct.

I didn't consider him saying "like using scp" to mean he thinks "it _is_ scp". Rather, I took it to mean, "it uses SSH to copy files, like scp".

But, I can see how one could interpret it that way. It was not my intent.

I'm staying the heck of out of the pedantry business in the future. This has been a ridiculous bundle of threads all spawned just because I had a bee in my bonnet about how the term SFTP is confusingly misused by lots of folks. I don't even use any of these "FTP" protocols for anything (I use rsync or SVN for website data, and scp for one-off file copies--I haven't used an FTP GUI since I owned an Amiga). I only ever touch FTP for testing problems our users report, and then always using lftp on the command line. I've got no dog in this race...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know, back in the day, there was an idea called "opportunistic encryption". How it worked was, you would put a FreeBSD box running S/WAN at the edge of your network, and if it detected a similar box at the other end, they would seamlessly encrypt your stream (and if not, just let it straight through). Now, if this idea had gotten the traction it deserved, we could all happily be using telnet, FTP, whatever, rather than _everyone_ having to be aware of encryption, your SA would just sort it once, for everyone, and they'd keep on using familiar tools.

<comment><USER6> Opportunistic encryption is generally a good idea, but as it has no feedback method you can't really be certain if it is working or not. The seamlessness works both ways.

<comment><USER5> Right, but the current situation is silly. For example right now if I want to connect into work, I fire up the Cisco VPN client, _then_ I ssh from my Mac to whatever Unix box I want to work on there. I'm not sure that "double encryption" really buys us anything here. Unless someone's actually in our datacentre tapping the wire coming out of the VPN host, in which case we've bigger problems...

<comment><USER7> It's not really for the double encryption. It has a big advantage in that you don't need to open SSH up to the internet, only to your VPN server. Even though you may have perfectly secure passwords, why expose SSH to the internet if you don't have to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> SFTP is its own debacle. It's a handy alternative to "scp" when you don't want to open a second connection to grovel through "find" on the target system, but it's even less firewall-friendly than FTP: you can't enable users to grab files with SFTP without _also_ enabling them to SSH to remote hosts.

Most enterprises _don't_ allow outbound SSH through their firewalls, in part because SSH is its own slippery slope: if you're allowing SSH, you're allowing people to build VPN tunnels.

The real-world operational problem that FTP solves is upload. There is no download application that HTTP doesn't solve better than FTP. If Apache shipped with a mod_upload with a reasonable configuration system and a simple, workable web interface for specifying what to put where, FTP could be laid to rest.

<comment><USER8> I have seen enterprise systems where sftp access is granted to third parties by restricting the login shell severely to allow only sftp uploads. Is there a problem with that approach? SOX / PCI is making the 'secure upload problem' more pressing daily.

<comment><USER4> Yes, for instance: X11 and port forwarding.

The bigger problem is, it's just hard to know what else you're allowing once you let someone "only" access SFTP via SSH.

Most of the BigCo's I work with use "Secure File Transfer" software to solve this problem, which are just glorified upload CGI scripts under SSL. That's the best solution, I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd definitely leave age out of the argument that FTP is bad seeing as how plenty of people use old programming languages, old OSes, and old software for the simple fact that it "just works."

</comment><comment><USER10> this is a matter of right tool for the job. for important stuff, everything should happen over a secure tunnel (ssl, ssh port tunneling or just using scp.) ftp is good for public file download/drop box where you want to easily support resume.

</comment><comment><USER11> Almost all his arguments apply equally to HTTP.

<comment><USER12> \- Unless tunneled over a secure socket, FTP is 100% insecure.

This is true for HTTP.

\- The spec defines no way of setting the modification dates/times of files.

The HTTP RFC defines the Last-Modified header.

\- The spec defines no reliable way of determining the string encoding used for filenames.

The HTTP RFC defines several headers related to encoding.

\- FTP was designed to be used interactively by a human sitting at a terminal, not by a GUI application working on the human's behalf. The spec doesn't even define the output format that should be used for directory listings.

This problem doesn't translate exactly to HTTP as it isn't used in the same manner. Directory listings are typically sent as HTML and a user clicks a link which all browsers are able to handle trivially. WebDAV adds features similar to FTP, but it is much more standardized.

\- The spec defines no way of dealing with file metadata, such as Unix permissions, owners, and groups.

There are HTTP error codes which indicate lack of permission, but there are no RFC-defined headers for these things. I believe WebDAV does define a method to deal with them.

\- FTP requires a minimum of two socket connections to transfer a file: the control connection, which is established first, and then data connections which are created and destroyed every time you transfer a single file, or request a directory listing.

HTTP has no such requirement. Keep-alive prevents sockets from being closed and the same connection can be used to get a directory listing and then transfer a file. There are no separate data and control connections.

\- FTP is not friendly with firewalls. Because it constantly needs to establish new connections, this has led us to "passive mode" which might as well be black magic as far as most people are concerned.

This is FTP's biggest flaw and this problem absolutely does not exist with HTTP. Once it is encrypted FTP is impossible to handle in a reasonable manner with a firewall.

In active mode FTP creates one connection to a well-known port for the control channel (21). For the data connection the server attempts to establish a connection from a well-known port (20) to a high-numbered port on the client. This obviously doesn't work well with a firewall in front of the client.

Passive mode modifies this arrangement so that the data channel comes from the client to the server. The problem is the ports used. On both ends the port will be a high-numbered. This requires allowing connections from any high- numbered port (withing a large range) to any high-numbered port. Some firewalls understand the FTP protocol and are able to see the port that is to be used; the server gives the client this port with a command in the control connection. The firewall can then allow that specific connection. Once the control connection is encrypted this is impossible.

Now then. How do his arguments apply equally to HTTP?

<comment><USER11> "Almost all" might have been hyperbole, but "many" is certainly true.

On the other hand, HTTP is clearly far superior to FTP, especially if you include extensions like WebDAV and the power of custom headers.

I was just pointing out, insecure formats that don't define how to do listings or set mod times or deal with Unix permissions can be quite good. FTP sucks mostly because of the ports/multiple connection issue, as you pointed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, I'd gladly switch to sftp, but dumb-ass OSX and Windows don't understand it out of the box and most users are unaware of more powerful (and easier to use) alternative OS, which leaves us stuck with this commercialized mediocrity.

Why wouldn't we also stop using Apple Finder, FAT, IE6, non-UTF encodings and bunch of other legacy crap? Ohh-ho-ho... so many topics to blog about...

<comment><USER14> I'd say that the reason why people aren't switching so readily is actually a function of the human condition moreso than any technical reason.

Looking at other industries, like health care, people are more content in spending effort/money on "miracle cures" than worrying about taking steps towards preventing these problems from happening.

The exact same thing happens in say, the Automotive industry - a large percentage of consumers dont take active measures towards ensuring their vehicle is in good running order, and are more content with dealing with the consequences.

The same thing seems to happen when talking about computer security. I dont think it's because people dont care about computer security, they're just more ready to accept the consequences rather than taking preventative steps.

It's a real damn shame too.

<comment><USER13> What? It's MUCH simplier than than: I can't send a Windows/OSX user an email with an SFTP version of this line:

ftp://server.com/report.pdf

It's that simple.

<comment><USER4> Why would you ever send ftp://anything when you could instead send <http://anything>?

<comment><USER13> Yep, that's a popular response I get from OSX people: if Apple can't do something, that's because "you don't need it".

<comment><USER4> Huh?

<comment><USER13> What's up with the sound? You just took a shit and can't reach your ass?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to use SFTP or scp for everything, but I've discovered that it's considerably slower than regular FTP. I wish that there was a way of encrypting the login but sending everything else via plain FTP for speed.

<comment><USER2> You can do that with WebDAV and Digest authentication. I don't actually know that it's comparable in speed, though.

I'd also question the speed argument...for large files, SSH can perform compression and make the transfer faster than FTP.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the compression tip! My extremely informal testing produced the following results taken by copying a random binary file I had to another computer:

SSH: 2.0MB/s

SSH w/ compression: 2.5MB/s

FTP: 2.8MB/s

While SSH does not approach the speed of FTP it does come close, perhaps close enough to finally ditch FTP altogether in most situations.

<comment><USER5> It depends to a certain extent on what cipher you use. Try Blowfish, AES, etc for the kind of data you move and see which one is better. We aren't talking by much, mind, but every little helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> sftp is not ideal; looks like the author is not aware that ssh (which is what sftp uses) is rather slow on WAN due to buffer issues:

<http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/>

[http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn- ssh/papers/i2mm-h...](http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn- ssh/papers/i2mm-hpn-ssh.ppt)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think using encryption limits the size of the files to about 2 GB in current versions. It is too little for DVD images.

<comment><USER2> Simply not true.

The openssh family of tools have had LFS support for many years. I've used scp several times to copy huge files...and our products have scp as a filesystem backup target, which means it deals with archives that are dozens or hundreds of GBs in size on a daily basis.</comment></comment>


Stripe NYC Meetup - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-nyc-meetup

<comment><USER2> Stripe is a great company and so I hope this comment does not sound critical, but I find it surprising that a simple Meetup announcement would make it to the front page of Hacker News. Right now I see this information about the post:

6 points by michaelschade 27 minutes ago

So, 6 upvotes in 27 minutes gets you on the front page? I am puzzled by that. Perhaps it is an otherwise slow day? Is there some other explanation?

<comment><USER3> 5 points in the first 30 minutes is pretty standard for a front page post on almost all HN days, except for peak time. At slow times 3 points can be enough...

<comment><USER4> Doesn't it also matter _who_ up-votes the post? I thought the ranking was a weighted points system. Meaning, if you have high karma, your up-vote is more respected.

I think I've even seen 1 or 2 up-votes getting a story to the homepage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stripe meetups look great and all, but I'm going to be unreasonably ticked off until they happen outside the US.

;)

<comment><USER6> Well, payment happening outside US would probably be a requirement before hosting any meetups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What would a meetup really give attendees? "Hey, you're a merchant who accepts credit cards? So am I! Kindred spirits!"

Not to be non-constructive, but really am struggling to understand the "point" of this, and why it needs to get such attention.</comment>


Second chance for Large Hadron Collider to deliver universe's secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/01/cern-large-hadron-collider

<comment><USER2> I'm of the opinion that the LHC will make a great mess of physics. I saw a show on Discovery where most of the physicists at CERN feel there's a 9/10 chance they'll find the Higgs. Just a hunch, but I don't think they'll find it. I think they'll find something that forces them to rethink all of sub- atomic physics, which would be way cooler.

Also, is anyone else tired of every LHC article talking about Earth getting sucked into a black hole? Ludicrous, I tell you...

<comment><USER3> Not only the black hole bit, but the time ripples propagating back from the future to prevent an abomination?

Yeesh...

I agree with you, about the scientists not finding the Higgs Boson. From everything I've seen so far of science, it hardly seems like it could be that simple. It seems as though every time we delve deeper into a field, our conception of how everything works is changed, and this hardly seems like the time for it to stop. I could be proven wrong though. Someone might prove that P=NP. That would be cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obligatory: <http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1919></comment>


Python Verbel Expressions - regex for people who don't know regex - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PythonVerbalExpressions

<comment><USER2> maybe()</comment>


Show HN: Tool for distributed and occasionally connected app dev - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tony-dinucci/Ovule.Nomad

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, I'd be particularly interested to hear any thoughts/feelings you have on the project. If you hate the idea I would love to know why and that would actually be (for me) more valuable than just hearing positives.</comment>


The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1

<comment><USER2> >In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read "The Demon Lover," a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional linear-text format; they'd read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing.

In other words, if you mangle a short-story and push it into a different format from the one it was written in, it's harder to read. That has nothing to do with hypertext.

>She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is itself distracting.

That's more a question of wordiness than of hypertext. Whether and where to link is a very important decision in modern composition, probably more important than word choice.

Basically, these studies are assuming that all content is created equal, and that's far from the case. I would say it's more a question of poor web design shattering focus - that said, much of the web is designed with the intent of shattering focus.

<comment><USER3> It might be interesting to try that with "David's Sling" since Stiegler originally wrote it to use an early hypertext, then rewrote it as a novel. (Note, I have not seen the hypertext version, I don't even know if he ever ported it to html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When movable type made cheap, mass printing of books possible, learned people of the time worried that the widespread availability of books would destroy the oral tradition of passing knowledge down through communities (and the Scribes worried that they would be put out of a job).

While the oral tradition is not yet destroyed (and in fact I attended a fantastic storytelling session earlier this year that was geared to adults), it has certainly been supplanted as the principal means through which people learn about the world - and thank heavens for it!

<http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1486/>

</comment><comment><USER5> _Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning._

So then, it's like TV, only even more powerful because it's more interactive. Web Surfing is the new channel surfing?

This makes me wonder if this is an expression of typical fears about new media.

If it's true, then of course the Internet will be supported by governments around the world. It appears to be a better opiate of the masses than TV. A public which spends a lot of time being "informed" but is only informed on a cursory, distracted, and superficial level is a public which is easier to control. (Even easier to control than an uninformed public.) TV news and programming in the US already seems to be geared toward producing such a public.

<comment><USER6> _A public which spends a lot of time being "informed" but is only informed on a cursory, distracted, and superficial level is a public which is easier to control. (Even easier to control than an uninformed public.)_

What makes that true?

<comment><USER5> Such a public is particularly receptive to spin. Such a public is also ill suited to examination and oversight of it's own institutions. Such people can think they've performed such oversight, even though they've been fooled. As such, they are more easily innoculated against the truth with disinformation and propaganda.

A public which is not informed resents the withholding of information. They will seek the truth if they can and resent those who withhold the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this is weird. Yesterday, on my work - home commute, I was thinking exactly this. I realized that the massive usage of Internet has led me to have more difficulties in concentrating and studying, and in general keeping focus on a given task, while at the same time has given me an edge over less intensive web users I know when it comes to extrapolate a more or less superficial meaning from a resource like an article such as this, or a discussion, or even a picture. I wonder if these two aspects could somehow 'live together', that is, have the brain 'switch' to a certain mode when doing a certain task.

edit: and I'm kinda worried about this.

<comment><USER8> A large part of meditation practices involve learning to train one's attention and focus. So yes, you can definitely learn to have the brain "switch" modes.

<comment><USER9> I agree they can 'live together' through some kind of deliberate training (like meditation) - but also with the right tools (for example <http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR: Reading web formatted text reduces our attention span [<http://twitter.com>], comprehension [<http://reddit.com>], and data retention [<http://google.com>] just by having embedded links.

<comment><USER10> I need to work on my attempt at humor.

<comment><USER11> You do. I don't see what is humorous about it. It was an insightful statement with a few very relevant links.

I particularly liked your linking of Google to "data retention", and Reddit to "comprehension" (or lack there of).

<comment><USER12> I think you're reading the list wrong. The list is...

\- reduces our attention span (blame Twitter for this.)

\- reduces our comprehension (blame Reddit for this.)

\- reduces our data retention (blame Google for this.)

There's a pretty good argument for all three, don't you think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting."

This does have some interesting implications for society as a whole. But, it seems that individuals who are able to maintain sustained, focused attention will have quite an advantage.

<comment><USER14> I read every single word anyway and more than often enough have to relies on my personal memory to mettle out arguments. I also don't skims through information.

I also eliminated all sort of information feeds except hacker news and a few economic resource. Emails, web statistics, etc, are not worth checking out often since they don't have much actionable insight or interesting insight.

I have a big craving for super long articles and essay just like this wired's story. I want more just like it. (Which is also why people enjoy Kalzumeus, Steve Yegge,T-A-W, and other writers of super long essay)

<comment><USER15> This essay is "super long" by web standards only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Every time I read an article like this I plan to spend less time online, but never seem to actually manage it.

Tools like leechblock do provide some help in blocking access to the biggest distractions.

I'm working on the meditation thing a little and plan to increase.

Has anyone come up with a good structured approach to getting focus back?

<comment><USER17> After reading this PG classic <http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html>, I have a machine only for work. (Which, ironically, I'm posting from right now, heh.)

I only connect via Ethernet, and often physically disconnect my laptop from the net, so when I feel the urge to get on Twitter, HN, etc. I have to reach for the cable again, which is enough of a red flag to get me back to work.

I've managed to keep myself from "needing" to be connected. My business partner is great about never bugging me when I'm coding, we use status.net to do asynchronous communication (think a private Twitter), Google Wave to collaborate, and phones for anything urgent and plenty of meatspace every week, of course.

When I'm coding, I have offline copies of all the web pages and documentation I need, so I can't use that as an excuse to get online.

I also use Firefox browser profiles extensively, one for Personal stuff, one for Work, one for <Projectname> etc. Between that and Firefox sessions, I can leave a bunch of shit open, but come back to it when I have time.

For a while I was a night person and just hit Twitter/HN/reddit once or twice a day, kind of got a digest in the "morning" (6 pm) and then worked all night, w/o too much happening on the Internet. (Yes, I'm an American, yes, I know about the rest of the world, but the point is that less happens at night and so you don't feel like you're missing something. Now that I'm a day person for the first time in years, I feel the urge to keep up every hour.)

I also have started exercising about half an hour a day (just a walk around the neighborhood) and limiting my online time to mainly using Twitter as a newsfeed, HN as a feed of interesting stuff and that's about it. I don't have time to keep up with world events too much anymore, sadly. No New York Times or NPR.org for me, though I usually read our little local newspaper in about 10 minutes each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A test I would like to see is learning abstract algebra by reading Wikipedia articles versus learning it by reading the better textbooks, such as the Artin textbook. My bet is that the textbook users would come out ahead by any reasonable means of assessing their understanding and performance.

<comment><USER19> I did much better in some of my classes learning math, CS, and EE concepts through Wikipedia than I did from the textbook or lectures.

Edit: possible cause: textbooks designed for selling to universities rather than designed to educate, and courses designed to maintain the professor's royalties.

<comment><USER11> I would guess that it was more likely due to the pick-and-choose nature of most courses. When I take a class, the material that is actively tested is usually only the general concepts and only the ones the professor deems important. Wikipedia is designed for you to be able to get a general idea about specific topics, where a text book is designed to include in-depth and comprehensive knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many of my friends whose jobs are associated with intense, abstract thinking (professors, researchers) tend to "not have time" for much websurfing. Interesting how they may have inadvertently protected their brains this way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to practice internet surfing instead of book reading.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/>

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.

</comment><comment><USER22> There have always been news junkies. It's just that the price of crack has dropped. Anything done to excess can harm you, and even if not done to excess, give you cancer.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there any evidence that what this article suggest happens to our brains while we are on using the web affects us when we are not using the web?

<comment><USER21> This seems close enough:

>Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. "Everything distracts them." Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations for issuing a press release? - <AUTHOR>

Anybody here issued a press release before?  I understand you have to issue it through a company that will distribute it to the press.  Does anyone have a recommendation on a good company to use?<p>(The press release I want to issue is to announce the date of when the new MMO I've been working on for the last 4 years is going to start.) <comment><USER2> It's much the same as writing anything, really. Figure out your core message. List supporting points that you want to make. Draft and revise.

Options at that point include "post it" and "hire a professional copyeditor to take over from your notes."

<comment><AUTHOR> But you have to pay a company to "post it", don't you?

<comment><USER2> Ah - you're interested in releasing press releases, not generating them.

I would start contacting relevant blogs / bloggers directly. If you can get it picked up in a few major channels, it will echo. Posting to HN can also be a good method. In either case, it helps to have a good presentation with some appropriate media content so that it's easy to prepare a compelling article about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't bother with a press release. Better to just use social channels and the web to do your own PR.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not an either/or kind of thing, though. Isn't it worth paying for the press release just to hope to get the story picked up various places? Aren't there lots of web sites that will basically just reprint press releases as their sources of content?

Of course I will use social channels and the web as well, but there's only so much I can do.</comment></comment>


Blogging Horror - <AUTHOR> http://girtby.net/archives/2008/5/22/blogging-horror

<comment><USER2> The comments on this article are great - I give huge props to Jeff Atwood for showing up, commenting, and staying polite and not getting overly defensive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I said this very thing a few weeks ago.

CodingHorror is no longer a daily look for me. More like weekly or monthly.

If you look back, you'll see the quality of posts went down soon after Jeff began advertising on his blog. I think that the "pressure to publish" caused him to stop trying to publish important things, but to just publish liberally to get eyeballs.

<comment><USER4> Pressure to publish? He has published 5-6 posts a week since 2004. His rate hasn't changed, and if you page through his pre-ad archives, the quality ratio is about the same as now.

<comment><USER3> If anything, his quantity of posting in the last 30 days has slowed from the .9x a day he used to post.

Really though, the postings from last June pale in comparison to the poor posts from the past 60 days which include thinly veiled shills for products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little decent is always good. The comments are good too.</comment>


Farebot, an app for NFC-equipped Android phones for use with MIFARE systems - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codebutler/farebot

<comment><USER2> I'm sure the Dutch will love this. Their public transport system is switching to a MIFARE based setup and it has been hacked to pieces. People can program their own transport cards, undo payments, refill their cards at home.

Now with this app they might even do it all while on the road.</comment>


The Bitcoin Community Disagrees on What Happens Next - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-18/the-bitcoin-community-disagrees-on-what-happens-next <comment><USER2> "It's an OK commodity but it's the equivalent of selling real estate on the moon. There's no inherent value. I applaud the ability of speculators to make money from selling it to other people, but I don't think even calling it a commodity is enough. It's a kind of shadow asset."

I love when people who are in finances say that bitcoin has no vale; when actual money today is so complex in determining its value that you could basically say its a virtual coin as well.

<comment><USER3> It's also obviously not true with even the tiniest amount of research. If you want to buy something online anonymously, then you use Bitcoin. There's the value.

<comment><USER4> The problem with this is that Bitcoin is just about the _least_ anonymous thing ever. It only seems anonymous because nobody's built the infrastructure to track it yet.

<comment><USER5> This statement is a bit hyperbolic. Bitcoin isn't as anonymous as say cash, but it's a lot more anonymous than most online payment methods (excluding a few altcoins which can really just be seen as innovations in the bitcoin/blockchain space).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure the value of Bitcoin is circumventing regulations. Similarly, I'm guessing the Bitcoin community doesn't care very much about whether a government agency classifies it as a currency, a commodity, or a potato. Note that most of the quoted people rarely if ever engage in commerce with Bitcoin - so I'm not sure why their opinion on regulation is terribly relevant.

<comment><USER7> The issue is in the way it is being taxed. For example in Germany, theoretically you have to collect VAT if you trade Bitcoin (at least if you do it professionally). I didn't know that before, but apparently only gold is exempt from that (and currencies). If you trade silver or some other stuff, you are liable for VAT.

So it would be nice if Bitcoin would also be exempt from VAT, like gold or currencies.

<comment><USER8> The only tax in Bitcoin is the voluntary mining fee. If governments want to collect tax on Bitcoin transactions, they will need to run a mining farm.

<comment><USER9> This is only true if you are prepared to commit tax fraud, or if Bitcoin is not considered a taxable asset class in your jurisdiction.

The chances of getting away with it may be decent depending on how you obtain and sell your BTC, but that does not make it any more legal than avoiding taxes on cash transactions you do that there's tax liabilities on.

<comment><USER8> If you are making taxable transactions, that is for you to deal with the appropriate authorities.

Putting entries in the block chain is not a taxable transaction anywhere that I am aware of, except that you may need to add an allotment for the miner to process your transaction.

<comment><USER10> That's like saying "signing a paper is not a taxable transaction" \- if that paper is a transfer of property, it probably is a taxable event, and so would the entry in the blockchain probably be, if it's between address owned by different people.

<comment><USER8> Yes, _if_ , _probably_.

I never made that assumption, but many people here seem to have.

<comment><USER10> You made a categorical statement - "putting entries in the block chain is not a taxable transaction. As far as we can tell, that's wrong. It'd be different had you written "putting entries in the block chain _isn 't always_ a taxable transaction".

<comment><USER8> What, specifically, is wrong about it? Taxes may apply to actual exchanges of goods and/or services, but there is no tax, save the "optional" miner fee, on making an entry in the blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These recent articles make it sound like there has been a recent revelation by the "U.S. Government" that bitcoin has _actually_ been a commodity all along.

The reality is much more complicated. The federal government is made up of many different agencies, and each one is trying to figure out whether they should be regulating it, in case they may take the fall for not preventing the next big Mt. Gox style collapse or scam.

While CFTC have recently decided that they should regulate bitcoin options as a commodity, the IRS have deemed bitcoin as property for capital gains tax purposes, but their FinCEN division (along with NYDFS and most other states) are regulating it very much as a currency under money transmission laws.

In the end this doesn't really matter. The power of bitcoin is that it is decentralized, and, like the internet itself, if an individual is able to connect to the network, then they are able to make transactions with others, regardless of how liberal or oppressive their government is.

TL;DR: Regulations will continue to make it increasingly difficult to run bitcoin businesses in the U.S., but that doesn't matter. Bitcoin's power will always come from the fact that it is a completely open network for individuals.

</comment><comment><USER11> From the title, it looked like this was going to be about the block size controversy, where there is serious disagreement about what happens next. The article is more like "can anybody find a use case for this thing?"

Bitcoin has had two runups driven by use cases - Silk Road I (drugs), and getting around China's exchange controls. Both were shut down. For most of 2015, Bitcoin has been around $225 ± 25. There were brief bubbles outside that range, and one big drop, but it came back to that trading range. So it's not interesting to speculators any more. Until someone finds a new use case, it's not likely to do much.

There's been progress. Mark Karpeles, who ran Mt. Gox and apparently stole its funds, is in jail in Japan.

<comment><USER5> Actually, bitcoin is still being used to get around China's exchange controls. That is why there is so much investment in mining in China - mining equipment is treated as capital investment, and it's trivial to then sell the proceeds for USD.

I would also guess that there are far more people using bitcoin on dark net marketplaces now than there ever were using Silk Road (mostly due to all the publicity), but I don't have any sources to back this up.

I do agree that we are unlikely to see any significant changes in the price of bitcoin in the medium term though. In the long run, the price of bitcoin is mostly irrelevant when bitcoin is being used as a payment network anyway.

<comment><USER11> _" I would also guess that there are far more people using bitcoin on dark net marketplaces now than there ever were using Silk Road (mostly due to all the publicity), but I don't have any sources to back this up."_

Bitcoin transaction volume in dollars hasn't increased in 18 months. See this graph.[1] The two big spikes were in November 2013 and March 2014. Since then, not much. Bitcoin usage is not increasing.

[1] [https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume-...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume- usd?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way I view Bitcoin and money is like the OS wars of the past few decades. Up until this point the big OS's (Microsoft == USD, Apple == Yuan) have been copyrighted by the government.

They control the updates, what is allowed on their platform, and the way developers make apps for that platform.

Bitcoin is the Linux of the money system. An Open Source OS for money, where developers can build apps without asking permission, and the community actually has a say in the progress of the OS, whether that's a good or bad thing we'll find out.

</comment><comment><USER13> The economics professor stated _As money, Bitcoin is terrible – a deeply deflationary currency that's within a bubble._ I'd like to expand on this a bit.

The deflation issue is complex. It's hard to imagine a stable situation where money has a fixed supply. The simplest steady state one can imagine is constant economic growth r, which is also the real interest rate. If we further assume a constant velocity of money (so the total value of all money is a fixed percentage of GDP), then any currency where the total supply of currency was fixed, would have a _deflation_ rate equal to the real interest rate. Therefore holding currency or zero interest bonds would be equivalent. But money has some transaction value that makes it more valuable than zero interest bonds, so this situation could not be an equilibrium.

Most economists think that in practice there is no way to have a stable currency except by forcing inflation by printing money (which in the current implementation is injected into the economy by buying bonds). I don't think it is possible to create an inflationary currency except through central banks. So I really think that bitcoin faces long term problems.

<comment><USER14> _" I don't think it is possible to create an inflationary currency except through central banks."_

I don't see why that would be the case. Would not "Bitcoin, but the mining rewards don't decrease" be an inflationary currency?

<comment><USER15> Constant rewards would mean the inflation tends to zero in the long term. But that's easy to fix by making the rewards increase over time in proportion to how many coins exist.

The harder problem is that without a central bank you can't track changes in the size of the economy. The more you want to avoid deflationary periods, the more you have to inflate "just in case". And high constant inflation has its own problems.

So it's better to say that it's extremely hard to create a mildly-inflationary currency without a central authority.

<comment><USER10> _The harder problem is that without a central bank you can 't track changes in the size of the economy._

Why not, if you have the total list of transactions being made - ie., the blockchain? Seems to me like it wouldn't be hard to measure the "Bitcoin GDP" and adjust accordingly.

<comment><USER14> You can, quite trivially, measure the total amount of BTC that moved from wallet to wallet. You can't tell what actually moved from entity to entity (at least, not without a lot of work, and probably not without some non-blockchain information). I'm not sure how good the former would serve as a proxy for the latter in your envisioned use case.

Really, if we wanted to stabilize a coin, I think we'd want to be measuring how it's moving relative to other things, which is definitely external info. It would be a challenge to come up with a means of folding these observations into the system in a secure (and ideally trustless) way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> bitcoin is a 256-bit number. Today, governments would like to regulate the usage of approximately 33,437,921 of these magic numbers. I'm guessing most of community can at least find humor in this.

<comment><USER15> That's not really how they divide...

And they don't care about the numbers in general, unlike certain other cases where people have tried to restrict numbers entirely.

They just regulate transfers of control of value. You can communicate transfers of control of value with anything. Rocks, flags, numbers, dance. Doesn't mean governments want to regulate "magic rocks".

<comment><USER16> Sure, you can represent private keys in many different formats and the keyspace is effectively 160-bit when brute forcing known addresses. I'm just making the point that unlike rocks and flags, bitcoin is intangible and more like speech.

If I posted a number which happened to have a value of $14,001 USD in this post, I would be breaking the law. If I sold t-shirts with bitcoin private keys printed on them, I would be considered an unlicensed money transmitter by FinCEN.

<comment><USER15> Same thing could happen if you point out a safety deposit box you're giving away with a pin of 00000000. It's not really about the number, because I can say 0 all day.

<comment><USER16> Unlike bitcoin, nothing I say in this comment can change the ownership of a safety deposit box. A few more things:

1\. Ownership of the deposit box is not define by pin holders

2\. Deposit boxes are tangible

3\. Deposit boxes and contents have intrinsic value

3\. Forgetting a pin doesn't effectively destroy the box and contents

4\. The security of a deposit box is not defined by only math

I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm just saying it is more complicated than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >That means the regulator can now bring charges against any wrongdoers trading cryptocurrency futures and options.

I didn't know there are options for Bitcoins. Does anybody know more about this?

<comment><USER10> The reason we are discussing this aspect of Bitcoin is because the regulator of derivatives and futures (CFTC) recently ruled against a company (Coinflip, aka Derivabit) which was an exchange for those kinds of financial instruments for BTC.

They made a Show HN some time ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7461343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7461343)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a distibuted computer program. Now they want to charge it? Why? Because money.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Community" ? You mean a horde of tech speculators who would gladly get an opportunity benefit from having some insight about bitcoin just to benefit from it.

I don't understand how there could really be a community that revolves around a crypto currency. It's just some people with a libertarian agenda, who don't like banks or government, and want to make money.

I would gladly hear about the community of programmers who actually write code and try to design new decentralized technology. The "bitcoin community" is not that. I don't think you can find many expert on how bitcoin works.

I would rather call those people finance tech entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER20> > It's just some people with a libertarian agenda, who don't like banks or > government

Sounds like a community to me.

<comment><USER21> It depends. It takes more to form a community than a common descriptor. For example, consider "atheist". There isn't really an "atheist community", in that there's very little in common between atheist Buddhists, atheist Jews, former Catholics, apostate Muslims, atheist skeptics, atheist Unitarians, etc, etc.

There are many communities that are accidentally or intentionally atheistic, of course. But that doesn't mean there's a community of atheists.

Given both the Bitcoin and libertarian tendencies against centrality, I'd be really surprised to discover that there was really a single Bitcoin or libertarian community. I'd expect a number of relatively distinct communities that interact around common resources or interests.

As an example, consider the Great Lakes. There isn't really a Great Lakes community; people in Toronto and Chicago don't have much sense of shared identity. But the shared resource demands joint action, so you see things like this:

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes%E2%80%93Saint_Lawr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes%E2%80%93Saint_Lawrence_River_Basin_Sustainable_Water_Resources_Agreement)</comment></comment></comment>


Pakistan causes YouTube outage for two-thirds of world - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4344105 <comment><USER2> Deja vu February 2008.</comment>


Elizabeth Warren vows to break up tech giants if elected in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47509945 <comment><USER2> Ugh. I am a person who accepts that government sometimes has an appropriate role in regulating things. Sometimes.

And I am not an unquestioning fanboy of any of the three mentioned companies.

But she seems to be aiming in the wrong direction.

First, we should err on the side of letting markets be free.

But if there is anything that deserves intervention, broadband monopolies are a much bigger problem imho than getting Amazon out of Whole Foods. And even worse, the combination of broadband companies getting control and ownership of content, to the extent that they are no longer dumb pipes, but they become interested in using content to extract top dollar in every scenario, with consumer unfriendly practices like bundling and walled gardens.

The fact that we can't have decent broadband at good prices in the US is, to me, a much bigger problem than Google owning Waze. Or Facebook owning WhatsApp -- which actually seems like a good thing, since it being in house could get Facebook on a faster path to good encryption, assuming their professed interest in that is sincere.

If you want to regulate Google, regulate their privacy practices. If you want to regulate Facebook, regulate the way they enable hidden players to influence elections. If you want to regulate Amazon, well, just keep them out of the broadband business because owning both the pipes and the content is bad for consumers.

So tired of having clueless candidates.

<comment><USER3> I don't think she's clueless, because you can't take what she's claiming at face value. She's saying what's fashionable with the Democrat voting base. Anti-business has long been part of the platform.

<comment><USER2> That's a cheap political shot and even if it were true (democrats are actually pro business, they're just pro sustainable business) then the whole point you are missing is that the choice of which businesses to target could be better imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At this point, it looks like they are going to say anything that appeases even the slightest subset of voters. It's sad really.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's nothing inherently wrong with big companies. The problem occurs when those companies begin to lobby for exemptions and loopholes that minimize competition at the expense of the general public.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a dark fantasy in which politicians need to post collateral for their campaign promises.

For example, "I'll break up Google while in office, or else I'll have my right arm amputated."

In that fantasy, politicians would think much more carefully before knowingly making hollow promises.

<comment><USER7> If nothing else, I see that as the future of game shows- win the Hawaiian vacation or lose your house. Not to self-promote, but I suspect you might lovelovelove some of my points here, because I explored comparable logic:

[https://nilskidoo.blackblogs.org/monkey-wrenching-the- americ...](https://nilskidoo.blackblogs.org/monkey-wrenching-the-americanaut/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> By breaking the up the US tech giants, don't we just get stronger tech giants from Asia? So in the global sense, we'd just have even bigger giants.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it would be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I agree with her that some giants have too much power over users and may deserve some regulation or provide access to competitors and while she may find sympathetic ears in some of employees, I'm afraid this is a bit quixotic against management of said behemoths.

<comment><USER10> Since - in a fair system - they also only get one vote, it should work out. Of course, we know that with unlimited political spending, the system is not fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting because it's a classical liberal proposal, but I'm not sure who's really in favor of it.

There's the traditional anti-monopolistic liberal argument for it, but then there's also an anti-elite populist argument that I think has greater strength on the right than the left.

I suspect that many of the people who believe this is a good idea would basically never vote for Elizabeth Warren.

<comment><USER12> This proposal is strategic. We are currently in the run up to the primaries. In the general election, she would lose if she stuck to such a platform. But in the primaries, she is only competing for Democratic votes. With the rise of AOC and others like her, the evidence shows that anti-capitalist ideas are playing well among Democrats.

So the Democratic primaries in today's environment are a race to the far edges of the left, and this seems like a reasonable strategy to win that race. She would have to use a different strategy in the general election, and my guess is she will quietly abandon this platform if she wins the nomination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's something decidedly unsavory about a politician promising to break up media companies. Some of the companies she's threatening play a huge role in the modern election cycle.

</comment><comment><USER14> That seems like a really big target to paint on your back this far out...

<comment><USER15> True, but considering how crowded the Democratic presidential field has become staking out some high-profile positions might be a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment> a-saleh Was there ever anything similar done? Only thing I recall was the weird AT&T split [1]

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

<comment><USER16> Standard Oil is probably the classic example, and also somewhat similar in terms of a monopoly position having coercive effects on markets (although in this case it's oligopolies rather than a monopoly). Anyway, that one comes to mind, but I am fairly.confident that if you look it up, you will find a good deal of examples of antitrust and antimonopoly laws being applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does the presidency have a legal instrument to actually accomplish this?

<comment><USER18> Absolutely- antitrust actions have split up large companies before. If Warren appoints people to the DoJ who want to do this then it can happen.

For some historical precedent check out the Bell System breakup-

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)</comment></comment>


Income Tax Department Seized Rs 2,500 crore from four trucks in Mumbai - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrump.com/income-tax-department-seized-rs-2500-crore-from-four-trucks-in-mumbai/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thats around US dolloar 450 million thats incredible Indian corrruption</comment>


This plant grows shimmering blue leaves to help it survive in the dark - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/10/24/this-plant-grows-shimmering-blue-leaves-to-help-it-survive-in-the-dark/ <comment><AUTHOR> Crazy idea: People often argue that we might have a lot of problems farming on Mars because it receives half the sunlight as Earth. Could we genetically engineer food crops to employ the iridoplasts discussed in this article so that the plants are better suited for low light environments?</comment>


Ultimaker 3 Announced with Dual Extrusion - <AUTHOR> https://ultimaker.com/en/products/ultimaker-3 <comment><AUTHOR> The website is quite resource hungry... I can barely view it on my smartphone.</comment>


How Functional Programming Ruined Me - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-functional-programming-ruined-me-7886c12a46fd <comment><USER2> Fluffy post with little to no useful content

<comment><USER3> Frankly, I'd like to hear from the people upvoting the article why they're doing this.

<comment><USER4> I am not into functional programming but I can see how useful the map function is. I guess I will dig into functional programming after reading this

<comment><USER5> I write in a functional language and I very rarely use map(). Most of the time list comprehension is more sensible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stagit – A static Git page generator - <AUTHOR> https://git.codemadness.org/stagit/ <comment><USER2> This is not a very informative link. Would be nice to have a description of what it is and why the reader should be interested in it.

<comment><USER3> It looks like this is the GitHub for the project: [https://github.com/oxalorg/stagit](https://github.com/oxalorg/stagit)

<comment><USER4> Actually [http://git.2f30.org/stagit/](http://git.2f30.org/stagit/) is the real host, what you linked was just a mirror. If you go up one level on the site, you can find a list of projects hosted by the 2f30 team, including stagit, which was made by Hiltjo Posthuma (one of the Suckless guys, iirk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice! Personally I'm using git2html (e.g. see [http://chriswarbo.net/git/git2html/git](http://chriswarbo.net/git/git2html/git) ) with a few modifications. In particular, I've had to limit it to only using the HEAD commit, since the disk space becomes crazy (e.g. it seems to render the contents of every file to a separate HTML page for each commit).

I'll take a look at stagit, since it might be saner (plus the resulting pages look nicer, and I can stop maintaining my own patches to git2html).

What I'd really like to see is a JS implementation of the "dynamic" features like diffing, so rather than having to pre-compute and store them, they can be generated on demand on the client-side by fetching the required git objects, etc. over HTTP (would presumably require a clone to be accessible on the same domain as the HTML). That way, everyone gets the plain pages like now, but those enabling JS can browse repos more thoroughly.

<comment><USER6> > What I'd really like to see is a JS implementation of the "dynamic" features > like diffing

That's possible. I've made something like that (dynamically fetching git info via dump HTTP server protocol) using Git.js [0] although for a different reason and it worked very well. Some caveats: the decompression must be handled in a WebWorker or the UI is stuck pretty easily. But objects can be fetched on demand so it's kind of like Microsoft's Git Virtual FS. As you've said cross origin policies apply so either have the viewer on the same site as repos or add appropriate CORS headers.

[0]: [https://github.com/yonran/git.js](https://github.com/yonran/git.js)

I see git.js even has a "repo-viewer" demo [1]. Although it's very primitive it shows the ref list and diffs.

[1]: [https://github.com/yonran/git.js/blob/master/demos/repo- view...](https://github.com/yonran/git.js/blob/master/demos/repo- viewer/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> same tool for gopher: [http://git.2f30.org/stagit- gopher/file/README.html](http://git.2f30.org/stagit-gopher/file/README.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great. A slightly more feature-rich alternative is Gitiles, which is used by the Chromium and Android projects.

[https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gitiles/](https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gitiles/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks pretty nice! The readme says it's not useful for repos with >2000 commits, but I wonder if we could hack together some sort of cache for it to facilitate delta updates?

<comment><USER10> > we could hack together some sort of cache for it to facilitate delta > updates?

Crunching diffs at scale is actually an extremely I/O intensive operation and I can say this from experience, since my product is doing just that. You can see an example of what I mean at

[https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=Microsoft/vscod...](https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=Microsoft/vscode#b%3Dgithub%3AMicrosoft%2Fvscode%3Amaster%26t%3Dcommits)

If you scroll down, you can see how the indexed information is used. The red, green, and blue bars, denotes how many lines were deleted, added and changed. The red, green and blue bars in the second row, shows how many lines were deleted, added and changed, which were non blank/comment lines.

If you want to crunch diffs at scale, you really have to throw CPU cores, RAM and multiple SSDs at the problem. The more CPU cores, translates to more diffs that can be processed in parallel. The more RAM, translates to better Kernel page caching. And multiple SSDs in RAID 0 configuration, translates to better read and write speeds.

<comment><USER11> Do you think it's possible to calculate the relationship between the depth of the git data and the number of I/O operations?

This is purely out of interest, our storage performs at around 2-4M random 4K read IOP/s per node and I was wondering (just for fun) how it might look thrown a good I/O crunch task like this.

<comment><USER10> > Do you think it's possible to calculate the relationship between the depth > of the git data and the number of I/O operations

It's actually pretty straight forward since you know exactly what operations has to be done. With very good I/O, you may find the CPU will become your bottleneck.

<comment><USER11> Yeah then it becomes even more interesting to me ;) especially when it comes to NUMA etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can have something like that also in your shell. Just apply

      git log --reverse | perl githead.pl

where githead.pl is

      my $date, $old; while (my $line = <>) { chomp $line; next unless $line; $date = "$1 $2 $3" if $line =~ m|Date:\s+(.+?)\s+(.+?)\s+(.+?)\s+|; if ($line =~ m/^\s+/) { if ($date ne $old) { printf("%-10s%s\n",$date,$line); $old = $date; } else { printf("%-10s%s\n",'',$line); }}}

</comment><comment><USER13>
        git clone git://git.codemadness.org/stagit

Can we please stop doing that? Use [https://](https://) or anonymous ssh.</comment>


8 Ways to get VC attention from Guy Kawasaki - <AUTHOR> http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/2007/03/22/8-ways-to-get-venture-capital-attention-from-guy-kawasaki/ <comment><USER2> Hmm... read some links in the comments too. <http://valleywag.com/tech/venture-capital/the-curse-of-guy- kawasaki-230871.php>

</comment><comment><USER3> 9) Make all your example use cases involve hockey.</comment>


Show Your Work: Don't forget 'loading' indicators - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@firasd/show-your-work-dont-forget-loading-indicators-9f511af1743d <comment><USER2> Here's a very simple catch-all JS snippet I have laying around for web stuff, assuming you're AJAXing stuff in (and using jquery).

      $(document).on({
      	ajaxStart: function() { /* code */ },
      	ajaxStop: function() { /* more code */ }
      });</comment>


How to Build a Building - <AUTHOR> https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1122

<comment><USER2>
       "Want to see the full spec? It's massive."

        Architectural – 26 pages
        Civil – 20 pages
        Electrical – 22 pages
        Landscaping – 1 page
        Mechanical / Plumbing – 31 pages
        Soils Report – 45 pages
        Structural – 9 pages

That's pretty small for a commercial building meeting a sustainability code - adding sheets to a set of plans helps with organization. It's roughly analogous to making one's code modular. However, with modern CAD systems it is entirely analogous to generating a new report from a database.

<comment><USER3> We frequently exceed this level of spec for an average size house.. by a long way. However, simple commercial work can often get away with lesser levels of specification as they are generally dealing with typical construction methods and 'volume' contractors and consultants.

Using the standard construction methods is kind of like including stdio.h. The better the knowledge and experience of the contractor, the more advanced the library, but the more complex the docs. In a typical set of docs, it is probably 50/50/50 legal vs contractual vs actual description of the building.

"with modern CAD systems it is entirely analogous to generating a new report from a database" (not analogous - they are actually databases with a cadd layer on top)

But I would love for this to be true! It is amazing how much is still done manually, or even by hand in the construction industry. There are very few firms who have attempted to fully integrate automation into their processes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The amount of planning that goes into erecting a building is mind boggling.

I'm pretty damn thankful that as a software engineer changes are just a click away.

I really hope I am around to see the advent of 3D printed buildings. Maybe in the future general contractors will actually be programmers who take your spec and code out the program for the 3D building printer.

<comment><USER5> The level of skill required to build a building upright and straight and the floors flat is even more mind boggling to me - and those that goes like 100+ floors? Can't…comprehend…

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My takeaway was _don't try this yourself_ (unless commercial real estate development is your actual business).

It was a great read, and I appreciate that he put it up. But, wow, what a nightmarish, exasperating, multi-year, high-risk distraction to one's core business.

<comment><USER2> Use the same logic one applies to legal matters - hire an architect familiar with the state of affairs. Boulder is a fairly restrictive community in terms of development - it can afford to be. Local knowledge is helpful - just like when going in front of the judge.</comment></comment>